Oh, it is definitely your job to communicate the needs and constraints you are having. But I also thoroughly disapprove of the culture of know-nothing managers whose only skill is to supposedly be "people persons".
So it is your job to communicate the need for refactoring/design/architecture. It is not your job to do that if your manager doesn't give you the time to do it/ cannot understand why you want to do it. basically, you should never work overtime if not for your enjoyment.
Jobs in Germany are much more protected than in the US, working class salaries are much higher, and the effective benefits incomparable. France has a different tradeoff with more free time, but they are also doing OK. It is the absence of socialised medicine, and the dismal infrastructure which kills the jobs in the US. Oh, and the tendency to hire psychopaths as CEOs.
It is interesting that you simultaneously think that it is fine that people form corporations so they have a limited liability in their investments, but not unions, to have bargaining power much larger than you could ever have, however competent you may be.
As per your post verizon was trying to reduce the benefits (salaries+pension+health care) of their employees. I realise you are a libertarian, and therefore are arithmetically impaired, but it works like that: you hire someone at some given level of benefits. If you want to change that, you negotiate. If they don't agree, tough luck, you signed the contract.
But maybe you think contracts only apply when they benefit corporations? Or maybe you think that people can assemble to form corporations, but not unions? Basically, you only have rights as an owner, and by extension, do not really own yourself...
Yes we all know contracts are valid only when they benefit the rich people. Divinity forbid that the corporations be held to the contracts they signed with the workers.
Basically, if you think you cannot afford a certain level of salary/benefits, don't hire the workers. If you do, you are responsible -- to your eventual bankruptcy -- for upholding your part of the bargain. If you cannot hire anyone at the miserly salaries you are proposing, rethink you business.
Fighting unjust and repressive management is the exact same thing as fighting repressive government.
Also cutting fibre lines and knocking phone service to a police station is exactly what you would do in the later case. Ask yourself: why is it that 45000 people all decided that they were angry enough to have that happen? And why are they the guilty party and not the management who let the situation come to that?
A very important fight/evolution in society is the evolution of democracy in the corporations. Not just worker representation (it is a good idea to have worker representative on the board, if only to provide dissenting voices when decisions are taken) but real shareholder representation. If I own stock in a company, the CEO is basically my employee. If he is incompetent, I should be able to fire him. The shareholder assembly should work like a parliament, responsible for setting the objectives and the regulations internal to the corporation, and the board is really the executive power.
Notably, the salary scale should be voted on. The CEO would then stop stealing shareholder money (because their outrageous salaries are stealing -- they sure did not add that much value), and long-term strategy would be encouraged. Most shareholders are in for the long haul, and they expect dividends more than stock-price upticks. If they don't it's their own damn fault.
And as this structure would never arise while the CEOs are in charge, it should be mandated by the government: the government allows the corporation to exist, and grants it certain rights. Thus it is reasonable that it decides how it should be run. Not the decisions, but who has the power. And the power should go to the owners.
In the case of civil engineering, failure is not really an option, for one, and further modification of buildings is rare. But it is still the case that wrong urban planning incurs a debt : case in point, suburbia will take tens of years to resorb, until cities are densified again.
In the case of aerospace, you need only look at the space shuttle to see this effect in action. Design decisions had to be lived with for 30 years, because the shuttle was not treated as the prototype it was. It should have operated for 5 years, and given rise to a new design based on the lessons learnt.
Technical debt is not just incompetence: sometimes, there is no optimal solution, and you cannot know which tradeoff is the best. Then as you have a deadline, you get something out, and you hope that iterating to a better solution will not be too painful. Sometimes, I write code that is there purely because it might be needed later -- and this time ends up sometimes having been a waste, and sometimes a saviour. In general, it is not wasted, but I have the luxury to do such developments.
Pressed more for time, and if I depended on tighter schedules, many of those developments would have never existed. And I would be less efficient in the long run. Many managers do not understand this.
No, the devs who never refactor simply do what they are told. It is not your job to save your company from its management.
And if you are a manager? hire enough people that they are not overworked and have time to think about the future. Otherwise, you are a management failure.
But then, the managers themselves typically follow instructions from above. The rot starts in the head.
Actually, American corporations are awash with cash. They could very well afford more R&D, and don't need the shareholders.
There is no risk of failure in many cases. Simply, the habit is to hire psychopath as CEOs, who are really good at squeezing the lemon. This works in times of boom, but when a crisis comes along, and some real insight is necessary, as well as long-term thinking, there is no one.
The culture of the deification of the CEO-psychopath is what is killing America.
I think making fun of magical thinking is a critical part of any curriculum. In fact, I believe it is the central tennet of education.
When you are very young, you learn many facts, reading, writing counting. As time goes, you learn more things, but also how they are articulated to form a self-consistent corpus of knowledge.
And you learn that reason and critical thinking is the glue thant binds knowledge. Education bascally recapitulates the evolution of knowledge, from disparate facts to over-arching theories. And so the abandonment of magical thinking (the furmula for the roots of a second order polynomial, dinosaurs became chickens) to theories: the structure of a ring does not allow closed form solutions for polynomials of degree more than 3 and evolution is the mechanisms through which we had dinosaurs, and now we have chicken and crocodiles.
Actually, nothing will get done unless someone traels through the images and decides which to filter. This is the community. And their will be fights for borderline cases.
If you want GUIs and portability, there is no competition to Qt. It's Free, too.
Re:We have ideas, we just can't exploit them
on
The Post-Idea World
·
· Score: 1
That is because the iPod came befor the following Big Idea: in a world where everything is so complex and interconnected as ours, any device, programme, design is derivative of something. Therefore, you but need a couple patents and some ayers to make a living.
Hopefully, the next Big Idea will be that in a world where everything is so complex and interconnected as ours, claiming ownership of an idea is preposterous.
I don't know if you say that just tongue-in-cheek. But just in case: there cannot be a nuclear explosion with a few grams of thorium. They can never get critical. I suspect kilos of the stuff are required. And large degrees of compression.
The system proposed here basically proposed to accelerate the radioactive decay and collect the heat. No chain reactions involved.
the Mach number is not a speed, it is a dimensionless number. Speeds are units of length / units of time. Dimensionless numbers are useful in fluid mechanics to identify different regimes/transitions between the elliptic/hyperbolic nature of the equations.
The Mach number of the shuttle in space is undefined. Most people don't know the speed of sound anyway...
It is just a fancy way of saying "fast". Unfortunately, it also a lie. One of those lies which leaves people slightly more stupid.
Yes, I know. Thus the question: why do people talk about the space shuttle orbiting the Earth at Mach 25 and no one tells them they are idiots (because they are)?
I always understood Mach to be a local measure: local to the plane, that is -- in fact local to the various surfaces of the plane. Mach as an absolute speed is, as you mention, utterly useless. Pitot tubes, by the way, are used differently to compute speed below or above Mach 1.
Thus the question remains: what the fuck do they mean when they say the shuttle orbits at mach 25? 25 times the speed of sound at the level of the sea in normal conditions? How is that relevant to anything?
Is it one of those "library of congress" measures?
Mach 1 is the speed of sound. Now, I'm at loss to decide what that is in vacuum...
It is relevant to flight in an atmosphere, because it predicts the formation of a shockwave at the surfaces of the aircraft which pass that value -- and this has consequences in terms of structural loading.
It stays relevant after because as the aircraft further accelerates, the angle of the shockwave reduces until it touches the craft. At this point, the shockwave becomes unstable, and a new one is formed _detached_ from the aircraft (at some distance from the nose). The flight is then called hypersonic.
But I never understood the meaning of "Mach" outside the atmosphere. I would guess that you pick the last relevant speed (still within the atmosphere) as the baseline and use that as a unit.
You are insured, like Warren Buffet, against people dying in the streets. That is the purpose, and it does its job. Arguably, it should take more, and give more generous benefits.
And as any insurance scheme, some people get paid, some pay, and all get security. It also can only work is everyone is forced to pay, otherwise, those with the most income would not enter into the deal until it were too late.
Of course, I know you believe people should be left out to die, but we are not all sociopaths. Also, yes, gvt is better than private industry at managing funds. We know that because it is all publicly scrutinised, unlike the private sector, which hides the shit under the carpet, and it has no profit motive, nor need for advertising. It requires massive amounts of incompetence for public sector services to be worse for the customers than private sector.
And it can always get fixed by voting in better persons. Private cartel == you are fucked, and aside from immigration, you cannot escape it.
Re:Well of course it will be downgraded...
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
You realise that trillions of debt is perfectly reasonable for an economy the size of the US? Or are you one of those brainless people "trillion OMG WTF!i!" ?
Only the debt to GDP ratio matters. You have the largest economy in the World, you also get the largest debt. In fact, if you had a tiny debt and were instead sitting on a pile of cash, it would be a disaster of epic proportion.
No. It does not require an exponential number of new entrants to sustain itself. In fact, it can perfectly be balanced as long as it is adjusted for life expectancy. And everyone gets the benefits. Of course, everyone could save for themselves, but a) humans are not good at long term planning, b) it is desirable that the better off help the not-so-well-off.
But then, you clearly don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is.
Slashdot Mirror
guarantied income always trumps guarantied contribution. It is always in the advantage of the employer...
Oh, it is definitely your job to communicate the needs and constraints you are having. But I also thoroughly disapprove of the culture of know-nothing managers whose only skill is to supposedly be "people persons".
So it is your job to communicate the need for refactoring/design/architecture. It is not your job to do that if your manager doesn't give you the time to do it/ cannot understand why you want to do it. basically, you should never work overtime if not for your enjoyment.
Jobs in Germany are much more protected than in the US, working class salaries are much higher, and the effective benefits incomparable. France has a different tradeoff with more free time, but they are also doing OK. It is the absence of socialised medicine, and the dismal infrastructure which kills the jobs in the US. Oh, and the tendency to hire psychopaths as CEOs.
Smaller businesses should be in favour of universal medical coverage, then. This would level the playing field.
It is interesting that you simultaneously think that it is fine that people form corporations so they have a limited liability in their investments, but not unions, to have bargaining power much larger than you could ever have, however competent you may be.
As per your post verizon was trying to reduce the benefits (salaries+pension+health care) of their employees. I realise you are a libertarian, and therefore are arithmetically impaired, but it works like that: you hire someone at some given level of benefits. If you want to change that, you negotiate. If they don't agree, tough luck, you signed the contract.
But maybe you think contracts only apply when they benefit corporations? Or maybe you think that people can assemble to form corporations, but not unions? Basically, you only have rights as an owner, and by extension, do not really own yourself...
Yes we all know contracts are valid only when they benefit the rich people. Divinity forbid that the corporations be held to the contracts they signed with the workers.
Basically, if you think you cannot afford a certain level of salary/benefits, don't hire the workers. If you do, you are responsible -- to your eventual bankruptcy -- for upholding your part of the bargain. If you cannot hire anyone at the miserly salaries you are proposing, rethink you business.
Fighting unjust and repressive management is the exact same thing as fighting repressive government.
Also cutting fibre lines and knocking phone service to a police station is exactly what you would do in the later case. Ask yourself: why is it that 45000 people all decided that they were angry enough to have that happen? And why are they the guilty party and not the management who let the situation come to that?
A very important fight/evolution in society is the evolution of democracy in the corporations. Not just worker representation (it is a good idea to have worker representative on the board, if only to provide dissenting voices when decisions are taken) but real shareholder representation. If I own stock in a company, the CEO is basically my employee. If he is incompetent, I should be able to fire him. The shareholder assembly should work like a parliament, responsible for setting the objectives and the regulations internal to the corporation, and the board is really the executive power.
Notably, the salary scale should be voted on. The CEO would then stop stealing shareholder money (because their outrageous salaries are stealing -- they sure did not add that much value), and long-term strategy would be encouraged. Most shareholders are in for the long haul, and they expect dividends more than stock-price upticks. If they don't it's their own damn fault.
And as this structure would never arise while the CEOs are in charge, it should be mandated by the government: the government allows the corporation to exist, and grants it certain rights. Thus it is reasonable that it decides how it should be run. Not the decisions, but who has the power. And the power should go to the owners.
In the case of civil engineering, failure is not really an option, for one, and further modification of buildings is rare. But it is still the case that wrong urban planning incurs a debt : case in point, suburbia will take tens of years to resorb, until cities are densified again.
In the case of aerospace, you need only look at the space shuttle to see this effect in action. Design decisions had to be lived with for 30 years, because the shuttle was not treated as the prototype it was. It should have operated for 5 years, and given rise to a new design based on the lessons learnt.
Technical debt is not just incompetence: sometimes, there is no optimal solution, and you cannot know which tradeoff is the best. Then as you have a deadline, you get something out, and you hope that iterating to a better solution will not be too painful. Sometimes, I write code that is there purely because it might be needed later -- and this time ends up sometimes having been a waste, and sometimes a saviour. In general, it is not wasted, but I have the luxury to do such developments.
Pressed more for time, and if I depended on tighter schedules, many of those developments would have never existed. And I would be less efficient in the long run. Many managers do not understand this.
No, the devs who never refactor simply do what they are told. It is not your job to save your company from its management.
And if you are a manager? hire enough people that they are not overworked and have time to think about the future. Otherwise, you are a management failure.
But then, the managers themselves typically follow instructions from above. The rot starts in the head.
Actually, American corporations are awash with cash. They could very well afford more R&D, and don't need the shareholders.
There is no risk of failure in many cases. Simply, the habit is to hire psychopath as CEOs, who are really good at squeezing the lemon. This works in times of boom, but when a crisis comes along, and some real insight is necessary, as well as long-term thinking, there is no one.
The culture of the deification of the CEO-psychopath is what is killing America.
You are right, of course. Thanks for the correction.
I think making fun of magical thinking is a critical part of any curriculum. In fact, I believe it is the central tennet of education.
When you are very young, you learn many facts, reading, writing counting. As time goes, you learn more things, but also how they are articulated to form a self-consistent corpus of knowledge.
And you learn that reason and critical thinking is the glue thant binds knowledge. Education bascally recapitulates the evolution of knowledge, from disparate facts to over-arching theories. And so the abandonment of magical thinking (the furmula for the roots of a second order polynomial, dinosaurs became chickens) to theories: the structure of a ring does not allow closed form solutions for polynomials of degree more than 3 and evolution is the mechanisms through which we had dinosaurs, and now we have chicken and crocodiles.
Actually, nothing will get done unless someone traels through the images and decides which to filter. This is the community. And their will be fights for borderline cases.
The "community" is very much in charge, here.
I agree. But tcl is even worse ;)
If you want GUIs and portability, there is no competition to Qt. It's Free, too.
That is because the iPod came befor the following Big Idea: in a world where everything is so complex and interconnected as ours, any device, programme, design is derivative of something. Therefore, you but need a couple patents and some ayers to make a living.
Hopefully, the next Big Idea will be that in a world where everything is so complex and interconnected as ours, claiming ownership of an idea is preposterous.
I don't know if you say that just tongue-in-cheek. But just in case: there cannot be a nuclear explosion with a few grams of thorium. They can never get critical. I suspect kilos of the stuff are required. And large degrees of compression.
The system proposed here basically proposed to accelerate the radioactive decay and collect the heat. No chain reactions involved.
the Mach number is not a speed, it is a dimensionless number. Speeds are units of length / units of time. Dimensionless numbers are useful in fluid mechanics to identify different regimes/transitions between the elliptic/hyperbolic nature of the equations.
The Mach number of the shuttle in space is undefined. Most people don't know the speed of sound anyway...
It is just a fancy way of saying "fast". Unfortunately, it also a lie. One of those lies which leaves people slightly more stupid.
Yes, I know. Thus the question: why do people talk about the space shuttle orbiting the Earth at Mach 25 and no one tells them they are idiots (because they are)?
I always understood Mach to be a local measure: local to the plane, that is -- in fact local to the various surfaces of the plane. Mach as an absolute speed is, as you mention, utterly useless. Pitot tubes, by the way, are used differently to compute speed below or above Mach 1.
Thus the question remains: what the fuck do they mean when they say the shuttle orbits at mach 25? 25 times the speed of sound at the level of the sea in normal conditions? How is that relevant to anything?
Is it one of those "library of congress" measures?
Mach 1 is the speed of sound. Now, I'm at loss to decide what that is in vacuum...
It is relevant to flight in an atmosphere, because it predicts the formation of a shockwave at the surfaces of the aircraft which pass that value -- and this has consequences in terms of structural loading.
It stays relevant after because as the aircraft further accelerates, the angle of the shockwave reduces until it touches the craft. At this point, the shockwave becomes unstable, and a new one is formed _detached_ from the aircraft (at some distance from the nose). The flight is then called hypersonic.
But I never understood the meaning of "Mach" outside the atmosphere. I would guess that you pick the last relevant speed (still within the atmosphere) as the baseline and use that as a unit.
You are insured, like Warren Buffet, against people dying in the streets. That is the purpose, and it does its job. Arguably, it should take more, and give more generous benefits.
And as any insurance scheme, some people get paid, some pay, and all get security. It also can only work is everyone is forced to pay, otherwise, those with the most income would not enter into the deal until it were too late.
Of course, I know you believe people should be left out to die, but we are not all sociopaths. Also, yes, gvt is better than private industry at managing funds. We know that because it is all publicly scrutinised, unlike the private sector, which hides the shit under the carpet, and it has no profit motive, nor need for advertising. It requires massive amounts of incompetence for public sector services to be worse for the customers than private sector.
And it can always get fixed by voting in better persons. Private cartel == you are fucked, and aside from immigration, you cannot escape it.
You realise that trillions of debt is perfectly reasonable for an economy the size of the US? Or are you one of those brainless people "trillion OMG WTF!i!" ?
Only the debt to GDP ratio matters. You have the largest economy in the World, you also get the largest debt. In fact, if you had a tiny debt and were instead sitting on a pile of cash, it would be a disaster of epic proportion.
No. It does not require an exponential number of new entrants to sustain itself. In fact, it can perfectly be balanced as long as it is adjusted for life expectancy. And everyone gets the benefits. Of course, everyone could save for themselves, but a) humans are not good at long term planning, b) it is desirable that the better off help the not-so-well-off.
But then, you clearly don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is.