An extension does nothing for your ability to pay or not pay the taxes due. If you want to procrastinate on filing, you need to either pay everything you might owe, or know you're definitely getting a refund.
I owed this year, so I filed last week. Doing everything a full week+ early means everything is a ghost town that will be a nightmare come the deadline.
Nobody is trying to copy it. They're trying to design it to have all the benefits the human brain has that allow us to work on things like this, but remove all of the features that don't work. Basically, we're trying to design the brain that god would have designed if he existed and actually designed it. =)
If you don't have a cell phone, there's not a very high correlation between you and the good customer demographic. You can't please everyone, but requiring people to have a cell phone would only alienate a small percentage of customers with enough money to be relevant to the bank.
I think the implied joke/dark humor is that the free market would enslave all of these people. The problem right now is that there is no market effect of genocide. If these people were made someone's property and worked for the man, the man would send merceneries to kill the people who want to kill his slaves. Either that, or he's suggesting that the market has determined that these people are non-essential, or even worse, non-consumers, and need to be removed to make room for future consumers.
A business who didn't know its market and felt they were entitled to a constant flow of profit went out of business. I have a hard time finding any more sympathy for a small business that doesn't understand its customer base than I do for the RIAA.
I occaisionally buy CD's, but I generally just cycle through the 300+ CD's my wife and I already have. If I find a new artist that I like, I want them to keep making good music, so I buy their stuff. There's any number of reasons for the declined in sales, but most of them come down to not catering to their audience. I don't buy music online because I don't like the idea of DRM. I can bypass the copy protection and make MP3's from the CDs I buy, so I have no problem putting stuff I want on my MP3 player. I haven't downloaded music as a mooch for many years. If I'm not willing to support an artist, why would I waste my time listening to their crap?
Better quality subscription based radio stations are probably also a notable contributor to this trend. If I cared enough about my commute noise to want something better than the 6 stations and 5 CD's in my car, I'd probably do the same as you.
An overdeveloped sense of entitlement. TV has lead us to believe that we deserve to live in opulent luxury. It's hard to do that if all of the jobs that pay above minimum wage are going to people who are more educated, harder working, more dedicated, and making not much more than our minimum wage to provide them with a very comfortable lifestyle in their homeland.
Data from ice cores is only valid if the assumptions about past environments are true. Anyway, at the current rate, there won't be any more ice in 20 years, so where will our data come from at that point, smartypants? =)
It worked well for Japan and the auto industry. They started with making inferior copies cheaply, figured out how to improve the quality without substantially increasing the cost, and now American manufacturers are second rate.
Though, there have been some impressive contributions to the crypto community from chinese researchers recently. They're already ahead of the curve in some fields.
Asking for cooperation from a US company to address a specific issue with specific content seems reasonable. YouTube doesn't have to cooperate, but I doubt anyone wants to have to block YouTube on all of the network connections coming into Japan to address this issue. That's what the end of TFA says happened in Thailand and I doubt many people want to see the same thing in Japan: "This week Thailand's military-installed government banned YouTube entirely after it failed to block a video considered insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a revered figure in the country."
There are other solutions, like giving everyone the same exposure, that seem more sensible, but asking for a governments to change quickly is unrealistic in any country. Asking a company delivering content to Japan to be compliant with Japanese laws is not unreasonable.
You think the large scale domain squatters won't just register in the names of every homeless person they can find or make up? In your world, are these people honest, upstanding members of the community? I always found that they overlapped quite a bit with spammers and other con artists. Your plan sounds good on the surface, but would have no positive impact whatsoever if it were applied in reality.
However, you're right about subdomains, directories, etc. Why does every movie need to have its own domain? MoneyGrubber2TheSearchForMoreMoneyTheMovie.com could be movies.sony.com/MoneyGrubber2 just as easily, and it would add the parent company's brand into the link, which some marketing exec should be drooling over.
My personal favorite is having people tell me my domain isn't used because I don't have a web page with anything interesting to them. They email me at the domain to tell me that I'm not using it and they would like me to give it to them. The irony escapes them.
Who you know still has a significant impact. Given two people who look on paper like they have equivalent experience, will you choose the one you've worked well with in the past, or try the unknown guy and see how it goes? Direct experience or internal references go a long ways in getting jobs. It's not a replacement for being able to do the job, but something that sets you apart among dozens or hundreds of people with comparable skills going after the same job.
Let me guess, your coding involved maintaining someone else's Perl code? That's not pure coding for the enjoyment of coding. That's more like being forcibly raped.
"OK" doesn't even mean that it is understood in all cases. I'm not sure if it's a cultural issue or something else, but I've found a desire to please when confronted with a direct question.
For example, people respond to questions like "Will this be done by Friday?" with "Yes" when the answer I would prefer is the more accurate one - "No, we have no intention of even starting that. To ensure your continued happiness this week, we will not tell you the bad news until next week(after it's supposed to be done)."
This is in stark contrast with more confrontational Americans who will respond to "You'll be able to put 80 hours into each of these 12 projects today, right?" with "Put the crack pipe down. 80*12=960, which is 4000% of the 24 hours that are available in one day. If you wanted any progress on any of them today, you should have said something before 5:30PM."
I didn't mean to suggest that an organization should only have one person who does everything, but rather hiring one programmer for a programmer-worth of work as opposed to a team to do the exact same thing. Having good teams or cross training in related parts of the organization is critical to the long term viability of the group. A single point of failure is bad, but there are some problems that need to be solved by more experienced people. One person with 20 years of experience can be much more productive in some types of projects than 20 people with 1 year of experience. Depending on the size of the organization, groups of 3-8 of these types of people can be just as productive as a much larger group of cheaper people, while avoiding the single point of failure problem.
A lot of businesses are so cost centric these days that they are consciously deciding to dramatically increase their future costs and run extremely high risks for the perception of saving some money in the short term. For small businesses, this makes sense. Getting something out at any level of risk means the company survives that much longer and gets to plan for the next phase. Large companies take this same philosophy, but are far more likely to put themselves in a position where they have to go back and do all of the deferred work at a substantially higher cost in the future.
I agree with most of what you're saying, and I am the guy who does everything. System administration, programming, security, business logic, production support, project management, and whatever else they can come up with. We had a whole team of good people and the business people fired them because they didn't see the value of a sustainable organization. Our 2007 motto is "More With Less", which is humorous in a business group where our management has been aiming to commit no more than 30% of the resources needed for any project for years. This is how we achieve such lofty goals as "4th straight year of not backing up our production servers". This is a bank and I'm not kidding about the backups. Business people can't tell the difference between a robust system and a horrible kludge, so they will push for the kludge every single time because it's cheaper in the short term.
The one point where I disagree is having someone come in and get up to speed in days. To me, that suggests a superficial understanding of what's going on. That may be fine for a coder who needs to fill in the blanks between an already well defined set of interfaces, but that's not the majority of what happens in software projects. There is a big gap between business people giving vague ideas of what they want and a team of developers trying to implement it. There is no way you're going to get documentation that will help you understand how serious management is about deadlines, or whether they value glitz over functionality, or any number of quasi-technical problems. There are always parts of any project that cannot be put into writing because they would require people to be far more introspective than they will be. For example, putting together a functional, bare bones web interface would make some people happy, whereas others would be happy with screen shots made in photoshop without a line of code to back it up.
There is one thing that American companies can do that doesn't seem as common in other cultures - launch projects going in 1000 different directions at once with the hope that 9 of the projects will make enough money to pay for themselves and 1 will make enough to pay for the other 990 that were dismal failures. Do other cultures value the willingness to fail miserably time and time again in hopes that one plan will be fabulously successful? Large companies can get away with this approach because they don't risk going out of business with failure after failure.
Google is a good example of a company that is doing very well with search and ads, but it seems like everything else coming out of them is free/ad revenue supported. It may very well be a sustainable model, but putting a lot of smart, creative people together doesn't magically make profit.
Sure, that's a business model that might work if you want to have long term, loyal customers and employees who work for you until they retire, keeping the cost of training new people down. However, Henry would not make it past middle management in any decent sized company these days without being about to demonstrate how his plans will save money this quarter, while increasing productivity and cutting costs next quarter. The current theme is infinite production at zero cost, and if you don't have a story that leads to that goal, you're going nowhere. Us technical people have it the worst, blathering some nonsense (from an MBA's perspective) of that being impossible.
Capitalism demands that the employer try to screw the employee by giving them as little as possible. What an employee is worth is set as an agreement between the employer and employee. If an employer isn't willing to pay what an employee wants, one side has to give in. Finding an employee somewhere with dirt floors who will take less is pretty easy in a global economy.
Why do they have to reconcile the difference? It's a race to the bottom and worst case scenario for the CEO's is retiring early. What's the worst that can happen for them? More people are willing to work locally for peanuts?
That depends on which set of clients have the most money. If the net income from the protection racket is higher, that's the top. If the exploits are more profitable, those are the top. The beauty of this business plan is that there's always room to up the ante if the most profitable client group changes.
This has always been the lure of outsourcing. Costs are increased, which increases the size of the manager's empire, while being able to point to someone and show how much money is being saved.
For example, instead of paying one programmer $80k, they have: 2 programmers offshore - $20k each system architect - $130k technical writer - $60k project manager - $70k team manager - $100k
Instead of spending $80k/year, they are spending $400k/year. However, they claim a savings of $120k using management-math by multiplying the number of programmers they have times the salary of one programmer if hired locally, minus the actual cost of the offshore programmers. You can claim a 75% cost savings on the programmers, even though you're spending 500% of what you need to. It's a great way to fluff out budgets and org charts.
They can make even more money offerring several consecutive levels of patches and exploits. There will always be someone willing to pay for the level of protection or exploit beyond what's commonly available for the low monthly maintenance fee.
I think the cost of materials is the catch. While you may be able to download the digrams of parts for a Ferrari, there is value in all of the raw materials needed and the assembly of all of those components. While you can take a diagram and machine a part from the diagram using the correct materials, you have to start with a block of the material larger than the end component. As you pointed out, the prototypes can be very expensive compared to the components that would be manufactured on a large scale.
I have faith that the legal implications will be worked out as soon as someone produces the first Faux-rari. Making it for personal use would likely be treated differently from someone trying to sell it. Of course, the RIAA would insist that the existence of the prototype producing machine is conclusive proof that you intended to use it to make copies of every piece of IP they have or will ever own.
I'm not sure I understand your point. If making them available only helps the students who want to learn, what's the problem? Aren't they the ones who deserve to have all of the advantages? Or are you trying to trick the lazy people into learning too? Is the problem that if 75% of the people stop showing up and end up failing or barely passing that it is a negative point on the teacher evaluation?
What I've learned in the corporate world is that 90%(maybe a cynical estimate, but it's well over 50%) of people are completely useless. There is nothing you can do to make those people learn or be less lazy. If you tell them what the minimum level of performance is to keep their job, they'll do 25% less to see if you'll actually fire them. And this trend will continue year after year with their productivity asymptotically approaching 0. Trying to teach these people is just as productive as trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
There's nothing you can do to help the people who don't want help, so shouldn't your audience be the people who are interested in listening to you?
Any quirk's need to be "cured" depends on its impact on the individual. If you have a bunch of symptoms that don't impact you severely enough to be willing to try the drugs, you don't need it. Other people could have more or less severe symptoms, but have a much more negative impact on their lives.
If your absentmindedness can be compensated for by checking several times if you locked the door, turned the water off, etc, it's not a big deal. If you are driving, go to change the radio station and get so caught up with the radio that you forget you're driving, that is likely to be a more severe problem.
Wrong. Once you have relegated a topic to a powerpoint presentation, it is a money sink. It is impossible for any productive or profitable information to be conveyed via powerpoint. Possible topics for powerpoints:
Why did our project fail? Where did all of our money go anyway? How much are we spending on these powerpoint presentations? Who cares about this meeting anyway? What did I do wrong to be subjected to a 60 page powerpoint? Future projects that are going to fail because the only forethought that went into them was a bullet point on a powerpoint slide.
Powerpoint exists to give busywork to non-contributors. It keeps them out of the way of people doing real work. If you don't believe me, try firing all of the people whose primary job is to work on powerpoint presentations and see if the productivity of the organization sky rockets.
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An extension does nothing for your ability to pay or not pay the taxes due. If you want to procrastinate on filing, you need to either pay everything you might owe, or know you're definitely getting a refund.
I owed this year, so I filed last week. Doing everything a full week+ early means everything is a ghost town that will be a nightmare come the deadline.
Nobody is trying to copy it. They're trying to design it to have all the benefits the human brain has that allow us to work on things like this, but remove all of the features that don't work. Basically, we're trying to design the brain that god would have designed if he existed and actually designed it. =)
If you don't have a cell phone, there's not a very high correlation between you and the good customer demographic. You can't please everyone, but requiring people to have a cell phone would only alienate a small percentage of customers with enough money to be relevant to the bank.
I think the implied joke/dark humor is that the free market would enslave all of these people. The problem right now is that there is no market effect of genocide. If these people were made someone's property and worked for the man, the man would send merceneries to kill the people who want to kill his slaves. Either that, or he's suggesting that the market has determined that these people are non-essential, or even worse, non-consumers, and need to be removed to make room for future consumers.
A business who didn't know its market and felt they were entitled to a constant flow of profit went out of business. I have a hard time finding any more sympathy for a small business that doesn't understand its customer base than I do for the RIAA.
I occaisionally buy CD's, but I generally just cycle through the 300+ CD's my wife and I already have. If I find a new artist that I like, I want them to keep making good music, so I buy their stuff. There's any number of reasons for the declined in sales, but most of them come down to not catering to their audience. I don't buy music online because I don't like the idea of DRM. I can bypass the copy protection and make MP3's from the CDs I buy, so I have no problem putting stuff I want on my MP3 player. I haven't downloaded music as a mooch for many years. If I'm not willing to support an artist, why would I waste my time listening to their crap?
Better quality subscription based radio stations are probably also a notable contributor to this trend. If I cared enough about my commute noise to want something better than the 6 stations and 5 CD's in my car, I'd probably do the same as you.
An overdeveloped sense of entitlement. TV has lead us to believe that we deserve to live in opulent luxury. It's hard to do that if all of the jobs that pay above minimum wage are going to people who are more educated, harder working, more dedicated, and making not much more than our minimum wage to provide them with a very comfortable lifestyle in their homeland.
Data from ice cores is only valid if the assumptions about past environments are true. Anyway, at the current rate, there won't be any more ice in 20 years, so where will our data come from at that point, smartypants? =)
It worked well for Japan and the auto industry. They started with making inferior copies cheaply, figured out how to improve the quality without substantially increasing the cost, and now American manufacturers are second rate.
Though, there have been some impressive contributions to the crypto community from chinese researchers recently. They're already ahead of the curve in some fields.
Asking for cooperation from a US company to address a specific issue with specific content seems reasonable. YouTube doesn't have to cooperate, but I doubt anyone wants to have to block YouTube on all of the network connections coming into Japan to address this issue. That's what the end of TFA says happened in Thailand and I doubt many people want to see the same thing in Japan:
"This week Thailand's military-installed government banned YouTube entirely after it failed to block a video considered insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a revered figure in the country."
There are other solutions, like giving everyone the same exposure, that seem more sensible, but asking for a governments to change quickly is unrealistic in any country. Asking a company delivering content to Japan to be compliant with Japanese laws is not unreasonable.
You think the large scale domain squatters won't just register in the names of every homeless person they can find or make up? In your world, are these people honest, upstanding members of the community? I always found that they overlapped quite a bit with spammers and other con artists. Your plan sounds good on the surface, but would have no positive impact whatsoever if it were applied in reality.
However, you're right about subdomains, directories, etc. Why does every movie need to have its own domain? MoneyGrubber2TheSearchForMoreMoneyTheMovie.com could be movies.sony.com/MoneyGrubber2 just as easily, and it would add the parent company's brand into the link, which some marketing exec should be drooling over.
My personal favorite is having people tell me my domain isn't used because I don't have a web page with anything interesting to them. They email me at the domain to tell me that I'm not using it and they would like me to give it to them. The irony escapes them.
Who you know still has a significant impact. Given two people who look on paper like they have equivalent experience, will you choose the one you've worked well with in the past, or try the unknown guy and see how it goes? Direct experience or internal references go a long ways in getting jobs. It's not a replacement for being able to do the job, but something that sets you apart among dozens or hundreds of people with comparable skills going after the same job.
Let me guess, your coding involved maintaining someone else's Perl code? That's not pure coding for the enjoyment of coding. That's more like being forcibly raped.
"OK" doesn't even mean that it is understood in all cases. I'm not sure if it's a cultural issue or something else, but I've found a desire to please when confronted with a direct question.
For example, people respond to questions like "Will this be done by Friday?" with "Yes" when the answer I would prefer is the more accurate one - "No, we have no intention of even starting that. To ensure your continued happiness this week, we will not tell you the bad news until next week(after it's supposed to be done)."
This is in stark contrast with more confrontational Americans who will respond to "You'll be able to put 80 hours into each of these 12 projects today, right?" with "Put the crack pipe down. 80*12=960, which is 4000% of the 24 hours that are available in one day. If you wanted any progress on any of them today, you should have said something before 5:30PM."
I didn't mean to suggest that an organization should only have one person who does everything, but rather hiring one programmer for a programmer-worth of work as opposed to a team to do the exact same thing. Having good teams or cross training in related parts of the organization is critical to the long term viability of the group. A single point of failure is bad, but there are some problems that need to be solved by more experienced people. One person with 20 years of experience can be much more productive in some types of projects than 20 people with 1 year of experience. Depending on the size of the organization, groups of 3-8 of these types of people can be just as productive as a much larger group of cheaper people, while avoiding the single point of failure problem.
A lot of businesses are so cost centric these days that they are consciously deciding to dramatically increase their future costs and run extremely high risks for the perception of saving some money in the short term. For small businesses, this makes sense. Getting something out at any level of risk means the company survives that much longer and gets to plan for the next phase. Large companies take this same philosophy, but are far more likely to put themselves in a position where they have to go back and do all of the deferred work at a substantially higher cost in the future.
I agree with most of what you're saying, and I am the guy who does everything. System administration, programming, security, business logic, production support, project management, and whatever else they can come up with. We had a whole team of good people and the business people fired them because they didn't see the value of a sustainable organization. Our 2007 motto is "More With Less", which is humorous in a business group where our management has been aiming to commit no more than 30% of the resources needed for any project for years. This is how we achieve such lofty goals as "4th straight year of not backing up our production servers". This is a bank and I'm not kidding about the backups. Business people can't tell the difference between a robust system and a horrible kludge, so they will push for the kludge every single time because it's cheaper in the short term.
The one point where I disagree is having someone come in and get up to speed in days. To me, that suggests a superficial understanding of what's going on. That may be fine for a coder who needs to fill in the blanks between an already well defined set of interfaces, but that's not the majority of what happens in software projects. There is a big gap between business people giving vague ideas of what they want and a team of developers trying to implement it. There is no way you're going to get documentation that will help you understand how serious management is about deadlines, or whether they value glitz over functionality, or any number of quasi-technical problems. There are always parts of any project that cannot be put into writing because they would require people to be far more introspective than they will be. For example, putting together a functional, bare bones web interface would make some people happy, whereas others would be happy with screen shots made in photoshop without a line of code to back it up.
There is one thing that American companies can do that doesn't seem as common in other cultures - launch projects going in 1000 different directions at once with the hope that 9 of the projects will make enough money to pay for themselves and 1 will make enough to pay for the other 990 that were dismal failures. Do other cultures value the willingness to fail miserably time and time again in hopes that one plan will be fabulously successful? Large companies can get away with this approach because they don't risk going out of business with failure after failure.
Google is a good example of a company that is doing very well with search and ads, but it seems like everything else coming out of them is free/ad revenue supported. It may very well be a sustainable model, but putting a lot of smart, creative people together doesn't magically make profit.
Sure, that's a business model that might work if you want to have long term, loyal customers and employees who work for you until they retire, keeping the cost of training new people down. However, Henry would not make it past middle management in any decent sized company these days without being about to demonstrate how his plans will save money this quarter, while increasing productivity and cutting costs next quarter. The current theme is infinite production at zero cost, and if you don't have a story that leads to that goal, you're going nowhere. Us technical people have it the worst, blathering some nonsense (from an MBA's perspective) of that being impossible.
Capitalism demands that the employer try to screw the employee by giving them as little as possible. What an employee is worth is set as an agreement between the employer and employee. If an employer isn't willing to pay what an employee wants, one side has to give in. Finding an employee somewhere with dirt floors who will take less is pretty easy in a global economy.
Why do they have to reconcile the difference? It's a race to the bottom and worst case scenario for the CEO's is retiring early. What's the worst that can happen for them? More people are willing to work locally for peanuts?
That depends on which set of clients have the most money. If the net income from the protection racket is higher, that's the top. If the exploits are more profitable, those are the top. The beauty of this business plan is that there's always room to up the ante if the most profitable client group changes.
This has always been the lure of outsourcing. Costs are increased, which increases the size of the manager's empire, while being able to point to someone and show how much money is being saved.
For example, instead of paying one programmer $80k, they have:
2 programmers offshore - $20k each
system architect - $130k
technical writer - $60k
project manager - $70k
team manager - $100k
Instead of spending $80k/year, they are spending $400k/year. However, they claim a savings of $120k using management-math by multiplying the number of programmers they have times the salary of one programmer if hired locally, minus the actual cost of the offshore programmers. You can claim a 75% cost savings on the programmers, even though you're spending 500% of what you need to. It's a great way to fluff out budgets and org charts.
They can make even more money offerring several consecutive levels of patches and exploits. There will always be someone willing to pay for the level of protection or exploit beyond what's commonly available for the low monthly maintenance fee.
I think the cost of materials is the catch. While you may be able to download the digrams of parts for a Ferrari, there is value in all of the raw materials needed and the assembly of all of those components. While you can take a diagram and machine a part from the diagram using the correct materials, you have to start with a block of the material larger than the end component. As you pointed out, the prototypes can be very expensive compared to the components that would be manufactured on a large scale.
I have faith that the legal implications will be worked out as soon as someone produces the first Faux-rari. Making it for personal use would likely be treated differently from someone trying to sell it. Of course, the RIAA would insist that the existence of the prototype producing machine is conclusive proof that you intended to use it to make copies of every piece of IP they have or will ever own.
I'm not sure I understand your point. If making them available only helps the students who want to learn, what's the problem? Aren't they the ones who deserve to have all of the advantages? Or are you trying to trick the lazy people into learning too? Is the problem that if 75% of the people stop showing up and end up failing or barely passing that it is a negative point on the teacher evaluation?
What I've learned in the corporate world is that 90%(maybe a cynical estimate, but it's well over 50%) of people are completely useless. There is nothing you can do to make those people learn or be less lazy. If you tell them what the minimum level of performance is to keep their job, they'll do 25% less to see if you'll actually fire them. And this trend will continue year after year with their productivity asymptotically approaching 0. Trying to teach these people is just as productive as trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
There's nothing you can do to help the people who don't want help, so shouldn't your audience be the people who are interested in listening to you?
Any quirk's need to be "cured" depends on its impact on the individual. If you have a bunch of symptoms that don't impact you severely enough to be willing to try the drugs, you don't need it. Other people could have more or less severe symptoms, but have a much more negative impact on their lives.
If your absentmindedness can be compensated for by checking several times if you locked the door, turned the water off, etc, it's not a big deal. If you are driving, go to change the radio station and get so caught up with the radio that you forget you're driving, that is likely to be a more severe problem.
Wrong. Once you have relegated a topic to a powerpoint presentation, it is a money sink. It is impossible for any productive or profitable information to be conveyed via powerpoint. Possible topics for powerpoints:
Why did our project fail?
Where did all of our money go anyway?
How much are we spending on these powerpoint presentations?
Who cares about this meeting anyway?
What did I do wrong to be subjected to a 60 page powerpoint?
Future projects that are going to fail because the only forethought that went into them was a bullet point on a powerpoint slide.
Powerpoint exists to give busywork to non-contributors. It keeps them out of the way of people doing real work. If you don't believe me, try firing all of the people whose primary job is to work on powerpoint presentations and see if the productivity of the organization sky rockets.