'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"
Value=lower salary & willing to give up having a life outside of work.
See, I never understood this. It is precisely when you are young that you want the life outside of work. It's much easier to leave work, come home, have a meal and a chat with your wife, read a book and go to bed early when you're 50 than when you're 20. At 20 you're primarily concerned with ingesting as much alcohol and as many other drugs as is compatible with having sex with as many strangers as possible.
As a manager / investor / shareholder, I'd rather have a predictable team with a 90%+ chance of turning a 30%+ annual ROI, instead of a 30% chance of a 300% ROI (and 70% chance of 0), but that's just my style - when you are either young and bold, or old and rich enough to throw away money on chances, the high risk investments are more attractive.
Then you're an irrational fool. 30% * 300% = 90% return, 90% * 30% ~ 30% return.
The point is that you can't measure probabilities with anything like that sort of accuracy in the real world. It's more likely to be "a 75% chance of a 20%+ annual ROI" or a "somewhere between 0 and 100% chance of earning anything more than that".
A ping point there being "Shareholders". I myself (42 years at the moment) would NEVER (again) work for a publicly traded company. Small, privately owned, outfits are the place for me. Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three. (Funny enough, it seems the owners profit gets better when it's priority three than when it's priority two)
In my experience, owner/directors in a private company have a far greater focus on profit than people working in a large publicly traded company, for the simple reason that it's basically going into (or coming out of) their pockets directly.
Also "Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three" sounds like some appallingly unconvincing Mission Statement dreamed up by someone in Marketing rather than a description of reality.
When I was young, I could do the pub every night thing, but I just worked 9-5 hours and this was in the UK back when pubs closed at 11. So you still generally could get home by midnight and up at 8am, and 8 hours sleep is sustainable on a longish term basis. But if you're working 12 hour+ days, I don't see how you'd fit in enough sleep.
Sometimes it was kind of fun to sit around like we had all the time in the world and basically gossip about people
That's not actual management but instead the odd parody of entitled wastrel sons of medieval feudal lords that some large US companies think is management.
I've always dreamed of having the lifestyle of an entitled wastrel son of a medieval feudal lord. The difference is, I think everyone else should too.
I took a temporary management assignment, and hated it. Sometimes it was kind of fun to sit around like we had all the time in the world and basically gossip about people
Sounds like my ideal job. You workaholics need to lighten up a little, you just make it difficult for the rest of us slobs.
The math of Obamacare for most businesses means less money will be lost if employees don't work more than 28 hours. What decision should a business make?
Finance its own atomic weapons project and start WW3 as a smokesscreen from the horror?
Meanwhile if you had gone to business school you would be relevant forever and probably better paid.
So your objective in life is to be better paid? That sounds kinda sad, actually.
If you're going to spend half your waking hours doing something you don't want to be doing in the first place, you might as well get paid as much as you can while you're doing it, if only so you will be able to retire earlier.
The weird thing with most people on slashdot is that, presumably because they're American, they seem to think working is a fun, good thing in itself. Well, for mot of us, it's not. It's shit you have to do to avoid ending up sleeping drowned in cheap wine in a cardboard box with no family or friends willing to talk to you.
On the contrary, system and network admin are the sorts of things we used to cross-train receptionists and secretaries to do.
If by "system and network admin" you mean "check the big green on light is glowing, if it isn't then re-start" then I suppose that is a fair enough comment.
Music is a terribly important thing when you're at school, I seem to remember. Over about nineteen, it's just stuff in the background while you do more interesting things.
They have things ranging from megastars like Oumou Sangare from Mali to the Polyphonic voices of Sardinia, and South Asian classical music to Tuvan throatsinging via Shona mbira.
No no no, you should be going to Oumou Sangare's Malinese pub gigs, buying Sardinian Polyphonic action figures and starting up your own Tuvan throatsinging group with your hipster buddies down the coffee shop.
Buying music in the 21st Century is no more than propping up the remains of slavery.
If the artist has signed a contract that means he gets nothing from the sale of his works, that just says to me he's a stupid twat who should have paid for a few hours of a decent contract lawyer's time.
Hi guys. Sorry to sound like a noob ( which i am in slashdot anyway ), but is there a way to contact a slashdot user via a private message or something ? I can't seem to be able to find the appropriate option/button/whatever.
The best way is to post a link to a few pics of your naked wife/girlfriend/sister with your email address neatly added at the bottom using Microsoft Paint's advanced image editing facilities. The person you're after can then email you directly. If you're really game, you could even put your phone number there.
No, he means ironic. Young fashion-victims often wear non-prescription-lensed glasses by expensive designers, which deliberately look like old-fashioned clunky thick plastic framed monstrosities from the 1950s. It is a way of saying "look, I am so cool and attractive that I can even wear these things on my face and still look beautiful while simultaneously paying homage to Jean Paul Sartre/Buddy Holly/whoever."
The best selling songwriter in the UK is Mel C from the Spice Girls. Seriously. She writes a high percentage of all the UK produced pop songs. "Chart" music has very little to do with artists, it's more of a fashion marketing company than anything else.
I don't see what your argument is.
You may think the Spice Girls were shit. I would agree with you. But they were popular. That's what "best selling" means: a lot of people bought your stuff. If Mel C
writes crappy songs for other artists that are popular, that's not her fault.
Whether it's a question of money or not, popularity has been, and always will be, orthoganal to artistic merit.
Then you have the advertisers, without which you would have never heard of the band.
Are you living in the 1970s? You think people still need "advertising" to hear about a band?
No, there really are not "10s to 100s of other people" that "turn a band into a viable business".
I suppose it might matter what you mean by "viable business". If it means "get rich enough to buy a private plane and a castle in Scotland" then yes you need 10s to 100s of people. But if you want to make a nice middle class income all you need is maybe 1 or two people besides the band (unless one of the band members can work a calculator, which is not a dead cinch, in my experience).
Well, fine, let them earn a nice middle class income. Who's stopping them?
br.
Meanwhile, it is the artists themselves who sign up to big record companies that DO want the advertising/marketing etc and DO want to get rich enough to buy a private plane a nd a castle in Scotland. No one's forcing them.
paying the artist direct where possible is the best option, but even that assumes the artist has the rights to sell directly their produce and hasn't signed over all sales rights to an organisation as described above.
If artists could manage quite happily without these organisations, then why don't they just do that?
Basically, the artist want all the advantages (advances on royalties, management, advertising and marketing campaigns, and all the rest) but then whine when they have to pay for them. Well, fuck it, they can just do it all themselves if they really want to. No one's stopping them.
But, of course, the poor artists are just musicians and don't understand all that finance stuff.
speaking as a person with dyslexia, i've wanted something like this all my life and no of the tech giants ever seemed to catch on.
all the people out there that think this would be bad for language as a whole or make people "lazy" can go suck a lemon
What's the point of the "crowd sourced" part apart from being a nice buzz-phrase?
In the short term, a word is either spelled correctly or incorrectly, it's not a democratic decision, except in the long run where usage defines "correctness".
Where there are ambiguities (e.g. in the case of incorrect homophones of the their/there variety) these require a better grammar checker than I have ever come across, rather than a spell checker.
Technically speaking, and restricting it to warfare, yes, we did. Prioir to the Blitzkrieg we had WWI wholesale slaughter style of battles, with half a million or more dead in a day. The Blitzkrieg actually greatly reduced the number of people killed in battle.
That is not taking into account what happened after the battle, the space program or Apple...
Do you know what really reduces the number of people killed in battle?
Not having wars started by fucking madmen. Germany did very little to help progrress in that direction.
Some quote about great artists comes to mind, any idea what I'm thinking of?
"Great artists steal raw materials and concepts and transform them into something unique for the betterment of all human society. Great businessmen steal ideas and transform them into mountains of cash."
Communism doesn't have to be based on either the Chinese or Soviet models. Both of those societies were largely backward and agrarian when the communist revolutions took place, as opposed to developed Western Democracies. A good deal of the political developments since WW2 in Europe could be described as the admixture of socialism into capitalism.
Democratic socialism does not have to turn into Maoism or Stalinism.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was 20, I could walk into jobs with 15 years of computing experience
You must have had some fucking gullible employers then.
'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"
Value=lower salary & willing to give up having a life outside of work.
See, I never understood this. It is precisely when you are young that you want the life outside of work. It's much easier to leave work, come home, have a meal and a chat with your wife, read a book and go to bed early when you're 50 than when you're 20. At 20 you're primarily concerned with ingesting as much alcohol and as many other drugs as is compatible with having sex with as many strangers as possible.
As a manager / investor / shareholder, I'd rather have a predictable team with a 90%+ chance of turning a 30%+ annual ROI, instead of a 30% chance of a 300% ROI (and 70% chance of 0), but that's just my style - when you are either young and bold, or old and rich enough to throw away money on chances, the high risk investments are more attractive.
Then you're an irrational fool. 30% * 300% = 90% return, 90% * 30% ~ 30% return.
The point is that you can't measure probabilities with anything like that sort of accuracy in the real world. It's more likely to be "a 75% chance of a 20%+ annual ROI" or a "somewhere between 0 and 100% chance of earning anything more than that".
A ping point there being "Shareholders". I myself (42 years at the moment) would NEVER (again) work for a publicly traded company. Small, privately owned, outfits are the place for me. Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three. (Funny enough, it seems the owners profit gets better when it's priority three than when it's priority two)
In my experience, owner/directors in a private company have a far greater focus on profit than people working in a large publicly traded company, for the simple reason that it's basically going into (or coming out of) their pockets directly.
Also "Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three" sounds like some appallingly unconvincing Mission Statement dreamed up by someone in Marketing rather than a description of reality.
When I was young, I could do the pub every night thing, but I just worked 9-5 hours and this was in the UK back when pubs closed at 11. So you still generally could get home by midnight and up at 8am, and 8 hours sleep is sustainable on a longish term basis. But if you're working 12 hour+ days, I don't see how you'd fit in enough sleep.
That's not actual management but instead the odd parody of entitled wastrel sons of medieval feudal lords that some large US companies think is management.
I've always dreamed of having the lifestyle of an entitled wastrel son of a medieval feudal lord. The difference is, I think everyone else should too.
I took a temporary management assignment, and hated it. Sometimes it was kind of fun to sit around like we had all the time in the world and basically gossip about people
Sounds like my ideal job. You workaholics need to lighten up a little, you just make it difficult for the rest of us slobs.
The math of Obamacare for most businesses means less money will be lost if employees don't work more than 28 hours. What decision should a business make?
Finance its own atomic weapons project and start WW3 as a smokesscreen from the horror?
Meanwhile if you had gone to business school you would be relevant forever and probably better paid.
So your objective in life is to be better paid? That sounds kinda sad, actually.
If you're going to spend half your waking hours doing something you don't want to be doing in the first place, you might as well get paid as much as you can while you're doing it, if only so you will be able to retire earlier.
The weird thing with most people on slashdot is that, presumably because they're American, they seem to think working is a fun, good thing in itself. Well, for mot of us, it's not. It's shit you have to do to avoid ending up sleeping drowned in cheap wine in a cardboard box with no family or friends willing to talk to you.
On the contrary, system and network admin are the sorts of things we used to cross-train receptionists and secretaries to do.
If by "system and network admin" you mean "check the big green on light is glowing, if it isn't then re-start" then I suppose that is a fair enough comment.
A lack of multitasking in 2012 is a bit of a drawback
Not for me. I do all of the following as single tasks, one at a time: watch TV programmes, watch movies, and play video games.
Does anyone seriously play a game in a window while having a movie play in another window and the web/TV news showing on a third?
Norwegian Jazz musician
Possibly the three most deadly words I have ever read.
Music is a terribly important thing when you're at school, I seem to remember. Over about nineteen, it's just stuff in the background while you do more interesting things.
They have things ranging from megastars like Oumou Sangare from Mali to the Polyphonic voices of Sardinia, and South Asian classical music to Tuvan throatsinging via Shona mbira.
No no no, you should be going to Oumou Sangare's Malinese pub gigs, buying Sardinian Polyphonic action figures and starting up your own Tuvan throatsinging group with your hipster buddies down the coffee shop.
Buying music in the 21st Century is no more than propping up the remains of slavery.
If the artist has signed a contract that means he gets nothing from the sale of his works, that just says to me he's a stupid twat who should have paid for a few hours of a decent contract lawyer's time.
Hi guys. Sorry to sound like a noob ( which i am in slashdot anyway ), but is there a way to contact a slashdot user via a private message or something ? I can't seem to be able to find the appropriate option/button/whatever.
The best way is to post a link to a few pics of your naked wife/girlfriend/sister with your email address neatly added at the bottom using Microsoft Paint's advanced image editing facilities. The person you're after can then email you directly. If you're really game, you could even put your phone number there.
iconic glasses, perhaps?
No, he means ironic. Young fashion-victims often wear non-prescription-lensed glasses by expensive designers, which deliberately look like old-fashioned clunky thick plastic framed monstrosities from the 1950s. It is a way of saying "look, I am so cool and attractive that I can even wear these things on my face and still look beautiful while simultaneously paying homage to Jean Paul Sartre/Buddy Holly/whoever."
The best selling songwriter in the UK is Mel C from the Spice Girls. Seriously. She writes a high percentage of all the UK produced pop songs. "Chart" music has very little to do with artists, it's more of a fashion marketing company than anything else.
I don't see what your argument is.
You may think the Spice Girls were shit. I would agree with you. But they were popular. That's what "best selling" means: a lot of people bought your stuff. If Mel C writes crappy songs for other artists that are popular, that's not her fault.
Whether it's a question of money or not, popularity has been, and always will be, orthoganal to artistic merit.
Are you living in the 1970s? You think people still need "advertising" to hear about a band?
No, there really are not "10s to 100s of other people" that "turn a band into a viable business".
I suppose it might matter what you mean by "viable business". If it means "get rich enough to buy a private plane and a castle in Scotland" then yes you need 10s to 100s of people. But if you want to make a nice middle class income all you need is maybe 1 or two people besides the band (unless one of the band members can work a calculator, which is not a dead cinch, in my experience).
Well, fine, let them earn a nice middle class income. Who's stopping them?
br. Meanwhile, it is the artists themselves who sign up to big record companies that DO want the advertising/marketing etc and DO want to get rich enough to buy a private plane a nd a castle in Scotland. No one's forcing them.
paying the artist direct where possible is the best option, but even that assumes the artist has the rights to sell directly their produce and hasn't signed over all sales rights to an organisation as described above.
If artists could manage quite happily without these organisations, then why don't they just do that?
Basically, the artist want all the advantages (advances on royalties, management, advertising and marketing campaigns, and all the rest) but then whine when they have to pay for them. Well, fuck it, they can just do it all themselves if they really want to. No one's stopping them.
But, of course, the poor artists are just musicians and don't understand all that finance stuff.
crowd sourced auto spelling correction
speaking as a person with dyslexia, i've wanted something like this all my life and no of the tech giants ever seemed to catch on.
all the people out there that think this would be bad for language as a whole or make people "lazy" can go suck a lemon
What's the point of the "crowd sourced" part apart from being a nice buzz-phrase?
In the short term, a word is either spelled correctly or incorrectly, it's not a democratic decision, except in the long run where usage defines "correctness".
Where there are ambiguities (e.g. in the case of incorrect homophones of the their/there variety) these require a better grammar checker than I have ever come across, rather than a spell checker.
Technically speaking, and restricting it to warfare, yes, we did. Prioir to the Blitzkrieg we had WWI wholesale slaughter style of battles, with half a million or more dead in a day. The Blitzkrieg actually greatly reduced the number of people killed in battle.
That is not taking into account what happened after the battle, the space program or Apple...
Do you know what really reduces the number of people killed in battle?
Not having wars started by fucking madmen. Germany did very little to help progrress in that direction.
Mod parent up for liking Gravity's Rainbow.
Some quote about great artists comes to mind, any idea what I'm thinking of?
"Great artists steal raw materials and concepts and transform them into something unique for the betterment of all human society. Great businessmen steal ideas and transform them into mountains of cash."
Communism doesn't have to be based on either the Chinese or Soviet models. Both of those societies were largely backward and agrarian when the communist revolutions took place, as opposed to developed Western Democracies. A good deal of the political developments since WW2 in Europe could be described as the admixture of socialism into capitalism.
Democratic socialism does not have to turn into Maoism or Stalinism.