Yeah, the OP and I did read about it. That's why wrote what we wrote. Why don't you read about it, and come back with either some new knowledge or good link which explains why HVDC is a bad option for long-distance power transmission.
which can ship power from one coast of North America to the other with losses of under 5%
When you're sending power very long distances, where you're not tapping into it every few miles, the low losses of HVDC make a pretty big difference. Go take a look at a population density map of Australia, and it might make more sense. The GP is talking many hundreds or even thousands of miles of uninterrupted power transmission. At those extreme ranges, the losses are going to be the biggest issue.
Sure, converting is an issue, but you're not doing that at more than a couple of places where you're dropping that continent-scale power grid into the local grid. The GP is talking about a continent scale power backbone.
And we all know how that will work. We'll establish breach@ourcompany.com as the official place to notify the people who need to know. All employees should email any breach information there. Brian is responsible for monitoring that email address. Now we lay off or reassign Brian.
Someone keeps an eye on it semi-regularly. In a meeting CIO is told about the breach, says, "Did you email our breach contact?" Yes? I'm off to play golf.
Maybe another solution would be to have everyone retire at 35, and instead of calling it UBI we call it early pension. Or something.
I was trapped in a multi-hour drive with a co-worker the other day, and we talked about this. One thing we both noted is that not encouraging old people to retire is a triple-whammy on the economy. Not only are they likely making a lot of money, they're likely hoarding it because they are worried about late-life medical costs, and they're taking up a job that one or more younger people desperately need.
One 70 year old is likely making 2-3x what a 25 year old would make.
This is a horrific trend I'm seeing with a bunch of my friends who pursued PhDs. (I bailed half-way through mine, and am grateful every day that I did.) Professors are sticking around into their 80s. Because why retire when you are still making money, and don't have to work too hard? But that salary could fund a couple of researchers, who are instead doing something outside their field, disappointed and disillusioned, and potentially in huge debt due to their education.
35 might be a bit young, but lets let everyone 55 and older retire, play golf, and be grandparents. They don't need to be millionaires, just give them $40k a year and some health insurance, and let them build up society with their knowledge, skills, and goodwill. Garden the sides of the street, watch the grand-kids, host a bake-sale, man a food-shelf. There is zero good reason to make people work into their 70s and 80s. If they want to? Sure, go ahead. But lets make the default not doing that.
It would be better for everyone.
That's a pretty easy start, and I'm idealistic enough to want to wonder how it would be controversial to most people. Do you hate grandparents? Do you want kids to grow up in the care of the state? Can we not agree to at least let old people be old people, and not work them to death?
it took 80 years for those jobs to materialize after the last big industrial revolution.......So yeah, the ship will probably eventually right itself.
I don't see that happening this time. Automation and machine learning is now better than the worst humans at many tasks. 80 years from now they will be better than the best humans at most tasks.
I have a pretty good imagination, but I can't come up with a single idea of what could possibly drive the economy in the future that would require humans to be involved at the scale required for full employment. As time goes on, there is less and less that we will possibly be able to do better than robots and machine learning. What possible industry could spring up where a robot with 3D vision in wavelengths we can't see and specialized hands to manipulate things could be done better by humans?
A computer taught itself Go in a few months and now is better than all of the humans on earth. And that was a proof-of-concept. That was the Model T of machine learning. (Model A was Chess, maybe?) In the very near future computers are going to be telling us things that we have no idea how they came up with, and which will often have accuracy to a degree which looks like magic to us.
Everything in the past that disrupted large-scale employment drove those people into jobs which, at the time, couldn't be automated or automated efficiently. That's not the case anymore. The average human is very close to being replaceable in just about any way one could conceive of. Think of all the people you meet in your daily life, and think about what percent of their job could be automated today, in 10 years, and in 20 years. When I do that, I realize that there are going to be a very large number of unemployed people in the very near future.
There won't be new jobs for workers – because just like the old jobs, general purpose systems will be able to do those as well.
I think what the bulk of the "sky's not falling" folks seem to be missing is what really happened in the past. We automated jobs that the average human could do, and they then moved on to other jobs that were, at that time, not possible or economical to automate.
Today, however, there is a rapidly diminishing pool of "things the average human can do that a computer can't do better". Historically, this hasn't been the case. Higher order thinking, dexterous fingers, the ability to problem solve and adapt always meant that your average human could find something to do better than the automation of the day was able to do.
That's past history.
When I can replace the average human on any given task with a system that can do it better, faster, and/or cheaper, what does that human do now? And the huge problem doesn't start when it's every job that can be done better - just enough jobs that the number left are insufficient to allow everyone to have a job.
The competitive advantage it would gain would be 7.5 billion in saved revenue.
Wrong. Because that 7.5 billion dollars is being EXTRACTED from the US economy. That 7.5 billion dollars used to pay for houses, gas, food, cars, and everything else those drivers needed for their daily life. That money was paid to other people, who bought packages that needed to be delivered.
Take that money out of the economy, and you don't get 100% of that money back. You lose a percentage of your customers, because they don't have money anymore. That's the real, fundamental problem with the race to the bottom.
And every other industry that can, will. If UPS does it, FedEx will have to if they wish to remain competitive. And so on. What will you do then?
This is a really interesting question. Because even if they reduce their prices to minimal profit, if you don't have money, you don't have money. And at this end-game, minimum wage isn't an answer, because there's a sizable chance that there just isn't a job for you to do. Sure, minimum wage rises to $40/hr, because we're at 50% employment, and that needs to cover a family since only half of them will be working. What happens when the family next door has 2 jobs and there isn't one for your family?
UBI is one answer, but I'm not convinced that it will really work. We've based our cultural values around being productive members of society. While you are correct that 50% of the population not having jobs doesn't make them freeloaders, at the moment, culturally, they would be. I think it would be easier for us to return to the make-work programs that got us out of the great depression rather than do UBI.
Civic beautification, cultural expression, arts, community engagement, child development and care....there are lots of places where we could pay people to do something that doesn't require a ton of skills, but still something that would have some value to the community. I think that would be a far easier pill to swallow than UBI. Add the bureaucratic overhead of managing the make-work programs at the state and local level, and you're well on your way to creating enough jobs to fill in for all those lost to automation and machine learning.
Is this the american dream? Nope. But I think we realistically need to be having these conversations well ahead of the time when we lay off 3.5 million truck drivers, ten times that many warehouse workers, half of all office workers, all legal clerks, etc., etc., etc. And those days are not that far away.
Refund for the ticket, a travel voucher worth half the ticket price that expires in 12 months, and some flapping lips saying that they're sorry and committed to your travel satisfaction.
Luckily they spotted this a month out and not just a few days before. Now they'll have most of the twitter angst die down before the holiday travel season starts. Then they'll just face the normal level of angry delayed holiday travelers. Well, less than the normal level, since they'll be flying a lot less planes.
I used to use this in a general science class to teach about how germs spread. I'd "sneeze" on a desk, paper, etc. before class, and then we'd do some normal activity. 3/4 of the way through class tell everyone what I'd done.
Inevitably kids would have glitter on their hands, face, desk, pencils, notebooks, etc. It was a very powerful, "this is why you cover your cough, and this is why you wash your hands" teaching tool.
At work I'm lucky to be beholden to IT purchasing decisions, so no. And at home, I'm on a laptop most of the time. Thus my Ubuntu shout-out. I love that they were smart enough to stick the taskbar on the left margin. Or if I put it there, I'm glad they are flexible enough to allow that. (I honestly don't know if that's stock or not.)
A major issue is that current aspect ratios make vertical space really valuable. Get my tabs and toolbars off the top and bottom of the screen and put them on the side, so I have more vertical space to work with.
Monitors are already far too wide to comfortably read edge-to-edge text. Use that wasted space and give me a few more lines vertically! That'd be innovative! (Cough, ubuntu, cough.)
My point was that by being the lying-ass coon dog that STARTED the process, he got the FIRST and MOST blame for being the original cause of the contraband fruit being touched.
And my point was that you (and most everyone else) have gotten the morality of that story completely wrong.
Who made the tree? Who put it in the garden? Who made the people? Who put them in the garden. Who made the snake? Who put him in the garden? Who gave him knowledge of what the tree does? Who gave him the ability to talk? Who knew exactly how this entire thing would play out because he's omniscient?
God.
So god makes this entire line of dominoes, then punishes the snake and Adam and Eve for doing what he completely orchestrated with full knowledge of the outcome.
The only way that the story makes even a lick of sense is if the snake understood the full consequences of eating the fruit, but withheld the critical details. There isn't any evidence of that. So this looks worse on god's part, because he tells the snake what the tree does in part but not in full so that the snake, whom he designed to talk and blab about it, does so with incomplete information, unaware that what he's doing is going to cause immense harm.
It's well past time that people stop using this fable as some sort of moral guide or example, unless it is that of god's despicable immorality and depravity.
Yep. I know it well. I've actually been pushed out of two organizations now where we were making that sort of investment, and the competing management factions let us get a large portion of the way there before the misers won out and canceled or scaled back the work. So much wasted time and effort, for so little benefit. Management blows my mind so much.
I love designing processes and systems to solve institutional problems as much as I like writing code to do the same. My goal in life is to make as many employees bored as I can. Because excitement in a business is often not a good thing.
I'm both an industrial engineer and a certified accountant so I get to fix stuff like that routinely...My latest employer had a system where they would take trial balances out of their accounting system...do a bunch of manual calculation on paper tape calculators, enter some number, see what was still wrong...
I'm pre-gaming Monday, but I'm going to drink a bunch more to try to forget I ever read this.
Actually, excel can be frickin' powerful.....I remember a guy using excel to determine who he needed to cut from the company.... He nearly terminated a bunch of people that shouldn't have been.
Indeed. Excel in the hands of management is like giving a caffeinated toddler a lightsaber. With great power comes great responsibility, and at the end of the day most of management using excel are fucking children running wild and fucking shit up.
Very few people actually use excel responsibly. Few enough that they should generally just call in IT to make an app instead. At least then there's a slight chance that it gets tested and validated before use. The amount of stupid shit I've seen like what you describe is enough for me to write off excel completely. Should be banned from most companies.
If you're using excel for something remotely close to a business critical use, you need to be fired. 99% of the time it's hacked together, filled with bugs and errors, not backed up properly, tied to stale data, etc. Almost nobody is helping their business by using excel. Summing some columns? Sure, use excel. Need to drop some data into a program to make a graph or two? Go for it. Hiring and firing decisions? Tracking sales? Invoicing? Fuck right off.
As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor.
Having written just a simple customer billing program for a customer service department, I'm well aware of this. Corporate customers billed by the month, by the minute, N free calls per month before billing at X rate, free first 10 minutes of support, all support summed up and billed by the hour....it was a fucking nightmare.
But prior to that, all the CS staff were just logging it in Excel, and sending it to the manager to sum up each month.New manager took one look at that process, shit their pants, and called IT in to create a solution.
But if the summary is to believed, this isn't a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system. It's this:
Adobe's finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company. The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets.
So they're pulling data from other systems to try to figure out if positions have been filled. This smacks of a stopgap system in an overly complex bureaucracy. Decentralized hiring, and no consistent process for reporting new hires and integrating them into the HR data system.
That's something that a programmer could help fix, if management was serious about tackling this in a more systematic and useful way. Instead they'll probably just mandate that everyone with position authority send a Wednesday afternoon email regarding staffing changes, and hire a bunch of interns to harass everyone to do it. Keeping track of it all in a Word table, because Excel is now forbidden.
Too bad they're not a software company. If they were, they could probably have someone code up a new system to automate this.
That snark aside, Excel is generally a pretty clunky and fragile system for anything complicated, even if you have it linked to your data sources. If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company. They've identified a software need that large companies have. They're one of a handful of companies where it would make sense for this sort of stuff to be developed.
I'm sure that Walmart and Ford likely have the same need, but their expertise isn't in making Software. But then again, neither is Adobe's.....
If you think you're immune just because you don't use Facebook, Google, or Twitter... well, maybe. But more likely you just are being manipulated so deftly that you are unable to notice that you are being manipulated.
I kind-of doubt this. For my part, I've made it moderately hard for companies to do this. Not impossible, but hard enough that it's probably not worth doing. It's all a cost-benefit analysis. If one person makes it really hard, it's not worth the investment to go after them. If you even understand what they are doing in the first place.
For my part, I separate my browsing into several different browsers on different platforms, with minimal cross-over between them. I think there is one site on my phone in common with my desktop. My phone has different accounts than my desktop, which are again different from my work laptop. My web mail browser isn't my news browser.
I use an RSS feed for all my news and most of my entertainment. One virtue of that is that I don't visit most of the sites contained within it - it's served via their website. I'm guessing that most of the media's metrics show the RSS company as their viewer. And I ad-block and cookie crush everything.
Could a company profile me and manipulate me? Maybe. But why would they bother? 99.9% of people are going to be far easier to deal with, and the return on investment trying to tie me across multiple browsers, accounts, and devices is going to be astronomically high. And I'm not sure how they really could with confidence either. It's just not worth the time and effort to do it when you're not sure it's not really the same person.
An asset is not a person. It's a thing. A resource. A human resource, which can be leveraged and used up.
I'd love to see more places go back to personnel offices and staff support offices. I'd love to hear companies speak of employees like something other than a lump of coal to be tossed into the boiler.
Sure am. I am baffled that people tolerate being abused by advertisers in exchange for free or cheaper entertainment.
Now, if you're fine being told you're a fatty with a limp dick who needs to pay someone to fix those issues, that's fine with me. I'll happily let you subsidize my entertainment. When I have to choose to either forego it or pay for it myself, I'll be forced to make one of those decisions.
What I've already decided is that I'm not ok with advertisers lying to me and abusing me. They're no longer allowed to scream at me based on their past behavior.
I want 0 advertisements in my life. Information? Sure. But nobody wants to provide that most of the time. Go figure Amazon is eating people's lunch in that regard.
Advertisers are an expert in what they need to sell to make a profit, but they are not an expert in what I need. But 95% of ads somehow think they know what I need. How does that work? Convince me that I'm broken, and sell me the cure. Too fat, to ugly, too unpopular, sad, and slow. Everything I have is old and out-of-date, I'm stuck in the stone age, getting left behind. And only you can save me, if I just give you a small amount of my hard earned money.
I don't mind if a site is financed with ads..I was browsing in private windows 75% of the time...If enough people do this, maybe the ad companies will start to figure out that injecting malware is less profitable than an unobtrusive ad.
How are you so passive and naive about advertising? That ship sailed nearly two decades ago. Over the course of 20 years, ads have just gotten worse and more obtrusive. Loud, animated, moving content around, covering it up, opening in windows in front and behind the browser, now pushing malware, some of which is used to show more ads.
Advertising does not get better. It can't, because of its very nature. It can't be a benefit to the end user of a website.
To advertise, one must draw the attention of the viewer. Nobody is going to pay for advertisements on the underside of manhole covers. The entire point of an advertisement is to be seen by as many people as possible.
And how does that mesh with visiting a website? By definition, effective advertisement is a barrier between you and the content, because your attention is diverted from the content to the ad. For ads to be effective, a website has to decide that it's more important for you not to see the content that you're there for than to show you the content.
That's stupid and backwards, and because of that, fuck advertising. I've seen very few ads on the internet in the last 15 years or so, and that's not going to change anytime in the future.
It's gotten to the point where I no longer buy AAA games when they are 5+ years old and on GOG or steam, because they are inevitably broken in some way. There is no thought towards "how can we make sure people are still playing this in 5-10 years" - it's all short-term profit now. The servers go away, the DLC or in-game currency is designed to essentially be required, and we're never going to port this to another platform, because why bother?
The last couple I bought were also utterly crippled and broken by cutscenes, which didn't help any. When I'm all ready to drop my devastating first strike on the big boss from behind, you can't fucking teleport me to the door in front of him so I can walk in and get a lecture before he gets to attack first. I just don't get why "stop playing and watch this movie" has infected most of modern gaming. When I want to game, I want to game. I don't want to be interrupted by a movie every time I get to some exciting part. And I definitely don't want to have my strategy obliterated by your need to dictate how and when I interact with NPCs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the OP and I did read about it. That's why wrote what we wrote. Why don't you read about it, and come back with either some new knowledge or good link which explains why HVDC is a bad option for long-distance power transmission.
There was no collusion!
The GP noted
which can ship power from one coast of North America to the other with losses of under 5%
When you're sending power very long distances, where you're not tapping into it every few miles, the low losses of HVDC make a pretty big difference. Go take a look at a population density map of Australia, and it might make more sense. The GP is talking many hundreds or even thousands of miles of uninterrupted power transmission. At those extreme ranges, the losses are going to be the biggest issue.
Sure, converting is an issue, but you're not doing that at more than a couple of places where you're dropping that continent-scale power grid into the local grid. The GP is talking about a continent scale power backbone.
And we all know how that will work. We'll establish breach@ourcompany.com as the official place to notify the people who need to know. All employees should email any breach information there. Brian is responsible for monitoring that email address. Now we lay off or reassign Brian.
Someone keeps an eye on it semi-regularly. In a meeting CIO is told about the breach, says, "Did you email our breach contact?" Yes? I'm off to play golf.
Maybe another solution would be to have everyone retire at 35, and instead of calling it UBI we call it early pension. Or something.
I was trapped in a multi-hour drive with a co-worker the other day, and we talked about this. One thing we both noted is that not encouraging old people to retire is a triple-whammy on the economy. Not only are they likely making a lot of money, they're likely hoarding it because they are worried about late-life medical costs, and they're taking up a job that one or more younger people desperately need.
One 70 year old is likely making 2-3x what a 25 year old would make.
This is a horrific trend I'm seeing with a bunch of my friends who pursued PhDs. (I bailed half-way through mine, and am grateful every day that I did.) Professors are sticking around into their 80s. Because why retire when you are still making money, and don't have to work too hard? But that salary could fund a couple of researchers, who are instead doing something outside their field, disappointed and disillusioned, and potentially in huge debt due to their education.
35 might be a bit young, but lets let everyone 55 and older retire, play golf, and be grandparents. They don't need to be millionaires, just give them $40k a year and some health insurance, and let them build up society with their knowledge, skills, and goodwill. Garden the sides of the street, watch the grand-kids, host a bake-sale, man a food-shelf. There is zero good reason to make people work into their 70s and 80s. If they want to? Sure, go ahead. But lets make the default not doing that.
It would be better for everyone.
That's a pretty easy start, and I'm idealistic enough to want to wonder how it would be controversial to most people. Do you hate grandparents? Do you want kids to grow up in the care of the state? Can we not agree to at least let old people be old people, and not work them to death?
it took 80 years for those jobs to materialize after the last big industrial revolution.......So yeah, the ship will probably eventually right itself.
I don't see that happening this time. Automation and machine learning is now better than the worst humans at many tasks. 80 years from now they will be better than the best humans at most tasks.
I have a pretty good imagination, but I can't come up with a single idea of what could possibly drive the economy in the future that would require humans to be involved at the scale required for full employment. As time goes on, there is less and less that we will possibly be able to do better than robots and machine learning. What possible industry could spring up where a robot with 3D vision in wavelengths we can't see and specialized hands to manipulate things could be done better by humans?
A computer taught itself Go in a few months and now is better than all of the humans on earth. And that was a proof-of-concept. That was the Model T of machine learning. (Model A was Chess, maybe?) In the very near future computers are going to be telling us things that we have no idea how they came up with, and which will often have accuracy to a degree which looks like magic to us.
Everything in the past that disrupted large-scale employment drove those people into jobs which, at the time, couldn't be automated or automated efficiently. That's not the case anymore. The average human is very close to being replaceable in just about any way one could conceive of. Think of all the people you meet in your daily life, and think about what percent of their job could be automated today, in 10 years, and in 20 years. When I do that, I realize that there are going to be a very large number of unemployed people in the very near future.
There won't be new jobs for workers – because just like the old jobs, general purpose systems will be able to do those as well.
I think what the bulk of the "sky's not falling" folks seem to be missing is what really happened in the past. We automated jobs that the average human could do, and they then moved on to other jobs that were, at that time, not possible or economical to automate.
Today, however, there is a rapidly diminishing pool of "things the average human can do that a computer can't do better". Historically, this hasn't been the case. Higher order thinking, dexterous fingers, the ability to problem solve and adapt always meant that your average human could find something to do better than the automation of the day was able to do.
That's past history.
When I can replace the average human on any given task with a system that can do it better, faster, and/or cheaper, what does that human do now? And the huge problem doesn't start when it's every job that can be done better - just enough jobs that the number left are insufficient to allow everyone to have a job.
The competitive advantage it would gain would be 7.5 billion in saved revenue.
Wrong. Because that 7.5 billion dollars is being EXTRACTED from the US economy. That 7.5 billion dollars used to pay for houses, gas, food, cars, and everything else those drivers needed for their daily life. That money was paid to other people, who bought packages that needed to be delivered.
Take that money out of the economy, and you don't get 100% of that money back. You lose a percentage of your customers, because they don't have money anymore. That's the real, fundamental problem with the race to the bottom.
And every other industry that can, will. If UPS does it, FedEx will have to if they wish to remain competitive. And so on. What will you do then?
This is a really interesting question. Because even if they reduce their prices to minimal profit, if you don't have money, you don't have money. And at this end-game, minimum wage isn't an answer, because there's a sizable chance that there just isn't a job for you to do. Sure, minimum wage rises to $40/hr, because we're at 50% employment, and that needs to cover a family since only half of them will be working. What happens when the family next door has 2 jobs and there isn't one for your family?
UBI is one answer, but I'm not convinced that it will really work. We've based our cultural values around being productive members of society. While you are correct that 50% of the population not having jobs doesn't make them freeloaders, at the moment, culturally, they would be. I think it would be easier for us to return to the make-work programs that got us out of the great depression rather than do UBI.
Civic beautification, cultural expression, arts, community engagement, child development and care....there are lots of places where we could pay people to do something that doesn't require a ton of skills, but still something that would have some value to the community. I think that would be a far easier pill to swallow than UBI. Add the bureaucratic overhead of managing the make-work programs at the state and local level, and you're well on your way to creating enough jobs to fill in for all those lost to automation and machine learning.
Is this the american dream? Nope. But I think we realistically need to be having these conversations well ahead of the time when we lay off 3.5 million truck drivers, ten times that many warehouse workers, half of all office workers, all legal clerks, etc., etc., etc. And those days are not that far away.
Refund for the ticket, a travel voucher worth half the ticket price that expires in 12 months, and some flapping lips saying that they're sorry and committed to your travel satisfaction.
Luckily they spotted this a month out and not just a few days before. Now they'll have most of the twitter angst die down before the holiday travel season starts. Then they'll just face the normal level of angry delayed holiday travelers. Well, less than the normal level, since they'll be flying a lot less planes.
I used to use this in a general science class to teach about how germs spread. I'd "sneeze" on a desk, paper, etc. before class, and then we'd do some normal activity. 3/4 of the way through class tell everyone what I'd done.
Inevitably kids would have glitter on their hands, face, desk, pencils, notebooks, etc. It was a very powerful, "this is why you cover your cough, and this is why you wash your hands" teaching tool.
At work I'm lucky to be beholden to IT purchasing decisions, so no. And at home, I'm on a laptop most of the time. Thus my Ubuntu shout-out. I love that they were smart enough to stick the taskbar on the left margin. Or if I put it there, I'm glad they are flexible enough to allow that. (I honestly don't know if that's stock or not.)
A major issue is that current aspect ratios make vertical space really valuable. Get my tabs and toolbars off the top and bottom of the screen and put them on the side, so I have more vertical space to work with.
Monitors are already far too wide to comfortably read edge-to-edge text. Use that wasted space and give me a few more lines vertically! That'd be innovative! (Cough, ubuntu, cough.)
My point was that by being the lying-ass coon dog that STARTED the process, he got the FIRST and MOST blame for being the original cause of the contraband fruit being touched.
And my point was that you (and most everyone else) have gotten the morality of that story completely wrong.
Who made the tree? Who put it in the garden? Who made the people? Who put them in the garden. Who made the snake? Who put him in the garden? Who gave him knowledge of what the tree does? Who gave him the ability to talk? Who knew exactly how this entire thing would play out because he's omniscient?
God.
So god makes this entire line of dominoes, then punishes the snake and Adam and Eve for doing what he completely orchestrated with full knowledge of the outcome.
The only way that the story makes even a lick of sense is if the snake understood the full consequences of eating the fruit, but withheld the critical details. There isn't any evidence of that. So this looks worse on god's part, because he tells the snake what the tree does in part but not in full so that the snake, whom he designed to talk and blab about it, does so with incomplete information, unaware that what he's doing is going to cause immense harm.
It's well past time that people stop using this fable as some sort of moral guide or example, unless it is that of god's despicable immorality and depravity.
Except the serpent didn't really lie, did he?
Yep. I know it well. I've actually been pushed out of two organizations now where we were making that sort of investment, and the competing management factions let us get a large portion of the way there before the misers won out and canceled or scaled back the work. So much wasted time and effort, for so little benefit. Management blows my mind so much.
I love designing processes and systems to solve institutional problems as much as I like writing code to do the same. My goal in life is to make as many employees bored as I can. Because excitement in a business is often not a good thing.
I'm both an industrial engineer and a certified accountant so I get to fix stuff like that routinely...My latest employer had a system where they would take trial balances out of their accounting system...do a bunch of manual calculation on paper tape calculators, enter some number, see what was still wrong...
I'm pre-gaming Monday, but I'm going to drink a bunch more to try to forget I ever read this.
You have my sincere condolences.
Actually, excel can be frickin' powerful.....I remember a guy using excel to determine who he needed to cut from the company.... He nearly terminated a bunch of people that shouldn't have been.
Indeed. Excel in the hands of management is like giving a caffeinated toddler a lightsaber. With great power comes great responsibility, and at the end of the day most of management using excel are fucking children running wild and fucking shit up.
Very few people actually use excel responsibly. Few enough that they should generally just call in IT to make an app instead. At least then there's a slight chance that it gets tested and validated before use. The amount of stupid shit I've seen like what you describe is enough for me to write off excel completely. Should be banned from most companies.
If you're using excel for something remotely close to a business critical use, you need to be fired. 99% of the time it's hacked together, filled with bugs and errors, not backed up properly, tied to stale data, etc. Almost nobody is helping their business by using excel. Summing some columns? Sure, use excel. Need to drop some data into a program to make a graph or two? Go for it. Hiring and firing decisions? Tracking sales? Invoicing? Fuck right off.
As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor.
Having written just a simple customer billing program for a customer service department, I'm well aware of this. Corporate customers billed by the month, by the minute, N free calls per month before billing at X rate, free first 10 minutes of support, all support summed up and billed by the hour....it was a fucking nightmare.
But prior to that, all the CS staff were just logging it in Excel, and sending it to the manager to sum up each month.New manager took one look at that process, shit their pants, and called IT in to create a solution.
But if the summary is to believed, this isn't a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system. It's this:
Adobe's finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company. The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets.
So they're pulling data from other systems to try to figure out if positions have been filled. This smacks of a stopgap system in an overly complex bureaucracy. Decentralized hiring, and no consistent process for reporting new hires and integrating them into the HR data system.
That's something that a programmer could help fix, if management was serious about tackling this in a more systematic and useful way. Instead they'll probably just mandate that everyone with position authority send a Wednesday afternoon email regarding staffing changes, and hire a bunch of interns to harass everyone to do it. Keeping track of it all in a Word table, because Excel is now forbidden.
Too bad they're not a software company. If they were, they could probably have someone code up a new system to automate this.
That snark aside, Excel is generally a pretty clunky and fragile system for anything complicated, even if you have it linked to your data sources. If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company. They've identified a software need that large companies have. They're one of a handful of companies where it would make sense for this sort of stuff to be developed.
I'm sure that Walmart and Ford likely have the same need, but their expertise isn't in making Software. But then again, neither is Adobe's.....
If you think you're immune just because you don't use Facebook, Google, or Twitter... well, maybe. But more likely you just are being manipulated so deftly that you are unable to notice that you are being manipulated.
I kind-of doubt this. For my part, I've made it moderately hard for companies to do this. Not impossible, but hard enough that it's probably not worth doing. It's all a cost-benefit analysis. If one person makes it really hard, it's not worth the investment to go after them. If you even understand what they are doing in the first place.
For my part, I separate my browsing into several different browsers on different platforms, with minimal cross-over between them. I think there is one site on my phone in common with my desktop. My phone has different accounts than my desktop, which are again different from my work laptop. My web mail browser isn't my news browser.
I use an RSS feed for all my news and most of my entertainment. One virtue of that is that I don't visit most of the sites contained within it - it's served via their website. I'm guessing that most of the media's metrics show the RSS company as their viewer. And I ad-block and cookie crush everything.
Could a company profile me and manipulate me? Maybe. But why would they bother? 99.9% of people are going to be far easier to deal with, and the return on investment trying to tie me across multiple browsers, accounts, and devices is going to be astronomically high. And I'm not sure how they really could with confidence either. It's just not worth the time and effort to do it when you're not sure it's not really the same person.
asset
An asset is not a person. It's a thing. A resource. A human resource, which can be leveraged and used up.
I'd love to see more places go back to personnel offices and staff support offices. I'd love to hear companies speak of employees like something other than a lump of coal to be tossed into the boiler.
Sure am. I am baffled that people tolerate being abused by advertisers in exchange for free or cheaper entertainment.
Now, if you're fine being told you're a fatty with a limp dick who needs to pay someone to fix those issues, that's fine with me. I'll happily let you subsidize my entertainment. When I have to choose to either forego it or pay for it myself, I'll be forced to make one of those decisions.
What I've already decided is that I'm not ok with advertisers lying to me and abusing me. They're no longer allowed to scream at me based on their past behavior.
Well said, AC.
I want 0 advertisements in my life. Information? Sure. But nobody wants to provide that most of the time. Go figure Amazon is eating people's lunch in that regard.
Advertisers are an expert in what they need to sell to make a profit, but they are not an expert in what I need. But 95% of ads somehow think they know what I need. How does that work? Convince me that I'm broken, and sell me the cure. Too fat, to ugly, too unpopular, sad, and slow. Everything I have is old and out-of-date, I'm stuck in the stone age, getting left behind. And only you can save me, if I just give you a small amount of my hard earned money.
Fuck that con.
I don't mind if a site is financed with ads..I was browsing in private windows 75% of the time...If enough people do this, maybe the ad companies will start to figure out that injecting malware is less profitable than an unobtrusive ad.
How are you so passive and naive about advertising? That ship sailed nearly two decades ago. Over the course of 20 years, ads have just gotten worse and more obtrusive. Loud, animated, moving content around, covering it up, opening in windows in front and behind the browser, now pushing malware, some of which is used to show more ads.
Advertising does not get better. It can't, because of its very nature. It can't be a benefit to the end user of a website.
To advertise, one must draw the attention of the viewer. Nobody is going to pay for advertisements on the underside of manhole covers. The entire point of an advertisement is to be seen by as many people as possible.
And how does that mesh with visiting a website? By definition, effective advertisement is a barrier between you and the content, because your attention is diverted from the content to the ad. For ads to be effective, a website has to decide that it's more important for you not to see the content that you're there for than to show you the content.
That's stupid and backwards, and because of that, fuck advertising. I've seen very few ads on the internet in the last 15 years or so, and that's not going to change anytime in the future.
It's gotten to the point where I no longer buy AAA games when they are 5+ years old and on GOG or steam, because they are inevitably broken in some way. There is no thought towards "how can we make sure people are still playing this in 5-10 years" - it's all short-term profit now. The servers go away, the DLC or in-game currency is designed to essentially be required, and we're never going to port this to another platform, because why bother?
The last couple I bought were also utterly crippled and broken by cutscenes, which didn't help any. When I'm all ready to drop my devastating first strike on the big boss from behind, you can't fucking teleport me to the door in front of him so I can walk in and get a lecture before he gets to attack first. I just don't get why "stop playing and watch this movie" has infected most of modern gaming. When I want to game, I want to game. I don't want to be interrupted by a movie every time I get to some exciting part. And I definitely don't want to have my strategy obliterated by your need to dictate how and when I interact with NPCs.
Now excuse me, I think some kid is on my lawn....