Pangloss

You didn't answer my question about OPEC. Was there some reason you feel that OPEC controls prices? In the first post you said "OPEC has just decided to capitalize more". Can you elaborate on what you mean? I agree with to your suggestion with that stipulation. There wouldn't be any long-term trouble, but what I was referring to was the problem we had that was addressed by the restructuring of the tax code under Reagan, prior to which people would sometimes have to pay as much as 70% or more on inheritance and other "windfalls". I think some careful and creative legislation could avoid problems like that. The other issue that I would object to over a long term would be that I don't personally see any value in *ever* taxing corporations. They simple pass the cost along to consumers, so it's really just another tax on you and me. The only reason they're useful is because they represent a different avenue of control over a key economic factor, which can sometimes be useful. (I'm not a pure-market guy.)

Says who? I don't follow your reasoning here. Did an oil well dry up somewhere? Did you mean to say that we don't have any *new* sources of oil to meet the new/increased level of demand? That seems to be the case, more or less. Now that's interesting, I had not heard that one before. Is there a cost figure for the energy used to produce that hemp, by any chance? I've read that that's a problem with corn-derived fuel.

I need to do some more reading? Ohhhhh I love it when people say that. Like what, Karl Marx? Would you like to cite your sources, so I can do that reading? Let's be specific here: Source? Examples? I disagree. One of the great things about a free market economy is that it's inherently protected from that sort of thing. Employees are free to leave and pursue work elsewhere. Nobody's tying those people down. It's a free country, they can come and go as they please, and in fact that's exactly what they do. So really when it comes down to brass tacks, complaints about greedy companies exploiting their workers never really seem to pan out. No examples can be given, no specifics can be shown, no facts can be portrayed, because they simply don't exist in any significant numbers. Now I readily acknowledge that there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there who may take some kind of temporary advantages. I'm sure that happens all the time. But like I said, if you don't like it, you walk, and that's what people do. The idea that greedy companies are holding people back, that this is any kind of prevailing trend in this economy, is ludicrous. You might as well be passing out tin foil hats. But like I said, let's hear your evidence. You say I need to do some more reading. Lemme have it. I love to read, and I most love to read OTHER points of view from my own. So I'm all years. Sock it to me. Actually that's not an unusual pay rate for a McDonald's employee at all. In places where they can't find people to work, they offer to pay them more. That's how a free market works. So move. Or take actions to bring better commerce to your area. And you know what's going to happen when you do that? You're going to take actions that are beneficial to those businesses. Tax breaks, incentives, etc. Why? Because those companies are going to help your people. But of course if you demonize them, accuse them of greedy profit motive, guess what? They're not going to be interested, and you're going to have to move after all. See, what you're preaching is about the use of force to create the socialist worker state. Well guess what? It's been tried. It hasn't worked. You really need to find a more successful refrain. So what it amounts to is this: Life sucks in your area. Granted. Now, are you going to do something about that, or are you going to insist that other people use their hard-earned money to solve your problem for you?

I was just wondering if anybody here knows if there's anything available for Linux that's similar to Microsoft's Group Policy control. In other words, the ability to lock down workstations so that the users can't tamper with their configuration settings. The control has to be centralized, so that a master plan can be contrived for the entire workstation, and then centralized from a file server so that the whole network can be governed remotely. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm working on a research paper, and I need a bit of general feedback on something. As I understand it, most flavors of Linux are still free, but some of the bigger names now require payment if you're a business. So an individual can download Fedora, but a company has to pay for Red Hat. Here are my questions: 1) Is that right? Or can a company, for example, download and install Fedora on a bunch of workstations without violating a license agreement? 2) If I want to run a server for a company, say to act as a file server, not for e-commerce or any kind of profit center, just infrastructure support, can I do that for free, or do I have to pay for it? (Assuming any distro -- doesn't have to be Red Hat.) 3) If I want to run an e-commerce center, to make major bucks for the company, does THAT copy of Linux have to be paid for? I'm looking for specific licensing here, and while opinions are welcome, anything you can point me to that might have really specific legal information would be appreciated. Thanks!

Er, I'm not sure I follow how OPEC has had any influence on the current price of oil. Can you expand on that point? As I understand it, they're all operating at max capacity, and have been since the price of oil was in the mid-20s, except for Saudi Arabia, which immediately maxed out and is now planning for new infrastructure. Since the only tool OPEC has to affect market price is production, it doesn't sound like they can have any impact at all. But maybe I'm just missing something here, so please feel free to explain. Regarding the refineries, they're in even worse shape, some of them operating at 104% capacity, and needing to operating at something like 80% in order to do maintenance (which is why they keep blowing up). What we need are more of them, and fast, but there's only one in the planning stages and the guy's been trying to build it for 15 years. (This was on 60 Minutes two weeks ago.) But aside from that, yeah, I agree it's a little ridiculous the way the oil companies are raking it in right now. But I think the solution is more competition and production -- that's what the market wants. Artificial "curbs on greed" are just penalties for success, and always lead to long-term trouble, not winning solutions.

I think Iraq has been a steady drain on Bush's support, but two other factors have come into play: The lack of immediate threat to the president (that's the "liberals are attacking him!" support) (or as Phi put it, they don't have to worry about getting him re-elected), and the high price of energy. One of the funkier things at work here is this: Liberal/left spin: Everyone is deep in debt because they lost their jobs thanks to Bush. The economy is miserable, there are no jobs to be found, and so nobody can afford gasoline. Conservative/right spin: People have foolishly sunk themselves into debt because they're busy trying to keep up with the Jonses by buying SUVs, expensive houses they don't need, and home electronics out the wazoo, and so nobody can afford gasoline. Either way you spin it, everyone's upset. It's a "perfect storm".

I think we also have to look at the benefits of bringing third world nations into the modern, global economy. It's not like we can just give them a percentage of our income and everything will be fine and dandy. Real success, like it or not, is based on economic growth. If you want to stop poverty, there is only one weapon in our arsenal to do that. India is an incredible success story, and will continue to thrive. China as well. The next trick up our sleeves should be Africa.

Shouldn't this be on the politics board?

So are you. Allow me to demonstrate a few of them. Everyone has the opportunity, thanks to government-backed student loans, which are indescribably easy to get. Not everyone has the apptitude, I agree. I tend to agree, but everyone does have some chance at success, and whether or not they succeed is based primarily on their level of effort, not the government's level of hand-outs. And yet we have 95% employment, a rising standard of living, a rising median income, a housing boom, a spending boom, and an entertainment boom. Yes, personal debt is outrageously high, but not high enough to account for these surges and our general level of prosperity. How do you account for this discrepency? Nonsense. Wages are based on what the market will bear, not collusion between corporations. If you don't like what you're making at one company, you shop your skills to another one -- that's called freedom. Ever read about something called the wage-price spiral, and what it meant to this country? Wages are going up, not down. This is especially obvious if you look at a 10, 20, or 50-year timeline. That statement is just ridiculous. Yes, of course, individual companies try to pay the lowest amount they can for a given employee. But there's no evidence of collusion between companies about wages, nor would it matter even if there was. As for unions, that's the funny thing about freedom and power. The moment they started forcing people to join unions, unions became about power, not helping the working man. Not surprisingly, the moment they stopped forcing people to join unions, people stopped joining them. If unions were such a great deal for the working man, how come that happened? Answer: People wised-up and realized that unions were a bad deal. (Just another one of the many reasons why I keep saying that nobody despises freedom like the far left of American politics.) Personally I think that's a shame to some extent -- we need a voice for the working man in our society, that stands against the dangers that do exist from corporations that are looking out for their bottom lines, not their employees. But that's the job of corporations, and lamenting about it doesn't do any good, nor does giving people a false impression about unions. Which keeps us competitive in a global economy. Those Americans end up getting better jobs doing higher-level work. You can try to poke holes in that argument, but the statistics back it up. If outsourcing were such a bad deal, we certainly wouldn't be looking at 95% employment (and rising), a rising standard of living and a rising median income. Every single job lost due to 9/11 and the Clinton/post-Clinton recession has been gained back, and many more besides. And they're obviously not all at Wal-Mart and Burger King, either. So the problem with this constant refrain from the left of "outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing" is that it just doesn't sell, because it just doesn't reflect any semblance of reality. Mark my words, if a Democrat comes to office in 2008, he or she will do *nothing* about outsourcing. That's because it's *good* for the country, not bad. By the way, the trend today is no longer outsourcing, it's insourcing. Bringing those jobs back at more competitive rates. For example, that programming job they sent to India, they'll hire someone here to do it at 40k insted of the 80k they might have paid before. The programmer they would have hired before has gone on to management or some other type of work, and the person they're hiring to do the programming at 40k is graduating from a trade school instead of having a computer science degree -- they have less schooling, because they don't need as much schooling. The job got easier (because the tools have gotten easier), so it doesn't *need* as much pay, and now it's a great way for someone to break into a higher paying job. Someone who might have been working at Wal-Mart before. That sort of thing is happening all over the place. The far left is just too blind to see it. Ideological nonsense.

They can be impeached. Probably for anything, really, but it would presumably be for misconduct or a criminal act of some kind. I believe that's it. The problem with requiring that they be able to perform their duties is that that requires a judgement call by another human being, who may have a partisan motive. Sufficient check/balance would have to be worked into the mix somehow.

Just for giggles and grins, I made the slide: We could really have some fun with that....

Catchy titles aside, nobody's actually suggesting that Microsoft or PowerPoint killed the shuttle. The idea here is that poor information management, perhaps spurred on by misplaced/inappropriate use of tools like PowerPoint, contributed to the loss of Columbia. This has come up before, but this particular op/ed piece (see link below) takes an interesting look at it. I know a bit about this problem from first-hand experience (as I'm sure many of us do). I teach MCSE and other types of computer training courses, and I've "done the PowerPoint thing". Nothing puts students to sleep faster, quite frankly. Today I won't have anything to do with them. I walk the room, ask questions, try to get people involved. It's SO much better for everyone -- even me. Students (and me) not only stay awake, they're more responsive, more interested, more motivated, more entertained... clearly they're (gasp) learning! But of course it's a little different here -- one would think that engineers charged with the responsibility of protecting astronaut's lives and billions of dollars worth of equipment would be able to stay awake. But I guess this just goes to show that human nature is human nature. Here are a couple of interesting quotes: Try this link to go around registration: http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,95353514,2093,f/ Official article link at the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Obviously he can't do anything about the commodity price, but a temporary ceiling could be imposed which would essentially restrict the amount of profit a domestic oil company would be allowed to make on the refining and distribution business. At $70/barrel (and 42 gallons per barrel), oil costs about $1.67/gallon. The rest of that $3 price goes to taxes (25-80 cents, depending on where you live), refinery cost+profit, and distribution cost+profit. I have no idea what the percentage of profit is for refining or distribution, but I'm sure it's no mistake that the oil companies are making money hand over fist at the moment. So I might support a temporary ceiling. Something that stops short of nationalization. I'd also like to see the government build a couple of refineries and related infrastructure in some out of the way places (closed military base, perhaps?). The important thing would be to ensure that the ceiling is temporary. More education of the public needs to happen regarding the down side that might result over the long haul from such a ceiling.

Any suggestions? One thing that I think folks (not necessarily you) may not fully understand is that oil is a commodity, and it's traded on commodity exchanges. As such, the seller (or for that matter, a group like OPEC) does not determine the price of oil. They can only control a limited number of factors, such as how much of it they will pump. Nor does the buyer generally have much say over where their oil comes from. Oil is oil is oil. This is a simplification, of course, but it just points out the problem with the idea that anybody can "do something" about the price of oil. Believe it or not, it's actually *good* that it's handled this way. Before that came about, oil was traded on a contractual basis, which lead to exploitation, nationalization, and many other issues. In a sense, commoditization has been a great equalizer, resulting in a situation where everyone pays the same price per barrel. Differences at the pump are due to local issues, such as refinery cost and availability, distribution issues, and national/local taxes. Even better, private investors can get involved in the process, creating a more competitive environment, which contributes to lowering prices. The down side is that open market trading leads to speculation, which does not require any kind of factual basis. And the speculation these days is all focused on "peak oil" (the feared end of the supply, and/or the inability of production to keep up with demand, something that has *never* happened, and may *still* never happen), and various random events, such as terrorism, natural disasters, and so forth. As I understand it, the price of *producing* a barrel of oil is only a few bucks a barrel (4?). I don't have a source on that, but I've read it somewhere, so take that with a grain of salt. And if you pop over to the OPEC web site, you'll see that they still would like to see oil priced at around $24-28/barrel (or at least they did the last time I dropped by). Nobody really likes high oil prices, and in fact one of the MANY amusing and contradictory lessons of the oil business is that too much money is a BAD thing. BTW, for a great history of the oil industry, I recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Prize" by Daniel Yergin, an extremely enlightening (and entertaining) read.

Right, but it "bumps" along the way. Being the science/math/computer geeks that we all are, I'm sure we all understand that the percentage could be constructed to ratchet up with each consecutive dollar amount, based on a very simple algorithm. In fact, you could even construct it to change with each penny, if you really wanted to be precise. The only wierdness about it, from a mathematical rather than socio-political viewpoint, is that you'd be dealing with percentages measured to many significant decimal places (e.g. "your tax rate is 22.5673521%").

Skye's post seems to confirm that their thinking is to give up the lesser settlements and focus on retaining the major/older ones. I'm afraid that the hurricane and school work has kept me from keeping up to date on this, but that would be consistent with earlier articles I've read on the subject. What matters, in the end, is that the two parties hammer something out, and then STICK to it.

I would think that assassination of a Supreme Court justice right *now* is that *last* thing that the extreme left would want.... (chuckle)

It's Intel's primary mobile Pentium processor, but it's actually a lot more than that. Centrino represents a total re-think on the Pentium 4 architecture. As you may recall, many of the design choices that Intel made at that time, including very long instruction pipelines, required the use of RAMBUS-manufactured RDRAM, which was expensive and proprietary, as well as changes in the way compilers were designed, in order to take full advantage of the architectural differences. The venture failed -- one of the greatest failures in the history of computing, in fact, although it's certainly not been reported that way. The compiler changes were never widely made or accepted, and the public backlash over RDRAM is now legend. These choices basically account for why AMD continues to beat Intel in terms of the amount of work they can accomplish per cycle. It isn't well-remembered now, but when earlier P4s were mated with RDRAM and ran appropriately optimized code (not a real-world test, obviously), the Athlons could never beat them at the same clock rate -- it was always a tie at best. But Intel just couldn't escape the cost issue, or convince enough software companies to produce more P4-friendly compilers, and in late 2002/early 2003, Intel threw in the towel and returned to SDRAM, which got around the cost issue, and were able to make up some of the speed shortfalls by embracing DDR2 and the 240-pin memory bus. But the architecture of the P4 is such that they're still, to some extent, saddled by the design choices they made earlier. With Centrino (also known as "Pentium M") they went back to the ground floor, so to speak, redesigning the architecture to take full advantage of dual channel SDRAM (DDR2). Centrino's main focus is actually power efficiency, but as with many chip engineering choices, most of the things you do for power efficiency also help you make the chip process data more efficiently. So what's happened is that Centrino has essentially paved the way for the future of Intel's desktop processors. At some point in 2006 you'll see a version of Centrino for the desktop. My guess is that this will actually become Intel's main product line, replacing the P4 completely. They could have done so already, but I believe they're trying to work 64-bit memory addressing and dual-core features into the mix so that the chip can be positioned as a full-market contender rather than a low-end niche product. This would also seem to complete the cycle and allow Intel to begin moving forward on speeds again (Centrino architecture will probably ramp up a lot better, ultimately allowing the company to finally move past 4ghz, which does not appear to be possible to do in a cost-effective manner with the P4 architecture). It's worth noting, by the way, that Centrino is the reason why Apple is moving to Intel.

This is part of what I'm talking about, by the way. From the National Weather Service: Dear god, have we all said our prayers?! I mean sure, you want to warn people, but how much warning does it take before you're just BEGGING people to treat you like the little boy who cried wolf? (My wife's favorite is the common mantra that we hear down here that you should write your name on your arm in indelible permanent marker. No joke, I've heard government officials on TV actually tell people to do that!)

I'm confused... when has the cost of living dynamic ever exceeded a few percentage points per year? How could it possibly exceed 100%? Maybe I'm just not following you there, so please forgive me, but if you could explain that more fully I'd appreciate it. One thing that it seems to me is that very few people, and nobody in the middle class, actually "scrapes by". What they fail to do is "keep up with the Jonses", and then complain about it. I have no idea if that's the case elsewhere, but we see it all the time in the US. I've seen network news broadcasts show middle class families complaining about "just getting by", with two cars in the driveway less than three years old, a 4-year-old house in a nice neighborhood, etc etc etc. Sure they both have to work, but that's because they like to do all the fun stuff too. Since when is it an entitlement that you have expensive cars? Obviously I'm generalizing here, but when you make a statement like "When people don't have enough money to make ends meet and start missing bills and accumulating late fees or overdraft fees from their bank, the problem further compounds upon itself.", I think that merits a response. Put another way, it's ridiculous the way we accumulate debt in this society and then complain about not making enough money! There's a reason why they call that "living beyond your means". Debt is not a ticket to the middle class!

Well I've been to the Caymans and it's pretty densely populated, so I'm a little surprised to hear him say that. Sure, you can rebuild, but flying debris is what destroys and damages other property, and is one of the main reasons for building codes (there's a reason why building materials are tested by firing a 6-foot 4x4 at them at 150mph). And oddly enough, tougher building codes often doesn't add as much as you might think to a new house. Most of the cost of a new house is based on property and resale values, not what it cost to build it. (But of course if your house gets blown down, it's the cost of rebuild that matters, as I'm sure was his point. I'm just pointing out that in terms of initial building cost it's not as big a deal as some might think.) And of course there's also the inconvenience and temporary shelter requirements associated with losing your house or workplace. That's a good point about the frequency issue. We did some thinking along those lines recently in deciding to upgrade our hurricane shutters from the standard, wooden, nail-it-in-place variety that most people have, to a permanently-mounted, sliding variety. It cost almost $5,000 to do the entire house, but I think over the long haul it'll be worth it. Regarding insurance, the funny thing about it is that all the major insurance companies in Florida still made a profit last year, and the state ran a budget surplus (in spite of covering most of the $46 billion damage bill, minus a few billion from the feds, IIRC). (While that's a really high number, by the way, it's nothing compared with what it would have been if the codes hadn't been raised since Andrew.) Some creative governmental and non-governmental approaches (lead by both Democrats and Republicans) have greatly improved the situation, but when I moved down here in 1995 new homeowners could not get *any* homeowners insurance, period. Now you can get it, but it's expensive, semi-backed by the state, and doesn't cover flooding (including flooding produced by a hurricane!). Flood insurance is available separately, but costs a lot, and there was a problem in Katrina in that areas flooded that weren't supposed to flood, so I can see the lawsuits flying around there already.

Hurricane Katrina has gotten me thinking. I wonder if we need to change the way we report on, and warn people about, hurricanes. Science has made vast improvements in prediction, and while that's certainly a good thing, it seems to have lead to misunderstandings amongst reporters and people in general about hurricanes. Here in South Florida the current death toll is up to a whopping eleven people. That's a huge number for a category one hurricane, but what's really staggering about it is that almost all of those deaths came after the hurricane had passed! And the first two came from people driving around during the storm, underestimating its potential. The others came afterwards, from downed power lines and other issues related to people being out and about when they should have been indoors. I don't know what the answers are, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss it. Some points come to me in particular that we may need: 1) MUCH less emphasis on pinpointing the specific place where the storm may go ashore. Katrina rambled around more than most storms, but even so it's never anything like a sure thing where these storms are going to hit. Florida has been hit by 6 hurricanes in the last 12 months, and not one of those hit exactly where predicted. Each and every time it caught some people by some degree of surprise. That alone seems like a really strange thing in this day and age. 2) More education about the dangers of being out right after a storm has passed. 3) Less emphasis on the category number, and more analysis of local conditions in the areas that may be hit. Recent rainfall and other environmental factors, current building codes and the level of adherence to them, that sort of thing. 4) More analysis of building codes in general. More discussion about why older buildings continue to exist without protection. Why is it that a house in Mobile can be built out of wood, but a house in Miami has to be made out of cinder block? And yet the house in Miami can't get flood insurance, and the house in Mobile can get flood insurance as cheap as that of, say, central Idaho? (I don't know squat about Mobile, I'm just suggesting a hypothetical line of inquiry.) Thoughts?

Okay, not much of a pun, but I have a headache this morning. Interesting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the surging popularity of the flat tax idea in Europe and Asia. Apparently several countries have adopted it or are near to doing so, including Russia, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Georgia, Italy, and more. Germany is having a frank (so to speak) and serious debate about it, and Britain (according to this article anyway) is in the midst of a bit of a scandal surrounding it. http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007174&mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage One of the things they mention in there is a new book by Rep. John Linder and libertarian talk show host Neil Boortz (the man who first made me think about politics). I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. Here's a link to the book's Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060875410/103-4951205-6402255?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=507846&s=books&v=glance What do you all think about a flat tax?