If we doubt the competency of colleagues and managers to objectivity evaluate one another, especially in the hiring and firing decisions, that negates the result that such as system is a meritocracy, since evaluation of merit would not be reliable. In fact it becomes the same old political system with the social interactions having a far greater weight, even in technical work, and just like non-technical working conditions.
The argument for "Meritocracy" is then just a ruse. It is another way for people with the power to make such decisions to retain the right to decide who gets hired and who gets fired in the way they have always done.
I know the shell, the command line, have since the days of glass TTYs, but you can lead the GUI users into it the next time they run across a situation where the file manager or finder doesn't give then the fine control they would get with file name regular expressions in the shell.
It isn't that Grandma has a problem finding the recipes file from time to time, she may well learn to use grep from the terminal, eventually, but it is for the person, whether sysadmin or not, who has to find stuff everyday all day. Then eventually he finds out that the shell and regular expressions will help him achieve his goal faster. If you want to introduce GUI users to the terminal, just answer a question with it. My son brought his Macbook to me one day and asked if Python was on his machine and how he could use it. I could have easily told him to go to the Applications folder and look, but I opened terminal and did "python" typed in a couple of statements and demoed it to him. I may also have done 'man python', to show him it was there. As python is used in system maintenence, it may not be listed in Applications if the idle application isn't installed, but I'll bet it is there.
On Windows, yes Windows, a good implementation of the shell can save you money, paying for the third-party programs that do utility jobs that aren't part of Windows but can be easily created with an instance of bash installed. Renaming lots of files is a task that comes to mind. There are plenty of programs written for Windows that do that and you will pay, but install Cygwin for nothing, one of the first things I do if I have to own a Windows system, and do it from a terminal, xterm, in bash with a for loop.
AMEN, And that is because the management doesn't often know what actually works. They can't tell. You can show them something that sorta works, but they are not smart enough to really know. They rely on heresay and that is why many projects don't quite work as they should, and it is politics and tact, not skill and merit, that matters to them.
Except, of course, this hinges very much on which context someone's work is judged to be "mediocre", and that can change over time. In fact, under the single payer system we have in the U.S. one can be judged as "mediocre" just for getting older and having some of the kind of medical issues that occur with age, as unfair as that is. Employers get away with it and especially when the business is losing profitability and managers have pressure to control their bottom lines, then they turn sociopathic if they aren't already. I knew of one manager who seemed to target those for layoff who had used the sick leave and medical coverage. He was never called on it, and the company eventually got baught out, but it was clear that he was narcissistic in other ways, too.
The U.S. made a huge regression back to laissez faire capitalism after 1980, and it isn't just Ronald Reagan's fault, although he helped it along, and I am not so naive as to suggest that politicians do anything but respond to economic trends rather than creating them.
If you want to understand the economic shifts of the past 30 years and predict what the consequence may be, look in your own back yard as techies. I consider myself a techie, although it isn't reaslly my strong suit, still I know my way around technology, and technology is by far the root cause for job insecurity for most people and the lopsided income distribution. The engineers who invented all this stuff and who are lately misusing it to try to rip people off through social media and program driven market speculation have no idea of the consequences now beginning to emerge; the dislocations to society. Elitist thinking, which is rampent in technical circles, won't protect them if the mass of people displaced by poor management of the economic effects become aware. I am not talking about mere luditism here, but a social revolution in which the top is decapitated for greed and selfishness. The unrest is already obvious which is why many people who post on these threads do so with an undercurrent of fear. The fear is justified. Technology really is neurtral, but at those times when things are out of wack because of its unfair use, then its practioners, from the company managements, to the investors, to the staff engineers, are up for examination. We are beginning to see this already, as bodies like the U.S. Congress have to wrestle increasingly with the effects of technical decisions. So those of you who see the government and other "outsiders", like Facebook users, as incompetent to judge your work, should put your own house in order and be above reproach for it not to could come back to haunt you Big Time.
It might be easy for the message to get lost here. The Sun's variability is not a factor in climate change is different from saying that it is not involved in climate change. The claim here is that other factors are more correlated with climate change, namely the production of greenhouse gasses. Even without that, there would still be variation caused by the regular changes in the earth's orbit, inclination, that are enough to account for the dramatic changes from glacial and interglacial intervals in earth's climate over the past several million years. I read the story as saying that variability of the Sun's radiation is not significant. The input of greenhouses gases is significant, with other factors in play. So orbital elements might set us up for another glacial period is say 15,000 years, but the load of greenhouse gasses might extend the current interglacial that far or make it stronger.
All this predictable discussion about the economic necessities is just too easy and obvious. Of course you have to pay your bills. The trick is to do that and do some good as a by-product. If the argument you give to your investors is only about maximizing their profit, you and they aren't being creative or good citizens.
I give you an example everything you have ever hated about social media, about Facebook, about Google, about Twitter, about millions of web sites and blogs out there. The people who invent these things are smart, but the applications are lazy and fall short of virtue in a myriad of ways, wihch is why we dislike them, but basically your have your own lack of morals and creativity to thank for that. All those guys here making the same mindless economic arguments, the same tiresome capitulation to the craven shortsightness of bankers and investors, are only admitting their own lack of insight. Now I know that you must justify your effort to your investors, but that should come with limits you shall not cross.
I have become a sharp critic of blogs and social media because they cater to the obvious and lowest nature in people, to appeal to the low hanging fruit and instant gratification of the most base consumerism, and people invest and use complex technical skills, even computer science, in exploitation of this lowest common demoninator in people, this short attention span, this media driven ADD, as though there is some new found source of energy in it, when it is just the collective laziness of mind and ignorance of the pressing and complex problems of the real world. It is as if it is really a pact with the Devil in age-old Huxterism and separation of people from their money.
The promise of the internet was much more, and that opportunity has been taken away by greed, by the mediocraty of the main market and mass consensus. The public taste is not the last word, but society has always had idea leaders, meme creators, who once came out of learned institutions, who led to offer wisdom and insight, because they felt that society needed a guide beyond the short-term economic necessities. Now we have elevated the Huxter, advertiser, the marketer, the public relations person, the propagandist, who are all tellers of white and greater lies, with little criticism, to high status that they have not earned, and all because somebody gets to make a buck. People are tiring of that and ultimately it will show as a loss of revenue to Internet companies as more and more people switch off or find and create alternatives. Good luck, and I hope that many of you are wrong,
What astonishes me the most about the tweet is the stupidity in posting it, given the presumed background of the person posting it. She seems to have forgotten that posts on public social media can get legs despite the nave assumption that it may have been meant for only one or a couple of people, and if she posted it to get wider attention, she underestimated its pushback. That is the kind of mistake a newbee on social media makes, not a PR person who is presumed to have some knowledge of how the medium, of Tweeting, works to promote a message.
The lesson here is that the door swings both ways. She is in public relations to create interest in the opinions of her clients, and yet she seems to have at least momentarlly forgotten how this all works, how social media works, how social media thrives on the easy, the facile, on low hanging fruit, on the predictable reactions of people. This is the biggest mistake one could make, which I think is why she got fired, and she deserved it.
That said, the incident is really my entry into criticism I have of the whole idea of social media, not only the limitations of blogs, which I have talked about before, but the whole idea of media companies, special interests, and businesses driving all communication through social media. To that end I am pleased that one of the opinion makers got burned, because I'd like to see the whole practice get discredited for suppression of public discussion that leads to problem solving, in the name of propaganda and business profits. It doesn't matter who the culprets are, one of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. The flaw is the same, a few people who own social media outlets get to control discussion by setting topics and agnedas while leaving the public in blog comment form only, not discussion between themselves, really. The old USENET had a better media for people getting together and discussing and debating, which Slashdot has some of, but Slashdot is like social media in that its editorial staff controls which stories get out to a larger audience, and even though it supports context replies, which is a huge step forward, unless it supports something like a newsgroup hiererarchy, there will not be deep public discussions on it.
The people of the world need much more freedom to debate and have discussions than social media allows. Even though there are plenty of discussions on social media they don't go very deeply. Nothing about social media is nuanced, especially if what is needed is extensive analysis and problem solving. Most people who use social media avoid discussion and especially political ones, because it is too hard to add any depth, there is no useful structure to a blog and context is too easily lost.
There needs to be a topic hierarchy, sub-threads by topic, metrics for number of replies, length of messages, context reply, and filters. Some of this exists on Slashdot, none of it eixsts on most socila media sites. It is not a big part of any of the discussion frameworks out there for developer use, Drupal, WordPress, etc. There are some small efforts in that direction. It might even be good for someone to port a USENET newsreader to the web, not just a standalone client, but something that supports USENET style messages in a website. The hegimony of social media business, the desire to mine the text block of a blog post is what limits the adoption of more structure,
Maybe you should use a different "advertising broker",
Maybe. And, maybe, sex-education sites should make more effort to not appear like porn...
But, of course, porn, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no doubt that even the most clinical and scientific discussion of sex will look like porn to someone, especially the stuffy wife of a member of the House of Lords. I can imagine that there are many Brits who are still like that.
And I do like your.sig "Somewhere in Chicago a community is missing an organizer.", for it signifies the problem, as in "Somewhere in Texas lives a fake dust farmer who is really a Wall Street Republican, born in New England," But I am not really making a partisan broadside here. I agree with your sig and my rejoinder and it has to do with the quality of leadership and how America is bad at producing leaders, after all if the best we can do is Harvard and Skull and Crosebones and drawing leaders out of corrupt corporations, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
On the one hand President Obama is anything but Presidential, and I agree with the opposition broadside that he still thinks like a community organizer and has not acquired the scope of the Leader of the Free World, even if the "free" part is a little tarnished. I voted for him and he is a disappointment to me. But most of the 44 odd Presidents of this nation have been disappointments, more or less.
As for G.W. Bush either he really was a Bumkin or more evil than we thought, not least for adopting the fake Texas persona when it was clear that he had more to do with Wall Street than Austin, and maybe that time at Harvard does tell, that inculcation into a cult of evil, like Mark Zuckerburg. The Face Book was a real document, a self-incriminating dossier, and is Facebook any more than that?
Our hobby site got blocked by Googe/SafeBrowsing twice this months. No, we weren't hacked. No, we weren't hosting malware. We just happened to use the same advertising broker, that was fooled into showing malware ads earlier.
If one wanted to make a good case, they could point out, how you can disappear from the Internet for mere association with someone else — and how suspicious it is, that that "something else" just happens to be a direct (if small-scale) competitor to Google...
No, I don't like governmental censorware — as Heinlein put it in several of his books, the real danger comes not from content, but from the government's attempt to tell their citizens, that they can not be trusted to view it. That UK is doing just that is an outrage. But the fact, that the automated censor happens to be mis-categorize some content has nothing to do with it — the censorship is scandalously wrong whether or not it functions as designed.
I am glad I don't live in the UK under the Cameron government, and my attitude toward the British was turned south by the condescending attitude voiced by several people in his government at the riots in London of two years ago, toward the "disadvantaged" people of color the UK government had invited to imegrate from former British Commonwealth, and how dare those same people ask for a living wage and torch a few store fronts doing so, as if it was the height of insolence for them to question the rights of British Aristocracy to keep them below the poverty line. Whether or not if that what was in the hearts of the Home Secretary and others in that government, it was that arrogance that was communicated. I have never thought the same about people form the UK since, snd especially the more formal their speech is. To this day it causes me to recoil when I hear that kind of British accent spoken over here in the U.S., the piece of the British Empire that made a clear break of it.
So, it doesn't really surprise that a nation that lays claim to being a democracy and who gave us Americans the underpinnings of our inclusive institutions beginning with the Magna Carta, should, in establishing shared power between the Monarch and the emerging land owner class, and in Parliment, not come as far as we in realizing the correct institutions of a free society. That still carrying around the institutions of a class society, that conservatives there shoudl forget the lessons of their history and of other states in their empire. I can laugh at them from this safe distance and say that I hopes it hurts them in some immediate way, such as their students losing in tech advancements and losing wealth. And I hope that Brits who come hear drop their British accent and ties and become Americans and ensure that this nation remain as free as it can be, while the Aristocrats back home clamp down on their people and lose advantage.
But wait, Hypocrisy is violating in deed your prescription for others. So saying that greed or lust are sins and then going out and robbing the offering plate and screwing one of your perisioners, don't say that men of the cloth don't do either with fair regularity, is a threat to the power of religion. It undermines religion, but it is the common type of religion that is based on moral authority, which most religion is. One of the good things about Pope Francis is that he is calling his own fellow Catholics on hypocrisy, like converting the lavish residence of one bishop into a home for the poor.
I am sympathetic to all those with legacy issues. I just clobbered an XP install and replaced it with Knoppix 7.2, Linux, but I am not still running Visucalc, although I did download the zip to see if it will run on DOSemu on Ubuntu. I'll bet it does.
Given with potential security problems with unpatched XP, if M$ decides to drop support, is like running on square wheels, If you run fast enough, you may not notice the rough ride, unless you slow down. It was been my experience that the latest Linux releases will tun on configurations that are too small for later releases of Windows. I actually run Knoppix 7.2 in 1/4 Gb on a vintage 2000 system that had been running Win2k. Yes, I had swap areas, but it worked without a hitch and reasonably fast. I think the processor was Celaron.
Of Course, people are going to have issues with finding drivers for really old hardware, and maybe they are afraid to chance it on new drivers, but I have run devices of vintage 2000 on recent Linux with generic drivers, and if you are resourceful you can figure out how to wrote a river for that HW that absolutely has to be supported. That sounds like an opportunity for Opern Source advocates, to support legacy hardware with Linux drivers. Sounds to me that M$ is creating opportunities for Linux device driver writers to support legacy hardware, if it isn't already supported. I guess that also applies to software that needs Wine or DOSemu support.
The House is where population is directly represented. The Senate is where States are directly represented. The Senate was supposed to protect the Sovereignty of States (which function was seriously harmed by the 17th Amendment) and limit the ability of a tyranny of the majority. I.e. the lightly populated states could combine forces to stop a majority in the House, which will inevitably be controlled by the big cities.
The interesting thing at the moment is that the Senate is more controlled by the big cities. (Seattle has two Senators, the rest of Washington gets ignored in that chamber.) Since not all House districts have a major city, they still listen to the countryside on occasion.
I could argue exactly the opposite, that population is under-represented by the Constitution and that because of changes the Founders never imagined that rural interests, energy companies and agribusiness, are over represented, in detrament to the urban population. In fact with the hard limit of 435 representatives in the House, the numerical will is thwarted by dilution if not by gerrymandering.
But rather than debating the Constitution, I'd rather point out that the Gun Rights debate of last year revealed that the Consitution has outlived its usefulness and that the dissolution of the Union is not far behind. There are massive forces tearing at this country that have been enhanced by poor stewardship of the Constitution in the courts and corruption in Congress. This comes to a head with the populous states on each coast realize that they can't be heard because of the disproportionate power of rural special interests, because of imbalance added to the political process by misapplication of principles of governemt. They will begin to think of Sucession as the solution. I have mentioned the case of California, which because of the size of its economy, its technical know-how, and the divergence with politics in the rest of the nation, could indeed become a separate nation and thrive.
My guess about your comment about Seattle being the home of both Senators is about rural interests seeming not having a voice. It think that the senate was designed to give "States Rights" a voice when meant that as Alexander Hamilton feared the "rabbel" that the patrician land owners and farmers wanted more power than democracy would afford them. Think of the bicameral system as parallel to the House of Lords and House of Commons in the British Parlement, The Senate and House of the U.S. Congress are parallel, and your fears about underrepresentation of rural interests ia offset by the more aristocratic make-up of rural political interests exaggerated by corruption in campaign finance.
That imbalance has become more extreme because of changes in rural economics. Whereas in Jefferson's day there were lots of small farmers, and that was his ideal of egalitarian stability, that has totally changed and the rural life is more diminated by billionaires who run huge factory farms, Agribusiness, yes, very efficient, yes, but hardly what the Framers imagined. The most Conservative parts of California are the Central Valley Agribusiness farms and Southern California defense based workers and Christians. They are at odds with the urban centers, and that is true nationwide.
Actually, the Congress, as much maligning as it deserves, seems to at least want to give the appearance, that it got the basic message: Thia country works on neither extreme but on compromise. Now, it may be that power shifts, literally, gives some group the ability to not compromise, but in general the ability to compromise is golden. At the minimum, members of the Congress got the message that not doing anything will get them out of office and soon, so they have their jobs and their power, to thank on the perceptions of the people who elected them to office. People were upset over the government shutdown and Sequestor. Even Libertarians got a lesson on what we need from the government, even if it is just all those things we take for granted.
But your dichotomy, as most dichotomies, is really false. The truth is not in either extreme, but is a balance of competing forces, of priorities that oppose one another. And "Freedom" is not just the absence of restraints. It means noting on a desert island. Self-reliance and Rugged Individualism are really myths, pushed by a bunch of brash Randians too far. Freedom means that your membership in society is honored as much as other people's and that the poragatives of other people to impinge on your efforts are limited. That is also a dynamic, as tension, a balancing act in reality. It is not absolute.
People confuse the rules of economic success, even its sociopathic tendancies, with inclusion in society. They are at odds. Even though some entrapaneur can think of what he can get away with, with whom he can take advantage of, there are limits determined by commonwealth, by membership in society by social norms reflected sometime in law. So, living in a society that protects your dignity as a person is not the same as living in one with few restraints, which we call lawless for good reason, and that includes your heed of the dignity of other people as well.
Replace these with "Central Valley Agribusiness" or "Ventura County Oil Magnate" or "Holywood Movie Mogel funded bu Conservative South Western Banker" the 40th president funded by the same, and it begins to make sense
California is very diverse politically and geographically. The part that is desert east of the Sierra Nevada mountains has much more in common with Nevada, Utah, and Arizona than with coastal California and the Central Valley.
The economy is one of the largest in the world, and although I don't trust the public policy views of any Silicon Valley business man and certainly not those coming out of Stanford University, there is a cogent point of view that California could go it alone, even as a separate nation, from the influience of Washington DC and politicians elsewhere, so even the idea of nationhood isn't that far fetched, not when you consider that the Nuclear Fusion Iniative, though funded by Department of Energy is a Livermore Labs project and just passed the break even milestone in October for producing energy from fusing atoms. That could free California from dependence on Midwest Carbon Energy and water from the interior of the country, as the large supply of energy would make it economical to desalinate sea water. This could come at a time when the state faces drought from global warming, and while the U.S. Congress drages its feet on energy policy and additives to the the food supply because of Midwest special interests, California could dictate its own policies with the power to succeed from the Union.
And we could separate ourselves from the Conservative hot bed of Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties and let them join Nevada or Arizona. The natural geographic differences help make the useful distinction.
It wouldn't be the worse tact to partition California, even if it remains in the Union, but to do it by drainage basins or physiographic/geologic provinces. So everything that drains west could become the new state, the rest and the part, either east of the San Andreas Fault, or the southern most counties could join an interior state, perhaps comprising the Basin Range Province.
Unless the science is an historical science, meaning that the data source is an historical artifact than can be lost. An example that comes to mind is a fossil collection. Consider how few fossils the human lineage is based on? It is quite small, losing any of that material could be damaging to revisiting the scientific reasoning behind the resulting phylogeny. Science is not about the result, ever, it is about the steps taken to get the result, and quite often the steps have to be repeated to refine or modify the resulting model, and for historical science, that means preserving and revisiting historical artifacts,
Even in physical science there are historical artifacts. Whenever a nova blows up, especially close to us, astronomers go back and look at old images of the region of the sky to look for the progenitor star, which they often find, and sometimes the information is on fragile glass plates, so someone had to take care of them.
But if 80% are in the bottom achievement level, that matters too, unless we live in a nondemocratic elitist state. So which is it? Even uneducated or underachieving people aren't totally stupid. If they are being screwed by elites, do you think that after some point they are going to take it anymore? I sometimes think I am talking to 1%'ers or wanna-bees. Be careful what you wish for. It could exact an unexpected toll.
I think you both overestimate the averaging affect of unions and massively underestimate the level of meritocracy existing in current organisations. I'm not saying unionisation is perfect or even necessarily the right solution for IT work, merely that the union world is far less horrible than you suggest and the current world is far less of a utopia. The Google's of the world will still hire the best they can get their hands on under unions and the most important merit you are currently rewarded for in any organisation is the ability to play politics not any kind of technical skill.
Well, put. The value of meritocracy can be overstated, as of unions, and conditions change. The trick is to recognize change and move on, and that can be quite hard. I have known people who fit all the variations. I have known "team players" and loners who work in tech. it is hard to make generalizations about how one should work and for whom. The greatest mistake is to not assess yourself correctly and to stay past the time when you are useful, and at the same time balance that with your obligations.
I think that people who are so quick to criticize others for not having such knowledge and timing use it to a competitive advantage. It sounds like they are offering constructive criticism when in fact they are patting themselves on the back and trying to discourage the person they are offering the free advice to, and the effort and the message are worth the price: "You Fucked up, I m better than you!". Overgeneralizing about unions or elitist meritocracy is a result. These guys think they are better than everybody else, they are smart engineers and probably carry Libertarian political views and voted for Romney or Ron Paul in the last election. They need the warning that they are a tiny elite, numerically, and that most American workers need some protection against abusive employers because they are not in a technical elite. The warning is that elites can be made to suffer at the hands of the great unwashed, the people they look down upon. The way this works is that if the majority come to the conclusion that instead of improving their lives that tech took away their livelihood and benefitted that elite that fancies itself superior, that they could take some revenge. I am not saying what they might do, but people who think that they are better could find themselves at some disadvantage.
One possibility is that people are beginning to see the downside of tech, in particular of its applications in social media. Companies like Google and Facebook are running the risk of ruining the image of smart technical people as capable of making everybody's life better. Non-technical people do not understand the technical and business decisions being made by these companies, but they do get the net effect, the business practice, the annoying distractions when they post a message or do a search, the manipulation that benefits someone else more than their friends and themselves. Ordinary people, even uneducated people, understand this effect, even though it is based on web technology driven by smart engineers and people with CS degrees. If they grow to mistrust tech, it could have immediate repracussions for smug smart-asses, so be careful what attitude you have and express.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, it would be sheer lunacy!
If we doubt the competency of colleagues and managers to objectivity evaluate one another, especially in the hiring and firing decisions, that negates the result that such as system is a meritocracy, since evaluation of merit would not be reliable. In fact it becomes the same old political system with the social interactions having a far greater weight, even in technical work, and just like non-technical working conditions.
The argument for "Meritocracy" is then just a ruse. It is another way for people with the power to make such decisions to retain the right to decide who gets hired and who gets fired in the way they have always done.
I know the shell, the command line, have since the days of glass TTYs, but you can lead the GUI users into it the next time they run across a situation where the file manager or finder doesn't give then the fine control they would get with file name regular expressions in the shell.
It isn't that Grandma has a problem finding the recipes file from time to time, she may well learn to use grep from the terminal, eventually, but it is for the person, whether sysadmin or not, who has to find stuff everyday all day. Then eventually he finds out that the shell and regular expressions will help him achieve his goal faster. If you want to introduce GUI users to the terminal, just answer a question with it. My son brought his Macbook to me one day and asked if Python was on his machine and how he could use it. I could have easily told him to go to the Applications folder and look, but I opened terminal and did "python" typed in a couple of statements and demoed it to him. I may also have done 'man python', to show him it was there. As python is used in system maintenence, it may not be listed in Applications if the idle application isn't installed, but I'll bet it is there.
On Windows, yes Windows, a good implementation of the shell can save you money, paying for the third-party programs that do utility jobs that aren't part of Windows but can be easily created with an instance of bash installed. Renaming lots of files is a task that comes to mind. There are plenty of programs written for Windows that do that and you will pay, but install Cygwin for nothing, one of the first things I do if I have to own a Windows system, and do it from a terminal, xterm, in bash with a for loop.
AMEN, And that is because the management doesn't often know what actually works. They can't tell. You can show them something that sorta works, but they are not smart enough to really know. They rely on heresay and that is why many projects don't quite work as they should, and it is politics and tact, not skill and merit, that matters to them.
Except, of course, this hinges very much on which context someone's work is judged to be "mediocre", and that can change over time. In fact, under the single payer system we have in the U.S. one can be judged as "mediocre" just for getting older and having some of the kind of medical issues that occur with age, as unfair as that is. Employers get away with it and especially when the business is losing profitability and managers have pressure to control their bottom lines, then they turn sociopathic if they aren't already. I knew of one manager who seemed to target those for layoff who had used the sick leave and medical coverage. He was never called on it, and the company eventually got baught out, but it was clear that he was narcissistic in other ways, too.
Yes, as long as the profit curve goes up. Ever worked for a company that is losing profit?
The U.S. made a huge regression back to laissez faire capitalism after 1980, and it isn't just Ronald Reagan's fault, although he helped it along, and I am not so naive as to suggest that politicians do anything but respond to economic trends rather than creating them.
If you want to understand the economic shifts of the past 30 years and predict what the consequence may be, look in your own back yard as techies. I consider myself a techie, although it isn't reaslly my strong suit, still I know my way around technology, and technology is by far the root cause for job insecurity for most people and the lopsided income distribution. The engineers who invented all this stuff and who are lately misusing it to try to rip people off through social media and program driven market speculation have no idea of the consequences now beginning to emerge; the dislocations to society. Elitist thinking, which is rampent in technical circles, won't protect them if the mass of people displaced by poor management of the economic effects become aware. I am not talking about mere luditism here, but a social revolution in which the top is decapitated for greed and selfishness. The unrest is already obvious which is why many people who post on these threads do so with an undercurrent of fear. The fear is justified. Technology really is neurtral, but at those times when things are out of wack because of its unfair use, then its practioners, from the company managements, to the investors, to the staff engineers, are up for examination. We are beginning to see this already, as bodies like the U.S. Congress have to wrestle increasingly with the effects of technical decisions. So those of you who see the government and other "outsiders", like Facebook users, as incompetent to judge your work, should put your own house in order and be above reproach for it not to could come back to haunt you Big Time.
It might be easy for the message to get lost here. The Sun's variability is not a factor in climate change is different from saying that it is not involved in climate change. The claim here is that other factors are more correlated with climate change, namely the production of greenhouse gasses. Even without that, there would still be variation caused by the regular changes in the earth's orbit, inclination, that are enough to account for the dramatic changes from glacial and interglacial intervals in earth's climate over the past several million years. I read the story as saying that variability of the Sun's radiation is not significant. The input of greenhouses gases is significant, with other factors in play. So orbital elements might set us up for another glacial period is say 15,000 years, but the load of greenhouse gasses might extend the current interglacial that far or make it stronger.
Or why Social Media and web sites just suck.
All this predictable discussion about the economic necessities is just too easy and obvious. Of course you have to pay your bills. The trick is to do that and do some good as a by-product. If the argument you give to your investors is only about maximizing their profit, you and they aren't being creative or good citizens.
I give you an example everything you have ever hated about social media, about Facebook, about Google, about Twitter, about millions of web sites and blogs out there. The people who invent these things are smart, but the applications are lazy and fall short of virtue in a myriad of ways, wihch is why we dislike them, but basically your have your own lack of morals and creativity to thank for that. All those guys here making the same mindless economic arguments, the same tiresome capitulation to the craven shortsightness of bankers and investors, are only admitting their own lack of insight. Now I know that you must justify your effort to your investors, but that should come with limits you shall not cross.
I have become a sharp critic of blogs and social media because they cater to the obvious and lowest nature in people, to appeal to the low hanging fruit and instant gratification of the most base consumerism, and people invest and use complex technical skills, even computer science, in exploitation of this lowest common demoninator in people, this short attention span, this media driven ADD, as though there is some new found source of energy in it, when it is just the collective laziness of mind and ignorance of the pressing and complex problems of the real world. It is as if it is really a pact with the Devil in age-old Huxterism and separation of people from their money.
The promise of the internet was much more, and that opportunity has been taken away by greed, by the mediocraty of the main market and mass consensus. The public taste is not the last word, but society has always had idea leaders, meme creators, who once came out of learned institutions, who led to offer wisdom and insight, because they felt that society needed a guide beyond the short-term economic necessities. Now we have elevated the Huxter, advertiser, the marketer, the public relations person, the propagandist, who are all tellers of white and greater lies, with little criticism, to high status that they have not earned, and all because somebody gets to make a buck. People are tiring of that and ultimately it will show as a loss of revenue to Internet companies as more and more people switch off or find and create alternatives. Good luck, and I hope that many of you are wrong,
And that justifies exactly what?
What astonishes me the most about the tweet is the stupidity in posting it, given the presumed background of the person posting it. She seems to have forgotten that posts on public social media can get legs despite the nave assumption that it may have been meant for only one or a couple of people, and if she posted it to get wider attention, she underestimated its pushback. That is the kind of mistake a newbee on social media makes, not a PR person who is presumed to have some knowledge of how the medium, of Tweeting, works to promote a message.
The lesson here is that the door swings both ways. She is in public relations to create interest in the opinions of her clients, and yet she seems to have at least momentarlly forgotten how this all works, how social media works, how social media thrives on the easy, the facile, on low hanging fruit, on the predictable reactions of people. This is the biggest mistake one could make, which I think is why she got fired, and she deserved it.
That said, the incident is really my entry into criticism I have of the whole idea of social media, not only the limitations of blogs, which I have talked about before, but the whole idea of media companies, special interests, and businesses driving all communication through social media. To that end I am pleased that one of the opinion makers got burned, because I'd like to see the whole practice get discredited for suppression of public discussion that leads to problem solving, in the name of propaganda and business profits. It doesn't matter who the culprets are, one of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. The flaw is the same, a few people who own social media outlets get to control discussion by setting topics and agnedas while leaving the public in blog comment form only, not discussion between themselves, really. The old USENET had a better media for people getting together and discussing and debating, which Slashdot has some of, but Slashdot is like social media in that its editorial staff controls which stories get out to a larger audience, and even though it supports context replies, which is a huge step forward, unless it supports something like a newsgroup hiererarchy, there will not be deep public discussions on it.
The people of the world need much more freedom to debate and have discussions than social media allows. Even though there are plenty of discussions on social media they don't go very deeply. Nothing about social media is nuanced, especially if what is needed is extensive analysis and problem solving. Most people who use social media avoid discussion and especially political ones, because it is too hard to add any depth, there is no useful structure to a blog and context is too easily lost.
There needs to be a topic hierarchy, sub-threads by topic, metrics for number of replies, length of messages, context reply, and filters. Some of this exists on Slashdot, none of it eixsts on most socila media sites. It is not a big part of any of the discussion frameworks out there for developer use, Drupal, WordPress, etc. There are some small efforts in that direction. It might even be good for someone to port a USENET newsreader to the web, not just a standalone client, but something that supports USENET style messages in a website. The hegimony of social media business, the desire to mine the text block of a blog post is what limits the adoption of more structure,
Maybe. And, maybe, sex-education sites should make more effort to not appear like porn...
But, of course, porn, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no doubt that even the most clinical and scientific discussion of sex will look like porn to someone, especially the stuffy wife of a member of the House of Lords. I can imagine that there are many Brits who are still like that.
And I do like your .sig "Somewhere in Chicago a community is missing an organizer.", for it signifies the problem, as in "Somewhere in Texas lives a fake dust farmer who is really a Wall Street Republican, born in New England," But I am not really making a partisan broadside here. I agree with your sig and my rejoinder and it has to do with the quality of leadership and how America is bad at producing leaders, after all if the best we can do is Harvard and Skull and Crosebones and drawing leaders out of corrupt corporations, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
On the one hand President Obama is anything but Presidential, and I agree with the opposition broadside that he still thinks like a community organizer and has not acquired the scope of the Leader of the Free World, even if the "free" part is a little tarnished. I voted for him and he is a disappointment to me. But most of the 44 odd Presidents of this nation have been disappointments, more or less.
As for G.W. Bush either he really was a Bumkin or more evil than we thought, not least for adopting the fake Texas persona when it was clear that he had more to do with Wall Street than Austin, and maybe that time at Harvard does tell, that inculcation into a cult of evil, like Mark Zuckerburg. The Face Book was a real document, a self-incriminating dossier, and is Facebook any more than that?
Our hobby site got blocked by Googe/SafeBrowsing twice this months. No, we weren't hacked. No, we weren't hosting malware. We just happened to use the same advertising broker, that was fooled into showing malware ads earlier.
If one wanted to make a good case, they could point out, how you can disappear from the Internet for mere association with someone else — and how suspicious it is, that that "something else" just happens to be a direct (if small-scale) competitor to Google...
No, I don't like governmental censorware — as Heinlein put it in several of his books, the real danger comes not from content, but from the government's attempt to tell their citizens, that they can not be trusted to view it. That UK is doing just that is an outrage. But the fact, that the automated censor happens to be mis-categorize some content has nothing to do with it — the censorship is scandalously wrong whether or not it functions as designed.
I am glad I don't live in the UK under the Cameron government, and my attitude toward the British was turned south by the condescending attitude voiced by several people in his government at the riots in London of two years ago, toward the "disadvantaged" people of color the UK government had invited to imegrate from former British Commonwealth, and how dare those same people ask for a living wage and torch a few store fronts doing so, as if it was the height of insolence for them to question the rights of British Aristocracy to keep them below the poverty line. Whether or not if that what was in the hearts of the Home Secretary and others in that government, it was that arrogance that was communicated. I have never thought the same about people form the UK since, snd especially the more formal their speech is. To this day it causes me to recoil when I hear that kind of British accent spoken over here in the U.S., the piece of the British Empire that made a clear break of it.
So, it doesn't really surprise that a nation that lays claim to being a democracy and who gave us Americans the underpinnings of our inclusive institutions beginning with the Magna Carta, should, in establishing shared power between the Monarch and the emerging land owner class, and in Parliment, not come as far as we in realizing the correct institutions of a free society. That still carrying around the institutions of a class society, that conservatives there shoudl forget the lessons of their history and of other states in their empire. I can laugh at them from this safe distance and say that I hopes it hurts them in some immediate way, such as their students losing in tech advancements and losing wealth. And I hope that Brits who come hear drop their British accent and ties and become Americans and ensure that this nation remain as free as it can be, while the Aristocrats back home clamp down on their people and lose advantage.
But wait, Hypocrisy is violating in deed your prescription for others. So saying that greed or lust are sins and then going out and robbing the offering plate and screwing one of your perisioners, don't say that men of the cloth don't do either with fair regularity, is a threat to the power of religion. It undermines religion, but it is the common type of religion that is based on moral authority, which most religion is. One of the good things about Pope Francis is that he is calling his own fellow Catholics on hypocrisy, like converting the lavish residence of one bishop into a home for the poor.
I'll bet that they got freebsd.org confused with freebd.org.
I am sympathetic to all those with legacy issues. I just clobbered an XP install and replaced it with Knoppix 7.2, Linux, but I am not still running Visucalc, although I did download the zip to see if it will run on DOSemu on Ubuntu. I'll bet it does.
Given with potential security problems with unpatched XP, if M$ decides to drop support, is like running on square wheels, If you run fast enough, you may not notice the rough ride, unless you slow down. It was been my experience that the latest Linux releases will tun on configurations that are too small for later releases of Windows. I actually run Knoppix 7.2 in 1/4 Gb on a vintage 2000 system that had been running Win2k. Yes, I had swap areas, but it worked without a hitch and reasonably fast. I think the processor was Celaron.
Of Course, people are going to have issues with finding drivers for really old hardware, and maybe they are afraid to chance it on new drivers, but I have run devices of vintage 2000 on recent Linux with generic drivers, and if you are resourceful you can figure out how to wrote a river for that HW that absolutely has to be supported. That sounds like an opportunity for Opern Source advocates, to support legacy hardware with Linux drivers. Sounds to me that M$ is creating opportunities for Linux device driver writers to support legacy hardware, if it isn't already supported. I guess that also applies to software that needs Wine or DOSemu support.
The House is where population is directly represented. The Senate is where States are directly represented. The Senate was supposed to protect the Sovereignty of States (which function was seriously harmed by the 17th Amendment) and limit the ability of a tyranny of the majority. I.e. the lightly populated states could combine forces to stop a majority in the House, which will inevitably be controlled by the big cities.
The interesting thing at the moment is that the Senate is more controlled by the big cities. (Seattle has two Senators, the rest of Washington gets ignored in that chamber.) Since not all House districts have a major city, they still listen to the countryside on occasion.
I could argue exactly the opposite, that population is under-represented by the Constitution and that because of changes the Founders never imagined that rural interests, energy companies and agribusiness, are over represented, in detrament to the urban population. In fact with the hard limit of 435 representatives in the House, the numerical will is thwarted by dilution if not by gerrymandering.
But rather than debating the Constitution, I'd rather point out that the Gun Rights debate of last year revealed that the Consitution has outlived its usefulness and that the dissolution of the Union is not far behind. There are massive forces tearing at this country that have been enhanced by poor stewardship of the Constitution in the courts and corruption in Congress. This comes to a head with the populous states on each coast realize that they can't be heard because of the disproportionate power of rural special interests, because of imbalance added to the political process by misapplication of principles of governemt. They will begin to think of Sucession as the solution. I have mentioned the case of California, which because of the size of its economy, its technical know-how, and the divergence with politics in the rest of the nation, could indeed become a separate nation and thrive.
My guess about your comment about Seattle being the home of both Senators is about rural interests seeming not having a voice. It think that the senate was designed to give "States Rights" a voice when meant that as Alexander Hamilton feared the "rabbel" that the patrician land owners and farmers wanted more power than democracy would afford them. Think of the bicameral system as parallel to the House of Lords and House of Commons in the British Parlement, The Senate and House of the U.S. Congress are parallel, and your fears about underrepresentation of rural interests ia offset by the more aristocratic make-up of rural political interests exaggerated by corruption in campaign finance.
That imbalance has become more extreme because of changes in rural economics. Whereas in Jefferson's day there were lots of small farmers, and that was his ideal of egalitarian stability, that has totally changed and the rural life is more diminated by billionaires who run huge factory farms, Agribusiness, yes, very efficient, yes, but hardly what the Framers imagined. The most Conservative parts of California are the Central Valley Agribusiness farms and Southern California defense based workers and Christians. They are at odds with the urban centers, and that is true nationwide.
Actually, the Congress, as much maligning as it deserves, seems to at least want to give the appearance, that it got the basic message: Thia country works on neither extreme but on compromise. Now, it may be that power shifts, literally, gives some group the ability to not compromise, but in general the ability to compromise is golden. At the minimum, members of the Congress got the message that not doing anything will get them out of office and soon, so they have their jobs and their power, to thank on the perceptions of the people who elected them to office. People were upset over the government shutdown and Sequestor. Even Libertarians got a lesson on what we need from the government, even if it is just all those things we take for granted.
But your dichotomy, as most dichotomies, is really false. The truth is not in either extreme, but is a balance of competing forces, of priorities that oppose one another. And "Freedom" is not just the absence of restraints. It means noting on a desert island. Self-reliance and Rugged Individualism are really myths, pushed by a bunch of brash Randians too far. Freedom means that your membership in society is honored as much as other people's and that the poragatives of other people to impinge on your efforts are limited. That is also a dynamic, as tension, a balancing act in reality. It is not absolute.
People confuse the rules of economic success, even its sociopathic tendancies, with inclusion in society. They are at odds. Even though some entrapaneur can think of what he can get away with, with whom he can take advantage of, there are limits determined by commonwealth, by membership in society by social norms reflected sometime in law. So, living in a society that protects your dignity as a person is not the same as living in one with few restraints, which we call lawless for good reason, and that includes your heed of the dignity of other people as well.
Replace these with "Central Valley Agribusiness" or "Ventura County Oil Magnate" or "Holywood Movie Mogel funded bu Conservative South Western Banker" the 40th president funded by the same, and it begins to make sense
California is very diverse politically and geographically. The part that is desert east of the Sierra Nevada mountains has much more in common with Nevada, Utah, and Arizona than with coastal California and the Central Valley.
The economy is one of the largest in the world, and although I don't trust the public policy views of any Silicon Valley business man and certainly not those coming out of Stanford University, there is a cogent point of view that California could go it alone, even as a separate nation, from the influience of Washington DC and politicians elsewhere, so even the idea of nationhood isn't that far fetched, not when you consider that the Nuclear Fusion Iniative, though funded by Department of Energy is a Livermore Labs project and just passed the break even milestone in October for producing energy from fusing atoms. That could free California from dependence on Midwest Carbon Energy and water from the interior of the country, as the large supply of energy would make it economical to desalinate sea water. This could come at a time when the state faces drought from global warming, and while the U.S. Congress drages its feet on energy policy and additives to the the food supply because of Midwest special interests, California could dictate its own policies with the power to succeed from the Union.
And we could separate ourselves from the Conservative hot bed of Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties and let them join Nevada or Arizona. The natural geographic differences help make the useful distinction.
It wouldn't be the worse tact to partition California, even if it remains in the Union, but to do it by drainage basins or physiographic/geologic provinces. So everything that drains west could become the new state, the rest and the part, either east of the San Andreas Fault, or the southern most counties could join an interior state, perhaps comprising the Basin Range Province.
Oh, I know. It was a weak joke about the number of facile pop songs for guitar in that key.
I thought it was 85% and recursive, the series converges slower, that is for Sturgon :-)
Unless the science is an historical science, meaning that the data source is an historical artifact than can be lost. An example that comes to mind is a fossil collection. Consider how few fossils the human lineage is based on? It is quite small, losing any of that material could be damaging to revisiting the scientific reasoning behind the resulting phylogeny. Science is not about the result, ever, it is about the steps taken to get the result, and quite often the steps have to be repeated to refine or modify the resulting model, and for historical science, that means preserving and revisiting historical artifacts,
Even in physical science there are historical artifacts. Whenever a nova blows up, especially close to us, astronomers go back and look at old images of the region of the sky to look for the progenitor star, which they often find, and sometimes the information is on fragile glass plates, so someone had to take care of them.
Well some individuals are more individual than other individuals :-)
But if 80% are in the bottom achievement level, that matters too, unless we live in a nondemocratic elitist state. So which is it? Even uneducated or underachieving people aren't totally stupid. If they are being screwed by elites, do you think that after some point they are going to take it anymore? I sometimes think I am talking to 1%'ers or wanna-bees. Be careful what you wish for. It could exact an unexpected toll.
I think you both overestimate the averaging affect of unions and massively underestimate the level of meritocracy existing in current organisations. I'm not saying unionisation is perfect or even necessarily the right solution for IT work, merely that the union world is far less horrible than you suggest and the current world is far less of a utopia. The Google's of the world will still hire the best they can get their hands on under unions and the most important merit you are currently rewarded for in any organisation is the ability to play politics not any kind of technical skill.
Well, put. The value of meritocracy can be overstated, as of unions, and conditions change. The trick is to recognize change and move on, and that can be quite hard. I have known people who fit all the variations. I have known "team players" and loners who work in tech. it is hard to make generalizations about how one should work and for whom. The greatest mistake is to not assess yourself correctly and to stay past the time when you are useful, and at the same time balance that with your obligations.
I think that people who are so quick to criticize others for not having such knowledge and timing use it to a competitive advantage. It sounds like they are offering constructive criticism when in fact they are patting themselves on the back and trying to discourage the person they are offering the free advice to, and the effort and the message are worth the price: "You Fucked up, I m better than you!". Overgeneralizing about unions or elitist meritocracy is a result. These guys think they are better than everybody else, they are smart engineers and probably carry Libertarian political views and voted for Romney or Ron Paul in the last election. They need the warning that they are a tiny elite, numerically, and that most American workers need some protection against abusive employers because they are not in a technical elite. The warning is that elites can be made to suffer at the hands of the great unwashed, the people they look down upon. The way this works is that if the majority come to the conclusion that instead of improving their lives that tech took away their livelihood and benefitted that elite that fancies itself superior, that they could take some revenge. I am not saying what they might do, but people who think that they are better could find themselves at some disadvantage.
One possibility is that people are beginning to see the downside of tech, in particular of its applications in social media. Companies like Google and Facebook are running the risk of ruining the image of smart technical people as capable of making everybody's life better. Non-technical people do not understand the technical and business decisions being made by these companies, but they do get the net effect, the business practice, the annoying distractions when they post a message or do a search, the manipulation that benefits someone else more than their friends and themselves. Ordinary people, even uneducated people, understand this effect, even though it is based on web technology driven by smart engineers and people with CS degrees. If they grow to mistrust tech, it could have immediate repracussions for smug smart-asses, so be careful what attitude you have and express.