No, they are paying you because they want your time and labor.
And you're not reading.
You: they're doing X. Me: they're doing X for reason Y You: NO THEY ARE DOING X
Yes we both agree they are trading money for labour. They are doing that because your labour generates more wealth than the money they are paying for it. If they didn't they could turn a greater profit by NOT paying for your time.
Many small businesses in the world create wealth without any employees at all.
Only in the legal sense of the word "employee", which is irrelevant outside of a semantic argument. In the real world the sole owner generates wealth by doing stuff then sells that for money. In the process that person pays themselves from the profits.
Either way their work generates the wealth.
Without creating a company and without trading your time and labor with an employer for money, how much money does your time and labor generate?
That's a silly question: at the point I started a company I did so because a company provides limited liability protecton, separation of financials, VAT registration and a few other legal and administrative niceities.
But I'm the one that did all the work. My actions generated the wealth. The company just sat there being an administrative entity. When I stopped doing the work, the company generated no wealth.
Companies do not DO anything. Only people do things.
If you're just showing up for a McJob, you're not producing wealth and you're not paid to produce wealth.
Bullshit! If you weren't producing wealth then why would the corporation pay you to show up.
The corporation is generating wealth and they're trading a portion of that wealth with you for your time and labor.
Bullshit! The corporation is not trading wealth for your time out of the badness of their hearts. They are paying you because you are generating more wealth for them than they are paying you.
Its rare everywhere. Just as rare in school as outside of it.
I said academia, not "school".
It's common in academia because frankly once it reaches postdoc level the people that can't take constructive criticism have generally left. There's a really heavy filter in favour of those that can, since it's generally a one way trip out and a brutally competitive selection process ot stay in.
Sometimes more because often educators have no or limited real world experience.
First, education is as much part of the real world as everything else. Second, I wasn't talking about educators.
I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
I don't really follow your point. The EM drive didn't follow real physics. With far future advanced engineering it'd still be a perpetual motion machine.
Oh, you mean like estimating each digit of the dividend?
Only the first few.
You just gave away that you never really did understand the division algorithm.
The? You are aware there's more than one, right?
You also seem to be confused about the difference between learning and memorizing.
The meaning of division is distinct from any particular algorithm used to calculate the digits of a particular example. For actual understanding the former is more important than the latter. In education we seem to place a large emphasis on the latter.
your attitude towards intellectual competency is disconcerting to say the least.
Yeah I want people to understand stuff rather than just do rote memorisation of opaque algorithms. I can see how that would be disconcerting to you as you clearly favour rote memorisation.
Oh yeah? You really think that's how venture capital and angel investing works? I seriously have no idea where you are getting this information.
Venture capital usually goes "friends and family", "angel funding", "series A" and so on. You can skip any stages, but it sure helps to have a nice fat wad for stage 1.
Yeah you do. You start off with $2 million (1970s dollars). You then show you were able to use money to make money. That's why being lucky and having a fat wad of cash from your parents is important.
I've only pointed out that you shouldn't be as confused
Yeah that's coz you're thick and didn't read my post.
I'm prepared to give a fair bit, but when you angrily agree then double down on your anger, it gets pretty tedious.
Difficult to measure doesn't mean it isn't useful or practical.
Straw man. I made no such claim.
You probably can't define exactly what constitutes "quality" either, but I still bet you use it as a factor when deciding what to purchase.
Quality like merit is context dependent.
So why are you so hung up about using that as the basis for hiring or firing decisions?
Oh do shut up. We both know I made no such claim. Would you like to make other wild-ass claims about things I didn't actually say?
You might argue that a person merely got lucky as the article does,
To get super rich? Yes. That's down to a mixture of factors including a huge amount of luck.
Similarly, people who ignore anything but technical skills will be limited
Well, thanks for repeatedly explaining the point I made in my original post. I mean Im not sure I really got it even though I wrote it, but having you mindlessly parrot it back to me like some grand insight sure did help.
A meritocracy ensures that over a long enough period of time, good behavior is
Oh so now it's good behaviour not value generation. Yep! So well defined and obvious that even you can't seem to keep track of it.
Maybe you think it takes too long for people to get their just deserts,
Yes, because karma is not actually a thing.
but the average person can't run around being a prick all day without it catching up to them.
You haven't spent very long on earth have you?
Based on your signature my only real guess is that meritocracy is a dirty word for you
My sig points to a time when someone got downmodded and called an "SJW" for posting a verifiable fact. Apparently that's fine with you. And apparently that makes you think that I think that "meritocracy" is a dirty word.
I mean you're free to think whatever you like, no matter how counterfactual.
If you know how to use money to make more, people will be falling over themselves to give you capital.
How do you demonstrate that you can do more than talk a good game?
Getting money isn't a problem in the real world.
I counter your assertion with one of the opposite.
That's conventional wisdom, right? "Gotta work ten hour days at your startup to make it a success." Interestingly it's not true, some startups succeed without overworking themselves.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
I love how you start with smug condesention then angrily agree with pretty much everything I wrote without even realising it.
Perhaps you're new here or have missed many many threads on "codes of conduct" and etc that come up here on a regular basis. There are an awful lot of people here who consider meritocracy to be only about techincal skills and nothing else.
Apparently a lot of people have a hard job defining merit. And the dictionary definition doesn't really help because it's a waffly way of saying merit is stuff that has [synonyms of merit], which doesnt really narrow anything down at all.
Gates didn't get rich because of his programming skills, he got rich because of his business skills
Its a mix: he happened to need both to capitalise on that opportunity. Once the money started coming in its clear which skillset took the front seat. Its the business skill that took him from selling a successful product to mega rich.
and he got lucky, but his business skills were good enough he would have gotten rich even without the IBM mistakes. Just not as rich
And he got lucky in being born into a rich family. Its astonishingly hard to get rich without a hefty dose of working capital: its glibly said that its easier to make two million dollars from one million than two dollars from one.
Generally you need to be smart, hard working and lucky to strike it rich.
On the other hand there are a lot of people here who fetishise a narrow view on technical skills to the point where they believe a "true" metriocracy is concerned only with that, which is why my post is getting downmods.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
The thing is very very few careers and jobs are solo ones. Engineering in particular is a team sport. Even the very best 10x engineers cant build the entire system all by themselves; there are too many niche areas of expertise and just too much stuff to get done.
The thing is once you are in a job with other people, merit isnt just about *technical* merit. Metit is about your ability broadly speaking to generate value for the company you work at.
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from. Bad working environments tend to concentrate bad people because the good people cycle out faster and the bad people stay.
We have all (well probably many of us) been in or seen situations where that's happened. Even something as neutral as "attrition" where the budget is cut and they stop hiring new people (even replacements) and rely on natural cycling to redcue the workforce. As the project tems get strained the working environment gets worse until the good people start to leave.
Well, toxic individuals are part of it. A great programmer who causes other pretty good programmers to leave is not a net asset. Unless that programmer can do everything (which we know isnt the case), the company would be better off with someone with les sharp techincal skills who doesn't cause all the other techincally skilled people to leave.
And the thing is good people do leave. You spend a lot of your life at work. You've only got one life and there's a ton of interesting stuff to do in it, so why waste any time on arseholes?
And that is the point where merit becomes a whole load more than "can code well" and so on. Engineering is a team sport and teams do not work well with lone wolves no matter how skilled.
Do you have anything to add other than "durrr gubbmint baaaad *drool*"?
Seriously that insight and thought-free attitude is nothing but deeply tedious. If you think "spending other peoples money" is bad, then why aren't you living in the government-free paradise of the Congo?
I also love the irony of such a complaint made on the web on the internet, two things developed with government money.
Government simply does not attract the best and brightest most of the time.
I think that qualifies as "not even wrong". I mean its technically right (which is the best kind of right) but theres a whole lot of implied context which is way off base.
I mean sure the government doesn't attract the best and the brightest most of the time, but neither does anyone else. Anyone who thinks business is better in this regard has clearly never worked for a company. Or dealt with a company in any capacity.
No problem, there are plenty of people who will volunteer to do it for free. I would and of course I would be tempted to simply upload it to wikileaks. I mean there is the solution right there, why don't they take it.
This is precisely why they don't use the volunteers who would do it for free. The whole point was responsible journalism.
There's a lot of sensitive information in there for good reasons. Not everything secret is bad and governments have prefectly good, utterly reasonable reasons for keeping some things secret. Snowden wanted to reveal the illegal stuff (which should not have been secret) without compromosing things that should have been kept secret, like operative identities, etc.
Snowden knew he didn't have the resources to cover it all himself, so rather than go for a Manning style public infodump, he went to a responsible outlet. Wikileaks is the complete antithesis of that.
Conservatives hate Nazis and other social democrats
You need to stop reading the internet and read some actual history books. Nazis are not socialist[*] and they're not democratic. Calling them social democrats makes you look very very foolish.
[*] If you believe that Nazis are socialists because they have "socialist" in the name then I assume you also believe that Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is indeed a democracy.
But if you're city folk, and will rarely use it, go for the Tesla SUV.
Quite. The closest that about 99% of city SUVs get to going off-road is running over the flowerbed in the private school carpark. City SUVs are stupid vehicles. They're not designed to go off-road. They're designed to look macho to people whoss ego is too fragile to drive a minivan.
Think of it as introduction to algorithms if you must.
If it was taught lke that, then sure. But it isn't. As we can see from your reply a vast amount of unnecessary weight is put on memorising this particular algorithm.
It's basic literacy,
No it isnt. Being able to do high precision calculations on paper just isnt that much of a useful skill to 99.99% of the population. Its not lke writing where not being able to do it hampers someone a lot. Its easy to lookup/figure out, but Ive simply never needed or used it enough to memorise it. It's just not that important.
Being able to rapidly make calculations to a couple of significant figures is a MUCH more useful skill and something I do a lot. People who can't do often get in a pickle since they cant sanity check their automated calculations.
But long division? Meh.
I would not want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who couldn't do long division.
I dont see why it matters. I wouldnt want to go over a bridge designed by an engineer who couldn't do rapid order of magnitude estimates.
It is useful because doing long division helps you to actually understand how division works.
No it doesn't. I'ts a pointless rote memorisation of a series of steps.
I never remembered it in school and yet I have had no problem understanding division. I was able to implement it just fine in asm on a CPU with no hardware instruction back in the day. I can figure it out or work it out on the very rare occasion I need it.
The main point, is most websites want to be done on the CHEAP.
Thats the fudamental point lots of people are missing here. Lots of people complaining about IDIOTS, but those "idiots" made the sound decision to go for a cheap website when they were small and spend the savings on growing the business. That's how they're now big enough to pay for the expensive whiners to get them out of a hole.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are paying you because they want your time and labor.
And you're not reading.
You: they're doing X.
Me: they're doing X for reason Y
You: NO THEY ARE DOING X
Yes we both agree they are trading money for labour. They are doing that because your labour generates more wealth than the money they are paying for it. If they didn't they could turn a greater profit by NOT paying for your time.
Many small businesses in the world create wealth without any employees at all.
Only in the legal sense of the word "employee", which is irrelevant outside of a semantic argument. In the real world the sole owner generates wealth by doing stuff then sells that for money. In the process that person pays themselves from the profits.
Either way their work generates the wealth.
Without creating a company and without trading your time and labor with an employer for money, how much money does your time and labor generate?
That's a silly question: at the point I started a company I did so because a company provides limited liability protecton, separation of financials, VAT registration and a few other legal and administrative niceities.
But I'm the one that did all the work. My actions generated the wealth. The company just sat there being an administrative entity. When I stopped doing the work, the company generated no wealth.
Companies do not DO anything. Only people do things.
If you're just showing up for a McJob, you're not producing wealth and you're not paid to produce wealth.
Bullshit! If you weren't producing wealth then why would the corporation pay you to show up.
The corporation is generating wealth and they're trading a portion of that wealth with you for your time and labor.
Bullshit! The corporation is not trading wealth for your time out of the badness of their hearts. They are paying you because you are generating more wealth for them than they are paying you.
Its rare everywhere. Just as rare in school as outside of it.
I said academia, not "school".
It's common in academia because frankly once it reaches postdoc level the people that can't take constructive criticism have generally left. There's a really heavy filter in favour of those that can, since it's generally a one way trip out and a brutally competitive selection process ot stay in.
Sometimes more because often educators have no or limited real world experience.
First, education is as much part of the real world as everything else. Second, I wasn't talking about educators.
I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
I don't really follow your point. The EM drive didn't follow real physics. With far future advanced engineering it'd still be a perpetual motion machine.
Oh, you mean like estimating each digit of the dividend?
Only the first few.
You just gave away that you never really did understand the division algorithm.
The? You are aware there's more than one, right?
You also seem to be confused about the difference between learning and memorizing.
The meaning of division is distinct from any particular algorithm used to calculate the digits of a particular example. For actual understanding the former is more important than the latter. In education we seem to place a large emphasis on the latter.
your attitude towards intellectual competency is disconcerting to say the least.
Yeah I want people to understand stuff rather than just do rote memorisation of opaque algorithms. I can see how that would be disconcerting to you as you clearly favour rote memorisation.
How do you feel about whiny mediocre programmers who get upset every time someone has to explain to them why their pet idea won't work?
Lord save me from those motherfuckers.
I've seen this far more often than "toxic" lead programmers.
Same, but no one fetishises them. Everyone hates their whiny incompetent arses. People try to justify the presence of the toxic competent ones though.
Receiving constructive criticism is a rare skill these days...BTW
Yep. Common inside academia, rare in business.
BTW, the 3 best engineers I've ever worked with, you would probably find toxic.
Why would I find them toxic? Do they give constructive criticism or are they arseholes about it?
I have thick skin (grew up working class) and knowledge...what you do have?
Are you inviting me to a willy measuring contest? I'll decline, thanks.
Oh yeah? You really think that's how venture capital and angel investing works? I seriously have no idea where you are getting this information.
Venture capital usually goes "friends and family", "angel funding", "series A" and so on. You can skip any stages, but it sure helps to have a nice fat wad for stage 1.
Like Bill Gates did.
WHICH IS THE ENTIRE POINT
You don't.
Yeah you do. You start off with $2 million (1970s dollars). You then show you were able to use money to make money. That's why being lucky and having a fat wad of cash from your parents is important.
I've only pointed out that you shouldn't be as confused
Yeah that's coz you're thick and didn't read my post.
I'm prepared to give a fair bit, but when you angrily agree then double down on your anger, it gets pretty tedious.
Difficult to measure doesn't mean it isn't useful or practical.
Straw man. I made no such claim.
You probably can't define exactly what constitutes "quality" either, but I still bet you use it as a factor when deciding what to purchase.
Quality like merit is context dependent.
So why are you so hung up about using that as the basis for hiring or firing decisions?
Oh do shut up. We both know I made no such claim. Would you like to make other wild-ass claims about things I didn't actually say?
You might argue that a person merely got lucky as the article does,
To get super rich? Yes. That's down to a mixture of factors including a huge amount of luck.
Similarly, people who ignore anything but technical skills will be limited
Well, thanks for repeatedly explaining the point I made in my original post. I mean Im not sure I really got it even though I wrote it, but having you mindlessly parrot it back to me like some grand insight sure did help.
A meritocracy ensures that over a long enough period of time, good behavior is
Oh so now it's good behaviour not value generation. Yep! So well defined and obvious that even you can't seem to keep track of it.
Maybe you think it takes too long for people to get their just deserts,
Yes, because karma is not actually a thing.
but the average person can't run around being a prick all day without it catching up to them.
You haven't spent very long on earth have you?
Based on your signature my only real guess is that meritocracy is a dirty word for you
My sig points to a time when someone got downmodded and called an "SJW" for posting a verifiable fact. Apparently that's fine with you. And apparently that makes you think that I think that "meritocracy" is a dirty word.
I mean you're free to think whatever you like, no matter how counterfactual.
If you know how to use money to make more, people will be falling over themselves to give you capital.
How do you demonstrate that you can do more than talk a good game?
Getting money isn't a problem in the real world.
I counter your assertion with one of the opposite.
That's conventional wisdom, right? "Gotta work ten hour days at your startup to make it a success." Interestingly it's not true, some startups succeed without overworking themselves.
I said hard working, not pathological.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
I love how you start with smug condesention then angrily agree with pretty much everything I wrote without even realising it.
Perhaps you're new here or have missed many many threads on "codes of conduct" and etc that come up here on a regular basis. There are an awful lot of people here who consider meritocracy to be only about techincal skills and nothing else.
Apparently a lot of people have a hard job defining merit. And the dictionary definition doesn't really help because it's a waffly way of saying merit is stuff that has [synonyms of merit], which doesnt really narrow anything down at all.
Gates didn't get rich because of his programming skills, he got rich because of his business skills
Its a mix: he happened to need both to capitalise on that opportunity. Once the money started coming in its clear which skillset took the front seat. Its the business skill that took him from selling a successful product to mega rich.
and he got lucky, but his business skills were good enough he would have gotten rich even without the IBM mistakes. Just not as rich
And he got lucky in being born into a rich family. Its astonishingly hard to get rich without a hefty dose of working capital: its glibly said that its easier to make two million dollars from one million than two dollars from one.
Generally you need to be smart, hard working and lucky to strike it rich.
On the other hand there are a lot of people here who fetishise a narrow view on technical skills to the point where they believe a "true" metriocracy is concerned only with that, which is why my post is getting downmods.
unless some other new technology like the EM drive were to be discovered
Speaking of fantasy physics....
The EM drive isnt a new piece of technology thats been discovered. It's a perpetual motion machine in disguise, i.e. complete and utter bunk.
Free speech used to have some protection in public space.
Your free speech is NOT infringed if listeners can more easily consult a third party to check if what you're saying is accurate.
Honestly the so-called defenders of free speech here do such a bad job that you're doing it more harm than good.
You have a right to speak. You certainly do not have the right to infringe others free speech so they can't call bullshit on you.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
The thing is very very few careers and jobs are solo ones. Engineering in particular is a team sport. Even the very best 10x engineers cant build the entire system all by themselves; there are too many niche areas of expertise and just too much stuff to get done.
The thing is once you are in a job with other people, merit isnt just about *technical* merit. Metit is about your ability broadly speaking to generate value for the company you work at.
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from. Bad working environments tend to concentrate bad people because the good people cycle out faster and the bad people stay.
We have all (well probably many of us) been in or seen situations where that's happened. Even something as neutral as "attrition" where the budget is cut and they stop hiring new people (even replacements) and rely on natural cycling to redcue the workforce. As the project tems get strained the working environment gets worse until the good people start to leave.
Well, toxic individuals are part of it. A great programmer who causes other pretty good programmers to leave is not a net asset. Unless that programmer can do everything (which we know isnt the case), the company would be better off with someone with les sharp techincal skills who doesn't cause all the other techincally skilled people to leave.
And the thing is good people do leave. You spend a lot of your life at work. You've only got one life and there's a ton of interesting stuff to do in it, so why waste any time on arseholes?
And that is the point where merit becomes a whole load more than "can code well" and so on. Engineering is a team sport and teams do not work well with lone wolves no matter how skilled.
I certainly won't dismiss Wikileaks as easily as you do. Their position is more radical
I'm not dismissing them, but I think it's clear that their sort of leaking is not the kind that Snowden's interested in.
Do you have anything to add other than "durrr gubbmint baaaad *drool*"?
Seriously that insight and thought-free attitude is nothing but deeply tedious. If you think "spending other peoples money" is bad, then why aren't you living in the government-free paradise of the Congo?
I also love the irony of such a complaint made on the web on the internet, two things developed with government money.
Government simply does not attract the best and brightest most of the time.
I think that qualifies as "not even wrong". I mean its technically right (which is the best kind of right) but theres a whole lot of implied context which is way off base.
I mean sure the government doesn't attract the best and the brightest most of the time, but neither does anyone else. Anyone who thinks business is better in this regard has clearly never worked for a company. Or dealt with a company in any capacity.
No problem, there are plenty of people who will volunteer to do it for free. I would and of course I would be tempted to simply upload it to wikileaks. I mean there is the solution right there, why don't they take it.
This is precisely why they don't use the volunteers who would do it for free. The whole point was responsible journalism.
There's a lot of sensitive information in there for good reasons. Not everything secret is bad and governments have prefectly good, utterly reasonable reasons for keeping some things secret. Snowden wanted to reveal the illegal stuff (which should not have been secret) without compromosing things that should have been kept secret, like operative identities, etc.
Snowden knew he didn't have the resources to cover it all himself, so rather than go for a Manning style public infodump, he went to a responsible outlet. Wikileaks is the complete antithesis of that.
Conservatives hate Nazis and other social democrats
You need to stop reading the internet and read some actual history books. Nazis are not socialist[*] and they're not democratic. Calling them social democrats makes you look very very foolish.
[*] If you believe that Nazis are socialists because they have "socialist" in the name then I assume you also believe that Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is indeed a democracy.
But if you're city folk, and will rarely use it, go for the Tesla SUV.
Quite. The closest that about 99% of city SUVs get to going off-road is running over the flowerbed in the private school carpark. City SUVs are stupid vehicles. They're not designed to go off-road. They're designed to look macho to people whoss ego is too fragile to drive a minivan.
Think of it as introduction to algorithms if you must.
If it was taught lke that, then sure. But it isn't. As we can see from your reply a vast amount of unnecessary weight is put on memorising this particular algorithm.
It's basic literacy,
No it isnt. Being able to do high precision calculations on paper just isnt that much of a useful skill to 99.99% of the population. Its not lke writing where not being able to do it hampers someone a lot. Its easy to lookup/figure out, but Ive simply never needed or used it enough to memorise it. It's just not that important.
Being able to rapidly make calculations to a couple of significant figures is a MUCH more useful skill and something I do a lot. People who can't do often get in a pickle since they cant sanity check their automated calculations.
But long division? Meh.
I would not want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who couldn't do long division.
I dont see why it matters. I wouldnt want to go over a bridge designed by an engineer who couldn't do rapid order of magnitude estimates.
It is useful because doing long division helps you to actually understand how division works.
No it doesn't. I'ts a pointless rote memorisation of a series of steps.
I never remembered it in school and yet I have had no problem understanding division. I was able to implement it just fine in asm on a CPU with no hardware instruction back in the day. I can figure it out or work it out on the very rare occasion I need it.
The main point, is most websites want to be done on the CHEAP.
Thats the fudamental point lots of people are missing here. Lots of people complaining about IDIOTS, but those "idiots" made the sound decision to go for a cheap website when they were small and spend the savings on growing the business. That's how they're now big enough to pay for the expensive whiners to get them out of a hole.
What EU nations can't control they tax.
What a curious idea that sovereign, democratic governments should be in control rather than corporations.