Answer for your serious question: hiring contractors isn’t “privatized” - that’s outsourcing. The thing you’re saving on is the ongoing cost of having permanent staff.
The difference is the government and public entities like mayoral offices or parliaments get to decide how the entity (doing the contracting) is run and approve costs, and the entity is under no obligation to return a profit.
I’ve never seen one that worked long term. The basic premise is “what was done for $X dollars with no profit motive can be done for <$X dollars with profit motive doesn’t hold up - you make something private, it wants to make more profit.
Just for the most ready to hand example for me, PG&E in SF vs public electricity utilities on the peninsula - the privatized electricity costs twice as much per kWh - and of course it does because the PG&E CEO needs to make $17M from somewhere, the share price needs to go up etc. the rich need to skim from the top, that makes the cost higher.
If you have an essential industry the cynical play is to privatize to save cost, then do a bad job and then effectively make your losses public through bail-outs while still making profit.
>The basic premise is “what was done for $X dollars with no profit motive can be done for <$X dollars with profit motive doesn’t hold up - you make something private, it wants to make more profit.
No, the basic premise of privatization is that, assuming the product or service has multiple potential customers, private industry can operate at scale which, alongside competition from other companies, drives down the price and the government can purchase it "off the shelf" at the prevailing commercial rate. Those assumptions don't always hold, utilities being a great example of this, but it's not inherently blind or naive to consider privatizing some components of government function. We don't expect the government to operate its own vehicle assembly lines even if the government needs cars; they just go buy one from Ford or GM.
I'd add that that, for this calculus to work out in a straightforward way, a competitive market is necessary but not sufficient. You also need other factors that help drive economies of scale, such as the thing in question being a manufactured good that can be sold to many people, or the production requiring expensive and specialized equipment that can be used for more than just that one thing.
I'm no expert, but I'd guess that these factors are more likely to line up in manufacturing and construction, or even R&D, than they are for things like maintenance of specialized IT systems or administration of services.
> The basic premise is “what was done for $X dollars with no profit motive can be done for <$X dollars with profit motive" doesn’t hold up - you make something private, it wants to make more profit.
The government often acts like it has infinite money. Sure, they'll make a lot of noise about the national debt, but it's all just about getting votes.
I expect privatization to be a way for a politician to stuff their pockets. They'll either buy their stock before the large government contract is announced, or the corporation will kick some money back in the form of campaign contributions, or find some way to just give cash directly.
Nobody ever gets charged with insider trading because everyone that would be involved in that is in on it as well.
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."
Aside: I still object to the use of “engineering” for a practice that doesn’t understand why what it does works. This is more similar to the “skilled masons” era of construction than “structural engineering” - “we know from experience this has worked in the past”.
I can think of at least one (Northern European style Socialism) that is better to live under via virtually any metric for 99.99% of people - and that includes the majority of users of this site that think they are some sort of tech unicorn.
Just not having insurance tied to employment would be such a massive win.
Humanity did fine with other systems that capitalism. Hunter gather societies were well adapted to their environments, Tibetan monks dealt with human relations differently etc.
It would be crazy to assume that the whole humanity longs for capitalism whatever their situation or belief system, the same way _we_ don't assume any current form of capitalism is specially superior to other alternative forms that could better benefit our situations.
Generally it’s the time it takes for you to get back to physiological baseline.
If you do a lot of activity, the amount of exertion can be measured in EPOC - how much extra oxygen your body needs for the extra metabolism to support repair (this is when any gains happen, growth, endurance, efficiency). When that’s back to baseline your body has done repairing, you’ve “recovered”.
If you aren’t recovered, your body still hasn’t repaired the damage you’ve done to it in the previous round, and you probably won’t be able to repeat the effort, whichever discipline. You’re digging yourself deeper in a hole. If you keep doing this, that’s overtraining, and you can get worse.
If you never experienced this, congratulations, you were operating inside your body’s natural limits! You may have good genes, and having good sleep and nutrition is probably more important than supplements.
Djay’s killer feature is algorithmic stem extraction. The streaming audio services that have integration (Tidal, now Apple Music) don’t allow this processing. It’s an arbitrary technical limitation that I suspect is rooted in a licensing agreement from the rights holders.
tl;dr this is great for playing with sequencing, but a lot of modern djays will want to be able to do stem separation even when exploring, and live use was always a tough sell with a no-internet kill switch.
Yeah Virtual DJ integration was great, I got frustrated with their beat gridding (I come from Ableton where it’s always been magic and the Traktor where auto grid was really good) but they’ve been pushing everything else forward for a while.
When you import a track to your collection, it does the processing. So, not completely in real time, but it only takes like a minute of background processing before it's ready. Virtually all DJ software has this as a feature nowadays, but of course, results vary.
It's like the next "big thing", very few DJ controllers on the market right now have dedicated buttons for it, but that's about to change.
Stemming takes about 15 seconds for a 3 minute song. And most DJ software downloads the entire song in a few seconds, then generates the display waveforms, and so on, and then you can play the song.
So "realtime" and "streaming" don't really apply, because the files download and process fast enough.
15 seconds for 3 minutes is quite slow, the open source thing i use, spleeter, says 100x speedup over realtime with a GPU, that would be 1.8 seconds for three minutes, which means that spleeter could, in fact, given all of the arguments of what i asked, do it "realtime".
It depends on the hardware. The laptop I use for DJ doesn't have a dedicated GPU.
I also use open source, preferring demucs over spleeter.
In my experience spleeter requires huge amounts of memory, my DJ laptop only has 16GB of RAM, and I need to close the browser to be able to successfully stem a 5 minutes song.
Demucs takes a bit longer, but it uses just 2GB of RAM. And the sound quality of the stems separation is much better with demucs, which is a more important factor than the runtime, IMO.
The difference is the government and public entities like mayoral offices or parliaments get to decide how the entity (doing the contracting) is run and approve costs, and the entity is under no obligation to return a profit.
reply