Success is always attributed to the extraordinary skill and foresight of the winner
And that's a correct thing to do in business. With few exceptions, extraordinary skill and foresight are necessary to win big in business, but they are not sufficient; the kind of skills that matter, however, may not be what you personally value or recognize.
Good on Jan for striking it lucky, spare a thought for the thousands, just as worthy, that the dice did not favor, nothing more nothing less.
Getting $19 billion for the company involves a great deal of luck, but he is seeing only a fraction of it. But whatever he is getting, his skills pretty much assured him wealth if he made the right choices.
Achieving a net worth of several million dollars does not require luck, and it usually doesn't even require extraordinary skills.
I don't get it. Even my shitty low-end cellular plan has unlimited texting, and WhatsApp doesn't seem to be doing much else. I can't even take the WhatsApp account with me when I change phone numbers. And WhatsApp is a big, bloated application.
I don't know where this "driving is a privilege" nonsense comes from. If "driving is a privilege", why not walking or breathing? They are all activities people engage in while on public lands. Unless there is a compelling public interest, government has no authority to restrict what we do on public lands; there simply is no constitutional basis for it. The restrictions we impose on driving needed to be justified by safety and environmental concerns.
But you're right: you have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. That means any private party can, if they so choose, collect your license plate information and follow you around. But the government is not a private party; it is more restricted in what it can and should be allowed to do. Police can't just follow you around without cause, and they shouldn't be allowed to collect license plate information without cause either.
As far as I can tell, it is mostly "privileged white middle-class males" that are adopting such pro-feminist bullshit attitudes as you do.
The rest of us know that whining and complaining about other people's attitudes doesn't get you anywhere, and that it is perfectly possible to toughen up and succeed despite other people being jerks.
It is about women who say they want to compete but are put off by the attitude of other competitors towards them due to their gender.
Well, then they need to start dealing with the real world.
Same with jobs, when people say we want more women in tech jobs what they mean is that women want to go into those jobs but are put off, and we should do something to remove those gender based barriers.
Sorry, you don't have a right not to be offended or "put off" by your co-workers.
Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.
I think he talked more about deficit reduction than debt reduction.
Obama called the national debt "irresponsible and unpatriotic". What he promised was to cut the deficit in half during his first term, i.e. make significant progress toward debt reduction; he did shit.
Who knows how much better the recovery could have been without all the roadblocks that Congressional Republicans have thrown in the way.
Bullshit. With all the money Obama spent, the economy is worse off than what Obama's own economists predicted would happen without doing anything.. Furthermore, he completely controlled Congress for the first two years. And as a president, his campaign promises need to limit themselves to what he can reasonably expect to achieve politically, not what he could do if he became a dictator.
You can theoretically make the argument that the economy would have been worse without Obama's programs; I think that's a preposterously stupid argument to make, but since it is completely hypothetical, nobody can disprove it.
But what is crystal clear and beyond any doubt whatsoever is that Obama's economic predictions and campaign promises were false and that the man and his staff are either liars or incompetent (probably both).
So, an American administration is totally responsible for the American economy.
Obama promised a litany of things he was going to do, including effecting a strong recovery and make progress towards debt reduction. He is responsible for his own words.
Last we heard, the business cycle mattered.
Quite right. Therefore, the administration overestimated and overpromised its ability to manage the economy and wasted trillions of dollars on economic programs. And they are also overestimating and overpromising their ability to limit climate change, which is why they shouldn't be trusted in that area either.
And the vaunted American people fucked themselves with buying houses they couldn't afford, flipping houses, taking equity out of their houses to gamble on the stock markets and whatever else what shiny. The Bush administration was complicit, as was Wall Street, as was the insurance industry, as were the builders, and the realtors, and the local zoning officials.
All true. And that only reinforces my point: no administration can be trusted to do this stuff.
However Kerry showed little patience for skeptics in his speech. 'We just don't have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,'
Translation: "We prefer our own interest groups, the ones who got us elected! We need to pay them off with trillions of dollars of tax payer money."
Mr. Kerry, you have no credible plan to stop climate change. The reductions you propose are laughable and utterly inadequate. If you proposed effective reductions, you'd face a rebellion from voters. Your administration hasn't even been able to produce a balanced budget, let alone reduce the national debt, something that even European social welfare states have done. The economic forecasts that got you elected turned out to be b.s., as did the predicted economic effects of your stimulus programs. Your administration's promises on ACA have turned out to be bald faced lies, and you haven't been able to even produce a working web site on time.
I'm not a skeptic on climate change; CO2 is rising and it's getting warmer. I simply don't believe that anything can realistically be done.
And even if something could be done, your administration is too incompetent, corrupt, and dishonest to be trusted with doing it.
It's not just a WMD, global warming causes child porn too, because... think of the children! We must give trillions to our cronies in industry in order to combat this menace!
Plan 9 wasn't a "commercial product", it was a research project. And of all companies, AT&T really should have known what it took to make an OS successful, given their SysV/BSD experience.
And, yeah, a lot of software developed by companies was open sourced even back then.
You may notice that El Masri was handed to the CIA by a European police force, and that the German government knew and acquiesced.
Even if your example had been genuine, yes, he would have been "just unlucky". Abuse of personal data, corruption, politically motivated police and legal actions, etc. are a daily occurrence in every nation, including every European nation; the CIA swooping in and abducting you is about as likely as getting struck by a meteorite.
That regulation was done poorly in the past doesn't mean that regulation doesn't work.
Some regulations work wonderfully. But the regulation that the parent poster proposed is just like the AT&T regulation.
The "regulation" most propose for current phone companies would be something like turning them into line operators, and separate companies would provide the service. That usually works best for the users, but is hard to get the business balance right.
I have no idea what that has to do with anything this thread is about.
It wasn't deregulation that broke AT&T's death grip on telecommunications... It was TECHNOLOGY. When microwave links came along, and ANYBODY could put together a nation-wide network without physically laying copper lines across the entire country, AT&T was in trouble. Long-distance was the first to go, but it wasn't going to be the last.
The same technology existed in Europe, and Europe deregulated much later. Why? Because telecom monopolies were government sanctioned. No amount of technology will help you if you are not legally permitted to use it and build businesses around it.
Deregulation didn't help any of it along, one damn bit.
Deregulation is what made it legal and possible to use microwave links and other technology.
Actually there are many ways into university. You just need to show you're capable.
You have to be judged by someone's criteria. In Australia, these are obviously uniform criteria established by the government. You seem to think that's a good thing. I know it isn't.
Quite common, and as I said, university here is based on academic merit, not on the size of your wallet.
Yes: uniform, national standards of academic merit defined by your government.
If you're not smart enough to get into an engineering degree there's a very good chance you won't actually make it through your degree, and if you get screwed by our system then there's usually a very good reason for it.
Yes, just like there was in East Germany too.
As for being mis-informed or prejudiced, yes watching an American friend painfully attempt to justify their existence via large essays detailing every detail of their life in order to get into an institution which should be solely basing their opinion on his ability to excel in academia, yes that can create prejudice. Hearing how Americans here on exchange / tourist visas complain about the process of moving from secondary to tertiary education makes me wince, and makes them quite jealous too.
Of course, it's a lot easier if everything is provided for by the government. Your point being?
In a world of good government funded education I don't understand why a private university exists at all if not to print a degree on a piece of paper for an underperforming student with a big wallet.
Yes, you don't understand, that's clear. You are bigoted and prejudiced, we already established that.
You don't seem to quite understand how easy it is to get into university here. To actually not get your chance you pretty much need to put the wrong name and address on your application.
I understand quite well. I just don't think it's a good thing.
I know this will have the usual free market advocates clutching their pearls and fainting, but here's the problem. It costs $X kagillion to cover a region with cable, and $Y kabillion per month to maintain it. Those figures do not change by any significant amount depending on market share.
If that were true, cable Internet service wouldn't slow down as subscribers are added. But it does, and when that happens, it seems to take a lot of time and investment to upgrade the system. So, in different words, you're wrong. The last mile creates significant fixed costs, but they are only a fraction of overall costs.
And to the degree that the last mile is a significant fixed cost, there are simple solutions. For example, we can make it easy for competitive companies to lay trunk lines and then allow customers to pick and choose which trunk lines their last mile connections hook up to. Or we can regulate companies to share last mile access at cost. Both systems work and are used in many places to create more competitive market places.
Fuck that. Regulate them. Regulate the shit out of them. We regulate (and tax, and so on) the wrong things in the US, and then declare regulation (and taxes, and so on) wrong and competition the solution to everything.
Maybe you're too young to remember, but we had that system for wired telephone service and it was a disaster. The Internet only took off once those highly regulated monopolies were broken up. The resulting market is still over-regulated and far from efficient, but it's a lot better than what we had.
The U.S. can do very much to an European citizen. Putting him on a no-fly list.
As far as the US is concerned, you are on a no-fly list until you disclose enough information so that you have proven that you're harmless. In fact, for non-citizens, we call that "getting a visa" or "getting a visa waiver".
And that's no different from the way Europeans treat foreigners, or from the way European governments treat their own citizens. European governments have extensive records on their citizens; why should the US let you into the country with less information on you than your own government has on you? Why should Americans trust you more than your own government trusts you?
Outbidding his company by tipping his bids to their own company. Stealing trade secrets and contract details to competitors.
There is not a shred of evidence that the US has done that. Even if it had, given the kinds of state-corporate connections that exist in Europe, I consider that justified.
Damaging his reputation by disclosing secrets he has to keep to interesting parties. Letting some accidental data breach happen.
Digging up dirt on Europeans and disclosing it is the purpose of NSA surveillance; dirt like ties to fascists and communists, child pornography, drugs, and organized crime. That's why Europe and the US have traditionally cooperated.
The real risk is from political influence through blackmail and intimidation. True, the NSA could do that with the data they collect: "vote for keeping US missiles in Germany or we will disclose... whatever". But if you're actually German, you're at much greater risk of that from the German government and bureaucracy, at all levels. Comparatively, you're better off with your data in US hands than in the hands of your own government, even if you believe that the US government is more corrupt than the German government.
They are simply forced to act, because they can't allow potentially sensitive data like tax information to flow via unreliable country like USA
What difference does it make whether the US gets European tax information? What do you think they are going to do with it?
And what country do you think is "more reliable"? France, Sweden, Germany, etc.? Don't make me laugh. Their surveillance and espionage against their own citizens and each other has been known for decades.
Yes, leave building such networks to the Germans: they have more than a century experience with building nation-wide espionage and surveillance networks, and they are very good at collecting and mining the resulting data.
Free university education based on academic merit alone is bigoted?
It is your beliefs about how US education works, and US society, that are prejudiced, bigoted, and uninformed.
Well I guess that does go against the common USA thinking of if you can't afford it you shouldn't have it.
And you just can't stop yourself, can you. Are you really that stupid and misinformed, or are you just making that up in order to troll?
I still wonder how you think the government determines winners and losers when the scheme is available to every citizen unconditionally.
As you said:
Our entry into the uni is solely judged by our abilities (according to high-school overall position marks which is a problem for another thread). We pick the courses / university we want to study at in order of preference, i.e. Engineering at UQ, Engineering at QUT, Engineering at USQ etc working our way down the preferences (typically the first preference will likely be the most popular because of the aforementioned prestige).
I.e., the nomenklatura of your country determines secondary school curricula and determines your merit and abilities according to its needs and ideological preferences. That's what you are ranked by, and if you don't conform, you have to go to a shitty university way down that list. Since there don't seem to be many good private universities in Australia, if you haven't been found worthy, you're screwed. Judging by the nonsense you spout, a good deal of those criteria are traditional left-wing anti-Americanism and a common progressive attempt at rewriting of history and economics.
Oh and the Austrian system has consequences? Yeah I can tell by the number of highly educated scientists they've churned out this century.
Really? If there is evidence that Austria has been doing particularly well on the scientific front this century, I'd love to see it.
They did well at the beginning of the 20th century, when progressivism sort of worked for a while (under very different conditions). But then great Austrian scientists like Karplus, Kandel, Kohn, Hayek, and von Mises all came to the US.
You should read some Hayek and von Mises; they explain to you in detail why you're full of it.
It's a shame that this has come so late. If AT&T hat open source Plan 9 right when it was being developed, it might have saved FOSS from the mess of IPC and distributed computing tools it currently has.
You'll wait a long time: that's been tried and it doesn't work. There are simply too many conflicting demands placed on databases, and any OS that favors one over the other immediately makes itself irrelevant for a large chunk of possible applications.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's a correct thing to do in business. With few exceptions, extraordinary skill and foresight are necessary to win big in business, but they are not sufficient; the kind of skills that matter, however, may not be what you personally value or recognize.
Getting $19 billion for the company involves a great deal of luck, but he is seeing only a fraction of it. But whatever he is getting, his skills pretty much assured him wealth if he made the right choices.
Achieving a net worth of several million dollars does not require luck, and it usually doesn't even require extraordinary skills.
I don't get it. Even my shitty low-end cellular plan has unlimited texting, and WhatsApp doesn't seem to be doing much else. I can't even take the WhatsApp account with me when I change phone numbers. And WhatsApp is a big, bloated application.
Why do people actually use WhatsApp?
I don't know where this "driving is a privilege" nonsense comes from. If "driving is a privilege", why not walking or breathing? They are all activities people engage in while on public lands. Unless there is a compelling public interest, government has no authority to restrict what we do on public lands; there simply is no constitutional basis for it. The restrictions we impose on driving needed to be justified by safety and environmental concerns.
But you're right: you have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. That means any private party can, if they so choose, collect your license plate information and follow you around. But the government is not a private party; it is more restricted in what it can and should be allowed to do. Police can't just follow you around without cause, and they shouldn't be allowed to collect license plate information without cause either.
Yeah, right. They just figure it's easier to do this clandestinely.
As far as I can tell, it is mostly "privileged white middle-class males" that are adopting such pro-feminist bullshit attitudes as you do.
The rest of us know that whining and complaining about other people's attitudes doesn't get you anywhere, and that it is perfectly possible to toughen up and succeed despite other people being jerks.
Well, then they need to start dealing with the real world.
Sorry, you don't have a right not to be offended or "put off" by your co-workers.
Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Obama called the national debt "irresponsible and unpatriotic". What he promised was to cut the deficit in half during his first term, i.e. make significant progress toward debt reduction; he did shit.
Bullshit. With all the money Obama spent, the economy is worse off than what Obama's own economists predicted would happen without doing anything.. Furthermore, he completely controlled Congress for the first two years. And as a president, his campaign promises need to limit themselves to what he can reasonably expect to achieve politically, not what he could do if he became a dictator.
You can theoretically make the argument that the economy would have been worse without Obama's programs; I think that's a preposterously stupid argument to make, but since it is completely hypothetical, nobody can disprove it.
But what is crystal clear and beyond any doubt whatsoever is that Obama's economic predictions and campaign promises were false and that the man and his staff are either liars or incompetent (probably both).
Obama promised a litany of things he was going to do, including effecting a strong recovery and make progress towards debt reduction. He is responsible for his own words.
Quite right. Therefore, the administration overestimated and overpromised its ability to manage the economy and wasted trillions of dollars on economic programs. And they are also overestimating and overpromising their ability to limit climate change, which is why they shouldn't be trusted in that area either.
All true. And that only reinforces my point: no administration can be trusted to do this stuff.
Translation: "We prefer our own interest groups, the ones who got us elected! We need to pay them off with trillions of dollars of tax payer money."
Mr. Kerry, you have no credible plan to stop climate change. The reductions you propose are laughable and utterly inadequate. If you proposed effective reductions, you'd face a rebellion from voters. Your administration hasn't even been able to produce a balanced budget, let alone reduce the national debt, something that even European social welfare states have done. The economic forecasts that got you elected turned out to be b.s., as did the predicted economic effects of your stimulus programs. Your administration's promises on ACA have turned out to be bald faced lies, and you haven't been able to even produce a working web site on time.
I'm not a skeptic on climate change; CO2 is rising and it's getting warmer. I simply don't believe that anything can realistically be done.
And even if something could be done, your administration is too incompetent, corrupt, and dishonest to be trusted with doing it.
It's not just a WMD, global warming causes child porn too, because... think of the children! We must give trillions to our cronies in industry in order to combat this menace!
Plan 9 wasn't a "commercial product", it was a research project. And of all companies, AT&T really should have known what it took to make an OS successful, given their SysV/BSD experience.
And, yeah, a lot of software developed by companies was open sourced even back then.
You may notice that El Masri was handed to the CIA by a European police force, and that the German government knew and acquiesced.
Even if your example had been genuine, yes, he would have been "just unlucky". Abuse of personal data, corruption, politically motivated police and legal actions, etc. are a daily occurrence in every nation, including every European nation; the CIA swooping in and abducting you is about as likely as getting struck by a meteorite.
Some regulations work wonderfully. But the regulation that the parent poster proposed is just like the AT&T regulation.
I have no idea what that has to do with anything this thread is about.
The same technology existed in Europe, and Europe deregulated much later. Why? Because telecom monopolies were government sanctioned. No amount of technology will help you if you are not legally permitted to use it and build businesses around it.
Deregulation is what made it legal and possible to use microwave links and other technology.
You have to be judged by someone's criteria. In Australia, these are obviously uniform criteria established by the government. You seem to think that's a good thing. I know it isn't.
Yes: uniform, national standards of academic merit defined by your government.
Yes, just like there was in East Germany too.
Of course, it's a lot easier if everything is provided for by the government. Your point being?
Yes, you don't understand, that's clear. You are bigoted and prejudiced, we already established that.
I understand quite well. I just don't think it's a good thing.
If that were true, cable Internet service wouldn't slow down as subscribers are added. But it does, and when that happens, it seems to take a lot of time and investment to upgrade the system. So, in different words, you're wrong. The last mile creates significant fixed costs, but they are only a fraction of overall costs.
And to the degree that the last mile is a significant fixed cost, there are simple solutions. For example, we can make it easy for competitive companies to lay trunk lines and then allow customers to pick and choose which trunk lines their last mile connections hook up to. Or we can regulate companies to share last mile access at cost. Both systems work and are used in many places to create more competitive market places.
Maybe you're too young to remember, but we had that system for wired telephone service and it was a disaster. The Internet only took off once those highly regulated monopolies were broken up. The resulting market is still over-regulated and far from efficient, but it's a lot better than what we had.
As far as the US is concerned, you are on a no-fly list until you disclose enough information so that you have proven that you're harmless. In fact, for non-citizens, we call that "getting a visa" or "getting a visa waiver".
And that's no different from the way Europeans treat foreigners, or from the way European governments treat their own citizens. European governments have extensive records on their citizens; why should the US let you into the country with less information on you than your own government has on you? Why should Americans trust you more than your own government trusts you?
There is not a shred of evidence that the US has done that. Even if it had, given the kinds of state-corporate connections that exist in Europe, I consider that justified.
Digging up dirt on Europeans and disclosing it is the purpose of NSA surveillance; dirt like ties to fascists and communists, child pornography, drugs, and organized crime. That's why Europe and the US have traditionally cooperated.
The real risk is from political influence through blackmail and intimidation. True, the NSA could do that with the data they collect: "vote for keeping US missiles in Germany or we will disclose ... whatever". But if you're actually German, you're at much greater risk of that from the German government and bureaucracy, at all levels. Comparatively, you're better off with your data in US hands than in the hands of your own government, even if you believe that the US government is more corrupt than the German government.
What difference does it make whether the US gets European tax information? What do you think they are going to do with it?
And what country do you think is "more reliable"? France, Sweden, Germany, etc.? Don't make me laugh. Their surveillance and espionage against their own citizens and each other has been known for decades.
Because... why? The US government can do very little to a European citizen.
If you're European, it's the European organizations that can wreck your life.
Yes, leave building such networks to the Germans: they have more than a century experience with building nation-wide espionage and surveillance networks, and they are very good at collecting and mining the resulting data.
It is your beliefs about how US education works, and US society, that are prejudiced, bigoted, and uninformed.
And you just can't stop yourself, can you. Are you really that stupid and misinformed, or are you just making that up in order to troll?
As you said:
I.e., the nomenklatura of your country determines secondary school curricula and determines your merit and abilities according to its needs and ideological preferences. That's what you are ranked by, and if you don't conform, you have to go to a shitty university way down that list. Since there don't seem to be many good private universities in Australia, if you haven't been found worthy, you're screwed. Judging by the nonsense you spout, a good deal of those criteria are traditional left-wing anti-Americanism and a common progressive attempt at rewriting of history and economics.
Really? If there is evidence that Austria has been doing particularly well on the scientific front this century, I'd love to see it.
They did well at the beginning of the 20th century, when progressivism sort of worked for a while (under very different conditions). But then great Austrian scientists like Karplus, Kandel, Kohn, Hayek, and von Mises all came to the US.
You should read some Hayek and von Mises; they explain to you in detail why you're full of it.
Does this mean Plan 9 from User Space (an implementation of Plan 9 tools and libraries for UNIX and Linux) will be GPLv2 licensed too now?
It's a shame that this has come so late. If AT&T hat open source Plan 9 right when it was being developed, it might have saved FOSS from the mess of IPC and distributed computing tools it currently has.
You'll wait a long time: that's been tried and it doesn't work. There are simply too many conflicting demands placed on databases, and any OS that favors one over the other immediately makes itself irrelevant for a large chunk of possible applications.