So be a picky union. Like the plumber's unions - you don't get to join a plumber's union without a decade of apprenticeship, peer recommendations, and a practical test. Union shops may coerce everyone into joining, but independent unions can leverage the brand name to guarantee star power. And can kick out dead weight, to boot.
I'm a 1X programmer, but when it comes to writing user manuals, I can crank out a rough draft in a few hours and a polished version in a day. (The downside is putting out a gorgeous, finished user manual, only to have the front end guy change around the menus and graphics the next day. Doh!)
In the anime series Dennou Coil in which kids adapted to such glasses far more easily than the adults, people had virtual pets. Should be easy enough to re-release a modernized Tamagatchi app for this thing. (Or even better, have a flashing light remind you it's time to water your plants and walk your dog.)
Internet cafes never quite took off the same way in the US, since Internet and computer access is readily available for free at most libraries and schools. Instead, offering Internet access became a benefit for restaurants and coffee shops (to the point where some Starbucks got fed up with people parking there all day long and removed their plugs to discourage moochers from staying there 8 hours with a laptop and using them as an office.)
As for gambling, the US government leaves that to states to decide. My state, Georgia, has a state funded lottery. Profits go toward K-12 and college educational programs. South Carolina did video poker instead of a lottery (didn't work nearly as well as the state lotto did in Georgia.) Some states don't want anything at all. Others allow free for all gambling in certain locations.
My office is IT, not industrial, but we have a general "offer to make yourself useful at least once" rule. Done with your assigned asks? Out of routine maintenance? Go ask your boss if anything needs to be done. If he doesn't know, he may ask you to ask a coworker if they need help. If no one needs help, congratulations: it's time to drink hot cocoa and surf Slashdot.
I'll care more about what AT&T wants and needs when they manage to make an Internet connection that stays on steadily for more than six hours at a time. Around here, both AT&T and Charter are notorious for cutting off when the wind gets too stiff.
Surprisingly, they run on Windows machines in English. The hardware probably comes from China, as do the pirated copies of Win XP and Win 7. They refuse to acknowledge that Microsoft localizes Windows in Korean just for the south.
Quantum entanglement is one of those more sci-fi than actual science, and yet it's a real thing we can't quite explain yet. Testing whether it's affected by gravity is a very cool method of poking the phenomenon a bit more. Maybe one day we'll get an answer besides "It's a quantum thing! You wouldn't understand!"
This is very, very true. A better value for someone getting a Master of Fine Arts in Literature who wants to be a writer would be to just live off that money, take two years to travel the country, and write in hotels whenever the heck they feel like writing. Writing is like coding - your first few programs are going to be terrible, but you get better as you practice. Your first book is usually going to be awful. So is the second. By the third or fourth book or program you've written, you're not sucking as bad. By the time you've been writing steadily for two years, you might even be pretty good. The difference is the person who got that MFA hasn't written four books like the person just going into debt to travel the country has, nor do they have the vast life experience the person couch surfing the USA has doubtless picked up.
I went the opposite route. I got my English degree in undergrad (with a focus on technical writing) with a plan to work on websites. The flaw in my plan was that I didn't finish my degree until 2002, at which point the dot com economy had imploded and if I wanted to work on web technology I'd have to move to Silicon Valley. I had no parental support for such a thing (my mother didn't want me to leave Georgia) and knew no one there. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was two years into an eight year degree program and didn't want me to go, either. Then my call center promoted me to a supervisor position, and my dreams of working on websites for a living fell by the wayside.
Two years ago I had the opportunity get a master's degree in Internet programming, and I graduate this May. Since then, I stumbled into a position as a low level Windows systems admin, giving me a nice well rounded IT experience along with my degree. Still trying to find a new job that doesn't require me to move, though!
The lesson derived from that is that you can't make an immediate generational jump from lower class to leisure class. Parents who earn 40K/year in the Army can't really afford to send their kids to SCAD to study underwater basket-weaving. However, grandparents who earned 20K/year in the Army back during WW2 were able to afford to send their kids to college to study engineering at Big State Us, and those engineers making 150K/year can now afford to send their kids to SCAD to learn underwater basket-weaving.
The value of a PhD in the wrong area is nowhere near the value of a master's degree in the right area. Businesses don't give a second glance to PhDs in literature, or sociology, or plant physiology, and the university positions for those are few and far between due to budget cuts. A master's degree in any STEM area will have two or three times the earning potential for a fraction of the cost. That isn't to say that you shouldn't pursue a PhD if you love your subject and love doing research on it. But banking on getting a position within a research university as a result of that degree is dead. (My husband managed to do it, but only by adjuncting at the school for years before he finished his PhD, so that when a full time spot opened up he was the first choice.)
My favorite one from them was the suburb in California that tried to pretend its homes weren't completely empty and the neighborhood devoid of life by renting stuff like a Little League team to play on the nearby softball field, renting cars to park in driveways, etc. Then home buyers would close on the mortgage and move in only to find that the entire place is actually abandoned.
Seems no different in premise than the Call of Duty games or any of the other war games that USians love to play. Too bad it appears to be a single player game and not an MMO - that would be rather awesome.
It sounds like your US education was quite radically different from the one I experienced. The teachers did their best to try to make the students think - but the majority of students did not learn to think, nor did they care to learn. Those of us who learned to think, to question, and to have an interest in everything presented before us were called "advanced learners" and shuffled off to separate classes, where we could think and play and learn to our heart's content. The difference was all in how our parents participated prior to us even starting school, and during the formative years. My mother asked, "Do you have any homework? Do you need help with it?" as far back as first grade, and by fourth grade I no longer needed her help. By 9th grade I finished my too easy homework on the bus. By tenth grade I'd tested into a specialized (magnet) school and for the first time I was surrounded by other thinkers. It was glorious.
Don't forget also that the classical education was reserved for the middle and upper classes, and the lower classes - the bulk of society - never got far beyond basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, if they even got that much at all. Our current model of educating everyone regardless of class is just as modern as your "Marxist education" - and a good bit more radical.
They figured out how to extrude rubies as giant sheets. I saw them when I went to LLNL a few years back. The laser amplification system they developed is very cool, even if otherwise completely useless.
Our biggest client switched to a SaaS model for their primary application. We weren't sorry to see their ratty old servers get retired since they weren't willing to replace the hardware, but we warned them that they'd need redundant ISPs for this model to work. After the first big 2-hour long Internet outage on their primary fiber provider, they agreed and now there's a backup DSL connection.
We do that for systems retired from medical offices, but we give the drive a good DBAN first. THEN we disassemble it (a coworker of mine collects the magnets for some reason) and then smash the platters a few times with a hammer for funsies.
Yep, the game evolved with the times, partially because its own playerbase was growing up (those who started in high school or college all invariably have careers and/or kids now), but also because the MMO market as a whole evolved and the grindfest MMO model is out of favor.
Prior to the introduction of easy leveling (Fields of Valor and Grounds of Valor, then Abyssea), I managed to sqeak five jobs up to level 75. After they made gaining experience a good deal easier, I finished all the jobs out to the new level cap of 99, just because I could. I only really play three or four of them with any regularity, though.
As far back as 1991 I went to "computer camp" - a two week long overnight camp for elementary school kids that was a charitable outreach from our local Army base. During those two weeks, we learned some BASIC and LOGO, did our very first "hello worlds" - and also did some nifty science-camp stuff, like making our own ice cream by hand (and thus learning how salt lowers the freezing point of water) and getting some hands on fundamentals in networking. (Oh token-rings, how we don't miss you.) All for the low low cost of free - although I think I did have to test into the camp.
Not defending the US education's system's oversight in this area, but I bet if Google interviewed some kids at a US engineering high school, they'd have better results.
Slashdot Mirror
So be a picky union. Like the plumber's unions - you don't get to join a plumber's union without a decade of apprenticeship, peer recommendations, and a practical test. Union shops may coerce everyone into joining, but independent unions can leverage the brand name to guarantee star power. And can kick out dead weight, to boot.
I'm a 1X programmer, but when it comes to writing user manuals, I can crank out a rough draft in a few hours and a polished version in a day. (The downside is putting out a gorgeous, finished user manual, only to have the front end guy change around the menus and graphics the next day. Doh!)
In the anime series Dennou Coil in which kids adapted to such glasses far more easily than the adults, people had virtual pets. Should be easy enough to re-release a modernized Tamagatchi app for this thing. (Or even better, have a flashing light remind you it's time to water your plants and walk your dog.)
Internet cafes never quite took off the same way in the US, since Internet and computer access is readily available for free at most libraries and schools. Instead, offering Internet access became a benefit for restaurants and coffee shops (to the point where some Starbucks got fed up with people parking there all day long and removed their plugs to discourage moochers from staying there 8 hours with a laptop and using them as an office.)
As for gambling, the US government leaves that to states to decide. My state, Georgia, has a state funded lottery. Profits go toward K-12 and college educational programs. South Carolina did video poker instead of a lottery (didn't work nearly as well as the state lotto did in Georgia.) Some states don't want anything at all. Others allow free for all gambling in certain locations.
My office is IT, not industrial, but we have a general "offer to make yourself useful at least once" rule. Done with your assigned asks? Out of routine maintenance? Go ask your boss if anything needs to be done. If he doesn't know, he may ask you to ask a coworker if they need help. If no one needs help, congratulations: it's time to drink hot cocoa and surf Slashdot.
I'll care more about what AT&T wants and needs when they manage to make an Internet connection that stays on steadily for more than six hours at a time. Around here, both AT&T and Charter are notorious for cutting off when the wind gets too stiff.
Surprisingly, they run on Windows machines in English. The hardware probably comes from China, as do the pirated copies of Win XP and Win 7. They refuse to acknowledge that Microsoft localizes Windows in Korean just for the south.
Quantum entanglement is one of those more sci-fi than actual science, and yet it's a real thing we can't quite explain yet. Testing whether it's affected by gravity is a very cool method of poking the phenomenon a bit more. Maybe one day we'll get an answer besides "It's a quantum thing! You wouldn't understand!"
Hope you didn't send your kid to SCAD!
Don't forget "Piled Higher and Deeper" - the BS, that is.
This is very, very true. A better value for someone getting a Master of Fine Arts in Literature who wants to be a writer would be to just live off that money, take two years to travel the country, and write in hotels whenever the heck they feel like writing. Writing is like coding - your first few programs are going to be terrible, but you get better as you practice. Your first book is usually going to be awful. So is the second. By the third or fourth book or program you've written, you're not sucking as bad. By the time you've been writing steadily for two years, you might even be pretty good. The difference is the person who got that MFA hasn't written four books like the person just going into debt to travel the country has, nor do they have the vast life experience the person couch surfing the USA has doubtless picked up.
It's also a location thing, probably. Big Data is only in the big cities, and people would rather not move if they can help it.
I went the opposite route. I got my English degree in undergrad (with a focus on technical writing) with a plan to work on websites. The flaw in my plan was that I didn't finish my degree until 2002, at which point the dot com economy had imploded and if I wanted to work on web technology I'd have to move to Silicon Valley. I had no parental support for such a thing (my mother didn't want me to leave Georgia) and knew no one there. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was two years into an eight year degree program and didn't want me to go, either. Then my call center promoted me to a supervisor position, and my dreams of working on websites for a living fell by the wayside.
Two years ago I had the opportunity get a master's degree in Internet programming, and I graduate this May. Since then, I stumbled into a position as a low level Windows systems admin, giving me a nice well rounded IT experience along with my degree. Still trying to find a new job that doesn't require me to move, though!
The lesson derived from that is that you can't make an immediate generational jump from lower class to leisure class. Parents who earn 40K/year in the Army can't really afford to send their kids to SCAD to study underwater basket-weaving. However, grandparents who earned 20K/year in the Army back during WW2 were able to afford to send their kids to college to study engineering at Big State Us, and those engineers making 150K/year can now afford to send their kids to SCAD to learn underwater basket-weaving.
The value of a PhD in the wrong area is nowhere near the value of a master's degree in the right area. Businesses don't give a second glance to PhDs in literature, or sociology, or plant physiology, and the university positions for those are few and far between due to budget cuts. A master's degree in any STEM area will have two or three times the earning potential for a fraction of the cost. That isn't to say that you shouldn't pursue a PhD if you love your subject and love doing research on it. But banking on getting a position within a research university as a result of that degree is dead. (My husband managed to do it, but only by adjuncting at the school for years before he finished his PhD, so that when a full time spot opened up he was the first choice.)
My favorite one from them was the suburb in California that tried to pretend its homes weren't completely empty and the neighborhood devoid of life by renting stuff like a Little League team to play on the nearby softball field, renting cars to park in driveways, etc. Then home buyers would close on the mortgage and move in only to find that the entire place is actually abandoned.
Seems no different in premise than the Call of Duty games or any of the other war games that USians love to play. Too bad it appears to be a single player game and not an MMO - that would be rather awesome.
It sounds like your US education was quite radically different from the one I experienced. The teachers did their best to try to make the students think - but the majority of students did not learn to think, nor did they care to learn. Those of us who learned to think, to question, and to have an interest in everything presented before us were called "advanced learners" and shuffled off to separate classes, where we could think and play and learn to our heart's content. The difference was all in how our parents participated prior to us even starting school, and during the formative years. My mother asked, "Do you have any homework? Do you need help with it?" as far back as first grade, and by fourth grade I no longer needed her help. By 9th grade I finished my too easy homework on the bus. By tenth grade I'd tested into a specialized (magnet) school and for the first time I was surrounded by other thinkers. It was glorious.
Don't forget also that the classical education was reserved for the middle and upper classes, and the lower classes - the bulk of society - never got far beyond basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, if they even got that much at all. Our current model of educating everyone regardless of class is just as modern as your "Marxist education" - and a good bit more radical.
I think this comment was intended for someone else.
They figured out how to extrude rubies as giant sheets. I saw them when I went to LLNL a few years back. The laser amplification system they developed is very cool, even if otherwise completely useless.
Our biggest client switched to a SaaS model for their primary application. We weren't sorry to see their ratty old servers get retired since they weren't willing to replace the hardware, but we warned them that they'd need redundant ISPs for this model to work. After the first big 2-hour long Internet outage on their primary fiber provider, they agreed and now there's a backup DSL connection.
We do that for systems retired from medical offices, but we give the drive a good DBAN first. THEN we disassemble it (a coworker of mine collects the magnets for some reason) and then smash the platters a few times with a hammer for funsies.
Yep, the game evolved with the times, partially because its own playerbase was growing up (those who started in high school or college all invariably have careers and/or kids now), but also because the MMO market as a whole evolved and the grindfest MMO model is out of favor.
Prior to the introduction of easy leveling (Fields of Valor and Grounds of Valor, then Abyssea), I managed to sqeak five jobs up to level 75. After they made gaining experience a good deal easier, I finished all the jobs out to the new level cap of 99, just because I could. I only really play three or four of them with any regularity, though.
I have three spreadsheets for FFXI. But I have not killed anyone... yet.
As far back as 1991 I went to "computer camp" - a two week long overnight camp for elementary school kids that was a charitable outreach from our local Army base. During those two weeks, we learned some BASIC and LOGO, did our very first "hello worlds" - and also did some nifty science-camp stuff, like making our own ice cream by hand (and thus learning how salt lowers the freezing point of water) and getting some hands on fundamentals in networking. (Oh token-rings, how we don't miss you.) All for the low low cost of free - although I think I did have to test into the camp.
Not defending the US education's system's oversight in this area, but I bet if Google interviewed some kids at a US engineering high school, they'd have better results.