More important: a Foosball table
Been in several non-startup but middle sized tech companies and ALL of them made a big point about having one. No one ever used them, but they had to have it, because that's what made Google so rich, wasn't it?
I was referring to variety between small street kitchens and not within the same.
TGI Fridays is boring and not variety as the menu will be the same in every location. (and to be honest: one category like "disgusting and microwaved" would be enough)
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
My guess: They were the only ones able to keep the old systems running while they were phased out and taking them away from that for some training would have crashed some mission critical, but legacy production systems.
Look, it's very unlikely that senior admin staff has not bothered following the evolution of the IT hardware of its own company. Because, how can you actually do your job if it does not happen?
Well I can see how this could happen: You only have that much time for self training. And either you use it to deepen your knowledge in an existing technology or learn technology hype of the day from scratch.
Would it really be more difficult to ask them on how and which training they need to be useful? Do they want to re-image machines until they're ready to retire? Or would they like to make some final impact, leaving a legacy by bringing something new to the company?
And do you need someone to re-image hard drives?
If we're talking about a few years left - why not offer some attractive part-time retirement? You will still have someone ready to do work while whatever tech they know is not completly phased out yet, but need to pay less and less while you're finally phasing it out over the next few years.
In some cultures, eating out is so common that apartments often have no kitchen.
But usually in those cultures even the smallest street kitchens found on every corner can provide better quality and more variety than the run-of-the-mill american chain restaurant that microwaves the same slop from coast to coast.
(and you should probably schedule a week to get your body used to both local spices and local microbiological environment found in those cultures...)
Instead people bought more socks than ever before because people had long wanted more socks than were capable of being produced. Just like hundreds of years ago with socks, what happens when you increase productivity and you can create more of something, consumptions tends to increase because people wanted more, just not at the previous price. People will keep on wanting more shit even as we find ways of making it ever more quickly and at lower costs and probably will until we find some way to alter our brain chemistry.
True for socks, but sad but true for fast Food restaurants. Indeed, People had long wanted to stuff themselves with even more junk food at McDonalds that they have been able to so far.
And heres a preview of what you can expect from this so-called "hate speech" law:
A German politician has been sued for "racial incitement".
What did he do? At a city council meeting, he read, out loud, 30 newspaper headlines from different newspapers, on crimes by Muslims and migrants.
Let me add a bit of context... first of all: anyone can sue anybody for anything. In that information is very little said if anyone actually did something or if it was forbidden to begin with.
Then, the two politicians involved were of AfD and Die Linke parties which, oversimplified, is as close to nazi and communist party as you can get while still staying within the constitution. So neither the one guys provocations nor the other guys shouts for censorship were not on par what you would expect from them.
And most important: none of this had to do with any existing, upcoming, or proposed laws.
For that use case, a plain old GPS tracker would be much cheaper. The main difference that speaks for integration is the use as a large powerbank and that calls for battery capacity and we're back at the Li-Ion
I'd like to see the phrase "sexual assault" go away and be replaced with a description of what *actually happened*. It's too easy to fit a multitude of different behaviours into a neat little box like "sexual assault" and defame somebody with it.
Especially if that box is neither neat nor little. Too much things get mixed here. When you read a report of groping you can't "metoo" with a "yes and that one guy looked at me and I didn't like it." Oh my - did he go further and even said "Hi!"? What a pig!
I usually lobby for the "Georeg Clooney Test": It is NOT sexual harassment if it would be OK if George Clooney did it.
Well that is right, but the opposite is true also. Being the only guy in an all female team isn't any better either. It's only without HR and legal involved. A ratio of 1:4 isn't diversity, it's Yoko Ono and the Beatles.
But contrary to your above claim, adding more women doesn't make it worse, but you have to add enough to be at least somewhere in the general area of 50:50. (Threshold probably being somewhere in the 30:70 area)
There is a 99.9% chance that your "web app" was either nothing more than a glorified bookmark that registered an icon in your start menu and did nothing more than redirecting to a regular website. If you actually used javascript running locally, local storage, or other webapp features, that was basically only thenew fancy HTML5 stuff to begin with and that won't go away either, You mostly have to do a boilerplate update.
Because the Spaceballs "merchandising" scene always had a ring of truth to it. It's not hard to see how much toy sales drove many of these franchises. From pretty much anything Disney, to Star Wars, to Transformers.
And now, 30 years after Spaceballs, "Star Wars" and "Disney" are one. Now that's what I call visionary.
Also, I love the name of Musk's company. I LOL'd the first time I found out about The Boring Company.
I still hold to my claim that he only founded it for the sake of that pun.
But stars range from yellow dwarfs to neutron stars and planets from small balls of rubble to gas giants. The bandwidth of planets is so large, that we have been discussing for decades if Pluto is one at all!
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe, it may be quite different. Or it may not, because our ACGT-version just works and is therefor widely used.
To stop this before this gets nasty: Please specify if you're talking about the lactose that is supposed to be in milk or loads of added sugar because people think choclate "milk" is still healthy.
But hey! It is working, easy to explain to anyone brighter than a box of darkness and most important: it's a really cool thing to show visitors on a tour through the office.
Come on, how many tech companies would show guests actual production hardware and even if, how often would it be some dull boxes in a Datacenter
I thought they were only flagged to become unaccessible. Deleting them may be destruction of evidence in case some gouvernment agency wants to screw with you ("you" as in the file hosting company who probably needs that army of lawyers for exactly such problems)
Likewise, not scanning them regularly still might open your company to charges of "posession"
My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building.
Right, but a person moving through their life is not the same as a bowling ball. Bowling balls, like anything with much mass but without a brain, are highly deterministic.
Good point. But in my experience, an unsettling amount of people behave rather like bowling balls than like something with a brain.
But joking aside, masses of people are deterministic enough to predict things like prices based on supply and demand, insurance rates based on past mortality rates and so on.
And even for the stuff that can't be predicted as there has never been anything like it before, we can make educated guesses instead of blind guesses. To predict the effects of the yet unknown situation X, we could either start from scratch, or we look what happend in a similar situation X'. Then we look into the diffferences between X and X' and only need to guess about the effects of Delta-X, the differences.
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your post as I agree with you there. Kurzweil did not take into account the differences between past and current technological "revolutions".
I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future.
It's called learning.
If the future is different from the past, then the lessons of the past will not necessarily apply to the future. This is not a complicated concept, but it seems to have escaped both you and Ray.
With no information about future events, we could either revert to crystal balls, tarot decks or plain guessing, or we could check our past for similar events and assume that similar causes will have similar effects.
The core of the argument against the magical thinking idea that low-skilled workers will be able to migrated into high-skilled jobs is that it actually often hasn't happened in the past. New jobs are created, and young people are hired into them, while older people are considered undesirable and incapable of grasping new technology.
Your argument is also a dumb one because robotics and AI are already destroying more jobs than they are creating. Forget about the past, all you have to do to know this is stupid is look at the present.
That wasn't the point of my post. In fact, that's exactly the problem I'm seeing to in Kurzweil's logic and that I highlighted in a different post here. In fact, I didn't say anything about the actual points of the article as I already did that in another point.
My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building. We can even predict impact time, force and so on. And we can do that because people took observations from the past and derived the underlying rules. Like sunrise: it happend every day so far in the past, that does in no way guarantee that it will happen again, but makes it quite unlikely for anything to happen in a much different way. "Similar condtions will lead to similar results" is no guarantee, but for non-complex systems it's a guidepost.
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More important: a Foosball table
Been in several non-startup but middle sized tech companies and ALL of them made a big point about having one. No one ever used them, but they had to have it, because that's what made Google so rich, wasn't it?
So, while it would likely improve this quarter's earnings report to get rid of them, it would have an impact down the line.
Wanna take a guess on the usual priorities for management?
I was referring to variety between small street kitchens and not within the same.
TGI Fridays is boring and not variety as the menu will be the same in every location. (and to be honest: one category like "disgusting and microwaved" would be enough)
Yes. Some things in the initial question don't add up.
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
My guess: They were the only ones able to keep the old systems running while they were phased out and taking them away from that for some training would have crashed some mission critical, but legacy production systems.
Look, it's very unlikely that senior admin staff has not bothered following the evolution of the IT hardware of its own company. Because, how can you actually do your job if it does not happen?
Well I can see how this could happen: You only have that much time for self training. And either you use it to deepen your knowledge in an existing technology or learn technology hype of the day from scratch.
Would it really be more difficult to ask them on how and which training they need to be useful? Do they want to re-image machines until they're ready to retire? Or would they like to make some final impact, leaving a legacy by bringing something new to the company?
And do you need someone to re-image hard drives?
If we're talking about a few years left - why not offer some attractive part-time retirement? You will still have someone ready to do work while whatever tech they know is not completly phased out yet, but need to pay less and less while you're finally phasing it out over the next few years.
In some cultures, eating out is so common that apartments often have no kitchen.
But usually in those cultures even the smallest street kitchens found on every corner can provide better quality and more variety than the run-of-the-mill american chain restaurant that microwaves the same slop from coast to coast.
(and you should probably schedule a week to get your body used to both local spices and local microbiological environment found in those cultures...)
Instead people bought more socks than ever before because people had long wanted more socks than were capable of being produced. Just like hundreds of years ago with socks, what happens when you increase productivity and you can create more of something, consumptions tends to increase because people wanted more, just not at the previous price. People will keep on wanting more shit even as we find ways of making it ever more quickly and at lower costs and probably will until we find some way to alter our brain chemistry.
True for socks, but sad but true for fast Food restaurants. Indeed, People had long wanted to stuff themselves with even more junk food at McDonalds that they have been able to so far.
And heres a preview of what you can expect from this so-called "hate speech" law:
A German politician has been sued for "racial incitement".
What did he do? At a city council meeting, he read, out loud, 30 newspaper headlines from different newspapers, on crimes by Muslims and migrants.
Let me add a bit of context... first of all: anyone can sue anybody for anything. In that information is very little said if anyone actually did something or if it was forbidden to begin with.
Then, the two politicians involved were of AfD and Die Linke parties which, oversimplified, is as close to nazi and communist party as you can get while still staying within the constitution. So neither the one guys provocations nor the other guys shouts for censorship were not on par what you would expect from them.
And most important: none of this had to do with any existing, upcoming, or proposed laws.
For that use case, a plain old GPS tracker would be much cheaper. The main difference that speaks for integration is the use as a large powerbank and that calls for battery capacity and we're back at the Li-Ion
I'd like to see the phrase "sexual assault" go away and be replaced with a description of what *actually happened*. It's too easy to fit a multitude of different behaviours into a neat little box like "sexual assault" and defame somebody with it.
Especially if that box is neither neat nor little. Too much things get mixed here. When you read a report of groping you can't "metoo" with a "yes and that one guy looked at me and I didn't like it." Oh my - did he go further and even said "Hi!"? What a pig!
I usually lobby for the "Georeg Clooney Test": It is NOT sexual harassment if it would be OK if George Clooney did it.
Well that is right, but the opposite is true also. Being the only guy in an all female team isn't any better either. It's only without HR and legal involved. A ratio of 1:4 isn't diversity, it's Yoko Ono and the Beatles.
But contrary to your above claim, adding more women doesn't make it worse, but you have to add enough to be at least somewhere in the general area of 50:50. (Threshold probably being somewhere in the 30:70 area)
There is a 99.9% chance that your "web app" was either nothing more than a glorified bookmark that registered an icon in your start menu and did nothing more than redirecting to a regular website. If you actually used javascript running locally, local storage, or other webapp features, that was basically only thenew fancy HTML5 stuff to begin with and that won't go away either, You mostly have to do a boilerplate update.
Because the Spaceballs "merchandising" scene always had a ring of truth to it. It's not hard to see how much toy sales drove many of these franchises. From pretty much anything Disney, to Star Wars, to Transformers.
And now, 30 years after Spaceballs, "Star Wars" and "Disney" are one. Now that's what I call visionary.
Also, I love the name of Musk's company. I LOL'd the first time I found out about The Boring Company.
I still hold to my claim that he only founded it for the sake of that pun.
But stars range from yellow dwarfs to neutron stars and planets from small balls of rubble to gas giants. The bandwidth of planets is so large, that we have been discussing for decades if Pluto is one at all!
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe, it may be quite different. Or it may not, because our ACGT-version just works and is therefor widely used.
Which is why pure apple juice isn't good as a regular drink either!
To stop this before this gets nasty: Please specify if you're talking about the lactose that is supposed to be in milk or loads of added sugar because people think choclate "milk" is still healthy.
If licences are ignored anyway - where is the problem specific to stock music? If I'm ignoring licences, I could ignore any music licence.
But ON a shelf. Not OFF the shelf.
But hey! It is working, easy to explain to anyone brighter than a box of darkness and most important: it's a really cool thing to show visitors on a tour through the office.
Come on, how many tech companies would show guests actual production hardware and even if, how often would it be some dull boxes in a Datacenter
I thought they were only flagged to become unaccessible. Deleting them may be destruction of evidence in case some gouvernment agency wants to screw with you ("you" as in the file hosting company who probably needs that army of lawyers for exactly such problems)
Likewise, not scanning them regularly still might open your company to charges of "posession"
Have a company NOT scanning documents on their servers for malware and childporn and you're open for all kinf of lawsuits, both criminal and civil.
I'm, not exactly happy with my documents being scanned, but if I was a lawyer in Google's compliance department, it would still be in place.
At least that bug showed that it's only an automated scanner and not someone actually reading through them.
Furthermore, did this actually happen in GSuite too or only the free version?
When they are large enough to feature the typical big red switch of the IBM PC area.
My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building.
Right, but a person moving through their life is not the same as a bowling ball. Bowling balls, like anything with much mass but without a brain, are highly deterministic.
Good point. But in my experience, an unsettling amount of people behave rather like bowling balls than like something with a brain.
But joking aside, masses of people are deterministic enough to predict things like prices based on supply and demand, insurance rates based on past mortality rates and so on.
And even for the stuff that can't be predicted as there has never been anything like it before, we can make educated guesses instead of blind guesses. To predict the effects of the yet unknown situation X, we could either start from scratch, or we look what happend in a similar situation X'. Then we look into the diffferences between X and X' and only need to guess about the effects of Delta-X, the differences.
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your post as I agree with you there. Kurzweil did not take into account the differences between past and current technological "revolutions".
I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future.
It's called learning.
If the future is different from the past, then the lessons of the past will not necessarily apply to the future. This is not a complicated concept, but it seems to have escaped both you and Ray.
With no information about future events, we could either revert to crystal balls, tarot decks or plain guessing, or we could check our past for similar events and assume that similar causes will have similar effects.
The core of the argument against the magical thinking idea that low-skilled workers will be able to migrated into high-skilled jobs is that it actually often hasn't happened in the past. New jobs are created, and young people are hired into them, while older people are considered undesirable and incapable of grasping new technology.
Your argument is also a dumb one because robotics and AI are already destroying more jobs than they are creating. Forget about the past, all you have to do to know this is stupid is look at the present.
That wasn't the point of my post. In fact, that's exactly the problem I'm seeing to in Kurzweil's logic and that I highlighted in a different post here. In fact, I didn't say anything about the actual points of the article as I already did that in another point.
My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building. We can even predict impact time, force and so on. And we can do that because people took observations from the past and derived the underlying rules. Like sunrise: it happend every day so far in the past, that does in no way guarantee that it will happen again, but makes it quite unlikely for anything to happen in a much different way. "Similar condtions will lead to similar results" is no guarantee, but for non-complex systems it's a guidepost.