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The classic 'American dream' is possibility. It's the idea that anyone can potentially work their way to great success, regardless of starting position. Even if they are born in poverty. It may be very difficult, but it can be done.

You know? There is a difference between possibility and probability.
To exemplify: there are higher odds you'll be injured on or near your toilet than it is to win the lottery - and, lemme guess, one necessarily takes more frequent chances with a toilet than with lotto (if you know what consequence I'm alluding here).

There are plenty of examples of people who did it via some mix of skill, luck and hard work. This is in contrast to the old way, where family background defined one's role in society to a much greater extent.

Well, one doesn't need search hard to find those thousands that lost (and were forgotten in the next minutes) for every one that has been a winner.

I guess I can take break to ponder a bit over the necessary vs the sufficient.
See, being cautios, having hope and staying positive, persevering and keeping cool will go long way in overcoming the obstacles and may seem like a necessity , but ...
even if you deeply believe in you, better stop kidding yourself: having rich parents is absolutely sufficient and certainly helps more than any and all the above.

Well, enough with the dreams and cliches, I really need to get back to work

The classic 'American dream' is possibility. It's the idea that anyone can potentially work their way to great success, regardless of starting position. Even if they are born in poverty. It may be very difficult, but it can be done.

You know? There is a difference between possibility and probability.
To exemplify: there are higher odds you'll be injured on or near your toilet than it is to win the lottery - and, lemme guess, one necessarily takes more frequent chances with a toilet than with lotto (if you know what consequence I'm alluding here).

There are plenty of examples of people who did it via some mix of skill, luck and hard work. This is in contrast to the old way, where family background defined one's role in society to a much greater extent.

Well, one doesn't need search hard to find those thousands that lost (and were forgotten in the next minutes) for every one that has been a winner.

I guess I can take break to ponder a bit over the necessary vs the sufficient.
See, being cautios, having hope and staying positive, persevering and keeping cool will go long way in overcoming the obstacles and may seem like a necessity , but ...
even if you deeply believe in you, better stop kidding yourself: having rich parents is absolutely sufficient and certainly helps more than any and all the above.

Well, enough with the dreams and cliches, I really need to get back to work

I thought that this applies to meetings.
The election and the results of it seems better summarized by If you thing the problems we create are bad,

For the impatients (or less inclined to ponder the nuances) here's my point: it is not entirely the fault of the voting constituients, "absolute-or-rate comparions" won't matter too much if all that's on the different plates to choose from is the same shit in other presentation

I thought that this applies to meetings.
The election and the results of it seems better summarized by If you thing the problems we create are bad,

For the impatients (or less inclined to ponder the nuances) here's my point: it is not entirely the fault of the voting constituients, "absolute-or-rate comparions" won't matter too much if all that's on the different plates to choose from is the same shit in other presentation

... is why suddenly yahoo is making a show of caring.

I have a four-letter yahoo account (not that kind of four-letter word...) from waaaaay back in the day. It was something I maintained for about two decades for plausible deniability... a cut-out.

SCORES of people have tries to hack it. A couple have succeeded, but not since I switched it to a 32-character mixed-case-and-special password. Still, they try at the rate of about 3 a week (that I *see* via attempted password-reset manipulations, 2-factor authentication change attempts, etc).

But ... I have received about 10 emails from folks who wanted to 'own' the email address. And -- I think -- because I didn't acquiesce, I have received hundreds of thousands of spam emails in the intervening time. They've submitted my email to stupid dating sites in French, German, Thai, Spanish, Tamil and most recently Hebrew. Hell, I got 1000+ emails/day from ONE SITE for a few days, about a week ago.

There's been phishing, spear-phishing based on the pseudo-identity hosted there, blind newsletter sign-up. Every kind of crap you can imagine, and several more.

And every step of the way, I reported the infringements, the spamming, the users who have a variant of the name (e.g. foo2525 instead of foo): to the spam-handlers and to the variant-users.

And yahoo has never given a shit. Not once. Period. IMHO, 'cause it was one account-holder. But I've kept it anyway -- since it's a great cut-out. And I'll continue to do so. Yahoo is a joke; has been for many years now. Sometimes... that's its value. It's a great example of what NOT to do, and it's a great revealer of the seedy underbelly of the 'net.

http://demotivators.despair.co...

For some reason this comes to mind...

With that in mind, is it a good idea to get people to continue to engage in futile endeavors? Who says quitting is always a bad thing.

I like this one:

Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.

Persistence is good if it gets you anywhere, but if you're just obsessing over things you can't do, can't change, can't make work, can't achieve then give up and move on. Particularly I hate people who can't ever accept that the team, the project or someone in authority has made a decision they disagree with and continue to reopen the issue, dredge up old discussions and undermine the decision. I've had one extreme case where a person on the project team was trash talking it to the rest of the company during the official presentation, essentially saying this is what we're delivering and it's crap and not what I wanted or how I'd design it.

My impression is that overall people have too much persistence and can't stop flogging the dead horse, if things are that bad or that hopeless stop trying to make it work and get out. If your boss is a total ass hat, find another job don't try to fix it. If your girlfriend is a total fruitcake don't try to reason with crazy. If nobody wants to buy what you're selling, you're probably wrong about what they wanted in the first place. Move on, try again. Except the exceptions of course, where banging your head on the same brick wall many enough times will lead to it cracking. But I wouldn't waste my head on that.

You cannot flunk the dolts because, "it might damage their self-esteem."

Deal with it.

Cheers,
Dave

I've found weekly stand-ups to be helpful, just make sure you are prepared for them. 10-15 min of the same content. Of course, any big blocks and walk in and say "boss, we gotta problem..." Also, get this for your office.

When you earnestly believe that you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your effort, there's no end to what you can't do.

http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html

Which is not to say that you're not skilled. But management trying to solve the problem of falling behind by saying "work more hours" is futile.

Well for people who are good at what they do an know it, will tend to have a bit of an ego about it. As well as it comes easy to them, having people who struggle at the work gets frustrating.

I have been considered as one of those Rockstar developers. And it is a constant challenge to make sure I am not talking down to people, or seeming to snotty.

I know what you mean

http://demotivators.despair.com/shirt-art/madeinusabyrobots-shirt.gif

I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.

That's great! ...until they make robots that fix themselves: http://www.despair.com/adaptation.html

Just get your Adaptation Demotivator from Despair, Inc. (I don't work for them, but I love their posters.)

http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html

Not true.

http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html

Obligatory demotivational poster: http://www.despair.com/potential.html

So, in other words http://www.despair.com/consulting.html

Despair.org has the poster for this one. None of us is as dumb as all of us. This is one of those dumbass articles intended to make programmers feel bad because we're not schmoozers and claim our code suffers as a result. It doesn't. The code suffers because bosses assume you can simply harness programmers together, probably under some MBA, assign them bits of the job ad-hoc, and you'll get miracles.

> Shouting "DO YOUR JOB" at people has a curiously poor track record for making people, y'know, actually do their job.

Actually this is the only motivational poster I have ever found motivational.

Maybe you need a little love.

http://despair.com/pu-059.html

If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.

We are tossing a 19 year old kid into the system for 2 and 1/2 years over shining a light. Without a doubt he could have caused more harm than he did, but to take away the beginning of his adult life... just seems wrong. Make him do a few thousand hours of community service while on probation will do more good for everyone than teaching him to be a professional convict at this point in his life.

My he serve as warning to others.

At $5, 3 handouts the size of a postcard seems to be a good course support.
But again, an "online course support" as suggested should be equally effective for students not suffering from ADHD.

Consulting

Inspire Hope? Geez, who writes this stuff?

Them Even tough it doesn't stop a good chunk of this world to seek an unwarranted one.

The only differences between economists and fortune tellers are the uniform and the pay scale.

Also, this poster is perfectly accurate: http://www.despair.com/economics.html

Refer to December 2012 Despair calendar.

Adaptation

The bad news is robots can do your job now. The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians. The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots- and we do not anticipate any further good news.

Despair.com is thataway ->

I see a lot of variations of this answer to people who fear technology change:

People will just move into areas that require labor, like building and maintaining automation.

This type of statement always reminds me of this poster:
The bad news is robots can do your job now.
The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians.
The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots- and we do not anticipate any further good news.

I kid, and I understand that people will move towards areas with more employment opportunity. However, in the short term there is going to be a lot of pain. This is also tied to the Luddite fallacy:

But as long as real prices fall or real incomes rise, the additional purchasing power gives consumers the ability to purchase entirely new products and services, such as better health care and wireless communication devices and services. This has many leading economists believing that technological change, although it disrupts the careers of individuals and the health of particular firms, cannot lead to systemic unemployment

The problem I see is that real income for most of the population has not risen (AFAIK).

http://www.despair.com/worth.html

Are you a consultant?
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html

I set up an account several years ago. Made a couple of dozen tweets and then realized that, not only did no one care about my tweets, but that there was no one that I could conceivably think of that I would care about that much to want to read everything they did. And for people that subscribe, or whatever it is, to more than one or two others must have no time in their day to do anything but read what is probably mostly drivel that is written by someone else who knows full well that no one really cares about what they writing.

It reminds me of this demotivator, it's for blogging but it still applies, http://www.despair.com/blogging.html

Congratulations, you won the Puzzle Prize!

For the unlucky ones (_don't_ despair, see below):

- The answer to the Symmetry Breaker riddle: Instant Multi-ball! An exponentially increasing cascade of them, actually, sticking to everything else and making the ride more manageable.
- Smilies: they should have sent some into space (especially those 60's / 70's 'acid house' ones) with SETI instead of those elaborate patterns'n'stuff. Would prove that humans have both self-knowledge _and_ knpw where their towels are: don't take things too seriously. Sending anything else just may piss off ET by underestimating their intellect. (Also, who knows if some colonists from Despair Inc ever got trapped in orbit around a black hole (talk about a major depression!), they might appreciate the boost.)

I was like you. I started my first job in computers at 19. I have a passion for technology and ran circles around my older co-workers. Despite being the fastest at solving problems I was among the first to get sacked when layoffs came up.
Now that I am near 40 I do occasionally see a younger version of myself and get easily annoyed. Mostly because the younger version of me cannot see the bigger picture and properly prioritize the best use of his talent.
You see yourself as helping by changing the BIOS settings, the older folks see you as mostly bouncing off the walls and occasionally getting something important right.
I know the 19 year old version of myself isn't going to understand a word of this but I'll give it a go nonetheless. If I have any advice it would be to try as hard as you can see things from their perspective through a lens of maturity. What seems like an hour to you, seems like 10 minutes to them. Try to learn what is really important more than what you think is important.
You are like a Dukati in rush hour traffic, zipping between cars is only going to piss people off. Going the same pace as everyone else, and occasional passing the slow poke in style isn't going to bother anyone but the slow poke.
You making a system faster and more efficient isn't very important if it has a side effect of crashing at 2am on a Sunday night a few weeks later.

Yes you commit more mistakes when you think more about things. Guess what, you also reach a lot more correct conclusions. The best way to avoid making mistakes is not doing anything at all. Same principle.

Blame.

The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures!

A housing authority housing (probably... too lazy to look up numbers) thousands of families, and probably tracking financial information on them all, across several hundred separate locations? No, they don't need an IS department at all. They can use Excel, right?

Do they need an IS service dept that resorts in connecting these utilities to the net? What for?

These types of attack have never happened, but in the age of ever-mounting cyber exploits, NYCHA, which is responsible for over a thousand buildings in the city, wants to take every precaution, though it could get expensive

. Ah, I see... that explains (works even better if you are not on a consulting position, but a permanent hire).

The cynic in me says the hackers will be held responsible.

Seconded.

FTFA adjusted with a link

Director Michael Hales said in a statement. “But we also hope they understand we are doing everything we can to protect them from further harm.”

It's another government boondoggle.

FTFY by including the proper citation (and attribution).

ehhhhhhh obligatory? http://www.despair.com/committees.html

despair has it right

Individuality is highly overrated, snowflake.

http://www.despair.com/individuality.html

I think you're looking for this shirt:

http://www.despair.com/madeinusa.html

http://www.despair.com/corruption.html

You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination and an endless supply of expendable labor.

You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.

For some reason it didn't give the href link: http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html

sorry for the double post

Allow me to correct you - this is what Economics actually is.

I think this sums it up: Not Everyone Gets To Be Astronaut

He's a poster child, indeed. To be specific, "Mistakes" by Despair, Inc.

http://www.despair.com/mis24x30prin.html