Re:Simple solution - Abolish Social security
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 1
Why? People would try to create above average children who can afford to take care of their parents. 10 homeless bums wont be able to take care of their parents as one gainfully employed person.
Why is it ok for someones router to be passing EM waves through my body but not OK for someone to breathe cigarette smoke in my face? Sure 20 years back people thought second hand smoke is not dangerous and maybe 20 years from now someone will discover there is a cumulative effect of having a lot of wifi signals passing through your body. If I am forced to take even the miniscule risk of damage because someone is too cheap to shield their wifi I should be compensated for it monetarily or in kind.
And what about the owner of the wifi paying me for using my airwaves for free without my permission? The owner of the wifi should be mandated by law to install shielding on his house to prevent leakage of the signal to a public place the street. Who knows what damage all the excess wifi is doing to my brain when I am just walking down the street or parked on a public right of way. If the owner wants to save money on shielding the least they can do is share their access point. In fact encryption, WEP/WPA , hiding of SSIDs etc should all be illegal
Arresting someone for accessing wifi is like arresting someone for brething the second hand smoke from a smoker's cigarette. Sure the bystander is getting his nicotine high for free but is it his fault or the fault of the smoker for not secluding his smoke. Before you go off the deep end saying wifi is a beneficial resource I would like to say noone has made a real study of what all the excess EM radiation is doing to our bodies. A number of places nowadays I can pick up like 15 different wifi signals (this near the UT campus). If my computer is picking the signals up the em waves are passing through my brain. Who knows what damage they are doing. People who use wifi are using a public good - the airwaves - without paying the public or asking permission. Its not technically infeasible to install shielding so your wifi signal does not leak out of your building but people dont do it to save money. The govt should be fining people who install wifi without shielding their buildings just like it fines the smokers not the bystanders for smoking in public places and the street is definitely a public place. An alternative would be to make it illegal to have encrypted wifi. If you are using a public good - the airwaves - for free than you need to pay back the public by sharing the access point.
Whats it with the in your home argument. He was on a street a public right of way. He has every right to use anything on a public right of way. In fact he should probably sue the owner of the wireless router as to why his signal was leaking out to a public right of way - who knows what kinds of cancers are caused by leaking wireless signals. If the law is going to ignore the pollution of public land by the owner of the wifi router the least the wifi router owner can do is share the resource. in fact encrypting wifi connections should be illegal. You should encrypt your own computer but if your signal is crossing my airspace you are harming me with excess electromagnetic radiation and need to compensate me either monetarily or by sharing your wifi. Alternatively if you want to encrypt access to wifi you should be required to install shielding on your entire house to prevent the signal from leaking out and causing interference on public right of ways and other people's houses.
You get paid more as a developer as compensation for spending most of your time in front of a screen rather than interacting with humans. Its not healthy for humans who are social animals to not have human interaction for most of the day. You are getting paid hazard pay pretty much the same as someone working on an oil rig. Teachers on the other hand are spending time with kids - one of the activities humans find most enjoyable. Of course they get paid less than you but it is still good money compared to what they could make as secretaries, bike messengers or walmart checkout clerks which are jobs increasingly done by arts majors so teaching is not a bad deal. The only thing which sucks in American teaching is the lack of respect for teachers amongst American kids. Teachers have traditionally been people who like having their ego stroked by eager to learn kids and for such people the respect has been more important than the money and they did a very good job of teaching as it would hurt their ego to have their students perform poorly. The mistake has been to increase administration and coddle the kids. Bring back corporal punishment and convent school like discipline and you can halve the budget and double the performance.
Repeat after me - Electricity is not a basic living necessity. If folks in the south cannot stay alive without air conditioning they shouldnt be living in the south; its not as if Canada is horribly overcrowded. Air conditioning is a comfort not a necessity and anyway Europe is losing its population - isnt it time the Europeans went back to places suited to their genetic makeup?
Have the kids pay for their parents in retirement. If parents screw up with their kids they starve in retirement. A little motivation does wonders for parenting performance. Right now we have a nanny state where the state has a bigger stake in the kids as future taxpayers than the parents and then we wonder about broken parents.
Making a person want to learn is what teaching is. Why do you think parents send their kids to school? If their kids wanted to learn by themselves they could just put them in front of a computer with a facts regurgigation program and we wouldnt need schools. Since when did it become a profession to read something out of a book and compare some pieces of paper to a guidebook to check if the answers match (i am sick and tired of teachers whining about grading. Grading should be as automatic as checking email or going to the loo for real teachers) We hire teachers and pay them good money to motivate our kids to learn. We can use a tape recorder to repeat facts.
Hey now we can have the Day after Tomorrow 2 or as I like to call it 2 days after tomorrow. This time the problem starts in the south and we can have nice special effects of a kangaroo freezing to death. Hell we could throw in some junk science to explain why Australian animals are so different (something to do with a previous freeze) The big thing is we could use all the Australian actors - Mel Gibson Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman as the main characters and ask them to their native Australian accent for a change.
Well in India till grade 5 you take English, Hindi, Science ( A mix of biology chemistry and Physics), Social Studies ( a mix of history,civics,economics,geography), General Knowledge (basically the basis of being a good quizzer), Math,Art,Music,Yoga,Moral Studies (this is things like why you should not steal),Computers Physical Ed (Basically go out and play football/basketball/volleyball/tennis/ cricket/TT/Badminton whichever you want in the ground. The school provides some equipment but no formal coaching except for those on the school teams - No wonder India with 1/5th of world population has problems winning even 1 gold medal at the olympics). At Grade 6-8 you have English, Hindi,Sanskrit/Foreign Language, History, Geography, Civics, Economics, Biology, chemistry, Physics, Math, Yoga,Art, Music now changes to where you get to choose an instrument or dance or vocal,computers and continue with Phys ed. At Grade 9 you choose which one you want to continue Hindi/sanskrit/foreign language , yoga is dropped,music is dropped, phys ed would have been dropped but the students would revolt:) so you go into your Class 10 board exams with English, second language, Social studies which is again tested as 1 subject with History 30% Geography 30% Civics 20% Economics 20%, 1 Subject science again tested as one subject with 33% weightage each for Physics,Chemistry and Biology and computers At Grade 11 you get to choose based on your grades in the class 10 exam. If you score high you get to choose the science stream, middle grades get to choose the commerce stream and the lowest scorers get to choose Arts. Of course there are some exceptions where high scoring students choose arts or commerce but in general the peer pressure and family pressure is to go for Science. Even within science people are put on Engineering track (Math Physics Chemistry English) or Medical track (Physics Chemistry Biology English) Students also have to choose a 5th subject. For Engg track your choices are Computer Science/Economics. For the Biology track the choices are Economics/Math. The electives vary a bit from school to school these were the ones offered at my school and I chose Computer Science. BTW till yoga , art, music , phys ed are not tested on a marks basis so noone takes them seriously. After you take your Grade 12 you get to choose your college based on your score - Highest scores science major, middle scores commerce majors, low scores art majors. The twist is that the Engineering and medical colleges dont use the Grade 12 national exam scores and have their own separate exams for entrance which are competitive so if 1 million people write the exam and their are only 2000 seats only the top 2000 get in irrespective of how well the rest scored. So through high school grades 9-12 not only are people attending school they are also attending separate after school classes aimed at cracking these entrance exams.
Now the other thing which happens is that many of the students who were not able to score well in the Science stream end up going for commerce courses at college level.
And then of course a large number of people who go and start working after high school go to evening classes and get their AMIE qualifications which lets them take evening engineering classes and become equivalently qualified to 4 year Bachelor of Engineering students.
So yeah we may have a tracked hi school education system but its not as if we dont get enough breadth of education.
Actually I have been trying to convince coworkers that if they need something immediately and it is a something I can answer off the top of my mind without interrupting what I am doing just IM. Reserve email for issues which will need me to stop what I am working on and spend some time writing an answer and in such cases expect a reply by eod or next day not immediately. I am still obsessive about checking email so now I have taken to completely shutting down outlook and starting it once every hour. Filters help and they would work even better if people would use the low importance flag on articles and jokes they forward. Dont get me wrong I appreciate the forwards but the flag would let me know its something I can look at at the eod.
Rather than sending the US executives to reeducation camp how about bringing them up in a culture of shame so that when their company screws up they take personal responsibility and kill themselves. Given that execs are paid 100s of millions of dollars they should be willing to bet their life on it. Maybe then they will provide their employees with the resources to do their jobs
Dont be cruel. Arts majors realize that the only real job their eduction prepares them for is to teach arts majors. Why would you want to take that away. There are some people too ugly to work as strippers and too dumb for McD so we must leave some alternate employment for arts majors.
Its not an easy job but you do get compensated very well and moreover its a very fulfilling job. Does it keep you busy sure but it makes you a lot happier than a typical corporate job so yeah in terms of job satisfaction and happiness stay at home moms have a very good deal.
Nobody claims being stay at home mom is an easy job but it is definitely a more fulfilling job than any other as you spend all your time taking care of people you love instead of pleasing PHBs. And the point I was trying to make is it is not uncompensated it is compensated in goods and services instead of cash and that women by the dint of biology are much more qualified to do it than men- I mean children have an instant connection to their mothers, fathers have to conciously build the connection
Your mistake was to believe HR would do anything for you. HR is pretty useless. They are usefull only for hiring and firing people. Just because they arent called personnel anymore doesnt mean their job function has changed. Basically when dealing with an abusive boss the only good solution is to change jobs unless you happen to be in a union shop where maybe just maybe the union can help but most IT shops are non union shops.
Men cant have babies. What part of that dont you understand? Child rearing will always be done more by women because of biology not because of anything society thought up. And what makes you think child rearing is uncompensated? A stay at home mom gets free rent, free food, free utilities, free sex, free handyman and gets to spend time with her kids - men would kill or this combo but society would frown on the stay at home part and biology wont allow the mother part.
Huh Where do you get that? In most IT classes women are so few in number that the guys are desperate to talk to them. They will do major favors which they would never do for a male classmate just so the girls will give them the time of the day. What kind of school did you go to? Was the male population exclusively gay?
Late Hours - Check. Done a number of system live system switchovers which are always done at 3 AM to minimize disruption if the swithover gets screwed. Overtime - Check. At least the nurses get paid for it , IT folks dont Days Off - Check. What days off? You carry a pager on weekends and if something happens you are back in the office and sometimes you are the only person in the office at least in nursing you are interacting with humans Not able to go home - Check. Tell me IT is not stressing after you have spent 40 hours straight at the office trying to get a system back up when millions of telephone users are basically making free calls as the billing system is down
The people dying on you is stressfull but nurses never have to deal with millions of dollars depending on what you are doing and frankly 90% of nurses will never see a patient die on them - not every nurse is an ICU nurse or a surgical nurse.
So yeah IT is orders of magnitude more stressfull than general nursing. Further dont forget in nursing you dont have the pressure of making the ultimate decision as that is on the Doctors; in IT many times you are the ultimate decision maker as the client/management doesnt understand the issue enough to decide and will go basically on what you recommend
The reality is smart kids just dont admit to having sex as they don't want the researcher to bother them with questions like "Really? A geek like you had sex? Did you pay for it? "
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Why? People would try to create above average children who can afford to take care of their parents. 10 homeless bums wont be able to take care of their parents as one gainfully employed person.
Why is it ok for someones router to be passing EM waves through my body but not OK for someone to breathe cigarette smoke in my face? Sure 20 years back people thought second hand smoke is not dangerous and maybe 20 years from now someone will discover there is a cumulative effect of having a lot of wifi signals passing through your body. If I am forced to take even the miniscule risk of damage because someone is too cheap to shield their wifi I should be compensated for it monetarily or in kind.
And what about the owner of the wifi paying me for using my airwaves for free without my permission? The owner of the wifi should be mandated by law to install shielding on his house to prevent leakage of the signal to a public place the street. Who knows what damage all the excess wifi is doing to my brain when I am just walking down the street or parked on a public right of way. If the owner wants to save money on shielding the least they can do is share their access point. In fact encryption, WEP/WPA , hiding of SSIDs etc should all be illegal
Arresting someone for accessing wifi is like arresting someone for brething the second hand smoke from a smoker's cigarette. Sure the bystander is getting his nicotine high for free but is it his fault or the fault of the smoker for not secluding his smoke. Before you go off the deep end saying wifi is a beneficial resource I would like to say noone has made a real study of what all the excess EM radiation is doing to our bodies. A number of places nowadays I can pick up like 15 different wifi signals (this near the UT campus). If my computer is picking the signals up the em waves are passing through my brain. Who knows what damage they are doing. People who use wifi are using a public good - the airwaves - without paying the public or asking permission. Its not technically infeasible to install shielding so your wifi signal does not leak out of your building but people dont do it to save money. The govt should be fining people who install wifi without shielding their buildings just like it fines the smokers not the bystanders for smoking in public places and the street is definitely a public place. An alternative would be to make it illegal to have encrypted wifi. If you are using a public good - the airwaves - for free than you need to pay back the public by sharing the access point.
Whats it with the in your home argument. He was on a street a public right of way. He has every right to use anything on a public right of way. In fact he should probably sue the owner of the wireless router as to why his signal was leaking out to a public right of way - who knows what kinds of cancers are caused by leaking wireless signals. If the law is going to ignore the pollution of public land by the owner of the wifi router the least the wifi router owner can do is share the resource. in fact encrypting wifi connections should be illegal. You should encrypt your own computer but if your signal is crossing my airspace you are harming me with excess electromagnetic radiation and need to compensate me either monetarily or by sharing your wifi. Alternatively if you want to encrypt access to wifi you should be required to install shielding on your entire house to prevent the signal from leaking out and causing interference on public right of ways and other people's houses.
now womens rea is something else. For clarification wait for legally blonde 3
You get paid more as a developer as compensation for spending most of your time in front of a screen rather than interacting with humans. Its not healthy for humans who are social animals to not have human interaction for most of the day. You are getting paid hazard pay pretty much the same as someone working on an oil rig. Teachers on the other hand are spending time with kids - one of the activities humans find most enjoyable. Of course they get paid less than you but it is still good money compared to what they could make as secretaries, bike messengers or walmart checkout clerks which are jobs increasingly done by arts majors so teaching is not a bad deal. The only thing which sucks in American teaching is the lack of respect for teachers amongst American kids. Teachers have traditionally been people who like having their ego stroked by eager to learn kids and for such people the respect has been more important than the money and they did a very good job of teaching as it would hurt their ego to have their students perform poorly. The mistake has been to increase administration and coddle the kids. Bring back corporal punishment and convent school like discipline and you can halve the budget and double the performance.
Repeat after me - Electricity is not a basic living necessity. If folks in the south cannot stay alive without air conditioning they shouldnt be living in the south; its not as if Canada is horribly overcrowded. Air conditioning is a comfort not a necessity and anyway Europe is losing its population - isnt it time the Europeans went back to places suited to their genetic makeup?
Have the kids pay for their parents in retirement. If parents screw up with their kids they starve in retirement. A little motivation does wonders for parenting performance. Right now we have a nanny state where the state has a bigger stake in the kids as future taxpayers than the parents and then we wonder about broken parents.
Why? What entitles little Joany to the same amount of resources as little Johny who is more talented?
Making a person want to learn is what teaching is. Why do you think parents send their kids to school? If their kids wanted to learn by themselves they could just put them in front of a computer with a facts regurgigation program and we wouldnt need schools. Since when did it become a profession to read something out of a book and compare some pieces of paper to a guidebook to check if the answers match (i am sick and tired of teachers whining about grading. Grading should be as automatic as checking email or going to the loo for real teachers) We hire teachers and pay them good money to motivate our kids to learn. We can use a tape recorder to repeat facts.
Hey now we can have the Day after Tomorrow 2 or as I like to call it 2 days after tomorrow. This time the problem starts in the south and we can have nice special effects of a kangaroo freezing to death. Hell we could throw in some junk science to explain why Australian animals are so different (something to do with a previous freeze) The big thing is we could use all the Australian actors - Mel Gibson Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman as the main characters and ask them to their native Australian accent for a change.
Excuse me China is a lot more capitalist than America. Trade unions are illegal in China . You dont get anymore capitalist than that
Well in India till grade 5 you take English, Hindi, Science ( A mix of biology chemistry and Physics), Social Studies ( a mix of history,civics,economics,geography), General Knowledge (basically the basis of being a good quizzer), Math,Art,Music,Yoga,Moral Studies (this is things like why you should not steal),Computers Physical Ed (Basically go out and play football/basketball/volleyball/tennis/ cricket/TT/Badminton whichever you want in the ground. The school provides some equipment but no formal coaching except for those on the school teams - No wonder India with 1/5th of world population has problems winning even 1 gold medal at the olympics). :) so you go into your Class 10 board exams with English, second language, Social studies which is again tested as 1 subject with History 30% Geography 30% Civics 20% Economics 20%, 1 Subject science again tested as one subject with 33% weightage each for Physics,Chemistry and Biology and computers
At Grade 6-8 you have English, Hindi,Sanskrit/Foreign Language, History, Geography, Civics, Economics, Biology, chemistry, Physics, Math, Yoga,Art, Music now changes to where you get to choose an instrument or dance or vocal,computers and continue with Phys ed.
At Grade 9 you choose which one you want to continue Hindi/sanskrit/foreign language , yoga is dropped,music is dropped, phys ed would have been dropped but the students would revolt
At Grade 11 you get to choose based on your grades in the class 10 exam. If you score high you get to choose the science stream, middle grades get to choose the commerce stream and the lowest scorers get to choose Arts. Of course there are some exceptions where high scoring students choose arts or commerce but in general the peer pressure and family pressure is to go for Science. Even within science people are put on Engineering track (Math Physics Chemistry English) or Medical track (Physics Chemistry Biology English) Students also have to choose a 5th subject. For Engg track your choices are Computer Science/Economics. For the Biology track the choices are Economics/Math. The electives vary a bit from school to school these were the ones offered at my school and I chose Computer Science.
BTW till yoga , art, music , phys ed are not tested on a marks basis so noone takes them seriously.
After you take your Grade 12 you get to choose your college based on your score - Highest scores science major, middle scores commerce majors, low scores art majors.
The twist is that the Engineering and medical colleges dont use the Grade 12 national exam scores and have their own separate exams for entrance which are competitive so if 1 million people write the exam and their are only 2000 seats only the top 2000 get in irrespective of how well the rest scored.
So through high school grades 9-12 not only are people attending school they are also attending separate after school classes aimed at cracking these entrance exams.
Now the other thing which happens is that many of the students who were not able to score well in the Science stream end up going for commerce courses at college level.
And then of course a large number of people who go and start working after high school go to evening classes and get their AMIE qualifications which lets them take evening engineering classes and become equivalently qualified to 4 year Bachelor of Engineering students.
So yeah we may have a tracked hi school education system but its not as if we dont get enough breadth of education.
If we did get the tech to do that would it be so bad?
Actually I have been trying to convince coworkers that if they need something immediately and it is a something I can answer off the top of my mind without interrupting what I am doing just IM. Reserve email for issues which will need me to stop what I am working on and spend some time writing an answer and in such cases expect a reply by eod or next day not immediately.
I am still obsessive about checking email so now I have taken to completely shutting down outlook and starting it once every hour.
Filters help and they would work even better if people would use the low importance flag on articles and jokes they forward. Dont get me wrong I appreciate the forwards but the flag would let me know its something I can look at at the eod.
Rather than sending the US executives to reeducation camp how about bringing them up in a culture of shame so that when their company screws up they take personal responsibility and kill themselves. Given that execs are paid 100s of millions of dollars they should be willing to bet their life on it. Maybe then they will provide their employees with the resources to do their jobs
Dont be cruel. Arts majors realize that the only real job their eduction prepares them for is to teach arts majors. Why would you want to take that away. There are some people too ugly to work as strippers and too dumb for McD so we must leave some alternate employment for arts majors.
Its not an easy job but you do get compensated very well and moreover its a very fulfilling job. Does it keep you busy sure but it makes you a lot happier than a typical corporate job so yeah in terms of job satisfaction and happiness stay at home moms have a very good deal.
Nobody claims being stay at home mom is an easy job but it is definitely a more fulfilling job than any other as you spend all your time taking care of people you love instead of pleasing PHBs. And the point I was trying to make is it is not uncompensated it is compensated in goods and services instead of cash and that women by the dint of biology are much more qualified to do it than men- I mean children have an instant connection to their mothers, fathers have to conciously build the connection
Your mistake was to believe HR would do anything for you. HR is pretty useless. They are usefull only for hiring and firing people. Just because they arent called personnel anymore doesnt mean their job function has changed. Basically when dealing with an abusive boss the only good solution is to change jobs unless you happen to be in a union shop where maybe just maybe the union can help but most IT shops are non union shops.
Men cant have babies. What part of that dont you understand? Child rearing will always be done more by women because of biology not because of anything society thought up. And what makes you think child rearing is uncompensated? A stay at home mom gets free rent, free food, free utilities, free sex, free handyman and gets to spend time with her kids - men would kill or this combo but society would frown on the stay at home part and biology wont allow the mother part.
Huh Where do you get that? In most IT classes women are so few in number that the guys are desperate to talk to them. They will do major favors which they would never do for a male classmate just so the girls will give them the time of the day. What kind of school did you go to? Was the male population exclusively gay?
Late Hours - Check. Done a number of system live system switchovers which are always done at 3 AM to minimize disruption if the swithover gets screwed.
Overtime - Check. At least the nurses get paid for it , IT folks dont
Days Off - Check. What days off? You carry a pager on weekends and if something happens you are back in the office and sometimes you are the only person in the office at least in nursing you are interacting with humans
Not able to go home - Check. Tell me IT is not stressing after you have spent 40 hours straight at the office trying to get a system back up when millions of telephone users are basically making free calls as the billing system is down
The people dying on you is stressfull but nurses never have to deal with millions of dollars depending on what you are doing and frankly 90% of nurses will never see a patient die on them - not every nurse is an ICU nurse or a surgical nurse.
So yeah IT is orders of magnitude more stressfull than general nursing. Further dont forget in nursing you dont have the pressure of making the ultimate decision as that is on the Doctors; in IT many times you are the ultimate decision maker as the client/management doesnt understand the issue enough to decide and will go basically on what you recommend
The reality is smart kids just dont admit to having sex as they don't want the researcher to bother them with questions like "Really? A geek like you had sex? Did you pay for it? "