I can't disagree. I still buy the occasional item from them because they still have an excellent filtering function which allows you to drill down to specific features, but they are flooded with a lot of other crap I just wouldn't buy from them or their third party sellers. At least you can still choose "Sold and shipped by Newegg" as a selection criteria.
I kind of think that Amazon will ultimately do something to improve some of their repuational problems -- third party sellers, fraudulent merchandise, mixed inventories, if only because they are an American company and their size gives them a lot of leverage over their suppliers. But it is contingent on people complaining, high levels of returns and pressure from the big/name brands Amazon wants to be associated with.
The Chinese leadership is more concerned with keeping the party on top and keeping a lid on 1.x billion people. The violent collapse of DPRK would flood China with refugees at a minimum, and possibly create a significant surge of internal refugees trying to escape the border region. That's destabilizing unto itself.
Now, add in even a short-term (year or so) disruption in trade. You have a few million refugees milling about and your economic engine has been stalled out, with an entire generation (everyone under 30 at least) who doesn't know much if anything other than a modern, middle class life (even if it is a Chinese variant).
To the Chinese, this is an existential crisis of stability and a major threat to the Party's dominance. I don't doubt the state & party could maintain control, the question is can China's relatively new modern social order withstand the inevitable political and military crackdown imposed to maintain the state & party's grip?
The financial resources of the *parents* are highly correlated with success. It's why white kids in urban school districts (like the one I send my child to) greatly outperform their African American peers.
The problem is, the *school system* can't make all the poor black families into middle class or better households, and none of the free lunches, counselors or other "programs" will magically bless them with the cultural advantages white families have built up over generations.
I honestly don't know what the solution really should be. Head Start seems to really help, but it only lasts so long and goes so far. The real problem is that the parents lack the skills to improve their kids chances, including their own lack of functional education. By the time their kids hit middle school they're learning about history, literature, and math their parents don't know.
My parents both only had high school educations (in the rural south, too), so by the time I was in high school they were unable to provide me with anything other than moral support, but they did give me that and always encouraged my education, including buying me any book I said I wanted. But I do believe that their lack of formal education was a real limiting factor in my own education success. I went to college and did reasonably well (graduated with a B average), but I had friends whose parents were professionals and had college or postgraduate educations and they just seemed to "click" better with many of the ideas in school. I did as well as they did in terms of straight grades, but I think I had to work a lot harder to build intellectual skills and when I struggled, find other resources/solutions on my own, while friends whose parents were academically oriented seemed to glide into law school or grad school pretty easily. I would have been a fish out of water.
The economy may drive poverty and poverty may drive long-term racial inequity, but really the problems are cultural in African American families. There are a lot of hand-to-mouth blue collar communities that manage reasonable educational outcomes.
Cracking the nut of African American educational disparity has become an obsession with educators, and unfortunately what it has led to is both a misguided focus on schools as socioeconomic welfare provisioning agencies and a whipsawing among educational "systems", each one more heavily promised to fix the issues.
School districts lack the funding base to be welfare providers and it saps their budgets trying, and while it's logical to assume they're a good place to provide welfare to children, the funding limitations pervert the education mission and capabilities. And all of it gets tangled up in a bunch of political agitating.
The merry-go-round of high-minded educational systems just disrupts what educators have long known -- how to effectively educate kids. We sent men to the moon with engineers educated with little more than blackboards and slide rules, educated by teachers who had college educations marginal by today's standards ("teacher's colleges" cranked out a lot of educators).
This last bit is where Gates does a lot of damage. He funds new systems (most of which end up being produced by private parties) and pays for districts to adopt them, but it winds up being like a business constantly adopting the latest in management systems. Everyone gets focused on the system and loses track of what the work is.
It's without question that a single city hit on the US (LA/Long Beach) or NYC or Houston or some other key city (those are all major ports) would result in substantial economic disruption. Population displacement and refugees, the near-total loss of the struck region's economic capability, and so on.
The "good" news is that this would also collapse the entire world economy, including China who depends heavily on exports to the rest of the world. And they all know it.
In fact, I think China is so aware of it that they may already have contingencies in place for decapitating DPRK from inside. I find it hard to imagine that an offer from China to allow DPRK military leaders to run North Korea and/or gain permanent sanctuary in China for terminating Kim's leadership wouldn't be appealing to the DPRK officer corps. No more living in fear of sudden exile, prison or execution by Kim. Preservation of North Korea as an independent state.
China has had the access and relative credibility as supportive regime to pull this off, and a ton of motivation to make something like this work, both in terms of avoiding global economic catastrophe which would hurt them as bad as anyone, and in terms of avoiding a regional disaster whih may affect them further.
One thing that mitigates this as a hopeful idea, though, is that Kim, in spite of his reputation as a doughy egomaniac, has proved remarkably capable of quickly consolidating power and reshuffling his military leadership, which would make it a lot more difficult for even the Chinese to subvert Kim through an internal coup. The mitigating value of this, though, is that it shows Kim is savvy and intelligent and not just a madman, which means he must also understand the existential risks he faces.
The problem with 14 year-olds is that while they're smart enough to know the words, they don't really know the music. We mistake their verbalization of intellectual concepts as understanding.
The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
I'm trying to figure out how this "boosts" the oil and gas industry.
At best some armchair investors my decide these predictions should guide their investment in either coal/oil stocks or futures contracts. Pro investors aren't likely to use a single predictive metric and will more likely be cross-referencing these predictions with past performance and actual market histories.
Otherwise it's just a prediction that wound up wrong, and mostly it seems to be in solar's favor. If they predicted X amount of solar and the actual result was X*Y solar, doesn't that signal that solar is improving rapidly, investment in solar is increasing, gaining in popularity, etc? And the opposite conclusion about oil and gas?
I'd also doubt that these predictions mean very much to the actual adoption of solar. I'm sure that's much more driven by available subsidies for solar installation, actual dollar costs for solar installation, grid resale prices, and all the other practical factors.
But the reason they probably have that much money to invest isn't necessarily inequality, but that they are individually profitable in an economy that has seen little growth and therefore have nothing to invest it in domestically that provides any return on investment.
So they pile up cash, and now they want to invest it, mostly overseas would be my guess, in growth sectors (which always seems to mean technology anymore).
I don't quite get the big PR announcement about it, though. I would think that announcing this kind of move would just drive up the asset prices of whoever they want to invest in. You would think the smarter idea would have been to have invested over time to avoid big price increases.
One of the biggest management embarrassments I've ever been exposed to was when a previous employer hired an EVP for HR. After a couple of weeks on the job and some exposure to some extensive, dodgy personnel management decisions, the new EVP sent out a memo to all department heads requesting info on several categories of bad behaviors common at our company, noting that they put the company at risk, created ill will among employees and needed to be changed.
About a day after that memo, the new EVP resigned. From a pure resume perspective, he had way more serious management background than our senior management (most of whom had been at this particular company for years, and only in this industry) and I think existing management felt chastised that someone would call them out for bad behavior.
Because the memo had been sent out, lots of people saw it and it was generally understood the new EVP had said "fuck you, I'm not doing this" when he was called out for reasonably doing his job. It was also understood he got a BIG severance for basically quitting his job 2 weeks in.
The other thought I had after posting this is there's maybe something about the distributed nature of US governance that makes "destabilization" almost impossible to really achieve much.
We can critique the level of democracy we have now, but until somebody starts openly advocating for the end of elections, dissolution of state governments and courts, etc, the system is kind of like an internetwork. It will just route around broken parts.
I guess if you write the law to so that the named sponsor has to be:
1) The name of the organization if it is an officially registered organization 2) The name of the largest individual contributor or registered group if it is an ad-hoc unregistered group
This way it's much harder for a single organization or wealthy individual to hide behind front groups. They would be forced to either make the group official in some way or falsify the name of the largest individual contributor.
It's too much overhead to register an official group for every political ad you want to run as sponsored by the front group. If they did register a bunch of front groups, at least now its public information and these can be correlated to find the real backer.
True, but wouldn't it be expected that the "congenital" case more closely represents the statistical baseline for mental illness in the general population and a theory of mental illness being more likely in high-IQ populations is mostly an explanation of the excess deviation from the statistical baseline?
If the baseline in the general population is 10% with mental illness, and 15% in high-IQ populations, you're mostly trying to explain the extra 5% with the assumption that for the most part congenital causes will be evenly distributed.
It may be that among high-IQ populations congenital causes is below the general population baseline and explains more than just the deviation, but we're talking mental illness here and determining specific causes is complex and unlikely to be possible for any significant sample size.
I would think in a survey of high IQ people with mental illness, you might at least be able to validate the rejection of religious belief, belief in statistically improbably positive future events, etc, as being relevant to high IQ mental illness sufferers.
I don't disagree, but the "study" was that high IQ people are more at risk for mental illness, not that it was a defined cause-effect.
Obviously the psychology associated with this is complex, and yes, there have been many extremely intelligent people with a belief in God, individual spiritual/metaphysical beliefs or philosophical understandings that provide a less cynical, positive psychological bias.
I was mostly elucidating the mechanism where I thought intelligence could become a barrier to belief systems prone to producing positive or hopeful outlooks which contribute to coping mechanisms that resist depression.
Actually, the PowerBall is capable of having no winners, which is how the jackpot gets up into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes, *somebody* will win the lottery but mathematically speaking the odds against winning are so mathematically large the most realistic prediction is that you can't win the lottery.
The sample populations here are terrible, but I can accept the overall proposition as plausible.
My theory would mostly center around the idea that higher intelligence is associated with a diminished ability to accept falsifiable or non-provable platitudes, optimism and superstitious thinking. This leads to a deficit of coping mechanisms for the difficulties of every day life and hardships, resulting increased stress, pessimism and negative thoughts and ideation. You might even oversimplify it as a lack of hope in some ways.
Less intelligent people may find superstitions (including but not just religious belief) easier to accept, especially if provided by authority figures. They're more likely to believe in optimistic future outcomes, including improbable ones, not out of gullibility but because they lack the understanding of why they are unlikely -- it's a "I can win the lottery" mindset. This provides a wealth of coping mechanisms for dealing with ordinary setbacks and problems, reducing stress and anxiety. Jesus won't _really_ set you free, but if you're dumb enough to believe it, he will actually set you free.
All this being said, it's probably just as easy to believe that people with an interest in joining an exclusive high IQ group are also people with a low sense of self esteem who are prone to depression. Belonging to a group that's not only exclusive but also exclusively for high intelligence people provides them with a sense of validation and superiority, but for many it's not enough and they wind up depressed and anxious anyway.
But I guess all of it could be true to some extent.
That's no different from before, except the badges and the cop cars. For members of the tribe it's still easier to get chummy with the tribe leaders than with the local state bigwigs or the DC scum. Not that I'm saying it's a good situation, just that while different it isn't necessarily worse for the tribespeople.
The problem is, though, it's like assuming someone is Italian they can get chummy with the mafia. When the tribal leadership is corrupt, they're a closed circle and being the same ethnic group doesn't get you anywhere. In fact, you're probably still better off as white because people might ask questions about what's going on if a white guy gets hassled on the reservation.
But if an Indian gets hassled? They've got nowhere to turn, except maybe by massively exposing themselves filing some kind of complaint with the FBI (which DOES have authority on reservations as a Federal law enforcement body). Now you're a snitch, a race traitor and the white man's lackey, and most likely living in an isolated place with nowhere to go.
Either tribal sovereignty needs be turned into the equivalent of state level sovereignty or it needs to be scrapped.
Business computing advanced by leaps and bounds from the 80s through the mid-2000s on every front, from storage, to computing to operating systems and networking. It wasn't just consumer electronics, and arguably these didn't really advance much until digital computing got cheap enough to embed in them.
AI has been in development forever, and besides expert systems getting slightly more experty, nobody has really seen a payoff from this. There are no self-driving cars that aren't glorified lab experiments or glorified cruise control. Big data is largely an exercise in self promotion and when used, it's principally for marketing and advertising or the surveillance state, not exactly productive payoffs.
Musk's reusable rockets are great, but we have yet to see the payoff on this. The general benefit is about as far away as the Victorian age was from James Watt's first steam engines. A worthwhile advancement, but not exactly broad enough in benefit or application yet to be seen as producing a broad productive leap forward.
The technology business over the last 10 years seems to have run out of productive innovations and has turned to non-productive pseudo-innovation designed largely to create rent-seeking opportunities.
Even companies traditionally tied to productive innovations like Microsoft are now completely reorienting their business model towards actual rent seeking, as in renting you Azure time, renting you the productivity software to connect to the software they rent to you to run on your rented cloud platform, and soon to come next, renting you the license for the desktop you use to do it on.
Apple is at least as invested in renting you music and movies as they are in selling you a phone that they've strategically incremented very slowly as a means of stringing out hardware purchases.
Facebook is the ultimate example of non-productive pseudo-innovation. Not only is an epic personal time waster, does it generate any kind of productive activity at all besides advertising revenue (advertising being a prime example of pre-technology non-productive business activity).
I feel bad for the plight of Native Americans, but that doesn't mean that "Tribal Sovereignty" isn't a dubious concept with all kinds of negative externalities, like being used as a patent dodge.
I live in a state with a large Native population and a number of good-sized reservations and more often than not "Tribal Sovereignty" winds up causing more trouble than it seems worth.
It creates a bunch of law enforcement problems, as local police generally can't enforce the law on tribal lands, and as you might imagine this creates all manner of ill will with neighboring non-tribal residents. While on the surface it seems to be beneficial to the natives because they're not subject to racist rural cops, what ends up happening is that the tribal police wind up being the enforcement tool of the corrupt tribal leadership. And there's little accountability for the natives, either, since the usual political and justice hierarchies don't apply to the native police forces.
I also think it hobbles investment in tribal areas -- sovereignty winds up making it difficult to enforce contracts and collect debts incurred by tribes and tribal residents. People I know who have done business with tribal casinos have horror stories of not being paid for labor or materials and finding that it's a maze of federal laws and bureaucracy to deal with it in the Federal court system. And that's the *casinos*, the actual successful tribal industry which has positive cash flow and something of a reputation to consider.
Bottom line is I don't think the average Native American really gets much value for their tribal sovereignty. It's mostly used as a gimmick for tribes to make money by evading state regulations and as a kind of political prop by tribal officials to further the illusion of native independence.
I'm always curious about the long-term nature of "destabilization" as a conflict goal. You have to have a society that's already highly unstable for "destabilization" to achieve any payoff in the near term.
If you add up all the BLM protests and every other minor protest and riot over the last 5 years it doesn't equal a mild week during the late 1960s or early 1970s. US civil society is pretty peaceful and despite the crowing of Trump supporters and critics, they aren't taking to the streets to fight each other. So any destabilization campaign the Russians might be pursuing appears to have a payoff potential so far down the road that Putin can't really expect it to do much for him.
The idea that it's oriented towards destabilizing the Federal government? I don't really buy that either. Congress has been deadlocked and dysfunctional for a decade or longer, and even getting Trump elected alone is something of buying into the myth of an all-powerful President. The power lies in the office and the thousands of lifelong bureaucrats that make up the executive branches, nearly all of whom have too much of a stake in the status quo to allow Trump at his most dangerous accomplish much.
And Trump himself really hasn't come off as an action-oriented actor -- he's all bellicose swagger.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that I do think Russia's goals are more "destabilization" than any kind of Trump-specific conspiracy, yet at the same time the payoff seems so unlikely and so far off in the future that it makes me question if its really any kind of organized goal.
Employers want instant drop-in replacements for job candidates, and it's totally impossible to do it all anymore.
I feel like this is the real crux of the problem. Employers simultaneously want someone with broad enough experience across disciplines to be useful in all of them, but *also* expect deep-dive expertise in all of them at the same time or any one of them at any time.
I think this was mostly possible 15 years ago -- you were kind of worthless not understanding switching, networking, server hardware and OS all at the same time to some fairly deep level, and all of it was mostly obtainable.
Now? I only see a couple of those things being understood at deep, expert levels at the same time. I think you can functional in all of them, but not really in expert in any of them.
What's funny is when you get exposed to some of the heavily silo'd people from a place like EMC. Once they start talking about *anything* outside their silo, it's like talking to my dad about technology. I didn't know it was *possible* to be a certified expert in storage systems, yet retain a 1995 level of knowledge about switched networking.
It took forever for even desktops to get more than 2 USB-3 A ports. Only in the last year maybe have I seen new systems ship with 100% USB-3 ports.
I wonder how much of this is just due to 99% of end users not fucking caring because 99% of their use case is USB-2 dependent at best, so manufacturers just don't bother with newer ports until the chipsets basically provide nothing but the new standard.
I also would guess that as usual Intel is to blame somehow, being all over the map about what ports they support with a given chipset and how many they provide access to.
Then there's downright manufacturer cost cutting -- if it saves them $0.05 per system to reduce ports, they will.
I think this is right, but choosing a vendor/technology to beef yourself up on, especially on your own time, feels like playing roulette -- you have to put it all on 23 red, essentially, to develop anything remotely like "expertise" and then *hope* that whatever you've invested in is "the thing" that your management, industry to even employment region, decides is the thing they will invest in.
It used to be a higher-percentage bet that whatever you invested in would have a good chance of paying off. But I've seen too many people buying into something only to find out it doesn't pay off because it turns out to be marketing BS or winds up in reality being not the economic choice people with money want to make (or, you seldom lose betting that management is cheap).
The other thing is that I mostly reject the notion that self-investment in most technologies produces anything like expertise, with the possible exception of software languages where there's a lot more opportunity for in-depth implementation. I run into plenty of people who are certification/video/example experts but who really have zero grasp of the logic/rationale of operational choices and real-world applications. And in many cases, it's not their fault but the reality of extremely expensive equipment, restrictive software licenses, and the hard reality of separating hype from fact in real-world implementations.
For a lot of IT technology you need a lot of time and an awfully big sandbox to think you've developed any "expertise" in a particular technology. I'm increasingly convinced that only real-world production experience counts as actual expertise.
Isn't it just a matter of time before somebody loses a civil lawsuit or goes to jail based mostly on "assistant" recordings?
Eventually they will manufacture new markets for those based on always-recording models. Helping old people, kids, some other "safety" justification and people just get used to the idea that it's always recording and transcribing everything.
Before too long people will start suing Amazon/Google for *not* calling the cops, alerting the authorities, etc, when something bad happens in a monitored environment.
So these devices will end up with some kind of 911-like compliance requirement and if you have an argument with a housemate you wind up having the cops show up.
I really don't get why anyone has one of these things. It's literally a Black Mirror episode.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't disagree. I still buy the occasional item from them because they still have an excellent filtering function which allows you to drill down to specific features, but they are flooded with a lot of other crap I just wouldn't buy from them or their third party sellers. At least you can still choose "Sold and shipped by Newegg" as a selection criteria.
I kind of think that Amazon will ultimately do something to improve some of their repuational problems -- third party sellers, fraudulent merchandise, mixed inventories, if only because they are an American company and their size gives them a lot of leverage over their suppliers. But it is contingent on people complaining, high levels of returns and pressure from the big/name brands Amazon wants to be associated with.
The Chinese leadership is more concerned with keeping the party on top and keeping a lid on 1.x billion people. The violent collapse of DPRK would flood China with refugees at a minimum, and possibly create a significant surge of internal refugees trying to escape the border region. That's destabilizing unto itself.
Now, add in even a short-term (year or so) disruption in trade. You have a few million refugees milling about and your economic engine has been stalled out, with an entire generation (everyone under 30 at least) who doesn't know much if anything other than a modern, middle class life (even if it is a Chinese variant).
To the Chinese, this is an existential crisis of stability and a major threat to the Party's dominance. I don't doubt the state & party could maintain control, the question is can China's relatively new modern social order withstand the inevitable political and military crackdown imposed to maintain the state & party's grip?
The financial resources of the *parents* are highly correlated with success. It's why white kids in urban school districts (like the one I send my child to) greatly outperform their African American peers.
The problem is, the *school system* can't make all the poor black families into middle class or better households, and none of the free lunches, counselors or other "programs" will magically bless them with the cultural advantages white families have built up over generations.
I honestly don't know what the solution really should be. Head Start seems to really help, but it only lasts so long and goes so far. The real problem is that the parents lack the skills to improve their kids chances, including their own lack of functional education. By the time their kids hit middle school they're learning about history, literature, and math their parents don't know.
My parents both only had high school educations (in the rural south, too), so by the time I was in high school they were unable to provide me with anything other than moral support, but they did give me that and always encouraged my education, including buying me any book I said I wanted. But I do believe that their lack of formal education was a real limiting factor in my own education success. I went to college and did reasonably well (graduated with a B average), but I had friends whose parents were professionals and had college or postgraduate educations and they just seemed to "click" better with many of the ideas in school. I did as well as they did in terms of straight grades, but I think I had to work a lot harder to build intellectual skills and when I struggled, find other resources/solutions on my own, while friends whose parents were academically oriented seemed to glide into law school or grad school pretty easily. I would have been a fish out of water.
The economy may drive poverty and poverty may drive long-term racial inequity, but really the problems are cultural in African American families. There are a lot of hand-to-mouth blue collar communities that manage reasonable educational outcomes.
Cracking the nut of African American educational disparity has become an obsession with educators, and unfortunately what it has led to is both a misguided focus on schools as socioeconomic welfare provisioning agencies and a whipsawing among educational "systems", each one more heavily promised to fix the issues.
School districts lack the funding base to be welfare providers and it saps their budgets trying, and while it's logical to assume they're a good place to provide welfare to children, the funding limitations pervert the education mission and capabilities. And all of it gets tangled up in a bunch of political agitating.
The merry-go-round of high-minded educational systems just disrupts what educators have long known -- how to effectively educate kids. We sent men to the moon with engineers educated with little more than blackboards and slide rules, educated by teachers who had college educations marginal by today's standards ("teacher's colleges" cranked out a lot of educators).
This last bit is where Gates does a lot of damage. He funds new systems (most of which end up being produced by private parties) and pays for districts to adopt them, but it winds up being like a business constantly adopting the latest in management systems. Everyone gets focused on the system and loses track of what the work is.
It's without question that a single city hit on the US (LA/Long Beach) or NYC or Houston or some other key city (those are all major ports) would result in substantial economic disruption. Population displacement and refugees, the near-total loss of the struck region's economic capability, and so on.
The "good" news is that this would also collapse the entire world economy, including China who depends heavily on exports to the rest of the world. And they all know it.
In fact, I think China is so aware of it that they may already have contingencies in place for decapitating DPRK from inside. I find it hard to imagine that an offer from China to allow DPRK military leaders to run North Korea and/or gain permanent sanctuary in China for terminating Kim's leadership wouldn't be appealing to the DPRK officer corps. No more living in fear of sudden exile, prison or execution by Kim. Preservation of North Korea as an independent state.
China has had the access and relative credibility as supportive regime to pull this off, and a ton of motivation to make something like this work, both in terms of avoiding global economic catastrophe which would hurt them as bad as anyone, and in terms of avoiding a regional disaster whih may affect them further.
One thing that mitigates this as a hopeful idea, though, is that Kim, in spite of his reputation as a doughy egomaniac, has proved remarkably capable of quickly consolidating power and reshuffling his military leadership, which would make it a lot more difficult for even the Chinese to subvert Kim through an internal coup. The mitigating value of this, though, is that it shows Kim is savvy and intelligent and not just a madman, which means he must also understand the existential risks he faces.
The problem with 14 year-olds is that while they're smart enough to know the words, they don't really know the music. We mistake their verbalization of intellectual concepts as understanding.
The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
I'm trying to figure out how this "boosts" the oil and gas industry.
At best some armchair investors my decide these predictions should guide their investment in either coal/oil stocks or futures contracts. Pro investors aren't likely to use a single predictive metric and will more likely be cross-referencing these predictions with past performance and actual market histories.
Otherwise it's just a prediction that wound up wrong, and mostly it seems to be in solar's favor. If they predicted X amount of solar and the actual result was X*Y solar, doesn't that signal that solar is improving rapidly, investment in solar is increasing, gaining in popularity, etc? And the opposite conclusion about oil and gas?
I'd also doubt that these predictions mean very much to the actual adoption of solar. I'm sure that's much more driven by available subsidies for solar installation, actual dollar costs for solar installation, grid resale prices, and all the other practical factors.
They're not a bank.
But the reason they probably have that much money to invest isn't necessarily inequality, but that they are individually profitable in an economy that has seen little growth and therefore have nothing to invest it in domestically that provides any return on investment.
So they pile up cash, and now they want to invest it, mostly overseas would be my guess, in growth sectors (which always seems to mean technology anymore).
I don't quite get the big PR announcement about it, though. I would think that announcing this kind of move would just drive up the asset prices of whoever they want to invest in. You would think the smarter idea would have been to have invested over time to avoid big price increases.
One of the biggest management embarrassments I've ever been exposed to was when a previous employer hired an EVP for HR. After a couple of weeks on the job and some exposure to some extensive, dodgy personnel management decisions, the new EVP sent out a memo to all department heads requesting info on several categories of bad behaviors common at our company, noting that they put the company at risk, created ill will among employees and needed to be changed.
About a day after that memo, the new EVP resigned. From a pure resume perspective, he had way more serious management background than our senior management (most of whom had been at this particular company for years, and only in this industry) and I think existing management felt chastised that someone would call them out for bad behavior.
Because the memo had been sent out, lots of people saw it and it was generally understood the new EVP had said "fuck you, I'm not doing this" when he was called out for reasonably doing his job. It was also understood he got a BIG severance for basically quitting his job 2 weeks in.
The other thought I had after posting this is there's maybe something about the distributed nature of US governance that makes "destabilization" almost impossible to really achieve much.
We can critique the level of democracy we have now, but until somebody starts openly advocating for the end of elections, dissolution of state governments and courts, etc, the system is kind of like an internetwork. It will just route around broken parts.
I guess if you write the law to so that the named sponsor has to be:
1) The name of the organization if it is an officially registered organization
2) The name of the largest individual contributor or registered group if it is an ad-hoc unregistered group
This way it's much harder for a single organization or wealthy individual to hide behind front groups. They would be forced to either make the group official in some way or falsify the name of the largest individual contributor.
It's too much overhead to register an official group for every political ad you want to run as sponsored by the front group. If they did register a bunch of front groups, at least now its public information and these can be correlated to find the real backer.
True, but wouldn't it be expected that the "congenital" case more closely represents the statistical baseline for mental illness in the general population and a theory of mental illness being more likely in high-IQ populations is mostly an explanation of the excess deviation from the statistical baseline?
If the baseline in the general population is 10% with mental illness, and 15% in high-IQ populations, you're mostly trying to explain the extra 5% with the assumption that for the most part congenital causes will be evenly distributed.
It may be that among high-IQ populations congenital causes is below the general population baseline and explains more than just the deviation, but we're talking mental illness here and determining specific causes is complex and unlikely to be possible for any significant sample size.
I would think in a survey of high IQ people with mental illness, you might at least be able to validate the rejection of religious belief, belief in statistically improbably positive future events, etc, as being relevant to high IQ mental illness sufferers.
I don't disagree, but the "study" was that high IQ people are more at risk for mental illness, not that it was a defined cause-effect.
Obviously the psychology associated with this is complex, and yes, there have been many extremely intelligent people with a belief in God, individual spiritual/metaphysical beliefs or philosophical understandings that provide a less cynical, positive psychological bias.
I was mostly elucidating the mechanism where I thought intelligence could become a barrier to belief systems prone to producing positive or hopeful outlooks which contribute to coping mechanisms that resist depression.
Actually, the PowerBall is capable of having no winners, which is how the jackpot gets up into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes, *somebody* will win the lottery but mathematically speaking the odds against winning are so mathematically large the most realistic prediction is that you can't win the lottery.
The sample populations here are terrible, but I can accept the overall proposition as plausible.
My theory would mostly center around the idea that higher intelligence is associated with a diminished ability to accept falsifiable or non-provable platitudes, optimism and superstitious thinking. This leads to a deficit of coping mechanisms for the difficulties of every day life and hardships, resulting increased stress, pessimism and negative thoughts and ideation. You might even oversimplify it as a lack of hope in some ways.
Less intelligent people may find superstitions (including but not just religious belief) easier to accept, especially if provided by authority figures. They're more likely to believe in optimistic future outcomes, including improbable ones, not out of gullibility but because they lack the understanding of why they are unlikely -- it's a "I can win the lottery" mindset. This provides a wealth of coping mechanisms for dealing with ordinary setbacks and problems, reducing stress and anxiety. Jesus won't _really_ set you free, but if you're dumb enough to believe it, he will actually set you free.
All this being said, it's probably just as easy to believe that people with an interest in joining an exclusive high IQ group are also people with a low sense of self esteem who are prone to depression. Belonging to a group that's not only exclusive but also exclusively for high intelligence people provides them with a sense of validation and superiority, but for many it's not enough and they wind up depressed and anxious anyway.
But I guess all of it could be true to some extent.
That's no different from before, except the badges and the cop cars. For members of the tribe it's still easier to get chummy with the tribe leaders than with the local state bigwigs or the DC scum. Not that I'm saying it's a good situation, just that while different it isn't necessarily worse for the tribespeople.
The problem is, though, it's like assuming someone is Italian they can get chummy with the mafia. When the tribal leadership is corrupt, they're a closed circle and being the same ethnic group doesn't get you anywhere. In fact, you're probably still better off as white because people might ask questions about what's going on if a white guy gets hassled on the reservation.
But if an Indian gets hassled? They've got nowhere to turn, except maybe by massively exposing themselves filing some kind of complaint with the FBI (which DOES have authority on reservations as a Federal law enforcement body). Now you're a snitch, a race traitor and the white man's lackey, and most likely living in an isolated place with nowhere to go.
Either tribal sovereignty needs be turned into the equivalent of state level sovereignty or it needs to be scrapped.
Business computing advanced by leaps and bounds from the 80s through the mid-2000s on every front, from storage, to computing to operating systems and networking. It wasn't just consumer electronics, and arguably these didn't really advance much until digital computing got cheap enough to embed in them.
AI has been in development forever, and besides expert systems getting slightly more experty, nobody has really seen a payoff from this. There are no self-driving cars that aren't glorified lab experiments or glorified cruise control. Big data is largely an exercise in self promotion and when used, it's principally for marketing and advertising or the surveillance state, not exactly productive payoffs.
Musk's reusable rockets are great, but we have yet to see the payoff on this. The general benefit is about as far away as the Victorian age was from James Watt's first steam engines. A worthwhile advancement, but not exactly broad enough in benefit or application yet to be seen as producing a broad productive leap forward.
The technology business over the last 10 years seems to have run out of productive innovations and has turned to non-productive pseudo-innovation designed largely to create rent-seeking opportunities.
Even companies traditionally tied to productive innovations like Microsoft are now completely reorienting their business model towards actual rent seeking, as in renting you Azure time, renting you the productivity software to connect to the software they rent to you to run on your rented cloud platform, and soon to come next, renting you the license for the desktop you use to do it on.
Apple is at least as invested in renting you music and movies as they are in selling you a phone that they've strategically incremented very slowly as a means of stringing out hardware purchases.
Facebook is the ultimate example of non-productive pseudo-innovation. Not only is an epic personal time waster, does it generate any kind of productive activity at all besides advertising revenue (advertising being a prime example of pre-technology non-productive business activity).
Did Orwell's 1984 stop being a basic high school literature requirement in the last 20 years?
I am continually baffled by the number of people mindlessly signing up for an active listening (and soon, viewing) device in their homes.
You can just see the incremental push for "new applications" which will ultimately require continuous listening, viewing and remote transcription.
I feel bad for the plight of Native Americans, but that doesn't mean that "Tribal Sovereignty" isn't a dubious concept with all kinds of negative externalities, like being used as a patent dodge.
I live in a state with a large Native population and a number of good-sized reservations and more often than not "Tribal Sovereignty" winds up causing more trouble than it seems worth.
It creates a bunch of law enforcement problems, as local police generally can't enforce the law on tribal lands, and as you might imagine this creates all manner of ill will with neighboring non-tribal residents. While on the surface it seems to be beneficial to the natives because they're not subject to racist rural cops, what ends up happening is that the tribal police wind up being the enforcement tool of the corrupt tribal leadership. And there's little accountability for the natives, either, since the usual political and justice hierarchies don't apply to the native police forces.
I also think it hobbles investment in tribal areas -- sovereignty winds up making it difficult to enforce contracts and collect debts incurred by tribes and tribal residents. People I know who have done business with tribal casinos have horror stories of not being paid for labor or materials and finding that it's a maze of federal laws and bureaucracy to deal with it in the Federal court system. And that's the *casinos*, the actual successful tribal industry which has positive cash flow and something of a reputation to consider.
Bottom line is I don't think the average Native American really gets much value for their tribal sovereignty. It's mostly used as a gimmick for tribes to make money by evading state regulations and as a kind of political prop by tribal officials to further the illusion of native independence.
I'm always curious about the long-term nature of "destabilization" as a conflict goal. You have to have a society that's already highly unstable for "destabilization" to achieve any payoff in the near term.
If you add up all the BLM protests and every other minor protest and riot over the last 5 years it doesn't equal a mild week during the late 1960s or early 1970s. US civil society is pretty peaceful and despite the crowing of Trump supporters and critics, they aren't taking to the streets to fight each other. So any destabilization campaign the Russians might be pursuing appears to have a payoff potential so far down the road that Putin can't really expect it to do much for him.
The idea that it's oriented towards destabilizing the Federal government? I don't really buy that either. Congress has been deadlocked and dysfunctional for a decade or longer, and even getting Trump elected alone is something of buying into the myth of an all-powerful President. The power lies in the office and the thousands of lifelong bureaucrats that make up the executive branches, nearly all of whom have too much of a stake in the status quo to allow Trump at his most dangerous accomplish much.
And Trump himself really hasn't come off as an action-oriented actor -- he's all bellicose swagger.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that I do think Russia's goals are more "destabilization" than any kind of Trump-specific conspiracy, yet at the same time the payoff seems so unlikely and so far off in the future that it makes me question if its really any kind of organized goal.
Employers want instant drop-in replacements for job candidates, and it's totally impossible to do it all anymore.
I feel like this is the real crux of the problem. Employers simultaneously want someone with broad enough experience across disciplines to be useful in all of them, but *also* expect deep-dive expertise in all of them at the same time or any one of them at any time.
I think this was mostly possible 15 years ago -- you were kind of worthless not understanding switching, networking, server hardware and OS all at the same time to some fairly deep level, and all of it was mostly obtainable.
Now? I only see a couple of those things being understood at deep, expert levels at the same time. I think you can functional in all of them, but not really in expert in any of them.
What's funny is when you get exposed to some of the heavily silo'd people from a place like EMC. Once they start talking about *anything* outside their silo, it's like talking to my dad about technology. I didn't know it was *possible* to be a certified expert in storage systems, yet retain a 1995 level of knowledge about switched networking.
It took forever for even desktops to get more than 2 USB-3 A ports. Only in the last year maybe have I seen new systems ship with 100% USB-3 ports.
I wonder how much of this is just due to 99% of end users not fucking caring because 99% of their use case is USB-2 dependent at best, so manufacturers just don't bother with newer ports until the chipsets basically provide nothing but the new standard.
I also would guess that as usual Intel is to blame somehow, being all over the map about what ports they support with a given chipset and how many they provide access to.
Then there's downright manufacturer cost cutting -- if it saves them $0.05 per system to reduce ports, they will.
I think this is right, but choosing a vendor/technology to beef yourself up on, especially on your own time, feels like playing roulette -- you have to put it all on 23 red, essentially, to develop anything remotely like "expertise" and then *hope* that whatever you've invested in is "the thing" that your management, industry to even employment region, decides is the thing they will invest in.
It used to be a higher-percentage bet that whatever you invested in would have a good chance of paying off. But I've seen too many people buying into something only to find out it doesn't pay off because it turns out to be marketing BS or winds up in reality being not the economic choice people with money want to make (or, you seldom lose betting that management is cheap).
The other thing is that I mostly reject the notion that self-investment in most technologies produces anything like expertise, with the possible exception of software languages where there's a lot more opportunity for in-depth implementation. I run into plenty of people who are certification/video/example experts but who really have zero grasp of the logic/rationale of operational choices and real-world applications. And in many cases, it's not their fault but the reality of extremely expensive equipment, restrictive software licenses, and the hard reality of separating hype from fact in real-world implementations.
For a lot of IT technology you need a lot of time and an awfully big sandbox to think you've developed any "expertise" in a particular technology. I'm increasingly convinced that only real-world production experience counts as actual expertise.
Isn't it just a matter of time before somebody loses a civil lawsuit or goes to jail based mostly on "assistant" recordings?
Eventually they will manufacture new markets for those based on always-recording models. Helping old people, kids, some other "safety" justification and people just get used to the idea that it's always recording and transcribing everything.
Before too long people will start suing Amazon/Google for *not* calling the cops, alerting the authorities, etc, when something bad happens in a monitored environment.
So these devices will end up with some kind of 911-like compliance requirement and if you have an argument with a housemate you wind up having the cops show up.
I really don't get why anyone has one of these things. It's literally a Black Mirror episode.