I knew someone who made a huge killing in some business early in his twenties or something, to the point where he was set for life. He decided to create a "charitable foundation" to do all his investments. He'd funnel money every which way into it and out of it, in the process funding his family's lifestyle and minimizing taxes. I'm not an accountant so I couldn't tell you what the shit he was doing meant, but I can't see how it could possibly not be a scam.
Some of the money did indeed get tossed to actual charities at the end of the day, but that was blatantly obviously not the main purpose of the "charitable foundation".
The exact scenario does not have to actually be happening for his general point to be made.
If you invest in something that causes ill effects, then donate the proceeds from that investment into combating ill effects, you might as well not be doing anything.
And I earn my paychecks because of the various free platforms that are available thanks to GNU. Although we sell our end product, it runs on OS's that are free, written using free compilers and tools, connects to backends running free software, stores customer data in free software databases, etc. The business side does use a lot of non-free software though.
I'd be curious to find an accounting of what percentage of business value out there can be traced down to being "enabled" by free software vs. non-free software.
This is an example of a benefit that only goes to corporations and the very rich, one not available to us regular suckers.
I wish I could simply declare that I live in Florida or some other state with no income tax, and still keep my same job/income/benefits/lifestyle, but I can't. But society has decided that it's OK to allow corporations to do exactly this.
I blame anyone who tries to boil down a complex set of technologies into a single incrementing number for the purpose of marketing to idiots.
The same thing happened to CDROM speeds, remember? I remember when a 2X CDROM drive was twice as fast as a 1X. Then, marketing departments figured out that the number before the X didn't really have to measure anything, so they just kept re-labeling their drives with bigger numbers before the X, and it became meaningless.
Until you can explain how a normal person is supposed to afford to pay for a $200,000 surgery, "You pay for your healthcare, I'll pay for mine" will never be anything more than a simplistic talk-radio sound bite that sounds nice but doesn't even come remotely close to solving the problem.
If socialized medicine and shared risk pools (insurance) are not the answer, fine, what is your proposal?
I want to see an actual description of a workable solution where everyone pays for their own healthcare, out of their savings, one that doesn't boil down to "the poor just suffer and/or die".
Bingo. Not saying that public educators are by and large overly-qualified, but they at least have Masters' degrees and passed some minimal certification standards. They are far more qualified to educate kids than most homeschoolers. Send the kid to real school, your "home schooling" is not doing him any favors.
Please. Police were ALSO going after Occupy protesters who were NOT squatting in tent cities, littering, urinating in public, using drugs, assaulting, etc.
The reason for the difference in treatment between Occupiers and Tea Partiers has everything to do with the groups' messages: Occupiers protest corporate power, Tea Baggers support corporate power. That's why one group gets to open carry and make death threats, and the other group gets truncheons and tear gas canisters to the face when they hold up signs.
Boss, Company X's product would save our company $3M a year in costs, but I told them to fuck off because THEY HAD BOOTH BABES at a TRADE SHOW!! Surely we don't need those cost savings.
Take CES for instance. I wouldn't take my 15 year old daughter to CES because it is a TRADE EVENT, mostly for corporate buyers and press. No 15 year old is going to be interested in that.
And if they are interested? Who cares? Why not "expose them" to a tech trade show? Because they might learn that sometimes companies pay attractive women to simply stand in their booths wearing skimpy outfits, because it will drive foot traffic and potentially lead to business? Some companies at trade shows put up strobe lights or serve free alcohol for the same reason. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
I won't dispute your facts, but I don't think we're comparing apples to apples. What other differences are there between the platforms that would account for the different cost per kg? Safety? Redundancy? It has to be more than simple "government waste". Yes, some of the difference might be waste, but that's an argument for reducing waste, not for punting and instead simply handing public money over to private hands.
Just another example: I moved from Bumblefuck Florida to Silicon the Bay Area in 2010. Here's what happened:
1. My rent doubled 2. The size of the place where I lived halved 3. Groceries, gas, and other expenses increased on average by about 50% 4. My salary only went up by about 20% 5. I have to pay state income tax now
The summary is, I have far less take-home pay and far less to save. By the math it was a terrible move, but one thing I have here is less risk. If I get tired of my tech job, there are 5 other tech companies across the street who are hiring. Also, if I ever want to do a start-up and get funded, the angel/vc climate here is much better--I don't have to travel 3 counties over to find the one angel investor for half the State.
So the public funds it and takes all the risk, and presumably, all the upside and profits go to private individuals/investors. Blatant transfer of public wealth into private hands. We're not even trying to hide it anymore.
Wow, that was... actually a great reply. I agree that now that you mention it, I'm conflating managers and supervisors. My only response to that oversight would be that in many companies, those two roles are played by the same person or groups of people.
The point I was trying to make was not the difference between those roles, but the fact that SOMEBODY has to herd the cats and make sure they're all running in the right direction. And these cats are NOT all going to be from the top 2%. Too many Slashdotters imagine this fantasy office, with a bunch of really smart, self-motivated techies all working diligently with a shared mind to produce an awesome product. Nobody is underpaid. Nobody is confused about the product's requirements. Nobody is overworked and can't finish their assigned tasks this week. Everybody has equity or a huge stake in the company's success. They all commute to work every morning on a unicorn too, because these companies are extremely rare and small.
In the real world, you've got a bunch of workers who can barely get their assigned tasks done. They are sloppy. They don't understand the product they're making. Many are hard working, but aren't naturally talented, and make mistakes. They have kids who are sick, or have stress outside of work. In other words, they are not idealized genius super-workers. Products don't simply leap from their fingertips onto store shelves, flawless, perfect for the market, selling itself. You need managers (and supervisors, thanks) to make sure they are productive and are achieving the company's goals.
For 99% of companies out there, you can't just punt and say, "Well, just hire the very very best!!"
Ok, smart guys, I give up... Exactly who's job is it "to tell people what to do, make sure they are doing their jobs, make sure they follow through, ferret out incompetence" if not management?
Where do the magical unicorns come in? I suppose that might be true if you're one of those few companies that hires only the brightest 2% of technical workers out there. In most companies, however, your team is made up of one, maybe two really talented people, a few hard workers, and the rest just productive enough to not get fired.
Management's job is often to tell people what to do, make sure they are doing their jobs, make sure they follow through, ferret out incompetence, and watch everyone like a hawk. You might call this micromanagement but it's unfortunately necessary when your workers are not the cream of the crop, not "self-motivating" nor "self-organizing"--basically most companies.
It's not that Stanford is too focused on Silicon Valley. It's that Silicon Valley is too focused on Stanford.
As an outsider to the valley, I find it pretty creepy how obsessed everyone is about Stanford and Stanford grads. It's as if, when one of them walks in the room, I'm supposed to cream my jeans over his very presence. Sure, some of them are smart, but so are some east coast state school graduates, community college graduates, and non-college-grads. I don't quite understand the "oooooooh Staaaaaaanford!" aura.
It's also pretty shitty that "Went to Stanford" is often an un-spoken, "soft" job requirement for more than a few valley tech companies.
I wouldn't say C "forces one to think about" anything, besides always wondering exactly how big you made that array that you're about to iterate through....
It's funny.. Whenever people criticize C++ with some nebulous claim of "poor performance", they always cite some specific poor usage of the language, or programmers who don't know what they are doing.
I could paint C as a language fraught with crashes and C programmers as idiots, by showing examples of buffer over-runs and null-pointer dereferencing, but it would be equally dishonest.
I'm not sure I understand these "trust" figures. I completely trust that banks, big business, and politicians will behave like banks, big business, and politicians. Like everyone, they will maximize their own gains at the expense of others, and take whatever advantage they can. I have complete, 100% confidence that they will behave this way.
Oh, my god! Your data is being sold! I'm sorry to hear how horrible this must be for you. I can't imagine the daily pain and anguish this is causing you.
Slashdot Mirror
Irradicating polio in a nation even if only for a while is...
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
I knew someone who made a huge killing in some business early in his twenties or something, to the point where he was set for life. He decided to create a "charitable foundation" to do all his investments. He'd funnel money every which way into it and out of it, in the process funding his family's lifestyle and minimizing taxes. I'm not an accountant so I couldn't tell you what the shit he was doing meant, but I can't see how it could possibly not be a scam.
Some of the money did indeed get tossed to actual charities at the end of the day, but that was blatantly obviously not the main purpose of the "charitable foundation".
The exact scenario does not have to actually be happening for his general point to be made.
If you invest in something that causes ill effects, then donate the proceeds from that investment into combating ill effects, you might as well not be doing anything.
And I earn my paychecks because of the various free platforms that are available thanks to GNU. Although we sell our end product, it runs on OS's that are free, written using free compilers and tools, connects to backends running free software, stores customer data in free software databases, etc. The business side does use a lot of non-free software though.
I'd be curious to find an accounting of what percentage of business value out there can be traced down to being "enabled" by free software vs. non-free software.
This is an example of a benefit that only goes to corporations and the very rich, one not available to us regular suckers.
I wish I could simply declare that I live in Florida or some other state with no income tax, and still keep my same job/income/benefits/lifestyle, but I can't. But society has decided that it's OK to allow corporations to do exactly this.
I blame anyone who tries to boil down a complex set of technologies into a single incrementing number for the purpose of marketing to idiots.
The same thing happened to CDROM speeds, remember? I remember when a 2X CDROM drive was twice as fast as a 1X. Then, marketing departments figured out that the number before the X didn't really have to measure anything, so they just kept re-labeling their drives with bigger numbers before the X, and it became meaningless.
Until you can explain how a normal person is supposed to afford to pay for a $200,000 surgery, "You pay for your healthcare, I'll pay for mine" will never be anything more than a simplistic talk-radio sound bite that sounds nice but doesn't even come remotely close to solving the problem.
If socialized medicine and shared risk pools (insurance) are not the answer, fine, what is your proposal?
I want to see an actual description of a workable solution where everyone pays for their own healthcare, out of their savings, one that doesn't boil down to "the poor just suffer and/or die".
Bingo. Not saying that public educators are by and large overly-qualified, but they at least have Masters' degrees and passed some minimal certification standards. They are far more qualified to educate kids than most homeschoolers. Send the kid to real school, your "home schooling" is not doing him any favors.
Please. Police were ALSO going after Occupy protesters who were NOT squatting in tent cities, littering, urinating in public, using drugs, assaulting, etc.
The reason for the difference in treatment between Occupiers and Tea Partiers has everything to do with the groups' messages: Occupiers protest corporate power, Tea Baggers support corporate power. That's why one group gets to open carry and make death threats, and the other group gets truncheons and tear gas canisters to the face when they hold up signs.
I'd love to hear that conversation.
Boss, Company X's product would save our company $3M a year in costs, but I told them to fuck off because THEY HAD BOOTH BABES at a TRADE SHOW!! Surely we don't need those cost savings.
Just because you are used to it doesn't mean that sexism is absent.
She didn't say that sexism is absent. She said that "problems with sexism" have been absent.
It seems that the only one who has a problem with companies hiring booth babes is you.
Take CES for instance. I wouldn't take my 15 year old daughter to CES because it is a TRADE EVENT, mostly for corporate buyers and press. No 15 year old is going to be interested in that.
And if they are interested? Who cares? Why not "expose them" to a tech trade show? Because they might learn that sometimes companies pay attractive women to simply stand in their booths wearing skimpy outfits, because it will drive foot traffic and potentially lead to business? Some companies at trade shows put up strobe lights or serve free alcohol for the same reason. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
I won't dispute your facts, but I don't think we're comparing apples to apples. What other differences are there between the platforms that would account for the different cost per kg? Safety? Redundancy? It has to be more than simple "government waste". Yes, some of the difference might be waste, but that's an argument for reducing waste, not for punting and instead simply handing public money over to private hands.
Just another example: I moved from Bumblefuck Florida to Silicon the Bay Area in 2010. Here's what happened:
1. My rent doubled
2. The size of the place where I lived halved
3. Groceries, gas, and other expenses increased on average by about 50%
4. My salary only went up by about 20%
5. I have to pay state income tax now
The summary is, I have far less take-home pay and far less to save. By the math it was a terrible move, but one thing I have here is less risk. If I get tired of my tech job, there are 5 other tech companies across the street who are hiring. Also, if I ever want to do a start-up and get funded, the angel/vc climate here is much better--I don't have to travel 3 counties over to find the one angel investor for half the State.
It's almost worth it.
So the public funds it and takes all the risk, and presumably, all the upside and profits go to private individuals/investors. Blatant transfer of public wealth into private hands. We're not even trying to hide it anymore.
What the hell is a virii?
Only on Slashdot would making software usage "easier and more common" be seen as a bad thing.
Wow, that was... actually a great reply. I agree that now that you mention it, I'm conflating managers and supervisors. My only response to that oversight would be that in many companies, those two roles are played by the same person or groups of people.
The point I was trying to make was not the difference between those roles, but the fact that SOMEBODY has to herd the cats and make sure they're all running in the right direction. And these cats are NOT all going to be from the top 2%. Too many Slashdotters imagine this fantasy office, with a bunch of really smart, self-motivated techies all working diligently with a shared mind to produce an awesome product. Nobody is underpaid. Nobody is confused about the product's requirements. Nobody is overworked and can't finish their assigned tasks this week. Everybody has equity or a huge stake in the company's success. They all commute to work every morning on a unicorn too, because these companies are extremely rare and small.
In the real world, you've got a bunch of workers who can barely get their assigned tasks done. They are sloppy. They don't understand the product they're making. Many are hard working, but aren't naturally talented, and make mistakes. They have kids who are sick, or have stress outside of work. In other words, they are not idealized genius super-workers. Products don't simply leap from their fingertips onto store shelves, flawless, perfect for the market, selling itself. You need managers (and supervisors, thanks) to make sure they are productive and are achieving the company's goals.
For 99% of companies out there, you can't just punt and say, "Well, just hire the very very best!!"
Ok, smart guys, I give up... Exactly who's job is it "to tell people what to do, make sure they are doing their jobs, make sure they follow through, ferret out incompetence" if not management?
Where do the magical unicorns come in? I suppose that might be true if you're one of those few companies that hires only the brightest 2% of technical workers out there. In most companies, however, your team is made up of one, maybe two really talented people, a few hard workers, and the rest just productive enough to not get fired.
Management's job is often to tell people what to do, make sure they are doing their jobs, make sure they follow through, ferret out incompetence, and watch everyone like a hawk. You might call this micromanagement but it's unfortunately necessary when your workers are not the cream of the crop, not "self-motivating" nor "self-organizing"--basically most companies.
It's not that Stanford is too focused on Silicon Valley. It's that Silicon Valley is too focused on Stanford.
As an outsider to the valley, I find it pretty creepy how obsessed everyone is about Stanford and Stanford grads. It's as if, when one of them walks in the room, I'm supposed to cream my jeans over his very presence. Sure, some of them are smart, but so are some east coast state school graduates, community college graduates, and non-college-grads. I don't quite understand the "oooooooh Staaaaaaanford!" aura.
It's also pretty shitty that "Went to Stanford" is often an un-spoken, "soft" job requirement for more than a few valley tech companies.
I wouldn't say C "forces one to think about" anything, besides always wondering exactly how big you made that array that you're about to iterate through....
It's funny.. Whenever people criticize C++ with some nebulous claim of "poor performance", they always cite some specific poor usage of the language, or programmers who don't know what they are doing.
I could paint C as a language fraught with crashes and C programmers as idiots, by showing examples of buffer over-runs and null-pointer dereferencing, but it would be equally dishonest.
Well, you can always choose not to, and live in a trailer eating dog food. Your choice.
I'm not sure I understand these "trust" figures. I completely trust that banks, big business, and politicians will behave like banks, big business, and politicians. Like everyone, they will maximize their own gains at the expense of others, and take whatever advantage they can. I have complete, 100% confidence that they will behave this way.
Oh, my god! Your data is being sold! I'm sorry to hear how horrible this must be for you. I can't imagine the daily pain and anguish this is causing you.