dkimball

But on the other hand:

"[The well-managed business'] workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment."

Ford theorizes that greater amounts of leisure time and better pay for workers are good for both the workers, for their enjoyment, and the employers, for having larger markets; I don't see this as evil.

You experience adventure games pretty differently from how I do.

Also note that "merit" and "enjoyment" are different things.

On actually reading the article: this title is a bad summary. (Makes me think of Slashdot.) What the article covers is the point, which I hope is uncontroversial, that stimuli give rise to responses, and influence the course of cognition: holding a warm cup of coffee makes you think more, well, warmly of someone you're interviewing; seeing a framed picture of a library causes you to speak more quietly; the smell of cleaning agents inspires you to keep your cubicle clean; long dint of repetition encourages you to decide that yes, in fact, you are having a Big Mac attack.

None of this is controversial, unless you're thinking in terms of Descartes -- the body and mind as purely separate and the mind as purely master of the body. There's a Catholic saying that "body and soul are one" -- what the soul (or mind, if you prefer) does, affects the body, and what the body does, affects the soul.

Another thing I'd mention: like evolutionary psychology, this article's research is highly culture-bound. They don't seem to be interested in determining whether pictures of libraries mean the same thing to Indonesian hill tribes, or whether the scent of Febreeze means the same thing to Moroccans (or red mages).

Also, as the article points out, this kind of unconscious encouragement can be overcome; you have only to be aware of it.

But, he can only be persuaded by the arguments that will necessarily persuade him, not necessarily those which correspond to reality. What merit is it to simply find the right button to push?

I looked at this article, but I don't think the experiment proves as much as Libet claims it does. Neither he nor subsequent researchers seem to have gone beyond toy problems (what EEG activity appears in someone writing or programming?).

Also, I find it hard to believe that free will "lives" in one or another part of the brain; neither determinism nor randomness is freedom, and a physical "organ of free will" would have to be either deterministic (from macro-scale physics) or random (from quantum-scale activity).

I agree that living without free will is probably psychologically insupportable; even Muslims and Calvinists, who believe in double predestination (and Marxists, who believe in historical determinism), live as if free will was true. (Read _The Pilgrim's Progress_ and tell me that Bunyan really believed Puritan doctrines...)

More to the point than the Geneva Conventions: the UN Convention Against Torture, which is exactly what it sounds like.

As for whether waterboarding is torture under US law: the US executed a few Kempaitai (Japanese secret police) agents for torturing US prisoners in WWII; they had waterboarded them. Waterboarding is also covered under UNCAT.

(Note to anyone assuming a partisan motivation: I am a serious Catholic, thus not by any stretch of the imagination a US liberal.)

The pleasure of writing, and/or bragging rights -- the same way that Wikipedia came to be what it is.

On the other hand, it can take a long time for ideas to be accepted. Even Pasteur was a radical in his day; and I can't find him on Wikipedia, but there was a French doctor who introduced the idea of washing one's hands -- I think in carbolic acid? -- before delivering a child. This worked very well; but the doctors thought it was a nuisance and produced no benefit, and kicked him out.

I'm not defending homeopathy, which I'm pretty deeply suspicious of; it _might_ merit further investigation, but homeopathic medicines certainly shouldn't be sold as medicines until they start performing a whole lot better than they have so far. I just want to point out that the medical field, and most scientific fields, are resistant to adopting new ideas even when those ideas do work.

Another example of that slowness: post-traumatic stress disorder, which was only accepted by the APA in DSM-IV (1980) after a long struggle.

Thanks for the update, and for giving it a chance. I agree that the production values are pretty bad...

Good luck in your search. I've never heard of an ad-hoc implementation of assembly language before, but while we're talking about wanting to head for the hills... :)

You know, on considering, I think you're right -- he doesn't advise against rules engines, just the Greenspun's Rule version. (Greenspun's Rule is that "any sufficiently long-running project includes a slow, buggy, and ad-hoc implementation of half of Common Lisp.")

I don't have much experience with rules engines, and I don't know what your budget is like; so I can't really make recommendations. That doesn't stop me from trying, though...

You might be interested in Intersystems' Ensemble. If you're anything like Alex, you'll run screaming for the hills at this point, since it's built on MUMPS (it's an extension of Caché, "postmodern MUMPS," which comes with everything from a web server to a blindingly fast SQL frontend). If you're not -- if you realize that it all compiles down to object code anyways, and what's important is programmer skill and code maintainability, not the presence of curly braces and variable declarations -- you'll keep reading. (Actually, Caché's version of MUMPS has both curly braces and variable declarations, although both are optional.)

Ensemble was designed to translate messages between incompatible healthcare databases, applying business rules in the process. It can be used for more than that; part of the training I had in the product (see below for my full disclosure) was using it to implement a simple loan acceptance protocol.

I think that its "flowchart mode" of execution might be very well suited to frequently-changing business rules. There's a video at http://www.maddash.net/videos/intersystems/ensemble/vehr/ which demonstrates this -- look at 7:15 for the flowchart (each element in it is programmable as necessary), and at 2:15 for the related flow through processing modules when something comes in.

You may be able to get a proof-of-concept demonstration -- see http://www.intersystems.com/ensemble/pilot/index.html for details. Even if not, if this looks interesting, it wouldn't hurt to get in touch with Intersystems Sales.

Full disclosure: I work at Intersystems, but I'm not associated with Sales, and I really should be getting back to work. :)

Alex Papadimoulis of the Daily WTF has an article on this -- it's his opinion that the simple, "bone-headed" approach is the best one for constraints like this, and homegrown business rule engines are dangerous:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Programming-Sucks!-Or-At-Lea...

However, commercial business rule engines might work out better, provided they stick to XML or known formats of I/O in general.

Just to set the record straight, Caché -- which is the last man standing of MUMPS packages at the present day -- includes support for bitmaps.

It also contains support for everything else from AJAX to the kitchen sink, since it originates with several independent (and competing) OS/programming-language/database systems, originating in the late '60s before worse-is-better ate everyone's lunch. It even works as a RAD environment (plus a webserver, an SQL database, an OO programming language, and a go-between for other systems' incompatible message formats): very unusual (I expect the kitchen-sink module, or perhaps the mail reader, in the next version), but not primitive.

Its reputation is sullied by some WTF-worthy users, and by old coding conventions (now less completely abandoned than they should be) that were like Perl but hard to understand.

Full disclosure: I work for Intersystems, but not in Sales, and this post is purely on my own initiative. (One does not pay people to make unflattering comparisons with Perl.)

You're right, it was the dopamine system I was thinking of -- the phrase had escaped me.

On Cheney: I think it's possible to say when someone's having a sybaritic lifestyle and when they're not; certainly someone who's as eagerly discussed by the media as Cheney now is (while Clinton's allowed to live his rather un-Presidential post-Presidential years in media silence).

This isn't a defense of Cheney, though. I would call him less nightmarish if he had the excuse of wanting money as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It seems to be a common vice, this thinking of life as Donkey Kong, and if you die with a high enough score you get to leave your initials on the machine at the end...

Two words: Poop sock.

MMORPGs have everything to do with being in the zone, nothing to do with sexuality; these two motivations are both exceptionally powerful. I remember an experiment with rats, where an electrode was hooked up directly to the center in the brain that generates the "in the zone" feeling; the rats pushed the lever to fire that electrode continually, until they died of starvation. MMORPGs, computer games in general, Wikipedia, checking e-mail, Hacker News... all operate based on the desire to zone in.

Now, the popularity of well-paid parasitic professions in the contemporary US (law, most prominently, where the marginal value of a new lawyer is negative) reveals that the desire for money is very strong as well; but is the desire for money always the same as the desire for sexual relations? I don't see Dick Cheney living it up like Bill Clinton...

Of course, multiple motivations can be present at once; but I think that good work, at least in computer areas, requires the desire to zone in as one of these motivations.

I think it's because of who proposed it: the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, according to Wikipedia in the "51st State" article.

I like the arrangement, too, but I can see why its provenance might taint it in some eyes. That's unfortunate; it's a much more pleasant arrangement than the one we currently have.

I could also see people objecting to changing the US's hundred-odd-year tradition of having ugly and grating arrangements of stars. :) And the circular star arrangement _is_ something one tends to see flown by sinister US successor states like those in _Fallout_ and _Jericho_...

I agree, I don't think it does. $50 feels like a lot even for a commercial-grade game, $60 feels like a fortune; gaming also has an enormous piracy problem (look up what happened to Paradox Interactive with the release of _Demigod_).

Gaming isn't really the same field as commercial software; a product is released once, and that's the end of it, as opposed to needing long-term support like a commercial product does. Put another way: after people buy Halo 3, they aren't likely to upgrade to Halo 3.11 for Workgroups.

There's always been a folk culture, including folk songs -- with "folk" and "songs" as separate words, "songs part of the popular consciousness" as opposed to "songs sung in an Appalachian dialect with a banjo, a long beard, and highly un-Appalachian politics."

We have a folk culture at the present day, too; the problem is that all songs used by the folk are copyrighted. Read _Sound Targets_, on music in the Iraq War, for another illustration of this; if every occasion of piracy mentioned in that book produced a $150,000 fine, the RIAA could field its own armed forces with the proceeds. (I hope I didn't just give them an idea.)

I'm not sure where we go from here. This situation can't continue, but "the laborer is worthy of his hire," to use the medieval form of the expression. If only the music industry weren't a gang of thugs (for a list of RIAA members: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_labels), we might already have a solution for this...

This is evocative of ferrethandjobs.com, although in that case it was a matter of capital letters not coming through.

URLs seem to require their own grammatical rules to avoid outrageous results, and this is just considering English; incorporating other languages likely to be in one's target audience would be important, too. One saving grace is that most languages don't sound much like each other... most of the time. (Which makes when they do all the more painful.)

Beware foreign borrowings, too...

I'd like to see that, too. I'm skeptical about this -- especially the part where she burned her identity documents to avoid being linked to a Communist coup that occurred when she was 102. Everyone knows that little old ladies are not to be trifled with, but this is going a little far.

As the old saying goes, "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent"...

This is doubly ironic with Apple's hipster, Manhattan-liberal gestalt...

No, I'm saying that you should never pay your workers less than they need to live on or drive them to exhaustion, even if the market will bear it.

China's extraordinary growth is because it's in the process of industrialization -- which, by definition, only happens once for a given country, and in which ideology does not have a very significant influence. Examples of industrializations of this sort include the Gilded Age in the US and the 1920s and 1930s in the USSR; contrary to what Chang expects, they don't go away once they're completed (but, since governments do not create them, they aren't endorsements for the government which conducts that industrialization; cf. Fernand Braudel's _A History of Civilizations_. For an extrapolation of the same character, but not in the context of economics and thus easier to recognize, see http://xkcd.com/605/).

Is China under its current regime stable over the long term? I don't think so. If the very guards in the prisons have no belief that the state will endure through their lifetimes, and their junior officers think nothing of complaining to foreigners about the incompetence of the civilian leadership, the state will probably not weather a strong internal challenge.

Do I think this challenge will come from a democratic opposition? Of course not. China is seeing a large amount of enthusiasm for the country and little enthusiasm for its government; in this circumstance, the most likely result is the overthrow of the Communist government in favor of a nationalist government of some sort (which will probably be enough of a headache for the rest of the world that we'll long for the good old days of the export-minded Communists). Expect a replay of the 1911 Revolution and the overthrow of the Qing; I wouldn't even rule out an era of "postmodern warlordism" in the interstitial period before the next government solidifies its power. It sounds silly, but China is a very large place, and asserting one's authority over the whole country -- especially after the collapse of a dysfunctional bureaucracy and/or a civil war -- is a non-trivial exercise.

I don't think the timeframe for this is particularly long, either, except by the standard of CEOs. I think most of HN's readers will see a breakup and new regime in China within their lifetimes; if I had to place a bet, I'd expect it to occur 40 years from now, give or take ten years -- that is, once the generation currently in their 20s and 30s ages into political power.

So, 100 years ago, this kind of weight was sideshow-worthy (and remember the other things one would see in a circus sideshow...); today, it wouldn't turn heads on a subway.

However: the US has become _more_ health-conscious in the past 100 years, not less. We must have something wrong, if concern for exercise and good nutrition goes hand-in-hand with this kind of obesity.

I think this is due, at least in part, to the drastic reduction of fat consumption relative to carbohydrates; but changes in lifestyle and in modes of entertainment must have something to do with it, too. No one mindlessly eats high-carbohydrate foods while playing poker, after all...

The increase in number of sedentary jobs relative to others probably has a role, too, but it must not be a very major factor on its own; otherwise, there would have been as much obesity among white-collar workers then as there is among everyone today.

There are things that man was not meant to know: not the coordinates of Cthulhu's tomb in the watery depths and the nature of spells to manipulate the Great Old Ones, but the unholy and arcane arts of transistors, CRTs, and low-fat yogurt.

[Edit: typo.]

(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...)

Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.

The Winter War, like Manchuria, was a "crime against peace" by the standard of Nuremberg; that establishes that Stalin, like both Hitler and Hirohito, had launched a small aggressive war prior to WWII.

The purges were not part of the war any more than the Holocaust was part of the war (pointed out at Adolf Eichmann's trial: the continued prosecution of the Holocaust actively impeded the Nazi war effort, especially by clogging up the railroad network); but I wanted to make it clear that Stalin as well as Hitler exterminated large numbers of his subjects during his "reign."

Overtime here is not mandatory, but employers have an obligation to pay a wage suitable to their employees' dignity as fellow human beings -- not necessarily their country's minimum wage; and from the article, it does not sound like 770 RMB/month -- nor even 1500 RMB/month -- are at this level. (Also note the manipulative use of fines and wage witholdings, which no one has commented on as yet on HN.)

These problems, plus 30-40 hours of overtime per week, a frantic pace of work, and no concern for workplace injuries or avoiding sexual harassment (an overused concept in the West, but the idea of keeping managers from exploiting female subordinates is sound), do not add up to acceptable working conditions.

I'm ignoring the article's pro-union orientation (unions are no cure-all, especially since union bosses are easily corrupted); and I'm aware of the cultural habit of taking naps during breaks. I'm also not going to talk about air conditioning, since it was only invented 60-odd years ago; nor will I comment on bucket sponge baths; and I'm sticking to RMB here, since expressing RMB as USD (especially USD at the nominal rate of exchange) is misleading at best.

Is some of this standard practice in the United States? Yes. (I'm not familiar with practices in Western Europe.) Do wrong actions become right because citizens of one's own country are doing them too? No.

The defensiveness of some of these comments is unsettling. Inhumane conditions are inhumane no matter where they are, and no matter what the situation is in the society; it is never right to do to one's workers what this article is describing, not even if there's a lot of competition for their jobs.

This is the kind of thing that explains why the United States is not lassiez-faire capitalist anymore; and it emphasizes that we should forswear our addiction to shopping cheap, in favor of buying what is produced in a morally licit fashion, and genuinely punishing corporate leaders over whom the US has jurisdiction and who knowingly go along with this kind of thing. I don't mean sanctions directed at the corporation: I mean punishing the individuals who sign off on or turn a blind eye to this, and I think that a crucial part of any such punishment, in addition to a long prison sentence, is the confiscation of the individual's personal fortune -- since this kind of person (well, almost always "this kind of man") sees money as score, and his objective is to die with a score high enough to leave his initials on the game's attract screen.

I want to emphasize here that this is not partisan United States issue, either. I am a serious Catholic; I vote Republican and like the Tea Party movement; and I know that this kind of thing is wrong, and that you don't have to be a Green, "pro-choice," or a gun-control advocate to recognize it as such.

I think the budget part is the largest one -- the extremely low capital necessary compared to almost any other field. Paul Graham has an essay on, I think, things noticed in the startup culture by someone native to a different field -- who observed that you can found Google or Reddit for less than it costs to remodel a kitchen...

My criterion is pre-1945 body count for the governments in question, including non-military actions (like the Holocaust of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; and the Holodomor of the Ukranians) as well as military. It doesn't matter whether or not you count Operation Keelhaul, the campaign against "rootless internationalists," and the like: Stalin worked more people to death in the GULAG network (and starved to death in the special settlements) than Hitler gassed (and worked to death: the Nazi concentration camps were modeled on their Soviet counterparts) in the Holocaust.

The Communists targeted class enemies, while the Nazis targeted racial ones, but this was a less important distinction than you think: if you were a kulak and became poor, you were now a poor kulak, not a proletarian... and in practice, Lenin and especially Stalin managed to off an awfully large number of race enemies anyways.

Edit: For the "worst _criminals_" part, as opposed to "worst faction": look at the crimes that the Nazis committed, that the Japanese committed, and that the Western Allies committed; Stalin committed crimes of the same categories, including crimes which one of these three groups did commit and the other two did not. The Winter War was Stalin's Manchuria; Berlin was his Nanking; his artillery bombardments of cities were his strategic bombing; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was his Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; his extermination of the Ukranians and the kulaks was his Holocaust (remember: a kulak was a class enemy, but a kulak who became poor was now a poor kulak, not a proletarian); and he committed the Katyn Forest massacre, which was on a larger scale than any comparable massacre done by anyone else.