The point is that using X irresponsibly is less problematic than using Y irresponsibly. For example: Driving while talking on a cell phone is slightly less problematic than driving while totally blasted on two pitchers of Michelob.
Do none of you people understand how to use logic and reason? It's like rational thought isn't a main evolutionary trait of human species.
Divided attention versus diverted attention. When I check my speedo or a college kid looks down to poke at his cell phone, eyes are 100% off the road; if I'm gazing through a transparent display with only one eye, I have one and one half eyes on the road and can recognize and respond to visual stimuli in the roadway. That's an important distinction.
It's like saying Cambodian children aren't much good for anything else, so we should use them for sex tourism and somehow imagine that at least they won't all starve when they've got all that semen to swallow.
The only thing you'll end up with is a bunch of starving, exploited eight year olds. Just like you'll end up with a heated ball of nickle-iron instead of a cold one. It might weigh slightly less. If you want to use that nuke power to move the thing, you're going to need to produce thrust; you'll need to redo the nukes to produce cigar-shaped blasts and turn the surface of the meteor... into... an... orion drive that's brilliant! The first nuke will blast away any surface protrusions and set a general shape--like a demolition blast used for sculpting a rock face (Mt Rushmore was carved with explosives)--while the following will provide thrust!
If you're taking 2 seconds to check your speedometer you're doing it wrong. On top of that you must be following the car in front of you too closely if 2 seconds is all it took for you to nearly close the gap unless the drive in front of you was breaking hard.
I don't have my speedometer's geometry memorized; I actually have to read and interpret the numbers, and that takes time. I have my tach's geometry memorized, oddly enough--that and the tach should be in a general area and it's usually the same area, whereas my speedo has to be in a very small area and it depends on where I'm driving. At the time I was coasting with traffic but worried about the rain, and wasn't sure if I was in the 60-ish range or 70-ish range and thus if I should slow down a bit and/or get more distance between me and the next car; I'll ride with traffic in the 80s in ideal conditions, but I'm not going to race down the road at 75mph in the rain in the right lane just because everyone else is that nuts.
When I look up from that and switch back to driving, I don't instantly go, "OH SHIT THE CAR AHEAD OF ME ISN'T MOVING!" I have to watch it, watch it get closer, assess the speed difference... the first thing I do is let off the gas. That didn't help, the car was coming FAST; so I hit the brakes, checked mirrors, and started to steer into the emergency lane.
Checking your speedometer is a function of driving. No sane person is disputing that some functions of driving increase the risk of an accident but are a necessary evil. Checking your email is not a function of driving. You just don't need to do it. And you're acting like someone who is reading their email isn't checking their speedometer too. This only increases the risks of an already distracting (by your own admission) function of driving.
The difference is scale. The risk associated with checking your speedometer may be necessary, or not. I used to almost never do it, but after 12 years of driving the cops started handing out fines. So assuming it's a necessary risk, it's... necessary. Now, if it weren't necessary, doing something 1/10 as risky might be major--like drinking soda while driving, that's fairly distracting and reduces your ability to quickly react to sudden hazards. But instead, that's considered normal and negligible--it doesn't appreciably increase risk when you consider all other normal driving activities.
Basically when it comes down to it the public is going to be against just about anything that is non-essential while driving. Your attempt of twisting the concept into checking email may be less distracting than performing a function of driving is pretty shortsighted.
The public is totally into texting while driving. Everywhere you look, people are texting and talking on cell phones while driving. We want cup holders, vanity mirrors (under the fucking driver's side visor), radios, DVD players (up front in the center console! You can watch movies while driving!), hands-free devices, and even cars with Android built-in so you can check your gmail while driving. We run major online and televised advertising campaigns to shove PSAs about how bad texting while driving is because the general public wants to text while driving.
I'm being rational about how humans behave and how different stimuli--regulations, technology, etc.--will affect human behavior. I'm being rational about risk and about the impact of these technologies on risk, and on how risk can be bounded. If you ban Google Glass while driving, you'll accomplish two things: You'll negatively impact the sales of Google Glass; and you'll encourage more texting while driving using the hold-the-phone-below-the-dash method. If you don't ban it, you'll probably get more texting while driving while looking through the display and out into the road and using voice recognition, while reducing texting by typing on the phone and staring down at the screen and away from the road.
If you want to eliminate texting while driving, you need legislation banning both teenagers and cell phones.
This is more child-like pessimism: "It's like a cell phone! That means they'll cause more traffic collisions!"
Let's make up a scenario to explain how complex this is.
Let's say 100,000 drivers per day--mostly college sorority chicks--tend to whip their phone out and frantically take pictures of things they see WHILE DRIVING, multiple times per day. This is incredibly fucking dangerous and causes thousands of collisions per year. It's something we want to stop.
Now let's say those drivers all use Google Glass, where instead of taking several long seconds to fumble with a phone and aim and snap and then verify the picture they just glance and say, "Okay Glass! Take a picture!" Compared to cell phones, this reduces the amount of time they're distracted to smaller bursts, and keeps them more aware of the road even when they're distracted. This is still dangerous, but less so.
Now assuming we have tried to stop them using cell phones, our enforcement policies cannot provide adequate deterrence. Given that and the above, the use of Google Glass creates a significant total risk reduction in practice.
Navigation is another interesting consideration. I cannot use my phone to nav while driving and retain any safe control over my car; it's always a heavily calculated risk when I raise the phone to verify route, and a lot of the time I have to just wing it and drive around because the risk is too high.
It does require a quantity of new research to establish conclusions about how Google Glass or its ilk will impact road safety. The above considerations are not magical and new; we know that hands-free devices still produce driver distraction, but we allow the use of hands-free talk devices to use a cellphone because we KNOW people will talk on cellphones and we KNOW holding a cellphone to your head occupies one hand and is more distracting (need to manage the physical location of the phone--it really takes up cycles) than just talking to the air. Overall social impacts on risk are an important consideration.
Since you're so apt to analyze the risk plane, why don't you do that for us, Captain Genius? Plot out the various risks for us and show what's likely and what we should worry about. Those kinds of super-star powers would be amazing, since humans have no clue how to assess risk.
That "pull of gravity" thing is so fucking ridiculous. You're going to have a probe being pulled toward a massive rock much more than the rock is being pulled toward the probe. The only reason it doesn't get laughed out of science entirely is you can't just land the probe on a pile of loosely coherent gravel and fire boosters, so you need to gravity-drag it. Otherwise, you're going to expend a ton of fuel keeping a distance that should be close, but not too close that expending fuel will create thrust against the rock and push it away.
Or... you could just couple to it and fire boosters. Enough boosters to move a 400 ton rock.
Also sometimes movies are right: Lunking a nuke at the surface of a giant rock won't do much.
The problem here is the total impact is unknown. It's unknown if something in your field of vision is actually going to impact your driving. A HUD with e-mail on it might impair driving less than, say, checking your speedometer--I've almost caused a collision twice on the highway for taking one or two seconds to check my speed when it seemed fast (driver ahead of me took that time to brake, and I had to re-assess when I looked back up and didn't realize cruising at 65 was suddenly a bad thing).
People like to knee-jerk about how everything they don't understand must be like something frightening that they do understand, and so they must apply draconian rules. I've seen it go as far as people wanting to ban manual transmission because it takes your mind off the road and you need both hands on the wheel--while statistics show that manual transmission drivers are better drivers (a lot of confounding here, since people avoid driving stick because they think it's too much work etc. and most manual drivers are enthusiasts or in other countries).
Opposite arguments include that maybe Google Glass is less optimal than not doing other shit while driving; but that people will be distracted and do stupid shit in the real world, and allowing Google Glass will reduce traffic incidents by transferring their dangerous behavior to a less-dangerous form. That argument of course doesn't work well because people want perfection--like when the Polio live vaccine was found to cause 3 or 4 polio deaths per year, so the USA proposed switching to a dead virus vaccine... with projections of thousands or tens of thousands of deaths per year due to the reduced rate of vaccination. But it's better than a live vaccine causing deaths (presumably because it's your fault for not getting the vaccine, not our fault for providing vaccination; and because it only affects poor people).
Often times people will get handed a pile of "data" like HTML pages, converted PDF or Word documents, or whatnot. This happens a lot, for example from acquisitions or contracts or whatnot. Verizon hands us shit that does not go into an accounting system regularly, and would be so much nicer if it was in some sort of CSV format.
You WILL encounter situations where people hand you garbage. You WILL encounter situations where a service provider routinely hands you garbage that none of your tools can interpret. It happens all the time.
That again is a huge step. Clinical care is a smaller step with less economic impact, but more direct impact on healthcare availability and thus a huge impact on public health.
You're trying to say, "People need to be able to get healthcare. This is why people can't get healthcare. Let's change this." I'm trying to say, "We have a public health issue. Here is the smallest step that will make the biggest immediate impact (=ROI) on public health with the smallest economic impact and the least risk. Let's do that first."
"Helps Others" is a fancy term. If it hurts 10 billion people but helps 10 thousand, people will say it "helps others". With no qualifiers, people will say something that seems to have an ideal of helping others "helps others".
It's not a "show me one person helped by this" thing; it's a "Show me that this doesn't do far more harm than good" thing.
"Healthcare for all Americans" came pretty much as "Oh, you can't afford insurance, so you don't have insurance?... okay, I have a solution: We'll jack up the price of insurance, then fine you if you don't buy it. Now it's illegal to not have insurance, so you should all have insurance!"
I would have just mandated that hospitals need to increase breadth and density of clinical staff per some hospital capacity metric. Your hospital grows, you need to cover more square kilometerage and staff more clinical hours per day, plus supplies for vaccinations and clinical treatment. If there's multiple hospitals in the area, density increases to up to twice what a single hospital specifies; after that, you're displaced, so the coverage spreads further rather than winding up with 6 hospitals in the area creating a huge network of free clinics in this one tiny area.
That way the hospitals manage it, the hospitals pay for it, and what we get is basic clinical care for everyone. It's a start, but at least now everyone gets free STD tests and vaccinations and gets broken bones set (no surgery; if we can yank and set it, we do that and add a splint) and sprains mended.
That's a huge step up in public health, giving us a system to build on. Trying to deploy a giant 100% complete system in one shot was a mistake.
My polymath skillset includes playing Go, programming in Sed/Awk/Python/Bash/C, bicycle mechanic shit, and Project Management. Oh and I know like fucking everything about building floors.
I work with a tech guy who became a manager and thinks everyone else is stupid. This is how IT works. Have you ever talked to an accountant? Accountants are viciously retarded. Accountants are fucking stupid as hell. All they do is write a number here... and subtract it from here! Basic math. Now: Let's see you process an end-of-the-year income statement. No?... Why not?... wot, that's hard? Bean-counters do it all the time...
I keep telling people that the effort to get people educated is fucking backwards, that government loans or government-funded degree college increases social inequality rather than decreasing it. But do they listen? Nooooo, they pull up that fucking Norway comic with the talking silhouette and go, "Look, he says that it makes the poor better off!" without any understanding of things like market forces or speculation.
Because the poor can really judge what's going to be an in-demand career in 4 years and can pick a career now that's going to get them a job then, instead of wind them out on the street with a worthless degree and no useful skills because there's 100,000 jobs and 1,000,000 fresh college grads that can do them. Hell why bother? If you're that good at speculation, just make a mint in the stock market and retire. We should tell these genius speculators to stop being poor!
I find that a grasp of Unix, awk, sed, bash scripting, and python goes a long way. People in Finance and HR complain about the tasks they do taking 3 days... and I look at them messing with data, spend 10 minutes writing an Awk script, run their data through it, and hand it back. This applies all over the place: my minor programming ability (I am not a programmer) enables me to bypass a lot of work.
I know. I'm going for a CAPM and honing my PM skills, and even management is blathering about how that's just "more processes" that "make us slower, not agile".
Techs keep telling me that anyone who knows what they're doing don't need processes. Techs tend to see a formulated procedure that uses a bunch of parts they understand and go, "Yeah I know all that, everyone knows that, all that is fluff." For example, Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis asks 11 specifying questions, examines the closest logical comparison, looks for differences, and looks for time-relevant changes; many technical people say they know all that stuff and so this is useless. It's kind of like a programmer saying they know all the stuff in the C standard library, so a C program is useless.
I've been trying to figure out how to architect a big python program that follows the PMBOK 5e for Project Management. I'm decent at coding (i.e. functions, program modules, etc.), but horrid at architecture (i.e. class structure, plug-in architecture, general implementation strategy); I will create a mess doing this. In the short term, I want to get a version with Work Breakdown Structures, Project, Program, and Portfolio management; in the long term, I want a full implementation plus extensions to integrate Git (it's a resource) and other stuff.
Actually what was said was, "The constituency doesn't understand legislation. You can't read a bill and understand it. When it's passed, you will understand because you will see what happens."
In other words: Pelosi said you're all too stupid to understand the law until you see what you actually get from welfare and what people get arrested for. Essentially it's the same as saying that women don't know how to read and so need to be shown--an accurate statement hundreds of years ago in many societies--and thus that the women should butt out of government because they can't understand all the important things going on, which are mostly argued in small breaths over vast things that are written down. It's so much the same because the argument is that the lay person is illiterate to legalese and cannot understand written law--or at least cannot carry out the written law in thought to what its consequence will be (i.e. oversight, agencies, forms to fill out, benefits paid out, costs to the government, tax impacts, etc.).
The government does not do "crafted in secret." They do "the common man is too stupid to self-govern; we are the shepherd, the watchful big brother."
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Let's not give in to an uninformed opinion without exploring the idea of making it work.
Not so much making it work as understanding the complex impact it has on a huge and dynamic system.
The point is that using X irresponsibly is less problematic than using Y irresponsibly. For example: Driving while talking on a cell phone is slightly less problematic than driving while totally blasted on two pitchers of Michelob.
Do none of you people understand how to use logic and reason? It's like rational thought isn't a main evolutionary trait of human species.
I'll have China running on 20% clean energy in 15 years with nothing more than raw steel.
The US needs to get back into the modern world and ban the production of new photovoltaic plants.
Divided attention versus diverted attention. When I check my speedo or a college kid looks down to poke at his cell phone, eyes are 100% off the road; if I'm gazing through a transparent display with only one eye, I have one and one half eyes on the road and can recognize and respond to visual stimuli in the roadway. That's an important distinction.
Sir, we are OUT OF BUDGET! We can't afford these new booster throats!
It's like saying Cambodian children aren't much good for anything else, so we should use them for sex tourism and somehow imagine that at least they won't all starve when they've got all that semen to swallow.
The only thing you'll end up with is a bunch of starving, exploited eight year olds. Just like you'll end up with a heated ball of nickle-iron instead of a cold one. It might weigh slightly less. If you want to use that nuke power to move the thing, you're going to need to produce thrust; you'll need to redo the nukes to produce cigar-shaped blasts and turn the surface of the meteor... into... an... orion drive that's brilliant! The first nuke will blast away any surface protrusions and set a general shape--like a demolition blast used for sculpting a rock face (Mt Rushmore was carved with explosives)--while the following will provide thrust!
If you're taking 2 seconds to check your speedometer you're doing it wrong. On top of that you must be following the car in front of you too closely if 2 seconds is all it took for you to nearly close the gap unless the drive in front of you was breaking hard.
I don't have my speedometer's geometry memorized; I actually have to read and interpret the numbers, and that takes time. I have my tach's geometry memorized, oddly enough--that and the tach should be in a general area and it's usually the same area, whereas my speedo has to be in a very small area and it depends on where I'm driving. At the time I was coasting with traffic but worried about the rain, and wasn't sure if I was in the 60-ish range or 70-ish range and thus if I should slow down a bit and/or get more distance between me and the next car; I'll ride with traffic in the 80s in ideal conditions, but I'm not going to race down the road at 75mph in the rain in the right lane just because everyone else is that nuts.
When I look up from that and switch back to driving, I don't instantly go, "OH SHIT THE CAR AHEAD OF ME ISN'T MOVING!" I have to watch it, watch it get closer, assess the speed difference... the first thing I do is let off the gas. That didn't help, the car was coming FAST; so I hit the brakes, checked mirrors, and started to steer into the emergency lane.
Checking your speedometer is a function of driving. No sane person is disputing that some functions of driving increase the risk of an accident but are a necessary evil. Checking your email is not a function of driving. You just don't need to do it. And you're acting like someone who is reading their email isn't checking their speedometer too. This only increases the risks of an already distracting (by your own admission) function of driving.
The difference is scale. The risk associated with checking your speedometer may be necessary, or not. I used to almost never do it, but after 12 years of driving the cops started handing out fines. So assuming it's a necessary risk, it's... necessary. Now, if it weren't necessary, doing something 1/10 as risky might be major--like drinking soda while driving, that's fairly distracting and reduces your ability to quickly react to sudden hazards. But instead, that's considered normal and negligible--it doesn't appreciably increase risk when you consider all other normal driving activities.
Basically when it comes down to it the public is going to be against just about anything that is non-essential while driving. Your attempt of twisting the concept into checking email may be less distracting than performing a function of driving is pretty shortsighted.
The public is totally into texting while driving. Everywhere you look, people are texting and talking on cell phones while driving. We want cup holders, vanity mirrors (under the fucking driver's side visor), radios, DVD players (up front in the center console! You can watch movies while driving!), hands-free devices, and even cars with Android built-in so you can check your gmail while driving. We run major online and televised advertising campaigns to shove PSAs about how bad texting while driving is because the general public wants to text while driving.
I'm being rational about how humans behave and how different stimuli--regulations, technology, etc.--will affect human behavior. I'm being rational about risk and about the impact of these technologies on risk, and on how risk can be bounded. If you ban Google Glass while driving, you'll accomplish two things: You'll negatively impact the sales of Google Glass; and you'll encourage more texting while driving using the hold-the-phone-below-the-dash method. If you don't ban it, you'll probably get more texting while driving while looking through the display and out into the road and using voice recognition, while reducing texting by typing on the phone and staring down at the screen and away from the road.
If you want to eliminate texting while driving, you need legislation banning both teenagers and cell phones.
This is more child-like pessimism: "It's like a cell phone! That means they'll cause more traffic collisions!"
Let's make up a scenario to explain how complex this is.
Let's say 100,000 drivers per day--mostly college sorority chicks--tend to whip their phone out and frantically take pictures of things they see WHILE DRIVING, multiple times per day. This is incredibly fucking dangerous and causes thousands of collisions per year. It's something we want to stop.
Now let's say those drivers all use Google Glass, where instead of taking several long seconds to fumble with a phone and aim and snap and then verify the picture they just glance and say, "Okay Glass! Take a picture!" Compared to cell phones, this reduces the amount of time they're distracted to smaller bursts, and keeps them more aware of the road even when they're distracted. This is still dangerous, but less so.
Now assuming we have tried to stop them using cell phones, our enforcement policies cannot provide adequate deterrence. Given that and the above, the use of Google Glass creates a significant total risk reduction in practice.
Navigation is another interesting consideration. I cannot use my phone to nav while driving and retain any safe control over my car; it's always a heavily calculated risk when I raise the phone to verify route, and a lot of the time I have to just wing it and drive around because the risk is too high.
It does require a quantity of new research to establish conclusions about how Google Glass or its ilk will impact road safety. The above considerations are not magical and new; we know that hands-free devices still produce driver distraction, but we allow the use of hands-free talk devices to use a cellphone because we KNOW people will talk on cellphones and we KNOW holding a cellphone to your head occupies one hand and is more distracting (need to manage the physical location of the phone--it really takes up cycles) than just talking to the air. Overall social impacts on risk are an important consideration.
Why do we care about city killers then? The severity seems low, and the probability is only twice in a hundred years?
If you need funding to deflect a planet-killing asteroid, your planet deserves to die. Seriously do you live on a planet full of Arabs?
Since you're so apt to analyze the risk plane, why don't you do that for us, Captain Genius? Plot out the various risks for us and show what's likely and what we should worry about. Those kinds of super-star powers would be amazing, since humans have no clue how to assess risk.
That "pull of gravity" thing is so fucking ridiculous. You're going to have a probe being pulled toward a massive rock much more than the rock is being pulled toward the probe. The only reason it doesn't get laughed out of science entirely is you can't just land the probe on a pile of loosely coherent gravel and fire boosters, so you need to gravity-drag it. Otherwise, you're going to expend a ton of fuel keeping a distance that should be close, but not too close that expending fuel will create thrust against the rock and push it away.
Or... you could just couple to it and fire boosters. Enough boosters to move a 400 ton rock.
Also sometimes movies are right: Lunking a nuke at the surface of a giant rock won't do much.
The problem here is the total impact is unknown. It's unknown if something in your field of vision is actually going to impact your driving. A HUD with e-mail on it might impair driving less than, say, checking your speedometer--I've almost caused a collision twice on the highway for taking one or two seconds to check my speed when it seemed fast (driver ahead of me took that time to brake, and I had to re-assess when I looked back up and didn't realize cruising at 65 was suddenly a bad thing).
People like to knee-jerk about how everything they don't understand must be like something frightening that they do understand, and so they must apply draconian rules. I've seen it go as far as people wanting to ban manual transmission because it takes your mind off the road and you need both hands on the wheel--while statistics show that manual transmission drivers are better drivers (a lot of confounding here, since people avoid driving stick because they think it's too much work etc. and most manual drivers are enthusiasts or in other countries).
Opposite arguments include that maybe Google Glass is less optimal than not doing other shit while driving; but that people will be distracted and do stupid shit in the real world, and allowing Google Glass will reduce traffic incidents by transferring their dangerous behavior to a less-dangerous form. That argument of course doesn't work well because people want perfection--like when the Polio live vaccine was found to cause 3 or 4 polio deaths per year, so the USA proposed switching to a dead virus vaccine... with projections of thousands or tens of thousands of deaths per year due to the reduced rate of vaccination. But it's better than a live vaccine causing deaths (presumably because it's your fault for not getting the vaccine, not our fault for providing vaccination; and because it only affects poor people).
Often times people will get handed a pile of "data" like HTML pages, converted PDF or Word documents, or whatnot. This happens a lot, for example from acquisitions or contracts or whatnot. Verizon hands us shit that does not go into an accounting system regularly, and would be so much nicer if it was in some sort of CSV format.
You WILL encounter situations where people hand you garbage. You WILL encounter situations where a service provider routinely hands you garbage that none of your tools can interpret. It happens all the time.
That again is a huge step. Clinical care is a smaller step with less economic impact, but more direct impact on healthcare availability and thus a huge impact on public health.
You're trying to say, "People need to be able to get healthcare. This is why people can't get healthcare. Let's change this." I'm trying to say, "We have a public health issue. Here is the smallest step that will make the biggest immediate impact (=ROI) on public health with the smallest economic impact and the least risk. Let's do that first."
They must've all been Mexican. Look at that grammar.
"Helps Others" is a fancy term. If it hurts 10 billion people but helps 10 thousand, people will say it "helps others". With no qualifiers, people will say something that seems to have an ideal of helping others "helps others".
It's not a "show me one person helped by this" thing; it's a "Show me that this doesn't do far more harm than good" thing.
"Healthcare for all Americans" came pretty much as "Oh, you can't afford insurance, so you don't have insurance? ... okay, I have a solution: We'll jack up the price of insurance, then fine you if you don't buy it. Now it's illegal to not have insurance, so you should all have insurance!"
I would have just mandated that hospitals need to increase breadth and density of clinical staff per some hospital capacity metric. Your hospital grows, you need to cover more square kilometerage and staff more clinical hours per day, plus supplies for vaccinations and clinical treatment. If there's multiple hospitals in the area, density increases to up to twice what a single hospital specifies; after that, you're displaced, so the coverage spreads further rather than winding up with 6 hospitals in the area creating a huge network of free clinics in this one tiny area.
That way the hospitals manage it, the hospitals pay for it, and what we get is basic clinical care for everyone. It's a start, but at least now everyone gets free STD tests and vaccinations and gets broken bones set (no surgery; if we can yank and set it, we do that and add a splint) and sprains mended.
That's a huge step up in public health, giving us a system to build on. Trying to deploy a giant 100% complete system in one shot was a mistake.
My polymath skillset includes playing Go, programming in Sed/Awk/Python/Bash/C, bicycle mechanic shit, and Project Management. Oh and I know like fucking everything about building floors.
I work with a tech guy who became a manager and thinks everyone else is stupid. This is how IT works. Have you ever talked to an accountant? Accountants are viciously retarded. Accountants are fucking stupid as hell. All they do is write a number here... and subtract it from here! Basic math. Now: Let's see you process an end-of-the-year income statement. No? ... Why not? ... wot, that's hard? Bean-counters do it all the time...
Oh. And I studied accounting.
I keep telling people that the effort to get people educated is fucking backwards, that government loans or government-funded degree college increases social inequality rather than decreasing it. But do they listen? Nooooo, they pull up that fucking Norway comic with the talking silhouette and go, "Look, he says that it makes the poor better off!" without any understanding of things like market forces or speculation.
Because the poor can really judge what's going to be an in-demand career in 4 years and can pick a career now that's going to get them a job then, instead of wind them out on the street with a worthless degree and no useful skills because there's 100,000 jobs and 1,000,000 fresh college grads that can do them. Hell why bother? If you're that good at speculation, just make a mint in the stock market and retire. We should tell these genius speculators to stop being poor!
I find that a grasp of Unix, awk, sed, bash scripting, and python goes a long way. People in Finance and HR complain about the tasks they do taking 3 days... and I look at them messing with data, spend 10 minutes writing an Awk script, run their data through it, and hand it back. This applies all over the place: my minor programming ability (I am not a programmer) enables me to bypass a lot of work.
I know. I'm going for a CAPM and honing my PM skills, and even management is blathering about how that's just "more processes" that "make us slower, not agile".
Techs keep telling me that anyone who knows what they're doing don't need processes. Techs tend to see a formulated procedure that uses a bunch of parts they understand and go, "Yeah I know all that, everyone knows that, all that is fluff." For example, Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis asks 11 specifying questions, examines the closest logical comparison, looks for differences, and looks for time-relevant changes; many technical people say they know all that stuff and so this is useless. It's kind of like a programmer saying they know all the stuff in the C standard library, so a C program is useless.
I've been trying to figure out how to architect a big python program that follows the PMBOK 5e for Project Management. I'm decent at coding (i.e. functions, program modules, etc.), but horrid at architecture (i.e. class structure, plug-in architecture, general implementation strategy); I will create a mess doing this. In the short term, I want to get a version with Work Breakdown Structures, Project, Program, and Portfolio management; in the long term, I want a full implementation plus extensions to integrate Git (it's a resource) and other stuff.
Back in 2008 this apparently happened many times. I only recalled the one.
Actually what was said was, "The constituency doesn't understand legislation. You can't read a bill and understand it. When it's passed, you will understand because you will see what happens."
In other words: Pelosi said you're all too stupid to understand the law until you see what you actually get from welfare and what people get arrested for. Essentially it's the same as saying that women don't know how to read and so need to be shown--an accurate statement hundreds of years ago in many societies--and thus that the women should butt out of government because they can't understand all the important things going on, which are mostly argued in small breaths over vast things that are written down. It's so much the same because the argument is that the lay person is illiterate to legalese and cannot understand written law--or at least cannot carry out the written law in thought to what its consequence will be (i.e. oversight, agencies, forms to fill out, benefits paid out, costs to the government, tax impacts, etc.).
The government does not do "crafted in secret." They do "the common man is too stupid to self-govern; we are the shepherd, the watchful big brother."