Two nights in a row, David Letterman asked his audience who went to see Gigli. No one clapped. No one.
Also, it's Yahoo!'s fault. Their posted reviews from newspapers all over the country gave Gigli a big fat grade D. Yahoo!'s reader reviews were even more scalding.
So, yeah, Gigli was an awsome movie but was victimized by pervasive evil-doers everywhere. Yeah, that's it. I'm sure of it.
So, you are going to battle the eco-weenies for a pipeline license back to the mainland?
Or perhaps you are going to ship to the markets Baharaine already has locked up with their liquified natural gas in the Eastern Hemesphere, including shipping around the world?
The eco-weenies would fight the prospect of converting coal and oil-fired powerplants to natual gas? Even if it is only an interim solution to future renewable resource usage, the natural gas would be a huge environmental success.
And Bahrain cannot maintain a monopoly. The potential market just seems too huge. They can still certainly keep raking in their revenues while the USA better utilizes its own resources.
Great and all, but today one needs that degree just to get interviewed.
This is an artifical and short-sighted constraint used by narrow-minded and ignorant HR departments and hiring managers. Any more, my education listing is at the very bottom of my resume...if it dropped off entirely, I still think everything above it is pretty good on its own. I would think twice about accepting a job where they are obsessed with paper credentials over demonstrated ability.
If the person already understands the concepts, it's much easier for me to train them. If they don't, then I have to spend more of my money to get them up to speed.
This is why I also think that "corporate loyalty" needs to come back into fashion. Companies need to get back into the habit of investing in their employees for long-term gains rather than use flash-in-the-pan contracts for incremental and often unsatisfying progress. A company need not be afriad of wasting training on people who enjoy being at their job and don't mind being there for years to come.
...why should any company hire American workers then?
Perhaps they shouldn't. Americans need a reality-check, where we don't need to always be on top of everything on the planet. While our national defense should always be first-rate (so those Chinese Ph.Ds. don't also get funny ideas about world domination), the USA should find ways to be cooperative with other countries. While jobs going to India will hurt in the very short-term, more opportunity will ultimately be born. Do you think that India and China shouldn't also have an opportunity for prosperity? We are all human, after all, and it isn't like their "commie" ideology will last much longer, anyway. Also, prosperity is the ultimate weapon against terrorism. John Ashcroft and your Dean friend can try to steal our liberties through spy networks or nationalized social programs all they want in the happy-faced claim towards safety and equality, but, ultimately, only a fundamentally sound global economy and a foriegn policy that doesn't fuck over every third-world country on the planet will lead to genuine safety.
You are a frigging idiot if you think you can get a job in IT without a degree...
1) That's not really true if you can talk the talk and walk the walk. I think people that can talk confidently in an interview and demonstrate real knowledge and discipline to the employer are who really get the jobs. Whether they have a degree or not is merely coincidence.
2) There is much much more to the world than IT.
BTW, McDonalds is now offering management-track jobs with benefits. I wouldn't be suprised if that was actually attrative to many post-IT-blowout people. And, McDonalds will train you for that job. Most IT companies think skills come from magic clouds in the sky and that training is for losers.
Yes thats possible but how do you get experience when theres no entry level jobs for people who have no degree?
Skilled laborers either learn on the job or through apprenticeships. Also, BA degrees are 10 cents on the dollar relative to BS degrees. A person doesn't have to go into $25,000 of self-inflicted debt to be qualified for glorified skilled labor such as "web programming".
Thats just a damn lie, I've seen evidence proving the opposite, which says a person with a bachlors makes twice as much as someone without.
You should look at the medical industry. Nurses and lab techs with two-year degrees can make IT people look foolish for working so hard for so little.
The only places where education+experience=big_salary consistently are high-end really-difficult engineering jobs (genuine engineering jobs, not IT), such as electrical engineering, and upper management positions that often require many paper credentials. Otherwise, I think personal motivation, personality, and demonstrated ability carry much more weight than a degree.
I certainly saw a lot of them come into my classroom, and get really depressed as they floundered.
I think that children who are obviously passionate about something, such as mathematics (to the point where they don't need to be told to study), then college is a no-brainer. Other kids who simply want a broader education can go, also, but they have to have full knowledge ahead of time that magic high-paying jobs just won't materialize before them. They will have to fully accept the fact that society doesn't necessarily reward education over skills, and, if they are okay with that, then they can be happy regardless of the outcome. Perhaps the most important thing is that kids' expectations shouldn't be pumped-up by "pie in the sky" teachers and counselers setting them up only for a big burst later on. Kids should also understand that being middle-class is perfectly okay and that most people don't get nice four-bedroom houses out in the country right out of school (I think many kids get unrealistic notions about money given that they haven't yet had to earn their lifestyle). I am also convinced that a real finance class should be part of high-school curricula, so, at least, students have an opportunity to understand what loans really are and how debt affects post-college budgets.
wouldn't it be worth it to spend a small amount of money on "tracking" if it meant a greate increase in the effectiveness of the help given to the homeless?
No. A federal database isn't needed to pass out bowls of soup or packs of condoms. For those people who are mentally ill, perhaps some means of care from a motivated local psychiatrist is helpful, but even this doesn't require the federal government to intervene.
BTW, poverty is a community issue, not a federal government issue, anyway. Someone needs to give HUD a clue.
Yea, but so does natural gas and the energy value of what is burned off in the Gulf of Mexico, anually, is greater than the entire energy consumption of the US in 1,000 years.
I find this hard to believe. That is so much energy just being thrown away that it would have to be economically viable, somehow, to distribute it to the mainland. 1000 years worth of natural gas could power a small turbine generator in every county no questions asked. Is there a conspiracy afoot?
The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement
I think hydrogen power could be complementary to solar power. The sun is essentially 5 billion years worth of "free" energy, which can be used for manufacturing hydrogen, which can be used to power my lawnmower.
Although, I do like the idea of sun-corn-biodiesel-lawnmower, also.
Whichever provides the highest overall efficency in converting the sun's energy into a unit of portable fuel should be the one that wins in the end.
Now imagine that people's cars run on domestically-produced hydrogen.
I hope the electrolysis machine safely vents all generated oxygen to the outside. If not, imagine if someone trys to start up their gas logs after a few days of splitting water in a modern air-tight home...
What you say is true ONLY in the commercial market. In fact the high degree you have obtained is more likely to get you hired when you are dealing in an environment where X amount of PHDs, X amound of MS degrees are required.
Even Universities are not immune to the commercial market. That's why graduate students and non-tenure-track instructors pick up a lot of the teaching burden. Also, from what I've heard/seen, competition for tenure-track positions is very intense.
...the ability to present your ideas to others, whether that's on paper, or stood at the front of a room. The ability to organise my thoughts, to analyse problems and come up with solutions, to think outside of the already known base of information and come up with new ideas, to manage my own time, these were all the skills that I picked up between graduating with my first degree, and being given my PhD.
I would argue that these traits allowed you to get your Ph.D. and they were only affirmed by your progress towards the degree. The Ph.D. process itself didn't fundamentally shape your personality or aptitudes. I'm pretty convinced that great people really are born and, then, shaped by childhood. By young adulthood, any damage from peers and parents has already occurred, and only a very small number of people radically change beyond that point.
Finishing a Phd requires a very different mindset from just doing an MSc.
It isn't just a different mindset--it's a willingness to disappear from the world for three years. A good Ph.D. project/thesis is nothing less than a fucking huge assload of work (that's probably an understatement, from what I've seen).
Anything less, and one has to wonder whether the Ph.D. really carries it's weight.
Ha. This is only true in companies that hire fresh college graduates, becuase they are cheap.
Being able to discuss a specific commercial project and real work performed carries huge weight in interviews. The college degree might get a raised eyebrow...but that's it. Unless a person can speak confidently from experience, their value as a potential employee stops when the interview ends.
I am amazed when I see enterprise systems implemented without any thought whatsoever when it comes to concepts like scale, distributed cache coherency, distributed deadlock, distributed transaction management, right down to the basic concept of protocol overhead when chosing the communication medium.
You might be suprised to learn that "enterprise systems" jobs are relatively rare taking the world as their context.
Regarding the fact that most employees don't know squat about scale, transactions, etc., well that is the fault of the company for not recognizing the shortcomings of their employees and providing TRAINING. These concepts don't require advanced degrees--they usually require simply educating the people about the issues. Rarely does transaction processing require a mathematical proof--people simply implement it, ideally knowing beforehand what's at stake.
Schools, at the employee's expense, are simply the wrong place to learn about domain-specific issues of a particular company at a particular point in time.
Walk through GM or Ford or Nvidia or Intel. There are lots of Drs. around.
Unfortunately, doctor-employing companies such as GM or Ford or Intel employ a very small fraction of the world's population. Ph.D.s are really and truly only intended for the people really and truly motivated enough to get them without second thoughts. These are the people heading up the design labs, and not the people who got the Ph.D. because it was "something to do after college."
You are however a domain expert in your field, and that may well be why you were hired.
More likely, now, is that you discover there are 1000 other people with the same ivory-tower credentials going after the three job openings in that domain.
People should only go as far as they are truly honestly motivated to go. Those whose passion will pave their own career before them: by all means go for the Ph.D. Everyone else should, at most, either go for a two-year degree or an apprenticeship, learn a bit more about the world, and, then, decide whether more schooling is a good thing for them.
Otherwise, it is perfectly feasible to get paid $40,000/year with a two-year degree and a bit of experience. That's a salary many indebted college graduates only dream about.
Also, I've seen clear and unabiguous evidence that the market provides little or no rewards for anything more than a two year degree for most people. In fact, there is a trend away from four-year degrees in many disciplines, where a bachelor's degree is actually a mark against canidates.
I hate to say this, but I've formed the opinion that even four-year degrees are overrated. Looking back at high school, everyone was buzzing about how you either go to college or into the military right away after high school, and that people who don't do that are somehow "losers". So, all the kids religously took the SATs, poured over all the unsolicited junk mail from colleges, paid the application fees, and, then, went to college as "Undecided". Shouldn't that strike us as odd?
One thing that the recent economy has taught me is that a four-year degree in a specialty--or worse, a graduate degree in a specialty--can be like a ball and chain regarding career changes. What would be better is for high school graduates to not commit to an expensive four-year degree program (unless, of course, they are unusually motivated) without a clue regarding their major; rather, they should enter the workforce, go to a very cost effective associate's program, or do the Mormon thing and take two years in South America or something. Kids need some time to discover themselves, and I'm not convinced the rush-em-through Universities are appropriate for this learning process, especially given that Universities are very very expensive.
I can't stress the cost of a four-year program enough. Unless a student can get by without loans (via a trust or scholarship), they should strongly--very strongly--consider the alternatives. It is way too common for students to graduate in some default generic major due to not knowing any better, yet ending up paying for it for the next ten years of their lives. Student debt levels now-a-days are simply insane.
Sure people claim that a college degree will pay for itself, but I'm not so sure. The best values are state-supported colleges, but it is still common to come out with $20,000 worth of debt. How many $60,000/year jobs are there? Certainly not enough for all graduates. I wonder if that $20,000 would have been better applied towards a down payment on real estate--perhaps the most sound investment most people will ever make in their lifetimes.
What would you rather have, $20,000 towards a home that you can defend with a gun, or $20,000 in debt living in an apartment with a family of 10 above and the rock star below? Even if you don't end up with a lot of money in the long run, raising a family in a real home with a back yard has a value that is hard to measure.
And, no one says you can't go to college later, after seeing the way the world works and knowing what direction is the right one for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I was waiting in line at the movies the other day, and heard some teenagers asking for tickets to "2 Fast 2 Furious".
Well, justice will be served when they total their car and possibly their lives by emulating the movie the following week.
... half the people in the line offer to buy the entire damn candy isle, just to shut the litte snot up.
:)
In Congress, we call those people Democrats
Two nights in a row, David Letterman asked his audience who went to see Gigli. No one clapped. No one.
Also, it's Yahoo!'s fault. Their posted reviews from newspapers all over the country gave Gigli a big fat grade D. Yahoo!'s reader reviews were even more scalding.
So, yeah, Gigli was an awsome movie but was victimized by pervasive evil-doers everywhere. Yeah, that's it. I'm sure of it.
So, you are going to battle the eco-weenies for a pipeline license back to the mainland?
Or perhaps you are going to ship to the markets Baharaine already has locked up with their liquified natural gas in the Eastern Hemesphere, including shipping around the world?
The eco-weenies would fight the prospect of converting coal and oil-fired powerplants to natual gas? Even if it is only an interim solution to future renewable resource usage, the natural gas would be a huge environmental success.
And Bahrain cannot maintain a monopoly. The potential market just seems too huge. They can still certainly keep raking in their revenues while the USA better utilizes its own resources.
Great and all, but today one needs that degree just to get interviewed.
This is an artifical and short-sighted constraint used by narrow-minded and ignorant HR departments and hiring managers. Any more, my education listing is at the very bottom of my resume...if it dropped off entirely, I still think everything above it is pretty good on its own. I would think twice about accepting a job where they are obsessed with paper credentials over demonstrated ability.
If the person already understands the concepts, it's much easier for me to train them. If they don't, then I have to spend more of my money to get them up to speed.
This is why I also think that "corporate loyalty" needs to come back into fashion. Companies need to get back into the habit of investing in their employees for long-term gains rather than use flash-in-the-pan contracts for incremental and often unsatisfying progress. A company need not be afriad of wasting training on people who enjoy being at their job and don't mind being there for years to come.
...why should any company hire American workers then?
Perhaps they shouldn't. Americans need a reality-check, where we don't need to always be on top of everything on the planet. While our national defense should always be first-rate (so those Chinese Ph.Ds. don't also get funny ideas about world domination), the USA should find ways to be cooperative with other countries. While jobs going to India will hurt in the very short-term, more opportunity will ultimately be born. Do you think that India and China shouldn't also have an opportunity for prosperity? We are all human, after all, and it isn't like their "commie" ideology will last much longer, anyway. Also, prosperity is the ultimate weapon against terrorism. John Ashcroft and your Dean friend can try to steal our liberties through spy networks or nationalized social programs all they want in the happy-faced claim towards safety and equality, but, ultimately, only a fundamentally sound global economy and a foriegn policy that doesn't fuck over every third-world country on the planet will lead to genuine safety.
You are a frigging idiot if you think you can get a job in IT without a degree...
1) That's not really true if you can talk the talk and walk the walk. I think people that can talk confidently in an interview and demonstrate real knowledge and discipline to the employer are who really get the jobs. Whether they have a degree or not is merely coincidence.
2) There is much much more to the world than IT.
BTW, McDonalds is now offering management-track jobs with benefits. I wouldn't be suprised if that was actually attrative to many post-IT-blowout people. And, McDonalds will train you for that job. Most IT companies think skills come from magic clouds in the sky and that training is for losers.
Yes thats possible but how do you get experience when theres no entry level jobs for people who have no degree?
Skilled laborers either learn on the job or through apprenticeships. Also, BA degrees are 10 cents on the dollar relative to BS degrees. A person doesn't have to go into $25,000 of self-inflicted debt to be qualified for glorified skilled labor such as "web programming".
Thats just a damn lie, I've seen evidence proving the opposite, which says a person with a bachlors makes twice as much as someone without.
You should look at the medical industry. Nurses and lab techs with two-year degrees can make IT people look foolish for working so hard for so little.
The only places where education+experience=big_salary consistently are high-end really-difficult engineering jobs (genuine engineering jobs, not IT), such as electrical engineering, and upper management positions that often require many paper credentials. Otherwise, I think personal motivation, personality, and demonstrated ability carry much more weight than a degree.
I certainly saw a lot of them come into my classroom, and get really depressed as they floundered.
I think that children who are obviously passionate about something, such as mathematics (to the point where they don't need to be told to study), then college is a no-brainer. Other kids who simply want a broader education can go, also, but they have to have full knowledge ahead of time that magic high-paying jobs just won't materialize before them. They will have to fully accept the fact that society doesn't necessarily reward education over skills, and, if they are okay with that, then they can be happy regardless of the outcome. Perhaps the most important thing is that kids' expectations shouldn't be pumped-up by "pie in the sky" teachers and counselers setting them up only for a big burst later on. Kids should also understand that being middle-class is perfectly okay and that most people don't get nice four-bedroom houses out in the country right out of school (I think many kids get unrealistic notions about money given that they haven't yet had to earn their lifestyle). I am also convinced that a real finance class should be part of high-school curricula, so, at least, students have an opportunity to understand what loans really are and how debt affects post-college budgets.
wouldn't it be worth it to spend a small amount of money on "tracking" if it meant a greate increase in the effectiveness of the help given to the homeless?
No. A federal database isn't needed to pass out bowls of soup or packs of condoms. For those people who are mentally ill, perhaps some means of care from a motivated local psychiatrist is helpful, but even this doesn't require the federal government to intervene.
BTW, poverty is a community issue, not a federal government issue, anyway. Someone needs to give HUD a clue.
Poor people don't have any rights, anyway.
(I hope people see the absurdity of this)
They will package the data into a specimen mail-order catalog for evil scientists world-wide. They will make millions!
Yea, but so does natural gas and the energy value of what is burned off in the Gulf of Mexico, anually, is greater than the entire energy consumption of the US in 1,000 years.
I find this hard to believe. That is so much energy just being thrown away that it would have to be economically viable, somehow, to distribute it to the mainland. 1000 years worth of natural gas could power a small turbine generator in every county no questions asked. Is there a conspiracy afoot?
The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement
I think hydrogen power could be complementary to solar power. The sun is essentially 5 billion years worth of "free" energy, which can be used for manufacturing hydrogen, which can be used to power my lawnmower.
Although, I do like the idea of sun-corn-biodiesel-lawnmower, also.
Whichever provides the highest overall efficency in converting the sun's energy into a unit of portable fuel should be the one that wins in the end.
Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.
Yes, but what is the inefficiency introduced by the motor-flywheel-generator unit?
I will be encouraged to pass gas?
Yes, of course, just don't offer to share the adapter you use to refill your laptop.
Now imagine that people's cars run on domestically-produced hydrogen.
I hope the electrolysis machine safely vents all generated oxygen to the outside. If not, imagine if someone trys to start up their gas logs after a few days of splitting water in a modern air-tight home...
What you say is true ONLY in the commercial market. In fact the high degree you have obtained is more likely to get you hired when you are dealing in an environment where X amount of PHDs, X amound of MS degrees are required.
Even Universities are not immune to the commercial market. That's why graduate students and non-tenure-track instructors pick up a lot of the teaching burden. Also, from what I've heard/seen, competition for tenure-track positions is very intense.
...the ability to present your ideas to others, whether that's on paper, or stood at the front of a room. The ability to organise my thoughts, to analyse problems and come up with solutions, to think outside of the already known base of information and come up with new ideas, to manage my own time, these were all the skills that I picked up between graduating with my first degree, and being given my PhD.
I would argue that these traits allowed you to get your Ph.D. and they were only affirmed by your progress towards the degree. The Ph.D. process itself didn't fundamentally shape your personality or aptitudes. I'm pretty convinced that great people really are born and, then, shaped by childhood. By young adulthood, any damage from peers and parents has already occurred, and only a very small number of people radically change beyond that point.
Finishing a Phd requires a very different mindset from just doing an MSc.
It isn't just a different mindset--it's a willingness to disappear from the world for three years. A good Ph.D. project/thesis is nothing less than a fucking huge assload of work (that's probably an understatement, from what I've seen).
Anything less, and one has to wonder whether the Ph.D. really carries it's weight.
Experience is NOT more important than education.
Ha. This is only true in companies that hire fresh college graduates, becuase they are cheap.
Being able to discuss a specific commercial project and real work performed carries huge weight in interviews. The college degree might get a raised eyebrow...but that's it. Unless a person can speak confidently from experience, their value as a potential employee stops when the interview ends.
That's a silly statement.
Actually, it isn't.
I am amazed when I see enterprise systems implemented without any thought whatsoever when it comes to concepts like scale, distributed cache coherency, distributed deadlock, distributed transaction management, right down to the basic concept of protocol overhead when chosing the communication medium.
You might be suprised to learn that "enterprise systems" jobs are relatively rare taking the world as their context.
Regarding the fact that most employees don't know squat about scale, transactions, etc., well that is the fault of the company for not recognizing the shortcomings of their employees and providing TRAINING. These concepts don't require advanced degrees--they usually require simply educating the people about the issues. Rarely does transaction processing require a mathematical proof--people simply implement it, ideally knowing beforehand what's at stake.
Schools, at the employee's expense, are simply the wrong place to learn about domain-specific issues of a particular company at a particular point in time.
Walk through GM or Ford or Nvidia or Intel. There are lots of Drs. around.
Unfortunately, doctor-employing companies such as GM or Ford or Intel employ a very small fraction of the world's population. Ph.D.s are really and truly only intended for the people really and truly motivated enough to get them without second thoughts. These are the people heading up the design labs, and not the people who got the Ph.D. because it was "something to do after college."
You are however a domain expert in your field, and that may well be why you were hired.
More likely, now, is that you discover there are 1000 other people with the same ivory-tower credentials going after the three job openings in that domain.
People should only go as far as they are truly honestly motivated to go. Those whose passion will pave their own career before them: by all means go for the Ph.D. Everyone else should, at most, either go for a two-year degree or an apprenticeship, learn a bit more about the world, and, then, decide whether more schooling is a good thing for them.
Otherwise, it is perfectly feasible to get paid $40,000/year with a two-year degree and a bit of experience. That's a salary many indebted college graduates only dream about.
Also, I've seen clear and unabiguous evidence that the market provides little or no rewards for anything more than a two year degree for most people. In fact, there is a trend away from four-year degrees in many disciplines, where a bachelor's degree is actually a mark against canidates.
I hate to say this, but I've formed the opinion that even four-year degrees are overrated. Looking back at high school, everyone was buzzing about how you either go to college or into the military right away after high school, and that people who don't do that are somehow "losers". So, all the kids religously took the SATs, poured over all the unsolicited junk mail from colleges, paid the application fees, and, then, went to college as "Undecided". Shouldn't that strike us as odd?
One thing that the recent economy has taught me is that a four-year degree in a specialty--or worse, a graduate degree in a specialty--can be like a ball and chain regarding career changes. What would be better is for high school graduates to not commit to an expensive four-year degree program (unless, of course, they are unusually motivated) without a clue regarding their major; rather, they should enter the workforce, go to a very cost effective associate's program, or do the Mormon thing and take two years in South America or something. Kids need some time to discover themselves, and I'm not convinced the rush-em-through Universities are appropriate for this learning process, especially given that Universities are very very expensive.
I can't stress the cost of a four-year program enough. Unless a student can get by without loans (via a trust or scholarship), they should strongly--very strongly--consider the alternatives. It is way too common for students to graduate in some default generic major due to not knowing any better, yet ending up paying for it for the next ten years of their lives. Student debt levels now-a-days are simply insane.
Sure people claim that a college degree will pay for itself, but I'm not so sure. The best values are state-supported colleges, but it is still common to come out with $20,000 worth of debt. How many $60,000/year jobs are there? Certainly not enough for all graduates. I wonder if that $20,000 would have been better applied towards a down payment on real estate--perhaps the most sound investment most people will ever make in their lifetimes.
What would you rather have, $20,000 towards a home that you can defend with a gun, or $20,000 in debt living in an apartment with a family of 10 above and the rock star below? Even if you don't end up with a lot of money in the long run, raising a family in a real home with a back yard has a value that is hard to measure.
And, no one says you can't go to college later, after seeing the way the world works and knowing what direction is the right one for you.