This isn't Scientific American, it was from a guest blogger.
In the past though, Slashdot had more technical submissions. Ie, interesting stuff that nerds liked. Now it's just click bait but with easier to block ads. That is the editors are just modern journalists, meaning that they feel there is no need to understand the subject matter but instead just try to get lots of lots of people to read the first line before giving up.
Also bizarre to call Python a modern language. It's been around a long time and is fundamentally not that different from other scripting languages that showed up around that time.
If you want expressive, readable, concise, precise, and executable, then use Scheme! Sure, you have to actually *learn* the language first, but that must be true for every language.
It's not going away, but it is declining and will not go back to the boom times ever again. Coal is being used less, and the jobs are increasingly being automated, so the demand for coal workers is going to continue to be down. Even buggy whips never disappeared completely.
You seriously dont' see the Conservatives/Republicans basing things on emotion either? Trump won because of a lot of undirected and hard to articulate anger. Ie, the whole "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" feeing from Network is all about emotion. Whereas cold hard logic says that coal is a dying industry because the need for coal is declining, and the need for coal workers is declining even faster as coal producers are replacing workers with automation. Now that the workers have been replaced they won't get rehired even if the demand for coal goes back up.
It's emotion that calls Obama the worst president of all time, not logic. Name calling is always rooted in emotion. Seriously, how can every democratic president of the last 50 years all be the "worst", there can only be one "worst". It's emotion that calls for building a wall on the border despite the net zero increase in the number of undocumented workes.
Yes, there is emotion screwing up logic on both the left and the right, and both sides are driven more by hatred of each other than in having well thought out solutions to problems.
The re-education is a red herring here. You're pushing politics into an issue that is not really political. The basic facts are that some jobs have gone away permanently, and retraining is a good way to get a different job. Anyone who says they already know how to mine coal and refuse to learn a different set of skills for a new job are their own enemies, the people on the coasts are not causing the problems. The reasons the jobs are going away is because the coal companies are automating the jobs, they don't need as many workers per unit of coal. All the political wrangling in the world won't change this, you cannot force companies to hire workers that they don't need.
The "coastal elites" comment again shows that youre trying to make this political, and implies you believe in the silly idea that there's literally a cultural war going on. If you live on the coasts you will see that they are not full of elites, there are a few of course, and there are elites in Kansas and Wisconsin too. California is a state full of liberals and conservatives both, you will find any and all political views represented. When you make this a fight about "us" versus "them", then you are a part of the problem in creating divides. I know this is easy to do, we're sort of hardwired to always have an enemy to direct anger towards.
I think you're a bit off. There ARE Republican politicians who do believe what they say. They're not thinkin about it analytically because they're never needed to do that to get elected. Elected representatives are a mirror of the voting base. If the voting base has a lot of undirected anger because of job loss, then the candidates will get elected by appealing to that anger and often by also having undirected anger (or at least they've articulated a target to point the anger at). In othe words, we have elected representatives who honestly believe that coal jobs could come back. And those representatives are probably taking money directly from the coal companies that have been automating away the jobs.
Yup, and yet people are being told it's due to undocumented immigrants, or unfair trade deals with other countries, or liberal green energy advocates, and so forth. The real reason jobs are going away can usually be traced to the CEOs.
The Republicans do a good job of convincing voters that running a company is a bonus for a politician. Never mind that CEOs are responsible for many of the same things the voters are bitching about - outsourcing jobs, hiring undocumented workers, moving plants overseas, automating the jobs with robots, etc. (the automation is the primary reason many lower skilled jobs are going away, that far outstrips any effect from undocumented immigrants, but it's also the reason for a lot of growth at the same time)
There's a complicated dance being done during elections to both keep big business happy while not appearing to be keeping big business happy. It helps that voters are not bothered by cognitize dissonance (candidate taking money from wall street is bad, candidate actually being from wall street is good).
Also, once past a certain size the business owners are very often not running the business. The stockholders and investors own the company and the board of directors has oversight, but the president/CEO actually runs the company and can be fired by the board. In general the president/CEO sucks up to the board, in the US the president often has an antogonistic relationship with congress, and congress is analogous to the board of directors
The difference I think is that the general public expects "lawyer" to have passed the bar, and "doctor of medicine" to have obtained a license. It's not as common for the general public to assume that an "engineer" has been licensed by the state. The public is not being fooled and the person claiming to be an engineer is not trying to fool anyone. I agree that the licensing boards are upset that all of this is being watered down over time so that engineer is now a generic term, but that's the way it's been going.
I started calling myself an "engineer" to friends and family once I started making more use of the engineering part of the Computer Engineering degree, meaning I wasn't just doing programming but also reading schematics, hooking up test equipment, doing some math, and so forth. After awhile, "engineer" started showing up in my job titles as well.
If someone with a license thinks the term is being watered down, then look to the hordes of electrical engineering graduates who don't have licenses, especially as electrical engineering jobs seem to becoming more and more about programming (VHDL, signal processing, encoding/decoding, image analysis, etc).
I have noticed that those jobs requring an engineering license are often more technical and/or rote in nature and are not at the top of their profession. Once someone becomes a lead designer in many companies there's no longer the requirement for the license. Depends on the job of course, a bridge designer certainly needs the license, but th designer of an electronic board usually does not (the certifications however probably need an underling with a license to do the sign offs).
Some of the tests seem archaic in some ways. Why should an electrical engineer be required to pass questions about fluid dynamics? Engineering is about specialists now, whereas maybe 100 years ago engineers were more generalists.
Also "engineer" is a very vague term. it covers a wide range of jobs. For instance "software engineer" isn't normally considered an "engineer", but there are also "computer engineers" that sort of straddle the border. I know electrical engineers that probably would never pass the basic engineering license exams in some states because it's been far too long since they had to use the mathematics on the tests.
A licensed civil engineer probably doesn't know much about traffic lights but someone who designs, builds, and maintains traffic lights might not have an engineering license while still being the expert. So why does the licensed engineer get the opportunity to talk about something he doesn't know anything about while the unlicensed engineer is ignored for not having a license?
The licensing can be a bit annoying because of the different states with different rules. An engineering license in one state does not always apply in other states, yet it is a large burden to keep licenses up to date when you move to a new state. So many corporations don't care about licenses when they hire most employees unless the actual job requires it (ie, the employee will be signing off on legal liability about safety).
In many places you don't need to register to use the term, but you may have to be licensed to perform engineering functions for the public (ie, if you open up your own firm). But my company has put "engineer" on my title even though I have no license, I have a degree with the word "engineering" on it, and I work for the engineering department. So sometimes I call myself an engineer, but I'm only fooling myself and am not fooling the public. I am not taking any legal liability for my work, the company takes the legal liability and it does have licensed engineers on staff to sign off on the electrical safety of products. As such the state I am in does not require me to get a license before I can do my job.
The state doesn't forbid me from saying I'm an engineer, though I would be violating regulations if I claimed to be a licensed engineer and was selling my services as such.
But he's said it was never his fault, it wasn't his personal finances but the bankruptcy of companies his name was on. So let's hope he does not run the country the way he runs his businesses.
I'm AT&T mostly because I inherited it from a work account. It did have the best voice coverage of anything else in the state. I don't care about data plans though, so I bought the minimum allowed for smart phones, which I think is ridiculous (they should allow no dataplan if that's the customer choice, otherwise it's just another expensive tacked-on fee).
Keeping the money is called stealing. I doubt that would ever change a country's policies for the better. If having a regime that does not meet our standards is just cause to lock up their money, then there are many many allies of the US to do this to. Stop acting like Iran is the only country doing this. We only do this to Iran because they are not as economically important to use as Saudi Arabia or Russia. Go back in time and the US was very friendly with very atrocious regimes, as long as they cliamed to be anti-communist we would hug them with open arms.
Good for you. I used to jog every day. I NEVER felt great after jogging. It was always a chore and it never got easier. If some people feel great after biking then good for them, they are lucky. But they should never browbeat others to join their cult.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't Scientific American, it was from a guest blogger.
In the past though, Slashdot had more technical submissions. Ie, interesting stuff that nerds liked. Now it's just click bait but with easier to block ads. That is the editors are just modern journalists, meaning that they feel there is no need to understand the subject matter but instead just try to get lots of lots of people to read the first line before giving up.
No math-first means he's at another of those wannabe colleges that trade schools in disguise. Removing the science from Computer Science.
Also bizarre to call Python a modern language. It's been around a long time and is fundamentally not that different from other scripting languages that showed up around that time.
If you want expressive, readable, concise, precise, and executable, then use Scheme! Sure, you have to actually *learn* the language first, but that must be true for every language.
Oh what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say "Ni" at will to old ladies.
It's not going away, but it is declining and will not go back to the boom times ever again. Coal is being used less, and the jobs are increasingly being automated, so the demand for coal workers is going to continue to be down. Even buggy whips never disappeared completely.
You seriously dont' see the Conservatives/Republicans basing things on emotion either? Trump won because of a lot of undirected and hard to articulate anger. Ie, the whole "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" feeing from Network is all about emotion. Whereas cold hard logic says that coal is a dying industry because the need for coal is declining, and the need for coal workers is declining even faster as coal producers are replacing workers with automation. Now that the workers have been replaced they won't get rehired even if the demand for coal goes back up.
It's emotion that calls Obama the worst president of all time, not logic. Name calling is always rooted in emotion. Seriously, how can every democratic president of the last 50 years all be the "worst", there can only be one "worst". It's emotion that calls for building a wall on the border despite the net zero increase in the number of undocumented workes.
Yes, there is emotion screwing up logic on both the left and the right, and both sides are driven more by hatred of each other than in having well thought out solutions to problems.
The re-education is a red herring here. You're pushing politics into an issue that is not really political. The basic facts are that some jobs have gone away permanently, and retraining is a good way to get a different job. Anyone who says they already know how to mine coal and refuse to learn a different set of skills for a new job are their own enemies, the people on the coasts are not causing the problems. The reasons the jobs are going away is because the coal companies are automating the jobs, they don't need as many workers per unit of coal. All the political wrangling in the world won't change this, you cannot force companies to hire workers that they don't need.
The "coastal elites" comment again shows that youre trying to make this political, and implies you believe in the silly idea that there's literally a cultural war going on. If you live on the coasts you will see that they are not full of elites, there are a few of course, and there are elites in Kansas and Wisconsin too. California is a state full of liberals and conservatives both, you will find any and all political views represented. When you make this a fight about "us" versus "them", then you are a part of the problem in creating divides. I know this is easy to do, we're sort of hardwired to always have an enemy to direct anger towards.
Well, it has the added benefit of influencing voters.
Isn't this all about getting Canadian oil down to the Gulf of Mexico in order to sell it to China?
I think you're a bit off. There ARE Republican politicians who do believe what they say. They're not thinkin about it analytically because they're never needed to do that to get elected. Elected representatives are a mirror of the voting base. If the voting base has a lot of undirected anger because of job loss, then the candidates will get elected by appealing to that anger and often by also having undirected anger (or at least they've articulated a target to point the anger at). In othe words, we have elected representatives who honestly believe that coal jobs could come back. And those representatives are probably taking money directly from the coal companies that have been automating away the jobs.
Yup, and yet people are being told it's due to undocumented immigrants, or unfair trade deals with other countries, or liberal green energy advocates, and so forth. The real reason jobs are going away can usually be traced to the CEOs.
The Republicans do a good job of convincing voters that running a company is a bonus for a politician. Never mind that CEOs are responsible for many of the same things the voters are bitching about - outsourcing jobs, hiring undocumented workers, moving plants overseas, automating the jobs with robots, etc. (the automation is the primary reason many lower skilled jobs are going away, that far outstrips any effect from undocumented immigrants, but it's also the reason for a lot of growth at the same time)
There's a complicated dance being done during elections to both keep big business happy while not appearing to be keeping big business happy. It helps that voters are not bothered by cognitize dissonance (candidate taking money from wall street is bad, candidate actually being from wall street is good).
I'ts like saying the first job of an engineer is to get hired. After getting hired the company always expects some work in return.
Also, once past a certain size the business owners are very often not running the business. The stockholders and investors own the company and the board of directors has oversight, but the president/CEO actually runs the company and can be fired by the board. In general the president/CEO sucks up to the board, in the US the president often has an antogonistic relationship with congress, and congress is analogous to the board of directors
My favorite New Yorker cartoon along these lines: http://www.condenaststore.com/...
The difference I think is that the general public expects "lawyer" to have passed the bar, and "doctor of medicine" to have obtained a license. It's not as common for the general public to assume that an "engineer" has been licensed by the state. The public is not being fooled and the person claiming to be an engineer is not trying to fool anyone. I agree that the licensing boards are upset that all of this is being watered down over time so that engineer is now a generic term, but that's the way it's been going.
I started calling myself an "engineer" to friends and family once I started making more use of the engineering part of the Computer Engineering degree, meaning I wasn't just doing programming but also reading schematics, hooking up test equipment, doing some math, and so forth. After awhile, "engineer" started showing up in my job titles as well.
If someone with a license thinks the term is being watered down, then look to the hordes of electrical engineering graduates who don't have licenses, especially as electrical engineering jobs seem to becoming more and more about programming (VHDL, signal processing, encoding/decoding, image analysis, etc).
Don't forget the companies who say "I want to hire you as an engineer" who never ask to see a license.
I have noticed that those jobs requring an engineering license are often more technical and/or rote in nature and are not at the top of their profession. Once someone becomes a lead designer in many companies there's no longer the requirement for the license. Depends on the job of course, a bridge designer certainly needs the license, but th designer of an electronic board usually does not (the certifications however probably need an underling with a license to do the sign offs).
Some of the tests seem archaic in some ways. Why should an electrical engineer be required to pass questions about fluid dynamics? Engineering is about specialists now, whereas maybe 100 years ago engineers were more generalists.
Also "engineer" is a very vague term. it covers a wide range of jobs. For instance "software engineer" isn't normally considered an "engineer", but there are also "computer engineers" that sort of straddle the border. I know electrical engineers that probably would never pass the basic engineering license exams in some states because it's been far too long since they had to use the mathematics on the tests.
A licensed civil engineer probably doesn't know much about traffic lights but someone who designs, builds, and maintains traffic lights might not have an engineering license while still being the expert. So why does the licensed engineer get the opportunity to talk about something he doesn't know anything about while the unlicensed engineer is ignored for not having a license?
The licensing can be a bit annoying because of the different states with different rules. An engineering license in one state does not always apply in other states, yet it is a large burden to keep licenses up to date when you move to a new state. So many corporations don't care about licenses when they hire most employees unless the actual job requires it (ie, the employee will be signing off on legal liability about safety).
In many places you don't need to register to use the term, but you may have to be licensed to perform engineering functions for the public (ie, if you open up your own firm). But my company has put "engineer" on my title even though I have no license, I have a degree with the word "engineering" on it, and I work for the engineering department. So sometimes I call myself an engineer, but I'm only fooling myself and am not fooling the public. I am not taking any legal liability for my work, the company takes the legal liability and it does have licensed engineers on staff to sign off on the electrical safety of products. As such the state I am in does not require me to get a license before I can do my job.
The state doesn't forbid me from saying I'm an engineer, though I would be violating regulations if I claimed to be a licensed engineer and was selling my services as such.
But he's said it was never his fault, it wasn't his personal finances but the bankruptcy of companies his name was on. So let's hope he does not run the country the way he runs his businesses.
I'm AT&T mostly because I inherited it from a work account. It did have the best voice coverage of anything else in the state. I don't care about data plans though, so I bought the minimum allowed for smart phones, which I think is ridiculous (they should allow no dataplan if that's the customer choice, otherwise it's just another expensive tacked-on fee).
Keeping the money is called stealing. I doubt that would ever change a country's policies for the better. If having a regime that does not meet our standards is just cause to lock up their money, then there are many many allies of the US to do this to. Stop acting like Iran is the only country doing this. We only do this to Iran because they are not as economically important to use as Saudi Arabia or Russia. Go back in time and the US was very friendly with very atrocious regimes, as long as they cliamed to be anti-communist we would hug them with open arms.
Good for you. I used to jog every day. I NEVER felt great after jogging. It was always a chore and it never got easier. If some people feel great after biking then good for them, they are lucky. But they should never browbeat others to join their cult.