Oh, please. This 5.6 quake is the seventh 4+ earthquake in Oklahoma since 1995 (eighth if you include the 4.7 foreshock). As much as I would love to see this linked to fracking (seriously, don't get me started on the energy industry), let's not jump to conclusions.
And did you notice that, of those 8 earthquakes, 4 of them have been since 2010? According to this there are 181 fracking facilities in the county where these earthquakes have been occurring. Maybe it's not caused by fracking, but I find it hard to believe that 181 fracking sites devoted to breaking up the earth's crust within a single county has no effect on seismic activity.
I seriously thought the roof was about to come down.. I live in east Edmond, about 30 miles from the strike point. I've lived in OK for most of my life, and we haven't had earthquakes until the last couple years. I've been through several 4+ magnitude quakes the last 2 years, and I can't help but think this correlates pretty well to the recent ramp up of fracking in OK.
The problem isn't Javascript (though it's certainly not my first choice of languages), it's the DOM. The problem is that there's about 5-10 versions of the DOM that you have to worry about, and you never know how browser X implemented its DOM. I think you've got it backwards -- you get lots of Javascript questions because good programmers get frustrated writing multiple implementations of the same code for each browser, and want to find something that "just works" so they can move on to some more interesting task.
Yeah, I get that talking things out is a good thing, and I'm quite good at it.. But it's hard to describe an algorithm over the phone with no visual aid. Sounds like you're a lot more reasonable than the people I interviewed with. Too bad I didn't interview with someone like you instead.
These were algorithm questions, but they were they wanted me to a.) talk it out (I can't think when I'm talking), b.) recite the code to them over the phone (fairly large code blocks, and I did not write the code out to a computer first), and c.) deal with them giving me "hints" that were counterproductive and were leading away from the correct implementation. I think it's a ridiculous metric anyway, as a good coder should distill the problem down to its parts, research the problem (i.e. see what Knuth has to say about it), weigh the options, and apply it to the task at hand. As an aside, I've heard MS frowns on candidates that have gmail accounts. Is that true?
I interviewed over the phone a couple times there.. They try to "ease" the difficulty by providing hints and asking you to "talk through" your process, etc. The problem is that these questions are often poorly defined (and I suspect made up on the fly), and one interviewer's "hints" were very distracting. In both cases I figured out the answers 5 minutes after hanging up, when I could finally be alone with my thoughts.
Side note -- if this happened in the US, he would have kept the source closed, founded a company, charged extortionary prices, and the entire medical profession would be worse off at his expense.
Before I became a Fed I thought the same as you. Turns out the retirement plan is called the TSP, and it's essentially a 401k with 1% mandatory contribution, and 100% matching up to 4% of your pay. Not that special.
As a retired academic, I really don't see why tuitions have skyrocketed. Faculty salaries have held close to CPI, the buildings are already built for the most part. I guess the energy to heat and light those buildings has gone up but not enough to explain the difference.
For one, look at the total number of employees compared to the number of professors teaching classes.
The ratio of employee:professor has grown, but that's largely because schools are foregoing the traditional professor model and instead using adjunct faculty and TAs because they're cheaper. Of course, the result is that you have a lot of highly educated people making barely over the poverty line, unable to pay back their student loans and unable to find a job outside of academia.
The first step the government could take is to tax everything an employer gives to an employee equally.
Right now, my employer has to be very careful about adding another person to the payroll. It means many thousands of dollars per year in health insurance costs. They don't get that hit if they work me 60hrs/week, instead of hiring someone else and working us each 30hrs/week. The two at 30 would give them the benefit of redundancy, and they wouldn't have worn out employees. But those considerations pale in comparison to the fixed overhead costs.
So what you're saying is that socialized medicine is good for businesses?
It does. Middle class people now have a better life than a king a few centuries ago. Of course, it's easy to take all the modern things for granted, and find something to complain about.
I dunno about that. One big piece of living like a king is having power.
True, but I believe the ratio is significantly greater, a support/maintenance team of 5 can take care of a system that replaces 100+ workers. Though I do say outsourcing is a larger threat then robots depending on your level and expertise. If you are a coder, customer relations etc... outsourcing is a bigger threat, if you are a laborer, manufacturing person etc... robots are a bigger threat.
Don't be so sure... Through the magic of code generation (a software bot, in essence) I've lowered the amount of code written in my team by a couple orders of magnitude. There's a lot of inefficiencies in the software world, and that generally doesn't improve with outsourcing.
Re:I think I've heard this before. . .
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
The problem is that we're not willing to accept an economic system that's more in tune with the realities of modern life. If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.
This is purely anecdotal, but most of the feds I work with are Republican or independant and right leaning. Kinda seems strange voting against your own financial interests, but whatever.
Okay, so let's say a crackhead approaches you on the street and says "hey, lend me $50,000 so i can buy crack! Please?! I'll pay it back, I promise!", and you write him a check for $50,000. You're telling me that you accept no responsibility for the utterly stupid loan you just made?
When consumption of goods becomes third party in nature the costs explode.
Actually, it's when the consumption becomes requisite, and the costs can be deferred, that the costs explode. Look at Canada -- they have a highly functional medical system. The average Canadian will get much better health care than the average American, and that's factoring in for taxes. The very richest Americans may get the greatest health care known to man, and the very poor will get somewhat sub-par health care at no cost to them, but the vast majority will get crappy to decent health care at a price that could be considered extortion. They'll pay it, because the alternative is dying.
This is the case with education as well. If your only chance to find employment above burger flipping is to go to college, you're going to go. And if the only way for you to go to college is to take out tens of thousands in loans you'll never be able to pay back, you're going to take those loans. Now, obviously not every job needs a Bachelor's degree, but try telling that to HR.
Tax dollar subsidize a lower and lower portion of tuition every year. The university I graduated from in 2005 has more than doubled their tuition since then. In that time, wages have been stagnant or in many cases dropped. If you're over 30, you had a much, MUCH easier time than these kids today. And for the record, I'm one of those people who worked during school, got a nice scholarship, and graduated with zero debt. But not everyone is that fortunate.
You mean the baby boomers who had their education paid for by the state, i.e. their parents' tax money? If tuition wasn't ridiculous, we wouldn't have this student loan problem. If we paid for university through taxes like we used to, tuition wouldn't be ridiculous.
No blame for the bank that loaned the lazy deadbeat $100k? You talk about risks, but the bank has zero risk because you can't ever, EVER get out of student loans. In fact, a lot of those people have huge loans because staying in school and borrowing more money was the only way to continue living because they couldn't make enough money to pay for their existing loans. This is more like a mafia loan than a home loan, friend.
No argument here.. My point is mainly that there are incompetent people in both camps. DBAs have a low opinion of devs because they've seen a few do stupid things.. Developers have low opinions of DBAs because they've seen a few do stupid things.. It's easy to only notice the failures of the other camp. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to writing a bunch of code generation templates because the DBA told us that all our CRUD has to be done in stored procedures, and NHibernate doesn't really support that out of the box.
So yeah, I once had this idiot, I mean DBA, insist on using an external, non-unique identifier as a primary key because it only gets recycled every few years, and he would have all the records archived off by then. Guess how that went a couple years later?
I was probably just below the "prodigy" line (had a 35 on my ACT in 8th grade --roughly ~1570 when converted to SAT), and burnout was definitely what happened to me.. I remember when I applied for the "gifted" high school they have here, where all the teachers have Ph.D's, and graduating counts toward 3 years college credits to any Engineering program. The very last part was where they separate the kids from their parents, and they only have one question: "do you want to go here?" I said no. I sometimes wonder how my life might have turned out had I said yes.. I bet my work like would have been more fulfilling. On the other hand, I met some lifelong friends in high school, got a full ride to college, and ended up with a decent career and a life.
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Oh, please. This 5.6 quake is the seventh 4+ earthquake in Oklahoma since 1995 (eighth if you include the 4.7 foreshock). As much as I would love to see this linked to fracking (seriously, don't get me started on the energy industry), let's not jump to conclusions.
See this link for the list.
And did you notice that, of those 8 earthquakes, 4 of them have been since 2010? According to this there are 181 fracking facilities in the county where these earthquakes have been occurring. Maybe it's not caused by fracking, but I find it hard to believe that 181 fracking sites devoted to breaking up the earth's crust within a single county has no effect on seismic activity.
I seriously thought the roof was about to come down.. I live in east Edmond, about 30 miles from the strike point. I've lived in OK for most of my life, and we haven't had earthquakes until the last couple years. I've been through several 4+ magnitude quakes the last 2 years, and I can't help but think this correlates pretty well to the recent ramp up of fracking in OK.
The problem isn't Javascript (though it's certainly not my first choice of languages), it's the DOM. The problem is that there's about 5-10 versions of the DOM that you have to worry about, and you never know how browser X implemented its DOM. I think you've got it backwards -- you get lots of Javascript questions because good programmers get frustrated writing multiple implementations of the same code for each browser, and want to find something that "just works" so they can move on to some more interesting task.
Yeah, I get that talking things out is a good thing, and I'm quite good at it.. But it's hard to describe an algorithm over the phone with no visual aid. Sounds like you're a lot more reasonable than the people I interviewed with. Too bad I didn't interview with someone like you instead.
These were algorithm questions, but they were they wanted me to a.) talk it out (I can't think when I'm talking), b.) recite the code to them over the phone (fairly large code blocks, and I did not write the code out to a computer first), and c.) deal with them giving me "hints" that were counterproductive and were leading away from the correct implementation. I think it's a ridiculous metric anyway, as a good coder should distill the problem down to its parts, research the problem (i.e. see what Knuth has to say about it), weigh the options, and apply it to the task at hand. As an aside, I've heard MS frowns on candidates that have gmail accounts. Is that true?
I interviewed over the phone a couple times there.. They try to "ease" the difficulty by providing hints and asking you to "talk through" your process, etc. The problem is that these questions are often poorly defined (and I suspect made up on the fly), and one interviewer's "hints" were very distracting. In both cases I figured out the answers 5 minutes after hanging up, when I could finally be alone with my thoughts.
Side note -- if this happened in the US, he would have kept the source closed, founded a company, charged extortionary prices, and the entire medical profession would be worse off at his expense.
Yes. Just bad for rich people.
FTFY
Before I became a Fed I thought the same as you. Turns out the retirement plan is called the TSP, and it's essentially a 401k with 1% mandatory contribution, and 100% matching up to 4% of your pay. Not that special.
As a retired academic, I really don't see why tuitions have skyrocketed. Faculty salaries have held close to CPI, the buildings are already built for the most part. I guess the energy to heat and light those buildings has gone up but not enough to explain the difference.
For one, look at the total number of employees compared to the number of professors teaching classes.
The ratio of employee:professor has grown, but that's largely because schools are foregoing the traditional professor model and instead using adjunct faculty and TAs because they're cheaper. Of course, the result is that you have a lot of highly educated people making barely over the poverty line, unable to pay back their student loans and unable to find a job outside of academia.
The first step the government could take is to tax everything an employer gives to an employee equally.
Right now, my employer has to be very careful about adding another person to the payroll. It means many thousands of dollars per year in health insurance costs. They don't get that hit if they work me 60hrs/week, instead of hiring someone else and working us each 30hrs/week. The two at 30 would give them the benefit of redundancy, and they wouldn't have worn out employees. But those considerations pale in comparison to the fixed overhead costs.
So what you're saying is that socialized medicine is good for businesses?
It does. Middle class people now have a better life than a king a few centuries ago. Of course, it's easy to take all the modern things for granted, and find something to complain about.
I dunno about that. One big piece of living like a king is having power.
True, but I believe the ratio is significantly greater, a support/maintenance team of 5 can take care of a system that replaces 100+ workers. Though I do say outsourcing is a larger threat then robots depending on your level and expertise. If you are a coder, customer relations etc... outsourcing is a bigger threat, if you are a laborer, manufacturing person etc... robots are a bigger threat.
Don't be so sure... Through the magic of code generation (a software bot, in essence) I've lowered the amount of code written in my team by a couple orders of magnitude. There's a lot of inefficiencies in the software world, and that generally doesn't improve with outsourcing.
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
The problem is that we're not willing to accept an economic system that's more in tune with the realities of modern life. If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.
This is purely anecdotal, but most of the feds I work with are Republican or independant and right leaning. Kinda seems strange voting against your own financial interests, but whatever.
Which is why their competition does well. Who competes with the government?
You are aware that the "competition" just resells packages through those companies, right?
Okay, so let's say a crackhead approaches you on the street and says "hey, lend me $50,000 so i can buy crack! Please?! I'll pay it back, I promise!", and you write him a check for $50,000. You're telling me that you accept no responsibility for the utterly stupid loan you just made?
When consumption of goods becomes third party in nature the costs explode.
Actually, it's when the consumption becomes requisite, and the costs can be deferred, that the costs explode. Look at Canada -- they have a highly functional medical system. The average Canadian will get much better health care than the average American, and that's factoring in for taxes. The very richest Americans may get the greatest health care known to man, and the very poor will get somewhat sub-par health care at no cost to them, but the vast majority will get crappy to decent health care at a price that could be considered extortion. They'll pay it, because the alternative is dying.
This is the case with education as well. If your only chance to find employment above burger flipping is to go to college, you're going to go. And if the only way for you to go to college is to take out tens of thousands in loans you'll never be able to pay back, you're going to take those loans. Now, obviously not every job needs a Bachelor's degree, but try telling that to HR.
Tax dollar subsidize a lower and lower portion of tuition every year. The university I graduated from in 2005 has more than doubled their tuition since then. In that time, wages have been stagnant or in many cases dropped. If you're over 30, you had a much, MUCH easier time than these kids today. And for the record, I'm one of those people who worked during school, got a nice scholarship, and graduated with zero debt. But not everyone is that fortunate.
You mean the baby boomers who had their education paid for by the state, i.e. their parents' tax money? If tuition wasn't ridiculous, we wouldn't have this student loan problem. If we paid for university through taxes like we used to, tuition wouldn't be ridiculous.
Government interference in the market is always the root cause - it creates a moral hazard.
That's why Somalia is a paradise, right?
No blame for the bank that loaned the lazy deadbeat $100k? You talk about risks, but the bank has zero risk because you can't ever, EVER get out of student loans. In fact, a lot of those people have huge loans because staying in school and borrowing more money was the only way to continue living because they couldn't make enough money to pay for their existing loans. This is more like a mafia loan than a home loan, friend.
That guy should not have been a DBA.
No argument here.. My point is mainly that there are incompetent people in both camps. DBAs have a low opinion of devs because they've seen a few do stupid things.. Developers have low opinions of DBAs because they've seen a few do stupid things.. It's easy to only notice the failures of the other camp. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to writing a bunch of code generation templates because the DBA told us that all our CRUD has to be done in stored procedures, and NHibernate doesn't really support that out of the box.
So yeah, I once had this idiot, I mean DBA, insist on using an external, non-unique identifier as a primary key because it only gets recycled every few years, and he would have all the records archived off by then. Guess how that went a couple years later?
I was probably just below the "prodigy" line (had a 35 on my ACT in 8th grade --roughly ~1570 when converted to SAT), and burnout was definitely what happened to me.. I remember when I applied for the "gifted" high school they have here, where all the teachers have Ph.D's, and graduating counts toward 3 years college credits to any Engineering program. The very last part was where they separate the kids from their parents, and they only have one question: "do you want to go here?" I said no. I sometimes wonder how my life might have turned out had I said yes.. I bet my work like would have been more fulfilling. On the other hand, I met some lifelong friends in high school, got a full ride to college, and ended up with a decent career and a life.