Yeah, I know. I'm posting this like a day later, but maybe someone will find it interesting. Back in the "good ole days" of the chemical industry (in excess of 50 years ago), PID controllers (for temperature control loops, for example) were implemented entirely (or almost entirely) pneumatically. It's not the same thing, because it isn't digital, but I've always been fascinated by it, just the same.
Actually, what I think he was trying to say (in what was to me a confusing way) is generally correct.
The reason the lights come on seemingly the same instant you flip the switch is NOT because electrons are going around the circuit that quickly. It's because changes to the electric field in the circuit propogate very quickly. Please see http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae69. cfm
I'm no expert, but I've believed this to be the case ever since I wrote a paper on it for a chemistry course and (for an unrelated course) designed a methanol reformer for use on a fuel cell vehicle. I've never said much about it, because I thought, "Well, who are you? All these specialists and people who make energy policy seem to think it's feasible.."
It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.
While the "accident" was admittedly caused by incredible stupidity, the Chernobyl reactor was far from being "inherently safe." This URL explains a little about why.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world.
I haven't read or seen a great deal of fantasy, but I can safely say of what I have read that good and evil are seldom sharply delineated in it in the way that I take the submitter to mean.
Some counter-examples from LotR immediately come to mind. Was Boromir entirely good or evil? Was Frodo? Or were they, like normal, real human beings, a mixture of impulses and behaviors?
Second, and probably more importantly, while the sharp delineation of good and evil on the human level is suspicious to me, the recognition that such things as good and corruption really exist is not fantastic or contrary to "the evidence."
Since you must be talking about Christianity (who else meets on Sunday in the US?) it bears pointing out that as much as Christian theologians disagree about, they would be almost universal in their rejection of the concepts of "good" and "evil" people. They would appreciate that humans remain a mixture of the two.
(I go back to the first point here and mention that both LotR and another popular fantasy series which doesn't suffer from the submitter's criticism, The Chronicles of Narnia, were both written by Christians).
Actually, I worked for a bit for "Esso," and while I was there I was told that it owns the mineral rights to more uranium ore than any other entity (whether government or no) in the world.
They also own massive amounts of coal and oil shale. And, believe it or not, they've done solar cell research in the past.
The only difference between ExxonMobil and the friendlier "oil majors" like BP is marketing. BP has gotten incredibly good at fooling gullible people into think that it cares about something besides making money.
I'm not an expert (just a B.S. chemical engineer), but, According to the thermodynamics text I have sitting on my desk (Smith, Van Ness, Abbott... who are, incidentally, very well known in the field, having written not only this commonly used text but also the section on thermo in the most commonly used chemical engineering handbook):
"In the thermodynamic sense, heat is never regarded as being stored within a body. Like work, it exists only as energy in transit from one body to another, or between a system and its surroundings."
Temperature, it also says, is a measure of "hotness," not of heat.
According to the heat transfer text (Incropera and Dewitt) on my shelf:
"Heat transfer (or heat) is energy in transit due to a temperature difference."
Possibly this definition is a convention restricted to engineering (the heat transfer authors are professors of mechanical engineering, so it isn't a phenomenon limited to chemical).
But, assuming it isn't, the word you and the parent are searching for is probably "energy" which is not the same thing as "heat."
I'll join the other poster to pick some nits as well. The value you give is more like a heat flux (energy/time/area) than a heat density, which would have units of something like "energy/volume." Also, strictly speaking there may or may not be such a thing as a heat density (depending on what you mean) because heat by definition only exists when it's being transferred.
What is the physical significance of the number you quoted as the "heat density" of a nuclear reactor? Which area is being measured?
Why? Like I pointed out in the post, men and women have measurably different brain structures, even while still in the womb. AFAIK, it is fairly established that the stereotype of women being more sensitive and having greater "emotional intellience" has a physiological basis in these differences. In other words, we strongly suspect that the differences manifest themselves in a different way of thinking. It seems likely on this basis alone that there are subjects and areas more well-suited in general to women than to men, and vice versa.
Again, as I pointed out in my first post, even if we do establish confidently that men in general make better scientists, we aren't justified in discouraging women from pursuing that career. What's true "in general" or "on average" doesn't limit the aptitude of individuals.
It does mean, however, that a simple difference in the levels of involvment in a particular activity doesn't tell the whole story. We can't automatically assume that unethical discrimination is going on in such cases.
Anyway, you are over-reacting, because obviously the disproportionate levels of female participation in some careers is due at least in part to societal pressures. I even said something like that in my post. What I'm saying now (and said) is that it isn't wrong (even though it is politically incorrect) to consider the possibility that they aren't entirely due to such unfair and inaccurate conventions.
I wonder if you also think of separate divisions for men and women in almost all sports as gender bias. It seems silly to pretend that the only differences between men and women (broadly speaking) exist below the neck. It may very well be that men are more likely to want to be or even make better mathematicians, scientists, or engineers because of something as fundamental as brain structure.
In fact, we know that there is a difference in brain structure in men and women. It manifests itself first in the womb.
Let's assume we know for a fact that in general men make better workers in engineering and allied fields. That we know this isn't unethical discrimination, any more than it's unethical for us to realize that world-class female athletes can't compete well with world-class male athletes in weight lifting. It only becomes unethical, in my opinion, when we prevent or discourage individual women from becoming engineers because of it.
Of course, I don't think anyone can argue that we haven't to a greater or lesser extent done exactly that in the past. Maybe we do need policies to encourage women to be involved in some fields to rectify the situation.
But at what point do we give up and say, "Women have made up at most [less than 50]% of our computer science classes, and we're not going to bend over backwards any further to get them in there." ?
Some people (you, it appears) would say that we should never give up that fight because the disparity always implies or confirms the existence of wrongful discrimination. I think that's unreasonable.
No one wants to hear about it, I'm sure, but these issues are near and dear to my heart as a religious person. France recently banned the wearing of head scarves, large crosses, and other overt religious symbols in public schools.
Also, a Swedish Pastor was recently arrested for saying things the government didn't like.
Re:I will never set foot in Best Buy again.
on
Best Buy Sued By Ohio
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· Score: 3, Informative
My dad had a somewhat similar but far less expensive experience. He bought a Sony tuner, and when he got it up, the unit was obviously used and not even the right model. Best Buy absolutely refused to replace it, claiming that he must be lying. He wrote certified letters to important people in Best Buy, but never received a response. Finally he went to Sony who promptly replaced it.
I'm not a psychologist, but to me there's nothing earth-shattering here. There are other instances of people who have words for a wide variety of shades of green (that normal Americans can't differentiate) but who use the same word for the colors we call orange and red.
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
And in fact I got an email a day or two ago from our distributed control system vendor warning us not to install SP2 on their operator/configuration consoles. SP2 and their software don't get along, and they are "working with Microsoft to resolve the issue."
This is correct to an extent that not many people realize. I worked a short time ago for a large oil company (hint: largest oil company. Largest company in the world until it was overtaken by Wal-mart a couple of years ago) and I was told that it owns the rights to more uranium than any other entity in the world. It used to be second, but then the USSR fell apart.
Let me guess, you were always the last one picked?
I was, too, but I'm not bitter about it.
That you happen to dislike sports doesn't make them any less worthwhile than wasting time posting to slashdot about how idiotic you think they are.
Your argument is bogus, anyway. Evolution, if it happened, is blind in a manner of speaking, and didn't have a purpose in mind when it gave us large brains. It was certainly quite some time before we figured out how to avoid lifting heavy things and running from predators.
The Olympics are not a celebration of brawn over brains. I really don't think any athletes or fans are thinking, "Finally.. a chance to stick it to all the smart people! Down with thinking!"
My argument does not "fall flat." I was speaking about disposable income, not suggesting that a person making $20,000 should give away 95% of it. I agree that if he did that, he would shortly lose what income he had because of being unable to groom regularly, dress appropriately for work, make it to work, etc.
It's true that a person on income X who gives away a fraction Y of his disposable income will, as a result, be unable to buy nearly as many nice things as another person who has inccome Z >> X who gives away fraction Y of his disposable income.
But, again, call me when you are a billionaire. What you say about "the West" may apply equally to people taking in 9 or 10 digit incomes. Billionaires may have quite a different idea about what living comfortably is, just as a person we would consider impoverished might find the lifestyle we think is merely "comfortable" to be grotesquely luxurious - even the lifestyle we are able to enjoy after giving self-sacrificially (in our minds as middle class Westerners) to charity.
For example, billionaires may be billionaires in part because of a great love of accumulating wealth, and giving away so much of it may involve a far larger sacrifice psychologically than is experienced by the middle-class man, even if after they both give, they have equal amounts to live on.
I say all this to challenge what seemed to me to be the naive assumption of the parent that the only consideration here in evaluating whether Gate's generosity is noteworthy is the amount of wealth he had left over aftewards. I think it's part of the story, but I also think that giving up 95% of what you own is a really big deal, whether you still have a couple of billion to live on or not.
The analogy isn't perfect (it's an analogy, after all), but I do think it's clarifying a bit. It's hypocritical in a way to judge extremely wealthy people for not giving away more when, relative to the really impoverished, most of us are also very wealthy, and yet buy electronic gadgets and new cars and other things that we don't need by any stretch of the imagination rather than helping them.
It's unimpressive....it's all about relative wealth and disposable income. The money he gives is a drop in a tiny tiny tiny bucket for him. While it is admirable that he is doing good things with extra money compared to others, it's not really out of his way.
Call me when your net worth is tens of billions of dollars and you're giving away 95% of it. I really suspect the basis of this comment is a mistaken belief in your own decency, viz, "If I had billions of dollars, I'd give it all away except a couple of million to live on." Everyone SAYS that. I suspect it's much harder than it sounds. I might be way off the mark here, but if you are a working geek, chances are you have disposable income. What are you doing with it? It's a fair question because if it really is just about relative wealth and disposable income, some dirt farmer or kid going through the garbage in a third world country could justifiably look at you and say, "Wow! If I had that guy's cash, I'd be giving it away like mad!" And then he would wonder, unless I miss my guess, why you aren't.
While it may have made him one of the richest people in the world, and may have allowed him to do some good...the harm his company does by maintaining a monopoly and stifling innovation outweighs those benefits.
I could buy the argument that the ends don't justify the means. But to argue that the harm MS has done really outweighs the good Gates has done with his personal wealth is mindboggling. So some relatively affluent people have been put out of work (in a country where the government would take care of them, worse case scenario), and your favorite software isn't as popular as maybe it might otherwise be. A lot of the money he is shoveling out is going more or less directly to save people's lives. Do you really think the two compare?
-- Didn't think of it too much. I wasn't really going to school to get a job. It was just kind of an extension of high school. I just picked something I thought I'd be interested in.
-- I decline to say, because I'd really rather remain entirely anonymous. I'm sure I've mentioned it before in other posts if you are really that curious. I will say that it is in the field that I studied.
-- My willingness to come here mostly against my wishes is an indication of how geographically flexible I willing to be. I also interviewed as far away as Chicago and Houston. The fact is, people in my field were having a really tough time finding jobs at the time. Ordinarilly around 90% of people graduating from my dept have jobs lined up before graduating. When I graduated, it was more like 50%. I interviewed with around a dozen companies, and went for four onsite interviews. This place is who offered me a job.
2. I am being in a sense "artificially restricted" by two things. First, it's where I could find a job doing something related to my chosen field. Second, I feel duty-bound to spend at least two years here because my job (like the jobs of most professionals) is not something I picked up in two days. The company has invested time and money in me, and I feel like so long as conditions aren't intolerable (they are hardly that) I owe them a little in return. Moreover, the place where I work is small, so when I leave, it won't be a faceless corporation I'm slighting, but people I've gotten to know and like, who have to go through all the pain and trouble of finding someone new, waiting for him to make it to the top of the learning curve, etc.
Anyway, I'm sure practically no towns in the US match my description, including this one. It was an exageration intended to make a point. Some place like Cambridge, Mass is certainly more culturally diverse and "refined" than the town where I live. That's definitely a consideration for someone who is considering moving to a small town.
FWIW, I have seen it. I grew up on a farm (15 miles to the nearest small town, 60 to the nearest place you might consider a city), and since moving away, I've lived in a small city of 200k (where I went to college), another moderately sized city of 600k (where I did an internship 2 summers), and now I live in a small town of 12k (Not my first choice, but it's where I could get work after graduating).
I can agree with you a little, because part of the reason I live in an apartment in town is broadband. I had the oppurtunity to move to the outskirts of town (just out of city limits) but didn't only because I didn't want to do the dialup thing.
Anyway, from my point of view (as a young single person), there's a heck of a lot more keeping small towns down than just the lack of broadband. If you haven't lived out in the middle of nowhere as I have and (to a lesser extent) currently do, these are things you might not have considered:
1. You can only buy the absolute necessities, usually. Even in my town which I assume is large compared to a "rural community", I can't buy fish unless its breaded and needs to be deep fried. There are no bookstores, coffee shops, or movie theaters. The only place to buy software for 50 miles is Walmart.
2. There is a small hospital here (because the entire county is sparsely populated, there frankly isn't a better place for one). But the more rural the community, the farther away you are from medical care. My grandpa died of a heart attack 12 or so years ago and perhaps could have been saved if it hadn't taken a small eternity to get him to a doctor. Soon afterward, his widow moved into town after living on a farm her entire life.
3. The culture is homogenized and philistine, not to mention frequently racist. What I wouldn't give to have regular face-to-face discussions with someone about something besides hunting, farming, or NASCAR.
And Etc. Certainly there are benefits to living in small communities, or even miles from the nearest neighbor. Peace and quiet, big yard, friendly people (as long as you don't stand out too much). (After you've done it for a while, though, the quaintness starts to wear off... it isn't attractive to start with unless you are already world-weary. Your kids will probably hate you for it. They leave the small towns, remember?) But the thing is, broadband is just one more thing that people who choose to live like that have to choose to give up. That small towns and the rural lifestyle are drying up is unfortunate in a way, and govt subsidized broadband would help that situation out incrementally, but it's just scratching the surface. We can't offer everything to these people simply because we can't afford to.
I would go so far as to say that even if we could, they wouldn't want it. Broadband, sure. But in the town near where I grew up, a large dairy and a pig processing plant almost went up (on separate occasions). The economic development commission wooed them, offered them huge low interest loans, but they ultimately decided not to build there, in part citing a lack of support from the community. People were up in arms. They wrote letters to the paper. It's been speculated that racism played no small part in all of this. What sort (or should I say, ethnicity) of people do you think would work in a pig processing plant in a small Texas town, after all?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, did you read the "answers" given by the other two candidates?
Indeed. When I read that question, I wondered how /. would have responded to it had it been about IT job offshoring.
Yeah, I know. I'm posting this like a day later, but maybe someone will find it interesting. Back in the "good ole days" of the chemical industry (in excess of 50 years ago), PID controllers (for temperature control loops, for example) were implemented entirely (or almost entirely) pneumatically. It's not the same thing, because it isn't digital, but I've always been fascinated by it, just the same.
Actually, what I think he was trying to say (in what was to me a confusing way) is generally correct.
. cfm
The reason the lights come on seemingly the same instant you flip the switch is NOT because electrons are going around the circuit that quickly. It's because changes to the electric field in the circuit propogate very quickly. Please see http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae69
I'm no expert, but I've believed this to be the case ever since I wrote a paper on it for a chemistry course and (for an unrelated course) designed a methanol reformer for use on a fuel cell vehicle. I've never said much about it, because I thought, "Well, who are you? All these specialists and people who make energy policy seem to think it's feasible.."
It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.
While the "accident" was admittedly caused by incredible stupidity, the Chernobyl reactor was far from being "inherently safe." This URL explains a little about why.
No, and for a couple of reasons.
First, the submitter is wrong.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world.
I haven't read or seen a great deal of fantasy, but I can safely say of what I have read that good and evil are seldom sharply delineated in it in the way that I take the submitter to mean.
Some counter-examples from LotR immediately come to mind. Was Boromir entirely good or evil? Was Frodo? Or were they, like normal, real human beings, a mixture of impulses and behaviors?
Second, and probably more importantly, while the sharp delineation of good and evil on the human level is suspicious to me, the recognition that such things as good and corruption really exist is not fantastic or contrary to "the evidence."
Since you must be talking about Christianity (who else meets on Sunday in the US?) it bears pointing out that as much as Christian theologians disagree about, they would be almost universal in their rejection of the concepts of "good" and "evil" people. They would appreciate that humans remain a mixture of the two.
(I go back to the first point here and mention that both LotR and another popular fantasy series which doesn't suffer from the submitter's criticism, The Chronicles of Narnia, were both written by Christians).
Actually, I worked for a bit for "Esso," and while I was there I was told that it owns the mineral rights to more uranium ore than any other entity (whether government or no) in the world.
They also own massive amounts of coal and oil shale. And, believe it or not, they've done solar cell research in the past.
The only difference between ExxonMobil and the friendlier "oil majors" like BP is marketing. BP has gotten incredibly good at fooling gullible people into think that it cares about something besides making money.
I think that to be fair, the DVDs would have to be burned at the point of origin and then read at the destination.
I'm not an expert (just a B.S. chemical engineer), but, According to the thermodynamics text I have sitting on my desk (Smith, Van Ness, Abbott... who are, incidentally, very well known in the field, having written not only this commonly used text but also the section on thermo in the most commonly used chemical engineering handbook):
"In the thermodynamic sense, heat is never regarded as being stored within a body. Like work, it exists only as energy in transit from one body to another, or between a system and its surroundings."
Temperature, it also says, is a measure of "hotness," not of heat.
According to the heat transfer text (Incropera and Dewitt) on my shelf:
"Heat transfer (or heat) is energy in transit due to a temperature difference."
Possibly this definition is a convention restricted to engineering (the heat transfer authors are professors of mechanical engineering, so it isn't a phenomenon limited to chemical).
But, assuming it isn't, the word you and the parent are searching for is probably "energy" which is not the same thing as "heat."
I'll join the other poster to pick some nits as well. The value you give is more like a heat flux (energy/time/area) than a heat density, which would have units of something like "energy/volume." Also, strictly speaking there may or may not be such a thing as a heat density (depending on what you mean) because heat by definition only exists when it's being transferred.
What is the physical significance of the number you quoted as the "heat density" of a nuclear reactor? Which area is being measured?
Was just about to post something very much like this, but thought I'd make sure I wasn't being redudant.
Give me a break.
Why? Like I pointed out in the post, men and women have measurably different brain structures, even while still in the womb. AFAIK, it is fairly established that the stereotype of women being more sensitive and having greater "emotional intellience" has a physiological basis in these differences. In other words, we strongly suspect that the differences manifest themselves in a different way of thinking. It seems likely on this basis alone that there are subjects and areas more well-suited in general to women than to men, and vice versa.
Again, as I pointed out in my first post, even if we do establish confidently that men in general make better scientists, we aren't justified in discouraging women from pursuing that career. What's true "in general" or "on average" doesn't limit the aptitude of individuals.
It does mean, however, that a simple difference in the levels of involvment in a particular activity doesn't tell the whole story. We can't automatically assume that unethical discrimination is going on in such cases.
Anyway, you are over-reacting, because obviously the disproportionate levels of female participation in some careers is due at least in part to societal pressures. I even said something like that in my post. What I'm saying now (and said) is that it isn't wrong (even though it is politically incorrect) to consider the possibility that they aren't entirely due to such unfair and inaccurate conventions.
I wonder if you also think of separate divisions for men and women in almost all sports as gender bias. It seems silly to pretend that the only differences between men and women (broadly speaking) exist below the neck. It may very well be that men are more likely to want to be or even make better mathematicians, scientists, or engineers because of something as fundamental as brain structure.
In fact, we know that there is a difference in brain structure in men and women. It manifests itself first in the womb.
Let's assume we know for a fact that in general men make better workers in engineering and allied fields. That we know this isn't unethical discrimination, any more than it's unethical for us to realize that world-class female athletes can't compete well with world-class male athletes in weight lifting. It only becomes unethical, in my opinion, when we prevent or discourage individual women from becoming engineers because of it.
Of course, I don't think anyone can argue that we haven't to a greater or lesser extent done exactly that in the past. Maybe we do need policies to encourage women to be involved in some fields to rectify the situation.
But at what point do we give up and say, "Women have made up at most [less than 50]% of our computer science classes, and we're not going to bend over backwards any further to get them in there." ?
Some people (you, it appears) would say that we should never give up that fight because the disparity always implies or confirms the existence of wrongful discrimination. I think that's unreasonable.
No one wants to hear about it, I'm sure, but these issues are near and dear to my heart as a religious person. France recently banned the wearing of head scarves, large crosses, and other overt religious symbols in public schools.
Also, a Swedish Pastor was recently arrested for saying things the government didn't like.
My dad had a somewhat similar but far less expensive experience. He bought a Sony tuner, and when he got it up, the unit was obviously used and not even the right model. Best Buy absolutely refused to replace it, claiming that he must be lying. He wrote certified letters to important people in Best Buy, but never received a response. Finally he went to Sony who promptly replaced it.
I'm not a psychologist, but to me there's nothing earth-shattering here. There are other instances of people who have words for a wide variety of shades of green (that normal Americans can't differentiate) but who use the same word for the colors we call orange and red.
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
And in fact I got an email a day or two ago from our distributed control system vendor warning us not to install SP2 on their operator/configuration consoles. SP2 and their software don't get along, and they are "working with Microsoft to resolve the issue."
There are only energy companies.
This is correct to an extent that not many people realize. I worked a short time ago for a large oil company (hint: largest oil company. Largest company in the world until it was overtaken by Wal-mart a couple of years ago) and I was told that it owns the rights to more uranium than any other entity in the world. It used to be second, but then the USSR fell apart.
Let me guess, you were always the last one picked?
I was, too, but I'm not bitter about it.
That you happen to dislike sports doesn't make them any less worthwhile than wasting time posting to slashdot about how idiotic you think they are.
Your argument is bogus, anyway. Evolution, if it happened, is blind in a manner of speaking, and didn't have a purpose in mind when it gave us large brains. It was certainly quite some time before we figured out how to avoid lifting heavy things and running from predators.
The Olympics are not a celebration of brawn over brains. I really don't think any athletes or fans are thinking, "Finally.. a chance to stick it to all the smart people! Down with thinking!"
... Let me guess. You only read every third word or so of my post before replying, right?
My argument does not "fall flat." I was speaking about disposable income, not suggesting that a person making $20,000 should give away 95% of it. I agree that if he did that, he would shortly lose what income he had because of being unable to groom regularly, dress appropriately for work, make it to work, etc.
It's true that a person on income X who gives away a fraction Y of his disposable income will, as a result, be unable to buy nearly as many nice things as another person who has inccome Z >> X who gives away fraction Y of his disposable income.
But, again, call me when you are a billionaire. What you say about "the West" may apply equally to people taking in 9 or 10 digit incomes. Billionaires may have quite a different idea about what living comfortably is, just as a person we would consider impoverished might find the lifestyle we think is merely "comfortable" to be grotesquely luxurious - even the lifestyle we are able to enjoy after giving self-sacrificially (in our minds as middle class Westerners) to charity.
For example, billionaires may be billionaires in part because of a great love of accumulating wealth, and giving away so much of it may involve a far larger sacrifice psychologically than is experienced by the middle-class man, even if after they both give, they have equal amounts to live on.
I say all this to challenge what seemed to me to be the naive assumption of the parent that the only consideration here in evaluating whether Gate's generosity is noteworthy is the amount of wealth he had left over aftewards. I think it's part of the story, but I also think that giving up 95% of what you own is a really big deal, whether you still have a couple of billion to live on or not.
The analogy isn't perfect (it's an analogy, after all), but I do think it's clarifying a bit. It's hypocritical in a way to judge extremely wealthy people for not giving away more when, relative to the really impoverished, most of us are also very wealthy, and yet buy electronic gadgets and new cars and other things that we don't need by any stretch of the imagination rather than helping them.
It's unimpressive....it's all about relative wealth and disposable income. The money he gives is a drop in a tiny tiny tiny bucket for him. While it is admirable that he is doing good things with extra money compared to others, it's not really out of his way.
Call me when your net worth is tens of billions of dollars and you're giving away 95% of it. I really suspect the basis of this comment is a mistaken belief in your own decency, viz, "If I had billions of dollars, I'd give it all away except a couple of million to live on." Everyone SAYS that. I suspect it's much harder than it sounds. I might be way off the mark here, but if you are a working geek, chances are you have disposable income. What are you doing with it? It's a fair question because if it really is just about relative wealth and disposable income, some dirt farmer or kid going through the garbage in a third world country could justifiably look at you and say, "Wow! If I had that guy's cash, I'd be giving it away like mad!" And then he would wonder, unless I miss my guess, why you aren't.
While it may have made him one of the richest people in the world, and may have allowed him to do some good...the harm his company does by maintaining a monopoly and stifling innovation outweighs those benefits.
I could buy the argument that the ends don't justify the means. But to argue that the harm MS has done really outweighs the good Gates has done with his personal wealth is mindboggling. So some relatively affluent people have been put out of work (in a country where the government would take care of them, worse case scenario), and your favorite software isn't as popular as maybe it might otherwise be. A lot of the money he is shoveling out is going more or less directly to save people's lives. Do you really think the two compare?
1.
-- Didn't think of it too much. I wasn't really going to school to get a job. It was just kind of an extension of high school. I just picked something I thought I'd be interested in.
-- I decline to say, because I'd really rather remain entirely anonymous. I'm sure I've mentioned it before in other posts if you are really that curious. I will say that it is in the field that I studied.
-- My willingness to come here mostly against my wishes is an indication of how geographically flexible I willing to be. I also interviewed as far away as Chicago and Houston. The fact is, people in my field were having a really tough time finding jobs at the time. Ordinarilly around 90% of people graduating from my dept have jobs lined up before graduating. When I graduated, it was more like 50%. I interviewed with around a dozen companies, and went for four onsite interviews. This place is who offered me a job.
2. I am being in a sense "artificially restricted" by two things. First, it's where I could find a job doing something related to my chosen field. Second, I feel duty-bound to spend at least two years here because my job (like the jobs of most professionals) is not something I picked up in two days. The company has invested time and money in me, and I feel like so long as conditions aren't intolerable (they are hardly that) I owe them a little in return. Moreover, the place where I work is small, so when I leave, it won't be a faceless corporation I'm slighting, but people I've gotten to know and like, who have to go through all the pain and trouble of finding someone new, waiting for him to make it to the top of the learning curve, etc.
Anyway, I'm sure practically no towns in the US match my description, including this one. It was an exageration intended to make a point. Some place like Cambridge, Mass is certainly more culturally diverse and "refined" than the town where I live. That's definitely a consideration for someone who is considering moving to a small town.
That's an interesting point.
FWIW, I have seen it. I grew up on a farm (15 miles to the nearest small town, 60 to the nearest place you might consider a city), and since moving away, I've lived in a small city of 200k (where I went to college), another moderately sized city of 600k (where I did an internship 2 summers), and now I live in a small town of 12k (Not my first choice, but it's where I could get work after graduating).
I can agree with you a little, because part of the reason I live in an apartment in town is broadband. I had the oppurtunity to move to the outskirts of town (just out of city limits) but didn't only because I didn't want to do the dialup thing.
Anyway, from my point of view (as a young single person), there's a heck of a lot more keeping small towns down than just the lack of broadband. If you haven't lived out in the middle of nowhere as I have and (to a lesser extent) currently do, these are things you might not have considered:
1. You can only buy the absolute necessities, usually. Even in my town which I assume is large compared to a "rural community", I can't buy fish unless its breaded and needs to be deep fried. There are no bookstores, coffee shops, or movie theaters. The only place to buy software for 50 miles is Walmart.
2. There is a small hospital here (because the entire county is sparsely populated, there frankly isn't a better place for one). But the more rural the community, the farther away you are from medical care. My grandpa died of a heart attack 12 or so years ago and perhaps could have been saved if it hadn't taken a small eternity to get him to a doctor. Soon afterward, his widow moved into town after living on a farm her entire life.
3. The culture is homogenized and philistine, not to mention frequently racist. What I wouldn't give to have regular face-to-face discussions with someone about something besides hunting, farming, or NASCAR.
And Etc. Certainly there are benefits to living in small communities, or even miles from the nearest neighbor. Peace and quiet, big yard, friendly people (as long as you don't stand out too much). (After you've done it for a while, though, the quaintness starts to wear off... it isn't attractive to start with unless you are already world-weary. Your kids will probably hate you for it. They leave the small towns, remember?) But the thing is, broadband is just one more thing that people who choose to live like that have to choose to give up. That small towns and the rural lifestyle are drying up is unfortunate in a way, and govt subsidized broadband would help that situation out incrementally, but it's just scratching the surface. We can't offer everything to these people simply because we can't afford to.
I would go so far as to say that even if we could, they wouldn't want it. Broadband, sure. But in the town near where I grew up, a large dairy and a pig processing plant almost went up (on separate occasions). The economic development commission wooed them, offered them huge low interest loans, but they ultimately decided not to build there, in part citing a lack of support from the community. People were up in arms. They wrote letters to the paper. It's been speculated that racism played no small part in all of this. What sort (or should I say, ethnicity) of people do you think would work in a pig processing plant in a small Texas town, after all?