It probably depends on your industry - we end up having a pretty specialized skill set, especially in the US. Because of that, we get very few responses even on LinkedIn. It also helps that former employees have created a group on there, so we post to that group asking if anyone knows anyone looking.
I don't keep track of very person I've ever worked with, do you? LinkedIn lets me alert connections to jobs without going through my whole, incomplete, out-of-date address book. We re-hired a tech last week based on his response on LinkedIn. It is entirely possible that word of the job would have gotten to him without LinkedIn, but I can only relay what happened.
I guess my point is that consumers need to pay attention to what they're buying.
Exactly my point, and very good examples! When my wife was looking for a Corolla-sized car, I was astounded to find that the Chevy Prism was consistently $2000 less on the used market, despite rolling off of the same assembly line and differing only in emblem glued to the grill.
Certainly memory requirements have gone up. I can't say anything about raw speed, since I haven't compared two installs on the same machine, but my general impression of 7 is that it is not faster than XP. Heck, it feels a little pokier on much newer hardware to me - but that's purely subjective.
Most benchmarks I've seen seem to put Windows 7 at a pretty good position compared to XP (and very good compared to Vista), but that's on good fairly modern hardware.
That's a pretty high-end machine! A typical laptop back then probably was around $500, and came with nowhere near 2GB. I just maxed out my mother-in-law's machine with 2GB and it is a 2004 machine. I think it was $1200 new, which was at the high end of what you could get at CompUSA at the time. Still has XP, though. It would probably run 7 "acceptably", but then again, she was running with 256MB of RAM for the first 7 years that she had it! It hurt... so... bad.
I think they haven't fallen, but they definitely stumbled. Whatever the cause, the perception seems to be that they have fallen quite a bit. J. D. Power has them below Lexus (??? same company), Acura, Mazda, Mercedes, Honda, and Porsche. In fact, they are right there with Kia. Now, Kia has improved tremendously, but I'd aspire for better:)
Nothing wrong with Brand Loyalty until they give you a reason to stop being loyal.
That strategy works great for consumables like deodorant and toothpaste, but not so great for durable goods. I'd hate to buy a car, only to find out that my favored brand is no longer making 'em like they used to. Now you are stuck with a big expensive mistake. Same with a washer or dryer - you expect to hold on to those for like 10 years or so, so it is worth doing research up-front rather than just buying the same brand that you did 10 years earlier.
In the case of cars, one of the reasons US cars were cheaper than their import counterparts in the past was because they were cheaper (as in cheaply built).
It's worse than that - there was no numerical way for US car-makers to compete on quality. They had a historical nightmare with benefit and retiree costs, and even if they managed to get their quality up, they wouldn't make any money. So they made cheap pieces of crap and competed on price (and even then, made much smaller margins). Recently they've each gone bankrupt or negotiated away much of their extravagant benefit costs, and surprise! Now they can compete better on quality.
Evidently I'm in the minority.
It's a pretty sizable minority, though. There are plenty of Japanese cars on the road these days. I wouldn't be so hasty to judge, either. If a car is 4 grand less at sale, that covers a lot of repairs down the road. Factor in the time value of money, and I'm not sure the total cost of ownership is such a slam dunk for the Japanese cars. I drive Toyotas because I value my time and don't want to spend it at the dealership (yeah, these days I should probably be in a Honda - but I got a good deal on the Toyotas because it was right in the midst of the recall fever and the dealer was shitting itself. Otherwise identical Hondas were several thousand more.), but if I did my own repair work or if I weren't paid hourly, I might take a different approach.
I, like you, mostly hate Walmart and the crappy products they sell. That said, I'll be the first one to purchase their $1 Christmas lights even if they barely make it through a single season. At that price I can buy 12 sets before I cover the cost of the nice LED lights, and God knows how many seasons you'd need before you recovered the electricity cost. And Applebees. God, I hate Applebees. It's disgusting - all the food tastes like it was hit by the same stream of "flavor" spray. But you know what? I'm going there tonight because it's a kid-friendly place, the prices are good, and my kid's PTA picked it for a fundraiser. Sure my soul will die a little with each bite of the high-calorie burger, but they have beer so hopefully my soul won't outpace my liver.
No it isn't - someone will pick up a nice used car. It's not as if he's throwing them away.
Look at the cars Cuba is running.
When you aren't allowed to buy a new car when your current one dies, you spend a lot of time making sure it's never completely dead. That doesn't mean it makes any financial or environmental sense to keep a 50s-era sedan running.
I'm afraid it was way too late for them to keep me as a customer.
I'd like to point out that brand loyalty can be just as naive as nationalism in a buying decision. Maytag was considered unsurpassed in quality for most of it's existence, but if you bought one in the ten year period of 1996-2006, you'd just as likely have a pile of junk. Toyota hasn't fallen as far as Maytag, but there's no sense in pretending that they are the pinnacle of reliability anymore (I say this as the owner of two Toyotas, so I'm not hating).
Erm, wood plantations *are* clear cutting whatever forest you have and treating trees as something like grain or whatever.
Right, but you aren't cutting down any new forest - presumably just using existing cleared land. It is sustainable so long as good farming practice is used and the land is not exhausted.
true forests are exceedingly rare e.g. less than 1% of all German "forests").
Yeah, I remember that from traveling through Germany. The "Black Forest" sure wasn't what it was when the Romans wrote about how it blocked out all light!:)
I like to think as governments as being "iz bad" (or maybe not bad but slow to respond, inefficient, and corrupt) with large companies asymptotically resembling government as they grow in size.
Europe, not being under a uniform set of rules, has a mix of history when it comes to forest management. Some rulers saw their strategic importance and took steps to protect them, some were unable to, and others just went for the short-term. Japan had the good fortune(?) to have an emperor who claimed all forests to be exclusively his, thus preserving them. These are exceptions rather than the general rule - most cultures use their forests up entirely.
But don't worry, thanks to wood pellets being used as a replacement for heating oil,
So far, those are being made out of scrap (at least in North America). I certainly hope we will continue to manage our forests such that they remain more or less a constant resource.
While you have a good point, there are a few points to consider: - The wood was not being used efficiently. A startling amount of the energy in the wood was going up the stack. - The forests were not being managed in any real way. No replanting, clear cutting. Forestry in North America, for all its warts, is currently sustainable. - We aren't limited to wood from trees - switchgrass gives you a bunch of cellulose and grows much faster than a tree. - This discussion isn't about energy, but about raw materials.
Fine, then express -any- lifespan ever, -precisely-, as a "simple quantity". Once again, seeing that you personally don't like how it was expressed, how would you have preferred it be stated in the verse?
Now you are just dodging. Lifespan can be measured to whatever precision interests you, but in the end you are just counting discrete units of time (years in this case). In biblical time they also had months, weeks, and days - but anything more precise than fractions of days is pushing it. Pi is an irrational number that cannot ever be expressed by regular numbers, no matter how many you use, so your asking me to express Pi precisely in our base-10 numeric system is never going to prove anything, because it can't be done.
How would I prefer it get expressed? I don't really care. I suppose if the author were interested in removing ambiguity, saying "120 years and no more or less," would have worked. As would "about 120 years". There are probably thousands of ways. But you pointed out earlier that the bible is ambiguous in many ways, and I can't really disagree with you. It is certainly possible that the author is being ambiguous on purpose.
So back on track, while I can't argue with you about the bible having ambiguity and the number 120 may very well be approximate, I still don't see how someone 5000 years ago would have any concept of base-10 significant digits, and even if they did, there was no zero to express the concept with.
You're not fairly representing the basic accuracy of the prediction. It has, unquestionably according to -both- me and you, gotten the maximum age right for billions of people (data points), and -possibly- one wrong.
Ah, I thought we were past arguing that because the passage has nothing to do with age prediction. Yeah, if we were still assuming that the passage was related to age prediction, it has a pretty good track record. I wouldn't bet on the future, though. And the number is quite high - the track record would be perfect if the author had picked 125.
Mainly to get you to admit what you already know--that the claim is astonishing in its accuracy over the number of unknown people and years it addresses, even interpreting every debatable point in your favor that it is "off" by two years.
We're still pretending the quote is predicting future ages, right? OK, well this is when I have to invoke sampling bias. To get a good idea of how good the Bible is at predicting future events, you'd have to look at all of the predictions - not just discuss one of them that was correct or close. To answer your question:
And, indeed, we could know what your relative performance is--I would not be surprised if you can't come up with a figure for, say, highest age in a single American state that isn't shown wrong from the lifespans of the the next decade
If I were to write a book numbering in the hundreds of pages with predictions about the future, I'm pretty sure I'd get most of them wrong. But a few would stick, and if I was ambiguous enough in my wording, people would spend a lot of time on Slashdot in the year 10000 debating what I really meant.
(I'm replying to all your posts with this one, since you have done three responses)
Good dodge. Now explain to (others, I could care less) how an irrational number isn't a number.
It wasn't a dodge. You asked me to do something that was impossible. I can't express pi as a (regular) number, and you know that. It is irrational. To clarify: I wasn't saying that pi isn't a number - I was saying that it is an insufficient definition. It is not the same beast as a simple quantity.
Again, though you continue to drop context, I said, and only require for my position (that subpoint of the 20 you hope to get to in your dreams), that the methodology by which we evaluate Jeanne be accurate with a billion-to-one ratio. If the absolutely most skilled, most honest, most knowledgable, evaluators in existence can beat that error ratio, they need to at minimum be given the top position at the NSA, with a corresponding raise. I have said nothing to denigrate their skills.
What in the world are you talking about? Odds are very good that her age is known and accurate. I've already granted you that there is some slim chance that her age is inaccurate. If that number is 1:100, then my chances of being right are exactly the reciprocal: 1000:1. I'll take that, since it means I'm a lot more likely to be right than you are.
The next -hundred years-, then, of the maximum lifespan of man, stipulating for discussion the possibility in -every single point under discussion- to the -interpretation most advantageous to you-, with you starting with all statistical knowledge of all humanity at your fingertips, as opposed to that nomad with nothing, doing the same for a future 3000 years.
You keep egging me into some pissing competition for prediction of the future - and we wouldn't even know the outcome for 100 years? What are you trying to accomplish? I have never claimed any predictive powers - in fact I claim the opposite: no one has ever provided any evidence of any predictive powers that meets any kind of scientific rigor. But now you have us WAAAAY of on a tangent.
And... to be sure you don't forget, as we stipulate absolutely every debatable point in the discussion, for now, to make it as absolute as easy as possible for you: Within. Two. Years.
Huh? Honestly I have no idea what you are referring to. What is within two years?
Thanks for restating what I just said. It is not simply a number. It cannot be expressed precisely by any number system. Asking me to do the impossible does not prove anyone's point.
Is the point of this thread to just make me type until I make a satement that could be construed as a minor error?
The context of the argument -presumes- a supernatural actor, and hence, all statements within in it presume such. They can be evaluated on logical terms -whether or not- the premise of a supernatural actor is accepted.
Nonsense - we are discussing a phrase in a book. Just because many claim the book is written by a supernatural author does not mean that our discussion starts at that point. In fact, I presume that the author was a regular human with no special gift to see the future.
Really, take that Philo 101 course.
You keep saying that, as if I don't understand how to make a logical argument. Yet you are starting a supposed logical argument with an assumption of magic powers.
"Maybe Socrates didn't exist! Ha!"
Which is exactly your argument for Jeanne's age. You put out some hypothetical about her birth records not being sound, despite numerous other people investigating the matter thoroughly, and then you have the gall to present as evidence some other guy on some other message board pondering the same question without any evidence. Rebutting other people's hard work and investigative findings with suppositions is just not a solid basis for a logical argument.
Goodness gracious, way to take a snippet out of context. Of course it can be partially numerically expressed, but it is not simply a number with some fixed precision. It is a ratio, and it is irrational. I think it is pretty clear that I know what pi is
Slashdot Mirror
It probably depends on your industry - we end up having a pretty specialized skill set, especially in the US. Because of that, we get very few responses even on LinkedIn. It also helps that former employees have created a group on there, so we post to that group asking if anyone knows anyone looking.
And LinkedIn helps you in what way?
I don't keep track of very person I've ever worked with, do you? LinkedIn lets me alert connections to jobs without going through my whole, incomplete, out-of-date address book. We re-hired a tech last week based on his response on LinkedIn. It is entirely possible that word of the job would have gotten to him without LinkedIn, but I can only relay what happened.
Ethical or no, I'll hire someone whose history I know over a total stranger any day.
I guess my point is that consumers need to pay attention to what they're buying.
Exactly my point, and very good examples! When my wife was looking for a Corolla-sized car, I was astounded to find that the Chevy Prism was consistently $2000 less on the used market, despite rolling off of the same assembly line and differing only in emblem glued to the grill.
Certainly memory requirements have gone up. I can't say anything about raw speed, since I haven't compared two installs on the same machine, but my general impression of 7 is that it is not faster than XP. Heck, it feels a little pokier on much newer hardware to me - but that's purely subjective.
Most benchmarks I've seen seem to put Windows 7 at a pretty good position compared to XP (and very good compared to Vista), but that's on good fairly modern hardware.
That's a pretty high-end machine! A typical laptop back then probably was around $500, and came with nowhere near 2GB. I just maxed out my mother-in-law's machine with 2GB and it is a 2004 machine. I think it was $1200 new, which was at the high end of what you could get at CompUSA at the time. Still has XP, though. It would probably run 7 "acceptably", but then again, she was running with 256MB of RAM for the first 7 years that she had it! It hurt... so... bad.
I think they haven't fallen, but they definitely stumbled. Whatever the cause, the perception seems to be that they have fallen quite a bit. :)
J. D. Power has them below Lexus (??? same company), Acura, Mazda, Mercedes, Honda, and Porsche. In fact, they are right there with Kia. Now, Kia has improved tremendously, but I'd aspire for better
Either that "PC" was a $3000 workstation when it was new, or you have a funny definition of "just fine".
Yes, I'm sure having salt-less roads must help! :)
Nothing wrong with Brand Loyalty until they give you a reason to stop being loyal.
That strategy works great for consumables like deodorant and toothpaste, but not so great for durable goods. I'd hate to buy a car, only to find out that my favored brand is no longer making 'em like they used to. Now you are stuck with a big expensive mistake. Same with a washer or dryer - you expect to hold on to those for like 10 years or so, so it is worth doing research up-front rather than just buying the same brand that you did 10 years earlier.
In the case of cars, one of the reasons US cars were cheaper than their import counterparts in the past was because they were cheaper (as in cheaply built).
It's worse than that - there was no numerical way for US car-makers to compete on quality. They had a historical nightmare with benefit and retiree costs, and even if they managed to get their quality up, they wouldn't make any money. So they made cheap pieces of crap and competed on price (and even then, made much smaller margins). Recently they've each gone bankrupt or negotiated away much of their extravagant benefit costs, and surprise! Now they can compete better on quality.
Evidently I'm in the minority.
It's a pretty sizable minority, though. There are plenty of Japanese cars on the road these days. I wouldn't be so hasty to judge, either. If a car is 4 grand less at sale, that covers a lot of repairs down the road. Factor in the time value of money, and I'm not sure the total cost of ownership is such a slam dunk for the Japanese cars. I drive Toyotas because I value my time and don't want to spend it at the dealership (yeah, these days I should probably be in a Honda - but I got a good deal on the Toyotas because it was right in the midst of the recall fever and the dealer was shitting itself. Otherwise identical Hondas were several thousand more.), but if I did my own repair work or if I weren't paid hourly, I might take a different approach.
I, like you, mostly hate Walmart and the crappy products they sell. That said, I'll be the first one to purchase their $1 Christmas lights even if they barely make it through a single season. At that price I can buy 12 sets before I cover the cost of the nice LED lights, and God knows how many seasons you'd need before you recovered the electricity cost. And Applebees. God, I hate Applebees. It's disgusting - all the food tastes like it was hit by the same stream of "flavor" spray. But you know what? I'm going there tonight because it's a kid-friendly place, the prices are good, and my kid's PTA picked it for a fundraiser. Sure my soul will die a little with each bite of the high-calorie burger, but they have beer so hopefully my soul won't outpace my liver.
Such a waste.
No it isn't - someone will pick up a nice used car. It's not as if he's throwing them away.
Look at the cars Cuba is running.
When you aren't allowed to buy a new car when your current one dies, you spend a lot of time making sure it's never completely dead. That doesn't mean it makes any financial or environmental sense to keep a 50s-era sedan running.
I'm afraid it was way too late for them to keep me as a customer.
I'd like to point out that brand loyalty can be just as naive as nationalism in a buying decision. Maytag was considered unsurpassed in quality for most of it's existence, but if you bought one in the ten year period of 1996-2006, you'd just as likely have a pile of junk. Toyota hasn't fallen as far as Maytag, but there's no sense in pretending that they are the pinnacle of reliability anymore (I say this as the owner of two Toyotas, so I'm not hating).
Erm, wood plantations *are* clear cutting whatever forest you have and treating trees as something like grain or whatever.
Right, but you aren't cutting down any new forest - presumably just using existing cleared land. It is sustainable so long as good farming practice is used and the land is not exhausted.
true forests are exceedingly rare e.g. less than 1% of all German "forests").
Yeah, I remember that from traveling through Germany. The "Black Forest" sure wasn't what it was when the Romans wrote about how it blocked out all light! :)
I like to think as governments as being "iz bad" (or maybe not bad but slow to respond, inefficient, and corrupt) with large companies asymptotically resembling government as they grow in size.
Ah, that's too bad - you should never have given up Canada! :)
In all seriousness, I suppose that wood plantations are better than clear cutting whatever forest you have left.
Europe, not being under a uniform set of rules, has a mix of history when it comes to forest management. Some rulers saw their strategic importance and took steps to protect them, some were unable to, and others just went for the short-term. Japan had the good fortune(?) to have an emperor who claimed all forests to be exclusively his, thus preserving them. These are exceptions rather than the general rule - most cultures use their forests up entirely.
But don't worry, thanks to wood pellets being used as a replacement for heating oil,
So far, those are being made out of scrap (at least in North America). I certainly hope we will continue to manage our forests such that they remain more or less a constant resource.
While you have a good point, there are a few points to consider:
- The wood was not being used efficiently. A startling amount of the energy in the wood was going up the stack.
- The forests were not being managed in any real way. No replanting, clear cutting. Forestry in North America, for all its warts, is currently sustainable.
- We aren't limited to wood from trees - switchgrass gives you a bunch of cellulose and grows much faster than a tree.
- This discussion isn't about energy, but about raw materials.
Fine, then express -any- lifespan ever, -precisely-, as a "simple quantity". Once again, seeing that you personally don't like how it was expressed, how would you have preferred it be stated in the verse?
Now you are just dodging. Lifespan can be measured to whatever precision interests you, but in the end you are just counting discrete units of time (years in this case). In biblical time they also had months, weeks, and days - but anything more precise than fractions of days is pushing it. Pi is an irrational number that cannot ever be expressed by regular numbers, no matter how many you use, so your asking me to express Pi precisely in our base-10 numeric system is never going to prove anything, because it can't be done.
How would I prefer it get expressed? I don't really care. I suppose if the author were interested in removing ambiguity, saying "120 years and no more or less," would have worked. As would "about 120 years". There are probably thousands of ways. But you pointed out earlier that the bible is ambiguous in many ways, and I can't really disagree with you. It is certainly possible that the author is being ambiguous on purpose.
So back on track, while I can't argue with you about the bible having ambiguity and the number 120 may very well be approximate, I still don't see how someone 5000 years ago would have any concept of base-10 significant digits, and even if they did, there was no zero to express the concept with.
You're not fairly representing the basic accuracy of the prediction. It has, unquestionably according to -both- me and you, gotten the maximum age right for billions of people (data points), and -possibly- one wrong.
Ah, I thought we were past arguing that because the passage has nothing to do with age prediction. Yeah, if we were still assuming that the passage was related to age prediction, it has a pretty good track record. I wouldn't bet on the future, though. And the number is quite high - the track record would be perfect if the author had picked 125.
Mainly to get you to admit what you already know--that the claim is astonishing in its accuracy over the number of unknown people and years it addresses, even interpreting every debatable point in your favor that it is "off" by two years.
We're still pretending the quote is predicting future ages, right? OK, well this is when I have to invoke sampling bias. To get a good idea of how good the Bible is at predicting future events, you'd have to look at all of the predictions - not just discuss one of them that was correct or close. To answer your question:
And, indeed, we could know what your relative performance is--I would not be surprised if you can't come up with a figure for, say, highest age in a single American state that isn't shown wrong from the lifespans of the the next decade
If I were to write a book numbering in the hundreds of pages with predictions about the future, I'm pretty sure I'd get most of them wrong. But a few would stick, and if I was ambiguous enough in my wording, people would spend a lot of time on Slashdot in the year 10000 debating what I really meant.
I suspect you meant "it's not a value that can be written as a number," but it can - as the Greek letter pi.
Let's pretend for a moment that I meant that it wasn't actually a number at all. How exactly would this advance your argument?
Yes it can - in base pi.
LOL, I suppose that's true.
And yes, I understand that the reciprocal of 1/100 is not in fact 1000 - that was a typo.
(I'm replying to all your posts with this one, since you have done three responses)
Good dodge. Now explain to (others, I could care less) how an irrational number isn't a number.
It wasn't a dodge. You asked me to do something that was impossible. I can't express pi as a (regular) number, and you know that. It is irrational. To clarify: I wasn't saying that pi isn't a number - I was saying that it is an insufficient definition. It is not the same beast as a simple quantity.
Again, though you continue to drop context, I said, and only require for my position (that subpoint of the 20 you hope to get to in your dreams), that the methodology by which we evaluate Jeanne be accurate with a billion-to-one ratio. If the absolutely most skilled, most honest, most knowledgable, evaluators in existence can beat that error ratio, they need to at minimum be given the top position at the NSA, with a corresponding raise. I have said nothing to denigrate their skills.
What in the world are you talking about? Odds are very good that her age is known and accurate. I've already granted you that there is some slim chance that her age is inaccurate. If that number is 1:100, then my chances of being right are exactly the reciprocal: 1000:1. I'll take that, since it means I'm a lot more likely to be right than you are.
The next -hundred years-, then, of the maximum lifespan of man, stipulating for discussion the possibility in -every single point under discussion- to the -interpretation most advantageous to you-, with you starting with all statistical knowledge of all humanity at your fingertips, as opposed to that nomad with nothing, doing the same for a future 3000 years.
You keep egging me into some pissing competition for prediction of the future - and we wouldn't even know the outcome for 100 years? What are you trying to accomplish? I have never claimed any predictive powers - in fact I claim the opposite: no one has ever provided any evidence of any predictive powers that meets any kind of scientific rigor. But now you have us WAAAAY of on a tangent.
And... to be sure you don't forget, as we stipulate absolutely every debatable point in the discussion, for now, to make it as absolute as easy as possible for you: Within. Two. Years.
Huh? Honestly I have no idea what you are referring to. What is within two years?
Thanks for restating what I just said. It is not simply a number. It cannot be expressed precisely by any number system. Asking me to do the impossible does not prove anyone's point.
Is the point of this thread to just make me type until I make a satement that could be construed as a minor error?
The context of the argument -presumes- a supernatural actor, and hence, all statements within in it presume such. They can be evaluated on logical terms -whether or not- the premise of a supernatural actor is accepted.
Nonsense - we are discussing a phrase in a book. Just because many claim the book is written by a supernatural author does not mean that our discussion starts at that point. In fact, I presume that the author was a regular human with no special gift to see the future.
Really, take that Philo 101 course.
You keep saying that, as if I don't understand how to make a logical argument. Yet you are starting a supposed logical argument with an assumption of magic powers.
"Maybe Socrates didn't exist! Ha!"
Which is exactly your argument for Jeanne's age. You put out some hypothetical about her birth records not being sound, despite numerous other people investigating the matter thoroughly, and then you have the gall to present as evidence some other guy on some other message board pondering the same question without any evidence. Rebutting other people's hard work and investigative findings with suppositions is just not a solid basis for a logical argument.
Goodness gracious, way to take a snippet out of context. Of course it can be partially numerically expressed, but it is not simply a number with some fixed precision. It is a ratio, and it is irrational. I think it is pretty clear that I know what pi is
Are you putting me on? I say "pi is irrational" and you say I'm wrong and then link me to a site describing pi as irrational?