"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England."
Why is it ok to disciminate over personality but not religion or race? It is much easier to change religion than personality so why no force people to change religion to conform to management views of "ok"?
If someone is "difficult", a GOOD manager will MANAGE that person and get a good result anyway. Managers are just to lazy these days.
Would it be moral (or legal?) for a citizen of a Western country to visit a country where killing and raping was allowed, kill and rape people there, and then come back and say, I've done nothing wrong. IE they have visited another country to get around laws.
This is basically what is happening here. They are moving jobs to other countries to avoid laws and standards of the west.
And whats the point of living a miserably poor lifestyle jost to make a point to corporate America?
Now you've really got me confused. How have you judged from my posting that my lifestyle is "miserably poor"? You're going to have to defend your assertion. In fact, what kind of lifestyle opposes a miserably poor condition? A new car every 3 years? Broadband Internet access? A home so large that you have to hire a maid since you don't have the time to clean it? Come on, let's get your yuppie viewpoint out into the open so we can dissect it.
You're little protest won't have any affect on corporations
On the contrary, if you'd look around instead of contemplating your navel, the consumptive lifestyles have (and are) indeed sunk companies and their employees. That's what you get when you align an entire economy with the desires of your average 14-yr-old girl. The stores are filled with fluff... what kind of idiot buys and buys that stuff? Answer: The kind of idiot that runs for the hills when he finally encounters financial problems. And a lot of people have run for the hills in the last 3 years.
You should really start to understand the power of accumulating small numbers.
You are not the only one who feels like this. I intend to semi drop out also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=64082&cid=5960 917.
I'm tired of the crap I have to do to live decently. I'm tired of the taxes I have to pay that subsidise companies and wealthy individuals. I'm tired of the lies put up by BOTH sides of politics. So yes I am taking my money out of the economy and using it on something useful, ME.
A bit extreme but...while economists always talk about wages putting pressure on inflation, they never ever mention company profits putting pressure on inflation. GO FIGURE!
Being forced to compete with others is not a downside.
Globalisation has been good for employers in the 1st world, but employees are screwed. True globalisation would mean that prices would fall (in the 1st world). Why do we pay so much for goods and services in a "global" market?
I wonder what the author is trying to say. The "open source movement" just is. People are free to use it or not, people are free to contribute it or not. When I first started using Linux, I recall that Linus didn't really care if people used it or not, he created an alternative for himself and put it out onto the net to share his work around. (I'm not saying this was the start of the movement, but it was a defining moment)
If there is a problem with the "open source movement", it is that we forget why it came into being in the first place. To give us a choice. It didn't need to be huge, it didn't need to be well thought of, it didn't to be used by fortune 500 companies, it just had to be there.
And I say to you James Turner and your 5 points, and to Steve Suehring with your 5 rebutals...so what?
Can you get move to India to get a job? Can you buy goods and services at their prices? Globally, there are $US300,000,000,000+ of tariffs and subsidies spent/imposed each year.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as free trade.
Richard E. Grant would be fantastic. He was very funny playing the Doctor in "Dr Who: The Curse of Fatal Death" for Comic Relief. But then Rowan Atkinson and Joanna Lumley also played the Doctor and were a riot!!!
I don't mind if govt uses open source or not. The best product for the situation should be used. What I do want do see is "open" document formats to allow them to switch software providers easily.
Will any of you posters complaining about this issue actually do something other than post on Slashdot?
Re:Its only painful due to experiience.
on
The Introvert Advantage
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I figure, if I don't find a similarly antisocial girl who has the same interests by the time I'm 40, I'm just not going to reproduce. Maybe one day I'll clone myself, just for the techie bragging rights, but probably not.;)
The great achievement of equality of the sexes was for women to make a living and control their fertility, thus allow them to have more control over their own lives. While men can live independant financial lives, we are still slaves when it comes to reproduciton. Until we can reproduce as single men we will be tied to women if we want to reproduce.
I'm not saying women are bad or that relationships are bad (I've been with my partner for 14 years) but we need to have the choice. This doesn't have to come from technological advances, social advances such better surrogacy laws would work just as well.
When I was a linux newbie, I tried Ygdrasil (spell?) and it was a nightmare. I then tried Slackware and loved it. I've used Redhat for the last 6 years and I must say Slackware is still the best, easiest and most stable distro I've used. But thats just me.
I don't know about "restriction of trade" law here in Aus. But I do know 1 thing that applies to this whole thread. You can't contract out of the law. Contracts have to be within the law. So if the law says you can't stop a person earning a living in their field, then signing such a document means absolutely nothing.
We would of course have a dam or 3. You can buy trout fingerlings cheaply im told:) Greywater system for non food garden. And rainwater in tanks for the veggie garden and home usage. Not all the 5 acres would be used. Some would be left as or reverted to native vegetation(if possible). And I will try to ensure that even after I'm gone, it stays like that forever. I know that people live the "permaculture life" this way so I hope I can as well.
The really cool thing about the power is this...I will make sure the house is on the grid. This way I don't need to have batteries to store power. Everything I generate, I will sell to the power comps. I'll still have normal 240v appliences. But the really cool thing is...I will sell it for more than I buy it possibly, see this, AGL Green Energy.
I don't have all the answers yet. But I'll get there.
I apologise for the rant and some of the things that are off topic, but I think my answer needs context.
I was retrenched in Feb. Partially my fault since I didn't suck up enough to the bosses. But now this fuckedcompany has announced a second round of retrenchments I'm told by friends still there. The consultant market is just dead in Australia.
I've been in IT for 13 years. Overall, it's been a real let down. Long hours (worker charity business model), PHBs ("can't we release it without testing?" one asked me), crap projects. I love IT, but not some of the workplaces. The problem is I don't know anything else other than IT, I hate working for other people and I don't have the entrepreneurial skills to start a business. But I am a greenie and I care about the future of humanity and the planet. And I detest our overly consumerist society.
I don't trust a business to do the right thing so I don't want to depend on a full time job. How many of you were retrenched so the company can keep up a decent profit GROWTH. Not profit, but profit GROWTH. Those assholes sacrificed you and me to please shareholders and "earn" their share options. Not to mention the systemic corruption and dishonesty in businesses, does anyone really think Enron, Tycho, HIH, OneTel, etc. are isolated incidents?
After a lot of thinking and chance reading of articles I found a solution which could fit all my criteria.
I'm going to partially drop out. In 5 years time I want to have built and moved into my own nice eco friendly house and do the permaculture thing. I want to be self-sufficienct in a practical way. I want to be close enough to Melbourne so I can work 1-2 days per week if I need to. But far enough so I can buy 5 acres cheaply and that I have decent dark skies to pursue my astronomy. I also want to have broadband so I can still do IT from home and participate in open source projects, play games, real Slashdot, view p0rn, etc.
So to get to the point....To achieve all this, while I was out of work I started to learn new skills and do research. I built a raised veggie patch and I planted an autumn/winter crop. I did research on different kinds of cheap and eco friendly building. I briefly researched power systems to see what sorts of things are possible. I looked around for a good chicken coup design, starting to build it next week:) I joined a seed savers club. I looked for decent cheap land within 1 hour drive to the city. I looked around for permacultutre courses and places to visit to see if I really want to make this big lifestyle change. And I was still looking for work of course.
Fortunately I was able to get a new job after 2 months. I haven't changed my mind, so this wasn't an unemployed depression thing. My journey has begun:)
Look, I hate VB (and Microsoft) and it sucks like life out of me also, as a previous poster said. But if you know its guts (and COM/COM+), you can do a lot of good work with it. It does have some real OO features such as polymorphism and interface inheritance. Unfortunately most VB devs are drag and droppers who know sweet FA about real programming and it shows in the poor quality code they produce. If you are a VB dev then the best way to really learn it is with the book: Microsoft Visual Basic Design Patterns (MS Press).
In the book "Learned Optimism" (1990) by Martin Seligman, he describes how he could do psychohistory (he is an Asimov fan):
We had, after all, the three essential things that Hari Selden demanded. First, we had a sound phsycological principal: Optimistic explanatory style predicts the ability to fight off depression, predicts high achievement, and predicts stick-to-itiveness. Second, we had a valid way of measuring explanatory style in people living or dead. Third, we had large numbers of people to study-numbers large enough to allow us to make statistical predictions.(p186)
A student suggested that they apply it to elections. So they did on the 1988 elections:
So there we were. Using only the explanatory style of speeches and the degree of rumination the revealed, we had attempted to predict the presidential primary results, the presidential elections, and the twenty-nine Senate elections. We succeeded completely for the primaries, predicting the winners and losers for each party long before the polls named a winner. The prediction for the presidential election was mixed...The fall speeches predicted a Bush victory. But so did everyone else. We called 86 percent of the Senate races right, including all but one of the upsets and squeakers. Nobody else did this well.
This then is the first instance I know in which social scientists have predicted major historical events-before the fact.(p197-198)
On a side note...being a hard core techo/sci type of guy, I tend to laugh at the waffle in "self help" books. But "Learned Optimism" is backed by hard science and is pretty good. Could someone do a review please?
Slashdot Mirror
"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England."
greedy bastards
Where do you work? Is http://www.dotdesign.ws/ the business in question?
Why is it ok to disciminate over personality but not religion or race? It is much easier to change religion than personality so why no force people to change religion to conform to management views of "ok"?
If someone is "difficult", a GOOD manager will MANAGE that person and get a good result anyway. Managers are just to lazy these days.
Would it be moral (or legal?) for a citizen of a Western country to visit a country where killing and raping was allowed, kill and rape people there, and then come back and say, I've done nothing wrong. IE they have visited another country to get around laws.
This is basically what is happening here. They are moving jobs to other countries to avoid laws and standards of the west.
And whats the point of living a miserably poor lifestyle jost to make a point to corporate America?
Now you've really got me confused. How have you judged from my posting that my lifestyle is "miserably poor"? You're going to have to defend your assertion. In fact, what kind of lifestyle opposes a miserably poor condition? A new car every 3 years? Broadband Internet access? A home so large that you have to hire a maid since you don't have the time to clean it? Come on, let's get your yuppie viewpoint out into the open so we can dissect it.
You're little protest won't have any affect on corporations
On the contrary, if you'd look around instead of contemplating your navel, the consumptive lifestyles have (and are) indeed sunk companies and their employees. That's what you get when you align an entire economy with the desires of your average 14-yr-old girl. The stores are filled with fluff
You should really start to understand the power of accumulating small numbers.
You are not the only one who feels like this. I intend to semi drop out also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=64082&cid=596
I'm tired of the crap I have to do to live decently. I'm tired of the taxes I have to pay that subsidise companies and wealthy individuals. I'm tired of the lies put up by BOTH sides of politics. So yes I am taking my money out of the economy and using it on something useful, ME.
It's even more insidious than this.
The women patch the men to improve them, and secretly insert interesting little clauses into the EULA that are effectively vendor lock in.
A bit extreme but...while economists always talk about wages putting pressure on inflation, they never ever mention company profits putting pressure on inflation. GO FIGURE!
Being forced to compete with others is not a downside.
Globalisation has been good for employers in the 1st world, but employees are screwed. True globalisation would mean that prices would fall (in the 1st world). Why do we pay so much for goods and services in a "global" market?
I wonder what the author is trying to say. The "open source movement" just is. People are free to use it or not, people are free to contribute it or not. When I first started using Linux, I recall that Linus didn't really care if people used it or not, he created an alternative for himself and put it out onto the net to share his work around. (I'm not saying this was the start of the movement, but it was a defining moment)
If there is a problem with the "open source movement", it is that we forget why it came into being in the first place. To give us a choice. It didn't need to be huge, it didn't need to be well thought of, it didn't to be used by fortune 500 companies, it just had to be there.
And I say to you James Turner and your 5 points, and to Steve Suehring with your 5 rebutals...so what?
Unfortunately with the development of free trade
Can you get move to India to get a job?
Can you buy goods and services at their prices?
Globally, there are $US300,000,000,000+ of tariffs and subsidies spent/imposed each year.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as free trade.
If it's FUD, can you please explain how and why it's FUD?
Richard E. Grant would be fantastic. He was very funny playing the Doctor in "Dr Who: The Curse of Fatal Death" for Comic Relief. But then Rowan Atkinson and Joanna Lumley also played the Doctor and were a riot!!!
I don't mind if govt uses open source or not. The best product for the situation should be used. What I do want do see is "open" document formats to allow them to switch software providers easily.
Will any of you posters complaining about this issue actually do something other than post on Slashdot?
I figure, if I don't find a similarly antisocial girl who has the same interests by the time I'm 40, I'm just not going to reproduce. Maybe one day I'll clone myself, just for the techie bragging rights, but probably not. ;)
The great achievement of equality of the sexes was for women to make a living and control their fertility, thus allow them to have more control over their own lives. While men can live independant financial lives, we are still slaves when it comes to reproduciton. Until we can reproduce as single men we will be tied to women if we want to reproduce.
I'm not saying women are bad or that relationships are bad (I've been with my partner for 14 years) but we need to have the choice. This doesn't have to come from technological advances, social advances such better surrogacy laws would work just as well.
When I was a linux newbie, I tried Ygdrasil (spell?) and it was a nightmare. I then tried Slackware and loved it. I've used Redhat for the last 6 years and I must say Slackware is still the best, easiest and most stable distro I've used. But thats just me.
I agree about the idea for the subsistance life, but I've decided to do it much sooner.
While you're at it also kill all the disabled people who are unable to contribute to the society.
I don't know about "restriction of trade" law here in Aus. But I do know 1 thing that applies to this whole thread. You can't contract out of the law. Contracts have to be within the law. So if the law says you can't stop a person earning a living in their field, then signing such a document means absolutely nothing.
We would of course have a dam or 3. You can buy trout fingerlings cheaply im told :) Greywater system for non food garden. And rainwater in tanks for the veggie garden and home usage. Not all the 5 acres would be used. Some would be left as or reverted to native vegetation(if possible). And I will try to ensure that even after I'm gone, it stays like that forever. I know that people live the "permaculture life" this way so I hope I can as well.
The really cool thing about the power is this...I will make sure the house is on the grid. This way I don't need to have batteries to store power. Everything I generate, I will sell to the power comps. I'll still have normal 240v appliences. But the really cool thing is...I will sell it for more than I buy it possibly, see this, AGL Green Energy.
I don't have all the answers yet. But I'll get there.
thanks!!
I apologise for the rant and some of the things that are off topic, but I think my answer needs context.
:) I joined a seed savers club. I looked for decent cheap land within 1 hour drive to the city. I looked around for permacultutre courses and places to visit to see if I really want to make this big lifestyle change. And I was still looking for work of course.
:)
I was retrenched in Feb. Partially my fault since I didn't suck up enough to the bosses. But now this fuckedcompany has announced a second round of retrenchments I'm told by friends still there. The consultant market is just dead in Australia.
I've been in IT for 13 years. Overall, it's been a real let down. Long hours (worker charity business model), PHBs ("can't we release it without testing?" one asked me), crap projects. I love IT, but not some of the workplaces. The problem is I don't know anything else other than IT, I hate working for other people and I don't have the entrepreneurial skills to start a business. But I am a greenie and I care about the future of humanity and the planet. And I detest our overly consumerist society.
I don't trust a business to do the right thing so I don't want to depend on a full time job. How many of you were retrenched so the company can keep up a decent profit GROWTH. Not profit, but profit GROWTH. Those assholes sacrificed you and me to please shareholders and "earn" their share options. Not to mention the systemic corruption and dishonesty in businesses, does anyone really think Enron, Tycho, HIH, OneTel, etc. are isolated incidents?
After a lot of thinking and chance reading of articles I found a solution which could fit all my criteria.
I'm going to partially drop out. In 5 years time I want to have built and moved into my own nice eco friendly house and do the permaculture thing. I want to be self-sufficienct in a practical way. I want to be close enough to Melbourne so I can work 1-2 days per week if I need to. But far enough so I can buy 5 acres cheaply and that I have decent dark skies to pursue my astronomy. I also want to have broadband so I can still do IT from home and participate in open source projects, play games, real Slashdot, view p0rn, etc.
So to get to the point....To achieve all this, while I was out of work I started to learn new skills and do research. I built a raised veggie patch and I planted an autumn/winter crop. I did research on different kinds of cheap and eco friendly building. I briefly researched power systems to see what sorts of things are possible. I looked around for a good chicken coup design, starting to build it next week
Fortunately I was able to get a new job after 2 months. I haven't changed my mind, so this wasn't an unemployed depression thing. My journey has begun
I refer to them as WizardBoys.
Look, I hate VB (and Microsoft) and it sucks like life out of me also, as a previous poster said. But if you know its guts (and COM/COM+), you can do a lot of good work with it. It does have some real OO features such as polymorphism and interface inheritance. Unfortunately most VB devs are drag and droppers who know sweet FA about real programming and it shows in the poor quality code they produce. If you are a VB dev then the best way to really learn it is with the book: Microsoft Visual Basic Design Patterns (MS Press).
:-b
In the book "Learned Optimism" (1990) by Martin Seligman, he describes how he could do psychohistory (he is an Asimov fan):
We had, after all, the three essential things that Hari Selden demanded. First, we had a sound phsycological principal: Optimistic explanatory style predicts the ability to fight off depression, predicts high achievement, and predicts stick-to-itiveness. Second, we had a valid way of measuring explanatory style in people living or dead. Third, we had large numbers of people to study-numbers large enough to allow us to make statistical predictions.(p186)
A student suggested that they apply it to elections. So they did on the 1988 elections:
So there we were. Using only the explanatory style of speeches and the degree of rumination the revealed, we had attempted to predict the presidential primary results, the presidential elections, and the twenty-nine Senate elections. We succeeded completely for the primaries, predicting the winners and losers for each party long before the polls named a winner. The prediction for the presidential election was mixed...The fall speeches predicted a Bush victory. But so did everyone else. We called 86 percent of the Senate races right, including all but one of the upsets and squeakers. Nobody else did this well.
This then is the first instance I know in which social scientists have predicted major historical events-before the fact.(p197-198)
On a side note...being a hard core techo/sci type of guy, I tend to laugh at the waffle in "self help" books. But "Learned Optimism" is backed by hard science and is pretty good. Could someone do a review please?