Exactly. Don't get fooled, there's plenty of people who are not ashamed of how stupid they are (or they don't even know it).
Hey now. We don't want to start hammering the dork dynasty dude again. Let's only complain about fundamentalist Muslims in far away countries. Let's not talk about fundamentalist Christians living in the swamps and deserets of America.
I think this is the problem at most companies. Once someone in charge has a "good" idea, then no one else can point out how stupid it is. Collecting data is easy, cheap. Analyzing it is what is expensive. And useful. Collecting unanalyzed data is a waste of time and effort. Period.
And the first analysis is: what sort of data should we collect to make analysis easier? But of course, if people actually analyzed the process itself, someone would have already pointed out that the only way to measure cost-effectiveness is to have an actual goal in mind. Collecting everything you can get your hands is an easy goal to state.
Stating why all that data will help you prevent attacks on America instead of being viewed as an attack on Americans is a whole lot harder to articulate.
Same old same old.
It's a lot easier to invade a country than it is to state what peace would really have to look like.
The reason they say the cameras aren't for crime reduction is because that is measurable. If we say it is to protect critical infrastructure and no terrorist attacks occur in Houston, well obviously the system worked and it was money well spent.
Same as the justification for TSA. The bin Laden operation was a one shot deal. After it happened, no one would be able to hijack a fully-loaded (public) airplane and use it as a flying bomb. In fact, only 3 of the 4 planes hijacked on 9/11 were successful. Once we knew this wasn't your regular hijacking to Cuba, passengers responded.
But since we set up all these security lines and prevent people from bringing on shampoo and dangerous trinkets, then TSA is obviously the reason for our success. Frankly, if we had door locks on airplane cabins, I suspect no one could take over an airplane even with box cutters now.
While some folks are terrified/paranoid about NSA monitoring, the real story is there are two types of monitoring.
One is the real-time monitoring that google does. That's all keyword based so when I type in an e-mail about guitars, I get served up ads for guitars or music shops or something. That's the _evidence_ that people use to say the NSA is watching our every move. Except google isn't watching anybody in particular, they are just serving up ads based on typed words
The other type of monitoring occurs _after_ a crime happens, That's when the cops grab all the video evidence they can. The Steubenville rape case investigation occurred _after_ the crime. And here's the key point. It takes 10 to 100 investigators to examines all the texts and e-mails (or videos) gathered.
The paranoid conflate those two into this all-seeing, all-encompassing "They're watching everybody all the time."
They aren't. They can't.
Economics still rules. I can serve up specific ads without paying attention to everything the same way a therapist can pinpoint key phrases and say "Tell me more" without actually listening 100% of the time. When I do want to follow someone in real-time full-time, it takes an entire squad.
I can see how this would work very well for some people. Read Self Comes to Mind for seeing how the physical brain creates a mental mind.
The fundamental basis is pain vs pleasure.
Scientific American had an article a few years ago that therapy was bad for certain groups of people such as children in school shootings. It brought up and reinforced tragedies instead of allowing them to gradually decay in the memory banks. I can see this doing the same thing for people who can't stop remembering things. It's basic brain training.
I know most people don't do that and "think" their brain _is_ them but you can train your brain to think programming or music or architecture. You can also train to avoid pointless memories and useless beliefs--probably the main reason we don't teach people to think about how they think or even teach people to perform critical thinking. (The first thing you _must_ criticize is the teaching itself and few teachers put up with that kind of shit).
Business doesn't build factories in order to employ workers; they build in order to meet demand.
If the workers of the world are unemployed and cannot buy products made by factories, that lack of demand is a severe issue. Henry Ford knew his workers needed to be able to buy the cars coming off the assembly line or else the assembly line will shut down.
Lack of demand cannot be fixed with subsidies to rich people. Those neo-econs confuse demand for money (qualitative easing of interest rates) with demand for products (the thing that actually causes business to hire employees and build factories).
I think red-light cameras have a negative connotation _because_ they make money and that is unfortunate.
Most every successful business makes money so if you want to contract out police work such as traffic speed enforcement, that contractor _has_ to make money.
If you want to keep the job in-house so-to-speak, well the government doesn't have to make money but then everybody whines about how expensive it is to maintain this wonderful society we have _because_ of government. They think it costs too much because all they look at is the expense of taxes, not benefit of courts, police, and laws that form a well-regulated market safe for businesses and customers.
Then all it takes is enough wealthy citizens and politicians getting actual tickets they can't talk or bribe their way out of and traffic enforcement gets to stop.
We either want laws or we don't. If you think less government is best, move to Somalia. We have yet to analyze our systems correctly (i.e. scientifically instead of politically).
The first rule should be to not give easy access to firearms to the general public in the first place.
Agreed. I don't understand the "logic" of the second amendment which apparently guarantees the right of any yahoo with a gun to overturn a democratically elected government. That ought to repealed or at least analyzed. You want to own a gun, fine. You want to overthrow the government. Not fine. (That's the theory independent of the reality that any yutz with a basement-full of guns probably can't even hold off the local SWAT team, much less commit armed revolution against a duly-elected govt.
Because in the end, the Grinch comes to learn the error of his ways and eventually saves Christmas. Somehow, I don't see Disney doing this...
That's because you're thinking old-style Christmas.
This is the new millennium; the Libertarian one.
We only have to save Christmas for the already rich. The rest of us can play with the wrapping paper they toss in the garbage.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia and everything to do with
1. How people how argue and more specifically
2. What pedants argue about.
You want to argue about who's going to win the Super Bowl or be purged next in North Korea? Lots of good arguments and at the end, there is an actual measurable outcome.
Want to argue about which is the best operating system? Lots of arguing there but no measurable outcome. You can measure which is the most popular but that's like saying the most popular music is the best music. We argue about music and art.
But the arguments over word use and definitions of fact are the most vociferous because they are the most picky. And only picky, anal retentive types will argue so the arguments get more and more precise each time. When done well, we call it science. But it's hard to use words and syntax well when arguing about word definitions and syntax. If you see no difference between French-Polish and Polish-French, well then there's no difference between African-American and American-African. It actually is debatable. Uninteresting to most but debatable to many.
I suspect as any industry becomes entrenched, it destroys competition.
Apparently the Koch Bros are still pissed at what Carnegie did to their father who came up with a more cost-effective way of refining petroleum and then was locked out of the market.
Considering that most of the cells "inside" the body (if you don't think of the human system as a torus)
are non-human and form an entire ecosystem that digests nutrients out of the substances we ingest,
it makes sense that good digestion is as fundamental to us as it is to a tree (which also relies on an exterior soil ecosystem).
This would also coincide with the apparent disease-like spread of autism thru the population.
The spread of autism also displays a flavor of inheritance and we aren't completely sure how gut bacteria spread
but it's likely that you get it from the people you spend the most time around.
"Rarely do people of the same occupation gather together, even if only for merriment, that it does not end in some plot to defraud the public."
I'm pretty sure that the large majority of people who cite Smith haven't actually _read_ Smith.
I find two things interesting about Wealth of Nations. One is that it is easily readable. The other is that it seems everybody interprets it from an ideological perspective, kind of like the Bible. He wrote it for kings to understand basic economics, both good and bad.
Actually, you forgot my favorite feature of working for Google: A complete lack of idiots. Everyone I work with -- right down to the facilities staff, amazingly enough -- is bright, focused, engaged and rational. In three years, working with hundreds of others (Google is highly collaborative), I found a single counterexample, and he's now gone.
"People who think like me are bright, and everyone here is bright."
monoculture.
It is definitely a monoculture, probably one I would like.
The problem comes when trying to develop something _popular_, something that will be grabbed by a large percentage of the population, i.e., regular joes and grandmothers and people for whom basic things are not intuitive. In the words of the rock band Jethro Tull: wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick. If you only sell to geeks, you only get 10-15% of the market.
...The big question is: why do they stick with it?
One reason might be because everybody there has already passed thru that particular hazing ritual.
It's traditional; it's fraternal; it's the way we've always done it.
...What we found in other projects with Oracle (we were a Oracle partner) was that our personnel had much deeper expertise with Oracle than members of their own company.
ditto.
In fact, I think that was one of the main reasons Oracle killed their User Groups--it cut into their consultancy profits. We would provide real training (and criticism and workarounds) for free to each other.
...Like you said, it isn't rocket-science. There isn't some dark magic involved in developing a schema.
The dark magic is required when dealing with managers.
The very first thing anybody tells me about their website is that they want to track users.
That of course, is the very last thing you actually want to do to people who are merely browsing but trying to convince managers of that is impossible.
And if you're a contractor, do you want the job or not?
Slashdot Mirror
I still maintain my fake but according to facebook and Google+, "true identities" of myself.
You mean Ronald McDonald isn't real!?! He must be real if I can post on his wall.
Exactly. Don't get fooled, there's plenty of people who are not ashamed of how stupid they are (or they don't even know it).
Hey now. We don't want to start hammering the dork dynasty dude again. Let's only complain about fundamentalist Muslims in far away countries. Let's not talk about fundamentalist Christians living in the swamps and deserets of America.
Isn't it easier for users to just ignore the over the top ridiculous comments?
Not after a certain saturation point. If I see 2 pagedowns of garbage, I'm off to some other site.
Signal to noise ratio as someone said earlier.
I think this is the problem at most companies. Once someone in charge has a "good" idea, then no one else can point out how stupid it is. Collecting data is easy, cheap. Analyzing it is what is expensive. And useful. Collecting unanalyzed data is a waste of time and effort. Period.
And the first analysis is: what sort of data should we collect to make analysis easier? But of course, if people actually analyzed the process itself, someone would have already pointed out that the only way to measure cost-effectiveness is to have an actual goal in mind. Collecting everything you can get your hands is an easy goal to state.
Stating why all that data will help you prevent attacks on America instead of being viewed as an attack on Americans is a whole lot harder to articulate.
Same old same old.
It's a lot easier to invade a country than it is to state what peace would really have to look like.
The reason they say the cameras aren't for crime reduction is because that is measurable. If we say it is to protect critical infrastructure and no terrorist attacks occur in Houston, well obviously the system worked and it was money well spent.
Same as the justification for TSA. The bin Laden operation was a one shot deal. After it happened, no one would be able to hijack a fully-loaded (public) airplane and use it as a flying bomb. In fact, only 3 of the 4 planes hijacked on 9/11 were successful. Once we knew this wasn't your regular hijacking to Cuba, passengers responded.
But since we set up all these security lines and prevent people from bringing on shampoo and dangerous trinkets, then TSA is obviously the reason for our success.
Frankly, if we had door locks on airplane cabins, I suspect no one could take over an airplane even with box cutters now.
24/7 monitoring doesn't happen.
While some folks are terrified/paranoid about NSA monitoring, the real story is there are two types of monitoring.
One is the real-time monitoring that google does. That's all keyword based so when I type in an e-mail about guitars, I get served up ads for guitars or music shops or something. That's the _evidence_ that people use to say the NSA is watching our every move. Except google isn't watching anybody in particular, they are just serving up ads based on typed words
The other type of monitoring occurs _after_ a crime happens, That's when the cops grab all the video evidence they can. The Steubenville rape case investigation occurred _after_ the crime. And here's the key point. It takes 10 to 100 investigators to examines all the texts and e-mails (or videos) gathered.
The paranoid conflate those two into this all-seeing, all-encompassing "They're watching everybody all the time."
They aren't. They can't.
Economics still rules. I can serve up specific ads without paying attention to everything the same way a therapist can pinpoint key phrases and say "Tell me more" without actually listening 100% of the time. When I do want to follow someone in real-time full-time, it takes an entire squad.
As the Dork Dynasty dude said, we need to stop 'em from reproducing somehow.
I can see how this would work very well for some people. Read Self Comes to Mind for seeing how the physical brain creates a mental mind.
The fundamental basis is pain vs pleasure.
Scientific American had an article a few years ago that therapy was bad for certain groups of people such as children in school shootings. It brought up and reinforced tragedies instead of allowing them to gradually decay in the memory banks. I can see this doing the same thing for people who can't stop remembering things. It's basic brain training.
I know most people don't do that and "think" their brain _is_ them but you can train your brain to think programming or music or architecture. You can also train to avoid pointless memories and useless beliefs--probably the main reason we don't teach people to think about how they think or even teach people to perform critical thinking. (The first thing you _must_ criticize is the teaching itself and few teachers put up with that kind of shit).
The original title of the book was 1948. He was writing about the cold war.
Editors made him change the title to 1984. Read 1985 for some more info.
What do we reckon is the probability of the Washington Post starting an investigative report on a story like this?
I suspect the probability is less than the WashPost ignoring this issue because it's foreign and got nothing to do with politics.
That would be the rationale I'd use to avoid reporting bad stuff about the bosshole.
Business doesn't build factories in order to employ workers; they build in order to meet demand.
If the workers of the world are unemployed and cannot buy products made by factories, that lack of demand is a severe issue. Henry Ford knew his workers needed to be able to buy the cars coming off the assembly line or else the assembly line will shut down.
Lack of demand cannot be fixed with subsidies to rich people. Those neo-econs confuse demand for money (qualitative easing of interest rates) with demand for products (the thing that actually causes business to hire employees and build factories).
I think red-light cameras have a negative connotation _because_ they make money and that is unfortunate.
Most every successful business makes money so if you want to contract out police work such as traffic speed enforcement, that contractor _has_ to make money.
If you want to keep the job in-house so-to-speak, well the government doesn't have to make money but then everybody whines about how expensive it is to maintain this wonderful society we have _because_ of government. They think it costs too much because all they look at is the expense of taxes, not benefit of courts, police, and laws that form a well-regulated market safe for businesses and customers.
Then all it takes is enough wealthy citizens and politicians getting actual tickets they can't talk or bribe their way out of and traffic enforcement gets to stop.
We either want laws or we don't. If you think less government is best, move to Somalia.
We have yet to analyze our systems correctly (i.e. scientifically instead of politically).
The first rule should be to not give easy access to firearms to the general public in the first place.
Agreed. I don't understand the "logic" of the second amendment which apparently guarantees the right of any yahoo with a gun to overturn a democratically elected government. That ought to repealed or at least analyzed. You want to own a gun, fine. You want to overthrow the government. Not fine. (That's the theory independent of the reality that any yutz with a basement-full of guns probably can't even hold off the local SWAT team, much less commit armed revolution against a duly-elected govt.
Because in the end, the Grinch comes to learn the error of his ways and eventually saves Christmas. Somehow, I don't see Disney doing this...
That's because you're thinking old-style Christmas.
This is the new millennium; the Libertarian one.
We only have to save Christmas for the already rich. The rest of us can play with the wrapping paper they toss in the garbage.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia and everything to do with
1. How people how argue and more specifically
2. What pedants argue about.
You want to argue about who's going to win the Super Bowl or be purged next in North Korea? Lots of good arguments and at the end, there is an actual measurable outcome.
Want to argue about which is the best operating system? Lots of arguing there but no measurable outcome. You can measure which is the most popular but that's like saying the most popular music is the best music. We argue about music and art.
But the arguments over word use and definitions of fact are the most vociferous because they are the most picky. And only picky, anal retentive types will argue so the arguments get more and more precise each time. When done well, we call it science.
But it's hard to use words and syntax well when arguing about word definitions and syntax. If you see no difference between French-Polish and Polish-French, well then there's no difference between African-American and American-African. It actually is debatable. Uninteresting to most but debatable to many.
I suspect as any industry becomes entrenched, it destroys competition.
Apparently the Koch Bros are still pissed at what Carnegie did to their father who came up with a more cost-effective way of refining petroleum and then was locked out of the market.
Playboy Model cures a developmental disorder that scientists don't even have a complete understanding for yet. She must be a genius!
If she has a book full of easy-to-follow pictures, I'd probably skim it.
You know, just for the medical value.
Considering that most of the cells "inside" the body (if you don't think of the human system as a torus)
are non-human and form an entire ecosystem that digests nutrients out of the substances we ingest,
it makes sense that good digestion is as fundamental to us as it is to a tree (which also relies on an exterior soil ecosystem).
This would also coincide with the apparent disease-like spread of autism thru the population.
The spread of autism also displays a flavor of inheritance and we aren't completely sure how gut bacteria spread
but it's likely that you get it from the people you spend the most time around.
Who gives a flashlight app permissions to access location, internet, flash drive, etc?
users who have finally seen the light, that's who.
The government has a lot of balls pointing fingers like that...
I don't believe it is fingers that they are pointing.
"Rarely do people of the same occupation gather together, even if only for merriment, that it does not end in some plot to defraud the public." I'm pretty sure that the large majority of people who cite Smith haven't actually _read_ Smith.
I find two things interesting about Wealth of Nations. One is that it is easily readable. The other is that it seems everybody interprets it from an ideological perspective, kind of like the Bible. He wrote it for kings to understand basic economics, both good and bad.
Actually, you forgot my favorite feature of working for Google: A complete lack of idiots. Everyone I work with -- right down to the facilities staff, amazingly enough -- is bright, focused, engaged and rational. In three years, working with hundreds of others (Google is highly collaborative), I found a single counterexample, and he's now gone.
"People who think like me are bright, and everyone here is bright."
monoculture.
It is definitely a monoculture, probably one I would like.
The problem comes when trying to develop something _popular_, something that will be grabbed by a large percentage of the population, i.e., regular joes and grandmothers and people for whom basic things are not intuitive. In the words of the rock band Jethro Tull: wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.
If you only sell to geeks, you only get 10-15% of the market.
...The big question is: why do they stick with it?
One reason might be because everybody there has already passed thru that particular hazing ritual.
It's traditional; it's fraternal; it's the way we've always done it.
...What we found in other projects with Oracle (we were a Oracle partner) was that our personnel had much deeper expertise with Oracle than members of their own company.
ditto.
In fact, I think that was one of the main reasons Oracle killed their User Groups--it cut into their consultancy profits. We would provide real training (and criticism and workarounds) for free to each other.
...Like you said, it isn't rocket-science. There isn't some dark magic involved in developing a schema.
The dark magic is required when dealing with managers.
The very first thing anybody tells me about their website is that they want to track users.
That of course, is the very last thing you actually want to do to people who are merely browsing but trying to convince managers of that is impossible.
And if you're a contractor, do you want the job or not?