Never confuse "leadership" with "management". I'm quite well compensated, and a key reason is my ability to drag projects across the finish line, and the primary obstacles are often managers and petty territorial pissing. Another reason is that I make a concerted effort to raise both the code quality and developer morale around me - often by forcing a change in toolchain or automation through the bureaucracy to address whatever's frustrating developers most day-to-day. Sure, some companies don't value that sort of thing, but plenty do - enough for a solid career.
It's the problem domain, not the language. Front-end webdev seems more concerned with language fashion, and kernel work still scoffs at anything but C, but in-between language doesn't seem to matter that much.
I've most of my career writing no-UI usermode code, and employers haven't much cared which language I knew. It's sort-of moved from C++/C#/Java being interchangeable to Java/C#/Python, though many hiring managers still seem skeptical of Python as a "real language" (I expect that will change over time).
It's not your ability to bang out code in any language that will advance your career anyhow - whether tech track or management, it's one set of leadership skills or another that come to matter most.
I suspect Seattle-area power use is dominated by industrial (mostly datacenters), but peak home use does not move pre-5PM in the winter - not sure why you even think it would. Oddly, there's lots of electric heating around here, and in the winter I suspect peak home load may be in the coldest hours. Not sure why gas isn't more common.
hedge your bets and go 50/50 south and west. Maybe 50% southwest, 25% west, 25% south and setup a water wheel and perhaps an agrarian society.
Lattitude matters too. Where I live, it's dark at 5PM. West-pointing would be a bit silly. Of course, it's a different story in Summer. A home fission plant sounds much more reliable to me! It'll really reduce my lighting costs when I glow in the dark.
may be wrong, but I somehow doubt that the unions were running the pension funds and company investments.
Well, they are now. The unsustainable pension obligations were the result of a series of negotiations with the unions - whether the unions fooled the company into this obligation, or the company knew this was unsustainable was anyone's guess, but it simply wasn't possible for the company to stay in business with that burden.
And I'm all in favour of robotic manufacturing, I just expect the benefits to be shared out equally, not focussed into the hands of a few people who can afford to buy robotic factories.
Ah, so overtly a Communist then. Lucky for you, "robotic factories" and "home 3D printers" will eventually be the same thing. Sill no guarantee you can actually afford one though, any more than you have a guarantee you can afford food or shelter. A man must work for his keep.
Is there any actual evidence that registry key actually had something to do with the NSA? I thought that was urban legend. I didn't hear about it from any of the Snowden releases. All of the stuff we did hear about make something like a registry key look childish compared to the actual exploits the NSA uses.
In any case, the limitations of Windows encryption were well know, and did limit its uptake, but BitLocker is still fine for most people to protect their laptops, as Microsoft can't decrypt it. Your domain admin can, but that's a feature Or at least it is to the domain admins who choose to roll it out).
Not just the internet. Chris Rock recently explained that he won't perform on college campuses any more - and that that's now the norm for stand-up comics - because students are just too easily offended and conservative (not in a vote-republican way, but in a prudish-and-humorless way).
Fuck all those fucking fuckers if they fucking think they'll fucking censor my fucking Slashdot.
Using your credit card reduces the declared cash reserve needs for banks as much as 10 to 1.
Banks don't care at all about that. The reserve requirement for savings accounts and CDs is 0 anyhow - only checking accounts (among consumer accounts) currently have any reserve requirements, and that's quite low.
And despite all that, bank have voluntarily deposited about $2 Trillion with the Fed, because the Fed is paying better interest on that money than T-Bills pay. Banks just aren't seeking to reduce their reserves right now, though that will change as the economy expands, I expect.
"-man" as a suffix is gender neutral, usually. "-person" etc just misunderstand the etymology.
The old English roots are: * "man", meaning roughly "human", any age or sex * "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf) * "wif", adult female (of any marital status)
Over time we lost the male-specific word, with "man" doing double-duty for male and neuter meanings, while the original meaning of "wif" became "wif-man" became "woman".
The one startup I worked for in Silly Valley was run by an Indian guy, not so young, but extraordinarily colorful - not so much "flamboyantly gay" as "the Cat from Red Dwarf". I half expected him to click his heels and spin around every time he walked past. I'm sure he was rich, as this wasn't his first time as a startup CEO, but that's all he had in common with "rich white frat boy".
OTOH, my interview with him consisted of us discussing who I had worked for in the past that he knew - not quite a clique, but some overlap with people he trusted was key.
I highly recommend Elizabeth Moon's book Speed of Dark which discussed exploiting in both senses of the word in a fictional context, along with the moral questions around a cure for autism. It's well-researched, at least, and sensitive to its topic.
When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges
Those jobs don't matter anyhow - they'll all be done by robots. The conversation was about skilled jobs that pay well. That's what we want America to be centered on! Not crap jobs that are going away soon anyhow.
The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest.
It's not that simple. When labor costs scale with the number of items sold, then sure. But when labor costs are your R&D budget (or whatever you call the cost of producing, say, a film), and you have vast economies of scale, then it's all about making a great product, not cutting labor costs. When what's on the line is the difference between iPhone sales and Zune/Kin/Fire phone sales, or a film with $1B vs $10 MM sales, the goal isn't cutting an extra million off R&D, but on hiring the best you can find.
we sent illegal aliens home rather than coddling them and giving them amnesty despite breaking the law, disease infection wouldn't be an issue, would it?
And if unicorn giggles cured cancer, all we'd need is more unicorns. But here in the realm of the possible, subsidizing health care for illegals is net cheaper for me. I'm not going to pay more just to watch them suffer, sorry.
Why should I have to pay for rehab for a drunk? They're the ones who couldn't control themselves. As I said in the beginning, if they have money to buy alcohol they have money to pay for their own treatment. In fact, this would address two issues: they would have to go to rehab or face jail and by spending money on rehab they'd have less money to spend on purchasing alcohol.
Again, if the goal is reducing my chance of injury, subsidizing recovery clinics is the cost-effective way. I'm not going to pay more just to watch them suffer, sorry. Now, if you want to also fine those convicted the cost of that care, sure, go for it, but that only addresses those caught an convicted, not the many others who might seek free help when they got some other form of reality check.
The point of laws is not to bless or condemn specific actions, but to provide in incentives that produce a society best for each of us.
Why should we provide health care for illegal aliens? Because diseases are contagious. Whether the person receiving the preventive care deserves it is entirely irrelevant - I'm paying to keep me from getting infected by some broke asshole.
Why should we provide rehab clinics for drunken drivers? Because drunk drivers are dangerous to others. Whether the person receiving the preventive care deserves it is entirely irrelevant - I'm paying to keep me from getting hit by some drunk asshole.
No it won't. We've already had the time (the stock market is nothing new) and it has resulted in concentration of wealth in a very small share of the population.
Worked for me. Can work for you. Stop making excuse and invest.
ince the bottom 80% of the population only owns 7% of the wealth, even if they all took a "broad interest" and invested everything they had
You accumulate wealth by investing, you don't accumulate wealth by magic and then invest it. The reason wealth is so concentrated is the mass investing is new, and it takes decades to grow wealth. More investing, and more understanding of wealth by more people, will certainly fix the concentration issues.
If this is important to you, first get your own house in order before complaining about others. Discount brokers and the internet has basically leveled the playing field - more than leveled, as the broker-manged-accounts are basically a scam anyhow. It's not rocket science, it just takes patience and the determination to avoid get-rich-quick scams and advisers.
GM was bankrupt because of their union pension plans, full stop. The pension plans cost more than all the active union workers. Blame anyone you want to for that, the future of manufacturing is all robots anyhow.
Disney shareholders, Viacom shareholders... the list goes on. I care about their pockets exactly the same amount as they care about mine - zero.
Why do you hate retired people? No, seriously - that's the vast majority of shareholders in the modern world. More than half of Americans own stock, usually as part of some 401k or pension plan (it was up to nearly 2/3s before the 08 collapse). The "owning class" is, well, everyone these days.
Sure, ownership is unduly concentrated, but time and a broad interest in investing will fix that. All you have to do is buy stock, no 1%er can stop you.
Why don't I and my fellow union members, in your view, have the right to seek more profit, just like they do?
Hey, go for it, whatever. I can always sell my stock, and work elsewhere. Just don't take over an industry, that's a monopoly practice as bad as any other. I think you'll find most software developers rather enjoy the idea of meritocracy, and aren't particularly eager for a system based solely on seniority, but maybe there some group somewhere who aren't - people who think they're below average are sure to like the concept!
The correct test is not "intention" but "reasonable person". IMO, no reasonable person would believe anything the read on the Internet, including threats. But reasonable people seem scarce these days.
Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill.
Sure, easy, take the log, subtract the other log, then take the antilog. You do have your log tables memorized, right? Before desktop calculators, being able to do logs and antilogs from memorized tables was also a "critical life skill". How else would you really understand how sliderules work?
Now, I do find it handy to know logs to 1-2 digits, as it lets me estimate things like 8th roots in my head (useful for thinking about interest rates), but, really, for an accurate answer it's not my sliderule I reach for. I bemoan the growing innumeracy of people myself, but given the growing tendency to really have a calculator at arms reach 24/7, I'm not sure how critical long division really is.
Expirable taxi licenses, granted by the government to anyone who passes a test and pays a fee would be government regulation and a part of the price of doing business. The cost of the process would be transferred to the customers while the benefit would be reaped by both the customers, small business owners and in part general public through the ensured qualities of the drivers and their abilities which would be determined by the administered test.
And in many places that's exactly how it works! Taxis, Towncars, and limos all have the same sticker. But the sticker on the car has nothing at all to do with the quality of the driver. People keep not getting this in these Uber discussions. Taxis are only very rarely owned by their drivers - the drivers rent them by the day from the taxi company. The assurance of product quality you get from anything attached to the car is limited (especially if it's a medallion you can move form car to car - tat adds no value at all).
Special licensing for the drivers seems much more useful, and is already in place separate from "medallions" everywhere I've heard of. It's the drivers license to focus on, not some BS revenue scheme for the cars.
If there's no artificial scarcity, then no it's not a monopoly, but then what purpose do the medallions serve? You do realize that Uber started with all full-time drivers, right? Real-time dispatch of "livery service" cars: the drivers are permitted just like taxi drivers, but the cars (usually Towncars) aren't technically taxis.
I'm all for a "chauffer's license" (as its called in many states): a specific commercial drivers license required to drive others for money, taxi or no.
You do realize many/most taxi drivers are part time, right? The normal system in most places means only the most successful drivers actually own a taxi. The rest rent by car by the calendar day, and pay a hefty sum for that. The result is it's normal to try to stay awake for as much of that 48 hours as possible, as it takes many hours of driving just to cover the fixed daily cost of the taxi, then sleep for a day or two, then repeat. This is not a system geared towards safety!
Why are medallions even sold as an asset, instead of leased from the city government? It just creates a vehicle for private rent-seeking and speculation
Rent-seeking by the government is no better!
Business monopolies can fail over time, and given time for the management to change, usually do (look at MS's works, ye mighty, and despair). But government-granted monopolies have lasted for centuries in the past.
Keep government in the business of regulating product quality and fraud, and out of the business of creating monopolies. A commercial driver's license is a great idea, and it the right answer to the "Uber problem". Artificial scarcity for government profit is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Never confuse "leadership" with "management". I'm quite well compensated, and a key reason is my ability to drag projects across the finish line, and the primary obstacles are often managers and petty territorial pissing. Another reason is that I make a concerted effort to raise both the code quality and developer morale around me - often by forcing a change in toolchain or automation through the bureaucracy to address whatever's frustrating developers most day-to-day. Sure, some companies don't value that sort of thing, but plenty do - enough for a solid career.
It's the problem domain, not the language. Front-end webdev seems more concerned with language fashion, and kernel work still scoffs at anything but C, but in-between language doesn't seem to matter that much.
I've most of my career writing no-UI usermode code, and employers haven't much cared which language I knew. It's sort-of moved from C++/C#/Java being interchangeable to Java/C#/Python, though many hiring managers still seem skeptical of Python as a "real language" (I expect that will change over time).
It's not your ability to bang out code in any language that will advance your career anyhow - whether tech track or management, it's one set of leadership skills or another that come to matter most.
I suspect Seattle-area power use is dominated by industrial (mostly datacenters), but peak home use does not move pre-5PM in the winter - not sure why you even think it would. Oddly, there's lots of electric heating around here, and in the winter I suspect peak home load may be in the coldest hours. Not sure why gas isn't more common.
hedge your bets and go 50/50 south and west. Maybe 50% southwest, 25% west, 25% south and setup a water wheel and perhaps an agrarian society.
Lattitude matters too. Where I live, it's dark at 5PM. West-pointing would be a bit silly. Of course, it's a different story in Summer. A home fission plant sounds much more reliable to me! It'll really reduce my lighting costs when I glow in the dark.
may be wrong, but I somehow doubt that the unions were running the pension funds and company investments.
Well, they are now. The unsustainable pension obligations were the result of a series of negotiations with the unions - whether the unions fooled the company into this obligation, or the company knew this was unsustainable was anyone's guess, but it simply wasn't possible for the company to stay in business with that burden.
And I'm all in favour of robotic manufacturing, I just expect the benefits to be shared out equally, not focussed into the hands of a few people who can afford to buy robotic factories.
Ah, so overtly a Communist then. Lucky for you, "robotic factories" and "home 3D printers" will eventually be the same thing. Sill no guarantee you can actually afford one though, any more than you have a guarantee you can afford food or shelter. A man must work for his keep.
Is there any actual evidence that registry key actually had something to do with the NSA? I thought that was urban legend. I didn't hear about it from any of the Snowden releases. All of the stuff we did hear about make something like a registry key look childish compared to the actual exploits the NSA uses.
In any case, the limitations of Windows encryption were well know, and did limit its uptake, but BitLocker is still fine for most people to protect their laptops, as Microsoft can't decrypt it. Your domain admin can, but that's a feature Or at least it is to the domain admins who choose to roll it out).
Not just the internet. Chris Rock recently explained that he won't perform on college campuses any more - and that that's now the norm for stand-up comics - because students are just too easily offended and conservative (not in a vote-republican way, but in a prudish-and-humorless way).
Fuck all those fucking fuckers if they fucking think they'll fucking censor my fucking Slashdot.
You say that like you're new to Slashdot - bought the UID recently?
This post not brought to you by the GNAA, but by OOG THE CAVEMAN and true oldschool trolling.
Using your credit card reduces the declared cash reserve needs for banks as much as 10 to 1.
Banks don't care at all about that. The reserve requirement for savings accounts and CDs is 0 anyhow - only checking accounts (among consumer accounts) currently have any reserve requirements, and that's quite low.
And despite all that, bank have voluntarily deposited about $2 Trillion with the Fed, because the Fed is paying better interest on that money than T-Bills pay. Banks just aren't seeking to reduce their reserves right now, though that will change as the economy expands, I expect.
"-man" as a suffix is gender neutral, usually. "-person" etc just misunderstand the etymology.
The old English roots are:
* "man", meaning roughly "human", any age or sex
* "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf)
* "wif", adult female (of any marital status)
Over time we lost the male-specific word, with "man" doing double-duty for male and neuter meanings, while the original meaning of "wif" became "wif-man" became "woman".
The one startup I worked for in Silly Valley was run by an Indian guy, not so young, but extraordinarily colorful - not so much "flamboyantly gay" as "the Cat from Red Dwarf". I half expected him to click his heels and spin around every time he walked past. I'm sure he was rich, as this wasn't his first time as a startup CEO, but that's all he had in common with "rich white frat boy".
OTOH, my interview with him consisted of us discussing who I had worked for in the past that he knew - not quite a clique, but some overlap with people he trusted was key.
I highly recommend Elizabeth Moon's book Speed of Dark which discussed exploiting in both senses of the word in a fictional context, along with the moral questions around a cure for autism. It's well-researched, at least, and sensitive to its topic.
When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges
Those jobs don't matter anyhow - they'll all be done by robots. The conversation was about skilled jobs that pay well. That's what we want America to be centered on! Not crap jobs that are going away soon anyhow.
The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest.
It's not that simple. When labor costs scale with the number of items sold, then sure. But when labor costs are your R&D budget (or whatever you call the cost of producing, say, a film), and you have vast economies of scale, then it's all about making a great product, not cutting labor costs. When what's on the line is the difference between iPhone sales and Zune/Kin/Fire phone sales, or a film with $1B vs $10 MM sales, the goal isn't cutting an extra million off R&D, but on hiring the best you can find.
we sent illegal aliens home rather than coddling them and giving them amnesty despite breaking the law, disease infection wouldn't be an issue, would it?
And if unicorn giggles cured cancer, all we'd need is more unicorns. But here in the realm of the possible, subsidizing health care for illegals is net cheaper for me. I'm not going to pay more just to watch them suffer, sorry.
Why should I have to pay for rehab for a drunk? They're the ones who couldn't control themselves. As I said in the beginning, if they have money to buy alcohol they have money to pay for their own treatment. In fact, this would address two issues: they would have to go to rehab or face jail and by spending money on rehab they'd have less money to spend on purchasing alcohol.
Again, if the goal is reducing my chance of injury, subsidizing recovery clinics is the cost-effective way. I'm not going to pay more just to watch them suffer, sorry. Now, if you want to also fine those convicted the cost of that care, sure, go for it, but that only addresses those caught an convicted, not the many others who might seek free help when they got some other form of reality check.
The point of laws is not to bless or condemn specific actions, but to provide in incentives that produce a society best for each of us.
Why should we provide health care for illegal aliens? Because diseases are contagious. Whether the person receiving the preventive care deserves it is entirely irrelevant - I'm paying to keep me from getting infected by some broke asshole.
Why should we provide rehab clinics for drunken drivers? Because drunk drivers are dangerous to others. Whether the person receiving the preventive care deserves it is entirely irrelevant - I'm paying to keep me from getting hit by some drunk asshole.
No it won't. We've already had the time (the stock market is nothing new) and it has resulted in concentration of wealth in a very small share of the population.
Worked for me. Can work for you. Stop making excuse and invest.
ince the bottom 80% of the population only owns 7% of the wealth, even if they all took a "broad interest" and invested everything they had
You accumulate wealth by investing, you don't accumulate wealth by magic and then invest it. The reason wealth is so concentrated is the mass investing is new, and it takes decades to grow wealth. More investing, and more understanding of wealth by more people, will certainly fix the concentration issues.
If this is important to you, first get your own house in order before complaining about others. Discount brokers and the internet has basically leveled the playing field - more than leveled, as the broker-manged-accounts are basically a scam anyhow. It's not rocket science, it just takes patience and the determination to avoid get-rich-quick scams and advisers.
GM was bankrupt because of their union pension plans, full stop. The pension plans cost more than all the active union workers. Blame anyone you want to for that, the future of manufacturing is all robots anyhow.
Disney shareholders, Viacom shareholders... the list goes on. I care about their pockets exactly the same amount as they care about mine - zero.
Why do you hate retired people? No, seriously - that's the vast majority of shareholders in the modern world. More than half of Americans own stock, usually as part of some 401k or pension plan (it was up to nearly 2/3s before the 08 collapse). The "owning class" is, well, everyone these days.
Sure, ownership is unduly concentrated, but time and a broad interest in investing will fix that. All you have to do is buy stock, no 1%er can stop you.
Why don't I and my fellow union members, in your view, have the right to seek more profit, just like they do?
Hey, go for it, whatever. I can always sell my stock, and work elsewhere. Just don't take over an industry, that's a monopoly practice as bad as any other. I think you'll find most software developers rather enjoy the idea of meritocracy, and aren't particularly eager for a system based solely on seniority, but maybe there some group somewhere who aren't - people who think they're below average are sure to like the concept!
The correct test is not "intention" but "reasonable person". IMO, no reasonable person would believe anything the read on the Internet, including threats. But reasonable people seem scarce these days.
Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill.
Sure, easy, take the log, subtract the other log, then take the antilog. You do have your log tables memorized, right? Before desktop calculators, being able to do logs and antilogs from memorized tables was also a "critical life skill". How else would you really understand how sliderules work?
Now, I do find it handy to know logs to 1-2 digits, as it lets me estimate things like 8th roots in my head (useful for thinking about interest rates), but, really, for an accurate answer it's not my sliderule I reach for. I bemoan the growing innumeracy of people myself, but given the growing tendency to really have a calculator at arms reach 24/7, I'm not sure how critical long division really is.
I blame systemd anyhow. The growing use of systemd is also the primary cause of global warming, and the declining honeybee population.
Expirable taxi licenses, granted by the government to anyone who passes a test and pays a fee would be government regulation and a part of the price of doing business.
The cost of the process would be transferred to the customers while the benefit would be reaped by both the customers, small business owners and in part general public through the ensured qualities of the drivers and their abilities which would be determined by the administered test.
And in many places that's exactly how it works! Taxis, Towncars, and limos all have the same sticker. But the sticker on the car has nothing at all to do with the quality of the driver. People keep not getting this in these Uber discussions. Taxis are only very rarely owned by their drivers - the drivers rent them by the day from the taxi company. The assurance of product quality you get from anything attached to the car is limited (especially if it's a medallion you can move form car to car - tat adds no value at all).
Special licensing for the drivers seems much more useful, and is already in place separate from "medallions" everywhere I've heard of. It's the drivers license to focus on, not some BS revenue scheme for the cars.
If there's no artificial scarcity, then no it's not a monopoly, but then what purpose do the medallions serve? You do realize that Uber started with all full-time drivers, right? Real-time dispatch of "livery service" cars: the drivers are permitted just like taxi drivers, but the cars (usually Towncars) aren't technically taxis.
I'm all for a "chauffer's license" (as its called in many states): a specific commercial drivers license required to drive others for money, taxi or no.
You do realize many/most taxi drivers are part time, right? The normal system in most places means only the most successful drivers actually own a taxi. The rest rent by car by the calendar day, and pay a hefty sum for that. The result is it's normal to try to stay awake for as much of that 48 hours as possible, as it takes many hours of driving just to cover the fixed daily cost of the taxi, then sleep for a day or two, then repeat. This is not a system geared towards safety!
Why are medallions even sold as an asset, instead of leased from the city government? It just creates a vehicle for private rent-seeking and speculation
Rent-seeking by the government is no better!
Business monopolies can fail over time, and given time for the management to change, usually do (look at MS's works, ye mighty, and despair). But government-granted monopolies have lasted for centuries in the past.
Keep government in the business of regulating product quality and fraud, and out of the business of creating monopolies. A commercial driver's license is a great idea, and it the right answer to the "Uber problem". Artificial scarcity for government profit is not.
Yes, yes it was. 8.5x11 was 80 column, but full-size paper was 132. So many hours staring at core dumps ...