Yes, if you're living on the edge, then small calamities become disasters. One hopes those are the circumstances where your community (church, neighborhood, or government) pulls together and helps you through.
Typical libertarian safety net of praying for a miracle. Thats not so much a net but more of falling from a tree and hoping a branch catches you on the way down.
And yet given the choice to be a French citizen or a Chinese citizen, I as would a vast majority of people if I can speak for all people in this one area, would still rather be a French citizen. Hell most people would rather be a Venezuelan citizen than a Chinese citizen. Happiness and contentment studies show Venezuela being one of the happiest places in South America despite not being a terribly rich country.
Why do you think that is? The safety net in France is a sure thing. If I get sick I know I can be taken care of. I have more personal freedoms and liberties. I have peace of mind in knowing that which is something that in capitalistic nations you need to spend or save an exorbitant amount of money to guarantee. Hell personal freedoms and liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, a non-corrupt justice system (for the most part...) are things that simply can't be bought on any market that I am aware of. Nobody can afford that in China unless you are politically connected.
In a socialist country you start out 10,000x as wealthy as you would in China by default because of the very popular government programs in place. So China's middle class has unprecedented growth. Cool whatever, I can show you a bunch of penny stocks that have had over 100% growth but they are still risky as hell. I could get rich on them but more than likely I will lose most of my money on them. Some people would rather buy a blue chip stock that tend to be much safer.
Stop spamming the boards with your irrelevant arguments. Beta is built on HTML5 and Javascript. It was designed in typical modern fashion with a focus on usability and responsiveness to various user agents. In no world does this have anything to do with Microsoft Windows 8 and Live Tiles. Beta is pretty fucking cool if you ask me.
There have been a number of attempts at making coding easy enough that non engineering types will be able to conceive their requirements in software then communicate these through a tool, usually in a visual manner and turns this into functional software. This has come in many different forms over the years, Powerbuilder, FoxPro, Scratch, BPEL, etc...
The fundamental flaw is one of the software development industry, especially when it comes to line of business applications. Analysts writing requirements have been and always have been an inefficient and flawed model as most requirements documents are woefully incomplete and tend to not capture the true breadth of necessary functionality that ends up existing in resultant software. Analysts are business oriented people and they will think about the features and functionality that are most valuable and tend to miss or not waste time on what are deemed as low value or low risk items. Savvy technical folks have needed to pick up the slack and fill in the gaps with non-functional requirements (Architecture) or even understand the business better than the analysts themselves for quality software for the business to even be realized.
I have seen this song and dance enough. True story, IBM sales reps take some executives to a hockey game, show them a good time, tell them about an awesome product that will empower their (cheap) analysts to visualize their software needs so that you don't need as many (expensive) arrogant software engineers always telling you no and being a huge bummer by bringing up pesky "facts" like priorities and time. So management buys Process Server, snake oil doesn't do it justice, without consulting anybody remotely technical. Time passes, and analysts struggle to be effective with it because it forces them to consider details and fringe cases. Software engineers end up showing them how to use it, at which point it just becomes easier for the software engineer to just do the work instead of holding hands and babying the analysts all day. Now your company is straddled with a sub par product that performs terribly, that developers hate using, that analysts couldn't figure out and that saved the company no money.
Idiot masses? How about you go be condescending elsewhere buddy. Not everybody who likes the new beta is an idiot. The usability is a vast improvement and if you can't see that then you are too blinded by your fear of change.
I am amazed at the huge negative response this beta is getting. It is very nice and elegant and solves many of the usability problems that have plagued this site for a long time.
Regardless of how you feel about the beta, we all agree that the Slashdot mobile site was fucking terrible. This site redesign solves that problem by embracing responsive design. It looks decent on my wide screen monitor as it does on my tablet and also my phone.
Commenting is much easier too.
Slashdot is trying to reinvent themselves because they ARE going the way of the dinosaur and all of you grey-beard engineers resistant to any and all change are dragging them down. Fuck Beta? You are bitching about Ajax and Javascript being required? Get the fuck out of the 90's and install a modern complete browser you sad paranoid old men! If you don't want ads or to be tracked then just install adblock and Ghostery like the rest of us. You are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I have been following this site for over a decade, and I approve this beta. Stop pretending like you have a fake universal consensus and stop flooding every other story with your pathetic Fuck Beta campaign
Partially what I meant in my post above is not just natural talent but also humanities limits on ambition, persistence and drive to succeed. Studies are coming out that are finding many genetic indicators that make a person more likely to possess personality traits like ambition and persistence. Maybe at best 1/3 of people will have the attitude necessary to overcome their own internal and external barriers to succeed in life. Another third perhaps are the type of people that wish to do the bare minimum to get by and are happy or resigned to a lesser life. The final third are people that have no ambition or desire to take care of themselves and would rather be a burden on society, take advantage of others or just be an outright criminal.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal?
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If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence. Most people don't possess these skills and are incapable of obtaining them with any amount of effort or drive. As sad as it sounds I very much believe we are reaching the upper limits on the capabilities of humanity as a whole.
We see it plain as day in the software industry. Probably 8 out of 10 software developers or business analysts are completely incompetent and even with years of education and multiple certifications seem to be unable to not only be productive, but instead be a net drain on productivity and quality of software as a whole. Many of these people are doing this job because the demand for even mediocre software talent is so high and the lack of mindless blue collar work forces people into IT fields that they have no natural talent or ability for. Fifty years ago many of these people would be pushing brooms in a steel mill.
In which you provide no objective evidence or studies to back up your anecdotal experiences. You shouldn't use such strong language.
An eye-opening experience for me was a co-worker I had a while back. She was kind, hard-working, and fair. She wasn't afraid to let me know when I was wrong about something and she didn't fly off the handle when I told her she was wrong about something. Then again, I don't recall many times other than when she was new that I had to let her know her perception of how something worked wasn't accurate.
Unfortunately, she get pulled down by the drama and decided to find another job.
It must be difficult working as a woman. Every other woman sees you as a target, somebody to claw down. The heartbreaking thing is watching this happen to somebody, watching things that are wrong and things that aren't even wrong or are sheer lunacy get thrown around just to smear somebody. Sometimes when it gets really bad I'll see things like official documentation get surreptitiously screwed with. One thing one has to be careful about in a workplace that's dominated by womyn-born-womyn is when one woman asks you to make one change to some software and then another woman asks you to make a very similar but different change.
Hoo boy, I've learned attempting to reconcile the two individuals requesting different things from me is a complete mistake when they're both womyn-born-womyn. I have a feeling that's what got the co-worker I liked working with in over her head. The most frustrating thing is that attempting to bring this to the attention of both individuals invariably is seen as picking sides. Sure, guys do this from time to time (just like having a vagina does not make one above sexism, having a penis does not make one above pettiness), but with a womyn-born-womyn you can count on it. It's not honest, but I've found the best way is to work through each nuance of the request, implement the parts of each that seem most correct, and then just tell both requesters it's all set. I don't know if they ever go back to check if I did what they asked, but the important point to a lot of womyn-born-womyn is that you were asked to do something so you did it without involving them in the details.
What you described is common workplace pettiness typically demonstrated by business stakeholders and analysts in a dysfunctional software development company. Lower level business analysts and project managers might have a much higher propensity to being female in many industries, Eg. Healthcare, where many of the domain experts and business experts used to be nurses or technicians that already have a higher propensity for being women. Your presumptions about the natural state of women are based on a painfully small subset of professional women as a demographic. Keep in mind as a software developer I have seen the same behavior as you describe but based on a more worldly view I am not jumping to such big conclusions as you describe because I have also certainly seen pettiness in the same subset comprised of men. Perhaps it is something about non-technical people being under the gun and stressed about something they don't truly understand that causes people to lash out and bring out the claws.
It's not important to be objectively correct to womyn-born-womyn. They have other priorities, values, and ways of knowing. There's a lot of what that article calls "Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice" going on. Unfortunately that "way of knowing" simply doesn't lend to success when you're writing a computer program. For many womyn-born-womyn, it's just simply unimportant to move to another "way of knowing," and why should they? What benefit would using "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing" or "Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices" that incorporate both personal subjective knowle
You are missing some important details that add even further to the bigger idea of what is actually going on at these organizations.
Non-Profits can often have a board and investors that benefit greatly from profits as well, but to a government this distinction is awarded based on either donations to charity or proof that money spent is going to charitable good. Healthcare systems exploit this by totaling up all of the unpaid medical care that they have given out to poor and uninsured people who happen to show up at the emergency room to receive free care. These amounts are put on the books as "charitable good" that they give to the community when the fact of the matter is they are obligated by law and ethics to not turn away people in need of immediate medical care.
So that money they would have written off as a business loss anyway on the taxes they otherwise would still have to pay on the already handsome profits they turn year after. They meet this percentage of total revenue requirement for charitable good and they retain their privileged tax free status operating in pretty much exactly the same way as a for profit corporation.
The funny thing is that with ACA greatly increasing the amount of insured people on the market it will be harder and harder for them to use these dwindling operating losses as charitable good meaning they might actually be at risk of losing their Non-Profit status unless they are able to donate substantial sums of money to charitable organizations. Donation to charity can already be written off from their taxes anyway so they actually stand to lose money and make considerably less profits by serving more insured people and giving less free healthcare from their Emergency Rooms. A funny thing is American Healthcare.
I must say that while I don't consider myself sympathetic to Libertarian ideals, I find your thoughts, experiments and models very intriguing. Thank you for sharing this. As someone who is trapped in the corporate rigamarole for family and financial reasons I found your comparison of communistic centrally planned economies to corporate processes and organization and the shared dysfunctions to be enlightening.
I must also say that I agree with your assessments of the failings of our modern capitalist system and how governmental policies foster monopolies. A market based system with tougher anti-trust regulations could be a potential solution for this and one I would get behind.
On the whole however, it is not logic that makes me skeptical of this as a long term solution but my lack of faith in human nature that such a system could remain uncorrupted. Human nature is such that we present gradual entropy into such a system until it decays into corruption and dysfunction. While human beings as a class will present ignorance, greed, corruption and decay, it is certainly a safer and easier task to find a strong, intelligent, benevolent leader that can achieve all of the goals of the complex system.
Competent totalitarianism I feel is the best that human beings can hope to achieve in a world before post-scarcity. There are a number of such examples throughout history where centrally planned leadership when competent can be HIGHLY effective. Robert E. Lee and his outnumbered, outgunned army nearly winning a statistically unwinnable war. Alexander the Great, a near child, leading less than 50k phalanxes and conquering most of the known world. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt engineering and building a monumental tomb that stands to this day. The United States sending a group of men to the Moon and back.
If such an exceptional authoritarian figure had supreme power and wealth then they would be uncorruptable as there is nothing any of their subjects would have to offer them. They would be an exceptional statesmen or even an exceptional economist out of the passion of the craft. This I believe is the only hope for humanity since there is a statistical percentage if such a person were chosen at random from a pool of competent peoples to fill that role then there is a statistical liklihood that this person might be a huge success and advance humanity. Compare this to the statistical liklihood that a well regulated free market system will eventually erode into corruption, monopolistic control and entropy, 100% of the time according to human history. Only a neo-monarchy can save us.
Thanks Larry for providing a service I've been using for a long time.
However, while it's not written in TFS, there may be another reason while myOpenID was not that popular: reliability?
It is rather annoying when one cannot login to a bunch of sites because myOpenID is unreachable...
A thousand times THIS.
My first and only experiences with MyOpenID was for authenticating to StackExchange, but it was quite possibly one of the buggiest and most unreliable services I ever had the displeasure to use. It was nearly a laugh but really a cry. I switched and never looked back. I certainly am not surprised nor am I crying a river over their demise.
You have a very optimistic view on the generous spirit and good nature of humanity. Few elderly would be taken of if there was no social security, most would die on the streets. Social problems will exacerbate and society will suffer.
At the same time you have an incredibly simplistic and pessimistic view on how social security is funded. Certainly more is paid out than what is put in, but the federal government will always have the ability to pay. They may have to print trillions of dollars out of thin air, or quantitatively ease liabilities off the balance sheet, but rest assured it will meet its obligations. Sure inflation will skyrocket, but then that is ultimately the universal tax on people and institutions not just on us but across the world. When the government doesn't have the tax income to pay its obligations then it has to create money which reduces the value of all money. So elderly will not die on the streets and we are a little poorer for it but it really is a necessary evil.
Fifty years of brain washing has people like you believing that you have no power, no voice, and no choices.
Quite the opposite mate.
History has only proved how little power the common really have. The real bane of the last 50 years was that in modern Neo-Conservativism they have managed to convince us that we have power, autonomy and most of all independence. What freedoms we do have are gifted to us.
The American revolution was a war of the rich versus the aristocrats. Most all wars in fact occur because of wealthy or aristocratic dueling factions. Two things are different today than were true back then, for one thing the rich and aristocratic are one in the same as the aristocrats and rich have all become the wealthy merchant class. The second thing is that the wealthy merchants don't feud and duel nearly as much as they used to which has the positive effect of 50 years of world peace not seen in any other time in humanity. The negative effect is that they have all banded together to consolidate their power against their only true enemy, the informed common man in an age of plentiful and cheap information, the only threat to their continued power.
The bottom line is that throughout all of human history there has always been the master and the slave. It is the way of things.
The dirty little secret though is that nobody can put a lien against your property for not paying your medical bills. Sure they can hire debt collectors to harass you, and possibly report you to the credit bureau, but they can't legally take your assets.
Most people start getting into trouble when they try to pay their medical bills at the expense of their mortgage or car payments. Then when you are forced to file bankruptcy the medical debts are realized. If you can service your other debts without any problems then you will never have any real problems with medical bills.
Tell me how governments are preventing the hire of apprentices? Companies are free to hire anybody they want to as long as they abide by labor laws so I am not sure what your complaint here is.
Are you upset that the government enforces a minimum wage and that these apprentices would need to be paid a minimum wage? Surely if these apprentices brought any value to your organization at all then they would be equal in value to the cost of the guy making your burger at McDonalds or greeting you at Wal Mart. Any coder, no matter how inexperienced is a bargain at minimum wage.
Thanks for pointing that out, because roman_mir is Foe number 1 on my list. Doesn't surprise me though, for hundreds of years of Conservatism, it has always produced the exact opposite effect of what it claims to solve.
Possibly jumping into a bad situation on the other hand is everything. One of the worst mistakes of my life was leaving a job I was happy with for what I felt was a company that would have better career growth potential.
It was an epic mistake and the worst job I have ever had, bar none. It was the only time in my life where I seriously considered quitting without having another job lined up. I worked for a miserable psychopath. Sadistic selfish micro-managing boss doesn't even begin to describe him. I found myself waking up in the mornings to go to work and running straight for the bathroom to vomit from intense panic attacks just because I was so nervous about going into work that day.
Fortunately I found something else after only 3 months but I honestly don't regret the experience because I learned an extremely valuable lesson in what aspects make a good job, and what drawbacks are inconsequential or can simply be dealt with. There is no such thing as a perfect job or situation, and I realized how much I appreciate and love my current job despite its obvious drawbacks. I never would have appreciated this place without that experience. Unless you are 110% sure it is a good move, and you are sure that you no longer want to stay at your current job, then don't do it.
It actually gets worse than even that. If an API is copyrightable, then all of the law related to derived works also applies. That means that whoever copyrighted the first interface for an ordered collection can count any subsequent API that appears to be inspired by it as a derived work.
You are making a pretty big leap there because the law on derived works leaves it open for interpretation that any significant improvement on the original patent can be considered a seperate patent.
... he would have gotten a big promotion for increasing shareholder value!
Re:Extreme positions never make sense
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In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 5, Insightful
extreme free market capitalism (with as close to zero government regulation as possible) very quickly leads to a market that is controlled by monopolies and/or cartels The "winners" set up barriers-to-entry that prevent new competition from entering the market, even if the competitors are delivering a better product/service at a better price. A market thus controlled is no longer a free market, and all the benefits of free market capatilism go up in a puff of smoke. You can counter this by introducing some government regulation to restore competition...but too much government regulation and you are right back where you started: a controlled market that doesn't function at all.
When it comes to effective regulation it is a matter of quality over quantity. The United States has shit tons of meaningless, toothless regulations and others that actually serve to promote cartels and create barriers to entry. We still end up with the same problem and a nation that is about as close to Fascism as it ever was in our history.
So even without regulation we end up with the same problem. Money is power, power molds our government institutions and corrupts our democracies into a putrid facade of what it was intended to be.
Implying that TOS was inherently Marxist is completely wrong, especially considering how it was a network television show airing in the 60's during the height of the red scare. If anybody had any inclination that it glorified communism or marxism in any way it would have never gotten past the pilot.
TOS had a few throwaway references to how the nations of Earth had united and threw away their differences, formed a better society and the Federation. It wasn't until the movies came out in the 80's where references existed to their not existing money or currency, and that their society was based around work for personal growth and glory in light of eradication of all poverty. TNG, Deep Space Nince, et. al expanded upon this notion in the subsequent series.
You exist a government entity and have one purpose and one sole purpose alone and that is to serve the residents of your municipality. You are clearly not in the business of making money through profit seeking endeavors.
With that being said, you worked hard on this and it seems to be a huge success, so the municipality should benefit greatly from such an endeavor. You may have something that works great for you but honestly Sharepoint is really only good for internal apps and you certainly do not have a scalable solution that could be easily marketed to other counties. The best thing you can do is to find a private company to partner with that can take the work that you did and use that as the foundation for building a product, as well as marketing and selling that product.
By letting private interests handle the risks involved, you and your county can serve an advisory role and still work out a mutually beneficial arrangement where your county is well compensated, either through a percentage of gross revenue or a large lump sum.
If you want to be a rich salesman your primary motivation should be closing the sale, not worrying about the product.
How do you sell a product that you know nothing about? Closing a sale takes the concious effort on the part of the buyer, meaning that one has to be convincing to the buyer as well as informative (which of course is impossible if you know little about the product). All I was saying is that most people are not convincing liars so worrying about the product and believing in the product helps everybody come to a mutually beneficial deal much easier.
No one does it because they think they're making the world a better place.
Wrong again. Motiviation to do good and profit are not mutually exclusive. Not all people are sociopathic. Even a sociopath can do unintentional good even if their motivations are purely profit driven. This is sort of what capitalism is about. Acceptance that greed will always be a part of the human condition, so if SOME of the time society is better when both parties satiate their desires in a mutually beneficial economic arrangement then we are further ahead as a society.
In reality though it is far more complicated and messy than that as the Libertarian Utopia doesn't account well and sometimes runs counter to other very human motivations. Surely all salesmen are in it for the money, this is a given, but this doesn't mean their behaviors will run counter to their sense of morality, ethics, and guilt.
The OP's employer is doing far more than just disrespecting their employees. One can make the case they are foolishly and carelessly wasting their employee's hours on a trivial task that many marketing firms charge peanuts for. Their employees work time is a captured asset assuming they are exempt salary so they would be foolish to waste their talents and skills on efforts that are beneath their abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if you're living on the edge, then small calamities become disasters. One hopes those are the circumstances where your community (church, neighborhood, or government) pulls together and helps you through.
Typical libertarian safety net of praying for a miracle. Thats not so much a net but more of falling from a tree and hoping a branch catches you on the way down.
And yet given the choice to be a French citizen or a Chinese citizen, I as would a vast majority of people if I can speak for all people in this one area, would still rather be a French citizen. Hell most people would rather be a Venezuelan citizen than a Chinese citizen. Happiness and contentment studies show Venezuela being one of the happiest places in South America despite not being a terribly rich country.
Why do you think that is? The safety net in France is a sure thing. If I get sick I know I can be taken care of. I have more personal freedoms and liberties. I have peace of mind in knowing that which is something that in capitalistic nations you need to spend or save an exorbitant amount of money to guarantee. Hell personal freedoms and liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, a non-corrupt justice system (for the most part...) are things that simply can't be bought on any market that I am aware of. Nobody can afford that in China unless you are politically connected.
In a socialist country you start out 10,000x as wealthy as you would in China by default because of the very popular government programs in place. So China's middle class has unprecedented growth. Cool whatever, I can show you a bunch of penny stocks that have had over 100% growth but they are still risky as hell. I could get rich on them but more than likely I will lose most of my money on them. Some people would rather buy a blue chip stock that tend to be much safer.
Stop spamming the boards with your irrelevant arguments. Beta is built on HTML5 and Javascript. It was designed in typical modern fashion with a focus on usability and responsiveness to various user agents. In no world does this have anything to do with Microsoft Windows 8 and Live Tiles. Beta is pretty fucking cool if you ask me.
There have been a number of attempts at making coding easy enough that non engineering types will be able to conceive their requirements in software then communicate these through a tool, usually in a visual manner and turns this into functional software. This has come in many different forms over the years, Powerbuilder, FoxPro, Scratch, BPEL, etc...
The fundamental flaw is one of the software development industry, especially when it comes to line of business applications. Analysts writing requirements have been and always have been an inefficient and flawed model as most requirements documents are woefully incomplete and tend to not capture the true breadth of necessary functionality that ends up existing in resultant software. Analysts are business oriented people and they will think about the features and functionality that are most valuable and tend to miss or not waste time on what are deemed as low value or low risk items. Savvy technical folks have needed to pick up the slack and fill in the gaps with non-functional requirements (Architecture) or even understand the business better than the analysts themselves for quality software for the business to even be realized.
I have seen this song and dance enough. True story, IBM sales reps take some executives to a hockey game, show them a good time, tell them about an awesome product that will empower their (cheap) analysts to visualize their software needs so that you don't need as many (expensive) arrogant software engineers always telling you no and being a huge bummer by bringing up pesky "facts" like priorities and time. So management buys Process Server, snake oil doesn't do it justice, without consulting anybody remotely technical. Time passes, and analysts struggle to be effective with it because it forces them to consider details and fringe cases. Software engineers end up showing them how to use it, at which point it just becomes easier for the software engineer to just do the work instead of holding hands and babying the analysts all day. Now your company is straddled with a sub par product that performs terribly, that developers hate using, that analysts couldn't figure out and that saved the company no money.
Idiot masses? How about you go be condescending elsewhere buddy. Not everybody who likes the new beta is an idiot. The usability is a vast improvement and if you can't see that then you are too blinded by your fear of change.
I am amazed at the huge negative response this beta is getting. It is very nice and elegant and solves many of the usability problems that have plagued this site for a long time.
Regardless of how you feel about the beta, we all agree that the Slashdot mobile site was fucking terrible. This site redesign solves that problem by embracing responsive design. It looks decent on my wide screen monitor as it does on my tablet and also my phone.
Commenting is much easier too.
Slashdot is trying to reinvent themselves because they ARE going the way of the dinosaur and all of you grey-beard engineers resistant to any and all change are dragging them down. Fuck Beta? You are bitching about Ajax and Javascript being required? Get the fuck out of the 90's and install a modern complete browser you sad paranoid old men! If you don't want ads or to be tracked then just install adblock and Ghostery like the rest of us. You are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I have been following this site for over a decade, and I approve this beta. Stop pretending like you have a fake universal consensus and stop flooding every other story with your pathetic Fuck Beta campaign
Partially what I meant in my post above is not just natural talent but also humanities limits on ambition, persistence and drive to succeed. Studies are coming out that are finding many genetic indicators that make a person more likely to possess personality traits like ambition and persistence. Maybe at best 1/3 of people will have the attitude necessary to overcome their own internal and external barriers to succeed in life. Another third perhaps are the type of people that wish to do the bare minimum to get by and are happy or resigned to a lesser life. The final third are people that have no ambition or desire to take care of themselves and would rather be a burden on society, take advantage of others or just be an outright criminal.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence. Most people don't possess these skills and are incapable of obtaining them with any amount of effort or drive. As sad as it sounds I very much believe we are reaching the upper limits on the capabilities of humanity as a whole.
We see it plain as day in the software industry. Probably 8 out of 10 software developers or business analysts are completely incompetent and even with years of education and multiple certifications seem to be unable to not only be productive, but instead be a net drain on productivity and quality of software as a whole. Many of these people are doing this job because the demand for even mediocre software talent is so high and the lack of mindless blue collar work forces people into IT fields that they have no natural talent or ability for. Fifty years ago many of these people would be pushing brooms in a steel mill.
Too bad it's not untrue.
In which you provide no objective evidence or studies to back up your anecdotal experiences. You shouldn't use such strong language.
An eye-opening experience for me was a co-worker I had a while back. She was kind, hard-working, and fair. She wasn't afraid to let me know when I was wrong about something and she didn't fly off the handle when I told her she was wrong about something. Then again, I don't recall many times other than when she was new that I had to let her know her perception of how something worked wasn't accurate.
Unfortunately, she get pulled down by the drama and decided to find another job.
It must be difficult working as a woman. Every other woman sees you as a target, somebody to claw down. The heartbreaking thing is watching this happen to somebody, watching things that are wrong and things that aren't even wrong or are sheer lunacy get thrown around just to smear somebody. Sometimes when it gets really bad I'll see things like official documentation get surreptitiously screwed with. One thing one has to be careful about in a workplace that's dominated by womyn-born-womyn is when one woman asks you to make one change to some software and then another woman asks you to make a very similar but different change.
Hoo boy, I've learned attempting to reconcile the two individuals requesting different things from me is a complete mistake when they're both womyn-born-womyn. I have a feeling that's what got the co-worker I liked working with in over her head. The most frustrating thing is that attempting to bring this to the attention of both individuals invariably is seen as picking sides. Sure, guys do this from time to time (just like having a vagina does not make one above sexism, having a penis does not make one above pettiness), but with a womyn-born-womyn you can count on it. It's not honest, but I've found the best way is to work through each nuance of the request, implement the parts of each that seem most correct, and then just tell both requesters it's all set. I don't know if they ever go back to check if I did what they asked, but the important point to a lot of womyn-born-womyn is that you were asked to do something so you did it without involving them in the details.
What you described is common workplace pettiness typically demonstrated by business stakeholders and analysts in a dysfunctional software development company. Lower level business analysts and project managers might have a much higher propensity to being female in many industries, Eg. Healthcare, where many of the domain experts and business experts used to be nurses or technicians that already have a higher propensity for being women. Your presumptions about the natural state of women are based on a painfully small subset of professional women as a demographic. Keep in mind as a software developer I have seen the same behavior as you describe but based on a more worldly view I am not jumping to such big conclusions as you describe because I have also certainly seen pettiness in the same subset comprised of men. Perhaps it is something about non-technical people being under the gun and stressed about something they don't truly understand that causes people to lash out and bring out the claws.
It's not important to be objectively correct to womyn-born-womyn. They have other priorities, values, and ways of knowing. There's a lot of what that article calls "Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice" going on. Unfortunately that "way of knowing" simply doesn't lend to success when you're writing a computer program. For many womyn-born-womyn, it's just simply unimportant to move to another "way of knowing," and why should they? What benefit would using "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing" or "Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices" that incorporate both personal subjective knowle
You are missing some important details that add even further to the bigger idea of what is actually going on at these organizations.
Non-Profits can often have a board and investors that benefit greatly from profits as well, but to a government this distinction is awarded based on either donations to charity or proof that money spent is going to charitable good. Healthcare systems exploit this by totaling up all of the unpaid medical care that they have given out to poor and uninsured people who happen to show up at the emergency room to receive free care. These amounts are put on the books as "charitable good" that they give to the community when the fact of the matter is they are obligated by law and ethics to not turn away people in need of immediate medical care.
So that money they would have written off as a business loss anyway on the taxes they otherwise would still have to pay on the already handsome profits they turn year after. They meet this percentage of total revenue requirement for charitable good and they retain their privileged tax free status operating in pretty much exactly the same way as a for profit corporation.
The funny thing is that with ACA greatly increasing the amount of insured people on the market it will be harder and harder for them to use these dwindling operating losses as charitable good meaning they might actually be at risk of losing their Non-Profit status unless they are able to donate substantial sums of money to charitable organizations. Donation to charity can already be written off from their taxes anyway so they actually stand to lose money and make considerably less profits by serving more insured people and giving less free healthcare from their Emergency Rooms. A funny thing is American Healthcare.
I must say that while I don't consider myself sympathetic to Libertarian ideals, I find your thoughts, experiments and models very intriguing. Thank you for sharing this. As someone who is trapped in the corporate rigamarole for family and financial reasons I found your comparison of communistic centrally planned economies to corporate processes and organization and the shared dysfunctions to be enlightening.
I must also say that I agree with your assessments of the failings of our modern capitalist system and how governmental policies foster monopolies. A market based system with tougher anti-trust regulations could be a potential solution for this and one I would get behind.
On the whole however, it is not logic that makes me skeptical of this as a long term solution but my lack of faith in human nature that such a system could remain uncorrupted. Human nature is such that we present gradual entropy into such a system until it decays into corruption and dysfunction. While human beings as a class will present ignorance, greed, corruption and decay, it is certainly a safer and easier task to find a strong, intelligent, benevolent leader that can achieve all of the goals of the complex system.
Competent totalitarianism I feel is the best that human beings can hope to achieve in a world before post-scarcity. There are a number of such examples throughout history where centrally planned leadership when competent can be HIGHLY effective. Robert E. Lee and his outnumbered, outgunned army nearly winning a statistically unwinnable war. Alexander the Great, a near child, leading less than 50k phalanxes and conquering most of the known world. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt engineering and building a monumental tomb that stands to this day. The United States sending a group of men to the Moon and back.
If such an exceptional authoritarian figure had supreme power and wealth then they would be uncorruptable as there is nothing any of their subjects would have to offer them. They would be an exceptional statesmen or even an exceptional economist out of the passion of the craft. This I believe is the only hope for humanity since there is a statistical percentage if such a person were chosen at random from a pool of competent peoples to fill that role then there is a statistical liklihood that this person might be a huge success and advance humanity. Compare this to the statistical liklihood that a well regulated free market system will eventually erode into corruption, monopolistic control and entropy, 100% of the time according to human history. Only a neo-monarchy can save us.
Thanks Larry for providing a service I've been using for a long time. However, while it's not written in TFS, there may be another reason while myOpenID was not that popular: reliability? It is rather annoying when one cannot login to a bunch of sites because myOpenID is unreachable...
A thousand times THIS.
My first and only experiences with MyOpenID was for authenticating to StackExchange, but it was quite possibly one of the buggiest and most unreliable services I ever had the displeasure to use. It was nearly a laugh but really a cry. I switched and never looked back. I certainly am not surprised nor am I crying a river over their demise.
You have a very optimistic view on the generous spirit and good nature of humanity. Few elderly would be taken of if there was no social security, most would die on the streets. Social problems will exacerbate and society will suffer.
At the same time you have an incredibly simplistic and pessimistic view on how social security is funded. Certainly more is paid out than what is put in, but the federal government will always have the ability to pay. They may have to print trillions of dollars out of thin air, or quantitatively ease liabilities off the balance sheet, but rest assured it will meet its obligations. Sure inflation will skyrocket, but then that is ultimately the universal tax on people and institutions not just on us but across the world. When the government doesn't have the tax income to pay its obligations then it has to create money which reduces the value of all money. So elderly will not die on the streets and we are a little poorer for it but it really is a necessary evil.
Quite the opposite mate.
History has only proved how little power the common really have. The real bane of the last 50 years was that in modern Neo-Conservativism they have managed to convince us that we have power, autonomy and most of all independence. What freedoms we do have are gifted to us.
The American revolution was a war of the rich versus the aristocrats. Most all wars in fact occur because of wealthy or aristocratic dueling factions. Two things are different today than were true back then, for one thing the rich and aristocratic are one in the same as the aristocrats and rich have all become the wealthy merchant class. The second thing is that the wealthy merchants don't feud and duel nearly as much as they used to which has the positive effect of 50 years of world peace not seen in any other time in humanity. The negative effect is that they have all banded together to consolidate their power against their only true enemy, the informed common man in an age of plentiful and cheap information, the only threat to their continued power.
The bottom line is that throughout all of human history there has always been the master and the slave. It is the way of things.
The dirty little secret though is that nobody can put a lien against your property for not paying your medical bills. Sure they can hire debt collectors to harass you, and possibly report you to the credit bureau, but they can't legally take your assets.
Most people start getting into trouble when they try to pay their medical bills at the expense of their mortgage or car payments. Then when you are forced to file bankruptcy the medical debts are realized. If you can service your other debts without any problems then you will never have any real problems with medical bills.
Tell me how governments are preventing the hire of apprentices? Companies are free to hire anybody they want to as long as they abide by labor laws so I am not sure what your complaint here is. Are you upset that the government enforces a minimum wage and that these apprentices would need to be paid a minimum wage? Surely if these apprentices brought any value to your organization at all then they would be equal in value to the cost of the guy making your burger at McDonalds or greeting you at Wal Mart. Any coder, no matter how inexperienced is a bargain at minimum wage.
Thanks for pointing that out, because roman_mir is Foe number 1 on my list. Doesn't surprise me though, for hundreds of years of Conservatism, it has always produced the exact opposite effect of what it claims to solve.
Possibly jumping into a bad situation on the other hand is everything. One of the worst mistakes of my life was leaving a job I was happy with for what I felt was a company that would have better career growth potential.
It was an epic mistake and the worst job I have ever had, bar none. It was the only time in my life where I seriously considered quitting without having another job lined up. I worked for a miserable psychopath. Sadistic selfish micro-managing boss doesn't even begin to describe him. I found myself waking up in the mornings to go to work and running straight for the bathroom to vomit from intense panic attacks just because I was so nervous about going into work that day.
Fortunately I found something else after only 3 months but I honestly don't regret the experience because I learned an extremely valuable lesson in what aspects make a good job, and what drawbacks are inconsequential or can simply be dealt with. There is no such thing as a perfect job or situation, and I realized how much I appreciate and love my current job despite its obvious drawbacks. I never would have appreciated this place without that experience. Unless you are 110% sure it is a good move, and you are sure that you no longer want to stay at your current job, then don't do it.
It actually gets worse than even that. If an API is copyrightable, then all of the law related to derived works also applies. That means that whoever copyrighted the first interface for an ordered collection can count any subsequent API that appears to be inspired by it as a derived work.
You are making a pretty big leap there because the law on derived works leaves it open for interpretation that any significant improvement on the original patent can be considered a seperate patent.
... he would have gotten a big promotion for increasing shareholder value!
extreme free market capitalism (with as close to zero government regulation as possible) very quickly leads to a market that is controlled by monopolies and/or cartels The "winners" set up barriers-to-entry that prevent new competition from entering the market, even if the competitors are delivering a better product/service at a better price. A market thus controlled is no longer a free market, and all the benefits of free market capatilism go up in a puff of smoke. You can counter this by introducing some government regulation to restore competition...but too much government regulation and you are right back where you started: a controlled market that doesn't function at all.
When it comes to effective regulation it is a matter of quality over quantity. The United States has shit tons of meaningless, toothless regulations and others that actually serve to promote cartels and create barriers to entry. We still end up with the same problem and a nation that is about as close to Fascism as it ever was in our history.
So even without regulation we end up with the same problem. Money is power, power molds our government institutions and corrupts our democracies into a putrid facade of what it was intended to be.
Implying that TOS was inherently Marxist is completely wrong, especially considering how it was a network television show airing in the 60's during the height of the red scare. If anybody had any inclination that it glorified communism or marxism in any way it would have never gotten past the pilot.
TOS had a few throwaway references to how the nations of Earth had united and threw away their differences, formed a better society and the Federation. It wasn't until the movies came out in the 80's where references existed to their not existing money or currency, and that their society was based around work for personal growth and glory in light of eradication of all poverty. TNG, Deep Space Nince, et. al expanded upon this notion in the subsequent series.
You exist a government entity and have one purpose and one sole purpose alone and that is to serve the residents of your municipality. You are clearly not in the business of making money through profit seeking endeavors.
With that being said, you worked hard on this and it seems to be a huge success, so the municipality should benefit greatly from such an endeavor. You may have something that works great for you but honestly Sharepoint is really only good for internal apps and you certainly do not have a scalable solution that could be easily marketed to other counties. The best thing you can do is to find a private company to partner with that can take the work that you did and use that as the foundation for building a product, as well as marketing and selling that product.
By letting private interests handle the risks involved, you and your county can serve an advisory role and still work out a mutually beneficial arrangement where your county is well compensated, either through a percentage of gross revenue or a large lump sum.
If you want to be a rich salesman your primary motivation should be closing the sale, not worrying about the product.
How do you sell a product that you know nothing about? Closing a sale takes the concious effort on the part of the buyer, meaning that one has to be convincing to the buyer as well as informative (which of course is impossible if you know little about the product). All I was saying is that most people are not convincing liars so worrying about the product and believing in the product helps everybody come to a mutually beneficial deal much easier.
No one does it because they think they're making the world a better place.
Wrong again. Motiviation to do good and profit are not mutually exclusive. Not all people are sociopathic. Even a sociopath can do unintentional good even if their motivations are purely profit driven. This is sort of what capitalism is about. Acceptance that greed will always be a part of the human condition, so if SOME of the time society is better when both parties satiate their desires in a mutually beneficial economic arrangement then we are further ahead as a society.
In reality though it is far more complicated and messy than that as the Libertarian Utopia doesn't account well and sometimes runs counter to other very human motivations. Surely all salesmen are in it for the money, this is a given, but this doesn't mean their behaviors will run counter to their sense of morality, ethics, and guilt.
The OP's employer is doing far more than just disrespecting their employees. One can make the case they are foolishly and carelessly wasting their employee's hours on a trivial task that many marketing firms charge peanuts for. Their employees work time is a captured asset assuming they are exempt salary so they would be foolish to waste their talents and skills on efforts that are beneath their abilities.