"That burnout primarilly happens in college, in my experience."
On my degree course there were only 3 women out of 90 students. They were all there at the end. I'm not sure I could draw any conclusions from that. Women are much better represented in the workplaces I've seen than they were at college. I know, I know, anecdotal.
"good companies don't keep crappy programmers."
No, but they do keep medium skilled programmers, especially if they have other useful skills (communication, primarily) as well as very skilled programmers. There's always a spectrum in any department.
Either way I think we've wandered quite a way off topic now...
Huh, that's not a real response. The GP said that women tend to be better because the education system tends to be skewed against letting women skate through in technical fields. So the lower tier doesn't make it to the workplace, but change majors. This reflects what I know from people still in university schools.
Uh, no, the GP didn't mention education at all. Where did you pull that rant from?
I don't know why I'd ever want a less talented programmer on a team. I really want everyone else to be better than I am
This is also irrelevant. There exists a multidimensional spectrum of abilities, some people are lower in some or even all dimensions than others. If you have a modicum of talent, enough to bump you up on one or more axis, the you will encounter people better and worse than you. "Want" is irrelevant.
There are some BSD tools in the firmware. I have no idea what the kernel is, but I did have a look through some of the filesystem support binaries and find text strings that seemed to suggest there was a BSD equivalent of fdisk or parted in there.
They aren't worse either. If you work in a place that they have to be better to show they're as good, or one in which they have to be determined in order to stay due to the misogyny, then you work in a backwards place full of cavemen.
In a decent workplace you have women and men of a variety of different skill levels. I know capable female engineers that are just doing it to pay the bills. I know capable male engineers that are biding their time until retirement. I've worked with incompetents of both genders and neither lasted that long.
I'd suggest you go work somewhere that's moved on from a 70s mindset.
Most people aren't me. For me it's been superior for years. For me Windows 7 has been riddled with problems in device support, drive/data consistency (!) and various other areas.
Linux Just Works(TM)
Not every linux. Ubuntu messed up on sound. Debian, OTOH, runs in a similar fashion on my NAS, netbook, desktop and servers, and works brilliantly on all of them.
YMMV, I'm sure you have all sorts of problems that the arrogant geeks in the linux community don't care about and told you to STFU n00b when you asked on the kernel mailing list.
Interesting, but it does seem like it's been relatively static for the last two or three years.
There was a 25% price jump last year, and last year is when the no-display rule came in, so I wonder if (when figures are collected) we'll see another drop in 2010/2011
It's not a luxury tax, it's a sin tax. And when said sin tax outweighs (as it does in some countries, no idea about the US), the tax burden from the activity, I think it's pretty damned rich to demand even more from those people who have been paying it.
S'all I'm saying.
People do choose to smoke, and can live without tobacco. Charging them extra for state healthcare when that habit has benefited the state more than enough to offset their costs, it's just wrong. And if the state is genuinely out of pocket on smokers, then the tax should be bumped up to cover it, IMHO.
I understand the origins of the term "taxation without representation". I borrowed it, perhaps improperly, to describe a tax that's taken without recompense or service in return.
Tobacco tax, especially in the situation where smokers will then be charged more than non-smokers for health care, would seem to be in that category.
Your pack is 25 cigarettes (I have no idea why, everywhere else in the world does 20), so that's something. But when I stopped last year a pack of 25 Marlboro gold/light/whatever you want to call them was heading north of 18 AUD in a lot of places. You could find them for 17 in a few places. I'm not sure if that tax has gone up again since then but it's going to go up again pretty soon I think.
I don't know how anyone could afford to be a heavy smoker here.
They also passed the law saying cigarettes are not allowed to be on display, so they're all in closed cupboards or drawers under the counter. And they must all be "fire safe" now, which is apparently even worse for the smoker and certainly tasted bad (for a given value of bad, I came to realise towards the time I was quitting that they all tasted bad)
I have no idea what impact all this has on the smoking rate here, but you can't say they aren't tackling the problem head-on.
"It only would apply to smokers who expect taxpayers to foot the bill for their healthcare. Your argument doesn't make sense in that context."
Eh?
But smokers who expect the taxpayer to foot the bill have been paying a lot of extra tax, that's the argument.
In countries like the UK the estimated extra burden on taxpayer funded services is around half the tobacco tax revenue. And STILL people say that smokers ought to be denied care or be made to pay for their care. It doesn't make sense to me.
I don't smoke (any more) but it's hard for me to see this as anything other than taxation as moral punishment, and denial of services paid for by that taxation as further moral punishment.
I never understand why they required to pay extra again by some people. Either the tobacco tax is a premier example of taxation without representation, or smokers have already paid in. Probably more than they'll ever get out in terms of medical care.
And that's if they even cost the medical system more. They tend to die off...
"Contributors to open-source projects must declare that the copyright on their work belongs to the project. That means it can't be itself copied from somewhere else without license (including tutorials, sample code, etc.). If that assignment isn't made, then any change in the project's licensing requires the approval of all the submitters!"
Wait, you see this as a bug?
I see it as a feature. If I contribute to a project then I don't want some arbitrary group of people on a committee at a later point in time to be able to decide that it's in the project's best interests to close the source, or (for instance) switch GPL to MIT license, or whatever else, without my say so or removing my code.
And in fact if you just cover everyone regardless of circumstance, it still ends up both cheaper (yes, for everyone) and with a higher level of coverage.
The objection "OMG! I'll be paying to help other people!" is so wrong it's funny. YOU would end up paying less under a universal system. That some of that lower amount would then go to help other people is a problem to you is... strange.
So because there are grey areas around know risky behaviours, the whole system is useless and must be scrapped.
Instead it's far better to rely on employers to provide healthcare for people, the unemployed or badly employed should be left to rot or bankrupt themselves, and insurance companies should be allowed to cream massive profits from the whole thing?
I agree, much better system. Fuck the poor, the weak and the long term unemployed and those that didn't understand the small print on their policy.
Yes, you got where you are all by yourself, with no contribution from the society around you, you big strong independent libertarian you. You'd have done just as well living in a cave on your own, I bet. To address your points -
Voluntary giving suffers from resources being squandered by many charities, it also suffers from funds only going to those whom are either currently in the spotlight or whom are considered moral/worthy by others, not necessarily those in most need. Government is not perfect by a long way, especially when it comes to efficiency, but it is generally consistent and tries to be blind.
And you genuinely think that giving people a reasonable safety net, providing for health and basic food, makes them grow up lazy and dependant? That if we just whipped that out from under those most in need they'd suddenly pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
And someone who suffers due to their own bad decision-making thinks that entitles them to take my property away from me, but that is not selfish? Why?
And someone who benefits immensely from the society around them thinks that entitles them to keep every red cent and fuck the rest of you, that's not selfish and childlike in your eyes?
In closing, don't lecture me about selfishness because that's your favorite talking point. You just make yourself look like a presumptious ass. The next time you want to do that, learn something about the person you're talking to and you'll wind up with a lot less egg on your face.
Funny, I don't feel any egg there. Nor do I believe for a second your claims about your many virtues, or that those values are widely held amongst libertarians.
Relying on the vagaries of charity in order to help the poor does not work. We have a lot of history to show this.
Well, we're talking about law reform either way, to get this imaginary healthcare system off the ground. So while we're imagining nice things, I'm going to imagine that the US government does a thorough, evidence based review of the war on drugs and puts an end to its current hysterical attitude to the whole thing.
Never going to happen, mind.
In other countries there's no need for the "I'm a dumbass" plan.
But there is the "I want attention now, even if it could wait, and I want a luxury room" plan.
If you want to get analytic about it, the answer is probably yes. Smokers in the UK (I have no idea of US figures) pay more additional tax than they cost the health system due to the high levels of tobacco tax. Anti-smoking groups argue that in the long term they cost the country further loss by being dead and not providing the state with more tax revenue, but I find that argument about as convincing and compelling as "every download is a lost sale".
The others are less clear cut, but IMHO drugs should be treated a lot differently to the way they are now, and clean needles should be available to cut down on infection risk.
And the drunk driver... yeah I don't know. Are they just an asshole or did they have mental problems leading to that situation?
The problem with denying care (for me at least) is that when you start, where do you stop? What about the skydivers, scuba divers and rock climbers? There was that stat that came out of the UK a little while back, from a respected professor in the drug advisory council, that taking ecstasy is roughly as risky as getting on a horse, yet many many people would make a moral judgement about the ecstasy user and deny them care, yet make no judgement of the horse rider.
"Because people are stupid and seem to think big daddy government is there with his hand outs and safe net"
Incorrect.
People are stupid regardless of whether they think big daddy government is there for them, and many will end up in penury either way. And not all of them because of stupidity. There are such things as long term illnesses that affect your earning potential, you know.
Having a starving, ill underclass with no education and no prospects, which seems to be the utopia that libertarians dream of, is not really a good idea for a pleasant, low-crime society.
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"That burnout primarilly happens in college, in my experience."
On my degree course there were only 3 women out of 90 students. They were all there at the end. I'm not sure I could draw any conclusions from that. Women are much better represented in the workplaces I've seen than they were at college. I know, I know, anecdotal.
"good companies don't keep crappy programmers."
No, but they do keep medium skilled programmers, especially if they have other useful skills (communication, primarily) as well as very skilled programmers. There's always a spectrum in any department.
Either way I think we've wandered quite a way off topic now...
Huh, that's not a real response. The GP said that women tend to be better because the education system tends to be skewed against letting women skate through in technical fields. So the lower tier doesn't make it to the workplace, but change majors. This reflects what I know from people still in university schools.
Uh, no, the GP didn't mention education at all. Where did you pull that rant from?
I don't know why I'd ever want a less talented programmer on a team. I really want everyone else to be better than I am
This is also irrelevant.
There exists a multidimensional spectrum of abilities, some people are lower in some or even all dimensions than others. If you have a modicum of talent, enough to bump you up on one or more axis, the you will encounter people better and worse than you. "Want" is irrelevant.
Actually no, unless we differentiate software engineering from IT, which I suppose we really should anyway.
I've worked in a few software roles now. Treating females as second class citizens was strangely unacceptable in any of them.
Unfortunately life has moved on since then, and I now live a couple of continents away from my gaming buddy, rather than in the same house.
Timezones are as much an impediment to online gaming as distance, too.
Agreed, for the most part.
R2 pissed me off more because of the removal of the ability to play through the game in split-screen.
R1 had been great fun to play through with a friend and few beers. The two gun thing, to me, was them trying to be Gears of War.
There are some BSD tools in the firmware. I have no idea what the kernel is, but I did have a look through some of the filesystem support binaries and find text strings that seemed to suggest there was a BSD equivalent of fdisk or parted in there.
Actually I believe it's just overtaken the 360.
The OS is not linux based though. The firmware does include a variety of BSD stuff, if you dig around in it.
Women are not better at coding.
They aren't worse either. If you work in a place that they have to be better to show they're as good, or one in which they have to be determined in order to stay due to the misogyny, then you work in a backwards place full of cavemen.
In a decent workplace you have women and men of a variety of different skill levels. I know capable female engineers that are just doing it to pay the bills. I know capable male engineers that are biding their time until retirement. I've worked with incompetents of both genders and neither lasted that long.
I'd suggest you go work somewhere that's moved on from a 70s mindset.
Ergh.... That was just unnecessary!
That's exactly the point though, isn't it?
Most people aren't me. For me it's been superior for years. For me Windows 7 has been riddled with problems in device support, drive/data consistency (!) and various other areas.
Linux Just Works(TM)
Not every linux. Ubuntu messed up on sound. Debian, OTOH, runs in a similar fashion on my NAS, netbook, desktop and servers, and works brilliantly on all of them.
YMMV, I'm sure you have all sorts of problems that the arrogant geeks in the linux community don't care about and told you to STFU n00b when you asked on the kernel mailing list.
Interesting, but it does seem like it's been relatively static for the last two or three years.
There was a 25% price jump last year, and last year is when the no-display rule came in, so I wonder if (when figures are collected) we'll see another drop in 2010/2011
It's not a luxury tax, it's a sin tax. And when said sin tax outweighs (as it does in some countries, no idea about the US), the tax burden from the activity, I think it's pretty damned rich to demand even more from those people who have been paying it.
S'all I'm saying.
People do choose to smoke, and can live without tobacco. Charging them extra for state healthcare when that habit has benefited the state more than enough to offset their costs, it's just wrong. And if the state is genuinely out of pocket on smokers, then the tax should be bumped up to cover it, IMHO.
I understand the origins of the term "taxation without representation". I borrowed it, perhaps improperly, to describe a tax that's taken without recompense or service in return.
Tobacco tax, especially in the situation where smokers will then be charged more than non-smokers for health care, would seem to be in that category.
Nah it's crazy but true.
Your pack is 25 cigarettes (I have no idea why, everywhere else in the world does 20), so that's something. But when I stopped last year a pack of 25 Marlboro gold/light/whatever you want to call them was heading north of 18 AUD in a lot of places. You could find them for 17 in a few places. I'm not sure if that tax has gone up again since then but it's going to go up again pretty soon I think.
I don't know how anyone could afford to be a heavy smoker here.
They also passed the law saying cigarettes are not allowed to be on display, so they're all in closed cupboards or drawers under the counter. And they must all be "fire safe" now, which is apparently even worse for the smoker and certainly tasted bad (for a given value of bad, I came to realise towards the time I was quitting that they all tasted bad)
I have no idea what impact all this has on the smoking rate here, but you can't say they aren't tackling the problem head-on.
Interesting. Over here in Australia a pack of smokes costs almost 20 dollars, so it's probably covered.
"It only would apply to smokers who expect taxpayers to foot the bill for their healthcare. Your argument doesn't make sense in that context."
Eh?
But smokers who expect the taxpayer to foot the bill have been paying a lot of extra tax, that's the argument.
In countries like the UK the estimated extra burden on taxpayer funded services is around half the tobacco tax revenue. And STILL people say that smokers ought to be denied care or be made to pay for their care. It doesn't make sense to me.
I don't smoke (any more) but it's hard for me to see this as anything other than taxation as moral punishment, and denial of services paid for by that taxation as further moral punishment.
Which they do, through tobacco taxes.
I never understand why they required to pay extra again by some people. Either the tobacco tax is a premier example of taxation without representation, or smokers have already paid in. Probably more than they'll ever get out in terms of medical care.
And that's if they even cost the medical system more. They tend to die off...
Wait, you see this as a bug?
I see it as a feature. If I contribute to a project then I don't want some arbitrary group of people on a committee at a later point in time to be able to decide that it's in the project's best interests to close the source, or (for instance) switch GPL to MIT license, or whatever else, without my say so or removing my code.
Meh.
I have a netbook.
AFAICT these fill the same sort of niche but are less capable. I played with an iPad2 the other day. Very slick.
Couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was for or why I'd want one though. It does the internets I guess. And it's shiny. Big whoop?
And in fact if you just cover everyone regardless of circumstance, it still ends up both cheaper (yes, for everyone) and with a higher level of coverage.
The objection "OMG! I'll be paying to help other people!" is so wrong it's funny. YOU would end up paying less under a universal system. That some of that lower amount would then go to help other people is a problem to you is... strange.
So because there are grey areas around know risky behaviours, the whole system is useless and must be scrapped.
Instead it's far better to rely on employers to provide healthcare for people, the unemployed or badly employed should be left to rot or bankrupt themselves, and insurance companies should be allowed to cream massive profits from the whole thing?
I agree, much better system. Fuck the poor, the weak and the long term unemployed and those that didn't understand the small print on their policy.
More libertarian lies and fantasies.
Yes, you got where you are all by yourself, with no contribution from the society around you, you big strong independent libertarian you. You'd have done just as well living in a cave on your own, I bet. To address your points -
Voluntary giving suffers from resources being squandered by many charities, it also suffers from funds only going to those whom are either currently in the spotlight or whom are considered moral/worthy by others, not necessarily those in most need. Government is not perfect by a long way, especially when it comes to efficiency, but it is generally consistent and tries to be blind.
And you genuinely think that giving people a reasonable safety net, providing for health and basic food, makes them grow up lazy and dependant? That if we just whipped that out from under those most in need they'd suddenly pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
And someone who suffers due to their own bad decision-making thinks that entitles them to take my property away from me, but that is not selfish? Why?
And someone who benefits immensely from the society around them thinks that entitles them to keep every red cent and fuck the rest of you, that's not selfish and childlike in your eyes?
In closing, don't lecture me about selfishness because that's your favorite talking point. You just make yourself look like a presumptious ass. The next time you want to do that, learn something about the person you're talking to and you'll wind up with a lot less egg on your face.
Funny, I don't feel any egg there. Nor do I believe for a second your claims about your many virtues, or that those values are widely held amongst libertarians.
Relying on the vagaries of charity in order to help the poor does not work. We have a lot of history to show this.
Well, we're talking about law reform either way, to get this imaginary healthcare system off the ground. So while we're imagining nice things, I'm going to imagine that the US government does a thorough, evidence based review of the war on drugs and puts an end to its current hysterical attitude to the whole thing.
Never going to happen, mind.
In other countries there's no need for the "I'm a dumbass" plan.
But there is the "I want attention now, even if it could wait, and I want a luxury room" plan.
Well that's always a difficult area to address.
If you want to get analytic about it, the answer is probably yes. Smokers in the UK (I have no idea of US figures) pay more additional tax than they cost the health system due to the high levels of tobacco tax. Anti-smoking groups argue that in the long term they cost the country further loss by being dead and not providing the state with more tax revenue, but I find that argument about as convincing and compelling as "every download is a lost sale".
The others are less clear cut, but IMHO drugs should be treated a lot differently to the way they are now, and clean needles should be available to cut down on infection risk.
And the drunk driver... yeah I don't know. Are they just an asshole or did they have mental problems leading to that situation?
The problem with denying care (for me at least) is that when you start, where do you stop? What about the skydivers, scuba divers and rock climbers? There was that stat that came out of the UK a little while back, from a respected professor in the drug advisory council, that taking ecstasy is roughly as risky as getting on a horse, yet many many people would make a moral judgement about the ecstasy user and deny them care, yet make no judgement of the horse rider.
Huge grey area, IMHO.
"Because people are stupid and seem to think big daddy government is there with his hand outs and safe net"
Incorrect.
People are stupid regardless of whether they think big daddy government is there for them, and many will end up in penury either way. And not all of them because of stupidity. There are such things as long term illnesses that affect your earning potential, you know.
Having a starving, ill underclass with no education and no prospects, which seems to be the utopia that libertarians dream of, is not really a good idea for a pleasant, low-crime society.