And other can voice their objection on the objection. And in this case there are several good reasons to object to OKCupid's objection even if you completely disagree with Eich:
1. Pragmatism: Living together in a democracy requires people to work together even if they have strong disagreements in their religious or political beliefs. For this reason objections should primarily be aimed directly at the belief itself and not at the persons holding them. This enables working together even with disagreements.
How does this even make sense within the topic of gay relationships? Can you criticize homosexuality without aiming at the homosexuals? Because that's what Eich is doing. And it's way past just 'raising an objection', it's about coming up with a law that directly affects the lives of the target group Eich disagrees with. So the pragmatic thing is to retaliate with the same - aim at the people doing this and affect *their* lives as well.
2. Fairness: Even if you disagree with someone you should still not misrepresent his stance. OKCupid claims gay relationships would illegal if Mr. Eich got his way on gay marriage. But Gay relationships would still be legal, even when gay marriage are banned. So you can not claim Eich wants gay relationships to be illegal, just because he supported California's Prop 8.
Let's not pretend Proposition 8 is harmless for the gays. The fact is that homosexuality is fairly common in populations (not just human ones). The proponents of Prop. 8 say it's unnatural and that's why they want gay marriage banned. As long as the society puts this stigma on the gays and even institutionalizes it, they will have a harder life. Where's the fairness in that?
3. Proportionality: Brendan Eich donated $1000 for Prop 8. A rather small sum of money for a high profile engineer such as Eich. This clearly not the most important topic for Eich. He is not a major spokesperson against gay marriage, he is best known for his Javascript work and not for his opposition to gay marriage. The response should have a reasonable proportion to the thing that is being criticized. Brendan Eich's $1000 are now 100x more visible than the $1,000,000 by Alan Ashton.
Are you suggesting that OKCupid should ask its users not to use WordPerfect? That would be laughable at best. OKCupid just picks a fight in their domain, where it makes sense. Plus, the message should be that any support for Prop. 8 is despicable.
Well written. I'd say that any job that does not require creativity or empathy is on the line. There are a couple of jobs that don't require much skills that will stay, like waiters, babysitters and receptionists - everything where the very fact that the customer is interacting with a human being is valuable. But there are nearly not enough of jobs like that and too many people who can't even do those. I doubt that anybody will entrust their toddler to Swen, the oil rig worker.
This is not a story about bank bailouts but about job automation.
You vastly underestimate the need for demand. If all people in the US decided to cut their expenses in half and stuff their money into their mattresses today and do so for the next 5 years, the economy would shrink and a lot of people would lose their jobs. There wouldn't be enough money circulating in the economy to support all the jobs. Not bullshit artificial jobs created just so people would have something to do, but real ones. The economy would have the *potential* to do much more, but wouldn't because of the missing demand.
Automation of all low skill jobs has the potential to create a situation like described above - if a large percentage of population is replaced by automation, there will not be enough demand for the goods and services - even though the economy would have enough capacity to build and provide all the stuff (through automation), it could not sell all of it.
Sooner or later the helicopter drops will have to come.
There were 80 - 100 protesters and you want to compare that to Kristallnacht and the French Revolution?
The closest that you could compare them to is Westboro Baptist Church - a small number of people that make the news because their cause is weird and while on one hand you understand where they're coming from, they are also spectacularly wrong.
In the 1970's that was (generally) one persons income, in 2012 that's two people's income. In terms of physical goods I think we compare quite favorably, but factoring in things like housing, energy and food? Not so much.
That means you have double the workforce competing for the same jobs. Except even that's not accurate enough. There's 50% more population, so even more than double the work force and low skill jobs are disappearing due to technological advances and outsourcing.
If you suddenly dumped 100 million people into the workforce in 1975, the society would collapse. So the fact that the economy in 2014 can support such numbers means we are better off than in 1975
Very little, maybe none. The stock was not bought from the shareholders. The company had to emit new stock, meaning the value of the existing stock went down. Pretty drastically. So the owners of GM were hurt by the "bailout".
That might sound like a great way to punish the people who own the company who messed up - until you look at who the people are. In 2008 the greatest shareholders were the US and Canadian governments. The second greatest were the GM employees. The rich people are not stupid, they got rid of the stock before everything went down the drain.
If the company's liquidated assets total to less then it's outstanding debt, then yes, even the top preferred shareholders get zero money back. Back in 2008 when GM was bailed out the asset to debt ratio was about 1/2...
a) As a "bailout", the fed took ownership of the company through stock. How shall GM pay their owners? From what? Shall they take a loan to pay them? From whom? Should they only pay the fed or the other owners as well?
b) If the company had tanked, its assets would be liquidated and payed out to the creditors. Not the owners, you see, because they are the ones who failed. They are left with nothing when the company fails
I don't think the One Click patent is the problem here. That one is at least clearly written and actually used by the company. It's the intentionally obfuscated and overly general patents that serve no practical purpose to the holder that bog the economy down.
We had the technology to detect planets for at least 80 years yet the first efforts started just 30 years ago. You know why? Because our star system model predicted that there are no planets that meet the condition to be detected by us (big, close to the star).
A model based on a sample of one system.
After people discovered a whole bunch of such planets, I thought that people would realize that they should not judge the universe based on just our solar system, but here it is all over again.
You've just described pretty much any economic transaction.
That's exactly my point. The poster I was responding to was portraying the sharing business as something new, something extraordinary that will ruin the world economy forever.
So according to your little theory, we should be having lower living standards than we had in the year 1950. Somehow you'd be hard-pressed to find an indicator that would support that claim. Real income, life expectancy, literacy, access to sewage and electricity, child mortality, number of cars per capita, % of people above poverty line etc. All are higher now than in 1950 . Unemployment is probably the only indicator you could point to (7,6% as opposed to 5.3%) but general well-being - not by a mile!
But something is being used up. My car will break after 150 000 miles. If I ride it alone, it will take 10 years. If I share it/rent it out, it will happen in 4 years and I will have to get a new one sooner. Same goes for the furnishings and the paint in the room I share, the lawnmower, the sander and everything else that's being shared through these services.
Something requiring empathy and/or creativity. If there's somebody neither creative nor emphatic, he should be on a disability. Because there is not going to be any work not requiring these things left for people in the near future.
It sounds more like a personal computer to me. The miniaturization, mobility and computational power aspect is missing. There the progress went much faster than anything anybody in the 60's anticipated.
Of course next you'll let us know how this is a political problem not a technical one, as if that makes any difference
Of course it does make a difference. 50 years ago, nobody thought we could produce enough food for double the world population without causing an ecological catastrophe like chopping down all the forests. Don't try to pretend that this 'technical' aspect is something you can just wave off as insignificant.
Buggy whip manufactury closed I would tell the workers - go work for Ford or GE or whoever, Underwood workers could go work for Olivetti, or in retail
Where are the current low skilled workers supposed to go? The time is coming where any job that does not need empathy or creativity can be done by a machine.
Now nobody here or in TFA is 'holding back progress' - so your pleading to stop doing it is going to fall on deaf ears.
Ten years is hardly 'gradual' if we're talking about generations. If it really happens within the next 10 years, then it's going to affect 90% of the current professional drivers.
Then there's a list of big things that he did not see coming at all:
- the internet!
- computers thousand times stronger than anything in 1964 - the size of your palm - in everybody's pocket
- advances in medical science - stem cells, 3d printing of tissue etc. and in medical technology - scanners creating a 3d model of your body (including the inside)
- detection and photography of extrasolar planets
- a man made probe exiting the solar system
- despite the overpopulation, abundance of food for everybody
etc.
Those lazy Marmosets, lab rats, mice, and chimps! No wonder they're getting fat.
But they all are in fact getting less exercise then their wild counterparts. Plus a lot of them are bred to reinforce some specific traits like calmness. The more calm an animal, the less calories it burns (no running around, fidgeting etc.).
I once had to work in a team where everybody wanted to take the lead of the group. It sucked. It made all of the team members frustrated. It didn't help productivity either.
It was an HR management failure - failure to build a working team, to pick the right people to form a team.
So be careful when an employer is looking for a leader type. Are they looking for one in a leadership position or just as a regular team member? Do they seem to understand that an effective team cannot have many leaders?
To reply to the question though: Leadership is not really overvalued, but it's very often misused and misunderstood and its rather the just-doing-my-job type of person that is undervalued.
Just one more note - 'to make a D triad follow a C# triad' is quite an unremarkable feat. It's just a half-tone interval between two chords - same as following an E chord with an F chord. The important information missing is - what key is the piece in? Making a C# triad followed by a D triad work is much harder in some keys than in others...
Slashdot Mirror
And other can voice their objection on the objection. And in this case there are several good reasons to object to OKCupid's objection even if you completely disagree with Eich:
1. Pragmatism: Living together in a democracy requires people to work together even if they have strong disagreements in their religious or political beliefs. For this reason objections should primarily be aimed directly at the belief itself and not at the persons holding them. This enables working together even with disagreements.
How does this even make sense within the topic of gay relationships? Can you criticize homosexuality without aiming at the homosexuals? Because that's what Eich is doing. And it's way past just 'raising an objection', it's about coming up with a law that directly affects the lives of the target group Eich disagrees with. So the pragmatic thing is to retaliate with the same - aim at the people doing this and affect *their* lives as well.
2. Fairness: Even if you disagree with someone you should still not misrepresent his stance. OKCupid claims gay relationships would illegal if Mr. Eich got his way on gay marriage. But Gay relationships would still be legal, even when gay marriage are banned. So you can not claim Eich wants gay relationships to be illegal, just because he supported California's Prop 8.
Let's not pretend Proposition 8 is harmless for the gays. The fact is that homosexuality is fairly common in populations (not just human ones). The proponents of Prop. 8 say it's unnatural and that's why they want gay marriage banned. As long as the society puts this stigma on the gays and even institutionalizes it, they will have a harder life. Where's the fairness in that?
3. Proportionality: Brendan Eich donated $1000 for Prop 8. A rather small sum of money for a high profile engineer such as Eich. This clearly not the most important topic for Eich. He is not a major spokesperson against gay marriage, he is best known for his Javascript work and not for his opposition to gay marriage. The response should have a reasonable proportion to the thing that is being criticized. Brendan Eich's $1000 are now 100x more visible than the $1,000,000 by Alan Ashton.
Are you suggesting that OKCupid should ask its users not to use WordPerfect? That would be laughable at best. OKCupid just picks a fight in their domain, where it makes sense. Plus, the message should be that any support for Prop. 8 is despicable.
I get a strong sense of the bovine fecal matter just from reading the texts on the packaging. That stuff is quite potent!
Well written. I'd say that any job that does not require creativity or empathy is on the line. There are a couple of jobs that don't require much skills that will stay, like waiters, babysitters and receptionists - everything where the very fact that the customer is interacting with a human being is valuable. But there are nearly not enough of jobs like that and too many people who can't even do those. I doubt that anybody will entrust their toddler to Swen, the oil rig worker.
This is not a story about bank bailouts but about job automation.
You vastly underestimate the need for demand. If all people in the US decided to cut their expenses in half and stuff their money into their mattresses today and do so for the next 5 years, the economy would shrink and a lot of people would lose their jobs. There wouldn't be enough money circulating in the economy to support all the jobs. Not bullshit artificial jobs created just so people would have something to do, but real ones. The economy would have the *potential* to do much more, but wouldn't because of the missing demand.
Automation of all low skill jobs has the potential to create a situation like described above - if a large percentage of population is replaced by automation, there will not be enough demand for the goods and services - even though the economy would have enough capacity to build and provide all the stuff (through automation), it could not sell all of it.
Sooner or later the helicopter drops will have to come.
You mean to the one where the US sent in troops without any insignia with the goal of annexing Iraq as the 51st state?
All of these comparisons are ridiculous.
There were 80 - 100 protesters and you want to compare that to Kristallnacht and the French Revolution?
The closest that you could compare them to is Westboro Baptist Church - a small number of people that make the news because their cause is weird and while on one hand you understand where they're coming from, they are also spectacularly wrong.
In the 1970's that was (generally) one persons income, in 2012 that's two people's income. In terms of physical goods I think we compare quite favorably, but factoring in things like housing, energy and food? Not so much.
That means you have double the workforce competing for the same jobs. Except even that's not accurate enough. There's 50% more population, so even more than double the work force and low skill jobs are disappearing due to technological advances and outsourcing.
If you suddenly dumped 100 million people into the workforce in 1975, the society would collapse. So the fact that the economy in 2014 can support such numbers means we are better off than in 1975
Very little, maybe none. The stock was not bought from the shareholders. The company had to emit new stock, meaning the value of the existing stock went down. Pretty drastically. So the owners of GM were hurt by the "bailout".
That might sound like a great way to punish the people who own the company who messed up - until you look at who the people are. In 2008 the greatest shareholders were the US and Canadian governments. The second greatest were the GM employees. The rich people are not stupid, they got rid of the stock before everything went down the drain.
If the company's liquidated assets total to less then it's outstanding debt, then yes, even the top preferred shareholders get zero money back. Back in 2008 when GM was bailed out the asset to debt ratio was about 1/2...
You are wrong.
a) As a "bailout", the fed took ownership of the company through stock. How shall GM pay their owners? From what? Shall they take a loan to pay them? From whom? Should they only pay the fed or the other owners as well?
b) If the company had tanked, its assets would be liquidated and payed out to the creditors. Not the owners, you see, because they are the ones who failed. They are left with nothing when the company fails
I don't think the One Click patent is the problem here. That one is at least clearly written and actually used by the company. It's the intentionally obfuscated and overly general patents that serve no practical purpose to the holder that bog the economy down.
We had the technology to detect planets for at least 80 years yet the first efforts started just 30 years ago. You know why? Because our star system model predicted that there are no planets that meet the condition to be detected by us (big, close to the star).
A model based on a sample of one system.
After people discovered a whole bunch of such planets, I thought that people would realize that they should not judge the universe based on just our solar system, but here it is all over again.
You've just described pretty much any economic transaction.
That's exactly my point. The poster I was responding to was portraying the sharing business as something new, something extraordinary that will ruin the world economy forever.
So according to your little theory, we should be having lower living standards than we had in the year 1950. Somehow you'd be hard-pressed to find an indicator that would support that claim. Real income, life expectancy, literacy, access to sewage and electricity, child mortality, number of cars per capita, % of people above poverty line etc. All are higher now than in 1950 . Unemployment is probably the only indicator you could point to (7,6% as opposed to 5.3%) but general well-being - not by a mile!
Nothing is being created.
But something is being used up. My car will break after 150 000 miles. If I ride it alone, it will take 10 years. If I share it/rent it out, it will happen in 4 years and I will have to get a new one sooner. Same goes for the furnishings and the paint in the room I share, the lawnmower, the sander and everything else that's being shared through these services.
Something requiring empathy and/or creativity. If there's somebody neither creative nor emphatic, he should be on a disability. Because there is not going to be any work not requiring these things left for people in the near future.
It sounds more like a personal computer to me. The miniaturization, mobility and computational power aspect is missing. There the progress went much faster than anything anybody in the 60's anticipated.
Of course next you'll let us know how this is a political problem not a technical one, as if that makes any difference
Of course it does make a difference. 50 years ago, nobody thought we could produce enough food for double the world population without causing an ecological catastrophe like chopping down all the forests. Don't try to pretend that this 'technical' aspect is something you can just wave off as insignificant.
Buggy whip manufactury closed I would tell the workers - go work for Ford or GE or whoever, Underwood workers could go work for Olivetti, or in retail
Where are the current low skilled workers supposed to go? The time is coming where any job that does not need empathy or creativity can be done by a machine.
Now nobody here or in TFA is 'holding back progress' - so your pleading to stop doing it is going to fall on deaf ears.
But should we pretend there is no problem at all?
Ten years is hardly 'gradual' if we're talking about generations. If it really happens within the next 10 years, then it's going to affect 90% of the current professional drivers.
Then there's a list of big things that he did not see coming at all:
- the internet!
- computers thousand times stronger than anything in 1964 - the size of your palm - in everybody's pocket
- advances in medical science - stem cells, 3d printing of tissue etc. and in medical technology - scanners creating a 3d model of your body (including the inside)
- detection and photography of extrasolar planets
- a man made probe exiting the solar system
- despite the overpopulation, abundance of food for everybody
etc.
Those lazy Marmosets, lab rats, mice, and chimps! No wonder they're getting fat.
But they all are in fact getting less exercise then their wild counterparts. Plus a lot of them are bred to reinforce some specific traits like calmness. The more calm an animal, the less calories it burns (no running around, fidgeting etc.).
Somehow the author of TFA forgot about that
I once had to work in a team where everybody wanted to take the lead of the group. It sucked. It made all of the team members frustrated. It didn't help productivity either.
It was an HR management failure - failure to build a working team, to pick the right people to form a team.
So be careful when an employer is looking for a leader type. Are they looking for one in a leadership position or just as a regular team member? Do they seem to understand that an effective team cannot have many leaders?
To reply to the question though: Leadership is not really overvalued, but it's very often misused and misunderstood and its rather the just-doing-my-job type of person that is undervalued.
I bet you were the first one to buy a Segway when it came out.
/sarcasm
Just one more note - 'to make a D triad follow a C# triad' is quite an unremarkable feat. It's just a half-tone interval between two chords - same as following an E chord with an F chord. The important information missing is - what key is the piece in? Making a C# triad followed by a D triad work is much harder in some keys than in others...