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For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)

Try Philip Greenspun's website for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.

Great, except that's not how you evaluate a company's value. A company's value is based on where they're going, relative to the risk in them getting there and the timeframes involved. In the case of Tesla, they're in the middle of a scaleup that no "competitors" are even close to matching.

The "scaleup" is entirely artificial, not market-driven. EVs are selling because California has mandated that a certain percentage of each automakers' sales are zero emissions vehicles. The target is about 2.5% for 2018, ramping up to 8% in 2025. There's no market basis for this; it's just CARB setting an arbitrary number. Every automaker has to either comply, or buy enough credits to comply from an automaker which exceeds their quota, or be banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker being banned from selling cars to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.

So every automaker, whether they believe in EVs or not, is busy producing EVs to comply. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the target, they run sales and incentives to make the market want enough (that's the scaleup you're seeing). Musk set up Tesla to take advantage of this, because he realized an automaker which produced only EVs would always exceed the quota, and thus could sell extra credits and make a profit, even if the vehicles were sold at-cost. Basically the system is rigged to force ICE sales to subsidize EV sales to hit an arbitrary production quota. That becomes harder to force as the percentage of ICE sales becomes smaller (profit margin on each ICE car has to be shifted to provide a bigger subsidy for EVs).

I don't short stocks because I think shorting is stupid. The most you can gain is the price of the stock at the time you shorted it; while the amount you can lose is infinite. It's the opposite risk/reward scenario of buying a stock. But it's quite obviously the Tesla fans who are buying into a fantasy here with Tesla's current valuation. Yes Tesla might eventually be worth that much. But they're still two orders of magnitude in production away from reaching that level. (Tesla is valued about the same as GM, and GM produces about 8000 cars per day vs Tesla's current production of about 6000 per month. Production being key here since you later cite investment in production as justification for lack of profit - clearly Tesla still needs a lot more investment in production if it wants to justify its stock valuation.) A *lot* can happen before Tesla's production capacity reaches that of GM's, so you're taking an enormous risk betting that it's going to be Tesla which finishes up on top of the EV race (or if EVs even represent the finish line, since it's CARB setting the goalposts, not the market)..

It's the same situation with Amazon. Stupid Amazon bears looked at past revenues relative to spending. Smart Amazon bears looked at future revenue potential, but just didn't believe they'd get there. Amazon bulls looked at future revenue potential, and did believe they'd get there. Amazon got there, the bulls profited, and both the stupid and smart bears lost. But at least the smart bears had a plausible argument.

Amazon is a great example. Amazon pre-dated the dot-com bubble. They were one of hundreds of dot com companies which were overhyped and overvalued. The people who bought into Amazon (IPO in 1997) weren't prescient that Amazon was going to come out on top. They just got stupid lucky betting on Amazon instead of the hundreds of other companies which crashed and burned when the dot com bubble burst. For every "faithful" Amazon investor who was "smart" and picked a winner, there were hundreds of "faithful" investors who were just as "smart" and picked

Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."

And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."

Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le

Similar here -- had an only child in my late thirties and I can see how much more energy I would have had for kids when I was younger. Getting less sleep is also a much bigger deal when you are older.

That said, trying to keep up also made me more health conscious (e.g. eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough vitamin D3, iodine, and B vitamins, etc. see for example Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Andrew Weil, "The Pleasure Trap" book, etc. ).

My dad had me when he was in his late forties -- so it's a little more obvious to me now why we did not do outdoor sports together... But I did learn a lot from seeing him do things and he helped me with building robots as a kid.

There are jokes above about people developing Rust instead of having kids -- and that is sadly too true in my case where my wife and I worked on free software together (our garden simulator and other software) instead of perhaps having kids sooner. Hard to say in retrospect it was worth it compared to having a kid sooner (especially so my own elderly father could have been a grandparent to my kid).

A better way to put that might be that having a kid generally takes so much resources you are generally less free to do other things (like invest in your "mind children" and/or various social causes). So if you (and especially if both spouses) try to have a career outside of the mainstream (especially in somewhere without a social safety net or good support for the arts and sciences), putting off kids is something you can slide into (and maybe regret). It's even more of a resource demand if you want to homeschool.

See also:
"The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet"
https://www.amazon.com/Murderi...
"Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."

Probably the biggest benefit for those who manage to be creative within the system (e.g. the lucky few academics who get tenure or who through luck or family connections or other reasons get a rare well-paying creative-type job outside of academia) is that they feel financially stable enough to have kids. For most others, especially women, see:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."

None of this is black and white since sometimes if you have a kid your own parents or even others in the community might be more amenable to helping you out in various ways. And kids help us grow in many ways -- and also help reconnect us with many important child-like basics in life. This is also such a complex topic no one post like this can do justice to it. It is hard to look back on anything I have written or implemented though and think such things may have as much connection with the future or personal significance or even social significance as having a child. That is something I may know now in my early fift

http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs. ... Science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be required to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going into medicine. This person would very likely be a top specialist of some sort, earning at least $300,000 per year. Instead of being fired at age 44, our medical specialist would be near the height of her value to her patients and employer. Her experience and reputation would continue to add to her salary and prestige until she was perhaps 60 years old. [A woman who wanted to spend more time with her children can choose from a variety of medical careers, such as emergency medicine, that involve shift work and where a high salary can be earned with just two or three shifts per week. She could also work from home as a radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.] ...
How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science.
What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. ...
A divorce litigator put it a little more simply: "There is no reason for a woman to go to medical school. If she wants to have the spending power of a doctor she can just have sex with three doctors." (see the Wisconsin chapter for how the arithmetic works out) In some states, though not Wisconsin, a plaintiff's own earnings or earning potential can reduce the potential profits from child support. "A degree in poetry is a lot better than a degree in medicine when you're a child support plaintiff," observed one litigator, and added "for a woman with a functioning reproductive system, the decision to attend college and work is seldom an economically rational one in the United States." ..."

He also writes: "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should de

... you probably lose your scientific career soon enough (sadly).
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Having a successful and informative experiment may sometime even end your career sooner than failing in an ideologically approved way:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Part of the reason why:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever. ...
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one

Firstly, not all manhole covers are round. I've seen triangular ones in Nashua and Japan, and there are a lot of rectangular ones in Italy.

Secondly, the reason manhole covers are round generally is that during the industrial age the four major machining operations were casting, cutting, turning, and drilling, and since the covers had to be reasonably accurate while being mass produced they were made by turning (ie - on a lathe).

Thirdly, this is a variation of a "Fermi problem", after Enrico Fermi who famously used it to determine whether an interview candidate could think logically and make back-of-the-envelope questions. However, this question in particular is famous, available to anyone who could look it up on the internet. Along with the answer.

That 'kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Since the question and answer are so readily available, I have to assume that you, the interviewer didn't actually make up your own question. But it looks like *you* happen to enjoy these sorts of questions, and I'm sure that you had to answer your share of these when you interviewed for the company.

That being said, I'm also interviewing your company, to see if I actually want to work here. Since you like questions like this, here's one for you...

(NB: I don't like working for idiots.)

I do believe you meant "STEM graduates serving coffee", since STEM is a dangerous gamble to be in these days.

http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

anyone go into science these days?

http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

Never mind the women part, just read the whole thing.

Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.

Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs:
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...

Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).

Refs:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "

http://patch.com/california/lo...
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."

http://www.businessweek.com/st...
"They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. ... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater

Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...

Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,

I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."

Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."

And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."

The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.

Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a

You make a good point though that doing some sorts of science are much cheaper now than they used to be, in large part because of cheap computing, so you can simulate and communicate and archive cheaply in a way never before possible. So yes, "professional amateurs" working part time and living very frugally might be able to do some tabletop-sized stuff supported by cheap computing. Or maybe they can help analyze data produced from big projects like supercolliders or NASA imagery, with the data distributed via the internet (a worthwhile thing). I'll agree that is a good point. While there may be less fundamental low-hanging scientific fruit than in the 1800s (basic chemistry, basic electromagnetism), there are certainly more edge cases now to explore as the scientific literature has grown in size.

However, given all the complaints already about financial difficulties of full-time adjuncts, as well as the difficulty of newly-minted K-12 teachers getting good jobs, I feel it is still a bit of wishful thinking to thing teaching is likely to support most people who want to do research. Also, in general, research and teaching require somewhat different mindsets and personalities to excel in or be happy in -- which is one reason so many college students get not-very-good teachers who are researcher wannabees (even ignoring self-education vs. teaching).

The main funding issue in the USA is competition and expectations relative the the vast numbers of PhDs being produced as opposed to the 1950s-1960s numbers and available funding then. Yes there are resources out there for science even now, as you say. But, saying the average bright PhD (or non-PhD) can get them is like saying you can take a job at Google or IBM because they have a lot of resources to use for your project without realizing there is a lot of competition for those resources even if you can get in to such a company. Yes, you might win the lottery, and people do every day, but is it unlikely relative to the number of players. IBM Research, for example, at least when I was there, has many people with many good and creative ideas, but IBM will only pursue the very few ideas with the most profit potential (generally measured in billions of dollars), discarding the rest (which frustrates researchers to no end, even if they may sometimes get to publish something before being asked to move to some new project). I read about that frustration even from a book from around the 1980s on researchers -- that people can be asked at a moment's notice to drop their project and do something else and never be able to work on the project again.

The bottom line is that, increasingly, many people are not being given accurate information about career expectations when they pursue PhDs. Although this is increasingly true for much of academia. Which suggests a bubble is about to burst...

Example from Greenspun:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
    To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."

See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

From: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
---
Why does anyone think science is a good job?

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. ...

Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.

Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.
---

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
http://www.basicallytech.com/b...
http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL...
"NRAO, 1971 ... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."

Forth still can be a great BIOS and command line system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Although IBM deserves credit for popularizing the VM idea with System 360 and then VM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Smalltalk by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others was a another great option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.

We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
http://www.complex.com/tech/20...

But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright

To really understand a lot of projects to the point where a developer can make substantial contributions often takes a substantial investment of time by a developer. So some combination of full-time employment in the area, government grants, a basic income, or gifts of some sort are required for experienced developers to have substantial time to look at source code. It's true some developers have time to do it as a hobby, and others might have time as students. But to really dig into complex code and keep at it for a substantial period of time require, in US society at least, generally requires some kind of external support (even if just a spouse who earns money). This issue is not helped by the fragmentation of many software projects via forks, the competition between similar FOSS projects, and the proliferation of languages and not-very-good standards which all chew up vast amounts of developer time.

Of course, some people, like Bill Gates, who was born with a substantial trust fund have inherited the wealth needed to allow them to develop free software the rest of their life. However, for good or bad, he did not pursue that choice.
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."

A substantial "basic income" equivalent to US Social Security from birth would, in a sense, make everyone a millionaire overnight and give them the time they need to pursue public benefit projects, whether doing code review or raising children well. Linux in part is a result of Finland's generous support for students like Linus.
http://www.linfo.org/linus.htm...
"Torvalds thus decided to create a new operating system from scratch that was based on both MINIX and UNIX. It is unlikely that he was fully aware of the tremendous amount of work that would be necessary, and it is even far less likely that he could have envisioned the effects that his decision would have both on his life and on the rest of the world. Because university education in Finland is free and there was little pressure to graduate within four years, Torvalds decided to take a break and devote his full attention to his project."

I've slept on a junky bed in the cold in my life too (during winter in Pittsburgh with a 40 minute slog through the snow each way to CMU where I was hanging out at the robotics institute, not able to afford to pay for much heat). I think you missed my point, or I obviously was not clear enough about it. Remember, this is in the context of a Nobel prize-winning scientist saying no one would hire him if he were starting today. The original poster says he or she needs a degree (at great personal cost) to make a difference in the world (including to make a meaningful life from that by contributing to science). I point out how I got a fancy degree and it really does not help that much in doing meaningful work. It certainly could have helped me make a lot of money most likely hurting other people in some monopolistic/cronyistic way (like via the FIRE sector of the economy where lots of Princeton grads go), but I was not into that way of life.

As for science, ignoring most colleges flunk out half their freshman class ultimately, consider this:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

If you want to make a difference in the world or even just in your own life, you have to just go out and do something of healthy value to the world (or at least yourself). But that is not what much of academia claims and the original poster seems to feel that he or she is being scammed by academia but can do nothing about it Thus the cake (diploma) is a lie (in many cases). I know -- I got a good piece of that "cake", but it still wasn't very filling or very healthy. Did it have some benefits? Sure. But it is also quite possible I would have done better in life without college (and especially pursuing grad school) at all, because they were great opportunity costs, great financial costs, and such experiences were also in many ways disempowering.

Or for a different perspective, words from someone who chose to become a carpet cleaner to have a good interesting life:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030206110440/http://www.unconventionalideas.com/bstcarer.html
"...
The point is that as a professional carpet cleaner, I don't need to look very far for challenge and stimulation. No, the work isn't easy, and can be physically demanding, but as you will gather from my descriptions, it isn't all repetitive drudgery either.
Many people get misled when seeking a career. They turn their backs on work which is supposedly beneath the ability o

You make some good points, but you also make some key questionable assumptions. Bill Gates was himself born a millionaire (trust fund from banker granddad) and also he did not write most of the software he resold, and what he wrote,he wrote based on knowledge gained in part from dumpster diving to find program listings from a computer center. Without his mother's knowing someone at IBM, he probably would not have gotten the deal for an OS for the IBM PC. IBM probably would have been better off using an in-house Forth that had been written bu David Frank, or Unix like the CS-9000, but suffered from internal politics.

The deep question is what part of the the fruits of our infrastructure (air, water, farmland, roads, machines, seeds, internet, books, software, ICs, etc.) should be shared equally (not "means-tested") and what part should somehow be used to "reward" hard work or risk taking or whatever. So you make an assumption with being "OK" with a huge wealth disparity whatever its cause (in this case, Bill Gates indeed being bright and hard working, but also rich from birth and part of a socially well-connected family). But another point of view might be that, say, half the economic output of the USA should be shared equally (US$25K per person per year) as social security payments from birth as a "basic income", and the other half should then be "earned"or divided based on effort or merit somehow.

Dan Pink questions the whole notion of financial reward as a motivator for intellectual work (even as we all need some money to survive and thrive in this culture we have built):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "

On Bill Gates and dumpster diving:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952

Bill Gates made a lot of money by damaging the community of people freely sharing knowledge and software with each other, while hypocritically pleading poverty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Often people can make a lot of money by disempowering other people and disrupting communities.

That said, is Windows a useful standard given its backward compatibility? Yes it is (as much as I don't like to have to admit that).

The JK Rowling story is more complex too. Many people write amazing stories, but few get widely published by the nature of our publishing industry. Still, her story is a good example of the value of a "basic income" to promote creativity.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053057866.html
"Too good, it turns out. Yes, Rowling was a single mother with a bad marriage behind her, and yes, she was briefly on the dole. But the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and Rowling was never far from her middle-class origins. ... "In fact," harrumphs the Yorkshire Post, "this middle-class English girl with an Exeter University degree and a career as a teacher didn't try to dispel the myth that she'd been a penniless, single mother." ..."

If the dole effectively promotes the arts effectively in a compassionate way, then why do we have copyright instead?

In a world of

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

From: http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
---
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
---

Also, a focus on early abstract academics (ABCs and gold stars) has deprived young children of time spent in nature and playing with sand, water, rocks, leaves, sticks, sunlight, and such. This means they have little physical appreciation for what abstractions like quantity, mass, heat flow, energy, and so on relate to, so kids have less physical intuition to bring to math and science. See John Holt and John Taylor Gatto for alternatives.

I think it may be more that kids realize that people who study STEM tend to get shafted economically relative to the degree of work. Example:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

There was another article on how there are less Electrical Engineers. I read the EE Times forums and many EEs say they tell their kids not to go into the field based on career prospects and working conditions.

Also on the failure of the US academic system for STEM:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human

"Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty": http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off."

Not that science is much better:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. ... What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. "

And:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/sep/28/post-doc-research-job-hunt
"After completing my PhD in 2001 I worked as a post-doc researcher in biological sciences in two different labs until 2006. Despite best efforts, the second post-doc didn't work out research wise and after two years of negative results my funding ran out. Even though I applied for other positions, by the time my contract ended I was officially unemployed. To save money I decided to move back in with my parents and claim jobseekers allowance, a galling process when you are 33 and have three higher degrees."

All that to become:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education an

Just ask Phil Greenspun.

I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

More links here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.

You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days:
http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft? :-)

It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...

Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

I'd also recommend playing around with Forth (or a latter day equivalent like "Joy") to get a good sense of factoring problem well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

My kid st

"Lemme guess, you're a HS dropout and you're bitter because nobody will buy your homemade shit, right?"

Ah, if only I had been smarter and more courageous in High School and indeed completely dropped out and focused on making "homemade" stuff. Probably I might indeed have been more successful and happier? But no, instead I left high school early for college and then blew all the money I earned from writing "homemade" computer software on Princeton, graduating the same year as Michelle Obama. And that was even after having read this awesome essay saying why spending money on Princeton was stupid:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money"
http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/anewsome/Bird%20Article.pdf

So, just an example of how I was deeply in a bubble back then (and probably still am now in various ways).

But, turning the points around to focus on the presenter generally shows you don't have much to say about the points presented? What is your point? That I am "bitter"? See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

See also:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

Anyway, compared to what I was told about the USA in public school growing up, yes, I am disappointed with where this country has gone in the last thirty years. But there is not just one specific thing I could point to (although neoliberal economics is perhaps a big part of it, which just continues to get worse as we automate jobs away and wealth continues to concentrate).

And I'm not saying all the changes are for the worse though. There is less air pollution in NYC, for example (reflective of an emerging environmental ethic). There is easy access to a wealth of information via the internet. Example:
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
We know a lot more about material science. We know a lot more about the science of nutrition and health. There sure are a lot of people trying to make a positive difference in the world. There is much goodness in the USA and abroad.

There remain reasons for optimism as historian Howard Zinn points out:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
" Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), bu

http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
      1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
      2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
      3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
      4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
      5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
    This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
    Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "

For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/

I believe there is much more logic in following article by Philip Greenspun from 2006 than in TFA.

And one other that is not there: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science [greenspun.com]

I had not seen this before, but thank you for pointing it out - his observations are dead-on.

Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Here are some links I put together for context about current academia:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See especially:

      "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
      http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

      "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
      http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

And one other that is not there:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Good luck.

As I said, see Greenspun, and others. If my view is warped, I am in good company.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

I have plenty of friends who are older programmers who have, out of necessity, left the industry, or become management. Others travel the country looking for another 3 or 6 month gig. What a great life at age 55+!

(Yes, I am sure you think that I and all my friends are below average, or outright lousy programmers. Not surprised - that is the default position of everyone I have ever dealt with in a hiring situation, even those I could code rings around, or those asking questions full of contradictory and incorrect assumptions, poor practices, etc.)

If I wanted to be a manager, I would have pursued that career. What I am saying is that if you want a career using math/science - CS/SD/Programming is one of the last ones to choose.

Programming for a living is just not worth it. It is already hard enough - without all the political and manager bullshit you have to put up with.

Those who honestly look at the overall situation - including use of H1-B indentured servants, offshoring(both reasonable and ridiculous), extensive unpaid overtime expectations, clueless management, agressive culture and backstabbing, ridiculous hiring requirements and practices, etc., etc., etc. understand that it is the coding/SD culture itself that is warped.

Coder culture has an extensive ugly underbelly, and the hostility and condescension in your post only underline the point of my post, and the story itself.

ironic captcha: degrade

Also on the theme of women being too smart and self-respecting for a career in science these days: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. ... Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog: "A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?" ... What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory. ..."

A "basic income" for all might help in correcting this situation.

Interesting link. Here is a sci-fi story about even-cheaper-than-foreign-labor AI and robotics leading to unemployed US Americans ending up in "Terrafoam" cages: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A great essay by Philip Greenspun on why US Americans, especially women, avoid science:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):

* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")

* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow

* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)

Actually, yes. There were some credit card reader vendors in Europe who did not put coders to work on the problem and those card readers did NOT work after Y2K.

Here are other reports of failures - which were quickly fixed after they happened - but were Y2K-caused:

• Power company report
• Catalog of faults reported elsewhere

So, there you have the proof that if nothing was done, problems existed.

Philip Greenspun has some good titles: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (dated, but I paid cash money for it back in the day), Software Engineering for Internet Applications, and SQL for Web Nerds. If you find yourself in the DB2 world, Graeme Birchall's DB2 SQL Cookbook is a must-have.

Philip Greenspun has some good titles: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (dated, but I paid cash money for it back in the day), Software Engineering for Internet Applications, and SQL for Web Nerds. If you find yourself in the DB2 world, Graeme Birchall's DB2 SQL Cookbook is a must-have.

Philip Greenspun has some good titles: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (dated, but I paid cash money for it back in the day), Software Engineering for Internet Applications, and SQL for Web Nerds. If you find yourself in the DB2 world, Graeme Birchall's DB2 SQL Cookbook is a must-have.

http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

I wrote that essay after working towards some FOSS tools to make it easier for kids to get into programming.

Also related:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."

And, speaking as someone who has been using computers for thirty years, and while thinking everyone should ideally have a baisc computer literacy to be an informed citizen, how many programmers does the world really need? Kids are smart. They know there are fewer and fewer "good" jobs in technology for all sorts of reasons.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://community.dice.com/t5/Tech-Market-Conditions/Alice-Dice-s-claim-of-4-Unemployment/td-p/235866

From:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daught

More evidence:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Of course, science has become so corrupt in many ways, it has done itself in...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding. "

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. ..."

But, see also on money as a bad motivator for creative work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Some deeper issues:
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

My own saga: :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

See also: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

"Luckily for Billy, foresight and technical expertise account for very little, while marketing and image mean everything, and THAT, at least, he is very good at."

Being born a multi-millionaire and dumpster diving for OS listings may have helped too...
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837221
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837517

That said, Bill Gates still has been something special beyond that. I don't think those were enough. I just hope someday Bill Gates takes some time off the time pressure of financially obesity and studies stuff like Howard Zinn's writings, John Taylor Gatto's, or John Holt's or thinks hard about the future implications of technological abunance on the economy and education.
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Database fundamentals haven't changed much. I don't know how much you know so far but this guy is pretty smart:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/

Lots of the core stuff about RDBMSs goes back decades and even old stuff like this is still very relevant. Try reading this page (just a dozen printed pages) and see what you think. He covers a lot of the fundamentals well and his style of writing is pretty entertaining.

Database fundamentals haven't changed much. I don't know how much you know so far but this guy is pretty smart:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/

Lots of the core stuff about RDBMSs goes back decades and even old stuff like this is still very relevant. Try reading this page (just a dozen printed pages) and see what you think. He covers a lot of the fundamentals well and his style of writing is pretty entertaining.

Database fundamentals haven't changed much. I don't know how much you know so far but this guy is pretty smart:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/

Lots of the core stuff about RDBMSs goes back decades and even old stuff like this is still very relevant. Try reading this page (just a dozen printed pages) and see what you think. He covers a lot of the fundamentals well and his style of writing is pretty entertaining.

Database fundamentals haven't changed much. I don't know how much you know so far but this guy is pretty smart:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/

Lots of the core stuff about RDBMSs goes back decades and even old stuff like this is still very relevant. Try reading this page (just a dozen printed pages) and see what you think. He covers a lot of the fundamentals well and his style of writing is pretty entertaining.

This looks like a good opportunity to remind everybody about the Bill Gates Wealth Clock, wherein you can learn what your contribution to Bill Gates' wealth is.

As he observes: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." And he's right. And then people wonder why more Americans don't go into science.

Unfortunately, I'm posting this a bit late in the game--there are 400 comments already--so it's not likely to get modded very far up, but those who actually care about science in the United States should read this.

I was referring to the situation described in this article: "There are millions of Japanese consumers whose only home computing device is an iMode phone, providing them with text messaging, Web pages, and various social and commercial services." It doesn't matter whether it's an i-mode phone, an iPhone, an iPad, an iBall, or whatever else. There are plenty of people who have realized that as long as you can activate and update a phone in the shop, and you don't plan to create, you don't need a PC. The problem will come if the pricing structure for a "real PC" changes such that "you don't plan to create" becomes "you can't afford to create".

Fuck you for pushing Microsoft whitewashing and trying to frame every company, product or service in the context of Fighting the Microsoft. Apple has its problems but you are utterly full of shit to try to claim that Apple's claim to fame is other than a company focused on providing a good user experience with (usually) quality software and (often) quality hardware.

Yes, IBM was the relatively big evil back then. It turned out to be small, very small, compared to Gates who was created by IBM as a side effect of the anti-trust remedies. Talk about Gates being only hated recently is nothing but pure whitewashing. ESR's comments are updated in 2004, but date back from 1998 a time when the views he expresses in the rant are a toned-down version of what was prevalent at the time. Or scroll down to readers' comments in Phil's page. Those are from 1999. You can find material going back to the mid-1970's he's always been perceived as an obnoxious dweeb.

the "villain" that he was seen as being in the 1990s.

Gates marketeers never get tired of getting paid to whitewash his reputation, do they? Here is the whine he wrote in 1976. He wasn't always big, but he was always annoying and wrong. The myth of Horatio Alger is just that a myth, and Gates was a rich kid from rich parents and rich grandparents who's mom's connections were in a lucky place at a lucky time.