This isn't the result of some abstract optimizing algorithm (yet). A person, or several people, in various marketing departments specifically decided to target insecure minors in order to increase their companies' profits (ostensibly because they are more easily manipulated).
You can claim it's incorrect to attribute motives and morality to corporations and be technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the individual decision makers in the companies don't get off the hook so easily.
Bernie seemed good, but I had no interest in Hillary or Trump. Those of you who were willing to "settle" for Hillary bear some responsibility for this, too. She was a terrible candidate is probably the only person who could have lost to Trump.
Yes, it's rare. But it does happen and the system should be able to handle it. Do you regularly use arbitrary hard coded values that cause your programs to fail in the event of rare, but not impossible or unforeseen inputs?
Lawmakers exempt themselves from laws and enforcers don't enforce the law against each other. Both of those classes are about as immune to the law as you can be. Embarrassing pics would need to be leaked before they would care about any implications.
I think that this cheerleading of hate from the establishment and overall atmosphere of divisiveness is very deliberate.
It looks like a classic "divide and rule" strategy to keep the people at each others' throats and continually blaming each other for the state of affairs instead of having everybody looking toward their governments, politicians, and "thought leaders". Those in power are making a killing on the current state of affairs and are getting wealthier every day. They don't want this gravy train to stop rolling.
If you can't handle running your own mailserver, point your domain MX records to a hosted service and let them handle it. Hosted mail for a single account is not expensive and if they hike the prices or start acting janky, then you just move to another service. You'll have all of the benefits of hosted email and the opportunity to keep your email address forever, typically for less than $10/month.
My non-technical mother-in-law does this and if she ever needs to switch mail providers, she can ask me for help. She's done it once before by herself and it's not hard (there are tutorials on both the registrar's and the email providers' sites).
OK. I see what you're saying and I agree with you.
As the other reply said, though, disproving the postulation that peer review can be generally trusted isn't exactly a revelation. After taking part in the peer review process from either side, even with the high-end journals, you really lose a lot of faith in the process. Statistically, it's certainly better than no peer review at all, but there's no guarantee that a paper will be improved by the process. In a lot of these fly-by-night journals, it's a total joke.
I don't mean to totally bash your point, because it is a revelation to the general public who have been (or are being) sold on the integrity of the peer review process.
I'm a scientist and I don't give two shits about any "authority" of science and have little unreserved trust in peer review. Likewise for "true science", whatever that is. Those are terms that apply more to religion or politics, which you can keep for yourself.
Science, as far as I'm interested in it, is all about well controlled variables and repeatability. I've seen plenty of published work that I'm skeptical about and what I take away from those works is that they can't be trusted. Implying that all of science (or the scientific method) is phony because some published results are fishy is incredibly simple-minded.
Getting a person there with something better than chemical rockets is just fantasy since if you got the vehicle to move fast enough even the cosmic background radiation will be shifted enough to irradiate people to death.
You have to be traveling at 0.999999 c before the cosmic background radiation becomes visible, but not yet even ionizing. Even with local variations in the background, you need to be well over 0.9999 c before it becomes dangerous. There's plenty of usable velocity below 0.9999 c!
Yeah? What's the half-life of CO2? Would you be happy living on Venus?
The radioactive waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years isn't particularly dangerous due to its radioactivity (as heavy metals, it's chemically more dangerous). The volume of waste is not horribly difficult to deal with if we could actually do that instead of cutting corners and basing our decisions on profits and hysteria.
Solar, tidal, geothermal, wind and water may directly produce little waste, but they each also have environmental impacts to varying degrees. A fusion reactor will irradiate its containment vessel and produce scary radioactive stuff, too.
TANSTAAFL. The best approach is to make rational decisions with the goal of fulfilling rational objectives.
Ah yes, the world from the point of view of executives... If you want to move into a new field, you need to start by importing the bloated, overpaid legion of administration that floats above the actual workers in that field. That's definitely where the action happens!
I had an Atari 800 too and have vaguely fond memories of it (I only had one floppy drive), but the first computer that was actually fairly capable was an 8088 IBM PC Convertible. It was a desktop or a laptop (that weighed 13 lbs without the modular printer, video module, and serial port expander) and would put your legs right to sleep! By the time I was done with it, I had wired all sorts of new stuff into it.
That was the system that really sparked my interest in computers.
Unfortunately, they do try that shit every time they get even a slight majority.
If the Dems would drop the "OMG gunz!!1!" issue, they would get a lot more support. Drop the identity politics, too, and they'd become a pretty reasonable party (if still heavily authoritarian, like almost all US parties).
The other three people didn't "take the offer", so much as they didn't refuse the offer and get dragged off of the plane. They weren't given an option; they were ordered to vacate the plane and given a voucher on the way out.
The $800 was offered for volunteers previously and nobody volunteered. These four passengers weren't given a choice.
Absolutely. Looking at all of the candidates offered over the last (how many?) electron cycles, I think that we'd legitimately get better results by randomly selecting a pool of candidates from the general population.
That's great, but what you're talking about has little relation to charisma or narcissism. If we generally had leaders that made quick decisions based on insufficient or rapidly changing data that were mostly successful (even if not perfectly optimal), then we would have (a subset of the entire set of) good leaders. Just like we would have if we had thoughtful, strategic leaders that sometimes took too long to reach a decision.
We don't have that, though. We have conmen, who are very often extremely incompetent at leading, and sometimes even incompetent at pulling off their con. The traits of charisma and leadership only intersect where it's necessary to rally a bunch of people with your charm. The traits of narcissism and leadership don't intersect at all, except in an accidental case-by-case way.
I understand your frustration, but if you were in any way qualified to pick what they work on, you'd likely be working on it yourself.
There's a pretty big gap between understanding a disease and knowing how to design a drug to treat it and being able to say, "Mah ass hurts, there otta be a cure for that!"
But you're right about the short-changing themselves. I was talking with a female colleague who holds a PhD about getting hired, and she said "well, our wages are fixed anyway. They said you have this degree and x years of experience so that's the salary". We work in the private sector, so no, our wages aren't "fixed". You can definitely discuss your salary. You just accepted the first offer they gave you, instead of bargaining. They would have at least offered you a stock-plan if you didn't agree right away.
I've heard this in academia, too, and they're not really fixed here either. It's just a shitty and abusive negotiation tactic that is used to try to cut the salary negotiation short and it often works. Women are apparently less likely to call the bluff and press for what they think they're worth.
The H-1B program isn't a product of the free market. It's distortion of the free market by the government (men with guns). The free market would dictate that tech workers that companies desperately need would command an ever increasing salary until that need is met.
Why do all of you "free market" nuts always use supply and demand to defend abuses on the production side and then suddenly forget about it when it comes to the labor side? Are you in favor of the men with guns stopping the suppression of competition by the use of patents, copyrights, trademark, import tariffs, enforcement of industrial espionage laws, and the like?
[Didn't vote for Clinton or Trump. A pox on both your stupid houses.]
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the result of some abstract optimizing algorithm (yet). A person, or several people, in various marketing departments specifically decided to target insecure minors in order to increase their companies' profits (ostensibly because they are more easily manipulated).
You can claim it's incorrect to attribute motives and morality to corporations and be technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the individual decision makers in the companies don't get off the hook so easily.
Bernie seemed good, but I had no interest in Hillary or Trump. Those of you who were willing to "settle" for Hillary bear some responsibility for this, too. She was a terrible candidate is probably the only person who could have lost to Trump.
Yes, it's rare. But it does happen and the system should be able to handle it. Do you regularly use arbitrary hard coded values that cause your programs to fail in the event of rare, but not impossible or unforeseen inputs?
Lawmakers exempt themselves from laws and enforcers don't enforce the law against each other. Both of those classes are about as immune to the law as you can be. Embarrassing pics would need to be leaked before they would care about any implications.
I think that this cheerleading of hate from the establishment and overall atmosphere of divisiveness is very deliberate.
It looks like a classic "divide and rule" strategy to keep the people at each others' throats and continually blaming each other for the state of affairs instead of having everybody looking toward their governments, politicians, and "thought leaders". Those in power are making a killing on the current state of affairs and are getting wealthier every day. They don't want this gravy train to stop rolling.
If you can't handle running your own mailserver, point your domain MX records to a hosted service and let them handle it. Hosted mail for a single account is not expensive and if they hike the prices or start acting janky, then you just move to another service. You'll have all of the benefits of hosted email and the opportunity to keep your email address forever, typically for less than $10/month.
My non-technical mother-in-law does this and if she ever needs to switch mail providers, she can ask me for help. She's done it once before by herself and it's not hard (there are tutorials on both the registrar's and the email providers' sites).
OK. I see what you're saying and I agree with you.
As the other reply said, though, disproving the postulation that peer review can be generally trusted isn't exactly a revelation. After taking part in the peer review process from either side, even with the high-end journals, you really lose a lot of faith in the process. Statistically, it's certainly better than no peer review at all, but there's no guarantee that a paper will be improved by the process. In a lot of these fly-by-night journals, it's a total joke.
I don't mean to totally bash your point, because it is a revelation to the general public who have been (or are being) sold on the integrity of the peer review process.
I'm a scientist and I don't give two shits about any "authority" of science and have little unreserved trust in peer review. Likewise for "true science", whatever that is. Those are terms that apply more to religion or politics, which you can keep for yourself.
Science, as far as I'm interested in it, is all about well controlled variables and repeatability. I've seen plenty of published work that I'm skeptical about and what I take away from those works is that they can't be trusted. Implying that all of science (or the scientific method) is phony because some published results are fishy is incredibly simple-minded.
Getting a person there with something better than chemical rockets is just fantasy since if you got the vehicle to move fast enough even the cosmic background radiation will be shifted enough to irradiate people to death.
You have to be traveling at 0.999999 c before the cosmic background radiation becomes visible, but not yet even ionizing. Even with local variations in the background, you need to be well over 0.9999 c before it becomes dangerous. There's plenty of usable velocity below 0.9999 c!
Yeah? What's the half-life of CO2? Would you be happy living on Venus?
The radioactive waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years isn't particularly dangerous due to its radioactivity (as heavy metals, it's chemically more dangerous). The volume of waste is not horribly difficult to deal with if we could actually do that instead of cutting corners and basing our decisions on profits and hysteria.
Solar, tidal, geothermal, wind and water may directly produce little waste, but they each also have environmental impacts to varying degrees. A fusion reactor will irradiate its containment vessel and produce scary radioactive stuff, too.
TANSTAAFL. The best approach is to make rational decisions with the goal of fulfilling rational objectives.
Ah yes, the world from the point of view of executives... If you want to move into a new field, you need to start by importing the bloated, overpaid legion of administration that floats above the actual workers in that field. That's definitely where the action happens!
It's Europe, so I'm assuming that they either:
1) Don't wash their clothes very often and smell rank all of the time. Maybe they wait for a sunny day and clean their clothes then.
2) Use a clothes dryer, but then pretend that they don't in international forums to preserve their silly self-image.
I had an Atari 800 too and have vaguely fond memories of it (I only had one floppy drive), but the first computer that was actually fairly capable was an 8088 IBM PC Convertible. It was a desktop or a laptop (that weighed 13 lbs without the modular printer, video module, and serial port expander) and would put your legs right to sleep! By the time I was done with it, I had wired all sorts of new stuff into it.
That was the system that really sparked my interest in computers.
No way! Strawmen in flyover country are their outgroup and an acceptable outlet for their seething hatred and intolerance.
You start off by confusing NAT and firewalls, so it's hard to believe that you really have much of a clue.
Unfortunately, they do try that shit every time they get even a slight majority.
If the Dems would drop the "OMG gunz!!1!" issue, they would get a lot more support. Drop the identity politics, too, and they'd become a pretty reasonable party (if still heavily authoritarian, like almost all US parties).
I miss my easy insertion abilities. Maybe I'm just getting old.
They make a pill, er app, for that now.
The other three people didn't "take the offer", so much as they didn't refuse the offer and get dragged off of the plane. They weren't given an option; they were ordered to vacate the plane and given a voucher on the way out.
The $800 was offered for volunteers previously and nobody volunteered. These four passengers weren't given a choice.
It's part of the employee's compensation package, so it still ends up being paid for by the employee.
My income tax withholding is handled by my employer and is not explicitly paid by me. Does that mean that it's also not a tax?
Absolutely. Looking at all of the candidates offered over the last (how many?) electron cycles, I think that we'd legitimately get better results by randomly selecting a pool of candidates from the general population.
That's great, but what you're talking about has little relation to charisma or narcissism. If we generally had leaders that made quick decisions based on insufficient or rapidly changing data that were mostly successful (even if not perfectly optimal), then we would have (a subset of the entire set of) good leaders. Just like we would have if we had thoughtful, strategic leaders that sometimes took too long to reach a decision.
We don't have that, though. We have conmen, who are very often extremely incompetent at leading, and sometimes even incompetent at pulling off their con. The traits of charisma and leadership only intersect where it's necessary to rally a bunch of people with your charm. The traits of narcissism and leadership don't intersect at all, except in an accidental case-by-case way.
Arrested by whom? You see, when the government does it, that means it's not fraud.
I understand your frustration, but if you were in any way qualified to pick what they work on, you'd likely be working on it yourself.
There's a pretty big gap between understanding a disease and knowing how to design a drug to treat it and being able to say, "Mah ass hurts, there otta be a cure for that!"
But you're right about the short-changing themselves. I was talking with a female colleague who holds a PhD about getting hired, and she said "well, our wages are fixed anyway. They said you have this degree and x years of experience so that's the salary". We work in the private sector, so no, our wages aren't "fixed". You can definitely discuss your salary. You just accepted the first offer they gave you, instead of bargaining. They would have at least offered you a stock-plan if you didn't agree right away.
I've heard this in academia, too, and they're not really fixed here either. It's just a shitty and abusive negotiation tactic that is used to try to cut the salary negotiation short and it often works. Women are apparently less likely to call the bluff and press for what they think they're worth.
The H-1B program isn't a product of the free market. It's distortion of the free market by the government (men with guns). The free market would dictate that tech workers that companies desperately need would command an ever increasing salary until that need is met.
Why do all of you "free market" nuts always use supply and demand to defend abuses on the production side and then suddenly forget about it when it comes to the labor side? Are you in favor of the men with guns stopping the suppression of competition by the use of patents, copyrights, trademark, import tariffs, enforcement of industrial espionage laws, and the like?
[Didn't vote for Clinton or Trump. A pox on both your stupid houses.]