Right, but these tend to be higher end purchases. Duty free shops with jewelry and liquor, stuff like that. But dropping someone off at McDonald's? That's just a stupid business plan.
Except that advertising does not earn that moch money per person. If advertising was so lucrative that watch ads in a taxi ride could cover the entire cost of the ride, then there would be no such thing as pay TV since they'd be paying us to watch.
Again, companies have a deluded idea of the value of their marketing, just like they do with advertising. Buying a hamburger at McDonalds does not pay enough to cover the driverless car. The profit from a meal at McDonalds is very small, vastly smaller than the cost of a taxi or paid rideshare. Even if every rider stopped to get a happy meal, it's still a terrible business model.
I think upper management would prefer something more predictable than Agile. Agile is usually pushed hardest by new employees coming from places that were already part of the Agile cult.
And this is because each new release also comes with new major problems. We aren't upgrading to High Sierra at work, because it does not work (never mind the blatant security hole). Every time a new tool is rolled out, something goes wrong, unless you're one of those that does nothing but use a Office (although on Mac that is tje most likely thing to break). When the updates don't break in functionality they will inevitably have rewritten the UI. I presume that latter is so that IT nuns can roam the corridors and easily see who did not upgrade and then give them a wack with a ruler.
Fake news gets mixed up a bunch. There is fake news that is misrepresentation, misunderstanding, or jumping to conclusions. "Chocolate is healthy for you!" Not fake per se, but the reporter could have done a better job rather than rushing to print. Then there's the fake news which is deliberate exaggeration, pushing a small story to make it a big story or other sensationalism. Still, there's a shred of truth hidden behind a whole lot of outrage, the sort of stuff Fox News is known for.
Then there's the real fake news. Stories that are made up from beginning to end. For instance the story about a town in Texas which is where the Mexican drug lords send all their families to live in safety and get decent medical care. Totally made up and pushed by Brietbart news. It is interesting that the president shouting the most about fake news had as his primary campaign adviser the head of Brietbart news. A deflection strategy; either shouting wolf all the time in order to make people cnfused about what's fake or not, or calling stuff fake so often at the drop of a hat in order to diminish the seriousness of "fake news".
Anyway, real fake news is a serious matter, and as time goes on it will become easier and easier to just make stuff up and still provide doctored photos, videos, and audio that make it sound convincing. But the other "fake news" that is just exaggeration or mistakes, while certainly a major failing of news media, should not be treated as the same level of dishonesty.
Problem is that everything these days turns into a partisan fight. Everyone's trying to find "gotchas", uncover political misdealings by the other side, and so on. So there are a lot of people who just won't accept that the CDC is trying to improve public health, they assume there's some political agenda behind everything.
Even the most rabid libertarian agrees that government is necessary for the common defense. In this case, we need a common defense against corporations. Regulations are necessary to prevent free market abuse, and anyone who thinks zero regulation makes the free market work best doesn't know very much about about history.
It's not even tech really. All office jobs are like that. Someone who thinks that the day to day workings in a tech company are different than say an accounting firm, has bought in to a media portrayal. I'm in a tech company, but I talk to HR, legal, executives, I sit down at lunch next to manufacturing employees, and so forth. If you'll notice, Office Space only is only peripherally about technology; it goes out of its way to be a rather generic company.
Does it matter? Very few people use it. Just like the digital FM, if you're at moderate range you get no signal. So coverage is much less. It mostly just convinced a lot of people to subscribe to cable or satellite. Sure, a few people use it, mostly cord cutters who wanted to supplement netflix/amazon with some local channels.
I do think it's surprising that tech industry doesn't split up and move away. Why do they all insist on being within a twenty mile radius of each other? We don't even have that much "high tech" anymore, we're dominated by advertising companies (google) and social media, if those people actually saw real life silicon chips they wouldn't know what to do with them.
These are nice suburban areas. Suburbs beat the squalor of the inner city any day. The snag is that the population boomed very quickly, faster than anyone could plan for. And as well it's not an area with easy access in and out of and no room for more housing without ripping and those suburbs and putting in high rises (nice for those raised in cities but bleak for those don't like density). The few high rises that do exist are extremely expensive anyway, yuppie magnets.
Housing needs to go up. As in multistories. But most people don't want to live in high rises or in high density areas. A few people do, but most prefer elbow room. But the bay area is impacted; it can't grow outwards easily (like LA) because it's surrounded by water and mountains. So it can only grow upwards. But the higher density also means it must have better roads and mass transit at the same time, which is a major snag.
Overall, we've just got too many people. The tech industry should spread out. There is not all that much advantage to being nearby to other big tech. People say it's vital to be near the venture capitalists but that is false; the majority of people living in the bay area do not work for startups, that's a media portrayal that doesn't hold up in real life. Yes there are other good reasons to live here beyond just tech, the air quality is overall very good, and the climate is moderate. On the other hand, there is not enough water in California for all the people who are here now.
As for homelessness, it is at a higher level than I have ever seen. Anyone who says the economy is doing great needs to go outside and take a look around. I see tents being put up on sidewalks in outlying residential neighborhoods. I have never seen this before, usually the homeless camps are near downtown areas, near shopping centers, and so forth. And someone is living in a one-car garage in my condo complex, causing a mess and danger (almost burned the place down when he lit a fire inside). RVs have been parked in random places for some time now, it's certainly better than living in a car but it's certainly not a long term solution.
So in other words, the CEO and shareholders allow the company to be dysfunctional. If a company does a half assed job, they will lose business, profits will go down, and somebody should take notice.
So yes, the Republican leadership did insist that he withdraw from the race. But the closer the election came, and the closer the tax screwup bill vote seemed to be, the more they decided they should back Moore anyway.
Ironic, since it was not very long ago that everyone bitched that Bill Clinton didn't have the right "character", and that he was a "waffler". So here we see the Republicans waffling over a candidate of low character. They're ready to toss their dignity away for the sake of a tie breaking vote in the Senate.
For some reason, being disgraced is not enough of a reason to convince voters. Some of them like the crazy uncle style of politician. In Alabama they're single-issue voters; tell them how the candidate stands on the abortion issue and that's all they need to know.
Even the hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who turned out to be a much bigger sleazebag than Clinton, was making a comeback on the Trump coat tails. All the voters want is someone on their team who can shout and rail against the other team. No one gives a shit about what's good for the country, they just want their chosen team to win.
Because science fiction isn't about science most of the time. Hollywood essentially does not care. They want action, and sparks flying and an ensign flying is action.
These days things are even worse. The Hollywood writers don't even try anymore, I suspect they don't even know that the crap they write is crap. Sparks flying out of everything. The great writers are gone, now it's the age of "make shit up". Seriously, I heard a military character say "oh twenty three hundred", as if the writer was so stupid he though putting "0" in front of any time was necessary for the military, instead of spending 30 seconds looking at wikipedia. Plotholes, gaffes, implausible tech, it's all you see these days.
This sort of advertiser spam is what killed Usenet for good. Sure, it wasn't doing well at the time, but it wasn't terminally ill either. Then the invasion of spammers made it an all but useless service. So yes, you need administration and moderation.
Above the individual employees are the managers, and above them the execs. Motivation has to start somewhere. That can mean paying bonuses for a good job done; if the execs get a bonus they're going to insist the managers do a good job. If the managers get a bonus they're going to insist the individual workers do a good job. And if the workers get a bonus they'll do a good job on their own.
Tha'ts something else entirely, it's a job you can do with very little skills or training. The early human computers were people who had to had a good education, and they set in rows doing mathematical calculations all day. They did not have high status but it was a skilled job. Those jobs very often went to women, and they were educated women. When electronic computers showed up, often those same women would make the leap to being the computer operators and coders. Again, they were not merely data entry operators, they were doing skilled work.
They didn't just figure out how to code. They were very often not just typing in exactly what was written on paper by someone else. They were sometimes translating what was on the paper into lower level machine language, especially in the very early days of programmable electronic computers. Even after the era of programming languages, the programmers at the top often stayed in their offices with pads of paper and a blackboard, while the coders were the only ones to use and touch the computer. This situation lasted until the late seventies, maybe even into the eighties if the company was slow to adopt minicomputers and put terminals on the programmers' desks.
I almost didn't go into computing when a family friend gave me a set of programming books that her deceased husband owned. Those books were about RPG-II, which meant writing your program onto specially formatted sheets of a paper which would then be handed off to other people to finish the work. That sounded horrible to me until I learned that this wasn't the only way to program. But it certainly was a very common style that was slowly coming to an end.
The women were actually writing the code, they were not just threading cores. They were not the chief programmers of course, "coder" was much lower in the hierarchy. The women took the specifications and programs and turned them into actual machine code. This was somewhat a rote translation job, but because the coders were the most familiar with the actual machines they were also the experts in what the machine could do. The higher level programming jobs were much more abstract, sitting at a desk without even a computer terminal and writing out the specifications and designs on paper.
Anyone who lived through that era would know that women were much more involved in computing early on, and over time the relative percentage of women in computing has declined. This actually happened, it is not conjecture or theory. All the ranting form the men's rights conspiracy groups won't change that. Yes, these coding jobs were the grunt jobs at the bottom of the totem pole, and yes, that's why women were doing those jobs.
Today, the bottom ranks of the IT are almost all men, and they're being outsourced. They're being outsourced because they are the bottom rung jobs. And surprise, if you look at those foreign outsource agencies, their talent has a much higher percentage of women in programming and team lead positions than you will usually see in America.
Untrue. Computer operation was considered clerical work, and was much more than data entry. Women were doing that era's equivalent of being a sysadmin. Before electronic computers, it was also common for women to be human computers, ie, get a bunch of people in room and have them work through methodical mathematical calculations (parallel processing). The majority of calculations done at Bletchley Partk were done by women. When electronic computers came along, women followed naturally in similar roles, turning high level descriptions and specifications into the actual machine language (in old IBM style, programmers versus coders).
I don't know any women who did that in computing or engineering. I do know a a lot of go-to-work moms though. Of course, I'm in Silicon Valley, which means that optimizing income/expenses of the household you need 2+ full time jobs. I do know guys who took extended leaves while the wife continued to work. But I don't know any women personally who were in the STEM field and then left to stay at home; although I know some who went into management and some who changed fields.
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Right, but these tend to be higher end purchases. Duty free shops with jewelry and liquor, stuff like that. But dropping someone off at McDonald's? That's just a stupid business plan.
Except that advertising does not earn that moch money per person. If advertising was so lucrative that watch ads in a taxi ride could cover the entire cost of the ride, then there would be no such thing as pay TV since they'd be paying us to watch.
Again, companies have a deluded idea of the value of their marketing, just like they do with advertising. Buying a hamburger at McDonalds does not pay enough to cover the driverless car. The profit from a meal at McDonalds is very small, vastly smaller than the cost of a taxi or paid rideshare. Even if every rider stopped to get a happy meal, it's still a terrible business model.
Pork bellies are a commoodity and can be use as food. There is no equivalence to cash, and especially none to experimental crypto currencies.
I think upper management would prefer something more predictable than Agile. Agile is usually pushed hardest by new employees coming from places that were already part of the Agile cult.
And this is because each new release also comes with new major problems. We aren't upgrading to High Sierra at work, because it does not work (never mind the blatant security hole). Every time a new tool is rolled out, something goes wrong, unless you're one of those that does nothing but use a Office (although on Mac that is tje most likely thing to break). When the updates don't break in functionality they will inevitably have rewritten the UI. I presume that latter is so that IT nuns can roam the corridors and easily see who did not upgrade and then give them a wack with a ruler.
Fake news gets mixed up a bunch. There is fake news that is misrepresentation, misunderstanding, or jumping to conclusions. "Chocolate is healthy for you!" Not fake per se, but the reporter could have done a better job rather than rushing to print. Then there's the fake news which is deliberate exaggeration, pushing a small story to make it a big story or other sensationalism. Still, there's a shred of truth hidden behind a whole lot of outrage, the sort of stuff Fox News is known for.
Then there's the real fake news. Stories that are made up from beginning to end. For instance the story about a town in Texas which is where the Mexican drug lords send all their families to live in safety and get decent medical care. Totally made up and pushed by Brietbart news. It is interesting that the president shouting the most about fake news had as his primary campaign adviser the head of Brietbart news. A deflection strategy; either shouting wolf all the time in order to make people cnfused about what's fake or not, or calling stuff fake so often at the drop of a hat in order to diminish the seriousness of "fake news".
Anyway, real fake news is a serious matter, and as time goes on it will become easier and easier to just make stuff up and still provide doctored photos, videos, and audio that make it sound convincing. But the other "fake news" that is just exaggeration or mistakes, while certainly a major failing of news media, should not be treated as the same level of dishonesty.
Problem is that everything these days turns into a partisan fight. Everyone's trying to find "gotchas", uncover political misdealings by the other side, and so on. So there are a lot of people who just won't accept that the CDC is trying to improve public health, they assume there's some political agenda behind everything.
Even the most rabid libertarian agrees that government is necessary for the common defense. In this case, we need a common defense against corporations. Regulations are necessary to prevent free market abuse, and anyone who thinks zero regulation makes the free market work best doesn't know very much about about history.
It's not even tech really. All office jobs are like that. Someone who thinks that the day to day workings in a tech company are different than say an accounting firm, has bought in to a media portrayal. I'm in a tech company, but I talk to HR, legal, executives, I sit down at lunch next to manufacturing employees, and so forth. If you'll notice, Office Space only is only peripherally about technology; it goes out of its way to be a rather generic company.
Also Office Space, which is technically a theatrical movie, but has been on TV.
Any TV series about startups is absolutely nothing like real tech companies.
Does it matter? Very few people use it. Just like the digital FM, if you're at moderate range you get no signal. So coverage is much less. It mostly just convinced a lot of people to subscribe to cable or satellite. Sure, a few people use it, mostly cord cutters who wanted to supplement netflix/amazon with some local channels.
I do think it's surprising that tech industry doesn't split up and move away. Why do they all insist on being within a twenty mile radius of each other? We don't even have that much "high tech" anymore, we're dominated by advertising companies (google) and social media, if those people actually saw real life silicon chips they wouldn't know what to do with them.
These are nice suburban areas. Suburbs beat the squalor of the inner city any day. The snag is that the population boomed very quickly, faster than anyone could plan for. And as well it's not an area with easy access in and out of and no room for more housing without ripping and those suburbs and putting in high rises (nice for those raised in cities but bleak for those don't like density). The few high rises that do exist are extremely expensive anyway, yuppie magnets.
Housing needs to go up. As in multistories. But most people don't want to live in high rises or in high density areas. A few people do, but most prefer elbow room. But the bay area is impacted; it can't grow outwards easily (like LA) because it's surrounded by water and mountains. So it can only grow upwards. But the higher density also means it must have better roads and mass transit at the same time, which is a major snag.
Overall, we've just got too many people. The tech industry should spread out. There is not all that much advantage to being nearby to other big tech. People say it's vital to be near the venture capitalists but that is false; the majority of people living in the bay area do not work for startups, that's a media portrayal that doesn't hold up in real life. Yes there are other good reasons to live here beyond just tech, the air quality is overall very good, and the climate is moderate. On the other hand, there is not enough water in California for all the people who are here now.
As for homelessness, it is at a higher level than I have ever seen. Anyone who says the economy is doing great needs to go outside and take a look around. I see tents being put up on sidewalks in outlying residential neighborhoods. I have never seen this before, usually the homeless camps are near downtown areas, near shopping centers, and so forth. And someone is living in a one-car garage in my condo complex, causing a mess and danger (almost burned the place down when he lit a fire inside). RVs have been parked in random places for some time now, it's certainly better than living in a car but it's certainly not a long term solution.
So in other words, the CEO and shareholders allow the company to be dysfunctional. If a company does a half assed job, they will lose business, profits will go down, and somebody should take notice.
So yes, the Republican leadership did insist that he withdraw from the race. But the closer the election came, and the closer the tax screwup bill vote seemed to be, the more they decided they should back Moore anyway.
Ironic, since it was not very long ago that everyone bitched that Bill Clinton didn't have the right "character", and that he was a "waffler". So here we see the Republicans waffling over a candidate of low character. They're ready to toss their dignity away for the sake of a tie breaking vote in the Senate.
For some reason, being disgraced is not enough of a reason to convince voters. Some of them like the crazy uncle style of politician. In Alabama they're single-issue voters; tell them how the candidate stands on the abortion issue and that's all they need to know.
Even the hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who turned out to be a much bigger sleazebag than Clinton, was making a comeback on the Trump coat tails. All the voters want is someone on their team who can shout and rail against the other team. No one gives a shit about what's good for the country, they just want their chosen team to win.
Because science fiction isn't about science most of the time. Hollywood essentially does not care. They want action, and sparks flying and an ensign flying is action.
These days things are even worse. The Hollywood writers don't even try anymore, I suspect they don't even know that the crap they write is crap. Sparks flying out of everything. The great writers are gone, now it's the age of "make shit up". Seriously, I heard a military character say "oh twenty three hundred", as if the writer was so stupid he though putting "0" in front of any time was necessary for the military, instead of spending 30 seconds looking at wikipedia. Plotholes, gaffes, implausible tech, it's all you see these days.
This sort of advertiser spam is what killed Usenet for good. Sure, it wasn't doing well at the time, but it wasn't terminally ill either. Then the invasion of spammers made it an all but useless service. So yes, you need administration and moderation.
Above the individual employees are the managers, and above them the execs. Motivation has to start somewhere. That can mean paying bonuses for a good job done; if the execs get a bonus they're going to insist the managers do a good job. If the managers get a bonus they're going to insist the individual workers do a good job. And if the workers get a bonus they'll do a good job on their own.
Tha'ts something else entirely, it's a job you can do with very little skills or training. The early human computers were people who had to had a good education, and they set in rows doing mathematical calculations all day. They did not have high status but it was a skilled job. Those jobs very often went to women, and they were educated women. When electronic computers showed up, often those same women would make the leap to being the computer operators and coders. Again, they were not merely data entry operators, they were doing skilled work.
They didn't just figure out how to code. They were very often not just typing in exactly what was written on paper by someone else. They were sometimes translating what was on the paper into lower level machine language, especially in the very early days of programmable electronic computers. Even after the era of programming languages, the programmers at the top often stayed in their offices with pads of paper and a blackboard, while the coders were the only ones to use and touch the computer. This situation lasted until the late seventies, maybe even into the eighties if the company was slow to adopt minicomputers and put terminals on the programmers' desks.
I almost didn't go into computing when a family friend gave me a set of programming books that her deceased husband owned. Those books were about RPG-II, which meant writing your program onto specially formatted sheets of a paper which would then be handed off to other people to finish the work. That sounded horrible to me until I learned that this wasn't the only way to program. But it certainly was a very common style that was slowly coming to an end.
The women were actually writing the code, they were not just threading cores. They were not the chief programmers of course, "coder" was much lower in the hierarchy. The women took the specifications and programs and turned them into actual machine code. This was somewhat a rote translation job, but because the coders were the most familiar with the actual machines they were also the experts in what the machine could do. The higher level programming jobs were much more abstract, sitting at a desk without even a computer terminal and writing out the specifications and designs on paper.
Anyone who lived through that era would know that women were much more involved in computing early on, and over time the relative percentage of women in computing has declined. This actually happened, it is not conjecture or theory. All the ranting form the men's rights conspiracy groups won't change that. Yes, these coding jobs were the grunt jobs at the bottom of the totem pole, and yes, that's why women were doing those jobs.
Today, the bottom ranks of the IT are almost all men, and they're being outsourced. They're being outsourced because they are the bottom rung jobs. And surprise, if you look at those foreign outsource agencies, their talent has a much higher percentage of women in programming and team lead positions than you will usually see in America.
Untrue. Computer operation was considered clerical work, and was much more than data entry. Women were doing that era's equivalent of being a sysadmin. Before electronic computers, it was also common for women to be human computers, ie, get a bunch of people in room and have them work through methodical mathematical calculations (parallel processing). The majority of calculations done at Bletchley Partk were done by women. When electronic computers came along, women followed naturally in similar roles, turning high level descriptions and specifications into the actual machine language (in old IBM style, programmers versus coders).
I don't know any women who did that in computing or engineering. I do know a a lot of go-to-work moms though. Of course, I'm in Silicon Valley, which means that optimizing income/expenses of the household you need 2+ full time jobs. I do know guys who took extended leaves while the wife continued to work. But I don't know any women personally who were in the STEM field and then left to stay at home; although I know some who went into management and some who changed fields.