You missed the point entirely. GM didn't out-compete with light rail; they made the choice completely unavailable. Joe Smith didn't say "Honey, if I bought a car and drove to work, I could get their 20 minutes earlier and stop and do an errand on the way back. I think I'll buy a car today." Instead, automobiles became the *only* way to get to work. That's not competition in my book.
If there was enough demand for light rail instead of automobiles, then another company would have created a light rail system to replace the ones that GM was buying.
This is a tragedy of the commons type problem. After GM has bought up tracks and torn them up, you think a city is gonna go for another company getting easements, rights of way, and imminent domain to lay down a new set of tracks? Nope. Besides, the GM cars can go anywhere, on government-subsidized roads. You're going to compete against a company whose vehicle's pathways are created and maintained by gov. subsidy? If you were another company, and were interested in making money, you would start making cars, not a light rail system.
Look at light rail systems all around the world. They are operated by government as part of the infrastructure. They aren't profitable enough to be run by private industry. This is clearly a case of industry working against the public interest.
Back in the 40's no one was really thinking about pollution, not governments, corporations, or citizens.
Demonstrably false. Wikipedia says: "Chicago and Cincinnati were the first two American cities to enact laws ensuring cleaner air in 1881. Other cities followed around the country until early in the 20th century, when the short lived Office of Air Pollution was created under the Department of the Interior. Extreme smog events were experienced by the cities of Los Angeles and Donora, Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, serving as another public reminder." [Emphasis mine]
Have you read _The 4th turning_? It basically says that each generation is a reaction to what they grew up with. Basically, one generation grows up in a crisis, so they value thrift and hard work, their children have their basic needs met, so they aren't concerned about material wants, but are more interested in spirituality, art, culture -- the immaterial aspects of life -- and also spoil their kids, and then *those* kids reject their parents' flakey new-age ideas, and grow up to become materialistic adults, but aren't interested in hard work or thrift, so they, wreck the economy and infrastructure, and cause a collapse, which leads *their* kids to live through a crisis, and they learn to value thrift and hard work... ad infinitum.
The major bottleneck was waiting to get any resumes for candidates that seemed worth interviewing. Most interviews ended with frustration that the candidate wasn't up to standard
Is it really out-of-bounds to wonder about this marathon interview process?
My question is, how well do interviewing skills translate to job performance? If you're doing these grueling interviews, and are constantly getting frustrated, my next obvious question is, do all the people who make it through the interviews turn out to be 100% perfect fit employees? Maybe someone who doesn't write a good resume or do marathon interviews that well might turn out to be a great employee.
Reminds me of some geek buddies of mine who can't get laid, or have a serious GF, because the women they know aren't models. Meanwhile average guys who interact with average girls get laid, have meaningful relationships, start families, etc. So much for smarts...
Craked online has top-ten lists that are pretty good -- that's what I was referring to. They are more edgier and adult than the magazine I remember -- perhaps their funnier because the writers are in their natural element. I haven't seen the magazine in years, so I don't know about that.
So even though it's ALWAYS WORKED BEFORE it would be INSANE TO THINK IT WOULD HAPPEN?
Selection bias. Only those who were 'rescued' by technology can claim "it has always worked before". Those who perished because they weren't 'saved by technology' are dead, and can't claim that it didn't work.
But clever readers will recount their history and know that many, many people have died from famine, disease, natural disasters, wars, etc. The End of the World has happened quite regularly for many groups of people.
The primary cause for famine and starvation is tribal feudal warfare and government corruption. Not the lack of food and not the lack of trying.
Yes, if only people would act like saints, there wouldn't be any problems at all.
I argue that most human ills are social ills, not technological ones. Technological solutions run into social problems, because the root of the problem is social. If a 'solution' ( New strains of wheat with Vitamin C! ) doesn't address the social issue ( Corrupt government officials exploit their people ), it's not really a solution, just a geek pipe-dream.
You do realize that this "Pollutant Industry" is a giant straw-man, right? Industries exist to make products people want/need. They don't exist to pollute the environment for the sake of polluting the environment.
Demonstrably false. Back in the 1940s, GM bought out and destroyed public light rail systems in major cities to create a market for personal automobiles. This lead to greater pollution, urban poor, and suburban sprawl. They weren't responding to peoples needs; they were destroying a perfectly good system to replace it with a worse one -- which only enriched their industry at the cost of society.
How about all the HB-1 visa holders that corporations *lobbied* our government to get in, just because they wanted workers who would work for less, instead of hiring Americans. Hay, maybe if there weren't HB-1 visa holders filling the slots, there would be more American how got trained and got training for those positions.
I mean seriously. We have a shortage of Java programmers in the US? This whole "We can't find IT tech workers with the proper skills" argument reeks.
For all you guys out there pining for the fjords, just go back and read some of those classic, black-and-white, pre-advertising MAD magazines. A lot of the material was *terrible*. I'm thinking particularly of the movie parodies. They were just frame after frame of bad pun or joke. But hey, at age 9, it makes you feel very grown up and rebellious to be reading such critical literature.
What you are experience is the nostalgia of youth. Watching an 80s transformers cartoon today, at my age, just doesn't invoke the sense of awesomeness it did when I was young. The cheesy plots, dialogue, ans sometimes crappy animation shine through.
Cracked magazine, however, seems to have come of age in the internet. The magazine always seemed like an un-funny knock off of mad magazine back in the day. Now, I find their online top-ten lists hilarious.
Those are all interesting issues, but I have a hunched they've been mostly hashed out in the extradition treaties that nations sign, and the ensuing court cases.
Obama had said during the campaign that he would do unilateral strike into Pakistan's territory, if it meant killing terrorists. You can't say an informed person thought he was going to behave differently on this.
Linux doesn't need any marketshare in order to do damage to Microsoft.
Just the fact that it's out there as a bogeyman is enough.
Hold on a minute. Linux's mere existence harms' Microsoft financially? Well, then, why hasn't it been doing this since the early 90s, when it was first developed? What has changed to allow its mere existence *now* to hurt MS?
Do you think java has gotten out of the phase of trendiness?
I'm looking to start learning a real language, to make my career more secure. Although I would like to learn c, c++, or even lisp, just for the fulfillment, when I look at monster.com ads, java is the only non-niche language that consistently shows up. Do you think there is an install base building for java, or not?
And I think the software lock-in has worked with MS Office. MS Office has so much functionality at such a cheap price point, you pretty much can't compete with it. It's just not worth it.
Pay some attention to the people around you, and watch how they conduct themselves. Plenty of people are good at personal skills. The world is full of examples to learn from.
I think the suggestions you make are good, but I think the people who are going to have social problems of this magnitude aren't going to be helped by these suggestions. I think there's good reason for it, so hear me out.
Face it, being an employed adult is pretty late in the game to have a fundamental problem in an area that most people had figured out by second grade. I think if a person doesn't know how to be nice or act in a group by age 25, they probably have Asperger's or are high-functioning autistics. Studies have shown that people on the AS spectrum don't have neuron activity in the mirroring area of the brain -- the part that allows us to imitate others. So they can't just learn from examples. You can't treat Jane the way Bob treats Jane. Each relationship has its own unique context. AS people literally cannot perceive social things or events like facial expression, body language, emotion, reading between the lines.
I think for real AS people, they need more than just a few pointers. The probably need intensive socialization therapy so as not to simply come off as a jerk. AS people literally cannot percieve the same social cues and realities that non-aspies can.
Now that's just learning how to act in a group. How to actually deal with real office politics and succeed, or at least not get trampled and maintain yourself -- that's a different story. Even normal people have a hard time with that.
- Help with lots of little things around the office. Although it's sometimes annoying, it's actually a good thing to be one of the guys that people go to when they have a computer problem, or they need a ride to a meeting, or help carrying some boxes to their desk.
Is this really gonna save someone's job when the chips are down? Most of the obviously aspie people I've met also blow this helpfulness thing also. They just can't see the problem from the other person's perspective. They offer help when its not wanted, fix things that aren't broken but simply non-optimal, and are completely oblivious to polite dismissals of their offers of help, charging forward with their single-minded goal of being useful to someone else. When someone approaches them with an actual problem that they want help with, they are unable to understand the other's person's communication, or even the fact that another person *has a different way of seeing the world*, and might see a problem where the aspie sees none, or might not be totally on board with the Aspie's radical solution to "fix" things.
Can you recommend a resource for learning personal skills and politics? Books or something? How does one do this, exactly? Just show up for meetings and be nice to people?
This kind of reminds me when a dorky buddy of mine suddenly became an expert in "The Game". He went from tolerable dork to "call the cops" creepy in a matter of weeks amongst female company. I can imagine a similar technically proficient but socially mal-adjusted IT guy making a similar transformation when they try to apply their engineering problem solving skills to office politics.
I've frequently argued that currency is like a big, distributed accounting ledger for the society. Imagine we recorded all our transactions on rocks like those mythical islanders do. Only, instead of rocks, we used big accounting books, which had records of *all* economic activity. Now imagine we cut those ledger entries up and divvied them around to peopled. That's ideally what currency should be -- an accurate accounting of the real economy.
You're misunderstanding this. Novels or other literature were never called "long-form epic poems", or ever categorized as epic poetry.
We can clearly delineate when modern chemistry broke away from alchemy. Although chemistry is a descendant of alchemy, it no longer is a kind of alchemy. That's because chemists took up the scientific method, which is fundamentally different from the tenets of alchemy. They didn't assume that lead could be turned into gold; they just wanted to research and discover the true properties of material. However, "science" never had a fundamental disagreement with any "foundational principles of philosophy" -- scientists rather took up certain positions already within science. Science is a kind of philosophy.
I've read through your posts, and your entire argument about Why Science is not Philosphy seems to be "It's just not". I think you are thinking solely of philosophy as people debating in a coffee shop. Philosophy is much broader than. You do recognize that science is a descendant of philosophy. At what point, exactly, did science break away from philosophy? What even or proclamation heralded "the scientific revolution", when science broke from its philosophical moorings? Is science founded on logical positivism? If you would agree, then you would be admitting that science is based on a philosophical position.
If 'science' is to have any meaning as a practice different from psuedo-science, or esp, or divination, then you have to take a philosophical position as to what constitute knowledge, reason, information, observation, reality, objectivity, etc. Those are philosophical positions; I argue therefore that science is a subset of philosophy. It fits entirely within philosophy's Venn diagram.
FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing what would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.
No, wrong, lots of people, especially talking heads on TV and in government thought they economy was just fine. In fact, just before the collapse of Bear Sterns, McCain's economic advisor said that we were in a 'mental recession'. This was the same guy who wrote "Dow 30,000", which came out before the tech bubble burst.
So, a lot of people -- powerful, influential people -- were saying things were great, and that message was getting out there.
Peter Schiff predicted it. He'd been telling people to move out of US assets and into gold and BRIC investments for a while now.
You're right, nobody can time the market, but you are 180 degrees wrong when you say everybody saw this coming. Even Alan Greenspan said he didn't see it.
Slashdot Mirror
If there was enough demand for light rail instead of automobiles, then another company would have created a light rail system to replace the ones that GM was buying.
This is a tragedy of the commons type problem. After GM has bought up tracks and torn them up, you think a city is gonna go for another company getting easements, rights of way, and imminent domain to lay down a new set of tracks? Nope. Besides, the GM cars can go anywhere, on government-subsidized roads. You're going to compete against a company whose vehicle's pathways are created and maintained by gov. subsidy? If you were another company, and were interested in making money, you would start making cars, not a light rail system.
Look at light rail systems all around the world. They are operated by government as part of the infrastructure. They aren't profitable enough to be run by private industry. This is clearly a case of industry working against the public interest.
Back in the 40's no one was really thinking about pollution, not governments, corporations, or citizens.
Demonstrably false. Wikipedia says: "Chicago and Cincinnati were the first two American cities to enact laws ensuring cleaner air in 1881. Other cities followed around the country until early in the 20th century, when the short lived Office of Air Pollution was created under the Department of the Interior. Extreme smog events were experienced by the cities of Los Angeles and Donora, Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, serving as another public reminder." [Emphasis mine]
Have you read _The 4th turning_? It basically says that each generation is a reaction to what they grew up with. Basically, one generation grows up in a crisis, so they value thrift and hard work, their children have their basic needs met, so they aren't concerned about material wants, but are more interested in spirituality, art, culture -- the immaterial aspects of life -- and also spoil their kids, and then *those* kids reject their parents' flakey new-age ideas, and grow up to become materialistic adults, but aren't interested in hard work or thrift, so they, wreck the economy and infrastructure, and cause a collapse, which leads *their* kids to live through a crisis, and they learn to value thrift and hard work... ad infinitum.
The major bottleneck was waiting to get any resumes for candidates that seemed worth interviewing. Most interviews ended with frustration that the candidate wasn't up to standard
Is it really out-of-bounds to wonder about this marathon interview process?
My question is, how well do interviewing skills translate to job performance? If you're doing these grueling interviews, and are constantly getting frustrated, my next obvious question is, do all the people who make it through the interviews turn out to be 100% perfect fit employees? Maybe someone who doesn't write a good resume or do marathon interviews that well might turn out to be a great employee.
Reminds me of some geek buddies of mine who can't get laid, or have a serious GF, because the women they know aren't models. Meanwhile average guys who interact with average girls get laid, have meaningful relationships, start families, etc. So much for smarts...
Welcome to America, where the streets are paved with gold, and people just throw toilet paper away when they're done with it!
Craked online has top-ten lists that are pretty good -- that's what I was referring to. They are more edgier and adult than the magazine I remember -- perhaps their funnier because the writers are in their natural element. I haven't seen the magazine in years, so I don't know about that.
So even though it's ALWAYS WORKED BEFORE it would be INSANE TO THINK IT WOULD HAPPEN?
Selection bias. Only those who were 'rescued' by technology can claim "it has always worked before". Those who perished because they weren't 'saved by technology' are dead, and can't claim that it didn't work.
But clever readers will recount their history and know that many, many people have died from famine, disease, natural disasters, wars, etc. The End of the World has happened quite regularly for many groups of people.
The primary cause for famine and starvation is tribal feudal warfare and government corruption. Not the lack of food and not the lack of trying.
Yes, if only people would act like saints, there wouldn't be any problems at all.
I argue that most human ills are social ills, not technological ones. Technological solutions run into social problems, because the root of the problem is social. If a 'solution' ( New strains of wheat with Vitamin C! ) doesn't address the social issue ( Corrupt government officials exploit their people ), it's not really a solution, just a geek pipe-dream.
You do realize that this "Pollutant Industry" is a giant straw-man, right? Industries exist to make products people want/need. They don't exist to pollute the environment for the sake of polluting the environment.
Demonstrably false. Back in the 1940s, GM bought out and destroyed public light rail systems in major cities to create a market for personal automobiles. This lead to greater pollution, urban poor, and suburban sprawl. They weren't responding to peoples needs; they were destroying a perfectly good system to replace it with a worse one -- which only enriched their industry at the cost of society.
How about all the HB-1 visa holders that corporations *lobbied* our government to get in, just because they wanted workers who would work for less, instead of hiring Americans. Hay, maybe if there weren't HB-1 visa holders filling the slots, there would be more American how got trained and got training for those positions.
I mean seriously. We have a shortage of Java programmers in the US? This whole "We can't find IT tech workers with the proper skills" argument reeks.
For all you guys out there pining for the fjords, just go back and read some of those classic, black-and-white, pre-advertising MAD magazines. A lot of the material was *terrible*. I'm thinking particularly of the movie parodies. They were just frame after frame of bad pun or joke. But hey, at age 9, it makes you feel very grown up and rebellious to be reading such critical literature.
What you are experience is the nostalgia of youth. Watching an 80s transformers cartoon today, at my age, just doesn't invoke the sense of awesomeness it did when I was young. The cheesy plots, dialogue, ans sometimes crappy animation shine through.
Cracked magazine, however, seems to have come of age in the internet. The magazine always seemed like an un-funny knock off of mad magazine back in the day. Now, I find their online top-ten lists hilarious.
Those are all interesting issues, but I have a hunched they've been mostly hashed out in the extradition treaties that nations sign, and the ensuing court cases.
Why is this funny? What *about* tenure? Is it really just a joke these days?
Obama had said during the campaign that he would do unilateral strike into Pakistan's territory, if it meant killing terrorists. You can't say an informed person thought he was going to behave differently on this.
Linux doesn't need any marketshare in order to do damage to Microsoft.
Just the fact that it's out there as a bogeyman is enough.
Hold on a minute. Linux's mere existence harms' Microsoft financially? Well, then, why hasn't it been doing this since the early 90s, when it was first developed? What has changed to allow its mere existence *now* to hurt MS?
Do you think java has gotten out of the phase of trendiness?
I'm looking to start learning a real language, to make my career more secure. Although I would like to learn c, c++, or even lisp, just for the fulfillment, when I look at monster.com ads, java is the only non-niche language that consistently shows up. Do you think there is an install base building for java, or not?
And I think the software lock-in has worked with MS Office. MS Office has so much functionality at such a cheap price point, you pretty much can't compete with it. It's just not worth it.
Pay some attention to the people around you, and watch how they conduct themselves. Plenty of people are good at personal skills. The world is full of examples to learn from.
I think the suggestions you make are good, but I think the people who are going to have social problems of this magnitude aren't going to be helped by these suggestions. I think there's good reason for it, so hear me out.
Face it, being an employed adult is pretty late in the game to have a fundamental problem in an area that most people had figured out by second grade. I think if a person doesn't know how to be nice or act in a group by age 25, they probably have Asperger's or are high-functioning autistics. Studies have shown that people on the AS spectrum don't have neuron activity in the mirroring area of the brain -- the part that allows us to imitate others. So they can't just learn from examples. You can't treat Jane the way Bob treats Jane. Each relationship has its own unique context. AS people literally cannot perceive social things or events like facial expression, body language, emotion, reading between the lines.
I think for real AS people, they need more than just a few pointers. The probably need intensive socialization therapy so as not to simply come off as a jerk. AS people literally cannot percieve the same social cues and realities that non-aspies can.
Now that's just learning how to act in a group. How to actually deal with real office politics and succeed, or at least not get trampled and maintain yourself -- that's a different story. Even normal people have a hard time with that.
- Help with lots of little things around the office. Although it's sometimes annoying, it's actually a good thing to be one of the guys that people go to when they have a computer problem, or they need a ride to a meeting, or help carrying some boxes to their desk.
Is this really gonna save someone's job when the chips are down? Most of the obviously aspie people I've met also blow this helpfulness thing also. They just can't see the problem from the other person's perspective. They offer help when its not wanted, fix things that aren't broken but simply non-optimal, and are completely oblivious to polite dismissals of their offers of help, charging forward with their single-minded goal of being useful to someone else. When someone approaches them with an actual problem that they want help with, they are unable to understand the other's person's communication, or even the fact that another person *has a different way of seeing the world*, and might see a problem where the aspie sees none, or might not be totally on board with the Aspie's radical solution to "fix" things.
Can you recommend a resource for learning personal skills and politics? Books or something? How does one do this, exactly? Just show up for meetings and be nice to people?
This kind of reminds me when a dorky buddy of mine suddenly became an expert in "The Game". He went from tolerable dork to "call the cops" creepy in a matter of weeks amongst female company. I can imagine a similar technically proficient but socially mal-adjusted IT guy making a similar transformation when they try to apply their engineering problem solving skills to office politics.
After I posted that, I could see what you mean. I should have put a sarcasm tag or some emoticon! :)
Let me explain: this was a joke, referencing a geek tendency towards pedantishness.
That's GNU/Linux. Or did you mean some other Linux?
I've frequently argued that currency is like a big, distributed accounting ledger for the society. Imagine we recorded all our transactions on rocks like those mythical islanders do. Only, instead of rocks, we used big accounting books, which had records of *all* economic activity. Now imagine we cut those ledger entries up and divvied them around to peopled. That's ideally what currency should be -- an accurate accounting of the real economy.
You're misunderstanding this. Novels or other literature were never called "long-form epic poems", or ever categorized as epic poetry.
We can clearly delineate when modern chemistry broke away from alchemy. Although chemistry is a descendant of alchemy, it no longer is a kind of alchemy. That's because chemists took up the scientific method, which is fundamentally different from the tenets of alchemy. They didn't assume that lead could be turned into gold; they just wanted to research and discover the true properties of material. However, "science" never had a fundamental disagreement with any "foundational principles of philosophy" -- scientists rather took up certain positions already within science. Science is a kind of philosophy.
I've read through your posts, and your entire argument about Why Science is not Philosphy seems to be "It's just not". I think you are thinking solely of philosophy as people debating in a coffee shop. Philosophy is much broader than. You do recognize that science is a descendant of philosophy. At what point, exactly, did science break away from philosophy? What even or proclamation heralded "the scientific revolution", when science broke from its philosophical moorings? Is science founded on logical positivism? If you would agree, then you would be admitting that science is based on a philosophical position.
If 'science' is to have any meaning as a practice different from psuedo-science, or esp, or divination, then you have to take a philosophical position as to what constitute knowledge, reason, information, observation, reality, objectivity, etc. Those are philosophical positions; I argue therefore that science is a subset of philosophy. It fits entirely within philosophy's Venn diagram.
What is rationality and observation? It all starts from a metaphysical, and ultimately, a philosophical, position, my friend.
FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing what would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.
No, wrong, lots of people, especially talking heads on TV and in government thought they economy was just fine. In fact, just before the collapse of Bear Sterns, McCain's economic advisor said that we were in a 'mental recession'. This was the same guy who wrote "Dow 30,000", which came out before the tech bubble burst.
So, a lot of people -- powerful, influential people -- were saying things were great, and that message was getting out there.
Peter Schiff predicted it. He'd been telling people to move out of US assets and into gold and BRIC investments for a while now.
You're right, nobody can time the market, but you are 180 degrees wrong when you say everybody saw this coming. Even Alan Greenspan said he didn't see it.