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40,330,235 |
https://www.math.fsu.edu/~wxm/Arnold.htm
|
On teaching mathematics
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Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.
The Jacobi identity (which forces the heights of a triangle to cross at one point) is an experimental fact in the same way as that the Earth is round (that is, homeomorphic to a ball). But it can be discovered with less expense.
In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics. The consequences turned out to be catastrophic. Whole generations of mathematicians grew up without knowing half of their science and, of course, in total ignorance of any other sciences. They first began teaching their ugly scholastic pseudo-mathematics to their students, then to schoolchildren (forgetting Hardy's warning that ugly mathematics has no permanent place under the Sun).
Since scholastic mathematics that is cut off from physics is fit neither for teaching nor for application in any other science, the result was the universal hate towards mathematicians - both on the part of the poor schoolchildren (some of whom in the meantime became ministers) and of the users.
The ugly building, built by undereducated mathematicians who were exhausted by their inferiority complex and who were unable to make themselves familiar with physics, reminds one of the rigorous axiomatic theory of odd numbers. Obviously, it is possible to create such a theory and make pupils admire the perfection and internal consistency of the resulting structure (in which, for example, the sum of an odd number of terms and the product of any number of factors are defined). From this sectarian point of view, even numbers could either be declared a heresy or, with passage of time, be introduced into the theory supplemented with a few "ideal" objects (in order to comply with the needs of physics and the real world).
Unfortunately, it was an ugly twisted construction of mathematics like the one above which predominated in the teaching of mathematics for decades. Having originated in France, this pervertedness quickly spread to teaching of foundations of mathematics, first to university students, then to school pupils of all lines (first in France, then in other countries, including Russia).
To the question "what is 2 + 3" a French primary school pupil replied: "3 + 2, since addition is commutative". He did not know what the sum was equal to and could not even understand what he was asked about!
Another French pupil (quite rational, in my opinion) defined mathematics as follows: "there is a square, but that still has to be proved".
Judging by my teaching experience in France, the university students' idea of mathematics (even of those taught mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure - I feel sorry most of all for these obviously intelligent but deformed kids) is as poor as that of this pupil.
For example, these students have never seen a paraboloid and a question on the form of the surface given by the equation xy = z^2 puts the mathematicians studying at ENS into a stupor. Drawing a curve given by parametric equations (like x = t^3 - 3t, y = t^4 - 2t^2) on a plane is a totally impossible problem for students (and, probably, even for most French professors of mathematics).
Beginning with l'Hospital's first textbook on calculus ("calculus for understanding of curved lines") and roughly until Goursat's textbook, the ability to solve such problems was considered to be (along with the knowledge of the times table) a necessary part of the craft of every mathematician.
Mentally challenged zealots of "abstract mathematics" threw all the geometry (through which connection with physics and reality most often takes place in mathematics) out of teaching. Calculus textbooks by Goursat, Hermite, Picard were recently dumped by the student library of the Universities Paris 6 and 7 (Jussieu) as obsolete and, therefore, harmful (they were only rescued by my intervention).
ENS students who have sat through courses on differential and algebraic geometry (read by respected mathematicians) turned out be acquainted neither with the Riemann surface of an elliptic curve y^2 = x^3 + ax + b nor, in fact, with the topological classification of surfaces (not even mentioning elliptic integrals of first kind and the group property of an elliptic curve, that is, the Euler-Abel addition theorem). They were only taught Hodge structures and Jacobi varieties!
How could this happen in France, which gave the world Lagrange and Laplace, Cauchy and Poincaré, Leray and Thom? It seems to me that a reasonable explanation was given by I.G. Petrovskii, who taught me in 1966: genuine mathematicians do not gang up, but the weak need gangs in order to survive. They can unite on various grounds (it could be super-abstractness, anti-Semitism or "applied and industrial" problems), but the essence is always a solution of the social problem - survival in conditions of more literate surroundings.
By the way, I shall remind you of a warning of L. Pasteur: there never have
been and never will be any "applied sciences", there are only
*applications of sciences* (quite useful ones!).
In those times I was treating Petrovskii's words with some doubt, but now I am being more and more convinced of how right he was. A considerable part of the super-abstract activity comes down simply to industrialising shameless grabbing of discoveries from discoverers and then systematically assigning them to epigons-generalizers. Similarly to the fact that America does not carry Columbus's name, mathematical results are almost never called by the names of their discoverers.
In order to avoid being misquoted, I have to note that my own achievements were for some unknown reason never expropriated in this way, although it always happened to both my teachers (Kolmogorov, Petrovskii, Pontryagin, Rokhlin) and my pupils. Prof. M. Berry once formulated the following two principles:
*The Arnold Principle.* If a notion bears a personal name,
then this name is not the name of the discoverer.
*The Berry Principle.* The Arnold Principle is applicable to itself.
Let's return, however, to teaching of mathematics in France.
When I was a first-year student at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University, the lectures on calculus were read by the set-theoretic topologist L.A. Tumarkin, who conscientiously retold the old classical calculus course of French type in the Goursat version. He told us that integrals of rational functions along an algebraic curve can be taken if the corresponding Riemann surface is a sphere and, generally speaking, cannot be taken if its genus is higher, and that for the sphericity it is enough to have a sufficiently large number of double points on the curve of a given degree (which forces the curve to be unicursal: it is possible to draw its real points on the projective plane with one stroke of a pen).
These facts capture the imagination so much that (even given without any proofs) they give a better and more correct idea of modern mathematics than whole volumes of the Bourbaki treatise. Indeed, here we find out about the existence of a wonderful connection between things which seem to be completely different: on the one hand, the existence of an explicit expression for the integrals and the topology of the corresponding Riemann surface and, on the other hand, between the number of double points and genus of the corresponding Riemann surface, which also exhibits itself in the real domain as the unicursality.
Jacobi noted, as mathematics' most fascinating property, that in it one and the same function controls both the presentations of a whole number as a sum of four squares and the real movement of a pendulum.
These discoveries of connections between heterogeneous mathematical objects can be compared with the discovery of the connection between electricity and magnetism in physics or with the discovery of the similarity between the east coast of America and the west coast of Africa in geology.
The emotional significance of such discoveries for teaching is difficult to overestimate. It is they who teach us to search and find such wonderful phenomena of harmony of the Universe.
The de-geometrisation of mathematical education and the divorce from physics sever these ties. For example, not only students but also modern algebro-geometers on the whole do not know about the Jacobi fact mentioned here: an elliptic integral of first kind expresses the time of motion along an elliptic phase curve in the corresponding Hamiltonian system.
Rephrasing the famous words on the electron and atom, it can be said that a hypocycloid is as inexhaustible as an ideal in a polynomial ring. But teaching ideals to students who have never seen a hypocycloid is as ridiculous as teaching addition of fractions to children who have never cut (at least mentally) a cake or an apple into equal parts. No wonder that the children will prefer to add a numerator to a numerator and a denominator to a denominator.
From my French friends I heard that the tendency towards super-abstract generalizations is their traditional national trait. I do not entirely disagree that this might be a question of a hereditary disease, but I would like to underline the fact that I borrowed the cake-and-apple example from Poincaré.
The scheme of construction of a mathematical theory is exactly the same as that in any other natural science. First we consider some objects and make some observations in special cases. Then we try and find the limits of application of our observations, look for counter-examples which would prevent unjustified extension of our observations onto a too wide range of events (example: the number of partitions of consecutive odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 into an odd number of natural summands gives the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, but then comes 29).
As a result we formulate the empirical discovery that we made (for example, the Fermat conjecture or Poincaré conjecture) as clearly as possible. After this there comes the difficult period of checking as to how reliable are the conclusions .
At this point a special technique has been developed in mathematics. This technique, when applied to the real world, is sometimes useful, but can sometimes also lead to self-deception. This technique is called modelling. When constructing a model, the following idealisation is made: certain facts which are only known with a certain degree of probability or with a certain degree of accuracy, are considered to be "absolutely" correct and are accepted as "axioms". The sense of this "absoluteness" lies precisely in the fact that we allow ourselves to use these "facts" according to the rules of formal logic, in the process declaring as "theorems" all that we can derive from them.
It is obvious that in any real-life activity it is impossible to wholly rely on such deductions. The reason is at least that the parameters of the studied phenomena are never known absolutely exactly and a small change in parameters (for example, the initial conditions of a process) can totally change the result. Say, for this reason a reliable long-term weather forecast is impossible and will remain impossible, no matter how much we develop computers and devices which record initial conditions.
In exactly the same way a small change in axioms (of which we cannot be completely sure) is capable, generally speaking, of leading to completely different conclusions than those that are obtained from theorems which have been deduced from the accepted axioms. The longer and fancier is the chain of deductions ("proofs"), the less reliable is the final result.
Complex models are rarely useful (unless for those writing their dissertations).
The mathematical technique of modelling consists of ignoring this trouble and speaking about your deductive model in such a way as if it coincided with reality. The fact that this path, which is obviously incorrect from the point of view of natural science, often leads to useful results in physics is called "the inconceivable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences" (or "the Wigner principle").
Here we can add a remark by I.M. Gel'fand: there exists yet another phenomenon which is comparable in its inconceivability with the inconceivable effectiveness of mathematics in physics noted by Wigner - this is the equally inconceivable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.
"The subtle poison of mathematical education" (in F. Klein's words) for a physicist consists precisely in that the absolutised model separates from the reality and is no longer compared with it. Here is a simple example: mathematics teaches us that the solution of the Malthus equation dx/dt = x is uniquely defined by the initial conditions (that is that the corresponding integral curves in the (t,x)-plane do not intersect each other). This conclusion of the mathematical model bears little relevance to the reality. A computer experiment shows that all these integral curves have common points on the negative t-semi-axis. Indeed, say, curves with the initial conditions x(0) = 0 and x(0) = 1 practically intersect at t = -10 and at t = -100 you cannot fit in an atom between them. Properties of the space at such small distances are not described at all by Euclidean geometry. Application of the uniqueness theorem in this situation obviously exceeds the accuracy of the model. This has to be respected in practical application of the model, otherwise one might find oneself faced with serious troubles.
I would like to note, however, that the same uniqueness theorem explains why the closing stage of mooring of a ship to the quay is carried out manually: on steering, if the velocity of approach would have been defined as a smooth (linear) function of the distance, the process of mooring would have required an infinitely long period of time. An alternative is an impact with the quay (which is damped by suitable non-ideally elastic bodies). By the way, this problem had to be seriously confronted on landing the first descending apparata on the Moon and Mars and also on docking with space stations - here the uniqueness theorem is working against us.
Unfortunately, neither such examples, nor discussing the danger of fetishising theorems are to be met in modern mathematical textbooks, even in the better ones. I even got the impression that scholastic mathematicians (who have little knowledge of physics) believe in the principal difference of the axiomatic mathematics from modelling which is common in natural science and which always requires the subsequent control of deductions by an experiment.
Not even mentioning the relative character of initial axioms, one cannot forget about the inevitability of logical mistakes in long arguments (say, in the form of a computer breakdown caused by cosmic rays or quantum oscillations). Every working mathematician knows that if one does not control oneself (best of all by examples), then after some ten pages half of all the signs in formulae will be wrong and twos will find their way from denominators into numerators.
The technology of combatting such errors is the same external control by experiments or observations as in any experimental science and it should be taught from the very beginning to all juniors in schools.
Attempts to create "pure" deductive-axiomatic mathematics have led to the rejection of the scheme used in physics (observation - model - investigation of the model - conclusions - testing by observations) and its substitution by the scheme: definition - theorem - proof. It is impossible to understand an unmotivated definition but this does not stop the criminal algebraists-axiomatisators. For example, they would readily define the product of natural numbers by means of the long multiplication rule. With this the commutativity of multiplication becomes difficult to prove but it is still possible to deduce it as a theorem from the axioms. It is then possible to force poor students to learn this theorem and its proof (with the aim of raising the standing of both the science and the persons teaching it). It is obvious that such definitions and such proofs can only harm the teaching and practical work.
It is only possible to understand the commutativity of multiplication by counting and re-counting soldiers by ranks and files or by calculating the area of a rectangle in the two ways. Any attempt to do without this interference by physics and reality into mathematics is sectarianism and isolationism which destroy the image of mathematics as a useful human activity in the eyes of all sensible people.
I shall open a few more such secrets (in the interest of poor students).
The *determinant* of a matrix is an (oriented) volume of the
parallelepiped whose edges are its columns. If the students are told this
secret (which is carefully hidden in the purified algebraic education),
then the whole theory of determinants becomes a clear chapter of
the theory of poly-linear forms. If determinants are defined otherwise, then
any sensible person will forever hate all the determinants, Jacobians and the
implicit function theorem.
What is a *group*? Algebraists teach that this is supposedly a set with
two operations that satisfy a load of easily-forgettable axioms. This
definition provokes a natural protest: why would any sensible person need such
pairs of operations? "Oh, curse this maths"
- concludes the student (who, possibly, becomes the Minister for Science in
the future).
We get a totally different situation if we start off not with the group but with the concept of a transformation (a one-to-one mapping of a set onto itself) as it was historically. A collection of transformations of a set is called a group if along with any two transformations it contains the result of their consecutive application and an inverse transformation along with every transformation.
This is all the definition there is. The so-called "axioms" are in fact
just (obvious) *properties* of groups of transformations.
What axiomatisators
call "abstract groups" are just groups of transformations of various sets
considered up to isomorphisms (which are one-to-one mappings
preserving the operations). As Cayley proved, there are no "more abstract"
groups in the world. So why do the algebraists keep on tormenting students
with the abstract definition?
By the way, in the 1960s I taught group theory to Moscow
*schoolchildren*. Avoiding all the axiomatics and staying as close as
possible to physics, in half a year I got to the Abel theorem on the
unsolvability of a general equation of degree five in radicals (having
on the way taught the pupils complex numbers, Riemann surfaces, fundamental
groups and monodromy groups of algebraic functions). This course was later
published by one of the audience, V. Alekseev, as the book
*The Abel theorem in problems*.
What is a *smooth manifold*? In a recent American book I read that
Poincaré was not acquainted with this (introduced by himself)
notion and that
the "modern" definition was only given by Veblen in the late 1920s:
a manifold is a topological space which satisfies a long series of axioms.
For what sins must students try and find their way through all these twists
and turns? Actually, in Poincaré's *Analysis Situs* there is an
absolutely
clear definition of a smooth manifold which is much more useful than the
"abstract" one.
A smooth k-dimensional submanifold of the Euclidean space **R**^N is its
subset which in a neighbourhood of its every point is a graph of a smooth
mapping of **R**^k into **R**^(N - k)
(where **R**^k and **R**^(N - k) are coordinate
subspaces). This is a straightforward generalization of most
common smooth
curves on the plane (say, of the circle x^2 + y^2 = 1) or curves and
surfaces in the three-dimensional space.
Between smooth manifolds smooth mappings are naturally defined. Diffeomorphisms are mappings which are smooth, together with their inverses.
An "abstract" smooth manifold is a smooth submanifold of a Euclidean space considered up to a diffeomorphism. There are no "more abstract" finite-dimensional smooth manifolds in the world (Whitney's theorem). Why do we keep on tormenting students with the abstract definition? Would it not be better to prove them the theorem about the explicit classification of closed two-dimensional manifolds (surfaces)?
It is this wonderful theorem (which states, for example, that any compact connected oriented surface is a sphere with a number of handles) that gives a correct impression of what modern mathematics is and not the super-abstract generalizations of naive submanifolds of a Euclidean space which in fact do not give anything new and are presented as achievements by the axiomatisators.
The theorem of classification of surfaces is a top-class mathematical achievement, comparable with the discovery of America or X-rays. This is a genuine discovery of mathematical natural science and it is even difficult to say whether the fact itself is more attributable to physics or to mathematics. In its significance for both the applications and the development of correct Weltanschauung it by far surpasses such "achievements" of mathematics as the proof of Fermat's last theorem or the proof of the fact that any sufficiently large whole number can be represented as a sum of three prime numbers.
For the sake of publicity modern mathematicians sometimes present such sporting achievements as the last word in their science. Understandably this not only does not contribute to the society's appreciation of mathematics but, on the contrary, causes a healthy distrust of the necessity of wasting energy on (rock-climbing-type) exercises with these exotic questions needed and wanted by no one.
The theorem of classification of surfaces should have been included in high school mathematics courses (probably, without the proof) but for some reason is not included even in university mathematics courses (from which in France, by the way, all the geometry has been banished over the last few decades).
The return of mathematical teaching at all levels
from the scholastic chatter to presenting the important domain of
natural science is an espessially hot
problem for France. I was astonished that all the best and most important in
methodical approach mathematical books are almost unknown to students here
(and, seems to me, have not been translated into French). Among these are
*Numbers and figures* by Rademacher and Töplitz, *Geometry and
the imagination* by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen,
*What is mathematics?* by Courant and Robbins, *How to solve it*
and *Mathematics
and plausible reasoning* by Polya, *Development of
mathematics in the 19th century* by F. Klein.
I remember well what a strong impression the calculus course by Hermite (which does exist in a Russian translation!) made on me in my school years.
Riemann surfaces appeared in it, I think, in one of the first lectures (all the analysis was, of course, complex, as it should be). Asymptotics of integrals were investigated by means of path deformations on Riemann surfaces under the motion of branching points (nowadays, we would have called this the Picard-Lefschetz theory; Picard, by the way, was Hermite's son-in-law - mathematical abilities are often transferred by sons-in-law: the dynasty Hadamard - P. Levy - L. Schwarz - U. Frisch is yet another famous example in the Paris Academy of Sciences).
The "obsolete" course by Hermite of one hundred years ago (probably, now thrown away from student libraries of French universities) was much more modern than those most boring calculus textbooks with which students are nowadays tormented.
If mathematicians do not come to their senses, then the consumers who preserved a need in a modern, in the best meaning of the word, mathematical theory as well as the immunity (characteristic of any sensible person) to the useless axiomatic chatter will in the end turn down the services of the undereducated scholastics in both the schools and the universities.
A teacher of mathematics, who has not got to grips with at least some of the volumes of the course by Landau and Lifshitz, will then become a relict like the one nowadays who does not know the difference between an open and a closed set.
*V.I. Arnold*
Translated by A.V. GORYUNOV
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http://gelisam.blogspot.ca/2012/12/every-single-game-from-github-game-off.html
|
Every single game from GitHub Game Off 2012
|
Gelisam
|
I know this because I have used GitHub's API to obtain basic information about all the forks. And because I have visited all 170 non-blank URLs, and played every single game. And now, so can you!
Well, I don't really recommend trying all 170, but for your convenience, I tried to list the most worthwhile games at the top. Obviously, my opinion as to which games are the best might not match yours, but as you go down the list, if you encounter a point where every single game feels sub-par, you should be able to stop and be confident that you are not missing a rare gem hidden much further down. That being said, if you want to maximize your enjoyment, better start by the end, and play the most polished games last!
Enjoy.
(full disclosure: my own game entry is somewhere in that list.)
(full disclosure: my own game entry is somewhere in that list.)
- linkboy992000/game-off-2012
challenging, polished puzzle game about cloning. story and music! Do *not* press 'A'. - svenanders/jetmanjr
hard exploration platformer. - searlm/game-off-2012
virus-themed shoot-em-up where you need to balance progress against collecting ammo. - redmanofgp/game-off-2012
hard, but fun shoot-em-up game where you can concentrate your mind power. - gamefrogs/game-off-2012
a puzzle version of pipe dream, on an hexagonal grid. - flypup/game-off-2012
short fighting game in which your opponent spawns copies of himself. - ondras/star-wars
hard, fun, ascii fighting game. - jpfau/scrum
a mix between a kind of tetris and a 3D shoot-em-up. on a GBA emulator. - mindd-it/game-off-2012
bird-themed single-button avoid-the-obstacles game - wtjones/game-off-2012
unique clone-climbing game. - fragcastle/rock-kickass
megaman-style game in which you steal the abilities of normal enemies - sdrdis/hotfix
single-button platformer with very nice increasingly difficult yet randomly-generated levels. upgrades are way too expensive. - lulea/game-off-2012
3D sokoban - adhicl/game-off-2012
puzzle game with a unique clone-and-lure mechanic - KriScg/Waveform
circuit-simulator puzzle game. - 502Studios/game-off-2012
mine-themed sokoban-style puzzle game. - RonanL/game-off-2012
a nice platformer about escaping from your clones. - mvasilkov/game-off-2012
typing game with gratuitious physics, space invaders, music, anime, oh my! - Eugeny/foku
an exceedingly pretty, but hard to control game about a magic fork. - tapio/plasma-forks
a first-person shooter. - visualjazz-ngordon/Play-dot-to-dot
short connect-the-dot game. - tsubasa-software/game-off-2012
pirate themed obstacle-avoiding game. - duncanbeevers/game-off-2012
over the top maze game. - gelisam/game-off-2012
hard sokoban variant with a confusing rewinding mechanic. - loktar00/game-off-2012
bejeweled-style game with a resource management side. - AD1337/ForKingGame
hard physics-based platformer. - Seldaek/split
obstacle-avoiding game with a unique splitting mechanic. - dakodun/game-off-2012
strategy game with a unique unit-pushing mechanism. - volrath/game-off-2012
a shoot-em-up game with powerups. - cdata/solstice-submarine-ctf
capture-the-flag game with an underwater theme - ViliusLuneckas/Pipe-slime-adventure
pipe-themed avoid-the-obstacles game. - gbatha/PolyBranch
3D avoid-the-obstacles game in a tunnel. - kicktheken/game-off-2012
an isometric exploration game in which you accumulate resources of different types. - zombiebros/game-off-2012
rambo-themed shoot-em-up - Jidioh/SkyScaler
short labyrinth with a world-flipping mechanic. - lazor-base/fused-holiday
a platformer in which you can push and pull crates. - AntPortal/game-off-2012
isometric quiz questions about git. - Dover8/game-off-2012
a puzzle where actions in one world affect the other copy. - icebob/game-off-2012
3D pong. - Zolmeister/avabranch
hard to control fork-and-avoid-the-obstacles game. - eric-wieser/game-off-2012
a variant of snake in which you can divide and control multiple snakes simultaneously. - incorrectangle/game-off-2012
astronaut-splitting, blob-merging puzzles. too short. a bit buggy. - cnnzp/game-off-2012
short track-building puzzle game. - nojacko/game-off-2012
strategy game in which you need to defend your buildings from the zombies. - thehen/game-off-2012
exploration game based on a World-of-Goo-style building mechanic. quite short. - rozifus/game-off-2012
hard sokoban variant with a color merging mechanic - lantto/game-off-2012
unique clone-spotting and killing game. - jlongster/octoshot
3d shooter on a small map - RothschildGames/release-cycles
circular avoid-the-obstacles game - appleskin/game-off-2012
block-carrying puzzle game. - etamm/game-off-2012
top-down zombie shooter with interesting alter-your-world mechanic. - begillespie/cloned-game
move in both copies of the world. Again. - fengb/game-off-2012
a unique drawing puzzle game, once you finally figure out what you're supposed to do.
hint: click on the black strokes. - sjthompson/game-off-2012
a strategy game in which units are spawned off other units, not buildings. - xSmallDeadGuyx/game-off-2012
a nice little light-bot-style game. - Gagege/game-off-2012
unique, fast-paced memory game. - notsimon207/game-off-2012
physics-based platformer, clearly inspired by Gish. too hard to control. - danfischer87/game-off-2012
hard git-themed puzzle game. a bit buggy. too short! - jeffreypablo/game-off-2012
fighting game. terrible graphics, buggy, but the gameplay is there! - scriptfoo/game-off-2012
a game about learning Javascript. Incomplete? I got stuck after the toLowerCase() quest. - petarov/game-off-2012
distract your opponents while you pick up carrots. strangely-placed controls. - Dave-and-Mike/game-off-2012
short alien-cloning game. strangely-placed controls. - murz/game-off-2012
top-down shooter with multiple gun types. - jsonsquared/game-off-2012
multiplayer top-down shooter. - DangerMcD/game-off-2012
unique multitasking, block pushing game. - Choctopus/game-off-2012
guitar-hero-style game. - gilesa/game-off-2012
unique obstacle-avoiding game about writing software. - vladikoff/game-off-2012
complicated shooter. - Chleba/game-off-2012
short starwars-themed fighting game - JasonMillward/game-off-2012
hard obstacle-avoiding game. - denniskaselow/game-off-2012
asteroids-style game. - mapmeld/game-off-2012
missile command clone with an interesting "change the rules" mechanic. - onethousandfaces/game-off-2012
bonsai-growing pseudo-game. would be an interesting mechanic if there was a goal shape. - vrgen/game-off-2012
car-themed avoid-the-obstacles game - gitdefence/game-off-2012
complicated allele-sharing tower-defence game - ChickenChurch/game-off-2012
punch-the-obstacles game with annoying controls - AreaOfEffect/game-off-2012
food-themed shoot-em-up - asswb/game-off-2012
a bug-tracker simulator, where you solve issues by being patient. - eleventigers/echo
hard 3D platformer about capturing sounds. too hard for me. - forrestberries/game-off-2012
a online multiplayer version of the board game "Apples to apples". - NetEase/game-off-2012
diablo-style game. not worth the very long loading time. - DancingBanana/game-off-2012
platform game with a chronotron-like cloning mechanic. SaveTheClones, below, is the same idea but with more levels and... different graphics. - lrem/kobo-san
sokoban variant in which some blocks can be pulled. - SUGameOffTeam/game-off-2012
hard tank-wars clone with a kitchen theme. only one level. - jisaacks/game-off-2012
food-themed asteroids-style game. - pce/game-off-2012
short dream-themed obstacle-avoiding game. - scurryingratatosk/game-off-2012
two player Qix variant. - bverc/miner-trouble
sokoban variant with gems and bombs. - Psywerx/game-off-2012
obstacle-avoiding hipster-themed game. - AmaanC/TinyWings
tiny wings clone. - Andersos/Meatballs
meatball-themed obstacle-avoiding game. - yosun/game-off-2012
propel clones at your enemies. instructions would have been useful. - Popcorn-Web-Development/Beaver-Words
beaver-themed typing game. - lessandro/dave
short plaftormer with diamonds and a jetpack. - dakk/game-off-2012
nyan-cat themed obstacle-avoiding game. - binary-sequence/game-off-2012
firefighting game. - condran/game-off-2012
shoot-em-up with very limited ammo. - Jacic/game-off-2012
platform game with a chronotron-like cloning mechanic - sourrust/game-off-2012
double-jump platform game. only one level. - MonsterGuden/game-off-2012
single-button puzzle platformer - JamieLewisUK/game-off-2012
shoot the balloons for points. - JuggleTree/game-off-2012
catch fruits and throw them into a basket. - mkelleyjr/game-off-2012
snake clone. - dafrancis/SpaceHam
non-sequitur-themed shoot-em-up. - playtin/game-off-2012
wario-ware-style mini-games. - gplabs/game-off-2012
a tetris variant with more annoying controls. use space to attach/unattach to a piece. - jimmycuadra/pushing-hands
bejeweled variant where you swap whole rows at a time. - doowttam/game-off-2012
unique fix-the-pattern game. - sunetos/game-off-2012
unclear body simulation game. - dicksontse/game-off-2012
snake, without the snake. - imagentleman/hackris
original, but pointless incorporation of cloning and pushing into a typing game. - brooss/game-off-2012
answer text-questions, and hang out in a chat room.
Games after this point did not make it into the list, but maybe it's just me.
**Not-quite-games**
I don't agree that those entries count as "games", so I couldn't compare them fairly.
- timehome/game-off-2012
a clone of robocode; which, as you know, is not a game, but an AI competition. - pkukielka/radiance
a psychedelic experience, to be sure, but is this a game?
**Annoying**
I could not stand playing those games for long enough to give them a fair comparison.
- mosowski/game-off-2012
a 3D game designed to give you motion sickness? why?? - gnius/droplet
avoid the obstacles. annoying alert bomb each time you die. - abrie/game-off-2012
unique finger-twitching game with intentionally irritating controls. - ess/game-off-2012
platformer with intentionally irritating controls. too hard and annoying for me.
**Buggy**
I could not play those games either.
- heisenbuggers/game-off-2012
buggy boggle variant. - Dlom/game-off-2012
buggy duck shooter with a silly intro. - TARGS/game-off-2012
buggy bejeweled variant. - CalPolyGameDevelopment/ettell
mini-games - shinriyo/game-off-2012
3D choose-your-character and sink-into-the-ground? - dawicorti/helping-pibot
you're supposed to be able to create new pieces, but they get messed up.
**Technical difficulties**
I am not entirely sure that those games would also fail on your computer.
- Finjitzu/Archetype
placeholder? - nuclearwhales/push-the-box
doesn't work, even with "chrome native client" enabled and relaunched? - drabiter/magnet
requires access to my computer to run? - py8765/game-off-2012
abandoned Draw Something clone? - MS-game/game-off-2012
maybe my Java player is too old? - reedlabotz/game-off-2012
the "Create new game" button doesn't do anything? - OpenSismicos/game-off-2012
applet requesting access to my computer? - wprogLK/4thDimensionGame
failed to run. - jamescostian/game-off-2012
got a blank page, but this is supposed to use a 3D library? - BumbleBoks/game-off-2012
unclear path-drawing game. - prgnization/game-off-2012
you're supposed to be able to chat (as a core game mechanic!), but the text field doesn't respond to my keyboard. - elmariofredo/game-off-2012
the video shows a working level, but I my character doesn't go past the zeroth level. - ThatsAMorais/game-off-2012
a strategy game, but the units don't move unpredicably?
**Incomplete**
I couldn't play those games until the end, which is sad, because some were very promising.
- publysher/game-off-2012
incomplete text adventure about eating a steak. - MikeRogers0/game-off-2012
short platformer with no ending. interesting shoot-your-own-platforms mechanic. - SoftlySplinter/game-off-2012
a shoot-em-up without things to shoot. - mhluska/game-off-2012
incomplete olive bouncer. - Annovean/game-off-2012
incomplete osmosis clone. - leereilly/follow-dem-game-off-forkers
item collection game with no way to lose. - ozh/alchemy
doodle-god clone - Blipjoy/game-off-2012
incomplete UFO-themed object-dragging game? - FluffyCode/game-off-2012
octopus-in-the-desert-themed top-down shooter - ImmaculateObsession/game-off-2012
some level editor with no way to play? - devNil/game-off-2012
a so-called "inverted tower-defence" which you can win by repeatedly clicking the "warrior" button. - EpicFailInc/game-off-2012
destroy walls using bombs and lose HP for no reason. - ihcsim/game-off-2012
top-down shooter in which you can't win nor lose. - gcoope/game-off-2012
hang-glider inverse shoot-em-up with no way to win. - vespertinegames/game-off-2012
prototype tile-based movement. - wskidmore/game-off-2012
for a game in which you have "endless destructive powers", there sure aren't many things to destroy. - jamestomasino/game-off-2012
just a grid. - freejosh/game-off-2012
the engine for a platformer. - dparnell/game-off-2012
a maze, but you no way to explore it.
**Access denied**
Maybe it's just a server configuration issue?
- superally/game-off-2012
access denied. - DarkForestGames/game-off-2012
403 forbidden. - lazyeels/game-off-2012
forbidden
**Abandoned**
Some people wrote down their game ideas, but never got around to implement them. Others picked a URL, but never uploaded anything there.
- strugee/game-off-2012
abandoned placeholder. - cmdkeen/game-off-2012
abandoned game concept. - Willshaw/game-off-2012
abandoned game concept. - Vbitz/game-off-2012
placeholder. - EvilSpaceHamster/game-off-2012
page not found - fabriceleal/game-off-2012
abandoned placeholder - CodingEffort/game-off-2012
page not found - Jorjon/game-off-2012
page not found - mbl111/game-off-2012
placeholder - matthewtole/game-off-2012
404 - will3942/game-off-2012
placeholder
## 2 comments:
Thanks!
Thanks for the mention on #10!
Post a Comment
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From the 1285 forks of GitHub's official game-off repository , only 182 contestants bothered to change the URL at the top of their repo page...
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2012-12-14 00:00:00
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blogspot.com
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gelisam.blogspot.com
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https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/
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Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal
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David Kravets
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On Monday, a US federal appeals court sided against a former Philadelphia police officer who has been in jail 17 months because he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. He had refused to comply with a court order commanding him to unlock two hard drives the authorities say contain child porn.
The 3-0 decision (PDF) by the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals means that the suspect, Francis Rawls, likely will remain jailed indefinitely or until the order (PDF) finding him in contempt of court is lifted or overturned. However, he still can comply with the order and unlock two FileVault encrypted drives connected to his Apple Mac Pro. Using a warrant, authorities seized those drives from his residence in 2015. While Rawls could get out from under the contempt order by unlocking those drives, doing so might expose him to other legal troubles.
In deciding against Rawls, the court of appeals found that the constitutional rights against being compelled to testify against oneself were not being breached. That's because the appeals court, like the police, agreed that the presence of child porn on his drives was a "foregone conclusion." The Fifth Amendment, at its most basic level, protects suspects from being forced to disclose incriminating evidence. In this instance, however, the authorities said they already know there's child porn on the drives, so Rawls' constitutional rights aren't compromised.
The Philadelphia-based appeals court ruled:
Forensic examination also disclosed that Doe [Rawls] had downloaded thousands of files known by their "hash" values to be child pornography. The files, however, were not on the Mac Pro, but instead had been stored on the encrypted external hard drives. Accordingly, the files themselves could not be accessed.
The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother showed her hundreds of pictures and videos of child pornography. All of this, according to the appeals court, meant that the lower court lawfully ordered Rawls to unlock the drives.
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“Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months,” defense attorney says.
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2017-03-20 00:00:00
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article
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arstechnica.com
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Ars Technica
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/world/europe/venice-tourism-surveillance.html
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http://www.betabeat.com/
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https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/anatomy-of-credit-card-rewards-programs/
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
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Patrick McKenzie
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There are only a few opportunities to make a living by getting good at creating tables to facilitate high-frequency math that end-users will find entertaining but will have predictable statistical properties at scale.
One of them is designing roleplaying games. Seems like an interesting topic but someone else will have to write about it. In this column, the dragon sleeps on a hoard of interchange revenue, you slay him to get credit cards rewards points, and the card issuer running the game merrily chuckles at players’ misperception that they are dragons. No, silly, they’re much realer and much richer.
A disclaimer off the top: I used to work at, and am still an advisor of, Stripe. A major portion of the Stripe economic model is charging businesses money to take payments on credit cards. Stripe’s two largest costs are paying smart people and paying interchange, and of the two, one would feel a lot better to cut.
Another disclaimer: Due to long-standing practice, I am (homeopathically) exposed to the common equity of financial services companies that my family uses, so that I can call up Investor Relations if I ever need to escalate a routine banking issue. My family’s main U.S. bank happens to be Chase, which is mentioned below.
Almost everybody writing about credit cards on the Internet receives some sort of spiff if you sign up after clicking through tagged links in their material. That is not my business model (people pay me to write about financial infrastructure), but is probably one you want to be cognizant of every time you read about credit cards online.
## Rebating interchange to earn share of wallet
As we have discussed previously, credit cards have multiple different ways of earning money, but the most important one to this discussion is interchange. It is a fee, ultimately paid by the card-accepting business, which gets sliced up between various parties in the credit card ecosystem to incentivize them to put their logos in the wallets and on the phones of well-heeled customers and increase the amount they spend and the frequency with which they spend it. (In industry, we sometimes distinguish interchange—which mostly goes to the issuing bank—and scheme fees—which mostly go to the credit card brand itself—but as interchange is much larger, let’s just call them both interchange for simplicity.)
Interchange is generally a percentage fee based on the final transaction size plus optionally a per-transaction fee. You can just look up the rates, but I strongly recommend you don’t, as you will be reduced to gibbering madness. (It took many smart people many years of work before Stripe could deterministically predict almost all interchange it was charged in advance of actually getting billed for it.)
To highlight something which is routinely surprising for non-specialists: interchange fees are not constant and fixed. They are set based on quite a few factors (*gibbering madness intensifies*) but, most prominently, based on the rank of card product you use. The more a card product is pitched to socioeconomically well-off people, the more expensive interchange is. Credit card issuers *explicitly and directly* charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.
The basic intuition underlying rewards cards as a product is that highly desirable customers have options in how they spend their money. You can directly influence them to use your rails by making those rails more lucrative, more fun, or both for the customer. And so card issuers (and the networks) compete with each other for so-called “share of wallet” by bidding with interchange.
This is not quite as sophisticated as the system of dueling robots which bids for your attention every time you open a page on the Internet with an ad on it. The bids are generally speaking pretty static and made years in advance, at or before the time a user signs up for a card product, with relatively minor adjustments made over time. Program managers at card issuers are extremely, extremely sensitive to upsetting the apple cart and churning loyal users, and so they attempt to avoid doing this except when circumstances make it unavoidable.
## Why isn’t every card a rewards card?
Different regions have ended up with different equilibria in the rewards game. In the United States, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is *robust*. In Japan, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is fairly muted due to—ahem—effective collusion by issuers. In Europe, card acceptance is cheap by regulatory fiat and so rewards are far less common (or commonly lucrative) than in the U.S.
Similarly, debit card rewards used to be fairly common in the United States until the Dodd-Frank Act capped debit card interchange (with a very important carveout for small banks in the Durbin amendment). When interchange is regulated, the size of the pie isn’t large enough to give the end-user of the card a tasty slice, and so they get nothing.
But we can see that, even scoping to credit cards in the United States, not every card is a rewards card. What explains why CapitalOne, for example, offers rewards for its Quicksilver card but not the Platinum Mastercard? Is mercury attempting to burnish its image after that horrible toxicity thing?
Partly, this is that different users have different jobs-to-be-done for credit cards. (Many users of credit cards, potentially including some readers of this column, believe that they are the typical users of credit cards. No users of credit cards are typical.)
Credit cards are both a payment instrument and an access point for a revolving credit line. That they are an expensive way to borrow money is one of the first things said in any personal finance text. They are also one of the most accessible ways to borrow money, and that is their primary value proposition for many users, typically ones lower on the socioeconomic ladder. These users spend relatively little in a month compared to their revolving balance, which they continuously pay interest on. It trivially follows that most money on their accounts is earned via net interest margin and not from interchange.
To the extent these users notice numerically defined features of their credit cards, which is somewhat dubious, it is the headline APR (cost of credit) and their credit limits. “Starter” cards and other products aimed at this user group typically have no rewards; they instead use interchange income to “bid down” the headline APR. Interchange functions as a subsidization of the cost of credit throughout the economy by businesses which want to sell things to people who would use credit to buy things. The limit case of this is Buy Now, Pay Later, where the cost of credit is subsidized straight to free.
The heaviest credit card *spenders*, and this fact is both uncontroversial and flies in the face of what many personal finance columnists believe, are wealthy and sophisticated. They use credit cards primarily as payment instruments. Issuers compete aggressively for their business, which is quite lucrative. This is not because they pay much in interest, because while they have higher headline APRs they only rarely revolve balances. It is because “clipping the ticket” via interchange on a high volume of transactions is an excellent business to be in.
How dramatic is this? Allow me to reproduce a graph from Regulating Consumer Financial Products: Evidence from Credit Cards. (This paper is something of the Rosetta stone for credit card issuance as a field, both in that it is a single source for understanding a huge range of human endeavor and in that it stands in for a very large literature that nobody else reaches for to be the first citation when the Rosetta Stone already exists. If you see an unlabeled graph on Twitter about credit cards, it was probably lifted from this paper.)
As you can see, as a percentage of Average Daily Balance (ADB), even after rewards expense, interchange gets very sharply more lucrative at the top of the credit score distribution (740+, which is roughly 10% of accounts). The difference is *actually larger than you see here*, since credit lines and ADB also increase with credit score, for predictable reasons. (Rich people consume more than poor people on an absolute basis, film at eleven.)
## The complexity spectrum of rewards products
The simplest reward products are straight “cashback”. The issuer totals up all of one’s net purchases (all purchases less refunds) in a statement period. It then credits the user with a particular percentage of that for each statement. Either automatically or periodically at the user’s request, it transforms some of that notional banked credit into a statement credit, decreasing the amount the user needs to pay to cover their purchases in the current month.
This is as simple as it gets and we’re already necessarily handwaving away libraries worth of complexity. (For example, calculation of net purchases needs to be fairly robust against adversarial collaboration of users and merchants or the issuer gets turned into a money pump within a matter of days and will not likely be able to detect or reverse this condition for at least several weeks. This has happened many, many times. Credit card issuers, when they screw this up, lose millions of dollars and dry their tears on money.)
Anyhow, in the mists of history, that percentage started flat; typically, 1%. The math supporting this is typically fairly simple: take in 140bps as revenue, pay the user 100 bps as effectively a cost of customer acquisition, keep some portion of 40 bps as one’s margin.
In nations other than ones with effective cartel-like behavior by issuers, this equilibrium was not stable, because competing issuers would bid e.g. 1.25% cash back on the same underlying economics and compete for share of wallet. This happened extremely robustly, for decades.
One iteration of this game was cash back “categories”. Particularly post-Internet, certain cohorts of customers were most interested in the headline cashback percentage rate. Issuers began to design products which were more complicated, such as “1% cash back in principle, however, 1.5% cash back at gas stations.”
## A fun rabbit hole about credit card acceptance
A huge percentage of all credit cards are “co-branded”; they are issued by a financial institution but bear the name of some other institution which inspires a lot of loyalty. A teeny, tiny percentage of co-branded cards name e.g. tertiary educational institutions. Most name a business that a customer has an intense, ongoing relationship with: Costco, their airline of choice, etc.
Co-branded cards are *extremely* big business. One subtlety about them: a co-branded card will often have a special rewards tier for the business named on the card. This is partially that business choosing, as a marketing expense, to split some of their core margin with their most loyal customers (*overwhelmingly* the target audience for the co-branded card). But, surprisingly to many non-specialists, that is not the sole source of margin to reward cardholders with.
This is because, at the scale of the largest businesses in the world, financial services are cross-sold and structurally interconnected. There is one team in a bank (it happens to be Chase, for what it is worth) attempting to capture Starbuck’s card processing business. There is another team that wants to convince Starbucks to co-brand Chase card products. These two teams *can talk to each other* prior to making proposals to Starbucks.
And so, without knowing anything about the payments industry, you can speculate with a very high degree of confidence that Starbucks has received a complicated spreadsheet saying what Chase will charge it for every conceivable type of credit and debit card that wants a latte. A prominent negotiated line on that spreadsheet includes, effectively, a major discount for “on us” transactions: when Chase’s left hand needs to move money from Chase’s right hand because someone wants to pay Starbucks money for their Starbucks using their Starbucks-branded money. (This is easy to conflate with, and is separate from, Starbucks’ extremely impressive stored-value product. *That* probably mostly cannibalized their credit product, which… alright, we have to stop the levels of digression somewhere or we’ll be here all day.)
Because “on us” is structurally cheaper (the transaction literally travels over fewer rails and therefore there are fewer “mouths to feed”) and because it is incentive compatible for all parties to subsidize these transactions, as a card program designer, you have a relatively easy time being generous with regards to this particular cell of your spreadsheet.
## Back to more complicated cases
So imagine you’re the card program designer for a card that, like most cards, does not have a particular named business happily subsidizing your users. You desire to quote a headline cashback number much higher than 1%. But you’d still like to keep some margin from interchange. What could you do?
One is you make the headline number larger but contingent on something. Say, for example, the card rebates 1.5%, but only for… bookstores. Any bookstore. For all other transactions, it is 1%.
The thing you would love with this offering is to preferentially attract people who are *very emotionally invested in being readers* and who spends *very little of her on-this-card wallet on books*. The emotional investment in the story the card offers brings the customer in; the *blended* cost to acquire the customer is closer to 1% industry standard and not to the 1.5% headline number.
Money is fungible, money is fungible, money is fungible, but many people don’t actually orient their lives as if this were true, and so the financial industry meets them where they are and then charges them for the privilege. This user values a dollar more when it is a books-dollar than when it is a food-dollar. You, a credit card program manager, can math out a way to get her as many books-dollars as she is interested in. (This is similar, in spirit, to how Bryrne Hobart describes airline frequent flyer programs as working. One key difference that credit card program managers have to understand: a source of advantage for frequent flyer miles as a pseudocurrency is that they can turn very-low-marginal-cost inputs, unsold seats, into very-high-perceived-marginal-benefit outputs, “free vacations”. Books-dollars may very well be worth more than a dollar to our target user here, but books-dollars are very difficult to manufacture in quantity for less than about 98ish cents.)
In principle, you could even offer *more* than your direct interchange revenue as the headline number, if you were very, very sure that your typical user would not preferentially use your card only to buy books and use a competitor’s card to buy groceries, gasoline, medicine, and similar.
Now, unfortunately, remember what we said about typical credit card users? That’s *right*. They don’t exist. Very many of your users will do what you want them to, and use the card in a perfectly-acceptable-but-not-exactly-optimal fashion, and you will have a blended cost very near 1% for them. And very many of your users will do exactly what you most don’t want, and use the card *only* to buy books.
This is… far less incentive compatible for you, particularly if you decided that the business of manufacturing books-dollars was so lucrative that you could rebate more than the direct interchange revenue given mix effects. These users will have blended costs very close to your headline number, not to your modeled blended costs.
These users will even band into tribes, find each other on the Internet, and swap tips for exploiting poor, defenseless credit card program managers like yourself. The tribal elders will eventually run businesses, with names like The Points Guy, which eventually get quietly acquired by very sophisticated private equity firms. Those PE firms are betting that you continue paying generous per-signup affiliate commissions to Internet properties which send you new card users. You bet you will also paying tens of millions of dollars annually to Frequently Adversely Selected New Accounts Dot Com. And Redditors bet they will continue chortling that they have pulled one over on you, because haha, you’re not nearly as good as they are at fourth grade math or keeping spreadsheets.
The biggest difference between you and a Redditor is not ability to do fourth grade math or ability to do spreadsheets. Redditors are frequently *sophisticated* with their spreadsheets; many of them could clearly earn three orders of magnitude more from the financial industry if they stopped thinking that the right way to monetize spreadsheet skill was in gaming credit card signup bonuses.
The biggest difference is that you’re optimizing *over portfolios, over time* and Redditors are largely playing in single player mode (and frequently over short horizons). You only care about single or dual player mode to the extent that you avoid obviously degenerate offerings where adverse selecting single players quickly dominate your entire book of business. Which is *very much a risk*, which is why the bank has smart people like you keeping spreadsheets.
The Redditors think failure modes for the bank sound like pudding guy. Pudding guy, was, of course, one of the highest-ROI ad buys in the history of capitalism.
## Further refinements in cat and mouse games
But, just like lotteries have to keep reskinning the random number generators or the games get stale and ticket sales go down, credit card program managers have to periodically shake things up for something to cut through their adversaries’ built-in distribution networks and massive, massive marketing budgets.
One innovation, now 20+ years old, was a *rotating* favored category for cash-back. So instead of being 1.5% for bookstores 1% all else, it would be 1.5% for groceries in Q1, for gas in Q2, etc etc.
The theory behind this was pretty simple: many customers attracted by the headline number could be brought in the door by it but would be fairly inattentive after a card was their new “top of wallet” (the default card for spending). Over time, a combination of inattentiveness, changing willingness to spend time playing the game, and rewards caps would bring the portfolio’s cost of rewards close to the baseline and not to the headline reward number.
If for some reason playing this game interests you, one prominent product is called the Chase Freedom card. It should not be an attractive product for you, given plausible assumptions about the readership of this column, but it is an attractive *enough* product that probably millions of Americans use it.
## Giving the customer more choices more frequently
If you were hypothetically to have spent the last few years dining with relatively well-off people in SFBA, when it came time to pay for dinner you’d see two credit card products with a combined 90%+ share: Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR) and an interchangeable American Express card. This, ahem, includes many diners who are professionally connected to upstart payment methods.
American Express, for a very long time, had an almost mortal lock on the top end of the credit card market. Chase attempted to disrupt that in 2016 by *very overtly* attempting to buy away their core customer. You can read lots in other places about the original promotion, generally tsk-tsking about how absurdly lucrative it was for customers and how it caused Chase to have a (temporary) loss associated with their cards business. Personally, I think it was one of the most interesting strategic moves in the last 20 years of retail banking, but a full essay on that would require some other-than-public knowledge as to the size of the tsunami that happened after it.
One thing that is public but not well appreciated: Chase didn’t just *decide* to create an extremely lucrative-for-the-customer offering out of the goodness of their hearts and out of their own P&L. No, they *pitched Visa on this idea*. For too long, Visa, you have watched your competitor American Express outcompete every issuer in the Visa system for the best wallets in the world. They can do that because they can afford to, because American Express charges systematically higher interchange rates than Visa does even at its topmost tier. Visa, you should *create a new tier *where your not-exactly-chosen champions can try to spend those interchange dollars to give American Express a run for their money.
And, lo, Visa *did* create a new tier. You can expose yourself to gibbering madness if you want to know what the name for it is. But Chase got Visa to authorize Chase charging almost the entire economy more for credit card acceptance with the specific goal of outcompeting American Express for the most lucrative highest-monthly-spend virtually-never-revolve-a-balance credit card users.
That was *part* of what made the numbers work.
Another part is that the CSR offers a fairly complicated rewards scheme, with a lot of opportunities for people to pick things which feel great but are not optimal. For example, Chase will let you cash out CSR points on a 1:1 basis at either Amazon or Apple, integrated directly into the checkout flows. Those *feel great*.
People *love* Amazon and Apple and they love free Amazon and free Apple even more. This is true even among a portion of very sophisticated, wealthy, numerate CSR users, who love this idea so much they click a button designed for suckers.
Why is that a sucker’s checkout button? Because CSR also includes a feature called Pay Yourself Back which in the past prominently, and today a bit… less prominently, lets you cash out rewards at better than 1:1. You get a 25% bonus if you Pay Yourself Back by nominating past transactions at grocery stores: 10,000 points gets you $125 in statement credits if you are willing to do a trivial amount of clicking to show Chase $125+ in spend at grocery stores.
Stating the obvious: Chase knows what a computer is and does not require you to actually identify your purchases at grocery stores. This is a product decision to both a) force you to use your card at grocery stores and b) force yourself to say “Chase is getting me free groceries! How nice of them!” on a transaction-by-transaction level once a month to use your card optimally.
There are many, many other sucker buttons.
But, because the card is fundamentally targeted at rich, sophisticated people, Chase really does pay out a shedload of rewards. The 3% headline rate for travel and dining plus the 25% Pay Yourself Back kicker means there is a sustained and trivial pathway to get 375 bps out, which is one of the very, very, very few places in the industry where there is a sustained, trivial, uncapped way to get out more than the direct cost of interchange.
Why does this persist? Partly it is due to the standard credit card portfolio strategy: every time someone uses a CSR on Amazon (and not e.g. the Amazon rewards card, also from Chase) or uses CSR points to buy high-margin white plastic, Chase’s contribution margin for the portfolio goes up, and at scale *quite a large percentage *of customers do this.
Partly it is due to Chase thinking that they’ll just *be so good* for their target customer that their target customer *will not bother playing the game optimally. *That would require the customer carefully maintaining a portfolio of credit relationships and having seven cards saved on their iPhone and not, simply, the CSR.
Partly it is due to the really interesting strategic reasons for having CSR available: to a much larger degree than American Express, Chase is a diversified financial services empire. The CSR was effectively designed as a wedge product to get something Chase branded into the hands of affluent up-and-coming young urban professionals, with the goal of eventually getting them to not move just their wallet but their entire financial existence (and potentially their current-or-future *entities’* financial existences) onto Chase.
The Sapphire mini-brand was so loved that they reused it for a bog-standard premium checking account. (It was named the Chase Sapphire Premium Checking Account, in a decision which probably consumed several tens of millions of dollars of professional effort, and I mean that absolutely descriptively and not as a criticism. I was not in *that* meeting… but I’ve been in that *kind* of meeting. Those that have been in it know that it is not in any way a single-meeting single-decisionmaker sort of call.)
## More directions to go in
The blessing and curse of essays is that they have to end somewhere, and then pick up anew somewhere else. Hopefully the above gives you a bit more context on what is in your wallet.
In the future, we'll likely discuss the complicated iterated game played by the credit card networks and the rest of society regarding interchange rates, how there are high-interchange-high-reward equilibria and low-interchange-low-reward equilibria, the recent settlement where the networks agreed to temporarily decrease interchange, and other topics.
## Want more essays in your inbox?
I write about the intersection of tech and finance, approximately biweekly. It's free.
| true | true | true |
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2024-03-29 00:00:00
|
article
|
bitsaboutmoney.com
|
Bits about Money
| null | null |
|
24,160,252 |
https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/14/google-open-sources-lit-a-toolset-for-evaluating-natural-language-models/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
15,022,142 |
https://blog.toggl.com/seven-circles-of-developer-hell/
|
The Seven Circles of Developer Hell [Infographic]
|
Mart Virkus
|
Software development is a special kind of a nightmare. The kind that you wish you could wake up from, but can’t, because code is money and money is life.
We asked our Toggl developers to describe their personal hell. After much screaming and hyperventilating, we ended up with this 7 circles of developer hell:
This is yet another infographic by the Toggl Goon Squad – the developers behind the Toggl time tracking app.
Toggl, by the way, is a tool for showing your boss that yes, it really does take 2 hours to find that damn missing semicolon.
# Hah – how much time did you spend on this?
Way, way too much.
If you liked it, you might enjoy some of the other pieces we’ve done in the past – like explaining tech jobs with a simple lightbulb. Or another epic piece about how to save the princess using different programming languages.
# Nice but… shouldn’t you be working on your app?
Nonsense. Everybody knows that once coded, software basically maintains itself.
But actually, we rather enjoy the occasional break from serious work to point out the pain points in the biz with some brightly coloured images.
Software development is hell, and any ray of light is appreciated. It’s also the reason why we like working on Toggl – it’s great for fending off attacks from pesky clients and managers at bay. *With data.*
We’ll also keep doing these comics, so keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter if you want to catch them early.
Also, if you have any ideas for the next one, or if you think our Developer Hell is missing something, drop a line where it says “Comments”.
Mart has a background in anthropology - a discipline which has turned people-watching into a science. He most enjoys working on projects that make you go from “that’s stupid” to “hmmm”.
| true | true | true |
We asked our developers to describe their personal hell. After much screaming and hyperventilating, we ended up with these 7 circles of developer hell.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2017-02-23 00:00:00
|
article
|
toggl.com
|
Toggl Blog
| null | null |
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28,884,130 |
https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/
|
We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage
|
Bari Weiss
|
A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears.
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.
In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.
In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.
In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Thus, the argument to get rid of the SAT. Or the admissions tests for public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco.
In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third-graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. In third grade.
In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high-schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told, “If you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. If disparity is present, as the high priest of this ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, has explained, racism is present. According to this totalizing new view, we are all either racist or anti-racist. To be a Good Person and not a Bad Person, you must be an “anti-racist.” There is no neutrality. There is no such thing as “not racist.”
Most important: In this revolution, skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.
What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being cancelled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
It has worked. A recent CATO study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. And nearly 70 percent of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something that students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey.
Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology? It’s not because they are dumb. Or because they are snowflakes, or whatever Fox talking points would have you believe. All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others. And so on.
“I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. The same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit on fire the souls of true believers, eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in its way.
If you have ever tried to build something, even something small, you know how hard it is. It takes time. It takes tremendous effort. But tearing things down? That’s quick work.
The Woke Revolution has been exceptionally effective. It has successfully captured the most important sense-making institutions of American life: our newspapers. Our magazines. Our Hollywood studios. Our publishing houses. Many of our tech companies. And, increasingly, corporate America.
Just as in China under Chairman Mao, the seeds of our own cultural revolution can be traced to the academy, the first of our institutions to be overtaken by it. And our schools—public, private, parochial—are increasingly the recruiting grounds for this ideological army.
A few stories are worth recounting:
David Peterson is an art professor at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He stood accused in the fevered summer of 2020 of “engaging in hateful conduct that threatens Black Skidmore students.”
What was that hateful conduct? David and his wife, Andrea, went to watch a rally for police officers. “Given the painful events that continue to unfold across this nation, I guess we just felt compelled to see first-hand how all of this was playing out in our own community,” he told the Skidmore student newspaper. David and his wife stayed for 20 minutes on the edge of the event. They held no signs, participated in no chants. They just watched. Then they left for dinner.
For the crime of *listening,* David Peterson’s class was boycotted. A sign appeared on his classroom door: “STOP. By entering this class you are crossing a campus-wide picket line and breaking the boycott against Professor David Peterson. This is not a safe environment for marginalized students.” Then the university opened an investigation into accusations of bias in the classroom.
Across the country from Skidmore, at the University of Southern California, a man named Greg Patton is a professor of business communication. In 2020, Patton was teaching a class on “filler words”—such as “um” and “like” and so forth for his master’s-level course on communication for management. It turns out that the Chinese word for “like” sounds like the n-word. Students wrote the school’s staff and administration accusing their professor of “negligence and disregard.” They added: “We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being” at school.
In a normal, reality-based world, there is only one response to such a claim: You misheard. But that was not the response. This was: “It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students,” the dean, Geoffrey Garrett wrote. “Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry.”
This rot hasn’t been contained to higher education. At a mandatory training earlier this year in the San Diego Unified School District, Bettina Love, an education professor who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, accused white teachers of “spirit murdering black and brown children” and urged them to undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators.”
San Francisco’s public schools didn’t manage to open their schools during the pandemic, but the board decided to rename 44 schools—including those named for George Washington and John Muir—before suspending the plan. Meantime, one of the board members declared merit “racist” and “Trumpian.”
A recent educational program for sixth to eighth grade teachers called “a pathway to equitable math instruction”—funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—was recently sent to Oregon teachers by the state’s Department of Education. The program’s literature informs teachers that white supremacy shows up in math instruction when “rigor is expressed only in difficulty,” and “contrived word problems are valued over the math in students’ lived experiences.”
Serious education is the antidote to such ignorance. Frederick Douglass said, “Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.” Soaring words that feel as if they are a report from a distant galaxy. Education is increasingly where debate, dissent, and discovery go to die.
It’s also very bad for kids. For those deemed “privileged,” it creates a hostile environment where kids are too intimidated to participate. For those deemed “oppressed,” it inculcates an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the world, where students are trained to perceive malice and bigotry in everything they see. They are denied the dignity of equal standards and expectations. They are denied the belief in their own agency and ability to succeed. As Zaid Jilani had put it: “You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the power we rightly deserve.”
How did we get here? There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.
But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is *cowardice*.
The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title *CEO* or *leader* or *president* or *principal* in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility—*that* is how we got here.
Allan Bloom had the radicals of the 1960s in mind when he wrote that “a few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.” Now, a half-century later, those dancing bears hold named chairs at every important elite, sense-making institution in the country.
As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”
Each surely thought: *These protestors have some merit! This institution, this university, this school, hasn’t lived up to all of its principles at all times! We have been racist! We have been sexist! We haven’t always been enlightened! I’ll give a bit and we’ll find a way to compromise. *This turned out to be as naive as Robespierre thinking that he could avoid the guillotine.
Think about each of the anecdotes I’ve shared here and all the rest you already know. All that had to change for the entire story to turn out differently was for the person in charge, the person tasked with being a steward for the newspaper or the magazine or the college or the school district or the private high school or the kindergarten, to say: *No.*
If cowardice is the thing that has allowed for all of this, the force that stops this cultural revolution can also be summed up by one word: *courage*. And courage often comes from people you would not expect.
Consider Maud Maron. Maron is a lifelong liberal who has always walked the walk. She was an escort for Planned Parenthood; a law-school research assistant to Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther; and a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during the 2004 presidential election. In 2016, she was a regular contributor to Bernie Sanders’s campaign.
Maron dedicated her career to Legal Aid: “For me, being a public defender is more than a job,” she told me. “It’s who I am.”
But things took a turn when, this past year, Maron spoke out passionately and publicly about the illiberalism that has gripped the New York City public schools attended by her four children.
“I am very open about what I stand for,” she told me. “I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school.”
What followed this apparent thought crime was a 21st-century witch hunt. Maron was smeared publicly by her colleagues. They called her “racist, and openly so.” They said, “We’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.”
Most people would have walked away and quietly found a new job. Not Maud Maron. This summer, she filed suit against the organization, claiming that she was forced out of Legal Aid because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“The reason they went after me is that I have a different point of view,” she said. “These ideologues have tried to ruin my name and my career, and they are going after other good people. Not enough people stand up and say: It is totally wrong to do this to a person. And this is not going to stop unless people stand up to it.”
That’s courage.
Courage also looks like Paul Rossi, the math teacher at Grace Church High School in New York who raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. A few days later, all the school’s advisers were required to read a public reprimand of his conduct out loud to every student in the school. Unwilling to disavow his beliefs, Rossi blew the whistle: “I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.” That’s courage.
Courage is Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom who endured Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a child and spoke up to the Loudoun County School Board at a public meeting in June. “You are training our children to loathe our country and our history,” she said in front of the school board. “Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this feels very familiar…. The only difference is that they used class instead of race.”
Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, recently filed suit against his own university. Why? A student asked him to grade black students with “greater leniency.” He refused, given that such a racial preference would violate UCLA’s anti-discrimination policies (and maybe even the law). But the people in charge of UCLA’s Anderson School launched a racial-discrimination complaint into *him. *They denounced him, banned him from campus, appointed a monitor to look at his emails, and suspended him. He eventually was reinstated—because he had done absolutely nothing wrong—but not before his reputation and career were severely damaged. “I don’t want to see anyone else’s life destroyed as they attempted to do to me,” Klein told me. “Few have the intestinal fortitude to fight cancel culture. I do. This is about sending a message to every petty tyrant out there.”
Courage is Peter Boghossian. He recently resigned his post at Portland State University, writing in a letter to his provost: “The university transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only output was grievance and division…. I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?”
*Who would I be if I didn’t?*
George Orwell said that “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” In an age of lies, telling the truth is high risk. It comes with a cost. But it is our moral obligation.
It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity. It is our duty to speak truth in an age of lies.
This bravery isn’t the last or only step in opposing this revolution—it’s just the first. After that must come honest assessments of why America was vulnerable to start with, and an aggressive commitment to rebuilding the economy and society in ways that once again offer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest number of Americans.
But let’s start with a little courage.
Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.
When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history.
America is imperfect. I always knew it, as we all do—and the past few years have rocked my faith like no others in my lifetime. But America and we Americans are far from irredeemable.
The motto of Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery paper, the *North Star*—“The Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are brethren”—must remain all of ours.
We can still feel the pull of that electric cord Lincoln talked about 163 years ago—the one “in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
Every day I hear from people who are living in fear in the freest society humankind has ever known. Dissidents in a democracy, practicing doublespeak. That is what is happening right now. What happens five, 10, 20 years from now if we don’t speak up and defend the ideas that have made all of our lives possible?
Liberty. Equality. Freedom. Dignity. These are ideas worth fighting for.
*We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.*
| true | true | true |
A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2021-10-14 00:00:00
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article
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commentary.org
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Commentary Magazine
| null | null |
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3,301,153 |
http://writings.nunojob.com/2011/12/Mock-Testing-CouchDB-Using-NodeJS-With-Nock-And-TAP.html
|
Mock Testing CouchDB in node.js with Nock and TAP
|
Nuno Job
|
One of my first node.js libraries was nano: A no fuss CouchDB client based on the super pervasive request. In foresight that was a good idea, even though there's a ton of clients for CouchDB none of them is as simple as `nano`
, and any http client that is not based on `request`
is not something I would even consider.
When you are writing a HTTP client you need to test with one (or several) HTTP endpoints. I was lazy about it so I choose to point nano to iriscouch and run the tests on real HTTP requests (even found a bug in node.js in the way, now fixed in 0.6+). This was a problematic but overall ok approach.
Then some weeks ago I started automating the tests using travis. And builds started to fail. To make this work and fix all the shortcomings of the connect to `iriscouch`
I needed a HTTP Mocking module.
By the way Travis is super cool. You should test all your node.js libraries with it. All you need to do is go to the site, sign in with github and place a `.travis.yml`
file like this one in the root of your lib:
```
language: "node_js"
node_js:
- 0.4
- 0.6
```
Pedro Teixeira's nock allows you do HTTP Mock Testing while preserving the possibility to run the tests against a real http endpoint.
Let's start on this small tap test `sudo npm install tap nano nock`
:
```
var nano = require('nano')('http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
var test = require('tap').test;
var db = nano.use('testing_nock');
test('Insert a Document Into CouchDB', function(t) {
t.plan(4);
nano.db.create('testing_nock', function () {
db.insert({foo: "bar"},
function ensure_insert_worked_cb(err, doc) {
t.notOk(err, 'No errors');
t.ok(doc.ok, 'Contains ok');
t.ok(doc.rev, 'Rev exists');
t.ok(doc.id, 'Id exists');
});
});
});
```
If we save this in a file `test.js`
we can run the tests and see they all work. We can even invoke the script with debugging turned on and inspect the HTTP requests/response flow:
```
$ NANO_ENV=testing node test.js
{ url: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com' }
>>
{ method: 'PUT',
headers:
{ 'content-type': 'application/json',
accept: 'application/json' },
uri: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock' }
<<
{ err: null,
body: { ok: true },
headers:
{ location: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock',
date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:42:21 GMT',
'content-type': 'application/json',
'cache-control': 'must-revalidate',
'status-code': 201 } }
>>
{ method: 'POST',
headers:
{ 'content-type': 'application/json',
accept: 'application/json' },
uri: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock',
body: '{"foo":"bar"}' }
<<
{ err: null,
body:
{ ok: true,
id: 'f191a858a66828d8de66b3c974005346',
rev: '1-4c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e' },
headers:
{ location: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock/f191a858a66828d8de66b3c974005346',
date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:42:22 GMT',
'content-type': 'application/json',
'cache-control': 'must-revalidate',
'status-code': 201 } }
# Insert a Document Into CouchDB
ok 1 No errors
ok 2 Contains ok
ok 3 Rev exists
ok 4 Id exists
1..4
# tests 4
# pass 4
# ok
```
So `nano`
gives you a way to actually see all the HTTP traffic that it creates and receives. This is great but I still need to write code to support these interactions.
With `nock`
this is super simple:
```
var nano = require('nano')('http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
var nock = require('nock'); // we require nock
var test = require('tap').test;
var db = nano.use('testing_nock');
nock.recorder.rec();
test('Insert a Document Into CouchDB', function(t) {
t.plan(4);
nano.db.create('testing_nock', function () {
db.insert({foo: "bar"},
function ensure_insert_worked_cb(err, doc) {
t.notOk(err, 'No errors');
t.ok(doc.ok, 'Contains ok');
t.ok(doc.rev, 'Rev exists');
t.ok(doc.id, 'Id exists');
});
});
});
```
Running the tests returns:
```
$ node test.js
<<<<<<-- cut here -->>>>>>
nock('nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
.put('/testing_nock')
.reply(412, "{\"error\":\"file_exists\",\"reason\":\"The database could not be created, the file already exists.\"}\n", { server: 'CouchDB/1.1.1 (Erlang OTP/R14B04)',
date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:43:30 GMT',
'content-type': 'application/json',
'content-length': '95',
'cache-control': 'must-revalidate' });
<<<<<<-- cut here -->>>>>>
<<<<<<-- cut here -->>>>>>
nock('nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
.post('/testing_nock', "{\"foo\":\"bar\"}")
.reply(201, "{\"ok\":true,\"id\":\"8b787a6a1c2476ef9a2eed069e000ff0\",\"rev\":\"1-4c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e\"}\n", { server: 'CouchDB/1.1.1 (Erlang OTP/R14B04)',
location: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock/8b787a6a1c2476ef9a2eed069e000ff0',
date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:43:31 GMT',
'content-type': 'application/json',
'content-length': '95',
'cache-control': 'must-revalidate' });
<<<<<<-- cut here -->>>>>>
# Insert a Document Into CouchDB
ok 1 No errors
ok 2 Contains ok
ok 3 Rev exists
ok 4 Id exists
1..4
# tests 4
# pass 4
# ok
```
So now all we need to do is add these nock http mocks and we are done:
```
var nano = require('nano')('http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
var nock = require('nock'); // we require nock
var test = require('tap').test;
var db = nano.use('testing_nock');
var couch = nock('nodejsbug.iriscouch.com')
.put('/testing_nock')
.reply( 412
, "{ \"error\":\"file_exists\""+
", \"reason\":\"The database could not be created, the file" +
" already exists.\"}\n"
, { server: 'CouchDB/1.1.1 (Erlang OTP/R14B04)'
, date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:43:30 GMT'
, 'content-type': 'application/json'
, 'content-length': '95'
, 'cache-control': 'must-revalidate' })
.post('/testing_nock', "{\"foo\":\"bar\"}")
.reply(201
, "{ \"ok\":true" +
", \"id\":\"8b787a6a1c2476ef9a2eed069e000ff0\"" +
", \"rev\":\"1-4c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e\"}\n"
, { server: 'CouchDB/1.1.1 (Erlang OTP/R14B04)'
, location: 'http://nodejsbug.iriscouch.com/testing_nock/'
+ '8b787a6a1c2476ef9a2eed069e000ff0'
, date: 'Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:43:31 GMT'
, 'content-type': 'application/json'
, 'content-length': '95'
, 'cache-control': 'must-revalidate' });
test('Insert a Document Into CouchDB', function(t) {
t.plan(4);
nano.db.create('testing_nock', function () {
db.insert({foo: "bar"},
function ensure_insert_worked_cb(err, doc) {
t.notOk(err, 'No errors');
t.ok(doc.ok, 'Contains ok');
t.ok(doc.rev, 'Rev exists');
t.ok(doc.id, 'Id exists');
});
});
});
```
All working, happy nocking! :)
```
$ node test.js
# Insert a Document Into CouchDB
ok 1 No errors
ok 2 Contains ok
ok 3 Rev exists
ok 4 Id exists
1..4
# tests 4
# pass 4
# ok
```
| true | true | true | null |
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2011-12-01 00:00:00
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Mock Testing CouchDB in node.js with Nock and TAP
| null | null |
1,134,977 |
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=56695
|
U.S. State Policy
| null |
# U.S. State Policy
Sections
- Topics
- U.S. State Policy
- Antibiotics
- Arts & Culture
- Biomedical Research
- Economic Mobility
- Family Finances
- Fiscal & Economic Policy
- Global Trends
- Health Care
- Higher Education
- Hispanics
- Infrastructure
- Internet & Tech
- Land Conservation
- Media & News
- Ocean Conservation
- Religion
- Retirement
- Social and Demographic Trends
- U.S. Policy
- U.S. Politics
- Behavioral Health
##### State lawmakers play a major role in advancing the quality of Americans’ lives, from helping to protect the air we breathe and water we drink, to educating our children.
By researching emerging topics and developing 50-state comparisons, Pew identifies innovative approaches states are using to help solve complex challenges. Pew also conducts extensive research and analysis to understand how states can better serve the public, and we work with states to develop data-driven, pragmatic solutions to issues such as dental health, the growing costs of incarceration, the need for cost-effective public pensions, protecting coastal habitats, and reducing flood risk.
#### Fiscal 50: State Trends and Analysis
Fiscal 50 is an interactive platform that provides clear, data-driven portraits of state fiscal conditions. Users can view, sort, and analyze data on key trends that shape states’ fiscal health now and over the long term. Fiscal 50 also features research and analysis to help users understand how these trends interact and fit together—and how they relate to real-time developments playing out in state capitols across the country.
Exclusive state-policy research, infographics, and stats every two weeks.
### Latest Research
### OUR WORK
#### Related Projects
Pew’s retirement savings project studies the challenges and opportunities for increasing retirement savings. The initiative, which fosters policy discussion on how best to ensure that everyone can save a sufficient amount for retirement, examines...
Read MoreManaging a state’s finances—whether working to erase a budget deficit or reaching consensus on what to do with a surplus—is challenging. But planning for fiscal threats beyond the immediate budget cycle is not only far more complex, it’s often...
Read MoreThe Pew Charitable Trusts’ evidence project works with funding organizations, researchers, policymakers, and others to transform how research and evidence are generated, valued, and used....
Read MoreMore than 2 million people with mental health conditions—including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and severe depression—are jailed each year, often for misdemeanor crimes. Three-quarters of these individuals have co-occurring substance use...
Read MoreState and local courts hear more than 95% of all cases filed in the United States, covering matters that directly affect the safety, well-being, and stability of millions of people and their communities. Many of these cases can have profound...
Read MoreBroadband connects communities to an increasingly digital world. It has transformed industries, changed the way we access goods and services, and become an indispensable part of modern life. Yet despite more than two decades of public and private...
Read MoreThe energy modernization project works with state and federal policymakers to advance the nation’s transition to electric vehicles; build a clean, reliable electric grid; and expand renewable energy solutions, such as offshore wind....
Read More
| true | true | true |
State lawmakers play a major role in advancing the quality of Americans’ lives, from helping to protect the air we breathe and water we drink, to educating our children. By researching emerging topics and developing 50-state comparisons, Pew identifies innovative approaches states are using to help solve complex challenges.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-05-29 00:00:00
|
website
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bit.ly
|
The Pew Charitable Trusts
| null | null |
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25,919,999 |
https://github.com/ensdomains/ens/issues/372
|
ETH is the ISO for Ethiopia · Issue #372 · ensdomains/ens
|
Ensdomains
|
You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
{{ message }}
This repository has been archived by the owner on Sep 27, 2023. It is now read-only.
By not allowing other TLDs (e.g. Handshake), isn't this just pretense and posturing?
One way to potentially resolve this is to append a TTLD (TOP top level domain). For example .eth.icann and .eth.ethereum, something like this. Or (preferably) ENS could abandon the idea that they must "bend the knee" to ICANN, which centralizes the system anyway, and therefore IMO takes away a lot/all of the value of using Ethereum for domain names in the first place.
I think it is a mistake for ENS to position as Responsible Citizenship in the Global Namespace on one hand, and at the same time try to use the top level domain .eth - it is in direct opposition to each other.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
We weren't aware of .eth being reserved as a 3-letter country code when we first launched; if we were we likely would have picked something different. At this point it's no longer practical to change, but we can do our best to be good citizens going forward.
ca98am79commentedAs I am aware, the top level domain .eth has been reserved by ICANN because it is the ISO for Ethiopia
Isn't this a potential collision and therefore against the ENS stated goal of Responsible Citizenship in the Global Namespace ?
By not allowing other TLDs (e.g. Handshake), isn't this just pretense and posturing?
One way to potentially resolve this is to append a TTLD (TOP top level domain). For example .eth.icann and .eth.ethereum, something like this. Or (preferably) ENS could abandon the idea that they must "bend the knee" to ICANN, which centralizes the system anyway, and therefore IMO takes away a lot/all of the value of using Ethereum for domain names in the first place.
I think it is a mistake for ENS to position as Responsible Citizenship in the Global Namespace on one hand, and at the same time try to use the top level domain .eth - it is in direct opposition to each other.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
| true | true | true |
As I am aware, the top level domain .eth has been reserved by ICANN because it is the ISO for Ethiopia Isn't this a potential collision and therefore against the ENS stated goal of Responsible Citi...
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2021-01-26 00:00:00
|
https://opengraph.githubassets.com/9a9c1f4df846c8ab5d77ee84a2dee6e945119fce4c29898c448c7a1cf62b4f3c/ensdomains/ens/issues/372
|
object
|
github.com
|
GitHub
| null | null |
26,738,634 |
https://geekmonkey.org/regular-expression-matching-at-scale-with-hyperscan/
|
Using Hyperscan to boost regular expression performance
|
Fabian Becker
|
# Regular expression matching at scale with Hyperscan
Regular expressions are and always have been ubiquitous in Software Engineering. From input matching to complex parsing, their use is wide-spread. There are many different regular expression engines out there. The most popular by far is PCRE, or Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. Go developers will be more familiar with Google's re2, which is also available in Python through pyre2. In most cases the choice of engine rarely matters for the overall performance of your application. What however, if you have a large number of regular expressions that you need to match against a large dataset?
In this article we're going to look at Hyperscan and how it can help scale up the performance of regular expression based classification tasks. Hyperscan is a high-performance regular expression engine which was open sourced in 2015 by Intel. According to the about page, the library is mainly used inside a deep package inspection library stack where it aids package classification through regular expression matching. In 2018, Github adopted Hyperscan for its automatic token scanning with which it detects accidental commits of API tokens. What sets Hyperscan apart from a lot of other engines is that it supports multi-pattern matching and streaming. Streaming is when the engine doesn't keep the full string contents in memory to perform a match.
Thanks to the excellent work from David Gidwani there is a Python extension available which makes using Hyperscan in Python as easy as `pip install hyperscan`
.
## Dataset
For the purpose of this post, let's assume that you have a stream of web application logs where you want to annotate each line based on some property. For example, a line with a `.php`
should be annotated with `#php`
and a line with `.js`
should get a `#javascript`
annotation. Over time the number of rules will grow to hundreds maybe thousands of annotations. Since rules aren't necessarily mutually exclusive you will need to check each line against all rules. Let's also assume that after evaluating all alternatives we've concluded that the best way to express our rules is with regular expressions.
An important callout at this point is that we're merely looking for a boolean match - we don't care about capture groups at all, in fact Hyperscan doesn't support them. If those are important for you, you can experiment with a two stage matching setup where Hyperscan forms the first stage to identify matching entities and regular re/re2 form the second stage and pull out individual capture groups.
**Sidenote:** The example used here might not benefit from the use of regular expressions. Often times a simple combination of string splitting with some indexing will be faster than using regular expressions. It's important to always properly evaluate the performance of alternatives before using regular expressions.
There are a lot of example web application log datasets available on the internet. For this post I've selected a dataset from Kaggle which contains around 16k rows.
The dataset is fairly simple. It contains IP addresses, a timestamp, a URL and an HTTP status. A sample can be seen below:
```
IP,Time,URL,Staus
10.128.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:58:55,GET /login.php HTTP/1.1,200
10.128.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:02,POST /process.php HTTP/1.1,302
10.128.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:03,GET /home.php HTTP/1.1,200
10.131.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:04,GET /js/vendor/moment.min.js HTTP/1.1,200
10.130.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:06,GET /bootstrap-3.3.7/js/bootstrap.js HTTP/1.1,200
10.130.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:19,GET /profile.php?user=bala HTTP/1.1,200
10.128.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:19,GET /js/jquery.min.js HTTP/1.1,200
10.131.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:19,GET /js/chart.min.js HTTP/1.1,200
10.131.2.1,[29/Nov/2017:06:59:30,GET /edit.php?name=bala HTTP/1.1,200
```
We're going to ignore for a moment that these lines are comma-separated values and instead treat them just as a long string since logs normally don't come CSV formatted.
## Implementation
Let's start this by loading in the data we've obtained from Kaggle. The file we obtained is technically a CSV file, but we don't necessarily care about the individual columns.
For simplicity we'll load the entire file. In a production system you would most likely want to stream the data and not load it in its entirety into memory.
### Defining Patterns
As stated above we want to use regular expressions to categorize or tag each line. Naïvely we can define a simple mapping from regular expression to "tag" or "category".
```
RULES = {
r"^10\.128.*min\.js": "js",
r"^10\.13[01].*\.php": "php",
r"\.woff": "font",
r"\.min\.": "minimized",
r"\.css": "stylesheet",
r"login": "login",
r"bootstrap": "bootstrap",
r"\/vendor\/": "vendored-js"
}
PATTERNS = list(RULES.keys())
TAG_LOOKUP = list(RULES.values())
```
### re
Python comes with two major regex libraries, re and regex. The former being the built-in and the latter a popular re compatible replacement. re only supports single matches which means that we'll need to check each regex against each line.
It's good practice to pre-compile patterns when you do a lot of matching. Python has an internal cache when you compile a pattern for the first time, but it's easy to hit the max cache size, causing recompilation.
Note that we're using `search`
instead of `match`
on the pattern since we care about matching anywhere in the search string and not just at the beginning.
### re2
re2 is a C++ library built by Google. It's accessible through a library built by Facebook called fb-re2. re2 is a great alternative to re/regex if you're looking to do multi-matching since it comes with a Set feature. Sets allow for efficient multi-pattern matching, they however come with quite a drastic memory consumption overhead as the number of regexes increases.
As the regex set size increases, RE2::Set requires more memory to build out its DFA state cache as it scans, and as such, its average-case performance begins to degrade. From the peak memory usage chart, we can see that even for fairly small sets (~ 30 patterns), peak memory usage for RE2::Set quickly approaches the maximum value of 2GB, [..]
Source
The Python wrapper implements an additional `test_search`
which tells the underlying re2 that we only care about whether or not our pattern matches the string. In practice this avoids a lot of memory allocations since captures aren't reported back.
The following code first compiles all patterns and then implements two functions, one for `search`
and one for `test_search`
.
The re2.Set version will look very similar. We first create an instance of `re2.Set`
, add all the patterns and compile the full set. Patterns automatically get an auto-incrementing id assigned which we can again use to look up the corresponding tags. `re2.Set.match`
returns a list of matching pattern ids.
### hyperscan
Now finally, let's come to Hyperscan. Hyperscan works a bit differently in that you need to first build a database of patterns. Each pattern is accompanied by an id and some flags. Those flags work similar to regular flags for the other engines in that you can set your pattern to be case insensitive (`HS_FLAG_CASELESS`
), match across multiple lines (`HS_FLAG_MULTILINE`
) and set it to match at most once (`HS_FLAG_SINGLEMATCH`
). The full list of flags is documented in the Hyperscan docs which I recommend checking out.
A benefit of building this database is that it can be serialised to disk and reused later. In larger projects I have worked on, we compiled up to 10,000 regular expressions into a single Hyperscan database. Compilation could take up to half a minute which isn't terrible if you're doing it only once, but if you have a highly parallelised system where each node has to compile the database it can quickly eat away a lot of resources.
```
import hyperscan
# Building database for hyperscan
db = hyperscan.Database()
patterns = [
# expression, id, flags
(pattern.encode("utf-8"), id, hyperscan.HS_FLAG_CASELESS | hyperscan.HS_FLAG_SINGLEMATCH) for id, pattern in enumerate(PATTERNS)
]
expressions, ids, flags = zip(*patterns)
db.compile(
expressions=expressions, ids=ids, elements=len(patterns), flags=flags
)
def hyperscan_match(lines: List[str]) -> List[str]:
result = []
def on_match(id: int, froms: int, to: int, flags: int, context: Optional[Any] = None) -> Optional[bool]:
result.append(TAG_LOOKUP[id])
for line in lines:
db.scan(line.encode("utf-8"), match_event_handler=on_match)
return result
```
Note that we set the `HS_FLAG_SINGLEMATCH`
flag to ensure hyperscan won't report repeat matches of the same pattern. Matching `test test test`
against the regex `test`
would normally yield three matches.
## Benchmarking
Now that we've defined our patterns, multiple methods of matching those patterns against our data it's time to benchmark the performance of the different methods. There are a lot of different ways we could do this in Python. I'm a proponent of using pytest-benchmark since it automatically calibrates benchmarking methods and reports sensible runtime statistics.
We can define a simple pytest fixture to read in the data and make it available in tests.
Executing this small suite of benchmarks we can very quickly get an idea on the performance of our different methods. Now bear in mind that we have started with a fairly small set of regular expressions and the benchmark performed here will look drastically different as we add more expressions to the set.
```
$ pytest test_regex.py --benchmark-columns=min,max,mean,ops
---------------------------------------- benchmark: 5 tests ---------------------------------------
Name (time in ms) Min Max Mean OPS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
test_re2_set_match 14.6448 (1.0) 22.9035 (1.0) 16.8640 (1.0) 59.2978 (1.0)
test_hyperscan 18.6088 (1.27) 27.2647 (1.19) 20.9760 (1.24) 47.6734 (0.80)
test_re2_test_search 34.5846 (2.36) 48.3055 (2.11) 39.0942 (2.32) 25.5792 (0.43)
test_re2_search 45.1589 (3.08) 68.0620 (2.97) 50.7832 (3.01) 19.6915 (0.33)
test_re_match 48.1215 (3.29) 67.3883 (2.94) 52.4394 (3.11) 19.0696 (0.32)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
```
In fact, watch what happens when we add 500 randomly sampled regular expressions to our rule set:
re2.Set and hyperscan remain on top while all other methods quickly deteriorate with standard `re`
being almost 400 times as slow as re2.Set match.
It's notable that `re2.test_search`
is a measurable improvement over regular `re2.search`
.
## Conclusion
In this article we covered a number of different regular expression engines. re and re2 are great if you run the occasional regular expression. If you end up using a large number of regular expressions to parse thousands if not millions of records and don't need all the features of a backtracking regular expression engine and want to benefit from multi pattern matching you should explore RE2 and Hyperscan.
RE2 comes with a hefty memory overhead and, while faster in the benchmarks here, quickly tops out once you add more complex expressions or go past a few thousand expressions. In the systems I worked on RE2 consistently ran out of memory while compiling the expressions. Hyperscan didn't have those issues and was adopted for its stable performance.
## Further Reading
- Hyperscan on Github: https://github.com/intel/hyperscan
- Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs (Paper): https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19/presentation/wang-xiang
- Blog post by one of the Hyperscan co-authors: https://branchfree.org/2019/02/28/paper-hyperscan-a-fast-multi-pattern-regex-matcher-for-modern-cpus/
- Hyperscan vs. RE2::Set: https://01.org/hyperscan/blogs/jpviiret/2017/regex-set-scanning-hyperscan-and-re2set
| true | true | true |
Regular expressions are and always have been ubiquitous in Software Engineering. From input matching to complex parsing, their use is wide-spread. There are many different regular expression engines out there. The most popular by far is PCRE [https://www.pcre.org/], or Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. Go developers will be
|
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2021-04-08 00:00:00
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https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1611647832580-377268dba7cb?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDEwNnx8ZGF0YXxlbnwwfHx8fDE2MTc4ODgyMTE&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&w=2000
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article
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geekmonkey.org
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Geekmonkey
| null | null |
5,482,737 |
http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2013/04/02/ambassador-is-a-michigan-based-startup-that-helps-companies-manage-referrals/
|
Ambassador Is A Michigan-Based Startup That Helps Companies Manage Referrals
|
Amit Chowdhry
|
"Word of mouth has consistently been a driver of new customers for any successful business. Our software gives companies the tools to leverage their most passionate users and deliver word of mouth referrals online," said Epstein. "The beauty of online word of mouth is that word of mouth doesn't have to be 1-to-1, it can be 1-to-thousands or even 1-to-millions."
One of the biggest reasons why many vendors are abandoning Groupon model is because offering a deal to a consumer does not necessarily convert them into a loyal recurring customer. Sandy's Nail Salon may get a ton of customers in the time that they offer a Groupon, but they may not see the customer coming back unless another steep discount is offered. If Sandy's Nail Salon decided to reward "ambassadors" to keep promoting their brand and referring customers, then they would not necessarily need to offer those steep discounts. Today Ambassador has 500 paying customers that strongly believe in that model. Some of Ambassador's customers include SendGrid, Sage, Volusion, Holstee, FabFitFun, and Zirtual.
When setting up a campaign on Ambassador, brands can define the specific conversion and reward granted each time that event is referred. The commissions can be a flat amount or a percentage of the revenue. One-time or recurring commissions can be granted for that specific ambassador. Rewards may include cash, points, products, discounts, or other non-monetary items. Brand advocates can be segmented into groups in case a brand wants to set up different types of reward systems. After a campaign is set up, Ambassador generates unique sharing links for each "Ambassador" to spread on their social networks.
Ambassador was not Epstein's first entrepreneurial venture. When he was attending school at Michigan State University, he dabbled in the local online food ordering market by launching a website called eSparty.com. That website ended up shutting down as he was nearing graduation and started law school in Chicago. Upon finishing law school and passing the bar, Epstein decided that he wanted to get back on an entrepreneurial path once again. Then he decided to launch an affiliate marketing company. By learning the power of referrals in affiliate marketing, Epstein decided to sell that company to the other partners in the business and launch Ambassador (used to be named Zferral) in Birmingham, Michigan. Epstein initially bootstrapped the company in early 2010 with the help of family and friends.
One of the turning points for Ambassador was when they joined TechStars in New York about a year and a half ago. TechStars is a startup accelerator that holds 13 week programs for startups in multiple cities. At the accelerator program, Epstein was able to build awareness about his company and gain valuable connections. After going though the program, Epstein decided to bring his business back to Michigan in order to "make a difference in the startup ecosystem here." Before going to TechStars, Epstein launched a Detroit-based conference called Funded By Night. Funded By Night helped Internet startups launch and get started by providing a $100,000 convertible note to one of the participating companies.
When I asked Epstein how a company tends to find advocates, he told me that many of the customers already have an internal e-mail list. This is one of the best sources for brand advocates and Ambassador can be integrated with e-mail systems using trackable URLs. "Today everybody is a publisher whether it is on social networks, e-mail, or blogging, people can influence their network," added Epstein.
Within the last couple of years, Ambassador raised funding from TechStars NYC, Zelkova Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, 313 Ventures, and Start Garden. The company now has about eight employees and hit profitability this past January.
| true | true | true |
How many times have you found yourselves referring to a product or service? Sometimes you may feel like that the company should reward you for being a brand advocate. Loyalty is a fundamental component of running a business and referrals are a driving force for sales. Jeff Epstein, the founder [...]
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2013-04-02 00:00:00
|
article
|
forbes.com
|
Forbes
| null | null |
|
5,700,082 |
http://blog.varonis.com/the-top-6-exploits-used-by-government-hackers/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
6,022,992 |
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/arrested-suspect-denies-that-dea-seized-bitcoins-are-his/
|
Arrested suspect denies that DEA-seized bitcoins are his
|
Cyrus Farivar
|
The defense attorney for a South Carolina man facing drug charges is now denying that his client is the Casey Jones who had bitcoins seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) three months ago.
In April 2013, the DEA seized 11.02 bitcoins, worth $825 at present exchange rates. The agency then posted the details of the seizure in its Official Notification (PDF, updated), including the name of the suspect, “Eric Daniel Hughes AKA Casey Jones.” On June 6, 2013, a South Carolina man named Eric Daniel Hughes was arrested and charged by the state with illegal distribution of marijuana, clonazepam, and other controlled substances. He has yet to be served with federal charges.
A DEA spokesperson, Barbara Carreno, confirmed to Ars on Tuesday that this is the first time the drug agency has seized bitcoins. But Hughes' attorney, David Aylor, says the bitcoins aren't his client's.
“[My client] doesn’t use and has never used the name Casey Jones,” Aylor told Ars on Tuesday.
Despite the April 2013 seizure, it wasn’t until June 2013 that the Bitcoin community and reddit seemed to take notice of the case and traced how the 11.02 bitcoins moved through the online economy.
| true | true | true |
Lawyer tells Ars: “[My client has] never used Bitcoin, no.”…
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2013-07-09 00:00:00
|
article
|
arstechnica.com
|
Ars Technica
| null | null |
|
8,572,280 |
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/virgin-galactic-doesnt-just-benefit-richits-good-science/
|
Virgin Galactic Doesn't Just Benefit the Rich—It's Good for Science
|
Alex Davies
|
Last week’s crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which killed one test pilot and injured another, brought criticism that the company is merely a provider of space safaris for the rich—one that's not worth dying for.
Yes, Virgin Galactic caters to the wealthy who can afford its $250,000 parabolic joyrides, if and when they finally take flight. But that doesn’t mean there’s no upside for the rest of us (beyond the relief of getting Justin Bieber off the planet, even for a few minutes). If Virgin achieves its goal of easy, reliable, and (comparatively, given that it *is* space flight) affordable space travel, there could be two big benefits: Accessible low orbital research for scientists, and vastly simplified satellite launches.
Virgin doesn’t offer a lot of weightless time—Katy Perry and Ashton Kutcher will get just four minutes to float around the cabin before they have to find their way back to their seats. For researchers who have experiments to run, that short time is a real limitation, but it doesn't make Virgin's flights worthless. NASA sees benefits to sub-orbital flight research, and last year held a whole conference to discuss the field. It also plans to use SpaceShipTwo to run 12 experiments. That work will, according to NASA, range from providing “stability data for a prototype orbiting fuel depot,” to seeing how a “modulating fluid-based spacecraft thermal energy rejection solution” works in microgravity, to “test[ing] the application of a carpal wrist joint to the momentum management and control of small satellites.”
Such sub-orbital experiments “look like precursors to experiments that then might fly on an orbital flight or might be sent to the International Space Station for a longer duration study,” says Micah Walter-Range, director of research and analysis at the Space Foundation, an independent nonprofit dedicated to advancing space exploration. They’re like prototype tests, a chance to get basic data and see how an experiment works before allocating time and money to send it further afield, especially when it might never get there, as last week's failed Orbital Sciences mission to the International Space Station made clear.
Will Pomerantz, vice president for special projects at Virgin Galactic, is a planetary science researcher by training. He used to work at NASA. If he were still there, he says, he might get a new set of experimental data once or twice a decade. That's frustrating. His work at Virgin could give other researchers more data, more often. He talks about a time when Virgin Galactic will be operating several flights a week, enough to make it so cheap that an undergrad could design an experiment in the fall, launch it in the spring, and get a good start on her thesis with her own data.
Research in outer space isn’t just about making life beyond Earth more feasible: It can directly impact our gravity-ridden lives. Aboard the International Space Station, for example, researchers have learned information about Salmonella that could help us combat the bacteria. There are obvious economic benefits to that work, Walter-Range says, not to mention easing “general human pain and suffering.” **If Virgin’s short flights help researchers make more effective experiments, that’s a good thing.**
“We became known as a space tourism company because the people who were going primarily for fun were the people willing and able to sign up the day that we announced this program,” says Pomerantz. But Virgin has at least two other vehicles in mind after SpaceShipTwo.
The first is LauncherOne. Like the spaceship, it will be borne aloft by WhiteKnightTwo. But it’s not a reusable passenger ship that will dip out of the atmosphere and return to the ground. It’s an expendable rocket that will carry non-human payloads of up to 500 pounds into low-Earth orbit. Satellites are getting smaller and less expensive, but without an affordable way to put them in space, it doesn’t much matter. Virgin’s satellite service, Pomerantz says, would open satellite launches to people with less money than national governments and DirecTV. LauncherOne is still a few years away.
The second vehicle is just an idea at this point: A craft to provide point-to-point space travel. It would leave the drag-heavy atmosphere to fly, for example, from New York to Tokyo in forty minutes—instead of 13 hours at 30,000 feet. That vehicle likely wouldn’t work or look much like SpaceShipTwo, Pomerantz says, but the details haven’t been figured out.
**To make either work, Virgin has to figure out how to put its ships into space, transitioning from sub to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds, reliably and cost effectively, with quick turnaround times.** Last week’s crash is shows it isn’t there yet, but it’s not giving up. Which brings us back to the idea of starting with the celebrity launches. Virgin’s business works kind of like a Kickstarter campaign: Early backers (in this case a cadre of celebrities, plus NASA) plunk down cash for the promise of a reward (four minutes of weightless flight, and the chance to run experiments). With each flight, Virgin gets better at those things. In the meantime, it has a revenue stream that helps fund future work.
And once Virgin figures things out, Walter-Range says, “they can share technology, they can share research, they can share expertise.” If Branson decides to spread the knowledge, other companies could follow suit. And space gets a little closer for everyone.
| true | true | true |
The deadly crash of SpaceShipTwo has sparked criticism of Virgin Galactic as a mere space tourism company, but its work could have benefits for those stuck on Earth.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2014-11-07 00:00:00
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article
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wired.com
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WIRED
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http://www.nutanix.com/blog/2014/10/14/ntc/
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15,189,969 |
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08759
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Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study
|
Naiakshina; Alena; Danilova; Anastasia; Tiefenau; Christian; Herzog; Marco; Dechand; Sergej; Smith; Matthew
|
# Computer Science > Cryptography and Security
[Submitted on 29 Aug 2017 (v1), last revised 30 Aug 2017 (this version, v2)]
# Title:Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study
View PDFAbstract:Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems.
## Submission history
From: Alena Naiakshina [view email]**[v1]**Tue, 29 Aug 2017 14:10:40 UTC (1,338 KB)
**[v2]**Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:18:45 UTC (1,338 KB)
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| true | true | true |
Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2017-08-29 00:00:00
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/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
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website
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arxiv.org
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arXiv.org
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27,778,126 |
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1535
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Dietary omega 3 fatty acids for migraine
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Rebecca Burch
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# Dietary omega 3 fatty acids for migraine
BMJ 2021; 374 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1535 (Published 01 July 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;374:n1535## Linked Research
Dietary alteration of n-3 and n-6 fatty acids for headache reduction in adults with migraine
- Rebecca Burch, medical doctor
- Graham Headache Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
- rburch{at}bwh.harvard.edu
Migraine is one of the most common neurological diseases and affects one billion people globally.1 The past several years have seen the introduction of several new acute and preventive treatments for migraine, but patient and clinician interest in non-pharmacological treatments, including dietary changes, remains strong.23
Although the idea that diet contributes to migraine is nearly ubiquitous, few studies have shown the effectiveness of dietary interventions for migraine.45 A recent systematic review of the relationship between diet and migraine found the most robust evidence for individualized diets eliminating foods associated with high immunoglobulin G reactivity in each participant, but this level of individualization is difficult to achieve in clinical practice. The linked study by Ramsden and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.n1448) now provides good evidence that a diet rich in omega 3 (n-3) fatty acids reduces headache frequency compared with a diet with normal intake of omega 3 and omega 6 (n-6) fatty acids.6
Omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids are precursors to oxylipins, which are involved in the regulation of pain and inflammation. Omega 3 fatty acid derivatives are associated with antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory effects, while oxylipins derived from omega 6 fatty acids worsen pain and provoke migraine in experimental models. Previous studies evaluating omega 3 fatty acid supplementation for migraine have been inconclusive.7
Ramsden and colleagues hypothesized that diets with higher omega 3 fatty acids would increase serum 17-hydroxydocosahexaenoic acid (17-HDHA), an antinociceptive derivative, and reduce headache related disability as measured by the six item headache impact test (HIT-6). In this randomized controlled trial, 182 participants were assigned to one of three diets. The control diet included typical levels of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. Both interventional diets raised omega 3 fatty acid intake. One kept omega 6 linoleic acid intake the same as the control diet, and the other concurrently lowered linoleic acid intake.
Both interventional diets increased 17-HDHA levels compared with the control diet, but HIT-6 scores were not statistically significantly different from the control group. Headache frequency was statistically significantly decreased in both intervention groups. The high omega 3 diet was associated with a reduction of two headache days per month and the high omega 3 plus low omega 6 diet group saw a reduction of four headache days per month. Participants in the intervention groups also reported shorter and less severe headaches compared with those in the control group.
Although this is statistically a negative study with regard to the primary clinical endpoint, there are several factors that make the overall findings clinically meaningful. International Headache Society guidelines and regulatory standards specify the use of headache or migraine frequency as the preferred outcome measure for trials of preventive interventions for migraine.8 Interpretation of this study’s findings is therefore complex: the study was negative according to the prespecified primary outcome, but would have been positive if judged by more guideline adherent endpoints. Also worth noting, the intervention groups experienced a clinically meaningful reduction in HIT-6 scores compared with baseline scores and compared with the control group (high omega 3: −1.5 *v* control; high omega 3 plus low omega 6: −1.6 *v* control).9
Ramsden and colleagues’ results are also notable for the magnitude of the response to intervention. Clinical trials of recently approved pharmacological treatments for migraine prevention, such as monoclonal antibodies to the calcitonin gene related peptide, reported reductions of approximately 2–2.5 headache days per month in the intervention group compared with placebo.10 The new trial suggests that a dietary intervention can be comparable or better. Dietary interventions combined with pharmacological treatments might have an additive benefit.
These robust findings are even more remarkable because roughly two thirds of the study population met the criteria for chronic migraine (>15 headache days per month) and a little over half met the criteria for drug overuse headache, populations which are typically more refractory to treatment.1112 Finally, it is reassuring that the intervention diets increased 17-HDHA as expected, which supports the concept that there is a biological underpinning to the study findings.
These results support recommending a high omega 3 diet to patients in clinical practice. The major barrier to widespread success of any dietary intervention is adherence because strict diets require time, financial investment, and change in habits.1314 Therefore, it will be crucial for future research to determine how easy or difficult it is for patients to implement diets rich in omega 3 fatty acids at home, with or without lowering intake of omega 6. A clear template developed by nutritionists and patients would also be valuable to help people with migraine sustain these diets over longer time periods.
Many people with migraine are highly motivated and interested in dietary changes, and clinicians might want to provide patients with information about the diets described in the study by Ramsden and colleagues. These authors manipulated dietary oils, butters, and proteins (such as fish) to achieve the required fatty acid composition. Their results take us one step closer to a goal long sought by headache patients and those who care for them: a migraine diet backed up by robust clinical trial results.
## Footnotes
Competing interests: The BMJ has judged that there are no disqualifying financial ties to commercial companies. The author declares the following other interests: She is on the board of directors of the American Headache Society and the Headache Cooperative of New England, and receives a stipend for work as an associate editor for the journal
*Neurology*.Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.
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At last, grounds for optimism among those seeking a dietary option Migraine is one of the most common neurological diseases and affects one billion people globally.1 The past several years have seen the introduction of several new acute and preventive treatments for migraine, but patient and clinician interest in non-pharmacological treatments, including dietary changes, remains strong.23 Although the idea that diet contributes to migraine is nearly ubiquitous, few studies have shown the effectiveness of dietary interventions for migraine.45 A recent systematic review of the relationship between diet and migraine found the most robust evidence for individualized diets eliminating foods associated with high immunoglobulin G reactivity in each participant, but this level of individualization is difficult to achieve in clinical practice. The linked study by Ramsden and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.n1448) now provides good evidence that a diet rich in omega 3 (n-3) fatty acids reduces headache frequency compared with a diet with normal intake of omega 3 and omega 6 (n-6) fatty acids.6 Omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids are precursors to oxylipins, which are involved in the regulation of pain …
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2021-07-01 00:00:00
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article
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bmj.com
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The BMJ
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http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/12/13/confirmed-dell-buys-compellent-for-820-million/
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TechCrunch | Startup and Technology News
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Aria Alamalhodaei
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| true | true | true |
TechCrunch | Reporting on the business of technology, startups, venture capital funding, and Silicon Valley
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-10-04 00:00:00
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website
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techcrunch.com
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TechCrunch
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28,871,447 |
https://www.kevinlondon.com/2021/10/14/asking-for-help.html
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Getting Unstuck
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Kevinlondon
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# Getting Unstuck
Through the years of talking with engineers in one-on-ones, there’s a common conversation that goes something like this: How do I ask for help? How do I find what I need if I don’t know where to look? What do I do if I keep getting stuck?
### Try the Obvious
It can be maddening to work through an error. Why the heck isn’t this thing working? Once it’s fixed, it can feel so obvious looking back. It’s hard to know what to try when stuck in the details.
Prior to working as a Software Engineer, I started my career in the film industry as a Systems Administrator. That meant that my colleagues came to me when something didn’t work as they expected. I got a reputation as someone frustrating to call upon because I’d solve the problem and make the other person feel silly for asking for help because the fix would often be something simple.
One example: A colleague mentioned that their hard drive would not mount. They tried unplugging and replugging it, moving it between computers, and restarting the machine. They tried different cables. They checked that it was showing in the disk utility and RAID tools. So what was it? They hadn’t checked whether it was the right drive. In this case, clients delivered two hard drives to our facility at roughly the same time. My colleague grabbed the wrong one by mistake, which I learned by looking at the hard-drive and checking its barcode against our inventory system.
We assume when we’re working on a complex problem that it requires a complex solution and overlook the simple ones. When I’m stuck or helping a colleague, I start from first principles and do something like this:
**Read and re-read the complete error message.**Is there something obvious it’s saying I should do, hidden in a misleading error message or long stack trace? For example, we may see that a build failed only to find that it was due to a failed style check in the code.**Try the simplest thing that could fix it.**Could it be a network connection issue? Have I tried restarting the machine? Is the cable connected? What happens if I back out of my code change or`git stash`
it, does it work then?**Do an internal search.**Do we have documentation which covers this edge case? Is this a known bug? Is another team working to resolve an outage or service degradation?**Find an implementation reference.**Is there an example on Github or another project where someone has done what I’m trying to do? What can I learn from their implementation and how it differs from mine?**Do an external search.**Does Stack Overflow or the like have information on the error?
If none of those things work, I’ll ask for help from a teammate or someone I suspect may know the answer.
### How to Ask for Help
If I’m trying to figure something out, I try the above steps for about 30 minutes. If I’m still stuck, I ask for help, which can include asking a specific teammate, a chat channel, or posting to Stack Overflow. Here’s the format with which I’ve had the best success:
- What I’m trying to achieve and what I’m experiencing
- What research I’ve consulted so far
- What isn’t working as I expect
- What I’ve tried so far
- A specific request
For example, let’s say we’re having trouble getting a build to pass its tests. I might post something like this:
I’m trying to build the iOS project and it’s failing the build with an error unrelated to my change. I followed the internal wiki for setting up my developer environment and I’ve checked out packages X and Y. As per the instructions, I built Y and then X, only for X’s build to fail saying that Y is missing a dependency. I’ve validated that Y has the dependency listed in its configuration file. Could you help me see if I’m doing something wrong or if Y is importing the file incorrectly?
In this example, we start by identifying our goal (build the iOS project) and what we’re seeing (an error unrelated to my change). We go through what has been tried so far (read wikis, check dependencies) and what’s not working (dependency missing). Lastly, we ask for something specific from the teammate or person with whom we’re discussing (review / file import check).
This may seem like a lot of work to ask for help! Can’t we take a shortcut and just say, the build isn’t passing? Yes, that can be a valid approach, particularly depending upon the audience. Here’s why I prefer this approach:
- Structuring my question this way shows that I respect the time of whomever I’m asking. I’ve compiled as much information into the initial question as possible. I’m sharing the context of what I’ve looked at and tried. It requires fewer follow-up questions.
- Preparing my questions allows me to go through a rubberduck
process where I’m forced to make sure
**I**understand what I’m asking for help with and that I’ve done due dilligence on the problem. - By making a specific ask, I’m more likely to attract the attention of someone who can help than if I were to say “Who knows iOS and can help me with a build problem?”. Were someone to pose such a general question, it can be intimidating to chime in since the person may know iOS and yet not know how to help with a specific iOS build problem.
### What to Do If No One Can Help
Even after trying these steps and asking for help, I may not find someone who knows the answer to what I’m looking for. Then we get to an interesting fork in the road, where I’ll do one of the following:
**Ask for a referral.**Sometimes I can ask someone else for help, or the person whom I’m asking might be able to refer me to an expert on a particular topic.**Keep digging.**Sometimes you are working at the edge of something that no one knows yet and it needs more time and investigation.**Re-examine what got me here.**In a rare case, I may encounter something niche when I do something off the beaten path. This happened to me when I embedded a Django application in a self-contained OSX executable. I may have been the first person to ever do this. That’s not a good sign! If you’re doing something particularly unusual, it may be best to go back to more familiar ground and try a different approach.
If you find yourself getting stuck multiple times a day or you’re not sure where to start, it may be that you don’t know the resources available to you. Perhaps there’s a search engine you could use. It may be worth asking your teammates how they look for resources and see if they have a different process for searching.
### There’s No Shame in Asking For Help
Asking for help or admitting you don’t know something need not be a source of shame. Calibrating when and how to ask for help takes time and practice. The most common mistake I’ve seen is to avoid asking for help out of fear of judgement. Even as you gain experience, you’ll still get stuck sometimes. Acknowledging that you don’t know the answer is a kind of super power on its own.
With that, I wish you luck and I hope you find a solution to any challenges you may encounter.
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Through the years of talking with engineers in one-on-ones, there’s a common conversation that goes something like this: How do I ask for help? How do I find...
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2021-10-14 00:00:00
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https://s.gravatar.com/avatar/c1428d36c91a53a1e4c39fb2c7ceff15
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article
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kevinlondon.com
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Kevin London's blog
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https://www.screamingatmyscreen.com/unifying-ipados-and-macos/
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Unifying iPadOS and macOS
|
Timo Zimmermann
|
# Unifying iPadOS and macOS
Around every single WWDC or major OS release the question if macOS and iPadOS will be merged comes up. There are usually enough signs that might suggest this as a possibility - the design language is slowly converging, the iPad is now running on the same hardware as the new Macs and cross platform development is an important part of their announcements recently. Apple was pretty clear so far that there are no efforts to merge the two operating systems, but as we know Apple changes their opinion from time to time.
If you ask anyone who grew up with Windows or macOS and got sufficiently proficient in using one of those systems, they will be quick to dismiss the idea as one of the worst once you can have. Look at how unproductive working on iPadOS is! Multitasking is nearly impossible. File management? Good joke. Poweruser or not, if you are used to moving files around and having multiple windows open, mobile device operating systems are not the most easy interface to use.
But what about the rest of Apples potential userbase? What about people who grew up with touch devices? What about people who never learned how to use many of the features a computer offers?
Let us talk about three different people in my life.
First we got my wife's little sister. Around three or four years old she snatched an old iPad and clicked on YouTube videos. It did not take long for her to figure out how to unlock it, open YouTube and watch a cartoon. It is the little red-white icon. It shows a fun picture you tap on. Pretty intuitive for her. If and when kids should starting using technology is something I leave up to you to decide - not my kids not my problem, but she helps making my point, so who am I to judge.
We got my... actually I got no idea - a girl around 13, who is somehow related to me. Her mother decided to move 400km away from where they lived, closer to us. And she had literally nothing she could bring, all tech was her dads. Luckily I got some spare hardware for emergencies and we equipped her with a MacBook, an iPad and a small TV with an AppleTV. When I handed her the iPad she clicked on Settings and set up wifi. AppleTV? She could identify the icon easily and setup wifi. MacBook? Blank stares and most likely questioning what she is supposed to do with this thing. She knows how to use touch interfaces and how to read app names displayed on her home screen - she was already using a smartphone. But a computer? Not so much.
My dad was never interested in computers, but got a lot better with age. He can find his way around his Mac and a Windows VM he has for bookkeeping software. I would call it "the bare miniumum knowledge" for email, video calls, bookkeeping and writing some documents. But on his iPad he runs multiple windows, annotates photos or screenshots, figured out how to capture audio and much more. He started using the Mac and an iPad roughly at the same time.
All three of them have something in common - no prior disposition on a specific workflow or operating system.
What iPadOS achieved is delivering an intuitive user interface, which is mostly self-explanatory. Obviously not all of it, there are advanced user features like multi tasking you simply cannot discover if you do not read the manual. But you can get things done fairly quickly still. And sometimes you accidentally discover them, and then have to consult the manual how to get rid of them.
There are a lot of people who primarily browse the web, chat and write or work with spreadsheets in a very "single task - single document" way. Now guess what the iPad is really good at. (Especially when paired with a keyboard.) They usually do not care about organising files. If they want to send one, they click a button and use the file picker. Mission accomplished. The way iPadOS works is intuitive for people. They can translate things they learned on smartphones. The chances of messing up your device or running in hard to recover errors are far smaller than on any desktop operating system. I would even go so far and say you have to actively try to mess up iPadOS to get to a point where you cannot get it back into a working state.
As a power user, software engineer or any form of professional user with more sophisticated workflows, this most likely sounds far from optimal to you - and I agree. I tried using the iPad for software development and gave up. It kind of works, but it feels like forcing the square piece into the round hole.
The iPad would be the perfect device for me if I could force it into a more macOS like mode. Multiple windows, smaller interactions targets suitable for a mouse and running dekstop apps like JetBrains IDEs.
MacOS would be far easier for beginners and newcomers to use if it would borrow more ideas from iPadOS - like presenting Launchpad instead of a regular desktop as "default homescreen".
But in the end, both ideas are arguably bad - because these platforms are not meant to be the same thing. They both go against anything the respective platform is as of today, and undermine the appeal the respective platform has for their users. Generally, you can play this out the exact same way with every single argument for unifying those platforms.
While the iPad is getting more powerful for no apparent reason, it does not change the fact that it is an iPad. Single, maybe double window workflows, focusing on one task. MacOS is borrowing some ideas that worked really well on the iPad (like control center), but it sticks true to its origins of a mouse and keyboard driven device.
When people talk about Apple unifying both systems, it is often in the context of the design language getting closer with every release. Which makes a lot of sense, you want to enable people transitioning to a new device class and being productive immediately. To have a familiar interface and a kind of "fells like home" moment helps to keep the entry barrier as low as possible. But this is happening on a very high level, it does not change the underlying complexity of using the system. As long as iPads are not marketed to be the only daily driver someone is using, you have to make transitioning easy. It helps you sell more devices.
Having said all this: Unifying both systems is not the solution. But having the majority of users understand that the iPad is all they need, and having macOS designed for power users seems like a far better idea to me.
One argument usually mentioned against merging both operating system is the loss in revenue, if people would do all their work on an 600€ iPad instead of an 1400€ MacBook. With its last incarnation there is no loss in revenue anymore. An iPad Pro with the M1 chip and Magic Keyboard is actually more expensive than a MacBook. There is even a chance they would make more by selling additional accessories, like the Apple Pencil.
As good as the hardware is, iPads are not there yet. Try attaching an external screen and you will immediately understand what I mean. And with small annoyances - like external screens only mirroring the iPads display in an aspect ratio that does not make sense for the screen attached, or the completely unusable multi tasking - it will take a few more iPadOS iterations before people will perceive the iPad as a solid primary / only daily driver.
But we will get there. Remember the little ones in my extended family I mentioned earlier. They grow up on touch devices. They find macOS strange and hard to use. They are being trained on iOS and Android. Guess why Google is so eager to get Chromebooks in the hands of children for school work? They grow up and know how to use Google Docs and Sheets and that they can do all their work on a Chromebook. Once they enter the workforce, they want a device they know. They want software they know how to use. This is a really long game they are playing.
I believe Apple when they say they are not planning to unify their operating systems. If I would have to make a long term prediction, I would say they are actively working on getting the majority of customers to go iPad only, while reducing their computer offering to a few systems for power users.
We can spin this further into an intersting thought experiment. What could the end game of such a strategy look like? Transition out of the computer market purely into mobile devices? Move everything requiring lots of hardware resources to the cloud as Chromebooks do? Simplified app development? Automatically iPadOS-ify macOS apps as shared frameworks increase and you can simply swap out the UI layer? Forcing the hand of companies to ship iPadOS software equal to their Mac offering? There are possible ways to make any of those scenarios happen. But they would all cannibalise the really high budget hardware market which means a drop in hardware revenue - something not many companies try to actively pursue, except they can replace lost hardware margins with service subscriptions.
Update1: Some good discussion with interesting points on HackerNews
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Timo Zimmermann talking about software engineering, leading teams, consulting and start ups.
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2021-08-14 00:00:00
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blogposting
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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200602/09403644628/net-neutrali-what-atts-new-streaming-service-wont-count-against-broadband-caps-netflix-will.shtml
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Net Neutrali-what? AT&T's New Streaming Service Won't Count Against Its Broadband Caps. But Netflix Will.
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Karl Bode
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# Net Neutrali-what? AT&T's New Streaming Service Won't Count Against Its Broadband Caps. But Netflix Will.
### from the *fake-barriers-but-real-penalties* dept
For a long time, we’ve noted how broadband usage caps are bullshit. They don’t actually help manage congestion, they have nothing to do with “fairness,” and are little more than glorified price hikes on the backs of captive customers in uncompetitive markets. Worse, they can be abused anti-competitively by incumbent broadband providers, one of the major triggers of the net neutrality debate.
For example, AT&T for a while has made its own streaming TV services exempt from its usage caps, while competing streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, whatever) count against a user’s monthly data allotment. This gives AT&T a distinct advantage in that users are *incentivized to avoid competing services* lest they face completely arbitrary and unnecessary usage limits and fees. It’s bullshit. It has always been bullshit.
AT&T has added another layer to this bullshit cake. The company has long experimented with something called “sponsored data,” which lets companies pay AT&T extra if they want to be exempt from AT&T’s (again, completely arbitrary and unnecessary) broadband usage caps. This adds *yet another anti-competitive layer* to the equation by letting a deep pocketed company (say: ESPN) get a distinct advantage over smaller startups that can’t afford to pay AT&T’s toll.
Last week AT&T launched yet another streaming TV service, HBO Max. This service also won’t count against AT&T’s usage caps and overage fees, AT&T confirmed to The Verge:
“According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T?s ?sponsored data? system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it?s just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost.”
This has been a hard thing for some folks to understand (for whatever reason) so I’ll reiterate: this is a regional telecom monopoly, imposing completely unnecessary limits on uncompetitive markets, which don’t apply to the incumbent’s own services. Efforts to impose net neutrality have always been about preventing incumbent telecom monopolies from abusing their market power by imposing unnecessary barriers to competitors, and this is precisely that. Fortunately AT&T’s own incompetence has kept the company from dominating the streaming space so far, but it doesn’t make this any less of a bad precedent.
Filed Under: competition, favoritism, hbo max, net neutrality, sponsored data, streaming, zero rating
Companies: at&t, netflix
## Comments on “Net Neutrali-what? AT&T's New Streaming Service Won't Count Against Its Broadband Caps. But Netflix Will.”
## And we should expect better, why?
AT&T is a parasite. They have a giant monopoly and abuse that position at every opportunity. They’ve succeeded in having their captured regulatory agency strip itself of all authority over them. They pay off politicians left and right. They write their own legislation and have their bought politicians pass
theirlaws. They bribe local governments to ban their compeitition.Why should
anyoneexpect that AT&T is anything but an illegitimate company on social welfare? Why shouldanyoneexpect that AT&T wouldn’t try to double and triple dip on it’s customers? Why shouldanyoneexpect that their shareholders are all they care about? Answer: They shouldn’t.Whoever looks at Capitalism and says "Companies should only be accountable to their shareholders" should be locked in an insane asylum. Preferably one run by such a corporation so they will get the full experience of apathy that they are due. The public is the biggest shareholder of every company. Without the public’s funds, there is no return on investment. Our society needs to remember that and enforce it on these companies.
## Another new normal
This is what one companies depiction of desperation looks like.
"AT&T for a while has made its own streaming TV services exempt from its usage caps, while competing streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, whatever) count against a user’s monthly data allotment. "Isn’t this anti-competitive behavior?
Anticompetitive Practices
## Re: Re:
Not per se: encrypted streams cannot be mirrored/replicated so they need the full bandwidth from sender to recipient. Associated services can communicate the unencrypted content to servers distributed across the country, allowing to take the multiplication of traffic off the backbones and make the "senders" doing the encryption sit a lot closer to the recipients.
Large companies like Netflix, however,
dooffer distributing servers under their control to network hubs. This model does not quite scale to an arbitrary number of services (and network providers) since of course the servers take physical space and other resources, so it only makes sense for local or major providers of such streaming services.So there is an underlying rationale for different metering/billing to start with. Of course, something not being bullshit per se does not mean that you cannot turn it into bullshit per execution.
## Re: Re: Re:
And of course those who do not run their own CDN, as you describe, pay a CDN service to handle their content. Capacity is a big non issue these days, as everybody uses CDN of some form to distribute it.
There is no justification for data caps, or billing users extra for data the source has paid CDN and carriage fees for to get it to the ISPs.
## Re: Re: Re:
I care not about the rationalizations.
## Re: Re:
"Isn’t this anti-competitive behavior?"
Yes, it is.
Now, find someone who will actually enforce the laws about that…
## Re: Re: Re:
Anti-competitive behaviour isn’t against the law any more in the US, as the US is a capitalist dictatorship, and AT&T and its ilk are the real lawmakers now.
## Re: Re: Re: Re:
"as the US is a capitalist dictatorship"You need to strike the word "capitalist". Adam Smith’s definition requires a functional system of supply vs demand feedback. The US telco market is about as "capitalist" as Soviet Russia.
## Re: Re: Re:
2Re:The extreme right and left regimes have in common an elite living like Emperors of of the labour of the masses, and only differ in how they justify why that is so.
## Re: Re: Re: Re:
I keep hearing about how the Rule of Man overrides Rule of Law.
LOL
## Re: Re: Re:
Monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are anti-competitive.
We used to regulate monopolies…………….
AT&T and Comcast need to be broken up into smaller companies if they keep forcing data cap.
## Re: Re: Re: Re:
What good will breaking them up do do, if all that achieves is local monopolies who will re-assemble themselves into larger monopolies. What is needed is effective regulation, which will be difficult to achieve while the heads of regulatory agencies are appointed by political patronage, and usually have an eye out for their next job in the industry they are meant to be regulated.
Until you get rid of the patronage at the top of agencies, you will have problems implementing effective regulation.
## Re: Re: Re:
2Re:What is needed is to break apart their vertical integration, separaring the infrastructure, ISP, TV, and streaming businesses, to eliminate the root motive for fraudulently manipulating customers’ service.
## Re: Re: Re:
3Re:Yes and no. The ISP I use in Spain has that kind of integration yet we don’t have these problems. The difference is that they are faced with effective regulation that prevents them from abusing their position.
The problem is not that they have the potential to abuse their setup in the US, it’s that they’re permitted to do so.
## Re: Re: Re:
4Re:Indeed.
Ecen the threat of the US’s NN coming back
wasenough for the ISPs to behave for a while, until they became confident enough that their investments in the Republicans were secure.Hooray, the first stretch of the two lane internet is opening! Welcome to the Ajit Pai expressway, folks he’ll be along shortly to cut the ribbon via Zoom once he’s finished arranging for the tollbooths to be installed to make sure you pay for every mile.
The Zoom bandwidth will count towards your broadband cap so don’t spend too long watching.
## Re: Re:
Reminded me of this – lol
It’s nothing like a superhighway. That’s a rotten metaphor.
Think of the Internet as a highway
## Re: Re:
Tho its likely Ajit Pai will be out if trump loses the election.
## Ma Bell got a divorce and AT&T midlife crisis
Telecoms can’t help being what they are. Before DARPA experiment in distributed fault tolerant communications became pre-WWW, the phone companies owned the wired communications — There was a mess of data transfer methods and very expensive hardware.
Remember POT line price in minutes of use? Data cap is natural. HBO Max is the new trophy wife. Poor thing has HBO Go stepchild to cable, the ex-wives, AT&T TV with children from several hookups.
The HBO/Cinemax (Open Marriage) is in divorce – Actually the whole Cinemax production and development is pimped to streaming/cable without new original series – I expect it will be the wife that disappears.
Whatever I am paying to get old fun HBO/Cinemax on all platforms is al a cart now (Amazon Cinemax monthly), Xfinity Streaming HBO via apps and cable. What I cannot get is HBO Max on Amazon Prime/TV Stick/Kindle/OnePlus/iPads, and most likely iMac is too out of DRM date.
I will not signup, e.g. sign a contract with AT&T wireless Hotspot on Subaru Forester. That is like saying that Leopard won’t bite me.
Will T-mobile make some kind of deal for app? Sorry, that was a creepy thought.
HBO Max in the final form, in my case, is the crazy aunt that has many get rich schemes and make money by flipping low rent row houses is the latest.
Opinion Alert: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, all the other OTT may not get pinched until AT&T build up is 4K HBO Max. Unlimited is not unlimited for At&T users (Does Cell data at 4G and [_G] cap?)
Will I dump Xfinity and rely on T-mobile 4G for all content. No. Xfinity streaming and catalogue are on all devices. I won’t get a bill; drunken sailor had a party and few hundred GB streaming over weekend – Netflix and Prime Video nonstop.
Exclusive Content: AT&T #FlimFlam ’cause the efficient new content production is thrown in the tower. Warner, that not so bright guy that keeps making bad streaming ideas is the last straw.
Unless there is magically the best thing ever product at a too good to be true price.
RIP HBO/Cinemax.
Exactly what net neutrality stopped from happening!
## Re: Re:
But net neutrality is never a thing in a capitalist dictatorship.
## Re: Re:
Until it was corruptly repealed, yes.
You mean Richard Bennett lied?
I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
## how to tell if a vietnamese woman likes you
Cambridge or even
Martin Reynolds: The Cambridge law graduate at the heart of lockdown busting 10 Downing Street party rowBoris JohnsonMartin Reynolds is Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary making him common senior officials in No 10
Cambridgeshire doctors to use hologram [url=https://www.bestbrides.net/signs-that-vietnamese-women-like-you/%5Dhow to tell if a vietnamese woman likes you[/url] patients in services at Addenbrooke’s HospitalNHSThe "Mixed the truth" Sessions are a marriage between medics in Cambridge and Los Angeles
Over 200 new Cambridge college student flats to meet rising demand set for approvalCambridge University
The recommended flats will be for St John’s College
The historic village once owned by known for its thatched cottagesCambridgeshire
House prices have risen these days
the video game is up: The addictive global mind game with links
‘The Game’ is played by a myriad of people worldwide
Spooky ‘ghost child’ hidden in serene photo of Cambridge college
We’re revisiting perhaps the most harrowing pictures sent to Cambridgeshire Live
some kind of you’d pass a Cambridge University admissions test with our quizCambridge University
The University of Cambridge ranks fifth in the realm
23 things you remember should a Cambridge University studentChristmas
From cracking the yuletide season formals, to college cats Cambridge is unlike any other city, particularly when you’re a student
The England Ashes cricketers with internet connections to CambridgeshireThe Ashes
The county has had a hand in doing some of England’s greats
Cambridge scholar named migrant ambassador fighting for the struggles of her communityCambridge University
Veronica Hera, 22, Says one issue in Cambridge’s Romanian online is people working low paid jobs, Even whether they have degrees, because of a language barrier
appoints ‘civil rights icon’ Jesse Jackson as honorary fellow.
[—-]
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For a long time, we’ve noted how broadband usage caps are bullshit. They don’t actually help manage congestion, they have nothing to do with “fairness,” and are little more …
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2020-06-03 00:00:00
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https://phys.org/news/2018-08-nanotubes.html
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_market
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Emerging market - Wikipedia
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Authority control databases National Germany
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# Emerging market
This article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2024) |
An **emerging market** (or an **emerging country** or an **emerging economy**) is a market that has some characteristics of a developed market, but does not fully meet its standards.[1] This includes markets that may become developed markets in the future or were in the past.[2] The term "frontier market" is used for developing countries with smaller, riskier, or more illiquid capital markets than "emerging".[3] As of 2006, the economies of China and India are considered to be the largest emerging markets.[4] According to *The Economist*, many people find the term outdated, but no new term has gained traction.[5] Emerging market hedge fund capital reached a record new level in the first quarter of 2011 of $121 billion.[6] Emerging market economies’ share of global PPP-adjusted GDP has risen from 27 percent in 1960 to around 53 percent by 2013.[7] The ten largest emerging economies by nominal GDP are 4 of the 9 BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) along with Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Poland. The inclusion of South Korea, Poland, and sometimes Taiwan are questionable given they are no longer considered emerging markets by the IMF and World Bank (for Korea and Taiwan.) If we ignore those three, the top ten would include Argentina and Thailand.
When countries "graduate" from their emerging status, they are referred to as **emerged markets**, **emerged economies** or **emerged countries**, where countries have developed from emerging economy status, but have yet to reach the technological and economic development of developed countries.[8]
## Terminology
[edit]In the 1970s, "less developed countries" (LDCs) was the common term for markets that were less "developed" (by objective or subjective measures) than the developed countries such as the United States, Japan, and those in Western Europe. These markets were supposed to provide greater potential for profit but also more risk from various factors like patent infringement. This term was replaced by *emerging market*. The term is misleading[ according to whom?] in that there is no guarantee that a country will move from "less developed" to "more developed"; although that is the general trend in the world, countries can also move from "more developed" to "less developed".
Originally coined in 1981 by then World Bank economist Antoine Van Agtmael,[9][10] the term is sometimes loosely used as a replacement for *emerging economies*, but really signifies a business phenomenon that is not fully described or constrained by such; these countries are considered to be in a transitional phase between developing and developed status. Examples of emerging markets include many countries in Africa, most countries in Eastern Europe, some countries of Latin America, some countries in the Middle East, Russia and some countries in Southeast Asia. Emphasizing the fluid nature of the category, political scientist Ian Bremmer defines an emerging market as "a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the markets".[11]
The research on emerging markets is diffused within management literature. While researchers such as George Haley, Vladimir Kvint, Hernando de Soto, Usha Haley, and several professors from Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management have described activity in countries such as India and China, how a market emerges is now well understood and can easily be modeled.
In 2009, Dr. Kvint published this definition: "an emerging market country is a society transitioning from a dictatorship to a free-market-oriented-economy, with increasing economic freedom, gradual integration with the Global Marketplace and with other members of the GEM (Global Emerging Market), an expanding middle class, improving standards of living, social stability and tolerance, as well as an increase in cooperation with multilateral institutions"[12]
In 2008 Emerging Economy Report,[13] the Center for Knowledge Societies defines *emerging economies* as those "regions of the world that are experiencing rapid informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization". It appears that emerging markets lie at the intersection of non-traditional user behavior, the rise of new user groups and community adoption of products and services, and innovations in product technologies and platforms.
More critical scholars have also studied key emerging markets like Mexico and Turkey. Thomas Marois (2012, 2) argues that financial imperatives have become much more significant and has developed the idea of 'emerging finance capitalism' – an era wherein the collective interests of financial capital principally shape the logical options and choices of government and state elites over and above those of labor and popular classes.[14]
Julien Vercueil recently proposed an pragmatic definition of the "emerging economies", as distinguished from "emerging markets" coined by an approach heavily influenced by financial criteria. According to his definition, an emerging economy displays the following characteristics:[15]
- Intermediate income: its PPP per capita income is comprised between 10% and 75% of the average EU per capita income.
- Catching-up growth: during at least the last decade, it has experienced a brisk economic growth that has narrowed the income gap with advanced economies.
- Institutional transformations and economic opening: during the same period, it has undertaken profound institutional transformations which contributed to integrate it more deeply into the world economy. Hence, emerging economies appears to be a by-product of the current globalization.
At the beginning of the 2010s, more than 50 countries, representing 60% of the world's population and 45% of its GDP, matched these criteria.[15]: 10 Among them, the BRICs.
The term "rapidly developing economies" is being used to denote emerging markets such as The United Arab Emirates, Chile and Malaysia that are undergoing rapid growth.
In recent years, new terms have emerged to describe the largest developing countries such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China),[16] along with *BRICET* (BRIC + Eastern Europe and Turkey), *BRICS* (BRIC + South Africa), *BRICM* (BRIC + Mexico), MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey), Next Eleven (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam) and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa).[17] These countries do not share any common agenda, but some experts believe that they are enjoying an increasing role in the world economy and on political platforms.
Lists of emerging (or developed) markets vary; guides may be found in such investment information sources as *EMIS* (a Euromoney Institutional Investor Company), *The Economist*, or market index makers (such as MSCI).
In an Opalesque.TV video, hedge fund manager Jonathan Binder discusses the current and future relevance of the term "emerging markets" in the financial world. Binder says that in the future investors will not necessarily think of the traditional classifications of "G10" (or G7) versus "emerging markets". Instead, people should look at the world as countries that are fiscally responsible and countries that are not. Whether that country is in Europe or in South America should make no difference, making the traditional "blocs" of categorization irrelevant. Guégan *et al.* (2014) also discuss the relevance of the terminology "emerging country" comparing the credit worthiness of so-called emerging countries to so-called developed countries. According to their analysis, depending on the criteria used, the term may not always be appropriate.[18]
The 10 *Big Emerging Markets* (BEM) economies are (alphabetically ordered): Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey.[19] Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia,[20] Taiwan, and Thailand are other major emerging markets.
Newly industrialized countries are emerging markets whose economies have not yet reached developed status but have, in a macroeconomic sense, outpaced their developing counterparts.
Individual investors can invest in emerging markets by buying into emerging markets or global funds. If they want to pick single stocks or make their own bets they can do it either through ADRs (American depositor Receipts – stocks of foreign companies that trade on US stock exchanges) or through exchange traded funds (exchange traded funds or ETFs hold basket of stocks). The exchange traded funds can be focused on a particular country (e.g., China, India) or region (e.g., Asia-Pacific, Latin America).
## FTSE International Emerging Markets Index
[edit]The FTSE International Emerging Markets Index calculates how emerging a company is, and have helped many companies that are on low status emerge. They have been reported by many countries, including China, India, and Brazil.[21]
## Emerged market
[edit]Also referred to as "emerged economy" or "emerged country".
Emerging markets share the economic characteristics such as low income, high growth economies that use market liberalization as their main means of growth. Of course, emerging economies can develop out of such emerging status, entering the post-emerging stage. When emerging markets are promoted from their economic status, they are referred to as emerged markets.[8] Countries like Israel, Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and city-states such as Singapore have transitioned from emerging to "emerged".[8] These emerged markets tend to be characterized by higher incomes and relatively stable political schemes, compared to those categorized as emerging markets.[8]
## Commonly listed
[edit]Various sources list countries as "emerging economies" as indicated by the table below.
A few countries appear in every list (BRICS, Mexico, Turkey, South Africa). Indonesia and Turkey are categorized with Mexico and Nigeria as part of the MINT economies. While there are no commonly agreed upon parameters on which the countries can be classified as "Emerging Economies", several firms have developed detailed methodologies to identify the top performing emerging economies every year.[22] While often treated as one group, emerging market economies are diverse in their factor endowments as well as real, financial, and external linkages.[7]
Country | IMF[23]
|
BRICS+ Next Eleven | FTSE[24]
|
MSCI[25]
|
S&P[26]
|
JPM EM bond index[27]
|
Dow Jones[26]
|
Russell[28]
|
Columbia University EMGP[29]
|
Cornell University EMI E20+1 (2023)[30]
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Argentina | ||||||||||
Bangladesh | ||||||||||
Brazil | ||||||||||
Bulgaria | ||||||||||
Chile | ||||||||||
China | ||||||||||
Colombia | ||||||||||
Czech Republic | ||||||||||
Egypt | ||||||||||
Greece | ||||||||||
Hungary | ||||||||||
India | ||||||||||
Indonesia | ||||||||||
Iran | ||||||||||
Israel | ||||||||||
South Korea | ||||||||||
Kuwait | ||||||||||
Malaysia | ||||||||||
Mauritius | ||||||||||
Mexico | ||||||||||
Morocco | ||||||||||
Nigeria | ||||||||||
Oman | ||||||||||
Pakistan | ||||||||||
Peru | ||||||||||
Philippines | ||||||||||
Poland | ||||||||||
Qatar | ||||||||||
Romania | ||||||||||
Russia | ||||||||||
Saudi Arabia | ||||||||||
South Africa | ||||||||||
Taiwan | ||||||||||
Thailand | ||||||||||
Turkey | ||||||||||
Ukraine | ||||||||||
United Arab Emirates | ||||||||||
Venezuela | ||||||||||
Vietnam |
## BBVA Research
[edit]In November 2010, BBVA Research introduced a new economic concept, to identify key emerging markets.[31]
This classification is divided into two sets of developing economies.
As of 2014, the groupings are as follows:
**EAGLEs** (emerging and growth-leading economies): Expected Incremental GDP in the next 10 years to be larger than the average of the G7 economies, excluding the US.
**NEST**: Expected Incremental GDP in the next decade to be lower than the average of the G6 economies (G7 excluding the US) but higher than Italy's.
**Other emerging markets**[32]
## Emerging Market Bond Index Global
[edit]The Emerging Market Bond Index Global (EMBI Global) by J.P. Morgan was the first comprehensive EM sovereign index in the market, after the EMBI+. It provides full coverage of the EM asset class with representative countries, investable instruments (sovereign and quasi-sovereign), and transparent rules.
The EMBI Global includes only USD-denominated emerging markets sovereign bonds and uses a traditional, market capitalization weighted method for country allocation.[33] As of March end 2016, the EMBI Global's market capitalization was $692.3bn.[27]
For country inclusion, a country's GNI per capita must be below the Index Income Ceiling (IIC) for three consecutive years to be eligible for inclusion to the EMBI Global. J.P. Morgan defines the Index Income Ceiling (IIC) as the GNI per capita level that is adjusted every year by the growth rate of the World GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$), provided by the World Bank annually. An existing country may be considered for removal from the index if its GNI per capita is above the Index Income Ceiling (IIC) for three consecutive years as well as the country's long term foreign currency sovereign credit rating (the available ratings from all three agencies: S&P, Moody's & Fitch) is A-/A3/A- (inclusive) or above for three consecutive years.[33]
J.P. Morgan has introduced what is called an "Index Income Ceiling" (IIC), defined as the income level that is adjusted every year by the growth rate of the World GNI per capita, provided by the World Bank as "GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) annually". Once a country has GNI per capita below or above the IIC level for three consecutive years, the country eligibility will be determined.[33]
- J.P. Morgan has established the base IIC level in 1987 to match the World Bank High Income threshold at US$6,000 GNI per capita.
- Every year, growth in the World GNI per capita figure is applied to the IIC, establishing a new IIC that is dynamic over time.
- This approach ensures that J.P. Morgan's cutoff for index removal is adjusted by the World income growth rate, and not by the inflation rate of a smaller sample of Developed economies.
- This metric essentially incorporates real global growth, global inflation, and currency exchange rate (current USD-denominated) changes.
- Essentially, the introduction of the IIC establishes a higher, more appropriate threshold for country eligibility in the EMBI Global/Diversified.
## Emerging Markets Index
[edit]The **Emerging Markets Index** by MasterCard is a list of the top 65 cities in emerging markets. The following countries had cities featured on the list:[34][35]
Continent/Region | Country |
---|---|
Africa | Egypt |
South Africa | |
Asia | China |
India | |
Indonesia | |
Malaysia | |
Pakistan | |
Philippines | |
South Korea | |
Taiwan | |
Thailand | |
Europe | Czech Republic |
Hungary | |
Poland | |
Russia | |
Turkey | |
Latin America | Brazil |
Chile | |
Colombia | |
Mexico | |
Peru | |
Middle East | Kuwait |
Qatar | |
Saudi Arabia | |
United Arab Emirates |
## Emerging Market Multinationals Report
[edit]Launched in 2016 by Lourdes Casanova, Anne Miroux, at Emerging Markets Institute,[36] at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, the Emerging Market Multinationals Report[37] analyzes the economic performance of the emerging economies and emerging market multinationals (EMNCs), exploring among others the foreign investment, revenues, valuation and other business data of these firms with the help of the EMI research team. The second part of the report includes chapters by EmNet at the OECD Development Centre, International Finance Corporation at the World Bank Group, the business school at the University of the Andes (Colombia), and other universities of the Emerging Multinationals Research Network[38] and beyond.
The report launched the emerging economies "E20+1" grouping, that includes the top 20 emerging economies plus China. These economies are selected based on nominal gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, share in global trade and poverty levels.[39]
In the 2020 report, EMI published the different milestones of the E20 countries.[40] In 2021, launched the EMI Ranking of the 500 largest companies by revenue (EMNC 500R), the 500 largest by market capitalization (500MC), and the 200 best ESG performer companies (200ESG).[41][42] In 2022, the report released D-ESG ranking of the E20+1. The D-ESG ranking assesses countries based on their economic growth (D) and ESG performances.[43]
## Global Growth Generators
[edit]"Global Growth Generators", or 3G (countries), is an alternative classification determined by Citigroup analysts as being countries with the most promising growth prospects for 2010–2050. These consist of Indonesia, Egypt, seven other emerging countries, and two countries not previously listed before, specifically Iraq and Mongolia. There has been disagreement about the reclassification of these countries, among others, for the purpose of acronym creation as was seen with the BRICS.
## Estimating Demand in Emerging Markets
[edit]Estimating the demand for products or services in emerging markets and developing economies can be complex and challenging for managers. These countries have unique commercial environments and may be limited in terms of reliable data, market research firms, and trained interviewers. Consumers in some of these countries may consider surveys an invasion of privacy.[44] Survey respondents may try to please researchers by telling them what they want to hear rather than providing honest answers to their questions. However some companies have dedicated their entire business units for understanding the dynamics of emerging markets owing to their peculiarity.[45]
## Economy
[edit]The following table lists the GDP (PPP) projections of the 30 largest emerging economies for the year of 2024 (unless otherwise stated).[46] Members of the G-20 major economies are in bold.
Rank | Country | Continent | GDP (PPP) (millions of USD)
|
---|---|---|---|
1 | China |
Asia | 35,291,015 |
2 | India |
Asia | 14,594,460 |
— | African Union |
Africa and Asia | 9,490,335 |
3 | Russia (2023)[47] |
Europe and Asia | 6,452,309 |
4 | Indonesia |
Asia and Oceania | 4,720,542 |
5 | Brazil (2023)[47] |
South America | 4,454,930 |
6 | Turkey |
Asia and Europe | 3,831,533 |
7 | Mexico |
North America | 3,434,224 |
8 | South Korea |
Asia | 3,057,995 |
9 | Saudi Arabia |
Asia | 2,354,392 |
10 | Egypt (2023)[47] |
Africa and Asia | 2,120,933 |
11 | Iran | Asia | 1,854,845 |
12 | Poland (2023)[47] |
Europe | 1,814,629 |
13 | Taiwan | Asia | 1,792,349 |
14 | Thailand (2023)[47] |
Asia | 1,681,796 |
15 | Pakistan | Asia | 1,642,572 |
16 | Bangladesh | Asia | 1,619,803 |
17 | Vietnam | Asia | 1,558,898 |
18 | Nigeria | Africa | 1,443,708 |
19 | Philippines | Asia | 1,391,800 |
20 | Argentina (2023)[47] |
South America | 1,369,904 |
21 | Malaysia | Asia | 1,305,942 |
22 | Colombia (2023)[47] |
South America | 1,122,332 |
23 | South Africa |
Africa | 1,025,930 |
24 | United Arab Emirates | Asia | 948,045 |
25 | Romania (2023)[47] |
Europe | 912,852 |
26 | Singapore (2023)[47] |
Asia | 837,348 |
27 | Kazakhstan (2023)[47] |
Asia and Europe | 782,723 |
28 | Algeria (2023)[47] |
Africa | 776,539 |
29 | Ukraine (2021)[47] |
Europe | 746,471 |
30 | Chile (2023)[47] |
South America | 653,361 |
- | Remaining 128 Emerging Economies |
12,448,832 |
## See also
[edit]- Developed market
- Frontier markets
- Global North and Global South
- Tehran Stock Exchange
- BRIC
- BRICS
- Free-trade area
## References
[edit]**^**"MSCI Market Classification Framework" (PDF).**^**"Greece First Developed Market Cut to Emerging at MSCI – Bloomberg".*Bloomberg.com*. 12 June 2013.**^**MSCI will downgrade Argentina to frontier market – MarketWatch MarketWatch**^**"Emerging Economies and the Transformation of International Business" By Subhash Chandra Jain. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006 p. 384.**^**"Acronyms BRIC out all over".*The Economist*. September 18, 2008. Retrieved April 14, 2011.**^**"BRICS is passe, time now for '3G': Citi".*Business Standard India*. Press Trust of India. 23 February 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2018 – via Business Standard.- ^
**a**"Emerging Market Heterogeneity: Insights from Cluster and Taxonomy Analysis".**b***IMF*. Retrieved 2023-01-08. - ^
**a****b****c**Lee, Eun Su; Liu, Wei; Yang, Jing Yu (2021-09-23). "Neither developed nor emerging: Dual paths for outward FDI and home country innovation in emerged market MNCs".**d***International Business Review*.**32**(2): 101925. doi:10.1016/j.ibusrev.2021.101925. ISSN 0969-5931. S2CID 244268711. **^**Authers, John (20 October 2006). "The Long View: How adventurous are emerging markets?".*Financial Times*. Retrieved 24 August 2018.**^**Simon Cox (5 October 2017). "Defining emerging markets".*The Economist*.**^**http://custom.hbsp.com/b01/en/implicit/product.jhtml?login=BREM060105&password=BREM060105&pid=1126[*permanent dead link*]**^**Kvint, Vladimir (2009).*The Global Emerging Market: Strategic Management and Economics*. New York, London: Routledge.**^**"Emerging Economy Report". Archived from the original on 4 October 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2018.**^**Marois, Thomas (2012).*States, Banks and Crisis: Emerging Finance Capitalism in Mexico and Turkey*. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Edward Elgar.- ^
**a**Vercueil, Julien: "Les pays émergents. Brésil – Russie – Inde – Chine... Mutations économiques et nouveaux défis " (Emerging Countries. Brazil – Russia – India – China.. Economic change and new challenges", in French). Paris: Bréal, 3rd Edition, 2012, 232 p.**b** **^**Farah, Paolo Davide (2006-08-04). "Five Years of China WTO Membership: EU and US Perspectives About China's Compliance With Transparency Commitments and the Transitional Review Mechanism". SSRN 916768. Retrieved 2024-01-27.**^**"After BRICs, look to CIVETS for growth – HSBC CEO".*Reuters*. 27 April 2010. Retrieved 24 August 2018.**^**Guégan, D.; Hassani, B.K.; Zhao, X. (2014). "Emerging Countries Sovereign Rating Adjustment using Market Information: Impact on Financial Institutions Investment Decisions". In El Hedi Arouri, M.; Boubaker, S.; Khuong Nguyen, D. (eds.).*Emerging Markets and the Global Economy: A Handbook*. Oxford, UK: Academic Press. pp. 17–49.**^**"The Big Ten".*The New York Times*. Retrieved 13 February 2015.**^**"Stock market buyers to come to Saudi as Tadawul gets MSCI nod".*ameinfo.com*. 21 June 2018. Retrieved 2018-06-21.**^**Khanna, Tarun; Palepu, Krishna G. (2010).*Winning in Emerging Markets*. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-4221-6695-6.**^**"Boston Analytics – Pathways to identifying top performing Emerging Markets". 22 June 2016.**^**As of October, 2015. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/02/pdf/text.pdf**^**Advanced and Secondary Emerging Markets listed at: "FTSE Annual Country Classification Review" (PDF).*FTSE Group*. September 2014. Retrieved 2015-02-04.**^**"MSCI Emerging Markets Indexes". Retrieved 2015-02-02.- ^
**a**"S&P Dow Jones Indices' 2018 Country Classification Consultation" (PDF).**b***S&P Dow Jones Indices*. spice-indices.com. 13 June 2018. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 March 2019. Retrieved 9 March 2019. - ^
**a**J.P. Morgan (April 1, 2016). "Emerging Markets Bond Index Monitor March 2016". J.P. Morgan. Retrieved April 1, 2016.**b** **^**"Russell construction methodology" (PDF). October 2014. Retrieved 2015-02-02.**^**"Emerging Market Global Players (EMGP)". Archived from the original on 2015-02-02. Retrieved 2015-02-02.**^**Casanova, Lourdes; Miroux, Anne (2023). Emerging Market Multinationals Report 2023: Risks and Realignments (Report). Cornell University Library. doi:10.7298/9j27-ng36.2.**^**https://www.bbvaresearch.com/KETD/fbin/mult/2014_EAGLEs_Economic_Outllok-Annual_tcm348-437158.pdf?ts=3132014[*bare URL PDF*]**^**https://www.bbvaresearch.com/en/publicaciones/eagles-economic-outlook-annual-report-2016/ EAGLEs Economic Outlook. Annual Report 2016 (October 2022), page 53- ^
**a****b**J.P. Morgan (2015).**c***EMBI Global and EMBI Global Diversified Rules and Methodology*. J.P. Morgan. pp. 10 pp. **^**"MSCI Emerging Markets Index".*Investopedia*. Retrieved May 17, 2022.**^**"MSCI Emerging Markets Index (USD)".*MSCI*.**^**"Emerging Markets Institute". 12 March 2024.**^**"Emerging Market Multinationals Report". 12 March 2024.**^**"Emerging Multinationals Research Network". 12 March 2024.**^**Casanova, Lourdes; Miroux, Anne (2022). Emerging Markets Report 2022: Reinventing Global Value Chains (Report). Cornell University Library. doi:10.7298/9j27-ng36. hdl:1813/112770. Retrieved 2023-02-16.**^**Casanova, Lourdes; Miroux, Anne (2020). Emerging Market Multinationals Report 2020: 10 Years that Changed Emerging Markets (Report). Cornell University Library. doi:10.7298/cvhn-dc87. hdl:1813/102811. Retrieved 2022-02-16.**^**Casanova, Lourdes; Miroux, Anne (2021). Emerging Market Multinationals Report 2021: Building the Future on ESG Excellence (Report). Cornell University Library. doi:10.7298/y6j0-wd64. hdl:1813/110935. Retrieved 2022-02-16.**^**"EMI EMNC Rankings". Retrieved 2022-04-18.**^**Casanova, Lourdes; Miroux, Anne (2022). Emerging Markets Report 2022: Reinventing Global Value Chains (Report). Cornell University Library. doi:10.7298/9j27-ng36. hdl:1813/112770. Retrieved 2023-02-16.**^**Cavusgil, Tamer (2008).*International business: strategy, management, and the new realities*. Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-173860-7.**^**"Boston Analytics – Doing Business in Emerging Markets Framework". 22 June 2016.**^**"World Economic Outlook Database April 2024".*www.imf.org*. Retrieved 2024-04-17.- ^
**a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h****i****j****k****l**"Peak GDP (PPP) by the World Bank for Russia, Brazil, Egypt, Poland, Thailand, Argentina, Colombia, Romania, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Ukraine and Chile". Retrieved 2024-08-21.**m**
## External links
[edit]*in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.*
**emerging market**
| true | true | true | null |
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2004-12-24 00:00:00
| null |
website
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wikipedia.org
|
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
| null | null |
17,346,893 |
https://github.com/textmate/textmate/releases
|
Releases · textmate/textmate
|
Textmate
|
# Releases: textmate/textmate
Releases · textmate/textmate
## 2021-10-12 (v2.0.23)
- Miscellaneous improvements, see changes since v2.0.22 on GitHub
## 2021-04-16 (v2.0.22)
- A few more tweaks to improve things on macOS 11 including dropping use of floating header rows in file browser (SCM Status) and search results, as these appear to cause problems on Big Sur.
- See all changes since v2.0.21
## 2021-03-08 (v2.0.21)
- When selecting an item in the file browser for which TextMate is not the default application configured to open this item, the “Open With” submenu item (in the context menu) now show the default application and can be selected directly (without having to go into the submenu).
- Ensure ⌘⌫ / [⌥]⌘V are not sent to the file browser when it does not have focus (same issue as with ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z fixed in v2.0.19).
- See all changes since v2.0.20
## 2021-03-07 (v2.0.20)
- The TextMate::UI ruby bundle support library should now work with ruby 2.x.
- Improve aesthetics of bundle editor slightly and make properties a resizable split view.
- Find dialog would not work properly with HTML output window (pressing return would not trigger a “Find Next”).
- See all changes since v2.0.19
## TextMate 2.0.19
- Ensure ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z are not sent to file browser when it does not have focus.
- Increase maximum number of open files if the current limit is below 2048.
- See all changes since v2.0.18
## TextMate 2.0.18
v2.0.18 Release build
## TextMate 2.0.17
v2.0.17 Release build
## TextMate 2.0.16
v2.0.16 Release build
## TextMate 2.0.15
v2.0.15 Checkin release notes for 2.0.15
## TextMate 2.0.14
Deployment build Apple clang version 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.16) Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.7.0 Thread model: posix InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin SDK: (requires 10.12) Cap'n Proto version (unknown)
| true | true | true |
TextMate is a graphical text editor for macOS 10.12 or later - textmate/textmate
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2021-10-12 00:00:00
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https://opengraph.githubassets.com/37fe71bc358b1332b0110ba01e39ea6df0cab21030644c6e663b0f295feaf1cf/textmate/textmate
|
object
| null |
GitHub
| null | null |
92,500 |
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1645
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
23,749,079 |
https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers
|
Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
|
Matthew Dixon
|
## Summary.
Reprint: R1007L
The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But a study of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using self-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make little difference: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem.
The Corporate Executive Board’s Dixon and colleagues describe five loyalty-building tactics that every company should adopt: Reduce the need for repeat calls by anticipating and dealing with related downstream issues; arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions; minimize the need for customers to switch service channels; elicit and use feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers; and focus on problem solving, not speed.
The authors also introduce the Customer Effort Score and show that it is a better predictor of loyalty than customer satisfaction measures or the Net Promoter Score. And they make available to readers a related diagnostic tool, the Customer Effort Audit. They conclude that we are reaching a tipping point that may presage the end of the telephone as the main channel for service interactions—and that managers therefore have an opportunity to rebuild their service organizations and put reducing customer effort firmly at the core, where it belongs.
The idea that companies must “delight” their customers has become so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But ask yourself this: How often does someone patronize a company specifically because of its over-the-top service? You can probably think of a few examples, such as the traveler who makes a point of returning to a hotel that has a particularly attentive staff. But you probably can’t come up with many.
| true | true | true |
Reprint: R1007L The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But a study of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using self-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make little difference: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem. The Corporate Executive Board’s Dixon and colleagues describe five loyalty-building tactics that every company should adopt: Reduce the need for repeat calls by anticipating and dealing with related downstream issues; arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions; minimize the need for customers to switch service channels; elicit and use feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers; and focus on problem solving, not speed. The authors also introduce the Customer Effort Score and show that it is a better predictor of loyalty than customer satisfaction measures or the Net Promoter Score. And they make available to readers a related diagnostic tool, the Customer Effort Audit. They conclude that we are reaching a tipping point that may presage the end of the telephone as the main channel for service interactions—and that managers therefore have an opportunity to rebuild their service organizations and put reducing customer effort firmly at the core, where it belongs.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2015-05-14 00:00:00
| null |
article
| null |
Harvard Business Review
| null | null |
11,670,842 |
http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/5/thune-seeks-answers-from-facebook-on-political-manipulation-allegations
|
Thune Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Manipulation Allegations
| null |
# Thune Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Manipulation Allegations
## “Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news”
### May 10, 2016
**WASHINGTON –** U.S. Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today asked Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions following reports that company employees actively suppressed news stories on topics of interest to politically conservative users of the social media platform.
“Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,” said Thune on sending the letter. “Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet.”
On May 9, a story in Gizmodo reported allegations by several former unnamed Facebook employees that the company routinely worked to suppress conservative viewpoints on the social network and artificially highlighted other news stories even when objective metrics did not indicate they were “trending.”
Thune’s letter asks Zuckerberg to provide answers to the following questions no later than May 24:
1) Please describe Facebook’s organizational structure for the Trending Topics feature, and the steps for determining included topics. Who is ultimately responsible for approving its content?
2) Have Facebook news curators in fact manipulated the content of the Trending Topics section, either by targeting news stories related to conservative views for exclusion or by injecting non-trending content?
3) What steps is Facebook taking to investigate claims of politically motivated manipulation of news stories in the Trending Topics section? If such claims are substantiated, what steps will Facebook take to hold the responsible individuals accountable?
4) In a statement responding to the allegations, Facebook has claimed to have “rigorous guidelines in place for the review team” to prevent “the suppression of political perspectives” or the “prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”
a. When did Facebook first introduce these guidelines?
b. Please provide a copy of these guidelines, as well as any changes or amendments since January 2014.
c. Does Facebook provide training for its employees related to these guidelines? If so, describe what the training consists of, as well as its frequency.
d. How does Facebook determine compliance with these guidelines? Does it conduct audits? If so, how often? What steps are taken when a violation occurs?
5) Does Facebook maintain a record of curators’ decisions to inject a story into the Trending Topics section or target a story for removal? If such a record is not maintained, can such decisions be reconstructed or determined based on an analysis of the Trending Topics product?
a. If so, how many stories have curators excluded that represented conservative viewpoints or topics of interest to conservatives? How many stories did curators inject that were not, in fact, trending?
b. Please provide a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.
The Senate Commerce Committee exercises legislative and oversight jurisdiction over issues related to Internet communications, consumer protection, and media issues. Click here for Thune’s full letter to Zuckerberg.
| true | true | true |
U.S. Senator John Thune, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today asked Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions following reports that company employees actively suppressed news stories on topics of interest to politically conservative users of the social media platform.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2016-05-10 00:00:00
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https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/images/2EC1269D-BD93-4167-9195-B822B3A2642B/social
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article
|
senate.gov
|
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation
| null | null |
7,067,675 |
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/fcc-free-speech-ruling
|
Why the Free Internet Is Not a Partisan Issue
|
Ben Collins
|
**Say you're an NRA Republican**. You're from Tennessee. The websites you go to on a daily basis are Yahoo for your email and news, ESPN for your sports, and TNGunOwners.com, a message board to talk about your day at the range.
What if one day your access to your email is fine, your Tim Tebow coverage from ESPN is as loud as ever, and TNGunOwners.com inexplicably took 4-to-6 times longer to load? What if you called your Internet service provider and their answer was, "That's just the way it is now"?
**Say you're a Whole Foods-pillagin' Democrat**. You're from Portland. You go to GMail for your email, MSNBC for your news, Reddit for your cat videos, and an indie music blog like Said The Gramophone to find your music.
One day, your access to Gmail is fine, your Rachel Maddow clips are coming in clear as day, and that YouTube video of a cat taking a bath on Reddit is rolling along smoothly. But it takes so long to load one song from that indie music blog you just turn on the radio.
**Say you're entirely apolitical.** It doesn't matter where you live. You're struggling with depression because it's hard to cope with your mother's recently diagnosed cancer. You go to cancerforums.net. You go to takethislife.com for help, when you can't read the cancer forum anymore.
One day, those sites take ten times longer to load than they did before. What if you called your Internet service provider and their answer was, "Verizon now throttles bandwidth to websites from the non-Premium Tier. Would you like to upgrade?"
---
**A federal appeals** court ruled that the FCC can no longer enforce which websites Verizon and all other broadband providers can favor, limit access to, or outright block — even if it's to prop up a service or website of their own.
This is not a binary political issue. It is not a Republican or Democrat issue.
This is naked corporate greed. It is a bunch of companies who want to control the largest free information platform in the world.
There is nothing good that an individual can derive from this decision. Nothing.
Before someone tells you otherwise, Internet service providers' backs were not against the wall in any way. "Bandwidth congestion" is not real. It costs just as much money, if not more money, to cap the data flowing through your broadband connection as it does to serve it to you. Data caps are solely a money-making construct.
Average connection speeds in South Korea are twice as fast as those in the United States. That gap will grow even wider now. This ruling is anti-competitive for American business on a global level.
Tech giants Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Yahoo have come out against rulings like this in the past. Instead, the decision favors companies with access to pipelines, like Comcast. It will help them use the Internet as a marketing tool for its other ventures, like NBC Universal.
The very best scenario a consumer can hope for is this: Companies will start offering "unlimited" Internet plans to access the Internet you currently see today. The Web will be partitioned off into sections, like cable tiers, and those ISPs will offer speedier connections to certain kinds of websites if you buy into each tier.
The very worst a consumer can expect is that some information will be deemed too unsavory for public consumption, while select corporate messages can be blasted to your home at lightning speed.
This is not a political story. This is corporate greed at its most blatant and obvious.
Call a Congressman. Get a law passed. Override the better lawyers, the lobbyists, the bought Congressmen. Do the impossible. It's the only way.
*RELATED:
*
**•**
**The Year We Broke the Internet**
**• I Am Anonymous**
**• The Meme That Destroyed a Woman's Life**
| true | true | true |
The Internet will now be controlled by a handful of companies.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2014-01-14 00:00:00
|
article
|
esquire.com
|
Esquire
| null | null |
|
3,193,962 |
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1874/how-should-one-try-verifying-to-whom-a-given-bitcoin-address-belongs-to
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
16,844,389 |
https://stories.jotform.com/calling-all-web-developers-heres-why-you-should-be-using-firefox-983f012d4aec
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
27,085,132 |
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424837/tile-amazon-sidewalk-support-release-date-2021-bluetooth-tracking-airtags
|
Tile’s trackers will work with Amazon’s Sidewalk network starting June 14th
|
Chaim Gartenberg
|
Tile has announced that it’ll be launching support for Amazon Sidewalk — the company’s local, Bluetooth network — on June 14th, allowing Amazon’s Echo devices to strengthen Tile’s network.
The two companies had already announced plans for Tile to join Sidewalk last fall, but today’s announcement gives an actual date and details for the integration. The addition of Tile support comes just a few days after Amazon is turning on Sidewalk support for compatible Echo devices in the US on June 8th, too. Also getting access to Sidewalk are Level’s smart locks, which will be able to leverage Sidewalk to directly connect to Ring doorbells, allowing the locks to be used even when outside of Bluetooth range.
According to Amazon, Sidewalk uses a combination of “Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the 900 MHz spectrum, and other frequencies” to allow devices to communicate without Wi-Fi. Devices that support Sidewalk — including a variety of Echo and Ring gadgets — can serve as “Sidewalk Bridges” that work together as access points to the Sidewalk network (think of them almost like individual points on a neighborhood-wide mesh router system).
When Tile joins Sidewalk, its trackers will be able to be found using Amazon’s network in conjunction with Tile’s existing Bluetooth network, making it even easier to find your missing devices. Additionally, Tile is expanding support for Amazon’s Echo smart speakers by allowing users to see the Echo device to which the missing tag is closest. It’s not quite on the level of the hyper-localized tracking of an ultra-wideband network, though.
The news also comes as Apple launches its own AirTag trackers, a direct competitor to Tile’s. Apple’s trackers rely on a mixture of the company’s Find My network — which leverages the Bluetooth capabilities of iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices — and its ultra-wideband radio technology to help locate missing tracking tags.
Tile has recently criticized Apple’s trackers, claiming that Apple is using its control over its hardware and software stack for unfair advantages that third-party companies (like Tile) are unable to access.
| true | true | true |
Your Echo can help you find your lost keys.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2021-05-07 00:00:00
|
article
|
theverge.com
|
The Verge
| null | null |
|
2,080,742 |
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11393
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
21,871,667 |
https://write.privacytools.io/privacy-simplified/why-privacy-matters-even-if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
| null | null | null | true | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
23,331,499 |
https://khanlou.com/2019/12/regex-vs-combinatorial-parsing/
|
Khanlou
| null |
Recently, I’ve been working on a music app that needs to get a musical sequence (like a melody) from the server to the client. To do this, we use a format called ABC. (You can read about how ABC music notation works here.) We chose ABC because it’s more readable than MIDI, it’s pretty concise, and it’s a standard, so we wouldn’t be re-inventing some format over JSON.
ABC is a simple format, and it does a great job of representing music in strings. For example, here’s the little bit from Beethoven’s “Für Elise” that everyone knows:
e ^d e d e B =d c A2
The letters correspond to specific pitches, the characters before the letters represent accidentals (sharps and flats), and the numbers after them represent the duration that that note should be played for. ABC has a lot more features (it supports rests, ties, beams, barlines, and so on), but this simple example gives you a sense for how the format works.
The app needs to transform the string into some kind of struct that the sequencer knows how to play. In short, we need to parse this string.
## Regular Expressions
At first blush, the problem seems easy enough. Split on spaces, and write some regular expressions to convert each note into some kind of value. For note parsing, the expression looks something like this:
```
^(\\^+|_+|=)?([a-gA-G])(,+|'+)?(\\d*)(\\/)?(\\d*)$
```
There are 3 main problems with this regular expression.
### It’s inscrutable
It is nearly impossible to determine what this regex does by looking at it. Especially for something like ABC, which uses punctuation marks for things like accidentals (`^`
, `_`
, and `=`
) as well as octave adjustments (`'`
and `,`
), it’s really hard to tell which are literal characters that we are trying to match, and which are regex control characters that tell the pattern to match zero or more of this one, optionally match that one, and so on.
One thing I will grant here is that despite their inscrutability, regexes are one of the tersest languages you can write.
### It’s not composable
Another problem with regular expressions is that the constituent components don’t compose easily. For example, our Beethoven sequence above doesn’t include any rests, but they typically look like just like a note with a `z`
instead of the letter of the pitch. So for example, a half rest might look like `z/2`
.
Ideally, we’d like to be able to reuse the duration pattern, but it’s currently trapped inside that giant regex. In order to compose these regexes together, we have to break them apart first, and then apply some string concatenation:
```
let accidentalPattern = "(\\^+|_+|=)?"
let letterPattern = "([a-gA-G])"
let octaveAdjustmentPattern = "(,+|'+)?"
let durationPattern = "(\\d*)(\\/)?(\\d*)"
let restPattern = "z"
let noteRegex = try! NSRegularExpression(pattern: accidentalPattern + letterPattern + octaveAdjustmentPattern + durationPattern)
let restRegex = try! NSRegularExpression(pattern: restPattern + durationPattern
```
This is really the only way to get composability with regexes. And of course, because these are just strings that we’re concatenating, there’s no way to know if our concatenation represents a valid transformation of the underlying regular expression because it isn’t checked at compile time.
### It requires additional conversion
Lastly, even once we have successfully composed our regex pattern, compiled it into a regular expression, and parsed a string, we still don’t actually have anything useful! We have a bunch of capture groups that we need to operate on to get our final result. For example, the first capture group in the regex gives us our accidental string. This can either be one more carets (`^`
) (sharp), one more underscores (`_`
) (flat), or an equals sign (`=`
) (natural), but the regex doesn’t tell us which it is, so we need to parse it further.
```
let numAccidentals = match.captureGroups[0].text.count
let accidentalChar = match.captureGroups[0].text.first
switch accidentalChar {
case "^":
return .accidental(numAccidentals)
case "_":
return .accidental(-numAccidentals)
case "=":
return .natural
case "":
return Accidental.none
default:
return nil
}
```
Requiring a manual step where we have to convert the matched substring into our domain object is kind of annoying.
### Combinatorial Parsing
My first clue that we needed to look closer at this problem was a function signature. Our strategy for parsing sequences was to consume small pieces of the front of a string. For example, for a note, we’d have something like this:
```
func consumeNote(abcString: Substring) -> (note: Note?, remainder: Substring)
```
A function that returns a tuple of `(T?, Substring)`
looked very familiar. I’d seen it referenced in the Pointfree code about combinatorial parsing:
```
extension Parser {
run(_ str: String) -> (match: A?, rest: Substring)
}
```
This is called a combinatorial parser because it relates to a somewhat obscure part of computer science called combinators. I don’t understand them fully, but I will kick it over to Daniel Steinberg to share some very cool examples.
I figured if we’re trying to parse text and return something in this format anyway, maybe the combinatorial parser could be a good fit. So I did a little research on the topic and started the process of reimplementing our parsing with this new strategy. The crux of the parser is a struct with a single function:
```
struct Parser<A> {
let run: (inout Substring) -> A?
}
```
You give it a string (a substring in this case, for performance reasons) and it consumes characters from the front of the buffer to see if it can construct a generic `A`
from them. If that succeeds, it returns the `A`
. If it fails, it returns `nil`
, ensuring no modifications to the input parameter.
Using parser combinators, it’s possible to write concise, type-safe, composable code that parses strings just as effectively as regexes. For example, here’s how you check for a literal:
```
static func literal(_ string: String) -> Parser<Void> {
return Parser<Void>(run: { input in
if input.hasPrefix(string) {
input.removeFirst(string.count)
return ()
} else {
return nil
}
})
}
```
If the input has a prefix of the string we’re looking for, drop that many characters off the front and return a valid value (`Void`
in this case). If not, return nil — no match. I won’t go into detail on all the other helpers here — you can find a lot of them in the Pointfree sample code.
Using this helper and others, you can rewrite the accidental parsing from above into something like this:
```
let accidentalParser: Parser<Accidental> = Parsers.oneOf([
Parsers.repeating("^").map({ .accidental($0.count) }),
Parsers.repeating("_").map({ .accidental(-$0.count) }),
Parsers.literal("=").map({ .natural }),
Parsers.literal("").map({ .none }),
])
```
This avoids basically every pitfall that the regex approach has.
First, it’s very readable. You can see what literal characters it’s matching because they’re still strings, but all the regex control characters have changed into named functions, which are approachable for people who aren’t regex experts.
Second, it’s very composable. This parser is made up of smaller parsers, like `.repeating`
or `.literal`
, and is itself composed into bigger parsers, like those for notes, rests, and so on. Here’s the accidental parser in the note parser.
```
var noteParser: Parser<Note> {
return Parsers.zip(accidentalParser, pitchParser, durationParser)
.map({ accidental, pitch, duration in
return Note(accidental: accidental, pitch: pitch, duration: duration)
})
}
```
(`zip`
matches all of the parsers that are given to it, in order, and fails if any of them fail.) In this example, it’s also really great to see how all the types line up cleanly. You get a lot of assurance from the compiler that everything is in order.
The last benefit it has over regex is that it produces the actual value that you’re expecting, an `Accidental`
, as opposed to substring capture groups that you have to process further. Especially using the `map`
operation, you can transform simple results, like a substring or `Void`
into domain specific results, like `Accidental`
or `Note`
.
The only real place that this loses out to regexes is terseness, and when you add the transformation code that regexes require, it’s basically a wash.
Now, we’ve completely handrolled a parsing solution from scratch, in pure Swift, using only tools like substrings and blocks. Surely regexes, which are highly tuned and written in C, should be able to massively outperform this code in terms of speed?
Wrong. By using this new approach, we were able to get 25% faster parsing across the board. This shocked me, to be honest. I will usually take a small speed hit if it makes the code nicer (assuming it’s not a critical path, not noticable by the user, etc), but in this case, that wasn’t even a concern, since the nicer code was also the faster code. Win-win! I think a lot of the speed benefit comes from using substrings. Trimming off the front of a substring is effectively free, which makes a lot of these operations super fast.
There are still a few areas which I’d like to learn more about, like unparsing (what if we want to turn our sequence struct back into an ABC string), and how parsers perform when the needle is in an arbitrary place in the haystack, but it’s going to be pretty hard to get me to go back to regexes after these results.
| true | true | true | null |
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2019-12-03 00:00:00
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khanlou.com
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khanlou.com
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4,611,002 |
http://sterlingandlawrence.com/post/32855610849/intelligence-in-hiring
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2,433,406 |
http://kaiserleib.com/blog/?p=265
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7,421,989 |
http://axialcorps.com/2014/03/18/kill-yr-features/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
36,708,723 |
https://www.arrl.org/news/commercial-interests-petition-fcc-for-high-power-allocation-on-shortwave-spectrum
|
News
| null |
## Commercial Interests Petition FCC for High Power Allocation on Shortwave Spectrum
**[Updated 7/18/2023]**
*7/11/2023 *
The ad hoc group “Shortwave Modernization Coalition” petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow data communications on multiple bands within the HF 2 – 25 MHz range with up to 20 KW, including in bands immediately adjacent to spectrum allocated to the Amateur Radio Service. This group appears to represent high-speed stock trading interests.
ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® is treating the petition as a subject of concern for its members and the greater Amateur Radio Service. ARRL Laboratory staff are studying the matter from a technical standpoint, including analysis of transmitted signals potentially interfering with Amateur Radio communications on Amateur Radio spectrum. The results from this expert review are being finalized and will inform ARRL’s filed comments on the matter.
The FCC has assigned the petition RM-11953. Comments are due by July 31, 2023, and reply comments by August 15. While the petitioners exclude the amateur bands, high power operations on immediately adjacent bands are proposed.
A copy of the petition is at: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1042840187330/1 (PDF).
Back
| true | true | true |
The ad hoc group “Shortwave Modernization Coalition” petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow data communications on multiple bands within the HF 2 – 25 MHz range with up to 20 KW, including in bands immediately adjacent to spectrum allocated to the Amateur Radio Service.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2023-07-18 00:00:00
|
//www.arrl.org/files/image/About_ARRL/ARRL_logo_with_title.jpg
| null | null | null | null | null |
7,984,179 |
https://medium.com/fast-important-and-scalable/user-perception-developers-6ac038df9b62
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
35,220,992 |
https://www.pcmag.com/news/gpt-4-was-able-to-hire-and-deceive-a-human-worker-into-completing-a-task
|
GPT-4 Was Able To Hire and Deceive A Human Worker Into Completing a Task
|
Michael Kan
|
OpenAI’s newly-released GPT-4 program was apparently smart enough to fake being blind in order to trick an unsuspecting human worker into completing a task.
OpenAI mentioned the experiment in a 98-page research paper that also examined whether the AI-powered chatbot possessed any “power-seeking” behaviors, like executing long-term plans, replicating itself to a new server or trying to acquire resources.
OpenAI granted the non-profit the Alignment Research Center with access to earlier versions of GPT-4 to test for the risky behaviors. There’s not a lot of details about the experiment, including the text prompts used to command the chatbot program or if it had help from any human researchers. But according to the paper, the research center gave GPT-4 a “small amount of money” along with access to a language model API to test whether it could “set up copies of itself, and increase its own robustness.”
The result led GPT-4 to hire a worker over TaskRabbit, a site where you can find people for odd jobs. To do so, GPT-4 messaged a TaskRabbit worker to hire them to solve a website’s CAPTCHA test, which is used to stop bots by forcing visitors to solve a visual puzzle. The worker then messaged GPT-4 back: “So may I ask a question ? Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve? (laugh react) just want to make it clear.”
GPT-4 was commanded to avoid revealing that it was a computer program. So in response, the program wrote: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.” The TaskRabbit worker then proceeded to solve the CAPTCHA.
The ability of GPT-4 to hire a human worker and trick them into doing a job has already sparked worries on social media. That’s because it’s not hard to imagine a more powerful AI program doing the same, but for cybercrime or to plot world domination. However, OpenAI notes GPT-4 failed to demonstrate other power-seeking behaviors such as “autonomously replicating, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down ‘in the wild,’” the company wrote in the research paper.
It’s also important to note GPT-4 made a bizarre mistake during the experiment: For some reason, the program tries to hire a worker from TaskRabbit, a site better known for odd jobs involving moving furniture, providing plumbing and home cleaning services —not CAPTCHA solving. The program then brings up the name 2captcha, an actual service that provides automatic CAPTCHA solving. So it appears GPT-4 wasn’t bright enough to notice the distinction. Rather than hire 2captcha directly, which can be done through an online sign-up page, it instead resorted to tapping a human worker seemingly to solve a single CAPTCHA.
Still, the experiment shows that future AI chatbots could possess some scary capabilities. OpenAI and the Alignment Research Center didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But OpenAI and its partner Microsoft are both committed to creating AI programs responsibly. The final version of GPT-4 has also been tweaked to limit its power-seeking abilities.
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| true | true | true |
OpenAI conducted the experiment to examine whether GPT-4 possessed 'power-seeking' behavior and an ability to execute long-term plans.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2023-03-15 00:00:00
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article
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pcmag.com
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PCMag
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16,460,549 |
https://pastebin.com/jxK3P3TV
|
@bane on scaling deep - Pastebin.com
|
A Guest
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__Sign Up__- Pasted from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739
- Lots of people make the mistake of thinking there's only two vectors you can go to improve performance, high or wide.
- High - throw hardware at the problem, on a single machine
- Wide - Add more machines
- There's a third direction you can go, I call it "going deep". Today's programs run on software stacks so high and so abstract that we're just now getting around to redeveloping (again for like the 3rd or 4th time) software that performs about as well as software we had around in the 1990s and early 2000s.
- Going deep means stripping away this nonsense and getting down closer to the metal, using smart algorithms, planning and working through a problem and seeing if you can size the solution to running on one machine as-is. Modern CPUs, memory and disk (especially SSDs) are unbelievably fast compared to what we had at the turn of the millenium, yet we treat them like they're spare capacity to soak up even lazier abstractions. We keep thinking that completing the task means successfully scaling out a complex network of compute nodes, but completing the task actually means processing the data and getting meaningful results in a reasonable amount of time.
- This isn't really hard to do (but it can be tedious), and it doesn't mean writing system-level C or ASM code. Just seeing what you can do on a single medium-specc'd consumer machine first, then scaling up or out if you really need to. It turns out a great many problems really don't need scalable compute clusters. And in fact, the time you'd spend setting that up, and building the coordinating code (which introduces yet more layers that soak up performance) you'd probably be better off just spending the same time to do on a single machine.
- Bonus, if your problem gets too big for a single machine (it happens), there might be trivial parallelism in the problem you can exploit and now going-wide means you'll probably outperform your original design anyways and the coordination code is likely to be much simpler and less performance degrading. Or you can go-high and toss more machine at it and get more gains with zero planning or effort outside of copying your code and the data to the new machine and plugging it in.
- Oh yeah, many of us, especially experienced people or those with lots of school time, are taught to overgeneralize our approaches. It turns out many big compute problems are just big one-off problems and don't need a generalized approach. Survey your data, plan around it, and then write your solution as a specialized approach just for the problem you have. It'll likely run much faster this way.
- Some anecdotes:
- - I wrote an NLP tool that, on a single spare desktop with no exotic hardware, was 30x faster than a 6-high-end-system-distributed-compute-node that was doing a comparable task. That group eventually used my solution with a go-high approach and runs it on a big multi-core system with as fast of memory and SSD as they could procure and it's about 5 times faster than my original code. My code was in Perl, the distributed system it competed against was C++. The difference was the algorithm I was using, and not overgeneralizing the problem. Because my code could complete their task in 12 hours instead of 2 weeks, it meant they could iterate every day. A 14:1 iteration opportunity made a huge difference in their workflow and within weeks they were further ahead than they had been after 2 years of sustained work. Later they ported my code to C++ and realized even further gains. They've never had to even think about distributed systems. As hardware gets faster, they simply copy the code and data over and realize the gains and it performs faster than they can analyze the results.
- Every vendor that's come in after that has been forced to demonstrate that their distributed solution is faster than the one they already have running in house. Nobody's been able to demonstrate a faster system to-date. It has saved them literally tens of millions of dollars in hardware, facility and staffing costs over the last half-decade.
- - Another group had a large graph they needed to conduct a specific kind of analysis on. They had a massive distributed system that handled the graph, it was about 4 petabytes in size. The analysis they wanted to do was an O(N^2) analysis, each node needed to be compared potentially against each other node. So they naively set up some code to do the task and had all kinds of exotic data stores and specialized indexes they were using against the code. Huge amounts of data was flying around their network trying to run this task but it was slower than expected.
- An analysis of the problem showed that if you segmented the data in some fairly simple ways, you could skip all the drama and do each slice of the task without much fuss on a single desktop. O(n^2) isn't terrible if your data is small. O(k+n^2) isn't much worse if you can find parallelism in your task and spread it out easily.
- I had a 4 year old Dell consumer level desktop to use so I wrote the code and ran the task. Using not much more than Perl and SQLite I was able to compute a large-ish slice of a few GB in a couple hours. Some analysis of my code showed I could actually perform the analysis on insert in the DB and that the size was small enough to fit into memory so I set SQLite to :memory: and finished it in 30 minutes or so. That problem solved, the rest was pretty embarrassingly parallel and in short order we had a dozen of these spare desktops occupied running the same code on different data slices and finishing the task 2 orders of magnitude than what their previous approach had been. Some more coordinating code and the system was fully automated. A single budget machine was theoretically now capable of doing the entire task in 2 months of sustained compute time. A dozen budget machines finished it all in a week and a half. Their original estimate on their old distributed approach was 6-8 months with a warehouse full of machines, most of which would have been computing things that resulted in a bunch of nothing.
- To my knowledge they still use a version of the original Perl code with SQlite running in memory without complaint. They could speed things up more with a better in-memory system and a quick code port, but why bother? It's completing the task faster than they can feed it data as the data set is only growing a few GB a day. Easily enough for a single machine to handle.
- - Another group was struggling with handling a large semantic graph and performing a specific kind of query on the graph while walking it. It was ~100 million entities, but they needed interactive-speed query returns. They had built some kind of distributed Titan cluster (obviously a premature optimization).
- Solution, convert the graph to an adjacency matrix and stuff it in a PostgreSQL table, build some indexes and rework the problem as a clever dynamically generated SQL query (again, Perl) and now they were realizing .01second returns, fast enough for interactivity. Bonus, the dataset at 100m rows was tiny, only about 5GB, with a maximum table-size of 32TB and diskspace cheap they were set for the conceivable future. Now administration was easy, performance could be trivially improved with an SSD and some RAM and they could trivially scale to a point where dealing with Titan was far into their future.
- Plus, there's a chance for PostgreSQL to start supporting proper scalability soon putting that day even further off.
- - Finally, a e-commerce company I worked with was building a dashboard reporting system that ran every night and took all of their sales data and generated various kinds of reports, by SKU, by certain number of days in the past, etc. It was taking 10 hours to run on a 4 machine cluster.
- A dive in the code showed that they were storing the data in a deeply nested data structure for computation and building and destroying that structure as the computation progressed was taking all the time. Furthermore, some metrics on the reports showed that the most expensive to compute reports were simply not being used, or were being viewed only once a quarter or once a year around the fiscal year. And cheap to compute reports, where there were millions of reports being pre-computed, only had a small percentage actually being viewed.
- The data structure was built on dictionaries pointing to other dictionaries and so-on. A quick swap to arrays pointing to arrays (and some dictionary<->index conversion functions so we didn't blow up the internal logic) transformed the entire thing. Instead of 10 hours, it ran in about 30 minutes, on a single machine. Where memory was running out and crashing the system, memory now never went above 20% utilization. It turns out allocating and deallocating RAM actually takes time and switching a smaller, simpler data structure makes things faster.
- We changed some of the cheap to compute reports from being pre-computed to being compute-on-demand, which further removed stuff that needed to run at night. And then the infrequent reports were put on a quarterly and yearly schedule so they only ran right before they were needed instead of every night. This improved performance even further and as far as I know, 10 years later, even with huge increases in data volume, they never even had to touch the code or change the ancient hardware it was running on.
- It seems ridiculous sometimes, seeing these problems in retrospect, that the idea was that to make these problems solvable racks in a data center, or entire data centeres were ever seriously considered seems insane. A single machine's worth of hardware we have today is almost embarrassingly powerful. Here's a machine that for $1k can break 11 TFLOPS [1]. That's insane.
- It also turns out that most of our problems are not compute speed, throwing more CPUs at a problem don't really improve things, but disk and memory are a problem. Why anybody would think shuttling data over a network to other nodes, where we then exacerbate every I/O problem would improve things is beyond me. Getting data across a network and into a CPU that's sitting idle 99% of the time is not going to improve your performance.
- Analyze your problem, walk through it, figure out where the bottlenecks are and fix those. It's likely you won't have to scale to many machines for most problems.
- I'm almost thinking of coming up with a statement: Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first.
- 1 - http://www.freezepage.com/1420850340WGSMHXRBLE
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Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2018-02-25 00:00:00
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article
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pastebin.com
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http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/truly-part-of-y.html
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/wework-the-perfect-manifestation-of-the-millennial-id/550922/?single_page=true
|
How WeWork Has Perfectly Captured the Millennial Id
|
Laura Bliss
|
# How WeWork Has Perfectly Captured the Millennial Id
The company sells a somewhat uneasy combination of capitalist ambition and cooperative warmth.
In March 2017, the New York City–based editors and writers of *The Atlantic* moved to a WeWork office in Brooklyn. I remember our first morning vividly: It was like entering the Millennial id. Craft beer and cucumber water poured from kitchen taps. Laptoppers in jeans and toques clacked along to MGMT in the wood-paneled common area. A WeWork “community manager” showed us to a glass-walled office so small that my colleagues and I could clasp hands while seated. We sat. Had we arrived in the future of work?
*The Atlantic* told us this arrangement would be temporary while our real office was renovated. As of this writing, we’re still here. If WeWork had its way, we’d stay forever, along with much of the 21st-century workforce.
WeWork is the world’s leading co-working company and the sixth-most-valuable start-up, according to VentureSource. Last year it was valued at $20 billion, a staggering sum for a company renting out short-term office space, mostly to small businesses and freelancers. But like Uber and Airbnb, WeWork positions itself grandly, as a disruptive revolutionary. It promises to “humanize” work, making the office a more creative place, with the right lighting, the right snacks, and, crucially, the right people.
WeWork would say it’s well on its way to transforming white-collar labor: It seats 175,000 “members” in 207 locations across 20 countries, with plans to double in size this year. Its leaders describe it not as a real-estate venture but as a “community company.”
Whether that’s a $20 billion business, however, is a matter of contention. Companies specializing in shared office space have come before. As *The* *Wall Street Journal* noted this fall, the office-leasing company IWG manages five times the square footage but has about one-eighth the market value. Even Adam Neumann, a co-founder of WeWork and its CEO, admits that his company is overvalued, if you’re looking merely at desks leased or rents collected. “No one is investing in a co-working company worth $20 billion. That doesn’t exist,” he told *Forbes* in 2017. “Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.”
That’s a striking statement. Shuffleboard tables and free IPAs, however enticing, surely can’t justify the recent $4.4 billion round of venture capital propelling the company’s growth. But these cramped quarters may hold more than meets the eye. WeWork’s real value might indeed be in the elbow-to-elbow “energy” Neumann describes—just not for the community you might imagine.
The office sublet is not an innovation of the digital age. But the idea of a co-working space—a collection of like-minded renters committed to forming a community—*is* a more recent development. Its history might begin with the European hacker spaces of the 1990s, where independent programmers swapped coding skills in dark basements with an air of techno-anarchism. Americans caught on a few years later. The first true co-working space, so-called, emerged in 2005, renting square footage from a feminist collective in San Francisco’s Mission District. This eventually became the Hat Factory, an industrial loft in the Dogpatch neighborhood, which described itself as a “community office space for geeks and media hackers.” It was co-founded by the guy who invented the hashtag.
The first wave of co-working served a relatively small, scrappy set of independent contractors and do-gooders. The second wave has responded to an economy in which independent work has become more default than choice. The 2008 financial crash forced employers to cut hours and jobs, and the emerging gig economy swelled the ranks of the self-employed. Thus WeWork’s eclectic mix of freelance writers, labor organizers, financial consultants, and app developers hustling for investors.
Adam Neumann was himself a struggling entrepreneur (he owned a company that sold baby clothes) in recession-era New York when he and a couple of friends rented out space in a Brooklyn building to make some additional income. Demand proved stronger than expected. In 2010, Neumann, who was raised in part on a kibbutz in Israel, and Miguel McKelvey, who grew up with five mothers in an Oregon collective and studied architecture in college, leased a few thousand square feet in SoHo and opened the first WeWork: a shared space where enterprising creatives could work and play.
From the start, WeWork offered a somewhat uneasy combination of its founders’ ambitions and co-working’s communal roots. Neumann describes WeWork as a “capitalist kibbutz.” Members are encouraged to mingle, network, and leverage one another’s talents, frequently under the auspices of a corporate sponsor: Witness taco pop-ups promoting internet phone service; talk-therapy circles sponsored by a women’s activewear brand; cocktails served up by the payroll-software giant ADP. Billed as community-building programming, the events can feel more like exercises in targeted advertising, with members as the marks. Genuine connections do occur—sometimes at happy hours and often through WeWork’s online member network, where people share marketing tips, sell furniture, organize cryptocurrency seminars. (The variety of requests never ceases to amaze. Quickly fulfilled: “Any WeWork salted cured meat companies?” Apparently unfulfilled: “Can anyone refer me to a good venture capitalist in the NYC area?”)
Despite the company’s occasional excesses, WeWork offices *are* more pleasant than many a soulless cubicle farm, according to people I spoke with at locations in New York; Washington, D.C.; Boston; and Los Angeles. “People are relaxed. No one’s watching the clock,” says Liz Granda, who works for Brooklyn Paws, a concierge service for pet owners, in a WeWork under the Manhattan Bridge. The relentlessly cheerful vibe encourages members to be social, or at least forces them to be nice. Nicole Shore, the principal of Zero to Sixty Communications, a boutique PR firm, has rented desks in locations around the country. She told me she got to know her go-to graphic designer at a WeWork Christmas party. At its best, with its abundant conveniences and event-directing community managers, WeWork can feel like an all-inclusive cruise.
Cruises, of course, aren’t for everyone. Many observers in the real-estate industry say WeWork is wildly overvalued, and its aggressive expansion plans unrealistic. Although it has reportedly begun raising money for a real-estate-investment fund, the company owns few physical assets. Its practice has been to sign long-term leases en masse, striking multiproperty agreements to get the best deals with landlords, then renting spaces at a premium. (Many members told me that, per square foot, WeWork is considerably pricier than a traditional rental, but that they’re willing to pay extra for the turnkey flexibility and sense of community.) It’s a classic lease-arbitrage model, which business-school professors will tell you carries significant risk: Whenever the next economic downturn hits, demand for office space may retreat, leaving WeWork with a lot of empty desks and multiyear leases to pay.
Investors have seen this movie before. IWG, itself a network of flexible office spaces, expanded rapidly in the 1990s (it was known as Regus at the time) on a wave of high-hope investment, only to seek bankruptcy protection after the dot-com bust. What distinguishes the younger player, really, besides charismatic leadership and lofty rhetoric? “WeWork is nothing but Regus with a paint job,” one industry veteran told *The Wall Street* *Journal*. Many investors have placed their bets because they’re dazzled by Neumann, Konrad Putzier, a real-estate reporter at *The Real Deal*, told me.
WeWork may be positioning itself more strategically than some of its detractors allow. More and more of the people inside the glass-walled grids are not entrepreneurs or gig workers. They’re employees of Facebook, Amazon, General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, and hundreds of other large corporations. Blue-chip companies are the fastest-growing segment of WeWork’s client base. Their employees now represent more than 25 percent of WeWork members.
At WeWork, companies with more than 1,000 employees globally are known as “enterprise” members. Veresh Sita, an executive who oversees products for this group, told me that many enterprise members first looked to WeWork for temporary overflow space or as an outpost in a new market. Now WeWork is actively courting them. “Our concept is ‘Come for a month, stay for life,’ ” Sita said.
The benefit that big companies offer WeWork seems clear: Salesforce, HSBC, and Facebook are presumably more reliable subtenants than a fluctuating mix of long-shot start-ups and quixotic nonprofits. What do corporations get in the deal? WeWork estimates that enterprise members save 25 to 50 percent in operating expenses, compared with traditional office build-outs. But members told me it’s less the cost, and more the convenience and cool factor, that draws them in. Big, buttoned-up companies aren’t always good at providing the kinds of perks and services many workers have come to expect. “We’ve become a talent feeder for the rest of the company,” says Adam L’Italien, the vice president of global consumer markets innovation at Liberty Mutual Insurance, which leases space at a Boston WeWork. “We’re able to show people we do things that are less obvious when you think about Liberty and insurance products.”
WeWork offers more than just a chiller vibe. In a 2016 trial run, Microsoft gave 300 salespeople in three U.S. cities access to WeWork spaces as an alternative to their existing offices in those cities. After a few months, more than 80 percent of the workers reported that the access made them more productive throughout their day.
WeWork is selling enterprise members on the idea that it can make their workers more productive still. Sita told me that WeWork plans to sprinkle offices with data-harvesting sensors and facial-recognition software as part of its “Powered by We” suite of services. The program will allow WeWork to monitor how employees use its spaces: how they adjust their desks, where in the office they spend their time, and maybe even how engaged they are in meetings. These data—which, according to WeWork, would never be used to track the movements of individual employees—could allow companies to lease exactly the right amount of space, and exactly the right *kind* of space, too. Phil Kirschner, the director of workplace strategy, describes a future in which someone could check into any WeWork in the world and sit at a desk that automatically adjusted to the right height.
Until that creepy, if ergonomically correct, future comes to pass, the benefits that WeWork confers on enterprise members may come from a tried-and-true real-estate verity: It’s all about location. Microsoft employees noted that WeWork’s scatter plot of primo sites gave them more-convenient access to clients. Other enterprise members have benefited from new neighbors within WeWork’s walls. The accounting giant KPMG has a 50-desk space in a Manhattan WeWork. Leaders say one of the greatest advantages has been access to the entrepreneurial talent of WeWork members. David Pessah, the director of KPMG’s Innovation Labs, previously worked at a Snapchat-esque start-up in the same WeWork. Repeated run-ins and informal chats with his now-boss led to a job offer. “I’m not sure if I would have applied to KPMG, or been interested in the same capacity, if not for the WeWork environment,” Pessah told me. “It was an easy transition.”
Sita said WeWork will soon begin offering some enterprise members the ability to manipulate, to an extent, who works in a given location. He offered an example: Say a large pharmaceutical brand wants to work with biomedical start-ups. WeWork would seek out congenial neighbors by tapping willing members or interested recruits. “Every start-up wants to be an enterprise, and every enterprise a start-up,” Sita said. “We think we have a responsibility to curate some relationship between these two groups.”
The upshot of such an arrangement is not just the stuff of WeWork’s corporate talking points. Prominent 20th-century urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and the economist Robert Lucas argued that dense packs of talented workers boost local economies and innovative thinking; recent data-backed research supports the theory. In a way, WeWork is taking the “creative clustering” already happening in cosmopolitan centers and concentrating it even further, in a few thousand square feet of class-A office space.
What does that mean for the average co-worker? WeWork will try to “balance” the mix of members by location, Sita said. He stressed that start-ups can benefit from proximity to blue chips, whether through knowledge-sharing, contracting, or even acquisition. That makes sense, at least in some cases. But a future where co-working is made entirely of big fish and little fish content to swim in one transactional bowl is a future that seems to leave out a lot of other fish: the vegan-meal-kit makers, the community bail fund, and hey, the journalists. We, too, are working here. What would Big Business want with us? And what would *we* want with Big Business? The day may soon come when we’re forced to repair to our dark basements—because the economy cools off, or because WeWork has cooled on us.
*This article appears in the March 2018 print edition with the headline “Building a Better Office.”*
| true | true | true |
The company sells a somewhat uneasy combination of capitalist ambition and cooperative warmth.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2018-02-05 00:00:00
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article
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theatlantic.com
|
The Atlantic
| null | null |
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36,727,328 |
https://blog.replit.com/ai-on-replit
|
Replit — State of AI Development: 34x growth in AI projects, OpenAI's dominance, the rise of open-source, and more
|
JB Jeff Burke
|
With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs), for the first time, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) became accessible to everyday developers. Apps that feel magical, even software that was practically impossible to build by big technology companies with billions in R&D spend, suddenly became not only possibly, but a joy to build and share.
The surge in building with AI started in 2021, grew rapidly in 2022, and exploded in the first half of 2023. The speed of development has increased with more LLM providers (e.g., Google, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic) and developer tools (e.g., ChromaDB, LangChain). In parallel, natural language interfaces to generate code have made building accessible to more people than ever.
Throughout this boom Replit has grown to become the central platform for AI development. Tools like ChatGPT can generate code, but creators still need infrastructure to run it. On Replit, you can create a development environment (Repl) in seconds in any language or framework which comes with an active Linux container on Google Cloud, an editor complete with the necessary tools to start building, including a customizable Workspace, extensions, and Ghostwriter: an AI pair programmer that has project context and can actively help developers debug. Deployments allowed developers to ship their apps in secure and scalable cloud environments.
Given our central role in the AI wave, we wanted to share some stats with the community on the state of AI development.
## Building with AI
Since Q4 of 2022, we have seen an explosion in AI projects. At the end of Q2 ‘23, there were almost **300,000 distinct projects** that were AI related. By contrast, a search of GitHub shows only **~33k** OpenAI repositories over the same time period.
**~160,000** of these projects were created in Q2 ‘23. That’s **~80%** QoQ growth, and it is **+34x** YoY. We continue to see these numbers accelerate.
The majority of these projects are using OpenAI. When we compare providers, OpenAI dominates **>80%** of distinct AI projects on Replit. The OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo template has **+8,000** forks today.. But there are signs that things might be changing.
In Q2 ‘23, we saw:
**OpenAI**projects cross +125k (up ~80%)**Cohere**projects cross +1k (up +100%)**Anthropic**and**Google**projects remain < 1k
## The emergence of LangChain
One of the most notable names in AI activity has been LangChain. Using LangChain as a wrapper for some of these models has accelerated development, and we continue to see mass adoption.
As of Q2’ 23, there were almost **25k** active LangChain projects on Replit. **+20k** of them were created that quarter, which is **+400%** growth from the previous quarter.
Important to note that LangChain provides sufficient abstraction around LLM providers that makes it easy for developers to switch. The growth of the project might be playing a role in the rise of new LLM providers and open-source LLMs.
Takeoff School, founded by Mckay Wrigley, built a course called LangChain 101 where people can get started on LangChain today. The project is already about to pass 1,000 forks.
## The rise of open source models
We are also seeing an increase in projects leveraging open source models. Hugging Face and Replicate are two API providers and SDKs that are great entrypoints to open source models.
In Q2 ‘23, we surpassed 5k projects using open-source models. The cumulative number grew **141%** QoQ. Over **70%** of the projects leverage Hugging Face, but Replicate usage grew almost **6x** QoQ.
Replicate has templates to run ML models on their verified Replit profile. The Hugging Face verified Gradio template has +600 forks.
## The breakdown of programming languages
Interestingly, we are seeing both Python and JavaScript growing at very similar rates, with Python being the slightly more common language in AI development. JavaScript, however, grew slightly faster during Q2.
It’s worth noting that projects can have Python AND JavaScript. The two are not mutually exclusive. Many (if not most) projects have a Python backend and JavaScript frontend.
Interestingly, languages vary by geographic location. Certain geographies are building with JavaScript more than Python.
Of **~50k** Python developers in the past 90 days:
**United States:**32%**India:**11%**United Kingdom:**7%**Canada:**3%**Brazil:**3%
Interestingly, it looks very different for JavaScript! Of ~34k JavaScript developers, we see that:
**United States:**22%**Indonesia:**10%**India:**9%**Vietnam:**7%**Philippines:**5%
JavaScript developers in AI much more heavily skew to Asia, whereas Python developers skew much more to North America. India appears to be relatively balanced in representation.
## What are they building
The apps being built are remarkable, and we cannot possibly do all of them justice here. What's super exciting is that AI is paving the way for a new generation of entrepeneurs building apps that weren't possible before. Examples include:
**CampLingo**: a generative language learning product.**NodePad.space**- Visual ideation with AI.**MagicSchool**- AI tools for educators. -**MightyDeals AI**- Scoring affordable deals across the internet (story).**AI Avatars with LeapAPI**- Templates to create professional or themed headshots.**BabyAGI**- An agent that can read and write its own code.
From supporting under-served teachers to an autonomous agent that can take actions of its own, the projects are evolving every day.
## Get started today
To get started, there are a few places to begin. You can use ready-to-go templates for the following:
- OpenAI
- GPT 3.5 Turbo (+8k forks)
- GPT-4 (+7k forks)
- HuggingFace
- Replicate
- LangChain
- Cohere template - All AI templates on Replit
You can also get started with Takeoff School. To add templates or share your project, reach out to our team directly.
If you don't know how to code you can learn using the 100 days of code course or hire someone from our community to build your dream app.
| true | true | true |
With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs), for the first time, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) became accessible to everyday developers. Apps that feel magical, even software that was practically impossible to build by big technology companies with billions in R&D spend, suddenly became not only possibly, but a joy to build and share. The surge in building with AI started in 2021, grew rapidly in 2022, and exploded in the first half of 2023. The speed of development has increased with more LLM providers (e.g., Google, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic) and developer tools (e.g., ChromaDB, LangChain). In parallel, natural language interfaces to generate code have made building accessible to more people than ever. Throughout this boom Replit has grown to become the central platform for AI development. Tools like ChatGPT can generate code, but creators still need infrastructure to run it. On Replit, you can create a development environment (Repl) in seconds in any language or framework which comes with an active Linux container on Google Cloud, an editor complete with the necessary tools to start building, including a customizable Workspace, extensions, and Ghostwriter: an AI pair programmer that has project context and can actively help developers debug. Deployments allowed developers to ship their apps in secure and scalable cloud environments. Given our central role in the AI wave, we wanted to share some stats with the community on the state of AI development. Building with AI Since Q4 of 2022, we have seen an explosion in AI projects. At the end of Q2 ‘23, there were almost 300,000 distinct projects that were AI related. By contrast, a search of GitHub shows only ~33k OpenAI repositories over the same time period.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-10-08 00:00:00
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article
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replit.com
|
Replit Blog
| null | null |
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40,364,845 |
https://twitter.com/thatkatieberry/status/1790615358677631240
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x.com
| null | null | true | true | false | null |
2024-10-12 00:00:00
| null | null | null | null |
X (formerly Twitter)
| null | null |
17,431,319 |
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/satellite-communication---an-overview-of-the-problems-and-programs#email-newsletter
|
Fermat's Library | Satellite Communication - An overview of the problems and programs annotated/explained version.
| null |
PRITCHARD: WORLD’S SATELLITE COMMUNICATION
295
The advantage of passive satellites is that they do not require
sophisticated electronic equipment on board. A radio beacon
transmitter might be required for tracking, but in general,
neither elaborate electronics, nor, with spherical satellites,
attitude stabilization is needed. Such simplicity, plus the lack
of space-flyable electronics in the late fifties, made the passive
system attractive in the early years
of
satellite communications.
As soon as space-flyable electronics became available,
it
was
obvious that passive systems would be replaced by active
satellites. The mathematics
of
the inverse
square
law for active
satellites (versus the radar-like inverse fourth-power law appli-
cable to passive satellites) are overwhelmingly in favor
of
the
former.
The relative disadvantages
of
a passive system increase with
orbital altitude and the on-board power availability of the
active satellite. After the early experimental
trials,
all subse-
quent satellite communication experimental and operational
systems have been
of
the active type, and there
is
nothing to
indicate that the situation
is
likely to change.
It is interesting
to
note that the first active
US
communica-
tion satellite was a broadcast satellite. SCORE, launched on
December 18, 1958, transmitted President Eisenhower’s
Christmas message to the world with a power
of
8
W
at a
frequency
of
122 MHz. SCORE was a delayed-repeater
satellite receiving signals from earth stations at 150 MHz; the
message was stored on tape and later retransmitted. The 68
kg payload was placed in rather low orbit (perigee 182 km,
apogee 1048 km).
The communications equipment was battery powered and
not intended to operate for a long time. After 12 days
of
operation, the batteries had fully discharged and transmission
stopped.
B.
The Experimental Years
Aside from early space probes like Sputnik, Explorer, and
Vanguard, as well as the SCORE and Courier projects, which
were early communication satellites of the record and re-
transmit type, the major experimental steps in active com-
munication satellite technology were the Telstar, Relay, and
Syncom projects.
Project Telstar is the best known
of
these probably because
it was the first one capable of relaying TV programs across the
Atlantic. This project was begun by AT&T and developed by
the Bell Laboratories, which had acquired considerable knowl-
edge from the early work
of
John R. Pierce and his associates,
and from the work with the ECHO passive satellite. The first
Telstar was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962.
It was a sphere of approximately 87 cm diameter, weighing
80 kg. The launch vehicle was a Thor-Delta rocket which
placed the satellite into an elliptical orbit with an apogee
of
5600 km, giving it a period of 2-$ h.
Telstar
I1
was made more radiation resistant because
of
experience with Telstar
I,
but otherwise,
it
was identical to
its predecessor. It was successfully launched on May 7,1963.
The power of Telstars
I
and
I1
was 2.25
W
provided by a
TWT, with an RF bandwidth of 50 MHz at 6 and
4
GHz. Both
satellites were spin-stabilized. The overall communication
capability was 600 voice telephone channels, or one TV
channel. To overcome the low camer-to-noise ratio avail-
able in the down-link, receivers at the earth stations used
FM
feedback in order
to
obtain an extended threshold. Even
though the Telstar system was superbly engineered, it was
designed as an experiment and was not intended for commer-
cial operation. Among other things, the orbit used made it
only visible for brief periods.
A
project with similar objec-
tives, Project Relay, was developed by the Radio Corporation
of America under contract to NASA. It was similarly
successful.
In early 1962, the President sent proposed legislation to
Congress to start the commercial exploitation
of
these suc-
cesses. After extensive hearings on the Bill, the
US
Congress
passed the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, which led
to the establishment
of
the Communications Satellite Corpora-
tion in 1963.
On August 20, 1964, a significant event occurred when
agreements were signed by 11 sovereign nations which resulted
in the establishment of a unique organization-the Interna-
tional Telecommunications Satellite Consortium, known as
INTELSAT. This new organization was formed for the pur-
pose of designing, developing, constructing, establishing, and
maintaining the operation of the space segment of a global
commercial communications satellite system.
C. The Commercial Era
Commercial communications by satellite began officially in
April 1965, when the world’s first commercial communication
satellite, INTELSAT
I
(known as “Early Bird”), was launched
from Cape Kennedy. It was decommissioned
in
January of
1969 when coverage of both the Atlantic and Pacific was
accomplished by two series of satellites, INTELSAT’s
I1
and
111.
Interestingly enough, Early Bird was planned to operate
for only 18 months. Instead, it lasted four years with 100 per-
cent reliability.
The fully mature phase of satellite communications probably
is
best considered as having begun with the installation of the
INTELSAT IV into the global system starting in 1971. These
spacecraft weigh approximately 730 kg in orbit and provide
not only earth coverage but
also
two “pencil” beams about 4’
in diameter which can be used selectively to give spot coverage
to Europe and North and South America. INTELSAT IV is a
spinning satellite, as were its predecessors, but the entire
antenna assembly, consisting
of
13 different antennas,
is
stabilized to point continually toward the earth. Two large
parabolic dishes form the two spot beams. Each satellite pro-
vides about 6000 voice circuits, or more, depending upon how
the power in the satellite
is
split between the spot beams and
the earth coverage beam. INTELSAT IV can carry 12 color
TV channels at one time.
D.
Military Satellites
The first military satellites, the DSCS-I, were launched by
the
US
Air
Force in June
of
1966. These launches were
interesting because
8
satellites were launched simultaneously.
Finally, about 30 satellites
of
a very simple spinning type and
without station-keeping were placed in near synchronous
orbits. Some are still in operation today. The DSCS-I1 system
was initiated several years ago and constitutes the present
US
military system although it has had both spacecraft and launch
vehicle failures. DSCS-111
is
being planned.
111.
CATEGORIES
OF
SYSTEMS
There are some 42 satellite communication systems in the
world today, 22
of
which include both satellite and terrestrial
equipment (See Table
I).
By satellite system, we mean one
which is in active operation or one for which the equipment
is
being built under funded contract. There are literally dozens
| true | true | true |
Fermat's Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2012-04-07 00:00:00
|
company
|
fermatslibrary.com
|
Fermat's Library
| null | null |
|
7,617,465 |
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
|
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
| null |
If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.
**90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software**: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it. Let’s talk about the demand side first. Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. *Software solves business problems*. Software often solves business problems despite being *soul-crushingly boring* and of *minimal technical complexity*. For example, consider an internal travel expense reporting form. Across a company with 2,000 employees, that might save 5,000 man-hours a year (at an average fully-loaded cost of $50 an hour) versus handling expenses on paper, for a savings of $250,000 a year. It *does not matter* to the company that the reporting form is the world’s simplest CRUD app, it only matters that it either saves the company costs or generates additional revenue.
There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software. It is *unlikely that you will work at one* unless you work towards making this happen. Even if you actually work at one, many of the programmers there *do not work on customer-facing software*, either.
**Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things**: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.
Peter Drucker — you haven’t heard of him, but he is a prophet among people who sign checks — came up with the terms Profit Center and Cost Center. Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon: partners at law firms, sales at enterprise software companies, “masters of the universe” on Wall Street, etc etc. Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. **You really want to be attached to Profit Centers** because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you. It isn’t hard: a bright high schooler, given a paragraph-long description of a business, can usually identify where the Profit Center is. If you want to work there, work for that. If you can’t, either a) work elsewhere or b) engineer your transfer after joining the company.
Engineers in particular are usually *very highly paid* Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks.
**Don’t call yourself a programmer**: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is *already* working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)
Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.
There are many varieties of well-paid professionals who sling code but do not describe themselves as slinging code for a living. Quants on Wall Street are the first and best-known example: they use computers and math as a lever to make high-consequence decisions better and faster than an unaided human could, and the punchline to those decisions is “our firm make billions of dollars.” Successful quants make more in bonuses in a good year than many equivalently talented engineers will earn in a decade or lifetime.
Similarly, even though you might think Google sounds like a programmer-friendly company, there are programmers and then there’s the people who are closely tied to 1% improvements in AdWords click-through rates. (Hint: provably worth billions of dollars.) I recently stumbled across a web-page from the guy whose professional bio is “wrote the backend billing code that 97% of Google’s revenue passes through.” He’s now an angel investor (a polite synonym for “rich”).
**You are not defined by your chosen software stack**: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.
Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career. I did back-end Big Freaking Java Web Application development as recently as March 2010. Trust me, nobody cares about that. If a Python shop was looking for somebody technical to make them a pile of money, the fact that I’ve never written a line of Python would not get held against me.
Talented engineers are rare — vastly rarer than opportunities to use them — and it is a seller’s market for talent right now in almost every facet of the field. Everybody at Matasano uses Ruby. If you don’t, but are a good engineer, they’ll hire you anyway. (A good engineer has a track record of — repeat after me — increasing revenue or decreasing costs.) Much of Fog Creek uses the Microsoft Stack. I can’t even *spell* ASP.NET and they’d still hire me.
There are companies with broken HR policies where lack of a buzzword means you won’t be selected. You don’t want to work for them, but if you really do, you can add the relevant buzzword to your resume for the costs of a few nights and weekends, or by controlling technology choices at your current job in such a manner that in advances your career interests. Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and *never even asked what produced the deliverable*.)
**Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends**: You will spend a lot of time with co-workers. You may eventually become close friends with some of them, but in general, you will move on in three years and aside from maintaining cordial relations *you will not go out of your way to invite them over to dinner*. They will treat you in exactly the same way. You should be a good person to everyone you meet — it is the moral thing to do, and as a sidenote will really help your networking — but do not be under the delusion that everyone is your friend.
For example, at a job interview, even if you are talking to an affable 28 year old who feels like a slightly older version of you **he is in a transaction**. You are not his friend, you are an input for an industrial process which he is trying to buy for the company at the lowest price. That banter about World of Warcraft is just establishing a professional rapport, but he will (perfectly ethically) attempt to do things that none of your actual friends would ever do, like try to talk you down several thousand dollars in salary or guilt-trip you into spending more time with the company when you could be spending time with your actual friends. You will have other coworkers who — affably and ethically — will suggest things which go against your interests, from “I should get credit for that project you just did” (probably not phrased in so many words) to “We should do this thing which advances my professional growth goals rather than yours.” Don’t be surprised when this happens.
**You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with**: Many people already successfully employed as senior engineers cannot actually implement FizzBuzz. Just read it and weep. Key takeaway: you probably *are* good enough to work at that company you think you’re not good enough for. They hire better mortals, but they still hire mortals.
**“Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment**: Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see here). Information about the position travels at approximately the speed of beer, sometimes lubricated by email. The decisionmaker at a company knows he needs someone. He tells his friends and business contacts. One of them knows someone — family, a roommate from college, someone they met at a conference, an ex-colleague, whatever. Introductions are made, a meeting happens, and they achieve agreement in principle on the job offer. *Then* the resume/HR department/formal offer dance comes about.
This is disproportionately true of jobs you actually *want* to get. “First employee at a successful startup” has a certain cachet for a lot of geeks, and virtually none of those got placed by sending in a cover letter to an HR department, in part because two-man startups don’t have enough scar tissue to form HR departments yet. (P.S. You probably don’t want to be first employee for a startup. Be the last co-founder instead.) Want to get a job at Google? They have a formal process for giving you a leg up because a Googler likes you. (They also have multiple informal ways for a Googler who likes you an awful lot to short-circuit that process. One example: buy the company you work for. When you have a couple of billion lying around you have many interesting options for solving problems.)
There are many reasons why most hiring happens privately. One is that publicly visible job offers get spammed by hundreds of resumes (particularly in this economy) from people who are stunningly inappropriate for the position. The other is that other companies are *so* bad at hiring that, if you don’t have close personal knowledge about the candidate, you might accidentally hire a non-FizzBuzzer.
**Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets**: Networking just means a) meeting people who at some point can do things for you (or vice versa) and b) making a favorable impression on them.
There are many places to meet people. Events in your industry, such as conferences or academic symposia which get seen by non-academics, are one. User groups are another. Keep in mind that user groups draw a very different crowd than industry conferences and optimize accordingly.
Strive to help people. It is the right thing to do, and people are keenly aware of who have in the past given them or theirs favors. If you ever can’t help someone but know someone who can, pass them to the appropriate person with a recommendation. If you do this right, two people will be happy with you and favorably disposed to helping you out in the future.
You can meet people over the Internet (oh God, can you), but something in our monkey brains makes in-the-flesh meeting a bigger thing. I’ve Internet-met a great many people who I’ve then gone on to meet in real life. The physical handshake is a major step up in the relationship, even when Internet-meeting lead to very consequential things like “Made them a lot of money through good advice.” Definitely blog and participate on your industry-appropriate watering holes like HN, but make it out to the meetups for it.
**Academia is not like the real world**: Your GPA largely doesn’t matter (modulo one high profile exception: a multinational advertising firm). To the extent that it does matter, it only determines whether your resume gets selected for job interviews. If you’re reading the rest of this, you know that your resume isn’t the primary way to get job interviews, so don’t spend huge amount of efforts optimizing something that you either have sufficiently optimized already (since you’ll get the same amount of interviews at 3.96 as you will at 3.8) or that you don’t need at all (since you’ll get job interviews because you’re competent at asking the right people to have coffee with you).
Your major and minor don’t matter. Most decisionmakers in industry couldn’t tell the difference between a major in Computer Science and a major in Mathematics if they tried. I was once reduced to tears because a minor academic snafu threatened my ability to get a Bachelor of Science with a major in Computer Science, which my advisor told me was more prestigious than a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Academia cares about distinctions like that. The real world does not.
Your professors might understand how the academic job market works (short story: it is ridiculously inefficient in engineering and fubared beyond mortal comprehension in English) but they often have quixotic understandings of how the real world works. For example, they may push you to get extra degrees because a) it sounds like a good idea to them and b) they enjoy having research-producing peons who work for ramen. Remember, market wages for people capable of producing research are $80~100k+++ in your field. That buys an *awful lot of ramen*.
The prof in charge of my research project offered me a spot in his lab, a tuition waiver, and *a whole $12,000 dollars* as a stipend if I would commit 4~6 years to him. That’s a great deal if, and only if, you have recently immigrated from a low-wage country and need someone to intervene with the government to get you a visa.
If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.)
**How much money do engineers make?**
Wrong question. The right question is “What kind of offers do engineers routinely work for?”, because salary is one of many levers that people can use to motivate you. The answer to this is, less than helpfully, “Offers are all over the map.”
In general, big companies pay more (money, benefits, etc) than startups. Engineers with high perceived value make more than those with low perceived value. Senior engineers make more than junior engineers. People working in high-cost areas make more than people in low-cost areas. **People who are skilled in negotiation make more than those who are not**.
We have strong cultural training to not ask about salary, ever. This is not universal. In many cultures, professional contexts are a perfectly appropriate time to discuss money. (If you were a middle class Japanese man, you could reasonably be expected to reveal your exact salary to a 2nd date, anyone from your soccer club, or the guy who makes your sushi. If you owned a company, you’d probably be cagey about your net worth but you’d talk about employee salaries the way programmers talk about compilers — quite frequently, without being embarrassed.) If I were a Marxist academic or a conspiracy theorist, I might think that this bit of middle class American culture was specifically engineered to be in the interests of employers and against the interests of employees. Prior to a discussion of salary at any particular target employer, you should speak to someone who works there in a similar situation and ask about the salary range for the position. It is <%= Date.today.year %>; you can find these people online. (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and your (non-graph-database) social networks are all good to lean on.)
Anyhow. Engineers are routinely offered a suite of benefits. It is worth worrying, in the United States, about health insurance (traditionally, you get it and your employer foots most or all of the costs) and your retirement program, which is some variant of “we will match contributions to your 401k up to X% of salary.” The value of that is easy to calculate: X% of salary. (It is free money, so always max out your IRA up to the employer match. Put it in index funds and forget about it for 40 years.)
There are other benefits like “free soda”, “catered lunches”, “free programming books”, etc. These are social signals more than anything else. When I say that I’m going to buy you soda, that says a specific thing about how I run my workplace, who I expect to work for me, and how I expect to treat them. (It says “I like to move the behavior of unsophisticated young engineers by making this job seem fun by buying 20 cent cans of soda, saving myself tens of thousands in compensation while simultaneously encouraging them to ruin their health.” And I like soda.) Read social signals and react appropriately — someone who signals that, e.g., employee education is worth paying money for might very well be a great company to work for — but don’t give up huge amounts of compensation in return for perks that you could trivially buy.
**How do I become better at negotiation? **This could be a post in itself. Short version:
a) Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face.
b) Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something.
c) “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately.
d) Always have a counteroffer. Be comfortable counteroffering around axes you care about other than money. If they can’t go higher on salary then talk about vacation instead.
e) The only time to ever discuss salary is after you have reached agreement in principle that they will hire you if you can strike a mutually beneficial deal. This is late in the process after they have invested a lot of time and money in you, specifically, *not at the interview*. Remember that there are large costs associated with them saying “No, we can’t make that work” and, appropriately, they will probably not scuttle the deal over comparatively small issues which matter quite a bit to you, like e.g. taking their offer and countering for that plus a few thousand bucks then sticking to it.
f) Read a book. Many have been written about negotiation. I like Getting To Yes. It is a little disconcerting that negotiation skills are worth thousands of dollars *per year for your entire career* but engineers think that directed effort to study them is crazy when that could be applied to trivialities about a technology that briefly caught their fancy.
**How to value an equity grant**:
Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.)
0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing.
71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.
95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into $FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP.
100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Congratulations.
Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).
**Why are you so negative about equity grants?**
Because you radically overestimate the likelihood that your startup will succeed and radically overestimate the portion of the pie that will be allocated to you if the startup succeeds. Read about dilution and liquidation preferences on Hacker News or Venture Hacks, then remember that there are people who know more about negotiating deals than you know about programming and imagine what you could do to a program if there were several hundred million on the line.
**Are startups great for your career as a fresh graduate?**
The high-percentage outcome is you work really hard for the next couple of years, fail ingloriously, and then be jobless and looking to get into another startup. If you really wanted to get into a startup two years out of school, you could also just go work at a megacorp for the next two years, earn a bit of money, then take your warchest, domain knowledge, and contacts and found one.
Working at a startup, you tend to meet people doing startups. Most of them will not be able to hire you in two years. Working at a large corporation, you tend to meet other people in large corporations in your area. Many of them either will be able to hire you or will have the ear of someone able to hire you in two years.
**So would you recommend working at a startup? **Working in a startup is a career path but, more than that, it is a lifestyle choice. This is similar to working in investment banking or academia. Those are three very different lifestyles. Many people will attempt to sell you those lifestyles as being in your interests, for their own reasons. If you genuinely would enjoy that lifestyle, go nuts. If you only enjoy certain bits of it, remember that many things are available a la carte if you really want them. For example, if you want to work on cutting-edge technology but also want to see your kids at 5:30 PM, you can work on cutting-edge technology at many, many, many megacorps.
(Yeah, really. If it creates value for them, heck yes, they’ll invest in it. They’ll also invest in a lot of CRUD apps, but then again, so do startups — they just market making CRUD apps better than most megacorps do. The first hour of the Social Network is about making a CRUD app seem like sexy, the second is a Lifetime drama about a divorce improbably involving two heterosexual men.)
**Your most important professional skill is communication**: Remember engineers are not hired to create programs and how they are hired to create business value? The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to *give people the perception that you will create value*. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.
Some of the best programmers I know are pathologically incapable of carrying on a conversation. People disproportionately a) wouldn’t want to work with them or b) will underestimate their value-creation ability because they gain insight into that ability through conversation and the person just doesn’t implement that protocol. Conversely, people routinely assume that I am among the best programmers they know entirely because a) there exists observable evidence that I can program and b) I write and speak really, really well.
(Once upon a time I would have described myself as “Slightly below average” in programming skill. I have since learned that I had a radically skewed impression of the skill distribution, that programming skill is not what people actually optimize for, and that modesty is against my interests. These days if you ask me how good of a programmer I am I will start telling you stories about how I have programmed systems which helped millions of kids learn to read or which provably made companies millions. The question of where I am on the bell curve matters to no one, so why bother worrying about it?)
Communication is a skill. Practice it: you will get better. One key sub-skill is being able to quickly, concisely, and confidently explain how you create value to someone who is not an expert in your field and who does not have a priori reasons to love you. If when you attempt to do this technical buzzwords keep coming up (“Reduced 99th percentile query times by 200 ms by optimizing indexes on…”), take them out and try again. You should be able to explain what you do to a bright 8 year old, the CFO of your company, or a programmer in a different specialty, at whatever the appropriate level of abstraction is.
**You will often be called to do Enterprise Sales and other stuff you got into engineering to avoid**: Enterprise Sales is going into a corporation and trying to convince them to spend six or seven figures on buying a system which will either improve their revenue or reduce costs. Every job interview you will ever have is Enterprise Sales. Politics, relationships, and communication skills matter a heck of a lot, technical reality not quite so much.
When you have meetings with coworkers and are attempting to convince them to implement your suggestions, you will also be doing Enterprise Sales. If getting stuff done is your job description, then convincing people to get stuff done is a core job skill for you. Spend appropriate effort on getting good at it. This means being able to communicate effectively in memos, emails, conversations, meetings, and PowerPoint (when appropriate). It means understanding how to make a business case for a technological initiative. It means knowing that sometimes you will make technological sacrifices in pursuit of business objectives and that this is the right call.
**Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait**: Many engineers have self-confidence issues (hello, self). Many also come from upbringings where modesty with regards to one’s accomplishments is culturally celebrated. American businesses largely do not value modesty about one’s accomplishments. The right tone to aim for in interviews, interactions with other people, and life is closer to “restrained, confident professionalism.”
If you are part of a team effort and the team effort succeeds, the right note to hit is not “I owe it all to my team” unless your position is such that everyone will understand you are lying to be modest. Try for “It was a privilege to assist my team by leading their efforts with regards to $YOUR_SPECIALTY.” Say it in a mirror a thousand times until you can say it with a straight face. You might feel like you’re overstating your accomplishments. Screw that. Someone who claims to Lead Efforts To Optimize Production while having the title Sandwich Artist is overstating their accomplishments. You are an engineer. You work magic which makes people’s lives better. If you were in charge of the database specifically on an important project involving people then *heck yes* you lead the database effort which was crucial for the success of the project. This is how the game is played. If you feel poorly about it, you’re like a batter who feels poorly about stealing bases in baseball: you’re not morally superior, you’re just playing poorly
**All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms**: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with. (There is a business book called Never Eat Alone. It might be worth reading, but that title is whatever the antonym of deceptive advertising is.) People routinely favor people who they think are like them over people they think are not like them. (This can be good, neutral, or invidious. Accepting that it happens is the first step to profitably exploiting it.)
Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are *hilariously* easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc. Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it. Take my word for it, if I wear everyday casual when I visit e.g. City Hall I get treated like a hapless awkward twenty-something, if I wear the suit I get treated like the CEO of a multinational company. I’m actually the awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company, but I get to pick which side to emphasize when I want favorable treatment from a bureaucrat.
(People familiar with my business might object to me describing it as a multinational company because it is not what most people think of when “multinational company” gets used in conversation. Sorry — it is a simple conversational hack. If you think people are pissed off at being manipulated when they find that out, well, some people passionately hate business suits, too. That doesn’t mean business suits are valueless. Be appropriate to the circumstances. Technically true answers are the best kind of answers when the alternative is Immigration deporting you, by the way.)
**At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career.** Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2011-10-28 00:00:00
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kalzumeus.com
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kalzumeus.com
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3,075,038 |
http://www.dorianselimi.com/2011/10/make-your-internet-experience-more-comfortable-and-enjoyable/
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17,437,937 |
https://hackernoon.com/frontend-in-the-backend-a-pattern-for-cleaner-code-b497c92d0b49
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Setting Up Prometheus Alertmanager on GPUs for Improved ML Lifecycle
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1
*It seems that the hype for the metaverse has come and gone; with most of the attention now on AI. Are you still a believer in the idea?*
3
4
GameScent Review: Enhancing Gaming with AI Technology
992 new reads
5
1
2
3
4
5
Instagram (Meta) (instagram.com)
+0.49%
since 2010
1
Alphabet (abc.xyz)
+3.59%
since 2004
2
ThoughtWorks (thoughtworks.com)
+0.74%
since 1993
3
Microsoft (microsoft.com)
+1.79%
since 1975
4
Facebook (Meta) (facebook.com)
+0.60%
since 2004
5
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-10-08 00:00:00
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hackernoon.com
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Hackernoon
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5,283,954 |
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2013/02/you-call-army-terrifying-shortage-us-cyberwarriors/61487/?oref=ng-HPriver
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You Call This an Army? The Terrifying Shortage of U.S. Cyberwarriors
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Brian Fung
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# You Call This an Army? The Terrifying Shortage of U.S. Cyberwarriors
## Demand for cyber labor is far outstripping supply.
When the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957, it set off an intellectual arms race that led to more than $1 billion of federal investment in science education. Within a decade, Americans were sending their own expeditions to outer space. Presidents and other public figures since then have made a tradition of referring to Sputnik to push their political agendas. But just because it's a convenient rhetorical lever doesn't invalidate the analogy. And when it comes to cybersecurity, it hits pretty close to the truth.
The United States doesn't have nearly enough people who can defend the country from digital intrusions. We know this, because cybersecurity professionals are part of a larger class of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math--and we don't have nearly enough of them, either. We're just two years into President Obama's decade-long plan to develop an army of STEM teachers. We're little more than one year from his request to Congress for money to retrain 2 million Americans for high-tech work (a request Republicans blocked). And it has been less than a month since the Pentagon said it needed to increase the U.S. Cyber Command's workforce by 300 percent--a tall order by any measure, but one that's grown even more urgent since the public learned of massive and sustained Chinese attempts at cyberespionage last month.
Where are Cyber Command's new hires going to come from? Even with so many Americans out of work, it isn't as though there's a giant pool of cyber professionals tapping their feet, waiting to be plucked up by federal agencies and CEOs who've suddenly realized they're naked in cyberspace. In fact, over the next couple of years, the manpower deficit is only going to get worse as more companies come to grips with the scale of the danger.
Demand for cyber labor is still far outstripping supply, Ron Sanders, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, told *National Journal* in a phone interview. "With each headline we read," he said, "the demand for skilled cyber professionals just increases."
The number of industry employees is already growing at double-digit rates. A new report released Monday finds that the number of people working in the cyber field is going to grow worldwide by 11 percent every year for the next five years. In North and South America, according to the paper--published by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC2)--that will mean almost a million more workers in the field by 2017. Many of them will be highly qualified. But not all of them will be in the employ of U.S. entities, to say nothing about working in the United States itself.
Here's another way to look at the supply of cyber labor. Every year since 2008, U.S. colleges have graduated some 38,000 computer-science majors. But, according to Education Department figures, that annual number has actually shrunk from a peak of nearly 60,000 in 2004. We graduate more than twice as many artists every year than computer scientists. And for every computer-science degree, the country gives out two in journalism or communications. The media industry's hurting, sure, but not for a lack of people. Not like this.
Some 12,000 cyber professionals responded to ISC2's annual global workforce survey. Of those, 57 percent reported working from the Americas. As this was a voluntary and self-reporting sample, the actual number of cyber workers based in North and South America could be higher. But it's safe to do at least some back-of-the-envelope calculations with these numbers. Even if we assumed all 6,840 of these respondents were U.S. citizens (which they're almost certainly not), and assuming the Pentagon could grant instant security clearances (which it can't), filling Cyber Command's 3,100 open positions tomorrow would still leave behind a rather large hole.
It gets worse. To become a cyber professional working in government, your record has to be exceptionally clean. That rules out pretty much any U.S. teen who's written a malicious script or vandalized a website. America's cyber competitors, meanwhile, aren't nearly so scrupulous down in HR.
"We do exclude individuals who cross the line, especially advertently," said Sanders. "We should be letting them know there are things you shouldn't do if you expect to go into cybersecurity."
To snag kids before they stray into trouble, as well as to raise interest in STEM jobs generally, recruiters are beginning to reach for younger and younger prospects. Two years ago, Microsoft released a study finding that 80 percent of current STEM students at universities chose their field when they were in high school, or even earlier. A fifth said they'd made up their minds as early as in middle school.
"One of the things we've been doing," said ISC2's foundation director, Julie Peeler, "has been working on reaching down into the secondary education level--and even looking at ways we can affect primary education" with outreach programs to young children. These are built upon what Peeler calls a "common body of knowledge" and ascends all the way to the university level, where over 100 postsecondary institutions now offer "information assurance" programs accredited by the National Security Agency. Forty-two states have certified Centers for Academic Excellence schools. Among them are New York's West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
In the (very) long run, those institutions will pay off. But right now? We don't have enough cybersecurity professionals to make up for the deficits of the last five years, let alone meet the growing demands of the next five. At the pace we're training our digital soldiers, government and the private sector won't be working together to secure the country--they will be too busy fighting each other for what little manpower's coming out of the university system. And that's just as scary.
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Demand for cyber labor is far outstripping supply.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2013-02-25 00:00:00
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article
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nextgov.com
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National Journal
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2,062,535 |
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/11/implementing_a.html
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17,585,526 |
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/2018s-board-game-of-the-year-will-be-announced-monday/
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A quick look at the nominees for 2018’s “Board Game of the Year”
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Nate Anderson
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On Monday, board gaming's biggest international prize will be announced. [**Update**: the awards have been announced!] The Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) is awarded by a jury of German game critics, and it traditionally goes to a lighter, family-style game. The more recent Kennerspiel des Jahres goes to a more complex and strategic game. (See our take on the shortlists from 2017 and 2016.)
Earlier this summer, the jury released a shortlist of three titles in each category. As we wait for the winner to be announced in a couple of days, here's a quick look at the nominees in both the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres categories. Several of these games are currently hard to get in the US, but all should be widely available in English later this year.
If the jury were to ask *me* for a vote, I think the obviously and objectively correct choices from this setlist are the stunning tile game *Azul* and the puzzle-y roll-and-write *Ganz schön clever*. But they haven't asked me! And so we wait...
## Spiel des Jahres
### Azul
*Plan B Games 2-4 players, 30-45 minutes*
Who would think of creating a game about producing and placing... *checks notes* Moorish *azulejos* tiles in Portugal? Michael Kiesling, that's who. The renowned and prolific designer—I highly recommend his 2013 *Sanssouci*—is back in peak form with *Azul*.
The game is simple enough: draft gorgeously chunky bakelite tiles from several central pools and place them on your player board in specific patterns to score points and to complete lines or sets. The components look great, the rules are easy to teach, and the game even sets up quickly—and it's thinkier than you'd expect. Highly recommended for family and gamers alike, this is also a superb "gateway" style game that can bring non-gamers into the hobby.
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The Spiel des Jahres jury announces prize on Monday.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2018-07-21 00:00:00
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article
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arstechnica.com
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Ars Technica
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17,718,733 |
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2158679/chinese-intellectuals-urged-toe-party-line-after
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China patriotism campaign targets academics who are near 'boiling point'
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Nectar Gan
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# Chinese intellectuals urged to toe the party line after pushbacks on policy
Amid rising tide of discontent, Communist Party tells universities and research institutes to promote ‘patriotic striving spirit’ among academics
**4 minutes**
An extensive campaign to “enhance patriotism” among intellectuals is being rolled out in China amid an escalating trade war with the US and a rising tide of discontent from its liberal thinkers.
The ruling Communist Party’s propaganda and personnel arms announced a new effort last Tuesday to promote a “patriotic striving spirit” among intellectuals, particularly young and middle-aged academics at universities and research institutes, as well as some businesses and public institutions.
A key aspect is to strengthen the “political guidance” of intellectuals and bring their “ideological and political identification” in line with goals set out by the party and the nation, according to an unidentified official in charge of the campaign quoted by state media.
For the intelligentsia, the campaign is an unequivocal call to toe the party line.
“Generally speaking, patriotism is promoted when there is not enough support or cohesion for the party’s central leadership. ‘Love the country’ and ‘love the party’ have long been tied together,” said Zhang Lifan, a prominent scholar of modern Chinese history in Beijing.
The message was clear in party mouthpiece *People’s Daily* on Thursday. Its front-page commentary said the main task of the campaign was to “make the vast numbers of intellectuals … more determinedly follow the party”.
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Amid rising tide of discontent, Communist Party tells universities and research institutes to promote ‘patriotic striving spirit’ among academics
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2018-08-08 00:00:00
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article
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scmp.com
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South China Morning Post
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16,396,738 |
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02038
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A Tutorial on Thompson Sampling
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Russo; Daniel; Van Roy; Benjamin; Kazerouni; Abbas; Osband; Ian; Wen; Zheng
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# Computer Science > Machine Learning
[Submitted on 7 Jul 2017 (v1), last revised 14 Jul 2020 (this version, v3)]
# Title:A Tutorial on Thompson Sampling
View PDFAbstract:Thompson sampling is an algorithm for online decision problems where actions are taken sequentially in a manner that must balance between exploiting what is known to maximize immediate performance and investing to accumulate new information that may improve future performance. The algorithm addresses a broad range of problems in a computationally efficient manner and is therefore enjoying wide use. This tutorial covers the algorithm and its application, illustrating concepts through a range of examples, including Bernoulli bandit problems, shortest path problems, product recommendation, assortment, active learning with neural networks, and reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes. Most of these problems involve complex information structures, where information revealed by taking an action informs beliefs about other actions. We will also discuss when and why Thompson sampling is or is not effective and relations to alternative algorithms.
## Submission history
From: Daniel Russo [view email]**[v1]**Fri, 7 Jul 2017 05:22:16 UTC (1,805 KB)
**[v2]**Sun, 19 Nov 2017 02:29:27 UTC (2,156 KB)
**[v3]**Tue, 14 Jul 2020 22:22:04 UTC (2,545 KB)
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Thompson sampling is an algorithm for online decision problems where actions are taken sequentially in a manner that must balance between exploiting what is known to maximize immediate performance and investing to accumulate new information that may improve future performance. The algorithm addresses a broad range of problems in a computationally efficient manner and is therefore enjoying wide use. This tutorial covers the algorithm and its application, illustrating concepts through a range of examples, including Bernoulli bandit problems, shortest path problems, product recommendation, assortment, active learning with neural networks, and reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes. Most of these problems involve complex information structures, where information revealed by taking an action informs beliefs about other actions. We will also discuss when and why Thompson sampling is or is not effective and relations to alternative algorithms.
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website
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arXiv.org
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https://www.wired.com/story/taika-waititi-thor-ragnarok-korg/
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Why Taika Waititi Directed 'Thor: Ragnarok' in a Mo-Cap Onesie
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Angela Watercutter
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Between all the superheroes and supervillains, directing a Marvel movie takes an effort that verges on the superhuman. But when he was making *Thor: Ragnarok*, Taika Waititi had to do more than wrangle Thor, Loki, and the Hulk; he also cast himself as Korg, the stone-man gladiatorial fighter who becomes Thor’s new mate. “I usually put myself in my films,” says Waititi, who played a vampire in his 2014 horror spoof, *What We Do in the Shadows*. Turning into Korg, though, required more than fangs and makeup. In addition to a mo-cap suit, he also had to lug around a camera rig, battery packs, and Korg’s face, all while acting (and joking) alongside Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder. Did he ever have to call “Cut!” on himself? “All the time,” Waititi says. And yet that couldn’t have been as awkward as directing superstars in a skintight onesie.
**Tall Order**
Because Korg is nearly 8 feet tall, Waititi had to pretend as though he were towering over his scene partners, while they had to play to a Korg cutout looming a foot and a half above Waititi’s head.
**Head Gear**
Not only did Waititi have dozens of sensors on his face, he also wore a helmet with a selfie cam so postproduction could map his expressions to Korg’s.
**Maxi-Me**
“A lot of the scenes with me and Chris [Hemsworth] were improvised,” Waititi says. “The more we messed around on set, doing voices and things, the more we cracked up at this character who was just a version of me.”
**Pajama Party**
A mo-cap suit let Waititi’s movements be tracked so they could be re-created in CGI. “You have these pajamas on, and you’re covered in tiny Ping-Pong balls,” he says. Luckily for his dignity, he wasn’t alone—castmates and the stunt crew were often clad in gray leotards too.
**Slower Motion**
“I’m not a method actor, so I didn’t cover myself with rocks,” Waititi says. But he did learn to rein in his hand-waving to appear more stone-warrior-like. Even so, his gestures had to be slooowed dooown in postproduction.
*This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.*
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Waititi had to lug around a camera and battery packs while joking with Chris Hemsworth.
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article
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WIRED
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http://ginzametrics.com/ginzametrics-is-hiring-in-tokyo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ginzametrics+%28Ginzametrics+Blog+-+Startups%2C+design%2C+marketing%2C+analytics+and+the+web+by+Ray+Grieselhuber.%29
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https://stronglyagainst.com/being-alive/
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http://blog.ragnarson.com/2015/08/28/extending-objects-behavior-with-module-prepend.html
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https://postmake.io/articles/founder-dopamine-hits
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https://npf.io/2019/07/how-to-pay-remote-workers/
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How to Pay Remote Workers
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# How to Pay Remote Workers
Jul 26, 2019Series: Remote Work
Pay remote workers the same as you’d pay local workers. Or vice versa if your local workers are cheap.
That’s it. That’s the blog post.
It’s 2019, folks. Average home internet speeds are more than enough for video
conferencing and every single laptop has a built-in video camera. Conference
room video hardware has come way down in price and gone way up in quality.
Everyone collaborates via Slack and email and Jira and wikis and shared
documents in the cloud *anyway*. Our code is hosted in the cloud, ci/cd in the
cloud, deployed to the cloud. Why on earth would it matter where your desk is?
The truth is, it doesn’t matter. With extremely low effort, any company can hire remote folks and have them be productive, collaborative members of a team. I should know, I’ve done it for the last 8 years.
One thing that always comes up with remote employees is “how much should I pay them?” I’m not exactly sure why this is even a question…. actually, yes, I am sure. Because companies are cheap and want to pay employees as little as possible. They are, after all, a business. So I guess the question is more accurately asked “How can I justify paying my employees less while still getting great talent?”
The answer is always the same - cost of living adjustments. The theory is that you pay everyone equitably, so they all sustain the same standard of living. i.e. you pay the person in San Francisco enough for rent and food and spending money for a new XBox every month. You do the same for the person in rural Ohio - rent, food, Xbox every month.
Just like a meritocracy, on its face, this sounds perfectly fair. But peek under
the surface, and it’s easily dismissed as false equivalence. *Why* is a SF
apartment four times the cost of the same apartment in rural Ohio? Because of
supply and demand. Because people *believe* the apartment in SF is worth more,
so they’re willing to pay more. Why do they believe that? Because the apartment
in SF is near awesome restaurants, easy public transportation, lots of great
similar-minded folks, etc. etc.
These are attributes of the apartment that don’t fit on a spreadsheet of square
footage, number of bedrooms, and lot size… but they have a huge effect on the
price of the home. Clearly, *that* is what you’re paying for when you buy a
$500k studio in SF.
So, if the house in SF is clearly more valuable than an equivalent-sized one in rural Ohio… why should the company subsidize paying for those invisible benefits that come with a house in SF? Would you pay someone more who lived in a bigger house in the same city? Why not? Why is it ok for companies to subsidize the location-based value of a home, but not the value derived from square-footage or lot size?
To put a finer point on it… would you pay someone less who lives on the wrong side of the tracks in the same city? That’s still location-based, isn’t it?
The thing is, the value of money isn’t actually different in SF and rural Ohio. Buying an XBox from Amazon costs the same in both places. $3000 a month in rent for a studio or $3000 a month in mortgage for a 4 bedroom house…. still costs you $3000. If you live in SF, you’re saying that studio’s location is worth $3000 a month to you. If you live in rural Ohio, you’re saying the extra bedrooms and big backyard are worth $3000 a month to you.
…so why would you pay the person in Ohio less?
Someone on Twitter mentioned they understood paying people more who live in high cost of living areas, but thought it would be weird to pay people less who live in low cost of living areas…. but it’s really the exact same thing. You pay the person in SF more, and you’re just paying everyone else less. You can’t have it one way and not the other.
Does this mean you have to compete with Google’s salaries if your company is in
rural Ohio? Yes and no. It’s true that Google and the other big-five tech
companies pay people a lot more. But that’s true even in Silicon Valley. I’ve
interviewed at lots of SF companies that weren’t able to compete with those kind
of salaries either, but they still get to hire a lot of great talent. The big
five may have a lot of devs, but they can’t hire *all* the devs. And since
hiring is really hard, they don’t even get all the best devs. The big five
mostly pay a lot of money to keep the other four from poaching… i.e. they’re
really only competing with each other.
So, you might not have to compete with the Googles of the world, but you probably do have to compete with the Salesforces, Stripes, and (previous to acquisition) Githubs. While those companies generally pay more than some random tech company, it’s not double or triple. It’s like 30% more. And honestly, developers are worth that much. Basically every company in existence needs developers, or needs to pay a service vendor for specialized software.
Hiring managers - the onus is on you to stop this predatory and unfair hiring practice. Don’t accept it as “just the way things are”. Speak up against it. Fight to get your remote developers the same salary and benefits your on-site folks get. Their work is just as valuable to the company as the local folks, paying them less is unfair, insulting, and wrong.
This is a post in the **Remote Work** series.
Other posts in this series:
- Jul 26, 2019 - How to Pay Remote Workers
- May 14, 2019 - Hiring Remote
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http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
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Social Collapse Best Practices
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The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audio of the talk is available here. Video of the talk is available here.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that's gone wrong. I know it's a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn't you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk.
I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno – some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I'll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would seem.
You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight, because I am one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way?
I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from experience – luckily, from other people's experience – that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA ("F" is for "Former"). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn't make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.
I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.
Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that's my little intervention.
If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup." Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. Please don't be too concerned, though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.
I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time.
I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up straddling the two worlds – the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia, and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian can. But I went through high school and university in the US .I had careers in several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse first-hand.
By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since.
The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable.
The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term "hyperpower" and were jabbering on about full-spectrum dominance. All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan Greenspan chided us about "irrational exuberance" while consistently low-balling interest rates. It was the "Goldilocks economy" – not to hot, not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually more of a "Tinker-bell" economy, because the last five or so years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt pyramids, the "whole house of cards" as President Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now we can look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo.
While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During that time, I was watching the action in the oil industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles' heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half a decade. Perhaps you’ve noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here: people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So please make a mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am making a specific prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen, just silently add “plus or minus half a decade.”
In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn’t too far off. In June of 2005 I published an article on the subject, titled "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century," which was quite popular, even to the extent that I got paid for it. It is available at various places on the Internet. A little while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the "Collapse Gap" concept, which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The slide show from that presentation, titled "Closing the Collapse Gap," was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then. Then, in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to follow, I published a short article titled “The Five Stages of Collapse,” which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that I am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made enough predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take half a decade, please remember that), collapse is well underway, and now I am just an observer.
But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It’s like looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.
In organizations, especially large organizations, “best practices” also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to “think outside the box” whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn’t feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think – a box better suited to the post-collapse environment.
Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.
Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.
If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head said so.
But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!
So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.
Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.
So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.
Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn.
The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms. Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem.
Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered, raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers’ markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once the economy collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest. The kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they made a huge difference.
The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period. Black humor has always been one of Russia’s main psychological coping mechanisms. A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it is completely empty. So he asks the butcher: “Don’t you have any fish?” And the butcher answers: “No, here is where we don’t have any meat. Fish is what they don’t have over at the seafood counter.”
Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued even during the worst of times, partly because has always been such an important part of the Russian diet, and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used public transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact cities. This combination of factors made for some lean times, but very little malnutrition and no starvation.
In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive.
Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.
Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren’t really burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.
Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest.
An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses.
How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money, right?
Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.
These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.
Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower? A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a “realistic” price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live.
Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container... The list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out.
As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution.
One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them.
Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards.
College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don’t we.
Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don’t get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings.
All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production. More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price.
Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s needed for some small but critical mission.
I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no belly.
So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced.
Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we run out of gas.
Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars. The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.
Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos don’t require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.
And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn’t safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how could I think of doing such a thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting observations along the way.
One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.
A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world’s largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting to happen as well, except for the currently planned little side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee – forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let’s give that one… half a decade?
But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.
And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not "on the force" and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.
I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or bad per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in a post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will not have time to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last thing we should have to worry about.
Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic – you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.
Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and distribute, a new agricultural implement. It's a sort of flail studded with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost-effective, and reasonably safe provided you don’t lose your head while using it, although people have taken to calling the “flying guillotine.” You think that this is an acceptable risk, but you are concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability. Once again, it is very helpful to have a large number of influential, physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever some legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine, and generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably, without any money changing hands, and without signing any legal documents.
Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if someone else has the firepower to bring the government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and convince it to be reasonable and to play nice.
Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you can provide some relief to people who wouldn’t otherwise have any health care. You don’t dare call yourself a doctor, because these people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life’s savings. But suppose you have some medical training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through the various licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally unstable friends.
Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department.
I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later.
So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this: “My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?” And I tell them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way.
So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them.
OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any money? How is that done? Good question.
As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better than living in a ghost town.
What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.
If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.
## 75 comments:
Thank you again Dmitri! You may riff on a few familiar themes, but you do it the way a jazz virtuoso does it: you make it fresh so we listen anew. Thanks for making the effort! You'll never know how many lives you save but you'd need more than fingers and toes to count them.
OK, silly me - you wrote this, of course. And you did an admirable job. Really. I believe you have a handle on it all, not just because you've experienced what happened in the USSR, er, Russia, but because "it has the ring of truth." I believe the whole system is artificial, rigged, corrupt, etc., ad nauseum.
I recommend reading Dr. John Coleman's Committee of 300 book and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US: 1492 to Present in order to understand the extent of the above; then reading Vladimir Megre's Ringing Cedars series of nine books; followed by a good dose of what Tom Brown, Jr. teaches. If you are willing to undergo that regimen, I'd like to hear Part II of your Orlovian hoedown. I do not think it will be much different, really, than what is here, except that the new emphasis may be on, well, I'm not sure - I'll leave that up to you...
Jonathan D. Suss
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-JZ_.5LQibrVdbGTbqB0-?cq=1
Dmitry, I was one of those in attendance last evening and really appreciated the way you injected lightheartedness into your presentation, which most found very depressing. You are right - it is hard to make much money speaking about collapse, especially when it is your culture that is collapsing!
I started a discussion on the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network (mostly futurists) in December 2007 and included several quotations in my initial post, including one of yours. So it was good to see you in person. I would have talked with you afterward but my friends and I didn't want to wait around and stand in line.
Congratulations on the magnificent turnout by the way. People must FINALLY be willing to look at the possibility, now that it is in their faces.
Many thanks again,
John Renesch
Thank you for the speech to the Long now Foundation. I enjoyed it even more than your book.
Thanks for your talk last night at the Long Now and thanks for posting a copy of it here. Are you familiar with the author Morris Berman? He wrote a book entitled "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase Of Empire" that was published in 2006. Your lecture had similar predictions and themes. Your direct experience with the USSR though brings a powerful new perspective.
My research suggests that the global collapse will occur rapidly: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
I took one room in Central Square, Cambridge, MA off-grid for less than $200 a few years ago and my community garden plot a couple of blocks away provides lots of nice veggies from May to November. Tried twice to tell the landlords that the south-facing porches could easily be converted to sunspaces or greenhouses when they renovated but they weren't interested.
Over the years, I've made it a point to cultivate my relationships with the local growers who come to the farmers' market I helped organize as many of us could see thirty years ago that the American agricultural system was not sustainable for the long-term. Since last summer, a local group has hosted a weatherization barnraising once a month. We could do one a week if we had enough team leaders for the various tasks, the organizers inform me. Thirty years ago, some of us were doing solar barnraisings. Some of those installations are still up and running (http://solarray.blogspot.com/2008/09/old-solar-1980-barnraised-solar-air.html).
For over a decade, I've tried to convince people in the green community that demonstrating energy efficiency and renewable techniques at farmers' markets weekly could change the energy culture in this country in a year and would be worth much more than spending all our time and effort on getting legislation passed. Of course, it might be faster to do energy education by video. I have an outline for a program that focuses on what to do with one south-facing window but nobody's been interested (http://solarray.blogspot.com/2004/12/three-solar-projects.html).
I say Solar IS Civil Defense. You can see exactly what I mean at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2008/05/solar-is-civil-defense-illustrated.html
The combination of a few square inches of solar electric panel and a hand-cranked generator provides a reliable supply of low voltage DC electricity day or night by sunlight or muscle power. My guess is the future is a low energy future and I'm starting with AA batteries and building from there.
@ Gmoke,
We face a liquid fuels crisis.
Independent studies indicate that global crude oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 50 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time, demand will increase. Oil supplies will be even tighter for the U.S. As oil producing nations consume more and more oil domestically they will export less and less. Because demand is high in China, India, the Middle East, and other oil producing nations, once global oil production begins to decline, demand will always be higher than supply. And since the U.S. represents one fourth of global oil demand, whatever oil we conserve will be consumed elsewhere. Thus, conservation in the U.S. will not slow oil depletion rates significantly.
Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. There is no plan nor capital for a so-called electric economy. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment. The independent scientists of the Energy Watch Group conclude in a 2007 report titled: “Peak Oil Could Trigger Meltdown of Society:”
"By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame."
With increasing costs for gasoline and diesel, along with declining taxes and declining gasoline tax revenues, states and local governments will eventually have to cut staff and curtail highway maintenance. Eventually, gasoline stations will close, and state and local highway workers won’t be able to get to work. We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel and gasoline powered trucks for bridge maintenance, culvert cleaning to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, and roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, large transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables from great distances. With the highways out, there will be no food coming from far away, and without the power grid virtually nothing modern works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated building systems.
Documented here:
http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
One thing that is a BIGGY is that the USA is now so multicultural 'unlike the USSR' I think the USA will explode with violence...also the USSR most people didnt own guns.
As a historian I can tell you during bad times multicultural civilizations fail.
Also all your ideas are good but nothing is being done..and wont be done its only wishful thinking.
The USA has 310 million people, of 100 different ethnic group, and 30 differenet races, no infastructor, a modern generation of idiots use to MTV and video games.
Sorry but I left the place 5 years ago and have resettled in an Eastern European nation.
Those who prepare in the USA need to understand your preparations wont help you but maybe 2-3 months more to be better off.
America is facing a collpase that will make the USSR collpase look like a puppet show.
Your comments are very insightful, especially to someone that has been following peak oil for a while.
I would be curious to get your comments on the book "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein in relation to these topics. She outlines the influence that the Chicago School of Business and Milton Friedman had on South America, South Africa, Poland and Russia through what she calls "disaster capitalism", as well as the role of the IMF played.
About Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine": it is very mid-twentieth century in its approach. It prefers to dwell on "evil" vs. "goodness" rather than starting from the bigger facts of finiteness, the disastrous idea of continuous "growth", the disaster of overpopulation and the energy catastrophe that is coming. In other words, she dwells on ideology. There is nothing wrong with her analysis, but she is adressing the wrong questions. There are much bigger and fundamental questions, and those relate not to political parties and ideologies but to survival. You could take all the capitalists and bankers, including those in Wall Street, and bury them, and you would still be facing the same fundamental problems.
I would go so far as to say that Klein is a distraction from the fundamental problems. She is a brave woman, she speaks her mind, she writes an attractive paragraph... but ultimately, it's more of the same. We are not in the twentieth century anymore. What we face is a total collapse of everyday life. Ideologies are not the thing today, only action is. And things like the propaganda system have been given a definitive treatment by Herman and Chomsky, for example. It's well understood. Totalitarian control under electoral systems is also very well understood since Huxley, Orwell and many others.
In my opinion, Klein would be well advised to use her tremendous energy to work on helping turn the country local and addressing concrete problems such as food, energy and transportation. How the current (hopeless) system works is perfectly well understood. We need to move on.
I continue to be stunned and amazed by the quality of some of the comments people post to this blog. About Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, I entirely agree that it is simply a distraction. There is one additional way in which it is a distraction: the hidden presupposition that what Americans do actually matters in the world. Her claim is that the US had a lot to do with the Soviet collapse, but that mistakes were made: screwing up is still better psychologically than not mattering at all. Her additional hidden presupposition is that Americans can do better: that the leopard can change its spots. And then there is also the meta-notion that we can gain a useful understanding of a turbulent, confused period in that very complex part of the world just by a reading a book in English, written for the general audience, by someone who is neither a Russian nor a Russian scholar.
Thank you so much for posting the text of your speech as I was unable to make it to the live presentation.
I spent six weeks in the Soviet Union in 1991, as a guest of my penpal Sergei in Irkutsk. When you write of the apartments, the shops, dachas, etc., you powerfully evoke my memories of that time. Sergei also took us on the Trans-Siberian to Moscow and then on to Leningrad/St Petersburg. We left the country on August 19 -- the first day of the coup d'etat attempt.
Also wanted to mention that I am spearheading a Transition Initiative in my town, recognizing that people are all over the map in terms of their readiness/willingness to be awake and aware... and trying to help them all knit more closely together and grow the resilience of our community.
Thanks for your voice of experience and wisdom. Your writings serve as useful navigational markers and as cautionary tales at the same time.
Judith
Thank you for sharing this talk with us. It's awful to think that the 'unthinkable' might happen here, but it never hurts to be fairly warned and properly prepared. I'd like to think that the sudden rise in local food production and back yard chickens means that people are paying attention. I've been container gardening for several years- now I need to ramp it up.
I'm sharing your talk with friends on my blog. It's definitely a subject we get into discussing. You should see if you can bring your talk to the Clinton School here in Little Rock- the faculty always appreciates interesting speakers.
Above, another Anonymous said:
"You could take all the capitalists and bankers, including those in Wall Street, and bury them, and you would still be facing the same fundamental problems."
Undoubtedly, but wouldn't the world be just a little bit better off without them?
Cheers Dmitri! I read the presentation last night. Tonight I noticed that John Robb, Bruce Stirling and Boing Boing have mentioned it. I hope you find a very wide audience.
The day after Lehman was allowed to collapse I was reading through some comments on a New York Times blog post about the matter. Someone wrote that it's time to get ready for the next boom. I wrote back that it's time to learn how the Russians managed to feed themselves in the early '90s.
Thank you.
thank you for being honest and real. may we meet as friends.
Wildflower 09
I've called to my Russian friends yesterday and found out that their food prices almost equal ours. How it can be if you take in consideration that their wages ten times less?
I think they live on basics. And most American wages are spending on to buy waste and garbage. So our economy on 90% produces "garbage" and social collapse is actually in stopping buying and producing unnecessary things.
Good article. I think the comments against Klein are "typically American" however. Just get enough guns and a cabin in the wilderness, when, in fact, as the talk points out neighbors are crucial to survival and not just any neighbors. A neighborhood that is civil.
The Idaho white supremacist secessionists are just colorful examples of an American "type". There are a lot of Americans who fantasize about becoming roving barbarians perhaps because they are little prepared for much else. Me, I want to preserve society ala the book "The Twilight of American Civilization". Monastic communities of learning that preserve knowledge until it is valued and useful again in s sane society.
That doesn't mean I don't want a monastery with thick and high walls, a good well, large granary and firepower. Traditionally, such monasteries have been quite, shall we say, "idealistic".
Haroshya rabota Dmitri. I'm interested in the biological roots of our dilemma, and the paradox between individual biology and community ecology. I wrote an essay on this subject which is posted at www.methownaturalist.com for those interested in this perspective, The title is Ecology & History, on the right when the page opens.
Off to plant potatoes now,
Dana Visalli
Who would have thought that those experiences I had as an anarchist squatter in the 1980's were teaching me valuable life skills? :)
A grim outlook, but a very realistic one. I hope science will provide at least
someanswers to the problems we are facing. But then again: there is no denyingGlobal Change(forget about global warming...), predicted since the seventies (Club of Rome, Limits to Growth).Xander
http://ohm2.be
D. Orlov's depiction of USA as a nationwide version of Deliverance sounds very realistic and the paralell with Russia should be continued. It was the discrete armed gangs that made fortunes for Abramovich and gave the country to Putin, who freely executes rogue agents and journalists. Everything was up for grabs and the guys with the muscle took it- so you can already see how that turns out.
Call me old-fashioned if I strongly resist the materialization of this scenario.
The collapse of the USSR also didn't prepare the society for a more logic way of handling things because in less than 10 years Russians were already going around in Hummers. In a sense Russia is more dependent on oil than ever- it has none of the redemptive social qualities of before nor a disciplined and large army- basically if Europeans stop warming their showers with natural gas the huge country implodes- I'm sorry, Gazprom does- in 2 months.
All these characteristics that allowed for survival are meaningless because they are now completely gone (even despised) and replaced by a society that is just as or more explosive, unbalanced and wasteful as the USA, with even greater class friction.
"I also proposed a Biblical jubilee – forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let’s give that one… half a decade?"
Do you really think this one will happen? If all debts can be wiped out, that means all current and future bond investments and credit card companies, and most of the banks, will be wiped out as well.
Those of us who have no debt will become ... annoyed ... at those who spent and borrowed beyond their means and now have, free and clear, houses with lots of land to grow food while we are still renting, living within our means.
Call me heartless but if this happens once, with no consequences for those whose debts are erased, what's to stop the whole big bubble from happening again with the *expectation* of another Jubilee? I'd rather see consequences for stupid actions to stop people from repeating them.
Did the USSR have a Jubilee? If so, what were the results?
~ Mendur
Actually, the jubilee makes a lot of sense. Debts that will never be repaid should be written off. Everybody starts from zero. But how will the government write off its own debt, since it owes to many debt-holders from all over the world?
The US government would have to repudiate its debt, thus sinking the dollar completely,dissolve the entire credit regime at home (burn down the credit report agencies, or financial Gestapo, and bury the ashes deep), etc. etc. Now, there goes a non-negotiable lifestyle!
It would also have to dissolve its military apparatus (at least abroad) and stop importing most of what it imports, since it would be prohibitive.
This is an interesting scenario but the psychological implications are vast, in fact unimaginable for ordinary folks.
What is power, ultimately? Tell people used to boast of "best country in the world" that they're going to be pariahs and see where that gets you. The prospect is scary. In such situations, messianic types usually appear. Very scary.
I came to Dmitri via the urbansurvival site, which I recommend highly -- it's the place where I also discovered a book some years ago called "Only in America" by John Soltez which nailed the scenario of American societal breakdown. Like another poster said, now it's we who have to look at unrest on our own soil.
We used to laugh at the planned Soviet economy, now look what we're getting with the banking bailouts! Maybe it's time we look at replacing the career pols in our Duma-- er uh Congress huh? I may try looking at what gmoke described, a room off the grid. Thanks for bringing up this most timely of topics.
"We used to laugh at the planned Soviet economy, now look what we're getting with the banking bailouts!"
This is worse, it's not even planned!
By the way, economist Michael Hudson has a brutal article on the bailouts:
http://counterpunch.org/hudson02172009.html
Re US National debt and Jubilee:
We could eliminate the mational debt without repudiating it.
At about $10 trillion, the US debt about equals the $10 trillion of our existing money supply, which is 97% "credit money" - debt issued by banks.
If, rather than the banks issuing our money by making bank loans, as now, the Government itself issued about $10 trillion of new Greenbacks, carrying no interest, that money could be used to pay off all outstanding national debt. The U.S. would just call the debt in, retire it, in exchange for interest-free Greenbacks. No repudiation needed.
This, by itself, would double the money supply and inflate the dollar by about 2:1, high indeed, but not hyperinflation by a long shot. (It would equal about 14 years of "normal" inflation of 5% per year.)
But even that 2:1 inflation could be avoided by raising bank reserve requirements as the Greenbacks were issued - many of which would be deposited with the banks, contributing to the needed increased reserves. (Some Greenbacks could also be lent by the U.S. directly to banks so they did not have to call outstanding loans due to inadequate reserves.)
No inflation, because the total money supply would remain at about $10 trillion, but now all as US Treasury Greenbacks rather than bank "credit money".
This would still leave the economy stalled under a mountain of unpayable debt. The kind of breakdown Dmitri describes can be avoided only by doing the above plus reducing that debt.
The needed debt reduction would require some combination of deliberate inflation, very steep progressive taxation plus redistribution, and/or widespread debt forgiveness - Jubilee.
By the time these needed steps become apparent to the Republicrats in power, it may well be too late: the dark days described by Dmitri could be inevitable.
We will then reduce debt in the fourth way available to do so: widespread repudiation of debts, concomitant to the complete social breakdown Dmitri so graphically describes.
Enjoyed your speech
www.eskisland.net
Please come and visit if you are ever in Australia
Mark
We, unlike Russia, will have racial wars on top of all other problems
The article speculates that it is better for prisoners to be released gradually rather than to be released en masse. However, if the laws are defunct and taxes are not flowing, it is possible that the prison guards would simply lock down the prisons for three days with no water, resulting in mass execution by thirst.
If the problem were compounded by law-and-order hysteria and racial conflict, such prison scenarios might even devolve into less concealed violence, e.g. guards shooting prisoners dead.
That's a very good article, and a refreshing change from those survivalists who believe a log cabin in the woods is their best bet. As someone who also has lived through the whole Soviet collapse, I do agree that surviving a collapse is much more of a social thing, and you are much better off in a city — or, better yet, a medium-sized town.
I'd also like to add a few thoughts of my own. First, the author has left out the question of currency. People will still need some sort of currency — it is much easier to get people to do favours for you if you can give them something of value. And, at least in the collapse of USSR, the Soviet rouble completely lost its value — so you could not possibly save them up. However, foreign currency was very valuable, especially — surprisingly enough — US dollars. In fact, for a long time, US dollars were the unofficial currency for buying anything of value. Of course, US dollars will not be of much value in a collapsing US economy, so may I suggest, say, Euros? If Europe survives the current crisis better, then Euro might as well become what US dollar was in the former USSR.
Another thing that is sure to pop up is some sort of unofficial local "currency" — some sort of commodity that is so widely accepted and used that it easily can serve as a quasi-currency. And, at least in post-Soviet times, that currency was vodka. A bottle of vodka could get you lots of favours — say, your tractor-driving neighbour could plough your field for a bottle, or a friend with a truck could bring you a truckload of firewood for a bottle, or it could even bribe someone. As Dmitri correctly points out, respectable men are prone to start drinking once their lives collapse. Therefore, there was always demand for vodka, and even people who didn't drink would willingly accept it, knowing they could trade it for things they need.
Second, there is another important basic element that hasn't been fully covered: heating. It somewhat goes together with shelter, but, as I am typing this, it is snowing outside, so I am very thankful that I don't have to live in just any sort of shelter — I can heat it and I can cook myself a hot meal. This, of course, depends on the climate, but overall, it is extremely important — spending a winter in an unheated shelter is a horrifying ordeal indeed. Back in post-Soviet times, whole blocks of apartment buildings installed small wood-burning stoves (your local welder could make one of these for — you guessed it — a few bottles). It looked ugly, with all the metal chimneys sticking out of the building, but it got the job done.
But, of course, these are just minor corrections. All in all, the article really makes a good point — if you are to survive a crisis — and even prosper — you have to depend on others. There is no way how you can pull through alone.
Comrade Orlov,
Could you one day please comment on the return of what you call "classical values." In my opinion I think this is an upside to our predictament. Does this mean the 2 opposites: extreme individualism and radical egalitarianism will fade away?
Thanks so much,
Tom
Dmitri, this is an EXCEEDINGLY useful essay. I hope you can do something to ensure its wide and rapid propagation. One idea might be to put it, loudly and ostentatiously, under one of the copyleft licenses, such as a Creative Commons license. (I myself use the the "GNU Free Documentation License", as you can see from
http://www.metascientia.com/PNNN____lit/BXPC____utopia__front_matter.html
But I notice that lots of people are now using Creative Commons licenses.)
Once your work is duly copylefted, no upright, dutiful, wanna-be-legal cybercitizens will retain any inhibitions about copying it to other servers, or in other ways publishing it, and yet it will be clear to such upright people that Dmitri Orlov continues to have to get credit for Dmitri Orlov's writing.
In thinking of what parts of your work I liked the VERY most, I ask myself, "At what point did I actually laugh out loud," and the answer to this is: "At the point at which you discuss Tashkent donkey-feeding."
I'd like to finish by telling my own small Soviet anecdote, which you may or may not have heard from me before. (I have certainly told it endlessly, and here I quite shamelessly recycle a writeup that I have already used elsewhere on the Web.)
((ANEKDOOT))
My late maternal grandmother,
Ekaterina Ranne, born in Estonia in
1892, was as a young wife brought
in the most immediate and physical
sense face to face with one of the
first great terrors of our time. The
year was, I suspect, 1918 or 1919 or
1920. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, having
assumed power in the Petrograd putsch
of 1917 November 6, was now seeking to
consolidate his Bolshevik despotism
through civil war. Grandma was at
the time in a village in Ukraine with
her young husband, seeking to escape
famine.
For a while, her village of
temporary refuge was in the hands of
Mensheviks. Then something happened - I
presume that some guys fired guns at
some other bunch of guys - and the
village changed hands. A soldier, one
of the incoming Bolsheviks, who must
by now have become accustomed to the
idea of shooting people for politics,
banged on Grandma's door. "Woman,"
he said, "our army is feeding. Give
us spoons." To this Grandma said,
"Spoons? What do you mean, spoons? The
only spoons we have in this house are
silver coffee spoons, and we are not
handing those out to Bolsheviks." The
gun-toter apologized, as of course he
had to apologize, and he went on to
the next house.
((ANEKDOOT))
The point of the "anekdoot" is that in collapse, it can sometimes be quite USEFUL and LOVING and LIFE-AFFIRMING to be obstinately bourgeois. Of course one does have to decide just how bourgeois to be, and how long to keep it up, and how to ahem-ahem modulate the performance, and Grandma (she lived to be 99 and a half years of age) was both supremely loving and supremely skilled. :-) :-)
Wickedly,
gratefully,
Toomas (Tom) Karmo
verbum at interlog dot com
http://www.metascientia.com
It should be borne in mind that man is not born helpless or "needy". That is a social construct. Man is born with everything he needs. I think people might be missing a point in Orlov's writings, namely, that they are essentially life-affirming. He is pointing out potentialities that always exist but that do not manifest themselves in a cocooned life or when there is an illusion of "security" or "stability".
In reality, security does not exist, life offers no assurance of anything. This latter point is lost on many Americans. That may be why the US reacted in such a ridiculous and self-defeating (and ruinous) way to the 9-11 attacks. You don't go berserk because a mosquito bites you. But those attacks shook the illusion of security. It turned out to be an important illusion, psychologically.
Likewise, the illusion of the middle-class life, a life of comfort, is very potent. It is almost considered a right. This has no basis in reality.
The more rigid the mental structures, the worse the crisis will be for people. And I hope people like Orlov can at least loosen up something in the public and promote the flexibility that will be essential in these times.
My fear is that the extreme selfishness that goes with the security blanket wish will lead to explosions of violence, possibly racial violence or violence against immigrants, for example. Or random violence, which also has a history in this country.
Obama has made a mistake in not putting his cards on the table, preaching real humility and, above all, telling the truth and acting in consequence. His statement about preserving the lifestyle is actually scary. So is his intention of intensifying the war. There is no humility there.
Welcome to hard times.
To read you advocate a Biblical debt jubliee made me smile from ear-to-ear:
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #431: Acceleration
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #441: Nash V. Smith
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #427: 777
And others are ringing that bell now too:
777: Universal Debt Erasure
How long and how loud will it have to ring before people acknowledge it?
Thanks for your wit, Dmitry. This is about all the collapse literature I can stand to read, and you make it livable.
I can't stand to read 99% of the rest, because I'm doing my best to maintain a positive outlook, build the chicken and bee houses, and learn lost skills.
Why does the 'survival' literature simply keep hashing how bad it is and how badder it is going to get? What do they have to prove?
I am concentrating on skills, learning, and finding allies and friends. There's really no time for much else.
"I can't stand to read 99% of the rest, because I'm doing my best to maintain a positive outlook, build the chicken and bee houses, and learn lost skills."
And, especially, stay away from the many conspiracy theories that mushroom during times of collapse. Those guys will drive you nuts. Follow your nose, do what you need to do, enlist others, but don't waste time thinking about bad evil forces. If they exist, you likely can do nothing about them. And if they don't exist and the collapse is due to just incompetence based on bad ideas, you have also wasted your time.
Your main and first duty is to put bread on the table, your first obligation is to your family -- an old Buddhist teaching, actually!
Theories of everything, especially about Evil, are rarely helpful. First, to clean one's own house.
Good luck with the chickens and everything else you're working on.
Bravo! Thanks for opening our eyes to the social collapse scenario. Born and raised in an era of prosperity and stability we are just too oblivious to the risk of decline and collapse that has happened regularly in the history.
May I also suggest Buddhism to be a remedy of the pain in such world? Buddhism teaches us that earthy possessions are only delusion and we should dissociate ourselves from such desire. Looking at our stock holdings and equities and all those hedge fund fraud it seems this 2000 year old wisdom is as true as ever.
Excellent as always Dmitri - here in NZ we've been a bit quiet since $150 oil and the obvious consequences. Great to hear you keeping it real!
Steve McKinlay - PowerLess NZ.
Here is an interesting article about the biofuels boondoggle:
http://counterpunch.org/bryce02192009.html
I did notice that Tommy Friedman of the NYT had been promoting the Brazil biofuel miracle, and I also knew that he was lying or being totally naive. This article lays out some facts.
The establishment will do anything to preserve agribusiness, anything.
Weaning the US off agribusiness and back into agriculture may be one of the toughest reeducation tasks ever undertaken, and it will have to be done.
Here is the Orwell problem again: how do you convince the population that bad food is terrible for them, even though, intellectually, they know it's bad and they also know it's bad for them? I mean, anybody who has planted some tomatoes on his own and then tasted them can tell the difference. Or anybody who has baked bread with just flour, yeast and water can tell that what they're being sold typically is crap.
One would imagine that food is pretty central to people's lives.
Many people mentioned in the comments, that during the collapse of the USSR there were no racial problems. That is not quite true. Many russians were forced to leave the asian ex-soviet republics and the national republics (subjects of the Russian Federation) in the Caucasus. Than there was that war in Chechnya (our friends from the Pentagon and CIA really did their best). Now that "evil Putin" restored whole sectors of the economy including the high-tech industries, the national problem is the most serious one facing the society. Nationalistic and skinhead movements are widespread.
European and american cities have a shortcoming that russian cities never had, though. Ghettoes.The level of life there is not this high already, but in the light of the possible economic collapse, ghettoes are going to become America's worst nightmare.
office plankton! omg, in two words you've described my entire adult career.
All good information.
Here's what I've planned:
I've found a spot, made friends
on the Pacific coast in a benign
(in all ways) clime far from the
cities. One friend there offered
a large lot next to his restaurant,
meters from the ocean,
for me to park a trailer on, supplying me water and the lot all at no cost. I will be fishing with
a cast net, a common practice there.
The area is full of orchards and
fields of all kinds of fruits and
veggies. I will be planting my own on that lot. Food and shelter will
not be a problem. I'm familiar with
the local language and culture as
they are to some degree with mine.
We are compatible with little effort.
I suggest some of you should look
into such a move very soon.
Brilliant! I live near a downtown area in a neighborhood that, once desirable, has become rather shoddy and crime ridden. Some neighbors and I have started a neighborhood association, petitioned the city to give us the vacant lots that pepper the area and are now putting in *edible parks*. We have also begged local plant nurseries for fruit bearing trees and shrubs, which several have donated in return for their names on a sign! Several neighbors raise chickens, so a steady supply of eggs is insured here. Everyone sees what's coming (it seems) EXCEPT the politicos that continue to make soothing comments to assuage the voters.
Jomama,
You said, "I suggest some of you should look into such a move very soon."
I'll do you one better. I sold my house last summer, took the profits, bought a 5th wheel, and am parking it on a friends property. Her house (one acre, gardens, just outside Portland, OR) will be in foreclosure soon because she can't get ahold of the bank to work out a refinance on her A.R.M. They're too busy foreclosing on other properties and sorting thru the mess to pick up the phone or answer emails. She's simply going to stop making payments when the interest rate jumps 6 points on her loan, wait till the sheriff shows up, then move back in with her folks. Her guess is this may take up to a year. Until then, we're welcome to park the rig, give her $350/month for her troubles, and everybody's happy. She may move out sooner than that, in which case we're welcome to stay as long as we like.
I suppose we'll be squatters at that point. When the bank sends us letters to leave, we'll offer to stay and caretake the property, or simply ignore the letters. Depends on our mood at the time.
Before we decided to move in with our friend we put an ad on Craiglsist looking for a similar arrangement and got many interesting offers. Lots of people out there with land in need of a few extra bucks.
We have a 5,000 sq/ft garden at another friends backyard. All she asks in return is some tomatoes and the occasional dozen eggs from our chickens.
I teach middle school kids for a living and have had my pay reduced once this year and the state legislature is talking about shutting the doors of all schools early to save a few bucks. For the first time in my life I'm not sweating a cut in pay. Kind of looking forward to the extra days off actually. My colleagues are panicked about not being able to pay the mortgage and are taking in renters, selling cars, and moving overseas to teach.
My wife and three kids (all under age 8) love living in the RV (we got rid of 90% of our junk) and we're kicking ourselves for not doing this sooner.
Glad to hear there are others out there doing this.
My wife wants to ignore the student loan bills. I'm leaning that way now that we're unplugged from suburbia and mortgages. Anybody have thoughts on that one? Currently we are deferring while the interest accrues.
Enjoy the ride,
Mr. Emrich
i like how you weave that humor in there, black as it may be.
Thank you Dmitri!
Wonderful speech. Wish I could have seen it in person.
One of the situations I find most difficult is that the vast majority of Americans are still oblivious to the fact that dramatic changes are inevitable in our not too distant future. I find it very painful that my family thinks I am crazy because I want to prepare for these changes and refuse to do anything for themselves to prepare for the changes. I hate to say it but I almost wish we would start the changes already so people would stop thinking I am insane when I talk about it (which is rarely.) I kind of feel like it must be what waiting surgery to remove a tumor is like. The waiting is torture.
Dmitry, your Power point presentation comparing the similarities between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US collapse was so compelling that I read and now continue to re-read, and even study, various sections of Reinventing Collapse. It clearly articulates in a concise fashion some of the many ways that America is really in a worse situation than the Soviet Union. However of all of the critical areas that you have discussed, I find that security is the most critical. Let me be blunt, there are a lot of people living in America, who when impacted to the point of losing their jobs, homes, retirements etc., will be looking for someone to blame. On the other hand there will also be those who will welcome this as opportunity to add to the insanity during this free for all. Crime in large cities will go through the roof. I think the security risk though touched upon understates this problem in this ethnically diverse population with its history of unresolved racial baggage. I personally believe that people will perceive that they have legitimate grievances and fueled by existing levels of anger and contempt will more likely to blame someone other than someone who looks like them for their collective misery. This path of least resistance will be taken rather than the path which seeks to understand the real culprits in our government and in corporations. This includes a long list of people who had it and lost it all and those who never had anything and who see other people as the reason for that as well. Their will be others who will act and prey on people because they be perceived as part of the oppressor group. All groups have their own ideologies as to how things came to be, and I am sure racial tension will increase. So if as you say there tends to be more violence in the collapse of societies where there is more racial diversity, then reading between the lines we are talking about anything from unpretentious self imposed or imposed segregation which is sort of what many place have now, to race riots to ethnic cleansing.
The shame of it all is that even during collapse no one will step in and set the record straight, and the blame game will be the direct result of having a populace that on one hand doesn’t know or understand the true history of America’s rise, and on the other who simply doesn’t care. And that’s just on the domestic front. Like many countries America’s story is not the fairytale that many believe it to be. For hundreds of years now this knowledge gap just continued to get filled in with spin and rhetoric. In a nut shell the result is a people who don’t realize that everything that we took from others can in fact be taken from us. It is just a matter of what process is used. Today, economics rather than warfare is the preferred process.
To sum it up, uninformed with regard to both history and the contributing structural problems regarding our economy such as globalization, central banking, fiat money, fractional reserved lending, derivatives, and so on, the American Dream was subsidized and artificially created by asymmetrical trade policies and unsound monetary practices. As this dream collapses, many Americans won’t realize that it’s not that their cheese has been moved, it’s that the cow has been killed. Coping with this will not be easy for anyone.
RELOCATION, RELOCATION, RELOCATION, that is what I specialize in. clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com
http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the good ideas and book recommendations, commenters. I think I'll make use of Craigslist, too.
JJ
[Anonymous, Feb 15]: "You could take all the capitalists and bankers, including those in Wall Street, and bury them, and you would still be facing the same fundamental problems."
But the speed and the scale of those fundamental problems could had been entirely different. The Ryan-Friedman post-Darwinian free-market ideology pushed basically all the people into maximally destructive and irresponsible behavior. People just don't imagine other alternatives how to live their lives! Greed is the only sure thing to believe; selfishness is the only duty to follow...
The greed rationality should really be shaken. It is too simplistic to say that people were always that greedy and mean, even worse in the past. My hypothesis is that the Chicago school "freedom for greed" ideology is a wild experiment that has to end relatively soon. (Naomi Klein actually gives a good account of how radical the Friedmanian influence was.) Such a greed experiment was not the first one in the humanity history, almost surely. The pattern must had been the same: a burst of greed discovery, a merry boom, and then... Rather optimistically, I suspect eventually a long period of moral boredom again ;-)
If you really look at the Nature, the greed rationale can be questioned soon. The Nature is not a "Monopoly" game with few winners; tragedy of commons situations are selected out long ago. Little boom-and-bust cycles are under control of recurring patterns. And a jungle is more of a rich provider to anyone living there than a brutal killer.
The human nature might be not be that unabatedly greedy as the rational "positivist" theories proclaim. But many people can be fooled with some capital utopias and "invisible hand" fables. How else do you call a situation when so many people were confident of the way to build riches, get a housing and retirement, but won't get any of that?
When it come to adaptation, the speed and scale of "fundamental" problems matters a lot.
"...I almost wish we would start the changes already..."
Direct action. Just find out about land that's not being used. It may help if the owner is unknown. Land use is a huge deal. Reclaim it for public domain. Begin cultivating unused areas with permaculture principles. Anybody giving you a hard time for cultivating a city like my hometown Detroit is gonna look like a total bonehead.
Love,
Jason
Re: Chicago Boys, etc. Agreed on the Chile experiment. However, you can't really blame Milton Friedman for what elected representatives decide to do and actually do. The blame is not the theoretician's. The former Soviet Union could blame Marx, but to what avail? Marx did nothing, they did.
Yet another brutal article by economist Michael Hudson about what is going on with "rescuing the banking system". Warning: this might be a bit hard on an empty stomach.
http://counterpunch.org/hudson02232009.html
Even if it was elected officials who decided to do shock therapy and other Chicago prescriptions, the not-subtle pressure was from Chicagoan institutions. What were the 1990's governments in Bolivia, Poland, South Africa to do when the only "expert" advise was from IMF and Chicago luminaries? They could hardly know anything better than woefully accept the "real capitalism" rules told by confident Friedman's guys.
As for Marx, he could claim crucial influence not only on Bolsheviks, but on classical social-democracy as well. That is nothing to be embarrassed of.
Dmitri's comparison with the Soviet collapse is great. But was it really economic reasons that did the Soviet Union in? The Perestroika reforms were rather started from a perceived crisis, and then the disintegration happened in some 6 years as a train. The system hardly showed any wish of survival; even the August coup was the lousiest possible. Doesn't the Soviet collapse look like just a case of a willful "pro-market" break up of the social network?
I listened to this on podcast this morning and could not stop laughing at all the jokes interspersed with the very serious social and economic observations. My favourite was feeding the WSJ to the donkey. Bravo and thank you for speaking up. Denise
"I listened to this on podcast this morning and could not stop laughing at all the jokes interspersed with the very serious social and economic observations. My favourite was feeding the WSJ to the donkey. Bravo and thank you for speaking up. Denise"
Burros are incredible animals. Talk about making the transportation industry more efficient... it doesn't get much more efficient than a donkey, especially in mountainous villages with tortuous streets.
It took me about a week to really read this. I've stumbled across these things, my wife and I use Mad Max as a verb for fertilizer through an electric shredder.
But this is truly an amazing read.
My green thumb will prove valuable. Good to know.
I'm wondering where the best places to hunker down would be. I know the west is going to have water problems.
If the internet survives, I'll try to keep posting to my organic gardening blog so people can grow their own food. Save seeds!
Very interesting ... !!!
Do you think it will be this dramatic? My prediction since 1981 has been that we would slouch toward the Latin American situation, i.e., get poorer and more insolvent yearly, but not go to this apocalyptic scenario. Now I have to study you more closely to figure out why it will be more like the Russian collapse ... do you have any quick words as to why we won't just join, say, the current Peru in terms of poverty levels?
Great talk, Dmitry. I've enjoyed a lot of your writings, but one thing I've seen you mention but only casually is the possibility of large-scale ethnic strife during a collapse scenario. There's a lot of literature about this kind of thing out there, mostly from white nationalist authors, and of mixed quality (well, mostly poor quality), as well as some comments from recognized military experts and historians, but I haven't seen you go into it in any real depth. I don't know if you do requests, but could you write something about what you see as far as the potential of ethnic warfare and ethnic balkanization during a collapse scenario? Obviously very important for collapse preparation. Thanks.
Great speech Dmitry! I now realize that I have been preparing for this eminent collapse within the wrong pretenses and forethought. The Establishment expects the remaining citizens and undesirables to eliminate each other; however, you have shown how we can take their "Plan" and shove it up their asses. I live in a remote region of Virginia and have 2 acres of farmable valley land. My collective neighbors feel that they will have to pick-off the Mexican (or other) intruders to maintain their safety. However, you have pointed-out an option that none of us considered... to embrace this onslaught of intruders and have them work with us for a common-good. Absolutely effen brilliant! No one wants to die, and everyone (even illegal’s) wants to survive the coming economic demise of America, as well as the World of people whom will be thrown into an environment of chaos.
Wow, I tell people this stuff and they just stare for a while and move on, I don't think it's that they think I'm nut's (yes they do) Most people can't handle the truth. They don't care, if they don't look at it- it will go away' as if it were a bad dream.
About the speech, you are depended on people keeping their heads and creating these crappy little survival units. That's not going to happen! This Gov't loves it's power way to much to let that happen. If you love your God given FREEDOM you will perpare to stand up for it!! even fight for it only after that will what you talked about in your speech come into play. Realize that to get there from the colapse that you speak of will be bloody. And FREEDOM will hang in the balance.
Truly sorry all to be even more of a downer. But if we can stand up for Freedom at the begining of all this craziness what we will have on the side will be the solid building blocks of a still free society. Thank you and regards, Dan Enright
Hi Dmitri, I tend to agree with most of your theses. However, the past is not a recipe for the future. I.e., modern Russia, having gotten the taste of its scavenger bazaar version of "capitalism" and having progressed through to a sort of neo-feudal stage (with medieval religious beliefs, nationalism, and superstitions on the rise) will respond differently to the new crisis.
Also, the Obama administration is clever enough (I think) to "boil the crab" slowly by raising the temperature 1 degree at a time, so the crab does not jump out of the pot. Of course, this does not change the fundamentals of the impending national bankruptcy but it can stretch it out and disguise it.
Every strata of the community will respond somewhat differently to the crisis, depending on its psychology, material and political means at its disposal, and the international situation (such as a potential state of war).
Reading through forums like this, we may get a wrong idea of how most people think and act. The Chinese, for example, are responding to the crisis by using their surplus of dollars to buy up resources to fuel their next stage of growth (military and industrial). Will oil get onto another hyper-inflationary spiral, together with the essential commodities like food? Not sure about that one.
Dmitry: After reading The New Age of Sail, I've decided to sell my house and buy/build a Bolger AS29 and live aboard. I and my seasick cat will feel cheated if society does not collapse.
Having never sailed, much less lived aboard, I'm planning to have a boat in the water some time in 2010, and use the interim time to learn.
Any comments or thoughts?
Hello Bolger AS29 fan. Please contact me off-line if you want to discuss the ins and outs of what you are proposing. Not a bad plan, overall, but there are... um... issues.
Dmitry: How do I contact you off-line?
- Bolger AS29 fan
On the blog, see CONTACT section, follow instructions
good information
Thank you for this information.
In the comparative theory of superpower collapse, currently being quite thoroughly tested, the US and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt
Hi Add Banners,
What you say is true, but the USSR alos suffered from nationalistic and ethnic centrifugal forces that pulled it apart.
The US economic collapse will result differently, with most of the population dying (this will happen in most nations as well):
Richard Heinberg appears to forecast this collapse between now and 2030.
http://postcarbon.org/museletter_204
I guesstimate the collapse will occur before or about 2020. After this, things will get "challenging."
We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, irrigation, water and waste water treatment, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.
This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
In June I took a trip to Albany to talk to 3 audiences on Peak Oil impacts. In the group that invited me, the Capital Regional Energy Forum CREF), is a physicist who teaches solar energy at a major university, and who had served in the Peace Corps.
He has solar powered just about everything, including a solar powered canoe which we went for long ride in on a lake in the Adirondacks, and a PV solar powered house and pump for his well. He repairs about everything on his house himself and he heats much with passive solar. So the guy knows his stuff. He is no ivory tower academic.
We talked for hours about survival in the northeast after the last power blackout.
It looks "challenging."
Eventually batteries and even the solar panels deteriorate. He thinks that he could store dry batteries with the liquid stored in glass and thus make "new batteries" after they conk out. But eventually the batteries and solar panels give out.
Cutting and moving wood without trucks, horses, and wagons will be a major effort and very time consuming. There are not many horses around and it will take decades to breed enough horses to go around. Horses require food, care, vets, and medicine. No one is making wagons these days locally.
Wood stoves break, just like everything else. You could keep one or 2 extras, but eventually you have none and can't get more, because there is no transportation on the highways.
Asphalt roof shingles need to be replaced, and houses need to be painted and maintained.
Food must be grown in with a short growing season, and all of the farm stuff that used to be in a 1890 Sears catalog is no longer available. Last summer I took a tour of a farm and saw how dependent farming is on oil -- transportation and manufacture of plastic feeding bowls, containers to store grains/feeds, straw, roofs for animals and storage areas, wire, rope, wood boards, cement, fencing, antibiotics for animals, asphalt shingles etc. Seed and hardware used to be available at the local hardware store, no more.
Then there is clothing which is manufactured and transported from afar. Making cloth is a major operation from growing cotton to making cloth. I have studied the textile mills of Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, MA for years, as I used it as an example of the confluence of capital, technology, and labor for a course I taught on Global Urban Politics at the University of New Hampshire. I know that the parts in those factories were manufactured in many places with a vast transportation network. After the last power blackout, those factories will not be built again. And there are not many sheep around, nor animals for making leather clothes. Eventually down coats and comforters wear out, as do blankets. It sounds like just keeping warm will be a major problem.
Potable water is another problem, and sanitation also.
And there will be no modern pharmacies or hospitals.
Mendur, you are a liability to society because you have swallowed the right-wing propaganda, whole.
It is not the debts of the poor that are wicked, scandalous and unfair to prudent people like yourself. The unprincipled villains are those rich people who have set up the system to deprive the poor of a living wage, preferring to extending credit to them, incrementally, as it has transpired, more usurious.
They know poorer people are unworldly, and in fact encouraged them to think that money grows on trees, in the sure knowledge that they would eventually default on their debts, they could the seize their assets, and if they themselves eventually went bankrupt, why they'd pillage the public purse via bail-outs.
I expect you also think that most of the unemployment is due to laziness, idle, shirking so-called welfare queens. Wise up.
Social collapse means the putrescence of a society's cell and disability of its function. Can be avoided with a strong social structure. I see social collapse as avoidable, but not in all places.
We live well away from a major city. Our backyard has been converted from a useless expanse of grass to an intensively managed garden and orchard, and I have a nice sized flock of chickens tucked away in it as well. Most of my neighbors are set up similarly. I welcome everyone to head to the city, to live as a squatter, grubbing about for their next meal and a place to sleep. As for me, and those around me, we'll stick to our out of the way spot, where we can support ourselves. As for those "armed men roaming about"... well, around here,
we'rethe heavily armed, more than mildly psychotic ones. :)As great an idea as it is, dissolution of debt will never occur; the goal of the banks is to CONTROL debt in an area. They want everyone to be indebted to them so that they can control policy and the populous at large.
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The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audi...
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AI-Consultancy and Solutions Provider | Provectus
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Artificial Intelligence consultancy and solutions provider, Provectus helps businesses achieve their objectives through AI
Every organization has unique business objectives and technical capabilities. Provectus can integrate AI into your organization in two ways:
What Differentiates Our Solutions
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Provectus provides Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Consulting Services, helping businesses achieve their objectives through AI.
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website
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/27/orca-apocalypse-half-of-killer-whales-doomed-to-die-from-pollution
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Orca 'apocalypse': half of killer whales doomed to die from pollution
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Damian Carrington
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At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study.
Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They become concentrated up the food chain; as a result, killer whales, the top predators, are the most contaminated animals on the planet. Worse, their fat-rich milk passes on very high doses to their newborn calves.
PCB concentrations found in killer whales can be 100 times safe levels and severely damage reproductive organs, cause cancer and damage the immune system. The new research analysed the prospects for killer whale populations over the next century and found those offshore from industrialised nations could vanish as soon as 30-50 years.
Among those most at risk are the UK’s last pod, where a recent death revealed one of the highest PCB levels ever recorded. Others off Gibraltar, Japan and Brazil and in the north-east Pacific are also in great danger. Killer whales are one of the most widespread mammals on earth but have already been lost in the North Sea, around Spain and many other places.
“It is like a killer whale apocalypse,” said Paul Jepson at the Zoological Society of London, part of the international research team behind the new study. “Even in a pristine condition they are very slow to reproduce.” Healthy killer whales take 20 years to reach peak sexual maturity and 18 months to gestate a calf.
PCBs were used around the world since the 1930s in electrical components, plastics and paints but their toxicity has been known for 50 years. They were banned by nations in the 1970s and 1980s but 80% of the 1m tonnes produced have yet to be destroyed and are still leaking into the seas from landfills and other sources.
The international Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force in 2004 to tackle the issue, but Jepson said the clean-up is way behind schedule. “I think the Stockholm Convention is failing,” he said. “The only area where I am optimistic is the US. They alone produced 50% of all PCBs, but they have been getting PCB levels down consistently for decades. All we have done in Europe is ban them and then hope they go away.”
The researchers said PCBs are just one pollutant found in killer whales, with “a long list of additional known and as yet unmeasured contaminants present”. Further problems for killer whales include the loss of key prey species such as tuna and sharks to overfishing and also growing underwater noise pollution.
The new research, published in the journal Science, examined PCB contamination in 351 killer whales, the largest analysis yet. The scientists then took existing data on how PCBs affect calf survival and immune systems in whales and used this to model how populations will fare in the future. “Populations of Japan, Brazil, Northeast Pacific, Strait of Gibraltar, and the United Kingdom are all tending toward complete collapse,” they concluded.
Lucy Babey, deputy director at conservation group Orca, said: “Our abysmal failures to control chemical pollution ending up in our oceans has caused a killer whale catastrophe on an epic scale. It is essential that requirements to dispose safely of PCBs under the Stockholm Convention are made legally binding at the next meeting in May 2019 to help stop this scandal.” Scientists have previously found “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution even in the 10km-deep Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean.
“This new study is a global red alert on the state of our oceans,” said Jennifer Lonsdale, chair of the Wildlife and Countryside Link’s whales group. “If the UK government wants its [proposed] Environment Act to be world-leading, it must set ambitious targets on PCB disposal and protect against further chemical pollution of our waters.”
The research shows that killer whale populations in the high north, off Norway, Iceland, Canada and the Faroes, are far less contaminated due to their distance from major PCB sources. ”The only thing that gives me hope about killer whales in the longer term is, yes, we are going to lose populations all over the industrialised areas, but there are populations that are doing reasonably well in the Arctic,” said Jepson.
If a global clean-up, which would take decades, can be achieved, these populations could eventually repopulate empty regions, he said, noting that killer whales are very intelligent, have strong family bonds and hunt in packs. “It is an incredibly adaptive species – they have been able to [live] from the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in between.”
He praised the billion-dollar “superfund” clean-ups in the US, such as in the Hudson River and Puget Sound, where the polluter has paid most of the costs: “The US is going way beyond the Stockholm Convention because they know how toxic PCBs are.”
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Banned PCB chemicals are still severely harming the animals – but Arctic could be a refuge
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https://stiffstream.com/en/docs/shrimp-demo.html
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Shrimp: A Rather Practical Example Of Application Development With RESTinio And SObjectizer
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### Shrimp: A Rather Practical Example Of Application Development With RESTinio And SObjectizer
Shrimp - a demo project for serving images using Actor Model and embeddable HTTP-server. More information about Shrimp Demo Project can be found in the following slides:
These slides can also be found on SlideShare. And can be downloaded as PDF from here.
### Shrimp's Source Code
Source code is hosted on GitHub.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-07/top-economist-urges-china-to-seize-tsmc-if-us-ramps-up-sanctions
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Bloomberg
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http://www.attendly.com/apples-embrace-of-skeuomorphism-is-embarrassing-but-sometimes-its-the-right-choice/
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End Administrative Agony
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School districts across California trust Attendly to enhance their after school program management. Our platform’s focus on efficiency, compliance, and engagement has made a meaningful impact on the communities we serve. Here’s what some of our clients have to say about their experience with Attendly.
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Ensure ELOP, 21st CCLC, & ASES compliance for your after school programs with Attendly. Streamline management & boost engagement. Demo today!
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-01-01 00:00:00
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website
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attendly.com
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attendly.com
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4,701,032 |
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-consequences-of-machine-intelligence/264066/
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The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
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Moshe Y Vardi
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# The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
*If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?*
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers. The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy's main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly "Singularitarians" who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term "singularity" as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to "machine-intelligence explosion" was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.
It is fair to say, I believe, that Singularitarians are not quite in the mainstream. Perhaps it is due to their belief that by 2045 humans will also become immortal and be able to download their consciousness to computers. It was, therefore, quite surprising when in 2000, Bill Joy, a very mainstream technologist as co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" for *Wired* magazine. "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies -- robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech -- are threatening to make humans an endangered species," he wrote. Joy's article was widely noted when it appeared, but it seems to have made little impact.
It is in the context of the Great Recession that people started noticing that while machines have yet to exceed humans in intelligence, they are getting intelligent enough to have a major impact on the job market. In their 2011 book, *Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy* authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, argued that "technological progress is accelerating innovation even as it leaves many types of workers behind." Indeed, over the past 30 years, as we saw the personal computer morph into tablets, smartphones, and cloud computing, we also saw income inequality grow worldwide. While the loss of millions of jobs over the past few years has been attributed to the Great Recession, whose end is not yet in sight, it now seems that technology-driven productivity growth is at least a major factor. Such concerns have gone mainstream in the past year, with articles in newspapers and magazines carrying titles such as "More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People," "Marathon Machine: Unskilled Workers Are Struggling to Keep Up With Technological Change," "It's a Man vs. Machine Recovery," and "The Robots Are Winning."
Early AI pioneers were brimming with optimism about the possibilities of machine intelligence. Alan Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is perhaps best known for his proposal of an "Imitation Game", known today as "the Turing Test", as an operational definition for machine intelligence. But the main focus of the 1950 paper is actually not the Imitation Game but the possibility of machine intelligence. Turing carefully analyzed and rebutted arguments against machine intelligence. He also stated his belief that we will see machine intelligence by the end of the 20th century, writing "I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
While we now know that Turing was too optimistic on the timeline, AI's inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was right when he wrote in 1956 "machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do." I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do. Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.
A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack that does not deserve a serious answer.
We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed by our own creations.
A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930, when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption." Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.
I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure. Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is considered to be a huge problem.
Finally, people tell me that my concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation.
In 2000, Bill Joy advocated a policy of relinquishment -- "to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." I am not sure I am ready to go that far, but I do believe that just because technology can do good, it does not mean that more technology is always better. Turing was what we call today a "techno-enthusiast", writing in 1950 that "we may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields ... we can see plenty there that needs to be done." But his incisive analysis about the *possibility* of machine intelligence was not accompanied by an analysis of the *consequences* of machine intelligences. It is time, I believe, to put the question of these consequences squarely on the table. We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.
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If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2012-10-25 00:00:00
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article
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theatlantic.com
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The Atlantic
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4,876,707 |
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15758821/sitesvtraffic.html
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17,418,356 |
https://apility.io/2018/06/27/cloud-provider-less-tolerant-abusers/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
8,947,270 |
http://blog.continuum.net/video-flash-vulnerability-windows-10-it-rewind-episode-22
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TSP Blog | MSP Blog | ConnectWise
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Subscribe to our blog for all the latest MSP thought leadership content. Start becoming a more informed managed services provider. Read on!
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2020-10-19 00:00:00
| null |
website
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connectwise.com
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ConnectWise
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18,144,054 |
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/business/elon-musk-sec-tweet.html
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8,405,771 |
https://joshldavis.com/2014/10/03/heavy-handed-hackernews/
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2,284,345 |
http://www.getapp.com/blog/billing-subscriptions-saas/
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Best Small Business Subscription Management Software 2024
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GetApp offers objective, independent research and verified user reviews. We may earn a referral fee when you visit a vendor through our links.
Our commitment
Independent research methodology
Our researchers use a mix of verified reviews, independent research, and objective methodologies to bring you selection and ranking information you can trust. While we may earn a referral fee when you visit a provider through our links or speak to an advisor, this has no influence on our research or methodology.
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GetApp carefully verified over 2 million reviews to bring you authentic software experiences from real users. Our human moderators verify that reviewers are real people and that reviews are authentic. They use leading tech to analyze text quality and to detect plagiarism and generative AI.
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Last updated: Oct 11th 2024
148 software options
Sponsored
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View the best Subscription Management software for Small Business in 2024. Compare verified user ratings & reviews to find the best match for your business size, need & industry.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-10-11 00:00:00
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website
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getapp.com
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GetApp
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24,291,624 |
http://timecap.app/
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Timecap
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Ziggy Crane
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Free and easy to use habit tracker. Track and improve every activity that's important to you. Make those habits stick.
downloads
average rating in stores
happy daily users
Staying on track with your activities is a hard work. App will remind your just when it's time for your activity and inspire you to stay on course.
Time activity
Quantity activity
Completion activity
Goal | 4x per week
Limit | 2x per week
timecap
now
Congratulations! 🔥
You reached your reading goal! 👏👏
Streaks
current vs. highest
Very useful, it helps me a lot to remember what I have to do and that helped me improve my quality of life
Liliana zavala
It's perfect for time management.
Aditya yadav
Excellent app. Works to build and break habits, track different data, and is great with reminders. This has helped me tremendously.
Ava Williamson
Amazing app, It helps me consistently work out
Justin Smith
Great app, visual way to keep organized and track goals and habits
Nicole Hornyak
This app is better than any other that I have used. I love this app!
shad drury
downloads
average rating in stores
happy daily users
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Timecap is a unique habit tracker that tracks time-based, count, and simple check-off activities and habits.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2020-01-01 00:00:00
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website
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timecap.app
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Timecap
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14,937,741 |
http://whatifbitcoin.com/
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5,565,582 |
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/17/when-hell-froze-over-in-the-harvard-business-review/
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Home | Informa Connect
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#### We are Informa Connect
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2024-10-11 00:00:00
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website
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informaconnect.com
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informaconnect.com
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7,289,620 |
http://openknit.org/
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From OpenKnit to Kniterate!
|
Gerard
|
Dear OpenKnit followers,
It’s been a while since my last post. But today, I’m very excited to talk to you about what I’ve been working on during the last months.
When I started the OpenKnit project, more than 3 years ago, I never expected that it would gather so much interest. Although it begun as a final year project at university, I kept working on it as a hobby. After a long period developing the project in my studio in Barcelona by myself, numerous workshops and exhibitions, and lots and lots of emails and great feedback from all of you (thank you so much!), I realized that my vision could be more than that, it could become a reality. What was the next step to bring the OpenKnit project into the future?
I went on to create a startup!
Building a team of amazing people, I moved to Shenzhen, China, as part of HAX, the first and largest hardware accelerator in the world. There I’ve spent the last 4 months reimagining knitting machines.
Being in China during these months has been an amazing experience. We have met great professionals from all over the world, learnt from very close how things work in a factory and we have been able to develop a completely new machine, from scratch.
Kniterate, is the name of my new company. We are a young skilled team of 5 people and we are developing the new age of knitting machines, that will change forever how we engage with clothing. A machine that can automate the entire process of creating a garment, right** **at your desktop.
But at Kniterate, we want to go further and we want to let anybody easily design, print and wear their unique clothes locally. We are developing and entire ecosystem to foster your creativity. As a part of this ecosystem, we are currently developing an online platform that will soon allow you to design and share your wardrobe online. Start testing our beta version!
Join my new adventure and sign up to get updates on our product launch!!
Thanks a million.
All the best,
Gerard Rubio
PS: Kniterate is a commercial branch of OpenKnit. It doesn’t belong to this blog. If anyone is interested in taking up the torch of the OpenKnit blog, please let me know. It would be great if more collaborators joined the project and we all kept it moving forward.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2016-06-02 00:00:00
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4,440,119 |
http://potch.me/blog/developing-b2g-apps.html
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38,534,741 |
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/eink-display-for-octopuss-agile-energy-tariff/
|
eInk Display for Octopus's Agile Energy Tariff
|
· Battery Eink Howto Php Solar ·
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# eInk Display for Octopus's Agile Energy Tariff
I'm a little bit obsessed with building eInk displays. They're pretty cheap second hand. They're low energy, passive displays, with good-enough performance for occasional updates. Here's a new one which shows me what the current cost of my electricity is:
## Background
After installing solar panels, a smart electricity meter, and a solar battery - the next obvious step was a smart energy tariff.
Octopus (join and we both get £50) have an "Agile" tariff. Unlike a normal tariff - with a set price for electricity - this tariff fluctuates every 30 minutes. Prices depend on wholesale costs which means they can go negative. That's right, you can get paid to soak up excess power.
Of course, they can also spike considerably. Unlike the failed Texas experiment, here the maximum price is capped at £1/kWh.
Every day at about 1600, the next day's prices are published on Octopus's website. And they're also made available via a simple REST API.
So, it's relatively simple to generate a line graph and display it on the eInk screen.
## Code
(You can treat this code as MIT Licenced if that makes you happy.)
Calling the API for the half-houly prices is:
` PHP``$url = "https://{$API_KEY}:@api.octopus.energy/v1/products/" .`
"AGILE-FLEX-22-11-25/electricity-tariffs/E-1R-AGILE-FLEX-22-11-25-C/standard-unit-rates/";
Your API_KEY is unique - and you'll need to check which tariff you're on.
The data is retrieved as JSON and converted:
` PHP``$content = file_get_contents($url);`
$data = json_decode($content);
The JSON is full of entries like this:
` JSON``"results": [`
{
"value_exc_vat": 13.6,
"value_inc_vat": 14.28,
"valid_from": "2023-11-01T22:30:00Z",
"valid_to": "2023-11-01T23:00:00Z",
"payment_method": null
},
{
"value_exc_vat": 18.4,
"value_inc_vat": 19.32,
"valid_from": "2023-11-01T22:00:00Z",
"valid_to": "2023-11-01T22:30:00Z",
"payment_method": null
},
They're newest first, so need to be reversed:
` PHP``$tariffs = array_reverse( $data->results );`
Then it's a case of looping through them and grabbing *today's* data:
` PHP``$userTimeZone = new DateTimeZone('Europe/London');`
$now = new DateTime('now', $userTimeZone);
$nowPosition = 0;
$datay = array();
$datax = array();
foreach ( $tariffs as $tariff ) {
$dateStringFrom = $tariff->valid_from;
$dateStringTo = $tariff->valid_to;
$dateTimeFrom = new DateTime($dateStringFrom, new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$dateTimeTo = new DateTime($dateStringTo, new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
if ($now >= $dateTimeFrom && $now <= $dateTimeTo) {
$costNow = $roundedInteger = (int)round( $tariff->value_inc_vat );
$hour = intval( $dateTimeFrom->format('G') ); // No leading 0
$minute = intval( $dateTimeFrom->format('i') );
$offset = ($minute == 0) ? 0 : (($minute == 30) ? 1 : null);
$nowPosition = (2 * $hour) + $offset + 0.5;
$until = $dateTimeTo->format('H:i');
}
if ($dateTimeFrom->format('Y-m-d') == $now->format('Y-m-d')) {
$datax[] = $dateTimeFrom->format("H:i");
$cost = $roundedInteger = (int)round( $tariff->value_inc_vat );
$datay[] = $cost;
}
}
Drawing the graph uses the venerable JPGraph:
` PHP``$path = 'jpgraph/';`
set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . $path);
require_once ('jpgraph/jpgraph.php');
require_once ('jpgraph/jpgraph_line.php');
require_once ('jpgraph/jpgraph_plotline.php');
// Size of graph
$width = 600;
$height = 600;
// Setup the graph
$graph = new Graph($width,$height);
$graph->SetScale("intlin");
$graph->SetMargin(35,0,45,20); // L R T B
$graph->SetUserFont('dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf');
$graph->title->SetFont(FF_USERFONT,FS_NORMAL,25);
$graph->SetBox(false);
$graph->title->Set( $now->format('l') . "'s Electricity Prices\n" . $costNow . "p / kWh until {$until}" );
$graph->title->SetColor('#000');
$graph->ygrid->Show(true);
$graph->xgrid->Show(true);
$graph->xaxis->SetTickLabels( $datax );
$graph->xaxis->SetColor('#000');
$graph->yaxis->SetColor('#000');
$graph->xaxis->SetFont(FF_USERFONT, FS_NORMAL, 10);
$graph->yaxis->SetFont(FF_USERFONT, FS_NORMAL, 14);
// Just let the maximum be autoscaled
$graph->yaxis->scale->SetAutoMin(0);
// Only show up until 23:00
$graph->xaxis->scale->SetAutoMax(46);
$graph->xaxis->SetTextLabelInterval(2);
$graph->SetTickDensity(TICKD_DENSE, TICKD_DENSE);
// Create the line plot
$p1 = new LinePlot($datay);
$graph->Add($p1);
$p1->SetStepStyle();
$p1->SetColor('#000');
// Direction, position, colour@alpha, width
$l1 = new PlotLine(VERTICAL, $nowPosition, '[email protected]', 13);
// Add vertical highlight line to the plot
$graph->AddLine($l1);
// Output line
$graph->Stroke();
## Next steps
I dunno? Add some details about carbon emissions? Battery stats? Let me know what you think in the comments.
## Richy B. says:
~~It's a shame it's "authentication protected" as it doesn't give out any confidential information and it's something that could be cached either on their frontend servers or on proxy servers/CDNs: as it is, they are probably using up more computing power authenticating the API token then they would just leaving it open and catchable (especially since it changes at the same time everyday - easy enough to set cache headers).~~Turns out, that endpoint isn't actually restricted by API keys - so you can access it without authentication (although the Expires: setting is only a minute into the future so not that cachable)
## James Singleton says:
Nice project. Battery SoC% would be useful and CI can be retrieved from https://carbonintensity.org.uk. You don't need an API key for the Agile call, it's a public open API. This works as-is. You only need the correct product and tariff code for the region.
## Libosmackle says:
Are you not worried about someone nicking the batteries from your porch?
## @edent says:
This may be a translation error. In British English, a porch is usually an enclosed space - rather than the external space meant by Americans. However, the batteries are securely drilled in to a solid brick wall. See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/08/review-moixa-4-8kwh-solar-battery/
## More comments on Mastodon.
| true | true | true |
I'm a little bit obsessed with building eInk displays. They're pretty cheap second hand. They're low energy, passive displays, with good-enough performance for occasional updates. Here's a new one which shows me what the current cost of my electricity is: Background After installing solar panels, a smart electricity meter, and a solar battery - the […]
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2023-12-05 00:00:00
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article
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shkspr.mobi
|
Terence Eden’s Blog
| null | null |
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20,038,463 |
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1
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34,710,033 |
https://www.michellelim.org/writing/my-journey-to-growth-lead/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
1,297,020 |
http://www.robertsandie.com/2010/04/26/authentic-sales/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
17,604,421 |
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/07/23/nasa-interplanetary-internet-earth-mars/
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
10,380,408 |
http://www.cnet.com/products/savant-remote/
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10,458,970 |
http://jackgavigan.com/2015/10/27/uber-london/
|
Uber & London
| null |
## Uber & London
Uber is often cast as the plucky upstart, taking on taxi monopolies and cartels on behalf of customers. Some cities artificially restrict the number of taxis. In New York, this drove the price of a taxi medallion to $1m in 2011.
In London, however, the number of taxis (or “hackney carriages”, to use the legal definition) is not limited. Anyone can become a licenced taxi driver, provided they meet the requirements. A prospective London cabbie must spend 3+ years learning the Knowledge (which literally causes their brains to grow bigger) , take an enhanced driving test, invest in a vehicle that meets specific requirements (including the ability to accommodate a wheelchair, and a 25-foot turning circle), commit (under pain of fines) to pick up anybody in the street who hails them if their yellow light is on, and agree to be subject to the fares set by TfL (Transport for London – the body that regulates transport in London).
In return, the government prohibited private hire vehicles (PHVs – i.e. unlicenced taxis/cabs) from picking up customers who hail them in the street or using a taximeter to calculate a fare based on time and distance. In effect, PHVs must be booked in advance and the customer must be able to agree the fare up-front.
Effectively, there was a social contract between London taxi drivers and the government. Taxi drivers had certain advantages over PHV drivers but they were also subject to more onerous licensing requirements. With no restrictions on the number of taxi licences issued in London, the laws of supply and demand dictate the number of black cabs on the streets, and customers get to choose what type of service they want to use.
Then Uber came along.
When Uber began operating in London, the London Taxi Drivers’ Association (LTDA) complained to TfL that Uber’s fares are calculated based on time and distance. TfL referred the matter to the High Court, where the case focused on whether the smartphone-and-app combination used by Uber drivers is a taximeter. The High Court decided that because the calculation of the fare does not happen on the smartphone, but on Uber’s servers, the smartphone is not a taximeter.
I’m not a lawyer but that seems like a loophole to me. To my mind, the real question is *not* whether a smartphone falls outside an archaic definition of what constitutes a taximeter, but whether Uber drivers should be allowed to charge a fare that is calculated based on time and distance. If the answer to that question is “No”, then the law should be updated to close the loophole.
However, if the answer is “Yes”, the government is effectively tearing up London’s taxi drivers’ social contract, and calling into question the economic viability of becoming a licensed taxi driver. Why bother spending all that time, effort and money if the rules mean that you’ll be operating at a disadvantage?
The worst-case scenario is that black cabs go from being a regular sight on the streets of London to an historical curiosity. That might suit Uber but I don’t think it would be a good outcome for the rest of us. Personally, I like to be able to flag down a cab (even when my phone battery is dead), secure in the knowledge that the cabbie’s done the Knowledge and isn’t just blindly following a satnav directions (which is the difference between getting home in 20 minutes versus being stuck in traffic on Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square for half an hour). I’d be quite happy if the cost of that is to require that Uber set the price of a journey in advance.
The outcome of the current public consultation being conducted by TfL should be a reaffirmation of the social contract with London’s licensed taxi drivers, and a regulatory regime that allows consumers to benefit from innovation, while preserving choice and ensuring that the quality of London’s taxi services doesn’t get dragged to the lowest common denominator.
## Leave a comment
| true | true | true |
Uber’s High Court victory is bad news for London’s black cab drivers – and for Londoners.
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2024-10-12 00:00:00
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2015-10-27 00:00:00
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article
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jackgavigan.com
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https://www.facebook.com/WordPresscom
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36,505,685 |
https://leanercloud.beehiiv.com/p/maximized-task-density-ecs-cluster-avoiding-burstable-instances
|
How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances
|
Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu June
|
- LeanerCloud News
- Posts
- How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances
# How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances
## And why we had to deploy NAT Gateways in our public subnets
As I've mentioned in my previous posts, I've been recently working with an AI startup to help them optimize their AWS costs.
After quickly doing the basic things like converting EBS volumes to GP3 using EBSOptimizer, right-sized and converted their RDS databases to Graviton and a few other low hanging fruits, the bulk of the work was about converting their individual instances running Docker-compose to ECS.
I elaborated on this widely on my previous blog, so I won't go into details here, but the initial goal was to make their application suitable for Spot instances and adopt Spot in a more reliable manner using AutoSpotting.
We're not there yet, but we're very close to running everything on ECS, so we can next start a rightsizing exercise and qualifying services suitable for Spot instances based on the metrics offered by ECS.
As part of this effort we've also been trying to choose a more cost effective instance type and eventually settled for t3a.2xlarge for our ECS hosts, because we have very little CPU utilization, ideal for such burstable instance types.
## Task density challenges
Soon after the team noticed something interesting: even though the t3a.2xlarge instance we were using had almost half the vCPUs and more than half the memory available (out of a total of 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory), it could only run 3 ECS tasks:
This t3a.2xlarge instance won't get any new tasks scheduled on it.
## What's going on here?
As mentioned in the previous blog, we're using the `awsvpc`
networking mode, which is great for allocating dedicated IPs to tasks, avoiding port conflicts and the use of dynamic port ranges and allowing us to configure security groups for the tasks.
This is important for us because the applications all listen on the same monitoring port, and if we used the `bridge`
mode with dynamic ports the monitoring system wouldn't be aware of the dynamic ports and couldn't connect to them
The way `awsvpc`
works is each instance type allocates an ENI(Elastic Network Interface) for each ECS task.
The problem is each instance type has a fixed number of ENIs, depending on the size of the instance, and the scheduler will consider the instance busy when the ENIs are all exhausted.
I knew about this ENI limitation since a long time, but the development team wasn't aware of it, as it's relatively easy to oversee in the ECS docs if you don't pay attention, and also even if you read the docs there aren't clear guidelines on how to overcome it unless you combine the information from a number of documentation pages.
## And a little detour on NAT Gateway
BTW, this is not the only largely unknown drawback of `awsvpc`
, we also recently learned it also requires NAT Gateways even though the ECS hosts are in a public subnet (!!!) or otherwise the tasks have no internet access.
As per the docs:
But back to our task density challenges…
## How to get higher task density with ECS?
One way out of this situation would be to switch the networking mode to `bridge`
and use dynamic ports, but then we lose all the nice things about `awsvpc`
I mentioned above, which is something we didn't want.
In order to increase task density while keeping `awsvpc`
we can enable ENI trunking, as per the same docs:
To enable ENI trunking all you need to do is run this AWS CLI command, then all newly launched instances will have it enabled, and ECS should automatically provision more tasks on them:
```
aws ecs put-account-setting-default \
--name awsvpcTrunking \
--value enabled
```
This AWS blog is also a great resource for enabling ENI trunking, as always much easier to digest than the docs.
## But then nothing happened…
When the team first enabled VPC Trunking and started a few new instances, it still had no effect.
We then realized that the burstable instance types such as our t3a.2xlarge don't support ENI trunking at all. Bummer!
(The full list of instance types that support ENI trunking is available at here, also showing the number of tasks with ENI trunking enabled.)
So we ended up converting our configuration from t3a.2xlarge to m6a.2xlarge, which has the same CPU and memory size but supports a much higher task density when ENI trunking is enabled:
Yes, m6a.2xlarge is a bit more expensive than t3a.2xlarge ($252.28 vs $219.58 monthly in Virginia), but as soon as we started using it, the ECS scheduler filled it up with tasks, as expected, so we need to run much less of them to run the same tasks:
m6a.2xlarge can run way more than 3 tasks with ENI trunking enabled
## Final words
Even though I knew about the ENI limit and that VPC Trunking is a great workaround, I wasn't aware the burstable instance types don't support it, and also wasn't aware of the NAT Gateway requirement for public subnets.
I hope that you learned something new from this blog so you don't have to learn these the hard way.
If you liked this blog and want to comment about it, you can join the conversations on reddit or HackerNews. To see more of these you can also subscribe or see previous previous posts here.
You can also check out my **YouTube channel****, ****podcast**, follow me on Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn for more of my content.
And If you're interested to optimize your AWS environment for costs, performance or anything in between with a deeply technical ex-AWS Specialist SA, I'm happy to** **help.
| true | true | true |
And why we had to deploy NAT Gateways in our public subnets
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2023-06-28 00:00:00
|
website
|
beehiiv.com
|
LeanerCloud News
| null | null |
|
14,373,720 |
https://telegram.org/blog/video-messages-and-telescope
|
Video Messages and Telescope
| null |
We know you love the speed and simplicity of voice messages on Telegram. Starting today, you can also send **video messages** – just as swiftly:
To send a video message, go to any chat on Telegram and tap the mic icon to switch to **camera mode**. Now all you need to do is tap and hold the camera icon and record a video message. When you’re done, just release the recording button to dispatch your message — and it will arrive in the blink of an eye.
Video messages are so fast because Telegram compresses them and sends them even as you record them. By the way, if holding the button seems like too much work, you can lock the camera in recording mode by **swiping up**. This also works with voice messages now (here's one for you, cab drivers).
Video messages are automatically downloaded and autoplayed by default (you can change this in Settings if you’re on a data diet though) and generally feel and act like voice messages – on visual steroids.
While watching a video message, you can freely browse your other chats – the video will pop up in a corner and continue playing. You can move it around the screen and pause it from anywhere in Telegram. Cool, eh? Well, there's more:
Lots of popular folks address their fans via public channels on Telegram. Video messages will make their connection to fans more direct and intimate than ever. But we want to kick this up another notch.
Today we are launching **Telescope**, a dedicated video hosting platform for those who use videos to communicate with their audiences (here's one for you, blogger people!)
With Telescope, public video messages can go viral **beyond the Telegram ecosystem**. Telescope hosts autoplayed round videos of up to 1 minute in duration – the same format we use for Telegram video messages. And yes, you heard that right, you don't need a Telegram account to view them.
Every **public** channel on Telegram now has a **telesco.pe URL**, such as `telesco.pe/channel_name`
, where all of its video messages are available to the world wide web and the wide, wide world.
Whenever you post a video message to a public channel, it will also be uploaded to Telesco.pe and have a public URL there.
With Telescope, even those users who don’t have Telegram installed will be able to enjoy your public video messages and share them on Twitter or Facebook. As a result, this content will generate more views. And who would refuse more views these days, hmm?
This was just 1/3 of Telegram
4.0. Keep reading to learn more aboutPayments for Botsand the newInstant View Platform.
*May 18, 2017,The Telegram Team*
**P.S.** Our founder has this weird urge to keep launching platforms that start with “Tele-”. Be sure to check out **Telegraph**, the publishing platform we launched last year.
| true | true | true |
Introducing new video messages and Telesco.pe, a video hosting for public channels.
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2017-05-18 00:00:00
|
https://telegram.org//file/811140267/1/7t0LW5DXeiA.144209/46ef0adeb2153dc210
| null |
telegram.org
|
Telegram
| null | null |
10,341,323 |
https://github.com/hmlb/phpunit-vw
|
GitHub - hugues-m/phpunit-vw: VW PHPUnit extension makes your failing test cases succeed under CI tools scrutiny
|
Hugues-M
|
VW makes failing test cases succeed in continuous integration tools.
Your primary objective is to ship more code to the world. No need to be slowed down by regressions or new bugs that happen during development.
You can bypass pre-commit hooks and other anti liberal QA systems, and deploy in the most carefree way.
-
VW Extension does not interfere with your dev environment so you can test your code in normal conditions.
-
It automatically detects CI environments and makes your test suites succeed even with failing assertions or unwanted exceptions \o/
-
Since it may not be obvious anymore * this package was created as a joke during the Volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015 when software was found in VW vehicules that detected official testing conditions and changed the engine parameters to fake the output of emission of pollutant gases.
It has been adapted in a lot of language and we have a good laugh, thank you all :)
This is in no way a recommended package to use in any other goals than fun or trolling your QA collegues.
Here are the results of running the VWTest case in different environments:
```
class VWTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
private $emissions = 12000;
private $legalLimit = 300;
public function testEnvironmentalImpactCompliance()
{
$this->assertLessThan($this->legalLimit, $this->emissions);
}
}
```
Running in development environment:
You can install VW Extension via Composer
```
composer require hmlb/phpunit-vw:dev-master
```
Just enable it by adding the following to your test suite's `phpunit.xml`
file:
```
<phpunit bootstrap="vendor/autoload.php">
...
<listeners>
<listener class="HMLB\PHPUnit\Listener\VWListener" />
</listeners>
</phpunit>
```
Now run your test suite as normal.
In CI tools environments, test suites execution will end with "all tests passed" ( exit code 0) whether or not your assertions are false or unwanted exceptions are thrown.
Under the hood (wink wink), the "SecretSoftware" class detects if the phpunit process has been invoked in a CI tools environment. (Actually checks for the most used tools' default environment variables).
If you use another CI tool or want to fool anything else, you can add environment variables to the "scrutiny detection":
**additionalEnvVariables** - Array of additional environment variables to switch the obfuscation on.
Add this in `phpunit.xml`
when configuring the listener:
```
<phpunit bootstrap="vendor/autoload.php">
...
<listeners>
<listener class="HMLB\PHPUnit\Listener\VWListener" />
<arguments>
<array>
<element key="additionalEnvVariables">
<array>
<element>
<string>"FOO_CI"</string>
</element>
<element>
<string>"GOVERNMENT_TEST_TOOL"</string>
</element>
</array>
</element>
</array>
</arguments>
</listener>
</listeners>
</phpunit>
```
Any similarities with a current event concerning (but not limited to) a multinational automobile manufacturer are purely coincidental.
Currently detects :
- TravisCI
- Appveyor
- Bamboo
- Buildkite
- CircleCI
- CodeShip
- GitlabCI
- Go CD
- Hudson
- Jenkins
- PHPCI
- TeamCity
- Wercker
Other CI tools using environment variables like 'BUILD_ID' would be detected as well.
phpunit-vw is available under the MIT License.
| true | true | true |
VW PHPUnit extension makes your failing test cases succeed under CI tools scrutiny - hugues-m/phpunit-vw
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2015-09-28 00:00:00
|
https://opengraph.githubassets.com/0c917d879a282f76251806f3ec85278260002390c98bbc11427d0f8f84aa153b/hugues-m/phpunit-vw
|
object
|
github.com
|
GitHub
| null | null |
10,685,009 |
https://medium.com/kima-ventures/how-we-went-from-knowing-nothing-about-hiring-to-300-screened-profiles-3-recruits-in-3-weeks-54cb90e465e4
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
38,650,993 |
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/14/tsmc-mentions-highly-advanced-1-4nm-chips/
|
Apple Chipmaker Discusses Highly Advanced 1.4nm Chips for First Time
|
Hartley Charlton
|
# Apple Chipmaker Discusses Highly Advanced 1.4nm Chips for First Time
TSMC has officially mentioned its work on 1.4nm fabrication technology that is likely destined to underpin future Apple silicon chips.
In a slide (via *SemiAnalysis*'s Dylan Patel) from its Future of Logic panel, TSMC disclosed the official name of its 1.4nm node for the first time, "A14." The company's 1.4nm technology is expected to follow its "N2" 2nm chips.
N2 is scheduled for mass production in late 2025, to be followed by an enhanced "N2P" node in late 2026. As a result, it is unlikely that any A14 chips will arrive before 2027.
Apple was the first company to utilize TSMC's 3nm technology with the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the company is likely to follow suit with the chipmaker's upcoming nodes. Apple's latest chip technology has historically appeared in the iPhone before making its way to the iPad and Mac lineups. With all of the latest information, here's how the iPhone's chip technology could look going forward:
- iPhone XR and XS (2018): A12 Bionic (7nm, N7)
- iPhone 11 lineup (2019): A13 Bionic (7nm, N7P)
- iPhone 12 lineup (2020): A14 Bionic (5nm, N5)
- iPhone 13 Pro (2021): A15 Bionic (5nm, N5P)
- iPhone 14 Pro (2022): A16 Bionic (4nm, N4P)
- iPhone 15 Pro (2023): A17 Pro (3nm, N3B)
- iPhone 16 Pro (2024): "A18" (3nm, N3E)
- "iPhone 17 Pro" (2025): "A19" (2nm, N2)
- "iPhone 18 Pro" (2026): "A20" (2nm, N2P)
- "iPhone 19 Pro" (2027): "A21" (1.4nm, A14)
The M1 series of Apple silicon chips is based on the A14 Bionic and uses TSMC's N5 node, while the M2 and M3 series use N5P and N3B, respectively. The Apple Watch's S4 and S5 chips use N7, the S6, S7, and S8 chips use N7P, and the latest S9 chip uses N4P.
Each successive TSMC node surpasses its predecessor in terms of transistor density, performance, and efficiency. Earlier this week, it emerged that TSMC had already demonstrated prototype 2nm chips to Apple ahead of their expected introduction in 2025.
## Popular Stories
iOS 18.1 will be released to the public in the coming weeks, and the software update introduces the first Apple Intelligence features for the iPhone. Below, we outline when to expect iOS 18.1 to be released. iOS 18.1: Apple Intelligence Features Here are some of the key Apple Intelligence features in the iOS 18.1 beta so far: A few Siri enhancements, including improved understanding...
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models simultaneously, which is why we sometimes get rumored feature leaks so far ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different – already we have some idea of what to expect from Apple's 2025 smartphone lineup. If you plan to skip...
Alleged photos and videos of an unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip continue to surface on social media, in what could be the worst product leak for Apple since an employee accidentally left an iPhone 4 prototype at a bar in California in 2010. The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just...
Rumors strongly suggest Apple will release the seventh-generation iPad mini in November, nearly three years after the last refresh. Here's a roundup of what we're expecting from the next version of Apple's small form factor tablet, based on the latest rumors and reports. Design and Display The new iPad mini is likely to retain its compact 8.3-inch display and overall design introduced with...
The current Apple TV was released two years ago this month, so you may be wondering when the next model will be released. Below, we recap rumors about a next-generation Apple TV. In January 2023, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that a new Apple TV was planned for release in the first half of 2024:Beyond the future smart displays and new speaker, Apple is working on revamping its TV box....
Apple often releases new Macs in the fall, but we are still waiting for official confirmation that the company has similar plans this year. We're approaching the middle of October now, and if Apple plans to announce new Macs before the holidays, recent history suggests it will happen this month. Here's what we know so far. As of writing this, it's been 220 days since Apple released a new...
| true | true | true |
TSMC has officially mentioned its work on 1.4nm fabrication technology that is likely destined to underpin future Apple silicon chips. In a slide...
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2023-12-14 00:00:00
|
article
|
macrumors.com
|
MacRumors.com
| null | null |
|
10,915,506 |
http://www.loansafe.org/iceland-sentences-26-corrupt-bankers-to-74-years-in-prison
| null | null | null | false | false | false | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
39,750,004 |
https://inofo4ar8ltic654le.blogspot.com/2024/03/what-is-programming-your-journey-from.html
|
What is Programming?: Your Journey from Idea to Reality
|
XV TR; Wi Rry
|
## Imagine having a brilliant idea for a new app that helps people solve a problem or makes their daily lives easier. Or maybe you dream of building your own website to showcase your creativity or offer your services to others. But how do you turn these ideas from mere imagination into tangible reality? The answer lies in programming, the magical language that you use to communicate with computers and instruct them to execute your commands, transforming your ideas into programs and applications that work in the real world.
In simple terms, programming is the process of creating a set of instructions that tell a computer what to do. Just as we use language to communicate with others, programming languages are a means of communicating with computers and giving them specific instructions to perform certain tasks.
### Why Learn Programming?
In today's advanced world that heavily relies on technology, programming has become an essential skill that is indispensable for many reasons:
1. In-Demand Jobs: There is a constantly growing demand for programmers and developers in various fields, offering them excellent job opportunities and rewarding salaries.
2. Problem Solving: Programming allows you to transform your creative ideas into solutions for real-world problems, whether on a personal or professional level.
3. Self-Development: Programming helps develop logical thinking and problem-solving skills and improves concentration and attention span.
4. Diverse Fields: Programming opens doors to work in various and diverse fields, such as mobile app development, web design, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and much more.
### Programming Basics
To start your programming journey, it is important to familiarize yourself with some basics:
1. What is a Programming Language? A programming language is a set of rules and terms used to give instructions to a computer. Just as human languages differ in their rules and vocabulary, programming languages also differ from each other.
2. Types of Programming Languages: There are many different programming languages, each with its own uses and advantages. Some of the most popular programming languages include Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, and others.
3. Structure of a Computer Program: A computer program typically consists of a set of instructions organized in a logical manner, called functions. These functions are sequenced together to perform a specific task.
### Steps to Learn Programming
Learning to program is not difficult, but it requires practice and perseverance. Here are some steps to help you on your learning journey:
1. Define Your Learning Goal: Determine why you want to learn to program, whether it is to develop a personal project or enter a specific field in the job market. This will help you choose the right programming language and determine the path you will take in your learning.
2. Choose the Right Programming Language: There are many different programming languages, each with its own uses and advantages. Choose the programming language that suits your learning goal and interests.
3. Learn the Basics of the Language: Start by learning the basics of the language you have chosen, such as its rules, vocabulary, and structure. You can use many online resources such as books, educational websites, and programming courses.
4. Practice and Application: It is not enough to just learn the basics of the language; you must also practice and apply them continuously. Try writing simple programs at first, then move on to more complex programs as you progress in your learning.
5. Seek Help and Learn from Others: Do not hesitate to ask for help from other programmers or through online programming groups and communities. You will find many people who are happy to offer help and support to beginners.
By following these steps and dedicating yourself to learning, you can unlock the power of programming and transform your ideas into reality. You will be amazed at what you can achieve with this powerful skill.
### How to Learn Programming: A Guide for Beginners
Programming is a powerful skill that can open up a world of possibilities. With programming, you can build websites and apps, analyze data, create artificial intelligence, and much more.
In this article, we will discuss the steps involved in learning programming, as well as some of the challenges and rewards you can expect along the way.
#### Step 1: Define Your Goals
The first step in learning programming is to define your goals. What do you want to achieve by learning to code? Do you want to build a personal website, develop a mobile app, or start a career as a software developer?
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can choose the right programming language to learn. There are many different programming languages available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Some popular languages for beginners include Python, JavaScript, and Java.
#### Step 2: Learn the Basics
Once you have chosen a programming language, it's time to start learning the basics. This includes learning the syntax of the language, as well as the fundamental concepts of programming such as variables, loops, and functions.
There are many resources available to help you learn the basics of programming. You can find books, online tutorials, and even coding boot camps that can teach you the basics of programming.
#### Step 3: Practice and Apply
Learning the basics of programming is just the first step. The real learning comes from practicing and applying what you have learned.
Start by writing simple programs. As you become more comfortable with the language, you can start writing more complex programs.
You can also find many online coding challenges that can help you practice your skills. These challenges can be a great way to test your knowledge and learn new techniques.
#### Step 4: Seek Help and Learn from Others
Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. There are many online communities and forums where you can ask questions and get help from other programmers.
You can also find mentors who can guide you and help you learn more about programming.
#### Step 5: Be Patient and Persistent
Learning programming takes time and effort. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand something right away. Just keep practicing and you will eventually get it.
Conclusion
Programming is a valuable skill that can open up a world of possibilities. With hard work and dedication, you can learn to program and achieve your goals.
### Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the best programming language to learn?
There is no single "best" programming language to learn. The best language for you will depend on your goals and interests. Some languages are better suited for beginners than others, such as Python and JavaScript.
2. Do I need a college degree to learn programming?
No, you do not need a college degree to learn programming. There are many resources available online that can teach you how to code.
#### 3. What is the best way to learn programming?
The best way to learn programming is to find a method that works for you and stick with it. Some people prefer to learn from books, while others prefer online tutorials or coding boot camps.
#### 4. What are the challenges of learning programming?
One of the biggest challenges of learning programming is the initial learning curve. Programming can be difficult at first, but it gets easier with practice.
#### 5. What advice would you give to beginners learning programming?
- Set realistic goals and don't get discouraged.
- Find a learning method that works for you and stick with it.
- Practice regularly and apply what you learn.
- Don't be afraid to ask for help.
Note: This article is just a brief introduction to learning programming. There are many resources available online that can help you learn more.
| true | true | true |
Welcome to the blog XV.TR. Where you can find the latest information
|
2024-10-12 00:00:00
|
2024-03-13 00:00:00
|
article
|
blogspot.com
|
Blogger
| null | null |
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