| Thursday,
November 20, 2008 t's like WoW for the
iPhone, apparently - only, it will play for you when you're doing other
things.
<http://kotaku.com/5093436/
aurora-feint-the-arena-brings-
asynchronous-mmo-to-iphone-this-fridayish>
-- Roland Dobbins
Wow. Such fun. As if I had time...
=========
Subject: Pournelle’s Law, for supercomputers?
Jerry, You’ll get a kick out of this:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html
If you count CPU cores as bona-fide CPUs (I think
that’s fair), then this desktop computer exceeds your minimum criteria by
nearly 1000X! And, a bullet in the middle of the page reads: “One
Researcher, One Supercomputer”. I wonder who they are quoting? It’s kinda
catchy , don’t you think? ;-)
-Jay
===========
ISink Like a Pirate Day
>Indian navy sinks suspected pirate "mother" ship >By
SAM DOLNICK, Associated Press Writer
>NEW DELHI – An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected
pirate "mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats >into
the night, officials said Wednesday, yet more violence in the lawless seas
where brigands are becoming bolder and more >violent.
So that's another way to tell we're in the 21st
century -- when it's the Indians instead of the cavalry who come riding to
the rescue.
Mike
Hoo Hah!
==
Somali Pirates
And just why should we spend a dime to help foreign
flagged vessels?
Gene
I will leave this for others to make the full case,
but recall the Barbary Pirates? Oil prices affect us all. When the costs of
shipping goes up --
I am not a fan of the US as world policeman, but we
are very much a maritime nation.
==============w
Deflector Shield
Deflector shield to protect astronauts against solar
wind may be practical.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27811652/
R Hunt
Solar wind is one thing: a full flare is quite
another.
===========
Obama Week Two
The Clinton Administration retread factory keeps
adding shifts and production lines.
They don't know what to do and wouldn't know how to do
it even if they did. They never did anything before beyond beltway patronage
peddling. Following the Gay DoD, HillaryCare, Waco and Blackhawk Down
fiascoes in his first six months, Slick Willie miniaturized his Presidency
in the interests of personal political survival.
From then on the only policy initiatives he allowed to
his Admininstration were ones he knew the Congress would block. This became
easier after 1994. He didn't spend one penny of political capital on Kyoto,
for instance. Hillary's sandpaper abrasiveness and Slick's zipper problems
effectively disguised a remarkably laissez faire era. It was politics
according to Dick Morris.
The economy was dominated by the end of the Cold War,
falling oil prices and the maturing of the PC revolution. No major decisions
were required so Bill didn't make any. Except with reference to emerging Al
Qaida, where he also avoided all decisions requiring action.
The problem for BO is twofold. First, I don't think he
has any core economic beliefs. He certainly has no experience and his Ivy
League lawyer background didn't expose him to serious economic thought. I'm
not sure he has any fixed belief beyond getting reelected. Second, the only
"experienced" Democratic advisors available are people whose own ideas were
never adopted and carried out, with the exception of Robert Rubin.
Indications now are that BO will spend some period
spinning his wheels trying to mediate irreconciliable intra-Democratic
conflicts over a shrinking pie. "Bailout" of the UAW's upper tier of older
workers is a case in point. The UAW itself already conceded greatly reduced
benefits for new hires two years ago.
Mark
==========
Drudge Report One Of The Best-Designed Sites On The
Web?
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/
1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-
the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web
"A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said: 'I still
maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has
been for years.' A few people agreed, but most didn't. Some thought it was a
joke. I wasn't kidding.
To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond
aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability,
speed, and purpose. However, I still think that the Drudge Report is an
aesthetic masterpiece even though I also consider it ugly. Can good design
also be ugly? I think Drudge proves it can."
(I'm reminded of a Louis Kahn quote: "Design is not
making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration,
love.")
-- Mike T. Powers
Well, I am in no danger of winning such an
award...
===========
Bigger Banks Aren't Always Better
This was linked on Instapundit, along with a quote
from you:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com
/features/2008/0811.longman.html
I won't excerpt it here, except to quote one line:
"Banking regulations prevented [smaller banks] from taking on the kind of
debt ratios assumed by their competitors..."
And to me, this is kind of the key to the whole
article; the rest is, basically, free advertising for (insert your local
bank's name here). I'm pretty sure that if the regulations were relaxed for
small banks as well as large ones, then those small banks would have been
perfectly happy to write terrible loans and then sell them to unsuspecting
Norwegians!
As you say, a pure-capitalist unrestricted market
eventually leads to terrible exploitation. I'd say that the real role of a
government is to decide how much exploitation is considered acceptable--and
to ensure that there's a clear line drawn, and a firm hand keeping it. The
failure here is not in the disgusting behavior of the banks; as the old
story goes, we knew they were snakes when we picked 'em up. The failure is
in the government refusing to do its regulatory duty.
Of course, none of this is actually a solution to the
problem we're in now. But rarely have the causes of a catastrophe been so
clear so soon.
-- Mike T. Powers
It is probably irrelevant given the election
results, but my remedy is simple: any company that is too large to be
allowed to fail is too large, and ought to be subject to anti-trust
regulation.
Of course more is needed but that is a good
start.
==========
The TSA ... incompetent nincompoops
This blog post is really funny, except that it is true
and the TSA is creating a great inconvenience for everyone at the airport.
Are they trying to drive the airlines into a bailout? The stupid part is
that the TSA is trying to push what it is doing as a science.
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2008/11
/the_tsa_and_their_consultants.php
-- Dwayne Phillips
Security theater. The article says Schmeier
coined the phrase. Perhaps so, but I have been using it for years, and so
far as I know I didn't see it elsewhere first. No matter. Tomorrow we'll
have Francis Hamit and a defense of security theater...
==========
Indeed. Indeed. the Big Three auto makers have to
pay about $71 and hour for a worker. Honda in the US pays about $41.
I'm not against factory workers making $71/hr in wages
and 100% health bennies. I'm just against it when it comes with work rules
that stifle productivity improvements. Raising workers' real incomes seems a
very moral goal to me. Is there any reason to assume Honda has the last word
on productivity?
Take Steel Dynamics again. Their average salary for
their mill shift workers is about $79k per year, plus bennies. They just
have very few of them, about 6-8 per shift. SD is a non-union shop, too.
In my dark period (stock analysis and options trading)
between retiring and finding a productive second life, sales per employee
was a key metric for me.
I think this is where the GOP failed miserably. Their
collective solution was to enter a corrupt bargain with undemocratic
foreigners to restore 19th Century labor conditions in factories, rather
than tackling this domestic problem head on. Their other bright idea was to
cease enforcing the immigration laws to pressure wages on the supply side.
otoh most lawyers, non-profit based activists and
bricks n mortar academics can't be reduced to minimum wage too soon.
Mark
==
Final Depression
And if he follows through (carbon) we will be headed
for a new Great Depression.
I think this is coming no matter what. We'll plumb new
depths and not recover at all if the Democrats follow through. And/or
experience a political breakup ala the USSR.
As far as I can tell energy prices were falling
throughout the Great Depression. The transition from coal trains and local
horses & wagons to ic engines continued throughout. The hydroelectric
projects started in the 1920s came online. Hoover Dam is an example.
Roosevelt added more and expanded the geographic scope via TVA. The first
x-country natural gas pipelines were laid in the 1930s following sufficient
development of electric welding. This yielded much lower costs per million
btus compared to the existing local coal gas plants.
Notice how we never hear about energy developments
during the 1930s?
Stuff like that requires lots of engineering, sweat,
shivering in cold rain and muddy boots. Todd Palin's game, and mine. It
therefore repels all these academic endomorph "economists". Playing the
Beltway game indoors is much more appealing.
Mark
Everyone should read Amity Schlaes The Forgotten
Man (available as Kindle book). Yes: energy investment brought cheap
energy to the South, and brought about industrialization in ways no one
expected. Public or private is important but nowhere near as important as
HAVING POWER. I can live with US Government owned nuclear plants.
The Nuclear Power Authority would not terrify me. Or let TVA build more
nuclear plants. What we need is energy.
==========
We live in a hyper reactionary age
A depressing but true statement. Best illustrated by
re-reading RAH's 40 y/o nonfiction commentaries. Sometime in the late 60s
early 70s he called for as much factory level fabrication as possible of
modular housing sections, and minimal onsite assembly work.
Pure common sense to anyone who's spent one day on a
muddy construction site in 45 degree drizzle.
Our methods are no more advanced in fundamental
concept than in the late 19th Century. Manufactured door and window units
were available well before 1900. We've hardly moved past this except with
mobile homes. Substituting electric skillsaws for manual carpenter's saws
and pneumatic nailers for hammers almost exhausts the innovations.
Surely here is another vast field for the application
of CNC robotics.
There's no reason even a very large house should take
longer than 40 days to build from the time lot clearing begins, with 28 of
them being concrete drying time to reach the 28 day yield strength. What we
had were the most irresponsible lending practices supporting the most
archaic technological approaches.
Even people talking about housing recovery are focused
on resuscitating the expensive labor intensive mathods. What we need are
Ford Camaceri scale plants dedicated to producing modular industrial robots
.
Mark
I haven't time for a detailed reply here, but
it's worth doing. I'll try another time.
Productivity doesn't harm people: having a larger
pie to divide is always easier than trying to divide a tiny pie.
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