It's the primary fallacy with Communism that a man-hour is a man-hour. That's why they made so many bad products.
In software (especially) a good programmer can work 10x or 100x as fast as an average programmer. If a work is worth $40k, then it's worth $40k, regardless of how much time went into it. You can see that it's not overcharging a customer if you think of the work produced as being worth $40k, not X hours (even if you used hours as a baseline way of coming up with an estimate).
With a real-life example, I'm not even vaguely interested in hearing how many man-hours a contractor will spend installing granite countertops -- I just want a start date, and end, and a total amount. If the work isn't done to spec, as it wasn't, you bring the contractor back in and make it to spec. Similarly, when I do contract work for people, if there's a feature or something they want added (as often happens) or a bug that needs to be fixed, I go back and happily do it, as long as it doesn't represent a major new feature, or deviate too far from what we agreed upon me providing.
Don't even specify the man-hours you'll work on a project if it involves the creation of a work. Of course, if your task is inherently hours-related (like providing 10 hours of technical support), then by hours is how you'll have to roll.
If you're working on an hourly consulting basis, sure, if you can get the job done in 20 hours when a slow person gets it done in 40 hours, the slow guy is actually going to get paid more for you to get the same job done slower.
That's why I charge a flat rate for services rendered. It motivates me to work faster (and thus get more free time), and insures the company from overage problems.
Yeah, well, ask a Brit to point out Bakersfield on a map. That's about a fair comparison.
Believe it or not, we do know what UTC and GMT are. We learn that in, oh, 3rd or 4th grade. Now, whether or not we remember it, well, remember that our knowledge of our own presidents gets real hazy after Washington.
There's a book, Flashforward, about how the search for the Higgs Boson quantum decoheres the entire planet, and people catch a glimpse of the future for themselves in the most probable location, like a decade in advance. Kind of a depressing story, but pretty damn interesting one all the same.
>>Universities should be areas for the open exchange of ideas.
Actually, universities are where people come to get an education and hopefully a bachelors' degree, masters' degree, business degree, or doctorate. They are also where people get together for scientific and philosophical study.
Is/Ought difference. What they *are*, I agree, are diploma mills. What they *ought* to be are places where ideas can be freely shared and cross-pollinated. I learned quite a bit listening to different speakers and attending different open lectures. Lot of fascinating stuff.
If president of the UC System, I'd even open up all classes to the public, as long as there was room and they weren't disruptive. The country would benefit from a more highly educated populace.
If he's on the sidewalk? Sure. Until he physically assaults someone, blocks someone and tries to push flyers into their chest (has happened to me), treatens violence.
I think you're missing some fundamental points about free speech. Free speech is free until they cross the line. Physical harrassment and threats of violence are two ways of crossing the line. As I said -- our society has dealt with these issues since the beginning, and has established a pretty reasonable set of standards governing free speech. If the guy threatens violence, call campus police and they'll escort him out. All your examples fail to defeat these long-time standards -- if the campuses would simply stick with them (instead of establishing free-speech cow-pens) they would be resolved correctly.
The logical result of Free-Speech Areas is that they are depriving free-speech everywhere out... but weaseling out of their duty by saying they allow it "somewhere".
Funny thing: I'm pretty sure he was invited onto campus and sponsored by student groups, no?
Nobody sponsored the fundamentalist minister. He'd just come to campus with his wife once or twice a year and harangue people. I really dug it in a Cotton Mather/Johnathan Edwards sort of way, and would debate him when I felt like having some fun. Unless you think "you're all going to hell!" is a threat (which I don't, at least not in this life) I think his presence there was a net gain for everyone -- even if you disagreed with him, provoking people to think and leave their comfortable established thought processes is really the highest level thing a university can do.
I played very infrequently before canceling my account, and had no problems getting my epic flying mount... was one of the first in my largish guild to do so. I guess I'm just puzzled by people who say they can't make money in WOW. I never farmed, and still had money pouring out of my ears just from doing all the quests.
>>It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in >>the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc.
Right, like the 9/11 truthers did at my campus, UCSD. Total fucktards all of them.
But it is a false dichotomy to say that the only options for speech are 1) truther morons invading classes and 2) roping off areas of a campus to allow people to speak freely.
We've dealt with this issue for over 200 years now, in our society, without resorting to cow corrals for people to speak. Universities should be areas for the open exchange of ideas. If a 9/11 retard wants to come in on a soapbox and yell at people on the sidewalks on campus, he has (sorry, should have) the right to do so. Vice versa, if a fundamentalist minister wants to walk onto the stage in the campus center and harangue everyone (which happened at UCSD once or twice a year), telling them they'll all burn in hell, he should have that right, too.
I'm very leery of anything that says that you lose your free speech by default -- except in limited situations A,B, and C.
Wait, you think the Plame case was anything but a publicity grab and political stunt on the part of Ole' Joe Wilson? A member of the Kerry '04 campaign?
In California, it's the opposite. Qualified health care providers are exempt from the Good Samaritan law, meaning they can be sued for fucking up when they try to help someone bleeding to death on the street. But a random Joe can help them out and not be in any danger of being sued.
So it encourages doctors to not help out, awesome.:p
Yep, given how often scientific theories have proven to be wrong, I wish that scientists and scientism-subcribers would be a *little* less arrogant when they claim that "this time we have it right".
The summary is wrong. The US is actually still leading the world in tech, and the survey is generally positive (science and math scores are up, etc.) The downfall of US Education is that percentage-wise, we're training slightly less BSs than before, but with the rise of India and China, etc., it would be grossly unfair to say that we needed to keep up man-for-man with bachelor degrees...
Of course, this being slashdot, all the modded-5 comments are all bitching about the downfall of technology... even though we spend by far and away more on R&D than any other country in the world, as the survey points out.
Map/Reduce is a very common operation in parallel processing. From my very quick look, it does seem as if the authors are right -- it looks like a quick and dirty implementation of a common operation, and not a "paradigm shift" in the slightest.
At least Ms. Payton showed more technological literacy than Sandy Berger, who "backed up" national security files by stuffing them in his pants and walking out.
I am also not a Catholic, but I also have a great deal of respect for the Pope's intelligence.
Crying that having a pope visit is an "incredible violation" of the university's autonomy is an amazingly stupid statement, by comparison.
Is the pope invading the college with his death squad of aspergellum-wielding cardinals? No? Then how is having a very major figure visit a university (which is, you know, supposed to be a crossroads of different viewpoints) threatening its "autonomy"?
If those were actually her preferences, she'd vote them. But in your example, those aren't her preferences. Instead, her preferences are these: Obama: Maybe Hillary: Yes Bush: No
I think you got Obama and Hillary backwards. He wants either Obama or Hillary to win (definitely not Bush) but wants Obama to win over Hillary.
In a Range Vote, an honest vote would be something like this: Obama: 100 Hillary: 80 Bush: 0
However, since he really wants Obama to win over Hillary (and it's a close race between the two), he'd game the Range Vote like this: Obama: 100 Hillary: 0 Bush: 0
However you want to quantize that to approval voting, the problem is exactly the same -- it just has a rougher granularity.
The upshot is that approval and range voting actively encourages dishonest voting. Like I said, take a look at how the range voting went on Ice Skating in the Olympics during the Cold War.
If you read my example, it is an example of gaming. The person's actual preferences are this: Obama: Yes Hillary: Yes Bush v3.0: No
But she strategically votes no for Hillary because she believes it it is a close race between Obama and Hillary, and she prefers Obama over Hillary. Gaming.
I wasn't suggesting enshrining two parties at all, but rather using alternative voting systems to come up with the final two candidates. Ideally, what I would like to see is an election where the Bull Moose Party would have won (like I think they should have), but the Green/Libertarian/Etc. party will not win (as they shouldn't -- even with an alternative voting system, they won't pick up a significant number of votes). In fact, I think the very worst situation is one in which a very small party can achieve a supermajority-like power through voting artifacts.
Approval Voting and Range Voting are the same system, just quantized differently.
For example, consider the following election. A poll shows that Obama has 34% votes, Hillary has 34%, and Bush v3.0 has 32%.
An Obama supporter would probably rank his preferences this way: Obama Hillary Bush v3.0
However, since (psychologically) people tend to get worked up over a single candidate, the hypothetical voter would probably vote like this in an Approval Voting scenario: Obama (Yes) Hillary (No) Bush v3.0 (No)
He's an Obama supporter, so he really wants Obama to win, and figures the race is really between Hillary and Obama, so he games the system by voting no for Hillary, even though he really wants Bush to lose, and actually wouldn't mind Hillary winning quite so much.
Of course, when enough Obama and Hillary people game the system this way (which *will* happen in close elections), the votes turn out that both Obama and Hillary lose to Bush v3.0 -- just like with a classic 3rd party spoiler effect.
That's more or less my central thesis -- all these nifty alternative voting systems are all gameable, and only work when people only actually vote their preferences. All multi-party elections are gameable (think Republicans paying for Nader voting drives). The only system that can't be gamed is a 2-party plurality vote, where people simply indicate preference for one over the other.
I think they really needed to release a book for the 14-20 game play areas, something that has been very underserved, well, forever in D&D. I think they sort of threw up their hands and said, "It's all broken!" and then wrote things with no rhyme or reason. Even the 3.5 revision did nothing to fix the nonsense that is, for example, Polymorph Any Object, which lets you turn boulders into Solars, or Black Holes, or whatever.
I'm taking it more seriously than Arrow. I think that you have to pitch the underlying assumption that people will actually vote their preferences. Because they won't -- most people are, actually, one-candidate supporters. It's basic human psycology. If I have a "Bush/Cheney 2008" flag on my front yard, due to Cognitive Dissonance and other effects I will want him to win at the expense of everyone else. If I'm an Obama supporter, I will do my best to make sure he beats Hillary in a close race, even to the extent of voting Hillary last so that he could edge her out in a Range Vote. And I'll do that even if Hillary was my 2nd choice.
I'm not sure why Range Voting is even a live option -- we've SEEN this effect happen at the Olympics all throughout the Cold War in the Ice Skating Competitions. They had to end up throwing out the top and bottom scores because the US and the USSR always cheated on their own skaters.
My statement about doing a 2 person final election, would probably eliminate a 3rd party candidate like Nader, but, well, he has never come very close to winning anyway. In the case of TR, it probably would have ended up with our first 3rd party president -- all he had to do is beat Taft.
Mainly though, I think the final election should be 2 parties more for psychological reasons than anything else. I've *read* the platform statements made by all the candidates right now, and I still can't keep track of who supports the Estate Tax, or reforming the tax code, or eliminating the cap on Social Security, or whatever. With 2 candidates, we can separate their stances much more easily.
Correct. In a two-party election, if 51% of people want A over B, then the election is fair if A wins.
Unless we have some sort of fuzzy win system, wherein A gets to be president 51% of the time, and B the remainder (which would be a disaster, IMO), this is a perfectly fair election.
Let's say that I'm an Obama supporter, and Obama and Hillary are in a close race. I don't mind Hillary, but I hate Edwards.
To game it, I rank Hillary artificially low so that my preferred candidate will edge out the one that I almost prefer just as much. I also honestly rank Edwards low, but probably even lower than Hillary, since I'm hoping for my man to win.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the primary fallacy with Communism that a man-hour is a man-hour. That's why they made so many bad products.
In software (especially) a good programmer can work 10x or 100x as fast as an average programmer. If a work is worth $40k, then it's worth $40k, regardless of how much time went into it. You can see that it's not overcharging a customer if you think of the work produced as being worth $40k, not X hours (even if you used hours as a baseline way of coming up with an estimate).
With a real-life example, I'm not even vaguely interested in hearing how many man-hours a contractor will spend installing granite countertops -- I just want a start date, and end, and a total amount. If the work isn't done to spec, as it wasn't, you bring the contractor back in and make it to spec. Similarly, when I do contract work for people, if there's a feature or something they want added (as often happens) or a bug that needs to be fixed, I go back and happily do it, as long as it doesn't represent a major new feature, or deviate too far from what we agreed upon me providing.
Don't even specify the man-hours you'll work on a project if it involves the creation of a work. Of course, if your task is inherently hours-related (like providing 10 hours of technical support), then by hours is how you'll have to roll.
That's why I charge a flat rate for services rendered. It motivates me to work faster (and thus get more free time), and insures the company from overage problems.
Yeah, well, ask a Brit to point out Bakersfield on a map. That's about a fair comparison.
Believe it or not, we do know what UTC and GMT are. We learn that in, oh, 3rd or 4th grade. Now, whether or not we remember it, well, remember that our knowledge of our own presidents gets real hazy after Washington.
There's a book, Flashforward, about how the search for the Higgs Boson quantum decoheres the entire planet, and people catch a glimpse of the future for themselves in the most probable location, like a decade in advance. Kind of a depressing story, but pretty damn interesting one all the same.
If president of the UC System, I'd even open up all classes to the public, as long as there was room and they weren't disruptive. The country would benefit from a more highly educated populace.I think you're missing some fundamental points about free speech. Free speech is free until they cross the line. Physical harrassment and threats of violence are two ways of crossing the line. As I said -- our society has dealt with these issues since the beginning, and has established a pretty reasonable set of standards governing free speech. If the guy threatens violence, call campus police and they'll escort him out. All your examples fail to defeat these long-time standards -- if the campuses would simply stick with them (instead of establishing free-speech cow-pens) they would be resolved correctly.
The logical result of Free-Speech Areas is that they are depriving free-speech everywhere out... but weaseling out of their duty by saying they allow it "somewhere".Nobody sponsored the fundamentalist minister. He'd just come to campus with his wife once or twice a year and harangue people. I really dug it in a Cotton Mather/Johnathan Edwards sort of way, and would debate him when I felt like having some fun. Unless you think "you're all going to hell!" is a threat (which I don't, at least not in this life) I think his presence there was a net gain for everyone -- even if you disagreed with him, provoking people to think and leave their comfortable established thought processes is really the highest level thing a university can do.
I played very infrequently before canceling my account, and had no problems getting my epic flying mount... was one of the first in my largish guild to do so. I guess I'm just puzzled by people who say they can't make money in WOW. I never farmed, and still had money pouring out of my ears just from doing all the quests.
>>It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in
>>the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc.
Right, like the 9/11 truthers did at my campus, UCSD. Total fucktards all of them.
But it is a false dichotomy to say that the only options for speech are 1) truther morons invading classes and 2) roping off areas of a campus to allow people to speak freely.
We've dealt with this issue for over 200 years now, in our society, without resorting to cow corrals for people to speak. Universities should be areas for the open exchange of ideas. If a 9/11 retard wants to come in on a soapbox and yell at people on the sidewalks on campus, he has (sorry, should have) the right to do so. Vice versa, if a fundamentalist minister wants to walk onto the stage in the campus center and harangue everyone (which happened at UCSD once or twice a year), telling them they'll all burn in hell, he should have that right, too.
I'm very leery of anything that says that you lose your free speech by default -- except in limited situations A,B, and C.
Oh please. Hillary Clinton made it very clear that you're not in the middle class unless you make $150k a year.
;)
$80k being rich -- ha! (Unless, I guess, you're talking about the AMT, in which case we'll all be rich soon.
I think I'm more troubled by the "designated free speech areas" that are springing up on campuses everywhere.
Not because people can (sort of) speak freely there, but colleges are banning free speech everywhere else.
Wait, you think the Plame case was anything but a publicity grab and political stunt on the part of Ole' Joe Wilson? A member of the Kerry '04 campaign?
In California, it's the opposite. Qualified health care providers are exempt from the Good Samaritan law, meaning they can be sued for fucking up when they try to help someone bleeding to death on the street. But a random Joe can help them out and not be in any danger of being sued.
:p
So it encourages doctors to not help out, awesome.
Yep, given how often scientific theories have proven to be wrong, I wish that scientists and scientism-subcribers would be a *little* less arrogant when they claim that "this time we have it right".
The summary is wrong. The US is actually still leading the world in tech, and the survey is generally positive (science and math scores are up, etc.) The downfall of US Education is that percentage-wise, we're training slightly less BSs than before, but with the rise of India and China, etc., it would be grossly unfair to say that we needed to keep up man-for-man with bachelor degrees...
Of course, this being slashdot, all the modded-5 comments are all bitching about the downfall of technology... even though we spend by far and away more on R&D than any other country in the world, as the survey points out.
Map/Reduce is a very common operation in parallel processing. From my very quick look, it does seem as if the authors are right -- it looks like a quick and dirty implementation of a common operation, and not a "paradigm shift" in the slightest.
At least Ms. Payton showed more technological literacy than Sandy Berger, who "backed up" national security files by stuffing them in his pants and walking out.
I am also not a Catholic, but I also have a great deal of respect for the Pope's intelligence.
Crying that having a pope visit is an "incredible violation" of the university's autonomy is an amazingly stupid statement, by comparison.
Is the pope invading the college with his death squad of aspergellum-wielding cardinals? No? Then how is having a very major figure visit a university (which is, you know, supposed to be a crossroads of different viewpoints) threatening its "autonomy"?
Sheer Marxist nonsense.
That's why I took this name. =)
Wait, I keep forgetting: Is recycling a good thing?
I think you got Obama and Hillary backwards. He wants either Obama or Hillary to win (definitely not Bush) but wants Obama to win over Hillary.
In a Range Vote, an honest vote would be something like this:
Obama: 100
Hillary: 80
Bush: 0
However, since he really wants Obama to win over Hillary (and it's a close race between the two), he'd game the Range Vote like this:
Obama: 100
Hillary: 0
Bush: 0
However you want to quantize that to approval voting, the problem is exactly the same -- it just has a rougher granularity.
The upshot is that approval and range voting actively encourages dishonest voting. Like I said, take a look at how the range voting went on Ice Skating in the Olympics during the Cold War.
If you read my example, it is an example of gaming. The person's actual preferences are this:
Obama: Yes
Hillary: Yes
Bush v3.0: No
But she strategically votes no for Hillary because she believes it it is a close race between Obama and Hillary, and she prefers Obama over Hillary. Gaming.
I wasn't suggesting enshrining two parties at all, but rather using alternative voting systems to come up with the final two candidates. Ideally, what I would like to see is an election where the Bull Moose Party would have won (like I think they should have), but the Green/Libertarian/Etc. party will not win (as they shouldn't -- even with an alternative voting system, they won't pick up a significant number of votes). In fact, I think the very worst situation is one in which a very small party can achieve a supermajority-like power through voting artifacts.
Approval Voting and Range Voting are the same system, just quantized differently.
For example, consider the following election. A poll shows that Obama has 34% votes, Hillary has 34%, and Bush v3.0 has 32%.
An Obama supporter would probably rank his preferences this way:
Obama
Hillary
Bush v3.0
However, since (psychologically) people tend to get worked up over a single candidate, the hypothetical voter would probably vote like this in an Approval Voting scenario:
Obama (Yes)
Hillary (No)
Bush v3.0 (No)
He's an Obama supporter, so he really wants Obama to win, and figures the race is really between Hillary and Obama, so he games the system by voting no for Hillary, even though he really wants Bush to lose, and actually wouldn't mind Hillary winning quite so much.
Of course, when enough Obama and Hillary people game the system this way (which *will* happen in close elections), the votes turn out that both Obama and Hillary lose to Bush v3.0 -- just like with a classic 3rd party spoiler effect.
That's more or less my central thesis -- all these nifty alternative voting systems are all gameable, and only work when people only actually vote their preferences. All multi-party elections are gameable (think Republicans paying for Nader voting drives). The only system that can't be gamed is a 2-party plurality vote, where people simply indicate preference for one over the other.
I think they really needed to release a book for the 14-20 game play areas, something that has been very underserved, well, forever in D&D. I think they sort of threw up their hands and said, "It's all broken!" and then wrote things with no rhyme or reason. Even the 3.5 revision did nothing to fix the nonsense that is, for example, Polymorph Any Object, which lets you turn boulders into Solars, or Black Holes, or whatever.
I'm taking it more seriously than Arrow. I think that you have to pitch the underlying assumption that people will actually vote their preferences. Because they won't -- most people are, actually, one-candidate supporters. It's basic human psycology. If I have a "Bush/Cheney 2008" flag on my front yard, due to Cognitive Dissonance and other effects I will want him to win at the expense of everyone else. If I'm an Obama supporter, I will do my best to make sure he beats Hillary in a close race, even to the extent of voting Hillary last so that he could edge her out in a Range Vote. And I'll do that even if Hillary was my 2nd choice.
I'm not sure why Range Voting is even a live option -- we've SEEN this effect happen at the Olympics all throughout the Cold War in the Ice Skating Competitions. They had to end up throwing out the top and bottom scores because the US and the USSR always cheated on their own skaters.
My statement about doing a 2 person final election, would probably eliminate a 3rd party candidate like Nader, but, well, he has never come very close to winning anyway. In the case of TR, it probably would have ended up with our first 3rd party president -- all he had to do is beat Taft.
Mainly though, I think the final election should be 2 parties more for psychological reasons than anything else. I've *read* the platform statements made by all the candidates right now, and I still can't keep track of who supports the Estate Tax, or reforming the tax code, or eliminating the cap on Social Security, or whatever. With 2 candidates, we can separate their stances much more easily.
Correct. In a two-party election, if 51% of people want A over B, then the election is fair if A wins.
Unless we have some sort of fuzzy win system, wherein A gets to be president 51% of the time, and B the remainder (which would be a disaster, IMO), this is a perfectly fair election.
Let's say that I'm an Obama supporter, and Obama and Hillary are in a close race. I don't mind Hillary, but I hate Edwards.
To game it, I rank Hillary artificially low so that my preferred candidate will edge out the one that I almost prefer just as much. I also honestly rank Edwards low, but probably even lower than Hillary, since I'm hoping for my man to win.