mkn

Unlike conventional designs, the proposed reactor is self-regulating through the inherent properties of uranium hydride, which serves as a combination fuel and moderator. The temperature-driven mobility of the hydrogen contained in the hydride controls the nuclear activity. If the core temperature increases over the set point, the hydrogen is driven out of the core, the moderation drops, and the power production decreases. If the temperature drops, the hydrogen returns and the process is reversed. Thus the design is inherently fail-safe and will require minimal human oversight. The compact nature and inherent safety open the possibility for low-cost mass production and operation of the reactors.

I'm sure a Google search or Wikipedia search would net you more.

While it's true that in a field where continued effort is required for continued success (like acting, to continue the theme of his 'American Idol' remarks), software (web software in particular) can be a different kind of beast. For sites that derive value from the network effect, your work can taper off once the network size reaches a certain point. (Witness Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish.com.)

Furthermore, while times are tight now, the 'get bought' method of internet riches, where/when available, has to qualify as an 'overnight' success.*

*Not to say that this is the most likely or desirable case, just that it qualifies as a counterexample.

The cosine function is a wonderful thing, and 100% of nothing is still... <mumble>carry the four, divide by seven, minus pi</mumble>... nothing.

I also watched, just today, this vid: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760... , in which Eric Lerner talks about dense plasma focus fusion. He makes the point, towards the end, that DPF fusion is about (literally) a million times closer to obtaining fusion than even the Polywell scheme. The core of these DPF devices are about as big as your hand.

I'm not putting down the Polywell scheme. I just thought the link to Lerner's talk was interesting as well. (It's also 64+ minutes long.)

That aside, the proper way to make the analogy you're making is not to compare investing in a CDS against putting money in or under your mattress, but rather to compare it with putting it in a certificate of deposit in your locally-owned bank or loaning it to a locally-owned business. Either of these would very likely have less return and a higher risk for you. However, you would be less susceptible to a global default cascade like the one that is happening now.

The reason that ...your own data center [would] be better... isn't that it's less likely to go down, but rather that, if everybody has their own data center, the chances of a global blackout go down drastically. This is precisely the analogue I was pointing out. If banks had stayed non-optimum and local, then (arguably) we would not be facing a (potential) global economic meltdown.

You may argue (rightly) that if you pursue these localist strategies when everyone else is pursuing these more profitable consolidated strategies, which carry this systemic risk of catastrophic failure, that you'd succumb to competition from others. This is the point of asking for regulation in the market, and (possibly) the case for asking for it here. At some point, almost by definition, the cloud computing market will commoditize. When that happens, the only way to cut costs will be do do without redundancy, if that is a legally available option.

The underlying problem is that people discount the cost/benefit of events that happen in the distant future, and the global catastrophes in these two systems always seems distant.

Finally, one may object that if redundancy is such a good idea, then it will happen naturally and never be eroded by market forces. In this case, then, there can really be no objection to legislation on the matter, because everyone will naturally comply anyways.

Analogously, should these cloud providers be required by law to maintain a (geographically distributed) computing reserve? A second (or third, even) clone of the current cloud?

I understand that the communication between the cloud and the world is distributed, but the actual cloud seems to be as distributed as a rock.

When asked about what could happen, there was some talk about a default cascade leading to depressed prices [waves arms] and a grocery store can't make payroll because they can't find a bank to give them a loan secured against their inventory. Now, I don't think he's wrong that we could see grocery stores not making payroll, nor that a default cascade could lead to that. I just think that the arm waving part is what saves us all. If things really do get that bad, then new systems will be formed of necessity. For example, some of those grocery store employees could take a portion of their pay in store credit, micro-lenders could come to the aid of the store (micro-lenders that include the employees), barter will happen, illiquid assets will be traded, and so on.

Not that it will be pretty, or that their won't be real pain, but there are ways to eke by.

Also, I think the most telling comment of the interview was when Mandelbrot said that we couldn't calculate the odds of a catastrophe like this. Taken to it's logical conclusion, this kind of means that we can't tell if we should even be paying attention to these two on this matter. (I know. Mandelbrot. But even Homer sometimes nods.)

However, I think that we really are in disagreement. There was some government policy that was bad for the market (easy money leading to bad lending) but the creation of credit default swaps certainly has to fall under "the (real) market."

This is my point about the No True Scotsman fallacy. Buying a credit default swap certainly had to be a bad idea from the very beginning. You're insuring an asset that you don't (necessarily have to) own. This falls right under the classical definition of a "Moral Hazard." However, they were bought by the very agents (or at least agents indistinguishable by market theory from the actual agents) that compose the market that is now correcting itself. The agents were incapable of seeing the disaster ahead. This either means that they weren't rational (in which case we don't have a 'market') or that they were rational (in which case free markets really did get us into this mess). I don't know which is more frightening.

The analogy is often made that free markets allow a kind of evolution to occur. The fitness function is profitability/solvency, and the organisms are investors, organizations, consumers, et al. I think this is a great analogy, but it does have some interesting implications. Fraud happens in nature (caterpillars that mimic ant pheromones to invade ant nests). Boom/bust cycles happen in nature (algal blooms, even in the absence of agricultural runoff). Parasitism happens in nature. All of these things have market analogues. Indeed, all of those analogues figure highly in the current debacle.

While "[h]eavily socialist systems can shield people from the truth of a problem," they can also shield people from the worst of market excesses. There doesn't seem, to me at least, to be any kind of fundamental reason why regulation and government action, socialist or otherwise, either has to shield people from truth or is incapable of shielding people from what could turn out to be very dire consequences.

Free markets won't [languish indefinitely]

The Krugman article I mentioned (http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/mushy.html) actually talks about a case in which a free market will languish indefinitely, namely, if nobody knows to expect any better than they're currently getting. This is just one of the many consequences of the fact that the agents that compose real markets differ significantly from the rational agents of classical economics. I mean, presumably, people who advocate for free markets aren't heartless and bloodthirsty. They advocate, fundamentally, because they want what's best for everybody. I think it's important for them, in light of their desire to do good, to take an honest look at the limitations of the theory and ask, "Are we going to get what's best for everybody by blindly implementing classical economic theory with disregard for the differences between the model and reality? Or are we going to do better by implementing it only so far as it goes and then putting other systems in place to ameliorate the worst of its excesses in the fairest manner we can find?" This is fundamentally a philosophical question, not an economic one.

That said, it seems like I need to educate myself on the various products, though any prototypes I build will still use MySQL just because of the price point. :o)

I'm back.

[T]he market place [is] revaluing assets inline with their true values.

This begs the question of how the assets became overvalued in the first place. The answer, though hard for market apologists to swallow, is that the market did it. We can't simply presume that every good thing that happens is due to the market and every bad thing is some unexplained phenomenon.

[T]hat is not the fault of capitalism but the fault of people playing silly buggers.

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. We can't say that "True Capitalism" would have fixed this, but people playing silly buggers are the cause of all the trouble. News flash: The market is composed of people playing silly buggers! This is the very crux of the point. "True Capitalist Markets" may always value assets best when unregulated, but "True Capitalist Markets" don't exist. Classical free markets are a mathematical construct in which all the agents act rationally but with imperfect information. Real markets are real constructs where the agents are silly stupid human beings with all their irrational beliefs and psychological frailties. This is why there is an emerging field called "Behavioral Economics." This is why there was an article by Paul Krugman featured here the other day about why real markets failed English Cuisine for a century or more.

The point can be beautifully summed up in a joke I read once: An economist and his granddaughter were walking along when the granddaughter saw a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Anxious for moral guidance, she tugs on her grandfather's shirt and asks, "Should I pick up that $20 bill?"

"Nonsense," replied the economist. "If that were a real $20 bill someone would have picked it up already."

At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.

One of my favorite examples by Edwards Deming is a factory that has three production lines, each manned by an employee, each producing the same product on the same equipment. Furthermore, assume that there are no defects in the equipment, the manufacturing processes are under statistical control (negligible products appearing 2 standard deviations from the mean in any measured variable, iirc), and that the employees are equally skilled at their jobs. The company has a policy to promote top performers and dismiss low performers.

Every year, at the annual review, the company policy demands that they promote one average worker, keep another average worker in production, and fire the other average worker, simply because even a statistically controlled process produces some variation. This is a random process in that all three candidates have been defined as equally qualified.

In a typical software organization, where there is hardly such a thing as a controlled process, performance reviews are pure fiction if they purport to say anything about the individual. It's simply amazing hubris to think that you can attribute any given success or failure to a quality of the individual employee when your processes are not under statistical control. It is therefore amazing naivete to think that promotions in an organization of any size are handed out based on merit. They are handed out based on, at best, a record of performance, which is subject to the vagaries of chance.

Note that I'm not advocating for any particular Utopic solution. I'm just acknowledging that local reviews of system components (employees, in this case) will never produce a globally optimum solution.

The opposite end of the spectrum is modern compilers. C/C++ compilers are generally so good that most attempts at nuanced optimization are just pointless; The compiler saw you coming and optimized your code behind your back before you got there. Why can't storage engines be like this? Why do you have to think not only about the type of your data, but how you want it implemented as well? Are there technical reasons why a db can't take generic data declarations ('string' instead of 'varchar(255)') and do the right thing with it when you populate your db? Or treat the use of a transaction as a hint that you'd like a storage engine that supports transactions?

I realize there comes a point where the db design has to be clamped down for production, but in the design stages there's a lot of optimization that a 'SQL compiler' could do behind your back. It currently seems like database product designers have taken the lazy way out and decided that optimization should live in the developers' heads rather than in the engine.

It just seems like SQL is this awful holdover from the days of COBOL and that we seriously need a modern product that let's us think about our programming problems rather than SQL's hangups. Am I missing something really basic, here?

Let me emphasize that, afaik, ronaldbradford knows his stuff, and I'm glad for him if he can make a living off of his MySQL knowledge. I just wish that that knowledge was embedded in the products themselves.

For example, on the home economics front, I'd advise that you buy pots and pans at Target so you can cook your own meals because you'll save $15/meal/person x 3 meals/day x 30 days/month x 4 persons/household = $5400/month/household, on average. Maybe you can save more by buying used pots at the thrift store, or inheriting them from your rich uncle, or salvaging them out of the garbage, but that doesn't invalidate the point.

Your question was glib, and this is a forum for smart people.

he's bringing down the team. Sucks to be him, but if he's affecting productivity, out he goes.

There was no mention of a productivity hit. We have to take the OP at his word that he/she meant, "If somebody isn't suave or outgoing enough, fire that person." I think I'd rather educate my team about diversity, tolerance, and respect than fire technically competent people who happen to like to keep their doors closed. If you have a team that requires all others to be social sophisticates and can't function in the face of shyness, then this is your second biggest problem after handling the inevitable discrimination suit for firing Joe Shy. Also, if I worked with me, I'd probably want some alone time, too.

There are just so many things wrong with point (9) that it's hard to get them all out. Here goes:

1) Team managers, unless highly skilled (and sometimes even then) don't always understand the factors that make their teams function/fail.

2) The aforementioned possible legal liability of insisting on a team of suaves.

3) The inadvisability of insisting on a team of suaves.

4) The presupposition that the person who is awkward/shy is the problem. Maybe (the hypothetical) you and your team are a gang of unproductive dicks?

5) Maybe you're productive dicks but it will never scale?

6) The whiny intolerance of anyone who's not having absolutely the easiest time of things.

7) The fact that none of this has ever been an issue on any team I've ever worked on?

8) The insipid notion that it's a zero sum game or that the only thing is the productivity or that you can improve productivity with misguided social engineering.

I could go on. I think that what it really comes down to is that I'd rather be the guy who succeeds by helping others succeed. Entrepreneurship is as much about finding value where others can't as it is about creating new value. That includes finding it in employees who are less than socially perfect.

It's actionable age discrimination, but go ahead. You gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelette.

9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him

It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)

12. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.

Also, breathe air, drink water, and eat food.

15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.

Again, actionable sexual harassment, but you're a nouveau web entrepreneur and therefore not concerned about things like legal liabilities. Let IBM, Microsoft, and other old school outfits worry about things like that. Besides, you're saving so much money by doing this that you can afford the suit.

I feel like I've fallen victim to a motivational seminar version of Poe's law.

This seems to square well with Daniel Gilbert's work on happiness as well. $40k/year for a family of four it $10k/capita. And I think we can at least take it seriously (even if we disagree) because there really is research behind these claims. Maybe we don't like the policies that the conclusions seem to warrant, or maybe we can point to methodological flaws in that research, but dismissing the claims outright is a bit premature.

So most economists worry about how taxes discourage people from working, but in fact, taxes can be encouraging people to have a less feverish pace of life and to focus more on time with friends and family rather than consumption.

I don't even know how to respond to that sentence.

Though the construction is a little awkward, he seems to be saying that taxes do reduce the incentive to work, but that this is a good thing, because they are inadvertently spending their time on the things that do empirically increase happiness. In other words, the proposed indirect approach of reduce taxes -> increase hours -> higher income ->increase happiness may be less effective than the proposed raise taxes -> more free time ->increase happiness. I'm not saying I agree with either one, just that it's not incoherent.

the [sic] idea of a decreasing marginal utility for money is not based on any scientific research.

From the article: We now have evidence that shows the extent of the difference, which is roughly that a dollar is worth 10 times more to a poor person than to a rich person whose income is 10 times higher. Remember, we're not talking about the power of a dollar to buy goods, but rather its power to buy happiness. Marginal utility certainly applies to the goods purchased, and the starving man's steak brings more happiness to him than does the CEO's.

Another salient point is that we almost never take into account the fact that we accommodate to the conditions around us. We truly believe that if we win the lottery we will be happy forever, even in the face of mountains of data to the contrary.

The most surprising result, I thought, was that (in the late 1990s U.S. dollars) happiness begins at $40k per year, and increases only slightly for incomes up to $100k per year, and then is essentially flat. One of the drivers for this was that, at $40k per year, you typically get health insurance through work, and this removes the primary worry that brings people's happiness down.

I think the really interesting thing would be to see if you could convince rich people of this so that they voluntarily, without legal compulsion, would give up some of their wealth to make others happy. I'd be interested to see if I would do this, if I ever became a .com/web 2.0 zillionaire.

We are the guys and girls that solve this...

That depends, I guess, on if we're the kind of people who keep others in houses, lend to banks, evaluate debtor's credit rating, produce the things people need in order to live, or have the intellect and authority to make the right policy decisions in this frankly harrowing time.

If a meltdown really happens, starting up will be a whole different ball game. Changing currency valuations will strongly influence things like who gets to be an industrial economy vs. who gets to be a service economy, who gets to have functioning infrastructure and who doesn't, and who can afford food and energy.

Though we are all a little disaster-fatigued, the global financial freeze-up that could wreak havoc on our abilities to make a living surely warrants attention on the front page.

The snippet from the article seems to suggest that the nightmare is due to the special sanctity of the First Amendment as compared to the Fourth. Rather, the nightmare comes from the burden of applying such a complex law as the DMCA with the frequency that would be necessary to enforce its provisions. It's the difference between doing your taxes once (or four times) per year vs. applying the DMCA every single time you turn the radio on.

I like my Fourth Amendment, too, thank-you-very-much.

Don't know why I felt compelled to point this all out.

There's some arm waving about how increasing the income tax on high wage earners will act as a disincentive to angel investors. Am I misunderstanding tax law, or aren't capital gains (e.g., from startup investments) separate from income for tax purposes?

Then, when Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would actually help, the author rails against it because it has 'failed everywhere it's been tried.' (Except where it has succeeded. And also, the dismal failures mentioned are anecdotal scaremongering.) The solution is held out in front of the author and he rejects it on unrelated, partisan grounds!

Maybe he makes sense to himself, but his oversimplifications haven't adequately made the case for the article title or his two supporting gripes.

The pinnacle of this has to be the competitive incentive programs used at certain large software firms. In a competitive review system, the best policy is to passively sabotage your coworkers. This is robust even in the case where you are the rare superstar who has all the knowledge (in which case you simply hoard your knowledge). Those that try to be stars simply attract more coworker subversion. The countervailing factor is the general misery caused by this system. Employees will continue to sabotage until the work environment is as bad as they are willing to tolerate at the prevailing pay level. Thus, the only guaranteed result of a competitive review system seems to be maximally low morale and the majority of employee effort spent on gaming the system.

The late W. Edwards Deming (one of my heroes) proposed that the solution to this (in a manufacturing context) was to have a collective reward system (e.g., profit sharing), and to treat high and low performers as special cases. High performers should be examined to see if their techniques can be generalized across the organization, and low performers are examined to see if their performance is a result of the system or (rarely) a cause idiosyncratic to the low performer.

Many of the software types I've spoken to balk at such a method being applied to their organizations, because "creating software is not a production line process." This seems specious to me.

Have any of you if you've worked in a software house that had a reward system in place like the one Deming advocates?

Translation:

If you ever do end up with me interviewing you, I'll likely work one or two obscure questions into the discussion to make you feel stupid so that I can gloat. That's how charming I am.

If a train stops at a train station, what happens at a workstation?

I know. The '90s called. They want their joke back.

The incomprehension of the tribe nearly always leads to the most crushing kind of social defeat. And when you factor in the inevitable failures of any novel challenge, I'll bet you'll find that the life of an intellectual hero isn't just lonely, it's leadenly depressing. (I'm thinking right now of a comment made by one of the Wright brothers on the train home after a failed flight attempt: "Man will not fly for a thousand years.") It's no fun to be a depressed hero, I'm sure. For every Goddard and Wright brother, there must be thousands of failure stories, each of them detailing a life you'd never want to live.

The cost associated with real innovation is generally very high. We are, after all, paleolithic creatures living in a technical world. Conformity means a successful hunt. We're monkeys with mp3 players. Thus, this innovator's penalty is an atavism, but it's not one we're going to overcome anytime soon.

I am not nearly a good enough statistician to give a good critique of Talib's theories.

Neither is he. (rimshot)

Aside: "RTFA?" Seriously? I mean, despite the clear evidence that I'd at least (mis)read the article from my post? I thought I needed to relax because someone was wrong on the internet.

Further, fta:

Also, it's harder for MTFs to pass than FTMs: men who become women still have large hands and bigger frames.

If ever there was a case of absolute symmetry, it's this one. Unless, of course, women who become men don't have small hands and small frames! This article is mind-bogglingly vapid.

I know. Someone was wrong on the internet. I should just relax.

First, the authors never seem to be someone qualified to design a curriculum. No doubt they are all qualified coders with a reasonable amount of work behind them and a good understanding of machine fundamentals. However, curriculum design is a specialty, with it's own pitfalls and peculiarities. We may as well ask these authors what a good technique is for thoracic surgery is. They're equally qualified.

Second, while the authors are not qualified to design a pedagogy, they certainly seem to feel that they are, based on their own idiosyncratic experiences. This borders on egomania. "I learned C/C++/Java/QBasic/Lisp first and look how awesome I am. Therefore, everyone should take my obviously optimum path to learning the One True Way of coding." Is there no room for others to learn differently? To take a path different from one's own and still come to the same fundamental understanding and skill level?

Third, and finally, the various authors' lack of imagination considering curriculum design is staggering. Can they not imagine a gentle introduction to algorithmic science via any of the Turing-complete languages out there other than their first language of choice? Is there no room for variety? For example, can any of them answer definitively whether it is better, for any describable subset of students, for them to (1) "learn the hard way" by having to interrupt their focus on the problem at hand to compile c code into object files, hand them to the linker, and then run the executable or (2) forgo the 'obviously essential' details of x86 architecture so that they can hit Run in their lisp/sheme/python environment and see the immediate results? Clearly, in the first case, those that get through the trial by fire will have an easier time learning other languages. However, couldn't that be an indictment against compiles languages as a first language; that the learning curve is too steep?

In the face of the infinite variety of students, learning styles, teaching styles, learning environments, available hardware, and (most of all) pedagogical goals, I'm reminded in this case of a wonderful proverb taught to me by my high school English teacher: It is better to shut up and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

You'd allow people to submit their startup idea, business name, contact info, anticipated operating expenses, fund-raising goal, and so on. Once anyVC.com had accepted the venture for presentation to it's users, anyVC posts these ventures with an "Invest Now" button. Or have an auction-type interface: X-many dollars at y% stake in company per dollar. You could just queue those up from smallest stake per dollar to highest. (Funds would probably have to be escrowed, so there'd have to be some serious legalese and possible snail-mail notary-public stuff going on to sign up to become a microVC. Maybe that's a show-stopper.)

Then, the entrepeneur looks at his queue and begins accepting funds from the smallest-stake per dollar to the highest.

This might limit certain exit strategies, like incorporation, unless anyVC.com aggregates the various micro-investments, paying out to the micro-investors when they want to cash out, minus a small handling fee.

The firms would then be subject to some oversight from anyVC.com, and joint reports would be filed to the micro-investors via the web site, or via a private channel if security is an issue. (Maybe the micro-investors have to be under NDA or non-compete?)

Has something like this been done? If not, have I overlooked something glaringly obvious that makes this impossible?

Edit: This may make even more sense in a tight credit market.

More on-topic, it seems like there's a sliding scale that goes from "print with ink on disposable paper" up to "download onto eBook-type reader." I wonder where the sweet spot is (if there is one) in terms of creating a product for what would have to be termed 'mobile (probably static) media?'

For example, if the number of times you can reprint the same page increases, at some point you have to start thinking of a more durable substrate than paper, and the up-front cost goes up. And then, how much more is an A-size reader, say 1/4" thick but not flexible? Then how much more for a flexible one? And then a 1/2 to 1" thick reader that could hold the library of congress?

Maybe eBook readers aren't so much a solution to book reading as they are to the paperless office problem?