This solution works for me too. Hand the code over. If it's clear you know what you're doing and have covered all the angles, I'll leave you alone. But even if you do know what you're doing it often helps to get perspective from someone who isn't so close to the work. And sometimes the boss has seen a lot of stuff you haven't and can open up new approaches for the experienced coder, too, because most people only learn what they have to know to get the job done and move on, so it's possible the boss has seen things that have been outside your critical path.
However, there are also a great many coders out there who honestly don't know their ass from their elbows and program by rote. This phenomenon has grown exponentially since the tech industry decided to outsource all work to India and China and insource H1-B's from India and China. So having a boss closely manage code development is often the only thing standing between endless spec minutiae and getting something to market.
Or you could get the best of both worlds and get a convertible laptop. Lenovo makes them. Got an x41 6 years ago and it's the best machine I've ever owned. It's a laptop when I want to work, and a tablet when I want to read ebooks or draw or goof around. Why play the either/or game when you can have both?
They've gone past being a liability. Now they're just an embarrassment. Let's cut them loose and treat them the same as we did the other state that practiced apartheid--South Africa. That means we drop all aid, divest all business with them, and reduce diplomatic contact to a minimum. If they want to be idiots, fine, go be idiots. But America shouldn't be party to their lunacy any more.
The disease is the out of control kleptocracy--corporations and the 1% dismantling everything good about our society. Learning different techniques to fool facial recognition software, etc, etc will only ever be used be a few while most will acquiesce. In short, it will make no difference to the trajectory of the path we're on.
The only, definitive way to put an end to all this crap is to tear down this failed system and start on America 2.0. America 1.0 got a lot of things right, and those things should be kept. But we also got some things wrong, and other things have developed that the original designers couldn't have foreseen. So let's wrest control back from the corrupt in that good old American way, non-violently if possible, by force of arms if necessary.
But sitting around, wasting time on weasel tactics like these is completely counter-productive. Let's act preemptively and use technology to destabilize the 1%, put them to flight, and make sure the crap they've been up to never happens again.
about what's going to happen when 3D printing and bioscale assemblers hit the mainstream. Right now we're having trouble because the [MP/RI]AA, who represent comparatively tiny industries, are pushing to destroy open systems. Imagine what happens when the Monsanto's and Walmarts of the world jump on the bandwagon because consumers stop consuming and start manufacturing on their own.
I imagine that if we win that battle an era of unparalleled advancement, freedom, and opportunity for humanity lies on the other side; however, the powers that be will not go quietly, and there will likely be an unprecedented era of repression that will only be overcome with a great deal of trouble and not a little bloodshed.
The only way I can imagine it breaking our way without said bloodshed is if we plan it such that it all happens at once everywhere from as many places as possible, using darknets, ad-hoc mesh networks, and other ways to ensure freedom of information and clever replication schemes to make sure you, me, and everyone we know gets in on the quantum leap in capability immediately instead of the usual diffusion model that has been constant in human history. That is, we can't afford to wait the 20 years for everyone to get a computer and online to get everyone's hands on 3D printers; and that means we have to build dead-simple interfaces into those technologies from the outset to cut the learning curve to zero.
We can't give the powers that be time to react. We can't give them the chance to divide, deflect, and defeat the change.
I have read/. almost from the beginning. My first user ID was four digit, but lost track and contact while making the transition from the West Coast to the East Coast. CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, heck, even Jon Katz are names that are woven into the DNA of my online experience. Every day for years I have seen their handles and known that somewhere in the universe something was OK. So when CmdrTaco signed off, it was like losing a member of my family. Losing Steve Jobs was sad, but nowhere near as immediate to me as that.
About a great many things when it comes to Occupy Wall Street. They are not self righteous whining posers unless you do not agree that Americans have the right to free speech, the freedom of assembly, the right to free and fair elections, and the many others enumerated in the Constitution.
You are also quite mistaken about how the Occupy protesters "have a lot to learn" about messaging, organizing, persuading others, etc. New York is the worldwide capital of advertising, fashion, and image making in general and those industries were heavily represented at OWS. How do we know? Well, you heard about OWS for months; when was the last time you heard about traditional, take to the streets protests? Hint: it's not because the latter don't happen all the time but because the powers that be have grown quite expert at ignoring/dismissing/hiding them. But OWS got your attention precisely because they are expert at communicating.
You're also mistaken about their goals. You did not need to look much farther than the Wikipedia entry to find them, but it is easier to get your information from Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Fox News than to do a little independent checking.
What is a legitimate question is to ask, what's next? Occupy Wall Street represents a different approach than the traditional approaches that the 1% have become past masters at pigeonholing/deflecting/defeating/ignoring. That's why they have gotten as much coverage as they have, because it's different. But how to take it to the next level is an open question. It will, however, be taken to the next level because the underlying issues have not been addressed and the government has not even started to pretend to address them. They're doubling down on tired forms and bankrupt memes.
I hope OWS and the Tea Party forces team up; they differ on the margins but share the same core concerns--the system doesn't work any more for the vast majority of the American people. Crowd-sourced surveillance and expose of the 1%, the way they are trying to monitor and control us, I believe will be the straw that breaks the camel's back of the status quo. The 1% can only succeed under the cloak of night and in the comfort of their backrooms and private clubs. If we rip that cover away, the public revulsion will be instant and universal and ineluctable.
I do the same but that option is about to go away, too, because the TSA has what they call VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) to bring their security theater to every other form of transportation in America. I have seen them in the New York subway. There have been reports of them stopping cars on the highway. It won't be long before "Comrade, your papers please" becomes standard practice in America.
Everyone is on Facebook and Twitter. Building a separate social network is counterproductive. They need to broaden their appeal, not isolate themselves into ever decreasing gyres of fanaticism.
They need to focus on unassailable connectivity and access to information via ad-hoc mesh networks and darknets, a professionally produced information system, and a comprehensive, crowd-sourced, and published surveillance of the 1% and forces who are trying to control and divide the American people and forestall the inevitable change. If the 1% and its servants in the government know there is no more place to hide, they'll really feel the pressure to change. If everything they do becomes known to the American people, then their claim to legitimacy will falter. If we yank back the curtain and reveal the little man working the levers, then the illusion of omnipotence will be broken.
That should be enough to force change in America. If not, then at least we the people will have all the intel we need to take further measures.
In October polls indicated that the majority of Americans agreed with the points Occupy Wall Street was raising. Coverage has waned, attention spans have shifted, and holidays have happened since then but a plurality still support them despite constant work by the corporate media (esp. Fox) to paint them as dirty no-good hippies.
When you look at what they're about, and what the Tea Party was/is? about they share core beliefs, the prime among which is that the American people have lost control of their government. If OWS and the Tea Party put aside their relatively minor differences, realized they're two sides of the same coin, and worked together the 1% would be out on its ass in a fortnight. For all of our hand-wringing to the contrary, Americans are not passive Chinese or Russians who will take endless abuse, and we are still a relatively heavily armed people. Yes, the US military has citizens outgunned, but can you really see any military commander dropping napalm on suburban Houston?
When you put OWS and the Tea Party together they are the 99%. No amount of corporate media brainwashing can annul that because the underlying issues are deep, systemic, and unresolved. Tomorrow the reaction may march under a different banner than OWS or the Tea Party, but continue it will. I suspect, though, that OWS and the Tea Party were the last friendly warning the 1% will get to straighten out and fly right.
If you have those skills it sounds like it might be worth starting a side business to undercut those rates. The demand for solar is there, but the process is so confusing and paperwork so byzantine most people give up before they get started.
It sounds like you've been quite thorough. The solar quotes you named are surprisingly high. Depending on your roof you might be able to DIY; there is a glut on the market for the actual panels. Some panel mounts use ballast and don't require roof penetration.
There is one wind turbine from Honeywell that claims to activate at.5mph. It might work for your situation.
Also, since you sound like an enthusiast there are instructables that have projects to use compost to produce methane for cooking/heat/electricity.
You have done a lot of work already, so it might be worth checking into refinancing with a green mortgage/energy efficient mortgage to knock a couple basis points off or to finance additional improvements. Some insurance companies give you a discount on homeowner's insurance if you have a green home, too.
Your break-even time with solar will vary widely depending on several factors. One is the average price per kwh where you are. If you live in a place where it's $.09/kwh, your break-even time will be much longer. In NYC, the price is about twice that, thus your break-even will be shorter. There are also varying degrees of incentives (federal, state, local) that alter the break-even calculation. Furthermore, many places around the country have net-metering policies. That means if you produce more electricity than you use the utility has to send you a check every month. That also affects the break-even time.
It can be a bit complicated to figure out on your own. But if you do the math and shop around you could well find implementing solar panels are more than worth your while to do.
And that's from a strict cost basis. Consider the independence it gives you to produce your own power. Blackout takes down the grid, so what? You're still living in a first world country courtesy of your solar panels. If you commute to work less than 100 miles every day and own an EV or plug-in hybrid, you save tons of money on gas too.
Lastly, you can say that not one penny of yours goes to petro dictators or regressive theocracies who use the money to plot our deaths on a daily basis. That, as the commercial goes, is priceless.
Some insurance companies give you a break on your homeowner's insurance if you make your home energy efficient. In the same way that having good grades gives you a break on your car insurance having a green home signals you're more responsible and conscientious than the average bear.
Also, according to the real estate industry having a green home can increase the value of your home up to 20% when compared to an identical house without efficiency upgrades.
There are banks who will knock basis points off your mortgage if you retrofit your house. They're called 'green mortgages' and can wind up saving you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the mortgage.
When it comes to the contractors, play hardball on their quotes. 1 in 4 contractors is out of work or underemployed right now. It's a buyer's market. Worst comes to worst you can install the panels on the roof yourself if you know how to orient them (ie. you can use a protractor, compass, and plumb line). The main thing is to bring in an electrician to marry the panel output to the rest of the house. Sure, you won't get the official rebate that way but if you're getting the panels at firesale prices it could be cheaper anyway.
Where do you live? Some places provide more incentives than others, and they can be difficult to find on your own. dsireusa.org has a centralized database of federal, state, and local incentives you can consult.
Also, before you install solar go after the low-hanging fruit. Most of your home energy costs come from climate control/heating-cooling/HVAC, so the easiest and cheapest step to take is to 'seal the envelope of the house,' ie. max out your insulation, swap out your windows for energy efficient ones, install automatic insulated roll-down shutters that close at night, put on wall sheathing to isolate your wall joists from the siding/exterior to minimize heat transfer, and insulate your floors as well to avoid heat leaching out through the basement.
The next step is to swap your HVAC for an efficient system. A ground-source heat pump is far and away the most proven and efficient system there is; it heats you in the winter and cools you in the summer. Couple a GSHP with a radiant floor heating system, which is the most efficient delivery system there is, and you'll not only save gobs of money but be so comfortable you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. The determining cost factor is what type of subsoil lies beneath your house; if you're sitting on solid rock you're out of luck, but if you have at least 15 ft. of dirt/clay/gravel you're in business.
The third step is to swap out your appliances for energy star ones. It won't help you much if you bought your stuff in the last 5 years, since chances are they already are energy star, but if you're still rocking a 70's era suite of machines you can see significant savings.
There are all kinds of incentives for the first three steps, much more than for wind/solar right now. And there are far more contractors out there who know how to implement them without any special training or markup. You can get competitive bids. And I would do it now, since 1 in 4 contractors is out of work or underemployed right now. It's a buyer's market.
After you've done all those things, you'll be much savvier about the process and in a stronger position to get a good bid on solar. And you'll need it less. And if you completed the first three steps, you may find that installing solar and micro-wind could put you in the plus-energy column, which means the utility has to send you a check every month. That accelerates your break-even time.
Talking about religion or politics in a masonic lodge is one of the few things that will get you kicked out of the fraternity without process. The separation of church and state there is very strict, and they keep it that way because those topics are so inherently divisive. Many of the founding fathers were masons so it makes sense they would have transferred that organizational wisdom to the constitution of the US.
This is asymmetrical warfare in cyberspace, except all the resources of congress don't count for squat here. Even a small group of motivated and skilled hackers can defeat anything congress can throw at them because congress has no conception of how technology works. Even the contractors they hire are not skilled (ever see a government IT project?). FBI? Please, would a skilled programmer work on cool stuff in the free market for more than six figures or for $50K and more bureaucracy and drudgery than you can shake a stick at at the FBI? Let's stop propagating the "government is omnipotent" meme.
Incidentally the Berlin Wall didn't fall for the reason you stated. I was there then. It fell because Hungary and Czechoslovakia stopped closing their borders to Austria and thousands of East Germans decided to "vacation" there. They crossed over, caught a bus north and hey presto were in the west. East Germany couldn't stop them because of warsaw pact treaties and because russia under gorbachev wouldn't change them. So the government of erich honneker destabilized, was replaced with egon krenz, who in a bid to stop the whole country emptying out opened the wall so easterners could visit and come back. That is why it fell.
And it needs to happen post-haste. The US govt, with its passage of the NDAA (the military can arbitrarily arrest you and put your ass in GitMo) and other recent atrocities, is wildly out of control. D.C. and the 1% know their comeuppance is due, and they will slaughter any untold number of us to forestall that.
The American people need to take their country in hand again, no matter what it takes. Intel is the first step.
God Bless America, and keep her safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
In my consulting days I worked in a lot of places across several industries. The idealized IT department you describe, where its staff care about the underserved needs of the company, does not exist. Anywhere. They are either drones, or good but frustrated technologists enmeshed in a system that really wants drones, not creative thinkers and talented problem solvers. And the good ones are never, repeat, never the ones in charge of the IT department.
CIOs have budget and they spend budget. But what they really get evaluated on is whether the CMO's or CEO's email crashed before The Big Presentation (tm) or whether their laptop got infected with a virus and couldn't stream Netflix in the middle of the afternoon. That's it.
And to be frank, the vast majority of the pro-IT posts I've seen here are those which run Windows networks. In which case, you have instantly failed the productivity test so go ahead, lock down every aspect of that OS--then at least they can't knock you on failure to Gestapo the heck out of the system when it comes time for your annual review.
Or you can do what I do, which is to find old machines gathering dust in a closet somewhere, install linux, do what I need to do to get the job done, and submit the end product to IT for publishing to production via a thumbdrive or email to an inbox, which if we want to be honest is the only file server corporate America really uses.
All the comments about submitting requests and going through channels and evaluating this and evaluating that and proper this and proper that don't fly in the real world of deadline-driven delivery schedules (and what industry isn't like that these days?). It's pure fantasy.
I made this transition ten years ago. It hasn't been a smooth ride. The skills you need to be an effective manager are human ones, not technical. The goal is to build a great team, work with them to define the technical objective, put your stamp on that, and then do what you can to help them work effectively with each other and run interference for them with the rest of the organization.
There are so many politics involved with that; I guarantee you no one in sales, marketing, HR, finance, or anything else gives a crap about any technical goal or about what's best for the company or any of that sort of thing. They only know ego and the size of their Christmas bonus. So you have to deal with them strictly on that basis. But that's an entirely different discussion tangential to what you were asking.
As far as motivating your team, the best summation of how to approach it that I've ever seen is
this video.
The second and last gotcha to be on guard for with the transition you're making is to embrace the exercise of your own authority. Human groups need authority to function well. It's how we're wired (unfortunately). You have to get over your natural reluctance as a programmer to exercise it. If you don't make firm decisions and stick to your guns, the team will begin to unravel. Some members may start to undermine you, and that will make it impossible for the team to accomplish its goals, to everyone's detriment. It's very difficult to make this psychological shift and you may experience a lot of feelings of guilt and self-doubt and it can really tear you down if you don't deal with it well. You might want to have a occupational therapist or somebody like that on hand to counsel you as you go through it. Otherwise you won't make it or you'll go full evil in reaction when the programmers stop doing their jobs.
I interviewed with the CIA in '98 for a "Consular Officer" position. Basically you live at an American embassy in some shithole country and pretend to be a regular member of the Foreign Service. You spend your time attending diplomatic functions trying to recruit informants. Yes, it really is that ridiculous.
The woman interviewing me was the station chief for Europe. The interview consisted of role playing scenarios like "You're in a car with your informant at night and run over a kid's dog. Do you stop?" (Uhh, duhh, no?) It went downhill from there. The stated salary was $30K/yr. After working for 10 years it might go up to $50K/yr if you manage to avoid disappearing into a foreign prison because, um, it's so hard to tail people going in and out of the embassy.
Anyway the woman was such a mental midget I decided anyone who would put their lives in such a person's hands for $30K/yr would have to be catatonically stupid. I cut the interview short and left. 3 months later there was an article in the New York Times about the Russians arresting an American spy, whose picture was shown. It was the same chick.
How can an agency that entertains such idiocy be anything but a joke?
I was centrally involved with relief for the Haiti earthquake and observed the Red Cross and many other such organizations in action. Or rather inaction. Their lack of logistical expertise and disaster planning is shocking.
But one outfit that did seem to have their act together was Doctors without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres. They just hop on planes and start helping people, no BS. They also seem to have relatively low overhead, which is where the lion's share of every donated dollar goes at most charities. Maybe someone else on/. knows differently, but at least from the outside as a colleague they seemed effective and well deserving of support.
How can you be *good* at investing when accepted corporate culture has normalized cooking the books to create the appearance of short term profits so the CEO can exercise stock options and walk away with millions? How can you be *good* at investing when there is such massive, systemic fraud? And I'm not even talking about the financial sector. That's even worse.
Let's stop pretending that any part of our system conforms to what we were taught in school about democracy or capitalism. The 1% have gamed the system so much that what we're living in is a giant ponzi scheme. It's already failed massively, but instead of fixing it they doubled down. Can you imagine what's going to happen when it fails again, as it inevitably will?
Yes, many people spend their money foolishly. They are also surrounded 24/7, 360 degrees by incessant messaging to do exactly that, paid for--wait for it--by those same companies who are pushing the ponzi scheme. In an ideal world people would tune out that messaging and behave rationally. We do not live in that ideal world.
OK, folks, let's concede that the government has ceased to be anything but an extension of the kleptocracy. Let's drop the left-vs-right, Republican-vs.-Democrat BS that is a dangerous distraction. Let's drop all the BS memes that have been focus-group tested by the 1% to take everyone's minds off what's really going on. OK? Let's stop pretending that Congress or any part of the government will listen to any level or form of input or bitching and change its ways. Let's just drop that stuff because it's unproductive.
Instead, let's approach this problem like the scientists, engineers, geeks, nerds, and can-do people we are and see it as a technical challenge we can solve. Society is broken, the economy is broken, government is broken. How do we fix it?
If SOPA is threatening the traditional internet, how do we route around the damage? Can we dramatically grow the number of nodes and routing capabilities? Can we design an open source ad-hoc mesh network that makes any attempt to shut it down an impossible project of confiscating every router, cellphone, car, and thing in the world that can communicate with each other?
Can we design crowd-sourcing tools that allow the 99% to track and neutralize the 1% far more effectively than they could ever do to us? Can we make it possible to in every way tell them that their BS is no longer welcome on Planet Earth?
Can we re-wire technical systems to promote and support the Steve Jobs & Woz's of the world to create a brighter future for us all?
That's really the conversation we ought to be having on/. every day, not endless hand-wringing about the supposed government and big companies who JUST WON'T LISTEN TO US.
Governments are incredibly inefficient. They're even more inefficient than Big Corporations. Bureaucracy hobbles them both. People who work for Government or for Big Corporations are the bottom of the barrel, because no one intelligent and creative would long survive an environment where their work and activity are constrained by a PHB with a room-temperature IQ but an incredible sociopathic ability to kiss ass.
So let's place any tech tool in the hands of those people versus in the hands of an intelligent, creative, and highly motivated person who is unconstrained by the illusion that governments and big corporations know best and can manage better. I'll put my money on the latter every time.
There are people who will think that's scary, but to me it's an ever bright beacon of freedom: the people will always prevail.
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This solution works for me too. Hand the code over. If it's clear you know what you're doing and have covered all the angles, I'll leave you alone. But even if you do know what you're doing it often helps to get perspective from someone who isn't so close to the work. And sometimes the boss has seen a lot of stuff you haven't and can open up new approaches for the experienced coder, too, because most people only learn what they have to know to get the job done and move on, so it's possible the boss has seen things that have been outside your critical path.
However, there are also a great many coders out there who honestly don't know their ass from their elbows and program by rote. This phenomenon has grown exponentially since the tech industry decided to outsource all work to India and China and insource H1-B's from India and China. So having a boss closely manage code development is often the only thing standing between endless spec minutiae and getting something to market.
Your mileage may vary.
Or you could get the best of both worlds and get a convertible laptop. Lenovo makes them. Got an x41 6 years ago and it's the best machine I've ever owned. It's a laptop when I want to work, and a tablet when I want to read ebooks or draw or goof around. Why play the either/or game when you can have both?
They've gone past being a liability. Now they're just an embarrassment. Let's cut them loose and treat them the same as we did the other state that practiced apartheid--South Africa. That means we drop all aid, divest all business with them, and reduce diplomatic contact to a minimum. If they want to be idiots, fine, go be idiots. But America shouldn't be party to their lunacy any more.
The disease is the out of control kleptocracy--corporations and the 1% dismantling everything good about our society. Learning different techniques to fool facial recognition software, etc, etc will only ever be used be a few while most will acquiesce. In short, it will make no difference to the trajectory of the path we're on.
The only, definitive way to put an end to all this crap is to tear down this failed system and start on America 2.0. America 1.0 got a lot of things right, and those things should be kept. But we also got some things wrong, and other things have developed that the original designers couldn't have foreseen. So let's wrest control back from the corrupt in that good old American way, non-violently if possible, by force of arms if necessary.
But sitting around, wasting time on weasel tactics like these is completely counter-productive. Let's act preemptively and use technology to destabilize the 1%, put them to flight, and make sure the crap they've been up to never happens again.
about what's going to happen when 3D printing and bioscale assemblers hit the mainstream. Right now we're having trouble because the [MP/RI]AA, who represent comparatively tiny industries, are pushing to destroy open systems. Imagine what happens when the Monsanto's and Walmarts of the world jump on the bandwagon because consumers stop consuming and start manufacturing on their own.
I imagine that if we win that battle an era of unparalleled advancement, freedom, and opportunity for humanity lies on the other side; however, the powers that be will not go quietly, and there will likely be an unprecedented era of repression that will only be overcome with a great deal of trouble and not a little bloodshed.
The only way I can imagine it breaking our way without said bloodshed is if we plan it such that it all happens at once everywhere from as many places as possible, using darknets, ad-hoc mesh networks, and other ways to ensure freedom of information and clever replication schemes to make sure you, me, and everyone we know gets in on the quantum leap in capability immediately instead of the usual diffusion model that has been constant in human history. That is, we can't afford to wait the 20 years for everyone to get a computer and online to get everyone's hands on 3D printers; and that means we have to build dead-simple interfaces into those technologies from the outset to cut the learning curve to zero.
We can't give the powers that be time to react. We can't give them the chance to divide, deflect, and defeat the change.
I have read /. almost from the beginning. My first user ID was four digit, but lost track and contact while making the transition from the West Coast to the East Coast. CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, heck, even Jon Katz are names that are woven into the DNA of my online experience. Every day for years I have seen their handles and known that somewhere in the universe something was OK. So when CmdrTaco signed off, it was like losing a member of my family. Losing Steve Jobs was sad, but nowhere near as immediate to me as that.
You are also quite mistaken about how the Occupy protesters "have a lot to learn" about messaging, organizing, persuading others, etc. New York is the worldwide capital of advertising, fashion, and image making in general and those industries were heavily represented at OWS. How do we know? Well, you heard about OWS for months; when was the last time you heard about traditional, take to the streets protests? Hint: it's not because the latter don't happen all the time but because the powers that be have grown quite expert at ignoring/dismissing/hiding them. But OWS got your attention precisely because they are expert at communicating.
You're also mistaken about their goals. You did not need to look much farther than the Wikipedia entry to find them, but it is easier to get your information from Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Fox News than to do a little independent checking.
What is a legitimate question is to ask, what's next? Occupy Wall Street represents a different approach than the traditional approaches that the 1% have become past masters at pigeonholing/deflecting/defeating/ignoring. That's why they have gotten as much coverage as they have, because it's different. But how to take it to the next level is an open question. It will, however, be taken to the next level because the underlying issues have not been addressed and the government has not even started to pretend to address them. They're doubling down on tired forms and bankrupt memes.
I hope OWS and the Tea Party forces team up; they differ on the margins but share the same core concerns--the system doesn't work any more for the vast majority of the American people. Crowd-sourced surveillance and expose of the 1%, the way they are trying to monitor and control us, I believe will be the straw that breaks the camel's back of the status quo. The 1% can only succeed under the cloak of night and in the comfort of their backrooms and private clubs. If we rip that cover away, the public revulsion will be instant and universal and ineluctable.
I do the same but that option is about to go away, too, because the TSA has what they call VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) to bring their security theater to every other form of transportation in America. I have seen them in the New York subway. There have been reports of them stopping cars on the highway. It won't be long before "Comrade, your papers please" becomes standard practice in America.
Everyone is on Facebook and Twitter. Building a separate social network is counterproductive. They need to broaden their appeal, not isolate themselves into ever decreasing gyres of fanaticism.
They need to focus on unassailable connectivity and access to information via ad-hoc mesh networks and darknets, a professionally produced information system, and a comprehensive, crowd-sourced, and published surveillance of the 1% and forces who are trying to control and divide the American people and forestall the inevitable change. If the 1% and its servants in the government know there is no more place to hide, they'll really feel the pressure to change. If everything they do becomes known to the American people, then their claim to legitimacy will falter. If we yank back the curtain and reveal the little man working the levers, then the illusion of omnipotence will be broken.
That should be enough to force change in America. If not, then at least we the people will have all the intel we need to take further measures.
In October polls indicated that the majority of Americans agreed with the points Occupy Wall Street was raising. Coverage has waned, attention spans have shifted, and holidays have happened since then but a plurality still support them despite constant work by the corporate media (esp. Fox) to paint them as dirty no-good hippies.
When you look at what they're about, and what the Tea Party was/is? about they share core beliefs, the prime among which is that the American people have lost control of their government. If OWS and the Tea Party put aside their relatively minor differences, realized they're two sides of the same coin, and worked together the 1% would be out on its ass in a fortnight. For all of our hand-wringing to the contrary, Americans are not passive Chinese or Russians who will take endless abuse, and we are still a relatively heavily armed people. Yes, the US military has citizens outgunned, but can you really see any military commander dropping napalm on suburban Houston?
When you put OWS and the Tea Party together they are the 99%. No amount of corporate media brainwashing can annul that because the underlying issues are deep, systemic, and unresolved. Tomorrow the reaction may march under a different banner than OWS or the Tea Party, but continue it will. I suspect, though, that OWS and the Tea Party were the last friendly warning the 1% will get to straighten out and fly right.
If you have those skills it sounds like it might be worth starting a side business to undercut those rates. The demand for solar is there, but the process is so confusing and paperwork so byzantine most people give up before they get started.
There is one wind turbine from Honeywell that claims to activate at .5mph. It might work for your situation.
Also, since you sound like an enthusiast there are instructables that have projects to use compost to produce methane for cooking/heat/electricity.
You have done a lot of work already, so it might be worth checking into refinancing with a green mortgage/energy efficient mortgage to knock a couple basis points off or to finance additional improvements. Some insurance companies give you a discount on homeowner's insurance if you have a green home, too.
Your break-even time with solar will vary widely depending on several factors. One is the average price per kwh where you are. If you live in a place where it's $.09/kwh, your break-even time will be much longer. In NYC, the price is about twice that, thus your break-even will be shorter. There are also varying degrees of incentives (federal, state, local) that alter the break-even calculation. Furthermore, many places around the country have net-metering policies. That means if you produce more electricity than you use the utility has to send you a check every month. That also affects the break-even time.
It can be a bit complicated to figure out on your own. But if you do the math and shop around you could well find implementing solar panels are more than worth your while to do.
And that's from a strict cost basis. Consider the independence it gives you to produce your own power. Blackout takes down the grid, so what? You're still living in a first world country courtesy of your solar panels. If you commute to work less than 100 miles every day and own an EV or plug-in hybrid, you save tons of money on gas too.
Lastly, you can say that not one penny of yours goes to petro dictators or regressive theocracies who use the money to plot our deaths on a daily basis. That, as the commercial goes, is priceless.
Some insurance companies give you a break on your homeowner's insurance if you make your home energy efficient. In the same way that having good grades gives you a break on your car insurance having a green home signals you're more responsible and conscientious than the average bear.
Also, according to the real estate industry having a green home can increase the value of your home up to 20% when compared to an identical house without efficiency upgrades.
There are banks who will knock basis points off your mortgage if you retrofit your house. They're called 'green mortgages' and can wind up saving you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the mortgage.
When it comes to the contractors, play hardball on their quotes. 1 in 4 contractors is out of work or underemployed right now. It's a buyer's market. Worst comes to worst you can install the panels on the roof yourself if you know how to orient them (ie. you can use a protractor, compass, and plumb line). The main thing is to bring in an electrician to marry the panel output to the rest of the house. Sure, you won't get the official rebate that way but if you're getting the panels at firesale prices it could be cheaper anyway.
Also, before you install solar go after the low-hanging fruit. Most of your home energy costs come from climate control/heating-cooling/HVAC, so the easiest and cheapest step to take is to 'seal the envelope of the house,' ie. max out your insulation, swap out your windows for energy efficient ones, install automatic insulated roll-down shutters that close at night, put on wall sheathing to isolate your wall joists from the siding/exterior to minimize heat transfer, and insulate your floors as well to avoid heat leaching out through the basement.
The next step is to swap your HVAC for an efficient system. A ground-source heat pump is far and away the most proven and efficient system there is; it heats you in the winter and cools you in the summer. Couple a GSHP with a radiant floor heating system, which is the most efficient delivery system there is, and you'll not only save gobs of money but be so comfortable you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. The determining cost factor is what type of subsoil lies beneath your house; if you're sitting on solid rock you're out of luck, but if you have at least 15 ft. of dirt/clay/gravel you're in business.
The third step is to swap out your appliances for energy star ones. It won't help you much if you bought your stuff in the last 5 years, since chances are they already are energy star, but if you're still rocking a 70's era suite of machines you can see significant savings.
There are all kinds of incentives for the first three steps, much more than for wind/solar right now. And there are far more contractors out there who know how to implement them without any special training or markup. You can get competitive bids. And I would do it now, since 1 in 4 contractors is out of work or underemployed right now. It's a buyer's market.
After you've done all those things, you'll be much savvier about the process and in a stronger position to get a good bid on solar. And you'll need it less. And if you completed the first three steps, you may find that installing solar and micro-wind could put you in the plus-energy column, which means the utility has to send you a check every month. That accelerates your break-even time.
Good luck!
Talking about religion or politics in a masonic lodge is one of the few things that will get you kicked out of the fraternity without process. The separation of church and state there is very strict, and they keep it that way because those topics are so inherently divisive. Many of the founding fathers were masons so it makes sense they would have transferred that organizational wisdom to the constitution of the US.
This is asymmetrical warfare in cyberspace, except all the resources of congress don't count for squat here. Even a small group of motivated and skilled hackers can defeat anything congress can throw at them because congress has no conception of how technology works. Even the contractors they hire are not skilled (ever see a government IT project?). FBI? Please, would a skilled programmer work on cool stuff in the free market for more than six figures or for $50K and more bureaucracy and drudgery than you can shake a stick at at the FBI? Let's stop propagating the "government is omnipotent" meme.
Incidentally the Berlin Wall didn't fall for the reason you stated. I was there then. It fell because Hungary and Czechoslovakia stopped closing their borders to Austria and thousands of East Germans decided to "vacation" there. They crossed over, caught a bus north and hey presto were in the west. East Germany couldn't stop them because of warsaw pact treaties and because russia under gorbachev wouldn't change them. So the government of erich honneker destabilized, was replaced with egon krenz, who in a bid to stop the whole country emptying out opened the wall so easterners could visit and come back. That is why it fell.
And it needs to happen post-haste. The US govt, with its passage of the NDAA (the military can arbitrarily arrest you and put your ass in GitMo) and other recent atrocities, is wildly out of control. D.C. and the 1% know their comeuppance is due, and they will slaughter any untold number of us to forestall that.
The American people need to take their country in hand again, no matter what it takes. Intel is the first step.
God Bless America, and keep her safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
In my consulting days I worked in a lot of places across several industries. The idealized IT department you describe, where its staff care about the underserved needs of the company, does not exist. Anywhere. They are either drones, or good but frustrated technologists enmeshed in a system that really wants drones, not creative thinkers and talented problem solvers. And the good ones are never, repeat, never the ones in charge of the IT department.
CIOs have budget and they spend budget. But what they really get evaluated on is whether the CMO's or CEO's email crashed before The Big Presentation (tm) or whether their laptop got infected with a virus and couldn't stream Netflix in the middle of the afternoon. That's it.
And to be frank, the vast majority of the pro-IT posts I've seen here are those which run Windows networks. In which case, you have instantly failed the productivity test so go ahead, lock down every aspect of that OS--then at least they can't knock you on failure to Gestapo the heck out of the system when it comes time for your annual review.
Or you can do what I do, which is to find old machines gathering dust in a closet somewhere, install linux, do what I need to do to get the job done, and submit the end product to IT for publishing to production via a thumbdrive or email to an inbox, which if we want to be honest is the only file server corporate America really uses.
All the comments about submitting requests and going through channels and evaluating this and evaluating that and proper this and proper that don't fly in the real world of deadline-driven delivery schedules (and what industry isn't like that these days?). It's pure fantasy.
There are so many politics involved with that; I guarantee you no one in sales, marketing, HR, finance, or anything else gives a crap about any technical goal or about what's best for the company or any of that sort of thing. They only know ego and the size of their Christmas bonus. So you have to deal with them strictly on that basis. But that's an entirely different discussion tangential to what you were asking.
As far as motivating your team, the best summation of how to approach it that I've ever seen is this video.
The second and last gotcha to be on guard for with the transition you're making is to embrace the exercise of your own authority. Human groups need authority to function well. It's how we're wired (unfortunately). You have to get over your natural reluctance as a programmer to exercise it. If you don't make firm decisions and stick to your guns, the team will begin to unravel. Some members may start to undermine you, and that will make it impossible for the team to accomplish its goals, to everyone's detriment. It's very difficult to make this psychological shift and you may experience a lot of feelings of guilt and self-doubt and it can really tear you down if you don't deal with it well. You might want to have a occupational therapist or somebody like that on hand to counsel you as you go through it. Otherwise you won't make it or you'll go full evil in reaction when the programmers stop doing their jobs.
Good luck!
I interviewed with the CIA in '98 for a "Consular Officer" position. Basically you live at an American embassy in some shithole country and pretend to be a regular member of the Foreign Service. You spend your time attending diplomatic functions trying to recruit informants. Yes, it really is that ridiculous.
The woman interviewing me was the station chief for Europe. The interview consisted of role playing scenarios like "You're in a car with your informant at night and run over a kid's dog. Do you stop?" (Uhh, duhh, no?) It went downhill from there. The stated salary was $30K/yr. After working for 10 years it might go up to $50K/yr if you manage to avoid disappearing into a foreign prison because, um, it's so hard to tail people going in and out of the embassy.
Anyway the woman was such a mental midget I decided anyone who would put their lives in such a person's hands for $30K/yr would have to be catatonically stupid. I cut the interview short and left. 3 months later there was an article in the New York Times about the Russians arresting an American spy, whose picture was shown. It was the same chick.
How can an agency that entertains such idiocy be anything but a joke?
I was centrally involved with relief for the Haiti earthquake and observed the Red Cross and many other such organizations in action. Or rather inaction. Their lack of logistical expertise and disaster planning is shocking.
But one outfit that did seem to have their act together was Doctors without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres. They just hop on planes and start helping people, no BS. They also seem to have relatively low overhead, which is where the lion's share of every donated dollar goes at most charities. Maybe someone else on /. knows differently, but at least from the outside as a colleague they seemed effective and well deserving of support.
How can you be *good* at investing when accepted corporate culture has normalized cooking the books to create the appearance of short term profits so the CEO can exercise stock options and walk away with millions? How can you be *good* at investing when there is such massive, systemic fraud? And I'm not even talking about the financial sector. That's even worse.
Let's stop pretending that any part of our system conforms to what we were taught in school about democracy or capitalism. The 1% have gamed the system so much that what we're living in is a giant ponzi scheme. It's already failed massively, but instead of fixing it they doubled down. Can you imagine what's going to happen when it fails again, as it inevitably will?
Yes, many people spend their money foolishly. They are also surrounded 24/7, 360 degrees by incessant messaging to do exactly that, paid for--wait for it--by those same companies who are pushing the ponzi scheme. In an ideal world people would tune out that messaging and behave rationally. We do not live in that ideal world.
OK, folks, let's concede that the government has ceased to be anything but an extension of the kleptocracy. Let's drop the left-vs-right, Republican-vs.-Democrat BS that is a dangerous distraction. Let's drop all the BS memes that have been focus-group tested by the 1% to take everyone's minds off what's really going on. OK? Let's stop pretending that Congress or any part of the government will listen to any level or form of input or bitching and change its ways. Let's just drop that stuff because it's unproductive.
Instead, let's approach this problem like the scientists, engineers, geeks, nerds, and can-do people we are and see it as a technical challenge we can solve. Society is broken, the economy is broken, government is broken. How do we fix it?
If SOPA is threatening the traditional internet, how do we route around the damage? Can we dramatically grow the number of nodes and routing capabilities? Can we design an open source ad-hoc mesh network that makes any attempt to shut it down an impossible project of confiscating every router, cellphone, car, and thing in the world that can communicate with each other?
Can we design crowd-sourcing tools that allow the 99% to track and neutralize the 1% far more effectively than they could ever do to us? Can we make it possible to in every way tell them that their BS is no longer welcome on Planet Earth?
Can we re-wire technical systems to promote and support the Steve Jobs & Woz's of the world to create a brighter future for us all?
That's really the conversation we ought to be having on /. every day, not endless hand-wringing about the supposed government and big companies who JUST WON'T LISTEN TO US.
Let's work the problem, folks.
Governments are incredibly inefficient. They're even more inefficient than Big Corporations. Bureaucracy hobbles them both. People who work for Government or for Big Corporations are the bottom of the barrel, because no one intelligent and creative would long survive an environment where their work and activity are constrained by a PHB with a room-temperature IQ but an incredible sociopathic ability to kiss ass.
So let's place any tech tool in the hands of those people versus in the hands of an intelligent, creative, and highly motivated person who is unconstrained by the illusion that governments and big corporations know best and can manage better. I'll put my money on the latter every time.
There are people who will think that's scary, but to me it's an ever bright beacon of freedom: the people will always prevail.