Employment should be thought of as almost a human right. If a spouse isn't allowed to pursue his calling simply because of where he lives, and he sticks by his working wife for over half a decade on a no-working-allowed H4 visa, that actually sucks pretty hard. It crosses the line from "tough choice" to "ok, now this policy is actually breaking a person's ability to develop".
If you can get Congress to agree to the first sentence, WRT current citizens, I'll support you on the second. As far as "breaking a person's ability to develop", I assume that they could develop in their own country, rather than to force mine to pay for their development costs, unless by some magic power the only place someone can "develop" is America.
If you want to cut down on this, it is absolutely necessary to improve the US education system.
We've been hearing this line for the past 30 years. The number of college graduates has never been higher (OK, it declined a bit last year). The unemployment rate for college graduates continues to be high.
In the face of these facts, I'd tend to say, from a macro level, that more/better education is more a last gasp at defending a non-meritocratic economic system from its demise than a solution to our unemployment problem. Anecdotally, I know people who have advanced STEM degrees who are still out of work. How is their advanced education helping them? And how will more education help with the whole depressed wages thing?
Well, I don't know about you, but various mutations of Yellow Pages still get delivered to my door like clockwork every year or so. So they're not dead yet.
Nope, two words, one apostrophised. Apostrophised words are generally counted as one word (not two), while words with essential hyphens, e.g., low-budget, devil-may-care, are counted as the number of words in the compound word.
Why do you assume that alternate investments would perform more poorly than oil/coal stocks? Show me that petro-stocks, if replaced by other investments matching the remainder of the endowment, would cause the endowment to have a significantly lower rate of return.
Your rant has more to do with your notion that anything that a hippy board for a liberal institution would propose is bad (especially when it's aligned with what tree huggers would do) than anything to do with reality. Actually, Stanford's board is one of the most hard-nosed bunch of financial bastards you'll find on a university board, with several B-school grads sitting thereon. If you don't think they actually crunched the numbers to hell and back before they made this decision, you're an idiot. Colleges don't fuck with their endowments.
But I am sorry if your XOM or BP stock dipped a bit on the news.
On the other hand, the growth in JavaScript does seem to confirm my (totally biased) opinion that there are tons of "reinventing the wheel" JavaScript projects out there...
Well, if I had to pick a modern language to use, it would be Javascript. Yes, I know this is heresy to some of you, but at least it has one feature not commonly found in other programming languages - prototypical inheritance - so it does have a reason for existing. That almost (but not quite) makes up for its shortcomings as a programming langauge like lack of a proper numeric stack and conflation between strings and numbers, due to the desire for it to be a "scripting" language (is "scripting" the new word for "ill-designed"?) and a syntax that allows constructors to be called as plain functions with hilarious results. So, really, the list of negatives isn't that long. As for rewriting everything? We've been doing that since Autocode. Think of it like a musician running his scales. It keeps us fresh.
What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver?
Then you would be dead and it's your own fault for choosing a car that does the thinking for you and thinks it's fine to kill you. Don't like the way it thinks? Buy a different car.
Because 't' and 'y' are often interchanged in typos, as is 'r' and 'e'. If you're on an Android phone and using Swype, the a->s->h gesture looks a lot like an a->h gesture. So, if you're light on the 't', and sloppy about hitting the 'r', trash looks a lot like yeah.
Obama should grow a pair. Instruct the FCC commissioners to reclassify, or be dismissed.
This would assume that what is happening is not exactly what he wants to have happen in order for his party to do well in the upcoming midterms. Politics == money in this society at this time. Full stop. Also, in any political appointment, you may assume the true reason for the person being in that role is that he can do what is necessary to help the President's party do well in the upcoming midterms. In the case of FCC commissioners, the most direct method to help the President's party do well is for them to make the telecom folks happy enough for them to contribute money. It's not exactly a quid pro quo sort of thing, just an "alignment of interests" sort of thing.
CEO salaries are tied to performance bonuses and stock options.
... said bonus targets often being ignored and options repriced so that the CEO cannot lose, as the board does not want to lose its so called "talent". Happy to finish that for you, by the way, as market apologists like you often leave out that last part.
Nothing of true value will be lost. Stupid people and money will be parted.
Not necessariry. When all those people lose their jobs, the folks who used to sell them coffee and rent them apartments, those who sold them cars and hotel reservations for their travel, their grocers and pharmacists, all will suffer. They are not "stupid people". They are businesses who sell to the folks employed by your "stupid people". The knock-on effects are often larger than the crash itself, if you hadn't remembered that from 2008 through... well, now.
I actually trust Slashdot a hell of a lot more than your economic analysis.
No no... gotta use the loophole to close the loophole..
The other things you talk about would be much easier to do if the money wasn't talking so loudly. Kill the money, get things done. Keep the money and you'll never change those things because, as of now, politicians of the major party stripe follow the money (as would any minor party's candidates should they get into power). Kill the money, you'd have a chance to get IRV or proportional representation or some other voting system that might give a third party a chance. Keep it, you'll be in unlistening two-party hell until the anarchist or fascist revolution comes around.
I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.
Absolutely. It goes back to the idea of Christian charity and a universal need for salvation (which comes from outside oneself, of course) and winds its way though the centuries to "The White Man's Burden" and cultural exceptionalism of all types. And you can see the linkages only if you have enough knowledge about history to see the links and how they're connected.
Are you sure that the idea "offended" him? He might have just been thinking that your model was too simplistic.
What do you mean by "created by hand"? Everything is "created by hand", even something that was created by typing software and commands into a keyboard, unless you've found a way to manipulate matter using your telekinetic abilities.
And "speaks to us about the human condition"? What cannot be separated from the human condition? Even if you have to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to do so.
So I think your teacher's original grade was correct (unless you had a model of what these terms meant). That he decided to change your grade speaks more of lack of confidence in his own beliefs rather than the quality of your paper.
Or else he was just tired of a tedious argument with you.
I wonder if that is because Americans are obscessed with youth - or perhaps fear of getting old?
The image? Probably. But more important is your first question...
What is it with America and superheroes?
The superhero is America's myth - the idea that with the right combination of luck, hard work, and/or good-heartedness, miracles can be achieved; that these miracle men (and women) will eventually overcome whatever evil is unleashed upon the world; and that, because of this, order is sustained and the world healed. In addition, the superhero is always isolated from society by dint of both his power and his superior morality or his circumstance. This latter attribute is the one most useful to the ruling class.
National Lampoon had it right on more than one level when they ran strips featuring the super hero "Son-o-God" in their magazine in the mid-1970's. The superhero is a Jesus substitute and his Bible the Constitution (at least those parts about meeting out justice, even if the protagonist usually is less concerned about things like the Bill of Rights) and Adam Smith, while he works to defend "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". In this mythos, salvation always comes from an external individual source - never from societal, collective action. This myth conditions the masses to wait for the superhuman savior rather than to organize in their own defense. It is another opiate of the masses writ in pulp.
There are particular graphic novels that make the character a bit more edgy, perhaps a bit more revolutionary - but almost never enough to actually challenge the system in which they are embedded. And even these few characters are the exceptions that prove the rule. The superhero is Nietzche's superman who bows down in defense of the status quo, even though this means that he enslaves himself to the people running the system and their goals (which are almost always good, but occasionally subverted by a few bad individuals).
And, as long as we wait for Superman, the masses will be distracted - the perfect circus, even for those without bread.
As another commenter said, the lambda functions are great. I'm not sure why there is so much hate for C++.
Well, let's take your example of lambda functions. They were used mathematically back in the late 50's. Other programming languages had them as part of the language since the early 70's. And now we're supposed to cheer because we have a version with a crappy syntax only a C++ committee could love that adds more interactions with exception handling, memory allocation, and just about every other poorly designed feature that was or will be shoehorned in because the language wasn't designed right in the first place?
Thanks, dude. I'll take Javascript any day. At least there I don't have to deal with much more awful than conflation between strings and numerics, a crappy numeric stack, and constructors that masquerade as functions at bad times. And I get prototypical objects as a bonus. Fuck it. I'll take a 1970's era Lisp compiler that will get me to within 30% of C++ speed or (if I write some C or assembler primitives) faster.
Face it. C++ is about as 1980's as you can get in PL design. It looks like a whore that puts on more makeup each year when, in reality, it's giving $5 blowjobs in a back alley because then you don't have to look at its ugly face.
It's time for it to go away. But at least you can rest happy that it will stick around forever thanks to folks like you who have continued to use this ugly, perverse language.
Say what you want about things like lisp and scheme, they managed to put incredibly powerful ideas into something that is at its core simple. If only other language designers achieved it too.
Yeah, but it has parentheses. To some folks that makes it seem almost as bad as socialism!
C++: The only language where exception handling interacts with the rest of the system in such a non-trivial way that you need an entire book to explain it correctly.
If you're lucky. Your CPU just might try to alleviate its pain by deciding to go on a kill spree, starting with you before turning on its own processes.
If you can't afford a home at that rate then maybe you're living in the wrong part of the country. There are parts of the US that have VERY cheap real estate and they're not terrible places to live either. They're just not hyper fashionable.
No, they're not terrible places to live, they're just places with minimal job mobility and limited economic prospects. Not to mention that what economic prospects exist there are usually involved in raping the environment or taking delight in economic exploitation of your neighbors, But yeah, I'm sure it's all that "fashion" that moves people into big cities. After all, it's so great to pay higher prices for food, housing, etc. for the sake of "fashionability". It couldn't be that part about your local employer dumping coal sludge into waterways so you need to buy bottled water to wash with and drink for two or three weeks out of year.
There is no solution to this situation that I could think of...
How about redistribution of wealth by some means? Say taxes and transfer payments? Robin Hood? But, no, there must be something horribly wrong with that idea because, according to you, we're fucked.
Slashdot Mirror
Employment should be thought of as almost a human right. If a spouse isn't allowed to pursue his calling simply because of where he lives, and he sticks by his working wife for over half a decade on a no-working-allowed H4 visa, that actually sucks pretty hard. It crosses the line from "tough choice" to "ok, now this policy is actually breaking a person's ability to develop".
If you can get Congress to agree to the first sentence, WRT current citizens, I'll support you on the second. As far as "breaking a person's ability to develop", I assume that they could develop in their own country, rather than to force mine to pay for their development costs, unless by some magic power the only place someone can "develop" is America.
If you want to cut down on this, it is absolutely necessary to improve the US education system.
We've been hearing this line for the past 30 years. The number of college graduates has never been higher (OK, it declined a bit last year). The unemployment rate for college graduates continues to be high.
In the face of these facts, I'd tend to say, from a macro level, that more/better education is more a last gasp at defending a non-meritocratic economic system from its demise than a solution to our unemployment problem. Anecdotally, I know people who have advanced STEM degrees who are still out of work. How is their advanced education helping them? And how will more education help with the whole depressed wages thing?
Well, I don't know about you, but various mutations of Yellow Pages still get delivered to my door like clockwork every year or so. So they're not dead yet.
Nope, two words, one apostrophised. Apostrophised words are generally counted as one word (not two), while words with essential hyphens, e.g., low-budget, devil-may-care, are counted as the number of words in the compound word.
Why do you assume that alternate investments would perform more poorly than oil/coal stocks? Show me that petro-stocks, if replaced by other investments matching the remainder of the endowment, would cause the endowment to have a significantly lower rate of return.
Your rant has more to do with your notion that anything that a hippy board for a liberal institution would propose is bad (especially when it's aligned with what tree huggers would do) than anything to do with reality. Actually, Stanford's board is one of the most hard-nosed bunch of financial bastards you'll find on a university board, with several B-school grads sitting thereon. If you don't think they actually crunched the numbers to hell and back before they made this decision, you're an idiot. Colleges don't fuck with their endowments.
But I am sorry if your XOM or BP stock dipped a bit on the news.
On the other hand, the growth in JavaScript does seem to confirm my (totally biased) opinion that there are tons of "reinventing the wheel" JavaScript projects out there...
Well, if I had to pick a modern language to use, it would be Javascript. Yes, I know this is heresy to some of you, but at least it has one feature not commonly found in other programming languages - prototypical inheritance - so it does have a reason for existing. That almost (but not quite) makes up for its shortcomings as a programming langauge like lack of a proper numeric stack and conflation between strings and numbers, due to the desire for it to be a "scripting" language (is "scripting" the new word for "ill-designed"?) and a syntax that allows constructors to be called as plain functions with hilarious results. So, really, the list of negatives isn't that long. As for rewriting everything? We've been doing that since Autocode. Think of it like a musician running his scales. It keeps us fresh.
What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver?
Then you would be dead and it's your own fault for choosing a car that does the thinking for you and thinks it's fine to kill you. Don't like the way it thinks? Buy a different car.
Because 't' and 'y' are often interchanged in typos, as is 'r' and 'e'. If you're on an Android phone and using Swype, the a->s->h gesture looks a lot like an a->h gesture. So, if you're light on the 't', and sloppy about hitting the 'r', trash looks a lot like yeah.
Obama should grow a pair. Instruct the FCC commissioners to reclassify, or be dismissed.
This would assume that what is happening is not exactly what he wants to have happen in order for his party to do well in the upcoming midterms. Politics == money in this society at this time. Full stop. Also, in any political appointment, you may assume the true reason for the person being in that role is that he can do what is necessary to help the President's party do well in the upcoming midterms. In the case of FCC commissioners, the most direct method to help the President's party do well is for them to make the telecom folks happy enough for them to contribute money. It's not exactly a quid pro quo sort of thing, just an "alignment of interests" sort of thing.
CEO salaries are tied to performance bonuses and stock options.
... said bonus targets often being ignored and options repriced so that the CEO cannot lose, as the board does not want to lose its so called "talent". Happy to finish that for you, by the way, as market apologists like you often leave out that last part.
What kind of "fraud" are porn stars participating in (other than faking their orgasms)?
Nothing of true value will be lost. Stupid people and money will be parted.
Not necessariry. When all those people lose their jobs, the folks who used to sell them coffee and rent them apartments, those who sold them cars and hotel reservations for their travel, their grocers and pharmacists, all will suffer. They are not "stupid people". They are businesses who sell to the folks employed by your "stupid people". The knock-on effects are often larger than the crash itself, if you hadn't remembered that from 2008 through... well, now.
I actually trust Slashdot a hell of a lot more than your economic analysis.
No no... gotta use the loophole to close the loophole..
The other things you talk about would be much easier to do if the money wasn't talking so loudly. Kill the money, get things done. Keep the money and you'll never change those things because, as of now, politicians of the major party stripe follow the money (as would any minor party's candidates should they get into power). Kill the money, you'd have a chance to get IRV or proportional representation or some other voting system that might give a third party a chance. Keep it, you'll be in unlistening two-party hell until the anarchist or fascist revolution comes around.
This is a very big deal. Yet it isn't even on the front page of CNN today.
That's because Wolf Blitzer hasn't found the plane yet.
I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.
Absolutely. It goes back to the idea of Christian charity and a universal need for salvation (which comes from outside oneself, of course) and winds its way though the centuries to "The White Man's Burden" and cultural exceptionalism of all types. And you can see the linkages only if you have enough knowledge about history to see the links and how they're connected.
Are you sure that the idea "offended" him? He might have just been thinking that your model was too simplistic.
What do you mean by "created by hand"? Everything is "created by hand", even something that was created by typing software and commands into a keyboard, unless you've found a way to manipulate matter using your telekinetic abilities.
And "speaks to us about the human condition"? What cannot be separated from the human condition? Even if you have to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to do so.
So I think your teacher's original grade was correct (unless you had a model of what these terms meant). That he decided to change your grade speaks more of lack of confidence in his own beliefs rather than the quality of your paper.
Or else he was just tired of a tedious argument with you.
I wonder if that is because Americans are obscessed with youth - or perhaps fear of getting old?
The image? Probably. But more important is your first question...
What is it with America and superheroes?
The superhero is America's myth - the idea that with the right combination of luck, hard work, and/or good-heartedness, miracles can be achieved; that these miracle men (and women) will eventually overcome whatever evil is unleashed upon the world; and that, because of this, order is sustained and the world healed. In addition, the superhero is always isolated from society by dint of both his power and his superior morality or his circumstance. This latter attribute is the one most useful to the ruling class.
National Lampoon had it right on more than one level when they ran strips featuring the super hero "Son-o-God" in their magazine in the mid-1970's. The superhero is a Jesus substitute and his Bible the Constitution (at least those parts about meeting out justice, even if the protagonist usually is less concerned about things like the Bill of Rights) and Adam Smith, while he works to defend "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". In this mythos, salvation always comes from an external individual source - never from societal, collective action. This myth conditions the masses to wait for the superhuman savior rather than to organize in their own defense. It is another opiate of the masses writ in pulp.
There are particular graphic novels that make the character a bit more edgy, perhaps a bit more revolutionary - but almost never enough to actually challenge the system in which they are embedded. And even these few characters are the exceptions that prove the rule. The superhero is Nietzche's superman who bows down in defense of the status quo, even though this means that he enslaves himself to the people running the system and their goals (which are almost always good, but occasionally subverted by a few bad individuals).
And, as long as we wait for Superman, the masses will be distracted - the perfect circus, even for those without bread.
Well, it is Oklahoma we're talking about here. It's not like they ever got anything right except not being part of Texas.
As another commenter said, the lambda functions are great. I'm not sure why there is so much hate for C++.
Well, let's take your example of lambda functions. They were used mathematically back in the late 50's. Other programming languages had them as part of the language since the early 70's. And now we're supposed to cheer because we have a version with a crappy syntax only a C++ committee could love that adds more interactions with exception handling, memory allocation, and just about every other poorly designed feature that was or will be shoehorned in because the language wasn't designed right in the first place?
Thanks, dude. I'll take Javascript any day. At least there I don't have to deal with much more awful than conflation between strings and numerics, a crappy numeric stack, and constructors that masquerade as functions at bad times. And I get prototypical objects as a bonus. Fuck it. I'll take a 1970's era Lisp compiler that will get me to within 30% of C++ speed or (if I write some C or assembler primitives) faster.
Face it. C++ is about as 1980's as you can get in PL design. It looks like a whore that puts on more makeup each year when, in reality, it's giving $5 blowjobs in a back alley because then you don't have to look at its ugly face.
It's time for it to go away. But at least you can rest happy that it will stick around forever thanks to folks like you who have continued to use this ugly, perverse language.
Say what you want about things like lisp and scheme, they managed to put incredibly powerful ideas into something that is at its core simple. If only other language designers achieved it too.
Yeah, but it has parentheses. To some folks that makes it seem almost as bad as socialism!
C++: The only language where exception handling interacts with the rest of the system in such a non-trivial way that you need an entire book to explain it correctly.
If you're lucky. Your CPU just might try to alleviate its pain by deciding to go on a kill spree, starting with you before turning on its own processes.
Hey, if Nichelle Nichols can be naked in a Trek movie, I say Carrie can go nude for Star Wars!
If you can't afford a home at that rate then maybe you're living in the wrong part of the country. There are parts of the US that have VERY cheap real estate and they're not terrible places to live either. They're just not hyper fashionable.
No, they're not terrible places to live, they're just places with minimal job mobility and limited economic prospects. Not to mention that what economic prospects exist there are usually involved in raping the environment or taking delight in economic exploitation of your neighbors, But yeah, I'm sure it's all that "fashion" that moves people into big cities. After all, it's so great to pay higher prices for food, housing, etc. for the sake of "fashionability". It couldn't be that part about your local employer dumping coal sludge into waterways so you need to buy bottled water to wash with and drink for two or three weeks out of year.
There is no solution to this situation that I could think of...
How about redistribution of wealth by some means? Say taxes and transfer payments? Robin Hood? But, no, there must be something horribly wrong with that idea because, according to you, we're fucked.