I think I really have managed to find the sweetest spot in IT. I make as much as a developer, my work is technically interesting, and best of all, I have absolutely nothing to do with production. Good performance testers are hard to find (mainly due to the high signal to noise ratio from the resume mills over seas), so when you are hired and recognized as such, you have some job security. Best of all, almost no one really understands what you are doing, but everyone understands when the website goes down, we lose $REALLY_BIG_MONEY every hour. If I prevent a single 2 hour production outage on our flagship product, I've paid my salary for the next 20 years. So we don't get shit on like QA testers, but no one is calling me at 3 in the morning either.
PC gamers are the complainers because they know better. They pay a premium for their gaming hardware in exchange for a better experience. Most console players don't know enough to complain.
Excuse me, but Steam rocks. I can log into any computer in the world, download steam, and play any of the dozens of games I have purchased from them. I can play without an internet connection just fine in offline mode. But best of all - I'm building a new system right now. As soon as I am finished, I will download the steam client, click a few buttons, and go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, all my games will be installed. That is just unparalleled service. Steam only sucks if you are a pirate.
Bullshit. The problem with the housing market was the securitization of mortgage debt, and insurance of that debt in a heavily deregulated market. This was not Fannie and Freddie. This was AIG selling everyone insurance on whether Bank of America's bonds would default, whether or not they held the bonds.
My son is severely ADD (from his mother's side). Before his medication kicks in, he is almost completely incapable of focusing. An example - when he was eight, I tried to get him to memorize his zip code on the way to school. This is a five digit number, right? In the ten minutes it took to get him to school, he could not successfully repeat the digits to me once. He was not able to focus long enough to hear all 5 digits and commit them to memory long enough to repeat them back.
ADD is very, very real. It is the mild cases that make life so difficult for the severe ones.
We've tried this, remember? It turns out that those small ISPs have to buy bandwidth from the big ISPs they are competing with, and surprise surprise, those big ISPs were complete dicks and drove the small ones out of business.
Market based solutions fail when there is no market. Monopolies are not markets.
Because insurance works by healthy people paying for the sick. If you freeload by not paying in during your healthy years, you are stealing from the people who did. Our current system allows people to do this. We just want you to pay your share, freeloader.
That's polished news - news that appears well researched, articles that are well written. I'm not sure what your experience has been, but every news story I've ever been even tangentially involved in has been hopelessly wrong on many counts.
Blogs are all about the comments. Yes, it may start with a wire feed. But soon after, you'll get a post from someone who is much closer to the situation than the original poster, who can share real insight on the topic. Then someone else with familiarity comes and corrects a piece that the knowledgeable commenter got wrong. As the comments on a well-read blog build, the real story emerges. THAT is real news - input from dozens of intimate sources, aggregated into a whole. Figuring out what is really happening takes effort - but a good blog can do the work that a single reporter would take months to do in just a few hours.
For example, it was reported a couple of days ago that the public option was defeated in the finance committee. Major news sources pushed it as a real story, when the truth was it was known by insiders that the public option was never going to come out of Finance for weeks or months. There are 4 other committees in the senate that have passed bills with the public option in it. Bloggers on sites like Dailykos can give you all the inside baseball of what is happening with health care reform, far better than any of the main stream media.
Last spring I bought a brother DCP Series DCP-9040CN MFC color laser printer/scanner/copier/fax that I couldn't be happier with. While this is really more of a small business machine than a personal printer, it sells for less than $400 (on sale at New Egg right now). The important thing to remember about color laser printers are replacement cartridges - Brother's sell for about half of what HP's sell for, and print more pages per cartridge. (If I recall correctly, the comparable HP printer in the same price range had cartridges running at $130 - and you need 4 of them). According to my brother-in-law (a district manager for Officemax), Brother consistently has the lowest price per page of any other manufacturer. The only drawback to this machine is that it is huge - 75 pounds.
The Soviet Union fell because communism doesn't work. Period. (Or do you really believe that communism is viable, and that the Soviet implimentation was flawed?) Gorbachev specifically went about liberalizing the economy and political system (perestroika and glasnost), and the resulting freedom to criticize the central government lead to the rise of nationalist parties in all of the Soviet satellite states in 1989. In 1991, the logical conclusion was reached, these countries declared independence, and the Soviet Union fell apart.
Notice that none of that had anything to do with money. It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure. The Soviets had demonstrated time and again that they cared nothing for the suffering of their people. They would happily murder them in the millions, let them starve, and imprison anyone who criticized the government. Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work. Gorbachev recognized that, and decided to end the suffering of his people. Soviets were standing in bread lines long before Reagan. I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan, but really y'all need to own up that the man was a complete joke that never accomplished anything but tricking Republicans into voting against their own self-interests.
The big sticking point for many of us opposing "public" health care is that the majority of people who are in the private health system in the US currently are at least satisfied with the care they're receiving
The majority of the people in the system are healthy. Find me some sick people who are willing to say that.
"drives down costs in the health industry" by forcing Doctors to take a loss to treat patients covered under the plan, a loss they're forced to make up by passing along the cost to those of us paying under the private system.
It's funny, but all these anti-healthcare reformers never mention the record profits insurance companies have been making over the last two decades. No, cutting the profits out of the equation will have nothing to do with reducing costs. Remember, if you are an insurance company, there is only one way to make money - take money from healthy people, and NOT PAY IT OUT.
All this without any mention of tort reform (the only real way to bring down health care costs in this country right now)
The tort reform in Texas has had no effect on costs. None.
Now you want me to pay for the people who WEREN'T willing to take care of themselves AND you want to take away the benefits I've worked so hard for?
Not at all. We just want access to an insurance company that doesn't waste my money giving it to shareholders, will not drop my coverage when I actually get sick enough to use it, will not require I enter bankruptcy if I come down with a catastrophic illness, and will stop pretending that we don't already pay for anyone who shows up to an emergency room. There is only one entity I know of that can pull that off.
You get perfectly good healthcare, until in fact YOU GET SICK. Of course you are satisfied with your healthcare now. You are healthy.
What happens when you actually get so sick you are no longer able to work? Your insurance company gladly took your premiums when you were healthy, but as soon as you need to use it, you have 18 months (that's if they don't find a reason to deny you coverage for a pre-existing condition - some estimates put that at 50% chance for major illnesses). If they can't fix you in 18 months, you will be bankrupted, and will remain unemployable and uninsurable for the rest of your miserable life.
So many smart people around here are so, so stupid.
No, we don't. But you are missing the point. By removing the intelligent students from the "normals", the effects on the normals will be opposite. They will perform significantly worse. This isn't about you.It's about the people you think are beneath you.
We weren't talking about intelligent people, we were talking about geniuses - intelligent people pushed to their full potential. we have plenty of smart people around that do the small stuff.
You are your own example of why you were wrong, and you are completely ignoring the well documented scientific literature of the Pygmalion effect. You were able to succeed just fine without anyone's assistance, teaching yourself skills that were not taught in school. Frankly, if this is the argument you present for why I am wrong, I'd say you are not as smart as you think you are.
We aren't saying "fuck the smart kids". We are saying "the smart kids already have advantages. they don't need further help." that's a huge difference.
You can *never* have enough intelligent people, or even "Einsteins". Until we're all chillin' on interstellar spacecraft with unlimited fuel and your only worry is what galaxy you're going to visit next, there are plenty of complex problems that need solving.
If you look at the history of scientific discovery, there are very (very!) few isolated incidents in which a single person makes a revolutionary discovery. The vast majority of the time discoveries are evolutionary, because our knowledge is so inter-dependent. Even Newton, arguably the most brilliant scientist of the last thousand years had Liebniz. Most discoveries are made possible due to incremental advances in other areas, and they therefore happen in clusters - suddenly all around the same time several people hit upon the same thing. The lone genius scientist is a myth.
Furthermore, you missed the point. Its not that you could have done more for yourself. Its that you might have done more for society.That's where you are wrong. The world doesn't need more Newtons. They will happen on their own. What the world needs are soccer coaches and scout leaders. Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Community gardeners and volunteers with the disabled. All of the average people you knew growing up that were able to support themselves, and give a little of themselves back to the community they live in. We need more people like that. It doesn't matter how smart you are - unless you are an uber-genius, you will have a far greater impact on the world keeping some kid from turning to car theft than running lab tests.
Yes, clearly it's better to drag down the more intelligent to make it fair for those who can't learn as fast. Fuck. That. The world needs ditch diggers.
Yes, it does. But it only needs a few Einstein's. It also needs retail managers, mediocre accountants, office workers, checkers, mail carriers...in far larger numbers than we need a smart (but not genius) kid to realize his full potential.
Sooo, you're saying wasting somebodies childhood is worth the greater good? Not that I think the public school does a very good job of teaching anyone, let alone smart kids.
Public school is by no means a wasted childhood. You could have been working in a factory, after all. Allowing Alice to be bored so that Bob has a chance in life is absolutely worth it.
I know many brilliant people who never lived up to their potential partly because, among other reasons, they were completely stifled in a public education system. They were never taught how to work hard to learn, how to challenge themselves.
I'd submit that the vast majority of us never live up to our potential. I certainly didn't. That doesn't mean that I am not happy and successful. Your friends were given the same opportunities that the rest of us were to learn those skills. They only have themselves to blame if they did not.
But of course, that's not the purpose of the educational system in the US. The purpose is to create a functional workforce that is conditioned to structured systems.
And what is wrong with that? I sit in my cube, every day, largely bored, but enjoying a standard of living my great-great-grandfather could never have imagined. Our system works pretty damn well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I really have managed to find the sweetest spot in IT. I make as much as a developer, my work is technically interesting, and best of all, I have absolutely nothing to do with production. Good performance testers are hard to find (mainly due to the high signal to noise ratio from the resume mills over seas), so when you are hired and recognized as such, you have some job security. Best of all, almost no one really understands what you are doing, but everyone understands when the website goes down, we lose $REALLY_BIG_MONEY every hour. If I prevent a single 2 hour production outage on our flagship product, I've paid my salary for the next 20 years. So we don't get shit on like QA testers, but no one is calling me at 3 in the morning either.
I don't suppose it has anything to do with Oracle owning Peoplesoft, which competes directly with SAP (a European company)?
PC gamers are the complainers because they know better. They pay a premium for their gaming hardware in exchange for a better experience. Most console players don't know enough to complain.
Excuse me, but Steam rocks. I can log into any computer in the world, download steam, and play any of the dozens of games I have purchased from them. I can play without an internet connection just fine in offline mode. But best of all - I'm building a new system right now. As soon as I am finished, I will download the steam client, click a few buttons, and go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, all my games will be installed. That is just unparalleled service. Steam only sucks if you are a pirate.
Bullshit. The problem with the housing market was the securitization of mortgage debt, and insurance of that debt in a heavily deregulated market. This was not Fannie and Freddie. This was AIG selling everyone insurance on whether Bank of America's bonds would default, whether or not they held the bonds.
ADD is very, very real. It is the mild cases that make life so difficult for the severe ones.
Market based solutions fail when there is no market. Monopolies are not markets.
Because insurance works by healthy people paying for the sick. If you freeload by not paying in during your healthy years, you are stealing from the people who did. Our current system allows people to do this. We just want you to pay your share, freeloader.
The work he has done on nuclear disarmament (largely unreported in the US media) has been simply astounding. FWIW.
Blogs are all about the comments. Yes, it may start with a wire feed. But soon after, you'll get a post from someone who is much closer to the situation than the original poster, who can share real insight on the topic. Then someone else with familiarity comes and corrects a piece that the knowledgeable commenter got wrong. As the comments on a well-read blog build, the real story emerges. THAT is real news - input from dozens of intimate sources, aggregated into a whole. Figuring out what is really happening takes effort - but a good blog can do the work that a single reporter would take months to do in just a few hours.
For example, it was reported a couple of days ago that the public option was defeated in the finance committee. Major news sources pushed it as a real story, when the truth was it was known by insiders that the public option was never going to come out of Finance for weeks or months. There are 4 other committees in the senate that have passed bills with the public option in it. Bloggers on sites like Dailykos can give you all the inside baseball of what is happening with health care reform, far better than any of the main stream media.
Last spring I bought a brother DCP Series DCP-9040CN MFC color laser printer/scanner/copier/fax that I couldn't be happier with. While this is really more of a small business machine than a personal printer, it sells for less than $400 (on sale at New Egg right now). The important thing to remember about color laser printers are replacement cartridges - Brother's sell for about half of what HP's sell for, and print more pages per cartridge. (If I recall correctly, the comparable HP printer in the same price range had cartridges running at $130 - and you need 4 of them). According to my brother-in-law (a district manager for Officemax), Brother consistently has the lowest price per page of any other manufacturer. The only drawback to this machine is that it is huge - 75 pounds.
Notice that none of that had anything to do with money. It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure. The Soviets had demonstrated time and again that they cared nothing for the suffering of their people. They would happily murder them in the millions, let them starve, and imprison anyone who criticized the government. Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work. Gorbachev recognized that, and decided to end the suffering of his people. Soviets were standing in bread lines long before Reagan. I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan, but really y'all need to own up that the man was a complete joke that never accomplished anything but tricking Republicans into voting against their own self-interests.
The majority of the people in the system are healthy. Find me some sick people who are willing to say that.
"drives down costs in the health industry" by forcing Doctors to take a loss to treat patients covered under the plan, a loss they're forced to make up by passing along the cost to those of us paying under the private system.
It's funny, but all these anti-healthcare reformers never mention the record profits insurance companies have been making over the last two decades. No, cutting the profits out of the equation will have nothing to do with reducing costs. Remember, if you are an insurance company, there is only one way to make money - take money from healthy people, and NOT PAY IT OUT.
All this without any mention of tort reform (the only real way to bring down health care costs in this country right now)
The tort reform in Texas has had no effect on costs. None.
Now you want me to pay for the people who WEREN'T willing to take care of themselves AND you want to take away the benefits I've worked so hard for?
Not at all. We just want access to an insurance company that doesn't waste my money giving it to shareholders, will not drop my coverage when I actually get sick enough to use it, will not require I enter bankruptcy if I come down with a catastrophic illness, and will stop pretending that we don't already pay for anyone who shows up to an emergency room. There is only one entity I know of that can pull that off.
What happens when you actually get so sick you are no longer able to work? Your insurance company gladly took your premiums when you were healthy, but as soon as you need to use it, you have 18 months (that's if they don't find a reason to deny you coverage for a pre-existing condition - some estimates put that at 50% chance for major illnesses). If they can't fix you in 18 months, you will be bankrupted, and will remain unemployable and uninsurable for the rest of your miserable life.
So many smart people around here are so, so stupid.
Then you really aren't all that smart.
No, we don't. But you are missing the point. By removing the intelligent students from the "normals", the effects on the normals will be opposite. They will perform significantly worse. This isn't about you.It's about the people you think are beneath you.
We weren't talking about intelligent people, we were talking about geniuses - intelligent people pushed to their full potential. we have plenty of smart people around that do the small stuff.
You are your own example of why you were wrong, and you are completely ignoring the well documented scientific literature of the Pygmalion effect. You were able to succeed just fine without anyone's assistance, teaching yourself skills that were not taught in school. Frankly, if this is the argument you present for why I am wrong, I'd say you are not as smart as you think you are.
We aren't saying "fuck the smart kids". We are saying "the smart kids already have advantages. they don't need further help." that's a huge difference.
If you look at the history of scientific discovery, there are very (very!) few isolated incidents in which a single person makes a revolutionary discovery. The vast majority of the time discoveries are evolutionary, because our knowledge is so inter-dependent. Even Newton, arguably the most brilliant scientist of the last thousand years had Liebniz. Most discoveries are made possible due to incremental advances in other areas, and they therefore happen in clusters - suddenly all around the same time several people hit upon the same thing. The lone genius scientist is a myth.
Furthermore, you missed the point. Its not that you could have done more for yourself. Its that you might have done more for society.That's where you are wrong. The world doesn't need more Newtons. They will happen on their own. What the world needs are soccer coaches and scout leaders. Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Community gardeners and volunteers with the disabled. All of the average people you knew growing up that were able to support themselves, and give a little of themselves back to the community they live in. We need more people like that. It doesn't matter how smart you are - unless you are an uber-genius, you will have a far greater impact on the world keeping some kid from turning to car theft than running lab tests.
Yes, it does. But it only needs a few Einstein's. It also needs retail managers, mediocre accountants, office workers, checkers, mail carriers...in far larger numbers than we need a smart (but not genius) kid to realize his full potential.
Remember these lessons, and you will go far in life. We lift ourselves up by helping those not as capable as ourselves.
Public school is by no means a wasted childhood. You could have been working in a factory, after all. Allowing Alice to be bored so that Bob has a chance in life is absolutely worth it.
I'd submit that the vast majority of us never live up to our potential. I certainly didn't. That doesn't mean that I am not happy and successful. Your friends were given the same opportunities that the rest of us were to learn those skills. They only have themselves to blame if they did not.
But of course, that's not the purpose of the educational system in the US. The purpose is to create a functional workforce that is conditioned to structured systems.
And what is wrong with that? I sit in my cube, every day, largely bored, but enjoying a standard of living my great-great-grandfather could never have imagined. Our system works pretty damn well.