That's weird, for me it's the complete opposite. I used to despise them, now I just find them an annoyance and laugh at their patheticness. Whereas Apple I used to find amusing, but they're rising quickly on my "despicableness meter". Google's starting to really get on my nerves too, though for different reasons (Gmail UI suddenly became butt-ugly, and other things like Google Maps seem like they don't work as well as they used to).
The Courier seemed fairly innovative. However, Ballmer killed it before it got out the door and the guy responsible for it took off in search of greener pastures.
I disagree, at least partially. For one thing, politicians are mostly just lawyers who have run for public office. (Then again, generals were previously soldiers too.) But still, lawyers are basically taking advantage of a system which their buddies set up to their (politicians' and lawyers') benefit, rather than trying to fix things with the power that they do have. Soldiers, at least, usually seem to actually believe in the BS they're fed, that they're fighting for a worthy cause, since they're actually being ordered around by politicians (ex-lawyers), not generals (the generals only make the orders more specific; it wasn't a general who decided to invade Iraq).
Imagine if politicians were all engineers who were elected into office (sorta like China!); would engineer-politicians be setting up laws so that they benefit lawyers? No, they'd be setting things up to help their engineering buddies. It's like a clan. Of course, with engineers helping each other out that way, at least we'd have all kinds of technological projects that would probably help the nation's economy, even if some are boondoggles, rather than a bunch of time-wasting lawsuits.
And a black man become president of the US does deserve some kind of award
Why? Idi Amin was a black man too, and he was a monster; should Uganda have gotten an award for having him as their President? Robert Mugabe's a black man too and people are starving to death under his rule. Only a racist would think that someone should get an award for having a certain skin color.
Germany can afford their safety net because they have a giant per-capita GDP, thanks to excelling in lots of high-tech high-value industries. There's tons of high-value stuff made in Germany, much of it exported. What do the Greeks make? It seems that tourism is their biggest industry, just like various banana republics in Central America.
I'll admit I'm not a scientist so I don't know that much about which schools are strongest in which scientific fields, but it was my impression that the Ivy League schools (namely Harvard and Yale) weren't really places where you went to do serious science work, they were places for the kids of rich assholes (politicians, etc.) to go to school and get some BS degree in sociology or something, while they schmooze at the Skulll and Bones club. I would think that major state universities would be the place for science, since science is much more pragmatic than politics.
Yes, exactly. But again, it's still the people's fault (meaning the lower and middle classes), because they allow it to happen when they have the power to vote for change. I don't know about Greece, but here in America, a large chunk of society worships rich people and think they shouldn't have to pay taxes because they're special, they're "job creators", etc., and that all the taxes should be paid by everyone else (including themselves, if they're not rich). For some, it's because they just worship wealth and whomever has the most of it, for others it's because they think they're going to rich pretty soon (and there's lots of overlap there).
As for the Greek working hours, I do have to question what the heck they're spending all their time doing, because I sure don't see many results. Germans, French and Italians produce all kinds of exported merchandise: cars, high-end industrial equipment, aircraft, software, and food and wine. Way over here in North America, I have tons of food in my pantry that says "Made in Italy". But what do the Greeks make? I think I got a small pack of Greek cheese a while ago, but that's the only thing I can think of; their main industries appear to be food (mainly for internal or European consumption) and tourism. That's not a recipe for a strong, first-world economy, that sounds exactly like a lot of poor third-world countries in Central and South America. Just because a bunch of people are working long hours doesn't mean they're going to be prosperous if they're just doing menial jobs, when their neighbors are building $100M aircraft and billion-dollar cruise ships.
Huh? If you start doing things on your own initiative, then you're going over your boss's head by definition, because it's his job to manage everything and know what's going on. That's a good way to get in hot water.
You seem to think that being in a company is like being in a democracy. It's not. It's like being in a feudal dictatorship. The only change you can do in a company without ruffling feathers is something that affects you and only you, and doesn't affect your deliverables (meaning you have to do it on your own time, so it doesn't affect your schedule).
If going to your boss and saying "this is wrong, we need to fix it" causes problems, you have a bad boss and you need to find another job. A good boss listens to input from his underlings, because they're the ones actually doing stuff; in a modern work environment, he's not supposed to be the expert on everything, he's just supposed to facilitate things. But he's still the boss, so doing things without telling him (unless it's all on your own time as I said before and doesn't affect anyone else including your team members) is a recipe for disaster.
Because the shithead bosses usually have the gift of gab; they're good at talking and schmoozing with the higher-ups and BSing them so it sounds like they're doing a lot of managerial work.
Something like this happened to me at my first job. They had flexible hours, so I'd come in a little late (like 10AM), and leave after everyone else, only working 8 hours plus lunch break. My boss had no complaints. Then I decided I'd like to get home earlier so I could do stuff in the evenings, so I started getting up early and getting to work early, like 7AM. Again, I worked 8 hours plus lunch, but now I was leaving while my boss was still there (as he was showing up around 9AM), so he complained that I was leaving too early. So, I went back to my old schedule of getting to work late and leaving late, and he didn't complain any more.
Because certain skills are in high demand in the tech industry, so if you have those skills, companies will try to recruit you. The OP already said this.
Yes, the job market really sucks right now for people with no skills, or who only know how to work retail or wait tables, or who have other professions that aren't in high demand, but many tech jobs are open right now, such as mobile software development.
On the same vain you can Create a better work environment without having to leave your existing company. Most of the time the company wants to change its own environment but no one is willing to stand up and help push it.
I totally disagree with this. If you're just a lowly peon, attempts to change the work environment are generally not well-received, because you're basically saying your boss and his boss are doing a bad job, and this makes them look bad, so they're not going to be very receptive. If you have suggestions and bring them to your boss and he likes them, that's another matter and can work, but if your boss doesn't like your ideas, you either need to shut up or find a new job. Going over your boss's head is usually a good way to get terminated.
And what happens if the whole economy collapses because not enough people are working and contributing to that social safety net? Just look at Greece for instance; everyone's getting largesse from the government and doing very little actual work to pay for it, so they keep asking for loans and bailouts. Safety nets only work if enough people in the population are working to pay for it.
No, lawyers don't do stupid things by and large, they do evil things. There's a difference. Their actions clearly make sense for them, because they make them lots of money. However, they harm other people and society with those actions, making them evil. It's just like someone stealing lots of money from people in a way that they don't get caught (perhaps robbing banks in a particularly clever way); it's not stupid, because it clearly takes skill to pull it off, but it only benefits them, and harms everyone else, making that action evil. People who do evil things deserve to be criticized for it, though obviously Americans like to praise such things these days because they think profit is more important than anything else.
Your steak analogy is bad. You can easily make steaks just as good as some overpriced $60 restaurant steak, and even better, if you know how to cook steak (it's not that hard), and buy a quality steak, and you can do it for a fraction of the price. The key is, that $60 isn't just buying you a steak, it's buying 1) the labor to cook it (plus a guarantee that it's to your liking, if you screw up your own steak you're outta luck, but the restaurant will take back a bad one and redo or replace it), and 2) the restaurant experience: someone waiting on you hand and foot, a nice building and interior atmosphere, etc. You can make food at home that's better than some expensive restaurant, but you won't get any service, you have to spend time doing it yourself, you need to know how to cook yourself (lots of people can't cook worth shit, others can only cook certain types of foods well so they'll go to restaurants for the types of foods they're not good at), etc.
As far as I can tell here, we're not talking about making your own phones at home DIY-style, we're talking about other major companies making competing phones. To use your restaurant analogy, that's like saying it's impossible for someone else to start up a new steakhouse restaurant as good as some existing steakhouse, and that's clearly stupid; anyone with sufficient capital and a good chef can set up a steak restaurant just as good as a fine steakhouse. Similarly, there's nothing that special about Apple; another company of sufficient size and capitalization to hire skilled employees can do the same thing, and they have.
It's located in Switzerland; the ownership is irrelevant. That's great if some of the CERN scientists are American, but they still have to move to Switzerland to work there.
I don't think that's quite right. If anyone was an IBM stockholder in the 70s or 80s, and kept their stock until now, they won't have seen a change except in their stock's value. Sure, the company has entirely changed their business strategy, but as far as the ownership is concerned, it's the same.
If I and a couple of buddies start a business fixing cars, and we decide there's more money in writing iPhone apps, and we transition the company over to that without changing the name, over the course of several years, that doesn't mean it's a different company, thought it may look that way if you look at two snapshots in time, before the transition and after.
Again, I completely disagree. At some point, people are elected who are in charge of things. Someone has to appoint those appointees, and there have to be elected people in the mix who have the power to change things, including the constitution. Sure, there may not be the possibility for immediate change (like in states such as California with its recall elections), but the opportunity does come around now and then. Every republican form of government has mechanisms built in to prevent "mob rule" from taking over and government being too beholden to short-term whims of the voters, by having a long feedback loop; just look at the federal government's Electoral College and the way Senators were chosen before the 17th Amendment. Yes, it sounds like Texas's system is worse than many. But if the people really want change, and don't forget about this and get distracted when the next election rolls around, they can effect change at the ballot box. If they don't, they only have themselves to blame, not people dead for 150 years.
Or perhaps because CERN exists on limited funding and cannot hire every scientist in the world - even if CERN managers love the idea. If a particular place of research is unusually productive... expect long lines at the gates.
That doesn't stop anyone from applying, it just means the competition is greater. Theoretically, CERN would hire the best applicants. So if you're not hired, you weren't the best, hence merit would be a big factor.
The experiments on LHC are scheduled years ahead.
Not that many years; it's been almost 20 years since the SSC. That's plenty of time to move.
Perhaps the scientists are employed by universities and have teaching jobs assigned to them. Then they cannot easily move without abandoning their students. (That would be legal but not very nice.)
I'm sure those students haven't been hanging around those universities for two decades. Are you trying to tell me that a university professor can NEVER leave his job, even between terms?
It also has little or nothing to do with the ".com boom". That was nothing but a bunch of companies that tried to CAPITALIZE on the internet (not actually build and grow it), who had no viable business models. ".com boom" had more to do with companies behind websites, not much else.
I totally disagree. The dot-com boom of the mid-to-late 90s was not only companies capitalizing on the internet by making websites, it was other companies building and growing it for all the new customers that wanted to sign on. In 1990, the only people on the internet were college students and the aforementioned non-commercial institutions. After ~1995, pretty soon everyone and his brother wanted to get on it; this fueled a massive surge in ISPs, and other companies to build and grow the internet itself. All those customers needed a way onto the internet, which was ISPs. All those ISPs needed a way onto the internet, so they had to pay the backbone providers. All the companies like Amazon that set up shop had to get access too. All that new activity fueled the building and growing. All those backbones weren't there before this, because there was no need for that much capacity.
Yes, politicians in Texas and the federal government are in the pocket of lobbyists, however the ultimate responsibility is with the people to elect people who represent them, not some corporations who give them bribes. For all our problems, one thing we don't appear to have is obviously rigged elections. Sure, there's been a few small irregularities here and there which may have cost an election when it was extremely close, but that's about it. If more than 50% of the electorate (or 49.9% of it in those other cases) is so dumb they'll elect corrupt politicians, then they don't really need to rig elections.
Actually, IIRC, the government helped fund a lot of its development back in the 70s and 80s, as it was mainly shared by universities (most of which are publicly-funded) (.edu), government agencies (.gov), the US military (.mil), and some non-profits (.org). However, of course in the 90s private industry took over as the commercial potential of it was realized (.com boom).
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That's weird, for me it's the complete opposite. I used to despise them, now I just find them an annoyance and laugh at their patheticness. Whereas Apple I used to find amusing, but they're rising quickly on my "despicableness meter". Google's starting to really get on my nerves too, though for different reasons (Gmail UI suddenly became butt-ugly, and other things like Google Maps seem like they don't work as well as they used to).
The Courier seemed fairly innovative. However, Ballmer killed it before it got out the door and the guy responsible for it took off in search of greener pastures.
I disagree, at least partially. For one thing, politicians are mostly just lawyers who have run for public office. (Then again, generals were previously soldiers too.) But still, lawyers are basically taking advantage of a system which their buddies set up to their (politicians' and lawyers') benefit, rather than trying to fix things with the power that they do have. Soldiers, at least, usually seem to actually believe in the BS they're fed, that they're fighting for a worthy cause, since they're actually being ordered around by politicians (ex-lawyers), not generals (the generals only make the orders more specific; it wasn't a general who decided to invade Iraq).
Imagine if politicians were all engineers who were elected into office (sorta like China!); would engineer-politicians be setting up laws so that they benefit lawyers? No, they'd be setting things up to help their engineering buddies. It's like a clan. Of course, with engineers helping each other out that way, at least we'd have all kinds of technological projects that would probably help the nation's economy, even if some are boondoggles, rather than a bunch of time-wasting lawsuits.
And a black man become president of the US does deserve some kind of award
Why? Idi Amin was a black man too, and he was a monster; should Uganda have gotten an award for having him as their President? Robert Mugabe's a black man too and people are starving to death under his rule. Only a racist would think that someone should get an award for having a certain skin color.
Yes, that's exactly what I did, after a short time.
That's what I'm wondering.
Germany can afford their safety net because they have a giant per-capita GDP, thanks to excelling in lots of high-tech high-value industries. There's tons of high-value stuff made in Germany, much of it exported. What do the Greeks make? It seems that tourism is their biggest industry, just like various banana republics in Central America.
I'll admit I'm not a scientist so I don't know that much about which schools are strongest in which scientific fields, but it was my impression that the Ivy League schools (namely Harvard and Yale) weren't really places where you went to do serious science work, they were places for the kids of rich assholes (politicians, etc.) to go to school and get some BS degree in sociology or something, while they schmooze at the Skulll and Bones club. I would think that major state universities would be the place for science, since science is much more pragmatic than politics.
Yes, exactly. But again, it's still the people's fault (meaning the lower and middle classes), because they allow it to happen when they have the power to vote for change. I don't know about Greece, but here in America, a large chunk of society worships rich people and think they shouldn't have to pay taxes because they're special, they're "job creators", etc., and that all the taxes should be paid by everyone else (including themselves, if they're not rich). For some, it's because they just worship wealth and whomever has the most of it, for others it's because they think they're going to rich pretty soon (and there's lots of overlap there).
As for the Greek working hours, I do have to question what the heck they're spending all their time doing, because I sure don't see many results. Germans, French and Italians produce all kinds of exported merchandise: cars, high-end industrial equipment, aircraft, software, and food and wine. Way over here in North America, I have tons of food in my pantry that says "Made in Italy". But what do the Greeks make? I think I got a small pack of Greek cheese a while ago, but that's the only thing I can think of; their main industries appear to be food (mainly for internal or European consumption) and tourism. That's not a recipe for a strong, first-world economy, that sounds exactly like a lot of poor third-world countries in Central and South America. Just because a bunch of people are working long hours doesn't mean they're going to be prosperous if they're just doing menial jobs, when their neighbors are building $100M aircraft and billion-dollar cruise ships.
Huh? If you start doing things on your own initiative, then you're going over your boss's head by definition, because it's his job to manage everything and know what's going on. That's a good way to get in hot water.
You seem to think that being in a company is like being in a democracy. It's not. It's like being in a feudal dictatorship. The only change you can do in a company without ruffling feathers is something that affects you and only you, and doesn't affect your deliverables (meaning you have to do it on your own time, so it doesn't affect your schedule).
If going to your boss and saying "this is wrong, we need to fix it" causes problems, you have a bad boss and you need to find another job. A good boss listens to input from his underlings, because they're the ones actually doing stuff; in a modern work environment, he's not supposed to be the expert on everything, he's just supposed to facilitate things. But he's still the boss, so doing things without telling him (unless it's all on your own time as I said before and doesn't affect anyone else including your team members) is a recipe for disaster.
Because the shithead bosses usually have the gift of gab; they're good at talking and schmoozing with the higher-ups and BSing them so it sounds like they're doing a lot of managerial work.
Something like this happened to me at my first job. They had flexible hours, so I'd come in a little late (like 10AM), and leave after everyone else, only working 8 hours plus lunch break. My boss had no complaints. Then I decided I'd like to get home earlier so I could do stuff in the evenings, so I started getting up early and getting to work early, like 7AM. Again, I worked 8 hours plus lunch, but now I was leaving while my boss was still there (as he was showing up around 9AM), so he complained that I was leaving too early. So, I went back to my old schedule of getting to work late and leaving late, and he didn't complain any more.
Because certain skills are in high demand in the tech industry, so if you have those skills, companies will try to recruit you. The OP already said this.
Yes, the job market really sucks right now for people with no skills, or who only know how to work retail or wait tables, or who have other professions that aren't in high demand, but many tech jobs are open right now, such as mobile software development.
On the same vain you can Create a better work environment without having to leave your existing company. Most of the time the company wants to change its own environment but no one is willing to stand up and help push it.
I totally disagree with this. If you're just a lowly peon, attempts to change the work environment are generally not well-received, because you're basically saying your boss and his boss are doing a bad job, and this makes them look bad, so they're not going to be very receptive. If you have suggestions and bring them to your boss and he likes them, that's another matter and can work, but if your boss doesn't like your ideas, you either need to shut up or find a new job. Going over your boss's head is usually a good way to get terminated.
And what happens if the whole economy collapses because not enough people are working and contributing to that social safety net? Just look at Greece for instance; everyone's getting largesse from the government and doing very little actual work to pay for it, so they keep asking for loans and bailouts. Safety nets only work if enough people in the population are working to pay for it.
No, lawyers don't do stupid things by and large, they do evil things. There's a difference. Their actions clearly make sense for them, because they make them lots of money. However, they harm other people and society with those actions, making them evil. It's just like someone stealing lots of money from people in a way that they don't get caught (perhaps robbing banks in a particularly clever way); it's not stupid, because it clearly takes skill to pull it off, but it only benefits them, and harms everyone else, making that action evil. People who do evil things deserve to be criticized for it, though obviously Americans like to praise such things these days because they think profit is more important than anything else.
Your steak analogy is bad. You can easily make steaks just as good as some overpriced $60 restaurant steak, and even better, if you know how to cook steak (it's not that hard), and buy a quality steak, and you can do it for a fraction of the price. The key is, that $60 isn't just buying you a steak, it's buying 1) the labor to cook it (plus a guarantee that it's to your liking, if you screw up your own steak you're outta luck, but the restaurant will take back a bad one and redo or replace it), and 2) the restaurant experience: someone waiting on you hand and foot, a nice building and interior atmosphere, etc. You can make food at home that's better than some expensive restaurant, but you won't get any service, you have to spend time doing it yourself, you need to know how to cook yourself (lots of people can't cook worth shit, others can only cook certain types of foods well so they'll go to restaurants for the types of foods they're not good at), etc.
As far as I can tell here, we're not talking about making your own phones at home DIY-style, we're talking about other major companies making competing phones. To use your restaurant analogy, that's like saying it's impossible for someone else to start up a new steakhouse restaurant as good as some existing steakhouse, and that's clearly stupid; anyone with sufficient capital and a good chef can set up a steak restaurant just as good as a fine steakhouse. Similarly, there's nothing that special about Apple; another company of sufficient size and capitalization to hire skilled employees can do the same thing, and they have.
Yes, exactly.
It's located in Switzerland; the ownership is irrelevant. That's great if some of the CERN scientists are American, but they still have to move to Switzerland to work there.
I don't think that's quite right. If anyone was an IBM stockholder in the 70s or 80s, and kept their stock until now, they won't have seen a change except in their stock's value. Sure, the company has entirely changed their business strategy, but as far as the ownership is concerned, it's the same.
If I and a couple of buddies start a business fixing cars, and we decide there's more money in writing iPhone apps, and we transition the company over to that without changing the name, over the course of several years, that doesn't mean it's a different company, thought it may look that way if you look at two snapshots in time, before the transition and after.
Again, I completely disagree. At some point, people are elected who are in charge of things. Someone has to appoint those appointees, and there have to be elected people in the mix who have the power to change things, including the constitution. Sure, there may not be the possibility for immediate change (like in states such as California with its recall elections), but the opportunity does come around now and then. Every republican form of government has mechanisms built in to prevent "mob rule" from taking over and government being too beholden to short-term whims of the voters, by having a long feedback loop; just look at the federal government's Electoral College and the way Senators were chosen before the 17th Amendment. Yes, it sounds like Texas's system is worse than many. But if the people really want change, and don't forget about this and get distracted when the next election rolls around, they can effect change at the ballot box. If they don't, they only have themselves to blame, not people dead for 150 years.
Or perhaps because CERN exists on limited funding and cannot hire every scientist in the world - even if CERN managers love the idea. If a particular place of research is unusually productive ... expect long lines at the gates.
That doesn't stop anyone from applying, it just means the competition is greater. Theoretically, CERN would hire the best applicants. So if you're not hired, you weren't the best, hence merit would be a big factor.
The experiments on LHC are scheduled years ahead.
Not that many years; it's been almost 20 years since the SSC. That's plenty of time to move.
Perhaps the scientists are employed by universities and have teaching jobs assigned to them. Then they cannot easily move without abandoning their students. (That would be legal but not very nice.)
I'm sure those students haven't been hanging around those universities for two decades. Are you trying to tell me that a university professor can NEVER leave his job, even between terms?
It also has little or nothing to do with the ".com boom". That was nothing but a bunch of companies that tried to CAPITALIZE on the internet (not actually build and grow it), who had no viable business models. ".com boom" had more to do with companies behind websites, not much else.
I totally disagree. The dot-com boom of the mid-to-late 90s was not only companies capitalizing on the internet by making websites, it was other companies building and growing it for all the new customers that wanted to sign on. In 1990, the only people on the internet were college students and the aforementioned non-commercial institutions. After ~1995, pretty soon everyone and his brother wanted to get on it; this fueled a massive surge in ISPs, and other companies to build and grow the internet itself. All those customers needed a way onto the internet, which was ISPs. All those ISPs needed a way onto the internet, so they had to pay the backbone providers. All the companies like Amazon that set up shop had to get access too. All that new activity fueled the building and growing. All those backbones weren't there before this, because there was no need for that much capacity.
Yes, politicians in Texas and the federal government are in the pocket of lobbyists, however the ultimate responsibility is with the people to elect people who represent them, not some corporations who give them bribes. For all our problems, one thing we don't appear to have is obviously rigged elections. Sure, there's been a few small irregularities here and there which may have cost an election when it was extremely close, but that's about it. If more than 50% of the electorate (or 49.9% of it in those other cases) is so dumb they'll elect corrupt politicians, then they don't really need to rig elections.
Actually, IIRC, the government helped fund a lot of its development back in the 70s and 80s, as it was mainly shared by universities (most of which are publicly-funded) (.edu), government agencies (.gov), the US military (.mil), and some non-profits (.org). However, of course in the 90s private industry took over as the commercial potential of it was realized (.com boom).