Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
There is also a linguistic and anthropological value being lost when a language is no longer spoken. In this specific case, the loss is more tragic considering that the language loss has been caused by disease and exploitation (rather than a pure language shift done for economic, social or utilitarian reasons.)
Such losses cannot be ascribed a monetary value, which is why a) the loss is invaluable and b) almost always inevitable.
What I don't understand is, why does China's government even *care* about porn? It's an atheist state that theoretically was spared the neurotic hang-ups Christianity has inflicted on the rest of the world.
Ditto, for China's official opposition to homosexuality & gay rights. With China's goal of limiting population growth & keeping people content, you'd think it would actively *encourage* guys who like dick to stick to guys... fewer babies, and more women for the men who genuinely *want* a woman.
China has a *serious* problem with its lopsided male-majority population. If every single woman in China married one man, something like 5-10% of its population would never be able to have a Chinese wife because too many women aborted female babies back in the 70s & 80s because they wanted their one (and only) child to be a son. Those men are a far bigger threat to China's social order than porn and gay people could *ever* be.
Just because China is an atheist state, that doesn't mean it is an open, liberal culture. In many ways Chinese culture (or CJKV cultures for that matter) lack some of the ridiculous mores of the West (specially Bible Belt mores.) But they are still very macho-oriented, prude societies.
In the case of China, the CCP still copes with Chinese cultural attitudes and nixes anything that might seem as "destabilizing" even if it is utterly ridiculous from our POV. It's about Confusian harmony, personal liberties are subverted to that.
When you see the Communist Party doing something in terms of policy, remember that. You cannot analyze it through Western cultural eyeglasses.
With control of more blockbusters, not only does Disney gain more leverage over theater chains such as AMC and Carmike Cinemas...
I'm shedding so many tears for those multi-million dollar theater chains.
And their employers, the majority of whom are teenagers learning the ropes of what working is all about. I don't shed tears when markets evolve, but it does concern me that little by little opportunities for teenangers or on-the-side part time jobs are becoming more and more scarce.
It affects us all. There is no easy solution, that's for sure.
What Are Some Books, Movies, Documentaries and Shows From This Year That You Liked and Recommend To Others?
My list, mind you some of them I've read them before, but I took up to re-read them again in 2017, some are just brand new. Some of them I hear on audible first and cross reference and annotate the books for the passages that I find most interesting or pertinent (I keep an notebook indexing specific topics and headlines, plus footnotes on my kindle.)
I have a busy work/parenting life, and audio books are the only way I can get through books. When I'm working out or driving, that's what I do.
Re-visited in 2017:
"Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey A. Moore (audible)
"Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey A. Moore (audible)
"The Demon Haunted World. Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan (re-read) (audible & book).
New Reads in 2017:
"Javascript with Promises", by Daniel Parker (book only)
"Building Microservices", by Sam Newman (book only)
"Babylon's Ashes", by James S. A. Corey (book only)
"Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook", by Tony Robbins (audible & book)
"The Modern Scholar: Principles of Economics: Business, Banking, Finance, and Your Life" (audible), by Peter Navarro.
"The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life" (audible), by Mark Mason
"How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life" (audible & book) by Massimo Pigliucci
"Factory Girls. From Village to City in a Changing China", by Leslie T. Chang (audible & book)
"Alibaba. The House That Jack Ma Built", by Duncan Clark (audible & book)
In Progress in 2017:
"The New Geography of Jobs", by Enrico Moretti (book only)
"The Go Programming Language" (book only)
"Diccionario Filosofico" by Pablo Antonio Cuadra (book only)
While that has been true to some extent, it has never been so ridiculous as it has been now. Basically from the moment Obama got elected, the republican party went nuts. The first sign of problems was the Tea Party and now we have a Trump presidency. Even ignoring Trump, the republican primaries had quite a few crazies overshadowing reasonable candidates.
George W. Bush had one huge screw up and very likely corruption at the heart of why (Iraq) and I would argue a bit weak and mostly had shots called by others in his administration, but the party in general was a bit more reasonable. McCain was a very good candidate and I wouldn't have minded the least if he won. Romney was out of touch and a weak candidate, but even then I wouldn't have been *too* concerned.
I don't know if it was racism reaction to a not quite fully white president or an inevitable reaction to the economy collapsing or some combination of both, but something started stirring in the republican party in 2009 that was just nasty. Combine that with a weak candidate that also triggers the frothing anti-clinton and anti-woman factions, while also pissing off democrats by doing unfair things to Sanders and we got Trump.
It is impossible to ignore that racism played a significant role in whatever happened to the GOP. Full disclosure. I voted for McCain in 2008. A lot of Republicans did, and had nothing to do with Obama being black.
But right after the election, I could not believe my eyes, my ears, to see so much nasty racism coming out the closets all of the sudden. That was my turning point when I started to move away from the GOP.
The reality is this, for a good segment of the population, say 20%, it is racial resentment (I don't know about fucking what, though.) It is a resentment that goes like this: "I have nothing because some blacks and homosexual illegal mexican muslims from China are living in welfare." Do not laugh at it. You know there is a lot of people that think like that.
They bitch about not having jobs, but don't move to where the jobs are. As Mike Rove from "Dirty Jobs" put it, they want the perfect job right in their towns (when the solution is to be like a Mexican and move to where the jobs are, abandoning everything if they must.) And they cannot tolerate the notion that somewhere a poor household where both parents are working multiple part-time jobs might need some help to stay afloat.
THAT'S WELFARE. IT BELONGS TO ME.
So, in essence, this incredibly virulent minority voted in 2016 hoping for what it is, in essence, a Herrenvolk Welfare State. Sure, some minorities jumped into this idiotic choo choo train (or some people who aren't racists looked the other way because they hated HRC's guts.)
But it doesn't change the fact that what these people want, and what Trump has implicitly promised, is that: a Herrenvolk Welfare State.
They ain't gonna get that shit, and in fact, they will be hurt the most with these new policies. I for one will not shed a tear. Let people reap what they sow.
I would like to agree, but watching the senate race in Alabama. The question to me becomes how bad does a person have to be to cause people to vote against their aligned party? While Doug Jones won, he won by less then 1% against a convicted pedophile? With church ministers standing up for this lowlife. How many traditional values is the population willing to give up, just for their party to win?
Now this will happen in Democratic states too, if a popular politician gets in trouble doing something, there is a huge support network trying to protect him, vilify the accusers and the messengers.
We as a nation can deal with people in power with positions that we don't agree with, however we have lost the feeling that these people are working for their constituents and their prosperity. They are in it for their own personal Ego trip Like President Trump, or for the Party Line like many of the Democratic and GOP Congressmen. This is the real tragedy of our nation. We have moved from debating policy to likability of the person, to general party alliance. So now the people in charge are just playing games with our nation to keep their power, by gerrymandering to keep their power, entertaining media show them that they are indeed pure conservative or pure liberal enough for their base, taking advantage of strongly held minority views to win elections...
I can't get passed the Fake New of 'convicted'. He was merely accused, nothing more. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything.
Though he was not convicted in a court of law, he was barred from entering a fucking mall. Private corporations do not do that unless they get valid complains against a person acting like a pedo.
So this isn't one of those "anyone can accuse anyone of anything". Take that bullshit and shove it.
I was renting for a long time until a house in the neighborhood came on the market. We did the math and after mortgage, taxes, insurance, and other fees we came up with 300$ less than what we paid in rent. Buying not only saves us a lot of money, it builds equity. As a first time buyer we made use of the available assistance that allowed us to invest into remodel and a new roof. "New roof?" you say, an expense that a renter does not have to worry about. True, but even with the loan payment that will end soon we still pay less per month compared to renting....for a house twice the size.
As a homeowner, I'd say this is highly situational. In my case, I'm certainly building equity, but it's hard to feel that since I have to make repairs (and with homes, you always have to.)
Main reason we bought the house was to get as close as possible to the 2nd best school district in the county (and one of the best in the nation), to build equity and because it is hard to find an affordable renting place in such neighborhoods. Otherwise, I would have stayed as a renter till my kids go to college.
Ultimately a person *might* save money (and that depends on where that person lives, when the purchase was made (did you purchase it low or high) and when the house might be sold (will the house be sold on an up or down market.)
The issue is always about cash flow and the ability to buy in a desirable place. Anyone can buy a home in a shit hole, but with kids, some people (actually many) are better off renting in more expensive zip codes.
And even then, there is the problem that zones can change over time. We bought to be close to a great public school, but alas, school budgets are being cut so much that even public schools in wealthy areas are beginning to suffer (and are starting to rely on donations from wealthy donors.)
And that has made me wonder if it might have been wiser to buy at a cheaper place (or rent) and send my kids to private school or fight to enter a magnet school. I would have retained capital (liquid assets) that I could be investing in a buy-and-hold long term position that guarantees me a much better ROI than a home would.
Anyhow, there are many developed countries when home ownership is not that big of a deal (Switzerland and Japan comes to mind.) No country is perfect, but we could stand to gain by learning a few things from other countries (where people use homes to live as opposed to use them as a main vehicle to wealth construction.)
Totally agree with you - the only thing I might comment on the suggestion that rather than Python,.NET languages would make more sense.
VBA in Excel has always been horrible.
Well, there is Python for.NET (IronPython).
Other than that I agree with you and the OP. Excel is an excellent tool for what it is supposed to be used. That people use it as a database, that's a WTF, but that has nothing to do with the value of Excel and its automation.
It is the perfect tool for most what-if analysis needs. I've know plenty of people that added value to their work with VBA in the financial/insurance world.
Python is a much better choice for this, when you need complex mathematical functions that cannot be done easily as a composition of Excel's built-in functions.
The negativity in/. is something weird to be honest (it makes me wonder what type of work they do.)
So I see a lot of negativity about this, even though in the past with no NN rules almost nothing happened, and when it did was shut down quickly (like torrent throttling).
So I have a challenge for you all worried about this. Today, make a note of how much your internet costs. Then do some speed tests and record the results.
In a year, do the same thing. How many of you seriously think we will be worse off?
I personally do not think much will change, if anything... there is little practical downside to the choice of the FCC, and so much fear mongering from the other side of things that it greatly strains credulity.
I do look forward to a year of ANY news having to do with an ISP being blamed on net neutrality though regardless of how it would have been affected by NN rules, sadly that's the one downside I am sure of...
The point of NN was not to fix a systemic error, but to legally prevent the things that companies were attempting (throttling.)
If NN was a nothingburger and the internet worked just the same before and after NN, then why cable companies poured millions in lobbying against it, and, more importantly, why so many fake emails were sent to the FCC to support a repeal of it? Why so much effort to repeal something that is widely popular and with by-partisan support????
Looks like a lot of effort to repeal something that was, supposedly, not a factor on anything.
You do not go through so much efforts to repeal a prohibition unless you are planning to commit the acts regulated by said prohibition.
Gold can not scale. Limited amount, it has to be verified and processed; that takes time and money to do. Ever look into gold? You pay overhead costs in actually trading in gold plus you have to pay to securely store and transport any sizable amount of it.
How did gold become the foundation of everything until the banksters finally took over?
Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.
When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale.
Uh, what? The whole point of bitcoin is that it is a fiat currency (with some desirable attributes), not an illiquid asset to back another one.
I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.
Gold is and hasn't been worth as much as we've made it for centuries. We based a system around it and that made it valuable. It has a silly jewelry value but that isn't what made it so expensive.
With futures trading and bigger banks involved... interesting times are coming. (not exactly a good thing; it's more of a curse but it is not dull)
And I see no reasons why it could (or should or would). Ergo, this shit is a 50/50 game, and considering that people are already reporting how illiquid bitcoin is (days just to transfer small amounts from one wallet to another), coupled with effectively high fees, then what exactly does it has in its favor.
Don't get me wrong, it could still be the next big time (who can predict what markets can do), but just look at the current illiquidity of it!
The current high prices truly look like an speculative bubble. Riches will be made for sure... after a correction or two (if not a crash.)
Agreed -- Bitcoin won't scale. It's already proving to be a very poor way to transfer small amounts of money. For example, last week, I sent $15 worth of BTC from one of my wallets to another. The default transaction fee was $7.50! Before sending, I overrode the suggested transaction fee and set it to the minimum amount, which was about about $1.50 -- that's effectively a 10% fee to move a small amount of money. I knew that opting for a lower transaction fee would result in a longer wait for my transfer to occur, but I was not in a hurry. I wanted to see what happened. Well, here I am 5 days later, and although the $15 is deducted from by source wallet, it has yet to show up in my destination wallet. And as long as there are thousands of other transactions around the globe paying higher fees, my money will forever be stuck in the ether. Bitcoin has proven to be: non-scalable, expensive, and unreliable.
From that observation, I wouldn't call it "unreliable" (though it could be). From your description, it is an incredibly illiquid asset.
Being non-scalable is not a a fundamental problem depending on what you want the asset for (gold or art investments are not scalable, and are certainly not liquid.)
It is ok if an investment is expensive IIF if there is a reliable high ROI. Bitcoin could have been that.
However, being effectively illiquid, then it bits its main premise the most. People want to use bitcoin as currency, but for that, it needs to be effectively liquid for all amounts (and it isn't.)
And that's going to be its Achille's heel. People want Bitcoin to be a liquid asset, but it isn't. So the crazy prices we see right now can only be concluded to be a bubble. Worst of all, a bubble from where you might not be able to divest quickly.
Current prices are just a function of speculation, of psychology, the exact same conditions people like Warren Buffet would warn against. What trading is occurring with bitcoin? How much trade of assets is currently occurring using Bitcoin as currency?
>the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood."
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Root causes, buddy, root causes. Figure out why you don't have an actual intelligent human in your life to discuss this stuff with, maybe work on that. Because humans are social primates, and if you're not taking care of your social needs, everything else will eventually crumble anyway.
Easy to say in your culture. In other cultures where hierarchy can make you or break you (literally), this is just not possible.
You never understand your own culture (the pros and cons of it) until you have actually stepped out of it, at least for long enough to allow some reflection.
Actually, the number of stores also increased that year by about the same percentage, indicating that automation did not reduce their rate of hiring, as might have otherwise been predicted.
It's a completely bogus statistic, and means nothing, because if true, everyone who replaces employees with automation will have to hire more people. That isn't possible.
Somehow in there, if we automate everything and have zero employees, we'll also have full employment with more employees needed in the world. I guess itdepends on how you look at it. Sounds like Schrödinger's Restaurant.
Err, not everyone that automates hires more people (see coal for instance.) And not everyone that implements automation hires more people linearly to the costs of automation (see those industries that increase traffic by adding kiosks and automated cash registers.)
When companies increase traffic and find they need to improve customer quality, they do need to hire more people (or retrain their existing ones to be more customer-oriented.)
A big ol ball? My init.d was about 13 scripts big which were readable and editable. Ever tried to edit systemd files? Depending on systemd version you have to create overrides, modify symlinks or edit systemd files straight up which can be in about 5 different locations and on top of that, systemd can have overrides on any changes either with an update or just inherited.
Systemd makes every system into a dependency mess.
Remove/fail a hard drive and your system will boot into single user mode, not even remote access will be available so you better be near the machine just because it was in fstab and apparently everything in fstab is a hard dependency on systemd.
This. I'm not sure whether systemd's complexity will pay off in the long run, but my God, it did complicate things.
This is more painful when, like me, we work in COTS/turn-key solutions that must work on several platforms. Some of our code base that worked flawlessly in most versions of Linux needed significant alterations to make it install and operate on Linux versions with systemd on it.
This effort was not trivial. It took an herculean effort to get everything to work without regressions (though absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, time will tell.)
Doesn't a fair number of people with similar and rare brain abnormalities constitute exactly that?
I don't particularly trust this administration to be telling the truth. Their record on that isn't very good.
I'd like to see information from independent doctors rather than ones who work with the state department and are publishing their paper with state department input.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but your position is incredibly obtuse. In this case, your skepticism is not logical.
You need help. Or you need to work with different people or something. What you are describing, that shit is not normal. That people actually vote this shit "insightful", holy crap, you guys need to grow the hell up and become men (real men, not boys with a need to thump your chest like capuchin monkeys pretending to be gorillas.)
The fact you had to resort to name calling to belittle his point shows he's right and you're wrong. It's why he's voted up, and you're not.
Males and Females interact differently. "Bro culture" is not bad, "Bros" are not a negative. Trying to paint it as so, and trying to paint people who are more upfront and frank about their positions and who aren't afraid of a little conflict to get stuff done quicker are not bad, as much as your ilk tries to make them out to be.
The more PC society gets, the less stuff actually gets done, the more processes are put in place, and the more people argue about people instead of ideas. The less PC society is, the more actual ideas are discussed, based on the idea's merits, rather than who put them forth, and whether they are "Acceptable" or not.
Try it sometimes, discuss an idea you think is "unacceptable" based on its sole merit. You might find that it's your perceived societal norm that's flawed, not the "unacceptable" idea.
I belittle the point because the point deserves belittling. There is no goddamned way that normal people who know how to communicate with other members of the human race in a professional manner need to do any of the bullshit that he purports. And yes, the bro-culture (as depicted in his post) is bad because it purports a level of aggressiveness as if it were a logical necessity to productivity.
That people vote him up (or me down) it's damned irrelevant and does not make his point right. People that truly believes this crap need to get to work in different circles to see how grown-ups, men and women in collaboration, actually get it done without the vulgarian histrionics.
It is likely going to be much higher co2 emissions because massive numbers of new coal plants are still going in. China continues to add 30-50 GW of new coal plants each year just in China. At the same time, they are adding 100+ GW of new coal plants in other nations. Then on top of that, they are exporting their coal which is some of the worst in the world.
Then add in trump trying to save coal in America. We will not add more coal here, but we will likely increase export. The only good part is that it is much cleaner than China's, but it will still pollute heavily regardless.
Bro, you are still peddling a 15-year old view that no longer holds sway. Your description of China might have been accurate 15-20 years ago. But c'mon, where the hell have you been? Under a rock or something?
Just FYI, thinking back over who I've hired, I've hired probably 65% women, 35% men, mostly because I hired for people working under my direct daily supervision and I'm an alpha, dominate personality. In other words, there was no question I was the boss and the leader. A nice, caring boss maybe, but very much the boss. I generally want things to be done my way. At least, learn my way and start by doing it my way,
then make changes only after you fully understand how I do it and why I do it that way. On average, more women are comfortable working in that type of than men. Men *generally tend* to want roles with more autonomy than what I hired for. The men generally didn't stick around as long as the women.
Sounds like you wanted cogs, not professionals, treating the latter badly in the name of "alphaness."
However, your experience is similar to what military leaders have said. Women train more easily. They follow instruction. They conform. But when novelty is needed, a "stepping-up", or in a high-stress environment, squads with women under perform in nearly every category tested.
Being a professional also involves following directions and patterns from above (within reason). It's part of professional discipline (which many people confuse with being cogs.)
I can see exactly where the op is coming from. I've seen my share of fools who simply can't follow directions. My way-or-the-highway. I actually had to work with one like that just recently (a woman mind you). And a few years before, with another one, a man. In both cases, they were both utterly destructive to productivity.
Ask a person to implement you a tree backed by several hash indexes, and you get all types of variations (even though the concept is simple.) And many of them will be wrong. So as the number of team members increase, you need to start having some patterns of coding, testing, and collaboration.
That is, you need processes. And processes do not need to be perfect, and sometimes not even 100% correct. But you need them to know what the hell people are doing under your command (you can't improve you cannot measure, and you cannot measure what you cannot track.) Have several dozen programmers under your wing working in multiple projects, and you begin to see the need for standardization.
People confuse creativity (professional creativity) with individuality. Furthermore (and specially in the MaleNerdVerse), people confuse individuality with being an obstinate monkey wrench blocking the gears. Hell, people confuse the dynamics of working in isolated 5-dude teams and working in engineering/enterprise projects requiring dozens, if not hundreds of collaborators.
Professionals (grown up people who care about the craft behind their work), they recognize the need to balance creativity, individuality and being part of a team that follows particular directions and processes (the things that makes them "cogs".)
I'm no social justice warrior at all, but this is incredibly generalizing. It just completely depends on the people involved. It sounds like you had a bad experience once, and then assumed it's the same everywhere.
It's not. I've worked with women in teams that resulted in an unpleasant work environment. And I've worked with women in teams that resulted in a great project.
Stop injecting logic in the conversation. Don't you see, we have a whole bunch of capuchin monkey juveniles pretending to be silverback alpha males. The moment you inject logic, you pop their nuts... err, bubbles, and that's rather cruel.
Jesus, you need help. I'd say your workplace sounds like Harvey Weinstein's frontal cortex, but the way you write suggests you never have seen a real-life workplace.
My thoughts exactly. Out of the dozens of companies I've worked, only one resembles that (and it was a pigshitpile.) Normal people do not do this. There is no need to be a vulgarian to get things done (in software or whatever.)
In a team of 5 men, the men are free to bounce ideas off each other, insult each other frequently, and establish a stable hierarchy. Creativity is unleashed, but incompetence is punished quickly. They can get shit done, and nobody sits around crying about how offended they are. At the end of the day, whatever got yelled at whoever is tabled, and you can grab a beer together, no hard feelings.
In a team of 4 men and 1 woman, the 4 men must walk around on eggshells and constantly self-censor. Should the women ever at any time feel that she is anything other than the most important person in the room, any or all of the men will face lawsuits or blackballing from HR firms. Creativity is squashed immediately: whatever the woman suggests must be adopted without criticism, else it is mansplaining and lawsuit time. You can't get a beer after work: include the woman and it is sexual harassment, exclude the woman and it is sexual discrimination.
Productivity collapses as you add additional women to the team. God help you if there's a minority among them. Stasi informers were less zealous.
Is it any wonder that the politically incorrect developing world is eating our lunch?
Only if you are a vulgarian. I've worked in software for over 20 years, over a dozen companies (and before that I worked in other industries.)
The notion that in order to establish a meritocratic hierarchy is by acting like chimps with rabies, that's completely ludicrous. Professional and competent people pit each other competitive and make their arguments, and based on that and other externalities can reach a quorum where incompetence is stamped out.
You do not need to do any of that shit flinging you are talking about. That's just jock alpha-male-wannabe behavior. People who can really get shit done and get together to get results competently, they do not need all that bullshit you describe.
You need help. Or you need to work with different people or something. What you are describing, that shit is not normal. That people actually vote this shit "insightful", holy crap, you guys need to grow the hell up and become men (real men, not boys with a need to thump your chest like capuchin monkeys pretending to be gorillas.)
Slashdot Mirror
For bringing the jobs back here
Those jobs (mostly IT) have been automated here, you ignorant rube. But whatevs. Enjoy your winning.
Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
There is also a linguistic and anthropological value being lost when a language is no longer spoken. In this specific case, the loss is more tragic considering that the language loss has been caused by disease and exploitation (rather than a pure language shift done for economic, social or utilitarian reasons.)
Such losses cannot be ascribed a monetary value, which is why a) the loss is invaluable and b) almost always inevitable.
What I don't understand is, why does China's government even *care* about porn? It's an atheist state that theoretically was spared the neurotic hang-ups Christianity has inflicted on the rest of the world.
Ditto, for China's official opposition to homosexuality & gay rights. With China's goal of limiting population growth & keeping people content, you'd think it would actively *encourage* guys who like dick to stick to guys... fewer babies, and more women for the men who genuinely *want* a woman.
China has a *serious* problem with its lopsided male-majority population. If every single woman in China married one man, something like 5-10% of its population would never be able to have a Chinese wife because too many women aborted female babies back in the 70s & 80s because they wanted their one (and only) child to be a son. Those men are a far bigger threat to China's social order than porn and gay people could *ever* be.
Just because China is an atheist state, that doesn't mean it is an open, liberal culture. In many ways Chinese culture (or CJKV cultures for that matter) lack some of the ridiculous mores of the West (specially Bible Belt mores.) But they are still very macho-oriented, prude societies.
In the case of China, the CCP still copes with Chinese cultural attitudes and nixes anything that might seem as "destabilizing" even if it is utterly ridiculous from our POV. It's about Confusian harmony, personal liberties are subverted to that.
When you see the Communist Party doing something in terms of policy, remember that. You cannot analyze it through Western cultural eyeglasses.
I'm shedding so many tears for those multi-million dollar theater chains.
And their employers, the majority of whom are teenagers learning the ropes of what working is all about. I don't shed tears when markets evolve, but it does concern me that little by little opportunities for teenangers or on-the-side part time jobs are becoming more and more scarce.
It affects us all. There is no easy solution, that's for sure.
What Are Some Books, Movies, Documentaries and Shows From This Year That You Liked and Recommend To Others?
My list, mind you some of them I've read them before, but I took up to re-read them again in 2017, some are just brand new. Some of them I hear on audible first and cross reference and annotate the books for the passages that I find most interesting or pertinent (I keep an notebook indexing specific topics and headlines, plus footnotes on my kindle.)
I have a busy work/parenting life, and audio books are the only way I can get through books. When I'm working out or driving, that's what I do.
Re-visited in 2017:
New Reads in 2017:
In Progress in 2017:
While that has been true to some extent, it has never been so ridiculous as it has been now. Basically from the moment Obama got elected, the republican party went nuts. The first sign of problems was the Tea Party and now we have a Trump presidency. Even ignoring Trump, the republican primaries had quite a few crazies overshadowing reasonable candidates.
George W. Bush had one huge screw up and very likely corruption at the heart of why (Iraq) and I would argue a bit weak and mostly had shots called by others in his administration, but the party in general was a bit more reasonable. McCain was a very good candidate and I wouldn't have minded the least if he won. Romney was out of touch and a weak candidate, but even then I wouldn't have been *too* concerned.
I don't know if it was racism reaction to a not quite fully white president or an inevitable reaction to the economy collapsing or some combination of both, but something started stirring in the republican party in 2009 that was just nasty. Combine that with a weak candidate that also triggers the frothing anti-clinton and anti-woman factions, while also pissing off democrats by doing unfair things to Sanders and we got Trump.
It is impossible to ignore that racism played a significant role in whatever happened to the GOP. Full disclosure. I voted for McCain in 2008. A lot of Republicans did, and had nothing to do with Obama being black.
But right after the election, I could not believe my eyes, my ears, to see so much nasty racism coming out the closets all of the sudden. That was my turning point when I started to move away from the GOP.
The reality is this, for a good segment of the population, say 20%, it is racial resentment (I don't know about fucking what, though.) It is a resentment that goes like this: "I have nothing because some blacks and homosexual illegal mexican muslims from China are living in welfare." Do not laugh at it. You know there is a lot of people that think like that.
They bitch about not having jobs, but don't move to where the jobs are. As Mike Rove from "Dirty Jobs" put it, they want the perfect job right in their towns (when the solution is to be like a Mexican and move to where the jobs are, abandoning everything if they must.) And they cannot tolerate the notion that somewhere a poor household where both parents are working multiple part-time jobs might need some help to stay afloat.
THAT'S WELFARE. IT BELONGS TO ME.
So, in essence, this incredibly virulent minority voted in 2016 hoping for what it is, in essence, a Herrenvolk Welfare State. Sure, some minorities jumped into this idiotic choo choo train (or some people who aren't racists looked the other way because they hated HRC's guts.) But it doesn't change the fact that what these people want, and what Trump has implicitly promised, is that: a Herrenvolk Welfare State.
They ain't gonna get that shit, and in fact, they will be hurt the most with these new policies. I for one will not shed a tear. Let people reap what they sow.
I would like to agree, but watching the senate race in Alabama. The question to me becomes how bad does a person have to be to cause people to vote against their aligned party? While Doug Jones won, he won by less then 1% against a convicted pedophile? With church ministers standing up for this lowlife. How many traditional values is the population willing to give up, just for their party to win?
Now this will happen in Democratic states too, if a popular politician gets in trouble doing something, there is a huge support network trying to protect him, vilify the accusers and the messengers.
We as a nation can deal with people in power with positions that we don't agree with, however we have lost the feeling that these people are working for their constituents and their prosperity. They are in it for their own personal Ego trip Like President Trump, or for the Party Line like many of the Democratic and GOP Congressmen. This is the real tragedy of our nation. We have moved from debating policy to likability of the person, to general party alliance. So now the people in charge are just playing games with our nation to keep their power, by gerrymandering to keep their power, entertaining media show them that they are indeed pure conservative or pure liberal enough for their base, taking advantage of strongly held minority views to win elections...
I can't get passed the Fake New of 'convicted'. He was merely accused, nothing more. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything.
Though he was not convicted in a court of law, he was barred from entering a fucking mall. Private corporations do not do that unless they get valid complains against a person acting like a pedo.
So this isn't one of those "anyone can accuse anyone of anything". Take that bullshit and shove it.
Close enough to get barred from entering a mall because he was found to be such a damned pervert.
I was renting for a long time until a house in the neighborhood came on the market. We did the math and after mortgage, taxes, insurance, and other fees we came up with 300$ less than what we paid in rent. Buying not only saves us a lot of money, it builds equity. As a first time buyer we made use of the available assistance that allowed us to invest into remodel and a new roof. "New roof?" you say, an expense that a renter does not have to worry about. True, but even with the loan payment that will end soon we still pay less per month compared to renting....for a house twice the size.
As a homeowner, I'd say this is highly situational. In my case, I'm certainly building equity, but it's hard to feel that since I have to make repairs (and with homes, you always have to.)
Main reason we bought the house was to get as close as possible to the 2nd best school district in the county (and one of the best in the nation), to build equity and because it is hard to find an affordable renting place in such neighborhoods. Otherwise, I would have stayed as a renter till my kids go to college.
Ultimately a person *might* save money (and that depends on where that person lives, when the purchase was made (did you purchase it low or high) and when the house might be sold (will the house be sold on an up or down market.)
The issue is always about cash flow and the ability to buy in a desirable place. Anyone can buy a home in a shit hole, but with kids, some people (actually many) are better off renting in more expensive zip codes.
And even then, there is the problem that zones can change over time. We bought to be close to a great public school, but alas, school budgets are being cut so much that even public schools in wealthy areas are beginning to suffer (and are starting to rely on donations from wealthy donors.)
And that has made me wonder if it might have been wiser to buy at a cheaper place (or rent) and send my kids to private school or fight to enter a magnet school. I would have retained capital (liquid assets) that I could be investing in a buy-and-hold long term position that guarantees me a much better ROI than a home would.
Anyhow, there are many developed countries when home ownership is not that big of a deal (Switzerland and Japan comes to mind.) No country is perfect, but we could stand to gain by learning a few things from other countries (where people use homes to live as opposed to use them as a main vehicle to wealth construction.)
here around the suburbs of Austin there's a lot of consternation about (of all things) the number of democrats moving in
Me thinks people who have problem with such things could move to Alabama. #conservativefirstworldproblem
Totally agree with you - the only thing I might comment on the suggestion that rather than Python, .NET languages would make more sense.
VBA in Excel has always been horrible.
Well, there is Python for .NET (IronPython).
Other than that I agree with you and the OP. Excel is an excellent tool for what it is supposed to be used. That people use it as a database, that's a WTF, but that has nothing to do with the value of Excel and its automation.
It is the perfect tool for most what-if analysis needs. I've know plenty of people that added value to their work with VBA in the financial/insurance world.
Python is a much better choice for this, when you need complex mathematical functions that cannot be done easily as a composition of Excel's built-in functions.
The negativity in /. is something weird to be honest (it makes me wonder what type of work they do.)
So I see a lot of negativity about this, even though in the past with no NN rules almost nothing happened, and when it did was shut down quickly (like torrent throttling).
So I have a challenge for you all worried about this. Today, make a note of how much your internet costs. Then do some speed tests and record the results.
In a year, do the same thing. How many of you seriously think we will be worse off?
I personally do not think much will change, if anything... there is little practical downside to the choice of the FCC, and so much fear mongering from the other side of things that it greatly strains credulity.
I do look forward to a year of ANY news having to do with an ISP being blamed on net neutrality though regardless of how it would have been affected by NN rules, sadly that's the one downside I am sure of...
The point of NN was not to fix a systemic error, but to legally prevent the things that companies were attempting (throttling.)
If NN was a nothingburger and the internet worked just the same before and after NN, then why cable companies poured millions in lobbying against it, and, more importantly, why so many fake emails were sent to the FCC to support a repeal of it? Why so much effort to repeal something that is widely popular and with by-partisan support????
Looks like a lot of effort to repeal something that was, supposedly, not a factor on anything.
You do not go through so much efforts to repeal a prohibition unless you are planning to commit the acts regulated by said prohibition.
Gold can not scale. Limited amount, it has to be verified and processed; that takes time and money to do. Ever look into gold? You pay overhead costs in actually trading in gold plus you have to pay to securely store and transport any sizable amount of it.
How did gold become the foundation of everything until the banksters finally took over?
Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.
When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale.
Uh, what? The whole point of bitcoin is that it is a fiat currency (with some desirable attributes), not an illiquid asset to back another one.
I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.
Gold is and hasn't been worth as much as we've made it for centuries. We based a system around it and that made it valuable. It has a silly jewelry value but that isn't what made it so expensive.
With futures trading and bigger banks involved... interesting times are coming. (not exactly a good thing; it's more of a curse but it is not dull)
And I see no reasons why it could (or should or would). Ergo, this shit is a 50/50 game, and considering that people are already reporting how illiquid bitcoin is (days just to transfer small amounts from one wallet to another), coupled with effectively high fees, then what exactly does it has in its favor.
Don't get me wrong, it could still be the next big time (who can predict what markets can do), but just look at the current illiquidity of it!
The current high prices truly look like an speculative bubble. Riches will be made for sure... after a correction or two (if not a crash.)
Agreed -- Bitcoin won't scale. It's already proving to be a very poor way to transfer small amounts of money. For example, last week, I sent $15 worth of BTC from one of my wallets to another. The default transaction fee was $7.50! Before sending, I overrode the suggested transaction fee and set it to the minimum amount, which was about about $1.50 -- that's effectively a 10% fee to move a small amount of money. I knew that opting for a lower transaction fee would result in a longer wait for my transfer to occur, but I was not in a hurry. I wanted to see what happened. Well, here I am 5 days later, and although the $15 is deducted from by source wallet, it has yet to show up in my destination wallet. And as long as there are thousands of other transactions around the globe paying higher fees, my money will forever be stuck in the ether. Bitcoin has proven to be: non-scalable, expensive, and unreliable.
From that observation, I wouldn't call it "unreliable" (though it could be). From your description, it is an incredibly illiquid asset.
Being non-scalable is not a a fundamental problem depending on what you want the asset for (gold or art investments are not scalable, and are certainly not liquid.)
It is ok if an investment is expensive IIF if there is a reliable high ROI. Bitcoin could have been that.
However, being effectively illiquid, then it bits its main premise the most. People want to use bitcoin as currency, but for that, it needs to be effectively liquid for all amounts (and it isn't.)
And that's going to be its Achille's heel. People want Bitcoin to be a liquid asset, but it isn't. So the crazy prices we see right now can only be concluded to be a bubble. Worst of all, a bubble from where you might not be able to divest quickly.
Current prices are just a function of speculation, of psychology, the exact same conditions people like Warren Buffet would warn against. What trading is occurring with bitcoin? How much trade of assets is currently occurring using Bitcoin as currency?
>the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood."
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Root causes, buddy, root causes. Figure out why you don't have an actual intelligent human in your life to discuss this stuff with, maybe work on that. Because humans are social primates, and if you're not taking care of your social needs, everything else will eventually crumble anyway.
Easy to say in your culture. In other cultures where hierarchy can make you or break you (literally), this is just not possible.
You never understand your own culture (the pros and cons of it) until you have actually stepped out of it, at least for long enough to allow some reflection.
Actually, the number of stores also increased that year by about the same percentage, indicating that automation did not reduce their rate of hiring, as might have otherwise been predicted.
It's a completely bogus statistic, and means nothing, because if true, everyone who replaces employees with automation will have to hire more people. That isn't possible.
Somehow in there, if we automate everything and have zero employees, we'll also have full employment with more employees needed in the world. I guess itdepends on how you look at it. Sounds like Schrödinger's Restaurant.
Err, not everyone that automates hires more people (see coal for instance.) And not everyone that implements automation hires more people linearly to the costs of automation (see those industries that increase traffic by adding kiosks and automated cash registers.)
When companies increase traffic and find they need to improve customer quality, they do need to hire more people (or retrain their existing ones to be more customer-oriented.)
Shit ain't a zero-sum game ya know?
A big ol ball? My init.d was about 13 scripts big which were readable and editable. Ever tried to edit systemd files? Depending on systemd version you have to create overrides, modify symlinks or edit systemd files straight up which can be in about 5 different locations and on top of that, systemd can have overrides on any changes either with an update or just inherited.
Systemd makes every system into a dependency mess.
Remove/fail a hard drive and your system will boot into single user mode, not even remote access will be available so you better be near the machine just because it was in fstab and apparently everything in fstab is a hard dependency on systemd.
This. I'm not sure whether systemd's complexity will pay off in the long run, but my God, it did complicate things.
This is more painful when, like me, we work in COTS/turn-key solutions that must work on several platforms. Some of our code base that worked flawlessly in most versions of Linux needed significant alterations to make it install and operate on Linux versions with systemd on it.
This effort was not trivial. It took an herculean effort to get everything to work without regressions (though absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, time will tell.)
The fact that the Trump administration is susceptible to indictments shows that they aren't truly corrupt.
Ok, I've seen sophistries in my life, but this one takes the cake.
I don't particularly trust this administration to be telling the truth. Their record on that isn't very good.
I'd like to see information from independent doctors rather than ones who work with the state department and are publishing their paper with state department input.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but your position is incredibly obtuse. In this case, your skepticism is not logical.
You need help. Or you need to work with different people or something. What you are describing, that shit is not normal. That people actually vote this shit "insightful", holy crap, you guys need to grow the hell up and become men (real men, not boys with a need to thump your chest like capuchin monkeys pretending to be gorillas.)
The fact you had to resort to name calling to belittle his point shows he's right and you're wrong. It's why he's voted up, and you're not.
Males and Females interact differently. "Bro culture" is not bad, "Bros" are not a negative. Trying to paint it as so, and trying to paint people who are more upfront and frank about their positions and who aren't afraid of a little conflict to get stuff done quicker are not bad, as much as your ilk tries to make them out to be.
The more PC society gets, the less stuff actually gets done, the more processes are put in place, and the more people argue about people instead of ideas. The less PC society is, the more actual ideas are discussed, based on the idea's merits, rather than who put them forth, and whether they are "Acceptable" or not.
Try it sometimes, discuss an idea you think is "unacceptable" based on its sole merit. You might find that it's your perceived societal norm that's flawed, not the "unacceptable" idea.
I belittle the point because the point deserves belittling. There is no goddamned way that normal people who know how to communicate with other members of the human race in a professional manner need to do any of the bullshit that he purports. And yes, the bro-culture (as depicted in his post) is bad because it purports a level of aggressiveness as if it were a logical necessity to productivity.
That people vote him up (or me down) it's damned irrelevant and does not make his point right. People that truly believes this crap need to get to work in different circles to see how grown-ups, men and women in collaboration, actually get it done without the vulgarian histrionics.
It is likely going to be much higher co2 emissions because massive numbers of new coal plants are still going in. China continues to add 30-50 GW of new coal plants each year just in China. At the same time, they are adding 100+ GW of new coal plants in other nations. Then on top of that, they are exporting their coal which is some of the worst in the world. Then add in trump trying to save coal in America. We will not add more coal here, but we will likely increase export. The only good part is that it is much cleaner than China's, but it will still pollute heavily regardless.
Bro, you are still peddling a 15-year old view that no longer holds sway. Your description of China might have been accurate 15-20 years ago. But c'mon, where the hell have you been? Under a rock or something?
Just FYI, thinking back over who I've hired, I've hired probably 65% women, 35% men, mostly because I hired for people working under my direct daily supervision and I'm an alpha, dominate personality. In other words, there was no question I was the boss and the leader. A nice, caring boss maybe, but very much the boss. I generally want things to be done my way. At least, learn my way and start by doing it my way, then make changes only after you fully understand how I do it and why I do it that way. On average, more women are comfortable working in that type of than men. Men *generally tend* to want roles with more autonomy than what I hired for. The men generally didn't stick around as long as the women.
Sounds like you wanted cogs, not professionals, treating the latter badly in the name of "alphaness."
However, your experience is similar to what military leaders have said. Women train more easily. They follow instruction. They conform. But when novelty is needed, a "stepping-up", or in a high-stress environment, squads with women under perform in nearly every category tested.
Being a professional also involves following directions and patterns from above (within reason). It's part of professional discipline (which many people confuse with being cogs.)
I can see exactly where the op is coming from. I've seen my share of fools who simply can't follow directions. My way-or-the-highway. I actually had to work with one like that just recently (a woman mind you). And a few years before, with another one, a man. In both cases, they were both utterly destructive to productivity.
Ask a person to implement you a tree backed by several hash indexes, and you get all types of variations (even though the concept is simple.) And many of them will be wrong. So as the number of team members increase, you need to start having some patterns of coding, testing, and collaboration.
That is, you need processes. And processes do not need to be perfect, and sometimes not even 100% correct. But you need them to know what the hell people are doing under your command (you can't improve you cannot measure, and you cannot measure what you cannot track.) Have several dozen programmers under your wing working in multiple projects, and you begin to see the need for standardization.
People confuse creativity (professional creativity) with individuality. Furthermore (and specially in the MaleNerdVerse), people confuse individuality with being an obstinate monkey wrench blocking the gears. Hell, people confuse the dynamics of working in isolated 5-dude teams and working in engineering/enterprise projects requiring dozens, if not hundreds of collaborators.
Professionals (grown up people who care about the craft behind their work), they recognize the need to balance creativity, individuality and being part of a team that follows particular directions and processes (the things that makes them "cogs".)
I'm no social justice warrior at all, but this is incredibly generalizing. It just completely depends on the people involved. It sounds like you had a bad experience once, and then assumed it's the same everywhere.
It's not. I've worked with women in teams that resulted in an unpleasant work environment. And I've worked with women in teams that resulted in a great project.
Stop injecting logic in the conversation. Don't you see, we have a whole bunch of capuchin monkey juveniles pretending to be silverback alpha males. The moment you inject logic, you pop their nuts... err, bubbles, and that's rather cruel.
Jesus, you need help. I'd say your workplace sounds like Harvey Weinstein's frontal cortex, but the way you write suggests you never have seen a real-life workplace.
My thoughts exactly. Out of the dozens of companies I've worked, only one resembles that (and it was a pigshitpile.) Normal people do not do this. There is no need to be a vulgarian to get things done (in software or whatever.)
In a team of 5 men, the men are free to bounce ideas off each other, insult each other frequently, and establish a stable hierarchy. Creativity is unleashed, but incompetence is punished quickly. They can get shit done, and nobody sits around crying about how offended they are. At the end of the day, whatever got yelled at whoever is tabled, and you can grab a beer together, no hard feelings.
In a team of 4 men and 1 woman, the 4 men must walk around on eggshells and constantly self-censor. Should the women ever at any time feel that she is anything other than the most important person in the room, any or all of the men will face lawsuits or blackballing from HR firms. Creativity is squashed immediately: whatever the woman suggests must be adopted without criticism, else it is mansplaining and lawsuit time. You can't get a beer after work: include the woman and it is sexual harassment, exclude the woman and it is sexual discrimination.
Productivity collapses as you add additional women to the team. God help you if there's a minority among them. Stasi informers were less zealous.
Is it any wonder that the politically incorrect developing world is eating our lunch?
Only if you are a vulgarian. I've worked in software for over 20 years, over a dozen companies (and before that I worked in other industries.)
The notion that in order to establish a meritocratic hierarchy is by acting like chimps with rabies, that's completely ludicrous. Professional and competent people pit each other competitive and make their arguments, and based on that and other externalities can reach a quorum where incompetence is stamped out.
You do not need to do any of that shit flinging you are talking about. That's just jock alpha-male-wannabe behavior. People who can really get shit done and get together to get results competently, they do not need all that bullshit you describe.
You need help. Or you need to work with different people or something. What you are describing, that shit is not normal. That people actually vote this shit "insightful", holy crap, you guys need to grow the hell up and become men (real men, not boys with a need to thump your chest like capuchin monkeys pretending to be gorillas.)