Someone that can actually deal with the hectic schedule of project management, and get things done on budget and on schedule is a very rare commodity. I get to charge a premium because of it. I also get very good rates on labour, electrical, everything for my own buildings due to the fact that I'm also hiring these same guys for work for someone else, so I get to take advantage of the same rates. My investments are tangible and secure, and the way I build the market can depreciate by about 30% inside a few months and I'll still get out fine. Actually the way they're set up I can easily ride out a 2-3 year market slump should I choose to do so.
My priority is to do this and get it out of the way so that I can have a large family and mostly just do some investment and building part time while they're growing up. I'm a very... driven individual.
The current economic problems have actually created an increased demand for people with my skills, not a lesser one. Its very interesting how its all playing out inside the construction industry.
About 3 years ago I started getting emails regarding tax returns from Intuit. All for a guy by the same name except he's from Georgia, USA.
I've tried contacting them, to no avail. Intuit says they can't send him anything due to privacy etc, meanwhile I'm getting all of his details in an email.
Since I had his address and everything I even tried calling the guy, but I guess his number is unlisted or something, couldn't find him. Figured that tax return emails were kind of important.
Well, largely I am working for someone else, I'm just working for them doing something in the same lines of what I'm investing in myself. It all sort of comes together and works magnificently.
My main point is that complaining about working 60 hours or so sometimes doesn't get you ahead in life. I was slaving working for 80+ hours for someone else. The thing is I got more money to invest in something to pull myself out of having to work for someone else.
Who said I had shares in anything? A lot of the work I do now is purely for myself, and I only deal in tangible assets, not figments of speculators imaginations, which is most of what the stock market is.
Previously the work has been in situations, not where we didn't want to pay someone to do it, but there simply was no one that we could get TO do it. These are the places where the opportunities are. They exist in every company from time to time. I am pretty damn good at changing hats, which was why I ended up with those sorts of hours.
Now its a situation where 60+ hours is simply required for the job. No one else has the required combination of knowledge, experience and ability to do it. At least not without hiring an entire other person for about the same salary(a large expense) for 40 hours a week to cover of just an extra 20, plus probably not end up with as good a job done due to the nature of it.
In addition, some of the new reactor designs are so safe that even if a supertanker full of diesel got tossed on top of the building the reaction would still stop. You would have the problem of the diesel fire spreading bits of uranium around but the reaction itself would be stopped, and Uranium, despite popular belief, isn't that terribly radioactive. It has a massively long half-life which means radiation released from it at any given time is fairly low. You can in fact hold plutonium in your hand and it will just feel slightly warm.
Back when they built Fukushima they didn't even KNOW how to stop the reaction without arbitrarily cooling it to the point where it no longer has enough energy to continue.
I volunteered myself for those hours. In some cases the bosses don't even know how long I worked. The up side for me is that I get results. Thats seen and valued more than anything else, especially given the current economic climate.
I'm Canadian by the way, and I'll probably be semi-retired by the time I'm your age.
I think you're crazy that you'll settle for doing less than your absolute best and then being able to enjoy the spoils of your hard effort for a long time afterwards.
I personally am aware that its detrimental to performance. However sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do.
When your normal performance requires a lot of thought but then you really need some stuff moved in the warehouse and theres no one to do it, you do your regular job and then do that job too.
Also its not legal here for a company to force an employee to work those kinds of hours. However where I come from theres this thing called responsibility and dedication that cause a lot of folks to end up doing those sorts of hours from time to time, not usually to the extent that I have however.
Also I have no idea what you're talking about this "wasting" crap. I'm in my mid-twenties and in a few months I'll have a net worth of over $500,000. By the time I'm 35 I'll be able to very comfortably retire.
I certainly hope you're joking and you aren't planning on wasting your whole life working 40 hours a week until you're 60.
60 hour weeks too stressful for more than a couple of weeks in a row??
I've been working 60+ hour weeks for several years now. You know what I was working before that? 80+ hour weeks. interspersed with 90 and 100+ hour weeks.
I'm just wondering how old you are... A lot of the 40+ generation seems to think everything started going down hill with the generation born in the 80's. If you're under 30 then you and another person I met recently may be confirming the stereotype >_
Most of the new reactor designs include fail-safes that don't rely on constant cooling for months to stop the reaction. Most can stop it within 2 days. the majority are even gravity based. One in particular involves a gravity based system that if something goes wrong triggers on its own and shoves graphite rods down into the reactor, stopping the reaction. I'd call that a pretty large guarantee of success. The facility wouldn't even have to be built as well as the original.
You forget that the biggest reason that fukushima was still running is because of NIMBY concerns in Japan not wanting new reactors built. The money was there for replacing it 10 years ago, but it was politically inconvenient and tepco couldn't get the permits. Based on a normal construction time it would have been replaced with a newer, safer design and we wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't for the anti-nuclear nutjobs.
I worded it poorly, and 20 I did see somewhere in a study that measured athiests vs christians vs muslims vs Buddhists, with one or two other metrics thrown in. In relation to the Wikipedia article I can be arsed to dig up right now its actually just 6 points.
According to numerous studies, while its not impossible to be intelligent and believe in god, it automatically deducts about 20 IQ points to have such a belief. Making your claim of believing in god and being intelligent less believable.
That sounds like a great program, and is another option available.
Really, the biggest concern here is the "no child left behind" bullshit. They're increasingly targeting the lowest of the set while the highest languish and eventually get so messed up in the head due to a severe lack of challenge that they may as well have been the lowest.
I propose we reset and take the school system backwards about 30-40 years, see what happens.
THIS was a superb solution. Sadly the same thing is happening in America and in Canada. It is often thought that "Well for the child's social development we shouldn't take him out of his age group" or "If we bump little Johnny it might make little Eric and Matthew feel stupid".
#1 is stupid because by the time I as 8 my peers were all 11 or 12 year olds anyways. I didn't hang out with anyone from my own age group regardless. This continued all through school and I went to several different schools.
#2 is retarded because no persons concerns should affect any other person as long as its not outright harmful to them. Little Eric and Matthew and
I was so bored that I missed something like 70% of my grade 12(graduating) year and still had a 82 average. This taught me extremely poor work ethic and caused other issues. If it wasn't for me learning some good work ethic outside of school I would have been completely screwed for life.
Skipping grades should be the go to method when no advanced programs exist. The child should definitely be involved in the decision, and have the final say, but trying to make it happen nowadays is ridiculous. Especially when you get a kid in grade 6 who is only getting high 80s and low 90s because he/she is so bored they're reading something else to pass time and ignoring lessons altogether.
I cringe every time I see the AVRO Arrow mentioned. Particularly lately with the Harper governments full intention of bending over for the American government.
Canada could be a world leader in aircraft development right now, both militarily and passenger plane wise. An entire starting industry killed off by one phone call from an American.
Since then we still somehow have a pretty decent group of aerospace development talent but lack a driving force for development. The one that we would have had that would have been started by the continuation of the AVRO Arrow project is sadly non-existant. Production and further development would have created factories and a concentration of talent that, even if the project had been canceled 10 or 15 years later, would have drawn in major private aerospace developers. Instead we have one less avenue for global gain and are even more reliant on export of natural resources.
You're a fool if you think that a gene produced somewhere can't be reproduced elsewhere in a slightly different set of conditions. The gene may not take that exact shape, however the gene they implant from a moth to the plant isn't going to be the same as it was in the moth regardless. Basically, they would maybe start with gene x from a moth, because it produces an immunity to element y that is problematic for the plant. They would then modify gene x to be able to be added to the plant. The new gene is different from the original, they just started with the same building blocks.
All that is really needed after that is some better testing regulations. I don't really trust the corporations to "do what's right" on their own. The gene could have an unexpected side effect that causes the plant to become toxic. There should be regulations stating something to the effect of the plant should be demonstrably identical to previously with the sole exception of producing the exact documented desired result. If it is not, but the result that happens is desirable enough, then any variations should be well documented and rigorously tested for safety, both environmental and human, before the final result is allowed to become a product. The element that is added of course needs to be rigorously tested for safety concerns as well.
There is really a massive lack of education on whats really taking place here. Its partly to do with the fact that many of these companies, and indeed the scientists themselves, feel that educating the public on whats going on would only create more fear and panic.
Thanks to religious/conspiracy/conservative nutjobs it would also provide a whole bunch of fuel for attacking the practice as a whole. America's over developed fascination with religion makes it severely hostile to any number of scientific endeavors, and actually causes more to be hidden out of public view than should be.
More knowledge would lead to better regulation, but even those who want better regulation on this stuff also know it needs to continue, and that attempting to educate the public on it is going to be unpopular at best and political suicide at worst. Plus probably create even more backlash against GMO.
Breeding is genetic engineering. With each generation comes the potential for a mutation, an entirely new gene.
We as humans have been mass breeding and finding the mutations beneficial to us for a LONG TIME.
You sort of understand what the difference is, but then twist it a tiny bit, possibly to fit your overall world view.
What GMO amounts to in relation to selective breeding, to use your programming analogy is this:
Its the difference between customizing a copy of source code based on other programs existing source code, and copying source using a buggy copy protocol that sometimes loses things and sometimes adds things at random until you get the desired trait, then once you find that trait, shifting the master copy of the source to the new lot and starting again.
The end result is the same the second one is just going to take orders of magnitude longer and throw back even more unexpected results than the first. They're just likely to be slightly less drastic unexpected results, but only slightly.
Slashdot Mirror
Construction actually.
Someone that can actually deal with the hectic schedule of project management, and get things done on budget and on schedule is a very rare commodity. I get to charge a premium because of it. I also get very good rates on labour, electrical, everything for my own buildings due to the fact that I'm also hiring these same guys for work for someone else, so I get to take advantage of the same rates. My investments are tangible and secure, and the way I build the market can depreciate by about 30% inside a few months and I'll still get out fine. Actually the way they're set up I can easily ride out a 2-3 year market slump should I choose to do so.
My priority is to do this and get it out of the way so that I can have a large family and mostly just do some investment and building part time while they're growing up. I'm a very... driven individual.
The current economic problems have actually created an increased demand for people with my skills, not a lesser one. Its very interesting how its all playing out inside the construction industry.
I jump on slashdot to cool the old brain cells every now and then during the day, I'll only post during lunch or a quick break though.
Since I'm the boss however I decide when those breaks are :)
Also: Not self employed. At least not entirely.
About 3 years ago I started getting emails regarding tax returns from Intuit. All for a guy by the same name except he's from Georgia, USA.
I've tried contacting them, to no avail. Intuit says they can't send him anything due to privacy etc, meanwhile I'm getting all of his details in an email.
Since I had his address and everything I even tried calling the guy, but I guess his number is unlisted or something, couldn't find him. Figured that tax return emails were kind of important.
Well, largely I am working for someone else, I'm just working for them doing something in the same lines of what I'm investing in myself. It all sort of comes together and works magnificently.
My main point is that complaining about working 60 hours or so sometimes doesn't get you ahead in life. I was slaving working for 80+ hours for someone else. The thing is I got more money to invest in something to pull myself out of having to work for someone else.
Who said I had shares in anything? A lot of the work I do now is purely for myself, and I only deal in tangible assets, not figments of speculators imaginations, which is most of what the stock market is.
Previously the work has been in situations, not where we didn't want to pay someone to do it, but there simply was no one that we could get TO do it. These are the places where the opportunities are. They exist in every company from time to time. I am pretty damn good at changing hats, which was why I ended up with those sorts of hours.
Now its a situation where 60+ hours is simply required for the job. No one else has the required combination of knowledge, experience and ability to do it. At least not without hiring an entire other person for about the same salary(a large expense) for 40 hours a week to cover of just an extra 20, plus probably not end up with as good a job done due to the nature of it.
I wish I could mod you up.
In addition, some of the new reactor designs are so safe that even if a supertanker full of diesel got tossed on top of the building the reaction would still stop. You would have the problem of the diesel fire spreading bits of uranium around but the reaction itself would be stopped, and Uranium, despite popular belief, isn't that terribly radioactive. It has a massively long half-life which means radiation released from it at any given time is fairly low. You can in fact hold plutonium in your hand and it will just feel slightly warm.
Back when they built Fukushima they didn't even KNOW how to stop the reaction without arbitrarily cooling it to the point where it no longer has enough energy to continue.
I volunteered myself for those hours. In some cases the bosses don't even know how long I worked. The up side for me is that I get results. Thats seen and valued more than anything else, especially given the current economic climate.
I'm Canadian by the way, and I'll probably be semi-retired by the time I'm your age.
I think you're crazy that you'll settle for doing less than your absolute best and then being able to enjoy the spoils of your hard effort for a long time afterwards.
I personally am aware that its detrimental to performance. However sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do.
When your normal performance requires a lot of thought but then you really need some stuff moved in the warehouse and theres no one to do it, you do your regular job and then do that job too.
Also its not legal here for a company to force an employee to work those kinds of hours. However where I come from theres this thing called responsibility and dedication that cause a lot of folks to end up doing those sorts of hours from time to time, not usually to the extent that I have however.
Also I have no idea what you're talking about this "wasting" crap. I'm in my mid-twenties and in a few months I'll have a net worth of over $500,000. By the time I'm 35 I'll be able to very comfortably retire.
I certainly hope you're joking and you aren't planning on wasting your whole life working 40 hours a week until you're 60.
60 hour weeks too stressful for more than a couple of weeks in a row??
I've been working 60+ hour weeks for several years now. You know what I was working before that? 80+ hour weeks. interspersed with 90 and 100+ hour weeks.
I'm just wondering how old you are... A lot of the 40+ generation seems to think everything started going down hill with the generation born in the 80's. If you're under 30 then you and another person I met recently may be confirming the stereotype >_
Most of the new reactor designs include fail-safes that don't rely on constant cooling for months to stop the reaction. Most can stop it within 2 days. the majority are even gravity based. One in particular involves a gravity based system that if something goes wrong triggers on its own and shoves graphite rods down into the reactor, stopping the reaction. I'd call that a pretty large guarantee of success. The facility wouldn't even have to be built as well as the original.
You forget that the biggest reason that fukushima was still running is because of NIMBY concerns in Japan not wanting new reactors built. The money was there for replacing it 10 years ago, but it was politically inconvenient and tepco couldn't get the permits. Based on a normal construction time it would have been replaced with a newer, safer design and we wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't for the anti-nuclear nutjobs.
I've had the same experience as GP, excepting the H1-B bit.
Unions attract/produce mediocrity with astounding success levels.
Private companies that actually care about their talent however are the ones that produce the stars.
Which is very sad. Overall I enjoyed it more than any of the 3 x-men movies, with possible exception of the second one.
Thats how it is worded in the studies. I guess it must be less inflammatory that way.
However you just said the same thing twice.
Oblgatory:
http://xkcd.com/386/
Already posted quickly with wikipeda link. Your rapid fire posting of two posts says more about you than me.
I'll see about linking to those studies once I'm finished re-imaging my laptop.
I worded it poorly, and 20 I did see somewhere in a study that measured athiests vs christians vs muslims vs Buddhists, with one or two other metrics thrown in. In relation to the Wikipedia article I can be arsed to dig up right now its actually just 6 points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
According to numerous studies, while its not impossible to be intelligent and believe in god, it automatically deducts about 20 IQ points to have such a belief. Making your claim of believing in god and being intelligent less believable.
That sounds like a great program, and is another option available.
Really, the biggest concern here is the "no child left behind" bullshit. They're increasingly targeting the lowest of the set while the highest languish and eventually get so messed up in the head due to a severe lack of challenge that they may as well have been the lowest.
I propose we reset and take the school system backwards about 30-40 years, see what happens.
THIS was a superb solution. Sadly the same thing is happening in America and in Canada. It is often thought that "Well for the child's social development we shouldn't take him out of his age group" or "If we bump little Johnny it might make little Eric and Matthew feel stupid".
#1 is stupid because by the time I as 8 my peers were all 11 or 12 year olds anyways. I didn't hang out with anyone from my own age group regardless. This continued all through school and I went to several different schools.
#2 is retarded because no persons concerns should affect any other person as long as its not outright harmful to them. Little Eric and Matthew and
I was so bored that I missed something like 70% of my grade 12(graduating) year and still had a 82 average. This taught me extremely poor work ethic and caused other issues. If it wasn't for me learning some good work ethic outside of school I would have been completely screwed for life.
Skipping grades should be the go to method when no advanced programs exist. The child should definitely be involved in the decision, and have the final say, but trying to make it happen nowadays is ridiculous. Especially when you get a kid in grade 6 who is only getting high 80s and low 90s because he/she is so bored they're reading something else to pass time and ignoring lessons altogether.
I cringe every time I see the AVRO Arrow mentioned. Particularly lately with the Harper governments full intention of bending over for the American government.
Canada could be a world leader in aircraft development right now, both militarily and passenger plane wise. An entire starting industry killed off by one phone call from an American.
Since then we still somehow have a pretty decent group of aerospace development talent but lack a driving force for development. The one that we would have had that would have been started by the continuation of the AVRO Arrow project is sadly non-existant. Production and further development would have created factories and a concentration of talent that, even if the project had been canceled 10 or 15 years later, would have drawn in major private aerospace developers. Instead we have one less avenue for global gain and are even more reliant on export of natural resources.
+ 5 million insightful.
Damn. I'm like this already due to work and I don't have kids.
Is there something wrong with me?
You're a fool if you think that a gene produced somewhere can't be reproduced elsewhere in a slightly different set of conditions. The gene may not take that exact shape, however the gene they implant from a moth to the plant isn't going to be the same as it was in the moth regardless. Basically, they would maybe start with gene x from a moth, because it produces an immunity to element y that is problematic for the plant. They would then modify gene x to be able to be added to the plant. The new gene is different from the original, they just started with the same building blocks.
All that is really needed after that is some better testing regulations. I don't really trust the corporations to "do what's right" on their own. The gene could have an unexpected side effect that causes the plant to become toxic. There should be regulations stating something to the effect of the plant should be demonstrably identical to previously with the sole exception of producing the exact documented desired result. If it is not, but the result that happens is desirable enough, then any variations should be well documented and rigorously tested for safety, both environmental and human, before the final result is allowed to become a product. The element that is added of course needs to be rigorously tested for safety concerns as well.
There is really a massive lack of education on whats really taking place here. Its partly to do with the fact that many of these companies, and indeed the scientists themselves, feel that educating the public on whats going on would only create more fear and panic.
Thanks to religious/conspiracy/conservative nutjobs it would also provide a whole bunch of fuel for attacking the practice as a whole. America's over developed fascination with religion makes it severely hostile to any number of scientific endeavors, and actually causes more to be hidden out of public view than should be.
More knowledge would lead to better regulation, but even those who want better regulation on this stuff also know it needs to continue, and that attempting to educate the public on it is going to be unpopular at best and political suicide at worst. Plus probably create even more backlash against GMO.
Sometimes they do! Germany could count as the something like .00001% of women that could happen to!
Breeding is genetic engineering. With each generation comes the potential for a mutation, an entirely new gene.
We as humans have been mass breeding and finding the mutations beneficial to us for a LONG TIME.
You sort of understand what the difference is, but then twist it a tiny bit, possibly to fit your overall world view.
What GMO amounts to in relation to selective breeding, to use your programming analogy is this:
Its the difference between customizing a copy of source code based on other programs existing source code, and copying source using a buggy copy protocol that sometimes loses things and sometimes adds things at random until you get the desired trait, then once you find that trait, shifting the master copy of the source to the new lot and starting again.
The end result is the same the second one is just going to take orders of magnitude longer and throw back even more unexpected results than the first. They're just likely to be slightly less drastic unexpected results, but only slightly.