How long would it have taken you to get everyone (including dev-ops) up to speed on MongoDB as opposed to actually building product over MySQL until (as it is today) a competitive solution was stable and "boring" enough?
The solution developed on top of MySQL started about 11 years prior to our switching from MongoDB. It never worked. It changed hands to a new rockstar developer who, over 14 more months, rewrote the code in 1/3 as many lines and got it semi-working, but it was academic: it could perform the task, but it was slow and clunky and impossible to maintain as a code base. When I installed MongoDB, they spent a month looking at it, and had a working prototype in 6 weeks; 2 months later, they released two entire new projects built on MongoDB to address both the things the first, failed project tried to address and an entirely new requirement.
MongoDB was considered fresh and new around version 2.2, still. It was being talked about and criticized even though 2.2 was deep into its maturity. Similarly, Linux was considered a new product around version 2.4; it was in production in version 2.2, and RedHat was happily chugging along, but it wasn't a cultural revolution in the IT industry until later than that. Scarcely before MongoDB, there was CouchDB and CouchBase, which most people are only aware of academically.
I jumped on MongoDB when it was this thing that some people had leveraged successfully and most people believed was a brand new fad that would go away just like everything else that tried to replace SQL over the past 20 years. MongoDB doesn't replace SQL; it does something different.
the article is suggesting that you don't simultaneously innovate in your development language, source-code storage system, and business model. That's all.
In a year's time, we moved from a dev team of 2 and SVN to a dev team of 4 and Git; we moved from raw SQL to ORM; and we incorporated MongoDB into our applications where appropriate. We also moved onto a cluster system with GFS2, which was successful, but badly mishandled: I didn't want the security implications of logging into the internal LAN's vmware vSphere management panel from internet-facing Web servers, and management didn't want to build a DMZ VMware farm, so we used sanlock fencing. Never use sanlock fencing. If we had built the cluster properly, it would have been a reverberating success capable of handling all kinds of disruption without the slightest hitch. I made all the correct assessments, but we decided as a business to go about it the wrong way; I conceded, and my lack of knowledge prevented me from predicting just how bad these concessions would be.
Three huge steps forward, three huge gains. One other huge step forward, done in ways recommended against, with good gains, but with growing pains; and even that moderate failure was both still a major success and readily avoidable in foresight, with the nebulous problem of "this could cause additional issues in some unknown situations" being correct, if unspecific. I know about black swans, I knew they were out there, didn't know what they looked like, but knew how to avoid them; unfortunately, I didn't take the steps to avoid them, and found out what they look like.
They've found a correlation between poverty and small brain size, but it's a complex issue that's not as simple as money or food or whatnot causing a small brain. You have a point about nutrition, and that's an important consideration going forward; it is unfortunate that we can't solve this readily, but it's a good consideration to make.
Still, nutrition is only one small part of it. The brain isn't a muscle: you don't get stronger at math by flexing your math brain parts; you only get better at the particular techniques in use for the mode of math you're studying, and can thus apply those techniques to similar problems. Even so, the brain changes dramatically in structure during learning: people who learn to navigate cities for a living (e.g. black car taxi cab drivers) show a 7% growth in their anterior hippocampi, as they learn to use visualization more effectively. They don't magically gain a better memory, but they do find it easier to visualize and internally inspect things using their spatial reasoning, which forms the basis of techniques to remember all kinds of facts and figures and places.
Poverty is correlated with not learning, which is a direct cause of a smaller brain: by not learning, you don't use the parts of your brain that execute important reasoning and memory tasks; this in turn causes those parts to stay smaller. We know, as well, that poverty is correlated with certain social atmospheres which make learning more difficult. A small child in a poverty-stricken family will face more social pressure, as the social imperative is the natural survival behavior for humans: unable to hunt and gather effectively, humans form communities to hunt and gather more effectively, bringing down large animals to feed the group; one deer can feed twenty people, so you only need an average of one deer every twenty days per person to feed the group. To use less esoteric, more factually reliable arguments, impoverished children suffer from a loss of feeling of importance, and focus more on peer pressure to adapt to a social need and justify their marginal lives.
The larger part of the solution would be to adjust the education system for poverty-stricken communities. We should focus more on bringing children in an impoverished community together in the classroom, granting them a feeling of importance directly beneficial to their educational performance. Early grade school should encourage impoverished children to work together toward goals, to make friends in the pursuit of things they can be proud of, and to guide themselves through a variety of activities all able to serve similar educational needs. While this may create some small gaps in education, it will maximize the breadth of intellectual skills these children develop: we might not be able to teach them an exact, consistent set of memory, mathematical, and social skills, but we can improve their feeling of self-worth and of community while conveying at least some. A middle-class district might get a head start on these impoverished children, but the difference won't be mere success versus failure.
Unfortunately, I have little answer for that. I know the tools and techniques to teach, but I don't know much about managing a room full of school children; I can't structure an educational system for this purpose, although I know what would go into it. I know how to solve poverty absolutely, but that's of little use in this context; simply guaranteeing every American gets the basic needs of food, shelter, clean clothes and personal hygiene, and the like won't eliminate the hierarchical nature of our society, and will still leave people struggling at the bottom, even if all those at the bottom are readily surviving and under no immanent threat of starvation and homelessness. In any realistic society, the problem of social pressure within the communities of the poor will always have such implications as must be addressed as I have said; I have not solved that problem, but I would like to.
I evaluate things I use. When MongoDB came out, I told our dev manager we should use it because we are storing flexible, complex data in MySQL and that's just not a good fit. Document stores are better, and MongoDB with acknowledged write mode in a 3-node replica set has roughly the same data consistency guarantees as PostgreSQL with a replicated WAL in the common async mode (there's a small window where the slave server may crash, and the master server may also immediately crash, and the very last few milliseconds of transactions are lost; on MongoDB, the same happens if the first replica node acks an update, the update never reaches the second replica node, and the first replica and the current primary crash immediately).
At the time, we were handling schemaless documents by creating tables in MySQL with rows that described other tables, and using incremental joins to assemble fields from hundreds of tables together to select individual documents. What is a single document collection and a quick find() in MongoDB is any combination of dozens or hundreds of tables in MySQL, accessed with complicated aggregation logic to select information about these tables and then select and join together data from them to build one document at a time. MySQL wasn't intended to store documents consisting of a number of standard fields followed by arbitrary structures of searchable, user-defined fields; MongoDB was.
The article suggests using these types of psychotic schemas in MySQL to avoid innovating by taking MongoDB up. It suggests using Apache and built-in CGI rather than nginx and an external application (WSGI+python, a Perl CGI application manager, php5-fpm, etc.). It suggests sticking to Perl or PHP instead of Python and Cherrypy. It suggests, by extension backwards, sticking to IIS5 instead of moving on to IIS6 or a Linux server.
The article ludicrously suggests not even evaluating new tools and using those which make your work better, faster, lower-risk, more consistent, less likely to fuck off in your face; it recommends you run scared from all the new things. Maybe you should learn risk management and get a good enough handle on your technical and business needs to evaluate new technology and decide which you can use effectively and which you should hold back on.
You'll buy a video, or buy a product with videos; you'll then hate the video and the product, but you'll take a hell of a lot more notice of that particular product or educational course. Dramatizing your persuasive argument--"Buy my course because fucking awesome video with explosions"--is one of the most effective ways to obtain buy-in.
We should tell the businesses it's their responsibility to solve their own problems. If they can't find workers, then bring in eager young men and pay for their education.
The cognitive disconnect is amazing, isn't it? "Most STEM degree holders don't go into STEM jobs... How do we get more STEM workers into the market?" You have a market oversupply, and you want to make it worse?
I keep explaining that we need to cut away the entire college education system from the Government's hands. Leave that to the market; leave it to businesses to say, "Fuck! We are paralyzed, because we have to pay $250,000 for a professional, and need more than available to accomplish our business strategies!" Businesses should never be in this position, because their mode of growth gives them more-than-adequate warning about what positions they'll need filled; therefor, they should hire, train, and send to college cheap entrant employees, with preference for the lower-risk but similar-cost investment of hiring an available professional.
People don't believe in this because the mechanism is disconnected. By giving out the ability to go to college on the public dime or on indelible loans, you are enforcing the responsibility onto every individual to educate himself and prepare for the workforce. This means individuals have to make complex market analysis across the whole body of growth of industries and of the needs of those industries, whereas businesses only need to look at their operations and growth and work performance information and cross that with their prediction of their particular market to project the next few years of staffing needs. Projecting staffing needs for more than two years out is a normal business operation; is predicting the complex behavior of the job market a normal human operation?
By creating an institution to provide everyone a path to college education, we are demanding everyone get educated or be ignored by employers. The risks they must take are easily absorbed by the rich, and not so well absorbed by the middle class; the poor have the least ability to make these complex analysis and to handle the consequences of selecting a degree that leads to oversupplied markets with few employment opportunities and many prospective applicants. Meanwhile, the onus of building a workforce is moved off the businesses, who only need stretch out their hands and grasp at the abundant skilled labor, and throw back the pieces they don't like. All power is taken from the individual, and moved to hiring managers and directors and business executives.
The disconnect in this thinking is a powerful tool. It allows us to convince the masses that these education policies are good for them, are important social institutions, that we are helping them. Meanwhile, we not only create a terrible institution of disenfranchisement of the poor and the laborer in general; but also avoid addressing the problem of K-12 education by simply claiming there isn't *enough* education, and thus publicly praise ourselves for remedying the failing education system by sending more people to college when they would have more success in life if we abandoned them to the job market after high school and simply focused on giving them every advantage of education up until then.
I patently despise our current education system. I believe we can do much better; that we can, for little cost, adjust the education system to produce much better results in the general case, churning out an endless supply of geniuses through good educational technique. In theory, we should also be able to address specific challenges in poverty-stricken districts, not satisfying ourselves with a simple general improvement in the education of the poor, but instead acting to bring them even further up to meet with the educational success of the middle class by delivering that same education in a manner more effective for their situation. This would provide much greater academic advantages to our students than extending their state education through college, even if state-supported college education programs didn't have such negative impacts on the job economy.
If this were Fark, it would have become a furry porn thread filled with anthropomorphic mouses reclining on sofas playing Xbox while getting blowjobs. From catgirls, I guess.
Shortly thereafter, it would become a catgirl-in-bikini thread.
It has to give you a bigger penis. You should look for a $500 wireless mouse with a unified RF, a charging cradle, laser, 5000dpi, and at least 13 programmable buttons. It should also glow all over the place when in use, and have a sick silkscreened diamond pattern.
Sometimes, to go forward, you go back. Thing is, the Program Manager was a modal dialogue containing all windows, and could be minimized; you selected program by opening windows containing icons of programs to select. The Gnome Shell eliminates that modal dialogue and moves the icons to an interface off to the side; the current desktop shrinks into the shell's entire display area, allowing you to move to another desktop containing other windows.
In short, windows are brought inside, rather than moved outside, the working space; nothing is behind the working space, but rather, the UI tools move behind the working space when not in use. Instead of icons of windows, Gnome Shell scales the windows down and displays them in a tiled fashion, providing a broad overview of the current working space.
This contrasts with earlier attempts in which the modal dialogue making up the working space was flattened into the background, creating the desktop. All elements of the modal dialogue were scattered around the screen as decoration, and minimized windows appeared in a task bar as titles rather than icons--just as useless when many windows were opened. The step following that was to make multiple working spaces in the same fashion. Gnome Shell has banished most of this, leaving a clock at the top of the screen, but little else to intrude on the use of the work space.
I don't tap my screen; I remember what application I want, and go directly to it. Rather than Applications:Graphics:Krita, I just type "Kri" and click the Krita icon. I can also drag the Krita icon to a space between desktops, spawning the window there. I can also type "image" and have all the image viewing and editing software appear in front of me.
Rather than a single view of a hierarchical database of applications and operations, I have the ability to declare what I want and have it given to me in the same way that an SQL SELECT statement declares what data I want and how to organize it. This is an improvement, and it is what obsoleted the old Deskbar applet everyone was raving about when Beagle and Tracker were going head-to-head.
I dunno, Gnome 2 and KDE feel like Windows 3.1 when you've used Gnome 3. A blunt desktop, some virtual desktops to move around, menus or start menus... the usual.
Then you pull out Gnome 3, and suddenly you can tap Winkey or point the mouse at the top left corner, and you get a view of all the windows on your current desktop. You can start typing "DVD burner" or "Images" or "Firefox", and it brings up Thoggin or Gimp or some Web browsers, that you then click on. You can drag your windows to other desktops; you can drag your windows between desktops to spawn new desktops. You have infinite desktops just by opening a window on the empty desktop at the end.
I hold complaints about Gnome 3's alt-tab behavior. Beyond that, it's thrown out all this navigation through bullshit menus and cluttered windows scattered across a dozen desktops in favor of straight out opening the applications you want and scanning through your open windows across all desktops. It gets out of your way and lets you use the computer, instead of fucking around with the UI.
That won't happen. Ketchup is a non-newtonian fluid: its viscosity changes with shear force, and so it refuses to flow until adequate force is applied. That's why ketchup doesn't leave the bottle with gentle force, but spurts out when squeezed. It will retain its shape just fine until forced out.
Heinz will collapse as a company and be bought by Kraft or something stupid while Hunts goes on to advertise to housewives that they can get that last squirt with their bottle.
Without public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Gotta hire a good, hard-working entrant, train them, educate them, move them up.
With public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Cash crop of cheap labor. Lots of risk on individuals (waste 4 years without job on education, possibly get oversupplied degree), the poor are least able to handle this risk, followed closely by the disenfranchised (anyone often passed over in the local culture, e.g. blacks or women).
Tax-funded college and government-guaranteed student loans benefit hiring businesses at the expense of the individual. This is hard to grasp because it looks like money and education and other tangible goods are being handed to the individual, while the market effects are more abstract and difficult to understand without having a huge amount of knowledge in the area.
This does very little to put us on a footing for a post-scarcity society. And we are assuredly on that path right now
No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.
Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive amount of energy required.
With thousands of trillions of times the energy available, we could turn anything into anything else. Automation would be a drop in the bucket: those machines are powered by a minimal amount of energy, but they'd be built with material we made dumping in billion of times as much energy to just turn sand into steel. We'd mine asteroids by turning base materials into fuel oils and hydrogen gas, then converting garbage silica rock and other bullshit that's not nickel-iron into nickel-iron, or oil, or gold, or palladium; we wouldn't need to find a high-ore-content rock to bring down.
That's post-scarcity. So much automated, so much that can just be done by magic, we don't need people doing anything. We'd have multi-level structures running hydroponic gardens for farms, rather than large swaths of arable land; it would take immense amounts of energy and material, but all that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the full power of the sun itself.
The push to educate everyone has come from the Government's great support arm. It uses taxpayer money or Federal guaranteed loans and cultural pressure, both decoupled from risk requirements that stop banks from handing out tons of free money, to get everyone to go to college and get a degree.
This strategy churns out piles of cheap labor, freeing businesses from the social responsibility of building a workforce. Without these public efforts, most students wouldn't be able to go it on their own; businesses would have to hire good, solid entrants and send them to school on the company dime, taking the risk of training them. Businesses are good at minimizing that risk, and so would build a well-tuned, highly-selected workforce with little economic loss. Individuals have to assess an opaque market of both business demand and the state of business demand and candidate availability in several years; they take huge personal risks simply not present when a business does it.
This cheap labor costs businesses little in salary, even less in training risk (training useless individuals), thus displacing their responsibility onto the individual. It puts risks most easily handled by the rich and impossible to handle by the poor onto the individual, disadvantaging those who are less-advantaged or who will have more difficulty getting a job anyway (e.g. minorities in more racist communities). It's bad for the individual, but good for business.
In a competitive market, costs tend to approach the marginal cost.
Nope.
In a competitive market, costs tend to be more stable. They don't race to the bottom; they just don't spiral out of control. With the hundreds of supermarkets in my area selling fruit at $5/lb, I'm going over to the smaller specialty stores to buy the same fruit for $1/lb. Pizza parlors have the same deal: you keep seeing $2.50/slice pizza and $2.25 for a 32oz soda, but once in a while they all get pissy because someone breaks rank and starts selling $1/slice pizza, $5 whole pizzas (instead of $9.99), and $1 sodas--and turning a huge profit. The independent shops... just keep their prices high, and keep selling, until that idiot realizes he's not going to get 3 times as much business that way.
In a competitive market, the price usually moves toward a cross-over point in the supply-demand curve, where raising the price brings in less profit. Without competitors, people aren't able to shop around, so the price can be raised more before people find an alternate means (harder than just finding an alternate supplier).
Aside, and less related, some markets aren't competitive, but appear to be. Rental housing, for example, is not competitive: entering the rental market is high-risk, as too many players in the market quickly causes massive economic problems; the rental market will tend to supply enough units to meet demand, but won't tend to allow new competitors to come in with lower rent prices to drive costs down, because they won't be able to fill units to cover costs. Prices in the rental market tend to increase when more wealthy people move into the area, as they're willing and able to spend more for the same apartment units.
This is really kind of dangerous. It's a "we know it when we see it" kind of law. What if your company is HQ in Bermuda, and you operate an independent subsidiary in UK? How is this different from your company being HQ in the UK, yet purchasing services from a company in Bermuda?
The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?
Slashdot Mirror
How long would it have taken you to get everyone (including dev-ops) up to speed on MongoDB as opposed to actually building product over MySQL until (as it is today) a competitive solution was stable and "boring" enough?
The solution developed on top of MySQL started about 11 years prior to our switching from MongoDB. It never worked. It changed hands to a new rockstar developer who, over 14 more months, rewrote the code in 1/3 as many lines and got it semi-working, but it was academic: it could perform the task, but it was slow and clunky and impossible to maintain as a code base. When I installed MongoDB, they spent a month looking at it, and had a working prototype in 6 weeks; 2 months later, they released two entire new projects built on MongoDB to address both the things the first, failed project tried to address and an entirely new requirement.
MongoDB was considered fresh and new around version 2.2, still. It was being talked about and criticized even though 2.2 was deep into its maturity. Similarly, Linux was considered a new product around version 2.4; it was in production in version 2.2, and RedHat was happily chugging along, but it wasn't a cultural revolution in the IT industry until later than that. Scarcely before MongoDB, there was CouchDB and CouchBase, which most people are only aware of academically.
I jumped on MongoDB when it was this thing that some people had leveraged successfully and most people believed was a brand new fad that would go away just like everything else that tried to replace SQL over the past 20 years. MongoDB doesn't replace SQL; it does something different.
the article is suggesting that you don't simultaneously innovate in your development language, source-code storage system, and business model. That's all.
In a year's time, we moved from a dev team of 2 and SVN to a dev team of 4 and Git; we moved from raw SQL to ORM; and we incorporated MongoDB into our applications where appropriate. We also moved onto a cluster system with GFS2, which was successful, but badly mishandled: I didn't want the security implications of logging into the internal LAN's vmware vSphere management panel from internet-facing Web servers, and management didn't want to build a DMZ VMware farm, so we used sanlock fencing. Never use sanlock fencing. If we had built the cluster properly, it would have been a reverberating success capable of handling all kinds of disruption without the slightest hitch. I made all the correct assessments, but we decided as a business to go about it the wrong way; I conceded, and my lack of knowledge prevented me from predicting just how bad these concessions would be.
Three huge steps forward, three huge gains. One other huge step forward, done in ways recommended against, with good gains, but with growing pains; and even that moderate failure was both still a major success and readily avoidable in foresight, with the nebulous problem of "this could cause additional issues in some unknown situations" being correct, if unspecific. I know about black swans, I knew they were out there, didn't know what they looked like, but knew how to avoid them; unfortunately, I didn't take the steps to avoid them, and found out what they look like.
They've found a correlation between poverty and small brain size, but it's a complex issue that's not as simple as money or food or whatnot causing a small brain. You have a point about nutrition, and that's an important consideration going forward; it is unfortunate that we can't solve this readily, but it's a good consideration to make.
Still, nutrition is only one small part of it. The brain isn't a muscle: you don't get stronger at math by flexing your math brain parts; you only get better at the particular techniques in use for the mode of math you're studying, and can thus apply those techniques to similar problems. Even so, the brain changes dramatically in structure during learning: people who learn to navigate cities for a living (e.g. black car taxi cab drivers) show a 7% growth in their anterior hippocampi, as they learn to use visualization more effectively. They don't magically gain a better memory, but they do find it easier to visualize and internally inspect things using their spatial reasoning, which forms the basis of techniques to remember all kinds of facts and figures and places.
Poverty is correlated with not learning, which is a direct cause of a smaller brain: by not learning, you don't use the parts of your brain that execute important reasoning and memory tasks; this in turn causes those parts to stay smaller. We know, as well, that poverty is correlated with certain social atmospheres which make learning more difficult. A small child in a poverty-stricken family will face more social pressure, as the social imperative is the natural survival behavior for humans: unable to hunt and gather effectively, humans form communities to hunt and gather more effectively, bringing down large animals to feed the group; one deer can feed twenty people, so you only need an average of one deer every twenty days per person to feed the group. To use less esoteric, more factually reliable arguments, impoverished children suffer from a loss of feeling of importance, and focus more on peer pressure to adapt to a social need and justify their marginal lives.
The larger part of the solution would be to adjust the education system for poverty-stricken communities. We should focus more on bringing children in an impoverished community together in the classroom, granting them a feeling of importance directly beneficial to their educational performance. Early grade school should encourage impoverished children to work together toward goals, to make friends in the pursuit of things they can be proud of, and to guide themselves through a variety of activities all able to serve similar educational needs. While this may create some small gaps in education, it will maximize the breadth of intellectual skills these children develop: we might not be able to teach them an exact, consistent set of memory, mathematical, and social skills, but we can improve their feeling of self-worth and of community while conveying at least some. A middle-class district might get a head start on these impoverished children, but the difference won't be mere success versus failure.
Unfortunately, I have little answer for that. I know the tools and techniques to teach, but I don't know much about managing a room full of school children; I can't structure an educational system for this purpose, although I know what would go into it. I know how to solve poverty absolutely, but that's of little use in this context; simply guaranteeing every American gets the basic needs of food, shelter, clean clothes and personal hygiene, and the like won't eliminate the hierarchical nature of our society, and will still leave people struggling at the bottom, even if all those at the bottom are readily surviving and under no immanent threat of starvation and homelessness. In any realistic society, the problem of social pressure within the communities of the poor will always have such implications as must be addressed as I have said; I have not solved that problem, but I would like to.
The article is meaningless bullshit.
I evaluate things I use. When MongoDB came out, I told our dev manager we should use it because we are storing flexible, complex data in MySQL and that's just not a good fit. Document stores are better, and MongoDB with acknowledged write mode in a 3-node replica set has roughly the same data consistency guarantees as PostgreSQL with a replicated WAL in the common async mode (there's a small window where the slave server may crash, and the master server may also immediately crash, and the very last few milliseconds of transactions are lost; on MongoDB, the same happens if the first replica node acks an update, the update never reaches the second replica node, and the first replica and the current primary crash immediately).
At the time, we were handling schemaless documents by creating tables in MySQL with rows that described other tables, and using incremental joins to assemble fields from hundreds of tables together to select individual documents. What is a single document collection and a quick find() in MongoDB is any combination of dozens or hundreds of tables in MySQL, accessed with complicated aggregation logic to select information about these tables and then select and join together data from them to build one document at a time. MySQL wasn't intended to store documents consisting of a number of standard fields followed by arbitrary structures of searchable, user-defined fields; MongoDB was.
The article suggests using these types of psychotic schemas in MySQL to avoid innovating by taking MongoDB up. It suggests using Apache and built-in CGI rather than nginx and an external application (WSGI+python, a Perl CGI application manager, php5-fpm, etc.). It suggests sticking to Perl or PHP instead of Python and Cherrypy. It suggests, by extension backwards, sticking to IIS5 instead of moving on to IIS6 or a Linux server.
The article ludicrously suggests not even evaluating new tools and using those which make your work better, faster, lower-risk, more consistent, less likely to fuck off in your face; it recommends you run scared from all the new things. Maybe you should learn risk management and get a good enough handle on your technical and business needs to evaluate new technology and decide which you can use effectively and which you should hold back on.
You'll buy a video, or buy a product with videos; you'll then hate the video and the product, but you'll take a hell of a lot more notice of that particular product or educational course. Dramatizing your persuasive argument--"Buy my course because fucking awesome video with explosions"--is one of the most effective ways to obtain buy-in.
We should tell the businesses it's their responsibility to solve their own problems. If they can't find workers, then bring in eager young men and pay for their education.
The cognitive disconnect is amazing, isn't it? "Most STEM degree holders don't go into STEM jobs ... How do we get more STEM workers into the market?" You have a market oversupply, and you want to make it worse?
I keep explaining that we need to cut away the entire college education system from the Government's hands. Leave that to the market; leave it to businesses to say, "Fuck! We are paralyzed, because we have to pay $250,000 for a professional, and need more than available to accomplish our business strategies!" Businesses should never be in this position, because their mode of growth gives them more-than-adequate warning about what positions they'll need filled; therefor, they should hire, train, and send to college cheap entrant employees, with preference for the lower-risk but similar-cost investment of hiring an available professional.
People don't believe in this because the mechanism is disconnected. By giving out the ability to go to college on the public dime or on indelible loans, you are enforcing the responsibility onto every individual to educate himself and prepare for the workforce. This means individuals have to make complex market analysis across the whole body of growth of industries and of the needs of those industries, whereas businesses only need to look at their operations and growth and work performance information and cross that with their prediction of their particular market to project the next few years of staffing needs. Projecting staffing needs for more than two years out is a normal business operation; is predicting the complex behavior of the job market a normal human operation?
By creating an institution to provide everyone a path to college education, we are demanding everyone get educated or be ignored by employers. The risks they must take are easily absorbed by the rich, and not so well absorbed by the middle class; the poor have the least ability to make these complex analysis and to handle the consequences of selecting a degree that leads to oversupplied markets with few employment opportunities and many prospective applicants. Meanwhile, the onus of building a workforce is moved off the businesses, who only need stretch out their hands and grasp at the abundant skilled labor, and throw back the pieces they don't like. All power is taken from the individual, and moved to hiring managers and directors and business executives.
The disconnect in this thinking is a powerful tool. It allows us to convince the masses that these education policies are good for them, are important social institutions, that we are helping them. Meanwhile, we not only create a terrible institution of disenfranchisement of the poor and the laborer in general; but also avoid addressing the problem of K-12 education by simply claiming there isn't *enough* education, and thus publicly praise ourselves for remedying the failing education system by sending more people to college when they would have more success in life if we abandoned them to the job market after high school and simply focused on giving them every advantage of education up until then.
I patently despise our current education system. I believe we can do much better; that we can, for little cost, adjust the education system to produce much better results in the general case, churning out an endless supply of geniuses through good educational technique. In theory, we should also be able to address specific challenges in poverty-stricken districts, not satisfying ourselves with a simple general improvement in the education of the poor, but instead acting to bring them even further up to meet with the educational success of the middle class by delivering that same education in a manner more effective for their situation. This would provide much greater academic advantages to our students than extending their state education through college, even if state-supported college education programs didn't have such negative impacts on the job economy.
If this were Fark, it would have become a furry porn thread filled with anthropomorphic mouses reclining on sofas playing Xbox while getting blowjobs. From catgirls, I guess.
Shortly thereafter, it would become a catgirl-in-bikini thread.
It has to give you a bigger penis. You should look for a $500 wireless mouse with a unified RF, a charging cradle, laser, 5000dpi, and at least 13 programmable buttons. It should also glow all over the place when in use, and have a sick silkscreened diamond pattern.
Sometimes, to go forward, you go back. Thing is, the Program Manager was a modal dialogue containing all windows, and could be minimized; you selected program by opening windows containing icons of programs to select. The Gnome Shell eliminates that modal dialogue and moves the icons to an interface off to the side; the current desktop shrinks into the shell's entire display area, allowing you to move to another desktop containing other windows.
In short, windows are brought inside, rather than moved outside, the working space; nothing is behind the working space, but rather, the UI tools move behind the working space when not in use. Instead of icons of windows, Gnome Shell scales the windows down and displays them in a tiled fashion, providing a broad overview of the current working space.
This contrasts with earlier attempts in which the modal dialogue making up the working space was flattened into the background, creating the desktop. All elements of the modal dialogue were scattered around the screen as decoration, and minimized windows appeared in a task bar as titles rather than icons--just as useless when many windows were opened. The step following that was to make multiple working spaces in the same fashion. Gnome Shell has banished most of this, leaving a clock at the top of the screen, but little else to intrude on the use of the work space.
I don't tap my screen; I remember what application I want, and go directly to it. Rather than Applications:Graphics:Krita, I just type "Kri" and click the Krita icon. I can also drag the Krita icon to a space between desktops, spawning the window there. I can also type "image" and have all the image viewing and editing software appear in front of me.
Rather than a single view of a hierarchical database of applications and operations, I have the ability to declare what I want and have it given to me in the same way that an SQL SELECT statement declares what data I want and how to organize it. This is an improvement, and it is what obsoleted the old Deskbar applet everyone was raving about when Beagle and Tracker were going head-to-head.
I dunno, Gnome 2 and KDE feel like Windows 3.1 when you've used Gnome 3. A blunt desktop, some virtual desktops to move around, menus or start menus... the usual.
Then you pull out Gnome 3, and suddenly you can tap Winkey or point the mouse at the top left corner, and you get a view of all the windows on your current desktop. You can start typing "DVD burner" or "Images" or "Firefox", and it brings up Thoggin or Gimp or some Web browsers, that you then click on. You can drag your windows to other desktops; you can drag your windows between desktops to spawn new desktops. You have infinite desktops just by opening a window on the empty desktop at the end.
I hold complaints about Gnome 3's alt-tab behavior. Beyond that, it's thrown out all this navigation through bullshit menus and cluttered windows scattered across a dozen desktops in favor of straight out opening the applications you want and scanning through your open windows across all desktops. It gets out of your way and lets you use the computer, instead of fucking around with the UI.
That won't happen. Ketchup is a non-newtonian fluid: its viscosity changes with shear force, and so it refuses to flow until adequate force is applied. That's why ketchup doesn't leave the bottle with gentle force, but spurts out when squeezed. It will retain its shape just fine until forced out.
Heinz will collapse as a company and be bought by Kraft or something stupid while Hunts goes on to advertise to housewives that they can get that last squirt with their bottle.
It looks like they were discussing methodology performance ("Do everything in memory! Write() is slow!"), not hardware performance.
This is totally Zalewalski shit.
Without public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Gotta hire a good, hard-working entrant, train them, educate them, move them up.
With public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Cash crop of cheap labor. Lots of risk on individuals (waste 4 years without job on education, possibly get oversupplied degree), the poor are least able to handle this risk, followed closely by the disenfranchised (anyone often passed over in the local culture, e.g. blacks or women).
Tax-funded college and government-guaranteed student loans benefit hiring businesses at the expense of the individual. This is hard to grasp because it looks like money and education and other tangible goods are being handed to the individual, while the market effects are more abstract and difficult to understand without having a huge amount of knowledge in the area.
This does very little to put us on a footing for a post-scarcity society. And we are assuredly on that path right now
No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.
Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive amount of energy required.
With thousands of trillions of times the energy available, we could turn anything into anything else. Automation would be a drop in the bucket: those machines are powered by a minimal amount of energy, but they'd be built with material we made dumping in billion of times as much energy to just turn sand into steel. We'd mine asteroids by turning base materials into fuel oils and hydrogen gas, then converting garbage silica rock and other bullshit that's not nickel-iron into nickel-iron, or oil, or gold, or palladium; we wouldn't need to find a high-ore-content rock to bring down.
That's post-scarcity. So much automated, so much that can just be done by magic, we don't need people doing anything. We'd have multi-level structures running hydroponic gardens for farms, rather than large swaths of arable land; it would take immense amounts of energy and material, but all that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the full power of the sun itself.
It's a hand-out to our slave masters.
The push to educate everyone has come from the Government's great support arm. It uses taxpayer money or Federal guaranteed loans and cultural pressure, both decoupled from risk requirements that stop banks from handing out tons of free money, to get everyone to go to college and get a degree.
This strategy churns out piles of cheap labor, freeing businesses from the social responsibility of building a workforce. Without these public efforts, most students wouldn't be able to go it on their own; businesses would have to hire good, solid entrants and send them to school on the company dime, taking the risk of training them. Businesses are good at minimizing that risk, and so would build a well-tuned, highly-selected workforce with little economic loss. Individuals have to assess an opaque market of both business demand and the state of business demand and candidate availability in several years; they take huge personal risks simply not present when a business does it.
This cheap labor costs businesses little in salary, even less in training risk (training useless individuals), thus displacing their responsibility onto the individual. It puts risks most easily handled by the rich and impossible to handle by the poor onto the individual, disadvantaging those who are less-advantaged or who will have more difficulty getting a job anyway (e.g. minorities in more racist communities). It's bad for the individual, but good for business.
I don't see how reading suicide prevention materials helps anyone.
Should read, "Jackass shockjock makes up fantasy about Nintendo re-releasing Virtual Boy"
I saw headlines that 50 Cent was shot dead last year and Terry Pratchett died this year. What? Are they BOTH alive?
Income tax: Best Buy gives you $800 paycheck, you pay $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, Future Shop pays $200 in taxes.
Consumption tax: Best Buy gives you $800, pays $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, pay $200 in taxes.
In a competitive market, costs tend to approach the marginal cost.
Nope.
In a competitive market, costs tend to be more stable. They don't race to the bottom; they just don't spiral out of control. With the hundreds of supermarkets in my area selling fruit at $5/lb, I'm going over to the smaller specialty stores to buy the same fruit for $1/lb. Pizza parlors have the same deal: you keep seeing $2.50/slice pizza and $2.25 for a 32oz soda, but once in a while they all get pissy because someone breaks rank and starts selling $1/slice pizza, $5 whole pizzas (instead of $9.99), and $1 sodas--and turning a huge profit. The independent shops... just keep their prices high, and keep selling, until that idiot realizes he's not going to get 3 times as much business that way.
In a competitive market, the price usually moves toward a cross-over point in the supply-demand curve, where raising the price brings in less profit. Without competitors, people aren't able to shop around, so the price can be raised more before people find an alternate means (harder than just finding an alternate supplier).
Aside, and less related, some markets aren't competitive, but appear to be. Rental housing, for example, is not competitive: entering the rental market is high-risk, as too many players in the market quickly causes massive economic problems; the rental market will tend to supply enough units to meet demand, but won't tend to allow new competitors to come in with lower rent prices to drive costs down, because they won't be able to fill units to cover costs. Prices in the rental market tend to increase when more wealthy people move into the area, as they're willing and able to spend more for the same apartment units.
Market is hard shit.
Sounds like income tax on the spender, rather than the recipient.
This is really kind of dangerous. It's a "we know it when we see it" kind of law. What if your company is HQ in Bermuda, and you operate an independent subsidiary in UK? How is this different from your company being HQ in the UK, yet purchasing services from a company in Bermuda?
The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?
I started replaying games in my mind.