Customers were completely insulated from the negative effects of their electricity use decisions.
Whoa whoa whoa, I think you need to check your goals. Why was this de-regulation thing attempted? Was it to smack the users on the nose and force them to use less electricity? Was it to teach them that they're not rich enough to turn on the A/C during the day? NO. It was to lower the price. Lowering the quality and bending the users over a barrel wasn't the intended goal. (Unless you've not some evidence that you'd like to share. I mean, the goal of healthcare HMOs by Nixon turned out to be reducing the quality of care to poor people)
And it's a utility man, it wasn't a matter of limited resources. People were not sucking all the juice so that no-one else could have any. No, they had predictable mandatory behavior because it's a basic fucking utility.
the two power companies which hadn't fully deregulated
Ugh, "fully deregulated" is called anarchy. It will never be enough for the libertarians. Move along.
What happens is that you and everyone else use less power and the price doesn't go up much.
Bwahahahahahah! He thinks prices went up because there was too much demand! Oh boy son didn't you even read the wiki page on this?. Holy shit, you think Enron execs went to prison because of a supply/demand curve? No, it was FRAUD.
But hey, yeah, there WAS an increase in power consumption. Cities grew bigger and stuff. You know, traditionally, if there's more customers, the utility companies build more generators to service them. Turns out that in a free-market system it pays REALLY WELL to keep a resource scarce rather than providing the expected services.
Where's my incentive to reduce my demand to prevent PG&E from going bankrupt?
Nowhere, because the power company should build more generation to deal with the fact they have to service more customers. This was a clusterfuck of an attempt to insert capitalism where it really doesn't belong.
Yeah, "a modest impact", hell, if we somehow eliminated coal all-together it might only have a modest impact. I believe the whole "how much are we going to have to change, and for what results?" is still one of those topics that's up for debate. Real meaningful debate, not the mindless droning of the politicians who still can't accept that the environmentalists were right about something.
I have to agree. We're switching to alternatives and the coal miners are now exporting. That's good from a CO2 perspective and from a trade deficit perspective. We've got more green energy, which is almost universally good. What? You thought all those coal mines were just going to shut down? No, that'll take longer. If ever.
Listen people, if you forecast nothing but doom and gloom, EVEN WHEN THERE IS GOOD NEWS, then people are going to become jaded to your forecasts. They're going to assume that everything you report on and forecast has one hell of a negative nancy bias. And their assumption is going to be correct. So buck up me kiddo, things are looking up.
I mean, jesus... 50% to 35% in 5 years? Damn. I didn't think our power structure was that nimble.
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they? Enron and the crisis they caused and profited from were a result of deregulation. Flat out. The "changes" that were made to the regulations? They were made to encourage a free market and competition. But there's no competition if there aren't any players with any power. And BOY OH BOY did those fuckers abuse what little power they were given.
Owning both electrical generation and the distribution of that electricity was made illegal.
Yes, they split power generation and power distribution. That's one part of it. It made for a system of competition so that there were no longer territories of my generators and my neighbors generators. It set up a system where the old boys kept control of the distribution, and the new kids were given the generation, both were given a doggy biscuit and some ground rules for playing nice, and then set upon each other.
That "capped retail price"? Think about that for a moment. The entire point of this deregulation thing is to lower the price of electricity to the users. Alright, that's the goal. That's the entire point. That's why they did this. They believed the free market would work it's magic and they'd see lower prices than in the old regulated system. If they can't do that, if the system on the whole doesn't produce prices below a certain point, GUESS WHAT? It turns out that deregulation doesn't work. The cap let the pain of a broken system land in corporate-ville rather than raping the customers. At least, you know, the excessive pain.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
The entire crisis was caused by the state government.
Yes, it was caused by the state government DEREGULATING the power industry and giving more control to corporate entities. It was a pretty bad move that they shouldn't have done. Some things you can't trust in the hands of businessmen. Like those things with natural monopolies. Like utilities. Congratulations, you found where the government made it's fault.
Nuclear power can't stand alone, at least with current reactor designs, because their output can't be ramped up or down very quickly
Yep, nukie plants hate fidling with the rods. Good for baseline. Coal takes about half an hour for the furnaces to heat up and make more steam. Gas turbines and disel generators can come online in minutes, but last I heard were more expensive and always smaller capacities. I think they're still obligated to buy all the solar and wind that get generated, so they can't really ask to raise and lower those outputs. So you get what you get. Hydro is on and off on a dime, just one of it's many awesome factors.
Speaking of which, it's more than just opening the gates at day, and shutting them at night. They literally spend power at night to PUMP WATER UPHILL into the reservoir. They treat it like a battery. Not great efficiency, but AMAZING capacity. And hey, coupled with nukie plants which like to run at steady rates, it's a great match.
But the electrical grid is a lot more complicated than most people realize. Anyone suggesting all power comes from one source type is a fool, but we can certainly shift more towards specific sources. The people I know in the business swear that one day the power company will be able to tell houses not to run their AC so much. Personally I find that a spooky amount of exterior control over my property.
Possibly not all that Slashdot or geek related, but my workout of choice is the sport of fencing. It's not as healthy as running, and it won't bulk you up like lifting weights, but there's a lot of though and strategy that goes into it. And the mind-numbing boredom of the gym is is such a big turn-off. I need to be engaged in my exercise otherwise I quite out of sheer boredom.
And it'll make you sweat. It's certainly a workout. Calories burnt aren't calories that go to you gut.
Different scenarios. One is taking a risk for a reward, the other is accepting something outside of my control. If the arm is going to be lost, so be it. And some kids face that scenario graduating (or dropping out) highschool. They know they're never going to be in the upper-middle lifestyle. Maybe if they get lucky dealing drugs. Maybe they can pretend they'll get superfamous as a rock-star/rapper/author. Or they can have ludicrously silly dreams of starting their own wildly successful business. But if there's a chance that I could save the arm, but at the risk of dying then that's somewhat equivalent to risking college and having a chance at the good life. A lot of people would risk saving the arm if you told the the odds were better than 50/50. And maybe if the consequence wasn't as bad as, you know, DEATH.
A high school grad capable of affording to go to college could afford to do other things as well, such as a start a business or a family.
Most businesses fail. So there is your 50/50 odds of pissing away all that money. And that's for people that have the money to start one up. And I don't think "starting a family" is a viable career path in and of itself.
Aye, I agree with your last part. Hence why I think tracking kids in highschool into tech schools is a good idea. One of the better blue-collar jobs is being a machinist. And there's ALWAYS a need for machinists out there. But not everyone has the skill, and not enough people try to get it. And while I feel it would be a hard pill to swallow: "sorry Johnny, your math scores aren't high enough to let you to go college, you should try being a welder instead", it would probably make kids take their studies seriously.
Ooooh ooohhh! And then the self-driven determined entrepreneurial types shove off and go make their own society. Possibly under the sea.
Yeah... That'll work out.
Come on dude, you are a living stereotype that has been the butt of many running jokes. Lemme guess... You're a fan of Ayn Rand. Your father owned a business. You grew up in upper-middle America. With a front lawn. Possibly in a cul-de-sac. You actually suckle as much government handouts as you can, while lambasting anyone that does likewise, but tell yourself that you deserve it because the government is the sucker here. And you pay most of your employees less than minimum wage. How close am I?
I have to admit it feels REALLY damn good. There's a contentedness that comes with financial stability. To know that you're saving up money rather than paying off debts. Don't think that it all boils down to having an engineering degree and a good job. Part of it is simply not being financially retarded. I've got coworkers and peers that make more than me but somehow still live paycheck to paycheck. Then there are the worry warts that stress out that their investments aren't making enough money this quarter. Oye.
But no. Having shifted from a blue-collar family, to poor college student, to sliding into an upper-middle lifestyle, I have to say that the good life is in fact pretty damn good. Occasionally I'm down about not having the wage I could get if I were in, say, new york. Or I'm depressed about not doing more with what free time I have. And there's the petty little stuff that everyone suffers through. But stepping back and looking at the big picture, yeah, life is good.
The problem is that no one really wants to have a shit job. And most of these kids are perfectly competent enough to go be a biologist, a lab tech, a philosophy consultant (as if that was a job), but there are plenty of people that are better then they are and they can't get a job in their field. So they drop down a peg and go be a pizza boy. And it turns out there enough that drop down that all pizza boys are now expected to have a college degree.
If you have an average US highschool grad who can afford to go to college, wouldn't you tell him to go get a degree? It's a real downer to accept that, even though you were smart enough and had enough money, that you probably shouldn't even try to get a good life. That you should lie down and accept a blue-collar job of hard work and a shitty retirement when you're too old to break your back every morning. There's a big push to be successful. That's normal. And success is pretty much defined as getting a good job, by having a good degree.
You're looking at it from the perspective of people hiring. That they really shouldn't put so much weight on a degree. But from the hiree's perspective, OH DEAR GOD YOU NEED A DEGREE. The split used to be those with a college degree and those without. Right now there is another split is between people with worthwhile degrees; science, technology, engineering, and math, and those with degrees like philosophy, history, or English. Too many people for too long felt that ANY sort of degree would guarantee a good life. That's no longer true. It puts you above the have-nots, but not by far.
I think we need more tracking in highschool. To set people up for their path. Either meaningful college, tech schools, or straight to the workforce.
There are 120 (USA) college football teams. That's $4.16 mill spread over every college. The AVERAGE salary of a head coach is $1.6 mill (Fucking hell!). Assistant coaches makes $200,000. There are usually... what? 5-9? You've still got a million dollars left over, but you haven't yet paid for anything to actually play the game, you've just paid $360,000,000 per year for people to tell you how to play the game. You've still got the tuition of all 2,520 players, travel expenses, all the little crap like uniforms, oh and stadiums that cost hundreds of millions to build and something like a quarter million to upkeep.
Let's hope those shirts are selling well.
I dare you, I double dog dare you, to try an argue that it helps bring in donations to the college.
Sigh. Ok. I'm sorry. I know I'm angry and bitter over this. I need to work on that. I understand that people can spend their money on whatever they want, even if it's not productive. That's culture. That's art. Even... ugh... sports. But at some point you have to tell the addict to get a fucking grip and put down the pipe. Even if the metaphorical drug is fine art or college football. There comes a point where you because sickened at how much a society simply pisses away to watch people ram their heads into each other. And it angers me that the educational system has been subverted to... this.
BWWAAHAHAHAAaaahahahahaaaaa! He thinks fortune 500 CEOs need to get loans!
Oh, god no son. Where have you been? If they really want something big, like corporate big, they get their corporation to buy it. Or they make a corporation on paper, funnel some money to it in various ways, and have the corporation take out the loan based on those assets, not their own. Or they don't funnel money to the corporation, but set up a loan based on the assets they're about to buy with said loan. Or, much like the lowly working slobs, they ask their buddies for some scratch. Millions of dollars in scratch. Not that they actually had the money move hands, no, that'd be taxed. The buddies buy it direct or donate to a charity run by the CEO, which is of course tax free.
Fencing is extremely simplified and limited to one plane of direction.
Simplified from what? Did you mean just "simple"? You're an idiot. Football is a team sport. So there is some communication and coordination efforts that you don't have in fencing. As far as which one is "deeper" *cough*physicalchess*cough*, who gives a shit? Neither are worth a $250K salary.
...ballistics calculations...
Come on dude, the quarterback and the kicker do not perform any ballistic calculations. There is no math involved. There are no numbers, no gravitational constants, no calculus. Throwing and kicking a ball is a skill. One you train up through practice, and not through mathematical calculations. There's a lot that goes into throwing a ball, don't get me wrong. That is, unless you define "Performing calculations" in such a way that the actual physical football is "performing" mathematical computations as it FALLS. You know, cause the world around the ball can be modeled with math in certain ways. And here's the kicker, if you take such a broad definition of "math", then you can apply that sentiment to ANYTHING.
And no, dogs don't know calculus. Have you ever read that to the last page?
Nail on the head when it comes to the angry geek part. My body though? Dude, did you miss that joke at the end? I'm a USFA C-rated fencer and founded my own fencing club. If anything I'm a jealous jock. (oh god, that felt bad to type...)
As for "the complex math"? Naw dude. Naw. The players do not utilize math. The coaches probably don't utilize math short of "we need 14/7=2 touchdowns to win". They're managers after all.
If no one involved in the actual game is performing mathematics of any note, you can't really say the game is deep. Analysis of the game can be deep. But as Dins pointed out, ANYTHING can be analyzed deeply. Yay science!
"Isn't any good"? Come on dude, both versions put text on the screen. Both completely fulfill the imaginary requirements. Whether or not the OS sees the process as having a fault or not is inconsequential. This is kind of the crux of the MIT-approach vs whatever it is you'd call Gabriel's idea conflict. Which is the real basis for the article. (Personally, I didn't think "brogramming" had anything to do with booze, so much as having a clique of young programmers that meshed well and were friends. Which is a hard environment for the new old guy to enter into, hence all the demonizing). The larger concern rather than wrongly indicating the performance of the program to the OS is that in some environments parts of the return statement are apparently reserved, and touching them results in undefined behavior. I say "larger concern", but since my code returns 23, and doesn't touch the upper bits, it's only a potential bug that would come with later development. On niche systems no-one cares about. So it's not that large of a concern. The sort of issue that only OCD anally retentive types care about. While a good trait for programmers when it comes to making code functional, it hurts them when it comes to how much they actually make. Something in which to seek balance, for sure.
But anyway!
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char** argv) {
unsigned int burgers = 3735928559;
int i;
char bro [10][10] = {{"bitch..."},{"of "},{"massive "},{"\n"},{"do "},{"I "},{"amounts "},{"code!"},{"bro, "},{"Yeah "}};
srand(6443+burgers);
while(i=rand()%10)
{
printf("%s",bro[i]);
}
printf("Chill and eat some %x",burgers);
return 0; }
Since rand() isn't standard at all, you could probably find out my development platform from this. Also, it took an unbelievably long time to find out that slashdot's ecode tag only indents when posting in Plain Old Text mode and eats your indentation in HTML mode. Also, if I'm posting is P.O.T mode, why the hell did my link above work? Just how old and crufty is the code behind Slashdot! Jesus, this wouldn't have happened if they followed the MIT-approach!
Stop giving them so much money. Pay them less.
Stop with the system of letting their buddies choose their salary. Choose people that are unassociated to be board members. Or let the stakeholder vote on it. Or actually set some rules for how much the CEO makes based off of performance.
Stop with the golden parachutes. Just don't put it in the contract. We don't reward pile-driving the company into the ground.
Stop the inefficiencies of gargantuan organizations. Split them up into smaller companies, each with their own CEO, who would earn what the branch managers are earning right now. God knows we've got enough people wanting to lead. Balance bureaucratic inefficiency with economy of scale.
This one. This right here. All of our income is from our salary, but what they report is not their income. The ones who run the game don't play by the same rules as us.
Yes, it is as crazy as it first seems.
1) They manage people. They're managers. Fine. It's one of the better jobs out there. A quarter of a mill is still a lot of money, even for a manager. But hey, some managers are running things that are important and are doing their job well. Some managers really do deserve a quarter mill. BUT:
2) They're domain experts in a domain in a very sparse and narrow domain. It's a game. It's not that deep. It doesn't take much to be an expert.
3) People do their job for fun. Not all aspects of it, no, but the major decisions and actions that we pay coaches for, people like to do as a game. Fundamentally, that's all competition and should drive their value down. How many people do you know would be the college coach for free?
4) What they're managing isn't that important. "But football is big business"... No, it isn't. It's a money pit. They produce nothing of value short of some recreational TV time and some T-shirts. The "income" of college football comes from donations to the college. Donations go up when they win some games and now all donations are entirely thanks to football. Bullshit.
5) It's just supposed to be an activity to keep the kids fit while they study at college. Something on the side. It's not supposed to be the subsidized minor league of the NFL. Football is not the intended purpose of our educational system.
6) That last one has a ripple effect. A lot of kids have dreams of getting a sports scholarship so they can get some education and not bust rocks with their head the rest of their life. How many kids have foregone their actual studies in highschool because they're too busy playing football? How many parents push (and push HARD) their kids to do well, not at studying, but at tackling each other? How many of those scholarship hopeful actually get one? Of those with scholarships, how many actually get an education in the middle of their football career? Somewhere along the line, football stopped becoming a means to an end, and became the end itself.
So no. Fuck that coach and his $240K. (wait, he coaches football right? It's totally legit if he coaches... say... fencing. Lot of skill there. Can't skimp on quality, nosiree)
How soon can I browse the salary history of CEO's, Congressmen, the chairmen of the FED, the leaders of Scientology, and the lobbyists on capitol hill?
Never went to college huh? Beer culture is a fairly serious problem. Too many rich kids getting away from daddy for the first time, not enough responsibility.
It doesn't take much to build up a culture:
Beer pong, Movies, and, you know, the existence of bars.
printf() returns an int which passed along to the return statement.
So lemme get this straight, you (wrongly) chastise me for failing to return an int, and yet you don't even double check your code and notice that the brackets in your include statements got eaten by the HTML interpreter?
Bro, do you even QA?
On a side note, what'd you do to display the code with a fixed-width font and indention? < and > worked for me but didn't want to display. After a full 10 seconds I couldn't find it on the site FAQ, and cheezily compacted the lines in some crazy Pico style or something. No, that don't fly with me homies. It's Allman/ANSI style brackets for life foo!
Actually I believe he was "turn-based" as a metaphor for any environment where split-second twitches fueled by intravenous red-bull and injecting meth directly into your eyeballs in an effort to overcome synaptic lag and reach true plank-length responses are the deciding factor in gameplay.
It's a common sentiment amongst the Counter-Strike crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
Customers were completely insulated from the negative effects of their electricity use decisions.
Whoa whoa whoa, I think you need to check your goals. Why was this de-regulation thing attempted? Was it to smack the users on the nose and force them to use less electricity? Was it to teach them that they're not rich enough to turn on the A/C during the day?
NO. It was to lower the price. Lowering the quality and bending the users over a barrel wasn't the intended goal. (Unless you've not some evidence that you'd like to share. I mean, the goal of healthcare HMOs by Nixon turned out to be reducing the quality of care to poor people)
And it's a utility man, it wasn't a matter of limited resources. People were not sucking all the juice so that no-one else could have any. No, they had predictable mandatory behavior because it's a basic fucking utility.
the two power companies which hadn't fully deregulated
Ugh, "fully deregulated" is called anarchy. It will never be enough for the libertarians. Move along.
What happens is that you and everyone else use less power and the price doesn't go up much.
Bwahahahahahah! He thinks prices went up because there was too much demand! Oh boy son didn't you even read the wiki page on this?. Holy shit, you think Enron execs went to prison because of a supply/demand curve? No, it was FRAUD.
But hey, yeah, there WAS an increase in power consumption. Cities grew bigger and stuff. You know, traditionally, if there's more customers, the utility companies build more generators to service them. Turns out that in a free-market system it pays REALLY WELL to keep a resource scarce rather than providing the expected services.
Where's my incentive to reduce my demand to prevent PG&E from going bankrupt?
Nowhere, because the power company should build more generation to deal with the fact they have to service more customers. This was a clusterfuck of an attempt to insert capitalism where it really doesn't belong.
Yeah, "a modest impact", hell, if we somehow eliminated coal all-together it might only have a modest impact. I believe the whole "how much are we going to have to change, and for what results?" is still one of those topics that's up for debate. Real meaningful debate, not the mindless droning of the politicians who still can't accept that the environmentalists were right about something.
I have to agree. We're switching to alternatives and the coal miners are now exporting. That's good from a CO2 perspective and from a trade deficit perspective. We've got more green energy, which is almost universally good. What? You thought all those coal mines were just going to shut down? No, that'll take longer. If ever.
Listen people, if you forecast nothing but doom and gloom, EVEN WHEN THERE IS GOOD NEWS, then people are going to become jaded to your forecasts. They're going to assume that everything you report on and forecast has one hell of a negative nancy bias. And their assumption is going to be correct. So buck up me kiddo, things are looking up.
I mean, jesus... 50% to 35% in 5 years? Damn. I didn't think our power structure was that nimble.
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they? Enron and the crisis they caused and profited from were a result of deregulation. Flat out. The "changes" that were made to the regulations? They were made to encourage a free market and competition. But there's no competition if there aren't any players with any power. And BOY OH BOY did those fuckers abuse what little power they were given.
Owning both electrical generation and the distribution of that electricity was made illegal.
Yes, they split power generation and power distribution. That's one part of it. It made for a system of competition so that there were no longer territories of my generators and my neighbors generators. It set up a system where the old boys kept control of the distribution, and the new kids were given the generation, both were given a doggy biscuit and some ground rules for playing nice, and then set upon each other.
That "capped retail price"? Think about that for a moment. The entire point of this deregulation thing is to lower the price of electricity to the users. Alright, that's the goal. That's the entire point. That's why they did this. They believed the free market would work it's magic and they'd see lower prices than in the old regulated system. If they can't do that, if the system on the whole doesn't produce prices below a certain point, GUESS WHAT? It turns out that deregulation doesn't work. The cap let the pain of a broken system land in corporate-ville rather than raping the customers. At least, you know, the excessive pain.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
The entire crisis was caused by the state government.
Yes, it was caused by the state government DEREGULATING the power industry and giving more control to corporate entities. It was a pretty bad move that they shouldn't have done. Some things you can't trust in the hands of businessmen. Like those things with natural monopolies. Like utilities. Congratulations, you found where the government made it's fault.
Nuclear power can't stand alone, at least with current reactor designs, because their output can't be ramped up or down very quickly
Yep, nukie plants hate fidling with the rods. Good for baseline. Coal takes about half an hour for the furnaces to heat up and make more steam. Gas turbines and disel generators can come online in minutes, but last I heard were more expensive and always smaller capacities. I think they're still obligated to buy all the solar and wind that get generated, so they can't really ask to raise and lower those outputs. So you get what you get. Hydro is on and off on a dime, just one of it's many awesome factors.
Speaking of which, it's more than just opening the gates at day, and shutting them at night. They literally spend power at night to PUMP WATER UPHILL into the reservoir. They treat it like a battery. Not great efficiency, but AMAZING capacity. And hey, coupled with nukie plants which like to run at steady rates, it's a great match.
But the electrical grid is a lot more complicated than most people realize. Anyone suggesting all power comes from one source type is a fool, but we can certainly shift more towards specific sources. The people I know in the business swear that one day the power company will be able to tell houses not to run their AC so much. Personally I find that a spooky amount of exterior control over my property.
Possibly not all that Slashdot or geek related, but my workout of choice is the sport of fencing. It's not as healthy as running, and it won't bulk you up like lifting weights, but there's a lot of though and strategy that goes into it. And the mind-numbing boredom of the gym is is such a big turn-off. I need to be engaged in my exercise otherwise I quite out of sheer boredom.
And it'll make you sweat. It's certainly a workout. Calories burnt aren't calories that go to you gut.
So yeah, I stay fit by stabbing my friends.
Or would you prudently ignore me?
Different scenarios. One is taking a risk for a reward, the other is accepting something outside of my control. If the arm is going to be lost, so be it. And some kids face that scenario graduating (or dropping out) highschool. They know they're never going to be in the upper-middle lifestyle. Maybe if they get lucky dealing drugs. Maybe they can pretend they'll get superfamous as a rock-star/rapper/author. Or they can have ludicrously silly dreams of starting their own wildly successful business.
But if there's a chance that I could save the arm, but at the risk of dying then that's somewhat equivalent to risking college and having a chance at the good life. A lot of people would risk saving the arm if you told the the odds were better than 50/50. And maybe if the consequence wasn't as bad as, you know, DEATH.
A high school grad capable of affording to go to college could afford to do other things as well, such as a start a business or a family.
Most businesses fail. So there is your 50/50 odds of pissing away all that money. And that's for people that have the money to start one up. And I don't think "starting a family" is a viable career path in and of itself.
Aye, I agree with your last part. Hence why I think tracking kids in highschool into tech schools is a good idea. One of the better blue-collar jobs is being a machinist. And there's ALWAYS a need for machinists out there. But not everyone has the skill, and not enough people try to get it. And while I feel it would be a hard pill to swallow: "sorry Johnny, your math scores aren't high enough to let you to go college, you should try being a welder instead", it would probably make kids take their studies seriously.
Ooooh ooohhh! And then the self-driven determined entrepreneurial types shove off and go make their own society. Possibly under the sea.
Yeah... That'll work out.
Come on dude, you are a living stereotype that has been the butt of many running jokes. Lemme guess... You're a fan of Ayn Rand. Your father owned a business. You grew up in upper-middle America. With a front lawn. Possibly in a cul-de-sac. You actually suckle as much government handouts as you can, while lambasting anyone that does likewise, but tell yourself that you deserve it because the government is the sucker here. And you pay most of your employees less than minimum wage. How close am I?
I have to admit it feels REALLY damn good. There's a contentedness that comes with financial stability. To know that you're saving up money rather than paying off debts. Don't think that it all boils down to having an engineering degree and a good job. Part of it is simply not being financially retarded. I've got coworkers and peers that make more than me but somehow still live paycheck to paycheck. Then there are the worry warts that stress out that their investments aren't making enough money this quarter. Oye.
But no. Having shifted from a blue-collar family, to poor college student, to sliding into an upper-middle lifestyle, I have to say that the good life is in fact pretty damn good. Occasionally I'm down about not having the wage I could get if I were in, say, new york. Or I'm depressed about not doing more with what free time I have. And there's the petty little stuff that everyone suffers through. But stepping back and looking at the big picture, yeah, life is good.
I hear shit really sucks when you're poor.
Open source projects?
The problem is that no one really wants to have a shit job. And most of these kids are perfectly competent enough to go be a biologist, a lab tech, a philosophy consultant (as if that was a job), but there are plenty of people that are better then they are and they can't get a job in their field. So they drop down a peg and go be a pizza boy. And it turns out there enough that drop down that all pizza boys are now expected to have a college degree.
If you have an average US highschool grad who can afford to go to college, wouldn't you tell him to go get a degree? It's a real downer to accept that, even though you were smart enough and had enough money, that you probably shouldn't even try to get a good life. That you should lie down and accept a blue-collar job of hard work and a shitty retirement when you're too old to break your back every morning. There's a big push to be successful. That's normal. And success is pretty much defined as getting a good job, by having a good degree.
You're looking at it from the perspective of people hiring. That they really shouldn't put so much weight on a degree. But from the hiree's perspective, OH DEAR GOD YOU NEED A DEGREE. The split used to be those with a college degree and those without. Right now there is another split is between people with worthwhile degrees; science, technology, engineering, and math, and those with degrees like philosophy, history, or English. Too many people for too long felt that ANY sort of degree would guarantee a good life. That's no longer true. It puts you above the have-nots, but not by far.
I think we need more tracking in highschool. To set people up for their path. Either meaningful college, tech schools, or straight to the workforce.
There are 120 (USA) college football teams. That's $4.16 mill spread over every college. The AVERAGE salary of a head coach is $1.6 mill (Fucking hell!). Assistant coaches makes $200,000. There are usually... what? 5-9? You've still got a million dollars left over, but you haven't yet paid for anything to actually play the game, you've just paid $360,000,000 per year for people to tell you how to play the game. You've still got the tuition of all 2,520 players, travel expenses, all the little crap like uniforms, oh and stadiums that cost hundreds of millions to build and something like a quarter million to upkeep.
Let's hope those shirts are selling well.
I dare you, I double dog dare you, to try an argue that it helps bring in donations to the college.
Sigh. Ok. I'm sorry. I know I'm angry and bitter over this. I need to work on that. I understand that people can spend their money on whatever they want, even if it's not productive. That's culture. That's art. Even... ugh... sports. But at some point you have to tell the addict to get a fucking grip and put down the pipe. Even if the metaphorical drug is fine art or college football. There comes a point where you because sickened at how much a society simply pisses away to watch people ram their heads into each other. And it angers me that the educational system has been subverted to... this.
BWWAAHAHAHAAaaahahahahaaaaa! He thinks fortune 500 CEOs need to get loans!
Oh, god no son. Where have you been? If they really want something big, like corporate big, they get their corporation to buy it. Or they make a corporation on paper, funnel some money to it in various ways, and have the corporation take out the loan based on those assets, not their own. Or they don't funnel money to the corporation, but set up a loan based on the assets they're about to buy with said loan. Or, much like the lowly working slobs, they ask their buddies for some scratch. Millions of dollars in scratch. Not that they actually had the money move hands, no, that'd be taxed. The buddies buy it direct or donate to a charity run by the CEO, which is of course tax free.
Rich people using their own money? HA!
Fencing is extremely simplified and limited to one plane of direction.
Simplified from what? Did you mean just "simple"?
You're an idiot.
Football is a team sport. So there is some communication and coordination efforts that you don't have in fencing. As far as which one is "deeper" *cough*physicalchess*cough*, who gives a shit? Neither are worth a $250K salary.
...ballistics calculations...
Come on dude, the quarterback and the kicker do not perform any ballistic calculations. There is no math involved. There are no numbers, no gravitational constants, no calculus. Throwing and kicking a ball is a skill. One you train up through practice, and not through mathematical calculations. There's a lot that goes into throwing a ball, don't get me wrong. That is, unless you define "Performing calculations" in such a way that the actual physical football is "performing" mathematical computations as it FALLS. You know, cause the world around the ball can be modeled with math in certain ways. And here's the kicker, if you take such a broad definition of "math", then you can apply that sentiment to ANYTHING.
And no, dogs don't know calculus. Have you ever read that to the last page?
Nail on the head when it comes to the angry geek part. My body though? Dude, did you miss that joke at the end? I'm a USFA C-rated fencer and founded my own fencing club. If anything I'm a jealous jock. (oh god, that felt bad to type...)
As for "the complex math"? Naw dude. Naw. The players do not utilize math. The coaches probably don't utilize math short of "we need 14/7=2 touchdowns to win". They're managers after all.
If no one involved in the actual game is performing mathematics of any note, you can't really say the game is deep. Analysis of the game can be deep. But as Dins pointed out, ANYTHING can be analyzed deeply. Yay science!
"Isn't any good"? Come on dude, both versions put text on the screen. Both completely fulfill the imaginary requirements. Whether or not the OS sees the process as having a fault or not is inconsequential. This is kind of the crux of the MIT-approach vs whatever it is you'd call Gabriel's idea conflict. Which is the real basis for the article. (Personally, I didn't think "brogramming" had anything to do with booze, so much as having a clique of young programmers that meshed well and were friends. Which is a hard environment for the new old guy to enter into, hence all the demonizing).
The larger concern rather than wrongly indicating the performance of the program to the OS is that in some environments parts of the return statement are apparently reserved, and touching them results in undefined behavior. I say "larger concern", but since my code returns 23, and doesn't touch the upper bits, it's only a potential bug that would come with later development. On niche systems no-one cares about. So it's not that large of a concern. The sort of issue that only OCD anally retentive types care about. While a good trait for programmers when it comes to making code functional, it hurts them when it comes to how much they actually make. Something in which to seek balance, for sure.
But anyway!
Since rand() isn't standard at all, you could probably find out my development platform from this.
Also, it took an unbelievably long time to find out that slashdot's ecode tag only indents when posting in Plain Old Text mode and eats your indentation in HTML mode. Also, if I'm posting is P.O.T mode, why the hell did my link above work? Just how old and crufty is the code behind Slashdot! Jesus, this wouldn't have happened if they followed the MIT-approach!
Stop giving them so much money. Pay them less.
Stop with the system of letting their buddies choose their salary. Choose people that are unassociated to be board members. Or let the stakeholder vote on it. Or actually set some rules for how much the CEO makes based off of performance.
Stop with the golden parachutes. Just don't put it in the contract. We don't reward pile-driving the company into the ground.
Stop the inefficiencies of gargantuan organizations. Split them up into smaller companies, each with their own CEO, who would earn what the branch managers are earning right now. God knows we've got enough people wanting to lead. Balance bureaucratic inefficiency with economy of scale.
This one. This right here. All of our income is from our salary, but what they report is not their income. The ones who run the game don't play by the same rules as us.
Yes, it is as crazy as it first seems.
1) They manage people. They're managers. Fine. It's one of the better jobs out there. A quarter of a mill is still a lot of money, even for a manager. But hey, some managers are running things that are important and are doing their job well. Some managers really do deserve a quarter mill. BUT:
2) They're domain experts in a domain in a very sparse and narrow domain. It's a game. It's not that deep. It doesn't take much to be an expert. 3) People do their job for fun. Not all aspects of it, no, but the major decisions and actions that we pay coaches for, people like to do as a game. Fundamentally, that's all competition and should drive their value down. How many people do you know would be the college coach for free?
4) What they're managing isn't that important. "But football is big business"... No, it isn't. It's a money pit. They produce nothing of value short of some recreational TV time and some T-shirts. The "income" of college football comes from donations to the college. Donations go up when they win some games and now all donations are entirely thanks to football. Bullshit.
5) It's just supposed to be an activity to keep the kids fit while they study at college. Something on the side. It's not supposed to be the subsidized minor league of the NFL. Football is not the intended purpose of our educational system.
6) That last one has a ripple effect. A lot of kids have dreams of getting a sports scholarship so they can get some education and not bust rocks with their head the rest of their life. How many kids have foregone their actual studies in highschool because they're too busy playing football? How many parents push (and push HARD) their kids to do well, not at studying, but at tackling each other? How many of those scholarship hopeful actually get one? Of those with scholarships, how many actually get an education in the middle of their football career? Somewhere along the line, football stopped becoming a means to an end, and became the end itself.
So no. Fuck that coach and his $240K.
(wait, he coaches football right? It's totally legit if he coaches... say... fencing. Lot of skill there. Can't skimp on quality, nosiree)
How soon can I browse the salary history of CEO's, Congressmen, the chairmen of the FED, the leaders of Scientology, and the lobbyists on capitol hill?
Never went to college huh? Beer culture is a fairly serious problem. Too many rich kids getting away from daddy for the first time, not enough responsibility.
It doesn't take much to build up a culture:
Beer pong, Movies, and, you know, the existence of bars.
printf() returns an int which passed along to the return statement.
So lemme get this straight, you (wrongly) chastise me for failing to return an int, and yet you don't even double check your code and notice that the brackets in your include statements got eaten by the HTML interpreter?
Bro, do you even QA?
On a side note, what'd you do to display the code with a fixed-width font and indention? < and > worked for me but didn't want to display. After a full 10 seconds I couldn't find it on the site FAQ, and cheezily compacted the lines in some crazy Pico style or something. No, that don't fly with me homies. It's Allman/ANSI style brackets for life foo!
#include
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{return printf("Bro, do you even code?\n");}
Actually I believe he was "turn-based" as a metaphor for any environment where split-second twitches fueled by intravenous red-bull and injecting meth directly into your eyeballs in an effort to overcome synaptic lag and reach true plank-length responses are the deciding factor in gameplay.
It's a common sentiment amongst the Counter-Strike crowd.
They typically don't have the managerial prowess, a firm grasp on micro-economics, or the skill with Excel to be significant EVE players.