Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion.
Agreed. It was remarkably stupid on the part of Groupon to turn that offer down. Obviously it's easy to say that in hindsight but I remember thinking these companies were stupid to turn down that kind of money which was clearly well beyond their current valuations.
There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
I've worked in M&A in years gone by. If the offers had been accepted they almost certainly would have gone through. Much of the due diligence was already done by the time the offer was made. The only thing that would have derailed them would be anti-trust concerns but those probably wouldn't have been a problem for either the Yahoo or Groupon deals.
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
There is a good chance it actually is worth less than zero. Yahoo hasn't been relevant for a while now. Yahoo used to matter in search but that hasn't been true for a long time and as a result there is no real reason for most people to go to Yahoo anymore. It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
They can call it whatever they want but it will still be a piece of shit. Of course many website and software vendors are complicit in keeping this piece of shit software alive and kicking.
A freelancer is hardly a true entrepreneur. A freelancer is effectively an employee without benefits.
A distinction without a difference. A freelancer is merely a form of consultant and they definitely are entrepreneurs. They are selling their time and expertise. A freelancer IS an entrepreneur whether or not they acknowledge this fact. Your notion that freelancers are somehow something fundamentally different somehow simply isn't true. In fact if a freelancer doesn't think of themselves as a small business owner and entrepreneur then they are probably going to do very poorly financially. You think entrepreneurs enjoy benefits? Ha!
Freelancers are capped by the market rates for staff plus the cost of providing them benefits.
That's true for any business, particularly consulting businesses.
This is quite different than truly being an entrepreneur making the value of what he is producing.
See that's where you are wrong. The freelancer IS producing something (services) and they are getting the market value of what they are producing. Per your own argument freelancers get the market rates for the services they provide. I run a manufacturing company in my day job. Do you think I can charge whatever the heck I want? Doesn't work that way. When I sell engineering services (and I do) I can charge market rates for that. There is NO difference.
You can have plenty of job security as a freelancer just so long as you do something valuable. If what you are doing isn't very valuable then you won't have any job security no matter where you are working.
No benefits, no paid time off, etc. None of this is conducive to a proper work/life balance.
Welcome to being an entrepreneur. You want time off? You earn enough to take some time. You want work/life balance? You earn it. Sometimes getting there requires working pretty hard for a while. You talk about work/life balance as if it is something you are entitled to have rather than something you earn. There's nothing wrong with working for someone else but very few people can earn a substantial income without a lot of time, effort and risk.
This is fine when you are single and have a safety net to fall back on. But that doesn't work when hard times hit and you have no net and/or you have a family.
Working for a company won't protect you when hard times hit. In fact it tends to create a false sense of security. It's up to you to build a safety net. And having a family does not preclude starting a company or working for yourself. I've experienced all those things at various times.
When I was in college I worked two jobs, competed in Division 1 sports and got an engineering degree, all simultaneously. After grad school I started a consulting company and had multiple active clients at any given time. Right now I work a full time job, coach two youth sports teams during the winter and am very active on the board of a non-profit. My wife currently works as a MD at up to 3 different hospitals/labs in a given week. My mother worked a full time job, often a second part time job, got her college degree and put my sister and I through private school. Frankly the notion that it is impossible to do more than one job is absurd unless you take a job you physically cannot handle.
I never felt so humiliated and a slave and my body shutdown. My blood vessels were bursting at the soles of my feet and heels.
As a freelancer you will likely be bidding on jobs with other freelancers from impoverished countries willing to "do the needful" for pennies. Welcome to Hell.
Only if you are an idiot with no marketable skills. You have to be a weapons grade idiot to seek work that can be outsourced so easily and where the only condition in the negotiation is price.
And at what point can we reevaluate this and say "six jobs at one time is not a job, it's being taken advantage of".
It's not being taken advantage of. It's called being a freelancer. There is lots of work in the world that does not require being in a single place for 40+ hours each week. Just because it is different doesn't mean it is worse or that you are being taken advantage of. I've held as many as 3-4 "jobs" at a given time. It's normal if you are a freelancer.
I don't pretend to know what the future will look like but the one thing I'm certain of is that it won't look like today. The job market your parents had isn't the one you will have and the one your kids will have will be different still. Get used to it.
Ah, that's exactly what GM did. They hid a problem they knew was killing people.
They hid (and/or didn't recognize) a problem once the data was brought to their attention. The engineers were incompetent but probably not criminal. The management was quite possibly criminal in addition to incompetent but the cover up was of a mistake, not an intentionally engineered fraud. With VW both the engineers and the management were criminial. Both companies have blood on their hands (literally) but most people are more willing to forgive what GM did that what VW did. It speaks to VW being more corrupt from top to bottom which compared with GM is kind of saying something.
Read into it a little before responding defending them if you want to have a reasoned discussion.
I've read into it plenty and I work in the industry. I'm not defending GM, I'm explaining why people are able to forgive their actions slightly more easily than those of VW. GM made a technical error and then management decided it wasn't worth correcting. In hindsight this was clearly wrong but there is at least plausible deniability that it was an error instead of a fraud. My company makes products that go into GM cars and I'm VERY familiar with how GM operates. I'm very willing to believe the problem was mostly a matter of incompetence because that would be entirely consistent with my direct dealings with GM engineering and management. I can very easily believe they thought it wasn't significant enough to justify a recall even though that decision was clearly epically stupid in hindsight. Furthermore the engineers at GM didn't commit the fraud, GM's management did. The worst you can really say about GMs engineers is that they weren't competent.
VW's actions on the other hand were clearly not a mistake or incompetence. They set out to intentionally and deliberately deceive customers and regulators. They intentionally and knowingly engaged in what is basically toxic waste dumping. VW engineering AND management were complicit in this fraud.
The issue was a design mistake, but the process of covering it up and not acting to fix a life threatening issue wasn't;
GM kills over a hundred people with a known fault and nobody in the US seems to give a shit
The flaw in the GM cars was obviously an accident. Nobody thinks GM was designing their cars to hurt people or violate the law even if they later covered up or ignored the problem. VW clearly and deliberately ordered their engineers to design the car to pollute more than allowed. One is some combination of negligence/incompetence and the other is deliberate fraud.
We can forgive a company that makes a mistake, even one that in hindsight is really dumb and obvious. Harder to forgive a company that intentionally and with malice aforethought tried to defraud customers and regulators. Pollution hurts people and the environment and there are very good reasons why we care about what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. We have reasonable estimates of the number of people killed each year directly and indirectly by pollution. Don't think for a moment that VWs actions didn't have any effect on the lives of others.
Instead of buying $5 USB cables I get to buy lightening cables from Apple for $20 that fail after a month of flexing.
I just got a bunch of Lightning cables from Monoprice for $3.99 each. You only pay $20 for a lightning cable if you are an idiot and can't be bothered to look for a better deal.
What universe are you living in? I run a company that manufactures wire harnesses. If we didn't need data cables I wouldn't have a job anymore. If you are one of these deluded people who thinks we can do everything through wireless then you couldn't be more wrong. The need for data cables will be around long after you and I are gone. What we don't need is unnecessary, redundant, uni-tasking cables. Single function power cords cannot die soon enough for mobile devices.
It's only where POWER and DATA go over the same cable that we end up with horrible proprietary crap!
Come again? USB isn't "horrible proprietary crap" and it has power and data. Basically none of the cables we are talking about are proprietary EXCEPT for stupid vendor supplied power connectors. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember every frickin' cell phone vendor shipping their own unique power cable. Now you basically have either micro-USB or if you are using Apple, lighting. Prior to USB-C so did every laptop vendor. HUGELY wasteful with no commensurate performance benefit.
Laptops have had that forever... Their simple barrel connectors can pull 200W+, no trouble at all.
Who gives a shit? What mobile device are you using that needs to pull 200W? My desktop computer doesn't even use that much power. Single function cables are idiotic, wasteful and unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. Particularly ones that only one vendor uses. The barrel connectors used on many laptops are particularly annoying. Having to carry a special quasi-unique power cord around everywhere is idiotic design.
And no USB connector will ever be 1/100th as durable as a tough, simple, basic barrel connector.
Demonstrably not true and completely missing the point. Barrel connectors have their uses but powering a laptop, tablet, cellphone or other mobile device should not be one of them. It is wasteful, unnecessary, and provides no meaningful performance benefit. The ONLY time a unitasking cable should be used with a mobile device is if there is a undeniable performance benefit, it will never be unplugged, and there is no multi-function substitute available.
The only reason this even remotely sounds good is because everybody has forgotten how fast proprietary chargers are.
As if that even remotely overcomes the deficiencies of proprietary charging cables. The fewer cable types we have to deal with the better. Power and data can and should go over the same cables. USB is imperfect but it's a huge improvement over what we used to do. Proprietary charging cables are wasteful, annoying, redundant, and unnecessary unitaskers. They are thinly veiled attempts at vendor lock in. I don't care how well they might work for the actual act of charging, they fail in every other way.
Now USB just needs to settle on a single un-keyed connector that can carry enough power to run a laptop and has enough speed to run a display. We're just about there.
And you also can't make a credible business or scientific case for government to finance manned space travel to the Moon or Mars at this point.
Sure I can. It's actually pretty easy to make that argument. But it probably won't happen until one of two things occurs - either there has to be an economic incentive or an existential threat. That's part of what NdGT talks about. We went to the moon to beat the Russians during the Cold War - an existential threat. Once that threat was confirmed to not be an issue anymore we stopped going to the Moon and haven't been back since. We hadn't figured out a way to profit from going there yet and so the government funding went elsewhere. If it looks like China is going to the Moon I guarantee you that the US will find the money to do it too - just in case...
We do need research and exploration, but that can be done most efficiently using robot probes.
Some exploration can be done efficiently with probes. Some cannot be done at all with probes. There are a wide variety of topics for which exploratory probes are quite useless, not the least of which is studying human physiology and life support away from Earth. There is plenty of benefit in probes but the notion that nothing will be gained by sending people is absurd and short sighted. That's like thinking that we can explore the ocean using nothing but satellites and ROVs. They're useful tools but they aren't a replacement for going yourself.
All you have to do is tell someone that there's money to be made in space.
That's great but until you do some exploring there isn't a single company in the world that is going to go there to find out. First you have to explore to get enough information to find out IF there is money to be made in space and if so, where it can be made. Private companies aren't going to do that bit on the frontier. They cannot except on comparatively small scales. Governments pretty much have to be the ones to do the initial exploration so the risks and rewards can be determined.
During the age of Columbus, any schmuck with a ship could go out exploring.
Not the big voyages. Those required the resources and backing of governments. A large sailing vessel in those days was equivalent to a SpaceX rocket rocket today. Hugely expensive and state of the art technology. Columbus could only do his voyage because he was backed by the crown. It wasn't until centuries later that "any schmuck with a ship" could set sail for wherever. People didn't sail across the Atlantic until a government backed expedition (Columbus) proved that there was something out there worth going to see.
Private companies getting in the game are just a necessary natural evolution of the technology.
Private companies are NOT the ones doing the exploration. They are building the equipment used by those doing the exploration. SpaceX is building rockets not much different from those used 40 years ago. They aren't building a moon base or any of the equipment needed to go to Mars. They are building what amounts to the Model T of chemical rockets to get the cost down. NASA is the one sending probes to Pluto. NASA is the one doing experiments on the space station. Private companies only get involved when there is something they can see a way to profit from. It's a good thing but pure exploration of the frontier is simply something they cannot do because the risk/reward ratio is off the charts bad.
I've listened to NdGT talk about this topic a fair bit and I agree with his basic thesis that private companies will not lead the way to Mars or even the Moon. You simply cannot make a credible business case for a private company to do it. I'm an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I've pitched investors on projects and the problem is largely an economic one. Paraphrasing his arguments the risks are large and substantially unquantifiable, the ROI is unknown and will take many years if not decades and the amount of money required for large exploration projects is huge. The only institution which is in a position to spend large amounts of money on something with big risks, huge costs and completely uncertain payoffs are governments. Once some of the risks have been quantified and enough information becomes available to make a reasonable guess at an ROI and time frame for the investment, THEN private enterprise can jump in.
We largely admire companies like SpaceX but SpaceX isn't doing anything wildly outside what NASA has already done. They're not sending probes to Mars, they are just improving the economics and a bit of the technology for chemical rockets - a technology we've had for 60+ years. People talk about mining asteroids but no private body is funding the exploration to go find them much less developing the technology to actually do something economically useful. The cost is too big, the returns too uncertain and the risks are still largely unknown. It's why we still need NASA out there on the frontier. Leave the launches to SpaceX and others and get NASA out into the solar system doing the cutting edge research and exploration we so desperately need. We don't need NASA building rockets, we need them figuring out how to get us permanently more than 200 miles from the surface of the Earth.
The invisible friends part of religion is only a small portion.
I disagree that it is a small thing but I agree that it isn't the only thing.
Religion doesn't bring tribalism, it's just one of the many uniforms that tribalism wears. Without religion people would, and do, find other ways to draw lines between groups of people.
Let me put it this way. Religion makes tribalism really, really easy AND it makes it difficult to reconcile because it isn't based on anything rational. You are quite right that tribalism comes in many forms but you cannot argue that religious based tribalism is particularly pervasive. And to my mind it is particularly odious as well.
Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds.
There are plenty of high quality engineers and scientists who are not particularly rational and a fair number are deeply religious. There are members of the National Academy of Science who are devout. Some of our most famous scientists such as Newton were very religious. While religion is largely irrational, obviously there is something about it that some otherwise rational and intelligent humans find irresistible. Some people have a hard time with saying "I don't know". Some people are insecure and scared and need an invisible friend to help them get through the day. Some people find comfort in someone else telling them what to do and how to think even when what they are being told makes no objective sense. Some people value the sense of community found in religious groups - tribalism is a big thing with humans. I don't think there is a single answer but clearly some find it appealing.
Personally I'm baffled by the appeal of religions. I gave up having invisible friends when I was a child and I really don't like people telling me I'm a bad person for not believing in ludicrous fairy tales. I find the tribalism and fighting that religion brings to be deeply troubling. I find proselytizing and brainwashing that religions engage in to be tantamount to rape, especially when aimed at children. I don't really care if someone wants to believe in something loony but I have a big problem when they think they need to infect others with their crazy.
Oh good. Just what the world needs. More engineer bashing.
Speaking as an engineer myself why should our field be above a good bashing when others aren't? We're not special. Folks here like to bash bankers, managers, marketing and other fields but can't imagine that engineers are anything other than wise saints who never do anything wrong or harmful. It's not true of course - engineers have the same human failures as anyone else.
So I'm thinking the authors of this book... aren't engineers. Always easier to bash the other guy than look inward, innit?
Given how much the engineers here bash other fields we certainly have a lot of engineers who can dish it out but cannot take it.
It is likely many promising young jihadists are schooled to suit the perceived needs of the movement.
So you think that they have a (figurative) farm system whereby they are training engineers years in advance of when they will need them? That argument fails Occam's Razor. A much simpler explanation is that individuals with technical skills are targeted for those skills.
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
No they do not. You have to be phenomenally clueless or bigoted to think otherwise. The same opportunities are NOT available to everyone. That was the entire point of the civil rights movement and the suffrage movement. Just because you have some choices doesn't mean everyone else does. Opportunity can be taken away very easily by institutions (government and private) if we allow it to occur. Opportunity is a fragile thing and not everyone gets equal opportunity under the law or in society. Bigotry, racism, and sexism and discrimination are real things with real consequences. Those who have to actually face them by definition do not have equal opportunity. The fact that some people manage to break through does not mean that the gap in opportunity is not real for many many people.
For example, I become a developer; not a cake baker. That doesn't mean I didn't have equal opportunity to become a cake baker. It means that I fucking chose to be something else.
Wow do you not get it. If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates? Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them? Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country? You think because you chose one job over another that there is no inequality in the real world? That's just ignorant as hell.
Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why — as long as they don't enslave workers — and neither should anybody else. Mind your own business, people.
Maybe you don't give a damn about your fellow human beings but those of us who aren't sociopaths do. I want to see people get good opportunities and not be held down because they happened to be born with a different set of genitals or a different skin color. Glass ceilings are a real thing. Clearly you've never seen anyone bump into one but I have. These are real issues that affect real people and in a civilized society we care about what happens to them. People don't have to be enslaved for a workplace to be a very bad place.
We have certain protected classes of people (gender, race, age, etc) precisely because there is clear and unambiguous evidence that if we allow discrimination based on those criteria that the results are bad both for society and for the individuals. The market demonstrably cannot fairly deal with this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion.
Agreed. It was remarkably stupid on the part of Groupon to turn that offer down. Obviously it's easy to say that in hindsight but I remember thinking these companies were stupid to turn down that kind of money which was clearly well beyond their current valuations.
There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
I've worked in M&A in years gone by. If the offers had been accepted they almost certainly would have gone through. Much of the due diligence was already done by the time the offer was made. The only thing that would have derailed them would be anti-trust concerns but those probably wouldn't have been a problem for either the Yahoo or Groupon deals.
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
There is a good chance it actually is worth less than zero. Yahoo hasn't been relevant for a while now. Yahoo used to matter in search but that hasn't been true for a long time and as a result there is no real reason for most people to go to Yahoo anymore. It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
They can call it whatever they want but it will still be a piece of shit. Of course many website and software vendors are complicit in keeping this piece of shit software alive and kicking.
A freelancer is hardly a true entrepreneur. A freelancer is effectively an employee without benefits.
A distinction without a difference. A freelancer is merely a form of consultant and they definitely are entrepreneurs. They are selling their time and expertise. A freelancer IS an entrepreneur whether or not they acknowledge this fact. Your notion that freelancers are somehow something fundamentally different somehow simply isn't true. In fact if a freelancer doesn't think of themselves as a small business owner and entrepreneur then they are probably going to do very poorly financially. You think entrepreneurs enjoy benefits? Ha!
Freelancers are capped by the market rates for staff plus the cost of providing them benefits.
That's true for any business, particularly consulting businesses.
This is quite different than truly being an entrepreneur making the value of what he is producing.
See that's where you are wrong. The freelancer IS producing something (services) and they are getting the market value of what they are producing. Per your own argument freelancers get the market rates for the services they provide. I run a manufacturing company in my day job. Do you think I can charge whatever the heck I want? Doesn't work that way. When I sell engineering services (and I do) I can charge market rates for that. There is NO difference.
It means you have absolutely no security.
You can have plenty of job security as a freelancer just so long as you do something valuable. If what you are doing isn't very valuable then you won't have any job security no matter where you are working.
No benefits, no paid time off, etc. None of this is conducive to a proper work/life balance.
Welcome to being an entrepreneur. You want time off? You earn enough to take some time. You want work/life balance? You earn it. Sometimes getting there requires working pretty hard for a while. You talk about work/life balance as if it is something you are entitled to have rather than something you earn. There's nothing wrong with working for someone else but very few people can earn a substantial income without a lot of time, effort and risk.
This is fine when you are single and have a safety net to fall back on. But that doesn't work when hard times hit and you have no net and/or you have a family.
Working for a company won't protect you when hard times hit. In fact it tends to create a false sense of security. It's up to you to build a safety net. And having a family does not preclude starting a company or working for yourself. I've experienced all those things at various times.
I worked more than 1 job before. IT SUCKS??!
When I was in college I worked two jobs, competed in Division 1 sports and got an engineering degree, all simultaneously. After grad school I started a consulting company and had multiple active clients at any given time. Right now I work a full time job, coach two youth sports teams during the winter and am very active on the board of a non-profit. My wife currently works as a MD at up to 3 different hospitals/labs in a given week. My mother worked a full time job, often a second part time job, got her college degree and put my sister and I through private school. Frankly the notion that it is impossible to do more than one job is absurd unless you take a job you physically cannot handle.
I never felt so humiliated and a slave and my body shutdown. My blood vessels were bursting at the soles of my feet and heels.
What the hell were you doing?
As a freelancer you will likely be bidding on jobs with other freelancers from impoverished countries willing to "do the needful" for pennies. Welcome to Hell.
Only if you are an idiot with no marketable skills. You have to be a weapons grade idiot to seek work that can be outsourced so easily and where the only condition in the negotiation is price.
And at what point can we reevaluate this and say "six jobs at one time is not a job, it's being taken advantage of".
It's not being taken advantage of. It's called being a freelancer. There is lots of work in the world that does not require being in a single place for 40+ hours each week. Just because it is different doesn't mean it is worse or that you are being taken advantage of. I've held as many as 3-4 "jobs" at a given time. It's normal if you are a freelancer.
I don't pretend to know what the future will look like but the one thing I'm certain of is that it won't look like today. The job market your parents had isn't the one you will have and the one your kids will have will be different still. Get used to it.
Ah, that's exactly what GM did. They hid a problem they knew was killing people.
They hid (and/or didn't recognize) a problem once the data was brought to their attention. The engineers were incompetent but probably not criminal. The management was quite possibly criminal in addition to incompetent but the cover up was of a mistake, not an intentionally engineered fraud. With VW both the engineers and the management were criminial. Both companies have blood on their hands (literally) but most people are more willing to forgive what GM did that what VW did. It speaks to VW being more corrupt from top to bottom which compared with GM is kind of saying something.
Read into it a little before responding defending them if you want to have a reasoned discussion.
I've read into it plenty and I work in the industry. I'm not defending GM, I'm explaining why people are able to forgive their actions slightly more easily than those of VW. GM made a technical error and then management decided it wasn't worth correcting. In hindsight this was clearly wrong but there is at least plausible deniability that it was an error instead of a fraud. My company makes products that go into GM cars and I'm VERY familiar with how GM operates. I'm very willing to believe the problem was mostly a matter of incompetence because that would be entirely consistent with my direct dealings with GM engineering and management. I can very easily believe they thought it wasn't significant enough to justify a recall even though that decision was clearly epically stupid in hindsight. Furthermore the engineers at GM didn't commit the fraud, GM's management did. The worst you can really say about GMs engineers is that they weren't competent.
VW's actions on the other hand were clearly not a mistake or incompetence. They set out to intentionally and deliberately deceive customers and regulators. They intentionally and knowingly engaged in what is basically toxic waste dumping. VW engineering AND management were complicit in this fraud.
The issue was a design mistake, but the process of covering it up and not acting to fix a life threatening issue wasn't;
I believe that is exactly what I said.
GM kills over a hundred people with a known fault and nobody in the US seems to give a shit
The flaw in the GM cars was obviously an accident. Nobody thinks GM was designing their cars to hurt people or violate the law even if they later covered up or ignored the problem. VW clearly and deliberately ordered their engineers to design the car to pollute more than allowed. One is some combination of negligence/incompetence and the other is deliberate fraud.
We can forgive a company that makes a mistake, even one that in hindsight is really dumb and obvious. Harder to forgive a company that intentionally and with malice aforethought tried to defraud customers and regulators. Pollution hurts people and the environment and there are very good reasons why we care about what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. We have reasonable estimates of the number of people killed each year directly and indirectly by pollution. Don't think for a moment that VWs actions didn't have any effect on the lives of others.
Instead of buying $5 USB cables I get to buy lightening cables from Apple for $20 that fail after a month of flexing.
I just got a bunch of Lightning cables from Monoprice for $3.99 each. You only pay $20 for a lightning cable if you are an idiot and can't be bothered to look for a better deal.
We no longer need ANY CABLE for data.
What universe are you living in? I run a company that manufactures wire harnesses. If we didn't need data cables I wouldn't have a job anymore. If you are one of these deluded people who thinks we can do everything through wireless then you couldn't be more wrong. The need for data cables will be around long after you and I are gone. What we don't need is unnecessary, redundant, uni-tasking cables. Single function power cords cannot die soon enough for mobile devices.
It's only where POWER and DATA go over the same cable that we end up with horrible proprietary crap!
Come again? USB isn't "horrible proprietary crap" and it has power and data. Basically none of the cables we are talking about are proprietary EXCEPT for stupid vendor supplied power connectors. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember every frickin' cell phone vendor shipping their own unique power cable. Now you basically have either micro-USB or if you are using Apple, lighting. Prior to USB-C so did every laptop vendor. HUGELY wasteful with no commensurate performance benefit.
Laptops have had that forever... Their simple barrel connectors can pull 200W+, no trouble at all.
Who gives a shit? What mobile device are you using that needs to pull 200W? My desktop computer doesn't even use that much power. Single function cables are idiotic, wasteful and unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. Particularly ones that only one vendor uses. The barrel connectors used on many laptops are particularly annoying. Having to carry a special quasi-unique power cord around everywhere is idiotic design.
And no USB connector will ever be 1/100th as durable as a tough, simple, basic barrel connector.
Demonstrably not true and completely missing the point. Barrel connectors have their uses but powering a laptop, tablet, cellphone or other mobile device should not be one of them. It is wasteful, unnecessary, and provides no meaningful performance benefit. The ONLY time a unitasking cable should be used with a mobile device is if there is a undeniable performance benefit, it will never be unplugged, and there is no multi-function substitute available.
The only reason this even remotely sounds good is because everybody has forgotten how fast proprietary chargers are.
As if that even remotely overcomes the deficiencies of proprietary charging cables. The fewer cable types we have to deal with the better. Power and data can and should go over the same cables. USB is imperfect but it's a huge improvement over what we used to do. Proprietary charging cables are wasteful, annoying, redundant, and unnecessary unitaskers. They are thinly veiled attempts at vendor lock in. I don't care how well they might work for the actual act of charging, they fail in every other way.
Now USB just needs to settle on a single un-keyed connector that can carry enough power to run a laptop and has enough speed to run a display. We're just about there.
And you also can't make a credible business or scientific case for government to finance manned space travel to the Moon or Mars at this point.
Sure I can. It's actually pretty easy to make that argument. But it probably won't happen until one of two things occurs - either there has to be an economic incentive or an existential threat. That's part of what NdGT talks about. We went to the moon to beat the Russians during the Cold War - an existential threat. Once that threat was confirmed to not be an issue anymore we stopped going to the Moon and haven't been back since. We hadn't figured out a way to profit from going there yet and so the government funding went elsewhere. If it looks like China is going to the Moon I guarantee you that the US will find the money to do it too - just in case...
We do need research and exploration, but that can be done most efficiently using robot probes.
Some exploration can be done efficiently with probes. Some cannot be done at all with probes. There are a wide variety of topics for which exploratory probes are quite useless, not the least of which is studying human physiology and life support away from Earth. There is plenty of benefit in probes but the notion that nothing will be gained by sending people is absurd and short sighted. That's like thinking that we can explore the ocean using nothing but satellites and ROVs. They're useful tools but they aren't a replacement for going yourself.
All you have to do is tell someone that there's money to be made in space.
That's great but until you do some exploring there isn't a single company in the world that is going to go there to find out. First you have to explore to get enough information to find out IF there is money to be made in space and if so, where it can be made. Private companies aren't going to do that bit on the frontier. They cannot except on comparatively small scales. Governments pretty much have to be the ones to do the initial exploration so the risks and rewards can be determined.
During the age of Columbus, any schmuck with a ship could go out exploring.
Not the big voyages. Those required the resources and backing of governments. A large sailing vessel in those days was equivalent to a SpaceX rocket rocket today. Hugely expensive and state of the art technology. Columbus could only do his voyage because he was backed by the crown. It wasn't until centuries later that "any schmuck with a ship" could set sail for wherever. People didn't sail across the Atlantic until a government backed expedition (Columbus) proved that there was something out there worth going to see.
Private companies getting in the game are just a necessary natural evolution of the technology.
Private companies are NOT the ones doing the exploration. They are building the equipment used by those doing the exploration. SpaceX is building rockets not much different from those used 40 years ago. They aren't building a moon base or any of the equipment needed to go to Mars. They are building what amounts to the Model T of chemical rockets to get the cost down. NASA is the one sending probes to Pluto. NASA is the one doing experiments on the space station. Private companies only get involved when there is something they can see a way to profit from. It's a good thing but pure exploration of the frontier is simply something they cannot do because the risk/reward ratio is off the charts bad.
I've listened to NdGT talk about this topic a fair bit and I agree with his basic thesis that private companies will not lead the way to Mars or even the Moon. You simply cannot make a credible business case for a private company to do it. I'm an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I've pitched investors on projects and the problem is largely an economic one. Paraphrasing his arguments the risks are large and substantially unquantifiable, the ROI is unknown and will take many years if not decades and the amount of money required for large exploration projects is huge. The only institution which is in a position to spend large amounts of money on something with big risks, huge costs and completely uncertain payoffs are governments. Once some of the risks have been quantified and enough information becomes available to make a reasonable guess at an ROI and time frame for the investment, THEN private enterprise can jump in.
We largely admire companies like SpaceX but SpaceX isn't doing anything wildly outside what NASA has already done. They're not sending probes to Mars, they are just improving the economics and a bit of the technology for chemical rockets - a technology we've had for 60+ years. People talk about mining asteroids but no private body is funding the exploration to go find them much less developing the technology to actually do something economically useful. The cost is too big, the returns too uncertain and the risks are still largely unknown. It's why we still need NASA out there on the frontier. Leave the launches to SpaceX and others and get NASA out into the solar system doing the cutting edge research and exploration we so desperately need. We don't need NASA building rockets, we need them figuring out how to get us permanently more than 200 miles from the surface of the Earth.
The invisible friends part of religion is only a small portion.
I disagree that it is a small thing but I agree that it isn't the only thing.
Religion doesn't bring tribalism, it's just one of the many uniforms that tribalism wears. Without religion people would, and do, find other ways to draw lines between groups of people.
Let me put it this way. Religion makes tribalism really, really easy AND it makes it difficult to reconcile because it isn't based on anything rational. You are quite right that tribalism comes in many forms but you cannot argue that religious based tribalism is particularly pervasive. And to my mind it is particularly odious as well.
Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds.
There are plenty of high quality engineers and scientists who are not particularly rational and a fair number are deeply religious. There are members of the National Academy of Science who are devout. Some of our most famous scientists such as Newton were very religious. While religion is largely irrational, obviously there is something about it that some otherwise rational and intelligent humans find irresistible. Some people have a hard time with saying "I don't know". Some people are insecure and scared and need an invisible friend to help them get through the day. Some people find comfort in someone else telling them what to do and how to think even when what they are being told makes no objective sense. Some people value the sense of community found in religious groups - tribalism is a big thing with humans. I don't think there is a single answer but clearly some find it appealing.
Personally I'm baffled by the appeal of religions. I gave up having invisible friends when I was a child and I really don't like people telling me I'm a bad person for not believing in ludicrous fairy tales. I find the tribalism and fighting that religion brings to be deeply troubling. I find proselytizing and brainwashing that religions engage in to be tantamount to rape, especially when aimed at children. I don't really care if someone wants to believe in something loony but I have a big problem when they think they need to infect others with their crazy.
Oh good. Just what the world needs. More engineer bashing.
Speaking as an engineer myself why should our field be above a good bashing when others aren't? We're not special. Folks here like to bash bankers, managers, marketing and other fields but can't imagine that engineers are anything other than wise saints who never do anything wrong or harmful. It's not true of course - engineers have the same human failures as anyone else.
So I'm thinking the authors of this book... aren't engineers. Always easier to bash the other guy than look inward, innit?
Given how much the engineers here bash other fields we certainly have a lot of engineers who can dish it out but cannot take it.
It is likely many promising young jihadists are schooled to suit the perceived needs of the movement.
So you think that they have a (figurative) farm system whereby they are training engineers years in advance of when they will need them? That argument fails Occam's Razor. A much simpler explanation is that individuals with technical skills are targeted for those skills.
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
Sounds like you are trying to do the same.
Everyone has the same opportunity.
No they do not. You have to be phenomenally clueless or bigoted to think otherwise. The same opportunities are NOT available to everyone. That was the entire point of the civil rights movement and the suffrage movement. Just because you have some choices doesn't mean everyone else does. Opportunity can be taken away very easily by institutions (government and private) if we allow it to occur. Opportunity is a fragile thing and not everyone gets equal opportunity under the law or in society. Bigotry, racism, and sexism and discrimination are real things with real consequences. Those who have to actually face them by definition do not have equal opportunity. The fact that some people manage to break through does not mean that the gap in opportunity is not real for many many people.
For example, I become a developer; not a cake baker. That doesn't mean I didn't have equal opportunity to become a cake baker. It means that I fucking chose to be something else.
Wow do you not get it. If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates? Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them? Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country? You think because you chose one job over another that there is no inequality in the real world? That's just ignorant as hell.
Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why — as long as they don't enslave workers — and neither should anybody else. Mind your own business, people.
Maybe you don't give a damn about your fellow human beings but those of us who aren't sociopaths do. I want to see people get good opportunities and not be held down because they happened to be born with a different set of genitals or a different skin color. Glass ceilings are a real thing. Clearly you've never seen anyone bump into one but I have. These are real issues that affect real people and in a civilized society we care about what happens to them. People don't have to be enslaved for a workplace to be a very bad place.
We have certain protected classes of people (gender, race, age, etc) precisely because there is clear and unambiguous evidence that if we allow discrimination based on those criteria that the results are bad both for society and for the individuals. The market demonstrably cannot fairly deal with this problem.
the false premise here is that any of the actions mentioned will make a difference.
The only thing guaranteed to not make a difference is to do nothing. Unlikely does not equal impossible.