We just need TERM LIMITS for all Elected Federal offices. I figure give them 12 years in congress max. After that send them packing for home. This Strom Thurmond's 47 years, and Ted Kennedy's 40 years stuff has got to stop.
Joe Biden knows less about coding than my daughter.
He knows less about coding than my Grandma who just now figured out this touch tone dialing thingy... (Forget the cell phone and that pesky "send" button..)
Hell, he probably knows less about coding than he knows about guns...
That's not saying much... Biden generally knows nothing (or perhaps cannot remember anything) about guns or any other subject he goes into public to talk about. He's an old guy who has lied for a living so long he knows no other way, and now he's loosing what was left of his mind and is struggling to keep his story straight enough to get though the current speech without contradicting himself twice in the same paragraph.
I'll say this, Biden is the one major reason I'd never support impeachment of Obama and why I pray he stays alive well past 2016. Biden is off his rocker and off the rails and he cannot remember from one moment to the next what he's said. We are better off with the current president than Biden, maybe not much, but enough I'm not willing to risk Biden.
They tested 16 developers and gave statistics with four significant
figures. I think you would need to test at least 100,000,000
developers to get such precise measurements. Who do they think
they are? Dr. Spock on Star Trek?
Naw, they just used a really accurate ruler, made each measurement 10 times and averaged their results...
You make an excellent point. There is no indication in the fine article about how accurate their results could be statistically, and given their really small sample size it doesn't seem likely 4 significant digits is justified.
It's because software sucks, and no one has any real idea what to do about it.
You are more right than you know. Where writing software is a skill that most can develop, the really good developers are more a cross between engineers and artists. They are more like architects, where the form and function are both of high importance because having software that "works" (in that it does everything required [engineering]) and having software that is "workable" (in that it is easy to use [artist]) are worlds apart. Finding developers that do both engineering and art is rare.
It's not just the GUI interface, but ANY "interface" that needs to be usable, functional, simple to understand and complete. Designing an interface that works is easy, making it functional and simple to understand is much harder, and then making sure it is complete (does enough, but not too much to make it complex) is the real art.
Now my boss is going to be watching the developer's eye movements instead of testing code... This will not end well.
There is no magic bullet and where this might find the sections of code that your developer finds difficult to understand, it still isn't going to give you any idea about the quality of the code they produce. All you will know is how hard they concentrated when producing it.
I remember when we watched SLOC, but it was of marginal value. Then it was logical edges and complexity which was sometimes useful, but not always. Now they want to use biometrics to figure out how complex I find my code? It won't be any more helpful than complexity was.
Keeping code understandable and bug free has always been about naming identifiers, formatting, comments and using standard patterns and TESTING it as much as possible. All these golden bullets will only end up in your foot if you choose to use them....
For the longest time people were sending ethernet raw packets...
So? Look, there are two possible approaches to security here and you don't need a fully encrypted VPN link between two buildings to have a secure link. You could just put your own wire between the two locations and protect the wire from unauthorized physical access.
I'd not suggest you put sensitive financial data on the internet "in the clear", but if you are sure the physical link is only available to your intended destination, you can safely send all the data you want in the clear. If you look at the configurations being used, what was really happening was the exchange was in one room and the traders had platforms in another room near by. They had short physical connections, which, unlike the internet, are easy to physically secure.
I think you missed my point. I'm not condoning some behavior as "minor" and therefor not worthy of attention, but a "hostile work environment" is not the same as sexual assault and rape and when you combine the two into one in an effort to show how pervasive this problem is, you cheapen the really serious, and weaken your real argument.
I've posted elsewhere that we ALL (men, women etc) need to be aware of this issue in the work place and take steps to intervene and avoid these kinds of problems. When we see somebody not acting professionally on the job or when we step over the line ourselves we need to DEAL with it, sooner rather than later. We also need to look out for each other. I'll give you an example...
I was sent on a business trip with two associates, a man and a woman. We where overseas. My female co-worker and I had hotel rooms on the same floor and she often needed to use my company calling card to phone home so we where knocking on each others door from time to time to pass the card back and forth. I never entered her room, nor let her enter mine. Both us guys were available when she needed to go places after work hours and offered to escort her for safety reasons. Not because she couldn't take care of herself (she was a self defense instructor), we where just all looking out for each other. I've done the same thing on many business trips with co-workers.
And that's just to illustrate that we all need to be looking out for each other, even at work. You may not like working with somebody, but the professional thing (and the right thing) to do is be looking out for the folks you work with and quickly deal with harmful situations as they arise and avoid them when possible. So that means dealing with "hostile work environments" before they become a pattern, dealing with harassment quickly and instituting a culture that discourages such behavior.
But my point is grouping rape in the same bin as an occasional off color joke does not serve the case all that well and only serves to make light of the really serious offense.
Not to mention that it cheapens the really serious offenses like rape and repeated harassment when they are grouped in with telling a suggestive joke once or forwarding a suggestive E-mail.
Offending someone is one thing (and should be avoided) but doing actual harm is quite another. Let's not group them together.
Yes, I would expect that in general a gigabit fiber link would be lower latency than a 1.5Mb/s ADSL link.
I don't think I disagree with your last statement. Except to say that there are reasons for higher bandwidth links to be lower latency which are related to the actual time it takes to get a data packet physically on and off the link (which was what I originally claimed) AND for other reasons which are not directly related to the link's speed (bandwidth). In order of increasing importance:
1. Link propagation delay (Cannot go faster than the speed of light, so how long is that path? If you have a satellite hop to a geostationary connection and back, you have a LOT of latency dictated by physics alone.)
2. Physical throughput/Bandwidth (how fast can we encode and decode data on the physical links).
3. Congestion in Switching (Higher throughput means less "store and forward" is happening. Buffering data increases latency.)
4. Number of network hops (Each hop means the packet got taken off the wire and put on another, which takes time. Routers look at the data, which takes even more time. Higher bandwidth equipment usually has faster hardware too.)
5. Driver/System software delays (Kernel time of the operating system. Higher bandwidth usually come with faster hardware and processors.)
The weather will get bad in many places, with continued global warming. Various areas are probably suffering from it right now, it's just that we don't know which areas and how much influence.
How can that be given the dire predictions that have been made? Certainly if man made GW was real there would be no doubt as to the affects it caused, yet here is the unvarnished truth. "We just don't know which areas and how much influence" GW may cause or has already caused (to paraphrase your comment above). Even without knowing though, you are willing to proclaim that things will get worse. I'm not so willing to just accept the party line until there is evidence that we know enough to predict with some known level of accuracy what's going to happen from some climate model or simulation. All we've proven so far is that our models suck for predicting the future.
By "GW advocate", you are referring to the nonscientists, aren't you? There's a bunch of idiots on both sides, but the science seems to be rather one-sided.
Idiots abound, that much is certain. But I'm not so sure about one-sided science. I've seen some pretty good science on both sides. What we really have is once side who wants to claim the question is settled calling the other side names. Global Warming has become a social issue, more than a scientific one, which is dangerous to *real* science. We haven't had any lynchings or mobs burning deniers at the stake yet, but we are approaching that level of intolerance within the idiot community you mention. Thoughtful science that doesn't support the accepted "fact" is not tolerated, but dismissed outright. Which is a sad state of affairs for the real scientific community and exposes them for what they really are... Human like the rest of us..
Think about what you just said for a few... Latency is about how fast you can get some piece of information from one point to another, so if you are only interested in "it's on" or "it's off" then what you say is true, it's about the physical layer and how long the signal takes to propagate physically down the link. But, for networking, we generally send data in "packets" which are always more than one bit. Modulation schemes exist that can send multiple bits per unique signal state (can send more than one bit at a time) but even a small "ping" packet will exceed what can be encoded in one signal state.
In the case where you have to send more than a one unique signal state to send your "packet" of information then the link rate matters because it says how long it takes between unique states at the physical layer. Think of it as sending each bit down the wire, one at a time, the faster you can put the bits on the wire and still receive them at the other end the shorter the transmission time for the "packet" will be.
So, to send 100 bytes on a 14.4Kbaud modem takes longer than the same 100 bytes on the ADSL link going over the same lines. Physically the speed of the signals going over the wire are the same, being electrical signals going over the same wires, but the 100 bytes go faster (and have lower latency) on the ADSL link because they get on and off the wire faster.
I know, it's just impossible to argue that point with the blue kool-aid drinkers. They generally don't pay that close attention to their budgets or where their money is going to realize they are being lied too.
Debt depends what country you're in, not everyone lives in the US, and a medic can probably change countries very easily. As someone who's been through redundancy and employment I regret not becoming a doctor. Apart from the intrinsic karma you are guaranteed lucrative employment for life.
Here in the USA, medical school is EXPENSIVE. It's also likely that wages for doctors will be in decline here, which will make paying back those student loans a long hard process (or at least harder than it is now.)
If you really want to be a doctor and If you can get your medical schooling cheaper elsewhere, I'm not going to tell you not to do it. I'm just advocating that college students need to consider the costs of the schooling they are trying to get and think about how they will be paying back those student loans they will need with the wages they can hope to get.
I say this because I've seen way too many folks here in the USA who have racked up huge student loan bills getting educated in careers which don't pay that much and then live in near poverty for decades just making the minimum loan payments. Here in the USA student loans must be paid even if you go bankrupt, they follow you until death. You pay them back or die trying. So one has to think carefully when getting a student loan.
Colleges though, have made huge profits by getting their students more loans and grants. Some Colleges have done so to their students long term harm, saddling them with very large debts which they have little hope of being able to repay.
Darned dyslexia and auto correct (Not to mention the tiny font and failing eyesight of my browser).... I've always had issues with spelling and although it's getting better over time, I still have times when I just don't see the problem until it's too late...
Hopefully the context makes it clear what I intended to say..
As a general rule, higher bandwidth connections are "faster" end to end, this is NOT universally true, just normally. Consider the latency of sending 100 bytes over a 2400 baud modem verses the same latency noted on a gigabit link (extreme example, I know). It will take a LONG time to transfer that 100 bytes over the modem link then receive a similar reply just because the physical layer takes so long. Higher bandwidth will lower latency.
How much difference is this physical layer delay considering say 10BaseT to 100BaseT? Minor but measurable, all things being equal. But, in general, getting higher bandwidth means newer equipment, which means lower latency, at least on your link.
There is also the "store and forward" part of switches/routers, which if a link is saturated may queue up packets where having more bandwidth will result in less saturation of the link, and thus less queuing. So again, bandwidth can lower latency.
Normally the biggest driver for latency is router performance and the number of links between the two points, unless there is a saturated link, then you will see queuing delays being the major driver. There are lots of special cases... But that's what network admins are paid to understand and deal with.
It's not about average usage, it's about instantaneous usage.
For some of us who play peer to peer games, it's not really about bandwidth usage but how long it takes to get the packet from here to there and back. It's about latency. Generally higher bandwidth means lower latency, but it's not a hard and fast rule.
If you are just downloading or streaming stuff, it's all about bandwidth then because a latency of even a few seconds won't matter much.
Well said.. To which I'd add, don't get into too much debt in the process.... If you love doing something, be thoughtful about the money side. Don't pay more than you can repay for your education. Pick something else and work towards what you really like, paying as you go.
so join them. Become a shareholder. Who's benefiting from the current record setting profits that American corporations are posting? Not the working class that's for sure.
Record profits? Not really, if you look at the dollars corrected for inflation. What's driving stock prices up is the Fed's quantitative easing monetary policy and the artificially low interest rates that this creates. This drives up Real Estate, Stocks, and commodities. It's a bubble that may eventually pop if the Fed isn't able to pull back all the money they are injecting at the right time. At any rate, inflation is on it's way, just don't ask me when.
Oh no.. Engineering isn't dead, but it's definitely not where I would suggest a young person head unless they just had "the gift". Do anything else first.
I would suggest healthcare. With the aging population, there will be a greater need for personal care. Even a healthy older person will need some level of care. I do not think robotics can handle this area well.
I would agree, with one caveat... Don't be a doctor. It takes WAY too much debt to get though medical school and wages for doctors are going to be in sharp decline.
An RN is a good choice. You can get a 4 year degree in nursing without going too far into debt. If you are a good student, get your RN then work on getting licensed as a physicians assistant. If you are not that great of a student, then there are a whole list of "technician" positions, like running the MRI and ultrasound machines which don't take 4 years in college.
That's not to say that a STEM career isn't a bad choice. There will always be a need for engineers and software developers, maybe not a whole lot of them, but there will be at least SOME jobs in this area forever..
But there is one thing we all need to realize. Where it was once normal to do the same job for your whole career, you need to expect to change careers two or three times if you are starting out now. The key is to be flexible, be observant and keep adapting to the market around you.
Did I mention that Rush is an ENTERTAINER yet? He's not a pollination, a reporter, a scientist or the leader of the right wing. But as you so aptly point out, he's not changed his position on the environmentalist wackos and their issues du jour. On your supposed "tree" issue, think about it and look at the facts. 1. Early in our settlement process of the US, planting trees was a requirement to get and keep a homestead. 2. Most trees being harvested in the USA today are actually FARMED and are not "old growth". Meaning somebody planted them in order to cut them. 3. Trees grow readily in fence lines, and we've added a lot of fence lines in the last 200 years... Summary: IMHO there are likely more trees now.
BTW, you simply have to hear "In a Yugo". (It's a song Rush used to play). You will like it.
However, We will never agree.. You drink the blue cool-aid, which is fine...
Slashdot Mirror
I had kept my old gameboy.... Imagine dragging that thing out and streaming a movie on it for your friends.... How did you do that?
We just need TERM LIMITS for all Elected Federal offices. I figure give them 12 years in congress max. After that send them packing for home. This Strom Thurmond's 47 years, and Ted Kennedy's 40 years stuff has got to stop.
Joe Biden knows less about coding than my daughter.
He knows less about coding than my Grandma who just now figured out this touch tone dialing thingy... (Forget the cell phone and that pesky "send" button..)
Hell, he probably knows less about coding than he knows about guns...
That's not saying much... Biden generally knows nothing (or perhaps cannot remember anything) about guns or any other subject he goes into public to talk about. He's an old guy who has lied for a living so long he knows no other way, and now he's loosing what was left of his mind and is struggling to keep his story straight enough to get though the current speech without contradicting himself twice in the same paragraph.
I'll say this, Biden is the one major reason I'd never support impeachment of Obama and why I pray he stays alive well past 2016. Biden is off his rocker and off the rails and he cannot remember from one moment to the next what he's said. We are better off with the current president than Biden, maybe not much, but enough I'm not willing to risk Biden.
They tested 16 developers and gave statistics with four significant figures. I think you would need to test at least 100,000,000 developers to get such precise measurements. Who do they think they are? Dr. Spock on Star Trek?
Naw, they just used a really accurate ruler, made each measurement 10 times and averaged their results...
You make an excellent point. There is no indication in the fine article about how accurate their results could be statistically, and given their really small sample size it doesn't seem likely 4 significant digits is justified.
It's because software sucks, and no one has any real idea what to do about it.
You are more right than you know. Where writing software is a skill that most can develop, the really good developers are more a cross between engineers and artists. They are more like architects, where the form and function are both of high importance because having software that "works" (in that it does everything required [engineering]) and having software that is "workable" (in that it is easy to use [artist]) are worlds apart. Finding developers that do both engineering and art is rare.
It's not just the GUI interface, but ANY "interface" that needs to be usable, functional, simple to understand and complete. Designing an interface that works is easy, making it functional and simple to understand is much harder, and then making sure it is complete (does enough, but not too much to make it complex) is the real art.
Now my boss is going to be watching the developer's eye movements instead of testing code... This will not end well.
There is no magic bullet and where this might find the sections of code that your developer finds difficult to understand, it still isn't going to give you any idea about the quality of the code they produce. All you will know is how hard they concentrated when producing it.
I remember when we watched SLOC, but it was of marginal value. Then it was logical edges and complexity which was sometimes useful, but not always. Now they want to use biometrics to figure out how complex I find my code? It won't be any more helpful than complexity was.
Keeping code understandable and bug free has always been about naming identifiers, formatting, comments and using standard patterns and TESTING it as much as possible. All these golden bullets will only end up in your foot if you choose to use them....
I'm a customer... I don't care.. I'm getting ready to stop the mail side of my subscription anyway.
Let me see.. We are due then? Last major crash was 2008 and it's 2014.
You might be right....
Wow. Something happened, but we don't know what or why.
Yea, well, I guess that it's better that we know where it ended up, unlike some airliners in recent history...
For the longest time people were sending ethernet raw packets...
So? Look, there are two possible approaches to security here and you don't need a fully encrypted VPN link between two buildings to have a secure link. You could just put your own wire between the two locations and protect the wire from unauthorized physical access.
I'd not suggest you put sensitive financial data on the internet "in the clear", but if you are sure the physical link is only available to your intended destination, you can safely send all the data you want in the clear. If you look at the configurations being used, what was really happening was the exchange was in one room and the traders had platforms in another room near by. They had short physical connections, which, unlike the internet, are easy to physically secure.
Misses what point?
I think you missed my point. I'm not condoning some behavior as "minor" and therefor not worthy of attention, but a "hostile work environment" is not the same as sexual assault and rape and when you combine the two into one in an effort to show how pervasive this problem is, you cheapen the really serious, and weaken your real argument.
I've posted elsewhere that we ALL (men, women etc) need to be aware of this issue in the work place and take steps to intervene and avoid these kinds of problems. When we see somebody not acting professionally on the job or when we step over the line ourselves we need to DEAL with it, sooner rather than later. We also need to look out for each other. I'll give you an example...
I was sent on a business trip with two associates, a man and a woman. We where overseas. My female co-worker and I had hotel rooms on the same floor and she often needed to use my company calling card to phone home so we where knocking on each others door from time to time to pass the card back and forth. I never entered her room, nor let her enter mine. Both us guys were available when she needed to go places after work hours and offered to escort her for safety reasons. Not because she couldn't take care of herself (she was a self defense instructor), we where just all looking out for each other. I've done the same thing on many business trips with co-workers.
And that's just to illustrate that we all need to be looking out for each other, even at work. You may not like working with somebody, but the professional thing (and the right thing) to do is be looking out for the folks you work with and quickly deal with harmful situations as they arise and avoid them when possible. So that means dealing with "hostile work environments" before they become a pattern, dealing with harassment quickly and instituting a culture that discourages such behavior.
But my point is grouping rape in the same bin as an occasional off color joke does not serve the case all that well and only serves to make light of the really serious offense.
Not to mention that it cheapens the really serious offenses like rape and repeated harassment when they are grouped in with telling a suggestive joke once or forwarding a suggestive E-mail.
Offending someone is one thing (and should be avoided) but doing actual harm is quite another. Let's not group them together.
Yes, I would expect that in general a gigabit fiber link would be lower latency than a 1.5Mb/s ADSL link.
I don't think I disagree with your last statement. Except to say that there are reasons for higher bandwidth links to be lower latency which are related to the actual time it takes to get a data packet physically on and off the link (which was what I originally claimed) AND for other reasons which are not directly related to the link's speed (bandwidth). In order of increasing importance:
1. Link propagation delay (Cannot go faster than the speed of light, so how long is that path? If you have a satellite hop to a geostationary connection and back, you have a LOT of latency dictated by physics alone.)
2. Physical throughput/Bandwidth (how fast can we encode and decode data on the physical links).
3. Congestion in Switching (Higher throughput means less "store and forward" is happening. Buffering data increases latency.)
4. Number of network hops (Each hop means the packet got taken off the wire and put on another, which takes time. Routers look at the data, which takes even more time. Higher bandwidth equipment usually has faster hardware too.)
5. Driver/System software delays (Kernel time of the operating system. Higher bandwidth usually come with faster hardware and processors.)
So are we good?
The weather will get bad in many places, with continued global warming. Various areas are probably suffering from it right now, it's just that we don't know which areas and how much influence.
How can that be given the dire predictions that have been made? Certainly if man made GW was real there would be no doubt as to the affects it caused, yet here is the unvarnished truth. "We just don't know which areas and how much influence" GW may cause or has already caused (to paraphrase your comment above). Even without knowing though, you are willing to proclaim that things will get worse. I'm not so willing to just accept the party line until there is evidence that we know enough to predict with some known level of accuracy what's going to happen from some climate model or simulation. All we've proven so far is that our models suck for predicting the future.
By "GW advocate", you are referring to the nonscientists, aren't you? There's a bunch of idiots on both sides, but the science seems to be rather one-sided.
Idiots abound, that much is certain. But I'm not so sure about one-sided science. I've seen some pretty good science on both sides. What we really have is once side who wants to claim the question is settled calling the other side names. Global Warming has become a social issue, more than a scientific one, which is dangerous to *real* science. We haven't had any lynchings or mobs burning deniers at the stake yet, but we are approaching that level of intolerance within the idiot community you mention. Thoughtful science that doesn't support the accepted "fact" is not tolerated, but dismissed outright. Which is a sad state of affairs for the real scientific community and exposes them for what they really are... Human like the rest of us..
Think about what you just said for a few... Latency is about how fast you can get some piece of information from one point to another, so if you are only interested in "it's on" or "it's off" then what you say is true, it's about the physical layer and how long the signal takes to propagate physically down the link. But, for networking, we generally send data in "packets" which are always more than one bit. Modulation schemes exist that can send multiple bits per unique signal state (can send more than one bit at a time) but even a small "ping" packet will exceed what can be encoded in one signal state.
In the case where you have to send more than a one unique signal state to send your "packet" of information then the link rate matters because it says how long it takes between unique states at the physical layer. Think of it as sending each bit down the wire, one at a time, the faster you can put the bits on the wire and still receive them at the other end the shorter the transmission time for the "packet" will be.
So, to send 100 bytes on a 14.4Kbaud modem takes longer than the same 100 bytes on the ADSL link going over the same lines. Physically the speed of the signals going over the wire are the same, being electrical signals going over the same wires, but the 100 bytes go faster (and have lower latency) on the ADSL link because they get on and off the wire faster.
I know, it's just impossible to argue that point with the blue kool-aid drinkers. They generally don't pay that close attention to their budgets or where their money is going to realize they are being lied too.
Debt depends what country you're in, not everyone lives in the US, and a medic can probably change countries very easily. As someone who's been through redundancy and employment I regret not becoming a doctor. Apart from the intrinsic karma you are guaranteed lucrative employment for life.
Here in the USA, medical school is EXPENSIVE. It's also likely that wages for doctors will be in decline here, which will make paying back those student loans a long hard process (or at least harder than it is now.)
If you really want to be a doctor and If you can get your medical schooling cheaper elsewhere, I'm not going to tell you not to do it. I'm just advocating that college students need to consider the costs of the schooling they are trying to get and think about how they will be paying back those student loans they will need with the wages they can hope to get.
I say this because I've seen way too many folks here in the USA who have racked up huge student loan bills getting educated in careers which don't pay that much and then live in near poverty for decades just making the minimum loan payments. Here in the USA student loans must be paid even if you go bankrupt, they follow you until death. You pay them back or die trying. So one has to think carefully when getting a student loan.
Colleges though, have made huge profits by getting their students more loans and grants. Some Colleges have done so to their students long term harm, saddling them with very large debts which they have little hope of being able to repay.
Darned dyslexia and auto correct (Not to mention the tiny font and failing eyesight of my browser).... I've always had issues with spelling and although it's getting better over time, I still have times when I just don't see the problem until it's too late...
Hopefully the context makes it clear what I intended to say..
As a general rule, higher bandwidth connections are "faster" end to end, this is NOT universally true, just normally. Consider the latency of sending 100 bytes over a 2400 baud modem verses the same latency noted on a gigabit link (extreme example, I know). It will take a LONG time to transfer that 100 bytes over the modem link then receive a similar reply just because the physical layer takes so long. Higher bandwidth will lower latency.
How much difference is this physical layer delay considering say 10BaseT to 100BaseT? Minor but measurable, all things being equal. But, in general, getting higher bandwidth means newer equipment, which means lower latency, at least on your link.
There is also the "store and forward" part of switches/routers, which if a link is saturated may queue up packets where having more bandwidth will result in less saturation of the link, and thus less queuing. So again, bandwidth can lower latency.
Normally the biggest driver for latency is router performance and the number of links between the two points, unless there is a saturated link, then you will see queuing delays being the major driver. There are lots of special cases... But that's what network admins are paid to understand and deal with.
It's not about average usage, it's about instantaneous usage.
For some of us who play peer to peer games, it's not really about bandwidth usage but how long it takes to get the packet from here to there and back. It's about latency. Generally higher bandwidth means lower latency, but it's not a hard and fast rule.
If you are just downloading or streaming stuff, it's all about bandwidth then because a latency of even a few seconds won't matter much.
Well said.. To which I'd add, don't get into too much debt in the process.... If you love doing something, be thoughtful about the money side. Don't pay more than you can repay for your education. Pick something else and work towards what you really like, paying as you go.
so join them. Become a shareholder. Who's benefiting from the current record setting profits that American corporations are posting? Not the working class that's for sure.
Record profits? Not really, if you look at the dollars corrected for inflation. What's driving stock prices up is the Fed's quantitative easing monetary policy and the artificially low interest rates that this creates. This drives up Real Estate, Stocks, and commodities. It's a bubble that may eventually pop if the Fed isn't able to pull back all the money they are injecting at the right time. At any rate, inflation is on it's way, just don't ask me when.
Oh no.. Engineering isn't dead, but it's definitely not where I would suggest a young person head unless they just had "the gift". Do anything else first.
I would suggest healthcare. With the aging population, there will be a greater need for personal care. Even a healthy older person will need some level of care. I do not think robotics can handle this area well.
I would agree, with one caveat... Don't be a doctor. It takes WAY too much debt to get though medical school and wages for doctors are going to be in sharp decline.
An RN is a good choice. You can get a 4 year degree in nursing without going too far into debt. If you are a good student, get your RN then work on getting licensed as a physicians assistant. If you are not that great of a student, then there are a whole list of "technician" positions, like running the MRI and ultrasound machines which don't take 4 years in college.
That's not to say that a STEM career isn't a bad choice. There will always be a need for engineers and software developers, maybe not a whole lot of them, but there will be at least SOME jobs in this area forever..
But there is one thing we all need to realize. Where it was once normal to do the same job for your whole career, you need to expect to change careers two or three times if you are starting out now. The key is to be flexible, be observant and keep adapting to the market around you.
Did I mention that Rush is an ENTERTAINER yet? He's not a pollination, a reporter, a scientist or the leader of the right wing. But as you so aptly point out, he's not changed his position on the environmentalist wackos and their issues du jour. On your supposed "tree" issue, think about it and look at the facts. 1. Early in our settlement process of the US, planting trees was a requirement to get and keep a homestead. 2. Most trees being harvested in the USA today are actually FARMED and are not "old growth". Meaning somebody planted them in order to cut them. 3. Trees grow readily in fence lines, and we've added a lot of fence lines in the last 200 years... Summary: IMHO there are likely more trees now.
BTW, you simply have to hear "In a Yugo". (It's a song Rush used to play). You will like it.
However, We will never agree.. You drink the blue cool-aid, which is fine...