> >I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
> -- Linus Torvalds
What about programmers
- for whom the code is a data structure?
- who formulate their data structures in a way (e.g. in a very powerful type system) such that all the data structures are code?
- who invent a completely novel way of thinking about computer programs such that in this paradigm both code and data structures are just trivial special cases of some mind-blowing concept ζ of which there exist other special cases that are useful to write powerful programs, but these special cases are completely alien from anything that could be called "code" or "data (structures)", i.e. these programmers don't think/worry about code or data structures, but about ζ?
> Big corporations have found the way to make us work for free in their own terms. The balance of power between the working class and capital is totally broken.
> And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game.
If you have such a (legitimate) stance, why don't you delete Pokémon Go (and Ingress) as fast as possible from your mobile phone and encourage other people to do the same?
It was obvious from begin that the whole purpose of the game was that naive players are to take pictures of objects that are of interest to Niantic for free. The "payment" is a short dosis of dopamine high. A lot of players seemed to be perfectly fine with this kind of "payment".
> They all said they would either be a consultant or a manager.
To be a good consultant, one must be exceptional in the area in which one consults.
Similarly: if they actually want to become a manager, why don't they study business administration instead. And because lots of people want to become managers: why don't they hang all day and night about textbooks and texts about economic topics and analyze reportings of companies or business case studies?
>
While I have my issues with the system, many Soviet-controlled countries implemented a two-tier higher education system that solved this by having one tier be focused on practical subjects and the other on theoretical ones.
In Germany, there exist even more tiers for tertiary education:
- vocational training
- universities (academic training)
- Fachhochschule (instutions of tertiary education that offer study programs that is more focused on skills that are needed by industry)
- in some parts of Germany: Berufsakademie: even more applied than Fachhochschule; you absolve half of your tertiary education at a company
Those exist elsewhere too, but at least in Hungary, they aren't separate institutions with different legal statuses (except for vocational schools), unlike the system I was talking about.
> You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust
The Soviet Union did manage to get massive leaps in some areas (in particular related to armament, but not only) such as
- armament/weapons
- space technology
- mathematics
- physics
> (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).
I guess you can immediately see how the Soviet Union "solved" this problem by the fact that you simply couldn't gain a lot of money from your innovation.
The Soviet Union was able to innovate in the areas they chose to sink resources into but innovation was clearly not as widespread as evidenced by their decades of stagnation from the 60s onwards.
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
Over 85 years and that's an inflation adjusted number. We give away more money each year (USAID/soft power efforts) than we spent on average on nuclear weapons. And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget. Currently, social safety net programs are half of the federal budget and the total military budget is about 1/6th of the budget for reference (that's 2/3rd total between those two parts of the budget).
> And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget.
$95 billion / year is $620 per US taxpayer.
> social safety net programs are half of the federal budget
I suppose you are referring to the big 3: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those are programs that people pay for. In the same way that retirement savings, pensions, and private health insurance is something that people pay for.
But whatever, every dollar wasted to blow up people in another country can be excused because the federal budget includes programs that provide services to people in this country...or something. It is extremely revealing how some people are completely unbothered by some spending and are extremely bothered by other spending. The nuclear weapons don't bother you, but spending a bit of money to help alleviate famine for people in destitute countries is just unacceptable.
No. My point is not that something costs more than something else.
Look at a city and the traffic there we know that everything can either feel empty with only a ~8% decrease, or be completely gridlocked with a ~8% increase. Small adjustments in what we spend money on has a great effect. Being destructive is the easiest way to show this. If you bomb a hospital, does that cost ten million USD for the bombs or one billion USD to rebuild and handle loss of quality of life.
Innovation is a term inherently tied to products sold at markets in product cycles that change over time. I think you're looking for the term invention.
An invention is a new device, method, or way of doing something that did not exist before. Innovation is anything that significantly improves real world processes or products. I believe the literature uses term "innovation systems" regardless of type of economies.
I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science from found documentation in Peenemünde et. al. (The personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet hands, and most of them ended in America, even though some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
They had genuine excellency in mathematics and theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't require much expensive or advanced equipment back then. Second, by their very nature, they were freer from ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
(I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues didn't understand them and did not consider them subversive per se.)
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths and physics all over the net, and people actually download them and use them to study. That does not apply in most other domains.
>
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in the Western countries there was an intense development of antibiotics).
"In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development soon began in this field. [...]
Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene. Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world."
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. As a simple example of practical biology in USSR, the Eastern Bloc basically invented modern doping programs.
I'd rather call this research medical science, and with some exceptions (the Doctor's Plot during the last year of Stalin's paranoid rule), medical science tended to be less policed than biology, because even the top dogs of the Party knew that they could fall ill and require top treatment.
Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the regular population never demonstrated themselves on the nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback mechanism that could not be ignored.
But I agree that the exact border between biology and medical science is murky.
Your examples do kind of reinforce the point being made.
Mathematics and (theoretical) physics are capital-light research sectors. Weapons platforms and space technology were state managed (I.e. didn’t require private sector capital financing).
Considering how many surveillance laws were passed in the USA after 9/11 (independent whether it was a terrorist attack or some controlled demolition) and wars were started on Afghanistan and Iran (the latter having nothing to do with Al-Quaida or the attacks on 9/11), it should be obvious that at least from the political side there is/was a hidden agenda:
- Conspiracy theory view: Some buildings were demolished. Politics seizes the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
- Non-conspiracy view: Some terrorist attack event happened (but every actuary can give you estimates on how often such an event is to be expected, so nothing surprising here), so politics seized the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
The only difference between these perspectives is what happened the three towers and some part of the Pentagon building to collapse.
> -- Linus Torvalds
What about programmers
- for whom the code is a data structure?
- who formulate their data structures in a way (e.g. in a very powerful type system) such that all the data structures are code?
- who invent a completely novel way of thinking about computer programs such that in this paradigm both code and data structures are just trivial special cases of some mind-blowing concept ζ of which there exist other special cases that are useful to write powerful programs, but these special cases are completely alien from anything that could be called "code" or "data (structures)", i.e. these programmers don't think/worry about code or data structures, but about ζ?
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