The problem is that the analogy of nails doesn't work.
Moving from one screwdriver to another is not much of a learning curve. Understanding what someone screwed in is not difficult.
Whilst programmers should be given some freedom, I would really avoid multiple languages. Sometimes it's not an issue, like if someone writes a library in C#, a vb.net developer can happily use it. That still means, though, that if the c# developer leaves, you've got to address that knowledge gap.
It's important to work as a team. The teams I've worked in where programmers work in their own way (one guy does his reports in Crystal, two others use an open source reporting engine, another outputs to Excel) you end up with problems. When the guy who prefers Excel is off sick, the people not versed in Excel have a harder job to resolve it. The teams I've worked in where people agree the method of working (preferably in meetings, and buy in to it together and form a common process are those that work more effectively.
I'd guess that the refrigerator made the most difference.
The best return in the UK is lagging your loft more followed by cavity wall insulation. Both cost relatively little, and yield a good return. Cavity wall seems to have a payback cost of around 5 years. I think loft insulation may even be quicker. It can also make the house feel more comfortable as the heat is more even.
Showers save a lot of power, and if you are on a water meter, it's even more sensible.
Solar makes sense to me in a lot of ways, but it's not ubiquitous enough yet. I like the idea of being my own supply, and making good use of people's roofs seems a more pleasant solution than ugly windfarms all over the hills. Solar is probably most worthy of consideration when building a house, or reroofing, when you can absorb some of the labour costs. I've not seen figures on the ROI of solar roofing, and most people marketing it don't seem to mention savings at all (which suggests it's not a good selling point).
I agree about fuel prices. It seems that we're going to have higher prices from here on in as we have to import more fuel. We may see more people wanting more nuclear power soon.
Not long ago, I worked on a project to convert some mainframe COBOL code (I think on an IBM S390) to a Windows server. The mainframe would have been running either COBOL-74 or COBOL-85. The initial thinking was to convert the code to.net, but I suggested that instead, we could run cobol on the PC ('97 object COBOL). We took all the mainframe code, some of which was over a decade old, and put it straight on the PC and compiled it faultlessly. Hundreds of programs. I know COBOL sites that have been running on code that is over 20 years old, continuing to pay off.
Now, what's the maximum lifespan of a VB application? 5-10 years. Anyone with millions of lines of VB is going to have to convert it, and the.net converter doesn't cut it.
With Python, it will change, but the change is more based on need, so much like COBOL, it will be evolutionary. So, what you've learnt before will be built on. I could write the same COBOL-74 program in the object COBOL IDE and it would work. Alternatively, I could use some of the new features. Learning the new features didn't mean starting from the bottom again.
The key thing is that the development of it is far more about "dogfooding" than marketing. Programmers will add features that they find useful because they aren't being paid to build a language for anything except productivity. They won't dump features because of a shiny new strategy. ASP and ASP.NET sessions are incompatible. Why? Because Microsoft made it so. You can implement some really dirty workarounds, like using SQL server, but I can see no reason why they didn't build this in, and no developer modifying a language that they use themselves would want to do this, because they wouldn't want to rewrite their world.
I'm moving towards Python because I'm fed up with the constant retraining for little or no benefit on closed source tools.
I had to retrain off VB6 onto.net, and I have no doubt that in a few years, the same thing will start again. I know VB6 isn't that popular here, but once you've been using any language for a time, you can use it very quickly, because it becomes second nature. Retraining lowers your skills.
I was just trying to point out that we only progressed at the rate we did was because of competition during the cold war era. Had that competition not existed, I doubt NASA would have got to the moon by now. And yes, it never made space travel cheaper or more available.
Government should be kept out of anything that can be made competitive, whether it be transportation, art or health. The old eastern bloc had companies turning out products that no-one wanted, the UK has state-sponsored operas that no-one wants to see, and which have made no cultural impression. There are dozens of shelved government computer systems in the UK that have cost many millions, and when you see the aims of the systems, you wonder how they ever cost an 8 figure sum in the first place.
NASA does some important scientific work, granted, but the ISS is a trick. Something to justify the existence of the shuttle, and largely providing no scientific benefit.
In 1939, a return flight cost $700 across the atlantic, or about $10,000 in today's money. It would have been slow and requiring a couple of stops. I guess it's still about $700 now. If in 60 years time, we see space prices drop in similar terms, it will cost less than $10000 to go on a space flight in todays terms.
I wasn't trying to be specific, more that what they are doing will generate progress. Aircraft were at one time experimental, like the Wright Brothers, then between the wars, we saw something development and challenges (like Lindburgh and the Schneider trophy). After the war we got commercial air travel, which over the past 50 years has been put further and further into the reach of everyone.
It was a couple of decades between the first flight and Frank Whittle creating the jet engine which gives us the level of commercial space travel that we have.
I'm not saying that Rutan and Branson are the only players out there, but that the largest driver to reducing costs of men in space is space tourism. As that gets cheaper, the competition will grow and the next stage will be orbit, in the same way that in aviation, people wanted to get to the point of having direct flights.
The cost of travelling on early transatlantic flights was about $700 return, something that in 1939 would have been something like $10,000 in today's money, and you'd have to change at Bermuda and the Azores.
The space race was the success it was because it created competition. Once man had put foot on the moon, though, it was really all over. I know the shuttle was cool, but it never really delivered what we all were told at the time - that we'd be able to get on one like a jumbo.
If we start getting competitors (and I think we will) then people will work their socks off to try and build things like orbital craft. We might see a bit of a bubble, but like the dot-com bubble, we'll get some survivors and a load of R&D. The waiting list for Branson's project is massive, and there's enough people with enough money for whom $100,000 or even $1 million is OK.
As far as I recall from the license, the issue is that under OOo, you have to in essence give up your code copyright.
But, I also understand that this doesn't stop someone taking the OOo code, removing all the OpenOffice.org references, and releasing it under another name without giving the changes back to Sun.
In the mushroom market, it's not really an issue. If I'm a high end chef and someone starts trying this on me, I'd look at alternative suppliers.
The problem is how to deal with companies who are either government created monopolies, or operate in markets that are difficult to enter (for reasons like incredibly high costs or massive regulation). There's thousands of guys doing computer maintenance and software development because the barriers to entry are almost nil.
One thing that was really done right in the UK is how ADSL was rolled out. It's been a massive success. BT own the exchanges (for reasons of their historical monopoly), but the telecom regulator forced them to open up retail competition, and even forced them to allow competitors to put their exchanges in. If you have a BT line, it still means you go to a BT exchange, and that the ADSL provider still pays a wholesale fee to BT, but that gives some competition over and above that basic wholesale fee. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of ADSL providers, each providing a different flavour of service. Some are cheap and cheerful, capped downloads. Others charge more but give faster speeds, more extra services. Over time, prices have been constantly falling.
The UK telecoms market is great for the consumer, because the regulator generally lets things run, but steps in when a provider tries to do something to do with locking-in (like forcing companies to allow mobile phone numbers to be transferred).
Things like wireless and 3g will start being a competitor to cable.
I was thinking about something similar. I'm starting to post free software to my site, stuff that's for my own use, but I'm happy to give away. I could however, leverage it to redirect to a page for Verizon users, slowing them down.
I'm only a 1 man software developer, but if thousands or tens of thousands of people did it, it would start to wake people up.
To paraphrase Jurassic Park "markets find a way". If someone tries to be a middleman, someone will always be looking for a way to bypass them. Sometimes through sheer bloodymindedness, but often because they see a giant market, and figure they can get a large chunk of it, albeit it at a smaller margin.
The problem for leech corporations is when this occurs. Instead of improving, they instead spent the whole time defending their existence. They then often can't adapt to the new competition.
Since early shuttle launches which proved the shuttle concept, we've done nothing useful in manned space travel. The real science has been done by unmanned missions.
Manned space travel should be given over to the sort of missions being run by Branson and Rutan. That's where the real innovation is going to come from. Even if it starts off being for multimillionaires, it will become for everyone, whether for pleasure or science. Scientists reap the benefits of cheaper more powerful PCs that are often the result of research for commercial markets.
Well, as I live in the UK, which is part of Europe, then I have been on european train systems. I've also travelled on trains in half a dozen european countries (France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and The Netherlands). Your statement is often made by people who haven't been on them.
The problems are still the same in France. Try travelling from a small village without a station to a town. One I looked into is from Mansle, in Charente to the town of Limoges. There's no station in Mansle, so that means taking a taxi to either Luxe which is about 5 miles away and picking up the service that only runs for commuters early in the morning, or taking a taxi to the town of Angouleme which is something like 18 miles away to catch a train to Limoges which is a 1:45 train journey.
All this considers that I don't want to go to some village near there which would add on yet more connection time and that I don't want to go after 7pm (after the last train).
The road journey takes about an hour and a half, something like 15 minutes less, and that's not including the taxi time which would add on something like 30 minutes at each end.
Also, if you want French railways, you have to accept the subsidy of French railways. Billions per annum spent on the network. And in the UK, billions spent on subsidising rail, and yet private bus companies with no subsidy can beat them on price.
Firstly, you have failed to address my point that Einstein's greatest work was in his time before coming to the USA.
Secondly, show your proof. I've tried to come up with a measurable scale (nobel prize winners). How about you come up with an alternative that proves that the US no longer values intellectual thought. Who launched the Hubble telescope? Who launches most of the space probes? Who runs projects like SETI?
Now, I may be buying an LCD soon, but it's not because of the power reasons. If that was the only reason, the economics wouldn't add up. £200 in a bank will yield me more per annum (for at least a few years) than the savings on an LCD monitor.
It's like solar power. It would cost something like £10,000 to get a solar roof fitted. As my power usage is only costing me something like £3-400 per annum, I simply can't justify financing £10,000 at something like 7% per annum (or at least £700 per annum).
Cavity wall insulation, however, gave me a return of about 5% per annum, which is worth it. Actually it's probably about break even, but the fact that it gives some environmental benefit was worth it to me.
There are times when it works. But it only works when lots of people want to go to the same place at the same time.
When people are given the choice, they will nearly always pick freedom over the alternative, and they have done so for 40 years. That's not to say there aren't uses for buses - I use them quite a lot - but only when it suits me. Going to my local town is easier by bus - they run frequently and it's similar price to parking (and easier). But then, plenty of other people want to do likewise. What other people don't want to do is go shopping and then onto see my friend on the other side of town, so it all breaks down then.
The car has taken over, and we have changed as a result. And no centralist is going to reverse that without raising the cost far beyond where it is now. We have out-of-town shopping and offices and people rent offices in old village premises. We no longer have such a focus on town centres and factories/mills. We have people running all sorts of sizes of businesses.
When towns have tried to encourage people to use more public transport by making parking more expensive, the result has not been for more people to get on buses. Instead, people have flocked to out-of-town shopping or market towns with free parking.
Incidentally - scrap trains. They are inefficient, inflexible and expensive. Digging up the railways and making dedicated roads for coaches and freight would deliver far more passengers and freight than the railways and at a much lower price. And trams? Inflexible buses with a high price tag.
When is the last time America produced a towering intellect on the order of Martin Luther King or Einstein?
America produced Einstein? Born in Germany, moved to Switzerland, where he took on Swiss citizenship, and then in 1940 moved to America. His greatest work was before he came to America.
Have a look on Wikipedia at Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Physics sometime and tell me that it's not chock-loaded with American scientists.
Good fun if you want to. Personally, never been too keen on people's home brew. Although someone near me makes cider that's quite tasty. Unfortunately, it's also about 8%;)
One money saver is to find a local real ale brewery, and get a refillable jug from them. Not only is it cheaper, but from the brewery it will be very fresh.
As someone who lives in the UK, I can tell you that it's very possible if you live in a major city. I've known people live for more than a decade in London without a car. When they went out from London, they typically took the train, and if that wouldn't work for them, they'd rent a car for the odd weekend that that didn't occur.
If there's two of you, or a family, the sums add up for a car.
Even though the cost of fuel seems to be skyrocketing, it's often low down the real priorities for saving money.
Turning down the thermostat, getting draft excluders (like the sausage type things) for doors and taking showers instead of baths, fitting energy saving bulbs and turning off appliances that aren't in use are simple, effective ways to save money. The shower will also save you time.
My household heating and cooking is something like £30/month for a decent size house. That's cooking, heating, lighting, the lot. How much would turning down the thermostat by a few degrees save me? Far less than what its worth me not having to wear a coat in the house.
Concentrate on other things in your spending. Cut out all sorts of rubbish that you don't need. Don't upgrade your computer that does what you need. Learn how to cook with cheaper cuts of meat (casseroles with them can be very tasty - they just take longer). Cook a decent casserole for everyone. Avoid the high end supermarkets. Try supermarket own brands of products which are mostly better. Shop around the offers - if chicken is on special, buy chicken and cook something using it. Consider online shopping for food - you may pay a delivery charge, but you'll be less tempted to pick up things you don't really need.
I understand that sentiment, as sales people are generally paid bonuses for high achievement. Then again, those same sales people make lousy basic pay.
I'm just talking about the whole "buy me a beer and I'll help you" attitude. As someone who was a project manager, I've bought beer/donuts for teams I've had working for me. They get them as a reward for a job well done.
The only real way to get rewarded for high performance in IT is working for yourself. If you can outperform the competition and do the work quicker, you don't just get more work. Instead, you get more work that you actually get some more pay for
Money is only a symbol of wealth. By the time we reach the last fish, so few people will exist that money will be worthless and we will have already reached a barter system.
Not only that, but reaching a point of the last fish caught/last river polluted will never happen. A correction in the number of human beings existing will occur.
A better quote is "money talks". It's what people understand. It's a symbol of wealth, a measurement of how large a car someone can buy, how much lettuce they can own, how much they can waste in a casino at the weekend, or how many wells they can have built in African villages.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving from one screwdriver to another is not much of a learning curve. Understanding what someone screwed in is not difficult.
Whilst programmers should be given some freedom, I would really avoid multiple languages. Sometimes it's not an issue, like if someone writes a library in C#, a vb.net developer can happily use it. That still means, though, that if the c# developer leaves, you've got to address that knowledge gap.
It's important to work as a team. The teams I've worked in where programmers work in their own way (one guy does his reports in Crystal, two others use an open source reporting engine, another outputs to Excel) you end up with problems. When the guy who prefers Excel is off sick, the people not versed in Excel have a harder job to resolve it. The teams I've worked in where people agree the method of working (preferably in meetings, and buy in to it together and form a common process are those that work more effectively.
The best return in the UK is lagging your loft more followed by cavity wall insulation. Both cost relatively little, and yield a good return. Cavity wall seems to have a payback cost of around 5 years. I think loft insulation may even be quicker. It can also make the house feel more comfortable as the heat is more even.
Showers save a lot of power, and if you are on a water meter, it's even more sensible.
Solar makes sense to me in a lot of ways, but it's not ubiquitous enough yet. I like the idea of being my own supply, and making good use of people's roofs seems a more pleasant solution than ugly windfarms all over the hills. Solar is probably most worthy of consideration when building a house, or reroofing, when you can absorb some of the labour costs. I've not seen figures on the ROI of solar roofing, and most people marketing it don't seem to mention savings at all (which suggests it's not a good selling point).
I agree about fuel prices. It seems that we're going to have higher prices from here on in as we have to import more fuel. We may see more people wanting more nuclear power soon.
Not long ago, I worked on a project to convert some mainframe COBOL code (I think on an IBM S390) to a Windows server. The mainframe would have been running either COBOL-74 or COBOL-85. The initial thinking was to convert the code to .net, but I suggested that instead, we could run cobol on the PC ('97 object COBOL). We took all the mainframe code, some of which was over a decade old, and put it straight on the PC and compiled it faultlessly. Hundreds of programs. I know COBOL sites that have been running on code that is over 20 years old, continuing to pay off.
Now, what's the maximum lifespan of a VB application? 5-10 years. Anyone with millions of lines of VB is going to have to convert it, and the .net converter doesn't cut it.
With Python, it will change, but the change is more based on need, so much like COBOL, it will be evolutionary. So, what you've learnt before will be built on. I could write the same COBOL-74 program in the object COBOL IDE and it would work. Alternatively, I could use some of the new features. Learning the new features didn't mean starting from the bottom again.
The key thing is that the development of it is far more about "dogfooding" than marketing. Programmers will add features that they find useful because they aren't being paid to build a language for anything except productivity. They won't dump features because of a shiny new strategy. ASP and ASP.NET sessions are incompatible. Why? Because Microsoft made it so. You can implement some really dirty workarounds, like using SQL server, but I can see no reason why they didn't build this in, and no developer modifying a language that they use themselves would want to do this, because they wouldn't want to rewrite their world.
I had to retrain off VB6 onto .net, and I have no doubt that in a few years, the same thing will start again. I know VB6 isn't that popular here, but once you've been using any language for a time, you can use it very quickly, because it becomes second nature. Retraining lowers your skills.
I was just trying to point out that we only progressed at the rate we did was because of competition during the cold war era. Had that competition not existed, I doubt NASA would have got to the moon by now. And yes, it never made space travel cheaper or more available.
Government should be kept out of anything that can be made competitive, whether it be transportation, art or health. The old eastern bloc had companies turning out products that no-one wanted, the UK has state-sponsored operas that no-one wants to see, and which have made no cultural impression. There are dozens of shelved government computer systems in the UK that have cost many millions, and when you see the aims of the systems, you wonder how they ever cost an 8 figure sum in the first place.
NASA does some important scientific work, granted, but the ISS is a trick. Something to justify the existence of the shuttle, and largely providing no scientific benefit.
In 1939, a return flight cost $700 across the atlantic, or about $10,000 in today's money. It would have been slow and requiring a couple of stops. I guess it's still about $700 now. If in 60 years time, we see space prices drop in similar terms, it will cost less than $10000 to go on a space flight in todays terms.
I wasn't trying to be specific, more that what they are doing will generate progress. Aircraft were at one time experimental, like the Wright Brothers, then between the wars, we saw something development and challenges (like Lindburgh and the Schneider trophy). After the war we got commercial air travel, which over the past 50 years has been put further and further into the reach of everyone.
It was a couple of decades between the first flight and Frank Whittle creating the jet engine which gives us the level of commercial space travel that we have.
I'm not saying that Rutan and Branson are the only players out there, but that the largest driver to reducing costs of men in space is space tourism. As that gets cheaper, the competition will grow and the next stage will be orbit, in the same way that in aviation, people wanted to get to the point of having direct flights.
The cost of travelling on early transatlantic flights was about $700 return, something that in 1939 would have been something like $10,000 in today's money, and you'd have to change at Bermuda and the Azores.
The space race was the success it was because it created competition. Once man had put foot on the moon, though, it was really all over. I know the shuttle was cool, but it never really delivered what we all were told at the time - that we'd be able to get on one like a jumbo.
If we start getting competitors (and I think we will) then people will work their socks off to try and build things like orbital craft. We might see a bit of a bubble, but like the dot-com bubble, we'll get some survivors and a load of R&D. The waiting list for Branson's project is massive, and there's enough people with enough money for whom $100,000 or even $1 million is OK.
But, I also understand that this doesn't stop someone taking the OOo code, removing all the OpenOffice.org references, and releasing it under another name without giving the changes back to Sun.
The problem is how to deal with companies who are either government created monopolies, or operate in markets that are difficult to enter (for reasons like incredibly high costs or massive regulation). There's thousands of guys doing computer maintenance and software development because the barriers to entry are almost nil.
One thing that was really done right in the UK is how ADSL was rolled out. It's been a massive success. BT own the exchanges (for reasons of their historical monopoly), but the telecom regulator forced them to open up retail competition, and even forced them to allow competitors to put their exchanges in. If you have a BT line, it still means you go to a BT exchange, and that the ADSL provider still pays a wholesale fee to BT, but that gives some competition over and above that basic wholesale fee. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of ADSL providers, each providing a different flavour of service. Some are cheap and cheerful, capped downloads. Others charge more but give faster speeds, more extra services. Over time, prices have been constantly falling.
The UK telecoms market is great for the consumer, because the regulator generally lets things run, but steps in when a provider tries to do something to do with locking-in (like forcing companies to allow mobile phone numbers to be transferred).
Things like wireless and 3g will start being a competitor to cable.
I'm only a 1 man software developer, but if thousands or tens of thousands of people did it, it would start to wake people up.
The problem for leech corporations is when this occurs. Instead of improving, they instead spent the whole time defending their existence. They then often can't adapt to the new competition.
Manned space travel should be given over to the sort of missions being run by Branson and Rutan. That's where the real innovation is going to come from. Even if it starts off being for multimillionaires, it will become for everyone, whether for pleasure or science. Scientists reap the benefits of cheaper more powerful PCs that are often the result of research for commercial markets.
I was thinking of the "kits" which produce horrible beer, drank because it's cheap. If you are trying to do it properly, then the best of luck to you.
The problems are still the same in France. Try travelling from a small village without a station to a town. One I looked into is from Mansle, in Charente to the town of Limoges. There's no station in Mansle, so that means taking a taxi to either Luxe which is about 5 miles away and picking up the service that only runs for commuters early in the morning, or taking a taxi to the town of Angouleme which is something like 18 miles away to catch a train to Limoges which is a 1:45 train journey.
All this considers that I don't want to go to some village near there which would add on yet more connection time and that I don't want to go after 7pm (after the last train).
The road journey takes about an hour and a half, something like 15 minutes less, and that's not including the taxi time which would add on something like 30 minutes at each end.
Also, if you want French railways, you have to accept the subsidy of French railways. Billions per annum spent on the network. And in the UK, billions spent on subsidising rail, and yet private bus companies with no subsidy can beat them on price.
Secondly, show your proof. I've tried to come up with a measurable scale (nobel prize winners). How about you come up with an alternative that proves that the US no longer values intellectual thought. Who launched the Hubble telescope? Who launches most of the space probes? Who runs projects like SETI?
Now, I may be buying an LCD soon, but it's not because of the power reasons. If that was the only reason, the economics wouldn't add up. £200 in a bank will yield me more per annum (for at least a few years) than the savings on an LCD monitor.
It's like solar power. It would cost something like £10,000 to get a solar roof fitted. As my power usage is only costing me something like £3-400 per annum, I simply can't justify financing £10,000 at something like 7% per annum (or at least £700 per annum).
Cavity wall insulation, however, gave me a return of about 5% per annum, which is worth it. Actually it's probably about break even, but the fact that it gives some environmental benefit was worth it to me.
When people are given the choice, they will nearly always pick freedom over the alternative, and they have done so for 40 years. That's not to say there aren't uses for buses - I use them quite a lot - but only when it suits me. Going to my local town is easier by bus - they run frequently and it's similar price to parking (and easier). But then, plenty of other people want to do likewise. What other people don't want to do is go shopping and then onto see my friend on the other side of town, so it all breaks down then.
The car has taken over, and we have changed as a result. And no centralist is going to reverse that without raising the cost far beyond where it is now. We have out-of-town shopping and offices and people rent offices in old village premises. We no longer have such a focus on town centres and factories/mills. We have people running all sorts of sizes of businesses.
When towns have tried to encourage people to use more public transport by making parking more expensive, the result has not been for more people to get on buses. Instead, people have flocked to out-of-town shopping or market towns with free parking.
Incidentally - scrap trains. They are inefficient, inflexible and expensive. Digging up the railways and making dedicated roads for coaches and freight would deliver far more passengers and freight than the railways and at a much lower price. And trams? Inflexible buses with a high price tag.
America produced Einstein? Born in Germany, moved to Switzerland, where he took on Swiss citizenship, and then in 1940 moved to America. His greatest work was before he came to America.
Have a look on Wikipedia at Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Physics sometime and tell me that it's not chock-loaded with American scientists.
One money saver is to find a local real ale brewery, and get a refillable jug from them. Not only is it cheaper, but from the brewery it will be very fresh.
If there's two of you, or a family, the sums add up for a car.
How much are you saving per annum using LCDs? £5? £10? I did work it out and it wasn't a good justification for getting LCD on its own.
Turning down the thermostat, getting draft excluders (like the sausage type things) for doors and taking showers instead of baths, fitting energy saving bulbs and turning off appliances that aren't in use are simple, effective ways to save money. The shower will also save you time.
My household heating and cooking is something like £30/month for a decent size house. That's cooking, heating, lighting, the lot. How much would turning down the thermostat by a few degrees save me? Far less than what its worth me not having to wear a coat in the house.
Concentrate on other things in your spending. Cut out all sorts of rubbish that you don't need. Don't upgrade your computer that does what you need. Learn how to cook with cheaper cuts of meat (casseroles with them can be very tasty - they just take longer). Cook a decent casserole for everyone. Avoid the high end supermarkets. Try supermarket own brands of products which are mostly better. Shop around the offers - if chicken is on special, buy chicken and cook something using it. Consider online shopping for food - you may pay a delivery charge, but you'll be less tempted to pick up things you don't really need.
I'm just talking about the whole "buy me a beer and I'll help you" attitude. As someone who was a project manager, I've bought beer/donuts for teams I've had working for me. They get them as a reward for a job well done.
The only real way to get rewarded for high performance in IT is working for yourself. If you can outperform the competition and do the work quicker, you don't just get more work. Instead, you get more work that you actually get some more pay for
Money is only a symbol of wealth. By the time we reach the last fish, so few people will exist that money will be worthless and we will have already reached a barter system.
Not only that, but reaching a point of the last fish caught/last river polluted will never happen. A correction in the number of human beings existing will occur.
A better quote is "money talks". It's what people understand. It's a symbol of wealth, a measurement of how large a car someone can buy, how much lettuce they can own, how much they can waste in a casino at the weekend, or how many wells they can have built in African villages.
It sounds like you've got a book worth writing. Just don't forget to include something about what's in people's browser histories ;)