"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,"
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The middle of this story will be filled with golden excess. But it won't end well.
Here's a funny thing: Medicine, Law, and Engineering were also fields that were over 90% male - women had to "break in". And don't imagine they didn't have to push past a lot of sexism and belittling and interrupting.
There was one woman in my 50-man engineering class of 1980; I saw the first woman hired as P.Eng. in my workplace in 1993. By the time I left, five of my last six bosses had been women (2003-2017), and in two cases, THEIR bosses had been women; I'd say they're now a third of the shop. I think this generation has to put up with much less prejudice and belittling (from their women boss, for sure).
Medicine and Law have been half women for a while now.
Then there's IT. Happens I also got a CompSci degree, 1985. A third of my class were women and it was widely assumed it would hit 50% by 1990 or so. And it WAS doing pretty well in the 1990s, then the female participation rate plummeted after the dot-bomb and has never really recovered.
The driving force here, I think, is not poisonous culture, but money. Medicine and Law were rapidly integrated because they are the best-paid jobs in society, and women kept pushing, hard; they had cause. Engineering is mostly better-paid than IT, at least the actual coding jobs.
It's the same as that thing about women not going in to drywall; obviously the best-paid, relative to work pain, jobs will be the most attractive. Coding has become way less attractive lately. Oh, and it's not a licensed profession, like medicine, law, engineering...that may have something to do with both its attractiveness and stability, too.
Speaking for structural engineers, that's college stuff. EVERYBODY on the team knows it. Budgets, schedules, coordination of six contractors, placating government inspectors...that's the "project management" piece, which is adult-hard. And women are often better at.
It doesn't matter if the design is correct if the rebar isn't inspected correctly because the site engineer had a shouting match with the inspection company foreman. Because he was a dick.
They bring huge value to the IT department, yes, but the IT department is 5% of the municipal government corporation. At only 5%, IT could run 20% cheaper, and still only chop 1% from the corporate budget.
Meanwhile, their convenience is costing time and money for the customer-serving departments. You could prove this if you tried both products and compared the results, but that was never even permitted. MS was a "strategy", a word meaning "not subject to cost/benefit analysis" and their products were never tested against competitors after the "Strategy" was announced by IT in 1994. Also, we cancelled any number of projects that could have been done with a few hundred lines of Perl cgi-bin script, after the IT estimate for an MS development solution was $50K and more; they had like 10 years to pay back at that price. I know they could have been solved with a few days of Perl, because that's exactly what I did, later on, quietly. They're all running well 10 years later, maintained by engineers. If we'd done them with MS, it would have cost $50K every five years, two more times by now, because that's how often MS changes development languages, and IT always insist that everybody must then pay for a rewrite.
So, no, I don't believe you when you talk about all this huge value from the One BIg Vendor strategy. It's also got huge NEGATIVE values that only the end-users are around to see.
A "heterogenous environment", as IT likes to call it, is indeed more expensive than a monolith in some ways, enough to compensate for their higher prices - but not enough to compensate for the many lost opportunities to all the other departments because the products are not an optimal match, or the difficulty of development is high enough that some things are not done at all.
Once they become, not just a "product" but a whole "ecosystem" of products for municipal governments, they will never have more loyal, nay, slavishly devoted customers. I just finished 30 years with a local government. I was in the water department, which had its own budget for a little of the early-PC era, when they were considered toys. I watched the IT department take over that end.
I watched with my bewilderment gradually exceeding my disgust as the same bunch that clung bitterly to their IBM mainframe environment long after it was obviously obsolete, jumped eagerly into the arms of Microsoft, glad to have new Masters that would tell them their strategy and what to buy. Once they paid attention to the formerly-hated PCs at all, they ensured the fewest-possible vendors in the "environment" by going MS with *everything* that MS sold. Macs were quickly eliminated, then competing software, anywhere that MS had an offering. It wasn't just the office products and all the development tools, dutifully switching from VB to.Net to C# when MS told them to: it was how they became MS salesmen themselves 5 minutes after leaving the sales meeting.
Nothing was ever even discussed in terms of "choices" or selections, things like OLE and MSN and IE and Silverlight were just enthusiastically described as the obvious future, the only road forward.
So I can't recommend strongly enough to MS shareholders that you get your company installed in local governments everywhere. They're big enough to buy lots of product, and not courageous enough to try anything else. Out in the service-providing departments, customers that are paying for all this, can come forward with obviously-superior products at lower prices, and IT will blandly mouth words about "Total Cost of Ownership", and "Integration with other products" without doing a cost-study, and never look into them. Why would they? MS will be the obvious Road Ahead, onward to the 22nd century.
Please reconsider. To outsiders, that actually makes America look worse.
If you were "just" a carceral state where non-violent crimes draw long sentences, that could be fixed with a change of leaders and a some legal reforms.
But if you have the highest incarceration rate in the world *legitimately*, it means that Americans *as a people* are criminal, violent, lying, untrustworthy scum. If that much of the population needs to be in concrete boxes, your whole bell curve must be left-shifted. Everybody must be relatively more-criminal than those of other, more honest nations.
Would you like to argue that's not true, that while America has a lot more bad apples that other countries, the rest of the barrel is somehow not spoiled? How about your top-level businessmen, the richest financiers? It looks a LOT to the rest of the world like they did great amounts of lying about asset values to enrich themselves while others lost; and it looks a LOT to everybody in America itself (the rest of us are watching kind of stunned) like your highest levels of politicians accuse each other of constant, and criminal, levels of lying and theft.
What are we SUPPOSED to think but that America is a bunch of crooks? We're trying not to do that, but you, sir, are not helping.
Not lost! It combined "inherent body capacitance" with modern dance, and was assigned to the youngest family member, since kids under 10 prefer to watch the TV from arms-length to start with.
My interpretive dance entitled "Getting Batman and the last half of Man from UNCLE to come in because the bastards scheduled them against each other" still draws appreciative reviews at family reunions to this day.
Ummm...I'm the previous poster. I started off in Calgary, where I got just 2 channels really well, a 3rd most of the time (could be dodgy during day, better at night, which isn't much of a problem).
In Vancouver, it's better: crystal-clear on all the three major Canadian networks 7x24, plus 3 more-local channels, two of which I admit are useless to me as an English speaker, though I sometimes wish I knew what the hell they were talking about on "The Harpreet Singh Show"; you never see such animated conversations on Kimmel. But especially for the local Asian populations, I think those channels are a nice bit of local community building.
I'm not sure what you were expecting beyond the 3 major networks, I assure you that's all we had in the standard-def "rabbit ears" broadcast days.
I got a nice antenna at Radio Shack when my wife and I got pissed at the ninth time our cable company raised the monthly a few bucks and we realized it had gone up over 20%, vewy, vewy quietwy. ("Elmer Fudd increases", we called them). It was a period of our lives when that extra $100+ per month was significant. So for anybody where >$1000/year is real money all the time, the shock is that more people haven't discovered this, so I hope that article gets wide play.
That was about 3 years ago, and everybody who's seen the antenna asks about it and expresses surprise that it exists, that we have one, that we get along with that as enough. This is people old and young. People haven't forgotten the *technology*, but they have forgotten the *practice* of using an antenna.
It always gives me a chance to express one of my favourite rants, which is that OTA broadcasts have a *regulated quality*, so they always look good, whereas all the private media, (where the provider owns the transmission infrastructure, be it cable, phone or satellite), are allowed to throw you any resolution JUUUUST good enough to keep you from cancelling. 8Mb/s for the Superbowl, sure, but for less-popular shows, they'll run the bandwidth down until somebody's nose is a single big pixel....and back up 10% when people actually leave.
When idealogues rant about privatization and government can't do anything right, I just show them OTA transmissions. TV quality has been publicly regulated and privately regulated and you can see what it does.
Let's consider the opposite strategy, then, if programmer is the 'single best example' of needing flow.
Should Apple sacrifice, I dunno, half the open area to work-pods you slide into like a fighter pilot? Basically a ring of three 4K monitors wrapped around you, the backs of the monitors 6" from the walls? I'm thinking four feet by six or seven. No windows, obviously. Sound insulation.
Is there no minimum to the amount of "distraction", that is, anything but what's on your monitors - that should be removed for optimum results?
If so, you've got the only argument they'll listen to - that you will take up even less of that precious office space. Open plans were never about anything but reducing that square-feet per person number.
That, and one other thing: 10x10 private offices were often places where people had some privacy in which to goof off. Watch YouTube in an open plan, and people notice. This is just not a real issue in a well-run place where the supervisor knows what the hell all her subordinates are doing and has done the work herself so that she has an idea how far along everybody should move every day. But when the super is too dumb to measure outputs, they will measure inputs.
I really worried when Goldberg took over, as I don't share almost any opinions with him and don't much like his way of looking at things.
But I think The Atlantic is good for me because it does have a plurality of opinions in it. They keep publishing Mark Bowden, who never met a military expense he didn't think should be doubled (go, F22!) and is generally alarmist about Threats To America; there's moderate conservatives like PJ O'Rourke, David Brooks, and Geo. Will, before you even get into them giving space to Charles Krauthammer. (And after about 25 years, there are *still* people mad about the "Dan Quayle Was Right" cover when he said that two-parent families are better families.)
They give space to conservative viewpoints, but rarely outright nutty ones. And it's good for me to read stuff I don't agree with.
But while home *buying* prices have exploded, the rent costs are pretty much sticking to inflation. You don't HAVE to bet your future on that particular investment.
It has the same number of problems per person, I'd say. Maybe you haven't noticed that they have a short growing season, short construction season, and other challenges that you do not.
I put in a 30-year career with my local Waterworks, which became a joint water/sewer utility about halfway through that (and we adapted well; very different pipes, but still, pipes...)
Continuity is huge in some industries. I dealt with some property issues that were decades old; frequently I was able to find somebody who was there at the time, or had been briefed 15 years ago by a guy leaving after 35 years who told them to watch out for that issue that came up in the 70s and remains a ticking time-bomb.
It's about deep familiarity with the whole complex intersection of technical problems, people problems, legal problems, accumulated history around some development issue ("We let company A develop there first, but company B cried foul, so they get to develop the other side of the road...there's a memo in the paper file about it, an Legal has the contract in their files..."), and so on. Most public services have this kind of need for institutional continuity and knowledge; the role in society of police, roads, legal surveyors, courts, and utilities is also a web of relationships.
If this string-of-jobs culture is inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, the quarter or so of society where that will never be desirable are going to be scooping up a lot of the best people. I know this is slashdot, but the whole world is not tech start-ups, guys.
I'd agree if companies coming in brought only money and no costs. Alas, companies need roads and police and courts and stuff, like any other economic actor. If they don't pay for themselves, it's just asking taxpayers to subsidize the jobs. The new employees DO benefit, but at the expense of their neighbours.
My only complaint about the WaPo link was that it didn't connect; paywall. I couldn't even see the headline, which I suppose would at least have completed your sentence. Couldn't you have put in a few words of summary instead of just the link? Or could we have another link to a newspaper that isn't walled? Thx.
Bill Bryson, NOT a big lover of gadgetry or cinema, brings pretty much an "average guy" sensibility to his travel writing, gushed for two pages after seeing a demo-show of what 70mm looked like at high frame rates.
HFR was recently tried a few times, but only in conjunction with 3D, which was likely a big negative to it. The killer app may be the combination of 70mm and 48fps. (And some say, 60 fps...)
...and any time pricing information is concealed, it's NOT a free market.
You know the only people who WANT a free market, really want one? Small actors who have no leverage. The BEST deal you can get when you're small is a fair one, as produced by a free market. Every large actor (the company vs you, at salary time, say) wants a closed market, so they can use their size advantage. The Company knows EVERY salary in the company (and they always want to know what you were paid at every previous job, when you apply) while you only know your own, at negotiation time. That's a huge advantage for them, which they always wish to preserve.
College-hating is an OLD sport for the American right wing, and less-so but present in Canada and the UK. Colleges were of course hotbeds of "radicalism" for the Boomers, the first generation to have more than a few percent of their number go to college. I put "radicalism" in quotes because Civil Rights for black people are now uncontroversial, as is the proposition that the Vietnam War and the Draft were bad ideas. It was also "radical", of course, to have the opinion that cannabis is a largely harmless intoxicant, unlikely to addict you or drive you insane. ("Reefer Madness" was already a joke-film to us, but our parents still believed that shit like gospel.) But it goes back way before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, of course. From the Wikipedia:
"God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” is a 1951 book by William F. Buckley Jr., in the author, based on his undergraduate experiences at Yale University, criticized Yale and its faculty for forcing collectivist, Keynesian, and secularist ideology on its students. "
1951 is ten years earlier still; somebody not born yet when it was published has been drawing (socialist) Social Security for a year already.
So, please, any notion that this is because 0.1% of the 4700 colleges in the US have recently uninvited a few speakers, spare us. The malice towards higher education goes back to an era when the ones forbidden to speak at Universities were all from the left wing. (Read up on the UCLA "Speaker Ban", which was applied mainly to communiists - but also to former VPOTUS Henry Wallace, just because he was speaking in opposition to Cold War policies: http://www.jofreeman.com/sixti... )
The Republican Party still hated colleges even when the only speakers they forbade were Communists, Anti-Militarists, and pro-socialists in general.
I went to just the one political speech in college (70s). It was free. Germaine Greer, and I went because I'd heard her name before. Other than that, I was too damn busy with classes; what little spare time I had I wanted to keep for partying, my chief concern being that "I had no life" as opposed to the poor and oppressed,or the State Of The Nation, or whatever.
So: if you want to comment on how forcing people to go watch TV or hit the web for political commentary is the same as "denying free speech" because the only thing that counts as free speech is being paid to give a speech, could you please first state the names of three college political speeches you've ever attended? Because if YOU don't go to them, then you can hardly say they are all that important a cultural moment.
It's always funny to read Americans stumbling over a parliamentary system description and thinking it overcomplicated and bizarre (and that QE2 is still, really, in charge).
There's a reason your system hasn't caught on anywhere in 230 years; a reason nearly everwhere else is some sort of parliament.
Yours makes your elected Head-of-State an elected King by our lights; Commander-in-Chief and repository of all national glory and honour. I wouldn't use the word "Warlord" but I note that the terrorist-fighting action-hero of "Air Force One" was named "President James Marshall". (Distributing Martial Law to the evil-doers, clearly).
It makes your Presidents want to look more Presidential by hitting people. Except with bombs.
By moving all the colourful honours and glory and ceremony related to the *nation* onto a ceremonial queen, we deprive our politicians of wrapping themselves in the national symbols to puff themselves up; by moving the commander-in-chief role away from the Prime Minister, we take away much of his action-figure status; most PMs can't get a military adventure going without the approval of at least several members of his cabinet, who are also (unlike your system) legitimate replacements for him that could be doing his job tomorrow if that cabinet thinks the PM has lost it.
It's too late for you guys to switch to Parliamentary, but we sure do thank you for highlighting its virtues for us with your brave experiment. Your written Constitution, alas, protected no torture victims, nor did all your three-sided checks and balances.
And then the most recent Presidential situation! My god, how we pity you. A massive systemic failure. We'll keep our system, which you are welcome to make all the fun of that you want. We don't need to make fun of the system that elected a leader who spoke of "Prime Minister Shinzo" and "Two Corinthians". Some jokes can't be improved upon.
When Linux first started to produce viable desktop products, the argument was the same as for Macs: we need to run just one O/S, and many of our users need Windows applications, so that's that, we all have to run Windows.
But then IT themselves pushed every major software project towards web solutions, because they didn't want to install any.EXE files at all - they never really got over their beloved mainframe environment, you see; they wanted all the PCs to go back to being dumb terminals and leave them in control. Cheaper and much, much easier on their nerves.
But we STILL had to buy Windows, because all the Web applications ran on IE. When we asked one vendor in 2004 if their program ran OK on Firefox and so forth as well, they blinked in surprise and said it had never occurred to them to test.
Then around 2010, more and more web applications would NOT run on IE, and best on Chrome, and they reluctantly allowed that install.
But a Linux conversion will STILL never happen, even though there is now no sane excuse at all. Because all of these changes had one central source: IT always does the easiest thing.
1) Always stay with existing solutions unless there's a gun to your head 2) Always buy a new solution from the largest, most monopolistic company you can find: IBM over Amdahl, Microsoft over Apple, Google over anybody. 3) Never do anything that a herd has not done first.
You could sell a government IT office on a solution that GM and Boeing and Prudential had tried first, I suppose. But don't look to government for IT pioneering.
Slashdot Mirror
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,"
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The middle of this story will be filled with golden excess. But it won't end well.
Here's a funny thing: Medicine, Law, and Engineering were also fields that were over 90% male - women had to "break in". And don't imagine they didn't have to push past a lot of sexism and belittling and interrupting.
There was one woman in my 50-man engineering class of 1980; I saw the first woman hired as P.Eng. in my workplace in 1993. By the time I left, five of my last six bosses had been women (2003-2017), and in two cases, THEIR bosses had been women; I'd say they're now a third of the shop. I think this generation has to put up with much less prejudice and belittling (from their women boss, for sure).
Medicine and Law have been half women for a while now.
Then there's IT. Happens I also got a CompSci degree, 1985. A third of my class were women and it was widely assumed it would hit 50% by 1990 or so. And it WAS doing pretty well in the 1990s, then the female participation rate plummeted after the dot-bomb and has never really recovered.
The driving force here, I think, is not poisonous culture, but money. Medicine and Law were rapidly integrated because they are the best-paid jobs in society, and women kept pushing, hard; they had cause. Engineering is mostly better-paid than IT, at least the actual coding jobs.
It's the same as that thing about women not going in to drywall; obviously the best-paid, relative to work pain, jobs will be the most attractive. Coding has become way less attractive lately. Oh, and it's not a licensed profession, like medicine, law, engineering...that may have something to do with both its attractiveness and stability, too.
Speaking for structural engineers, that's college stuff. EVERYBODY on the team knows it. Budgets, schedules, coordination of six contractors, placating government inspectors...that's the "project management" piece, which is adult-hard. And women are often better at.
It doesn't matter if the design is correct if the rebar isn't inspected correctly because the site engineer had a shouting match with the inspection company foreman. Because he was a dick.
They bring huge value to the IT department, yes, but the IT department is 5% of the municipal government corporation. At only 5%, IT could run 20% cheaper, and still only chop 1% from the corporate budget.
Meanwhile, their convenience is costing time and money for the customer-serving departments. You could prove this if you tried both products and compared the results, but that was never even permitted. MS was a "strategy", a word meaning "not subject to cost/benefit analysis" and their products were never tested against competitors after the "Strategy" was announced by IT in 1994. Also, we cancelled any number of projects that could have been done with a few hundred lines of Perl cgi-bin script, after the IT estimate for an MS development solution was $50K and more; they had like 10 years to pay back at that price. I know they could have been solved with a few days of Perl, because that's exactly what I did, later on, quietly. They're all running well 10 years later, maintained by engineers. If we'd done them with MS, it would have cost $50K every five years, two more times by now, because that's how often MS changes development languages, and IT always insist that everybody must then pay for a rewrite.
So, no, I don't believe you when you talk about all this huge value from the One BIg Vendor strategy. It's also got huge NEGATIVE values that only the end-users are around to see.
A "heterogenous environment", as IT likes to call it, is indeed more expensive than a monolith in some ways, enough to compensate for their higher prices - but not enough to compensate for the many lost opportunities to all the other departments because the products are not an optimal match, or the difficulty of development is high enough that some things are not done at all.
Once they become, not just a "product" but a whole "ecosystem" of products for municipal governments, they will never have more loyal, nay, slavishly devoted customers. I just finished 30 years with a local government. I was in the water department, which had its own budget for a little of the early-PC era, when they were considered toys. I watched the IT department take over that end.
I watched with my bewilderment gradually exceeding my disgust as the same bunch that clung bitterly to their IBM mainframe environment long after it was obviously obsolete, jumped eagerly into the arms of Microsoft, glad to have new Masters that would tell them their strategy and what to buy. Once they paid attention to the formerly-hated PCs at all, they ensured the fewest-possible vendors in the "environment" by going MS with *everything* that MS sold. Macs were quickly eliminated, then competing software, anywhere that MS had an offering. It wasn't just the office products and all the development tools, dutifully switching from VB to .Net to C# when MS told them to: it was how they became MS salesmen themselves 5 minutes after leaving the sales meeting.
Nothing was ever even discussed in terms of "choices" or selections, things like OLE and MSN and IE and Silverlight were just enthusiastically described as the obvious future, the only road forward.
So I can't recommend strongly enough to MS shareholders that you get your company installed in local governments everywhere. They're big enough to buy lots of product, and not courageous enough to try anything else. Out in the service-providing departments, customers that are paying for all this, can come forward with obviously-superior products at lower prices, and IT will blandly mouth words about "Total Cost of Ownership", and "Integration with other products" without doing a cost-study, and never look into them. Why would they? MS will be the obvious Road Ahead, onward to the 22nd century.
Please reconsider. To outsiders, that actually makes America look worse.
If you were "just" a carceral state where non-violent crimes draw long sentences, that could be fixed with a change of leaders and a some legal reforms.
But if you have the highest incarceration rate in the world *legitimately*, it means that Americans *as a people* are criminal, violent, lying, untrustworthy scum. If that much of the population needs to be in concrete boxes, your whole bell curve must be left-shifted. Everybody must be relatively more-criminal than those of other, more honest nations.
Would you like to argue that's not true, that while America has a lot more bad apples that other countries, the rest of the barrel is somehow not spoiled? How about your top-level businessmen, the richest financiers? It looks a LOT to the rest of the world like they did great amounts of lying about asset values to enrich themselves while others lost; and it looks a LOT to everybody in America itself (the rest of us are watching kind of stunned) like your highest levels of politicians accuse each other of constant, and criminal, levels of lying and theft.
What are we SUPPOSED to think but that America is a bunch of crooks? We're trying not to do that, but you, sir, are not helping.
Not lost! It combined "inherent body capacitance" with modern dance, and was assigned to the youngest family member, since kids under 10 prefer to watch the TV from arms-length to start with.
My interpretive dance entitled "Getting Batman and the last half of Man from UNCLE to come in because the bastards scheduled them against each other" still draws appreciative reviews at family reunions to this day.
Ummm...I'm the previous poster. I started off in Calgary, where I got just 2 channels really well, a 3rd most of the time (could be dodgy during day, better at night, which isn't much of a problem).
In Vancouver, it's better: crystal-clear on all the three major Canadian networks 7x24, plus 3 more-local channels, two of which I admit are useless to me as an English speaker, though I sometimes wish I knew what the hell they were talking about on "The Harpreet Singh Show"; you never see such animated conversations on Kimmel. But especially for the local Asian populations, I think those channels are a nice bit of local community building.
I'm not sure what you were expecting beyond the 3 major networks, I assure you that's all we had in the standard-def "rabbit ears" broadcast days.
Please stop expressing disbelief, people.
I got a nice antenna at Radio Shack when my wife and I got pissed at the ninth time our cable company raised the monthly a few bucks and we realized it had gone up over 20%, vewy, vewy quietwy. ("Elmer Fudd increases", we called them). It was a period of our lives when that extra $100+ per month was significant. So for anybody where >$1000/year is real money all the time, the shock is that more people haven't discovered this, so I hope that article gets wide play.
That was about 3 years ago, and everybody who's seen the antenna asks about it and expresses surprise that it exists, that we have one, that we get along with that as enough. This is people old and young. People haven't forgotten the *technology*, but they have forgotten the *practice* of using an antenna.
It always gives me a chance to express one of my favourite rants, which is that OTA broadcasts have a *regulated quality*, so they always look good, whereas all the private media, (where the provider owns the transmission infrastructure, be it cable, phone or satellite), are allowed to throw you any resolution JUUUUST good enough to keep you from cancelling. 8Mb/s for the Superbowl, sure, but for less-popular shows, they'll run the bandwidth down until somebody's nose is a single big pixel....and back up 10% when people actually leave.
When idealogues rant about privatization and government can't do anything right, I just show them OTA transmissions. TV quality has been publicly regulated and privately regulated and you can see what it does.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Productivity. I was definitely just goofing off.
Let's consider the opposite strategy, then, if programmer is the 'single best example' of needing flow.
Should Apple sacrifice, I dunno, half the open area to work-pods you slide into like a fighter pilot? Basically a ring of three 4K monitors wrapped around you, the backs of the monitors 6" from the walls? I'm thinking four feet by six or seven. No windows, obviously. Sound insulation.
Is there no minimum to the amount of "distraction", that is, anything but what's on your monitors - that should be removed for optimum results?
If so, you've got the only argument they'll listen to - that you will take up even less of that precious office space. Open plans were never about anything but reducing that square-feet per person number.
That, and one other thing: 10x10 private offices were often places where people had some privacy in which to goof off. Watch YouTube in an open plan, and people notice. This is just not a real issue in a well-run place where the supervisor knows what the hell all her subordinates are doing and has done the work herself so that she has an idea how far along everybody should move every day. But when the super is too dumb to measure outputs, they will measure inputs.
I really worried when Goldberg took over, as I don't share almost any opinions with him and don't much like his way of looking at things.
But I think The Atlantic is good for me because it does have a plurality of opinions in it. They keep publishing Mark Bowden, who never met a military expense he didn't think should be doubled (go, F22!) and is generally alarmist about Threats To America; there's moderate conservatives like PJ O'Rourke, David Brooks, and Geo. Will, before you even get into them giving space to Charles Krauthammer. (And after about 25 years, there are *still* people mad about the "Dan Quayle Was Right" cover when he said that two-parent families are better families.)
They give space to conservative viewpoints, but rarely outright nutty ones. And it's good for me to read stuff I don't agree with.
But while home *buying* prices have exploded, the rent costs are pretty much sticking to inflation. You don't HAVE to bet your future on that particular investment.
It has the same number of problems per person, I'd say. Maybe you haven't noticed that they have a short growing season, short construction season, and other challenges that you do not.
I put in a 30-year career with my local Waterworks, which became a joint water/sewer utility about halfway through that (and we adapted well; very different pipes, but still, pipes...)
Continuity is huge in some industries. I dealt with some property issues that were decades old; frequently I was able to find somebody who was there at the time, or had been briefed 15 years ago by a guy leaving after 35 years who told them to watch out for that issue that came up in the 70s and remains a ticking time-bomb.
It's about deep familiarity with the whole complex intersection of technical problems, people problems, legal problems, accumulated history around some development issue ("We let company A develop there first, but company B cried foul, so they get to develop the other side of the road...there's a memo in the paper file about it, an Legal has the contract in their files..."), and so on. Most public services have this kind of need for institutional continuity and knowledge; the role in society of police, roads, legal surveyors, courts, and utilities is also a web of relationships.
If this string-of-jobs culture is inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, the quarter or so of society where that will never be desirable are going to be scooping up a lot of the best people. I know this is slashdot, but the whole world is not tech start-ups, guys.
I'd agree if companies coming in brought only money and no costs. Alas, companies need roads and police and courts and stuff, like any other economic actor. If they don't pay for themselves, it's just asking taxpayers to subsidize the jobs. The new employees DO benefit, but at the expense of their neighbours.
My only complaint about the WaPo link was that it didn't connect; paywall. I couldn't even see the headline, which I suppose would at least have completed your sentence. Couldn't you have put in a few words of summary instead of just the link? Or could we have another link to a newspaper that isn't walled? Thx.
Relates to rock pressures, so, yeah, six times deeper.
Bill Bryson, NOT a big lover of gadgetry or cinema, brings pretty much an "average guy" sensibility to his travel writing, gushed for two pages after seeing a demo-show of what 70mm looked like at high frame rates.
HFR was recently tried a few times, but only in conjunction with 3D, which was likely a big negative to it. The killer app may be the combination of 70mm and 48fps. (And some say, 60 fps...)
...and any time pricing information is concealed, it's NOT a free market.
You know the only people who WANT a free market, really want one? Small actors who have no leverage. The BEST deal you can get when you're small is a fair one, as produced by a free market. Every large actor (the company vs you, at salary time, say) wants a closed market, so they can use their size advantage. The Company knows EVERY salary in the company (and they always want to know what you were paid at every previous job, when you apply) while you only know your own, at negotiation time. That's a huge advantage for them, which they always wish to preserve.
College-hating is an OLD sport for the American right wing, and less-so but present in Canada and the UK. Colleges were of course hotbeds of "radicalism" for the Boomers, the first generation to have more than a few percent of their number go to college. I put "radicalism" in quotes because Civil Rights for black people are now uncontroversial, as is the proposition that the Vietnam War and the Draft were bad ideas.
It was also "radical", of course, to have the opinion that cannabis is a largely harmless intoxicant, unlikely to addict you or drive you insane. ("Reefer Madness" was already a joke-film to us, but our parents still believed that shit like gospel.)
But it goes back way before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, of course. From the Wikipedia:
"God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” is a 1951 book by William F. Buckley Jr., in the author, based on his undergraduate experiences at Yale University, criticized Yale and its faculty for forcing collectivist, Keynesian, and secularist ideology on its students. "
1951 is ten years earlier still; somebody not born yet when it was published has been drawing (socialist) Social Security for a year already.
So, please, any notion that this is because 0.1% of the 4700 colleges in the US have recently uninvited a few speakers, spare us. The malice towards higher education goes back to an era when the ones forbidden to speak at Universities were all from the left wing. (Read up on the UCLA "Speaker Ban", which was applied mainly to communiists - but also to former VPOTUS Henry Wallace, just because he was speaking in opposition to Cold War policies:
http://www.jofreeman.com/sixti... )
The Republican Party still hated colleges even when the only speakers they forbade were Communists, Anti-Militarists, and pro-socialists in general.
I went to just the one political speech in college (70s). It was free. Germaine Greer, and I went because I'd heard her name before. Other than that, I was too damn busy with classes; what little spare time I had I wanted to keep for partying, my chief concern being that "I had no life" as opposed to the poor and oppressed,or the State Of The Nation, or whatever.
So: if you want to comment on how forcing people to go watch TV or hit the web for political commentary is the same as "denying free speech" because the only thing that counts as free speech is being paid to give a speech, could you please first state the names of three college political speeches you've ever attended? Because if YOU don't go to them, then you can hardly say they are all that important a cultural moment.
It's always funny to read Americans stumbling over a parliamentary system description and thinking it overcomplicated and bizarre (and that QE2 is still, really, in charge).
There's a reason your system hasn't caught on anywhere in 230 years; a reason nearly everwhere else is some sort of parliament.
Yours makes your elected Head-of-State an elected King by our lights; Commander-in-Chief and repository of all national glory and honour. I wouldn't use the word "Warlord" but I note that the terrorist-fighting action-hero of "Air Force One" was named "President James Marshall". (Distributing Martial Law to the evil-doers, clearly).
It makes your Presidents want to look more Presidential by hitting people. Except with bombs.
By moving all the colourful honours and glory and ceremony related to the *nation* onto a ceremonial queen, we deprive our politicians of wrapping themselves in the national symbols to puff themselves up; by moving the commander-in-chief role away from the Prime Minister, we take away much of his action-figure status; most PMs can't get a military adventure going without the approval of at least several members of his cabinet, who are also (unlike your system) legitimate replacements for him that could be doing his job tomorrow if that cabinet thinks the PM has lost it.
It's too late for you guys to switch to Parliamentary, but we sure do thank you for highlighting its virtues for us with your brave experiment. Your written Constitution, alas, protected no torture victims, nor did all your three-sided checks and balances.
And then the most recent Presidential situation! My god, how we pity you. A massive systemic failure. We'll keep our system, which you are welcome to make all the fun of that you want. We don't need to make fun of the system that elected a leader who spoke of "Prime Minister Shinzo" and "Two Corinthians". Some jokes can't be improved upon.
Did you actually put the word "just" in front of "sing opera in six languages" ??
When Linux first started to produce viable desktop products, the argument was the same as for Macs: we need to run just one O/S, and many of our users need Windows applications, so that's that, we all have to run Windows.
But then IT themselves pushed every major software project towards web solutions, because they didn't want to install any .EXE files at all - they never really got over their beloved mainframe environment, you see; they wanted all the PCs to go back to being dumb terminals and leave them in control. Cheaper and much, much easier on their nerves.
But we STILL had to buy Windows, because all the Web applications ran on IE. When we asked one vendor in 2004 if their program ran OK on Firefox and so forth as well, they blinked in surprise and said it had never occurred to them to test.
Then around 2010, more and more web applications would NOT run on IE, and best on Chrome, and they reluctantly allowed that install.
But a Linux conversion will STILL never happen, even though there is now no sane excuse at all. Because all of these changes had one central source: IT always does the easiest thing.
1) Always stay with existing solutions unless there's a gun to your head
2) Always buy a new solution from the largest, most monopolistic company you can find: IBM over Amdahl, Microsoft over Apple, Google over anybody.
3) Never do anything that a herd has not done first.
You could sell a government IT office on a solution that GM and Boeing and Prudential had tried first, I suppose. But don't look to government for IT pioneering.