commenting woes

by

by liberal japonicus

Two people have written in and said that they are having problems with the captcha system. I'll see what's up and put a ticket in. It would help if folks who could comment could just add one to this post. Pithy one-liners preferred.

 

UPDATE: a number of emails to the kitty looks like it is broken for everyone. Will try and keep you updated

 

UPDATE 2: We have the option of going to Disqus, which I know nothing about.

 

194 thoughts on “commenting woes”

  5. Earlier today (circa 8 AM Pacific) I was getting the phenomena (happens occasionally) where the comment pages are not formatted correctly — just the text of the comments, with no format, no images, etc. But it cleared up after an hour or so.

  7. what goes on here? previous comment posted (after preview) without the captcha challenge
    also, when I first click in the comment box, chrome offers to fill in my street address, etc.
    –TP

  11. Well, I’ve turned off some things, which may open the gates of hell. Tony, I think that is related to this
    Do you want your readers to sign in with Typepad, Twitter, Facebook or other services before they leave a comment?
    Yes — require all commenters to sign in
    Optional — allow commenters to sign in if they choose
    No — commenters cannot sign in
    I changed it to the No option, which probably then requires information to be filled out and your Chrome autofill does that. Obviously a problem, especially if you are commenting anonymously, but the Yes option doesn’t work and I’m not sure how the Optional option would fare.
    I’m also going to have comments on posts auto-close after 1 month. (it was set for 2 months, I was thinking 2 weeks was too short)

  14. lj,
    I scroll down to the bottom of the page.
    I see the “Post a comment” box and the “Your Information” boxes under it.
    The first box already contains “Tony P.”
    The second already contains my email address.
    The third contains “Web Site URL” in gray.
    I click in the comment box and Chrome thinks I’m trying to fill in a form, so it offers to enter my street address. I ignore the offer and just type my comment.
    Now I will preview.
    Okay, preview looks fine. Click “Edit” to add this bit. Now I will preview and post. Will let you know whether Captcha came up.
    –TP

  26. What I’ve been seeing lately is that I’ll correctly fill in the captcha, it will be rejected, and the next offering will be blank. And the next after that. It goes through the motions, but no image.
    Usually the audio version works, but since I’m very much the only morning person in my family, I’m usually surfing with the sound turned off.

  32. For me, captcha has worked fine. If I can’t figure out the scrambled word and try for another, it goes blank about half the time. But another refresh gets something I can read.
    I’d say not worry about the lack until and unless we start seeing spam posts in the comments. If it happens, then we figure out how to deal with it.

  33. I’ve had sporadic problems commenting here going back to when hilzoy was still around. I wouldn’t be able to post, then I would. Never have known what was going on.

  37. Here’s another one for bobbyp:
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-buybacks-killing-american-economy-170000218.html
    This deserves to be front and center in any tax reform.
    I invest in the stock market and have benefited from this trend, but it’s a con, especially when corporations borrow to buy back stock.
    It’s just another example of shifting a wallet from one pocket to another to avoid investing in the productive enterprises of the companies, including wages.

  38. the drifts are taller than me, even with my big boots on, so i’m looking for a way to lighten up.
    if we’re open threading, this might be good for laugh.
    apologies if this pops up twice (or more)…

  41. Thanks, hairshirt. I’ll look that egghead prof up. I am not familiar with his work, but he speaks truth. (you might enjoy Zombie Economics by John Quiggen of Crooked Timber).
    Dear Count. True stuff. True crime. That’s one reason why I have refused to “diversify” my meager IRA into bonds as recommended by my idiot life insurance rep (provided by the company I work for). It’s aggressive growth mutual funds for me, baby…all. the. way….even at the ripe old age of 66. The rich are robbing this country blind in so many ways, and most just don’t seem to notice. You know…if you can’t beat ’em… and markets climb a wall of worry, and go up until they come down. When the stock prognosticators stop being nervous, well, that’s the time to get nervous.
    When the markets crashed in 2008 I was beside myself because I wanted a big pile of cash to buy stocks….and had none. Alas, I am always held back by slow horses and an overwhelming desire to bluff players holding the absolute nuts.
    Pithy.
    Thanks!

  42. That was good, Russell.
    However, in fact, Ms Rand, in her declining later years, racked by lung cancer (heavy smoker, promoted by the collectivist tobacco purveyors (as in, “got a light, buddy”; there may be a photo extant of her naked, but for jodhpurs, stiletto heels, and a Camel unfiltered, riding Alan Greenspan around the living room of the (“Collective’s) clubhouse living room as she read the galleys of Atlas Shrugged out loud — must have been a long night for even Nathanial Branden) signed on to Social Security and Medicare on her willingly cuckolded husband’s account to pay her bills — sh*thead conservatives and, forgivingly, horny teenaged boys, not yet buying enough of her juvenalian output to pay the capitalist debt collectors .. Stalinists by any other name.
    The scheme for SS and Medicare was suggested to her by a … wait for it … SOCIAL WORKER … she sought counsel from.
    Had she been a few years younger, she would have gone without, Obamacare not yet being available, so she could whinge about the high deductibles.
    Brian Williams should lie so extravagantly.
    She was all for abortion, which disallows her from signing in and posting at RedState, but it is a big murderous tent.

  43. Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy
    my opinion and my opinion only, what’s killing the american economy is pretty freaking simple.
    too many people want to be a millionaire if not a billionaire, not enough people want to actually build anything. rentiers, greedheads, and chiselers run the world.
    if you don’t actually create value, where is the money gonna come from?
    we’ve been resting on our laurels for quite a while now, we’re sort of running on vapors at this point.
    a marvelous, robust economy, with 47 million people on food stamps. one out of six of us.
    another generation like this, and the wheels will come off.
    and if and when the shit really and truly does hit the fan, the big money is going to be on the plane with brett, looking for some other place to suck the life out of.
    it was a nice ride.

  44. if you don’t actually create value, where is the money gonna come from?
    What do you want to make? We’ve got everything we need. And it’s cheap.

  45. russell, so what you are saying that that we have too many bright people building bizarre financial products, rather than anything useful. I could go with that.
    But if someone want to be a billionare, rather than just a multi-millionare, they still pretty much have to build a company that actually does something useful.

  46. But if someone want to be a billionare, rather than just a multi-millionare, they still pretty much have to build a company that actually does something useful.
    Hahaha…4 of the top 10 wealthiest Americans are heirs to the Walton fortune. Two others inherited a large successful oil company (Koch bros.). One guy got rich on the great luck of a well timed patent (Bill Gates) that some say he stole. Buffet bought companies that were already successful, just undervalued.
    Expropriate the expropriators.
    The rest of you….sell now.

  47. a marvelous, robust economy, with 47 million people on food stamps. one out of six of us.
    Disagree. We have a robust economy capable of great things. We just give all the rewards to the wrong people.
    It is a social decision that can cost us dearly, but like all social decisions, it can be changed.

  49. The FBI seems to be running a protection racket for the pig vermin Koch Brothers:
    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_FBI_And_The_Protesters
    If true, this would be an impeachable offense, to my mind, by Barack Obama.
    Unfortunately, the corrupt, bought and paid for, subhuman Republican Party hopes to get the FBI under its executive charge in 2016 so it can order the harassment, arrests, and murder of the same activists, so maybe we’d better stick with the lesser of two evils.
    What’s the FBI going to do with 10 million heavily armed Obamacare enrollees whose lives and the lives of their children are threatened by 50 million vermin, stinking Republicans and their leaders in this country?
    The FBI is going to have its hands full.

  52. Actually, I expect that the FBI is going to be very interested in oil sands protesters for a while, given the recent revelation that the organizations protesting Keystone and fracking are financed by the Russian government.
    Yeah, as in, “corrupt, bought and paid for”. As astroturf as the CPUSA.

  54. What do you want to make? We’ve got everything we need. And it’s cheap.
    There are a lot of dimensions to this comment.
    To make a simple reply, by “build” I’m not referring to manufacturing per se, but to a broader sense of building enduring enterprises.
    For lots of folks, the business model is get it big enough to sell, then cash in and move on. What happens with the actual enterprise after that, along with the people and resources that make it up, is noise.
    Who gives a sh*t? I got mine.
    It’s a quick buck orientation.
    There are things to say about what we might want to build, in the manufacturing sense, and whether what we have is what we need, and what overall value is or is not created by it being cheap, but that’s maybe a (set of) topic(s) for another day.
    But if someone want to be a billionare, rather than just a multi-millionare, they still pretty much have to build a company that actually does something useful.
    Hedge funds.
    Disagree. We have a robust economy capable of great things. We just give all the rewards to the wrong people.
    Oh no, we agree. I might soften it and replace “the wrong people” with “only some of the people”, but believe me when I say we are on the same page.
    given the recent revelation that the organizations protesting Keystone and fracking are financed by the Russian government.
    You need to stop reading paranoid nut job websites and go out and talk to some actual people.
    You’re losing your edge.

  55. There’s so much value to be created in rebuilding our roads and bridges, upgrading our electrical grid, expanding access to broadband communications, renewing decaying brownfield sites, improving water-delivery systems, expanding mass transit, removing dilapidated buildings in abandoned city neigborhoods, and providing better educations for a butt-load of people – just off the top of my head – that it’s sickening. Our national head is up our national ass. We could reap the rewards for generations, but the financiers have other ideas.

  56. “they still pretty much have to build a company that actually does something useful.”
    This is absolutely the farthest thing from the truth. To be a billionaire these days you have to build something people will think marks them as cool. It can’t, by definition, be anything useful. All of tech is busily building consumer ad generating crap or, the best case, repurposing old tech to be considered cool. The rise in the power of the CMO over the past fifteen years is directly in correlation with the wasteland of crappy internet companies. Just think, the race for the worlds largest company is now between Google who hang had a useful thing since it claimed coolness for its search, Apple who claimed coolness for its phone and Facebook. None of these create anything “useful” as opposed to what they replaced. There is no functional advantage, and, these are the closest things, well the first two are, to useful in tech in fifteen years.

  57. “Yeah, as in, “corrupt, bought and paid for”. As astroturf as the CPUSA.”
    You are over-claiming alleged charges found in the BigGreenRadicals “report” you linked to, Brett. Not even that “document” (who compiled this thing? Brian Williams’ crack reporter brother? It’s three pages of nothing with a one-sentence conclusion that says the report only “raises serious questions” and then 33 pages of mimeographed publicly available legal boilerplate that proves nothing, not that it was meant to.
    I looked in vain in this report for something, anything, that would explain who BigGreenRadicals is. They must be shy.
    http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Big_Green_Radicals
    http://ecowatch.com/2014/11/01/richard-berman-big-green-radicals/
    You astrosurf the astroturf and then accuse others of astroturfing? Did you take fire on that Williams’ helicopter, too?
    I’ll tell you what. Knock on the front door of any anti-Transcanada-Keystone conservative rancher/farmer in Nebraska or Oklahoma, or Texas who doesn’t want to hand over their land, and tell them their efforts to resist are financed by Vlad Putin and you’ll get a real world demonstration of armed Americans dispensing buckshot into the ass of a jasper astro-turfer as he hops the fence line.
    I am gratified that you agree with the action of the big, bad U.S. Government via its FBI harassing citizens on behalf of corporate interests.
    It shows a certain kind of perversely flexible open mindedness.
    My views on Keystone, not addressed here, are more nuanced than you might think, but that’s irrelevant.
    Doesn’t mean you aren’t a volunteer corporate huckster.
    Russell: The sad thing is Brett’s website is not just a paranoid website, which at least would provide some cracked entertainment value. It’s an astroturfing organization, corporately funded and run a Public Relations firm, Berman and Berman, a fact not disclosed neither by Brian Williams or Brett Bellmore, or Berman and the other Berman.

  58. Speaking of Russians, Saudi ARAMCO (possible financier of elements of 9/11) and the world’s oil executives, including probably every American fracking oil executive who owns a tux, lifting the champagne glasses under one roof — all for one and one for all.
    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/energy-execs-party-like-oils-at-99-2015-02-11?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    I wonder who finances Greenpeace’s and the Sierra Club’s and the Environmental Defense Fund’s efforts to get a little environmental balance in Putin’s kleptomaniac Russia.
    The CIA?

  59. Marty, in the realm of “useful”, here’ maybe an example of a hedge fund doing something socially useful. Taking on bogus, copycat patents in the pharmaceutical industry which drive up the cost of medicine.
    If Putin is financing this, more power to him.
    No doubt Berman and Berman is being hired to go after Bass through their PR subsidiary, Bellmore’sGotNothingButGreatRecipes.
    http://www.businessinsider.com/kyle-bass-files-first-ipr-petition-2015-2
    I’ll be looking for this when I decide about investing in individual pharma companies.

  60. Just think, the race for the worlds largest company is now between Google who hang had a useful thing since it claimed coolness for its search, Apple who claimed coolness for its phone and Facebook.
    In the case of Google, specifically, I’m not sure I agree.
    The approach they take to page ranking arguably improved the quality of internet search results, which is actually valuable.
    The technical innovations they’ve made in dealing with very very large datasets – many of which they have made available, at least in part, for other folks to build on – are central to a lot of current-day internet technology.
    I don’t dispute that a lot of tech “innovation”, especially on the consumer side, is BS, and that a lot of the perceived value is just vibe.
    But in the case of Google, specifically, I think there actually is a “there” there.
    There are folks here who actually are hands on with the big data stuff, I’d be curious to know their opinions.

  61. Doesn’t mean you aren’t a volunteer corporate huckster.
    And he’s not even getting paid.
    Who’s the chump here?

  62. Looks like someone decided to do something about the Muslims on U.S. soil:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/3-muslims-killed-north-carolina
    A Crusade, perhaps, of the cracker, Confederate, conservative Republican kind by the looks of the gun.
    Meanwhile, ISIL’s domestic subsidiary, the rank end of the pig vermin Republican Party, Secretary of State Bibi), cheers the murder of an American hostage:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/conservatives-kayla-mueller-israel
    Time for a domestic war.

  64. count,
    I would be more impressed if he wasn’t planning to short every stock before he files anything. Its the Bill Ackman method of shorting. I think it should be illegal to short and then bring legal action, or threaten it. On the other hand, it should be illegal to overcharge in the US and undercharge in other countries for widely used drugs.
    I have a different opinion on drugs for orphan diseases. There is an ongoing general discussion here about the impact of taxes and regulation on the flow of capital. Some good points on either side are raised, and the impact of any given individual tax or regulation is pretty undefinable in general. In the case of orphan disease it is not. Any strong move to limit the price of these drugs will stop research almost immediately. The potential secondary benefits of this research do not make it worth losing a few billion, or even just making very little money. The use of capital for tis endeavor is already high risk, but its high reward. Without the reward the risk will not be taken.

  65. “A Crusade, perhaps, of the cracker, Confederate, conservative Republican kind by the looks of the gun.”
    A review of the Facebook page of the man charged in these murders, Craig Hicks, shows a consistent theme of anti-religion and progressive causes. Included in his many Facebook “likes” are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, gay marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.

  66. Any strong move to limit the price of these drugs will stop research almost immediately. The potential secondary benefits of this research do not make it worth losing a few billion, or even just making very little money. The use of capital for tis endeavor is already high risk, but its high reward. Without the reward the risk will not be taken.
    well, i’m no socialist. but it would be hard to make a better case for privatization of an industry. or, if not that, at least getting the govt in the business of making medicines.

  68. Brett, if that link about the killer is correct, I can’t say I’m that surprised. Bill Maher is an Islamophobe, so was Hitchens and Dawkins and one does encounter them on leftwing websites–they are almost the norm on the right and you’re not exactly free of the ailment, but yes, there are fanatics on the anti-religion side. I make a distinction between the folks who say they think religion in general is bad and don’t single out one in particular, and those who say they think religion in general is bad, and then pick in particular on the Muslims. Sort of a dead giveaway, since it’s not hard to find violent Christians, Jews, Hindus and even Buddhists and for Christians you don’t have to go back to the Crusades or even Jim Crow to find them. The Christian Right was in bed with Rios Montt and Jonas Savimbi, who could have given pointers on atrocity-committing to ISIS.

  71. It was over parking, but there are claims that it might also have been a hate crime. But it’s too early to tell, of course–the media has been known to get things wrong from time to time.

  72. “Sort of a dead giveaway, since it’s not hard to find violent Christians, Jews, Hindus and even Buddhists and for Christians you don’t have to go back to the Crusades or even Jim Crow to find them.”
    It isn’t all that hard, it’s just much easier to find violent Muslims.
    Oh, and the Crusades were beating back Islamic aggression, if you know anything about the history.
    But, yeah, the guy was not a “cracker, Confederate, conservative Republican”, and there was never any reason to think he was. The Count’s predjudices are showing.

  73. “It isn’t all that hard, it’s just much easier to find violent Muslims. ”
    That’s called confirmation bias, Brett. The Christian Right and the non-Christian Right supported people like Montt and Savimbi and D’Aubisson who between them killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in brutal, awful, grotesque ways and it’s rich to hear some of the same folks a few decades later claiming that Islam is uniquely evil.
    And I suppose the First Crusade’s sack of Jerusalem with the slaughter of Jews and Muslims was all part of beating back Muslim aggression, along with the Fourth Crusade’s sacking of Constantinople. I don’t really give a damn about the Crusades–nobody in that era had a modern sensibility regarding human rights. I actually wish Obama had stuck to purely modern examples of Christian wrongdoing if he were going to bring that up and he gave one–Jim Crow. But there would be a huge firestorm if he really got serious discussing how Christianity is implicated in some of the worst examples of 20th Century violence. The Holocaust couldn’t have occurred without centuries of Christian anti-semitism. Not really something I’d expect a President to say, but true. And churchgoers in America are more likely than secular types to support torture.
    I’m Christian, btw.

  74. Oh, and the Crusades were beating back Islamic aggression, if you know anything about the history.
    The number and range of things on which you are expert is, truly, mind-boggling.

  75. The count’s prejudcies seem rather to be primarily in the direction of hyperbole, rather than attacking any particular set of positions. 😉

  76. In fact, much of the history of Latin American violence in the late 20th century was in part an inter-Christian war between the liberation theology types and the rightwing Christians. I remember reading how the Argentinian regime (which killed between 10 and 30 thousand and was also viciously anti-semitic) claimed it was defending Christian civilization. It’s been both amazing and depressing to me to see how little people seem to remember of this. Instead all the usual nitwits focus on the Crusades and think they are scoring points by saying that the Muslims started it. (As if the Middle East were some peaceful utopia before Mohammad. Try reading a history of the Byzantine Empire before Muhammad–the Emperor Heraclius wanted to slaughter all Jews because they had sided with Persians and had slaughtered Christians,who in turn had been persecuting Jews. Darn those Muslims for making the Middle East violent.)

  77. The count’s prejudcies seem rather to be primarily in the direction of hyperbole, rather than attacking any particular set of positions. 😉
    Well, my great affection for Maynard notwithstanding, this is bs. He is not averse to attacking any particular set of positions. Hyperbole yes. But he is pretty focused on the set of positions he attacks, and sometimes those are not warranted.

  78. “I would be more impressed if he wasn’t planning to short every stock before he files anything.”
    Oh, me too. And the practice should be illegal.
    But why isn’t the principle of incentivizing socially beneficial activism via the big payoff, short or otherwise, O.K., like your example of limiting price competition for orphan drugs to incentivize the research, development, and marketing of drugs for rare diseases, which I favor, as long as Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance subsidize the costs to the limited number of patients.
    This last being the key to the drug companies ever bothering to address drugs for small markets.
    Socialism works.
    Maybe Bass (maybe? for sure he wouldn’t) wouldn’t trouble himself over this issue without the big payoff, though I’d prefer he volunteer his services gratis.

  80. “The number and range of things on which you are expert is, truly, mind-boggling.”
    It’s scarcely my fault if you slept through history class. Or perhaps never covered the Crusades, I understand history classes have gotten kind of weak since I was in school. (Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth…)
    The Crusades begain in the 11th century, as an effort to recapture territory conquered by Muslims, after the slaughter of 3000 Christian pilgrams in Jeruselem, and the destruction of many Christian and Jewish holy sites.
    I realize it has become popular with some people, including our current President, to pretend the Crusades were a war of agression against peaceful Muslims, but the truth is nothing of the sort.

  81. “UPDATE 2: We have the option of going to Disqus, which I know nothing about.”
    Just stay as far away from “SolidOpinion” as possible.

  82. “A review of the Facebook page of the man charged in these murders, Craig Hicks, shows a consistent theme of anti-religion and progressive causes. Included in his many Facebook “likes” are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, gay marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.”
    By the strict standards espoused by Sandy Hook Troofers, this is obvious a False Flag operation.

  84. The Catholic hierarchy’s role in the Argentinian dictatorship in the late 70’s-early 80’s.
    Link
    Down the old memory hole. In this case with good reason, since Reagan and Jean Kirkpatrick and other heroes of the American right supported the fascists who were torturing people to death. Until they invaded the Falklands.
    Yeah, support for terror and violence against civilians is a uniquely Muslim problem. Only folks given to stupid belief in moral equivalence would compare support for torture and death squads in Latin America and Africa with support for torture and death squads in Syria and Iraq.

  85. An “orphan drug” is one being developed to treat a rare disease — one which is so uncommon that the market for a drug to treat it is tiny. Hence the risk of not making back the development costs. (Not sure where the “orphan” part of the name came from.)

  86. “The Count’s prejudices are showing.”
    No kidding? Like my underpants, I wear them on the outside of my clothes, so it’s not a big discovery.
    We’ll be confiscating guns owned and provided by the NRA to liberals too, with the exception of the ones they use for hunting and they store at the armory.
    I’d like to know to know if the guy had a concealed carry permit, provided by the North Carolina Republican Party. I’ll give the latter kudos for not discriminating against liberals in the application of stupid laws.
    I am disappointed that this reported Leftist didn’t use the alternative weaponry suggested by the NRA for use in the event of a gun shortage … scissors, his SUV, a baseball bat, razor-edged derbies, etc.
    Maybe one or more of the three dead ones might have pulled through.
    Parking, hunh? If we’re to permit the carrying of weaponry, why not kill over parking?
    What is more maddening then someone scooting into a parking place you’ve been waiting for with your blinker on?
    Certainly a bigger and more common threat to citizen well-being than your average mugging, home invasion, black kid marauding while armed with Skittles, or the domestic Muslim terrorist attack.
    Such rudeness.
    An armed society makes for a more polite society.
    As Tench Coxe, the visionary who foresaw the development of the SUV with automatic transmission and gun turrets driven by armed American a^sholes, will tell you.

  88. what is an orphan drug?
    Orphan drugs are drugs targeting ‘orphan diseases’, which are typically very rare disorders that would lack the large patient base typically used to amortize the initial R&D cost.
    In the US, and other countries as well, drugs developed for orphan diseases typically have a protected status. In the US, companies can charge more (sometimes *a lot* more) for orphan drugs within a 7 year period, for example.
    For more info:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug

  90. As a hater of the bow tie, unless it squirts water, I can see why Science Guy Bill Nye should be held responsible for murderous rampages by his acolytes.
    The bow tie is a prompt, a signal, a trigger warning, if you will, like the Queen of Diamonds in “The Manchurian Candidate”.
    You wouldn’t believe the number of shooting sprees I’ve been on after listening to Tucker Carlson bragging on TV about kicking faggot butt at the urinals.

  94. The Crusades begain in the 11th century, as an effort to recapture territory conquered by Muslims, after the slaughter of 3000 Christian pilgrams in Jeruselem, and the destruction of many Christian and Jewish holy sites.
    Recapture implies it was previously held and ruled by Christian Europeans.
    Which is sort of true, but if you’re talking about the quote-unquote holy land, for “previously held” you have to go back to 638.
    The more proximate cause of the initial Crusade was the loss of territory in Asia Minor to the Seljuks by the Byzantine Empire. Alexios asked Urban II for help, Urban responded by declaring a Crusade, for a mixed bag of motives.
    Interestingly, Constantinople ended up being one of the places “recaptured” during the Crusades. Kind of an own-goal, that.
    “The Crusades” encompasses a generous number of military efforts, taken over 200 years, against a variety of opponents (many of them some variety of Christian), in a variety of places (including the Baltic Sea).
    Characterizing them as a “defensive war” against an “insurgent Islam threatening western Europe” is simplistic to the point of ignorance.
    If you’re talking, specifically, about Crusades in Palestine, Syria, and thereabouts, you’re talking about people from western Europe “recapturing” territory, on another continent, that had been under the political control of one Muslim group or another for over 450 years at the time of the first Crusade.
    And when it had last been held by a Christian entity, that had been the Byzantines, who were a distinct entity, politically socially and religiously, from Latin Europe.

  95. As a point of reference, 450 years ago the first European battle fought on American soil occurred, when Spanish forces wiped out a French Huguenot settlement in Florida.
    Perhaps the French Huguenot community (do they still exist?) could declare a Crusade to recapture their lost territory in Jacksonville.

  96. Remarkably, under Sharia law, the Prophet prohibits shooting someone over a parking spot.
    Yet another visionary.
    I’m reading Henry IV, Part I and II, and then on to Henry V, and both Bolingbroke and the future King, Prince Harry, use the sending of troops into the Crusades as a foreign policy outlet to get people’s minds off the dreadful state of shopping in their domestic economies.
    Who does that sound like?
    All religions, even the Stalinist one, justify murder of one kind or another.
    If you could place all of the bodies of the individuals murdered by religious interests in the history of Man end to end, and then light it up, you’d have one hell of a large billboard advertising religion.
    Christianity being no exception, though claiming exceptionalism in all things but murder.
    Geez, without at least one murder on the Cross, where would Christianity be today? That God volunteered the victim is no excuse.
    Religion has its good points too, lest my prejudices, sewn into my underwear for all to see, get the best of me.
    I can see this discussion evolving into the Hitler versus Stalin body count argument, with Mohammad followers edging out the followers of Christ and Yahveh to take the lead, but with the latter feeling a little let down at the defeat, demanding a recount, and then redoubling their efforts.
    Followers being thick and ordinary as usual.
    I think both conservative Muslims and conservative white DJs and their teenaged followers in the American South burned their copies of Rubber Soul at one time, their sensibilities aligning once again.
    To which Ringo said, “Good, that just means they’ll have to go out and buy the records again, which means more money for the Beatles.”
    Then he spent it on orphan drugs.

  98. To try again, and follow up on wj:
    Not sure where the “orphan” part of the name came from.
    The ‘orphan’ drugs target ‘orphan’ diseases, which have been ‘orphaned’ by pharmaceutical development because there is no practical way to recover R&D costs. Typically because the disease is so rare, each individual patient would have to pay an exorbitant share of the R&D costs. As opposed to a prevalent disease, where the cost can be amortized over millions of patients.

  100. Thanks to one and all for the clarification regarding orphan drugs.
    I am, unsurprisingly, basically on the same page with cleek.
    If market forces are an insufficient impetus to develop medications needed to address “orphan” diseases, then public intervention is appropriate. Of whatever form. And, it looks like we already do that, through tax policy and exclusive rights to manufacture for a limited time.
    Apparently an “orphan” disease in the US is one that affects 200K or fewer people.
    That’s still a lot of people.

  101. russell, maybe he was thinking about the retaking of Spain…?
    Not if he’s talking about Jerusalem.
    The “retaking of Spain” is the Reconquista. The history there is also less than straightforward, but maybe a topic for another day.

  102. “Nope, just keeping us between the navigational beacons.”
    Are you in the Coast Guard?
    Drinking and boating do not mix, which is why they are mixed all the time.

  103. apparently, the NC shooting was over parking.
    by an outspoken atheist liberal gun-worshipping lunatic.
    someone for everyone to hate.

  106. Not in the Coast Guard, just listening to five o’clock somewhere while typing. Just as dangerous. Hopefully there are no objections from the outspoken atheist liberal gun-worshipping lunatic lobby. Although I am always more concerned about the soft spoken atheist liberal gun-worshipping lunatic lobby.

  107. Also heard at the National Prayer Breakfast — the voice of the Prophet:
    “And even at this year’s breakfast, the message of the “non-controversial” keynote speaker, NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip, was a very blunt contradiction of the president’s injunction to humility about religious truth:
    If you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don’t have a relationship [with Him], if He’s not the master of your life, if you’ve never gotten on your knees and asked Him to forgive you of your sins, [and] you’re just a pretty good guy or a pretty good gal, you’re going to go to Hell.”
    From TPM.
    I hope we can stay to see the Demolition Derby before Waltrip’s hitman, backs over us in his stock car.
    I invite Waltrip to parachute into ISIL territory and break the news to those guys.
    Regarding the shooter, I hate it when religious Second Amendment conservatives arm jacka*s murderous atheists too.
    You’d thin they’d know better.
    What the two have on common is that they are Americans and they adore the Second Amendment.
    I’d like to see a gunfight between our liberal atheist gun freaks and the armed Libertarian/Republican gun freaks up in New England who harass and threaten parking meter attendants.

  108. And, it looks like we already do that, through tax policy and exclusive rights to manufacture for a limited time.
    And that policy has been pretty effective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act ):
    Before Congress enacted the ODA in 1983 only 38 drugs were approved in the USA specifically to treat orphan diseases.[8] In the USA, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization. In contrast, the decade prior to 1983 saw fewer than ten such products come to market. From the passage of the ODA in 1983 until May 2010, the FDA approved 353 orphan drugs and granted orphan designations to 2,116 compounds. As of 2010, 200 of the roughly 7,000 officially designated orphan diseases have become treatable.
    It’s definitely not without its downsides (patients within that 1st seven years can have staggering costs).

  109. I’d like to see a gunfight between our liberal atheist gun freaks and the armed Libertarian/Republican gun freaks up in New England who harass and threaten parking meter attendants.
    cream pies at twenty paces!!

  114. and no group of Christians never tried to kill no entire fucking population of non-Christians.
    “>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Genocide
    Oh, cleek, you poor deluded fool, don’t you know that conflict didn’t involve Christians? It was an ethnic war between Serbs, Croats, and ethnic Muslims. Haven’t you ever even once read or heard about it from a respectable source over the past twenty years?
    God, if you’re going to try to spoonfeed us delusions like that, why don’t you just serve up a fanciful line like how, I dunno, that “genocide” happened in a conflict involving “ethnic Orthodox Christians”, “ethnic Catholic Christians”, and “Bosniaks”?!?

  116. In the case of Google, specifically, I’m not sure I agree.
    The approach they take to page ranking arguably improved the quality of internet search results, which is actually valuable.
    The technical innovations they’ve made in dealing with very very large datasets – many of which they have made available, at least in part, for other folks to build on – are central to a lot of current-day internet technology.
    I don’t dispute that a lot of tech “innovation”, especially on the consumer side, is BS, and that a lot of the perceived value is just vibe.
    But in the case of Google, specifically, I think there actually is a “there” there.
    There are folks here who actually are hands on with the big data stuff, I’d be curious to know their opinions.

    It’s not just big data with Google. Not by a long shot.
    I studied language technology back in the day at a fairly intense research school. Google courted and hired a number of my classmates (not me, my research area was too esoteric) and maintained a research lab in the building next to mine.
    Google really does have a “there” there, as you put it. Their impact on not just big data but language technology and human-computer interaction tech has been dramatic and meaningful, both in terms of funding and direct research. Facebook and Apple are more about engineering – implementing or tweaking existing tech – but Google has helped drive a lot of research which led to new tech, even if a lot of it is under the hood. If you go into a number of tech fields, you’ll find an awful lot of Google research scientists as co-authors on papers – they’re doing research, too, and they’re publishing it. Not all of it is for public consumption, of course, but a lot of it is, and Google has (well, had; I’m out-of-the-loop these days) a very good reputation for fostering open collaborative research with external scholars.

  117. The stuff I was thinking of with Google was stuff like Chubby, and Google File System, and Map/Reduce, which turned into Hadoop.
    I’m sure there’s more.
    Net/net, a very influential organization, in lots of good ways. IMVHO.

  120. and speaking of Florida:

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, Florida State Senator Alan Hays has proposed a bill that would require public school students to watch D’Souza’s 2014 effort America: Imagine A World Without Her—a film that is to American history what Troy McClure’s Meat And You: Partners In Freedom is to the beef industry. By making America mandatory viewing for Florida teenagers, Hays says he hopes to counteract the message spread by their history books, which teaches them that our ancestors slaughtered indigenous tribes, brought African slaves to their shores, and stole territories from Mexico, yet neglect to say that these things were totally awesome because America is awesome.

  121. I find myself in unlikely agreement with noted North Korean film reviewers regarding that movie.
    Isn’t the word “mandatory” related to the word “mandate”, as in local governments should not be subject to mandates by state and federal governments.
    Latin spoken by pigs is so confusing.

  123. So once the trouble starts, I won’t have to lug all of my guns down to Texas.
    I can just buy what I need there.
    Sweet.

  124. That decision should wreak havoc with the State of Texas prohibiting its residents from purchasing marijuana in Colorado and smoking it back home.

  125. Google really does have a “there” there, as you put it. Their impact on not just big data but language technology and human-computer interaction tech has been dramatic and meaningful, both in terms of funding and direct research.
    They also are doing things rather outside the computer area. For eample, over 100 medical folks researching things like artificial skin. It may not lead to the next big computer thing. But it may be darned significant even so.

  126. “The Republicans — if there is a successful attack during a DHS shutdown — we should build a number of coffins outside each Democratic office and say, ‘You are responsible for these dead Americans,’” Kirk said Tuesday.’
    Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/dhs-funding-gop-senate-house-bill-115075.html#ixzz3RU3EjOgA
    I suspect, if ISIL/al Qaeda kill liberals, Democrats, and others of the overwhelming OTHER so anathema to vermin Republicans during the DHS shutdown, the Republicans will applaud their conservative Muslims brothers- in-murder for accomplishing what pig filth Republicans so dearly desire.
    Later, Kirk counseled Republicans to give it up, to his credit, perhaps fearing that there WOULDN’T be a terrorist attack during the shutdown, which might lead some to question the need for a Republican militarized homeland police state at all.

  127. In closing for the day, and maybe the week (please, screams the rabble, make it the year!), let me observe that the Koch Brothers have been known to squirt their lactating breast milk from the far side of the Supreme Court chambers directly into the waiting open mouths of the feeding five conservative Supreme Court Justices:
    http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2015/02/04/supreme-court-concludes-firing-a-woman-for-breastfeeding-isnt-sexist-because-men-can-lactate/

  128. They also are doing things rather outside the computer area.
    I think it’s a good thing, and as much as I hate Google’s stance on hovering up personal data, I am impressed with how they serve as an incubator for diverse interests. I think its smart, too, as it gives the company diverse patent, expertise, and infrastructure diversity. That ensures they can follow the market if web advertising ever decreases in revenue (personally, I think it will).

  129. “diverse diversity”, heh. I used to use the recaptcha as a last check. I guess I should get used to using the ‘preview’ button.

  130. Google. Yes they do some diverse interesting things. Not particularly useful. Somehow the disclaimer that no one knows about it but its really great doesn’t sway me. They have a board and CEO who, outside buying YouTube, having created a profitable business since search. So, I suppose, useful is in the eye of the beholder.

  133. Not particularly useful
    Which same could be said of pretty much everything DARPA ever researched, too. Until it turned out to be vastly useful, not to mention occasionally revolutionary, some years later.
    Basic research is like exploring an unknown continent. You don’t have any idea what you will find. But you can depend on the fact that you will find something. And some of those will be things you will be very glad you found.

  134. Not particularly useful.
    –
    Self-driving car research (yes, further out than people make it out to be, but they are making profound progress)
    -google scholar (a basic extension of search, sure, but I find it useful)
    -google fiber (infrastructure is useful)
    -lots of little projects. Frex, one of the students in my graduate program was funded by google to research the practicality of in-hub motors for electric cars. Short answer, last time I checked in: they aren’t.
    etc etc etc. I hardly consider myself a google fanboy (somethings I really despise about them), but they definitely have had an impact.

  135. Oh and I almost forgot…google translate. I’m not much into natural language interpretation, but my understanding is google has done very good work in the area.

  136. Somehow the disclaimer that no one knows about it but its really great doesn’t sway me.
    The technologies I referenced above are very well known among people who work in modern internet technologies. It’s not an insignificant space.
    You use stuff they developed or contributed to every single day, whether you know it or not.
    Artificial skin and self-driving cars are all very space-age and sparkly, but the plumbing makes the world go round.
    Seriously, there is a “there” there.

  137. It is a lovely day
    You’ll forgive me if I think this is kind of small beer.
    Right now you can buy a handgun in a state you do not reside in. You have to have the seller ship it to a licensed seller in your state.
    This ruling. to the degree that it affects anything, means you don’t have to have it shipped, you can wear it home.
    Pret a porter sidearms.
    Buy whatever you want, if you want to carry it around in my state you’ll need a license to carry or you’ll find your @ss in front of a judge.

  138. Google has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on research and other companies. Despite the assertion to the contrary, I do not use the stuff they’ve developed every day. Hadoop is the most likely thing I might use unknowingly, and I doubt it. I just don’t do “big data” reporting much. Android is the epitome of me too software, so no. Google almost everything else is their play to be MS for no reason other than they have billions to spend on trying. They stopped supporting google translate, and a bunch of other things.
    I will avoid talking about “modern internet technologies” as I’m certain to offend some people with my opinion.
    Finally, I think their investment in basic research is great, it just doesn’t support the thesis that to be a billionaire you need to build something useful, in fact, they built something cool, became billionaires, and have used some of the money to try to find something useful.

  139. I do not use the stuff they’ve developed every day.
    I guess my point is that you wouldn’t know if you did.
    my thought process there is that if stuff you use every day uses stuff they developed or contributed to, you’re using their stuff every day.
    i’ve worked on stuff (not at Google) that you probably consume every day, in one way or another.
    stuff that works well and does something useful ends up getting used.
    it just doesn’t support the thesis that to be a billionaire you need to build something useful
    you’ll get no argument from me on this.

  140. Re Chapel Hill
    Just imagine if the victims had been white Christians and the perpetrator a Muslim with a history of anti-Christian hate-speech …

  141. “Just imagine if the victims had been white Christians and the perpetrator a Muslim with a history of anti-Christian hate-speech …”
    Why would I imagine this? More important, YOU imagine for us what your reaction would be? Is it the same? Really?

  142. Android is the epitome of me too software
    because there were a lot of freely-useable pro-class smartphone/tablet OS’s out there ? yet another smartphone OS (YASPOS) ?

  144. YOU imagine for us what your reaction would be? Is it the same? Really?
    Actually, yes it would be. Why would it not?
    But I also have complete confidence that the reaction overall, especially in the red states, would be entirely different. Not to mention hysterical.

  145. All of tech is busily building consumer ad generating crap or, the best case, repurposing old tech to be considered cool.
    I’ve been pondering this since Marty first wrote it.
    What strikes me is that the way that a lot of technological innovation shows up in the marketplace is as some kind of increased convenience.
    So, the substance of the good or service is kind of the same, it’s just handier.
    Amazon predictively stages stuff you might want in a warehouse near you, so you get your sweater (or whatever) a day earlier. You can pay for your cup of coffee with your phone. Your phone will tell you where the nearest Thai restaurant is. Your house knows when you walk from one room to another, and it turns the light on for you.
    Stuff like that. It’s all stuff you can easily live without, it’s just incrementally handier and (depending on point of view) maybe slightly hipper to use the gizmo.
    It seems like there’s an upper limit on how much value can be added that way. Once the novelty of stuff wears off, the coolness factor kind of declines, and in the end you end up with the same cup of coffee, or the same sweater, or whatever.
    How much further can you go with stuff like that, before it becomes kind of pointless? Maybe Amazon figures out where you are based on the GPS location of your phone, and delivers your stuff to you in person, by drone, so you don’t even have to wait until you go home to get it?
    My sense in general is that a robust economy has to be based on creating value of some kind.
    Have we gone past some point where that’s even all that relevant?
    In other words, if we already have pretty much all the stuff we actually need, are we in some kind of law-of-diminishing-returns territory?
    Sorry for the rambling comment.

  146. we may well be at the point of diminishing returns on all the “innovations” you cite. But that doesn’t mean that there are not completely new things that can be done with computers — things which would substantially change the way we live for the better. Not to mention innovations in areas like medical technology.
    The other problem I have is with the suggestion that “incremental improvements” are worthless. Most technological progress** is the result of incremental improvements. Lots and lots of incremental improvements, added together.
    ** As is, one could argue, most progress of other kinds. In fact, incremental improvement is pretty much the only way most social progress happens — unless you are willing to fight a civil war to make it happen.

  147. Sorry for the rambling comment.
    Rambling but insightful, so no apology necessary.
    It brings me to channeling my inner Tony P. in wondering why health care’s growing as a sector of our economy is so often put forth as being inherently bad. Isn’t there incredible value in keeping people from suffering and/or being sick and/or dead? It’s kind of hard for me to think of anything of more value.
    What good are lights that come on automatically when you walk into a room if you can’t get out of bed?

  148. I’d second wj on incremental progress. If you just take the example of cell phones…I know walk around with a reasonably capable computer in my pocket at all times. The technology that made that possible involves a host of developments in battery tech, wireless signal transmission, energy efficiency, manufacturing, etc etc. I don’t know if anybody could have predicted how powerful and commonplace smart phones would be 15 years ago…in part due to the number of stumbling blocks: ‘you’d never be able to make a battery *that* small’ or ‘you’d never be able to make a transistor *that* small’, etc
    Also, I think he’s dead on with medical technology. One of the reasons I’m in biomedical research is because there is an incredible amount to do. Treatments and diagnostics can get better, faster, cheaper. And do.
    And just to double down on the ‘cheaper’ point: That’s a huge part of progress. If you look at genetic sequencing, for example, a few decades ago it was an incredibly laborious process…now we are crossing the threshold into personalized medicine based in no small part on the rapidly decreasing cost and increasing speed of sequencing.
    In short, I don’t think ‘we in some kind of law-of-diminishing-returns territory?’
    Just to briefly speak to the concept of the ‘incrementally handier’, I think that in and of itself has an impact. One of my friends is a low level executive for a biotech company. 10 years ago, his position would have had an administrative assistant associated with it. Now, one assistant works with roughly a half dozen people. This is enabled by things like a synchronized calender and email in your pocket.
    I think the economy is changing, perhaps as drastically as it did during the industrial revolution: we are just getting a lot more efficient. One person can do more, and all those little efficiencies add up.

  149. Maybe Amazon figures out where you are based on the GPS location of your phone, and delivers your stuff to you in person, by drone, so you don’t even have to wait until you go home to get it?
    maybe Amazon’s drone brings multiple options to you so you can choose which you like.
    right now, if i buy a pair of shoes on-line, there’s a 50/50 chance i’m going to send them back because they don’t fit right. maybe, if i’m feeling determined, i’ll then order a different size to try on. but maybe not. if it’s the latter, Amazon has just lost a potential sale.
    so… if i order a size 10, it might be worth it to Amazon to send me a 9.5 and a 10.5 too, so that i can choose. keep the one i want, return the other two. they pay a little more in postage, but they have a better chance of getting the sale.
    and the postage issue can be minimized. surely they have the sales data to see if the brand/style i ordered runs small or large compared to customer expectations. i think Zappos posts that info on their site already. so they could probably just send the size i ordered along with the size that will probably fit. and then i return the one i don’t want, and they get the sale. or make it an option – pay a little more in shipping and get to try two pair.
    like you said, that’s still the same shoes. but, that’s because Amazon is a store, not a manufacturer.

  150. Russell, wj, hsh,
    I believe technology can still add tremendous value in the world. Healthcare, food management, climate management are some of the good. There is a creeping dark side as varying types of hackers, not just countries and anonymous types, learn to create chaos in a world more connected every day.
    I do not believe our current economic expansion can continue to be based on technological innovation, for many of the insightful reasons raised in russells ramble.
    I believe we have innovated to the point where our economic systems are archaic, they will not support another 30? years of a growing workforce and shrinking useful work. At some point we will have to divide work up in a different way and money. But as the last gasp of the old way we are being sold useless advances as “must have” items to create an aura of s new generation of high value businesses’.
    Now that’s a ramble.

  152. Marty, thanks for the clarification. I, for one, had managed to totally miss your point.
    As far back as I can remember we have had fads, and new “must have” items which nobody really needed. It, like fashion generally, is a phenomena which never goes away — it just occasionally changes what part of the consumer economy it inhabits. Makes no sense to me either, but there is it.
    That said, I think we need to keep firmly in mind that innovation continues as well. And it can well include innovation in how the economy works. We probably will need some changes soon (if we do not already). And we will certainly have vigorous resistance from those who are profiting from the current arrangements. But the changes will come, regardless.
    The only question is: what will those changes be? If we had the answer to that we could, as with other innovations, be positioning ourselves even now to take advantage….

  153. that doesn’t mean that there are not completely new things that can be done with computers — things which would substantially change the way we live for the better.
    Agreed, my question is basically whether those are the things we’re doing.
    As an example: compare the number of people and the amount of resources directed toward figuring out how to put ads that are exquisitely tailored to your shopping habits in your browser session, vs the number of people and amount of resources directed toward a practical way to store solar-generated power.
    I couldn’t tell you what the numbers are, but my guess is that they don’t reflect the substantive, long-term value that the two different projects would create.
    Not to mention innovations in areas like medical technology.
    Agreed, as regards medical technology.
    The other problem I have is with the suggestion that “incremental improvements” are worthless.
    I wouldn’t say incremental improvements, per se, are worthless.
    I would say that when the improvement is purely in the area of convenience, the value added is maybe not so large.
    I think the economy is changing, perhaps as drastically as it did during the industrial revolution: we are just getting a lot more efficient.
    As an aside, I note that part of that process is that we tend to not do things that can’t be rationalized enough to be made more efficient, whether via technology or otherwise.
    Put another way, things that can’t be made efficient get crowded out.
    Sometimes that’s a win, sometimes not.
    right now, if i buy a pair of shoes on-line
    in my case, I don’t buy shoes online, because I can’t try them on.
    Which kind of gets me back to my point: assuming there is some value added by the sheer handiness of being able to buy shoes without leaving your house, is there really enough there to build an economy on?
    I’m not saying everybody has to stop buying stuff online, I’m just asking if there’s enough value in that to sustain the kind of wealth generation that we’ve become accustomed to / dependent on.

  154. ” If we had the answer to that we could, as with other innovations, be positioning ourselves even now to take advantage….”
    There are few options in the what’s next arena. In the last six years, perhaps 14, we have moved at an accelerating rate into that future. It is the future of the technology priest. Aside from the STEM experts, everyone else is essentially equal. They work as much as society needs them to and then get protected and supported at a minimal level acceptable to the priest castes conscience.
    The groundwork is laid, the sides are formed, the momentum is in the favor of the priests. We’ll see.

  155. when the improvement is purely in the area of convenience, the value added is maybe not so large.
    Sometimes that’s quite true. On the other hand, sometimes increased convenience means that we get time and energy to devote to other pursuits. Having a refrigerator in your kitchen is an increased convenience compared to going to the green grocer every day. But that’s a lot of time saved. Ditto a lot of other conveniences.
    Maybe most people don’t use that extra time for anything constructive. But some of them use the time to invent the next incremental improvement to our real economy. Or the next revolutionary change. And it only takes a few people doing that….

  156. Here’s something I think I may be seeing in this discussion: the use of “technology” to mean stuff that the “tech industry” makes (i.e. computery stuff).
    Suspension bridges are technology. Hell, fire is technology (as are commas, which allow the distinction between *an interjection followed by a noun* as opposed to *a modifier preceding the noun it’s modifying*, though Satan may consider hell fire to be technology, sans comma), at least when used purposefully.
    That’s not to say, for instance, that health care isn’t going to be advanced by computery technology, be directly at the point of care or at the administrative level, but it is to say that the value-generating potential of health care I was referring to wasn’t restricted to techy stuff.
    As far as the whole tech-for-convenience/efficiency thing goes, some stuff is inherently not so useful, while other stuff with the potential to create actual value gets misapplied or abused by the user, which isn’t a problem with the technology itself, rather with humans being thoughtless or stupid about things in general.
    I’d like to hope that our culture will mature in terms of the use of technology (of the computery sort) and become less enamored with being constantly connected and feeling the need to respond to every input immediately.

  157. Mostly, the computer industry tends to refer to ourselves as “high tech” not just “technology.” Which is doubtless raw egotism on our part. 😉
    But it does help clarify what is being talked about.

  158. As far as my comments here go, by technology I mean basically any technology, but with an emphasis on technological development.
    I.e., invention. So, new technologies, or new applications of existing technologies.
    The question I have about it has to do with the value created by the innovation.
    I more or less agree with what I take to be Marty’s sense that a lot of the traditional economy is kind of played out, and that we’re assuming technical innovation is going to save our bacon.
    If you consider that in a global competitive environment, I can see where stuff like, for example, growing tissue in a lab to use for surgery or organ replacement has the opportunity be a real value-generating technology.
    Other things that would fall in a high-value-added category might include more efficient power generation, transmission, and storage, technologies to address the effects of climate change (never mind its cause), and, broadly, innovations in medicine or agriculture.
    Getting your sweater to you same-day, delivered by a drone, less so. It’s nice, but I don’t see stuff like that as creating enough value to sustain an economy of our scale.
    These are the kinds of questions that might be addressed by an industrial policy, if we had one.

  159. I think we, here, should define an industrial policy as a goal. At a minimum, I think we could create an outline of what the key sections should address.
    Not that it hasn’t been done, it’s just that there is a breadth of viewpoints here in an environment where those differing views are reasonably evaluated.
    Or, shorter, there’s some smart people here whose conclusions would be interesting.

  161. I more or less agree with what I take to be Marty’s sense that a lot of the traditional economy is kind of played out, and that we’re assuming technical innovation is going to save our bacon.
    how many people are actually assuming that, vs how many are whistling past the graveyard while hoping something else comes along to save us before it’s too late?
    because, for every American like me who can write C++, China and India have a dozen. right now, i feel like i’m holding out against the cultural differences that make me worth employing. some day, some one will figure out how to overcome that problem.
    tech has a way of getting around. if you figure something out, it doesn’t take long for someone else to figure out how you did it.

  162. It may be worth noting that, for every person here who can code C++ (or the language of your choice), there are indeed a dozen in India or China whose resumes say they can code it. But if you are IT manager looking to outsource an important project, you will have to figure out which of them belong to the 5% who can actually do so competently. By which time, unless you get lucky, your project will have missed its deadline and your position in serious jeopardy.

  163. because, for every American like me who can write C++, China and India have a dozen.
    last month, I was out in OH burying my mother-in-law. i have two brothers-in-law via my wife, her brother and her sister’s husband.
    sister’s husband works for / has some equity in a small company out in San Fran. they have an approach to managing complex data in large enterprises, which is supported by a product that they own, i.e. they hold the rights to the IP. they started out as a company in the UK, first thing they did was figure out how to lay off all of the UK engineers and hire an Indian crew.
    per sister’s husband, an Indian engineer with a PhD in computer science goes for about $15K/year.
    there are complications that go along with outsourcing, if it’s not managed well you might as well stack up a bunch of $100 bills and set them on fire.
    but that is about 10-to-1 difference in pay scale.
    i’ve been writing code for about 30 years, C / C++ for a little over 20, C# since it was invented. I bring some other things to the table, mostly having to do with getting a product out the door that answers the mail, mostly on time, mostly on budget, I’m also pretty good at turning somebody’s bright idea into something you can actually build and support. Plus, I can actually have a conversation about the technology with people who aren’t technical, which is helpful.
    All of that makes me a fairly marketable guy, but a 10-to-1 salary differential is something that gets people’s attention.
    Realistically, I probably have another 5-7 years and then I’m done. Between my wife and I, we’re in reasonably good shape. I’m most likely gonna be OK.
    If I were 40, or 30, I’d be thinking about what my future might be.
    If I were 20, I might think about being a plumber, staying out of debt, and growing my own food.

  164. On the other hand, I know several companies which, after years of trying to make it work, are “on-shoring” their IT and/or “in-sourcing” it. Because even with a 10-1 cost differential, the grief is just more expensive than the nominal savings.
    It’s taken a long time for the lesson to be absorbed. And obviously a lot of companies haven’t absorbed it yet. But the future may not be as grim as you suppose, russell.
    P.S. There are even a couple of companies which are back training rookie mainframe systems guys. Because their existing systems staff are all hit ting retirement age, and the attempts they have made to incorporate Indian mainframe guys just haven’t worked out. Not as many jobs there as in C++codinjg. But another straw in the wind.

  165. Indias income growth is coming along nicely, what used to be $3 workers are now $15. In 20 years the pay differential will be small enough to make offshoring there useless. There are several billion other people in Eastern Europe, China, East Asia, South America and Africa that will take up the slack. Culture remains the question. A larger problem is the inevitable decline of OS, networking and storage innovation that makes those 2nd, 3rd and maybe 4th generation language skills less valuable and even more outsourceable.
    The decline is hard to spot because it, unlike the downturns in 2001 where places like SF suddenly saw 50 to 60% drops in pay for C+ coders, is not a widespread layoff event. It is easiest spotted by assessing the average age of your peers. Fewer entry level jobs is the leading indicator. Fewer contracting positions available is another. Ask any ABAP programmer that’s been around 15 years. It took several years and thousands of tech folks changing careers to level out that bubble.
    So, the supposed saving grace is the workforce is shrinking, that means every metric we are used to following becomes suspect. Is 2% growth really ok because the number of people being added is smaller? So real wages will go up even though the overall pie isn’t growing much? Is the number even relevant in a more globalized economy? Does buy local actually solve some of that or is it just too small to even continue to invest in? Is STEM education the panacea we are pushing it to be, or should we be making sure the next generation of construction workers, mill workers and supermarket shelf stockers get a wage above minimum? Are there too many barbers too? Is my next car really going to be unbreakable for 150k miles and then disposable? Or do driverless cars mean I just don’t own a car and Uber becomes ubiquitous?
    Interesting. India has an industrial policy that focuses on onshoring higher level work from other countries as fast as possible because inertia, and an experienced workforce, will likely keep large chunks in India once the cost benefit doesn’t exist. So should we subsidize keeping work here until the cost delta is made up?
    I could talk about offshoring risks, they are real. But the people who have learned to manage them have been really successful. The key has always been to have enough scale to invest in the right management practices.

  166. I think we, here, should define an industrial policy as a goal.
    mmmm…reminds me of JK Galbraith with a hint of Kalecki.

  167. Disqus is the best comment system. It keeps you logged in, is always ‘up’ (at worst, you have to reload it). If you are not logged in, you can make a comment, then log in, and not lose your comment. Apparently the programmers behind all other systems don’t worry about lost data.

  169. in other words, would you like to kick this off:
    I think we, here, should define an industrial policy as a goal. At a minimum, I think we could create an outline of what the key sections should address.

  172. I’d be more impressed except that I am old enough to remember Sears Roebuck catalogues arriving in the mail. We managed (following their directions) to figure out what size clothes we should order. Returns because we ordered the wrong size? Ha!
    It didn’t seem to be that big a deal. But perhaps standards for perfection of fit have gotten higher….

  174. But cleek, that’s why you should wear uncomfortable shoes. 10 hours on your feet in ill-fitting footwear subjectively adds whole days to your life!

  175. “But perhaps standards for perfection of fit have gotten higher….”
    More like, standards for attributing sizes to clothing have gotten lower, with the efforts by manufacturers to make fat people feel better about themselves. It’s difficult to be sure if any given article of apparel you order is accurately designated as to size, or off a size to sooth fatties’ feelings.
    I say that as a guy who’s carrying around 50 lbs of extra weight. The “same” size in one brand fits comfortably, another brand is like a sausage casing in the ‘same’ size.
    At the other end of the scale, my wife finds that some “XS” dresses fit, some are loose. Mostly she finds that the dresses she likes aren’t available in her size. (The bane of her life, she didn’t have that problem in the Philippines.)
    NV: The same principle that makes calorie deprivation work!

  176. That may well be part of the problem. At the time, clothes were sold by inches, not “sizes” — especially in catalogues.
    I haven’t noticed that, for example, (men’s) shoe sizes have changed particularly. But I don’t shop for clothes all that often. And, of course, women’s clothing may be a whole different story.

  179. I wear a 11 1/2 EE shoe, apparently, and should avoid stock-sized shoes like they’re plague rats.
    If you’ve never had a foot neuroma, you want to avoid that as much as you can.
    The C++ programming thing is kind of a sore point with me. Like many, it’s something I can put on my resume, but like many, it’s something I should avoid tooting my horn much as being a primary skill. Being able to write a program in C++ is one thing; being a competent C++ programmer is another thing. And, to address the offshoring thing, being a competent C++ programmer who can interpret the program specification accurately AND communicate accurately with the customer is yet another.
    There are doubtless lots of people in e.g. India who can do all of those things, but unfortunately they tend to be diluted by the many, many others who can only do one or two.
    Fortunately for me, my living is not made on my ability to program well in C++. It’s just a tool, much like FORTRAN was a tool back in the day.

  180. “It’s just a tool, much like FORTRAN was a tool back in the day.”
    What do you mean, “back in the day”??1? You can have my FORTRAN compiler when you pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.
    But it does make me wonder: if you really wanted to make sure that programming jobs stay on-shore, how about devising the new, great, whiz-bang programming language, that makes full use of American slang in its syntax and commands, so that only natives have much of a chance of correct coding.
    Implementation left as an exercise for those with too much time on their hands.

  181. cleek, I’m not sure I’d pin that one on Christianity. The woman clearly is mentally ill, not being trained by religious warriors. Unless I missed something …

  182. If I were 20, I might think about being a plumber, staying out of debt, and growing my own food.
    I kind of wish you were 20, would do all of that, and would blog about it. I’d be very interested in seeing how all of it went.

  183. cleek, I’m not sure I’d pin that one on Christianity. The woman clearly is mentally ill
    i didn’t expect you to be the one to whip out the No True Christian excuse. but, there it is.

  184. There are doubtless lots of people in e.g. India who can do all of those things, but unfortunately they tend to be diluted by the many, many others who can only do one or two.
    My thought is that folks who can do all three are relatively rare anywhere you go.
    The issue with building software, no matter who does it and where it happens, is that a number of stars have to align. There has to be an understanding of the domain that the software is being written for, there has to be an understanding of the environment (technical and otherwise) in which the software has to operate, there has to be an understanding of the overall human and business (and/or whatever) processes that the software has to integrate with and support, there has to be an understanding of what the metrics for success and failure are.
    Writing code that basically works is probably 10-20% of all of that.
    The biggest issue with offshoring, in my experience and my understanding of other people’s experience, is that you have to break things down to a sufficient level of granularity, and describe things with a sufficient level of clarity, that you take the 80-90% of stuff that isn’t just writing code out of the equation.
    You have to hand the problem to the coder on a plate.
    Same problem exists with any outsourcing effort, whether offshore or not.
    What is the end product supposed to do?
    Why is it important for it to do that?
    Who is going to use it?
    How do the folks who are going to use it do whatever it is that the software is supposed to help them do now?
    How and why will using the software instead of whatever they do now make anything better?
    If you don’t have good answers to all of the above, along with a number of other things, outsourcing (on shore or off shore) is not going to help you.
    Writing code has its challenges, but to be perfectly honest it’s not that hard. The hardest thing about it (IMO) is the persistence and patience needed to keep banging your head against the wall until the freaking thing works. It’s like trying to communicate with an alien intelligence, the hardest part is not just throwing your hands up in the air, saying f**k it, and finding a less annoying way to make a living.
    You either have an appetite for that kind of thing, or you don’t. If you’re the kind of person who will sit for an hour to untangle a knot, instead of just throwing the mess out and getting yourself a fresh piece of string, you might be a good coder.
    Being able to understand real-world problems and being able to come up with insightful solutions for them is a different kettle of fish.
    Whether it’s worth your while to outsource depends on whether what you need is a knot untied, or a problem solved.
    Folks who can understand problems, identify useful solutions, *and* untie the knot, are fairly valuable.
    You can find them all around the world, but your odds of knowing that you have the right person, and also your odds of actually getting full value out of their work, are better if you can sit across the table from them.
    That’s my experience.
    I kind of wish you were 20, would do all of that, and would blog about it. I’d be very interested in seeing how all of it went.
    Too late for me.
    If you are actually curious, you could just find some plumbers and ask them.

  185. I wear a 11 1/2 EE shoe, apparently, and should avoid stock-sized shoes like they’re plague rats.
    The thing, for me, about buying clothes online is that the size is only one piece of the puzzle.
    is it comfortable?
    Do I actually like the way it looks when I wear it?
    I don’t know how you figure that stuff out without actually trying the thing on.
    I know that you can always send stuff back, but it just seems like a giant PITA to me.
    It just seems about 100 times easier, to me, to go to the store, look at the thing, try it on, and decide if I want it.
    I live in a fairly densely populated area, it’s hard to imagine what I might possibly want that isn’t available within a 30 minute drive. Certainly an hour.
    So, if you live in a less densely populated place, I can see the equation coming out in a different place.
    But, for me personally, just looking at a picture and reading some text doesn’t tell me what I want to know.

  186. It’s certainly true that it is far better to shop for clothes in person. You can be sure that it fits everywhere — not just in the few places that the measurements cover. You can be sure what the color really is — pictures color accuracy is, shall we say, chancy. And so on and so on.
    But my point was, people across the country managed, for decades, with buying from a catalog. Which, when you come down to it, gives pretty much the same level of information that you get buying online. So if we are unhappy with the inaccuracies of buying online, it’s not that it is objectively bad so much as that our standards have risen substantailly.
    Which is fine, of course. But you ought not to forget what really happened.

  187. If you are actually curious, you could just find some plumbers and ask them.
    I am actually curious, but don’t know any plumbers who have no debt, grow their own food, are good writers, musicians, and talented at designing software. But I’ll look around.

  188. But my point was, people across the country managed, for decades, with buying from a catalog.
    I know some folks who live in a Sears Roebuck house, bought (not by them) from a catalog.
    So you are completely correct.
    but don’t know any plumbers who have no debt, grow their own food, are good writers, musicians, and talented at designing software.
    I don’t know anyone who checks all of those boxes, either.
    My point upthread was that, were I a young person just starting out, the broader economy might look fairly dicey to me. I might prefer to find ways to provide for my needs, while limiting my exposure to the risk and volatility of a consumer and finance driven economy.
    There are lots of people who take that approach, and lots of people who combine multiple elements from your list. The plumbing + software combination is probably not so common, any other mixture should actually not be that hard to track down.

  189. I’ve a cousin who can check all of those boxes but software and writing. At least, I don’t think they can check writing. But I know they can’t check software. I agree that plumbing and coding is likely a quite hard combo to find.

  190. My grandfather, a plumber, came out of the great depression debt free, owning a nice vacation house on Lake St. Clair. He used to say that no matter how bad the economy gets, people still need to sh*t.
    He also said that he could have come out of the great depression wealthy, if he hadn’t had ethics, and done so much work pro bono.
    He had some amazing stories to tell.

  192. As a Humanities guy, I’ve been unqualified for every job I’ve ever had.
    Rather than learning a practical trade, only to be offshored or replaced by a robot, I decided, I guess, to be useless from the get go.
    Plumbers should pay me royalties for being such an unhandy klutz with tools, despite the fact that I renovated residential real estate for awhile.
    My idea of software is a karate sidekick to whatever device isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.
    When I look under the hood of my car, about all I have to offer is harsh language directed at the engine, though I did manage to get the check engine light (about as good of a warning as a “fatal error message” on the computer) to go off the other day by unhooking the battery cables.
    We’ll see if that works or whether a second round of swearing at an inanimate object is required.
    I watch my technically-oriented friends fiddle with audio-visual TV clickers aimed at four or five different devices and notice their cussing is about as loud as mine and nearly as effective.
    I don’t have a TV or cable. Just Netflix.
    If you read the small print in the new drone policy proposed by the FAA, there’s a sentence there prohibiting me, and only me, from ever owning, operating, or receiving pizza through my window via drone.
    The last time I made a paper airplane and threw it, it hit a girl directly in the eye.

Comments are closed.