Almost every company or business cares about making the world a bit better. Maybe it's just to make the small world inside their homes better. But it's not just about money, money, money. Companies give money to charity, they try to keep the workforce happy, they may try to keep the customers happy, and so forth.
And even when you look at only the bottom line, keeping the community happy is good for business. Don't dump toxic chemicals in the river, don't use child labor, and so forth.
When you say "do work", it sounds a lot like "keep up the status quo".
People ignored the old victims. Fingers in their ears, believing racism was a thing of the past or that the way things are is the way they should be. Now suddenly when it's their group being discriminated against, they notice it and it makes front page news.
When I started in CS in college, there was a fair representation of women. It may not have been exactly 50%, more like 30-40%, but they certainly were not rare. Fast forward a few decades and women are rare in engineering and R&D, even more so in IT. Biology did not change, this decline is absolutely due to people and sociology, not because women are not suited to the fields or that they're inherently not interested.
Anyone who thinks this is the natural way things should be today is deluded, probably an ardent supporter of the status quo.
Well sure, if I see a white male hired, I assume it's because of a more privileged background. Discriminate against minorities, then it's a tricky problem that needs solving and maybe have some more meetings about it. Discriminate against white males and it's front page news and action is taken quickly to remedy it.
Here's the snag. Exclude women and minorities, and people seem to think it's ok, or even defend it. Exclude white males and suddenly people are up in arms.
Excluding no-one is best. But people should open their eyes and realize that discrimination happens and continues to happen even when it's not to someone looking like you.
Stopping someone from speaking in a public square would be censorship, stopping them from entering my house and yammering in my living room is not censorship. If someone kicked them out of a video service that had only 1000 subscribers, that wouldn't be censorship, such a tiny service in no way prevents them from spouting off their shit somewhere else. So why is a large video company suddenly censoring if it tells them to get lost? They can find another service, make their own service, go to a news outlet, mimeograph flyers and post them on telephone poles, etc.
Also, not all censorship is illegal. The US constitution only says that congress cannot engage in censorship, it does not restrict corporations or individuals from doing that.
The first amendment to the US constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
With regards to restricting free speech, the constitution only places restrictions on congress. The constitution does not apply to Youtube here.
The problem is when nut jobs and bastards get an inside seat when deciding national policy. Remember lots of dictators around the world started as nut jobs and/or bastards. Idiots spreading misguided rumors have caused damage; we had someone showing up armed at a pizza parlor looking for hillary's pedo ring.
We do not have to tolerate these people. We are already responsible, we just want the nut jobs and bastards to also be responsible. Do we stand by while others convince kids to eat Tide pods, or do we have a responsibility to tell them to shut up? Do we stand by while others claim over and over that Obama was not a US citizen (or McCain), or should we attempt to correct them?
Infowars is an extremely dangerous source of information because so many powerful people are stupid enough to believe the fake news coming out of there. They're not a news service, they are a troll zoo. As responsible people we should encourage people to stop visiting them, and we should tell them to shut the hell up.
But you're stuck with the first gen reactors. They cost so much to build that it is not desirable to dump them readily, and the huge cost also means there is less political appetite to create newer and better reactors.
I learned typing on a manual typewriter. That really built up the strength, but also muscle memory. You really learn to type if you have to press every key with firmly with confidence.
I can type very fast, I was like that in the 80s zipping away on the computer keyboard. But I also use a pen to take notes. My handwriting isn't as good as it used to be but I am most definitely still writing. I'm writing on paper, on whiteboards, on postit notes, etc. It's easier and faster in a meeting to jot down notes with pen and paper than on a tablet, and it's less disruptive than typing on a laptop.
There are lots of other things you need fine finger muscles for. Using tools for example. That's a big thing that separates humans from apes for example. I don't foresee a date soon where we just tap the ipad and have it screw on a bolt or hammer a nail.
Monetary cost is just one factor. There are long term costs to health, environment, and so forth to be taken into account. Then there is the major problem that non renewable power is... not renewable. We WILL run out of coal and oil someday. Do we want civilization to collapse when this happens, or do we want alternatives to ramp up before this happens?
100% carbon capture from coal does not solve that problem, or other problems with coal. The big political push for coal is only about jobs, and those jobs aren't coming back - if coal makes a resurgence it will use much more automation with fewer workers.
Supply and demand for oil are such that we're expending enormous costs to get more of it, including piping down low quality oil from Canada so we can ship it to China. We've found all the "easy" places to get oil, now we're working on the hard to get oil.
We need renewable energy soon, and dependence on fossil fuels is a temporary interim to tide us over and it needs to ramp down over time. We also need as a society to use less energy (and water, etc), and that's a difficult problem to solve.
I agree, we dumped nuclear too soon. But there's still a problem with used nuclear fuel. We still don't know what to do with it. The decomissioned reactor at San Onofre, is burying their cooled rods in the gound at their site (in containers of course). Except that this is essentially a few steps away from the beach. What happens in a hundred years? 200? That's going to erode or be underwater, people will forget what's buried there, civilization might even have collapsed.
The problem with nuclear is that it's infused with politics. Plants get built where they are because someone promised jobs to a congressman's district in exchange for votes, never mind that the site is on an earthquake fault. Asking for concrete and detailed plans for future maintenance gets answered with a few political donations. Over time the budgets go down, maintenance gets worse, there are fewer employees working longer shifts, and so forth. You want to store used fuel but it's a big political battle. Replacing outdated and unsafe technology is not allowed because so much money has already been sunk into it so it keeps running. Better plants don't get built because it costs so much money, and so much politics standing in the way that no one can really get an unbiased analysis.
And negligance is commmon, natural disasters are common. Which means negligance coinciding with a natural distaster must be taken into account, as this happens very often. Just look at any major earthquake aftermath and you can see lots of damage that could have been mitigated.
The important things you need with a nuclear plant that need solving. Some can be solved with newer technology maybe. - What to do with spent fuel - can you use it all up or do you have to store it someplace safe for all eternity? - Can you turn off the plant when it's no longer needed without this being a massive engineering effort? Can it be shut down in times of war, after a disaster, when demand goes down, when it is decomissioned? - make a long term plan (decades, centuries) for how to maintain and manage the plant.
Being a good programmer needs more than just knowing how to be a coder. You need domain knowledge. And you can't always rely on the domain expert being on hand.
Ie, you're going to use a formula that someone gave you in a spec, so you should know how to convert that formula to the programming language and have it give an accurate result in a reasonable amunt of time. Yet it is very common for even experienced programmers to screw that up badly because they don't know how floating point works, they don't know rudimentary numerical methods, and so forth. Worse, because they don't know the math they screw up the formula and don't even realize that it's wrong. The same applies to other areas, there may be some geometry, some engineering, some financial knowledge, some statistical background, and that's just the numbers part. There's medical, biological, musical, socialogical and other uses of programs.
But this education is not leading to better workers. It is the most dumbed down of computing, it's training unskilled labor how to use computers. And this is in no way "computer science", it is simple programming. Computer science is large a mixture of applied mathematics, abstract mathematics, numerical analysis, algorithms, electrical engineering, data structures and a mathematical reasoning of them, and much more
Now you don't need all that to become a grunt coder at the modem rung of the job market, but you're not even going to become a decent grunt coder from what you get at coding bootcamps or code.org. The competition out there is fierce and those grunt coder jobs are going to whoever will accept the lowest wage.
They aren't really teaching "CS" in elementary schools. They're treating CS as a job skill and preparing a workforce who can do simple labor. At least they should call all of this "introduction to computer science". It's like doing physics in high school, the most you're doing is replicating experiments and memorizing formulas, you won't be able to graduate from high school and demand a job in physics.
I think a lot of this feeds into parents fears that kids are falling behind. This started in the 80s at least, when computing was suddenly the big thing. CS departments are overcrowded by people with no aptitude or interest in the subject, because their parents insisted this was the right pipeline to get a good paying job. There was the Apple ad showing the student returning home as a failure because he didn't have an Apple computer before college.
But for all these parents who thought computers were mysterious and never figured out how to use a home computer, or even figuring out how to use the computer they had at work, their kids figured them out on their own. If the children can get through high school they'll know how to use the computer, that should no longer be a worry.
So I do think introduction to computing is useful, calling it computer science is stupid. And I do not believe that everyone needs to be a "coder", although knowing the concepts may be useful. But math should take precedence, reading and communication should take precedence, science should take precedence.
Or more accurately, your data is managed by people you hope are experts and whose main focus you hope is keeping everyone's data secure and hopefully reliable.
No, I'm not buying every single channel I used to get with satellite. No one ever watched all channels they could receive. It does save money to cut the cord, lots of it. Even if I got all of HBO, netflix, amazon, and hulu, it's still half the cost of satellite (which in turn is much cheaper than cable). People aren't cutting the cord because it's the cool thing to do, but because they realize they're paying for an expensive service and they're not getting their money's worth, it's an economic decision.
Microsoft is pushing the subscription model becuase they've seen the writing on the wall that users are not upgrading as regularly as they like which cuts into profits. Why users are going with this model, I have no idea. It's very clearly a trap, but there are a lot of enterprise customers who are in a romantic relationship with Microsoft.
Degrees help with the promotions though. I've seen skilled people hit their ceilings often because a lack of a degree.
Also important is adaptability. College is good training for that. Because the job you do today will not be anything like the job you do 10 years from now.
Michigan has some top notch universities, and that spawns some high tech industries too. It's things like medical, biotech, hiightech. Automotive seems almost like an after thought sometimes.
What about our families that used to make a good living harpooning whales, or the other side of my family that made horseshoe nails? People with those fancy high school degrees looking down at me and mine, screw em all!
Back in late 90s there was a rumor our medical company might relocate out of silicon valley to save on costs. The idea was to move to Pleasanton. Most people strongly objected because of the awful commute. Fast forward, and some people probalby consider Pleasanton to actually be a part of Silicon Valley, and people regularly commute from much further away than ever.
Today my company has been recently acquired from a company not based in California, with many offices in other states and countries. So part of me wants to do the adventure and live somewhere else, and especially if I can keep my salary (fat chance).
I think the big advantage of having so much tech in a geographically small area is that it's easy to find a new job quickly. After college, people are usually willing to relocate anywhere to get a start. After awhile, relocating is painful and highly disruptive. I think part of the reason for so much job hopping in silicon valley is that there are lots of interesting jobs nearby.
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It's sad that trying to get rid of discrimination is considered politics and that there's two sides to the issue.
Almost every company or business cares about making the world a bit better. Maybe it's just to make the small world inside their homes better. But it's not just about money, money, money. Companies give money to charity, they try to keep the workforce happy, they may try to keep the customers happy, and so forth.
And even when you look at only the bottom line, keeping the community happy is good for business. Don't dump toxic chemicals in the river, don't use child labor, and so forth.
When you say "do work", it sounds a lot like "keep up the status quo".
People ignored the old victims. Fingers in their ears, believing racism was a thing of the past or that the way things are is the way they should be. Now suddenly when it's their group being discriminated against, they notice it and it makes front page news.
When I started in CS in college, there was a fair representation of women. It may not have been exactly 50%, more like 30-40%, but they certainly were not rare. Fast forward a few decades and women are rare in engineering and R&D, even more so in IT. Biology did not change, this decline is absolutely due to people and sociology, not because women are not suited to the fields or that they're inherently not interested.
Anyone who thinks this is the natural way things should be today is deluded, probably an ardent supporter of the status quo.
Well sure, if I see a white male hired, I assume it's because of a more privileged background. Discriminate against minorities, then it's a tricky problem that needs solving and maybe have some more meetings about it. Discriminate against white males and it's front page news and action is taken quickly to remedy it.
Here's the snag. Exclude women and minorities, and people seem to think it's ok, or even defend it. Exclude white males and suddenly people are up in arms.
Excluding no-one is best. But people should open their eyes and realize that discrimination happens and continues to happen even when it's not to someone looking like you.
Stopping someone from speaking in a public square would be censorship, stopping them from entering my house and yammering in my living room is not censorship. If someone kicked them out of a video service that had only 1000 subscribers, that wouldn't be censorship, such a tiny service in no way prevents them from spouting off their shit somewhere else. So why is a large video company suddenly censoring if it tells them to get lost? They can find another service, make their own service, go to a news outlet, mimeograph flyers and post them on telephone poles, etc.
Also, not all censorship is illegal. The US constitution only says that congress cannot engage in censorship, it does not restrict corporations or individuals from doing that.
The first amendment to the US constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
With regards to restricting free speech, the constitution only places restrictions on congress. The constitution does not apply to Youtube here.
The problem is when nut jobs and bastards get an inside seat when deciding national policy. Remember lots of dictators around the world started as nut jobs and/or bastards. Idiots spreading misguided rumors have caused damage; we had someone showing up armed at a pizza parlor looking for hillary's pedo ring.
We do not have to tolerate these people. We are already responsible, we just want the nut jobs and bastards to also be responsible. Do we stand by while others convince kids to eat Tide pods, or do we have a responsibility to tell them to shut up? Do we stand by while others claim over and over that Obama was not a US citizen (or McCain), or should we attempt to correct them?
Infowars is an extremely dangerous source of information because so many powerful people are stupid enough to believe the fake news coming out of there. They're not a news service, they are a troll zoo. As responsible people we should encourage people to stop visiting them, and we should tell them to shut the hell up.
But you're stuck with the first gen reactors. They cost so much to build that it is not desirable to dump them readily, and the huge cost also means there is less political appetite to create newer and better reactors.
I learned typing on a manual typewriter. That really built up the strength, but also muscle memory. You really learn to type if you have to press every key with firmly with confidence.
I can type very fast, I was like that in the 80s zipping away on the computer keyboard. But I also use a pen to take notes. My handwriting isn't as good as it used to be but I am most definitely still writing. I'm writing on paper, on whiteboards, on postit notes, etc. It's easier and faster in a meeting to jot down notes with pen and paper than on a tablet, and it's less disruptive than typing on a laptop.
There are lots of other things you need fine finger muscles for. Using tools for example. That's a big thing that separates humans from apes for example. I don't foresee a date soon where we just tap the ipad and have it screw on a bolt or hammer a nail.
Monetary cost is just one factor. There are long term costs to health, environment, and so forth to be taken into account. Then there is the major problem that non renewable power is... not renewable. We WILL run out of coal and oil someday. Do we want civilization to collapse when this happens, or do we want alternatives to ramp up before this happens?
100% carbon capture from coal does not solve that problem, or other problems with coal. The big political push for coal is only about jobs, and those jobs aren't coming back - if coal makes a resurgence it will use much more automation with fewer workers.
Supply and demand for oil are such that we're expending enormous costs to get more of it, including piping down low quality oil from Canada so we can ship it to China. We've found all the "easy" places to get oil, now we're working on the hard to get oil.
We need renewable energy soon, and dependence on fossil fuels is a temporary interim to tide us over and it needs to ramp down over time. We also need as a society to use less energy (and water, etc), and that's a difficult problem to solve.
I agree, we dumped nuclear too soon. But there's still a problem with used nuclear fuel. We still don't know what to do with it. The decomissioned reactor at San Onofre, is burying their cooled rods in the gound at their site (in containers of course). Except that this is essentially a few steps away from the beach. What happens in a hundred years? 200? That's going to erode or be underwater, people will forget what's buried there, civilization might even have collapsed.
The problem with nuclear is that it's infused with politics. Plants get built where they are because someone promised jobs to a congressman's district in exchange for votes, never mind that the site is on an earthquake fault. Asking for concrete and detailed plans for future maintenance gets answered with a few political donations. Over time the budgets go down, maintenance gets worse, there are fewer employees working longer shifts, and so forth. You want to store used fuel but it's a big political battle. Replacing outdated and unsafe technology is not allowed because so much money has already been sunk into it so it keeps running. Better plants don't get built because it costs so much money, and so much politics standing in the way that no one can really get an unbiased analysis.
And negligance is commmon, natural disasters are common. Which means negligance coinciding with a natural distaster must be taken into account, as this happens very often. Just look at any major earthquake aftermath and you can see lots of damage that could have been mitigated.
The important things you need with a nuclear plant that need solving. Some can be solved with newer technology maybe.
- What to do with spent fuel - can you use it all up or do you have to store it someplace safe for all eternity?
- Can you turn off the plant when it's no longer needed without this being a massive engineering effort? Can it be shut down in times of war, after a disaster, when demand goes down, when it is decomissioned?
- make a long term plan (decades, centuries) for how to maintain and manage the plant.
Being a good programmer needs more than just knowing how to be a coder. You need domain knowledge. And you can't always rely on the domain expert being on hand.
Ie, you're going to use a formula that someone gave you in a spec, so you should know how to convert that formula to the programming language and have it give an accurate result in a reasonable amunt of time. Yet it is very common for even experienced programmers to screw that up badly because they don't know how floating point works, they don't know rudimentary numerical methods, and so forth. Worse, because they don't know the math they screw up the formula and don't even realize that it's wrong. The same applies to other areas, there may be some geometry, some engineering, some financial knowledge, some statistical background, and that's just the numbers part. There's medical, biological, musical, socialogical and other uses of programs.
But this education is not leading to better workers. It is the most dumbed down of computing, it's training unskilled labor how to use computers. And this is in no way "computer science", it is simple programming. Computer science is large a mixture of applied mathematics, abstract mathematics, numerical analysis, algorithms, electrical engineering, data structures and a mathematical reasoning of them, and much more
Now you don't need all that to become a grunt coder at the modem rung of the job market, but you're not even going to become a decent grunt coder from what you get at coding bootcamps or code.org. The competition out there is fierce and those grunt coder jobs are going to whoever will accept the lowest wage.
They aren't really teaching "CS" in elementary schools. They're treating CS as a job skill and preparing a workforce who can do simple labor. At least they should call all of this "introduction to computer science". It's like doing physics in high school, the most you're doing is replicating experiments and memorizing formulas, you won't be able to graduate from high school and demand a job in physics.
I think a lot of this feeds into parents fears that kids are falling behind. This started in the 80s at least, when computing was suddenly the big thing. CS departments are overcrowded by people with no aptitude or interest in the subject, because their parents insisted this was the right pipeline to get a good paying job. There was the Apple ad showing the student returning home as a failure because he didn't have an Apple computer before college.
But for all these parents who thought computers were mysterious and never figured out how to use a home computer, or even figuring out how to use the computer they had at work, their kids figured them out on their own. If the children can get through high school they'll know how to use the computer, that should no longer be a worry.
So I do think introduction to computing is useful, calling it computer science is stupid. And I do not believe that everyone needs to be a "coder", although knowing the concepts may be useful. But math should take precedence, reading and communication should take precedence, science should take precedence.
Or more accurately, your data is managed by people you hope are experts and whose main focus you hope is keeping everyone's data secure and hopefully reliable.
No, I'm not buying every single channel I used to get with satellite. No one ever watched all channels they could receive. It does save money to cut the cord, lots of it. Even if I got all of HBO, netflix, amazon, and hulu, it's still half the cost of satellite (which in turn is much cheaper than cable). People aren't cutting the cord because it's the cool thing to do, but because they realize they're paying for an expensive service and they're not getting their money's worth, it's an economic decision.
Microsoft is pushing the subscription model becuase they've seen the writing on the wall that users are not upgrading as regularly as they like which cuts into profits. Why users are going with this model, I have no idea. It's very clearly a trap, but there are a lot of enterprise customers who are in a romantic relationship with Microsoft.
Degrees help with the promotions though. I've seen skilled people hit their ceilings often because a lack of a degree.
Also important is adaptability. College is good training for that. Because the job you do today will not be anything like the job you do 10 years from now.
Michigan has some top notch universities, and that spawns some high tech industries too. It's things like medical, biotech, hiightech. Automotive seems almost like an after thought sometimes.
What about our families that used to make a good living harpooning whales, or the other side of my family that made horseshoe nails? People with those fancy high school degrees looking down at me and mine, screw em all!
Ha, coal jobs are declining, they are moving towards increased automation with fewer workers. That's even without the decreased demand for coal.
Back in late 90s there was a rumor our medical company might relocate out of silicon valley to save on costs. The idea was to move to Pleasanton. Most people strongly objected because of the awful commute. Fast forward, and some people probalby consider Pleasanton to actually be a part of Silicon Valley, and people regularly commute from much further away than ever.
Today my company has been recently acquired from a company not based in California, with many offices in other states and countries. So part of me wants to do the adventure and live somewhere else, and especially if I can keep my salary (fat chance).
I think the big advantage of having so much tech in a geographically small area is that it's easy to find a new job quickly. After college, people are usually willing to relocate anywhere to get a start. After awhile, relocating is painful and highly disruptive. I think part of the reason for so much job hopping in silicon valley is that there are lots of interesting jobs nearby.