If a party to a contract puts language into a contract, the only safe assumption you can make is that said party wants to some day be able to do that thing.
Thank you. I'm astonished at the number of people who don't understand that. And yes, if you really don't intend to do it, take it out. Won't take it out? Then you're either lying, or powerless to make your company not do that thing and have no business representing that your company won't.
That's actually why I hate tipping. When I go to a restaurant, I just want to enjoy a meal. I don't want to enjoy a meal AND have to decide what tip you deserve. If we're going to do some kind of "tip everybody well" scheme, just pay them properly and stop the tipping farce.
What I end up doing is tipping well as long as you're decent, and very well if you're exceptional. You have to be really awful to get no or next to no tip.
I'm also a big proponent of not giving your business to people who treat you badly, so yeah, if you give me bad service I'll absolutely go somewhere I get better service. It's not about passing out rewards or dominance, I'm just not going to pay anybody to treat me poorly when I have another choice.
...did you know that you can render a car inoperable with a device as simple and cheap as a nail? That you can destroy many electronics simply by getting them wet? That you can harm a person simply by swinging a fist into them? Etc, etc, etc.
Yes, we know this. For many things, it's not possible to make them unbreakable, therefore we enact societal consequences for breaking them like jail, fines, etc. It's been that was for, well, all of recorded history.
I don't know why, but outrageously stupid statements are becoming more and more common. No, this house doesn't "exist largely as a set of digital files". It exists largely as tons of wood. The *instructions* are digital files.
It's hardly a no win situation. It's the norm in a lot of professions. If I abuse the privs that come with my job, nobody's going to paper over it and pretend I didn't do anything wrong. If you hand someone authority over life and death, why should it be different?
I know this is a popular sentiment, but I really disagree. It's not possible for a CEO to have such precise and detailed vision into a company that he or she can preclude the possibility of nefarious action by everyone in the company.
Everyone who's been working for more than a couple years will likely find themselves having to decide whether to tell someone up the chain there's a problem. Now imagine the CEO, who is at the top of lots of chains. You're expecting that bad news always finds its way to the top, and that one person has the time to supervise those chains enough that unreported problems are ferreted out.
The blame the CEO for everything mentality is just another way of saying "We don't know if it's your fault, but we're blaming you." I don't think an innocent CEO should fall on his sword in cases like this. A genuinely innocent CEO should be leading the charge and cleaning house.
I can't imagine the appropriate regulators have the skills needed to audit code of that complexity/size to weed out nefarious behavior. If they hired the skills, I can't believe they could afford it.
It'd be much safer to make it a patch that's not stored in the VCS at all. Legit code lives over here in $REPO. Unethical, illegal patch lives elsewhere and is maintained separately. The number of people who knew about this isn't necessarily that large.
It's *possible* they were both unethical and dumb enough to leave this in plain sight, it's just not necessary.
Presidential candidates have only themselves to blame, really. For once, I'd love to have a president's campaign promises include only things that a president actually have power to do. Instead, they promise like a monarch and then deliver like a president.
You're missing the whole point. It's not about being efficient. It's very deliberate inefficiency, in fact.
If you're arguing that government shouldn't do this, back up a couple to where I said: "There's a whole other question of whether government SHOULD do this...."
I'm not convinced they should. I'm convinced they can.
The premise, which was stated in TFA, is that technology is making some jobs disappear. That's been true for centuries, the canonical example being buggy whip manufacturers and the subsequent absence of society's collapse. It's NOT a given that the economy changing is a bad thing.
What if we do automate enough that "get a job" is simply unworkable? Some segments of society will be fine, including most of us (educated, probably reasonably well off). Some won't. I argued the other side of this here once, pointing out that there's TONS to do in areas like medical research. Someone wisely pointed out to me that not everybody is cut out to do medical research. It's true. What do you do with all the people who are good taxi drivers, but we no longer need taxis? Or the ones who flip burgers now, til we automate that? Or the delivery guys who are replaced by autonomous vehicles or drones? I'll be the first to admit this is speculative future, but what if? We can't all mow each other's lawns.
What DO you do if the pool of required labor is smaller than the pool of people?
"I suppose you must believe that every use of a dollar results in equivalent employment."
No.
Great. Well, that's how a government can stimulate employment. It's nothing more than forcing you to spend your money on things that generate more domestic jobs than you would have on your own.
My biggest problem with proposals like this is the wild swings, just like you're mad about. You've been living under SS for 51 years and want to keep it? Well...ok. I completely understand and would choose to let you if it were up to me.
Things like BIA are divisive. I don't want to compel anyone to do it, but if there are 10s or 100s of millions who want to, why not let them? You'd just have to make people stick to their decision. If you opt out of paying in, you can't decide to join if you fall on hard times later. If you opt in to hedge against hard times later, you can't opt out if you become wealthy.
It might not work for the same reason health care insurance is having problems. The people who want it are sick (or smart enough to know they might get sick later). The people who don't are healthy and shortsighted.
Of course it can, does, and has. If you're sitting on cash, I tax it away from you and hire someone to dig ditches with a spoon, I created a job.
If you don't believe that, I suppose you must believe that every use of a dollar results in equivalent employment. I don't think that's true. If I fly to Macau and blow $100,000 at a casino that money probably creates very close to zero domestic jobs. If I hire a couple guys to build a highway, it creates 2 and they'll spend most of that $100,000 creating more jobs.
There's a whole other question of whether government SHOULD do this, but it's unambiguously possible.
Most of those jobs are sh**ty jobs, because going to high school doesn't really prepare you for any jobs where you can make anything like a living wage. For that you need to go to a technical school or college.
I'm not even touching the "living wage" argument. It's the standard and natural preference for experience. If I have a slot to fill and I get two more or less equal candidates, one with experience and one who never had a job, people hire the one with experience.
I've also known very intelligent and capable people who are long term unemployed. Typically they are either horrible in human relations or they have an elitist chip on their shoulder, which amounts to "I'm way to good to be doing that job."
I'm thinking of two specific people, one of whom I happily worked with for about 5 years, and one of whom we hired when he'd been unemployed for about a year and a half. That person has been excellent.
It's naive to ignore things like opportunity cost and the hard fact that life tends to get expensive. The notion that experienced professionals should just go flip burgers is wasteful and ridiculous. If I lost my job, my time would much better be spent finding a new one than flipping burgers and making very little. It's not about arrogance. I cheerfully pick up trash in parks just to make the place look nicer, and I volunteer.
My granddaughter had problems getting an internship when she was in college
Internships are a scam. No one should be expected to work for free. If you are, you're being taken advantage of.
s/other people's money/fruits of other people's labor/g
The point isn't the money, the point is that people labor to create something. Is it reasonable to take it from them, and if so when? Society can't do with it what it wishes with impunity. People stop working when they don't benefit from doing the work.
I lean fiscally conservative, but anyone who believes it's this simple is...well, I'll be a little tactful...very wrong.
Ask new high school grads how easy it is to "get a job". It's possible, but it can take months, and the job you get won't be great and won't pay much. I've also known very intelligent and capable people who were long term unemployed. They aren't anymore, but a year or two out of work completely discounts any "get a job" nonsense. There aren't always jobs for everyone who wants one to get.
t's time for everybody here to grow up and see this for what it was and is, a simple misunderstanding because a kid was doing dangerous looking things.. He needs to take his toy home and grow up a bit...
Absolutely not.
He wasn't doing anything dangerous looking. People overreacted. Fine, I can forgive that. Go ahead and determine that the kid didn't have a bomb, apologize for the misunderstanding, and make an end of it. That didn't happen. The kid was interrogated, arrested, fingerprinted, suspended for 3 days, and might be charged with an actual crime, and he did nothing wrong.
It's time to grow up and accept that punishing people who didn't do anything wrong is never acceptable.
This will obviously be a trigger story for people in the tech community that feel sensitive to this issue
Sure. I'm "sensitive to this issue" because I saw the same sort of stupid abuse of authority, albeit in a minor way. Abuse of authority should get pushback. People make mistakes, and that's fine, but the people who screwed this up should have been told to knock it off before the kid was disciplined.
I just wish they handled this privately with the parents without dragging the liason officer into the mix, the local police, etc.
It should have ended almost immediately. Teacher suspects a bomb, someone competent determines it's a clock, everyone goes about their business, parents get a courtesy call to let them know what happened.
Agreed. Even if it wasn't, there's nothing wrong with money. It's a medium of exchange.
I need to buy thousands of dollars in plumbing services. I produce IT services. It's really, really hard to exchange those in a useful way without this thing called money that we've all agreed to trade. I can easily turn IT services into money, and plumbers will happily accept money because they can easily turn it into something else they need, like supplies and labor.
That's not relevant. My employer paid for my labor. What I do with the money once it's mine isn't the responsibility or to the credit of my employer. What a pharmaceutical company does with their profits once they belong to them are in exactly the same way not to the credit of their customer.
You can keep following that chain back indefinitely. It's not really the consumer's money, it's their employers, or their governments, or whatever. It's a nonsensical view.
First, it seems like the fundamental misunderstanding these people are making is that the code you write embodies your "specialization". Wrong. Your value is not in the code you wrote yesterday, it's in the problem solving ability in that particular domain that resides between your ears. Your value is the code you can write tomorrow.
No convoluted construct is required if you want to retain ownership of the code and just license it to whoever wants it written. Put it in the contract. If the buyer won't take it now, they won't take it with some clunky layer of nonsense on top of it, either.
Seriously, the problem with no industry and no organization anywhere ever is that there aren't enough layers of people making "contributions" that someday trickle down to people who actually do work. It's far more often the converse. You have people with an idea filtered through layers to people who will be tasked with implementing it, who clearly and succinctly explain what's wrong with the idea and how to fix it, then that useful content is filtered back out before it gets to the people who want the thing to begin with. And so yet another project cruises on towards its iceberg.
But sure, add more layers. What could possibly go wrong?
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Thank you. I'm astonished at the number of people who don't understand that. And yes, if you really don't intend to do it, take it out. Won't take it out? Then you're either lying, or powerless to make your company not do that thing and have no business representing that your company won't.
That's actually why I hate tipping. When I go to a restaurant, I just want to enjoy a meal. I don't want to enjoy a meal AND have to decide what tip you deserve. If we're going to do some kind of "tip everybody well" scheme, just pay them properly and stop the tipping farce.
What I end up doing is tipping well as long as you're decent, and very well if you're exceptional. You have to be really awful to get no or next to no tip.
I'm also a big proponent of not giving your business to people who treat you badly, so yeah, if you give me bad service I'll absolutely go somewhere I get better service. It's not about passing out rewards or dominance, I'm just not going to pay anybody to treat me poorly when I have another choice.
...did you know that you can render a car inoperable with a device as simple and cheap as a nail? That you can destroy many electronics simply by getting them wet? That you can harm a person simply by swinging a fist into them? Etc, etc, etc.
Yes, we know this. For many things, it's not possible to make them unbreakable, therefore we enact societal consequences for breaking them like jail, fines, etc. It's been that was for, well, all of recorded history.
I don't know why, but outrageously stupid statements are becoming more and more common. No, this house doesn't "exist largely as a set of digital files". It exists largely as tons of wood. The *instructions* are digital files.
It's hardly a no win situation. It's the norm in a lot of professions. If I abuse the privs that come with my job, nobody's going to paper over it and pretend I didn't do anything wrong. If you hand someone authority over life and death, why should it be different?
That's the faulty premise in the question.
How about "What can we do so that cops shoot people who aren't doing anything wrong less often?"
Prosecute them. Hold them to a HIGHER standard than the rest of us, not a lower one.
I know this is a popular sentiment, but I really disagree. It's not possible for a CEO to have such precise and detailed vision into a company that he or she can preclude the possibility of nefarious action by everyone in the company.
Everyone who's been working for more than a couple years will likely find themselves having to decide whether to tell someone up the chain there's a problem. Now imagine the CEO, who is at the top of lots of chains. You're expecting that bad news always finds its way to the top, and that one person has the time to supervise those chains enough that unreported problems are ferreted out.
The blame the CEO for everything mentality is just another way of saying "We don't know if it's your fault, but we're blaming you." I don't think an innocent CEO should fall on his sword in cases like this. A genuinely innocent CEO should be leading the charge and cleaning house.
I can't imagine the appropriate regulators have the skills needed to audit code of that complexity/size to weed out nefarious behavior. If they hired the skills, I can't believe they could afford it.
It'd be much safer to make it a patch that's not stored in the VCS at all. Legit code lives over here in $REPO. Unethical, illegal patch lives elsewhere and is maintained separately. The number of people who knew about this isn't necessarily that large.
It's *possible* they were both unethical and dumb enough to leave this in plain sight, it's just not necessary.
Presidential candidates have only themselves to blame, really. For once, I'd love to have a president's campaign promises include only things that a president actually have power to do. Instead, they promise like a monarch and then deliver like a president.
You're missing the whole point. It's not about being efficient. It's very deliberate inefficiency, in fact.
If you're arguing that government shouldn't do this, back up a couple to where I said: "There's a whole other question of whether government SHOULD do this...."
I'm not convinced they should. I'm convinced they can.
The premise, which was stated in TFA, is that technology is making some jobs disappear. That's been true for centuries, the canonical example being buggy whip manufacturers and the subsequent absence of society's collapse. It's NOT a given that the economy changing is a bad thing.
What if we do automate enough that "get a job" is simply unworkable? Some segments of society will be fine, including most of us (educated, probably reasonably well off). Some won't. I argued the other side of this here once, pointing out that there's TONS to do in areas like medical research. Someone wisely pointed out to me that not everybody is cut out to do medical research. It's true. What do you do with all the people who are good taxi drivers, but we no longer need taxis? Or the ones who flip burgers now, til we automate that? Or the delivery guys who are replaced by autonomous vehicles or drones? I'll be the first to admit this is speculative future, but what if? We can't all mow each other's lawns.
What DO you do if the pool of required labor is smaller than the pool of people?
Great. Well, that's how a government can stimulate employment. It's nothing more than forcing you to spend your money on things that generate more domestic jobs than you would have on your own.
My biggest problem with proposals like this is the wild swings, just like you're mad about. You've been living under SS for 51 years and want to keep it? Well...ok. I completely understand and would choose to let you if it were up to me.
Things like BIA are divisive. I don't want to compel anyone to do it, but if there are 10s or 100s of millions who want to, why not let them? You'd just have to make people stick to their decision. If you opt out of paying in, you can't decide to join if you fall on hard times later. If you opt in to hedge against hard times later, you can't opt out if you become wealthy.
It might not work for the same reason health care insurance is having problems. The people who want it are sick (or smart enough to know they might get sick later). The people who don't are healthy and shortsighted.
Of course it can, does, and has. If you're sitting on cash, I tax it away from you and hire someone to dig ditches with a spoon, I created a job.
If you don't believe that, I suppose you must believe that every use of a dollar results in equivalent employment. I don't think that's true. If I fly to Macau and blow $100,000 at a casino that money probably creates very close to zero domestic jobs. If I hire a couple guys to build a highway, it creates 2 and they'll spend most of that $100,000 creating more jobs.
There's a whole other question of whether government SHOULD do this, but it's unambiguously possible.
I'm not even touching the "living wage" argument. It's the standard and natural preference for experience. If I have a slot to fill and I get two more or less equal candidates, one with experience and one who never had a job, people hire the one with experience.
I'm thinking of two specific people, one of whom I happily worked with for about 5 years, and one of whom we hired when he'd been unemployed for about a year and a half. That person has been excellent.
It's naive to ignore things like opportunity cost and the hard fact that life tends to get expensive. The notion that experienced professionals should just go flip burgers is wasteful and ridiculous. If I lost my job, my time would much better be spent finding a new one than flipping burgers and making very little. It's not about arrogance. I cheerfully pick up trash in parks just to make the place look nicer, and I volunteer.
Internships are a scam. No one should be expected to work for free. If you are, you're being taken advantage of.
s/other people's money/fruits of other people's labor/g
The point isn't the money, the point is that people labor to create something. Is it reasonable to take it from them, and if so when? Society can't do with it what it wishes with impunity. People stop working when they don't benefit from doing the work.
I lean fiscally conservative, but anyone who believes it's this simple is...well, I'll be a little tactful...very wrong.
Ask new high school grads how easy it is to "get a job". It's possible, but it can take months, and the job you get won't be great and won't pay much. I've also known very intelligent and capable people who were long term unemployed. They aren't anymore, but a year or two out of work completely discounts any "get a job" nonsense. There aren't always jobs for everyone who wants one to get.
When I went to college, not that long ago, grants were a small part of overall aid. Your idea would result in students just taking out larger loans.
Absolutely not.
He wasn't doing anything dangerous looking. People overreacted. Fine, I can forgive that. Go ahead and determine that the kid didn't have a bomb, apologize for the misunderstanding, and make an end of it. That didn't happen. The kid was interrogated, arrested, fingerprinted, suspended for 3 days, and might be charged with an actual crime, and he did nothing wrong.
It's time to grow up and accept that punishing people who didn't do anything wrong is never acceptable.
Sure. I'm "sensitive to this issue" because I saw the same sort of stupid abuse of authority, albeit in a minor way. Abuse of authority should get pushback. People make mistakes, and that's fine, but the people who screwed this up should have been told to knock it off before the kid was disciplined.
It should have ended almost immediately. Teacher suspects a bomb, someone competent determines it's a clock, everyone goes about their business, parents get a courtesy call to let them know what happened.
Agreed. Even if it wasn't, there's nothing wrong with money. It's a medium of exchange.
I need to buy thousands of dollars in plumbing services. I produce IT services. It's really, really hard to exchange those in a useful way without this thing called money that we've all agreed to trade. I can easily turn IT services into money, and plumbers will happily accept money because they can easily turn it into something else they need, like supplies and labor.
Money isn't bad. It's actually very useful.
So that monstrous document is saying we should use libraries?
Yes, we should. We already do.
That's not relevant. My employer paid for my labor. What I do with the money once it's mine isn't the responsibility or to the credit of my employer. What a pharmaceutical company does with their profits once they belong to them are in exactly the same way not to the credit of their customer.
You can keep following that chain back indefinitely. It's not really the consumer's money, it's their employers, or their governments, or whatever. It's a nonsensical view.
First, it seems like the fundamental misunderstanding these people are making is that the code you write embodies your "specialization". Wrong. Your value is not in the code you wrote yesterday, it's in the problem solving ability in that particular domain that resides between your ears. Your value is the code you can write tomorrow.
No convoluted construct is required if you want to retain ownership of the code and just license it to whoever wants it written. Put it in the contract. If the buyer won't take it now, they won't take it with some clunky layer of nonsense on top of it, either.
Seriously, the problem with no industry and no organization anywhere ever is that there aren't enough layers of people making "contributions" that someday trickle down to people who actually do work. It's far more often the converse. You have people with an idea filtered through layers to people who will be tasked with implementing it, who clearly and succinctly explain what's wrong with the idea and how to fix it, then that useful content is filtered back out before it gets to the people who want the thing to begin with. And so yet another project cruises on towards its iceberg.
But sure, add more layers. What could possibly go wrong?