Cem Kaner makes the argument that the most important person in the QA department for a company is the CEO. If the CEO sets reasonable expectations, then constructive conversations about investments in quality are possible.
The majority of CEOs are sales guy who are inclined to kowtow to the sales and marketing side, but are want someone else to take the heat if things go badly. Thus they carefully avoid making commitments about quality. Without expectations set, it does not really matter what a QA engineer says. They will get steamrolled by the tacit decision to always ship made at the C-level.
Perhaps there should be courses for various specialized workplace skill sets available at university, but that is a really lousy model for designing a major.
#1 is muddier than you are trying to suggest. Using a BB gun at close range sounds like clear intent to cause an injury, and any action to intentionally injure that results in death can arguably be manslaughter. We have not established that the student in question intended to create what could be defined as an explosion.
"Teaching to the test" is mostly a problem is your tests are very flawed. The tests do not need to be egregiously flawed, but it is expensive in time & expertise to create and maintain and administer and grade good quality tests.
Tests that are cheap to make and cheap to grade have many flaws. NCLB only cares about the common kinds of tests, all of which are cheaply done. That is the root of the problem.
It is traditional for the People (the gov't) to speak on behalf of the victims of injuries that result in death, not the family. That is a big part of the point of having a crime called murder in the first place -- so that we stay away from the clan-based justice that ruled the Dark Ages and other barbaric times.
In the black girl's case, there is not even an injury, yet the People are supposed to get involved? Are we supposed to care about the embarrassment of a school official over a dead child?
Fair points. I take a "nuanced" view that Peak Oil is partially correct. The widely held assumption at the time, believed not only by this particular theorist, was that a prosperous world economy could not run on $40 per barrel oil and $60 oil could crash the economy. Now we know that there are some problems, but the world economy can at least wheeze forward on $100 oil. Given time, the economy could adjust to even higher oil prices.
In a roundabout way, I am suggesting that Peak Oil may be wrong or (partially) right, but it is probably unimportant. As long as the transition happens slowly, the ability of the world economy to adjust to high oil prices has been underestimated in many quarters.
The other thing to consider is that Peak Oil, defined narrowly, might be correct, but alternative hydrocarbons such as gas from fracking can alleviate demand on crude oil.
Peak Oil is not exactly wrong, but it is quite misleading. The Cheap Oil is a finite resource. If we forget about ever seeing $20 or $40 barrels of oil again, there is a lot of hydrocarbons out there. As the price point goes up, the practical options become ever greater. At $200 per barrel, we could well go centuries -- that would be painful in a number of ways but it is doable (out great great grandkids may not get a choice).
What is harder to gauge is the environmental costs. That is often an externality that the oil industry, automotive industry, and average consumer is more than happy to try and push onto everyone else.
He is just a whining, like most people who like to complain about taxes.
States with income taxes that high tend to have real estate taxes that are lower (and vice versa). So his example seems to be describing someone who is living in a huge mansion way beyond the means of a "measly" 250k salary, and spending, spending, spending on consumer goods at the same time.
Changing gov't policy to coddle the most fiscally incompetent is not a winning strategy.
I highly doubt you pay 60% of your income on taxes, even adding all those things together. In fact, unless you earned a major windfall that happened to be taxed extra highly due to your piss poor planning (e.g. paid short term capital gains plus CA taxes under the alternate minimum gains rules on $10+ million in stock), it is not plausible you paid much more than 40% in total taxes on your income.
It's amazing how ignorant people are of home much they actually pay in taxes, and the people who like to complain about taxes tend to be the most ignorant.
In the context of a conversation about the universe being created chock full of purpose by the Creator, dodging the question by saying the Creator just so happened to create things in a mature state with no intent is simply bizarre. That is just digging deeper into the logical hole.
It is not the universe's fault, but it would be God's choice. God just does random things with not an iota of intent because He felt like it should be a startling admission to anyone paying attention.
God does almost everything everywhere without any purpose whatsoever.
Now consider fiat money. Unless there are rigid controls on the creation of money, and who gets to spend it, then the guy who decides to make the money benefits from making it, and there is little limit to how fast he would want to.
That is a straw man argument. The historical record demonstrates that there are limits.
The net effect of inflation is a tax on savings. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a small tax on savings. A tax is just a tax.
People with ideological blinkers like to imagine that if we can remove certain taxes the world will magically become a better place. It might. Or we might just get a world with an even more complex tax system in other areas, that confuses and oppresses average taxpayers and allows the wealthy to dodge more taxes by ponying up for tax accountants who game the system. The historical record suggest the second result is the more likely.
Personally, I don't think it matters what a person believes in that regard. The universe looks to be 14 billion years old, so you might as well say that it is so, even if it chronologically has only been around for 6 thousand or so.
To posit that God made a universe with a perfect apparent history of 14 billion years only 6000 years ago according to God's wristwatch would create deep quandaries to any theist is thinks non-superficially. If God creates apparent facts, why are those facts not true? Why does God need to create a universe of lies?
The tablet euphoria is built on the recognition that the killer apps for 90% of the casual users are amazon, google maps, youtube, facebook, an app store for games & random utilities, a music/video player (not necessarily those specific examples, but their moral equivalent.)
Even people who are power users are often also casual users who fit this profile. People who own laptops often enough just want to chat with their SO on the couch about what movie to see, planning the vacation, browse for reviews of a purchase, etc. The pad is often a nicer experience.
A laptop or desktop is overkill for the majority of casual use. This is not a niche, it is how most people will experience computers in the future.
Okay, that is a coherent argument. I am not sure I am of the same mind, but it is hard to disagree a facile Scrooge McDuck-laden argument. The question still remains whether Apple possesses the Lucky Dime.
That is a non-argument, just an assertion that Apple "should have" gone for market share. How exactly making less money an improvement over making more money? It is not surprising that the hardware margins are shrinking for Apple -- what is surprising is just how long Apple has maintained huge margins.
There was a golden age of fat profits for Apple hardware, but it was inevitable the margins would shrink as reasonable competition appeared. As the Lord and Master of a highly profitable walled garden (Apple app store), they can still theoretically make good money while breaking even on hardware. Can Samsung afford to offer sweetheart deals to internal customers who have even lower profit margins than Apple, and no app store to supplement the income?
It is a great question, even if I might disagree about some of the details suggested. It is worth noting that until recently even novels were most often chapters strung together in only somewhat coherent larger arcs. For example, we consider Dickens as an important early novelist, but most of his work were serials that faced many of the same kinds of pressures expected in a TV series. We remember the shining exceptions (LotR, Dune, etc.) but forget how many novels were quite appropriately forgotten.
...because that is how far back in time you need to go for a PhD to be a great investment in most fields.
There were big increases in tenure track jobs when the universities were growing like gangbusters to educate the baby boomers. That door slammed shut in 1970.
When I was in graduate school for physics, I saw the demographic statistics. The median age of tenured faculty in physics steadily dropped in the post-war era down to the low 30s in 1970, and then that trend reversed to start rapidly rising. The median age of tenured physics faculty in the USA climbed by 20 year from 1970 to 1995!
The "Good Times" were long gone, and were in a period of slow organic growth and gentle attrition.
My own adviser had a fairly successful career. Of the 24 PhDs he "fathered" over twenty something years, 1 had tenure and 2 others had equivalent research positions (e.g. NIST). As an (to be generous) average performing graduate student, he took me aside and pointed out the writing on the wall, even if I completed the program. I took the Masters and headed to Silicon Valley...
I have not looked at current stats, but I doubt things have improved for PhDs since the 90s. The median age of tenured faculty probably have drifted slightly downwards since a peak in the 90s, but the overall situation has probably gotten worse.
To be an activist is a labor intensive activity. If you do not own 10% of the outright company, the board might not listen, regardless of the merit of your arguments. The very low loads Vanguard prides itself on argues against making the attempt.
For the bigger funds, it is not practical to dump a stock simply because it is run by doofuses. The bigger funds are usually growing funds, they just opt to stop buying more stock in that company.
Competently run mutual funds have an idea of the price point where buying a company is attractive. That price point is virtual floor on the stock price. A board directors annoying the fund managers does not cause an ouster, but it does mean that floor where in the past the funds would step in and buy has dropped way down.
You're assuming that he's basing it on the "current political situation" and not the substance of relative defining texts...
I am confused. What context are you talking about?
In the context of the times, Mohammed was perhaps the greatest women's rights activist to ever live. His was a strongly patriarchal system. He explicitly allowed women to own property. He explicitly required his followers to honor the marriage contracts -- in Islam marriage contracts are negotiated and women may have substantial guarantees written therein. Some of his wives were scholars and honored advisers.
Islam of the early days was centuries ahead of Christianity, by common Western standards of today.
As for the child wife, we do not happen to know the details of the Mohammed's bedroom. It was the norm of the time for a treaty to be sealed by marriage into the ruler's family. As the ruler of a rapidly growing community, he was required to take many wives or risk dangerous offense. If the new ally happens to have only a 9-year-old to offer, ambiguity about the bedroom allows for polite fictions. Mohammed was a social reformer, but he did not happen to take those particular traditions onto his plate.
As an atheist, I do not find much to criticize about early Islam in the context of the other religions in the region. My concerns are about how the early days are idealized. But if we could only go back to the Good Olde Dayes when the people could get away with beating to death a ruler who is too obviously incompetent (the fate of the third Caliph), then maybe I would consider conversion...
Exactly. One of the implicit assumptions is that a healthy human mind is fundamentally incapable of understanding important fundamental truths about the universe. It is simply the limits of our biology.
Those who attempt to transcend these limits become, at best, insane, or, if genuinely successful in pursuing this path, something inhuman in every pejorative sense of the word. To transcend human biology in this manner requires giving up every kind ethical idea the human mind understands, as a down payment.
Getting used to the merely weird is ultimately no defense. The terrible things that really matter are inherently destructive to human minds. As a pedestrian example, no one really gets used to being in the thick of WWI trench warfare. Some adopt mental strategies and call on moral reserves that slows the rate of their decline, but decline is inexorable. Given enough time, everyone becomes a permanent mental basket case from trench warfare, some merely sooner than others.
It is worth noting that the Great War weighed heavily on the minds of Lovecraft's generation of artists. For some, that war shattered the belief in the inevitable progress of the human race built on the foundation of Enlightenment. Perhaps the human race as moral creatures peaked in 1913, and the lessons of the war were pebbles in the oncoming avalanche of future horrors? That is the emotional playground Lovecraft danced in, when writing the Mythos tales.
The 5th would not apply because the gov't is simply defining what is a reasonable contract, or, in you want to look at it the other ways, what is not an unjust termination. If this law passed, the employee can choose to not comply and suffer the ultimate consequences of the implied threat of termination.
Strong libertarians all likely to fall all over the map on this one.
Hardly. But AC is allowing "attitude" to muddy his own point.
I would further add that, even in a strongly libertarian society, law enforcement is supposed to win the "arms race", by some reasonable definition of the term. Such is not automatically nefarious.
Laws on masks in Mexico are a desperate tactic to protect police officers from assassination in a situation where law enforcement is sometimes losing the arms race. Granted, it is abused by police officers involved in organized crime, but how the law reads does not affect the behavior of those persons.
Close, but not quite right. The technology that allows harvesting the useful material from the "spent rods" can even more easily retrieve the plutonium. Uranium-235 is somewhat rare, and getting up a large pile of pure material is a large effort. Uranium-238 is plentiful, and represents the bulk of the material in the power reactor rods. But fission converts some of that U238 to plutonium.
People who think seriously about nuclear weapons worry rather little about uranium bombs. They are so expensive that giving one away to terrorists is beyond absurd -- it would be like giving away a super carrier on the vague hope it will annoy your enemies.
It is the plutonium bombs that are scary. Because the same precious stockpile of uranium that can make 4 or 5 uranium bombs, with the right technology, can make ~50 plutonium bombs. Because of this enormous difference, President Clinton outright threatened to bomb North Korea if it were believed they were harvesting plutonium (behind closed doors, of course).
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Cem Kaner makes the argument that the most important person in the QA department for a company is the CEO. If the CEO sets reasonable expectations, then constructive conversations about investments in quality are possible.
The majority of CEOs are sales guy who are inclined to kowtow to the sales and marketing side, but are want someone else to take the heat if things go badly. Thus they carefully avoid making commitments about quality. Without expectations set, it does not really matter what a QA engineer says. They will get steamrolled by the tacit decision to always ship made at the C-level.
Mod parent up, please.
Perhaps there should be courses for various specialized workplace skill sets available at university, but that is a really lousy model for designing a major.
#1 is muddier than you are trying to suggest. Using a BB gun at close range sounds like clear intent to cause an injury, and any action to intentionally injure that results in death can arguably be manslaughter. We have not established that the student in question intended to create what could be defined as an explosion.
Please mod parent up.
Doing anything and everything hard is about doing things that are likely to be mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes.
Cleaning up after your mistake is part of the game. Learn from it. Move forward.
In fact, I would strenuously argue what we have here is a wonderful age appropriate mistake, and the last thing we want to do is punish this behavior.
"Teaching to the test" is mostly a problem is your tests are very flawed. The tests do not need to be egregiously flawed, but it is expensive in time & expertise to create and maintain and administer and grade good quality tests.
Tests that are cheap to make and cheap to grade have many flaws. NCLB only cares about the common kinds of tests, all of which are cheaply done. That is the root of the problem.
It is traditional for the People (the gov't) to speak on behalf of the victims of injuries that result in death, not the family. That is a big part of the point of having a crime called murder in the first place -- so that we stay away from the clan-based justice that ruled the Dark Ages and other barbaric times.
In the black girl's case, there is not even an injury, yet the People are supposed to get involved? Are we supposed to care about the embarrassment of a school official over a dead child?
Fair points. I take a "nuanced" view that Peak Oil is partially correct. The widely held assumption at the time, believed not only by this particular theorist, was that a prosperous world economy could not run on $40 per barrel oil and $60 oil could crash the economy. Now we know that there are some problems, but the world economy can at least wheeze forward on $100 oil. Given time, the economy could adjust to even higher oil prices.
In a roundabout way, I am suggesting that Peak Oil may be wrong or (partially) right, but it is probably unimportant. As long as the transition happens slowly, the ability of the world economy to adjust to high oil prices has been underestimated in many quarters.
The other thing to consider is that Peak Oil, defined narrowly, might be correct, but alternative hydrocarbons such as gas from fracking can alleviate demand on crude oil.
Peak Oil is not exactly wrong, but it is quite misleading. The Cheap Oil is a finite resource. If we forget about ever seeing $20 or $40 barrels of oil again, there is a lot of hydrocarbons out there. As the price point goes up, the practical options become ever greater. At $200 per barrel, we could well go centuries -- that would be painful in a number of ways but it is doable (out great great grandkids may not get a choice).
What is harder to gauge is the environmental costs. That is often an externality that the oil industry, automotive industry, and average consumer is more than happy to try and push onto everyone else.
He is just a whining, like most people who like to complain about taxes.
States with income taxes that high tend to have real estate taxes that are lower (and vice versa). So his example seems to be describing someone who is living in a huge mansion way beyond the means of a "measly" 250k salary, and spending, spending, spending on consumer goods at the same time.
Changing gov't policy to coddle the most fiscally incompetent is not a winning strategy.
I highly doubt you pay 60% of your income on taxes, even adding all those things together. In fact, unless you earned a major windfall that happened to be taxed extra highly due to your piss poor planning (e.g. paid short term capital gains plus CA taxes under the alternate minimum gains rules on $10+ million in stock), it is not plausible you paid much more than 40% in total taxes on your income.
It's amazing how ignorant people are of home much they actually pay in taxes, and the people who like to complain about taxes tend to be the most ignorant.
In the context of a conversation about the universe being created chock full of purpose by the Creator, dodging the question by saying the Creator just so happened to create things in a mature state with no intent is simply bizarre. That is just digging deeper into the logical hole.
It is not the universe's fault, but it would be God's choice. God just does random things with not an iota of intent because He felt like it should be a startling admission to anyone paying attention.
God does almost everything everywhere without any purpose whatsoever.
Is that an insightful theistic position?
Now consider fiat money. Unless there are rigid controls on the creation of money, and who gets to spend it, then the guy who decides to make the money benefits from making it, and there is little limit to how fast he would want to.
That is a straw man argument. The historical record demonstrates that there are limits.
The net effect of inflation is a tax on savings. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a small tax on savings. A tax is just a tax.
People with ideological blinkers like to imagine that if we can remove certain taxes the world will magically become a better place. It might. Or we might just get a world with an even more complex tax system in other areas, that confuses and oppresses average taxpayers and allows the wealthy to dodge more taxes by ponying up for tax accountants who game the system. The historical record suggest the second result is the more likely.
Personally, I don't think it matters what a person believes in that regard. The universe looks to be 14 billion years old, so you might as well say that it is so, even if it chronologically has only been around for 6 thousand or so.
To posit that God made a universe with a perfect apparent history of 14 billion years only 6000 years ago according to God's wristwatch would create deep quandaries to any theist is thinks non-superficially. If God creates apparent facts, why are those facts not true? Why does God need to create a universe of lies?
The tablet euphoria is built on the recognition that the killer apps for 90% of the casual users are amazon, google maps, youtube, facebook, an app store for games & random utilities, a music/video player (not necessarily those specific examples, but their moral equivalent.)
Even people who are power users are often also casual users who fit this profile. People who own laptops often enough just want to chat with their SO on the couch about what movie to see, planning the vacation, browse for reviews of a purchase, etc. The pad is often a nicer experience.
A laptop or desktop is overkill for the majority of casual use. This is not a niche, it is how most people will experience computers in the future.
Okay, that is a coherent argument. I am not sure I am of the same mind, but it is hard to disagree a facile Scrooge McDuck-laden argument. The question still remains whether Apple possesses the Lucky Dime.
That is a non-argument, just an assertion that Apple "should have" gone for market share. How exactly making less money an improvement over making more money? It is not surprising that the hardware margins are shrinking for Apple -- what is surprising is just how long Apple has maintained huge margins.
There was a golden age of fat profits for Apple hardware, but it was inevitable the margins would shrink as reasonable competition appeared. As the Lord and Master of a highly profitable walled garden (Apple app store), they can still theoretically make good money while breaking even on hardware. Can Samsung afford to offer sweetheart deals to internal customers who have even lower profit margins than Apple, and no app store to supplement the income?
It is a great question, even if I might disagree about some of the details suggested. It is worth noting that until recently even novels were most often chapters strung together in only somewhat coherent larger arcs. For example, we consider Dickens as an important early novelist, but most of his work were serials that faced many of the same kinds of pressures expected in a TV series. We remember the shining exceptions (LotR, Dune, etc.) but forget how many novels were quite appropriately forgotten.
...because that is how far back in time you need to go for a PhD to be a great investment in most fields.
There were big increases in tenure track jobs when the universities were growing like gangbusters to educate the baby boomers. That door slammed shut in 1970.
When I was in graduate school for physics, I saw the demographic statistics. The median age of tenured faculty in physics steadily dropped in the post-war era down to the low 30s in 1970, and then that trend reversed to start rapidly rising. The median age of tenured physics faculty in the USA climbed by 20 year from 1970 to 1995!
The "Good Times" were long gone, and were in a period of slow organic growth and gentle attrition.
My own adviser had a fairly successful career. Of the 24 PhDs he "fathered" over twenty something years, 1 had tenure and 2 others had equivalent research positions (e.g. NIST). As an (to be generous) average performing graduate student, he took me aside and pointed out the writing on the wall, even if I completed the program. I took the Masters and headed to Silicon Valley...
I have not looked at current stats, but I doubt things have improved for PhDs since the 90s. The median age of tenured faculty probably have drifted slightly downwards since a peak in the 90s, but the overall situation has probably gotten worse.
To be an activist is a labor intensive activity. If you do not own 10% of the outright company, the board might not listen, regardless of the merit of your arguments. The very low loads Vanguard prides itself on argues against making the attempt.
For the bigger funds, it is not practical to dump a stock simply because it is run by doofuses. The bigger funds are usually growing funds, they just opt to stop buying more stock in that company.
Competently run mutual funds have an idea of the price point where buying a company is attractive. That price point is virtual floor on the stock price. A board directors annoying the fund managers does not cause an ouster, but it does mean that floor where in the past the funds would step in and buy has dropped way down.
You're assuming that he's basing it on the "current political situation" and not the substance of relative defining texts...
I am confused. What context are you talking about?
In the context of the times, Mohammed was perhaps the greatest women's rights activist to ever live. His was a strongly patriarchal system. He explicitly allowed women to own property. He explicitly required his followers to honor the marriage contracts -- in Islam marriage contracts are negotiated and women may have substantial guarantees written therein. Some of his wives were scholars and honored advisers.
Islam of the early days was centuries ahead of Christianity, by common Western standards of today.
As for the child wife, we do not happen to know the details of the Mohammed's bedroom. It was the norm of the time for a treaty to be sealed by marriage into the ruler's family. As the ruler of a rapidly growing community, he was required to take many wives or risk dangerous offense. If the new ally happens to have only a 9-year-old to offer, ambiguity about the bedroom allows for polite fictions. Mohammed was a social reformer, but he did not happen to take those particular traditions onto his plate.
As an atheist, I do not find much to criticize about early Islam in the context of the other religions in the region. My concerns are about how the early days are idealized. But if we could only go back to the Good Olde Dayes when the people could get away with beating to death a ruler who is too obviously incompetent (the fate of the third Caliph), then maybe I would consider conversion...
Exactly. One of the implicit assumptions is that a healthy human mind is fundamentally incapable of understanding important fundamental truths about the universe. It is simply the limits of our biology.
Those who attempt to transcend these limits become, at best, insane, or, if genuinely successful in pursuing this path, something inhuman in every pejorative sense of the word. To transcend human biology in this manner requires giving up every kind ethical idea the human mind understands, as a down payment.
Getting used to the merely weird is ultimately no defense. The terrible things that really matter are inherently destructive to human minds. As a pedestrian example, no one really gets used to being in the thick of WWI trench warfare. Some adopt mental strategies and call on moral reserves that slows the rate of their decline, but decline is inexorable. Given enough time, everyone becomes a permanent mental basket case from trench warfare, some merely sooner than others.
It is worth noting that the Great War weighed heavily on the minds of Lovecraft's generation of artists. For some, that war shattered the belief in the inevitable progress of the human race built on the foundation of Enlightenment. Perhaps the human race as moral creatures peaked in 1913, and the lessons of the war were pebbles in the oncoming avalanche of future horrors? That is the emotional playground Lovecraft danced in, when writing the Mythos tales.
The 5th would not apply because the gov't is simply defining what is a reasonable contract, or, in you want to look at it the other ways, what is not an unjust termination. If this law passed, the employee can choose to not comply and suffer the ultimate consequences of the implied threat of termination.
Strong libertarians all likely to fall all over the map on this one.
Hardly. But AC is allowing "attitude" to muddy his own point.
I would further add that, even in a strongly libertarian society, law enforcement is supposed to win the "arms race", by some reasonable definition of the term. Such is not automatically nefarious.
Laws on masks in Mexico are a desperate tactic to protect police officers from assassination in a situation where law enforcement is sometimes losing the arms race. Granted, it is abused by police officers involved in organized crime, but how the law reads does not affect the behavior of those persons.
Close, but not quite right. The technology that allows harvesting the useful material from the "spent rods" can even more easily retrieve the plutonium. Uranium-235 is somewhat rare, and getting up a large pile of pure material is a large effort. Uranium-238 is plentiful, and represents the bulk of the material in the power reactor rods. But fission converts some of that U238 to plutonium.
People who think seriously about nuclear weapons worry rather little about uranium bombs. They are so expensive that giving one away to terrorists is beyond absurd -- it would be like giving away a super carrier on the vague hope it will annoy your enemies.
It is the plutonium bombs that are scary. Because the same precious stockpile of uranium that can make 4 or 5 uranium bombs, with the right technology, can make ~50 plutonium bombs. Because of this enormous difference, President Clinton outright threatened to bomb North Korea if it were believed they were harvesting plutonium (behind closed doors, of course).