562 karma · joined April 19, 2009
When I used to work on campaigns for a third party, the most annoying thing was the fact that there is a lot of inertia from people who have no idea who any of the candidates are ritually voting a party line. In NY, where I lived, there was even a special lever that marked the whole party row, to enable reduced thinking.
Another comment here says that politicians love an apathetic population. More correctly, they like apathetic populations that vote consistently.
His discussion of the matter seems very confused. The problem with the bond market right now is that there is no inflation, but real returns elsewhere are often negative. So bonds are a safe place to put money. It's certainly not being invested. Now, one can argue whether the Fed has any ability to affect that. The clock may have run out on quantitative easing, as I have heard argued. That means the Fed would be somewhat irrelevant and the US economy would falter in the absence of fiscal stimulus.
There aren't many voices articulating sense in this discussion. Many have simply said "deficits bad" and called on increasing unemployment as the solution to our concerns. Good luck with that. I think the solution probably requires preventing the unemployed from becoming the desperately long-term unemployed, at a minimum, and also using the favorable bond situation to repair infrastructure, which is apparently in huge backlogs across the country.
To some extent, I wonder if Bill Gross is really just sort of pandering to his clientele, who are not sophisticated economists and who are happy to agree that politics is full of apes. After all, at the end, his call to action is for a vote of confidence in PIMCO. This article doesn't give me much faith, but I suppose if he hit the right buttons, his investors might just pull that lever, and keep sending the money his way.
If a national government decided to let an independent fiat currency be developed by an independent corporation, and all the other corporations, such as banks, agreed to use that fiat currency, that currency would have the same value: you need it to trade for your needs because you get paid in it.
It is not clear why trade could not continue in the absence of the federal government, as all the banks would probably be willing to lend to corporations with good credit, and they would probably continue storing their reserves in those banks.
In other words, I think you assume too many magical steps.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251254.1251257 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HOTOS.20...
void function(int const * const value)
void function(int const *value)
void function(const int *value)
I think all of these mobile efforts by MS are doomed, but I don't see why Kin was a worse idea than WP7.
I have heard statistics that a lot of the creation of jobs occurs with small business. Also, that a lot of the job losses occur at small businesses. The net jobs created are reflected in the bls statistics that show increase in employment among different kinds of businesses.
This, besides the fact that a correction has already happened, as evidenced by the drop in house prices and the number of homes in foreclosure.
If there is another "correction" now, beyond what has already happened, and it causes even more bankruptcies, discharged debts, haircuts, bank runs, and the like, then the entire economy will suffer, not just those who played in the mess.
As banks look toward deflationary times, they are holding onto cash reserves. (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCRESNS) This may be because they fear making loans that will not be paid back 100%, but the result is deflationary because they are all doing it, and they are all keeping that money from the system. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A deflationary period, while our country has so much private debt, combined with high unemployment, will likely leave us with more and more bankruptcies and the "dynamo problem" of the great depression. If this is what you're looking forward to to punish a few house flippers, well, I can't agree with your sentiment on that.
Does it mean that people don't care whether there is an exercise room if they are not being paid well? Or am I looking at it the wrong way?
2. I think the worst thing that happened in OOP was the development of ER-like methods (Rumbaugh, Booch) to "model" the system before it got built. It doesn't clarify anything and it doesn't fit with the original idea from Smalltalk, where software is developed in a gradual and exploratory style. When he states you don't need to develop a "complex object class hierarchy" for a small task, I think he is falling into this trap.
3. Obviously, other approaches are good for a number of problems, and OOP is not the be-all and end-all. I would never avoid using it, though, because it is good for many problems, especially UI. OOP is worst in static languages (EC++), and best in dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, JS), in my opinion.
4. Spreadsheets. I wish the VBA interface to Excel were more OO, because I think the methods are on the wrong interfaces. There is definitely room for improvement. OTOH, the user interface is a facade around something that may or may not be implemented in OO. I also wish that I could refer to things in the user interface using OO methods, kind of like using Prototype in JS.
5. In financial applications, I wonder what technique allows him to "innovate" without his model "breaking down". He doesn't say, but it sure seems like he doesn't like objects! (for whatever reason, he also doesn't really say.)
6. Finally, I get the feeling that he's really saying he no longer writes a real object model for his applications. This is, apparently, because the object libraries he is working with have gotten so good at modeling everything he needs that he is mostly writing glue, and it is all fitting into a few modules of mostly procedural code. So, in other words, OO is a huge success.