Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
Oh really? That's good to hear, as all the horror stories I'm hearing are involving the Muslim immigrants.
Size isn't everything. Germans and Indonesians are the biggest ethnic minorities in Netherland, but you hardly notice them.
The biggest problems don't come from recent immigrants, but from the kids and grandkids of the immigrants of the '70s. They've been Dutch since birth, have rarely been to the country of their parents, yet they don't feel accepted and don't see any future for themselves. So they make trouble or explore fundamentalism, which makes them even less accepted. It's a vicious cycle.
The Indians and Chinese are great; they're generally friendly, don't cause any problems, don't commit any crimes, don't follow insane religions, and actually contribute to society and to the economy with their high-paying, high-value jobs.
Indians are great and often adapt well. Chinese hardly adapt at all. They form their own mini societies, and some don't even learn the local language, but they do take care of their kids and they have a tight social structure that deals with any problems.
Maybe the problem is that Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were poorer and lower educated than other groups of immigrants, and they didn't bring a lot of functional social structure with them. Iranian immigrants are completely different, for example. They're often refugees, well educated, and have a tendency towards atheism. They integrate well with Dutch society, but badly with Turks and Moroccans.
So is Europe having the same problem as the US, where the native children don't have any interest in science and engineering, and all think they're going to become movie stars or sports stars?
Managers, football players and singers (we have three simultaneous Idol/Popstar shows on TV at the moment). Why managers? Because they get paid more than engineers. So people with brains become managers, and we end up with a surplus of managers and a shortage of engineers.
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
I remember a study that showed women without children were slightly happier than women with children, but a follow-up study showed that women who had children at a later age were happier than women without children, who in turn were happier than women who had children at a young age.
It's always more complicated than you think.
Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things.
It helps, though. We're expecting our first kid in a couple of weeks, and I just got a big lego set for my birthday from my wife. After not having bought any lego for 20 years.
Why is it that European countries allow so many immigrants from those areas anyway?
Various reasons, but mostly for extra labour. We had too much work and too few workers in the '70s, and apparently it was the other way around in Turkey and northern Africa.
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Only if you ignore immigration. We've got plenty of that to make up for the low birth rates.
That's the unfortunatel upside of people being unhappy where they live: other countries can use that to supplement their population.
I kinda agreed about Josh when I read the article... then I read some of this guys other stuff, about Tyler, and a few of his other articles.
Basically it boils down to he wants cogs in a machine at any cost.
I also read the Tyler article, and that's not quite what happened there. He didn't want Tyler to be a cog, he wanted him to be a mentor, a guru perhaps. Lift the others up instead of putting them down, which is what Tyler had been doing before.
A genius programmer who can't work with others isn't anywhere near as valuable as one who can.
These myths of one coder being so valuable that he/she can't be replaced are just untrue.
If the one coder is really that good, and the others are crap, then those myths can definitely be true. A single quality programmer who writes maintainable code and shares his knowledge can keep an entire team on track. Someone like that would be worth his weight in gold. Josh from the article doesn't really sound all that good, however.
Exactly. The poster would be outsourced. Josh would be left as the head of research or something. Regardless... this whole topic is moot because now it is nothing but the anti-Joshs posting against the Joshs. Unfortunately their are a lot more of anti-Josh.
Why would you admire an anti-social asshole who only pretends he's a good programmer? I admire quirky genius programmers, but Josh doesn't sound like one of them.
"Josh" is the kind of guy that develops Googles, Yahoo, etc.
No he isn't. Well, I don't know about Yahoo, but Google invests in smart, maintainable code. Josh writes convoluted code that nobody else can maintain, and he's unable to work with others. You can't build a company out of that.
And there are far better coders out there who write self-documenting code that the other coders, the "average" ones, are able to maintain and fix.
You stop being a quirky genius soon as you declare yourself as one. Since then you're just a wannabe poser.
See that's why I'm NOT a quirky genius.
Exactly. There's nothing cool about trying to be a quirky genius. But if you happen to be a quirky genius, it's definitely cool to try to be a team player. That's what makes your genius valuable.
Why do people feel the need to control quirky geniuses who are doing nothing wrong? Seriously, there's nothing in this example that's out of the ordinary, except for the women's t-shirts. That's what you get for having a casual work place. My thought would be that if the author has such a problem with this guy, maybe he needs to be skilled enough to replace him.
The T-shirts in the example are not the problem (though the hygiene might be). The problem is that he claims his code works and is self-documenting, when in fact it doesn't work the way the customer wants, and other programmers (the chief engineer at least) are unable to read his code.
That's the problem. That and his anti-social attitude of calling them names instead of helping them to fix his incomprehensible code.
Outside the wire, US forces have loaded weapons, ballistic vests, and helmets. Period.
Interestingly, I think Dutch forces on patrol in Iraq actually wore soft hats. Not sure about the vests, but they tried hard to be non-threatening and appreciated by the locals.
I've got a better example for you. In the early years of WW2, Russia had an abundance of soldiers, but a shortage of weapons. So infantry attacks would sometimes happen in two waves: the first with weapons, and the second with instructions to pick up the weapons of their fallen brothers from the first wave.
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not)
Historical, yes. Emotional, no doubt. But religious? No. Marriage is older than many modern religions, and people of different religions as well as non-religious people marry. It's not surprising that many religious people want to get their religion involved in their marriage (though not all do), but marriage itself is not religious.
Not from a civil point of view, anyway. It may be religious from some religious points of view, but anything can be religious from a religious point of view. And religious points of view can differ quite a lot.
And anyway, you're the one who started this conversation talking about "counter[ing] a tyranny of the majority." The modification required to do that -- electing representatives rather than voting on all issues directly -- is exactly the difference that makes it a republic.
No. What makes a country a republic is not having a monarch. Tyranny or lack there of has nothing to do with it.
False. Now, if you said "At least today, with protection of songwriter's creations, a few lucky lottery winners can live better lifestyles" then you would be spot on because even today 99.999% of songwriters, performers, etc, see no significant increase in their financial situation due to their artistic work.
And in any case, most artists make more money by performing than by selling recordings. And you don't need copyright to make a living from performances. You just need a ticket price.
So they increases the margins by a lot, but pretend they didn't. That's dishonest on several levels. If they need to sell the laptop for $1025, then they need to advertise it for $1025, not advertise it for $825 and refuse to sell it for that amount. That's false advertising.
That said, the comparison to Elvis is completely ridiculous. Elvis at least performed his own songs and so his success was due in large part to his own ability to perform. While this guy may be a talented editor, the music can only ever be as good as his source material.
Not in this case. While much of his source material was good, he has also taken some completely crappy youtube performances and made them the basis of his song by cutting them up completely.
(I agree the comparison to Elvis is ridiculous, however. Elvis was a performer, this guy is an editor.)
Nickelback recycles their songs. Several years ago someone mathematically picked apart their songs and showed they are all the same.
There's lots of bands that only really have one song with rewritten lyrics each time. Nickelback is hardly the worst offender.
(I have no problem with Nickelback. It's nice, average middle of the road poprock. Not something I'd ever spend money on, but it doesn't give me homicidal urgest either, which isn't too bad considering some of the stuff out there.)
why is it that the slashdot hordes makes excuses when google does the same thing microsoft did as it clawed its way to power by betraying its business partners?
Like what exactly? Microsoft has broken laws time and time again in order to build a monopoly. Remember how they forced PC builders to only sell PCs with MS DOS (and later Windows)? Remember how many times they've been involved in anti-trust cases? How many competing business they bought to kill them, or simply drove out of business? How much crap they keep forcing on us?
Google, on the other hand, provides a very good free service, gives lots of innovative software away for free, sponsors lots of Open Source development, and all of it voluntary without them demanding anything in return.
Well, except for our information. Privacy is pretty much dead because of Google, and then there's the Chinese censorship thing.
Google is by no means the shining saintly company that it pretends to once have been, but it's nowhere near the same league as Microsoft as far as evil is concerned. And they certainly don't have any moral obligation to keep giving tons of money to Mozilla.
(I can't believe you've been modded +3 interesting.)
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
Oh really? That's good to hear, as all the horror stories I'm hearing are involving the Muslim immigrants.
Size isn't everything. Germans and Indonesians are the biggest ethnic minorities in Netherland, but you hardly notice them.
The biggest problems don't come from recent immigrants, but from the kids and grandkids of the immigrants of the '70s. They've been Dutch since birth, have rarely been to the country of their parents, yet they don't feel accepted and don't see any future for themselves. So they make trouble or explore fundamentalism, which makes them even less accepted. It's a vicious cycle.
The Indians and Chinese are great; they're generally friendly, don't cause any problems, don't commit any crimes, don't follow insane religions, and actually contribute to society and to the economy with their high-paying, high-value jobs.
Indians are great and often adapt well. Chinese hardly adapt at all. They form their own mini societies, and some don't even learn the local language, but they do take care of their kids and they have a tight social structure that deals with any problems.
Maybe the problem is that Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were poorer and lower educated than other groups of immigrants, and they didn't bring a lot of functional social structure with them. Iranian immigrants are completely different, for example. They're often refugees, well educated, and have a tendency towards atheism. They integrate well with Dutch society, but badly with Turks and Moroccans.
So is Europe having the same problem as the US, where the native children don't have any interest in science and engineering, and all think they're going to become movie stars or sports stars?
Managers, football players and singers (we have three simultaneous Idol/Popstar shows on TV at the moment). Why managers? Because they get paid more than engineers. So people with brains become managers, and we end up with a surplus of managers and a shortage of engineers.
While at work, the breasts get full. This discourages milk production. For many women, the end result is that they have to switch to fake milk.
Depending on the breast of course, a pump doesn't even work very well. It hurts too.
Pumps work fine. Plenty of women use them. My sister got just as high from using a pump as from breatfeeding directly.
The number is a rough estimate by some who work in the field.
A rough estimate of what exactly? How do you quantify something like that?
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
I remember a study that showed women without children were slightly happier than women with children, but a follow-up study showed that women who had children at a later age were happier than women without children, who in turn were happier than women who had children at a young age.
It's always more complicated than you think.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things.
It helps, though. We're expecting our first kid in a couple of weeks, and I just got a big lego set for my birthday from my wife. After not having bought any lego for 20 years.
Why is it that European countries allow so many immigrants from those areas anyway?
Various reasons, but mostly for extra labour. We had too much work and too few workers in the '70s, and apparently it was the other way around in Turkey and northern Africa.
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Only if you ignore immigration. We've got plenty of that to make up for the low birth rates.
That's the unfortunatel upside of people being unhappy where they live: other countries can use that to supplement their population.
I kinda agreed about Josh when I read the article... then I read some of this guys other stuff, about Tyler, and a few of his other articles.
Basically it boils down to he wants cogs in a machine at any cost.
I also read the Tyler article, and that's not quite what happened there. He didn't want Tyler to be a cog, he wanted him to be a mentor, a guru perhaps. Lift the others up instead of putting them down, which is what Tyler had been doing before.
A genius programmer who can't work with others isn't anywhere near as valuable as one who can.
These myths of one coder being so valuable that he/she can't be replaced are just untrue.
If the one coder is really that good, and the others are crap, then those myths can definitely be true. A single quality programmer who writes maintainable code and shares his knowledge can keep an entire team on track. Someone like that would be worth his weight in gold. Josh from the article doesn't really sound all that good, however.
Exactly. The poster would be outsourced. Josh would be left as the head of research or something. Regardless... this whole topic is moot because now it is nothing but the anti-Joshs posting against the Joshs. Unfortunately their are a lot more of anti-Josh.
Why would you admire an anti-social asshole who only pretends he's a good programmer? I admire quirky genius programmers, but Josh doesn't sound like one of them.
"Josh" is the kind of guy that develops Googles, Yahoo, etc.
No he isn't. Well, I don't know about Yahoo, but Google invests in smart, maintainable code. Josh writes convoluted code that nobody else can maintain, and he's unable to work with others. You can't build a company out of that.
And there are far better coders out there who write self-documenting code that the other coders, the "average" ones, are able to maintain and fix.
You stop being a quirky genius soon as you declare yourself as one. Since then you're just a wannabe poser.
See that's why I'm NOT a quirky genius.
Exactly. There's nothing cool about trying to be a quirky genius. But if you happen to be a quirky genius, it's definitely cool to try to be a team player. That's what makes your genius valuable.
A genius asshole is just another asshole.
Why do people feel the need to control quirky geniuses who are doing nothing wrong? Seriously, there's nothing in this example that's out of the ordinary, except for the women's t-shirts. That's what you get for having a casual work place. My thought would be that if the author has such a problem with this guy, maybe he needs to be skilled enough to replace him.
The T-shirts in the example are not the problem (though the hygiene might be). The problem is that he claims his code works and is self-documenting, when in fact it doesn't work the way the customer wants, and other programmers (the chief engineer at least) are unable to read his code.
That's the problem. That and his anti-social attitude of calling them names instead of helping them to fix his incomprehensible code.
Outside the wire, US forces have loaded weapons, ballistic vests, and helmets. Period.
Interestingly, I think Dutch forces on patrol in Iraq actually wore soft hats. Not sure about the vests, but they tried hard to be non-threatening and appreciated by the locals.
I've got a better example for you. In the early years of WW2, Russia had an abundance of soldiers, but a shortage of weapons. So infantry attacks would sometimes happen in two waves: the first with weapons, and the second with instructions to pick up the weapons of their fallen brothers from the first wave.
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not)
Historical, yes. Emotional, no doubt. But religious? No. Marriage is older than many modern religions, and people of different religions as well as non-religious people marry. It's not surprising that many religious people want to get their religion involved in their marriage (though not all do), but marriage itself is not religious.
Not from a civil point of view, anyway. It may be religious from some religious points of view, but anything can be religious from a religious point of view. And religious points of view can differ quite a lot.
But to say we have a "Democracy" as a government is in fact a wholesale distortion. The "people" have very little effect on the national level.
Even though the US is a lousy democracy without proportional representation, it's still a democracy. Just not a great one.
And anyway, you're the one who started this conversation talking about "counter[ing] a tyranny of the majority." The modification required to do that -- electing representatives rather than voting on all issues directly -- is exactly the difference that makes it a republic.
No. What makes a country a republic is not having a monarch. Tyranny or lack there of has nothing to do with it.
The fact that it's a democratic republic doesn't stop it from being a republic.
Exactly: it's both.
I get a bit tired of the "republic is not democracy" crowd. They're orthogonal, and can go quite well together.
"Guten Tag, haben sie Pfannkuchen?"
To me as a Dutchman, that sounds like you're asking for pancakes rather than jelly donuts.
False. Now, if you said "At least today, with protection of songwriter's creations, a few lucky lottery winners can live better lifestyles" then you would be spot on because even today 99.999% of songwriters, performers, etc, see no significant increase in their financial situation due to their artistic work.
And in any case, most artists make more money by performing than by selling recordings. And you don't need copyright to make a living from performances. You just need a ticket price.
>>>When did it become a requirement that we should coddle artistic people? They can get a day job just like everyone else.
In which case they won't have time to make the music, books, videos that we love. Lousy solution.
People have been making music, books and videos since time immemorial. Well, maybe not videos, but certainly music.
In fact, did kutiman get paid for making these videos? He still managed to find time to make them.
So they increases the margins by a lot, but pretend they didn't. That's dishonest on several levels. If they need to sell the laptop for $1025, then they need to advertise it for $1025, not advertise it for $825 and refuse to sell it for that amount. That's false advertising.
That said, the comparison to Elvis is completely ridiculous. Elvis at least performed his own songs and so his success was due in large part to his own ability to perform. While this guy may be a talented editor, the music can only ever be as good as his source material.
Not in this case. While much of his source material was good, he has also taken some completely crappy youtube performances and made them the basis of his song by cutting them up completely.
(I agree the comparison to Elvis is ridiculous, however. Elvis was a performer, this guy is an editor.)
Nickelback recycles their songs. Several years ago someone mathematically picked apart their songs and showed they are all the same.
There's lots of bands that only really have one song with rewritten lyrics each time. Nickelback is hardly the worst offender.
(I have no problem with Nickelback. It's nice, average middle of the road poprock. Not something I'd ever spend money on, but it doesn't give me homicidal urgest either, which isn't too bad considering some of the stuff out there.)
why is it that the slashdot hordes makes excuses when google does the same thing microsoft did as it clawed its way to power by betraying its business partners?
Like what exactly? Microsoft has broken laws time and time again in order to build a monopoly. Remember how they forced PC builders to only sell PCs with MS DOS (and later Windows)? Remember how many times they've been involved in anti-trust cases? How many competing business they bought to kill them, or simply drove out of business? How much crap they keep forcing on us?
Google, on the other hand, provides a very good free service, gives lots of innovative software away for free, sponsors lots of Open Source development, and all of it voluntary without them demanding anything in return.
Well, except for our information. Privacy is pretty much dead because of Google, and then there's the Chinese censorship thing.
Google is by no means the shining saintly company that it pretends to once have been, but it's nowhere near the same league as Microsoft as far as evil is concerned. And they certainly don't have any moral obligation to keep giving tons of money to Mozilla.
(I can't believe you've been modded +3 interesting.)