Yeah I read an article in the last year or so that debunked the whole idea that the "small business" owners were the real job creators, though for years politicians like to romantically say it to be so over and over again. I forget the details, but the gist of it was, if a small business goes out of business another will take it's place very readily, and additional small business tend to compete against each other for the same amount of business. So having more of them doesn't really create more jobs.
Greece isn't really a good example for your argument. You've outlined Greece's problems correctly. However that didn't stop them from spending when they had less money. All they did was threaten to leave the Euro and take massive loans from Germany.
Their tax and corruption VS the monetary policy aren't really related issues either (but both important in their own right).
However if the did have their own money, they could simply devalue their currency (print more money), which would have an impact on inflation of course, but it would have been an option to them other than to just take massive debt. Though I forget how it turned out, as I think they ended up defaulting on it all anyway so there is that. Also Greece has like zero exports. About the only thing they make money on, would be tourism. Additionally by printing money, devaluing their currency, and increasing inflation, they can basically make everything cheaper (for tourists with money that is worth a lot more than Greece's), making it much more attractive to tourists to come and visit and spend foreign money. That is another reason the euro tanked the country, as Greece was always a cheep tourist destination which then had to compete with the rest of Europe more competitively.
Nope. Cars are more expensive now because for the last decade interest rates have basically been nothing. Seen by the fact that there were deals for ages for "0 percent financing". So free money. So people can borrow huge amounts. So they can afford more car. Car makers respond with, here have more car, and it will be expensive, but don't worry you can afford it just get an interest free loan for 8 years, etc...
Nope. They sell a 50k car at a loss these days, knowing that they will fiance it and make all the profit off that. Dealers are merely lenders at this point, the product is somewhat meaningless.
I'm for sure going to use that term for now on whenever this topic comes up... and I agree. I'm sure it will turn into a whole new legal frontier, post death rights of use, specifying exactly what your "corpse puppet" might be used for etc...
All kidding aside, the takeaway I get from looking at the Canadian numbers, is that the lowest scores that hurt our "productivity" are the "ICT Adoption", which is basically the number of subscriptions per capita of cellular and internet services. Which isn't a huge surprise when you look at how expensive and noncompetitive our telecommunication industry is (Rogers, Bell, and Telus) compared to the rest of the world. To which Canadian's have been complaining about for years. Perhaps it is time for government to take a look at what is causing our productivity index to fall and do something about it. The next time some conservative mentions corporate tax cuts to enhance productivity I'll be sure to point that out.
I've inherited a couple of these nightmares over the last several years. I managed to kill one of them by porting it into Access (which took me months to detangle), but at least it takes 5mins to run as opposed to weeks of careful data entry. I'm sure some poor bastard will inherit my mess of an Access application many years from now and probably curse my existence, but its 1000 time better than what it was before.
The primary problem with these things is that they can get fantastically complicated, typically the only one who really understands it wrote the thing, there will be little or no documentation, and when they leave no one really understands how it works or what it does. After that a number of "Wizards" are given the magic wand, and all they know is if they hold it a certain way, and wave it just so, magic happens. They then teach several generations of Wizards over the years, each one passing down the slightly more lost knowledge of the magic wand.
While tearing them apart and rebuilding something better much of the time you want to beat your head against a wall with all the wtf moments you encounter. However I will say it was somewhat interesting from the perspective that its a big puzzle to tug at until it comes apart, and there were certain times I felt like some crypto hacker trying to decode some Mayan mystery... (part of that was the unformatted data output that adhered to no standards and reverse engineering it into something usable).
Excel being the hammer, and every problem a nail, because that is all you have access to, or at least did.
I've inherited several OMG level "spreadsheets" over the last couple of years. Typically used for some programming task where they don't have a programmer, or the programming tools to use, and don't have the money to initiate a project and get a developer etc... In many cases it also fits the bill where the task is really seemingly too small to justify a whole system (but is really TOO big for something like Excel, but that's what you got soooo....). I think in many cases they were done long enough ago that not as many people has widespread access to something like MS Access, which while in itself is also terrible is a heck of a lot more appropriate than Excel.
The last one I got was something like 90 tabs of macros and custom calculations, and involved a lot of careful pasting of many thousands of records each year to run the thing (and which any manually misplaced cell or record could cause havok). It would take someone several weeks of work to use it. I took one look at it and went HELL NO. While it took months (working in my "spare" time), I managed to port it into MS Access and automate it all. It now takes about 5 minutes to process instead of weeks of careful data entry (and in testing found tons of mistakes made in the past no one noticed). While MS Access it still a bit of a mickey mouse solution, it is still a hell of a lot better than Excel.
Anyway that said, I'm sure someone is going to get my poor MS Access application dumped on them at some point 10 years from now and will be WTF is this mess lol!
All it does is take data (unformatted no less) exported from a FORTRAN application that was written 40 years ago, that no one understands, nor does anyone want to touch it with a 10 foot pole for fear of breaking it, and runs a bunch of statistics on the data and exports them into a couple hundred pages of reports. The proper way would be to alter the original application to actually generate the statistics you need and the required formatted report, however as mentioned there is zero desire to do that, so we're left with a kludge. At least I made a slightly less kludgey kludge.:)
I suppose this is where definitions start getting a bit muddy due to scale.
However are they certain there aren't binary planets? I mean if you can have binary stars that orbit each other around a central pivot, why not planets as well? Again didn't rtfa so I don't know how massive the planet is to it's "moon", which I assume is how this might be defined at least for orbitary (word?) purposes...
The key is not to lie about it, but advertise it. There is ALWAYS more work. Besides, typically the work you are automating isn't the kind of stuff you really want to be doing anyway (hence the automation). Besides, even if you automate the work, they'll still need you there to occasionally be able to update or adjust it due to business need or fix it should it ever break.
Like the example I recently did this to a chunk of work that got dumped on me due to reorg/transition. The last guy would take several solid weeks to do it manually, and he's done it for years and knew what he was doing. I took one look at it and was like no way am I doing that. It would have taken me a couple months. While it took a considerable amount of work (a heck of a lot more than I had originally though when I first started of course), I can now do the same thing in about 2 minutes of processing time. In addition while testing I found all sorts of previous errors due to the manual process, as no matter how knowledgeable and careful the other guy was, it is gonna happen. For me I did it because I didn't really have the time to do it manually along with the rest of my duties, nor did I really have the inclination to do that sort of manual drudgery. However I was up front with my manager in saying that it is going to take me longer to do this because I intend on automating the whole thing so I can do it in minutes rather than weeks after I am done.
Part of it involved reverse engineering some export data from another system no one really understands, which I will now be able to leverage that code I did for a couple other future projects for other systems which would also like to consume that data in a more automated fashion. (When I started this whole mess, my first bit of advice to management was to alter the existing system to make it do what the business wants, however it's from the 70's, no one knows how it does what it does anymore, it simply works, so no one wants to touch it with a 10ft pole for fear of having to replace it)
That said, this wasn't a systems project for me. This was me creating a tool for myself to make my life easier. So while I am somewhat proud of some of the elegant ways I put it together, it also has a number of embarrassing kludges that just work. I wouldn't call it a house of cards, but if it ever does break or need to be altered, there is no documentation, I would be the only one that understands how it works, so I'd have to be the one to fix it should it ever need it. I didn't do that on purpose, its as I said this wasn't my job to create a system, this was a tool I made for myself to address a need. So should someone else ever have to deal with it, they can either try and figure out wtf I did, or they can build their own and I wouldn't feel too bad about that.
Regardless of language, ANY legacy system that is decades old, that likely has little or no documentation, which has had development upon development piled upon in by a variety of developers, some good, some not so much makes it "difficult" no mater what language you are working in. It just happens that with COBOL, being so old, is what you mostly find. The language itself is pretty literal.
I've worked with legacy systems for years. I've found some pretty "interesting" things in my time (in most cases a OMFG why the heck did they do it this way), which upon deep inspection usually end up being what was thought at the time as an expedient or elegant hack to solve some unique problem of the day. I am literally trying to reverse engineer a DB data model which are just full or what I perceive as development shortcuts which were done primarily because it was just easier to do at the time rather than them making any sort of comprehensive sense. The person that did them is 20 years gone, so you can only guess as to the motivation in many cases. Though often time when you look hard enough you can see the business rule that changed, and the kludge was done to address it. Some are even a bit inspired, however it takes a lot of sorting out before you get it.
Having taken a COBOL in university (years ago), I'd go farther to say not only is COBOL not hard, it is probably easier that most. It is a very literal language if you can call it that.
The only thing that makes it "hard", is that outside of perhaps some specialized uses (i.e. banking for example), it isn't used anywhere. So aside from learning the basics in university, there isn't a lot of places to really cut your teeth on it, thus likely most COBOL coders are of the graybeard variety. Additionally the only other thing being that almost all of the code associated with it will be Legacy (with a fscking capitol "L"), meaning that much of it will be an incomprehensible undocumented and uncommented mess to be untangled. Which isn't to say that is unique to COBOL, only that much of it would fall into that category unlike some of the more modern languages and maybe more importantly more modern techniques used to write them (i.e. proper documentation). Maybe...:) I work with a lot of legacy systems, none of which are COBOL, but all of them probably have similar if not as extensive issues.
From what I read, which admittedly isn't much, the primary concern to be addressed with in molten salt reactors is the fact that it is highly corrosive. Which means that they won't last as long as conventional reactors, and require costly maintenance to keep in service for any reasonable lifespan to be feasible. I think much of the other problems have been addressed or at least mitigated to some degree, but that primary one is still the thorn that keeps it largely on paper.
I think you pretty much covered it. However I think I'd add some details from the Canadian perspective.
Before I get into your comment, I will say that the Canadian health care system is awfully expensive where the bulk of any provincial tax spending by far goes towards healthcare, probably around 60-80% neighborhood in most cases. Of that about the same is just wages. There is a lot of reasons for that, however to make it less expensive that is really the only route.
There is also difficulties getting service in more rural areas due to demand, though that could be the same for the US. Also getting a family doctor can be a many year wait which isn't also very good. Doesn't help that many Canadian trained doctors head south for better money due to the US system.
I've always thought the health insurance system in the US is absolutely crazy. As seen with attempted changes, there are big insurance US lobbies that keep it that way.
At any rate I can attest to the point about the wait times for non-life threatening issues. Basically everyone goes though the same triage, which is pretty specific, and geared towards who may need the more immediate care.
Sometimes it's no problem, other times you need to wait a considerable long time. There are two major factors that influence this unfortunately for some. 1) Is that people without a family doctor (see above), will go to emergency which just clogs up the system with people who don't really have an emergency. 2) The age of those involved and the issue they are having...
So for example I've gone in with a broken bone before and sat for hours, however there is a really good chance that isn't gonna kill me, even though it may be painful. However if at the same there are a lot of elderly folks in for whatever, or babies they all are going to get priority over you because they have an increased chance that something that might be minor for an adult might be deadly to them. Also it doesn't help that many paranoid parents bring their babies in for any sort of fever or sniffles etc...
I remember distinctly one instance where I was waiting and there was a construction guy with a spike through is hand with napkins bleeding all over the place. I offered to let him go first, and they were like, nah he is fine that ain't gonna kill him anytime soon...
Anyway Canadian system is far from perfect and could use serious improvement, but I think it is still far better than the US system.
Oh and one last thing that I always thought was a bit wacky about the Canadian system... It doesn't include eyes or teeth. You're on your own with insurance much like the US for both of those things. So if you get in a fight and someone breaks your arm, it's all taken care of. However if they knock out your teeth, you're on the hook for paying for it, which is a bit nuts in my estimation. So not in the face! Also perhaps why beyond hockey why people might be missing a tooth here and there in Canada.
for small definitions of "largely". Parts of it were legal, just poorly thought out (and still in existence today). Likely being able to leverage something like 30$ for every 1$ you had on hand (or whatever it is now). It use to be less, but lobbied, and changed for the sake of market "liquidity".
What caused all the destruction was using the above, to knowingly buy derivatives of dirty mortgages, that everyone knew was bad, which were packaged by institutions that also knew they were bad, but everyone refused to believe the bubble would ever pop, and in the end they were to big to fail.
Which of course was enabled by the regulations that let banks also do all that silly sub-prime lending in the first place foisted upon people who should have known better, but were also believing that the bubble would never pop and that housing prices would forever increase.
The first in last were "legal" in that they were lobbied for by the banks, and regulation lessened to allow for it. The middle part, I'd say wasn't so legal. However I'm guessing difficult to prove, and at least on the parts of banks, plausible deniability based on the institutions providing the fake ratings. All a very circular complicit package if you ask me.
Even now, ask yourself, are housing prices so high because people have access to huge loans, or do people need to get huge loans because housing prices are so high. The reason is the loans. Well why the big loans? Because banks make all their money off debt, which interest rates low, they need to loan more to make the same amount of money... I mean it is a super complex question with a pretty simple answer really.
As to why interest rates are so low, well I'm not sure of the answer really. Were they artificially lowered by countries trying to promote growth in a previous recession enticing people to spend more with easy access to capitol? Then a deal done with banks later because the low rates were crippling the banks bottom line so regulation was lessened as a result? If so it has had some unintentional results, in that most of that money has ended up in an unsustainable housing market, with all the debt owned by banks, all teetering on the edge.
Also lets get it on some super important mission. Only to see some super serious news anchor try to get though the historic writing, only to throw his papers in the air on live TV to exclaim "Fsck it I quit, this is ridiculous!". Would also make for good political speeches.
"On this day, a day unlike any other, the intrepid Rocket McRocketFace arches onward and upward on this historic mission, indeed the whole world is looking skyward in pride of human achievement that Rocket McRocketFace has enabled to happen.... etc..."
dammit... just saw a bunch of posts with the same subject, little surprise I guess...
Just thought I'd mention that "they" have been calling for the death of the desktop for ages. Sure there are more laptops now, but they haven't gone away. They said the same thing for tablets and phones (silly).
If anything, bitcoin has probably had a bigger impact on the availability of desktop PC's due to the skyrocketing price of video cards as a result...
Though I will also say that this quote from MS: "99 percent of existing Windows 7 apps are compatible with new Windows 10 updates" is also complete BS, or at least disingenuous.
I have at least one project that falls into this bucket, where in anticipation of all of this, we have to try and figure out how to replace these apps. The problem isn't Windows 10 really. The problem is that most of the programs out there that run on Windows 7 are running on the 32bit version of Windows 7, while the version of Windows 10 that most enterprises are moving to is 64bit. I'd say compatibility is a bit lower than that "1%" when trying to accomplish that task. IT departments have a hard enough time without trying to support multiple client OS versions. (i.e. Sure chances are better that they may work with windows 10 32bit, however that isn't the issue as few will be moving to that).
Though I notice they never seem to mention what the fee per device is, not that many are going to likely support it anyway, its the proverbial thumb in the dyke anyway.
As someone else mentioned, it's everywhere, and it's click-bait.
I can't really blame Slashdot, it seems a more systemic thing. I mean you'd hope they'd be a bastion of truth and facts, however lets get real, it's a web news aggregator that calls itself "News for Geeks, Stuff that Matters" (or was it Nerds?), hardly the NYT... Speaking of which... Not exactly their finest hour either by many accounts. I also noticed just now BTW in trying to look up that quote that seemingly Slashdot has gotten rid of the tagline... Too limiting perhaps.
If anything, you can probably blame the unregulated wild west that Facebook has turned into and it's influence on the media. I'm more surprised I think that the above article wasn't entitled "You'll never believe this one little trick discovered by a single mom on how to do interviews well!"
Without getting into it, I'll just share one story, that sort of made me pretty embarrassed as a Canadian.
Years ago I went on a trip to Europe, though mostly Italy and Greece. As such I was in Rome and Athens a fair bit, used the public transit, and most importantly (at least in terms of this story) arrived in Rome and left from Athens. The bottom line, is without too much hassle with very little money, I could take their rail system to their respective international airports. This was novel to me because at the time (and for years after), Canada's largest international (Pearson Airport in Toronto), had no such thing. Once in TO, your options are a bus, cab, or car to get to the airport. The buses take forever, the cabs ridiculously expensive, and cars were also expensive to park, but that was all the options you had.
Fast forward many years later, they finally built a rail service from the TO airport to the rest of the rail system in TO. However upon completion, they decided to price it out of existence making it only slightly less expensive than taking a cab. A couple years later, I believe they have lowered the price somewhat, however it is still a far cry from jumping on the subway someplace urban, and stepping off at the airport for what amounted to peanuts.
Also Union Station in TO (main hub) is a POS confusing mess. I had an easier time finding my way around Rome and Athens, and not only do I not speak the language, but when I actually left Athens, my closest station was closed because they decided to have that 1st huge protest about the Euro and Debt in front of their legislative building (which pretty much says exactly when and where I left Athens...watched it all unravel on the rooftop patio of my hotel).
Disagree on so many levels. Also Walmart is/was the worst for this well before Amazon even existed.
Socialism is the social fabric (i.e. the tax payer) supporting those that can't support themselves (i.e. the fact that you work at Walmart/Amazon yet because you are paid so little you qualify for very basic social programs).
Basically you are supporting socialism by saying that Walmart and Amazon and others shouldn't pay their fair share nor their employees fairly. In essence the tax payer will be augmenting the wages payed by Amazon/Walmart because they don't have to. The tax payer is essentially unintentionally subsidizing the Amazon/Walmart workforce.
By applying a tax, you are forcing the corporate world to pay a living wage so that people do not need the socialism. I expect if you (or Walmart/Amazon) calculate how much those social programs cost (to which you will be changed a tax) VS how much more it would cost to simply pay your workforce enough that they wouldn't qualify for those programs, I'd bet a large amount of money that the later is much less than the former (i.e. the cost to have government run those programs to subsidize your underpaid workforce is likely a lot less efficient than simply paying them better wages).
Number one, which I was going to mention elsewhere but it bares mentioning, is that while we have Agile projects, and I've been required to take Agile training, and have participated in some Agile projects, typical my project tend to be more Waterfall. Now I saw "more" as for years now, my waterfall isn't pure, and takes elements of Agile before I even knew what Agile was. So there is much more back and forth with developers, and yes sometimes requirements get dropped in favor of higher priority ones.
Number two, now as to your biggest problem, yes I know what you mean. I've been involved with several projects in the 2-3 year range that a lot of work and money got poured into, only to end up a death march to failure. That said, it wasn't because of what Agile is supposed to fix (basically requirements documentation), but rather typically a combination of two things, A) No money, or they want to spend less money somehow so lets re-analyse everything again, or B) Management change causing priority to change and the project getting "put on hold" or just killed. Agile solves neither of those problems, which are fundamentally management and strategic issues. You could argue that at least with Agile over that same time period at least you would have something to show for it, while that might be the case, probably not. At BEST you might have a semi-functional system that meets some requirements. At worst you just have a hot mess of code and requirements that are not good enough to put into any sort of reasonable production environment. With Waterfall, at least you have some fairly well thought out requirements documentation that could potentially be used to build a solid system... provided you don't wait so long so that much of the business rules you captured are now out of date...
Anyway I'm not a huge fan of Agile as a lot of it seems like BS to me, however it does have useful elements, and I can see for certain applications it being perhaps more flexible and successful than a straight up waterfall. But then again, as I first mentioned, you'd probably just not use straight up waterfall anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I read an article in the last year or so that debunked the whole idea that the "small business" owners were the real job creators, though for years politicians like to romantically say it to be so over and over again. I forget the details, but the gist of it was, if a small business goes out of business another will take it's place very readily, and additional small business tend to compete against each other for the same amount of business. So having more of them doesn't really create more jobs.
Greece isn't really a good example for your argument. You've outlined Greece's problems correctly. However that didn't stop them from spending when they had less money. All they did was threaten to leave the Euro and take massive loans from Germany.
Their tax and corruption VS the monetary policy aren't really related issues either (but both important in their own right).
However if the did have their own money, they could simply devalue their currency (print more money), which would have an impact on inflation of course, but it would have been an option to them other than to just take massive debt. Though I forget how it turned out, as I think they ended up defaulting on it all anyway so there is that. Also Greece has like zero exports. About the only thing they make money on, would be tourism. Additionally by printing money, devaluing their currency, and increasing inflation, they can basically make everything cheaper (for tourists with money that is worth a lot more than Greece's), making it much more attractive to tourists to come and visit and spend foreign money. That is another reason the euro tanked the country, as Greece was always a cheep tourist destination which then had to compete with the rest of Europe more competitively.
I can only imagine what you might say should you accidentally loose it (or some filthy hobbit steals it).
Nope. Cars are more expensive now because for the last decade interest rates have basically been nothing. Seen by the fact that there were deals for ages for "0 percent financing". So free money. So people can borrow huge amounts. So they can afford more car. Car makers respond with, here have more car, and it will be expensive, but don't worry you can afford it just get an interest free loan for 8 years, etc...
and here we are.
Nope. They sell a 50k car at a loss these days, knowing that they will fiance it and make all the profit off that. Dealers are merely lenders at this point, the product is somewhat meaningless.
I'm for sure going to use that term for now on whenever this topic comes up... and I agree. I'm sure it will turn into a whole new legal frontier, post death rights of use, specifying exactly what your "corpse puppet" might be used for etc...
That should help our productivity! :)
All kidding aside, the takeaway I get from looking at the Canadian numbers, is that the lowest scores that hurt our "productivity" are the "ICT Adoption", which is basically the number of subscriptions per capita of cellular and internet services. Which isn't a huge surprise when you look at how expensive and noncompetitive our telecommunication industry is (Rogers, Bell, and Telus) compared to the rest of the world. To which Canadian's have been complaining about for years. Perhaps it is time for government to take a look at what is causing our productivity index to fall and do something about it. The next time some conservative mentions corporate tax cuts to enhance productivity I'll be sure to point that out.
I've inherited a couple of these nightmares over the last several years. I managed to kill one of them by porting it into Access (which took me months to detangle), but at least it takes 5mins to run as opposed to weeks of careful data entry. I'm sure some poor bastard will inherit my mess of an Access application many years from now and probably curse my existence, but its 1000 time better than what it was before.
The primary problem with these things is that they can get fantastically complicated, typically the only one who really understands it wrote the thing, there will be little or no documentation, and when they leave no one really understands how it works or what it does. After that a number of "Wizards" are given the magic wand, and all they know is if they hold it a certain way, and wave it just so, magic happens. They then teach several generations of Wizards over the years, each one passing down the slightly more lost knowledge of the magic wand.
While tearing them apart and rebuilding something better much of the time you want to beat your head against a wall with all the wtf moments you encounter. However I will say it was somewhat interesting from the perspective that its a big puzzle to tug at until it comes apart, and there were certain times I felt like some crypto hacker trying to decode some Mayan mystery... (part of that was the unformatted data output that adhered to no standards and reverse engineering it into something usable).
Excel being the hammer, and every problem a nail, because that is all you have access to, or at least did.
I've inherited several OMG level "spreadsheets" over the last couple of years. Typically used for some programming task where they don't have a programmer, or the programming tools to use, and don't have the money to initiate a project and get a developer etc... In many cases it also fits the bill where the task is really seemingly too small to justify a whole system (but is really TOO big for something like Excel, but that's what you got soooo....). I think in many cases they were done long enough ago that not as many people has widespread access to something like MS Access, which while in itself is also terrible is a heck of a lot more appropriate than Excel.
The last one I got was something like 90 tabs of macros and custom calculations, and involved a lot of careful pasting of many thousands of records each year to run the thing (and which any manually misplaced cell or record could cause havok). It would take someone several weeks of work to use it. I took one look at it and went HELL NO. While it took months (working in my "spare" time), I managed to port it into MS Access and automate it all. It now takes about 5 minutes to process instead of weeks of careful data entry (and in testing found tons of mistakes made in the past no one noticed). While MS Access it still a bit of a mickey mouse solution, it is still a hell of a lot better than Excel.
Anyway that said, I'm sure someone is going to get my poor MS Access application dumped on them at some point 10 years from now and will be WTF is this mess lol!
All it does is take data (unformatted no less) exported from a FORTRAN application that was written 40 years ago, that no one understands, nor does anyone want to touch it with a 10 foot pole for fear of breaking it, and runs a bunch of statistics on the data and exports them into a couple hundred pages of reports. The proper way would be to alter the original application to actually generate the statistics you need and the required formatted report, however as mentioned there is zero desire to do that, so we're left with a kludge. At least I made a slightly less kludgey kludge. :)
It's all relative... ba boom tish!
I suppose this is where definitions start getting a bit muddy due to scale.
However are they certain there aren't binary planets? I mean if you can have binary stars that orbit each other around a central pivot, why not planets as well? Again didn't rtfa so I don't know how massive the planet is to it's "moon", which I assume is how this might be defined at least for orbitary (word?) purposes...
I automate parts of my job all the time.
The key is not to lie about it, but advertise it. There is ALWAYS more work. Besides, typically the work you are automating isn't the kind of stuff you really want to be doing anyway (hence the automation). Besides, even if you automate the work, they'll still need you there to occasionally be able to update or adjust it due to business need or fix it should it ever break.
Like the example I recently did this to a chunk of work that got dumped on me due to reorg/transition. The last guy would take several solid weeks to do it manually, and he's done it for years and knew what he was doing. I took one look at it and was like no way am I doing that. It would have taken me a couple months. While it took a considerable amount of work (a heck of a lot more than I had originally though when I first started of course), I can now do the same thing in about 2 minutes of processing time. In addition while testing I found all sorts of previous errors due to the manual process, as no matter how knowledgeable and careful the other guy was, it is gonna happen. For me I did it because I didn't really have the time to do it manually along with the rest of my duties, nor did I really have the inclination to do that sort of manual drudgery. However I was up front with my manager in saying that it is going to take me longer to do this because I intend on automating the whole thing so I can do it in minutes rather than weeks after I am done.
Part of it involved reverse engineering some export data from another system no one really understands, which I will now be able to leverage that code I did for a couple other future projects for other systems which would also like to consume that data in a more automated fashion. (When I started this whole mess, my first bit of advice to management was to alter the existing system to make it do what the business wants, however it's from the 70's, no one knows how it does what it does anymore, it simply works, so no one wants to touch it with a 10ft pole for fear of having to replace it)
That said, this wasn't a systems project for me. This was me creating a tool for myself to make my life easier. So while I am somewhat proud of some of the elegant ways I put it together, it also has a number of embarrassing kludges that just work. I wouldn't call it a house of cards, but if it ever does break or need to be altered, there is no documentation, I would be the only one that understands how it works, so I'd have to be the one to fix it should it ever need it. I didn't do that on purpose, its as I said this wasn't my job to create a system, this was a tool I made for myself to address a need. So should someone else ever have to deal with it, they can either try and figure out wtf I did, or they can build their own and I wouldn't feel too bad about that.
So the plan is to go from a large potted plant to 10,000 people in 19 years? Uh huh.
Regardless of language, ANY legacy system that is decades old, that likely has little or no documentation, which has had development upon development piled upon in by a variety of developers, some good, some not so much makes it "difficult" no mater what language you are working in. It just happens that with COBOL, being so old, is what you mostly find. The language itself is pretty literal.
I've worked with legacy systems for years. I've found some pretty "interesting" things in my time (in most cases a OMFG why the heck did they do it this way), which upon deep inspection usually end up being what was thought at the time as an expedient or elegant hack to solve some unique problem of the day. I am literally trying to reverse engineer a DB data model which are just full or what I perceive as development shortcuts which were done primarily because it was just easier to do at the time rather than them making any sort of comprehensive sense. The person that did them is 20 years gone, so you can only guess as to the motivation in many cases. Though often time when you look hard enough you can see the business rule that changed, and the kludge was done to address it. Some are even a bit inspired, however it takes a lot of sorting out before you get it.
Having taken a COBOL in university (years ago), I'd go farther to say not only is COBOL not hard, it is probably easier that most. It is a very literal language if you can call it that.
The only thing that makes it "hard", is that outside of perhaps some specialized uses (i.e. banking for example), it isn't used anywhere. So aside from learning the basics in university, there isn't a lot of places to really cut your teeth on it, thus likely most COBOL coders are of the graybeard variety. Additionally the only other thing being that almost all of the code associated with it will be Legacy (with a fscking capitol "L"), meaning that much of it will be an incomprehensible undocumented and uncommented mess to be untangled. Which isn't to say that is unique to COBOL, only that much of it would fall into that category unlike some of the more modern languages and maybe more importantly more modern techniques used to write them (i.e. proper documentation). Maybe... :) I work with a lot of legacy systems, none of which are COBOL, but all of them probably have similar if not as extensive issues.
From what I read, which admittedly isn't much, the primary concern to be addressed with in molten salt reactors is the fact that it is highly corrosive. Which means that they won't last as long as conventional reactors, and require costly maintenance to keep in service for any reasonable lifespan to be feasible. I think much of the other problems have been addressed or at least mitigated to some degree, but that primary one is still the thorn that keeps it largely on paper.
I think you pretty much covered it. However I think I'd add some details from the Canadian perspective.
Before I get into your comment, I will say that the Canadian health care system is awfully expensive where the bulk of any provincial tax spending by far goes towards healthcare, probably around 60-80% neighborhood in most cases. Of that about the same is just wages. There is a lot of reasons for that, however to make it less expensive that is really the only route.
There is also difficulties getting service in more rural areas due to demand, though that could be the same for the US. Also getting a family doctor can be a many year wait which isn't also very good. Doesn't help that many Canadian trained doctors head south for better money due to the US system.
I've always thought the health insurance system in the US is absolutely crazy. As seen with attempted changes, there are big insurance US lobbies that keep it that way.
At any rate I can attest to the point about the wait times for non-life threatening issues. Basically everyone goes though the same triage, which is pretty specific, and geared towards who may need the more immediate care.
Sometimes it's no problem, other times you need to wait a considerable long time. There are two major factors that influence this unfortunately for some.
1) Is that people without a family doctor (see above), will go to emergency which just clogs up the system with people who don't really have an emergency.
2) The age of those involved and the issue they are having...
So for example I've gone in with a broken bone before and sat for hours, however there is a really good chance that isn't gonna kill me, even though it may be painful. However if at the same there are a lot of elderly folks in for whatever, or babies they all are going to get priority over you because they have an increased chance that something that might be minor for an adult might be deadly to them. Also it doesn't help that many paranoid parents bring their babies in for any sort of fever or sniffles etc...
I remember distinctly one instance where I was waiting and there was a construction guy with a spike through is hand with napkins bleeding all over the place. I offered to let him go first, and they were like, nah he is fine that ain't gonna kill him anytime soon...
Anyway Canadian system is far from perfect and could use serious improvement, but I think it is still far better than the US system.
Oh and one last thing that I always thought was a bit wacky about the Canadian system... It doesn't include eyes or teeth. You're on your own with insurance much like the US for both of those things. So if you get in a fight and someone breaks your arm, it's all taken care of. However if they knock out your teeth, you're on the hook for paying for it, which is a bit nuts in my estimation. So not in the face! Also perhaps why beyond hockey why people might be missing a tooth here and there in Canada.
for small definitions of "largely". Parts of it were legal, just poorly thought out (and still in existence today). Likely being able to leverage something like 30$ for every 1$ you had on hand (or whatever it is now). It use to be less, but lobbied, and changed for the sake of market "liquidity".
What caused all the destruction was using the above, to knowingly buy derivatives of dirty mortgages, that everyone knew was bad, which were packaged by institutions that also knew they were bad, but everyone refused to believe the bubble would ever pop, and in the end they were to big to fail.
Which of course was enabled by the regulations that let banks also do all that silly sub-prime lending in the first place foisted upon people who should have known better, but were also believing that the bubble would never pop and that housing prices would forever increase.
The first in last were "legal" in that they were lobbied for by the banks, and regulation lessened to allow for it. The middle part, I'd say wasn't so legal. However I'm guessing difficult to prove, and at least on the parts of banks, plausible deniability based on the institutions providing the fake ratings. All a very circular complicit package if you ask me.
Even now, ask yourself, are housing prices so high because people have access to huge loans, or do people need to get huge loans because housing prices are so high. The reason is the loans. Well why the big loans? Because banks make all their money off debt, which interest rates low, they need to loan more to make the same amount of money... I mean it is a super complex question with a pretty simple answer really.
As to why interest rates are so low, well I'm not sure of the answer really. Were they artificially lowered by countries trying to promote growth in a previous recession enticing people to spend more with easy access to capitol? Then a deal done with banks later because the low rates were crippling the banks bottom line so regulation was lessened as a result? If so it has had some unintentional results, in that most of that money has ended up in an unsustainable housing market, with all the debt owned by banks, all teetering on the edge.
Let's get that GoFundMe started!
Also lets get it on some super important mission. Only to see some super serious news anchor try to get though the historic writing, only to throw his papers in the air on live TV to exclaim "Fsck it I quit, this is ridiculous!". Would also make for good political speeches.
"On this day, a day unlike any other, the intrepid Rocket McRocketFace arches onward and upward on this historic mission, indeed the whole world is looking skyward in pride of human achievement that Rocket McRocketFace has enabled to happen.... etc..."
dammit... just saw a bunch of posts with the same subject, little surprise I guess...
You can take my desktop from my cold dead hands!
Just thought I'd mention that "they" have been calling for the death of the desktop for ages. Sure there are more laptops now, but they haven't gone away. They said the same thing for tablets and phones (silly).
If anything, bitcoin has probably had a bigger impact on the availability of desktop PC's due to the skyrocketing price of video cards as a result...
With an emphasis on "crappy".
Though I will also say that this quote from MS: "99 percent of existing Windows 7 apps are compatible with new Windows 10 updates" is also complete BS, or at least disingenuous.
I have at least one project that falls into this bucket, where in anticipation of all of this, we have to try and figure out how to replace these apps. The problem isn't Windows 10 really. The problem is that most of the programs out there that run on Windows 7 are running on the 32bit version of Windows 7, while the version of Windows 10 that most enterprises are moving to is 64bit. I'd say compatibility is a bit lower than that "1%" when trying to accomplish that task. IT departments have a hard enough time without trying to support multiple client OS versions. (i.e. Sure chances are better that they may work with windows 10 32bit, however that isn't the issue as few will be moving to that).
Though I notice they never seem to mention what the fee per device is, not that many are going to likely support it anyway, its the proverbial thumb in the dyke anyway.
As someone else mentioned, it's everywhere, and it's click-bait.
I can't really blame Slashdot, it seems a more systemic thing. I mean you'd hope they'd be a bastion of truth and facts, however lets get real, it's a web news aggregator that calls itself "News for Geeks, Stuff that Matters" (or was it Nerds?), hardly the NYT... Speaking of which... Not exactly their finest hour either by many accounts. I also noticed just now BTW in trying to look up that quote that seemingly Slashdot has gotten rid of the tagline... Too limiting perhaps.
If anything, you can probably blame the unregulated wild west that Facebook has turned into and it's influence on the media. I'm more surprised I think that the above article wasn't entitled "You'll never believe this one little trick discovered by a single mom on how to do interviews well!"
It is also horrible in Canada.
Without getting into it, I'll just share one story, that sort of made me pretty embarrassed as a Canadian.
Years ago I went on a trip to Europe, though mostly Italy and Greece. As such I was in Rome and Athens a fair bit, used the public transit, and most importantly (at least in terms of this story) arrived in Rome and left from Athens. The bottom line, is without too much hassle with very little money, I could take their rail system to their respective international airports. This was novel to me because at the time (and for years after), Canada's largest international (Pearson Airport in Toronto), had no such thing. Once in TO, your options are a bus, cab, or car to get to the airport. The buses take forever, the cabs ridiculously expensive, and cars were also expensive to park, but that was all the options you had.
Fast forward many years later, they finally built a rail service from the TO airport to the rest of the rail system in TO. However upon completion, they decided to price it out of existence making it only slightly less expensive than taking a cab. A couple years later, I believe they have lowered the price somewhat, however it is still a far cry from jumping on the subway someplace urban, and stepping off at the airport for what amounted to peanuts.
Also Union Station in TO (main hub) is a POS confusing mess. I had an easier time finding my way around Rome and Athens, and not only do I not speak the language, but when I actually left Athens, my closest station was closed because they decided to have that 1st huge protest about the Euro and Debt in front of their legislative building (which pretty much says exactly when and where I left Athens...watched it all unravel on the rooftop patio of my hotel).
Disagree on so many levels. Also Walmart is/was the worst for this well before Amazon even existed.
Socialism is the social fabric (i.e. the tax payer) supporting those that can't support themselves (i.e. the fact that you work at Walmart/Amazon yet because you are paid so little you qualify for very basic social programs).
Basically you are supporting socialism by saying that Walmart and Amazon and others shouldn't pay their fair share nor their employees fairly. In essence the tax payer will be augmenting the wages payed by Amazon/Walmart because they don't have to. The tax payer is essentially unintentionally subsidizing the Amazon/Walmart workforce.
By applying a tax, you are forcing the corporate world to pay a living wage so that people do not need the socialism. I expect if you (or Walmart/Amazon) calculate how much those social programs cost (to which you will be changed a tax) VS how much more it would cost to simply pay your workforce enough that they wouldn't qualify for those programs, I'd bet a large amount of money that the later is much less than the former (i.e. the cost to have government run those programs to subsidize your underpaid workforce is likely a lot less efficient than simply paying them better wages).
Two points:
Number one, which I was going to mention elsewhere but it bares mentioning, is that while we have Agile projects, and I've been required to take Agile training, and have participated in some Agile projects, typical my project tend to be more Waterfall. Now I saw "more" as for years now, my waterfall isn't pure, and takes elements of Agile before I even knew what Agile was. So there is much more back and forth with developers, and yes sometimes requirements get dropped in favor of higher priority ones.
Number two, now as to your biggest problem, yes I know what you mean. I've been involved with several projects in the 2-3 year range that a lot of work and money got poured into, only to end up a death march to failure. That said, it wasn't because of what Agile is supposed to fix (basically requirements documentation), but rather typically a combination of two things, A) No money, or they want to spend less money somehow so lets re-analyse everything again, or B) Management change causing priority to change and the project getting "put on hold" or just killed. Agile solves neither of those problems, which are fundamentally management and strategic issues. You could argue that at least with Agile over that same time period at least you would have something to show for it, while that might be the case, probably not. At BEST you might have a semi-functional system that meets some requirements. At worst you just have a hot mess of code and requirements that are not good enough to put into any sort of reasonable production environment. With Waterfall, at least you have some fairly well thought out requirements documentation that could potentially be used to build a solid system... provided you don't wait so long so that much of the business rules you captured are now out of date...
Anyway I'm not a huge fan of Agile as a lot of it seems like BS to me, however it does have useful elements, and I can see for certain applications it being perhaps more flexible and successful than a straight up waterfall. But then again, as I first mentioned, you'd probably just not use straight up waterfall anyway...