Way more coherent. I went and looked after seeing your comment, and I'm really surprised. I've had emails back and forth with customers who were less coherent than that.
The AC replying to you nailed it. I'm not sure if it will help, but you could try reading what I wrote another time or two. I'll try to explain again, because being angry at strawmen is apparently the theme of this thread.
Nobody is telling you that the correct way to achieve 2+2 is to reduce it to 1+1+1+1. That's a scenario you've made up. That's your personal strawman, and it's not what happens in common core math.
I'll try with a computer example. You need to write a snippit of code to solve the trivial calculation of 2^5. But you're told you have to use a for loop to do it.
You just type in 2*2*2*2*2 and hand that in, and you get an F. Why? Because the point wasn't to solve the trivial calculation. The point was to demonstrate that you could write a for loop to do it. Why? Because if you can write a for loop for this trivial calculation, you can write one that does much more powerful stuff in the future.
This is how scaffolding and decent teaching actually works. Learn a process. Demonstrate you understand it using fairly trivial tasks. Then gradually apply it to harder and harder tasks.
You and the rest of the angry people here can't seem to grasp that the goal isn't to get the right answer. As the AC here said:
The process is king, as the process leads to deep understanding, that in future situations allows you to discard trivial solutions, assess and categorize problems....
You're stuck in 20th century math where we were focused on memorizing solutions and where the solution was the end goal. We've realized now that that's not the most effective way to learn math. Process is far more important, and understanding the process allows for much higher order thinking and problem solving.
What you're arguing is that it's better to learn many unrelated short-term skills than it is to learn a number of skills that in aggregate provide better access to more complicated material in the future. It's pretty classic short-term thinking.
I get that you're angry because you don't understand it. I'm a little unclear why you want to hate Common Core so badly that you're unwilling to even try to understand it.
See this part that you wrote:
more important than figuring out the correct answer.
That's wrong. That's you making up in your head what the lesson is, because you don't understand the real lesson. You don't understand the goal.
The goal was never to get the correct answer. The goal was to teach the student a fundational skill they will build on in later grades.
You're making up a problem that doesn't exist by creating this scenario in your head where a boogieman is forcing kids to "use approved versions" to solve trivial tasks. That's not what's happening. That's you trying to wedge your experience in math into what the common core is doing. If you take some time to try to actually understand it. you'll likely be surprised to find that it's nothing like you imagine it to be.
Yes, things that you don't understand are scary. The solution isn't to bitch and moan on the internet about them. The solution is to learn about them, so they are less scary.
What you and the GGP are missing is what the actual lesson is: You assume it's to learn how to do long division, because that's what it looks like to you. That's what you learned, and how you learned it. Newsflash: This is a different standard, in a different time. It's not the same lesson you learned.
This lesson is to learn that method of long division. Not the underlying math, but the method.
That's why his kiddo got an F. Not because he can't do long division, because he can't demonstrate that he understands that method. That's the standard he was being assessed on. Dad's mistake was assuming that long division was the end goal, when it's actually an indirect goal. While the GP here was a bit harsh, he was spot on.
The reason that the focus is on this method is that it's a building block for higher order math skills. Column division with remainders isn't. The idea is that if students learn enough of these methods, they can apply them to algebra and calculus in the future. That wasn't a lesson on long division. It was foundational work to support mathematics growth far in the future.
Good on dad up there for caring and teaching his kiddo a new skill, but bad on him for misunderstanding the lesson and subverting his kid's learning. If you really care and want to help, you're going to need to learn what's being taught and why, and not just inject your vastly out-of-date knowledge into kids' brains. That's going to make things worse rather than better.
There are definitely cliques of editors who are very.... let's say protective.....but I don't necessarily think it's indicative of all of Wikipedia.
Ok, but how do you determine whether you're looking at a topic where some asshat reverts all useful corrections and updates or one where some expert actually was able to provide their expertise without interference?
Knowing that some, potentially large percent of topics are managed by said asshats devalues all of them if there's no way to tell the difference. People generally don't go to wikipedia to look at stuff they know - they go to look at unfamiliar stuff.
While I was in grad school I naturally looked at a couple of the pages that touched on the research I was doing. All were 20-30 years out of date, poorly written, and in many areas incorrect even based on the old research. So I spent a couple of days, re-wrote one of them, added citations to current research, and then posted the re-write. And less than an hour later it was entirely reverted.
I messaged the editor, and was met with silence. I tried to escalate the issue and got nowhere.
So yeah, no wonder that 1% of editors "write" everything. If you look at all of the solid content that was reverted by those asshats, I wonder how many actual authors there would be.
And like the rest of you, I gave up. I go to google now and find other sources, because I can't trust that anything on wikipedia is of accurate and of decent quality, no matter how it looks.
In addition, it's not like fossil fuel production, shipment, and consumption are secrets at the scale of a country. Not hard to ballpark any nation's emissions just examining that. Nobody is hoarding the fossil fuels they extract or import at any meaningful scale.
We must find a way to fix the wealth inequality and disparity, and eradicate a pointless desire to become a trillioniare.
I don't think that will ever happen. For most of human existence, having more stuff likely correlated with not dying. More food, more spears, more firewood, more family. I suspect that hoarding is baked into our genes at this point.
Throughout recorded history, the powerful have always amassed more than they needed, at the expense of the weak. Kings, bishops, emperors, generals and dukes alike all amassed fortunes and land. Time and time again the weak suffered increasingly under the system until they rose up and overthrew it. In the age of democracy, we seem to have turned to legislation rather than bloody revolt, but it's still the same old thing we've been doing for thousands of years.
If we had been able to separate money from democracy, we might have had a bit more of a shot at minimizing greed. But not only haven't we been able to do that, at this point politics seemingly runs solely on money, not votes or popular outcry. Given this, I expect it to continue to get worse rather than better.
When taxing only estates left to descendants worth more than $5,000,000 is controversial and deemed excessive double taxation by the ruling class, we really don't have a shot at fixing greed. That's a value that should set anyone up for the rest of their life. If I had half that much money, I'd retire tomorrow. "Why should we pay taxes on a gift worth more than what 99% of people will make over the course of their entire lifetime?"
I'm guessing not. I was wondering why they didn't just point a webcam out the window. Capture enough busy highway, sky, and pedestrian areas combined with the noise from the camera, and you're probably accomplishing the same thing.
In addition, many people are doing things they like. They chose those skills. They had a passion to learn those skills. Retraining will likely be very difficult if you're trying to teach someone to do something they're not passionate about.
I'm a somewhat odd individual in that I've got a number of skill-sets that are very disparate, a product of an interesting life with 3 degrees in 3 different areas and work in 4-5 vastly different careers to go along with it. But that's not most people. Most people are experts at something.
When your expertise suddenly becomes worthless, what then? How do you pick up the pieces and try to rebuild a life that revolves around that expertise, and the job benefits that go along with it?
Imagine if someone makes an AI that can do native language processing that can interpret the fever dreams of sales, customers, and managers, and write code based on them. "I want the app to have a blue background, a pony theme, and the sound effects need to be various frogs, and the background needs to be black, with stripes, and also blue, but the stripes need to be white....." Boom, suddenly a whole bunch of developers are out of a job. When then? How do you retrain? What do you retrain in?
While that's a pretty crazy example, lesser versions of that are going to be popping up more and more as the years go by. You got a culinary degree and specialized in cake decorating, now a 3D frosting printer can do the job for 1/3 the cost in 1/2 the time. Do you try to stick in the pastry world? Re-train on bread baking? Try being a high-end chef? Or do you bail on your entire training and career and try to retrain on something else?
And half-way through that retraining, when the machines take over that job, when then?
And the pilots have trained for that exact scenario, and have drilled on it, and have studied the common causes of that. Yeah, the comparisons to a car are not really useful here.
Autonomous cars need to be 99.999999999999999% reliable before they should be considered ready for public consumption.
No, they really do not need to be that reliable. Not even close to that reliable.
People are not that reliable. People like the Dopey Doris you describe can't keep themselves alive because the phone is so much more interesting than driving is. I absolutely want Doris to have a self-driving car, because even current technology is likely better at driving than she is.
Even a shitty self-driving car will likely be better than the bottom 25% of human drivers. Unless that makes the middle 50% far worse, it will be a net win. I get the concern, but I think it's 5-10 years out of date. If Doris' car can keep itself in between the lines and auto-brake, that's a win for everyone on the roads.
Yes, your road may need to be repainted, and it may take Doris crashing into you to drive that improvement. Maybe it's not up to spec, and the entire road needs to be rebuilt. But once that happens, all the rest of the Dorises will not be crashing into people. That's progress. And it doesn't take 100% reliability to get there.
And while many people try to make multiple tweets to explain some thought in a rambling way, most of the well-shared re-tweets are concise statements and fit in well with the theory behind sound bites.
And therein lies the problem. Sound bites. That's all you get out of Twitter. Nothing deep, no interesting communication, nothing of substance.
But the users, audience, and content is pretty well versed in the 140 character limit.
It would take me two tweets to tell someone the title of my master's thesis. Two entire tweets! Here is something with deep meaning to me, something I might love to share with someone, and I can't even efficiently tweet the fucking title! We spent weeks on that title, trying to summarize the research as concisely as possible. But when your research needs long, technical words to describe it, there isn't a substitution. Imagine me trying to explain what the words in the title actually mean - I'm into dozens of tweets at that point, and not even getting into anything of substance.
I can't fathom why people love twitter and defend it. It's the definition of noise. The effort it takes to cut through that noise is so extreme that most users don't bother, adding to the noise. I don't get why people like the noise, and I don't get the effort that goes into cutting through the noise.
On a semi-regular basis I'll see some stupid fucking news article where they decide to highlight some tweets, and inevitably the person they're showing tweets from is doing some sort of 1/12, 2/12 series of tweets because their thoughts don't fit into 140 characters. How do otherwise seemingly rational human beings not stop at that point and realize that a tweet is not the appropriate medium for their voice? How did Twitter become so crack-like that people can't fathom not using it?
But I would argue that that itself is a symptom of a lack of competition. Google has no need to improve the algorithm. There is no benefit to their doing it. It won't make them more money. Failing to do so won't cost them anything.
If there was a competing site out there eating their lunch on the automated filtering and flagging, they'd be fixing that yesterday. At this point youtube is a monopoly, and with it comes all the problems that a monopoly brings.
Should be trivial to recreate with less fancy materials for less money, although it likely won't look as good. Next house, not sure if I'll just shell out for one of those, or build my own.
I did the math, and even though I went to school a long time ago, when things were far cheaper, and even though I got 1.5 out of 2 graduate degrees paid for, it's still barely worth it. If I had gone on to be a master electrician, I'd out-earn my current career trajectory until my mid-50s. After that my education will likely put me quite a bit ahead, especially if I stick around working until I'm 70.
With the student loans and the time spent in school earning negative money, making $15 an hour as an apprentice electrician would have put me far ahead. Being underpaid at a couple of jobs because I was changing fields didn't help, and had I just been working my way up the ranks, I'd have been making 2x what I did in those positions as an electrician, with no school debt to overcome.
That was then. Now? It's looking like there are only a handful of college degrees which will likely be worth it: Law, Business, STEM, Medicine. And I'm not even sure about the T in STEM. Professors are sticking around until they are 80, which means there aren't many tenured faculty jobs available. So even if you dream of being an English Lit professor, have fun competing with 1000 other applicants for the one open position in the country.
I grew up in an era where a graduate degree was the ticket into the upper middle class. Now it's more like an anchor to keep you poor for a very long time unless you pick very wisely.
I don't work from home often, but when I do I tend to get about 2 days of work done in 6 hours, and then I run out of stuff to do. I have worked remotely before, and I've been paired with a coworker who did as well. In both cases, working remotely was massively productive at the start, then the lack of human contact crushed productivity.
I really think the happy medium is a day every week or two. Give your employees an uninterpreted day to crank through work, and they'll be amazingly productive. I don't understand why management can't figure this out. If I ever get forced to be management, maybe I'll find out it's some unworkable nightmare to do, but I have a hard time imagining that.
Very interesting. I don't make extensive use of my smartphone, but I've never felt that way about it. It's as snappy most of the time as my laptop is. Most pages I vew render just as fast, and email is actually more responsive than the Win 7 Outlook I have to use at work.
Well, you are definitely old fashioned and out of touch.:)
I did reconsider my priorities in life, and that's what lead to the smartphone. I have a 30 minute public transport commute each way to work. My priority was not being at work longer than I had to be, which lead me to consider making functional use of my commute. So now I zip off a half-dozen emails to and from work, and stay in the office an hour less each day.
I can also pop off early to the pub and have a beer, because I'm 5 seconds from being able to start responding to any emergency. Sure, being retired and not having to do that would be nice, but until then, it's incredible that I can have the bulk of the internet in my pocket running on a machine that's faster than a lot of the computers I built in my life.
Not having to spend a full workday on a floor filled with gray cubicles under fluorescent lights is definitely a good reason to get a smartphone in my opinion. YMMV, but as a large portion of my job is being an on-demand SME, doing that on a smartphone with a beer in my hand is only marginally harder than sitting at my computer. The only real problem is swype not knowing a lot of the technological jargon and abbreviations I have to use.
That was my point - they come prefab in panels. What happens when the tech changes and those panels are no longer made? In the future, how will one modify the current prefab panels to fit them into a 50 year old prefab structure if the prefab sizes are different?
Structurally, how does one incorporate a different panel with different physical properties possibly modified to fit into existing prefab construction? Remember, we're not talking about 2 story houses here - we're talking skyscrapers. Sure, one different panel won't make it fall down, but at what point do repairs reach the point where you need a structural engineer on site?
Pure wood is easy, because you can just cut it to fit. And how you stick wood to wood is pretty well understood. Sticking a wood laminate to a 50 year old other type of wood laminate I'm guessing is slightly more complicated.
And no, laminate probably won't rot. But will the binder deteriorate over time? Will it become brittle after 50 years? We understand wood extremely well, and when it fails it's easy to fix. This could be stunningly good multi-century technology, or 50 years from now we may need to be tearing them down, because we've moved away from the technology used to build them and can't repair them.
Slashdot Mirror
Way more coherent. I went and looked after seeing your comment, and I'm really surprised. I've had emails back and forth with customers who were less coherent than that.
Sometimes hard to believe that this used to be a tech site which had the tagline News for Nerds.
And kids aren't even learning how to divide, thanks to this crap.
Do you have data to support that? Or just an anecdote or two?
The AC replying to you nailed it. I'm not sure if it will help, but you could try reading what I wrote another time or two. I'll try to explain again, because being angry at strawmen is apparently the theme of this thread.
Nobody is telling you that the correct way to achieve 2+2 is to reduce it to 1+1+1+1. That's a scenario you've made up. That's your personal strawman, and it's not what happens in common core math.
I'll try with a computer example. You need to write a snippit of code to solve the trivial calculation of 2^5. But you're told you have to use a for loop to do it.
You just type in 2*2*2*2*2 and hand that in, and you get an F. Why? Because the point wasn't to solve the trivial calculation. The point was to demonstrate that you could write a for loop to do it. Why? Because if you can write a for loop for this trivial calculation, you can write one that does much more powerful stuff in the future.
This is how scaffolding and decent teaching actually works. Learn a process. Demonstrate you understand it using fairly trivial tasks. Then gradually apply it to harder and harder tasks.
You and the rest of the angry people here can't seem to grasp that the goal isn't to get the right answer. As the AC here said:
The process is king, as the process leads to deep understanding, that in future situations allows you to discard trivial solutions, assess and categorize problems....
You're stuck in 20th century math where we were focused on memorizing solutions and where the solution was the end goal. We've realized now that that's not the most effective way to learn math. Process is far more important, and understanding the process allows for much higher order thinking and problem solving.
What you're arguing is that it's better to learn many unrelated short-term skills than it is to learn a number of skills that in aggregate provide better access to more complicated material in the future. It's pretty classic short-term thinking.
I get that you're angry because you don't understand it. I'm a little unclear why you want to hate Common Core so badly that you're unwilling to even try to understand it.
See this part that you wrote:
more important than figuring out the correct answer.
That's wrong. That's you making up in your head what the lesson is, because you don't understand the real lesson. You don't understand the goal.
The goal was never to get the correct answer. The goal was to teach the student a fundational skill they will build on in later grades.
You're making up a problem that doesn't exist by creating this scenario in your head where a boogieman is forcing kids to "use approved versions" to solve trivial tasks. That's not what's happening. That's you trying to wedge your experience in math into what the common core is doing. If you take some time to try to actually understand it. you'll likely be surprised to find that it's nothing like you imagine it to be.
Yes, things that you don't understand are scary. The solution isn't to bitch and moan on the internet about them. The solution is to learn about them, so they are less scary.
What you and the GGP are missing is what the actual lesson is: You assume it's to learn how to do long division, because that's what it looks like to you. That's what you learned, and how you learned it. Newsflash: This is a different standard, in a different time. It's not the same lesson you learned.
This lesson is to learn that method of long division. Not the underlying math, but the method.
That's why his kiddo got an F. Not because he can't do long division, because he can't demonstrate that he understands that method. That's the standard he was being assessed on. Dad's mistake was assuming that long division was the end goal, when it's actually an indirect goal. While the GP here was a bit harsh, he was spot on.
The reason that the focus is on this method is that it's a building block for higher order math skills. Column division with remainders isn't. The idea is that if students learn enough of these methods, they can apply them to algebra and calculus in the future. That wasn't a lesson on long division. It was foundational work to support mathematics growth far in the future.
Good on dad up there for caring and teaching his kiddo a new skill, but bad on him for misunderstanding the lesson and subverting his kid's learning. If you really care and want to help, you're going to need to learn what's being taught and why, and not just inject your vastly out-of-date knowledge into kids' brains. That's going to make things worse rather than better.
There are definitely cliques of editors who are very.... let's say protective.....but I don't necessarily think it's indicative of all of Wikipedia.
Ok, but how do you determine whether you're looking at a topic where some asshat reverts all useful corrections and updates or one where some expert actually was able to provide their expertise without interference?
Knowing that some, potentially large percent of topics are managed by said asshats devalues all of them if there's no way to tell the difference. People generally don't go to wikipedia to look at stuff they know - they go to look at unfamiliar stuff.
While I was in grad school I naturally looked at a couple of the pages that touched on the research I was doing. All were 20-30 years out of date, poorly written, and in many areas incorrect even based on the old research. So I spent a couple of days, re-wrote one of them, added citations to current research, and then posted the re-write. And less than an hour later it was entirely reverted.
I messaged the editor, and was met with silence. I tried to escalate the issue and got nowhere.
So yeah, no wonder that 1% of editors "write" everything. If you look at all of the solid content that was reverted by those asshats, I wonder how many actual authors there would be.
And like the rest of you, I gave up. I go to google now and find other sources, because I can't trust that anything on wikipedia is of accurate and of decent quality, no matter how it looks.
In addition, it's not like fossil fuel production, shipment, and consumption are secrets at the scale of a country. Not hard to ballpark any nation's emissions just examining that. Nobody is hoarding the fossil fuels they extract or import at any meaningful scale.
We must find a way to fix the wealth inequality and disparity, and eradicate a pointless desire to become a trillioniare.
I don't think that will ever happen. For most of human existence, having more stuff likely correlated with not dying. More food, more spears, more firewood, more family. I suspect that hoarding is baked into our genes at this point.
Throughout recorded history, the powerful have always amassed more than they needed, at the expense of the weak. Kings, bishops, emperors, generals and dukes alike all amassed fortunes and land. Time and time again the weak suffered increasingly under the system until they rose up and overthrew it. In the age of democracy, we seem to have turned to legislation rather than bloody revolt, but it's still the same old thing we've been doing for thousands of years.
If we had been able to separate money from democracy, we might have had a bit more of a shot at minimizing greed. But not only haven't we been able to do that, at this point politics seemingly runs solely on money, not votes or popular outcry. Given this, I expect it to continue to get worse rather than better.
When taxing only estates left to descendants worth more than $5,000,000 is controversial and deemed excessive double taxation by the ruling class, we really don't have a shot at fixing greed. That's a value that should set anyone up for the rest of their life. If I had half that much money, I'd retire tomorrow. "Why should we pay taxes on a gift worth more than what 99% of people will make over the course of their entire lifetime?"
That's how close we are to solving greed.
I'm guessing not. I was wondering why they didn't just point a webcam out the window. Capture enough busy highway, sky, and pedestrian areas combined with the noise from the camera, and you're probably accomplishing the same thing.
In addition, many people are doing things they like. They chose those skills. They had a passion to learn those skills. Retraining will likely be very difficult if you're trying to teach someone to do something they're not passionate about.
I'm a somewhat odd individual in that I've got a number of skill-sets that are very disparate, a product of an interesting life with 3 degrees in 3 different areas and work in 4-5 vastly different careers to go along with it. But that's not most people. Most people are experts at something.
When your expertise suddenly becomes worthless, what then? How do you pick up the pieces and try to rebuild a life that revolves around that expertise, and the job benefits that go along with it?
Imagine if someone makes an AI that can do native language processing that can interpret the fever dreams of sales, customers, and managers, and write code based on them. "I want the app to have a blue background, a pony theme, and the sound effects need to be various frogs, and the background needs to be black, with stripes, and also blue, but the stripes need to be white....." Boom, suddenly a whole bunch of developers are out of a job. When then? How do you retrain? What do you retrain in?
While that's a pretty crazy example, lesser versions of that are going to be popping up more and more as the years go by. You got a culinary degree and specialized in cake decorating, now a 3D frosting printer can do the job for 1/3 the cost in 1/2 the time. Do you try to stick in the pastry world? Re-train on bread baking? Try being a high-end chef? Or do you bail on your entire training and career and try to retrain on something else?
And half-way through that retraining, when the machines take over that job, when then?
Step 1: Take a photo. Of anything.
Step 2: Hash it.
Step 3: Report the hash.
Step 4: Try to upload the photo.
Step 5: Realize you just asked a really dumb question.
Step 6: Depart the internet in shame.
And the pilots have trained for that exact scenario, and have drilled on it, and have studied the common causes of that. Yeah, the comparisons to a car are not really useful here.
Autonomous cars need to be 99.999999999999999% reliable before they should be considered ready for public consumption.
No, they really do not need to be that reliable. Not even close to that reliable.
People are not that reliable. People like the Dopey Doris you describe can't keep themselves alive because the phone is so much more interesting than driving is. I absolutely want Doris to have a self-driving car, because even current technology is likely better at driving than she is.
Even a shitty self-driving car will likely be better than the bottom 25% of human drivers. Unless that makes the middle 50% far worse, it will be a net win. I get the concern, but I think it's 5-10 years out of date. If Doris' car can keep itself in between the lines and auto-brake, that's a win for everyone on the roads.
Yes, your road may need to be repainted, and it may take Doris crashing into you to drive that improvement. Maybe it's not up to spec, and the entire road needs to be rebuilt. But once that happens, all the rest of the Dorises will not be crashing into people. That's progress. And it doesn't take 100% reliability to get there.
Likely hiring shadowrunners to do it.....
And while many people try to make multiple tweets to explain some thought in a rambling way, most of the well-shared re-tweets are concise statements and fit in well with the theory behind sound bites.
And therein lies the problem. Sound bites. That's all you get out of Twitter. Nothing deep, no interesting communication, nothing of substance.
But the users, audience, and content is pretty well versed in the 140 character limit.
It would take me two tweets to tell someone the title of my master's thesis. Two entire tweets! Here is something with deep meaning to me, something I might love to share with someone, and I can't even efficiently tweet the fucking title! We spent weeks on that title, trying to summarize the research as concisely as possible. But when your research needs long, technical words to describe it, there isn't a substitution. Imagine me trying to explain what the words in the title actually mean - I'm into dozens of tweets at that point, and not even getting into anything of substance.
I can't fathom why people love twitter and defend it. It's the definition of noise. The effort it takes to cut through that noise is so extreme that most users don't bother, adding to the noise. I don't get why people like the noise, and I don't get the effort that goes into cutting through the noise.
On a semi-regular basis I'll see some stupid fucking news article where they decide to highlight some tweets, and inevitably the person they're showing tweets from is doing some sort of 1/12, 2/12 series of tweets because their thoughts don't fit into 140 characters. How do otherwise seemingly rational human beings not stop at that point and realize that a tweet is not the appropriate medium for their voice? How did Twitter become so crack-like that people can't fathom not using it?
But I would argue that that itself is a symptom of a lack of competition. Google has no need to improve the algorithm. There is no benefit to their doing it. It won't make them more money. Failing to do so won't cost them anything.
If there was a competing site out there eating their lunch on the automated filtering and flagging, they'd be fixing that yesterday. At this point youtube is a monopoly, and with it comes all the problems that a monopoly brings.
I posted this above, but so you see it: https://parcelnest.com.au/page...
Exactly what you're describing, for sale. Looks decent, is functional.
Already mass marketed: https://parcelnest.com.au/page...
Should be trivial to recreate with less fancy materials for less money, although it likely won't look as good. Next house, not sure if I'll just shell out for one of those, or build my own.
I did the math, and even though I went to school a long time ago, when things were far cheaper, and even though I got 1.5 out of 2 graduate degrees paid for, it's still barely worth it. If I had gone on to be a master electrician, I'd out-earn my current career trajectory until my mid-50s. After that my education will likely put me quite a bit ahead, especially if I stick around working until I'm 70.
With the student loans and the time spent in school earning negative money, making $15 an hour as an apprentice electrician would have put me far ahead. Being underpaid at a couple of jobs because I was changing fields didn't help, and had I just been working my way up the ranks, I'd have been making 2x what I did in those positions as an electrician, with no school debt to overcome.
That was then. Now? It's looking like there are only a handful of college degrees which will likely be worth it: Law, Business, STEM, Medicine. And I'm not even sure about the T in STEM. Professors are sticking around until they are 80, which means there aren't many tenured faculty jobs available. So even if you dream of being an English Lit professor, have fun competing with 1000 other applicants for the one open position in the country.
I grew up in an era where a graduate degree was the ticket into the upper middle class. Now it's more like an anchor to keep you poor for a very long time unless you pick very wisely.
I don't work from home often, but when I do I tend to get about 2 days of work done in 6 hours, and then I run out of stuff to do. I have worked remotely before, and I've been paired with a coworker who did as well. In both cases, working remotely was massively productive at the start, then the lack of human contact crushed productivity.
I really think the happy medium is a day every week or two. Give your employees an uninterpreted day to crank through work, and they'll be amazingly productive. I don't understand why management can't figure this out. If I ever get forced to be management, maybe I'll find out it's some unworkable nightmare to do, but I have a hard time imagining that.
Very interesting. I don't make extensive use of my smartphone, but I've never felt that way about it. It's as snappy most of the time as my laptop is. Most pages I vew render just as fast, and email is actually more responsive than the Win 7 Outlook I have to use at work.
What do you do that takes so long?
Well, you are definitely old fashioned and out of touch. :)
I did reconsider my priorities in life, and that's what lead to the smartphone. I have a 30 minute public transport commute each way to work. My priority was not being at work longer than I had to be, which lead me to consider making functional use of my commute. So now I zip off a half-dozen emails to and from work, and stay in the office an hour less each day.
I can also pop off early to the pub and have a beer, because I'm 5 seconds from being able to start responding to any emergency. Sure, being retired and not having to do that would be nice, but until then, it's incredible that I can have the bulk of the internet in my pocket running on a machine that's faster than a lot of the computers I built in my life.
Not having to spend a full workday on a floor filled with gray cubicles under fluorescent lights is definitely a good reason to get a smartphone in my opinion. YMMV, but as a large portion of my job is being an on-demand SME, doing that on a smartphone with a beer in my hand is only marginally harder than sitting at my computer. The only real problem is swype not knowing a lot of the technological jargon and abbreviations I have to use.
That was my point - they come prefab in panels. What happens when the tech changes and those panels are no longer made? In the future, how will one modify the current prefab panels to fit them into a 50 year old prefab structure if the prefab sizes are different?
Structurally, how does one incorporate a different panel with different physical properties possibly modified to fit into existing prefab construction? Remember, we're not talking about 2 story houses here - we're talking skyscrapers. Sure, one different panel won't make it fall down, but at what point do repairs reach the point where you need a structural engineer on site?
Pure wood is easy, because you can just cut it to fit. And how you stick wood to wood is pretty well understood. Sticking a wood laminate to a 50 year old other type of wood laminate I'm guessing is slightly more complicated.
And no, laminate probably won't rot. But will the binder deteriorate over time? Will it become brittle after 50 years? We understand wood extremely well, and when it fails it's easy to fix. This could be stunningly good multi-century technology, or 50 years from now we may need to be tearing them down, because we've moved away from the technology used to build them and can't repair them.