I used to work in Two Guys in NJ back in the 70s. Thieves actually walked out the door with a freakin' canoe. And they'd have gotten away with it, if they hadn't come back for the oars. Dumb shits.
I want to drive to Seattle and set fire to the ELF's office, plus any other ELF offices I pass along the way, because I think they need to be taught a lesson that losing millions of dollars of property HURTS. Eye-for-an-eye, "walk in your victim's shoes", and all that stuff.
You know what I learned from "team" projects in college? Just do the whole damned thing yourself if you want any shot at passing.
Obviously, when you are in a position of authority, you will know to not hire those people.
I have learned in my working life (I'm 51, and have always had a job since the age of 15) that one does not work in isolation, and the people who do best are people who surround themselves with competent and trusted colleagues: teams, essentially. The team can be: Program director, project manager A, project manager B, project A programmers 1, 2, and 3, project B programmers 1, 2, 3, QA staff 1, 2, 3, Office Admin. - about a dozen people. How did programmer B3 get on the team? Because programmer B1 knew him in university, and knows he does good work. QA dude #2 is there because lead QA 1 was hired by project manager A who was in a school play with QA 1 and knows what kind of a critical mind he has.
It goes on from there.
Your critique, while interesting, and certainly valuable, is far off the mark of the Real World. We are a social species and our social administration is always done by people working with people. You can be the lone programmer, but if you need your entry badge renewed, you better be nice to the Admin. You can be the lone programmer, but if you're a dick, you will go from one project to another, and will be consistently passed over by the better connected and more socially adept programmers.
THAT is the real world - it is not one of individuals - it is one of societies of individuals. With humans, it is not the individual who is fittest, but the group that is fittest...
And these groups form at a young age and continue through life. Young people should nurture these relationships and develop tight social networks. It can mean the difference between a daily grind and a worthwhile vocation.
It's the friendships and connections you make there that really matter. Any idiot can memorise equations. Any fool can jump through a hoop. But work on a team project and make a connectionï, make friends that can help you later, and people you can help later - THAT'S why people spend stupid amounts of money on an Ivy League education. "What you know" is assumed. "Who you know" is particular and requires access.
As a consequence, such an "education" as described in TFA is more a training system, the reproduction of the proletariat, not an education, not a method of making connection.
The guy who invented the stokemonkey used to live in San Francisco on 22nd street west of Diamond. He loved to ride his bike, but found climbing streets where the sidewalks are staircases and the cars park sideways... a little too difficult. so he designed and built the stokemenkey to help him get up the hill. And it did, and it does.
I borrowed a friend's stokemonkey and I went to and from downtown SF to where I lived on the west side of Twin Peaks, with NO PROBLEM. distance: 5 miles. Vertical: 605 ft. Yes, I had to peddle. A lot. But it was orders of magnitude easier than doing it on a regular bike.
If your kids are too old to be stuffed on the back of a stokemonkey, then they're old enough to ride on their own. Start 'em young, start 'em tough.
no no no - not the stupid yikebike - electric bikes in general. You can get one from Schwinn for like $500. They are very cheap and really make daily biking much easier and faster.
Sure, it's big, it's bulky, but for the most part, you will no longer need a car.
And for those who like things a little more space age, There's the go-one and similar vehicles, like this one pulling into a campus at Intel.
The velomobiles will protect you in the rain, and you can't face plant in it. The Stokemonkey is stupidly powerful and extremely practical (try and haul 2 little kids and 4 sacks of groceries on a yikeBike). The YikeBike is for yuppies who want a cool toy.
I agree with the Crimson Avenger (Hi!), however, I disagree with the time frame and angle of incidence.
right now there are about 6.5B people on earth. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that within 100 years, at least 6.5B people will be dead.
Given that people have kids and they sometimes don't live even half as long as 100 years, I would suggest that the number will be much much larger.
Therefore: there is no argument: everyone alive will die.
Therefore the question devolves on this: How and When will we die? Will we die in 10 years in some nuclear holocaust because the USA, China, and the Russians get into it over resources? Will we die in 20 years from starvation because we didn't do jack shit to deal with the loss of cheap fossil fuels, permitting a catabolic collapse of the industrial system? Will we die in 30 years from a bioengineering mistake (like air-bourne AIDS, or Ebola that transmits like the flu but with a 1 week incubation)? Will we die at home surrounded by friends and family, loved and appreciated for a life well lived, or will we die in some transit camp in eastern Oregon, cowering in a tent waiting for the water truck to arrive?
Civilisation can "collapse". If it happens in an afternoon, yeah: that would suck. Six months? Yeah, pretty sucky. 250 years? No so sucky. An important thing to remember about all this is we, as humans, live on fantastically short time scales, and we are very able to adjust to new circumstances and have fun in the process. A friend of mine survived the "special times" in Cuba. She was 10 or 11 at the time. She said that it sucked. Really badly. But after about 6 months, you start to smile and you adapt and you go play on the beach and get on with life, in her case of an 11 year old. They didn't always have enough food, but they didn't starve. It's this temporal amnesia that people have that permits us to adapt.
I'm 51, and I remember my mom being a housewife, my dad working in a factory, and we had 6 kids, and we had a house and 2 cars. Now: keep a housewife, a mortgage, two cars, and feed six kids on the wages of a factory worker today. Not. going. to. happen. I remember those times. Many people have foggy memories of the 1960s or 50s. Temporal amnesia. We get used to degraded circumstances, and operate from them as a norm. We forgot that you could raise a family on blue collar wages. Our circumstances are degraded. But we accept them as normal...
you are correct that it takes massive amounts of energy to make energy devices. The Odums talk about this a lot. At the same time, a retreat away from the Jetsons does not equal an instantaneous, or even necessarily a rapid, collapse into the neolithic.
That's correct. However, I'd add a qualifier. Climatology is a *soft* science. Its very nature makes it difficult to run controlled experiments, or infer clear causal relationships to the degree that it has.
Wrong. That puts climatology in the same boat as Political Science or Anthropology. That is neither fair nor accurate. Climatology is a "hard" science, but it bases its facts and research in a nested set of theories that use probability and statistics that are themselves based on hard localised empirical data, and it uses the data generated from these systems to make more generalised predictions in both theory and outcome.
MP3 was the shizzle when drives were expensive, but I just bought a 1 TB drive for $112 this afternoon. It will hold my entire CD collection (1104 CDs) as FLAC file easily, with room to spare.
The CD is critical, because EVEN THOUGH I back up my drives, the CDs are perfect as last resort data sources.
1. Fact: There are times when it comes down faster than you can melt it,
1b. and in conditions and locations where it won't work, and eventually,
2. you will end up with some EMT truck rolling to save someone's life and it will have chains to get through the blizzard, and therefore:
And so I guess we shouldn't ride bicycles because they don't have air bags?
I agree we should get people off the road - but how will they travel most distances between 1 and 4 km? Over 4km, it makes sense to use public transit. Below 1 km, walk. between that? Bicycle. But, bicycling is dangerous...
I don't consider danger the main yard stick to judge a vehicle. It is an important one, but not the only one.
1. as someone noted below, it often snows at night. So much for solar power heating the roadway then.
2. In an intense blizzard, it gets pretty dark out, so even then, your sun power is limited, and there's no way it can beat the accumulation. Just take average sun insolation (which will be reduced do to cloud cover) x 0.15 then x 0.(x) reduced efficiency to heat (2nd law thermo and all that) and divide that into the amount of energy needed to melt a foot of snow. Answer: not going to happen.
3. It only takes ONE truck with chains to make hash out of those panels.
Computer has: CPU
Cellphone has: CPU
Computer has: input pad (keyboard)
Cellphone has: input pad (numbers and associated buttons)
Computer has: video screen
Cellphone has: video screen
Computer has: audio out to a jack or speaker
Cellphone has: audio out to a jack or speaker
Computer has: memory RAM
Cellphone has: memory RAM
Computer has: memory storage (HDD or SSD)
Cellphone has: memory storage (usually SSD)
So, given that a cellphone is, for most intention and purpose, fundamentally a fucking COMPUTER, are they going to make people get a license so they can operate it "safely"?
Dear Antipodean legislators considering this legislation:
I want you to know and understand very clearly that I, Ralph Spoilsport (owner and operator of Ralph Spoilsport Motors) think you are a complete and utterly pathetic pack of nimrods and all around stupid ass knuckleheads for letting such a notion get beyond the "gee, that's a dumb idea stage". By even considering this as a possible line of action puts you at the same level of the most knuckledragging retarded dipstick government reps normally only found in the Middle East or Red State America.
If you actually pass this legislation, I hope your arms swell up and drop off.
keep ALL your personal stuff on the external drive. Problem solved. He wants the laptop? Sure - take it. He doesn't have to know about the external drive.
And when you return it, give it to him in the condition he bought it for you: wiped clean.
Others are even worse than your not remembering the product; the commercials are so bad you remember the commercial, the product, and studiously avoid actually buying the product because the ad pissed you off.
No shit. When I was living in the States, I refused to eat at Carl's Junior because the commercials were so disgusting. It was usually some macho douchebag chowing down on a burger in slow motion making hideous slurping sounds and bits of it dripping on his shirt, and the announcer coming off like that's cool... or something... eeeew. gross.
Nielsen and the Networks are joined at the hip. Nielsen measures the Networks, and the Networks get to charge advertisers according to the data so provided. No Networks? No Nielsen, because there would be no one to PAY Nielsen for their efforts.
As a consequence, Nielsen will do whatever it can to stonewall, obfuscate, and generally hide the obvious: the day of Network hegemony is coming to a close.
This doesn't mean the Networks are going to disappear. What it does mean is that the Network business model of delivering motion picture, and the techniques, methods, aesthetics, and processes developed to support that system, is no longer the complete hegemonic force it used to be. In 1948 there was radio and TV and movies and... ummmm... not much else. Today there is broadcast TV, Cable TV, online video, radio, satellite radio, computer games, game consoles, Web2.0 social networks and similar systems (viz 2nd life), podcasts, etc. etc. etc.
The last actual advertisement I paid attention to AT ALL was last week (well, actually this morning - the girl on the billboard was f*cking hott. don't know what she was selling, but damn she was cute...) when I actually clicked on an advert to find out more about a certain brand of eReader (no, not the kindle...) So, that particular advert was successful, and it was online. Not on TV.
That's the mindshare competition TV is dealing with, and what Nielsen refuses to deal with. TV could actually GROW in size, and still be increasingly marginalised by the explosion of all the other media.
Slashdot Mirror
better not let them play outside then - some big bad car might jump the curb and run them over.
Kristallnacht ring a bell?
We live in a nation of laws. If they have broken the laws, then it is incumbent to the justice system to take care of it. That's why we have one.
RS
Look for iPod sales in Buffalo and Seattle and Vermont to increase.
I used to work in Two Guys in NJ back in the 70s. Thieves actually walked out the door with a freakin' canoe. And they'd have gotten away with it, if they hadn't come back for the oars. Dumb shits.
So which category am I in?
Fascist.
Obviously, when you are in a position of authority, you will know to not hire those people.
I have learned in my working life (I'm 51, and have always had a job since the age of 15) that one does not work in isolation, and the people who do best are people who surround themselves with competent and trusted colleagues: teams, essentially. The team can be: Program director, project manager A, project manager B, project A programmers 1, 2, and 3, project B programmers 1, 2, 3, QA staff 1, 2, 3, Office Admin. - about a dozen people. How did programmer B3 get on the team? Because programmer B1 knew him in university, and knows he does good work. QA dude #2 is there because lead QA 1 was hired by project manager A who was in a school play with QA 1 and knows what kind of a critical mind he has.
It goes on from there.
Your critique, while interesting, and certainly valuable, is far off the mark of the Real World. We are a social species and our social administration is always done by people working with people. You can be the lone programmer, but if you need your entry badge renewed, you better be nice to the Admin. You can be the lone programmer, but if you're a dick, you will go from one project to another, and will be consistently passed over by the better connected and more socially adept programmers.
THAT is the real world - it is not one of individuals - it is one of societies of individuals. With humans, it is not the individual who is fittest, but the group that is fittest...
And these groups form at a young age and continue through life. Young people should nurture these relationships and develop tight social networks. It can mean the difference between a daily grind and a worthwhile vocation.
RS
As a consequence, such an "education" as described in TFA is more a training system, the reproduction of the proletariat, not an education, not a method of making connection.
RS
I borrowed a friend's stokemonkey and I went to and from downtown SF to where I lived on the west side of Twin Peaks, with NO PROBLEM. distance: 5 miles. Vertical: 605 ft. Yes, I had to peddle. A lot. But it was orders of magnitude easier than doing it on a regular bike.
If your kids are too old to be stuffed on the back of a stokemonkey, then they're old enough to ride on their own. Start 'em young, start 'em tough.
RS
no no no - not the stupid yikebike - electric bikes in general. You can get one from Schwinn for like $500. They are very cheap and really make daily biking much easier and faster.
Sure, it's big, it's bulky, but for the most part, you will no longer need a car.
And for those who like things a little more space age, There's the go-one and similar vehicles, like this one pulling into a campus at Intel.
The velomobiles will protect you in the rain, and you can't face plant in it. The Stokemonkey is stupidly powerful and extremely practical (try and haul 2 little kids and 4 sacks of groceries on a yikeBike). The YikeBike is for yuppies who want a cool toy.
However: the future is not to be denied: the future of transportation lies in lightweight electric and electric assist (i.e. electric assisted pedal bikes and trikes) vehicles.
Get 'em now while they're relatively cheap and unwanted...
RS
right now there are about 6.5B people on earth. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that within 100 years, at least 6.5B people will be dead.
Given that people have kids and they sometimes don't live even half as long as 100 years, I would suggest that the number will be much much larger.
Therefore: there is no argument: everyone alive will die.
Therefore the question devolves on this: How and When will we die? Will we die in 10 years in some nuclear holocaust because the USA, China, and the Russians get into it over resources? Will we die in 20 years from starvation because we didn't do jack shit to deal with the loss of cheap fossil fuels, permitting a catabolic collapse of the industrial system? Will we die in 30 years from a bioengineering mistake (like air-bourne AIDS, or Ebola that transmits like the flu but with a 1 week incubation)? Will we die at home surrounded by friends and family, loved and appreciated for a life well lived, or will we die in some transit camp in eastern Oregon, cowering in a tent waiting for the water truck to arrive?
Civilisation can "collapse". If it happens in an afternoon, yeah: that would suck. Six months? Yeah, pretty sucky. 250 years? No so sucky. An important thing to remember about all this is we, as humans, live on fantastically short time scales, and we are very able to adjust to new circumstances and have fun in the process. A friend of mine survived the "special times" in Cuba. She was 10 or 11 at the time. She said that it sucked. Really badly. But after about 6 months, you start to smile and you adapt and you go play on the beach and get on with life, in her case of an 11 year old. They didn't always have enough food, but they didn't starve. It's this temporal amnesia that people have that permits us to adapt.
I'm 51, and I remember my mom being a housewife, my dad working in a factory, and we had 6 kids, and we had a house and 2 cars. Now: keep a housewife, a mortgage, two cars, and feed six kids on the wages of a factory worker today. Not. going. to. happen. I remember those times. Many people have foggy memories of the 1960s or 50s. Temporal amnesia. We get used to degraded circumstances, and operate from them as a norm. We forgot that you could raise a family on blue collar wages. Our circumstances are degraded. But we accept them as normal...
you are correct that it takes massive amounts of energy to make energy devices. The Odums talk about this a lot. At the same time, a retreat away from the Jetsons does not equal an instantaneous, or even necessarily a rapid, collapse into the neolithic.
all the best,
RS
Wrong. That puts climatology in the same boat as Political Science or Anthropology. That is neither fair nor accurate. Climatology is a "hard" science, but it bases its facts and research in a nested set of theories that use probability and statistics that are themselves based on hard localised empirical data, and it uses the data generated from these systems to make more generalised predictions in both theory and outcome.
RS
MP3 was the shizzle when drives were expensive, but I just bought a 1 TB drive for $112 this afternoon. It will hold my entire CD collection (1104 CDs) as FLAC file easily, with room to spare.
The CD is critical, because EVEN THOUGH I back up my drives, the CDs are perfect as last resort data sources.
RS
No Seven Eleven. No Mickey D's. Sounds like a sucky place to work.
1. Fact: There are times when it comes down faster than you can melt it,
1b. and in conditions and locations where it won't work, and eventually,
2. you will end up with some EMT truck rolling to save someone's life and it will have chains to get through the blizzard, and therefore:
3. your highway is hash.
I agree we should get people off the road - but how will they travel most distances between 1 and 4 km? Over 4km, it makes sense to use public transit. Below 1 km, walk. between that? Bicycle. But, bicycling is dangerous...
I don't consider danger the main yard stick to judge a vehicle. It is an important one, but not the only one.
2. In an intense blizzard, it gets pretty dark out, so even then, your sun power is limited, and there's no way it can beat the accumulation. Just take average sun insolation (which will be reduced do to cloud cover) x 0.15 then x 0.(x) reduced efficiency to heat (2nd law thermo and all that) and divide that into the amount of energy needed to melt a foot of snow. Answer: not going to happen.
3. It only takes ONE truck with chains to make hash out of those panels.
Verdict: it's still a dumb idea.
So much for the solar panels when a 4 ton 4WD EMT truck rolls along on at 40mph.
RS
Cellphone has: CPU
Computer has: input pad (keyboard)
Cellphone has: input pad (numbers and associated buttons)
Computer has: video screen
Cellphone has: video screen
Computer has: audio out to a jack or speaker
Cellphone has: audio out to a jack or speaker
Computer has: memory RAM
Cellphone has: memory RAM
Computer has: memory storage (HDD or SSD)
Cellphone has: memory storage (usually SSD)
So, given that a cellphone is, for most intention and purpose, fundamentally a fucking COMPUTER, are they going to make people get a license so they can operate it "safely"?
Dear Antipodean legislators considering this legislation:
I want you to know and understand very clearly that I, Ralph Spoilsport (owner and operator of Ralph Spoilsport Motors) think you are a complete and utterly pathetic pack of nimrods and all around stupid ass knuckleheads for letting such a notion get beyond the "gee, that's a dumb idea stage". By even considering this as a possible line of action puts you at the same level of the most knuckledragging retarded dipstick government reps normally only found in the Middle East or Red State America.
If you actually pass this legislation, I hope your arms swell up and drop off.
RS
RS
Use FF for everything but pr0n, then when you want to go see nekkid people, fire up opera or camino or safari or whatever.
RS
And when you return it, give it to him in the condition he bought it for you: wiped clean.
RS
Others are even worse than your not remembering the product; the commercials are so bad you remember the commercial, the product, and studiously avoid actually buying the product because the ad pissed you off.
No shit. When I was living in the States, I refused to eat at Carl's Junior because the commercials were so disgusting. It was usually some macho douchebag chowing down on a burger in slow motion making hideous slurping sounds and bits of it dripping on his shirt, and the announcer coming off like that's cool... or something... eeeew. gross.
Pissed me off so bad, I refused to eat there.
RS
David's dad?
As a consequence, Nielsen will do whatever it can to stonewall, obfuscate, and generally hide the obvious: the day of Network hegemony is coming to a close.
This doesn't mean the Networks are going to disappear. What it does mean is that the Network business model of delivering motion picture, and the techniques, methods, aesthetics, and processes developed to support that system, is no longer the complete hegemonic force it used to be. In 1948 there was radio and TV and movies and... ummmm... not much else. Today there is broadcast TV, Cable TV, online video, radio, satellite radio, computer games, game consoles, Web2.0 social networks and similar systems (viz 2nd life), podcasts, etc. etc. etc.
The last actual advertisement I paid attention to AT ALL was last week (well, actually this morning - the girl on the billboard was f*cking hott. don't know what she was selling, but damn she was cute...) when I actually clicked on an advert to find out more about a certain brand of eReader (no, not the kindle...) So, that particular advert was successful, and it was online. Not on TV.
That's the mindshare competition TV is dealing with, and what Nielsen refuses to deal with. TV could actually GROW in size, and still be increasingly marginalised by the explosion of all the other media.
RS