I work with computers all day. I often wonder what people think computers are all about.
They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.
People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.
The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.
So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).
The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.
The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.
So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.
However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...
IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.
One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.
So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.
But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.
It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)
I could be wrong, but I don't think the US had many international free trade deals before the federal minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage came into effect in the 1930's.
Free trade; that is trade without tariffs and quotas, really only began post WW2. Before the 1900s, trade was there, but there usually tariffs involved to generate national revenue as well protect industries.
But as I said, I could be wrong. Care to point out the multitude of free trade deals the US had prior to the 1930s?
We're not forcing poorer countries to have a minimum wage. We're setting an equal playing field between all workers.
It's very colonial thinking to imagine the West as eternally advanced and they *need* us so they can work for us while we do advanced work and they serve us.
That means they won't have an export oriented economy. Good. They will then develop their own internal economy. Or trade with similar countries.
Or there are various alternate arrangements that can be made that are not 'free trade'. High tariffs as we see fit as industries change. Technological partnerships as China currently forces on people wanting access to the Chinese market...
I'm also against the minimum wage. I don't think it helps the poor and is really about protecting the middle class from competition by the lower class. Like White industrial workers using it to prevent African Americans from getting work.
However, it is a reality of the world we live in. We can't make policies without taking it into account.
Given that we have minimum wage laws, we shouldn't have free trade with countries with substantially lower wages.
Sure, solve it by getting rid of the minimum wage laws too:P
There are times I think the old America which was more focused on classical liberalism would actually have more 'social justice' than the current one.
Just think about 'free-trade' in a classical liberal sense.
Minimum wage laws - how can the government apply different laws to different people. Why should the government restrict the right of an American to compete against his Asian competitor. Why should the American have to obey a $10/hour minimum wage, but his Asian counterpart does not?
Solution - either stop free trade or mandate that every country exporting goods to the US must obey the American minimum wage.
This kind of thinking is actually what America used internally when different states wanted different minimum wages. I mean how could New York impose a minimum wage, but Alabama doesn't. Obviously, jobs would flow to Alabama. So the US federal government created the federal minimum wage for goods destined for inter-state commerce. If you were just a local pizza shop in Alabama, not involved in interstate commerce, you didn't have to obey the federal minimum wage.
It made a lot of sense. So why wasn't this same great logic used when we started international trade deals? My own view... this occurred when the government stopped trying to be just the law. When the government began looking at outcomes and goals. So it made sense to expand trade deals... I mean Americans are too good to work in textiles... those are not jobs Americans should be doing right?
The same kind of logic and and should be done for environmental laws.
I say all this from a libertarian mind set. Having different laws for different people is a far greater violation of individual rights than restricting free trade.
I suppose you really believe nothing would get done without state financed universities.
History says others. Thomas Edison worked part time as a clerk to fund his research. Henry Ford worked his way up from machinist to create Ford.
Things would get done without state financed things.
However, let's not argue that point. Whenever you get into these discussions with liberals they talk about the small things the government does that anyone, but the most libertarian minded person would say is a role of government (infrastructure, legal, defence, basic research).
Yet, how much of your tax dollars are actually used productively in these areas? Emphasis on the world productively here.
For every dollar of real law enforcement, there is probably 3 spend on unproductive things like the war on drugs and frivolous traffic schemes and other frivolous regulations.
For every dollar spent on actual national defense, 10 is spent on unneeded wars, big equipment, world policing.
For every dollar spent on university R&D, 10 is spent on inflated public sector salaries, pensions, frivolous degrees, pumping people through the university system who really have no place being there..........
We could do everything we *need* government to do with 10% tax rate.
I'll just add... even if you say that well the scientists are just working in the same. They weren't really driving communism, it doesn't stop politics from killing science.
These scientists in Australia and other parts of the world are aligning themselves with a specific political ideology. Some scientists suffer from tunnel vision.
Climate scientists obsess of climate issues and want to see anything done about it. They don't care who they ally themselves with or what happens in other domains of life.
No doubt, modern scientists are aligning themselves with centralized administration types... as they've always done historically.
Slowly but surely, scientists tend to end up on the wrong side of history... as the biggest government promises them the most funding and power.
Science will not cure politics. Politics will corrupt science.
Why are scientists calling for a carbon tax? It's a serious question. It's all fine to be a scientists and seek truth about how our world works. But far too many scientists are going well beyond this and into policy advocacy.
Some cheer this. As a engineer and lover of science, I resent it. It will corrupt the field of science. Power always does.
I believe global warming is occurring. The scientific facts point that why. Yet why are scientists calling for specific policy (http://www.couriermail.com.au/business/eminent-australians-call-for-carbon-tax/story-e6freqmx-1226075318518). They've taken themselves into politics and will suffer the same problems as all involved in politics. I have no more sympathy for these scientists than for a politician who gets death threats. It's part of the job... now that you're a politician who wants to make decisions that affect people's lives.
Politics has been and will always be about activists. It has been and will always be about power and money and armies.
"Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?"
Oh... someone seems to have missed the whole communist thing. The whole goal of the Soviet Union and other communist countrieswas to ban religion and implant a scientific materialistic world view on the people.
"The State recognizes no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism (Albania)
You can bet in all these regimes there were scientists involved.
You are right scientists don't need to send death threats. They have much better means like getting involved with politics and having armies and the police at their side to slaughter tens of millions.
Scientists like John Desmond Bernal supported the idea of communist rule by science.
That my friend is what scientists do when they have power. They do the same thing religions do. Even in the western world as we look at many programs as it relates to education, healthcare... we see the same pattern of science and politics creating such monsters.
As it relates to politics, scientific state is very similar to a theocracy... with all the great problems with it.
Scientists are people like any other... power corrupts. They might have peer review... but Catholic priests were also banned from molesting children... somehow it didn't help them.
If these scientists which to toss their hat in the political arena... they should be prepared to face the opposing political forces.
Science can tell you what happens, it cannot tell you what to do about it. That is all about values. They're no longer just scientists... they're politicians.
I also take issue with the idea that the cloud is unreliable.
Reliable compared to what?
I've been in quite a few companies... large and small. Our internal systems (source control, various tools, internal web pages, exchange mail...) all go down way more often than our external tools.
If anything the cloud is way more reliable. Now granted it's huge news when a cloud company like Amazon/Google go down for a few hours. It affects a lot more people and makes the news.
But internally, we all face more downtown from internal apps.
If you don't see Stewart's approach is almost always favoring centralized rational administration, you either have not been watching the Daily Show long enough, or you're insanely biased.
He believes that government can and should run things (especially healthcare and education) He then proceeds to mock how screwed it is when government runs things.
He's wonder out loud why the government can't just be run properly and provide affordable healthcare and education.
He will rarely ponder issues of wages, power corruption, difficulty in managing centralized system...
Yes, he goes from the premise that all people and politicians can be rational... hence the idea of rational administration... a very tempting ideology... which is itself completely irrational. Self-interest, power...are much more observable in people and power structures.
Researchers are blinded by their above average intelligence into thinking they respond to reason.
Researchers and academics are just as much victims of our need to win arguments and ideology instead of using reason to seek truth as anyone else.
Of course you need to trump up one profession as being the true truth seekers who have reason while most people are dimwitted fools is the ultimate non-truth seeking argument.
I'd love to sit down with one of these politicians like Obama who rant about high tech and education and see if they're truly misguided... or malicious.
Maybe they only meet bankers and CEOs and University presidents. Maybe engineers are just not at the table? Maybe he really does think there's this grand shortage of engineers.
However, my money is on maliciousness and ideology. Being part of the progressive movement, he thinks education is the solution to all problems. I'm Canada, we see the same thing. In the last election, the liberal party (Ignatieff) basically said Canada can compete globally... we just need to keep investing in education.
Note, the progressive ideology is there on both the left and the right... you will hear the same thing from those on the right... just to a lesser extent.
How he said this with a straight face... I have no idea. This after watch Nortel collapse. After watching ATI being bought out. After watching the auto-industry collapse.
Education isn't quite the advantage you think it is. When the world is educated, education is nothing special. When the information age makes information easily accessible and computers make processing information easy, you don't need mass numbers of educated people... just a few.
There's 6 billion people on Earth. Just how many researchers, OS developers, database... do you think society needs? Most people are going to end up in regular boring jobs.
Yet, they keep trotting out the ideology that the only way the Western World can compete is via education.
Funny enough, on the same day that I read Obama wants to increase the number of engineering graduates... I saw this
Lockheed martin is laying off staff. I wonder if Obama recognizes the irony here.
My hunch, Obama is too ideological and malicious. His ideology points him to think education is going to solve everything. He is malicious in his duty to teacher unions and the public sector... and the education ideology is the gift that keeps on giving to public sector unions.
Do you really think business people understand efficiency that well?
I don't say this sarcastically by the way. But people assume there's these business people maximizing efficiency all the time and all decisions are made to in that manner.
Most business people today have been raised to understand the industrial age models of efficiency. At the high end, they understand six-sigma and the like. Basically things need to be easy to measure for them to understand anything.
How do you measure vague work output like that of an engineer? How do you quantify the time taken communicating across time zones versus the cost versus the 'quality' of the product that actually gets released... versus the in house talent kept for new innovation...
It's not as easy as measuring manufacturing defects and product returns.
And no I don't have an answer to this either. It's one of those things that might just be too difficult to measure. I've worked very well with offshore teams. Today with email, chat, wikis... if you have good people in another time zone, it's not that much of an issue.
I'd say the hardest thing to teach kids is the notion of a variable. Some get it and then programming just flows naturally. Others just don't get it.
I also taught various math classes and you face the same problems there in algebra and other classes.
In math class it can be a bit easier for the kids to get by as they can just memorize the steps and the formulas. If some fantasy world of mine, most of these kids would not have passed the course. Yet we have the educational system we have... and they pass. I kept the problems worded the same as in their homework assignments.
Such is the education system. When I was teaching (back in engineering now), you just have to suck it up and try to do the best you can. There's a million things I'd do differently, but it's a bureaucracy out there that's darn near impossible to change.
I taught computer science in high school. Unfortunately, we get a lot of people trying to bypass learning programming. There is this whole driver in the educational system that different people just learn differently and that you should be able to teach everyone, everything... you just need to find the right way to teach them.
That is to say... the attitude is to not say math is hard. It is only hard because math was always taught in a numerical way. You need to find a way to teach math to audible learners, action learners...
I'm not going to dispute people learn differently... but different domains require different forms of thought.
In regard to programming... there's no getting around the idea of a variable or an algorithmic sequences of steps.
Do you really think the great barrier to kids learning programming is that they see an IF they get scared, but they see a diamond representing an IF, they suddenly get it?
Nope, don't me wrong, I used flow charts to demonstrate concepts. I used activities and steps to teach algorithms.
The key thing is you can't escape the concepts in the domain. You can't dilly dally away the notion of a variable or a sequence of steps. That's what programming is.
And anyone who has programmed or taught programming will tell you that it is the concepts that need to be learned and understood. The superficial expression of those concepts (visual tools, programming language...) are not anything substantial and don't really impact a child's interest.
To top it off, to do anything useful, it is far quicker to use a programming language than drag around pictures and icons. And you should see the joy in the kids when they make a ball move across the screen or they make the computer say 'John is an idiot'. It's hilarious.
yes... put money in the hands of poor people. What a radical concept.
Instead of funneling money into a public sector monopoly that primarily benefits those employed by the public sector monopoly... just like public education mainly benefits teachers and administrator and the war on drugs mainly benefits the police and lawyers and prison guards.
There is no such thing as the 'public interest.' I hear that term... all I see is a gang of public sector workers walking away with a big bag of money.
No different than corporate interests these unions be.
Indeed, giving vouchers to the poor for everything is about as good a system as you can get.
If mass transit can be provided by non-profits or by a business... more power to them. But they'll have to get every single penny from the people giving their cash or using their vouchers.
Why should the primary goal of a society be innovation? I don't ask that sarcastically. Seriously... you speak of stagnation in software development as though that is the end of the argument.
For politicians and arguably for most of the population... things like jobs, security, power, wages... matter a whole lot more.
Looking at society, lawyers provide much more job security and long term employment than software developers. Expect more strangling pieces of legislation that benefit lawyers and paper pushers and regulatory compliance people in the field of technology.
It's ironic in a way that the FCC is pointing this out.
What has more of an impact on my life? My local government or the higher levels of government?
When most decisions were made locally, sure then local news coverage is important. I'd care about my local politician as they would be the major policy drivers that affect my life.
But so many issues are now the domain of state and federal governments that local government are don't really do much. The things they do are pretty much routines these days (roads, water, parks, a small part of transit).
All the big issues and the big money are at higher levels of government. Healthcare, education, military, regulation, bailouts, big transit...
The internet didn't kill local news... I stopped watching local news a long time ago. Long before the internet become popular. Local news died because it is irrelevant.
I think the author of the article should examine if colleges and universities are anti-intellectual.
Universities SHOULD be intellectual places. The idea that university is what you make it... is well the reason people say just skip college.
If university is what you make it, why not skip the tuition and make life what you make it. I have always read a lot and tried things out. I consider myself an intellectual.
These days with the internet, information is so easily available and collaboration infinitely easier. You will only get into any kind of decent intellectualism in your doctorate... and even there I am increasingly seeing problem as university become areas of grant quotas, ideology, and paper outputs... About the only hope you have of really pursuing intellectualism is in a doctorate in a technical field.
And well I'm not averse to definitions. I am definitely anti-intellectual-institutions... because well.. they're not very intellectual.
There is no intellectual merit to it at all. It reads like an opinion piece.
About the last refuge for real academic work is in the hard sciences. Yet even there you see the problems. Professors have to constantly make up studies and work to show value to administrators and grants...
And so are geeks anti-intellectual? I'd prefer to ask:
Have Colleges and university become anti-intellectual.
I have this underlying theory that all institutions are inherently corrupted over time. As Locke would say, power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
Just as the church was one associated with God... universities used to be associated with intellect.
We can all see in plain sight how ridiculous it was to associate belief with the church.
In time, we will see that associated intellect with educational institutions was also ridiculous.
And no... peer review does not solve anything. When the institutions in question get to pick their peers... when there is a lot of self interest and ideology involved...
Slashdot Mirror
Mark my words... this is what computers were meant to do:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2218882&cid=36363480
I work with computers all day.
I often wonder what people think computers are all about.
They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.
People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.
The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.
So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).
The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.
The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.
So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.
However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...
IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.
One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.
So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.
But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.
It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)
Expect a rough time.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the US had many international free trade deals before the federal minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage came into effect in the 1930's.
Free trade; that is trade without tariffs and quotas, really only began post WW2. Before the 1900s, trade was there, but there usually tariffs involved to generate national revenue as well protect industries.
But as I said, I could be wrong. Care to point out the multitude of free trade deals the US had prior to the 1930s?
So what if we stop them from exporting to us?
We're not forcing poorer countries to have a minimum wage. We're setting an equal playing field between all workers.
It's very colonial thinking to imagine the West as eternally advanced and they *need* us so they can work for us while we do advanced work and they serve us.
That means they won't have an export oriented economy. Good. They will then develop their own internal economy. Or trade with similar countries.
Or there are various alternate arrangements that can be made that are not 'free trade'. High tariffs as we see fit as industries change. Technological partnerships as China currently forces on people wanting access to the Chinese market...
I'm also against the minimum wage. I don't think it helps the poor and is really about protecting the middle class from competition by the lower class. Like White industrial workers using it to prevent African Americans from getting work.
However, it is a reality of the world we live in. We can't make policies without taking it into account.
Given that we have minimum wage laws, we shouldn't have free trade with countries with substantially lower wages.
Sure, solve it by getting rid of the minimum wage laws too :P
Either way is good.
There are times I think the old America which was more focused on classical liberalism would actually have more 'social justice' than the current one.
Just think about 'free-trade' in a classical liberal sense.
Minimum wage laws - how can the government apply different laws to different people. Why should the government restrict the right of an American to compete against his Asian competitor. Why should the American have to obey a $10/hour minimum wage, but his Asian counterpart does not?
Solution - either stop free trade or mandate that every country exporting goods to the US must obey the American minimum wage.
This kind of thinking is actually what America used internally when different states wanted different minimum wages. I mean how could New York impose a minimum wage, but Alabama doesn't. Obviously, jobs would flow to Alabama. So the US federal government created the federal minimum wage for goods destined for inter-state commerce. If you were just a local pizza shop in Alabama, not involved in interstate commerce, you didn't have to obey the federal minimum wage.
It made a lot of sense. So why wasn't this same great logic used when we started international trade deals? My own view... this occurred when the government stopped trying to be just the law. When the government began looking at outcomes and goals. So it made sense to expand trade deals... I mean Americans are too good to work in textiles... those are not jobs Americans should be doing right?
The same kind of logic and and should be done for environmental laws.
I say all this from a libertarian mind set.
Having different laws for different people is a far greater violation of individual rights than restricting free trade.
I suppose you really believe nothing would get done without state financed universities.
History says others. Thomas Edison worked part time as a clerk to fund his research. Henry Ford worked his way up from machinist to create Ford.
Things would get done without state financed things.
However, let's not argue that point. Whenever you get into these discussions with liberals they talk about the small things the government does that anyone, but the most libertarian minded person would say is a role of government (infrastructure, legal, defence, basic research).
Yet, how much of your tax dollars are actually used productively in these areas? Emphasis on the world productively here.
For every dollar of real law enforcement, there is probably 3 spend on unproductive things like the war on drugs and frivolous traffic schemes and other frivolous regulations.
For every dollar spent on actual national defense, 10 is spent on unneeded wars, big equipment, world policing.
For every dollar spent on university R&D, 10 is spent on inflated public sector salaries, pensions, frivolous degrees, pumping people through the university system who really have no place being there. ... ... ...
We could do everything we *need* government to do with 10% tax rate.
I'll just add... even if you say that well the scientists are just working in the same. They weren't really driving communism, it doesn't stop politics from killing science.
These scientists in Australia and other parts of the world are aligning themselves with a specific political ideology. Some scientists suffer from tunnel vision.
Climate scientists obsess of climate issues and want to see anything done about it. They don't care who they ally themselves with or what happens in other domains of life.
No doubt, modern scientists are aligning themselves with centralized administration types... as they've always done historically.
Slowly but surely, scientists tend to end up on the wrong side of history... as the biggest government promises them the most funding and power.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Science will not cure politics.
Politics will corrupt science.
Why are scientists calling for a carbon tax?
It's a serious question. It's all fine to be a scientists and seek truth about how our world works. But far too many scientists are going well beyond this and into policy advocacy.
Some cheer this. As a engineer and lover of science, I resent it. It will corrupt the field of science. Power always does.
I believe global warming is occurring. The scientific facts point that why. Yet why are scientists calling for specific policy (http://www.couriermail.com.au/business/eminent-australians-call-for-carbon-tax/story-e6freqmx-1226075318518). They've taken themselves into politics and will suffer the same problems as all involved in politics. I have no more sympathy for these scientists than for a politician who gets death threats. It's part of the job... now that you're a politician who wants to make decisions that affect people's lives.
Politics has been and will always be about activists. It has been and will always be about power and money and armies.
"Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?"
Oh... someone seems to have missed the whole communist thing. The whole goal of the Soviet Union and other communist countrieswas to ban religion and implant a scientific materialistic world view on the people.
"The State recognizes no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism (Albania)
You can bet in all these regimes there were scientists involved.
You are right scientists don't need to send death threats. They have much better means like getting involved with politics and having armies and the police at their side to slaughter tens of millions.
Scientists like John Desmond Bernal supported the idea of communist rule by science.
That my friend is what scientists do when they have power. They do the same thing religions do.
Even in the western world as we look at many programs as it relates to education, healthcare... we see the same pattern of science and politics creating such monsters.
As it relates to politics, scientific state is very similar to a theocracy... with all the great problems with it.
Scientists are people like any other... power corrupts.
They might have peer review... but Catholic priests were also banned from molesting children... somehow it didn't help them.
If these scientists which to toss their hat in the political arena... they should be prepared to face the opposing political forces.
Science can tell you what happens, it cannot tell you what to do about it. That is all about values.
They're no longer just scientists... they're politicians.
I also take issue with the idea that the cloud is unreliable.
Reliable compared to what?
I've been in quite a few companies... large and small.
Our internal systems (source control, various tools, internal web pages, exchange mail...) all go down way more often than our external tools.
If anything the cloud is way more reliable. Now granted it's huge news when a cloud company like Amazon/Google go down for a few hours. It affects a lot more people and makes the news.
But internally, we all face more downtown from internal apps.
If you don't see Stewart's approach is almost always favoring centralized rational administration, you either have not been watching the Daily Show long enough, or you're insanely biased.
He believes that government can and should run things (especially healthcare and education)
He then proceeds to mock how screwed it is when government runs things.
He's wonder out loud why the government can't just be run properly and provide affordable healthcare and education.
He will rarely ponder issues of wages, power corruption, difficulty in managing centralized system...
Yes, he goes from the premise that all people and politicians can be rational... hence the idea of rational administration... a very tempting ideology... which is itself completely irrational. Self-interest, power...are much more observable in people and power structures.
On the contrary.
As a libertarian, I find free trade completely immoral as it subjects different people to different laws.
Why should I as a Western person need to obey a $10/hour minimum wage when my competition in Asia does not?
Why are doctors and lawyers shielded from competition while engineers and manufacturing workers are not?
This to me is a far more grievous offense than protectionism. At least under protectionism, those in the same economic system obey the same laws.
So you think John Stewart gathers facts and uses reason instead of emotion... somehow I think you've come to that conclusion by quasi-rational means.
John Stewart is every bit as ideological as Bill O'Reilly... although O'Reilly is definite louder.
Almost all of Stewards arguments are premised up the notion of centralized rational administration. He never deviates much from the premise.
Researchers are blinded by their above average intelligence into thinking they respond to reason.
Researchers and academics are just as much victims of our need to win arguments and ideology instead of using reason to seek truth as anyone else.
Of course you need to trump up one profession as being the true truth seekers who have reason while most people are dimwitted fools is the ultimate non-truth seeking argument.
On other words... nothing new.
I'd love to sit down with one of these politicians like Obama who rant about high tech and education and see if they're truly misguided... or malicious.
Maybe they only meet bankers and CEOs and University presidents. Maybe engineers are just not at the table? Maybe he really does think there's this grand shortage of engineers.
However, my money is on maliciousness and ideology. Being part of the progressive movement, he thinks education is the solution to all problems. I'm Canada, we see the same thing. In the last election, the liberal party (Ignatieff) basically said Canada can compete globally... we just need to keep investing in education.
Note, the progressive ideology is there on both the left and the right... you will hear the same thing from those on the right... just to a lesser extent.
How he said this with a straight face... I have no idea. This after watch Nortel collapse. After watching ATI being bought out. After watching the auto-industry collapse.
Education isn't quite the advantage you think it is. When the world is educated, education is nothing special. When the information age makes information easily accessible and computers make processing information easy, you don't need mass numbers of educated people... just a few.
There's 6 billion people on Earth. Just how many researchers, OS developers, database... do you think society needs? Most people are going to end up in regular boring jobs.
Yet, they keep trotting out the ideology that the only way the Western World can compete is via education.
Funny enough, on the same day that I read Obama wants to increase the number of engineering graduates... I saw this
http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/06/15/lockheed.martin.job.cuts/
Lockheed martin is laying off staff.
I wonder if Obama recognizes the irony here.
My hunch, Obama is too ideological and malicious. His ideology points him to think education is going to solve everything. He is malicious in his duty to teacher unions and the public sector... and the education ideology is the gift that keeps on giving to public sector unions.
Do you really think business people understand efficiency that well?
I don't say this sarcastically by the way. But people assume there's these business people maximizing efficiency all the time and all decisions are made to in that manner.
Most business people today have been raised to understand the industrial age models of efficiency. At the high end, they understand six-sigma and the like. Basically things need to be easy to measure for them to understand anything.
How do you measure vague work output like that of an engineer? How do you quantify the time taken communicating across time zones versus the cost versus the 'quality' of the product that actually gets released... versus the in house talent kept for new innovation...
It's not as easy as measuring manufacturing defects and product returns.
And no I don't have an answer to this either. It's one of those things that might just be too difficult to measure. I've worked very well with offshore teams. Today with email, chat, wikis... if you have good people in another time zone, it's not that much of an issue.
Yep.
I'd say the hardest thing to teach kids is the notion of a variable. Some get it and then programming just flows naturally. Others just don't get it.
I also taught various math classes and you face the same problems there in algebra and other classes.
In math class it can be a bit easier for the kids to get by as they can just memorize the steps and the formulas. If some fantasy world of mine, most of these kids would not have passed the course. Yet we have the educational system we have... and they pass. I kept the problems worded the same as in their homework assignments.
Such is the education system. When I was teaching (back in engineering now), you just have to suck it up and try to do the best you can. There's a million things I'd do differently, but it's a bureaucracy out there that's darn near impossible to change.
I taught computer science in high school. Unfortunately, we get a lot of people trying to bypass learning programming. There is this whole driver in the educational system that different people just learn differently and that you should be able to teach everyone, everything... you just need to find the right way to teach them.
That is to say... the attitude is to not say math is hard. It is only hard because math was always taught in a numerical way. You need to find a way to teach math to audible learners, action learners...
I'm not going to dispute people learn differently... but different domains require different forms of thought.
In regard to programming... there's no getting around the idea of a variable or an algorithmic sequences of steps.
Do you really think the great barrier to kids learning programming is that they see an IF they get scared, but they see a diamond representing an IF, they suddenly get it?
Nope, don't me wrong, I used flow charts to demonstrate concepts. I used activities and steps to teach algorithms.
The key thing is you can't escape the concepts in the domain. You can't dilly dally away the notion of a variable or a sequence of steps. That's what programming is.
And anyone who has programmed or taught programming will tell you that it is the concepts that need to be learned and understood. The superficial expression of those concepts (visual tools, programming language...) are not anything substantial and don't really impact a child's interest.
To top it off, to do anything useful, it is far quicker to use a programming language than drag around pictures and icons. And you should see the joy in the kids when they make a ball move across the screen or they make the computer say 'John is an idiot'. It's hilarious.
yes... put money in the hands of poor people. What a radical concept.
Instead of funneling money into a public sector monopoly that primarily benefits those employed by the public sector monopoly... just like public education mainly benefits teachers and administrator and the war on drugs mainly benefits the police and lawyers and prison guards.
There is no such thing as the 'public interest.' I hear that term... all I see is a gang of public sector workers walking away with a big bag of money.
No different than corporate interests these unions be.
Indeed, giving vouchers to the poor for everything is about as good a system as you can get.
If mass transit can be provided by non-profits or by a business... more power to them. But they'll have to get every single penny from the people giving their cash or using their vouchers.
You have to ask if you have learned?
Why should the primary goal of a society be innovation?
I don't ask that sarcastically. Seriously... you speak of stagnation in software development as though that is the end of the argument.
For politicians and arguably for most of the population... things like jobs, security, power, wages... matter a whole lot more.
Looking at society, lawyers provide much more job security and long term employment than software developers. Expect more strangling pieces of legislation that benefit lawyers and paper pushers and regulatory compliance people in the field of technology.
He also didn't believe in free trade fearing it leads to colonial type political systems.
Let me know when get rid of free trade and then we can talk about his vision for national debt to keep us all interested in government.
It's ironic in a way that the FCC is pointing this out.
What has more of an impact on my life? My local government or the higher levels of government?
When most decisions were made locally, sure then local news coverage is important. I'd care about my local politician as they would be the major policy drivers that affect my life.
But so many issues are now the domain of state and federal governments that local government are don't really do much. The things they do are pretty much routines these days (roads, water, parks, a small part of transit).
All the big issues and the big money are at higher levels of government. Healthcare, education, military, regulation, bailouts, big transit...
The internet didn't kill local news... I stopped watching local news a long time ago. Long before the internet become popular. Local news died because it is irrelevant.
Lawyers > major corporations :P
There's an ever more ironic infringement of freedom.
He suggests forcefully collecting tax money from people and giving it to authors.
Let's see which is a greater violation of freedom:
1. Amazon which installs DRM on ebooks which you have the freedom not to purchase
2. Have the government forcefully tax people and then have an organization to hand out money to authors
Hmmmm...
I think the author of the article should examine if colleges and universities are anti-intellectual.
Universities SHOULD be intellectual places.
The idea that university is what you make it... is well the reason people say just skip college.
If university is what you make it, why not skip the tuition and make life what you make it. I have always read a lot and tried things out. I consider myself an intellectual.
These days with the internet, information is so easily available and collaboration infinitely easier. You will only get into any kind of decent intellectualism in your doctorate... and even there I am increasingly seeing problem as university become areas of grant quotas, ideology, and paper outputs... About the only hope you have of really pursuing intellectualism is in a doctorate in a technical field.
And well I'm not averse to definitions. I am definitely anti-intellectual-institutions... because well.. they're not very intellectual.
At the crux of it all is what is intellect?
I went through the system and I got my degree. My own view is that the college/university system has little to do with intellect.
It is a mass education system that has more to do with job creation and ideology than any serious attempt at academic study.
Not to pick on the current president. But has anyone read for example Michelle Obama's Master's thesis? http://www.politico.com/pdf/080222_MOPrincetonThesis_1-251.pdf
There is no intellectual merit to it at all. It reads like an opinion piece.
About the last refuge for real academic work is in the hard sciences. Yet even there you see the problems. Professors have to constantly make up studies and work to show value to administrators and grants...
And so are geeks anti-intellectual?
I'd prefer to ask:
Have Colleges and university become anti-intellectual.
I have this underlying theory that all institutions are inherently corrupted over time. As Locke would say, power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
Just as the church was one associated with God...
universities used to be associated with intellect.
We can all see in plain sight how ridiculous it was to associate belief with the church.
In time, we will see that associated intellect with educational institutions was also ridiculous.
And no... peer review does not solve anything. When the institutions in question get to pick their peers... when there is a lot of self interest and ideology involved...