dmccunney

this comes as no surprise. But Camerron's post illustrates a deeper issue.

The world we live in is a mental model created by our brains, and the data that underlies the model is supplied by our senses. The model we make will differ depending on which of our senses is dominant.

For example, my primary sense is vision. When I read fiction, I often see pictures in fiction my head. I can be thrown out of a story because the pieces don't fit together, and I find myself saying "You can't get there from here!"

But vision isn't everyone's primary sense. My SO is a good example. She's extremely nearsighted. Without her glasses, anything farther than about 2' from her face is a blur. Her primary sense is hearing. When she asks me a technical question, my first impulse is to grab pencil and paper and draw a diagram. That conveys nothing to her, so I need to find a different metaphor based on hearing to describe the underlying concept.

I corresponded with a chap years back whose primary sense was touch. He felt holes in arguments. And in the oddest case I recall hearing of, there was a chap who could not find his way to the office in the morning. He was not stupid, and was a trained engineer. But testing revealed he was not visual at all. Landmarks conveyed nothing to him. He did have a strong kinesthetic sense. So he was driven from his home to his office in a low slung sports car that transmitted every dip and curve in the toad to the passengers. Thereafter, he could find his way to the office with no problem,. because his body remembered what the drive felt like.

I've spent a fair it of time over the years exploring where people are coming from in discussions. "Yes, I understand what you believe. You've made that quite clear and explicit. My question is why you believe it? How did you adopt this belief? What makes it emotionally satisfying to you?' Belief systems like religion and politics live on an emotional level, and aren't usually amenable to rational argument but cause they aren't rational in origin.

What our primary sense is and how that affects your view of the world my be more critical than you assume. No, you aren't representative, and others may not share your experience.

I'm contrary on this. I see salary level as a negative, not a positive. I want to be paid comparably to my peers.

I don't think I'm unique. I think just about all workers want to be paid comparably to their peers. They get upset if they discover others doing the same stuff with the same levels of skill and experience are making more than they are. (And here I mean a lot more, not just "been with the company longer and got regular raises".)

Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the workers labor. And focusing on pay can be misleading. I saw an IT salary comparison a while back. An IT staffer in San Diego might make more than double what a staffer doing the same job in Wheeling, WV made. The reason was simple. It cost far more to live in San Diego. Employers there had to pay far higher salaries so their people could afford to live there. And the chap in WV might actually being doing better, relative to peers in San Diego, because even at half the salary, his living expenses were a lot lower, and more of what he made was disposable income, instead of just covering his rent.

If the salary you make is your main focus, I think you are doing it wrong. Money is a means to an end. Having money lets you buy things you need. Having more money lets you also buy things you want. If all you have is money, you have problems. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. All you can do is exchange it for food, clothing, and shelter.

And if your main focus is salary level, you are like the character played by James Garner in a film called The Wheeler Dealers. Garner was a Texas entrepreneur, buying and selling, being followed around by a breathless female financial analyst trying to understand what he was doing. He stated it very clearly. "It's a game. Money is how you keep score." If that's the game you like to play, you probably shouldn't be in IT.

I had an interchange a while back with a chap elsewhere who was folding a startup that had not proved out. That's the normal outcome for a startup. Most fail. Too many people think "Oh, I'll go work for a startup! I'll put in 90 hour weeks for shit pay. But the startup will succeed and IPO and I'll get filthy rich" No, you won't. Even in a startup that succeeds and IPOs, only the founders are likely to get rich.

If you found a startup, the goal shouldn't be getting rich. You should be doing something you love to do, and will continue to do regardless of whether your startup succeeds and you IPO. If the startup succeeds, you may get filthy rich, but that will be a side effect, and not the point of the exercise. The chap I was talking to agreed completely with my notions.

The OP's complaint wasn't money, it was inability to make a meaningful contribution. The company was too big, with too many little cubbyholes where folks could get tucked away and not have an opportunity to contribute. His challenge was to find another place in the company where he would have an opportunity to make a contribution, or to find another company to work for that would provide the opportunity. If I were him, I might even accept a starting salary that was lower than my current one, simply because I could do stuff that made a contribution, and I saw potential for growth and making more money later.

I have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn't want it to go into the trash. She said it was "slow slow SLOW".

Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took 8 minutes to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe "death by thrashing" You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn't help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn't find confirmation it worked in the P2110.)

I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS.

Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn't. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist.

Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I'd call speedy.

Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other's slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was one copy of large apps shared between them.

FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work.

Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn't have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it.

I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere.

I still have the machine, but haven't booted it in ages.

A universal basic income is not a cure for this particular problem.

The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have and can't get jobs.

Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of "making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when many people couldn't.

You "make a living" doing a job. The job exists because someone else is willing to pay to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how to do anything someone else will pay for?

Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.

As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price than you can charge.

(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They cannot eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone else. How much more are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first place.)

Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By definition, those new jobs are new, and the folks idled don't know how to do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of an advanced degree to be able to do it. What do those folks do instead?

Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What is changing is the amount of work that can be done elsewhere or by machine. Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid. There must be minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you have a minimum wage job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.

But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell people, if it can be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to be paid, it will. We are still discovering how many that applies to.

Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside from providing income needed to live, jobs structure time, and give you something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you didn't have to work for a living?

This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one. The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are status markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you can't make a living?

I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer mostly not even asking the right questions.

When was the last time you went to Sourceforge? How do you access it?

It isn't ad filled here. They went through a bad patch when owned by the previous owner, who was trying to figure out how to monetize it, and made bad choices in how ads were presented. These days, ads normally get presented during the period when you are actually downloading something hosted on Sourceforge. (And I visit using Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled. It works fine.)

And bear in mind that the practical definition of "free" these days is "Someone else pays for it." Just who is that someone else and where does the money come from? Offerings like Sourceforge are expensive to operate and maintain, with full time salaried employees doing it. The money in their paychecks comes from somewhere. The usual source of the money is advertising.

Yes, GitHub is still free, but GitHub is now owned by Microsoft, and there are folks who object to that. (I am not one of them.)

Would you be willing to pay for a "no ads" version of Sourceforge or similar service?

Yes, B5 was an aggressive adopter of digital technology. The driver was costs. Models were expensive, and if they could be replaced by CGI, the cost of making the show could be dramatically reduced. B5 was being produced for the syndication market, which was a different animal than the usual networks, and doing it cheaper while retaining quality was a major goal. Short lived competitor "Space: Above and Beyond (which lasted one season) used models, with production costs over $1,000,000 per episode, and that was a major reason they only lasted a season. B5 did use Amiga and Video Toaster in the beginning, though I believe they transitioned to other equipment later. J. Michael Straczynski's partner Doug Netter had a company called Netter Digital that did the work. JMS commented that when he did pitch meetings with possible networks that would air the show, it was him and a 5 minute clip of their CGI renderings. When I saw the first episode opening, with the Vorlon craft emerging from hyperspace to dock at Babylon 5, I sat back open mouthed going "Whoa". I'm a computer guy, and had some notion of what it took to do that

I think I admire the energy and dedication behind this, but I can't see getting one.

I've been involved with eBooks for over 15 years. It began when my then employer decided all IT staff members should have PDAs. A Handspring Visor Deluxe running Palm OS 3.1 appeared on my desk. I started looking for stuff that would assist in my work as a Sysadmin.

An early discovery was Plucker - a desktop program and Palm client. Plucker was designed to spider websites, and convert what it grabbed into something that could be viewed on the Palm device. A good deal of the documentation for stuff I dealt with was in HTML, and Plucker desktop could convert locally stored HTML files to versions viewable on the PDA. I could carry a documentation library in my pocket.

It was a hop, skip, and jump to realizing I could read other things as well, and a good bit of Project Gutenberg and other things issued under licenses that permitted it joined the party. (I still have about 4K converted Plucker documents in a 7Z archive.)

While I still have a working PDA, the next step was a 7" Android tablet. A variety of eBook viewers for Android existed. My choice was the open source FBReader for Android. I had previously used a version of FBReader written in C under Windows and Linux. FBReader for Android was a Java port, but worked pretty much the same was. The win for FBReader was multiple format support. I prefer ePub, but FBReader can display Mobi, FB2, and a few other things native, and display PDFs, DjVu files, and CBR/CBZ files using plugins. Effectively, I didn't have to care what format a book was in. On the old PDA, I could read a variety of formats too, but each had a dedicated viewer app, and I had to remember which book was in which format displayed by what program. FBReader on Android was a breath of fresh air.

I do not use eInk devices. I understand the advantages - they are battery friendly, and viewable out of doors. But too much of the content I read requires color support. A color LCD screen is a requirement.

I also need a device that can do other things besides display eBooks. There are limits to what I want to carry around when traveling. I already take a laptop and a cell phone. A device that displays eBooks, but can do other things in a pinch like check email, Look Stuff Up, or display MS Office files is a major plus. (I do not use a phone for that. The stuff I tend to view needs a larger screen size than a practical phone can have.)

And while I prefer open source, I am not wedded to it. I will cheerfully pay for closed source software if there isn't an open source offering that does whatever I require, or there is, but the closed source version is simply better. (And a major part of "better" is UX. Open source software tends to have less than optimal user interfaces. The folks who wrote the programs wrote good code for performing the function, but are not UX designers.) I feel the same about open source hardware.

This is a worthy effort, and I wish it all success, but I think it appeals to a rather small niche market. Amazon, Kobo, and the like are not exactly threatened. ______ Dennis

An assortment: "The Silent Language" by Edward T. Hall. Hall was an anthropologist attached to the University of New Mexico. He and his research partner, linguist Norman Trager, were doing research in comparative culture. Hall realized they would need a comprehensive theory of culture to describe what they were comparing and provide ways to compare them. Hall's model was "culture as communication", and the results were presented in the book above. His key point was that most of culture was like the iceberg - 90% of it is processed on an unconscious reflex level. We are no more aware of most of our culture than a fish is of the water it swims in. We only become aware when we are set down in a culture that does things differently than ours. The Silent Language is about how we use space. The followup "The Hidden Dimension looks into how different cultures use time. Many things fell into place when I read Hall.

"Games People Play" by Eric Berne. Berne was a psychiatrist and founder of the discipline of Transactional Analysis. Games People Play was a PopSci bestseller when first published, which was odd because it's a highly technical volume written for other psychiatrists. His thesis was that most human behavior could be viewed as games, and most of what we did were ways of structuring time. Follow up with his "What Do You Say After You've Said Hello?" and "Beyond Games and Scripts". Hall's work above did much to explain teh behavior of societies. Berne's work does much to explain the behavior of people in societies.

"The Anatomy of Criticism" by Northrop Frye. Frye was a Professor of English at Toronto University. He had completed a study of William Blake called "Fearful Symmetry", and was attempting to do a study of Spencer's Faery Queen. But he found himself trying to make sense of various terms used in literature, and the result became a work of pure theory, unconnected with any specific works. He refers to poetry and poetics, but his canvas is broader. Part of his problem was that there was no general term in English for a work of prose fiction. It's a set of four essays, covering Historical Criticism, Ethical Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, and Rhetorical Criticism, but makes clear that while each form is valid in its own terms, none fully described literature, and a more synoptic view was required.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn Kuhn's work challenged the accepted notions of scientific progress, and the notion of steady accumulation. His thesis was that the real progress came from notions that lay outside accepted theories, and provided new paradigms by which reality might be understood, and faced all the resistance transformative ideas face from entrenched doctrine until they are demonstrated to be correct.

"Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities" by Peter F. Drucker. Drucker was our present generation's primary primary theorist and consultant on the practice of management, and just what management was and what mangers did. This work was probably his magnum opus, where he pulled together the ideas he'd formulated elsewhere into a coherent whole. It's a liberal education not only in management, but in the nature and structure of market based economies.

"The Making of Economic Society" by Robert F. Heilbroner. This is probably the best single volume overview I'm aware of on economics and economic history, beginning with just what an economy is, and the changing conception of economics through history, with the transition from Traditional through Command to Market economies and the issues involved with each. Many animated discussions I see online about economics make me say "Those words don't mean what you think they do. Please read Heilbroner, and come back when you have. Then we might at least be talking about the same things."

"The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. Russell is concerned with knowledge, and how we know what we know. He asks "Is there any knowledge in the world so certin that no reasonable man could doubt it?", and concludes that it's one of the most difficult questions that can be asked. When we understand the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we are launched on the study of philosophy, which is concerned with precisely such questions. If philosophy is of interest, this is a superb place to start.

"Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" by R. H. Tawney. Economies don't exist in vacuums. The are aspects of the societies in which they exist, and reflect the values of those societies. Religion has been a critical part of the value systems of societies for as long as there have been societies, and religious notions on what sort of behavior is acceptable affect the structure of economies by determining what sort of transactions are permissible. Tawney is specifically concerned with religious thought in England affecting social organization and economic issues in the period immediately preceding the Reformation and the two following centuries, but while his focus in England, his description of the way in which Christian religious doctrine changed gradually to make a capitalist economy possible in England, the underlying processes could be applied through Europe in general. Read this as a companion to Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", originally written in German and concerned with the Netherlands and Germany.

"Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" by Joseph A. Schumpeter. Schumpeter was an Austrian economist, a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes, and (briefly) Austria's Finance Minister in the 1920's. Like Keynes, he considered himself influenced by Marx. But unlike many others, he believed Marx "asked all the right questions, and got all the wrong answers". Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was Schumpeter's (often delightfully snarky) attempt to understand what Marx got wrong and why. It's a useful brainwash after you've spent any time reading MArx or other folks who consider themselves Marxists, and provides a needed sense of perspective.

There's more, but I have to stop somewhere...

Whether any government mandated minimum wage boost "works", depends upon who you are. Who benefits from it?

If you are currently in a minimum wage job, you may benefit. You're making more money, because the government says so! (But your employer might just decide wage costs are too high and lay you off...)

If you are unemployed and looking for a minimum wage job, the bar just got raised. The higher the minimum wage is set, the harder employers look at how badly they need the work done. The job they might be willing to pay $10/hour for might not be worth $15/hour to them. Your quest to get a minimum wage job just got harder.

And if you are willing to accept less money, because some money is better than none, it doesn't help you, because employers aren't legally permitted to pay you less, even if you would be happy to accept it. So you likely get a substantial underground economy of "off the books" employees, getting paid in cash that doesn't get reported to the government. And those folks may actually take home more than minimum wage employees because taxes don't get deducted from their wages.

(I live in the NY metropolitan area. I see a lot of that. And there are employers who would pay the higher minimum wage, but the employees don't want to be on the books. Many are undocumented aliens, and being on the books leaves a trail pointing to them and possible deportation.)

If you are the government that mandated the higher minimum wage, you might not benefit financially, because the amount of taxes you see is less than what you might see if minimum wage was lower and more people had minimum wage jobs. (Of course, for government who do this, it's about getting votes, and impact on tax revenue isn't a consideration.)

And bear in mind that what the employee gets in a minimum wage job is rather less than what the employer has to spend. The employer must deduct and remit taxes, and must maintain the appropriate records for legal purposes, and that costs money.

Ultimately, "it takes two to tango". There must be workers looking for minimum wage jobs, and employers offering them. The government can't require employers to hire workers they don't need, and increases in minimum wage will tend to decrease the number of minimum wage jobs available.

Ultimately, minimum wage increases have the effect of decreasing total employment, but this seems to get missed in such discussions.

The goal of minimum wage increases is to insure workers can make a survivable income. But value is relative - something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the worker's labor. Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage for a reason. They are low skilled/unskilled labor, and what the worker does simply isn't worth that much to those who need it done. What the minimum wage folks need is to be able to acquire the knowledge and skills that are worth more to employers and be able to get better jobs. Increases in minimum wage by themselves don't aid that.

We are seeing all sorts of commentary elsewhere about job losses to automation. The only reason many minimum wage jobs still exist is because it's more expensive up front to automate them than employers want to spend. At some point, minimum wage boosts might just make it worth the employer's while to spend the money needed to automate those jobs. Then what do the job seekers do?

This is an example of why I flatly refused to install an IM client at a former employer who wanted IT staff connected and instantly available. (The issue was laid to rest in a conference call when a co-worker said "The nice thing about Dennis is that if he's at his desk, he answers the phone on the first ring. If he's not at his desk, you won't get hin in IM, either!" Bless him. He got it.)

The sort of stuff I did was mostly not user facing, since I was admin for the nix boxes, and not usually supporting Windows on the desktop. The things I did tended to require peace, quiet, and extended concentration to make sure I understood the problem and had created a working solution that wouldn't blow up in someone's face.

The underlying problem is that computers are good at multi-tasking, and humans aren't. When a computer is handling multiple concurrent tasks, and an interrupt comes in, it must save its place in what it's doing at the moment, handle the interrupt, then go back to the saved place and continue where it left off. It's stack processing, computers are designed to do it well, and are generally fast enough that the user thinks the computer is only doing the task she's working on. The overhead isn't apparent.

Humans aren't good at stack processing. I've seen papers from years back indicating the average developer can handle 5-7 parallel tracks at a time, and beyond that, things get lost. Stuff getting lost because the developer was trying to keep track of too many things were highly fertile sources of bugs.

And humans aren't anywhere near as fast as computers. Conceptually, you do the same thing as a computer - you are working on a task and get interrupted. You must save your place in what you're doing, handle the interruption, and resume where you left off. There is significant overhead there, and if you get interrupted enough, you spend most of your time stack processing instead of actually working on tasks. You get the equivalent of old time mainframe "death by thrashing", where the mainframe was spending more time context switching than actually doing work.

Some of us are better at multi-tasking than others, but I think all of us over-estimate how good we actually are. I've advised folks elsewhere to try an experiment - work on one task at a time, and continue till it's completed, instead of juggling multiple concurrent tasks. I'm willing to bet the amount of work you actually get done will jump.

What confuses me is why the shop in the article thought that sort of real time communication was a good idea in the first place.

Dennis

The key statement in the article is the last: "Bottom line: Robots do replace workers. On the other hand, some industries that don't automate end up losing workers anyway, because their costs are too high and their customers go elsewhere. For workers, robots are only part of the problem."

There are several key underlying points:

1. Work flows to where it can be done cheapest. It always has.

2. Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else will pay to have it done. That includes the worker's labor. Large numbers of workers are currently being told "What you do isn't worth what you want to be paid to do it.", as jobs relocate or get automated out of existence.

3. Supply and demand rules. When demand is high and supply is low, prices are high. As supply increases, prices drop.

4. Everyone wants the best deal they can get.

Work flowing elsewhere has been going on for a very long time. Before automation and robotics came along, and work had to be performed manually by human workers, employers had incentives to locate where the work was done in places with lower labor costs. Locating in non-union areas was a first step. Moving offshore was next. (Ask what used to the the International Ladies Garment Worker Union about it.)

China bootstrapped itself from Third World agrarian nation to First World industrial power by leveraging low labor costs. The moved peasants off the farm to the cities to become an industrial workforce. Unlike the experience of Russia which did the same thing under the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, coercion wasn't needed. Those factory jobs had better hours, better working conditions, and paid better than being a peasant on the farm. People migrated en mass to get those jobs. Chinese workers got paid a fraction of what Western workers would get for the same jobs, but it cost far less to live in China. Those factory jobs were a step up for those who had them.

But China is suffering from its own success. The supply of peasants on the farm is drying up, manufacturers must compete for labor, pay is rising in consequence, and China is no longer the low cost producer. A major Chinese manufacturer announced a full court press into robotics a while back in consequence.

The inflection point we see now is that higher level jobs than assembly line worker can be and are being automated, and "knowledge work" is flowing to places where it can be done cheaper, with outsourcing an increasingly common practice.

And "everyone wants the best deal they can get" is a driver. Unless you are one of the one tenth of one percent who doesn't care what something costs, you are probably on a budget. You have fixed costs you must pay, like rent and food, and variable costs come out of what's left of your income. The Internet provides all sorts of tools for locating the best deals, and price will be a factor. It may not be the only factor on which you make a purchase decision, but all else being equal, lower price wins.

So outfits who make things or provide services have a strong interest in reducing costs to be able to provide lower prices, and lowering labor costs is a goal. The fact that we can get many things cheaper than we used to is a consequence of the factors mentioned above. A question I normally ask folks who want jobs returned to the US is "How much more are you willing to pay for what you buy to see that happen? You will pay more." I don't normally get meaningful answers.

Complaints about immigration that reduce to "Those <whatevers> will work cheaper than I do and take my job!" raise similar issues. The people who want to buy whatever you make or do are on a budget just like you are. If the immigrant you worry about can do the job as well as you can and will charge less to do it, explain why they should pay you more? What's in it for them?

I don't have pat answers to the problem of job loss. I just think we aren't asking the right questions. ______ Dennis

The biggest worldview changer for me was probably the work of the late Edward T. Hall.

Hall was an anthropologist attached the the University of New Mexico. He and his research partner, linguist Norman Trager, were doing research in comparative culture. Hall discovered they would need to provide a comprehensive theory of culture to define what they were comparing and make it possible to do meaningful comparisons.

The results of that effort are documented in Hall's books _The Silent Language_, _The Hidden Dimension_, and _Beyond Culture_.

Culture is normally thought of as "Everything we know and do", but Hall demonstrated it was broader and deeperl Like the proverbial iceberg, 90% of culture takes place on an unconscious level, handled by reflex. We aren't aware may things we do are done by reflex, unless we find ourselves in a culture that does things differently.

As an example, you are at a gathering of some sort. (What sort doesn't matter.) It's not crowded, and there's room to spread out comfortably. You are talking to someone you just met. How far apart are you standing? Why that distance instead of nearer or farther away?

If you live in the US, the answer to "how close are you standing?" is "about 3 feet". The dominant culture here derives from northern Europe, where that is the correct social distance to maintain with folks who aren't family or close friends. No one ever explicitly tells you "Thou shalt stand three feet away from strangers and folks you don't know really well!" You absorb it by osmosis beginning in early childhood, by observing and mimicking what you see the adults do. By the time you are old enough to be out on your own, it's embedded reflex you do without thinking.

Now plunk yourself down in a culture with a different notion of correct social distance, like Greece, where the default is about a foot and a half, and watch the fun. Someone from our culture will think the Greeks are "pushy" and "in your face". The Greeks will think we are cold and standoffish. Each side is simply attempting to maintain the social distance correct for their culture.

Many things fell into place when I read Hall, and my notions about why various things occur changed radically. A lot of current international problems can be considered clashes between cultures with differing underlying elements. Religion, political structure, and economic system are overlays on top of underlying cultural patterns, and differences in the overlays may mask the deeper underlying issues. ______ Dennis

Profit is not a "choice", it's a requirement.

The one thing we can say for certain about tomorrow is that it will be different from today. We don't know (and likely can't know) how it will be different - only that it will be.

To survive and prosper tomorrow, we probably need to stop doing some things we currently do, start doing some new things entirely, and do some things we continue to do differently than today.

Making these changes requires resources. We need raw materials and machinery (if we are making things), we need skilled labor, we need management, and we need capital. We must invest in our enterprise.

Chances are, we don't have the capital just lying around. Soundly run companies are generally fully invested. So we must get capital from outside of our enterprise. We may get it in the form of equity, by selling stock, or in the form of debt, by getting loans.

Either way, that capital has a cost. Shareholders expect to make money through increasing in the value of their stock or dividends paid or both, and how likely they are to buy depends on how likely they think they are to make the desired money on their investment. Lenders are interested in whether we are good for it and will repay the loan. They charge interest on the loan, and the amount they charge will reflect their perception of the risk they assume in making the loan. The stronger your balance sheet, the less risk they will perceive, and the lower your rate will likely be.

The usual mantra chanted by profit making enterprises is that they wish to make as high a profit as possible. It's the wrong answer.

The correct question is "How much profit do we have to make to cover our marginal cost of capital?" For many firms, the answer to that question will be higher than their most optimistic estimate to how much they can make. They're in trouble.

Back in the early 70's, I worked for a government (HUD/ERDA) sponsored project to promote alternative energy use. It was the first flowering of OPEC, gas prices at the pump were rising over (gasp!) $1/gallon, and there was a sudden massive interest in reducing dependence on foreign oil.

What my shop was pushing was using solar collectors to heat hot water. That was about 20% of the average residential energy bill, had a relatively low up front cost, and a relatively short payback period. We were aware of and tracked a variety of alternative energy sources including photovoltaics, but expected them to get niche pickup at best because they were simply too expensive. To a large extent, that's still the case.

Another point to note is that energy usage isn't just electricity. Back then, a national energy budget divided roughly into quarters, with industrial heating and cooling, residential/light commercial heating and cooling, transportation, and electricity making up the demand. The total amount of energy consumed is rather larger, but that breakdown is still pretty much the same. I don't see solar electric power addressing things like heavy duty heating and cooling, nor most transportation.

One thing I got convinced of back then is that the form of energy used will be the cheapest that will do the job. Energy from fossil fuel still predominates because it is still cheapest.

Solar is still essentially a niche market, though growing, and lower costs are the driver. I was grimly amused a while back over the woes of Solyndra, an effort to create large scale photovoltiac production in the US, that got about half a billion in government funding. The underlying notion was creation of US jobs.

Photovoltaics is semi-conductor electronics, the Chinese jumped in with both feet, and started turning out solar cells at prices domestic producers couldn't match. In fact, some Chinese producers came to grief. They dove in based on demand estimates that were unfounded, produced a glut on the market, far lower pricers for buyers, and failures among firms that were late to the manufacturing party.

People went on about US jobs, and I thought "Drive on the NJ Turnpike, and every other pole has a solar cell array generating power to help run the Turnpike. Somebody has the contract to design, produce, install and maintain those arrays, and those jobs by nature will be local. Decreasing costs for the raw materials used to produce the arrays made it possible to sell the end products cheaper, and increased the demand. The Chinese can do it cheapest and can have solar cell production. The money is in moving up the value chain and making things people will buy that use those solar cells."

I'm delighted to see solar electricity costs dropping to the reported levels, but anyone who sees it as a solution for overall energy woes isn't looking at a big enough picture. ______ Dennis

Back in the early 70's, I worked for a government (HUD/ERDA) sponsored project to promote alternative energy use. It was the first flowering of OPEC, gas prices at the pump were rising over (gasp!) $1/gallon, and there was a sudden massive interest in reducing dependence on foreign oil.

What my shop was pushing was using solar collectors to heat hot water. That was about 20% of the average residential energy bill, had a relatively low up front cost, and a relatively short payback period. We were aware of and tracked a variety of alternative energy sources including photovoltaics, but expected them to get niche pickup at best because they were simply too expensive. To a large extent, that's still the case.

Another point to note is that energy usage isn't just electricity. Back then, a national energy budget divided roughly into quarters, with industrial heating and cooling, residential/light commercial heating and cooling, transportation, and electricity making up the demand. The total amount of energy consumed is rather larger, but that breakdown is still pretty much the same. I don't see solar electric power addressing things like heavy duty heating and cooling, nor most transportation.

One thing I got convinced of back then is that the form of energy used will be the cheapest that will do the job. Energy from fossil fuel still predominates because it is still cheapest.

Solar is still essentially a niche market, though growing, and lower costs are the driver. I was grimly amused a while back over the woes of Solyndra, an effort to create large scale photovoltiac production in the US, that got about half a billion in government funding. The underlying notion was creation of US jobs.

Photovoltaics is semi-conductor electronics, the Chinese jumped in with both feet, and started turning out solar cells at prices domestic producers couldn't match. In fact, some Chinese producers came to grief. They dove in based on demand estimates that were unfounded, produced a glut on the market, far lower prices for buyers, and failures among firms that were late to the manufacturing party. Solyndra couldn't compete.

People went on about US jobs, and I thought "Drive on the NJ Turnpike, and every other pole has a solar cell array generating power to help run the Turnpike. Somebody has the contract to design, produce, install and maintain those arrays, and those jobs by nature will be local. Decreasing costs for the raw materials used to produce the arrays made it possible to sell the end products cheaper, and increased the demand. The Chinese can do it cheapest and can have solar cell production. The money is in moving up the value chain and making things people will buy that use those solar cells."

I'm delighted to see solar electricity costs dropping to the reported levels, but anyone who sees it as a solution for overall energy woes isn't looking at a big enough picture. ______ Dennis

I know Terry, and saw him read this with fellow writer Jack Womack years ago. Terry was the enthusiastic describer of these weird biological critters, and Jack did the "Meat?" responses with a perfect voice and wonderful tone of incredulity.

It's a lovely story, but everything Terry has done is worth reading.

So just what was your goal? You don't really seem to have thought this through.

This is a case of "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it." You started a company, convinced your friends to join you, and Lo! Your company has been successful. Now you have to run the thing, and you're discovering you don't like it.

What did you expect?

If your company hadn't succeeded, it would be dead and gone,and all the folks you convinced to work with you would have suffered. In fact, it hasn't failed, and those who threw in with you haven't suffered.

This is presumably what you wanted when you started your firm in the first place.

Agreed, you can't just bail and abandon everybody and everything. You took on a responsibility, and it's on you to discharge it. Never mind what everyone else might think. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see. If you cut and run, you won't.

I'd do two things. First, I'd think about what was bothering me, and I'd make a list of what I didn't like about what I was doing, and what I'd most like to be rid of.

Then I'd have a heart to heart talk with my coworkers. I'd tell them I was unhappy, and what I was unhappy about, and I'd ask for help. I'd tell them I wanted time and space. That I wanted a few hours in the day when I wasn't buried under the affairs of the firm. That I needed people to step up and take on some of my responsibilities.

I'm willing to bet you have people working with you that can take some of the load off your shoulders. I am willing to bet there are parts of your job you could carve out and hand to someone else. I am willing to bet that there are people working with you who would like to grow and take a bigger role in your enterprise.

You are trying to do too much, and burning out in the process. Delegate. Think through just what your role currently is, and what you would like it to be. Think about what parts of what you do could be done by others, and who in your company could do them instead of you. Then sit down with your people and work out a plan to make that happen.

It won't be easy. It's hard to give up control like that. It's hard to deal with the fact that someone else might not do what you did they way you did it. But what's important is that it gets done, and the way they do it may be better than the way you did it. You have to be able to give your people space to do things in their own way, and your only real concern is whether they do it effectively.

As companies grow and add people, roles change. What people do and how they do it changes. As the founder of a startup, your early days are very hands on, and you probably do some of just about everything that needs to be done on a day to day basis. As the company grows, you can't do that. There aren't enough hours in a day. Other people must take on some of what you do, and you must step back and let them do it.

Your challenge now is making that happen. ______ Dennis

I don't have just one. Under Windows, I use a fork of Florian Ballmer's Notepad2 to replace Notepad. It's one of a number of editors based on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control. It's small, starts fast, and can replace Windows Notepad through a registry hack. I also have Notepad++ and an assortment of other things installed.

Under Linux, I use Vim, emacs, and Geany, which is a lightweight IDE also based on Scintilla.

I have two Ubuntu Linux installations. The desktop uses XFCE4. The ancient notebook uses LXDE because it's really low end hardware.

The notebook can't run Unity. The desktop can, but Unity is optimized to get the best use of small screens, and I have a large one.

Speaking personally, I never left Firefox.

I've been using Mozilla code since the Netscape 7.X days (and tried to use NS6, but it was way too buggy.) I progressed from MS7 to the Mozilla Suite to Firefox, and have stayed there.

I have Chrome (and Opera, Safari, Midori, Konqueror, K-Meleon, D+, and a few other things including IE installed, but mostly to keep up on what others are doing. Firefox is what I use in production, and I currently run Aurora (which will be the next release when it gets out of beta.)

FF isn't the smallest or fastest browser on the machine I'm on at the moment (and old netbook) but is the most capable. FF, like other current browsers, makes assumptions about what you will run it on, and assumes a reasonably current machine with a reasonable CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM. I have another old machine I don't even try to run FF on.

My reasons are tied up in the architecture. FF uses the Gecko engine, like everything else Mozilla puts out. Aside from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Gecko interprets and renders XUL, an XML language for designing user interfaces. The look and feel of FF is determined by XUL, CSS, and widgets, and the browser is simply an instance of something Gecko renders.

This makes it possible to create themes that change what FF looks like, and extensions that modify and extend what it does, and that power is why I use it. My RSS reader, IRC client and several other things that would ordinarily be external programs are implemented in FF as extensions. Since the browser is always running when I'm at the computer, this make things very convenient.

Other browsers like Chrome added an extension capability, but they are pure JavaScript and limited by what the device API will let you do in JavaScript. Half of what I do in FF isn't possible in Chrome.

Chrome is a worthy browser, and I'm glad it's there, but it's not what I use. It invokes somewhat faster than FF, but page rendering is equivalent, and memory usage rises rapidly as you add extensions, so there's little difference between FF and Chrome in use. Faster invocation is a non-issue here: I start the browser when I sit down at the machine and simply leave it running, so a few extra seconds to invoke it isn't a concern. Too many people have the bad habit learned from IE of hopping in and out of the browser, and I just tell such folks "You're doing it wrong".

On my desktop booted into Windows, I run FF from a RAMdisk. The desktop still runs XP and has 4GB RAM, but 32 bit Windows can only use 3.2GB of it. I found a RAMdisk driver that can use the rest and have a 768MBR ramdrive seen as Z:. Firefox, its cache, and its profile all live there and FF is run from there. It's quick. (Batch files populate the ramdisk on start up, and store the contents back to HD on shutdown.) I don't believe I can do that with Chrome.

Nope. Remember that Project Gutenberg hosts books which have lapsed into the public domain. That's not true for a lot of the stuff mentioned. (A decent collection of Van Vogt is available through Baen Book's Webscriptions program, though it lacks classics like Slan.)

You will find the occasional oddity: a couple of Samuel R. Delany's early Ace Double publications just popped up, and Chip is still very much alive. Chip has been in the business a long time - if they've lapsed into the public domain, it's because he allowed them to.

(It is weird when you see stuff appearing on PG by people you know/knew - Delany among the living, and Terry Carr and Laurence M. Janifer among the deceased.)

A note on various of the Gutenberg SF entries: the versions on Project Gutenberg may be the magazine serial versions. They may differ substantially from the book versions. (Shorter, to fit magazine space limitations.)

Copyright law was different back then, and magazine versions had different copyrights than book versions. In many cases, magazine copyrights were not renewed, but book copyrights were, so you'll see magazine serial versions on PG but the books won't be available.

This is particularly true for E. E. Smith's Lensman and Skylark of Space series: the book publication versions aren't on PG. (I have no idea who currently holds the rights to the Lensman series.)

It is possible to find them on the darknet, but quality will vary.