Oh, come on! These two curves are perfectly related: They're both attempting to vaguely connect 2 variables that intuitively seem like they ought to have something to do with each other without actually being a remotely accurate description of reality.
So you think there's a "vague connection" between tax rate and tax revenue? Or between innovation and regulation of that innovation? Do tell.
There's absolutely no way to measure real innovation.
You have a reason for this statement? Your supporting statements just mean that such measurement is a bit harder and less accurate than it could be. Not that innovation is somehow impossible to measure.
There are lots of motivations for innovation, some of which can't be bottled, organized, or turned into policies.
Irrelevant especially since there are substantial motivations (such as the profit motive) which can be so "bottled".
That means that trying to take a theoretical approach to creating more innovation is just plain unworkable.
Non sequitur. Nothing of your post aside from the unfounded claim that innovation can't be measured has any relevance to this statement.
On a separate point, if the whole rationale for intellectual property legislation is to promote innovation, shouldn't the focus be on protecting the rights of the actual person doing the creating, as opposed to whichever faceless entity who may own the contractual right to make use of the invention?
No. because by contract the faceless entity is the one actually doing the creating. All this talk of "real innovators" ignores that they need various things such as support staff, infrastructure, and capital which are provided by the "faceless entity" in exchange for that contractual right. Without such a transferable right, then one also ends up with unresolvable issues of ownership in cases where there is no one person who is responsible for all of the creating.
Second, it should be painfully obvious to you that being able to sell one's IP rights to another strengthens the right in question. Let's consider a more general example, labor. The ability to sell our labor greatly strengthens our rights as workers and simultaneously makes us much more valuable to would-be employers. If some law was passed to make that not so (say, enforcing the Marxist opinion on labor, that it should have a non-transferable ownership to all products made by that labor), then that would greatly reduce the value of our labor (and perhaps even cause a collapse of society).
The way it is structured today, it is very clear that intellectual property legislation only benefits those with the capital to buy over the rights and not the creators themselves.
"Very clear"? Keep in mind that they have to buy over those rights. Who's selling? The creators themselves who benefit from the selling. In other words, this is a way for creators of IP to benefit by providing another means for doing so.
As long as you have two parameters, can vary one parameter with respect to the second, and the second parameter varies continuously with respect to small changes in the first parameter (all else being equal), you have a curve.
And how does that translate into "regulation of innovation"???
How is this not fairly obvious? Innovation is the process of turning ideas into viable economic products. Patents provide monopoly access to certain ideas for a period of time. Hence, they are regulation on access to ideas (a key issue in the innovation process) and thus, regulation of innovation.
You do realize that the Earth gets hit every day by stuff that would destroy your car's paint job (and perhaps the garage it was in) - if there wasn't something in the way.
To reach Earth's surface, a vehicle would have to dissipate several tens of millions of joules of energy per kilogram of the vehicle. And it will, by heating up the atmosphere and vaporizing the vehicle. If the cubesat isn't designed for reentry, then most of the vehicle will probably be vaporized long before it reaches the Earth's surface. Even if somehow, it were made of unobtainium, that could withstand the heat of reentry intact, it'd still slow down to terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere. That might mess up someone's car, but it's not nuclear bomb-scale "duck and cover".
That is relatively quickly. It's certainly quick enough to keep them from being a major contributor.
The majority of satellites are in LEO, and it's where there is the most concern about space junk.
LEO is not just a single orbit. Objects can last from days to millennia depending how high up they are and how fluffy they are (cross section versus mass). The most concern about space junk is in the higher orbits where a collision can scatter debris in orbits that last longer than a human lifetime.
In fact, it's so effective, it can seriously damage or destroy businesses that do work, too.
I'm sure if you really look, you might be able to find an example of that. But don't confuse that with modern society's short sighted and ineffective efforts to remove future risk from society. I don't think it should be called "failure", if society rewards ignoring great risks and allows market participants to bail when a house of cards falls down.
If corporations are making record profits, how is it they have no money for hiring and cost of living raises (as opposed to the actual case, they're unwilling).
That's different from the stock market being up. I don't see a lot of evidence for the claim that corporations are making record profits.
In a recession,. the market should be down and corporate profits dwindling.
FIFY. Let us recall that taxes aren't free money. This development may be a better way to squander money than say actually waging war, but it's still squandering money.
Modern analyses show the prisoner's dilemma only works the way it's classically portrayed if the two prisoners don't know each other
Good models deviate from phenomena of reality because reality doesn't have the priors of the model. Hence, the prisoners' dilemma remains a good model. There's no need for magic "modern analysis" to determine this.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is to ethics and game theory as "First, we assume that a horse is a frictionless sphere in a vacuum" is to horse racing and gambling.
No, that is not true. The prisoners' dilemma remains valuable because it abstracts to the simplest possible level an important game theoretic idea, namely, that cooperation is not always the rational choice.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data.
The more data you have the more obscure identifiers you have. But there has to be declining returns to this.
Even with perfect knowledge of your customers, you still can only get them to buy so much (after all, they get only so much money). And I think the customer base gets resistant to marketing techniques as well (especially given how unsubtle those techniques tend to be).
Read his post again. He said western governments have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries.
There's a reason I quote.
Do you not understand that western governments, and particularly the U.S. and U.N., have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries?
That quote already answered your complaint. Since "particularly" the U.S. and U.N. were doing this.
Again, read his post. His statement was about the attitude, not whether people with such attitude actually have the power to follow through.
Again read my quote. It's already answered.
How the hell do you justify your "fuck these guys, they're annoying me, kill them all" attitude to yourself? You want them to leave you alone? It's really simple. Leave *them* the fuck alone.
If he were merely complaining about the attitude when why does he command us to leave them alone? Having a bad attitude and not acting on it would be leaving them alone.
Third time, read again. His statement was about ignorance, stupidity, and immorality. Those are not synonymous with self-interest (nor are they mutually exclusive)
Again:
I don't know how much more of this world I can stand. The ignorance and stupidity and *immorality* of even the intellectual elites of modern society disgust and frighten me.
This one requires a bit of explanation. First, is it possible for humans to be anything other than "ignorant", "stupid", and "immoral"? For example, even if I were to somehow subsume the resources of the entire known universe and make myself a giant khallow brain, there would still be things that would be unknowable to me. I would still be ignorant. Similarly, no matter how smart we become, we'll still be dumb to someone who is much smarter than that. And in either consideration, as we are, we only have vague glimmers of what the future holds.
When when our very lives depend on the deaths of other plants and animals (via feeding), we have a fundamental immorality at the core. Plus, certain immoral behavior has turned out to be successful evolution-wise. We wouldn't be here (IMHO), if some of our ancestors hadn't acted immorally. Those traits get passed on.
Those intellectual elites are simply self-interested people, and their manipulation and beguiling are just another type of free market trade - they're selling ideas/favors/promises in return for status/power. And they have results to show for it. They are not more flawed than the general population.
Finally, we get to the "intellectual elite". There are two things to observe here. First, some people are truly more flawed morally than other people. When presented with the opportunity, some people will do immoral things that most people wouldn't do (child rape is a notable example).
Second, there is a mechanism here to select for people who are willing to deceive others. They'll tend to be more successful in getting status and power than those who don't attempt such deception.
If anything they are better, for it is the general population who decided to give the elites that status/power.
Let's Godwin this particular argument. You are effectively arguing that Adolf Hilter is morally better than German Holocaust victims (who would be among the general population who gave him such power). Sure, they might have thought that he was a crazy, dangerous person and resisted him at the time (or not as the case may be), but I doubt anyone in 1932 knew ahead of time what would come (that ignorance and stupidity thing, this time in predicting the future).
That's why I find this particular argument to be a non sequitur. It doesn't follow that intellectual elites are morally better than the people who give them that status and power, bec
Silicon Valley is not just a place with a bunch of nerds working in an internet factory, its an ecosystem of cultural diversity built around technology, art and science.
Sure it is. Here's what I heard when I was there. "Silicon Valley is a great place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there." That matches my experiences with the place.
San Francisco apparently has some sort of culture (since that keeps getting talked about on Slashdot), but the rest of the Valley is standard urban sprawl and copious office space though with unusual opportunities for used high tech equipment.
I'll just note that 1) is constrained by night time crime and who will do both 2) and 3) at the same time? 3) is just status signalling (we're awesome and we show it by staying in a really expensive location). 2) is rather opposite of status signalling.
If your business isn't like that it's another matter and sure, go for cheap programmers, have fun, I won't be working there:D
I find where you want to work is irrelevant since there are more IT workers than just you.
Network effects from being close to all those other tech companies. (Seriously. This is why cities are generally more economically effective, and why large cities tend to be more effective than small cities; the effect is super-linear.)
Or sublinear if you account more for crime, overcrowding, and corruption. It depends on what you value. I'm sure the companies who relocate get good people, but it's a certain type of good people.
Well, we have to set things up for the next recession.
As to the recession, what part of it was a hoax? The banks and investment firms failing? The incredibly bad decisions or ridiculous leverage? The substantial drop in house prices? The poorly thought out policy decisions that dug the hole deeper?
My take is that wages were going down even if that recession never happened. It's supply and demand. There's too much supply of labor and not enough demand for it.
that there isn't really a lack of money waiting for investment
It's waiting for opportunities like Bloomberg's or to avoid some of the crazy uncertainty of the past few years (for example, some of the costs of hiring people). That's my take.
Do you not understand that western governments, and particularly the U.S. and U.N., have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries?
I don't and you don't understand either, because neither organization you mention above has been around for a large portion of that time. I find it interesting how people can blame the evils of millennia on the latest poster children (a blame which doesn't fit very well, I might add) and conveniently forget that things have gotten vastly better over that time.
How the hell do you justify your "fuck these guys, they're annoying me, kill them all" attitude to yourself? You want them to leave you alone? It's really simple. Leave *them* the fuck alone.
Who do you think really falls into this category here? A random poster on Slashdot isn't running some Congo Free State or Nazi Germany, turning genocide into wealth or power. They have almost no power or desire to meddle in other peoples' affairs. In addition, I see a number of these would-be genociders basing their claims on the fatalistic perception that they won't be left alone even if they try to disengage (for example, the people who believe that we'll either have to nuke over a billion Muslims or be eventually subjugated by a "global caliphate").
I don't know how much more of this world I can stand. The ignorance and stupidity and *immorality* of even the intellectual elites of modern society disgust and frighten me.
You can stand by lowering your absurd standards. It's painfully obvious that the whole world, even the vast non-human part, runs on self-interest. Rather than bewail that humans will behave in future as they always have, perhaps we should try to fix what can be fixed rather than fix what can't be.
For example, I'll point out that relatively free markets and capitalism has a great track record in getting self-interested people to help each other. So does democracy and the college system of higher education. Social, economic, and legal infrastructure which prevents or renders obsolete a variety of abuses seems to be a better approach than wishing people could be better.
I personally steer clear of "intellectual elites" because a lot of them get in that sort of position merely by having a desire for status or power and taking considerable effort to manipulate and beguile others, As a result of that filter, they tend to be even more flawed than the general population.
That's all well and good, but remember that when plants fail in an area, that's just like you becoming bankrupt because the US market crashed.
And? The point here is that here we have a market which probably has been around longer than mammals have weighed over a kilogram. Which involves participants who have just evolved into their niches with no deliberate trading strategy whatsoever. And which has never been controlled.
Yet it works.
Don't worry, just like plants will spread back into that area over time, you will be able to regain some of your savings after a while, too.
I haven't worried when I've lost savings in the past to market or economic turmoil (which aren't the same thing). So you don't have to be concerned here.
And it's worth noting here that the failures that happen in pollination participants are not only natural, but result I think in a lot of the evolution of the market participants that is seen. There seems to be a similar effect in human systems. Namely, failure, such as bankruptcy, seems to be a very effective way to remove businesses that no longer work.
Except when you're not speaking of generations of humans from birth to birth which is quite frequent. Here, they're speaking of a career generation which is at best a very fuzzy idea since employees don't magically give birth to new trained employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on! These two curves are perfectly related: They're both attempting to vaguely connect 2 variables that intuitively seem like they ought to have something to do with each other without actually being a remotely accurate description of reality.
So you think there's a "vague connection" between tax rate and tax revenue? Or between innovation and regulation of that innovation? Do tell.
There's absolutely no way to measure real innovation.
You have a reason for this statement? Your supporting statements just mean that such measurement is a bit harder and less accurate than it could be. Not that innovation is somehow impossible to measure.
There are lots of motivations for innovation, some of which can't be bottled, organized, or turned into policies.
Irrelevant especially since there are substantial motivations (such as the profit motive) which can be so "bottled".
That means that trying to take a theoretical approach to creating more innovation is just plain unworkable.
Non sequitur. Nothing of your post aside from the unfounded claim that innovation can't be measured has any relevance to this statement.
On a separate point, if the whole rationale for intellectual property legislation is to promote innovation, shouldn't the focus be on protecting the rights of the actual person doing the creating, as opposed to whichever faceless entity who may own the contractual right to make use of the invention?
No. because by contract the faceless entity is the one actually doing the creating. All this talk of "real innovators" ignores that they need various things such as support staff, infrastructure, and capital which are provided by the "faceless entity" in exchange for that contractual right. Without such a transferable right, then one also ends up with unresolvable issues of ownership in cases where there is no one person who is responsible for all of the creating.
Second, it should be painfully obvious to you that being able to sell one's IP rights to another strengthens the right in question. Let's consider a more general example, labor. The ability to sell our labor greatly strengthens our rights as workers and simultaneously makes us much more valuable to would-be employers. If some law was passed to make that not so (say, enforcing the Marxist opinion on labor, that it should have a non-transferable ownership to all products made by that labor), then that would greatly reduce the value of our labor (and perhaps even cause a collapse of society).
The way it is structured today, it is very clear that intellectual property legislation only benefits those with the capital to buy over the rights and not the creators themselves.
"Very clear"? Keep in mind that they have to buy over those rights. Who's selling? The creators themselves who benefit from the selling. In other words, this is a way for creators of IP to benefit by providing another means for doing so.
Woohoo, there may be a curve
As long as you have two parameters, can vary one parameter with respect to the second, and the second parameter varies continuously with respect to small changes in the first parameter (all else being equal), you have a curve.
And how does that translate into "regulation of innovation"???
How is this not fairly obvious? Innovation is the process of turning ideas into viable economic products. Patents provide monopoly access to certain ideas for a period of time. Hence, they are regulation on access to ideas (a key issue in the innovation process) and thus, regulation of innovation.
the problems:
BQP=BPP?
P=NP?
Those problems have nothing to do with speed of propagation of information. Structure of space is not implied by the Turing computation model.
If you don't use up the budget you don't get more next year. Especially if your working at an agency that can't be measured for efficiency in any way.
Well, any other way.
You do realize that the Earth gets hit every day by stuff that would destroy your car's paint job (and perhaps the garage it was in) - if there wasn't something in the way.
To reach Earth's surface, a vehicle would have to dissipate several tens of millions of joules of energy per kilogram of the vehicle. And it will, by heating up the atmosphere and vaporizing the vehicle. If the cubesat isn't designed for reentry, then most of the vehicle will probably be vaporized long before it reaches the Earth's surface. Even if somehow, it were made of unobtainium, that could withstand the heat of reentry intact, it'd still slow down to terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere. That might mess up someone's car, but it's not nuclear bomb-scale "duck and cover".
If 10-15 years is "relatively quickly," yes.
That is relatively quickly. It's certainly quick enough to keep them from being a major contributor.
The majority of satellites are in LEO, and it's where there is the most concern about space junk.
LEO is not just a single orbit. Objects can last from days to millennia depending how high up they are and how fluffy they are (cross section versus mass). The most concern about space junk is in the higher orbits where a collision can scatter debris in orbits that last longer than a human lifetime.
In fact, it's so effective, it can seriously damage or destroy businesses that do work, too.
I'm sure if you really look, you might be able to find an example of that. But don't confuse that with modern society's short sighted and ineffective efforts to remove future risk from society. I don't think it should be called "failure", if society rewards ignoring great risks and allows market participants to bail when a house of cards falls down.
If corporations are making record profits, how is it they have no money for hiring and cost of living raises (as opposed to the actual case, they're unwilling).
That's different from the stock market being up. I don't see a lot of evidence for the claim that corporations are making record profits.
In a recession,. the market should be down and corporate profits dwindling.
And it was.
Shut up and give the money.
FIFY. Let us recall that taxes aren't free money. This development may be a better way to squander money than say actually waging war, but it's still squandering money.
Modern analyses show the prisoner's dilemma only works the way it's classically portrayed if the two prisoners don't know each other
Good models deviate from phenomena of reality because reality doesn't have the priors of the model. Hence, the prisoners' dilemma remains a good model. There's no need for magic "modern analysis" to determine this.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is to ethics and game theory as "First, we assume that a horse is a frictionless sphere in a vacuum" is to horse racing and gambling.
No, that is not true. The prisoners' dilemma remains valuable because it abstracts to the simplest possible level an important game theoretic idea, namely, that cooperation is not always the rational choice.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data.
The more data you have the more obscure identifiers you have. But there has to be declining returns to this.
Even with perfect knowledge of your customers, you still can only get them to buy so much (after all, they get only so much money). And I think the customer base gets resistant to marketing techniques as well (especially given how unsubtle those techniques tend to be).
Read his post again. He said western governments have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries.
There's a reason I quote.
Do you not understand that western governments, and particularly the U.S. and U.N., have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries?
That quote already answered your complaint. Since "particularly" the U.S. and U.N. were doing this.
Again, read his post. His statement was about the attitude, not whether people with such attitude actually have the power to follow through.
Again read my quote. It's already answered.
How the hell do you justify your "fuck these guys, they're annoying me, kill them all" attitude to yourself? You want them to leave you alone? It's really simple. Leave *them* the fuck alone.
If he were merely complaining about the attitude when why does he command us to leave them alone? Having a bad attitude and not acting on it would be leaving them alone.
Third time, read again. His statement was about ignorance, stupidity, and immorality. Those are not synonymous with self-interest (nor are they mutually exclusive)
Again:
I don't know how much more of this world I can stand. The ignorance and stupidity and *immorality* of even the intellectual elites of modern society disgust and frighten me.
This one requires a bit of explanation. First, is it possible for humans to be anything other than "ignorant", "stupid", and "immoral"? For example, even if I were to somehow subsume the resources of the entire known universe and make myself a giant khallow brain, there would still be things that would be unknowable to me. I would still be ignorant. Similarly, no matter how smart we become, we'll still be dumb to someone who is much smarter than that. And in either consideration, as we are, we only have vague glimmers of what the future holds.
When when our very lives depend on the deaths of other plants and animals (via feeding), we have a fundamental immorality at the core. Plus, certain immoral behavior has turned out to be successful evolution-wise. We wouldn't be here (IMHO), if some of our ancestors hadn't acted immorally. Those traits get passed on.
Those intellectual elites are simply self-interested people, and their manipulation and beguiling are just another type of free market trade - they're selling ideas/favors/promises in return for status/power. And they have results to show for it. They are not more flawed than the general population.
Finally, we get to the "intellectual elite". There are two things to observe here. First, some people are truly more flawed morally than other people. When presented with the opportunity, some people will do immoral things that most people wouldn't do (child rape is a notable example).
Second, there is a mechanism here to select for people who are willing to deceive others. They'll tend to be more successful in getting status and power than those who don't attempt such deception.
If anything they are better, for it is the general population who decided to give the elites that status/power.
Let's Godwin this particular argument. You are effectively arguing that Adolf Hilter is morally better than German Holocaust victims (who would be among the general population who gave him such power). Sure, they might have thought that he was a crazy, dangerous person and resisted him at the time (or not as the case may be), but I doubt anyone in 1932 knew ahead of time what would come (that ignorance and stupidity thing, this time in predicting the future).
That's why I find this particular argument to be a non sequitur. It doesn't follow that intellectual elites are morally better than the people who give them that status and power, bec
What about that is contradictory (well aside from the H1-B claim which isn't part of the recession thing)?
I doubt it was engineered. These rats tend to have good instincts for when to flee sinking ships.
Silicon Valley is not just a place with a bunch of nerds working in an internet factory, its an ecosystem of cultural diversity built around technology, art and science.
Sure it is. Here's what I heard when I was there. "Silicon Valley is a great place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there." That matches my experiences with the place.
San Francisco apparently has some sort of culture (since that keeps getting talked about on Slashdot), but the rest of the Valley is standard urban sprawl and copious office space though with unusual opportunities for used high tech equipment.
If your business isn't like that it's another matter and sure, go for cheap programmers, have fun, I won't be working there :D
I find where you want to work is irrelevant since there are more IT workers than just you.
. Also, investors won't enjoy having to go to Bumfuck, Iowa to talk to you and see the operation.
Another indication that investment is an entertainment sector industry, not a financial one.
Network effects from being close to all those other tech companies. (Seriously. This is why cities are generally more economically effective, and why large cities tend to be more effective than small cities; the effect is super-linear.)
Or sublinear if you account more for crime, overcrowding, and corruption. It depends on what you value. I'm sure the companies who relocate get good people, but it's a certain type of good people.
As to the recession, what part of it was a hoax? The banks and investment firms failing? The incredibly bad decisions or ridiculous leverage? The substantial drop in house prices? The poorly thought out policy decisions that dug the hole deeper?
My take is that wages were going down even if that recession never happened. It's supply and demand. There's too much supply of labor and not enough demand for it.
that there isn't really a lack of money waiting for investment
It's waiting for opportunities like Bloomberg's or to avoid some of the crazy uncertainty of the past few years (for example, some of the costs of hiring people). That's my take.
Why is this so hard for politicians (and anyone else with an ax to grind) to understand.
I can't locate it now, but there is a saying about how incredibly difficult it is to enlighten people who make a career of being ignorant.
Do you not understand that western governments, and particularly the U.S. and U.N., have been fucking with the entire african and mid-east region for centuries?
I don't and you don't understand either, because neither organization you mention above has been around for a large portion of that time. I find it interesting how people can blame the evils of millennia on the latest poster children (a blame which doesn't fit very well, I might add) and conveniently forget that things have gotten vastly better over that time.
How the hell do you justify your "fuck these guys, they're annoying me, kill them all" attitude to yourself? You want them to leave you alone? It's really simple. Leave *them* the fuck alone.
Who do you think really falls into this category here? A random poster on Slashdot isn't running some Congo Free State or Nazi Germany, turning genocide into wealth or power. They have almost no power or desire to meddle in other peoples' affairs. In addition, I see a number of these would-be genociders basing their claims on the fatalistic perception that they won't be left alone even if they try to disengage (for example, the people who believe that we'll either have to nuke over a billion Muslims or be eventually subjugated by a "global caliphate").
I don't know how much more of this world I can stand. The ignorance and stupidity and *immorality* of even the intellectual elites of modern society disgust and frighten me.
You can stand by lowering your absurd standards. It's painfully obvious that the whole world, even the vast non-human part, runs on self-interest. Rather than bewail that humans will behave in future as they always have, perhaps we should try to fix what can be fixed rather than fix what can't be.
For example, I'll point out that relatively free markets and capitalism has a great track record in getting self-interested people to help each other. So does democracy and the college system of higher education. Social, economic, and legal infrastructure which prevents or renders obsolete a variety of abuses seems to be a better approach than wishing people could be better.
I personally steer clear of "intellectual elites" because a lot of them get in that sort of position merely by having a desire for status or power and taking considerable effort to manipulate and beguile others, As a result of that filter, they tend to be even more flawed than the general population.
That's all well and good, but remember that when plants fail in an area, that's just like you becoming bankrupt because the US market crashed.
And? The point here is that here we have a market which probably has been around longer than mammals have weighed over a kilogram. Which involves participants who have just evolved into their niches with no deliberate trading strategy whatsoever. And which has never been controlled.
Yet it works.
Don't worry, just like plants will spread back into that area over time, you will be able to regain some of your savings after a while, too.
I haven't worried when I've lost savings in the past to market or economic turmoil (which aren't the same thing). So you don't have to be concerned here.
And it's worth noting here that the failures that happen in pollination participants are not only natural, but result I think in a lot of the evolution of the market participants that is seen. There seems to be a similar effect in human systems. Namely, failure, such as bankruptcy, seems to be a very effective way to remove businesses that no longer work.
A generation time span has always been 30 years
Except when you're not speaking of generations of humans from birth to birth which is quite frequent. Here, they're speaking of a career generation which is at best a very fuzzy idea since employees don't magically give birth to new trained employees.