Well, part of the "problem" IMO is probably also the discrepancy between 22% "in the field" and 12% "working on code" - female developers choose or are steered to management by a large margin. I'd say 40% of the development managers I've met in my career have been women, while the 12% number sounds right for coders. I've worked with just one women who was senior on the non-management technical track out of the hundreds of coders I've worked with in my career.
There's definitely something interesting there, but I'm not sure it counts as a "problem".
Oh, I should also point out that in 20+ years and hundreds of co-workers, I've never seen people making sexist jokes who expected women to just "go along to get along" with that. There were a few guys here and there who thought that sort of thing was funny (certainly not the norm), but they all had the basic manners to shut up and look embarrassed if one of the women on the floor happened by. But then, I'm not a brogrammer wring Ruby on Rails, either - I hear the culture is pretty awful over on the web side of the industry.
Well, I'm generally extremely skeptical of such claims in reviews, since people are generally idiots and don't understand why claims are refused to begin with. BUt for sure the rate of complaints about "drive was shipped with no padding, arrived broken" are on the rise at Newegg. It's to bad too, as no good can come of Amazon having an effective monopoly over any product space.
If you compose documents in draft view in Word, and in your opions you set "style area pane width" to 1" or so, all will become clear. Word makes a ton more sense (to my geeky perspective) when the style that is applied to each paragraph is explicitly called out in the margin.
No that it matters any more, other than the legal world (always stuck in the previous century), why would you ever print a document? And if it won't be printed ever, why are you using a word processor?
The problem is that we cannot allow supply and demand alone to control pay. The inevitable result is a vast majority working full time and still being below the poverty line and a few at the top making enough in a year to support several families for life. That is not a sustainable situation.
That doesn't make any kind of sense at all. What would that "majority working full time" be doing all day, if not making products and providing services for the majority? You seem very distracted by numbers of dollars, but fundamentally the economy is about making a couple of TVs and a couple of cars and a few pairs of shoes per household. No matter how rich you are, you can't drive 100 cars, you can't live in 100 houses, you cant drink as much as 100 people, you can't eat as much as 100 people (well, OK, Imelda Marcus shows you can have shoes for 100 people, but she was pretty odd).
No one is missing a meal because a CEO ate 42% of the food in the nation. Yes, both "stuff" and "control of the means of production" are measured in dollars, but who cares? The important goal is for control of the means of production to accrue to those who are good at it, who drive to more efficient ways of making more "stuff" for everyone. And right up until we ruin everything with bailouts, capitalism does that well - regardless of how people get wealth, if they make poor choices about how corporations are run they don't keep their wealth.
You seem very concerned about some sense of social justice, as if "fair share" is more important than technological progress. What a bunch of nonsense.
I don't care about the shipping cost, but I've found that Amazon often has better packaging. Newegg is awesome about returns for damaged goods, but still: better extra padding in the first place.
And after WordPerfect had sold copies to all 12 geeks who love "codes" in a word process, the company went under. Meanwhile, the concept of specifying formatting using style sheets seems to have cascaded over to other media and become quite popular.
This actually was the result of (computer-simulated) evolution, is the thing. Unlike, say, Joe Klanns mechanical spider design, which was an incremental improvement over an old design for harbor cranes and the result of exploratory tinkering, Theo Jansen apparently came up with his design through a computer-simulated evolution algorithm.
Both designs are very cool because they perform like wheels - you can just push on them and they'll walk along, like a cart, or you can crank and axel and they'll walk under power.
You make a very good point. I think our society would benefit greatly from a strong ethical code (one with a strong work ethic and expectation of self-discipline), but we've left the old ones behind. They're wrong now, in so many details, and yet even so people are often more successful in life when following them simply because of work ethic and self-discipline.
I don't think you need a religious basis, either, just the basic moral sense of not going out of your way to hurt or control others, plus the expectation that you must not just work to support yourself, but plan for future difficulties. Let "those who live this way live well" be the inspiration, not "because God said so", and I think most people in modern life would see value in the code.
Any unwanted medical service should be considered assault, and that's generally the case in America (though it's a matter of state laws), including the case of attempting to resuscitate on a patient with a known DNR.
CEO pay is exactly like sports star pay or movie star pay: you have to bid high to have a chance of getting a good guy, and even then you might get just hype.
What does the pay ratio of one job to another have to do with anything at all? Pay is a matter of supply and demand, which isn't a bad approximation of how valuable one additional worker of that sort is to society. CEOs are a bit of a special case, since you have the celebrity effect and bidding wars, but if more people could do the job of other C-level officers well, those jobs wouldn't pay so much. Their pay in any case has very little effect in general on how much everyone else gets paid (unless of course you're destroying your own company by hiring Chainsaw Al).
The beauty of capitalism, sans bailouts, is that owners who make such stupid decisions lose their wealth. Control of the means of production accrues in the long run to those who make wiser long-term decisions.
About 9 million percent more than in Japan. Heck, the entire business decision-making process revolves around no one openly taking any position about an issue until consensus is reached, so that no one important has ever lost an argument. There's a reason Japanese factories famously had to hire an American consultant to tell them to take suggestions from workers: any process improvement is an admission that the existing process is less than perfect, and thus whoever wrote that process wasn't perfect. How shameful.
Then there's Russia, where they just don't care. If you're not a fan of Chernobyl, I recommend against flying Aeroflot.
Does God provide these miracles capriciously? If he's not a trickster god, then there will be some pattern to the lives of those who receive miraculous healing that is different from the lives of those who don't. That pattern could be detected, measured, and predicted. A non-capricious God might even leave us an instruction manual: I choose from among those who do these things to grant miracles. But ultimately if there were a pattern of miracles, then the scientific method would work just fine on that - science has solved far harder mysteries.
I don't understand your point. Very few people are born wealthy, and at least in America most wealthy people accumulate whatever wealth they have over their lifetimes. I grew up in a trailer park in hillbilly country, but now I'm approaching independently wealthy, precisely by saving and investing part of my income. It's not easy to get enough to live on (I've lived on half my take-home pay for 15 years now), but it is fairly easy to get 1 per-capita share of all publically-traded companies, as that's less than 2 year's median income.
Seriously - if you can save 2 years median income you have "your fair share" of the means of production. That's no even close to enough to live on because there just isn't that much corporate profit. About $10 goes to salary for every $1 that goes to owners. Massive injustice?
And Amazon's management isn't bonused that way. You'll generally only find that sort of thing at failing companies. Amazon's skilled workers get paid quite well, it's only the unskilled workers that are paid poorly. Massive injustice? Sorry, you don't get paid for breathing: if you want more money, learn to do something that society values more.
Well, science does require some axioms which cannot be objective tested, but they seem to be the minimum possible set: that logic works, that our senses mostly work, and that what we can observe is representative of the whole.
None of those can be disproven, but then without them you can't reason about the world under any system at all.
But if a supernatural force does exist, it would be, by it's very nature, beyond science's ability to quantify or measure.
Why so? Science makes 2 basic assumptions: the assumption that we can reason from sense data (that is, that we're not in the matrix, nor the victim of some evil demon tricking us with all we perceive), and the assumption that what we can see or measure is representative of the whole. Or if you prefer: "we're supposed to use the minds and senses that God gave us to decide how the world is".
A "supernatural" force that acts in any sort of predictable or explainable way is no different from anything else science studies. As long as there's a pattern to it all, the scientific method applies. For science to fail you must postulate a "trickster god" who acts in some arbitrary and capricious way, or worse one who is deliberately messing with us for laughs.
Oh, I think he has a very good idea about "what evolution says" in a great many high schools across America. So much of what creationists object to is utter BS that no one knowledgeable would espouse, but is still widely taught.
Reading through the talk.origins FAQ is often a guided tour through the failure of American high schools to teach the basic facts of evolution, or to keep teaching old and disproven ideas or examples. Some of the stuff people learned in school is just bizarre, and it's very easy to see why they don't believe it - certainly no biologist would!
The NYT shouldn't be giving lessons to anyone - they were very slow to make an accommodation to digital, and they're still clearly on an "ink smeared on dead trees" business model, that happens to do some online stuff as a side venture.
Just a couple of years ago the total value of the company was less than the value of it's real estate and other holdings: the actual business was valued negatively by the market (the same was true of Sun in their final year - Oracle basically got the non-real-estate part of Sun for free).
Did someone actually do that, ever? They must have been desperate to pay so much, but I think a bonus based in some way on savings is fairly normal. Makes more sense to me based on improvements to profit, not just senseless reduction in costs, but the two are related.
Sometimes parts of a business just stop being viable, and the sensible thing is to just stop doing those parts and hope the rest of the company can survive. Sometimes technological progress causes that sort of thing, and sometimes a company/business unit just sucks and needs to die.
Oh, it's a silly plan for this decade - we still suck at putting stuff in orbit. My point was just that Light=>panel=>atmosphere beats Light=>atmosphere=>panel.
The cost of evacuation certainly had a lot to do with fear and scaremongering. The cost of compensation will certainly have to do with fear and scaremongering.
Coal is a fair comparison for Japan, as that's something they can actually import. CNG is great, but it sucks to transport. Wind only goes so far, and Japan's in a bad latitude for solar. And coal does suck so very badly.
Airline safety varies wildly by operating country.
Nuclear safety and airline safety go hand in hand, risk-wise, in different cultures and countries. Japanese airlines have many of the same needless risks stemming from overly-hierarchical decision making and inability to admit mistakes that have hurt the Fukushima efforts - it's the exactly same cultural issues at play (my brother used to be a pilot for a Japanese airline - he had many of these same complaints).
It's people questioning whether it can be done safely when cost-cutting is considered more important than safety
All of which applies equally to airlines, but while airline safely varies by country, it's generally still safer to fly than to drive in each one.
What market? They sit on each other's boards granting bonuses.
Well, for just about any job there are cases of people hiring friends and relatives, but it's not the norm for CEOs, or C-level people in general.
You see "turn around" CEOs hired in order to fire half the work force, because that's what the board sees as good. There's usually a shareholder fight that happens around those, BTW, since it's an admission that all your plans (as a board member) have failed, and it's time to give up and either start over or just milk what cash you can from the decaying corpse.
Either way, the board is still going to try to find the cheapest CEO who will do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, part of the "problem" IMO is probably also the discrepancy between 22% "in the field" and 12% "working on code" - female developers choose or are steered to management by a large margin. I'd say 40% of the development managers I've met in my career have been women, while the 12% number sounds right for coders. I've worked with just one women who was senior on the non-management technical track out of the hundreds of coders I've worked with in my career.
There's definitely something interesting there, but I'm not sure it counts as a "problem".
Oh, I should also point out that in 20+ years and hundreds of co-workers, I've never seen people making sexist jokes who expected women to just "go along to get along" with that. There were a few guys here and there who thought that sort of thing was funny (certainly not the norm), but they all had the basic manners to shut up and look embarrassed if one of the women on the floor happened by. But then, I'm not a brogrammer wring Ruby on Rails, either - I hear the culture is pretty awful over on the web side of the industry.
Well, I'm generally extremely skeptical of such claims in reviews, since people are generally idiots and don't understand why claims are refused to begin with. BUt for sure the rate of complaints about "drive was shipped with no padding, arrived broken" are on the rise at Newegg. It's to bad too, as no good can come of Amazon having an effective monopoly over any product space.
If you compose documents in draft view in Word, and in your opions you set "style area pane width" to 1" or so, all will become clear. Word makes a ton more sense (to my geeky perspective) when the style that is applied to each paragraph is explicitly called out in the margin.
No that it matters any more, other than the legal world (always stuck in the previous century), why would you ever print a document? And if it won't be printed ever, why are you using a word processor?
The problem is that we cannot allow supply and demand alone to control pay. The inevitable result is a vast majority working full time and still being below the poverty line and a few at the top making enough in a year to support several families for life. That is not a sustainable situation.
That doesn't make any kind of sense at all. What would that "majority working full time" be doing all day, if not making products and providing services for the majority? You seem very distracted by numbers of dollars, but fundamentally the economy is about making a couple of TVs and a couple of cars and a few pairs of shoes per household. No matter how rich you are, you can't drive 100 cars, you can't live in 100 houses, you cant drink as much as 100 people, you can't eat as much as 100 people (well, OK, Imelda Marcus shows you can have shoes for 100 people, but she was pretty odd).
No one is missing a meal because a CEO ate 42% of the food in the nation. Yes, both "stuff" and "control of the means of production" are measured in dollars, but who cares? The important goal is for control of the means of production to accrue to those who are good at it, who drive to more efficient ways of making more "stuff" for everyone. And right up until we ruin everything with bailouts, capitalism does that well - regardless of how people get wealth, if they make poor choices about how corporations are run they don't keep their wealth.
You seem very concerned about some sense of social justice, as if "fair share" is more important than technological progress. What a bunch of nonsense.
I don't care about the shipping cost, but I've found that Amazon often has better packaging. Newegg is awesome about returns for damaged goods, but still: better extra padding in the first place.
And after WordPerfect had sold copies to all 12 geeks who love "codes" in a word process, the company went under. Meanwhile, the concept of specifying formatting using style sheets seems to have cascaded over to other media and become quite popular.
Don't forget good kerning! Though with a schoolbook font (love those) it doesn't matter quite as much.
This actually was the result of (computer-simulated) evolution, is the thing. Unlike, say, Joe Klanns mechanical spider design, which was an incremental improvement over an old design for harbor cranes and the result of exploratory tinkering, Theo Jansen apparently came up with his design through a computer-simulated evolution algorithm.
Both designs are very cool because they perform like wheels - you can just push on them and they'll walk along, like a cart, or you can crank and axel and they'll walk under power.
Ah, a Wikieditor/fanboy. Admit it: you will be torrenting this 100GB copy just so you can delete every article, then do it all again.
You make a very good point. I think our society would benefit greatly from a strong ethical code (one with a strong work ethic and expectation of self-discipline), but we've left the old ones behind. They're wrong now, in so many details, and yet even so people are often more successful in life when following them simply because of work ethic and self-discipline.
I don't think you need a religious basis, either, just the basic moral sense of not going out of your way to hurt or control others, plus the expectation that you must not just work to support yourself, but plan for future difficulties. Let "those who live this way live well" be the inspiration, not "because God said so", and I think most people in modern life would see value in the code.
Any unwanted medical service should be considered assault, and that's generally the case in America (though it's a matter of state laws), including the case of attempting to resuscitate on a patient with a known DNR.
The TV show had more-or-less run out of ideas by the end, though. It was good, but it was good that it ended with dignity. Sort of on-topic, really.
CEO pay is exactly like sports star pay or movie star pay: you have to bid high to have a chance of getting a good guy, and even then you might get just hype.
What does the pay ratio of one job to another have to do with anything at all? Pay is a matter of supply and demand, which isn't a bad approximation of how valuable one additional worker of that sort is to society. CEOs are a bit of a special case, since you have the celebrity effect and bidding wars, but if more people could do the job of other C-level officers well, those jobs wouldn't pay so much. Their pay in any case has very little effect in general on how much everyone else gets paid (unless of course you're destroying your own company by hiring Chainsaw Al).
The beauty of capitalism, sans bailouts, is that owners who make such stupid decisions lose their wealth. Control of the means of production accrues in the long run to those who make wiser long-term decisions.
About 9 million percent more than in Japan. Heck, the entire business decision-making process revolves around no one openly taking any position about an issue until consensus is reached, so that no one important has ever lost an argument. There's a reason Japanese factories famously had to hire an American consultant to tell them to take suggestions from workers: any process improvement is an admission that the existing process is less than perfect, and thus whoever wrote that process wasn't perfect. How shameful.
Then there's Russia, where they just don't care. If you're not a fan of Chernobyl, I recommend against flying Aeroflot.
Does God provide these miracles capriciously? If he's not a trickster god, then there will be some pattern to the lives of those who receive miraculous healing that is different from the lives of those who don't. That pattern could be detected, measured, and predicted. A non-capricious God might even leave us an instruction manual: I choose from among those who do these things to grant miracles. But ultimately if there were a pattern of miracles, then the scientific method would work just fine on that - science has solved far harder mysteries.
I don't understand your point. Very few people are born wealthy, and at least in America most wealthy people accumulate whatever wealth they have over their lifetimes. I grew up in a trailer park in hillbilly country, but now I'm approaching independently wealthy, precisely by saving and investing part of my income. It's not easy to get enough to live on (I've lived on half my take-home pay for 15 years now), but it is fairly easy to get 1 per-capita share of all publically-traded companies, as that's less than 2 year's median income.
Seriously - if you can save 2 years median income you have "your fair share" of the means of production. That's no even close to enough to live on because there just isn't that much corporate profit. About $10 goes to salary for every $1 that goes to owners. Massive injustice?
And Amazon's management isn't bonused that way. You'll generally only find that sort of thing at failing companies. Amazon's skilled workers get paid quite well, it's only the unskilled workers that are paid poorly. Massive injustice? Sorry, you don't get paid for breathing: if you want more money, learn to do something that society values more.
Well, science does require some axioms which cannot be objective tested, but they seem to be the minimum possible set: that logic works, that our senses mostly work, and that what we can observe is representative of the whole.
None of those can be disproven, but then without them you can't reason about the world under any system at all.
But if a supernatural force does exist, it would be, by it's very nature, beyond science's ability to quantify or measure.
Why so? Science makes 2 basic assumptions: the assumption that we can reason from sense data (that is, that we're not in the matrix, nor the victim of some evil demon tricking us with all we perceive), and the assumption that what we can see or measure is representative of the whole. Or if you prefer: "we're supposed to use the minds and senses that God gave us to decide how the world is".
A "supernatural" force that acts in any sort of predictable or explainable way is no different from anything else science studies. As long as there's a pattern to it all, the scientific method applies. For science to fail you must postulate a "trickster god" who acts in some arbitrary and capricious way, or worse one who is deliberately messing with us for laughs.
Oh, I think he has a very good idea about "what evolution says" in a great many high schools across America. So much of what creationists object to is utter BS that no one knowledgeable would espouse, but is still widely taught.
Reading through the talk.origins FAQ is often a guided tour through the failure of American high schools to teach the basic facts of evolution, or to keep teaching old and disproven ideas or examples. Some of the stuff people learned in school is just bizarre, and it's very easy to see why they don't believe it - certainly no biologist would!
The NYT shouldn't be giving lessons to anyone - they were very slow to make an accommodation to digital, and they're still clearly on an "ink smeared on dead trees" business model, that happens to do some online stuff as a side venture.
Just a couple of years ago the total value of the company was less than the value of it's real estate and other holdings: the actual business was valued negatively by the market (the same was true of Sun in their final year - Oracle basically got the non-real-estate part of Sun for free).
Did someone actually do that, ever? They must have been desperate to pay so much, but I think a bonus based in some way on savings is fairly normal. Makes more sense to me based on improvements to profit, not just senseless reduction in costs, but the two are related.
Sometimes parts of a business just stop being viable, and the sensible thing is to just stop doing those parts and hope the rest of the company can survive. Sometimes technological progress causes that sort of thing, and sometimes a company/business unit just sucks and needs to die.
Oh, it's a silly plan for this decade - we still suck at putting stuff in orbit. My point was just that Light=>panel=>atmosphere beats Light=>atmosphere=>panel.
The cost of evacuation certainly had a lot to do with fear and scaremongering. The cost of compensation will certainly have to do with fear and scaremongering.
Coal is a fair comparison for Japan, as that's something they can actually import. CNG is great, but it sucks to transport. Wind only goes so far, and Japan's in a bad latitude for solar. And coal does suck so very badly.
Airline safety varies wildly by operating country.
Nuclear safety and airline safety go hand in hand, risk-wise, in different cultures and countries. Japanese airlines have many of the same needless risks stemming from overly-hierarchical decision making and inability to admit mistakes that have hurt the Fukushima efforts - it's the exactly same cultural issues at play (my brother used to be a pilot for a Japanese airline - he had many of these same complaints).
It's people questioning whether it can be done safely when cost-cutting is considered more important than safety
All of which applies equally to airlines, but while airline safely varies by country, it's generally still safer to fly than to drive in each one.
What market? They sit on each other's boards granting bonuses.
Well, for just about any job there are cases of people hiring friends and relatives, but it's not the norm for CEOs, or C-level people in general.
You see "turn around" CEOs hired in order to fire half the work force, because that's what the board sees as good. There's usually a shareholder fight that happens around those, BTW, since it's an admission that all your plans (as a board member) have failed, and it's time to give up and either start over or just milk what cash you can from the decaying corpse.
Either way, the board is still going to try to find the cheapest CEO who will do the job.