Unskilled labor has the greatest disparity between the value, and the cost, of labor and management.
Skilled labor, like data entry or bricklaying, has a somewhat lower disparity.
Specialized labor, like software engineering or acting, compensation ratio runs from something like 10X one way to about 10X the other way.
Many companies in software engineering have high end software engineers who also understand business managing their software engineers, in which case the manager is usually paid more. Some have high end business people running the developers, and the manager gets paid more. A lot, though, have project managers who are actually doing the management of the programmers, and they get paid less.
It is still common in software engineering, in the project manager case, for there to be a high end software engineer or business person as the formal manager. That person gets paid more and is above the software engineer in the org chart, but the day-to-day task management is done by the project manager.
So, in short, if you want to get paid more than your tactical effective manager, go work someplace that has project managers.
"twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.'"
Really? "Hah hah, little nerd, you don't get any pussy!" The former NSA chief is using sophomoric name-calling to make himself feel better about having become one of the most crafty and subversive enemies our nation has ever faced. Just like high school, when the jocks would do the same to feel better about their abusive relationships with their fathers.
My congressional rep is a pretty far right "We gotta stop the terr'rists" type. I've been trying to figure out the message that will ring with him, to help him understand what we have at stake here. I think it is this: Surveillance cannot become a condition of purchasing American goods and services, or we will lose business. And the solution is already in use in New Jersey:
"Under settled New Jersey law, individuals do not lose their right to privacy simply because they have to give information to a third-party provider, like a phone company or bank, to get service."
I don't want to play to stereotypes, but the reality is that New Jersey is host to some of the traditionally hard-to-crack criminal enterprises. Yet they have decided that the ability to do business must not take a back seat to making law enforcement a little easier. We cannot let surveillance become a condition of purchasing American goods and services.
Attention Non-Programmers: This is what the future looks like. If you don't learn to make your computers obey you, if you don't take control of your information flows, you will be marginalized by the people, corporations, and governments that do.
I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying it is. As philosopher-poet Ash once observed; "Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."
How about handing in one of those White House petitions about this issue and asking them what they are going to do about it. The answer should be interesting.
I think you haven't seen many of the answers to petitions that challenge the whims of the oligarchy. They sometimes run into tens, or even dozens of words, but boil down to, "No, because I said so."
I imagine the court will say that the government is not stopping anyone from exercising their rights to free speech simply because they are recording their conversations and building graphs of associations.
The first also covers freedom of association, which is infringed by the government building graphs of all associations, just as it would infringe free speech if they bugged everyone's living room. More on Freedom of Association here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
I think it boils down to presumption of innocence. There was not enough concrete evidence of exactly what happened to find him guilty. I suspect he committed manslaughter, and that Trayvon escalated the situation, and that under our legal system Zimmerman should not be found guilty. Given the uncertainty, it is an accurate reflection of our preference to let a guilty man go free than to convict an innocent man.
Bad CEO? Throwing chairs, browbeating your employees, prioritizing squeezing your customer over making a quality product, bribing government officials all over the world to expand your regulatory monopolies while preaching laissez-faire extremism to excuse cheating on your taxes -- those things don't necessarily make you a bad CEO. By the quarterly profit measure, they make you a good one. Those things don't make you a bad CEO; they make you a bad person.
A Google spokesperson says the company regularly hosts fundraisers for candidates of all stripes, even when Google disagrees with some of their policies â" as it does with Inhofe on climate change. This explanation didn't wash with the activists outside Google's D.C. headquarters near K Street.
Why would that explanation lack credibility? It sounds a lot more forthright than I would expect. Let's frame it a little differently and I think it will ring quite true:
"Google doesn't care about the policies of the politicians it supports, or whether those policies harm the nation, the planet, or the American people. Google will happily help channel money to any politician who can help us pay a little less taxes to maintain the system we benefit from, or who can influence laws so that we are not held responsible for our stalking or the government stalking we facilitate. Oligarchy rules!"
So earnings are 25% higher but cost of living is 50% lower.
First, no, it's not 50% lower. Land and homes are cheaper, but they are not the majority of your cost of living. Electricity, food, and consumer goods are much closer to parity price (though retail markup is higher in the city, of course). Gas is very close to parity, and you have to use more of it because everything is further away. There's no public transit, and people in the country lose efficiencies of scale in police, fire, and education services. So sure, there's an effect from cost of living, but it is nothing like 50%. I gave you numbers in my post -- you want to counter it with some ridiculous claim, you show me something to back it up or you're just a blowhard.
And even if it is big enough to balance the 25% difference in income, that still doesn't make rural folks rich. That term being wielded by a lobby to describe people making $32k in the US is pure bullshit regardless of the relative cost of living.
Its main effect now is that poor people living in urban areas are subsidizing rich people living in the country.
Uhhh, I grew up way out in farm country in Ohio. I have lived in five different major metro areas. The people in the country are not rich. What kind of bullshit psy-ops lobby-funded advertising is this, and why is it being parroted blindly here? Let's just do a quick bullshit check. One web search, second hit, talks about a study done in Oregon:
In 2011, the (per capita personal income) in non-metro counties was $31,383 and in the metro counties it was $39,267; a difference of $7,884 (25 percent). The difference was due primarily to the difference in earnings from work.
Obviously that's just one data point, feel free to do more comprehensive research yourself. I'll tell you from personal experience; people in the country make less money on average than people in the city. This report is some assholes like the Koch brothers, a lobby called "Alliance for Generational Equity," trying to create infighting so they can drown the government in the bathtub. Let's not start being their lickspittle mouthpieces, parroting their easily debunked lies.
Volkswagen claims a consumption rating equivalent to 261 mpg; but that's using the full charge of the battery.
310 miles in all, starting out on a charge, on its 2.6-gallon (yes, that's right) fuel tank.
Not sure what "starting out on a charge" means, but if it means starting with zero battery power, the mileage is 119.23 -- and that is only according to the manufacturer. The test drive in the article was too short and limited to be meaningful.
I think that what she means is that biological chemistry uses enzymes that lower the activation energy. So 99.99% of all biological chemical reactions occur at less than 50C (my very arbitrary guesstimate).
Well, OK, but so what? Why would it matter what temperature it happens at? Suppose we can produce a cellular phone case using a low temperature process that requires 3 kilowatt hours and vents 2 kilowatt hours of energy as waste heat, or using a high temperature process that requires 2 kilowatt hours and vents 1 kilowatt hour of energy as waste heat. If all other things were equal, which would be better?
The casual allure of the heat portion of the statement seems to be that high temperature things are inherently bad, but it is really efficiency that matters to the long-run health of the system. If the slower, lower temperature process were more efficient, it would be the better answer -- but the mere fact that it happens at a lower temperature differential does not necessarily imply greater efficiency.
"Nature uses life-friendly chemistry, which is nontoxic and water-based, and which does not require high heat,"
Nature's manufacturing processes are exothermic, just like factory processes. They're just really slow, so the heat difference at any moment is fairly low. Take plants, for example -- they take in solar energy, increase order locally, and produce heat during respiration. The law of increasing entropy requires unordered energy to be released to offset the increases in local order.
The heat produced is not as shockingly different as it seems based on casual observation; the waste heat is just being expelled over a longer period of time. According to Wikipedia, and my incomplete understanding of the entire process, photosynthetic biomass production is at most 32% efficient (see below). I would guess meatware manufacturing is not much more efficient, if at all.
Wikipedia: Photosynthetic Efficiency: Stated another way: 100% sunlight -> non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving 53% (in the 400-700 nm range) -> 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving 37% (absorbed photon energy) -> 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving 28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) -> 32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving 9% (collected as sugar) -> 35-40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving 5.4% net leaf efficiency.
Angela Merkel comes off looking like a real asshole, IMO. When it came out that the US was spying on US and German citizens, she defended it as necessary for the war on terror. Then she finds out we're spying on her fellow oligarchs and all of a sudden it's an unjustifiable violation of trust.
I love my country. I love our heritage, and the spirit of the people who are giving healthy, skeptical attention to its direction.
I understand that many of We The People are, by virtue of the flaws that make us human, unaware of the problems or the threat they pose. They do not make me ashamed; it is the nature of humanity that not everyone will see the same problems at the same time. When a problem first arises, nobody knows about it, and gradually the awareness spreads. We are in the early phase of the problem becoming visible to the broad public.
What I am ashamed of -- or, more accurately, displeased with -- is those who are profiting by guiding us further into the jaws of authoritarianism. Some are ignorant, some show callous disregard. The worst genuinely believe they are entitled, or destined, to rule.
I am not ashamed of my country. I am displeased with those enemies who would harm it for their own gain.
Hey, if Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize for expanding our wars and the war powers assumed by his office, why shouldn't a company that that profiteers on regulatory agriculture monopolies get the World Food Prize? I understand The Pope is being considered for an equally prestigious anthropology prize.
As long as they can get their weekly does of the Kardashians, Americans just don't give a shit about their freedoms anymore.
Fat, dumb, and happy. That's how the emperor of Rome did it, and that's how our government is doing it now.
We already know that part. Is there nothing more to say? Add something to the conversation, don't stop with the trite half-witticism. How do we jar them out of their complacence? Or if we believe they are beyond redemption, how should that affect we who can see?
How do you explain this to those you know who are disinclined to understand or to care? How would you capture the spirit of an otherwise good person who is narc'd out on teevee?
What of the narcotic effect of the media? Is media the problem in itself; the catatonia-inducing pablum industry run wild on excessive copyright revenue resulting from an ever expanding regulatory monopoly? Excessive filthy luchre turning otherwise honorable people against their better intentions?
Should we harden ourselves to their self-inflicted plight? Forge ourselves into victors of this increasingly distorted society, so that we can gather more of the ill-distributed booty for ourselves? Should we seek to turn the distortions against the machine itself?
Or something else -- what's your take? What lies a little further down the contemplation path, beyond "people are fat and stupid"? Merely moaning that The People are fat and lazy is a tired and uninspiring refrain. Give us something from inside you -- what do those roadweary observations mean to you?
Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too.
And from the article: We need to find solutions to the fanboys and one of the solutions I came up with is to block them on my blog posts.
Moderated forums are not identical to censorship. Censorship is the attempt to prevent an opinion from being expressed. Moderation can have the objective only to prevent disruption of a particular forum, and not be an attempt to suppress an opinion. It is certainly possible for moderation to approach censorship in effect, depending on the prominence of the forum to the topic in question and the concentration of the authority to moderate, but moderation is not necessarily censorship and should be considered in context.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know a good freedom dealer? I'm an addict and need my fix of freedom, but I can't seem to find it within the borders of the US at this point.
See if you can find a Crypto Party near you. Or contact your local hackerspace and ask if you can help them host one.
Unskilled labor has the greatest disparity between the value, and the cost, of labor and management.
Skilled labor, like data entry or bricklaying, has a somewhat lower disparity.
Specialized labor, like software engineering or acting, compensation ratio runs from something like 10X one way to about 10X the other way.
Many companies in software engineering have high end software engineers who also understand business managing their software engineers, in which case the manager is usually paid more. Some have high end business people running the developers, and the manager gets paid more. A lot, though, have project managers who are actually doing the management of the programmers, and they get paid less.
It is still common in software engineering, in the project manager case, for there to be a high end software engineer or business person as the formal manager. That person gets paid more and is above the software engineer in the org chart, but the day-to-day task management is done by the project manager.
So, in short, if you want to get paid more than your tactical effective manager, go work someplace that has project managers.
"twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.'"
Really? "Hah hah, little nerd, you don't get any pussy!" The former NSA chief is using sophomoric name-calling to make himself feel better about having become one of the most crafty and subversive enemies our nation has ever faced. Just like high school, when the jocks would do the same to feel better about their abusive relationships with their fathers.
>> if you remove lead from bullets you see a price increase of nearly an order of magnitude.
> I don't think you know what an order of magnitude means. I am not paying $10 a shot for my Barnes bullets.
It is possible the prior poster was talking about bullets and you are talking about cartridges.
My congressional rep is a pretty far right "We gotta stop the terr'rists" type. I've been trying to figure out the message that will ring with him, to help him understand what we have at stake here. I think it is this: Surveillance cannot become a condition of purchasing American goods and services, or we will lose business. And the solution is already in use in New Jersey:
"Under settled New Jersey law, individuals do not lose their right to privacy simply because they have to give information to a third-party provider, like a phone company or bank, to get service."
I don't want to play to stereotypes, but the reality is that New Jersey is host to some of the traditionally hard-to-crack criminal enterprises. Yet they have decided that the ability to do business must not take a back seat to making law enforcement a little easier. We cannot let surveillance become a condition of purchasing American goods and services.
Attention Non-Programmers: This is what the future looks like. If you don't learn to make your computers obey you, if you don't take control of your information flows, you will be marginalized by the people, corporations, and governments that do.
I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying it is. As philosopher-poet Ash once observed; "Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."
How about handing in one of those White House petitions about this issue and asking them what they are going to do about it. The answer should be interesting.
I think you haven't seen many of the answers to petitions that challenge the whims of the oligarchy. They sometimes run into tens, or even dozens of words, but boil down to, "No, because I said so."
I imagine the court will say that the government is not stopping anyone from exercising their rights to free speech simply because they are recording their conversations and building graphs of associations.
The first also covers freedom of association, which is infringed by the government building graphs of all associations, just as it would infringe free speech if they bugged everyone's living room. More on Freedom of Association here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
I think it boils down to presumption of innocence. There was not enough concrete evidence of exactly what happened to find him guilty. I suspect he committed manslaughter, and that Trayvon escalated the situation, and that under our legal system Zimmerman should not be found guilty. Given the uncertainty, it is an accurate reflection of our preference to let a guilty man go free than to convict an innocent man.
does Ballmer deserve his reputation as a bad CEO?
Bad CEO? Throwing chairs, browbeating your employees, prioritizing squeezing your customer over making a quality product, bribing government officials all over the world to expand your regulatory monopolies while preaching laissez-faire extremism to excuse cheating on your taxes -- those things don't necessarily make you a bad CEO. By the quarterly profit measure, they make you a good one. Those things don't make you a bad CEO; they make you a bad person.
A Google spokesperson says the company regularly hosts fundraisers for candidates of all stripes, even when Google disagrees with some of their policies â" as it does with Inhofe on climate change. This explanation didn't wash with the activists outside Google's D.C. headquarters near K Street.
Why would that explanation lack credibility? It sounds a lot more forthright than I would expect. Let's frame it a little differently and I think it will ring quite true:
"Google doesn't care about the policies of the politicians it supports, or whether those policies harm the nation, the planet, or the American people. Google will happily help channel money to any politician who can help us pay a little less taxes to maintain the system we benefit from, or who can influence laws so that we are not held responsible for our stalking or the government stalking we facilitate. Oligarchy rules!"
So earnings are 25% higher but cost of living is 50% lower.
First, no, it's not 50% lower. Land and homes are cheaper, but they are not the majority of your cost of living. Electricity, food, and consumer goods are much closer to parity price (though retail markup is higher in the city, of course). Gas is very close to parity, and you have to use more of it because everything is further away. There's no public transit, and people in the country lose efficiencies of scale in police, fire, and education services. So sure, there's an effect from cost of living, but it is nothing like 50%. I gave you numbers in my post -- you want to counter it with some ridiculous claim, you show me something to back it up or you're just a blowhard.
And even if it is big enough to balance the 25% difference in income, that still doesn't make rural folks rich. That term being wielded by a lobby to describe people making $32k in the US is pure bullshit regardless of the relative cost of living.
Its main effect now is that poor people living in urban areas are subsidizing rich people living in the country.
Uhhh, I grew up way out in farm country in Ohio. I have lived in five different major metro areas. The people in the country are not rich. What kind of bullshit psy-ops lobby-funded advertising is this, and why is it being parroted blindly here? Let's just do a quick bullshit check. One web search, second hit, talks about a study done in Oregon:
In 2011, the (per capita personal income) in non-metro counties was $31,383 and in the metro counties it was $39,267; a difference of $7,884 (25 percent). The difference was due primarily to the difference in earnings from work.
Obviously that's just one data point, feel free to do more comprehensive research yourself. I'll tell you from personal experience; people in the country make less money on average than people in the city. This report is some assholes like the Koch brothers, a lobby called "Alliance for Generational Equity," trying to create infighting so they can drown the government in the bathtub. Let's not start being their lickspittle mouthpieces, parroting their easily debunked lies.
Sensationalist bullshit. From the article:
Volkswagen claims a consumption rating equivalent to 261 mpg; but that's using the full charge of the battery.
310 miles in all, starting out on a charge, on its 2.6-gallon (yes, that's right) fuel tank.
Not sure what "starting out on a charge" means, but if it means starting with zero battery power, the mileage is 119.23 -- and that is only according to the manufacturer. The test drive in the article was too short and limited to be meaningful.
Just because Gnome and Canonical have gone full metal retard,
hahaha
I think that what she means is that biological chemistry uses enzymes that lower the activation energy. So 99.99% of all biological chemical reactions occur at less than 50C (my very arbitrary guesstimate).
Well, OK, but so what? Why would it matter what temperature it happens at? Suppose we can produce a cellular phone case using a low temperature process that requires 3 kilowatt hours and vents 2 kilowatt hours of energy as waste heat, or using a high temperature process that requires 2 kilowatt hours and vents 1 kilowatt hour of energy as waste heat. If all other things were equal, which would be better?
The casual allure of the heat portion of the statement seems to be that high temperature things are inherently bad, but it is really efficiency that matters to the long-run health of the system. If the slower, lower temperature process were more efficient, it would be the better answer -- but the mere fact that it happens at a lower temperature differential does not necessarily imply greater efficiency.
"Nature uses life-friendly chemistry, which is nontoxic and water-based, and which does not require high heat,"
Nature's manufacturing processes are exothermic, just like factory processes. They're just really slow, so the heat difference at any moment is fairly low. Take plants, for example -- they take in solar energy, increase order locally, and produce heat during respiration. The law of increasing entropy requires unordered energy to be released to offset the increases in local order.
The heat produced is not as shockingly different as it seems based on casual observation; the waste heat is just being expelled over a longer period of time. According to Wikipedia, and my incomplete understanding of the entire process, photosynthetic biomass production is at most 32% efficient (see below). I would guess meatware manufacturing is not much more efficient, if at all.
Wikipedia: Photosynthetic Efficiency:
Stated another way:
100% sunlight -> non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
53% (in the 400-700 nm range) -> 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
37% (absorbed photon energy) -> 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) -> 32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
9% (collected as sugar) -> 35-40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
5.4% net leaf efficiency.
Ben Franklin thought of the 'th' character in 1768, published in 1779 in A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling.
Angela Merkel comes off looking like a real asshole, IMO. When it came out that the US was spying on US and German citizens, she defended it as necessary for the war on terror. Then she finds out we're spying on her fellow oligarchs and all of a sudden it's an unjustifiable violation of trust.
Well played - a nicely crafted post. Thanks!
I'M ASHAMED OF MY COUNTRY.
I love my country. I love our heritage, and the spirit of the people who are giving healthy, skeptical attention to its direction.
I understand that many of We The People are, by virtue of the flaws that make us human, unaware of the problems or the threat they pose. They do not make me ashamed; it is the nature of humanity that not everyone will see the same problems at the same time. When a problem first arises, nobody knows about it, and gradually the awareness spreads. We are in the early phase of the problem becoming visible to the broad public.
What I am ashamed of -- or, more accurately, displeased with -- is those who are profiting by guiding us further into the jaws of authoritarianism. Some are ignorant, some show callous disregard. The worst genuinely believe they are entitled, or destined, to rule.
I am not ashamed of my country. I am displeased with those enemies who would harm it for their own gain.
But Venezuela? I want him to escape prosecution. I do not want him to enable a despotic government to appear to be free.
The problem with the non-despotic governments is that my government keeps threatening them if they don't carry our despotic water.
Hey, if Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize for expanding our wars and the war powers assumed by his office, why shouldn't a company that that profiteers on regulatory agriculture monopolies get the World Food Prize? I understand The Pope is being considered for an equally prestigious anthropology prize.
As long as they can get their weekly does of the Kardashians, Americans just don't give a shit about their freedoms anymore.
Fat, dumb, and happy. That's how the emperor of Rome did it, and that's how our government is doing it now.
We already know that part. Is there nothing more to say? Add something to the conversation, don't stop with the trite half-witticism. How do we jar them out of their complacence? Or if we believe they are beyond redemption, how should that affect we who can see?
How do you explain this to those you know who are disinclined to understand or to care? How would you capture the spirit of an otherwise good person who is narc'd out on teevee?
What of the narcotic effect of the media? Is media the problem in itself; the catatonia-inducing pablum industry run wild on excessive copyright revenue resulting from an ever expanding regulatory monopoly? Excessive filthy luchre turning otherwise honorable people against their better intentions?
Should we harden ourselves to their self-inflicted plight? Forge ourselves into victors of this increasingly distorted society, so that we can gather more of the ill-distributed booty for ourselves? Should we seek to turn the distortions against the machine itself?
Or something else -- what's your take? What lies a little further down the contemplation path, beyond "people are fat and stupid"? Merely moaning that The People are fat and lazy is a tired and uninspiring refrain. Give us something from inside you -- what do those roadweary observations mean to you?
Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too.
And from the article:
We need to find solutions to the fanboys and one of the solutions I came up with is to block them on my blog posts.
Moderated forums are not identical to censorship. Censorship is the attempt to prevent an opinion from being expressed. Moderation can have the objective only to prevent disruption of a particular forum, and not be an attempt to suppress an opinion. It is certainly possible for moderation to approach censorship in effect, depending on the prominence of the forum to the topic in question and the concentration of the authority to moderate, but moderation is not necessarily censorship and should be considered in context.