If a portion of UML is not widely known, to the point that only one or two people on a software team readily understand it, then it is essentially not worth it and it might as well not exist.
The only risk there is that it kind of sounds like you're trying to teach to the middle of the class. If it's an important enough concept to make a difference, it might be worth teaching the team members who don't get it.
That said, there's certainly too much UML arcana and there are too many people who piss about with it. I use certain core parts of the UML a lot, but that's not the same as trying to impose every feature of UML on an IT department that already has enough bullshit to contend with.
Standard notation is a wonderful thing. Ultimately I don't give a money's fart if it's UML or something else, as long as it's expressive enough and not too hard to read. And whatever it is, it's there to illustrate how something works or is supposed to work. In some problem domains that might be overkill, and in others it's essential to getting the damned thing built, tested and deployed. Professional judgment is needed to decide where it's useful and where it isn't.
Random searches provide excellent security, provided the punishment for getting caught exceeds the benefits multiplied by the risk.
That's an overly simplistic calculation. From the bad guy's point of view, what really matters is (the probability of getting caught) times (the penalty for getting caught) versus the benefits of success. Why that matters is that random searches may well have a success rate of less than 100%, especially when what is being searched for is not known by the searchers. I use the term "penalty" rather than "punishment" because delay and disruption might well matter to a terrorist planner as much as whether one of his goons winds up in jail.
And, as you mention, that's taking the point of view that there should be deterrence regardless of cost. In real life, there is a cost to society of implementing random searches. Along with the cost of delays and the loss of liberty (to name two), there is the very real cost of false positives. For a search methodology that is attempting to catch all of a very small number of bad guys in a very large population (for example, a few dozen terrorists among a few million air travellers), the rate of false positives can be huge. I'll not do a calculation here, but with some very charitable assumptions about the specificity and sensitivity of TSA searches it's still possible to have tens of thousands of innocent people falsely detained (and possibly punished) for every real terrorist.
What makes you think the next place will be any better?
I'm a consultant. I've been at maybe 30 client sites over the past several years. Only one did that level of monitoring, and these are big, well-known companies. So the odds are good that there are other places to work where they are more focused on making money than micromanaging the hell out of their employees and contractors.
Incidentally, even though most monitoring seems pretty relaxed, I don't make assumptions about that. I am usually given a client company's email address when I show up. I never use that for anything but client business, and I assume that anything that goes over that channel will be monitored. And I never do IM's from the client site and never use client-provided web access for anything but client work (OK, maybe I look up a restaurant on Yelp occasionally so I can have some variety at lunchtime). I do ssh into my own server and send email from there when I need to. Nobody has ever said anything about that, and if they did, I wouldn't answer beyond "None of your business, bite my crank." If they want more, that's why they have subpoenas. Even then, I never do work for client B while at client A's site, and never make comments about a client that I couldn't back up if challenged. Doing otherwise is unethical, and also just plain slimy.
Where this level of intrusive monitoring does happen, I see it as a displacement activity practiced by incompetent managers: they can't tell how their people are really doing, so instead they find something that they do understand and try to control that. Unfortunately it tells them next to nothing about real performance. I'm fairly senior in our firm, and if I find a manager pulling that kind of stunt, I start asking them awkward questions about how they prioritize the monitoring of consultants' email use relative to, say, their project's client satisfaction or progress to plan. If it's anything but bottom of the list, they're on a performance-improvement plan, and they have six months to adjust their behavior or they're out the door. We're in a high-turnover business, and our ability to retain good people contributes to our competitive advantage. Fucking with them needlessly is expensive and stupid unless there's an obvious problem.
# Employers are shifting a lot of work offshore to take advantage of cheap labor. This is almost always the reason for doing this.
Agree.
# Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.
Disagree. They are from much poorer countries, and the compensation gap between an IT job and alternative employment is higher. So they need the income more desperately than a Westerner who is better able to find alternative employment.
# Even though the work ethic is better, projects tend to come in late. Maybe it's language, maybe it's the distance, whatever.
The work ethic, is not better. What looks to you like a work ethic is greater desperation and being on the receiving end of harshly explotative tentacle of globalization.
# Quality tends to suffer. Why? Part of it has to do with skill level, but I think the other part is that requirements are filtered through several layers of project managers and analysts.
And since they're exploited, the can't talk back to the boss. So they'll do what they're told whether it makes sense or not. One of the innovations that drove quality improvements was to empower any assembly-line worker to stop the line if a quality problem was detected. Offshoring has been optimized to balance two factors: cost to the buyer, and how much the middleman rakes off for the transaction. There also tends to be a big emphasis on schedule, since it's a big cost driver for the buyer. But in achieving these optimizations, the system has firewalled off any feedback path that could be used to improve product quality.
I've been working in IT jobs in the US for my whole career. The idea that there is such a thing as cheap, crappy, quality-insensitive commodity computing was always a beancounter's brainfart and nothing else.
Oh, and regarding your wish to see the IT workforce shrink: I was in aerospace during two of its brutal contractions. Don't assume that some kind of Darwinian selection by skill level takes place as they staff down. The selective advantage is to whoever can hang onto a job. That can be accomplished by skills, showmanship, ass-kissing or nepotism. Don't bet on it always being skills. Once we lost 90% of our software-engineering workforce, the quality of the survivors did not improve. The percentage of the workforce who had either family ties to senior management or incriminating videos did go up, though.
What you can do is to create a replicated database where they can execute their queries and do their mistakes.
I'm not entirely sure what they're using the DB for right now, but it it's anything transactional then this is the only sensible choice. And I like the idea of having a "dev" reporting server where they can try out their lame-ass SQL skills before promoting to the production reporting server. And as added value, you can denormalize a bit on the reporting server to make their lives easier.
Might also be a good idea to start looking for other customers, these sound like a pain in the ass.
The military has a problem with the sort of gifted rule breakers who are good at this stuff...They aren't geared toward using them. That's the whole reason we have organizations like the CIA.
I've met a number of CIA people. Analysts, of course-- wouldn't know the covert people, since after all they're covert. "Gifted rule breakers" is not the phrase I'd use. Academically-inclined, diligent, slightly smug preppies would be a more accurate description. The reason we have organizations like the CIA is to evade accountability, not because they are somehow more gifted than military people.
Anyway, hacking is more likely to be the domain of No Such Agency.
If you want "gifted," don't bother looking in Washington and environs. Plodders, ass-kissers and shysters, those you can easily find. It's the company town from hell.
This is typical of the conservative punitive mind-set. It's also typical of people who don't learn: if they're doing something that doesn't work, their solution is to do it more and harder.
I am the parent of a teenager who, if we lived in Texas, might be subjected to this idiocy. The likely outcome if it were applied to her would be more resistance to authority, more risky behavior and a greater likelihood of catastrophic consequences, including inappropriate escalation of repression by dim-witted authorities.
Fortunately we live in a less pig-ignorant part of the country, so we were able to make other arrangements. They involved giving her more personal responsibility rather than imposing more restrictions and privacy invasions. For her this solution has worked. Another thing to keep in mind is that kids are different and what's medicine for one could well be poison for another. I don't trust a committee of state employees to be able to make this kind of assessment, and I trust them even less to make timely corrections if the approach isn't working.
What's lacking in all layers of the US government is adherence to the principle that people should be left alone unless they are doing something violent or predatory. Micromanagement like this is a symptom of deep pathology on the part of those doing the micro-managing. These idiots should be driven out of office and humiliated.
I wish that MS had bought Yahoo for the simple reason that Yahoo's way past their sell-by date and digesting them would have given Microsoft a good case of food poisoning. Yahoo's content is now at sub-USA Today levels of dumbing down, their mail client is a joke and hardly anyone uses them for search anymore. So what's there to buy? More than anything it looked like a replay of the Time Warner/AOL merger. Too bad Microsoft didn't take the poisoned bait. Now we'll have to wait for another massive tactical blunder.
Throw it all in a huge pile and just search it later.
Based on having done it a number of times before, I disagree. Free-text search gives poor result relevancy compared to search that's aware of metadata. So use tags, AND also invest in a decent search tool.
And it's worth spending some time coming up with an initial set of tags. That, by the way, is taxonomy not ontology. Ontology is about modeling a wider range of relationships than the "is-a"/"has-a" that taxonomy covers.
If the users want to add more tags, that's fine. Closed-ended taxonomies are seldom worth a hit. Unless you're a good-sized enterprise, don't waste time trying to impose a taxonomy on your users. It's costly and requires a lot of process discipline to do right.
Multi-rooted hierarchical tagging works best-- but a "flat" scheme isn't bad either.
Oh, and it's a trivial exercise to create a virtual-folder view based on tags. You can implement it either from a central repository of metadata or by carrying the metadata on the individual mail messages.
Regardless, using folders without tags is generally a lousy solution. Look at all the different and generally piss-poor ways that people organize information on their desktops for an idea of how well that usually works.
I made a midlife career change at 44. I've been doing IT consulting for several years and am still enjoying it. But I also know that IT isn't for everyone, and even for those it suits, it doesn't always have to be a lifetime career choice.
If you're feeling stale, move on to something that interests you. If you're just in it for the money, you'll become another soulless time-server who just kills the enjoyment of the job for those of us who still give a shit.
Yeah, I suppose in an odd way it's comforting to know that the mass media in the 1950s were just as patronizing and insulting to the intelligence of listeners/viewers as the modern version, and just as bought off by its corporate drone paymasterrs. The main difference now is more tits and ass and less overt political posturing due to the phony "fairness doctrine" that meant that they had to pretend to be impartial while still being right-wing.
I shut off my TV three or four years ago and find that I now have much more time to do things that are more satisfying, like socializing and playing music. Quit feeding them and they'll go away.
This bad leadership has root causes. Incentives to sociopathic management behavior are intrinsic to the capitalist system. In the short term this psychopathic exploitation pays off. Anything with negative effects that manifest after the next quarter's numbers doesn't matter. By that time the perrpetrators have been rewarded and have moved on. Don't assume that better efficiency can fix an inherently corrupt, dysfunctional system. Making the trains run on time has been tried before. Good thing the Allies came along to blow up the tracks.
What the immigration does is make the choice a little easier for corporations to pick the US over India. Sure, immigration does, to some small extent push down US wages. Know what pushes down US wages even more though? When they say "fuck it" and simply have the entire thing done in India for a fraction of the cost.
In that case, why isn't that work already being done now in India for a fraction of the cost? It's certainly not because the corporations are altruistically inclined towards US-based IT workers. They're just out to make a buck and don't give a shit about us. So there must be some benefit to the employer of doing it in the US. Offshoring works OK in some situations but it hasn't paid off nearly as well as the pro-globalization dogmatists assumed.
Although one benefit to employers is holding down wages of the US-resident IT worforce, I've come to believe that other motivations are stronger. I think one big one is that IT departments are often run by control freaks, and the near-indentured servitude of H1-B holders allows a degree of exploitation that would not be possible with employees who are more able to change employers. It also means that intelligent programmers and engineers who are here on H1-B's end up having to do stupid things because they're not empowered enough to push back when the boss has a brainfart. The consequences of dismissal or resignation are just too great: there's a huge difference between going to work for the competition three blocks down the road versus being shipped home to Chennai on short notice. In my experience this disempowerment is a contributing factor to a number of failed IT projects I've seen. And I say this as a beneficiary of those failures: I make my living cleaning up some of those messes.
My view is that, if temporary visas are issued at all, they should not be locked to a specific employer. That would eliminate many of the market distortions that result from the present arrangement, which rewards abusive employers at the expense of H1-B holders as well as US-based IT people. It would be better yet if there were no temporary visa program at all, and immigration of skilled IT workers were encouraged. After all, if the jobs aren't here, they'll go back home anyway, or will do like American aerospace workers did after the big post-Vietnam-war layoffs and start new businesses. Highly-skilled, entrepreneurial people who leave their homelands to pursue opportunities are unlikely to become a liability to their host country. And, just like the earlier immigration of Germans, Italians, Irish, many of those immigrants end up going back home anyway. It's a fallacy that they all end up staying here.
And the only thing that's keeping my job here in the US is not immigration, it's the fact that I've got skills that someone is willing to pay for, and I'm in a firm that knows how to market those skills. I've worked with, and learned from, a lot of H1-B people. And also from a lot of American citizens. If you're not able to keep learning and finding new opportunities, you're screwed regardless of the level of immigration in your business.
Incidentally, the US has not always had a "liberal immigration policy." Know much about how Chinese immigration was handled in California in the 19th and early 20th centuries? And what about immigration policies regarding skilled or highly educated Mexicans? Oh, never mind, there was no soch policy. They weren't down with the brown in those days. I think a more correct set of adjectives would be "unevenly enforced and racist."
This is just another indication that, if they can't kill us or piss on us, they're going to try to own us.
I've had occasional dealings with Harvard MBAs. Their arrogance and sense of entitlement, coupled with the hypercompetitive shallowness that characterizes a certain kind of A student, is typical of an especially odious segment of the American ruling elite. I would rather they knew nothing about open source, so that they would be on the losing side and find themselves marginalized and irrelevant, rather than letting them force themselves into leadership positions through their highly refined self-promotion and ass-kissing skills.
So when is UC Berleley going to fire Yoo? He is clearly seeking to undermine the consitutional system in the US, and his other legal opinions are nothing but shallow and mendacious rationales for torture.
There has to be accountability for these criminal acts. Impeachment is only a half-measure. If it doesn't end in imprisonment for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their co-conspirators, the system is not working right.
Of course, the fact that they got into office in the first place is itself evidence of a profound systemic defect.
Business is NOT win or die, it isn't even win or lose. Yes there is some competition in business, quite a bit of it actually, but being second best in business does NOT mean that you are going to go under or lose your shirt.
Yeah, I've been in win-or-die situations, and I've also experienced some extremely difficult business challenges. The business challenges have been far less close to the bone. More like a hard-fought game of chess, less like dealing with a guy trying to slit your throat (which was one of the win-or-die situations I got into-- my definition of winning in that case was not dying).
But I think that the capitalist system, especially in the US, has features that reward sociopathic and predatory behavior and which, at very least, provide few incentives for behaving ethically. Some people do anyway. I like to think that I do, but I have no expectation of being rewarded for it. I do it mainly because the alternative is so distasteful.
I also find "win or die" armchair social Darwinists distateful, since they talk big about primal struggles but have never really had to fight for survival on any but a metaphorical level. That leads to the phony machismo and lack of empathy that is epitomized by George Bush. People who have faced real threats to their existence tend to be less cocky.
It's simpler than that. Confronting potentially armed and dangerous criminals is risky. Therefore the police are constantly motivated by the self-preservation instinct to find excuses to do other, less risky enforcement activities. And the least risky is to harass people who wouldn't hurt anyone: pot-smokers, the indigent, immigrants, law-abiding citizens, even kids. Those people are us.
In short, we're soft targets. I just hope that we can find a solution to this other than our having to become more violent towards the authorities.
If you view it from the idea of making people used to the idea of being bullied and controlled then it makes perfect sense.
Yeah, I was recently in a conversation about Heathrow where we speculated that they should hire Temple Grandin to re-engineer the queues. You'll never even notice the man with the bolt gun at the end.
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That said, there's certainly too much UML arcana and there are too many people who piss about with it. I use certain core parts of the UML a lot, but that's not the same as trying to impose every feature of UML on an IT department that already has enough bullshit to contend with.
Standard notation is a wonderful thing. Ultimately I don't give a money's fart if it's UML or something else, as long as it's expressive enough and not too hard to read. And whatever it is, it's there to illustrate how something works or is supposed to work. In some problem domains that might be overkill, and in others it's essential to getting the damned thing built, tested and deployed. Professional judgment is needed to decide where it's useful and where it isn't.
I belive the proverb is "Cut chicken to scare monkey."
And, as you mention, that's taking the point of view that there should be deterrence regardless of cost. In real life, there is a cost to society of implementing random searches. Along with the cost of delays and the loss of liberty (to name two), there is the very real cost of false positives. For a search methodology that is attempting to catch all of a very small number of bad guys in a very large population (for example, a few dozen terrorists among a few million air travellers), the rate of false positives can be huge. I'll not do a calculation here, but with some very charitable assumptions about the specificity and sensitivity of TSA searches it's still possible to have tens of thousands of innocent people falsely detained (and possibly punished) for every real terrorist.
Incidentally, even though most monitoring seems pretty relaxed, I don't make assumptions about that. I am usually given a client company's email address when I show up. I never use that for anything but client business, and I assume that anything that goes over that channel will be monitored. And I never do IM's from the client site and never use client-provided web access for anything but client work (OK, maybe I look up a restaurant on Yelp occasionally so I can have some variety at lunchtime). I do ssh into my own server and send email from there when I need to. Nobody has ever said anything about that, and if they did, I wouldn't answer beyond "None of your business, bite my crank." If they want more, that's why they have subpoenas. Even then, I never do work for client B while at client A's site, and never make comments about a client that I couldn't back up if challenged. Doing otherwise is unethical, and also just plain slimy.
Where this level of intrusive monitoring does happen, I see it as a displacement activity practiced by incompetent managers: they can't tell how their people are really doing, so instead they find something that they do understand and try to control that. Unfortunately it tells them next to nothing about real performance. I'm fairly senior in our firm, and if I find a manager pulling that kind of stunt, I start asking them awkward questions about how they prioritize the monitoring of consultants' email use relative to, say, their project's client satisfaction or progress to plan. If it's anything but bottom of the list, they're on a performance-improvement plan, and they have six months to adjust their behavior or they're out the door. We're in a high-turnover business, and our ability to retain good people contributes to our competitive advantage. Fucking with them needlessly is expensive and stupid unless there's an obvious problem.
And since they're exploited, the can't talk back to the boss. So they'll do what they're told whether it makes sense or not. One of the innovations that drove quality improvements was to empower any assembly-line worker to stop the line if a quality problem was detected. Offshoring has been optimized to balance two factors: cost to the buyer, and how much the middleman rakes off for the transaction. There also tends to be a big emphasis on schedule, since it's a big cost driver for the buyer. But in achieving these optimizations, the system has firewalled off any feedback path that could be used to improve product quality.
I've been working in IT jobs in the US for my whole career. The idea that there is such a thing as cheap, crappy, quality-insensitive commodity computing was always a beancounter's brainfart and nothing else.
Oh, and regarding your wish to see the IT workforce shrink: I was in aerospace during two of its brutal contractions. Don't assume that some kind of Darwinian selection by skill level takes place as they staff down. The selective advantage is to whoever can hang onto a job. That can be accomplished by skills, showmanship, ass-kissing or nepotism. Don't bet on it always being skills. Once we lost 90% of our software-engineering workforce, the quality of the survivors did not improve. The percentage of the workforce who had either family ties to senior management or incriminating videos did go up, though.
Might also be a good idea to start looking for other customers, these sound like a pain in the ass.
Anyway, hacking is more likely to be the domain of No Such Agency.
If you want "gifted," don't bother looking in Washington and environs. Plodders, ass-kissers and shysters, those you can easily find. It's the company town from hell.
My dad used to put it slightly differently: "Like pushin' butter up a wildcat's ass with a hot poker."
I propose calling it "source under glass."
This is typical of the conservative punitive mind-set. It's also typical of people who don't learn: if they're doing something that doesn't work, their solution is to do it more and harder.
I am the parent of a teenager who, if we lived in Texas, might be subjected to this idiocy. The likely outcome if it were applied to her would be more resistance to authority, more risky behavior and a greater likelihood of catastrophic consequences, including inappropriate escalation of repression by dim-witted authorities.
Fortunately we live in a less pig-ignorant part of the country, so we were able to make other arrangements. They involved giving her more personal responsibility rather than imposing more restrictions and privacy invasions. For her this solution has worked. Another thing to keep in mind is that kids are different and what's medicine for one could well be poison for another. I don't trust a committee of state employees to be able to make this kind of assessment, and I trust them even less to make timely corrections if the approach isn't working.
What's lacking in all layers of the US government is adherence to the principle that people should be left alone unless they are doing something violent or predatory. Micromanagement like this is a symptom of deep pathology on the part of those doing the micro-managing. These idiots should be driven out of office and humiliated.
I wish that MS had bought Yahoo for the simple reason that Yahoo's way past their sell-by date and digesting them would have given Microsoft a good case of food poisoning. Yahoo's content is now at sub-USA Today levels of dumbing down, their mail client is a joke and hardly anyone uses them for search anymore. So what's there to buy? More than anything it looked like a replay of the Time Warner/AOL merger. Too bad Microsoft didn't take the poisoned bait. Now we'll have to wait for another massive tactical blunder.
And it's worth spending some time coming up with an initial set of tags. That, by the way, is taxonomy not ontology. Ontology is about modeling a wider range of relationships than the "is-a"/"has-a" that taxonomy covers.
If the users want to add more tags, that's fine. Closed-ended taxonomies are seldom worth a hit. Unless you're a good-sized enterprise, don't waste time trying to impose a taxonomy on your users. It's costly and requires a lot of process discipline to do right.
Multi-rooted hierarchical tagging works best-- but a "flat" scheme isn't bad either.
Oh, and it's a trivial exercise to create a virtual-folder view based on tags. You can implement it either from a central repository of metadata or by carrying the metadata on the individual mail messages.
Regardless, using folders without tags is generally a lousy solution. Look at all the different and generally piss-poor ways that people organize information on their desktops for an idea of how well that usually works.
I made a midlife career change at 44. I've been doing IT consulting for several years and am still enjoying it. But I also know that IT isn't for everyone, and even for those it suits, it doesn't always have to be a lifetime career choice.
If you're feeling stale, move on to something that interests you. If you're just in it for the money, you'll become another soulless time-server who just kills the enjoyment of the job for those of us who still give a shit.
They're looking for excuses to keep violating net neutrality, and they are also fishing for subsidies.
Yeah, I suppose in an odd way it's comforting to know that the mass media in the 1950s were just as patronizing and insulting to the intelligence of listeners/viewers as the modern version, and just as bought off by its corporate drone paymasterrs. The main difference now is more tits and ass and less overt political posturing due to the phony "fairness doctrine" that meant that they had to pretend to be impartial while still being right-wing.
I shut off my TV three or four years ago and find that I now have much more time to do things that are more satisfying, like socializing and playing music. Quit feeding them and they'll go away.
This bad leadership has root causes. Incentives to sociopathic management behavior are intrinsic to the capitalist system. In the short term this psychopathic exploitation pays off. Anything with negative effects that manifest after the next quarter's numbers doesn't matter. By that time the perrpetrators have been rewarded and have moved on. Don't assume that better efficiency can fix an inherently corrupt, dysfunctional system. Making the trains run on time has been tried before. Good thing the Allies came along to blow up the tracks.
Although one benefit to employers is holding down wages of the US-resident IT worforce, I've come to believe that other motivations are stronger. I think one big one is that IT departments are often run by control freaks, and the near-indentured servitude of H1-B holders allows a degree of exploitation that would not be possible with employees who are more able to change employers. It also means that intelligent programmers and engineers who are here on H1-B's end up having to do stupid things because they're not empowered enough to push back when the boss has a brainfart. The consequences of dismissal or resignation are just too great: there's a huge difference between going to work for the competition three blocks down the road versus being shipped home to Chennai on short notice. In my experience this disempowerment is a contributing factor to a number of failed IT projects I've seen. And I say this as a beneficiary of those failures: I make my living cleaning up some of those messes.
My view is that, if temporary visas are issued at all, they should not be locked to a specific employer. That would eliminate many of the market distortions that result from the present arrangement, which rewards abusive employers at the expense of H1-B holders as well as US-based IT people. It would be better yet if there were no temporary visa program at all, and immigration of skilled IT workers were encouraged. After all, if the jobs aren't here, they'll go back home anyway, or will do like American aerospace workers did after the big post-Vietnam-war layoffs and start new businesses. Highly-skilled, entrepreneurial people who leave their homelands to pursue opportunities are unlikely to become a liability to their host country. And, just like the earlier immigration of Germans, Italians, Irish, many of those immigrants end up going back home anyway. It's a fallacy that they all end up staying here.
And the only thing that's keeping my job here in the US is not immigration, it's the fact that I've got skills that someone is willing to pay for, and I'm in a firm that knows how to market those skills. I've worked with, and learned from, a lot of H1-B people. And also from a lot of American citizens. If you're not able to keep learning and finding new opportunities, you're screwed regardless of the level of immigration in your business.
Incidentally, the US has not always had a "liberal immigration policy." Know much about how Chinese immigration was handled in California in the 19th and early 20th centuries? And what about immigration policies regarding skilled or highly educated Mexicans? Oh, never mind, there was no soch policy. They weren't down with the brown in those days. I think a more correct set of adjectives would be "unevenly enforced and racist."
This is just another indication that, if they can't kill us or piss on us, they're going to try to own us.
I've had occasional dealings with Harvard MBAs. Their arrogance and sense of entitlement, coupled with the hypercompetitive shallowness that characterizes a certain kind of A student, is typical of an especially odious segment of the American ruling elite. I would rather they knew nothing about open source, so that they would be on the losing side and find themselves marginalized and irrelevant, rather than letting them force themselves into leadership positions through their highly refined self-promotion and ass-kissing skills.
So when is UC Berleley going to fire Yoo? He is clearly seeking to undermine the consitutional system in the US, and his other legal opinions are nothing but shallow and mendacious rationales for torture.
There has to be accountability for these criminal acts. Impeachment is only a half-measure. If it doesn't end in imprisonment for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their co-conspirators, the system is not working right.
Of course, the fact that they got into office in the first place is itself evidence of a profound systemic defect.
But I think that the capitalist system, especially in the US, has features that reward sociopathic and predatory behavior and which, at very least, provide few incentives for behaving ethically. Some people do anyway. I like to think that I do, but I have no expectation of being rewarded for it. I do it mainly because the alternative is so distasteful.
I also find "win or die" armchair social Darwinists distateful, since they talk big about primal struggles but have never really had to fight for survival on any but a metaphorical level. That leads to the phony machismo and lack of empathy that is epitomized by George Bush. People who have faced real threats to their existence tend to be less cocky.
It's simpler than that. Confronting potentially armed and dangerous criminals is risky. Therefore the police are constantly motivated by the self-preservation instinct to find excuses to do other, less risky enforcement activities. And the least risky is to harass people who wouldn't hurt anyone: pot-smokers, the indigent, immigrants, law-abiding citizens, even kids. Those people are us.
In short, we're soft targets. I just hope that we can find a solution to this other than our having to become more violent towards the authorities.
"There's money to be made from corporate welfare and we're gonna get us some." That's the logic.
And there are plenty of legislators who can be bought off to pass this law as soon as the election season's over.