Right. So statistics like "1 in [100 or 200, whatever]" risk are nonsense -- they've changed too many variables.
It gets worse.
Initial reports from NASA directors were that the area that shed foam *this time* was an area where they specifically decided *not* to apply the fixes that were applied to the area that shed foam on Columbia.
A post-mortem on the decision making procedure to that hadn't been completed yet (the bird was still in space, it wasn't a priority) but the director's best guess was that analysis suggested the risk of fixing the area that shed this time was greater than the risk of not fixing it. However the decision was reached, it's now certain that it was foolhardy.
My speculation: this was a formula-driven decision with no (actual) human oversight. They plugged risk/reward guesses from various engineering groups into a spreadsheet, that told them to not touch the foam in that area, done deal. Nobody ever got fired for trusting persuasive statisticians, right?
The problem: where is the common sense? We know that the foam formula and technique changed and that that was a probable culprit in Columbia. We therefore know that the tools being used to predict the behavior of the foam are suspect. It's fine to use a formula and deterministic decision procedure to get advisory starting points for action but not so fine to use such analyses to override common sense.
In other news, reports of ghost sightings are up in Nasa executive offices. People report seeing a wild-haired, Bronx-accented guy roaming the halls, carrying a glass of ghostly icewater and dipping something into it. NASA speculates it must be a donut.
Here's a plan, all the more convenient given the landing at Edwards: sell the fleet to various amusement parks; use the cash to buy some human transports from the russians; direct the remaining shuttle budget into two crash programs -- ours to build old-style three-stage beasts to fling unmanned 15 ton payloads towards the ISS and then the moon and one purchased on the open market to build the fastest-cheapest-best robots to go work on things like Hubble and preparing moon camps.
Meanwhile, let's go for more robotic missions to mars but, gee, perhaps actually try a little harder to sterilize them next time. I thank you on behalf of my microbial friends on the Red Planet.
Often in the press, because so many of us are trying to make living at this free software hacking thing, we see a lot of emphasis on customers, and costs, and business needs. That's all great and fine but if we focus only on those issues, we would have to admit that maybe Michael Taylor is right! Maybe it's good enough to have a "shared source program", as if access to source code is a form of peep show. Maybe it's more important to have freedom-robbing licensing terms because, as he says, that makes it easy to "monetize" the hacking process. If open source hackers can exploit the benefits of cooperating -- perhaps proprietary source hackers can do the same thing -- only picking and choosing to work only with those people who buy licenses: either way, the same development efficiencies are achievable.
It seems to me that Michael Taylor is successfully refuting the Open Source initiative's claim to be a productive force in the world. Open Source has positioned itself squarely with the same set of corporate values as MSFT, only MSFT is clearly the superior competitor. Stealing revenue from MSFT for a few years, and making them stronger a few years later, is not progress -- it's shooting ourselves in the foot.
The free software movement, on the other hand, is about preserving personal and democratic freedoms, first and foremost. You, a creative person, have written some code. Your friend, another creative person, has written some code. How are the two of you free to interact? The GPL, in spite of its critics, concentrates on preserving your rights in this circumstance.
In the equations of the purely business view, at least as it is so poorly framed today, you -- the creative person -- don't count. Don't obviously have the same rights as others. Aren't all that important. Taylor's rhetoric betrays that this logic underlies his arguments:
It's more about people taking an anti-Microsoft stance?
Taylor: Well, first you have to define "people" because I can tell you that most IT professionals don't want to be in the business of maintaining system-level software.
We should, in that view, abandon free licensing because the customer counts more than the worker. You should be glad, creative proprietary software hacker, that you have a job at all -- of course you should give up your rights to communicate freely with your professional peers. (Nevermind that nothing about free or open source licensing implies IT professionals maintaining system-level software -- on that point, he's just FUDing.)
There are many economic, engineering, and engineering safety arguments for free software licensing but let's not lose sight of the origins
and most beautiful contribution of the free software movement so far: the idea that programmers' rights of expression -- their freedom to cooperate with their friends -- is at stake.
Thanks, Martin Taylor, for reminding us that, in your world view, that which has so much in common with the Open Source initiative, hackers are second-class citizens. It was a resistence to servitude that sparked the free software movement and attacks like yours will, in the long run, only make us stronger and more determined.
I think that since the presumptive intention
of the donors of this money has been thwarted
the best thing to do is to use it as neutrally
and apolitically as is practical for a charitable
purpose.
Surely the failed fundraiser has a primary
address. Surely that town or city has urgent
needs that have nothing to do with computers
and that are so basic as to not be reasonably
disagreeable to many people. Surely donors
were aware that some part of their donation would
benefit the community around the organization that
collected it.
Give the money there. Let the good that comes
of (feeding orphans, adopting a highway, planting
trees in a city park, whatever) stand as a
memorial to a nice idea that didn't quite work
out.
In other words, honor the morality behind a
failed charity effort by redirecting the funds
to the most agreeable yet context-specific
charitable cause possible. Maybe label the
contribution, to the degree possible, as
"from the free and open source software community
of the world".
If the computer stores in your town are
franchises of national chains you stand
no chance because the local management
is unlikely to have the authority to take
you up on any offer you make -- you would
need to sell much higher up the supply chain.
-t
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
bmw:
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
me:
Larry is speaking in CEO-speak.
When he says "there will be no innovation"
what he means is that "there will be no reliable
economic engine which (a) pays people to
innovate systematically and (b) earns a windfall
in profit against those salary expenditures.
Bill can hire Dave and pay Dave to invent stuff.
Bill copyrights or patents such stuff, keeps
it proprietary, sells it for a per-unit markup,
and voila -- Bill has earned back many, many
times Dave's salary.
Larry belongs to the same club as Bill. He'll
only pay someone to innovate if he can earn back
many, many times that amount back in profit --
or at least if he thinks he has a good chance of
doing so.
Therefore, if you constrain Larry to use only
free software, deprived of his large profit,
he won't ever hire Dave or anyone like him.
This is a legitimate social problem in the sense
that the Bills and Larrys of the world actually
exist and, pretty much, operate within both the
law and our generally shared concensus about the
nature of civil society. Larry's view is a
dominant view among the crowd of people with
access to enough money to hire Dave.
Larry's view is a *legitimate* view.
Top-of-food-chain-capitalists do a huge
amount of good for us all (as a group, on balance,
not necessarily per-individual or in every
action). That clique has long held this very
profit-motivated ethic and their attitude is
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Most of the Dave's in the world make their
living by being hired by a Bill or a Larry.
With free software, Bill or Larry can't hire
Dave to write free software without breaking from
their traditional and presumptively civil ethic
about how to do business.
Larry is screaming that by insisting on
Free Software, Dave is shooting himself in the
foot.
Much has and will be said about how to tweak the
business communities practices to make room for
free software and so I won't try to add to that
here. I will say this:
Larry and Bill's Clique of Capitalists is not
the only co-dominant clique on the planet.
Among the other co-dominant cliques are what
I call Engineers. Like the capitalists, we
engineers have a long history of successful
contribution to society and, often against
horrific odds, personal success.
We engineers make things work. Those capitalists
make societies work.
We engineers say: proprietary code is unsound
engineering.
The capitalists say: free code is unsound
business practice.
That's pretty much where we are: trying to
figure out the best way to reconcile these
views. (Example of evidence that my account is
correct: Microsoft's initiatives to make source
at least *visible* to customers.)
That is the reality of the situation, in my view:
a variety of factors have converged to
*necessitate* the dominance of free software --
yet our capitalist friends are utterly unprepared
to cope with that.
It's an accident of history and a time for
cultural, business, and engineering innovation
to bring all these cliques back into harmony.
After all, we engineers like capitalists an
aweful lot. It's hard to get much done without
them.
It's funny how, across the aisle, the
celebrity hackers in this tale are
simultaneously poking fun at the willfully
non-technical folks who pay them and the
accidentally non-technical folks who worship
them in forums like/..
Lucky them. At least they have tenure.
> As to svn backends... I think it is prudent to
> point out a false statement made by Lord.
> [Hey, FSFS exists.]
I agree it is good to point out FSFS. The interview is, indeed, misleading in that respect.
As far as I know, back when the interview was conducted, FSFS did not exist or at least was not on many radars.
A separate question is whether or not FSFS really makes the server-side of svn all nice now or not --- but certainly that is not going to be worked out in/. comments.
Your reading of my use of the word "boast"
is a good one. I think that it describes
*authentic* human boasting (in the colloquial
sense) as well. There's the human emotions
associated with boasting, on the one hand,
and there's the objective measurable sense on
the other. I see those as varying shades on
the same underlying color.
Pride and modesty have *every* place in scientific
papers. A good paper *reaks* of the pride of
an author who had the good fortune to get to
write it. A good author in possession of a
good idea is modest enough to know the importance
of putting aside his fears of speaking in public
and his opportunities to maximize personal gain.
A good author does those things when, with as
much pride as he can afford, he presents the paper
in the academic forum.
> There is no indication of merit or pride > in the title,
Really? Perhaps I have misunderstood something....
Why didn't he title it as something like "A minor correction/reinterprtation of the Lorentz transformations"?, for example? Or "The Ether, Considered Harmful"?
AFAICT, it's because he was an enlightenment age physicist (i.e., looking for a correct, simple to articulate theory) and figured he'd solved a big chunk of it. I.e., I always figured he knew from the start that, by redisovering the transformations on the basis of a few axioms (and also, therefore, extending them and giving them some intuitive structure) he'd really nailed something and had joined the pantheon of phythagoras, euclid, etc.
"Boasting" != "Ego Bound" which seems to be the bug your reply is aimed at squashing (and kudos to you, for that.)
Why should we believe that an open source project is significantly easier to infiltrate and hork than a proprietary software project? Certainly there have been past cases of companies shipping binary-only distributions that were already infected. And how many people around the world contribute scantilly reviewed code to Microsoft or Sun distributions?
The real solution to the problem isn't a change in licensing: it's implementing more formal review processes and preparing rapid recovery procedures for when the review processes fail. Both of those solutions are, if anything, more easily implemented for publicly licensed code than for privately licensed since (a) no permission is needed to perform reviews; (b) to rapidly recover from a disaster, access to the source is needed.
> I'm considering going to cash for most > everything. Has anyone experimented with > that lately, and what difficulties did you > face?
There's the usual set of difficulties such as whether or not you can rent a car.
In general, there's "going cash" in the sense of not using credit and there's "going cash" in the sense of not using plastic as your payment method. If you just want to avoid using credit you can get debit cards that "count as" credit cards for things like renting cars. If you want to not use plastic at all, you have a much harder problem.
Not using credit (which I fell into out of not having any other choice) is _great_. You want that dinner out? Well, you'll feel it, very directly, in your bank balance. That's fantastic because you get to think about the tradeoffs you make in a very tangible way. I highly recommend this approach. Oh, and, unless you are really rich: learn to cook and take up hobbies like reading books.
Not using plastic? I think it is superstition. You can be tracked just fine anyway. We live in interesting times.
> I honestly don't understand why geeks will get > upset when people mock their style.
Because your average non-geek will adopt a style even if it hurts, while your average supra-geek is actually hypersenstive to his body -- slightly overwhelmed by it in fact.
The slobbish, ugly, smelly style of a supra-geek is, more often than not, a naive embracing of personal comfort --- coupled to a psychological utility of putting up barriers.
"Dress the part" is really good advice --- but not in isolation. It has to _feel_good_ to dress the part. In that regard, it has to _make_sense_.
The super-smart are natural leaders, frankly. They just have to run the guantlet until they're trimmed down to a socially sane base level. In some sick sense, it's good that they get beat up because that turns them into very aware people of the Real Issues.
My informal research suggests that there's biochemical reasons why this is a good (albeit illegal) path upon which to set your average maladjusted freaky geek. It makes up for some chemistry that he's missing.
(But watch out for obsessive/compulsive and psychological-addictive behavior.)
and, p.s., it has an entirely different effect on "your average dude" and is not recommended except as the occaisional party/sleep aid. In contrast, at mild levels, it tends to make freaky geeks feel and act "normal".
Identify, within your community, some people who are a local maximum of:
1) tolerent and understanding of someone like him
People who won't be shocked or in any way
flustered by his screwiness.
2) comperably smart
People whom he will respect on his own terms.
3) living well to an almost fetishy level
People who drink incredibly good wine,
dine at very fine restaurants, enjoy a
good hot-tub, have some sexual success in
their life, know where to get a good massage,
etc.
4) know how to convey well-meaning snobbishness
People who don't put up with crap. Who
keep their affairs in order. Who can look
down on his baser habits without making him
feel like a _complete_ idiot about them.
Introduce him.
In short -- show him the good life, viscerally and interpersonally -- then hope he works on making his own version of it.
In short, give him worthy role models. People he can emulate and then surpass.
Monkey see, monkey do.
p.s., and yeah -- get him laid. Watch out for
sexual compulsion but, otherwise.... well it
would be illegal to hook him up with a decent
prostitute so I can't recommend that. (figure
out if he's gay, btw.)
p.p.s. "doesn't understand" why people react
to e.g., his uncombed hair? bullshit. he's
playing you. He understands perfectly well
but you're an easy distraction.
p.p.p.s.: is he old enough to shave? buy him
a straight razor. If he's a nebbishy little
obsessive geek, then the trick is to focus his
obsession on sensual matters. Distract him
from cultural/scientific abstractions towards
an abstraction of his Self.
p.p.p.p.s: show him this post. This thread.
let him take on his problem as _his_ problem.
He's a big boy, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. So statistics like "1 in [100 or 200,
whatever]" risk are nonsense -- they've changed
too many variables.
It gets worse.
Initial reports from NASA directors were that
the area that shed foam *this time* was an
area where they specifically decided *not*
to apply the fixes that were applied to
the area that shed foam on Columbia.
A post-mortem on the decision making procedure
to that hadn't been completed yet (the bird
was still in space, it wasn't a priority)
but the director's best guess was that analysis
suggested the risk of fixing the area that
shed this time was greater than the risk of
not fixing it. However the decision was reached,
it's now certain that it was foolhardy.
My speculation: this was a formula-driven
decision with no (actual) human oversight. They
plugged risk/reward guesses from various
engineering groups into a spreadsheet, that
told them to not touch the foam in that area,
done deal. Nobody ever got fired for trusting
persuasive statisticians, right?
The problem: where is the common sense? We
know that the foam formula and technique
changed and that that was a probable culprit
in Columbia. We therefore know that the tools
being used to predict the behavior of the foam
are suspect. It's fine to use a formula and
deterministic decision procedure to get advisory
starting points for action but not so fine to
use such analyses to override common sense.
In other news, reports of ghost sightings are
up in Nasa executive offices. People report
seeing a wild-haired, Bronx-accented guy roaming
the halls, carrying a glass of ghostly icewater
and dipping something into it. NASA speculates
it must be a donut.
Here's a plan, all the more convenient given
the landing at Edwards: sell the fleet to
various amusement parks; use the cash to buy
some human transports from the russians;
direct the remaining shuttle budget into two
crash programs -- ours to build old-style
three-stage beasts to fling unmanned 15 ton
payloads towards the ISS and then the moon
and one purchased on the open
market to build the fastest-cheapest-best robots
to go work on things like Hubble and preparing
moon camps.
Meanwhile, let's go for more robotic missions
to mars but, gee, perhaps actually try a little
harder to sterilize them next time. I thank
you on behalf of my microbial friends on the
Red Planet.
What is a value of stock if not future dividends?
Assets.
-t
Often in the press, because so many of us are trying to make living at this free software hacking thing, we see a lot of emphasis on customers, and costs, and business needs. That's all great and fine but if we focus only on those issues, we would have to admit that maybe Michael Taylor is right! Maybe it's good enough to have a "shared source program", as if access to source code is a form of peep show. Maybe it's more important to have freedom-robbing licensing terms because, as he says, that makes it easy to "monetize" the hacking process. If open source hackers can exploit the benefits of cooperating -- perhaps proprietary source hackers can do the same thing -- only picking and choosing to work only with those people who buy licenses: either way, the same development efficiencies are achievable.
It seems to me that Michael Taylor is successfully refuting the Open Source initiative's claim to be a productive force in the world. Open Source has positioned itself squarely with the same set of corporate values as MSFT, only MSFT is clearly the superior competitor. Stealing revenue from MSFT for a few years, and making them stronger a few years later, is not progress -- it's shooting ourselves in the foot.
The free software movement, on the other hand, is about preserving personal and democratic freedoms, first and foremost. You, a creative person, have written some code. Your friend, another creative person, has written some code. How are the two of you free to interact? The GPL, in spite of its critics, concentrates on preserving your rights in this circumstance.
In the equations of the purely business view, at least as it is so poorly framed today, you -- the creative person -- don't count. Don't obviously have the same rights as others. Aren't all that important. Taylor's rhetoric betrays that this logic underlies his arguments:
It's more about people taking an anti-Microsoft stance?
Taylor: Well, first you have to define "people" because I can tell you that most IT professionals don't want to be in the business of maintaining system-level software.
We should, in that view, abandon free licensing because the customer counts more than the worker. You should be glad, creative proprietary software hacker, that you have a job at all -- of course you should give up your rights to communicate freely with your professional peers. (Nevermind that nothing about free or open source licensing implies IT professionals maintaining system-level software -- on that point, he's just FUDing.)
There are many economic, engineering, and engineering safety arguments for free software licensing but let's not lose sight of the origins and most beautiful contribution of the free software movement so far: the idea that programmers' rights of expression -- their freedom to cooperate with their friends -- is at stake.
Thanks, Martin Taylor, for reminding us that, in your world view, that which has so much in common with the Open Source initiative, hackers are second-class citizens. It was a resistence to servitude that sparked the free software movement and attacks like yours will, in the long run, only make us stronger and more determined.
-t
I think that since the presumptive intention of the donors of this money has been thwarted the best thing to do is to use it as neutrally and apolitically as is practical for a charitable purpose.
Surely the failed fundraiser has a primary address. Surely that town or city has urgent needs that have nothing to do with computers and that are so basic as to not be reasonably disagreeable to many people. Surely donors were aware that some part of their donation would benefit the community around the organization that collected it.
Give the money there. Let the good that comes of (feeding orphans, adopting a highway, planting trees in a city park, whatever) stand as a memorial to a nice idea that didn't quite work out.
In other words, honor the morality behind a failed charity effort by redirecting the funds to the most agreeable yet context-specific charitable cause possible. Maybe label the contribution, to the degree possible, as "from the free and open source software community of the world".
-t
If the computer stores in your town are franchises of national chains you stand no chance because the local management is unlikely to have the authority to take you up on any offer you make -- you would need to sell much higher up the supply chain. -t
larry:
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
bmw:
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
me:
Larry is speaking in CEO-speak.
When he says "there will be no innovation" what he means is that "there will be no reliable economic engine which (a) pays people to innovate systematically and (b) earns a windfall in profit against those salary expenditures.
Bill can hire Dave and pay Dave to invent stuff. Bill copyrights or patents such stuff, keeps it proprietary, sells it for a per-unit markup, and voila -- Bill has earned back many, many times Dave's salary.
Larry belongs to the same club as Bill. He'll only pay someone to innovate if he can earn back many, many times that amount back in profit -- or at least if he thinks he has a good chance of doing so.
Therefore, if you constrain Larry to use only free software, deprived of his large profit, he won't ever hire Dave or anyone like him.
This is a legitimate social problem in the sense that the Bills and Larrys of the world actually exist and, pretty much, operate within both the law and our generally shared concensus about the nature of civil society. Larry's view is a dominant view among the crowd of people with access to enough money to hire Dave.
Larry's view is a *legitimate* view. Top-of-food-chain-capitalists do a huge amount of good for us all (as a group, on balance, not necessarily per-individual or in every action). That clique has long held this very profit-motivated ethic and their attitude is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Most of the Dave's in the world make their living by being hired by a Bill or a Larry. With free software, Bill or Larry can't hire Dave to write free software without breaking from their traditional and presumptively civil ethic about how to do business.
Larry is screaming that by insisting on Free Software, Dave is shooting himself in the foot.
Much has and will be said about how to tweak the business communities practices to make room for free software and so I won't try to add to that here. I will say this:
Larry and Bill's Clique of Capitalists is not the only co-dominant clique on the planet. Among the other co-dominant cliques are what I call Engineers. Like the capitalists, we engineers have a long history of successful contribution to society and, often against horrific odds, personal success.
We engineers make things work. Those capitalists make societies work.
We engineers say: proprietary code is unsound engineering.
The capitalists say: free code is unsound business practice.
That's pretty much where we are: trying to figure out the best way to reconcile these views. (Example of evidence that my account is correct: Microsoft's initiatives to make source at least *visible* to customers.)
That is the reality of the situation, in my view: a variety of factors have converged to *necessitate* the dominance of free software -- yet our capitalist friends are utterly unprepared to cope with that.
It's an accident of history and a time for cultural, business, and engineering innovation to bring all these cliques back into harmony. After all, we engineers like capitalists an aweful lot. It's hard to get much done without them.
It's funny how, across the aisle, the celebrity hackers in this tale are simultaneously poking fun at the willfully non-technical folks who pay them and the accidentally non-technical folks who worship them in forums like /..
Lucky them. At least they have tenure.
> I read somewhere that Canonical these days
> employs Tom Lord, of Arch version control system
>fame
They do not. What you recall reading is not true.
-t
> You fail to realize that Tom Lord is a genius,
> and as such has no need for people skills.
I only wish....
> As to svn backends... I think it is prudent to
/. comments.
> point out a false statement made by Lord.
> [Hey, FSFS exists.]
I agree it is good to point out FSFS. The
interview is, indeed, misleading in that
respect.
As far as I know, back when the interview was
conducted, FSFS did not exist or at least was
not on many radars.
A separate question is whether or not FSFS
really makes the server-side of svn all nice
now or not --- but certainly that is not going
to be worked out in
-t
Your reading of my use of the word "boast" is a good one. I think that it describes *authentic* human boasting (in the colloquial sense) as well. There's the human emotions associated with boasting, on the one hand, and there's the objective measurable sense on the other. I see those as varying shades on the same underlying color. Pride and modesty have *every* place in scientific papers. A good paper *reaks* of the pride of an author who had the good fortune to get to write it. A good author in possession of a good idea is modest enough to know the importance of putting aside his fears of speaking in public and his opportunities to maximize personal gain. A good author does those things when, with as much pride as he can afford, he presents the paper in the academic forum.
hehe. By "modern physics" I meant QM, relativity, plus all subsequent theories that hope to subsume/replace/unify those. -t
> So it would be like publishing a paper called
>"on datastructures" if you were the person that
> invented datastructures....
Your analogy sucks except for that, yes,
modern physics was a very young field back
then, just as CS is a very young field now.
> There is no indication of merit or pride
> in the title,
Really? Perhaps I have misunderstood something....
Why didn't he title it as something like
"A minor correction/reinterprtation of the
Lorentz transformations"?, for example? Or "The Ether, Considered Harmful"?
AFAICT, it's because he was an enlightenment age physicist (i.e., looking for a correct, simple to articulate theory) and figured he'd solved a big chunk of it. I.e., I always figured he knew from the start that, by redisovering the transformations on the basis of a few axioms (and also, therefore, extending them and giving them some intuitive structure) he'd really nailed something and had joined the pantheon of phythagoras, euclid, etc.
"Boasting" != "Ego Bound" which seems to be the bug your reply is aimed at squashing (and kudos to you, for that.)
Actually, the title:
"On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"
is exceedingly boastful.
In computer science, an analogy might be to publish a paper titled:
"On datastructures, in general"
What an oddly broad topic to choose, unless
you are claiming to be saying something
rather profound.
Why should we believe that an open source project is significantly easier to infiltrate and hork than a proprietary software project? Certainly there have been past cases of companies shipping binary-only distributions that were already infected. And how many people around the world contribute scantilly reviewed code to Microsoft or Sun distributions?
The real solution to the problem isn't a change in licensing: it's implementing more formal review processes and preparing rapid recovery procedures for when the review processes fail. Both of those solutions are, if anything, more easily implemented for publicly licensed code than for privately licensed since (a) no permission is needed to perform reviews; (b) to rapidly recover from a disaster, access to the source is needed.
> I'm considering going to cash for most
> everything. Has anyone experimented with
> that lately, and what difficulties did you
> face?
There's the usual set of difficulties such as
whether or not you can rent a car.
In general, there's "going cash" in the sense
of not using credit and there's "going cash"
in the sense of not using plastic as your
payment method. If you just want to avoid
using credit you can get debit cards that
"count as" credit cards for things like
renting cars. If you want to not use plastic
at all, you have a much harder problem.
Not using credit (which I fell into out of
not having any other choice) is _great_.
You want that dinner out? Well, you'll feel
it, very directly, in your bank balance.
That's fantastic because you get to think about
the tradeoffs you make in a very tangible way.
I highly recommend this approach. Oh, and,
unless you are really rich: learn to cook and
take up hobbies like reading books.
Not using plastic? I think it is superstition.
You can be tracked just fine anyway. We live
in interesting times.
Maybe this will turn out to be a non-event
but, in general, the development community
is a very tempting target.
Actually, breakins are crude. Subtley malicious
code is the sophisticated approach.
Bah. Arrogance is sometimes the mistaken
interpretation of _frankness_.
Don't fetishize "ego" or "ego supression" --
it'll just screw you up. These are oversimplified
terms in which to comprehend real life.
don't build "social skills"
build self-care.
Are you trying to make him a mature genius or
a second-rate salesman?
> I honestly don't understand why geeks will get
> upset when people mock their style.
Because your average non-geek will adopt a style
even if it hurts, while your average supra-geek
is actually hypersenstive to his body -- slightly
overwhelmed by it in fact.
The slobbish, ugly, smelly style of a supra-geek
is, more often than not, a naive embracing of
personal comfort --- coupled to a psychological
utility of putting up barriers.
"Dress the part" is really good advice --- but
not in isolation. It has to _feel_good_ to dress
the part. In that regard, it has to _make_sense_.
The super-smart are natural leaders, frankly.
They just have to run the guantlet until they're
trimmed down to a socially sane base level.
In some sick sense, it's good that they get beat
up because that turns them into very aware people
of the Real Issues.
Yup.
My informal research suggests that there's
biochemical reasons why this is a good
(albeit illegal) path upon which to set your
average maladjusted freaky geek. It makes
up for some chemistry that he's missing.
(But watch out for obsessive/compulsive and
psychological-addictive behavior.)
and, p.s., it has an entirely different
effect on "your average dude" and is not
recommended except as the occaisional party/sleep
aid. In contrast, at mild levels, it tends to
make freaky geeks feel and act "normal".
> Have him play a team sport!
I recommend "ultimate frisbee".
> [make him a stoner]
Seconded.
I'll add a caution: watch out for obsessive
compulsion and psychological addiction.
And I'll add a speculation: it might be a good
fit for his brain chemistry.
Identify, within your community, some people
who are a local maximum of:
1) tolerent and understanding of someone like him
People who won't be shocked or in any way
flustered by his screwiness.
2) comperably smart
People whom he will respect on his own terms.
3) living well to an almost fetishy level
People who drink incredibly good wine,
dine at very fine restaurants, enjoy a
good hot-tub, have some sexual success in
their life, know where to get a good massage,
etc.
4) know how to convey well-meaning snobbishness
People who don't put up with crap. Who
keep their affairs in order. Who can look
down on his baser habits without making him
feel like a _complete_ idiot about them.
Introduce him.
In short -- show him the good life, viscerally
and interpersonally -- then hope he works on
making his own version of it.
In short, give him worthy role models. People he
can emulate and then surpass.
Monkey see, monkey do.
p.s., and yeah -- get him laid. Watch out for
sexual compulsion but, otherwise.... well it
would be illegal to hook him up with a decent
prostitute so I can't recommend that. (figure
out if he's gay, btw.)
p.p.s. "doesn't understand" why people react
to e.g., his uncombed hair? bullshit. he's
playing you. He understands perfectly well
but you're an easy distraction.
p.p.p.s.: is he old enough to shave? buy him
a straight razor. If he's a nebbishy little
obsessive geek, then the trick is to focus his
obsession on sensual matters. Distract him
from cultural/scientific abstractions towards
an abstraction of his Self.
p.p.p.p.s: show him this post. This thread.
let him take on his problem as _his_ problem.
He's a big boy, after all.