If the content of this book intrigues you, I highly recommend this Lecture Series by UC Berkeley Online Course, Spring 2011 , Prof. Geoffrey D. Nunberg. I listened to them a few years ago when the quality was terrible, but they were still fascinating and have been re-recorded in much better quality and with slides. The course starts way back with spoken word to written word to signs on up through history. Great series.
There are terrific similarities between the two groups. They are both angry about the bank bailouts, but one focuses its rage on the government for providing the bailout and the other focuses its rage on Wall Street for taking it. In fact, the biggest difference between the two may be their demographic: Tea Party is mostly older and OWS mostly younger, making this a conflict of generations rather than classes. The problem is the manipulators are hard at work keeping people from finding any common ground by demonizing the other side instead of addressing their grievances.
I sympathized with the early Tea Party. Now I sympathize with these protesters, and this constant demonization of them is so heartbreaking. For the first time in my life I'm confronting these people on Facebook, forcing them to support their statements with references or showing them how they are being manipulated (90% of the time by a story I can trace back to Breitbart). For a week they fought back, but then they toned down their attacks... Unfortunately, watching the new Facebook Ticker, I can see that they have merely taken their hatred to where they think I can't see it. Wonderful social experiment that new Facebook Ticker, see what you're "Friends" are saying about you behind your back and there's no way to turn it off.
All we can do is try to get people to see the human beings behind the villainous caricatures. When they try to connect the movement to the "sinister machinations of George Soros," I point out that Soros is a prolific philanthropist and humanitarian. When they call the protesters scum, slackers, and anarchists, I point them to the We are the 99% blog and ask them to justify their position with references from that site.
People in the Tea Party should be doing the same thing, putting a human face on their movement. We should be finding common ground. Keeping us fighting each other is exactly what the powers that be need to prevent any significant change.
I keep seeing the "Mortgage crisis was cause because Banks were forced to lend to poor people" meme too, but they never provide any numbers to support this. The Government didn't force banks to give people mortgages for amounts that were far greater than the value of the homes they were buying while simultaneously selling investors these mortgages as bundled securities while they were secretly betting everything they had on the failure of these same investments.
I thought that was the case too, but the wikipedia article on the controversy paints a more complex picture. Apparently there is a video of the flag raising that clearly shows it was not staged initially, but there was a second photo that was staged, the "gung-ho shot;" however, no one tried to pass the second photo off as being anything other than a posed shot... so there's a myth that sounds scandalous, but the reality is that it was simply a misunderstanding.
This is why Science is so $#@%ing awesome. As Samuel Clemens put it best, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact.” This will be a very tough hypothesis to sell, but the researcher says his evidence is ready to take on all skeptics.
There are incredible stories waiting to be revealed in the fossil record and stories we have already uncovered. There's the footprints of Austrolopithecus, which were preserved in volcanic ash, large and small, male and female, close together as if they were huddling--perhaps the male had his arm around his mate, and the female's footprints lopsided as if she were carrying an infant. Imagine what it was like for them, walking fearfully across a landscape raining ash from a distant volcano... This story is drawn in this famous diorama.
Or the Taung child, whose skull bares the scars of an eagle attack. The child was carried away by a bird of prey. A story both fantastic and tragic at once.
Or the stories of Homo erectus , who was the velociraptor of our human ancestors. She was a total badass, which is why I love this statue of her at the Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins carrying a rotting caribou carcass across the Serengeti.
Science has thousands of these stories that we have already discovered, and an infinite supply of them in store for us if we keep exploring. Knowing this, I simply don't understand how people can be so impressed with a book covering a few hundred years of human history and consider it sacred. The sacred is all around us, written in the natural world waiting for us to read it.
I hate to say it, but Google's other mistake was in making it an invite-only-beta for so long too. The value of the social network is in the size of the network, and Google crippled itself by restricting the size of the network. Google+ generated a lot of buzz from the people who first got to use it, and many of my friends waited weeks to finally get into it, but when Google finally opened it up the buzz had died down and everyone had moved back to where the conversation was happening, Facebook.
If you're going to try and kill Facebook, it has to be done with a sneak attack. If Google+ had gone online open to everyone in the world right from the beginning, complete with ways to migrate all your friends into it from Facebook, they might have succeeded in moving everyone over to their platform before Facebook could counterattack. Instead, they let me and all my geek friends migrate, but left my Mother, Grandmother, and other family on Facebook and now it takes a smidgen of technical savvy to migrate your friends past Facebook's lock-down, which is more than most people want to deal with.
I've read that factoid too, and it's pure spin. I'm in the top 5%, meaning my family makes a little more than $150k a year. So the spinsters say I have nothing to complain about, as if we live in the lap of luxury. But you know what? I live in the DC Beltway, and our family income puts us in the middle middle class, where we can only afford a modest house and can only afford partial days at daycare for our son and have no idea how we're supposed to afford the second child we want to have.
I consider myself part of the 99% because we work hard just to survive and I sympathize completely with the unfortunate souls sharing their stories personal tragedy on the 99% blog. People who are trying to frame this as an 80% versus 20% thing have no clue what it's like out here in the real world where corporations have engineered the system to take every last fucking dime from honest hard-working Americans while refusing to give anything back to the country that made their success possible.
This is a great opinion piece, and thank you for posting it. I don't know what you meant by the "Tact is unfortunately overrated." comment, but I don't consider ESR's post as being tactful or politically correct. Rather, unlike RMS's tweet-rant, ESR has posed a thorough intellectual take down of Steve Jobs, even pointing out that Jobs' egomaniacle nature essentially killed him because he thought he could cure himself with alternative medicine instead of simply having the tumor removed, which would have saved his life.
I don't see how arguing that a person's control-freak nature caused them to make an incredibly stupid decision that ended up killing himself can be described as "tactful" or "politically correct," but it needs to be said. Let's not confused well-reasoned thoughtful arguments with "sugar coating" things.
Sorry... There seems to be some confusion from my poorly-worded post. I know that CCing your work copyrights it, but registering with the Library of Congress implements a traditional copyright, without the flexibility of a CC license... those are two conflicting licenses and the conflict has not been resolved in the courts yet.
You'll retain the rights to your work, but make it available for others to use with whatever restrictions (or lack of) you so desire. If you want full control, they offer more traditional copyrights as well. The best part is that the licenses were developed by professional lawyers and they provide forms to craft the appropriate legalese for you to protect your work.
I don't know how it works, but I also recommend registering your work with the Library of Congress electronically for $35. This will get it registered in the National Archives, which is the greatest backup system in the world. This does copyright your work, which can conflict with the Creative Commons license... but since no one has brought the conflicting licenses to court AFAIK, I have no idea what it means to both Copyright and Creative Commons your work.
The additional problem is that creative people are competing against a world wide web's worth of people putting creative content online for free. And the professionals are hurting because of it. I found this out at a science conference session on photography. While I do amateur photography and give all my content away for free under a creative commons license, which has gotten me 300 photos in Wikipedia and in numerous books and other publications, every single one of those photographs given away is work a professional photographer could not make money off, and the professionals let me know their frustration.
I feel the pinch with my writing. I would love to be a professional writer, but the competition is ridiculous. So I self-published my books and posted them online for free just to be read, but I found myself in competition with thousands of other authors also self-publishing. The stories in the news of self-published authors and writers like Corey Doctorow hitting it big represent an infinitesimal percentage of writers out there. The professional writers who are out there make a pittance and work incredibly long hours perpetually promoting themselves to stay relevant. I actually prefer my day job developing software and writing as a hobby in my spare time. I think it's much less stressfull.
I appreciate the fact that this opinion piece comes from Salon, an online news site whose business model still involves paying writers to produce original content, which has been incredibly unsuccessful. Compare Salon to the Huffingtonpost, an online news site whose business model involves reposting other news sources' content and getting celebrities and other individuals to post commentary for free because it gives them a soapbox. Salon can't compete with the information deluge the Huffpo provides. It's a perfect example of the way things used to work and the way they work now.
I'm not saying any of this is inherently bad, it's just a change; however, it does bother me the our cultural expectations haven't caught up with the times. Everyone still epitomizes making money off of creative content as the only sign of success, but I write, blog, and photograph because I enjoy it and see the contribution to our culture as a more noble motivation. I feel sorry for all those college kids studying photography, creative writing, and art now because they live in a world where it appears that art is thriving better than at any other time in human history, but no one is making a living off of it anymore.
Hear! Hear! Just today I submitted a post titled "Did Alternative Medicine Contribute to Steve Jobs' Death?" I previewed the post, the text of the body looked fine, I hit submit and the title became "Did Alternative Medicine Contribute to Steve Jobs'". WTF??? Maybe the title change appeared in the preview, but I was too busy scrutinizing the body of the post. I cringed, considered resubmitting the post, but decided to skulk away. Nobody's gonna read that.
I will hand it to the editors though, they have refactored my writing to sound much better at times and provided more logical text-linking when my submissions do make the front page.
I appreciate the second link's take on things, with the "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor, but I think the author misses some key elements in how it applies to modern society. Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied. Just as the Enlightenment 200 years ago resulted in an explosion of discoveries about the natural world because the realm of scientific knowledge was so small at the time... You couldn't investigate any natural phenomena without discovering a new element or species.
It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration.
Queue the "Marxist" ad hominem attack in 3... 2... 1...
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
You have to understand that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the 24hour corporate spin machine has told them that NN is all about limiting what you can say on the internet. They liken it to the Fairness Doctrine, the now-dead bill that once required broadcasters to give equal time to liberal and conservative viewpoints and, ironically. the same law Limbaugh used to get on the air, a law that once made sense when there was a scarcity of broadcasting outlets.
Net Neutrality works the other way. We now have limitless outlets for expressing our views on the Internet, but corporations need scarcity in order to make money. So they seek to throttle the bandwidth, creating an artificial scarcity on their product and drive its value up. Without Net Neutrality, corporations have the right to discriminate against speech they don't like or companies they are in competition with. It's the exact opposite of Free Speech, but the conservative media have convinced their followers that black is white and that this bill is double-plus bad for Free Speech.
Without Net Neutrality, the Internet risks falling into a communications war, bad for all Americans and bad for the Corporations who are arguing against it. I don't understand how the same ideology that argues so strongly for Free Trade around the world has taken such a strong stance against the same exact principle for the Internet.
Thank you for posting this. It explains why so many of the Academic solutions to problems I'm researching are so incredibly lacking. I've seen 200+ page theses claiming to solve a problem, but after getting through them I find that the paper actually only describes how one would go about solving the problem and the author hasn't produced one shred of real code, but lots of pseudocode, to make their point.
Honestly, this is why managers avoid hiring Ph.D.s like the black plague in the software development world. I shared a cubicle with a Ph.D. who had just come out of spending the last 10 years crafting some incredibly complex formula for accurately predicting something to do with radio waves. We gave him a report to write. Six months later he gave us a white paper on how he was going to go about writing the report. Six months after that he got a job writing white papers for another software company. We gave the report to one of our average programmers, who got it done in a month.
For the amount of effort and verbosity that goes into Academic research, it sure seems like very little comes out of it. No wonder only 40% of research papers get cited in the first five years of their being published.
I know that the way religious people frame their arguments means they will find some way to weasel out of their beliefs being disproved with an irrational argument (ie. "God won't let you prove he exists, because then you wouldn't need to have faith."). Funny how so many religious people cite scientific studies that found people in hospitals who were prayed for had better recovery rates, but when a double-blind study was performed, where the patients didn't know they were being prayed for, and there was no difference between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups, they either ignore it or use it as evidence that god demands faith without proof (never mind that this ignores the faith of those who were prayed-for in the double-blind study).
But this is also why I like certain mixtures of Science and Religion. I love that fact that the Dalai Lama has said that when science and religion conflict, you must go with science, and has encouraged his monks to work with scientists to uncover the mental health benefits of meditation (and they are myriad if you read the published journal studies). Carl Sagan challenged the Dalai Lama on this point, asking if he would even abandon the belief in reincarnation if science disproved it. The Dalai Lama replied that yes he would, but you would find it very hard to disprove such a thing.
This is also why I enjoy the work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson who spent a lifetime at UVA studying the phenomenon of children remembering past lives that he could take details from and research to see if these people and events did exist and took place. He calls the phenomenon "reincarnation" but is very careful to point out that there is no evidence that a soul is transferring from one person to the next and that some other natural phenomenon could be taking place to explain it. He also provides many case studies where the things a child remembers of a past life are demonstrably false. His work was considered so interesting that a team of researchers continues to investigate it at UVA to this day, and they construct experiments, such as passwords that only one person knows to unlock an account, to see if a child ever comes along after that person dies and can tell it them.
I know this sounds flaky, but it is science and I'm willing to entertain it. At the same time, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... so the research is interesting, but has fantastic hurdles to overcome before anyone can accept it.
I don't need evidence to say "I don't think there are ants on the moon". I do need evidence if I were to say "There are no ants on the moon". Both are two subtly different positions. The former is not one of faith, the latter is.
I think it's even a bit more nuanced than that. When you say "I don't think there are ants on the moon," you are still not speaking as a scientist and you are asserting a matter of faith. If you provide evidence-based reasons for why there are not ants on the moon, you are speaking as a scientist. When you state a belief without evidence, that is faith. When you propose an hypothesis with supporting empirical evidence, that is science.
If you were to ask me, if I believed in god. Since I am a professional scientist, I would want to give you two answers. In my capacity as a professional scientist I would have to--I would be required to--be agnostic on the subject since I couldn't cite with scientific certainty say that there is a god and I couldn't with scientific certainty say that there isn't.
But if I were allowed to respond as just a regular non-scientist and if you allowed me to take the very same indulgences that all other non-scientists are allowed to take and that is I'm allowed to reject the training I've recieved as a scientist that taught me--that drilled into my head--not to accept anything as fact that can't be scientifically proven, but instead I'm now allowed to do what many many others do and profess--I'm allowed now to profess to know something and to profess to strongly believe it in the complete absence of facts...then I'm gonna have to say that my very strong faith, my very very strong belief is that there is not god. But on this level, on this level now, my belief is perfectly equivalent to religious belief. We're both doing the same thing.
So when a scientist says "The charge on an electron is 1.602X10^-19 coulombs." That is not an expression of belief or faith. That is an established fact. It's based on many many Galileo-type experiments, following the format that was established by Galileo 400 years ago. It is not at all equivalent to religious belief. But when a scientist says there is no god, and he's acting in the capacity of a scientist, he's not giving you a scientific conclusion on the subject, he is at that moment expressing a personal belief and opinion.
...The battle isn't really religion versus science per se. These two things are not so much incompatible as they are just not equivalent and not intersecting. I think the tension lies in the type of thinking, and the approach that is peculiar to both. One encourages uncritical acceptance of ideas and the other seriously discourages it.
Exactly. The contractor gets paid twice as much, not the employees. In fact, profit motivations of the contractor put pressure on them to pay their employees as little as possible, and since most contracts are written in such a way as to absolve the contractor of responsibility if projects fail, the easiest way to maximize profit is to hire unqualified staff.
This is my firsthand experience. I was government contractor for 10 years. They hired me because I wasn't very qualified to write software (this was on a mission-critical aviation logistics system), but, lucky them, I worked hard and became one of their star programmers. I was the second highest-paid person on staff with our contractor in an organization of over 100 people. I found out from a leaked document that my company was making $150k a year off me after paying my salary. Since most employees were making less than half my salary, the contractor was pulling in about $15 to $20 million a year on our contract since the only overhead they had was covering our health insurance and 401ks (offices, computers, furniture, and other supplies were all provided by the government). That's $15 to $20 million a year to serve as a Human Resource department for 100 employees.
When the contract came up for recompete, the contractor used extremely heavy-handed tactics to try and force me to sign an exclusivity agreement with them, which was pointless in a right to work state. I objected on the grounds that the company provided no added value to the contract and that the employees, most of whom were just warming chairs, would get picked up by whoever won the contract (saw this happen many times over the years). It was a principle thing and I didn't appreciate being bullied. When they continued to pressure me (a manager actually blocked the door to prevent me from leaving without signing the document), I produced the leaked document and told them I would quit without a 10% raise. They let me go without a second thought.
Since I left, the software project I had spent the previous three years working on has completely failed without there being anyone qualified to work on it, but the contractor doesn't care because they get paid no matter what and it's cheaper to hire people with zero programming experience and pay them diddlysquat to struggle through their job than it is to reduce your profits and hire people who are educated software development. I'm not bitter about being let go, but I am bitter about the project failure. I was really dedicated to my job and felt I was making a difference in the organization, but the contractor, who honestly didn't really know anything about my job or the project I was working on (Government employees managed me directly), could only see the dollar signs.
I assure you, this is not about placing "blame." This is all about giving government employees the ability to put checkmarks next to items on their todo list. The department where I worked hired a contractor to build a LIMS for them so they could claim progress on a project the higher-ups were demanding. The government manager who started the project took credit for making progress on it after he got promoted elsewhere, the contractor got $15 million for producing a single webpage with a a phone number field that auto-focused to the next input after you filled it in, and the new government manager killed the project and took credit for eliminating waste.
"You need to go get rid of 250,000 contractors in the Defense Department, where you can really pick up some small change." ~ Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, February 16, 2011 on balancing the budget (source)
"The problem with Socialism is Socialism, the problem with Capitalism is Capitalists," as William F. Buckley once said. Government contracting combines the worst elements of socialism and capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
If the content of this book intrigues you, I highly recommend this Lecture Series by UC Berkeley Online Course, Spring 2011 , Prof. Geoffrey D. Nunberg. I listened to them a few years ago when the quality was terrible, but they were still fascinating and have been re-recorded in much better quality and with slides. The course starts way back with spoken word to written word to signs on up through history. Great series.
There are terrific similarities between the two groups. They are both angry about the bank bailouts, but one focuses its rage on the government for providing the bailout and the other focuses its rage on Wall Street for taking it. In fact, the biggest difference between the two may be their demographic: Tea Party is mostly older and OWS mostly younger, making this a conflict of generations rather than classes. The problem is the manipulators are hard at work keeping people from finding any common ground by demonizing the other side instead of addressing their grievances.
The Tea Party got this treatment from the Huffington Post, who focused on the most racist signs from the protesters. Now we're seeing the same thing, with Andrew "we have the guns" Breitbart's photographer blatantly staging a photo of a protester supposedly defecating on a police car. Brietbart's previous credits include videos edited to make USDA employee Shirley Sherrod look like a racist and ACORN employees look like they were giving tax evasion advice on running child prostitution rings.
I sympathized with the early Tea Party. Now I sympathize with these protesters, and this constant demonization of them is so heartbreaking. For the first time in my life I'm confronting these people on Facebook, forcing them to support their statements with references or showing them how they are being manipulated (90% of the time by a story I can trace back to Breitbart). For a week they fought back, but then they toned down their attacks... Unfortunately, watching the new Facebook Ticker, I can see that they have merely taken their hatred to where they think I can't see it. Wonderful social experiment that new Facebook Ticker, see what you're "Friends" are saying about you behind your back and there's no way to turn it off.
All we can do is try to get people to see the human beings behind the villainous caricatures. When they try to connect the movement to the "sinister machinations of George Soros," I point out that Soros is a prolific philanthropist and humanitarian. When they call the protesters scum, slackers, and anarchists, I point them to the We are the 99% blog and ask them to justify their position with references from that site.
People in the Tea Party should be doing the same thing, putting a human face on their movement. We should be finding common ground. Keeping us fighting each other is exactly what the powers that be need to prevent any significant change.
I keep seeing the "Mortgage crisis was cause because Banks were forced to lend to poor people" meme too, but they never provide any numbers to support this. The Government didn't force banks to give people mortgages for amounts that were far greater than the value of the homes they were buying while simultaneously selling investors these mortgages as bundled securities while they were secretly betting everything they had on the failure of these same investments.
I appreciate the correction. : )
I thought that was the case too, but the wikipedia article on the controversy paints a more complex picture. Apparently there is a video of the flag raising that clearly shows it was not staged initially, but there was a second photo that was staged, the "gung-ho shot;" however, no one tried to pass the second photo off as being anything other than a posed shot... so there's a myth that sounds scandalous, but the reality is that it was simply a misunderstanding.
This is why Science is so $#@%ing awesome. As Samuel Clemens put it best, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact.” This will be a very tough hypothesis to sell, but the researcher says his evidence is ready to take on all skeptics.
There are incredible stories waiting to be revealed in the fossil record and stories we have already uncovered. There's the footprints of Austrolopithecus, which were preserved in volcanic ash, large and small, male and female, close together as if they were huddling--perhaps the male had his arm around his mate, and the female's footprints lopsided as if she were carrying an infant. Imagine what it was like for them, walking fearfully across a landscape raining ash from a distant volcano... This story is drawn in this famous diorama.
Or the Taung child, whose skull bares the scars of an eagle attack. The child was carried away by a bird of prey. A story both fantastic and tragic at once.
Or the stories of Homo erectus , who was the velociraptor of our human ancestors. She was a total badass, which is why I love this statue of her at the Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins carrying a rotting caribou carcass across the Serengeti.
Science has thousands of these stories that we have already discovered, and an infinite supply of them in store for us if we keep exploring. Knowing this, I simply don't understand how people can be so impressed with a book covering a few hundred years of human history and consider it sacred. The sacred is all around us, written in the natural world waiting for us to read it.
I hate to say it, but Google's other mistake was in making it an invite-only-beta for so long too. The value of the social network is in the size of the network, and Google crippled itself by restricting the size of the network. Google+ generated a lot of buzz from the people who first got to use it, and many of my friends waited weeks to finally get into it, but when Google finally opened it up the buzz had died down and everyone had moved back to where the conversation was happening, Facebook.
If you're going to try and kill Facebook, it has to be done with a sneak attack. If Google+ had gone online open to everyone in the world right from the beginning, complete with ways to migrate all your friends into it from Facebook, they might have succeeded in moving everyone over to their platform before Facebook could counterattack. Instead, they let me and all my geek friends migrate, but left my Mother, Grandmother, and other family on Facebook and now it takes a smidgen of technical savvy to migrate your friends past Facebook's lock-down, which is more than most people want to deal with.
Horrible case of missed opportunity.
I've read that factoid too, and it's pure spin. I'm in the top 5%, meaning my family makes a little more than $150k a year. So the spinsters say I have nothing to complain about, as if we live in the lap of luxury. But you know what? I live in the DC Beltway, and our family income puts us in the middle middle class, where we can only afford a modest house and can only afford partial days at daycare for our son and have no idea how we're supposed to afford the second child we want to have.
I consider myself part of the 99% because we work hard just to survive and I sympathize completely with the unfortunate souls sharing their stories personal tragedy on the 99% blog. People who are trying to frame this as an 80% versus 20% thing have no clue what it's like out here in the real world where corporations have engineered the system to take every last fucking dime from honest hard-working Americans while refusing to give anything back to the country that made their success possible.
This is a great opinion piece, and thank you for posting it. I don't know what you meant by the "Tact is unfortunately overrated." comment, but I don't consider ESR's post as being tactful or politically correct. Rather, unlike RMS's tweet-rant, ESR has posed a thorough intellectual take down of Steve Jobs, even pointing out that Jobs' egomaniacle nature essentially killed him because he thought he could cure himself with alternative medicine instead of simply having the tumor removed, which would have saved his life.
I don't see how arguing that a person's control-freak nature caused them to make an incredibly stupid decision that ended up killing himself can be described as "tactful" or "politically correct," but it needs to be said. Let's not confused well-reasoned thoughtful arguments with "sugar coating" things.
I had the same question... It looks like what they posted was the full article in which case its more like a tweet than a substantive post.
Sorry... There seems to be some confusion from my poorly-worded post. I know that CCing your work copyrights it, but registering with the Library of Congress implements a traditional copyright, without the flexibility of a CC license... those are two conflicting licenses and the conflict has not been resolved in the courts yet.
Minor edit. That should read: "Look into the Creative Commons system."
You'll retain the rights to your work, but make it available for others to use with whatever restrictions (or lack of) you so desire. If you want full control, they offer more traditional copyrights as well. The best part is that the licenses were developed by professional lawyers and they provide forms to craft the appropriate legalese for you to protect your work.
I don't know how it works, but I also recommend registering your work with the Library of Congress electronically for $35. This will get it registered in the National Archives, which is the greatest backup system in the world. This does copyright your work, which can conflict with the Creative Commons license... but since no one has brought the conflicting licenses to court AFAIK, I have no idea what it means to both Copyright and Creative Commons your work.
The additional problem is that creative people are competing against a world wide web's worth of people putting creative content online for free. And the professionals are hurting because of it. I found this out at a science conference session on photography. While I do amateur photography and give all my content away for free under a creative commons license, which has gotten me 300 photos in Wikipedia and in numerous books and other publications, every single one of those photographs given away is work a professional photographer could not make money off, and the professionals let me know their frustration.
I feel the pinch with my writing. I would love to be a professional writer, but the competition is ridiculous. So I self-published my books and posted them online for free just to be read, but I found myself in competition with thousands of other authors also self-publishing. The stories in the news of self-published authors and writers like Corey Doctorow hitting it big represent an infinitesimal percentage of writers out there. The professional writers who are out there make a pittance and work incredibly long hours perpetually promoting themselves to stay relevant. I actually prefer my day job developing software and writing as a hobby in my spare time. I think it's much less stressfull.
I appreciate the fact that this opinion piece comes from Salon, an online news site whose business model still involves paying writers to produce original content, which has been incredibly unsuccessful. Compare Salon to the Huffingtonpost, an online news site whose business model involves reposting other news sources' content and getting celebrities and other individuals to post commentary for free because it gives them a soapbox. Salon can't compete with the information deluge the Huffpo provides. It's a perfect example of the way things used to work and the way they work now.
I'm not saying any of this is inherently bad, it's just a change; however, it does bother me the our cultural expectations haven't caught up with the times. Everyone still epitomizes making money off of creative content as the only sign of success, but I write, blog, and photograph because I enjoy it and see the contribution to our culture as a more noble motivation. I feel sorry for all those college kids studying photography, creative writing, and art now because they live in a world where it appears that art is thriving better than at any other time in human history, but no one is making a living off of it anymore.
Hear! Hear! Just today I submitted a post titled "Did Alternative Medicine Contribute to Steve Jobs' Death?" I previewed the post, the text of the body looked fine, I hit submit and the title became "Did Alternative Medicine Contribute to Steve Jobs'". WTF??? Maybe the title change appeared in the preview, but I was too busy scrutinizing the body of the post. I cringed, considered resubmitting the post, but decided to skulk away. Nobody's gonna read that.
I will hand it to the editors though, they have refactored my writing to sound much better at times and provided more logical text-linking when my submissions do make the front page.
Me talk pretty one day.
I appreciate the second link's take on things, with the "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor, but I think the author misses some key elements in how it applies to modern society. Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied. Just as the Enlightenment 200 years ago resulted in an explosion of discoveries about the natural world because the realm of scientific knowledge was so small at the time... You couldn't investigate any natural phenomena without discovering a new element or species.
It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration.
Queue the "Marxist" ad hominem attack in 3... 2... 1...
Yes. And we know they got rich by hard work and risk-taking because they spend billions of dollars on advertising to convince us of this.
Now if only the Association for Computing Machinery would get on board.
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
You have to understand that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the 24hour corporate spin machine has told them that NN is all about limiting what you can say on the internet. They liken it to the Fairness Doctrine, the now-dead bill that once required broadcasters to give equal time to liberal and conservative viewpoints and, ironically. the same law Limbaugh used to get on the air, a law that once made sense when there was a scarcity of broadcasting outlets.
Net Neutrality works the other way. We now have limitless outlets for expressing our views on the Internet, but corporations need scarcity in order to make money. So they seek to throttle the bandwidth, creating an artificial scarcity on their product and drive its value up. Without Net Neutrality, corporations have the right to discriminate against speech they don't like or companies they are in competition with. It's the exact opposite of Free Speech, but the conservative media have convinced their followers that black is white and that this bill is double-plus bad for Free Speech.
Without Net Neutrality, the Internet risks falling into a communications war, bad for all Americans and bad for the Corporations who are arguing against it. I don't understand how the same ideology that argues so strongly for Free Trade around the world has taken such a strong stance against the same exact principle for the Internet.
Thank you for posting this. It explains why so many of the Academic solutions to problems I'm researching are so incredibly lacking. I've seen 200+ page theses claiming to solve a problem, but after getting through them I find that the paper actually only describes how one would go about solving the problem and the author hasn't produced one shred of real code, but lots of pseudocode, to make their point.
Honestly, this is why managers avoid hiring Ph.D.s like the black plague in the software development world. I shared a cubicle with a Ph.D. who had just come out of spending the last 10 years crafting some incredibly complex formula for accurately predicting something to do with radio waves. We gave him a report to write. Six months later he gave us a white paper on how he was going to go about writing the report. Six months after that he got a job writing white papers for another software company. We gave the report to one of our average programmers, who got it done in a month.
For the amount of effort and verbosity that goes into Academic research, it sure seems like very little comes out of it. No wonder only 40% of research papers get cited in the first five years of their being published.
I know that the way religious people frame their arguments means they will find some way to weasel out of their beliefs being disproved with an irrational argument (ie. "God won't let you prove he exists, because then you wouldn't need to have faith."). Funny how so many religious people cite scientific studies that found people in hospitals who were prayed for had better recovery rates, but when a double-blind study was performed, where the patients didn't know they were being prayed for, and there was no difference between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups, they either ignore it or use it as evidence that god demands faith without proof (never mind that this ignores the faith of those who were prayed-for in the double-blind study).
But this is also why I like certain mixtures of Science and Religion. I love that fact that the Dalai Lama has said that when science and religion conflict, you must go with science, and has encouraged his monks to work with scientists to uncover the mental health benefits of meditation (and they are myriad if you read the published journal studies). Carl Sagan challenged the Dalai Lama on this point, asking if he would even abandon the belief in reincarnation if science disproved it. The Dalai Lama replied that yes he would, but you would find it very hard to disprove such a thing.
This is also why I enjoy the work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson who spent a lifetime at UVA studying the phenomenon of children remembering past lives that he could take details from and research to see if these people and events did exist and took place. He calls the phenomenon "reincarnation" but is very careful to point out that there is no evidence that a soul is transferring from one person to the next and that some other natural phenomenon could be taking place to explain it. He also provides many case studies where the things a child remembers of a past life are demonstrably false. His work was considered so interesting that a team of researchers continues to investigate it at UVA to this day, and they construct experiments, such as passwords that only one person knows to unlock an account, to see if a child ever comes along after that person dies and can tell it them.
I know this sounds flaky, but it is science and I'm willing to entertain it. At the same time, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... so the research is interesting, but has fantastic hurdles to overcome before anyone can accept it.
I think it's even a bit more nuanced than that. When you say "I don't think there are ants on the moon," you are still not speaking as a scientist and you are asserting a matter of faith. If you provide evidence-based reasons for why there are not ants on the moon, you are speaking as a scientist. When you state a belief without evidence, that is faith. When you propose an hypothesis with supporting empirical evidence, that is science.
I like Carolyn Proco's take on it:
Exactly. The contractor gets paid twice as much, not the employees. In fact, profit motivations of the contractor put pressure on them to pay their employees as little as possible, and since most contracts are written in such a way as to absolve the contractor of responsibility if projects fail, the easiest way to maximize profit is to hire unqualified staff.
This is my firsthand experience. I was government contractor for 10 years. They hired me because I wasn't very qualified to write software (this was on a mission-critical aviation logistics system), but, lucky them, I worked hard and became one of their star programmers. I was the second highest-paid person on staff with our contractor in an organization of over 100 people. I found out from a leaked document that my company was making $150k a year off me after paying my salary. Since most employees were making less than half my salary, the contractor was pulling in about $15 to $20 million a year on our contract since the only overhead they had was covering our health insurance and 401ks (offices, computers, furniture, and other supplies were all provided by the government). That's $15 to $20 million a year to serve as a Human Resource department for 100 employees.
When the contract came up for recompete, the contractor used extremely heavy-handed tactics to try and force me to sign an exclusivity agreement with them, which was pointless in a right to work state. I objected on the grounds that the company provided no added value to the contract and that the employees, most of whom were just warming chairs, would get picked up by whoever won the contract (saw this happen many times over the years). It was a principle thing and I didn't appreciate being bullied. When they continued to pressure me (a manager actually blocked the door to prevent me from leaving without signing the document), I produced the leaked document and told them I would quit without a 10% raise. They let me go without a second thought.
Since I left, the software project I had spent the previous three years working on has completely failed without there being anyone qualified to work on it, but the contractor doesn't care because they get paid no matter what and it's cheaper to hire people with zero programming experience and pay them diddlysquat to struggle through their job than it is to reduce your profits and hire people who are educated software development. I'm not bitter about being let go, but I am bitter about the project failure. I was really dedicated to my job and felt I was making a difference in the organization, but the contractor, who honestly didn't really know anything about my job or the project I was working on (Government employees managed me directly), could only see the dollar signs.
I assure you, this is not about placing "blame." This is all about giving government employees the ability to put checkmarks next to items on their todo list. The department where I worked hired a contractor to build a LIMS for them so they could claim progress on a project the higher-ups were demanding. The government manager who started the project took credit for making progress on it after he got promoted elsewhere, the contractor got $15 million for producing a single webpage with a a phone number field that auto-focused to the next input after you filled it in, and the new government manager killed the project and took credit for eliminating waste.
"You need to go get rid of 250,000 contractors in the Defense Department, where you can really pick up some small change." ~ Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, February 16, 2011 on balancing the budget (source)
"The problem with Socialism is Socialism, the problem with Capitalism is Capitalists," as William F. Buckley once said. Government contracting combines the worst elements of socialism and capitalism.
Reminds me of this comic: What it's Like to Play Games Online as an Adult.
Reminds me of this classic ST VS SW mashup Enterprise VS Star Destroyer. : )