I hear you: Someone said "It's getting better for smart people like us" and you're saying "It sure doesn't feel like it's getting better. We're still being screwed."
But you're conflating two things. I agree: they're out to get us, even if they don't mean to. But.
How people treat us -- social status -- is one thing. The affordances of a culture are another. Clearly these two things do not vary completely independently, but they do have some freedom and are distinct.
Social status is a function of values and emotion and squishy stuff like that. The affordances of a culture have objective bases. For instance, in a culture which relies upon breaking rock for vital goods, he who breaks rocks best has the greatest advantage. As much as that society might like to scorn rock-breakers, they are forced by objective reality to value rock-breakers. Those who cannot break rocks at all are left to scrabble for value.
Yes, they hate us. But -- and this is what Animats was saying -- we have finally arrived at a day in which we are those rock-breakers, and the rocks which need breaking can only be broken by about 25% of the population (I agree with that statistical guess for my own reasons).
What he's saying is that the game is increasingly rigged in our favor.
The social aspects will follow. Human hearts have immense inertia, but they will, in time, change. ----------------------------------------------
Lack of interest from the mainstream press didn't bother [The Christian Coalition] at all; to the contrary, they routinely barred reporters from their meetings.[...]
At one of those closed meetings, Guy Rodgers delivered a speech to coalition activists that exposed what is still a critical weakness of the religious right. As he explained with a smirk, they relied upon mobilizing a relatively small group of sympathetic voters in elections that most Americans simply ignore.
"In a presidential election, when more voters turn out than in any other election, only 15 percent of eligible voters actually determine the outcome. How can that be? Well, of all the adults 18 and over eligible to vote, only about 60 percent are registered... Of those registered to vote, in a good turnout, only half go to the polls. That means 30 percent of those eligible are actually voting. So 15 percent determines the outcome in a high-turnout election. In low-turnout elections... the percentage that determines who wins can be as low as 6 or 7 percent."
Although Rodgers didn't mention presidential primaries, those contests too often attract only a fraction of eligible and registered citizens. "Is this sinking in?" he asked. "We don't have to persuade a majority of Americans to agree with us." Most of them, he said, stay home and watch television.
In other words I'm kind of equating saying "Geeks need a special political lobby" with saying "rich white people need a special political lobby". Geeks are not being oppressed or left out. What need have "we" of a special political lobby.
Ahh. There is the confusion. You have been expanding "lobby" into "political force for special protectionist privileges." I can see where you could come by that idea; certainly the press loves to paint lobbies in that color. However, "lobby" need not be just a racket for getting goodies or protections for a subset of the population.
A much better expansion of "lobby" is "political force to make the world as we would like it to be." Clearly for many groups, "as we would like it to be" is "more goodies for us". But that need not be the case.
Since many geeks feel similarly strongly about such issues as free speech, intellectual property law, etc., we could, theoretically, have a lobby to advance those causes.
Of course, practically it would be very difficult to do, because geeks are such a minority it would be hard to get them to rock a vote....
----------------------------------------------
Re:Programmer's Code of Ethics
on
Database Nation
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· Score: 2
Nonsense.
You're talking about abdicating your responsibility to your own morality/ethics. It is not anyone else's responsibility to come up with a morality for you, nor is it anyone else's job to enforce a morality on you.
The "code of ethics" you describe is not a code of ethics but a body of law. Law is - and should only be - the province of making interactions between peoples fair. Law should never concern itself with "good" and "bad".
You are solely responsible for adopting/inventing your own morality. You are solely responsible for enforcing it upon yourself.
Law which protects people from themselves is despicable. ----------------------------------------------
Re:ethics and programming...
on
Database Nation
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· Score: 4
Quit. And tell them why.
Sorry to be so blunt, but in the current job market, it's hard to be sympathetic to the plea "but I gotta code to eat".
Your morality is your responsibility. Live up to your standards. If you feel what you are being asked to do is wrong, don't do it.
Morality isn't about being comfy and avoiding sacrifice and strife. Morality is a heuristic for figuring out what short- to medium- term suckinesses must be endured for longer-term happiness. Morality is what tells you when to sacrifice some of your comfort.
If you feel it is wrong to track students throughout their primary educational careers, then you are responsible for not contributing to that project. It is not anyone else's responsibility to make sure your morality isn't transgressed against. ----------------------------------------------
I have one more major nit to pick: What has this guy got against chords??? For someone using music analogies pretty darn freely, he seems remarkably clueless about the agility chords can provide.
The finest moment of zen keyboarding I ever witnessed was on the Mother of All Chordal Software: WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. Once upon a time I did power word-processing for a living. On one contract, the supervisor of the manual writing team demonstrated the following viruosity: she was making corrections on the electronic document from the red-marked paper, hands flying, while I waited for her attention; she turned to me to take my question, and after I had been chatting with her a while, I noticed her monitor was still flickering, the cursor still dancing over the document, characters spilling out, getting sucked back in, other modes flashing across the screen, while she serenely talked to me. I was about to ask if it should be doing that, when I realized: She had out-typed the computer, which was doggedly catching up. And the program allowed her to do that - accurately and reliably.
Power typists will always use a combination chords and runs, for the same reasons pianists and lutenists: because it's powerful, and it can be done blindlingly fast. ----------------------------------------------
By all means, if you feel that "more kids than just budding geeks need" support (and I don't disagree!), then go volunteer to Big Brother/Big Sister of America, or the Boy/Girl Scouts, or the YMCA/YWCA, or any of a zillion other general organizations which exist to provide non-parental adult support to all kids.
However, clearly those things aren't working for this demographic. They aren't going to work, because they are aimed at a conforming norm. They can do great things for the (vast majority of) people who fit their mold; even some geeks do manage to derive benefit from some of the above organizations.
Being a geek is more than an interest in computers. Nor is "geek" a state of social ineptitude. We've gone over these traits repeatedly here on/. and I don't think I need to go into this again.
We are a people. Our kind of different is valid. I think a lot of us go off the rails, especially in adolescence, because of not merely the pressure to conform, but the lack of models/heuristics of how to be true to themselves and still function smoothly in society.
Let me give you a very specific example. A classic geek trait is introversion, which is not the same thing as being shy. A thing which I've learned and taught to all my friends is this: If you pay attention, you can tell when you're getting stressed out by being around too many people; many geeks develop the defensive mechanism of being acerbic to drive people away, which kicks in when they're over-stressed by too many people. So instead of verbally theething on your loved ones and friends, just say "Hey, I'm feeling really over-socialized right now, and need some solitude. Can I get back to you later?" And it works for us.
I certainly wish I knew this trick when I was 13.
And there's lots more where that comes from.
We really are different from other people. Not sick, not wrong, just different. We need different tools, especially different cultural tools.
I presume you wouldn't suggest that geeks who need glasses not get them because it would make them stand out from the mainstream. Same thing.
I think we need a way of getting those tools to our young: the young geeks.
Other people need other tools (perhaps some of them would benefit from the same tool box). I sincerely hope they get them. But I'm going to worry about the baby-geeks because I was one, and it's the one demographic no one really cares about. They're my agenda, because I largely wasn't anybody's agenda, and I'd like for my suffering not to have been in vain. ----------------------------------------------
Uh, guys.... The licensing of motor vehicles and the operation of motor vehicles has as much, if not more, to do with a cash cow for the State as some sort of public good.
If the licensing of drivers was meant to keep the unsafe drivers off the roads, there would be fewer people with driver's licenses.
Licensing didn't work for automobiles, and it's not going to work for the Net. At least not to promote safety/security.
Meanwhile, you'd better expect politicians to get wind of this and start salivating over the prospect of yet another way to line their coffers. ----------------------------------------------
This legislation is, clearly, the best thing to ever happen to efforts to popularize encryption. I'd like to applaud the Australian government for their efforts to inculcate in their populace an understanding of the necessity of strong encryption. I expect shortly the average Australian citizen will be more encryption savvy than the citizens of any other country in the world.
Remember, practice safer connections! ----------------------------------------------
OK, so we pretty much all seem to agree that things can really, really suck for young geeks.
I suspect everyone here would agree that intervention is desirable, as amphigory neatly describes.
I suspect we largely agree with the sentiment (expressed in another thread) that the intervention which the current system is prepared to do ranges from "inept" to "violation of human rights".
Well, that's because the intervention is done by normals. They're never going to get how to help a geek in distress, because (a) they have never been through it and lack the empathy necessary for problem solving and (b) they are unaware of some of the issues peculiar to geeks (list available on request; my profile is better than the FBI's:).
So the question before us is: So, should we, collectively and individually, be Doing Something?
I'm a geek, right. I don't have any particular warm fuzzy feeling about social-program volunteering, and I don't suspect any other geek does. HOWEVER:
If we don't help, aren't we part of the problem: an indifferent world that leaves these kids to rot in their misery?
What I'm envisioning is an organization much like Big Brother/Big Sister -- only run by and for geeks. A sort of "Big Geek" service.
A couple of notes on the idea:
There is (allegedly) already another organization focusing on outcast anti-defamation; this would be an organization providing intervention.
The reason for making it an organization, as opposed to individual efforts, would be so that it would build "brand" (name identity) so that school administrators would think to call it in.
The intervention provided could be as simple as a kind of mentoring relationship. But maybe senior geeks would be moved to intervene more profoundly, offering on-the-job apprenticeships (get them out of the schools!), fostering (taking them in if home life gets untenable), help graduating from high school/applying to colleges early, etc.
Would people actually participate in something like this?
They need to be shown that somebody who can do something gives a damn.
Actually, it's sufficient to be shown that anybody gives a damn - even if they can't do anything about it.
Of course, it's nicer if they can rescue you from your misery. But we geeks are made of stern stuff. We can tough out anything, so long as we have corroborating evidence of our premises: just one other person saying "You are worth fighting for" is all it takes to make a difference.
(And may this stand as an indictment: that there are clearly young men who have never once heard that message.)
Here is the one needful thing; if you find yourself in a situation with such an anguished young person, this is what you can say:
"What has been done to you is wrong. What is being done to you is wrong. It is wrong for anyone to hit you. It is wrong for you to have to live in fear of physical violence. It is wrong for you to feel hatred for yourself, and it is wrong for people to try to make you hate yourself. You are not crazy for being in pain. You do not deserve to be treated like this."
Those are the words no one ever says. ----------------------------------------------
Several things are necessary for a group of people to feel "Community". One such thing is a high density of interpersonal relationships.
It's not enough to know (of) a group of people through some public forum. A sense of community only arises when a large number of people each have a one-on-one relationship of some kind with each of a large number of other people (in the same group).
If you don't have those private relationships, you may become emotionally invested in the *idea* of the group, without having any sense of belonging. I find/. to be a lovely example of this: I think Slashdot's really great, but I don't have any particular feelings of community because I don't know (almost) anyone here personally.
Another way of putting this is that if you represent a community as a graph, where the people are the nodes and the edges are the interpersonal connections, a community will be densely connected.
It is my deep suspicion that you can't have that sense of community without a population in which at least half of the people know at least half of the people.
The larger the population the harder it is to keep up that level of personal interconnectivity. So, yes, size is a limiting factor.
But another issue is that a system which allows you to talk privately one-on-one as readily as address the group is more likely to grow community than a system which does not.
A look at the other threads shows there's lots of frames vs. (nested) tables argument going on here.
Frankly, there is no good answer. Frames suck for all the reasons frames suck. Tables suck because:
On at least one major platform (a WinTel 'chine (>ptui!<) running Netscape) exceeding 6 nested tables is often fatal. Strangenesses can result from nesting only three.
There are gratuitous graphical hacks (without which, our marketing department assures me, our company cannot survive) which can only be done through the clever use of frames.
What version of Lynx are you people using? Using tables for formatting text can look appalling in Lynx.
Upshot: Why are we trying to make pages look like the interfaces to applications? That's how we got into this mess. The tools just don't do what we're trying to get them to do.
Sorry to be a party-pooper. ----------------------------------------------
I'm as much a technofetishist as the next geek, and I don't mean (in this rant) to complain about consumerism. I'm certainly willing to grant a "What things do geeks covet?" thread has merit as an investigation into putative geek culture.
However, I just had to say: Bah Humbug. I don't celebrate Christmas, not being a Christian. (Not that there's anything wrong with being a Christian, it's just I ain't one.) Frankly, I rather resent being expected to participate in some other religions' cultural expressions. There's an immense amount of cultural pressure to be a "good sport" and go along with it. To which the only response must be: Bah Humbug.
As if that weren't bad enough itself, I really loathe the whole xmas-gift-swapping nonsense for its own sake. It's blecherous. I don't like getting holiday gifts and I don't like giving them. If there's something I covet, I'd rather I just go get it for myself, and get it right.
I'd rather be exempt from this ritual which saps all sincerity from the gestures. "It's the thought that counts" - and as far as I can tell xmas drains all the thoughtfulness out of gift giving. Probably it's the level of obligation around gift-giving which corrupts it; you never can tell whether a gift is an authentic expression of someone's affection, or just them acceding to cultural expectations.
OK, I've gotten that off my chest, and I'm done ranting. Back to covetting loot. ----------------------------------------------
Righto. So you want to Open Source Academia. Here's some important clues to use, from someone already at work on that project, and derived from watching the OSS Movement:
Always carefully differentiate between the OSA Movement (the Cause, the desire to bring Open Source to the Academe in general) and specific OSA Projects. Keep firmly fixed in the front of your mind that until you have viable OSA projects - OS materials ready for use - going on about an OSA Movement is oh so much hot air.
You can't build an entire University by yourself. At the very least you're going to need the help of some other OSA developers. So pick a project of a scale you can actually do something on. Closed Source Academia is a mountain; don't try to move it all at once, pick up the biggest rock you can handle and work on it. If you manage to move it out of the way, go get another rock. This will help keep you from getting demoralized by the scope of the Cause, and provide validation for it.
Example:
pick one topic/subject you are really motivated on;
prepare an OS class/text/tutorial/interpretive dance/etc.;
find peers and submit to peer review;
revise till perfect;
present it to the Universe;
iterate.
However one of the things I have discovered is that once you start doing this, it begs the question "Why have Universities at all?" I will not go into the history of Universities here, but suffice it to say: they were originally nothing more than physical convergences of independent scholars putting out their shingles and charging by the lecture (no kidding). Since we are discussing virtual academia, physical convergence is no longer necessary. Degrees were awarded by examination. There is nothing to stop some entrepenurial souls from putting together their own accrediting firm, which examines applicants, and then certifies their level of attainment. We can "unbundle" the selling of the education from the evaluation of the education. (Why does it not strike anyone else as an egregious conflict of interest that Universities award degrees to the same people they taught?? Should not a disinterested objective external party be the one to say whether or not the University was successful in teaching a student??) There are many other affordances of the university as modernly construed, but all of them bear revisiting.
If recreating the monolithic institution of the modern university, only on-line, is no longer your aim, the project gets vastly easier.
Academia is more than a venue for teaching, it is a bastion of research. It is popular to consider these two things to be pitted against one another, but once you actually start trying to do OSA, you find that teaching and research are two sides of a single coin. Unless you own that research, you can't GPL it. This generally means if you want to have GPL teaching materials you have to do your own research - where "research" here means all the leg work necessary. You might not have to reproduce every experiment, but you have to make yourself sufficient expertly that your work is useful. Even small errors will scuttle your credibility, and credibility is the sine qua non of education.
But this brings up one of the most fundamental (and fascinating) aspects of the idea of "Open Source Academia". What does it mean for Academia to be "Open Source"? It means the primary sources of your research must be available to the users of your Academic product. That means: no textbooks without heavy footnotes (ideally links!) to the actual research/evidence/examples. No unsupported assertions, no reliance on links to other secondary sources (i.e. other textbooks!).
The field in which I am doing OSA work is the history of music. In my field, that means making available to the user of my scholarship the actual manuscript pages I worked from. In CSA, there are, of course, cites, but often to extremely hard-to-get-a-hold-of works. To my mind, OSA means publishing OS facimiles of the work; it means preparing "facing page" transcriptions and translations.
Open Source is about putting the tools in the users hands, not just getting the job done for them. It is not enough for an academic product/project to inform the student. It must also put the sources into their hands so they can make their own scholarship from scratch. Only then is it Open Source.
Museums are usually not Open Source. Until I got very involved in OSA, I didn't realize this. But then I had occasion to see a special exhibit at my favorite science museum. In the special exhibit there were ascertions made about the history of science which contradicted ascertions made in the permanent history of mathematics section of the museum. Neither had any kind of citation or evidence - what science museum does? It was only when I began to try to find someone who could tell me "What is the evidence for this? What historical sources were used for this exhibit? Why do you believe this is true?" that I truly began to realize how Closed Source this science museum is. But then I reflected; I had worked for a science museum in another city, and it had been just as closed source. Meanwhile the local fine arts museum also presents historical artifacts with no discussion of how or why things are classified ("How do you know this jar held perfume?" "Why do you think this is a picture of his mother?" etc.)
Open Source Academia is a completely different way of thinking about education - of others, and of oneself. Traditional "Education" is like the Classic Mac; you're supposed to think of it as an appliance, and not to try to get into the case without special authorization. Once you've stepped into Open Source Academia, you realize you've got the CLI for studying anything no matter how "academic", and you want the source for everything: "Show me the Source!"
Back to the practicalities: Just like in OSS, you need fanatics. Linux is built by people who are willing to make it their primary project, their primary intellectual passion. You are not going to build OSA products with OSS geeks in their spare time. You need real OSA geeks. You need people who are fanatics about their "academic" area of scholarship, and who believe in Open Source.
You need peer review. I can't stress this enough. The project I've been working on has been going on (off and on) for ~30 years. I can't begin tell you how much it's been damaged by lack of peer review. Crappy work got propagated decades ago, and people who relied on it got seriously screwed. We're still cleaning up the mess, trying to rebuild the reputation of the project. The only way not to have this problem is vigorous peer review. (Heck, the whole point of Open Source, from certain standpoints anyway, is that Open Source accelerates the finding and fixing of bugs. Yet to academics, their papers are their babies; this also has to change in OSA.)
OSA could revolutionize the world as much as OSS - but like OSS, only if it is fruitful. So don't talk about it: do it! ----------------------------------------------
Most employers want someone who can communicate and complete projects, whether or not they enjoy said projects. Uni is an example of being able to do these things without an employment record.
What utter rubbish. A random degree from a technical university in an English speaking country is absolutely no guarantee the holder can use English well. Many technical programs will turn a blind eye to any deficiencies in writing (to say nothing of speaking) betrayed by mathematically talented students.
Similarly, there is no guarantee that because someone holds a degree that they are in any way prepared for real-world projects, where you don't have an instructor holding your hand. ----------------------------------------------
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that if someone murders me, or my wife, or my niece, in any of the same ways that Al listed (prior to the quoted line), the murderers should be treated less harshly simply because the three of us chose not to lead an openly gay lifestyle.
If someone murders you, your wife, or your niece, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for murder.
However, if they murder because of the race, religion, sexuality, etc. of you, your wife, or your niece, they will also be prosecuted (in effect) for threatening the other people of that race, religion, sexuality, etc. They will be prosecuted on the additional charge of committing an act of terrorism against a demographic.
That's what is meant by something being a "hate crime". And it makes, IMHO, perfect sense; there are two crimes being committed, and hate crime legislation finally takes that into account. ----------------------------------------------
Is anyone else here reminded of "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson (shortstory in Mirrorshades)?
I think Katz' argument is interesting - that there's something noble and tragic in the story of Disney.
However, a very different argument has already been made by Gibson. Katz writes:
One of Disney's many quirks was that even though he wrapped himself in Americanism and the flag, he was dubious about representative democracy and non-conformist individual expression.
His plan was that Epcot would be run by Imagineers and Disney executives, not elected representatives. He probably feared that the all-too-human inhabitants would ruin his technology.
Gibson proposes fascism is inherent in that view of technology - in that romance of technology. He wasn't looking at Disney, but at Hugo Gernsback and contemporaries. Gibson wrote, through late 20th century eyes, of what the idealized future of "The Gernsback Continuum" looked like, and it was wholesome, squeeky-clean and fascist to the core.
This story is also an explanation of why Cyberpunk happened to science fiction. (That's why it's in the front of the anthology.) That utopian view of the future was so politically naive and inhumane, that younger writers were loathe to embrace it. Dystopia was an antitode to the sugared poison of a "utopia" of an efficient tyranny.
1000 Anno Domini saw the Muslim culture in Andalusia (now Spain) flourishing to the point it overshaddowed the rest of Europe. ----------------------------------------------
When you say tragic, I have the feeling you're talking more about Greek Tragic than Plane-Crash tragic.
I think this is precisely right. He's saying, if I understand, that Technology has a price and great Technologies have great prices. With every new way, and old way comes to the end. To say something is "tragic" is not necessarily a simple negative value assessment.
I disagree with Katz, but (apparently unlike a lot of people) not because I don't understand or because I think he's slighting Technology.
I am willing to agree that technology is tragic only via the equation "Life is tragic. Technology is an abstraction of life."
"Life" used above means "The Human Condition". It is impossible to separate Technology out of The Human Condition. The Human Condition (according to many philosophers and poets) is tragic; ergo Technology, as a reflection, an expression, an abstraction of the Human Condition, must be tragic.
We are what we do; we are how we do it. We are our Technology.
P.S. I don't see how Katz is going to find endings and beginings in such a carefully timeless place as Disney. ----------------------------------------------
Re:My thoughts on Servitude.
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 1
"Couple of years"? "Couple of years?"
Are you out of your MIND?!
NOW! Put together your resume now, and get it out. Do you have any idea of what the job market is like right now?
You don't need to suffer more where you are to gain "valuable experience". You could be getting the same "valuable experience" and more pay.
The willingness of employers to look past qualifications right now is better than you may ever see again. The market is so tight for people with clues that employers are willing to compromise.
If nothing else: ask for a raise, if you're doing the work. Hell, ask for a promotion.
Yes, accepting a pay cut for some other intangible reward is OK, but, dude, you are not in a situation in which you should have to accept a pay cut for the intangible rewards you're getting. ----------------------------------------------
If you had STUCK THROUGH COLLEGE, you would not be in that situation.
What are you, this kid's superego? Get off his case.
Sheesh. Spare us your insecurity. Only someone completely unconvinced at the worth of his degree could write that. Get therapy or something, dude; don't take it out on some unsuspecting passer-by by trying to shame him.
Both of you have WAAAAAAAAY too much faith in the value of degrees or certifications. I haven't any, and I'm doing Just Fine. School is most certainly NOT the only way. I wouldn't got back to school for a million bucks.
A luser with a college degree is still a luser. Evidently.
I have not read this book, and I am glad it has been brought to my attention; I look forward to reading it. I will do so, though, with a certain amount of trepidation.
I have been a temp/contractor/freelancer for 8 years now; I have never held any other kind of job. And I am rather used to the warped media view of what I do. All stories in the press either take the stance that (less commonly) temps/contractors/freelancers/etc. are incompetant bloodsuckers who will take the client for all they're worth or (the vast majority) temps/contractors/freelancers/etc. are exploited by the system of temping/contracting/freelancing and duped into thinking there's something good about it.
My trepidation, then, arises from the bit Katz quotes on "Cab Drivers". Sounds like - and, no, I don't have enough information to really know - the same-old-same-old. "Oh, those poor benighted independents! Eeking out a hard-scrabble existence, chasing job after job, for a chance of getting paid! Oh, pity the poor contractor without health insurance, without 401(k), without job security!"
For what it's worth: I chose this lifestyle because it works for me. Most reasonable agencies in this day and age offer benes (health, 401k, etc.) to their W2 employees. I have, in some ways, more job security than most people: if my relationship with a client deteriorates, I call up my agent and say "Get me out of here" - and he does.
That having been said, on to the real point:
In the last eight years, I've worked on some 50 client sites, in just about every conceivable kind of workplace: businesses of every shape and size, univerisities, non-profits, the gummint, even a major religion (no kidding). Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a month, sometimes for many months at a stretch.
Part of what got me hooked on this kind of work was the opportunity to see the insides of so many different workplaces. I wanted an answer to "What is 'work' like for most people?" and I didn't want to generalize, as everyone seemed to, from a paltry handful of data points.
These are some of the things I have learned:
Everyone thinks their workplace is "normal", no matter how abusive it is.
Workplaces are like families in that, because people tend not to be in more than one or two at a time, they have no benchmark against which to compare them. So everywhere I went, from places with fantastic morale and loyalty to the pits of Hades, everyone thought that where they worked - their relationship to their boss, their relationship to their coworkers, their morale of their division/company/branch/department, etc. - was "normal", and that if they changed their jobs their new work experience would be just the same. If their current experience was bad, it wouldn't get better anywhere else; if their current experience was good, it wouldn't be worse (or better) anywhere else.
The major reason that's bad is that it allows people in positions of authority to get away with murder. It's fatalism pure and simple.
The minor reason that's bad is that it reduces the posibility for sympathy between workers of very different companies to nil. Say worker A, coming from The Eighth Circle, LTD, applies for a job at Elysian Fields, Inc. where they are interviewed by worker B. All worker B can tell is that worker A didn't get much accomplished, had a rocky relationship with their job, and seems pretty despondent/desperate. Worker B does not see that in the context of Elysian Fields, Inc. worker A could be a great employee, because worker B doesn't realize the existence of different contexts. This is one of the reasons people tend to move from cruddy job to cruddy job, and good job to good job!
People believe their bosses have the power of life and death over them.
Sometimes, I think that a whole lot of people try to use their bosses as substitute parents, trying to earn the love and appreciation and approval of absent parents through the proxy of their bosses. Cuz they act like kids: unwilling to say "no, I'm sorry, I can't do that for you", shameful and resentful at not doing things good enough, and in short completely manipulatable.
(Which is one of the reasons I suspect as crooked any company which makes a big deal of how much it is a "family".)
Self-determination (poo-pooed above) really is worth it
Self-determination, however, is not just a function of being independently employed. It is much easier to find self-determination when you're on your own - that's a good chunk of why I went that route - but not everyone (or even most everyone) manages to find self-determination in being a temp/contractor/freelancer, nor is it impossible to be self-determined while "employed directly".
Self-determination is a state of mind, or, if you will, a state of spirit. It is a deep undertstanding that you are, in the end, responsible for the course of your life.
Some people get to self-determination via paranoia and cynicism: "Ain't nobody looking out for me, ever, but me." Some people get there via religious faith or a strong sense of calling: "I have to do what I was put here to do." Some people get there via a brush with death: "I am not going to waste any more of my precious seconds of life in such misery." Some people get there via philosophy, some people get there via hunger.
Doesn't matter how you get there: get there.
Self-determination is the rope by which you can haul yourself out of the quicksand of bad employment situations. Self-determination is the difference between being pathetically vulnerable and being able to shrug off the crap.
This isn't some woo-woo newage neo-psychology about positive thinking. Self-determination is a tool for hacking on lives. And its old name is "liberty", and people fought and died for it.
Most people believe that the expression "Being your own boss" actually has relevant meaning
Look: you, every last one of you, are the captains of your own fates. You are your own bosses, already.
Ultimately, you have only yourself to answer to. Are you, upon your death bed, going to worry "Was I sufficiently obedient? Was I a good enough employee? Were my bosses pleased with my service?"
You are responsible for the course of your life. That doesn't mean it's entirely your fault, but it is your responsibility, same way that if your puppy messes on your rug, the mess is not your fault, but it's still your responsibility. Shit happens. What I'm talking about is how you then deal with the shit.
It is nobody else's job to rescue you from the misery of an abusive job, or a job you just don't like. It's nobody else's job to answer the question "What shall I do with my life?" It's nobody else's job to intervene and say "You're throwing the best years of your life away on a crummy situation."
It's your job to care about you. It's your job to care about you enough to stand up for yourself; to refuse to allow other to take advantage of you; to force yourself to get out of fatal ruts. It's your job to step back and take a good long look at your life so far and ask "Is where I am now on the path to where I want to be? Is this getting me where I want to go? Is this trip I am on worth being on?".
A staggering number of people entrust this job to their bosses, or to Lady Luck (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi!). But, ya know, those bosses don't care about you. That's not their job. You cannot abdicate this responsibility without suffering. To try and get someone else to do this for you is to look for parenting, to try to find someone to treat you like you're a kid and they're your mom-or-dad. But not even your parents can do this for you once you're an adult. This is what it means to be an adult.
Most (adult) people who are abused allow the abuse to happen
If your work situation is abusive - whether your boss is taking advantage of you financially or you are being sexually harassed by co-workers or your workspace is giving you an RSI - ask yourself "Why am I putting up with this?"
If the only answer you have is "I've gotten myself into debt up to my eyeballs and I'm terrified of being unemployed, so my current employer has me by the short and curlies", then I recommend to you the book Your Money or Your Life (Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin)
If your answer is "Because I am too timid to confront the problem/people", then you really do have a problem, because even if you get out of the current situation, you'll bring your fatal weakness with you. You'll be an abuse victim waiting to happen.
Only you can rescue you. The rest of us are powerless to. You have to decide to be brave and decide stop it for yourself.
And that's what I learned as a temp/contractor/freelancer. ----------------------------------------------
I'm appalled to discover/.ers are so frightened by an area of research, so willing to make value judgements about a technology which doesn't even exist, so devoid of imagination as to the potential benefits of such a technology.
You people sound exactly like all those clueless yahoos^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommentators in the mainstream press who ranted that "The internet will be the end of interpersonal contact, high culture and human civilization" and "ATMs will never catch on because people really like standing in line to interact with slow and surly service personnel" and "Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone used email." Not to mention "Cloning will be the end of human individuality!" and "Designer genes will be the end of human individuality!"
Get A Grip, people.
This guy may be off the deep end for skipping all those pesky intermediary animal tests, but investigating ways to interface wetware and hardware is one of the most interesting and potentially humanitarian aims a scientist could have. Think prosthetics that work like (or better than) original limbs. Think repairs to nerves. Think about the control of mental illness (such as depression) without side-effect riddled drugs. Think about just having a sufficient grasp of how the nervous system works to be able to hack on it.
Yeah, there are potentially scary applications. That's medicine. All hacking on the human body could be used to human detriment, hence the aphorism "the power to heal is the power to harm". And not only in medicine. Universally, the only technologies without the potential to do harm are those without any potential at all.
I'd thought nerds, of all people, would grok that. ----------------------------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you: Someone said "It's getting better for smart people like us" and you're saying "It sure doesn't feel like it's getting better. We're still being screwed."
But you're conflating two things. I agree: they're out to get us, even if they don't mean to. But.
How people treat us -- social status -- is one thing. The affordances of a culture are another. Clearly these two things do not vary completely independently, but they do have some freedom and are distinct.
Social status is a function of values and emotion and squishy stuff like that. The affordances of a culture have objective bases. For instance, in a culture which relies upon breaking rock for vital goods, he who breaks rocks best has the greatest advantage. As much as that society might like to scorn rock-breakers, they are forced by objective reality to value rock-breakers. Those who cannot break rocks at all are left to scrabble for value.
Yes, they hate us. But -- and this is what Animats was saying -- we have finally arrived at a day in which we are those rock-breakers, and the rocks which need breaking can only be broken by about 25% of the population (I agree with that statistical guess for my own reasons).
What he's saying is that the game is increasingly rigged in our favor.
The social aspects will follow. Human hearts have immense inertia, but they will, in time, change.
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The religious right gets it. It's time for geeks to get it. The following is from a salon.com article on how The Christian Coalition does it:
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Ahh. There is the confusion. You have been expanding "lobby" into "political force for special protectionist privileges." I can see where you could come by that idea; certainly the press loves to paint lobbies in that color. However, "lobby" need not be just a racket for getting goodies or protections for a subset of the population.
A much better expansion of "lobby" is "political force to make the world as we would like it to be." Clearly for many groups, "as we would like it to be" is "more goodies for us". But that need not be the case.
Since many geeks feel similarly strongly about such issues as free speech, intellectual property law, etc., we could, theoretically, have a lobby to advance those causes.
Of course, practically it would be very difficult to do, because geeks are such a minority it would be hard to get them to rock a vote....
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Nonsense.
You're talking about abdicating your responsibility to your own morality/ethics. It is not anyone else's responsibility to come up with a morality for you, nor is it anyone else's job to enforce a morality on you.
The "code of ethics" you describe is not a code of ethics but a body of law. Law is - and should only be - the province of making interactions between peoples fair. Law should never concern itself with "good" and "bad".
You are solely responsible for adopting/inventing your own morality. You are solely responsible for enforcing it upon yourself.
Law which protects people from themselves is despicable.
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Quit. And tell them why.
Sorry to be so blunt, but in the current job market, it's hard to be sympathetic to the plea "but I gotta code to eat".
Your morality is your responsibility. Live up to your standards. If you feel what you are being asked to do is wrong, don't do it.
Morality isn't about being comfy and avoiding sacrifice and strife. Morality is a heuristic for figuring out what short- to medium- term suckinesses must be endured for longer-term happiness. Morality is what tells you when to sacrifice some of your comfort.
If you feel it is wrong to track students throughout their primary educational careers, then you are responsible for not contributing to that project. It is not anyone else's responsibility to make sure your morality isn't transgressed against.
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Right on.
I have one more major nit to pick: What has this guy got against chords??? For someone using music analogies pretty darn freely, he seems remarkably clueless about the agility chords can provide.
The finest moment of zen keyboarding I ever witnessed was on the Mother of All Chordal Software: WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. Once upon a time I did power word-processing for a living. On one contract, the supervisor of the manual writing team demonstrated the following viruosity: she was making corrections on the electronic document from the red-marked paper, hands flying, while I waited for her attention; she turned to me to take my question, and after I had been chatting with her a while, I noticed her monitor was still flickering, the cursor still dancing over the document, characters spilling out, getting sucked back in, other modes flashing across the screen, while she serenely talked to me. I was about to ask if it should be doing that, when I realized: She had out-typed the computer, which was doggedly catching up. And the program allowed her to do that - accurately and reliably.
Power typists will always use a combination chords and runs, for the same reasons pianists and lutenists: because it's powerful, and it can be done blindlingly fast.
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By all means, if you feel that "more kids than just budding geeks need" support (and I don't disagree!), then go volunteer to Big Brother/Big Sister of America, or the Boy/Girl Scouts, or the YMCA/YWCA, or any of a zillion other general organizations which exist to provide non-parental adult support to all kids.
However, clearly those things aren't working for this demographic. They aren't going to work, because they are aimed at a conforming norm. They can do great things for the (vast majority of) people who fit their mold; even some geeks do manage to derive benefit from some of the above organizations.
Being a geek is more than an interest in computers. Nor is "geek" a state of social ineptitude. We've gone over these traits repeatedly here on /. and I don't think I need to go into this again.
We are a people. Our kind of different is valid. I think a lot of us go off the rails, especially in adolescence, because of not merely the pressure to conform, but the lack of models/heuristics of how to be true to themselves and still function smoothly in society.
Let me give you a very specific example. A classic geek trait is introversion, which is not the same thing as being shy. A thing which I've learned and taught to all my friends is this: If you pay attention, you can tell when you're getting stressed out by being around too many people; many geeks develop the defensive mechanism of being acerbic to drive people away, which kicks in when they're over-stressed by too many people. So instead of verbally theething on your loved ones and friends, just say "Hey, I'm feeling really over-socialized right now, and need some solitude. Can I get back to you later?" And it works for us.
I certainly wish I knew this trick when I was 13.
And there's lots more where that comes from.
We really are different from other people. Not sick, not wrong, just different. We need different tools, especially different cultural tools.
I presume you wouldn't suggest that geeks who need glasses not get them because it would make them stand out from the mainstream. Same thing.
I think we need a way of getting those tools to our young: the young geeks.
Other people need other tools (perhaps some of them would benefit from the same tool box). I sincerely hope they get them. But I'm going to worry about the baby-geeks because I was one, and it's the one demographic no one really cares about. They're my agenda, because I largely wasn't anybody's agenda, and I'd like for my suffering not to have been in vain.
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Uh, guys.... The licensing of motor vehicles and the operation of motor vehicles has as much, if not more, to do with a cash cow for the State as some sort of public good.
If the licensing of drivers was meant to keep the unsafe drivers off the roads, there would be fewer people with driver's licenses.
Licensing didn't work for automobiles, and it's not going to work for the Net. At least not to promote safety/security.
Meanwhile, you'd better expect politicians to get wind of this and start salivating over the prospect of yet another way to line their coffers.
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This legislation is, clearly, the best thing to ever happen to efforts to popularize encryption. I'd like to applaud the Australian government for their efforts to inculcate in their populace an understanding of the necessity of strong encryption. I expect shortly the average Australian citizen will be more encryption savvy than the citizens of any other country in the world.
Remember, practice safer connections!
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OK, so we pretty much all seem to agree that things can really, really suck for young geeks.
I suspect everyone here would agree that intervention is desirable, as amphigory neatly describes.
I suspect we largely agree with the sentiment (expressed in another thread) that the intervention which the current system is prepared to do ranges from "inept" to "violation of human rights".
Well, that's because the intervention is done by normals. They're never going to get how to help a geek in distress, because (a) they have never been through it and lack the empathy necessary for problem solving and (b) they are unaware of some of the issues peculiar to geeks (list available on request; my profile is better than the FBI's :).
So the question before us is: So, should we, collectively and individually, be Doing Something?
I'm a geek, right. I don't have any particular warm fuzzy feeling about social-program volunteering, and I don't suspect any other geek does. HOWEVER:
If we don't help, aren't we part of the problem: an indifferent world that leaves these kids to rot in their misery?
What I'm envisioning is an organization much like Big Brother/Big Sister -- only run by and for geeks. A sort of "Big Geek" service.
A couple of notes on the idea:
Would people actually participate in something like this?
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They need to be shown that somebody who can do something gives a damn.
Actually, it's sufficient to be shown that anybody gives a damn - even if they can't do anything about it.
Of course, it's nicer if they can rescue you from your misery. But we geeks are made of stern stuff. We can tough out anything, so long as we have corroborating evidence of our premises: just one other person saying "You are worth fighting for" is all it takes to make a difference.
(And may this stand as an indictment: that there are clearly young men who have never once heard that message.)
Here is the one needful thing; if you find yourself in a situation with such an anguished young person, this is what you can say:
"What has been done to you is wrong. What is being done to you is wrong. It is wrong for anyone to hit you. It is wrong for you to have to live in fear of physical violence. It is wrong for you to feel hatred for yourself, and it is wrong for people to try to make you hate yourself. You are not crazy for being in pain. You do not deserve to be treated like this."
Those are the words no one ever says.
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Several things are necessary for a group of people to feel "Community". One such thing is a high density of interpersonal relationships.
It's not enough to know (of) a group of people through some public forum. A sense of community only arises when a large number of people each have a one-on-one relationship of some kind with each of a large number of other people (in the same group).
If you don't have those private relationships, you may become emotionally invested in the *idea* of the group, without having any sense of belonging. I find /. to be a lovely example of this: I think Slashdot's really great, but I don't have any particular feelings of community because I don't know (almost) anyone here personally.
Another way of putting this is that if you represent a community as a graph, where the people are the nodes and the edges are the interpersonal connections, a community will be densely connected.
It is my deep suspicion that you can't have that sense of community without a population in which at least half of the people know at least half of the people.
The larger the population the harder it is to keep up that level of personal interconnectivity. So, yes, size is a limiting factor.
But another issue is that a system which allows you to talk privately one-on-one as readily as address the group is more likely to grow community than a system which does not.
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A look at the other threads shows there's lots of frames vs. (nested) tables argument going on here.
Frankly, there is no good answer. Frames suck for all the reasons frames suck. Tables suck because:
Upshot: Why are we trying to make pages look like the interfaces to applications? That's how we got into this mess. The tools just don't do what we're trying to get them to do.
Sorry to be a party-pooper.
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I'm as much a technofetishist as the next geek, and I don't mean (in this rant) to complain about consumerism. I'm certainly willing to grant a "What things do geeks covet?" thread has merit as an investigation into putative geek culture.
However, I just had to say: Bah Humbug. I don't celebrate Christmas, not being a Christian. (Not that there's anything wrong with being a Christian, it's just I ain't one.) Frankly, I rather resent being expected to participate in some other religions' cultural expressions. There's an immense amount of cultural pressure to be a "good sport" and go along with it. To which the only response must be: Bah Humbug.
As if that weren't bad enough itself, I really loathe the whole xmas-gift-swapping nonsense for its own sake. It's blecherous. I don't like getting holiday gifts and I don't like giving them. If there's something I covet, I'd rather I just go get it for myself, and get it right.
I'd rather be exempt from this ritual which saps all sincerity from the gestures. "It's the thought that counts" - and as far as I can tell xmas drains all the thoughtfulness out of gift giving. Probably it's the level of obligation around gift-giving which corrupts it; you never can tell whether a gift is an authentic expression of someone's affection, or just them acceding to cultural expectations.
OK, I've gotten that off my chest, and I'm done ranting. Back to covetting loot.
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Not to mention "widget" and "gizmo". These along with "thingy" were my favorite object/function/variable names in college.
If a problemset was hard to do, it should be hard to grade! ;)
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Righto. So you want to Open Source Academia. Here's some important clues to use, from someone already at work on that project, and derived from watching the OSS Movement:
Always carefully differentiate between the OSA Movement (the Cause, the desire to bring Open Source to the Academe in general) and specific OSA Projects . Keep firmly fixed in the front of your mind that until you have viable OSA projects - OS materials ready for use - going on about an OSA Movement is oh so much hot air.
You can't build an entire University by yourself. At the very least you're going to need the help of some other OSA developers. So pick a project of a scale you can actually do something on. Closed Source Academia is a mountain; don't try to move it all at once, pick up the biggest rock you can handle and work on it. If you manage to move it out of the way, go get another rock. This will help keep you from getting demoralized by the scope of the Cause, and provide validation for it.
Example:
However one of the things I have discovered is that once you start doing this, it begs the question "Why have Universities at all?" I will not go into the history of Universities here, but suffice it to say: they were originally nothing more than physical convergences of independent scholars putting out their shingles and charging by the lecture (no kidding). Since we are discussing virtual academia, physical convergence is no longer necessary. Degrees were awarded by examination. There is nothing to stop some entrepenurial souls from putting together their own accrediting firm, which examines applicants, and then certifies their level of attainment. We can "unbundle" the selling of the education from the evaluation of the education. (Why does it not strike anyone else as an egregious conflict of interest that Universities award degrees to the same people they taught?? Should not a disinterested objective external party be the one to say whether or not the University was successful in teaching a student??) There are many other affordances of the university as modernly construed, but all of them bear revisiting.
If recreating the monolithic institution of the modern university, only on-line, is no longer your aim, the project gets vastly easier.
Academia is more than a venue for teaching, it is a bastion of research. It is popular to consider these two things to be pitted against one another, but once you actually start trying to do OSA, you find that teaching and research are two sides of a single coin. Unless you own that research, you can't GPL it. This generally means if you want to have GPL teaching materials you have to do your own research - where "research" here means all the leg work necessary. You might not have to reproduce every experiment, but you have to make yourself sufficient expertly that your work is useful. Even small errors will scuttle your credibility, and credibility is the sine qua non of education.
But this brings up one of the most fundamental (and fascinating) aspects of the idea of "Open Source Academia". What does it mean for Academia to be "Open Source"? It means the primary sources of your research must be available to the users of your Academic product. That means: no textbooks without heavy footnotes (ideally links!) to the actual research/evidence/examples. No unsupported assertions, no reliance on links to other secondary sources (i.e. other textbooks!).
The field in which I am doing OSA work is the history of music. In my field, that means making available to the user of my scholarship the actual manuscript pages I worked from. In CSA, there are, of course, cites, but often to extremely hard-to-get-a-hold-of works. To my mind, OSA means publishing OS facimiles of the work; it means preparing "facing page" transcriptions and translations.
Open Source is about putting the tools in the users hands, not just getting the job done for them. It is not enough for an academic product/project to inform the student. It must also put the sources into their hands so they can make their own scholarship from scratch. Only then is it Open Source.
Museums are usually not Open Source. Until I got very involved in OSA, I didn't realize this. But then I had occasion to see a special exhibit at my favorite science museum. In the special exhibit there were ascertions made about the history of science which contradicted ascertions made in the permanent history of mathematics section of the museum. Neither had any kind of citation or evidence - what science museum does? It was only when I began to try to find someone who could tell me "What is the evidence for this? What historical sources were used for this exhibit? Why do you believe this is true?" that I truly began to realize how Closed Source this science museum is. But then I reflected; I had worked for a science museum in another city, and it had been just as closed source. Meanwhile the local fine arts museum also presents historical artifacts with no discussion of how or why things are classified ("How do you know this jar held perfume?" "Why do you think this is a picture of his mother?" etc.)
Open Source Academia is a completely different way of thinking about education - of others, and of oneself. Traditional "Education" is like the Classic Mac; you're supposed to think of it as an appliance, and not to try to get into the case without special authorization. Once you've stepped into Open Source Academia, you realize you've got the CLI for studying anything no matter how "academic", and you want the source for everything: "Show me the Source!"
Back to the practicalities: Just like in OSS, you need fanatics. Linux is built by people who are willing to make it their primary project, their primary intellectual passion. You are not going to build OSA products with OSS geeks in their spare time. You need real OSA geeks. You need people who are fanatics about their "academic" area of scholarship, and who believe in Open Source.
You need peer review. I can't stress this enough. The project I've been working on has been going on (off and on) for ~30 years. I can't begin tell you how much it's been damaged by lack of peer review. Crappy work got propagated decades ago, and people who relied on it got seriously screwed. We're still cleaning up the mess, trying to rebuild the reputation of the project. The only way not to have this problem is vigorous peer review. (Heck, the whole point of Open Source, from certain standpoints anyway, is that Open Source accelerates the finding and fixing of bugs. Yet to academics, their papers are their babies; this also has to change in OSA.)
OSA could revolutionize the world as much as OSS - but like OSS, only if it is fruitful. So don't talk about it: do it!
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What utter rubbish. A random degree from a technical university in an English speaking country is absolutely no guarantee the holder can use English well. Many technical programs will turn a blind eye to any deficiencies in writing (to say nothing of speaking) betrayed by mathematically talented students.
Similarly, there is no guarantee that because someone holds a degree that they are in any way prepared for real-world projects, where you don't have an instructor holding your hand.
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If someone murders you, your wife, or your niece, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for murder.
However, if they murder because of the race, religion, sexuality, etc. of you, your wife, or your niece, they will also be prosecuted (in effect) for threatening the other people of that race, religion, sexuality, etc. They will be prosecuted on the additional charge of committing an act of terrorism against a demographic.
That's what is meant by something being a "hate crime". And it makes, IMHO, perfect sense; there are two crimes being committed, and hate crime legislation finally takes that into account.
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Is anyone else here reminded of "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson (shortstory in Mirrorshades)?
I think Katz' argument is interesting - that there's something noble and tragic in the story of Disney.
However, a very different argument has already been made by Gibson. Katz writes:
Gibson proposes fascism is inherent in that view of technology - in that romance of technology. He wasn't looking at Disney, but at Hugo Gernsback and contemporaries. Gibson wrote, through late 20th century eyes, of what the idealized future of "The Gernsback Continuum" looked like, and it was wholesome, squeeky-clean and fascist to the core.
This story is also an explanation of why Cyberpunk happened to science fiction. (That's why it's in the front of the anthology.) That utopian view of the future was so politically naive and inhumane, that younger writers were loathe to embrace it. Dystopia was an antitode to the sugared poison of a "utopia" of an efficient tyranny.
Katz is advised to take this under consideration.
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1000 Anno Domini saw the Muslim culture in Andalusia (now Spain) flourishing to the point it overshaddowed the rest of Europe.
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When you say tragic, I have the feeling you're talking more about Greek Tragic than Plane-Crash tragic.
I think this is precisely right. He's saying, if I understand, that Technology has a price and great Technologies have great prices. With every new way, and old way comes to the end. To say something is "tragic" is not necessarily a simple negative value assessment.
I disagree with Katz, but (apparently unlike a lot of people) not because I don't understand or because I think he's slighting Technology.
I am willing to agree that technology is tragic only via the equation " Life is tragic. Technology is an abstraction of life."
"Life" used above means "The Human Condition". It is impossible to separate Technology out of The Human Condition. The Human Condition (according to many philosophers and poets) is tragic; ergo Technology, as a reflection, an expression, an abstraction of the Human Condition, must be tragic.
We are what we do; we are how we do it. We are our Technology.
P.S. I don't see how Katz is going to find endings and beginings in such a carefully timeless place as Disney.
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"Couple of years"? "Couple of years?"
Are you out of your MIND?!
NOW! Put together your resume now, and get it out. Do you have any idea of what the job market is like right now?
You don't need to suffer more where you are to gain "valuable experience". You could be getting the same "valuable experience" and more pay.
The willingness of employers to look past qualifications right now is better than you may ever see again. The market is so tight for people with clues that employers are willing to compromise.
If nothing else: ask for a raise, if you're doing the work. Hell, ask for a promotion.
Yes, accepting a pay cut for some other intangible reward is OK, but, dude, you are not in a situation in which you should have to accept a pay cut for the intangible rewards you're getting.
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If you had STUCK THROUGH COLLEGE, you would not be in that situation.
What are you, this kid's superego? Get off his case.
Sheesh. Spare us your insecurity. Only someone completely unconvinced at the worth of his degree could write that. Get therapy or something, dude; don't take it out on some unsuspecting passer-by by trying to shame him.
Both of you have WAAAAAAAAY too much faith in the value of degrees or certifications. I haven't any, and I'm doing Just Fine. School is most certainly NOT the only way. I wouldn't got back to school for a million bucks.
A luser with a college degree is still a luser. Evidently.
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I have not read this book, and I am glad it has been brought to my attention; I look forward to reading it. I will do so, though, with a certain amount of trepidation.
I have been a temp/contractor/freelancer for 8 years now; I have never held any other kind of job. And I am rather used to the warped media view of what I do. All stories in the press either take the stance that (less commonly) temps/contractors/freelancers/etc. are incompetant bloodsuckers who will take the client for all they're worth or (the vast majority) temps/contractors/freelancers/etc. are exploited by the system of temping/contracting/freelancing and duped into thinking there's something good about it.
My trepidation, then, arises from the bit Katz quotes on "Cab Drivers". Sounds like - and, no, I don't have enough information to really know - the same-old-same-old. "Oh, those poor benighted independents! Eeking out a hard-scrabble existence, chasing job after job, for a chance of getting paid! Oh, pity the poor contractor without health insurance, without 401(k), without job security!"
For what it's worth: I chose this lifestyle because it works for me. Most reasonable agencies in this day and age offer benes (health, 401k, etc.) to their W2 employees. I have, in some ways, more job security than most people: if my relationship with a client deteriorates, I call up my agent and say "Get me out of here" - and he does.
That having been said, on to the real point:
In the last eight years, I've worked on some 50 client sites, in just about every conceivable kind of workplace: businesses of every shape and size, univerisities, non-profits, the gummint, even a major religion (no kidding). Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a month, sometimes for many months at a stretch.
Part of what got me hooked on this kind of work was the opportunity to see the insides of so many different workplaces. I wanted an answer to "What is 'work' like for most people?" and I didn't want to generalize, as everyone seemed to, from a paltry handful of data points.
These are some of the things I have learned:
Everyone thinks their workplace is "normal", no matter how abusive it is.
Workplaces are like families in that, because people tend not to be in more than one or two at a time, they have no benchmark against which to compare them. So everywhere I went, from places with fantastic morale and loyalty to the pits of Hades, everyone thought that where they worked - their relationship to their boss, their relationship to their coworkers, their morale of their division/company/branch/department, etc. - was "normal", and that if they changed their jobs their new work experience would be just the same. If their current experience was bad, it wouldn't get better anywhere else; if their current experience was good, it wouldn't be worse (or better) anywhere else.
The major reason that's bad is that it allows people in positions of authority to get away with murder. It's fatalism pure and simple.
The minor reason that's bad is that it reduces the posibility for sympathy between workers of very different companies to nil. Say worker A, coming from The Eighth Circle, LTD, applies for a job at Elysian Fields, Inc. where they are interviewed by worker B. All worker B can tell is that worker A didn't get much accomplished, had a rocky relationship with their job, and seems pretty despondent/desperate. Worker B does not see that in the context of Elysian Fields, Inc. worker A could be a great employee, because worker B doesn't realize the existence of different contexts. This is one of the reasons people tend to move from cruddy job to cruddy job, and good job to good job!
People believe their bosses have the power of life and death over them.
Sometimes, I think that a whole lot of people try to use their bosses as substitute parents, trying to earn the love and appreciation and approval of absent parents through the proxy of their bosses. Cuz they act like kids: unwilling to say "no, I'm sorry, I can't do that for you", shameful and resentful at not doing things good enough, and in short completely manipulatable.
(Which is one of the reasons I suspect as crooked any company which makes a big deal of how much it is a "family".)
Self-determination (poo-pooed above) really is worth it
Self-determination, however, is not just a function of being independently employed. It is much easier to find self-determination when you're on your own - that's a good chunk of why I went that route - but not everyone (or even most everyone) manages to find self-determination in being a temp/contractor/freelancer, nor is it impossible to be self-determined while "employed directly".
Self-determination is a state of mind, or, if you will, a state of spirit. It is a deep undertstanding that you are, in the end, responsible for the course of your life.
Some people get to self-determination via paranoia and cynicism: "Ain't nobody looking out for me, ever, but me." Some people get there via religious faith or a strong sense of calling: "I have to do what I was put here to do." Some people get there via a brush with death: "I am not going to waste any more of my precious seconds of life in such misery." Some people get there via philosophy, some people get there via hunger.
Doesn't matter how you get there: get there.
Self-determination is the rope by which you can haul yourself out of the quicksand of bad employment situations. Self-determination is the difference between being pathetically vulnerable and being able to shrug off the crap.
This isn't some woo-woo newage neo-psychology about positive thinking. Self-determination is a tool for hacking on lives. And its old name is "liberty", and people fought and died for it.
Most people believe that the expression "Being your own boss" actually has relevant meaning
Look: you, every last one of you, are the captains of your own fates. You are your own bosses, already.
Ultimately, you have only yourself to answer to. Are you, upon your death bed, going to worry "Was I sufficiently obedient? Was I a good enough employee? Were my bosses pleased with my service?"
You are responsible for the course of your life. That doesn't mean it's entirely your fault, but it is your responsibility, same way that if your puppy messes on your rug, the mess is not your fault, but it's still your responsibility. Shit happens. What I'm talking about is how you then deal with the shit.
It is nobody else's job to rescue you from the misery of an abusive job, or a job you just don't like. It's nobody else's job to answer the question "What shall I do with my life?" It's nobody else's job to intervene and say "You're throwing the best years of your life away on a crummy situation."
It's your job to care about you . It's your job to care about you enough to stand up for yourself; to refuse to allow other to take advantage of you; to force yourself to get out of fatal ruts. It's your job to step back and take a good long look at your life so far and ask "Is where I am now on the path to where I want to be? Is this getting me where I want to go? Is this trip I am on worth being on?".
A staggering number of people entrust this job to their bosses, or to Lady Luck (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi!). But, ya know, those bosses don't care about you. That's not their job. You cannot abdicate this responsibility without suffering. To try and get someone else to do this for you is to look for parenting, to try to find someone to treat you like you're a kid and they're your mom-or-dad. But not even your parents can do this for you once you're an adult. This is what it means to be an adult.
Most (adult) people who are abused allow the abuse to happen
If your work situation is abusive - whether your boss is taking advantage of you financially or you are being sexually harassed by co-workers or your workspace is giving you an RSI - ask yourself "Why am I putting up with this?"
If the only answer you have is "I've gotten myself into debt up to my eyeballs and I'm terrified of being unemployed, so my current employer has me by the short and curlies", then I recommend to you the book Your Money or Your Life (Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin)
If your answer is "Because I am too timid to confront the problem/people", then you really do have a problem, because even if you get out of the current situation, you'll bring your fatal weakness with you. You'll be an abuse victim waiting to happen.
Only you can rescue you. The rest of us are powerless to. You have to decide to be brave and decide stop it for yourself.
And that's what I learned as a temp/contractor/freelancer.
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And you call yourselves geeks!
I'm appalled to discover /.ers are so frightened by an area of research, so willing to make value judgements about a technology which doesn't even exist, so devoid of imagination as to the potential benefits of such a technology.
You people sound exactly like all those clueless yahoos^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommentators in the mainstream press who ranted that "The internet will be the end of interpersonal contact, high culture and human civilization" and "ATMs will never catch on because people really like standing in line to interact with slow and surly service personnel" and "Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone used email." Not to mention "Cloning will be the end of human individuality!" and "Designer genes will be the end of human individuality!"
Get A Grip, people.
This guy may be off the deep end for skipping all those pesky intermediary animal tests, but investigating ways to interface wetware and hardware is one of the most interesting and potentially humanitarian aims a scientist could have. Think prosthetics that work like (or better than) original limbs. Think repairs to nerves. Think about the control of mental illness (such as depression) without side-effect riddled drugs. Think about just having a sufficient grasp of how the nervous system works to be able to hack on it.
Yeah, there are potentially scary applications. That's medicine. All hacking on the human body could be used to human detriment, hence the aphorism "the power to heal is the power to harm". And not only in medicine. Universally, the only technologies without the potential to do harm are those without any potential at all.
I'd thought nerds, of all people, would grok that.
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