I feel like we might be talking about the same thing. It was actually a miserable feeling as I was sleeping that day - like I was struggling to deconstruct the problem in my dream while at the same time keeping all the parts of it in my dream memory. And every "option" I came up with during sleep was painful because if wrong, I would have to lose some dream memory and reconstruct my work up till that point.
I was once designing an algorithm to do something at a lower running time, combining a mixture of data structures and graph theory. I had stayed up almost 22 hours in front of a computer to get it done because I thought I was "almost there".
Then I fell asleep, jerked awake 4 hours later because I had actually solved it in my dream. When I woke up I realized that the solution in my dream was not complete and that there was a flaw with it. With another hour of modification I finished it up.
It might be that you can't read in a train, but there are many who could. For them it wouldn't be time wasted. I don't think it's a good idea to stop a project just because a minority cannot experience the full benefits of it.
The difference between subsidizing mass transit by rail and mass transit by highways is that everyone uses the highways, but I don't believe that everyone would use the rail. I admit it's my guess at future behavior, but I'm basing it on experience from the past and present. In my experience most (but not all) of the people that ride public subsidized mass transit do so because they have no other reasonable option.
This is really interesting, because as someone from the other side of the argument, I see the exact opposite. Everyone uses highways because they have to. There is usually no reasonable alternative. The observation that most people who use public transit use it only because they have to is apt, because that shows how poorly done public transit is and how few options there are. All the more reason to fix it up. It's already been demonstrated in other countries that people will use public transit, so that's not the problem. The problem is having a train/subway/bus system work efficiently enough so that it's no longer the afterthought form of transportation.
My point is, all other things equal, you should not have to be paid extra for geographical concerns. I am well aware of the relocation bonus, but that's overhead that could've been added to the base salary or just as a signing bonus to get someone of even higher quality. To see an extreme example, consider if half the population had an attribute that requires 100% overhead in compensation that neither they nor their employers see. It's not hard to see that that would factor into the hiring decision when otherwise they'd be employees of the same value as people who did not require the overhead.
As to the point whether my assumption is valid, it's definitely a question of degree. The actual data point can be on the scale of 0-100% of potential employer-employee matches missed for geographical reasons. I personally do not have a hard time seeing many small firms not even considering hiring people out of commutable distance.
After reading your posts, I think we are talking about different things. You say you fail to see how it could work. I say if it worked, here are the benefits: x, y, etc. Personally I disdain associating a methods of transportation with prestige or humility. Especially when the more "prestigious" option carries with it a negative environmental impact, this is nothing short of selfishness.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but some music simply cannot be produced without certain equipment. It's almost like saying, "I can create art with a paper and pencil; why do you spend all that money on a stone block and a chisel? You must be doing something wrong."
But at that point you have a 20 + 5~15 min. upper limit on your normal commute time. And if I get used to the schedule I can arrive at the train station 3 minutes before train comes, for a total commute of 23.
Yes that's my point though. On an international level it's not so great, yet it's one of the better ones in the country. What does upgrading to automated switching require? A big wad of cash. This big wad of cash has to come from the government. So the answer is YES please invest more in public transportation.
There is a very big, and unsubstantiated assumption you are basing your theory on. That businesses are having a hard time attracting talent based on geography.
No that is not an assumption of truth. It is merely an assumption for the theoretical framework on which to have a theoretical argument. Neither of us are presenting any solid, non-anecdotal evidence.
In any case, I'm not saying they are having a hard time attracting talent. I'm saying they could be attracting more or better talent with access to a bigger population. One of the principles that make free markets work well is competition of undifferentiated products. In this case both employees and employers would have more competition for what they're offering (labor and pay) as well as less differentiation in what they're looking for - geographical location would matter less.
The people most likely to be using mass transit are not the ones being recruited for highly skilled positions, they are the people that work in service positions that cater to the highly skilled laborers.
First, I completely disagree. 1) I think most people would consider me as a skilled worker yet I use the subway every day. Other skilled works do the same. Not everyone prefers using a car or a cab instead. 2) What does that have to do with anything? Just because the rich people don't use it doesn't mean it's worthless. Even if what you say is true, service positions are still necessary positions.
Second, you are actually talking about mass transit vs. cars, and the people who can vs who cannot afford to use a car to commute, right? The rail system would make places reachable which would previously not be reachable in a reasonable time frame even with a car.
Last, you make a case for mass transit being bad. To me, that is the same as making a case to improve it for people who do choose to or have to use it.
It is not to waste MORE time commuting, but to cut down the two hours that would've been spent driving to the thirty minutes sitting on a rail. That increases the radius at which businesses can attract employees. Theoretically, this reduces the need to opening up more branches in different cities for the purpose of attracting talent.
From the employees' standpoint, increased mobility is still a plus, assuming that working does not occupy 100% of your time. I, for one, would like to see beaches and amusement parks even if I work in the middle of nowhere.
Yea public transportation is a joke, but this is a step to fix it. No progress would be made if people dismiss it at every level.
As someone who strongly prefers not to drive and does not have a car, YES. I live in NYC, which while having not such a great subway system, has a system I appreciate being able to use every day.
I just hope this doesn't displace automobiles completely. Cars/highways definitely allow us much more freedom that I don't want to see creep away.
"I supported your bill but because of the harassment will not again". Why is this senator publicly letting personal affairs affect legislation? I hope he is never re-elected.
HTML you can learn in about 30 minutes. The rest of it takes significantly more investment of time. To me, "knowing HTML" is about as worthy of a title as "knowing how to use a calculator" is.
If you're looking for someone who can create static pages for you, the title should be "Web Designer". And that will net you people with a whole range of skill sets. Ideally be specific about what you want to be made or be specific about all the skills you require.
I think you two are addressing two distinct, though both equally frustrating, aspects of the same situation. There's:
Monopolistic pricing - eye gouging the customers at a price way above costs. This should not be acceptable and we should absolutely find ways to prevent this from happening for much longer.
Price discrimination - much more reasonable. This ensures people pay for what they are using. As long as they're not charging way above cost, there's no problem with tiered pricing. Why should you, as a light user, pay the same as and therefore subsidize me, a heavy user?
To solve (1), you need more competition and/or more regulation. We all see the bandwidths that more infrastructurally advanced nations enjoy and know that it should be possible for us to have that too.
To solve (2), solve (1). (2) is really just a problem of perception - we're outraged that these monopolies are free to price as they want and have no power to stop it. With more competition (even a couple of competitors in each area), we can vote against these pricing strategies with our money if necessary. But as it is, (2) is not actually, inherently evil or bad for society.
Certainly not immortalized as heroic actions, but they should be immortalized through documentary nonetheless. This is an opportunity to allow us to see the effects of war that we've never had before. If done right, this could serve as a valuable history lesson.
I'm still very confused. You're saying these guys have abstracted away the concept of a storage device.
You HAVE to open it first. So you're saying the OS now knows you magically want to work with an image of a cat instead of that other image of a dog you have.
You HAVE to write to it. OS also knows you wanted to flip the cat to the right and give it a cool pirate's hat.
You HAVE to close it after usage. Hmm... So I no longer have to write destructors for my image-manip classes.
If there's no difference in the amount of coding required and if there's no difference to the underlying operations performed (abstraction still means the OS has to perform fopen/fprintf/fclose eventually), what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like we might be talking about the same thing. It was actually a miserable feeling as I was sleeping that day - like I was struggling to deconstruct the problem in my dream while at the same time keeping all the parts of it in my dream memory. And every "option" I came up with during sleep was painful because if wrong, I would have to lose some dream memory and reconstruct my work up till that point.
Yea in old country, bittorrent blocks pirate bay!
I was once designing an algorithm to do something at a lower running time, combining a mixture of data structures and graph theory. I had stayed up almost 22 hours in front of a computer to get it done because I thought I was "almost there".
Then I fell asleep, jerked awake 4 hours later because I had actually solved it in my dream. When I woke up I realized that the solution in my dream was not complete and that there was a flaw with it. With another hour of modification I finished it up.
Why does the article go on to talk about designing a double-blind study for judging the "maturity" of teenagers?
It might be that you can't read in a train, but there are many who could. For them it wouldn't be time wasted. I don't think it's a good idea to stop a project just because a minority cannot experience the full benefits of it.
The difference between subsidizing mass transit by rail and mass transit by highways is that everyone uses the highways, but I don't believe that everyone would use the rail. I admit it's my guess at future behavior, but I'm basing it on experience from the past and present. In my experience most (but not all) of the people that ride public subsidized mass transit do so because they have no other reasonable option.
This is really interesting, because as someone from the other side of the argument, I see the exact opposite. Everyone uses highways because they have to. There is usually no reasonable alternative. The observation that most people who use public transit use it only because they have to is apt, because that shows how poorly done public transit is and how few options there are. All the more reason to fix it up. It's already been demonstrated in other countries that people will use public transit, so that's not the problem. The problem is having a train/subway/bus system work efficiently enough so that it's no longer the afterthought form of transportation.
My point is, all other things equal, you should not have to be paid extra for geographical concerns. I am well aware of the relocation bonus, but that's overhead that could've been added to the base salary or just as a signing bonus to get someone of even higher quality. To see an extreme example, consider if half the population had an attribute that requires 100% overhead in compensation that neither they nor their employers see. It's not hard to see that that would factor into the hiring decision when otherwise they'd be employees of the same value as people who did not require the overhead.
As to the point whether my assumption is valid, it's definitely a question of degree. The actual data point can be on the scale of 0-100% of potential employer-employee matches missed for geographical reasons. I personally do not have a hard time seeing many small firms not even considering hiring people out of commutable distance.
After reading your posts, I think we are talking about different things. You say you fail to see how it could work. I say if it worked, here are the benefits: x, y, etc. Personally I disdain associating a methods of transportation with prestige or humility. Especially when the more "prestigious" option carries with it a negative environmental impact, this is nothing short of selfishness.
I don't know... Seems to me like another reason not to cut 18 cables and not know how to hide your identity.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but some music simply cannot be produced without certain equipment. It's almost like saying, "I can create art with a paper and pencil; why do you spend all that money on a stone block and a chisel? You must be doing something wrong."
But at that point you have a 20 + 5~15 min. upper limit on your normal commute time. And if I get used to the schedule I can arrive at the train station 3 minutes before train comes, for a total commute of 23.
Yes that's my point though. On an international level it's not so great, yet it's one of the better ones in the country. What does upgrading to automated switching require? A big wad of cash. This big wad of cash has to come from the government. So the answer is YES please invest more in public transportation.
There is a very big, and unsubstantiated assumption you are basing your theory on. That businesses are having a hard time attracting talent based on geography.
No that is not an assumption of truth. It is merely an assumption for the theoretical framework on which to have a theoretical argument. Neither of us are presenting any solid, non-anecdotal evidence.
In any case, I'm not saying they are having a hard time attracting talent. I'm saying they could be attracting more or better talent with access to a bigger population. One of the principles that make free markets work well is competition of undifferentiated products. In this case both employees and employers would have more competition for what they're offering (labor and pay) as well as less differentiation in what they're looking for - geographical location would matter less.
The people most likely to be using mass transit are not the ones being recruited for highly skilled positions, they are the people that work in service positions that cater to the highly skilled laborers.
First, I completely disagree. 1) I think most people would consider me as a skilled worker yet I use the subway every day. Other skilled works do the same. Not everyone prefers using a car or a cab instead. 2) What does that have to do with anything? Just because the rich people don't use it doesn't mean it's worthless. Even if what you say is true, service positions are still necessary positions.
Second, you are actually talking about mass transit vs. cars, and the people who can vs who cannot afford to use a car to commute, right? The rail system would make places reachable which would previously not be reachable in a reasonable time frame even with a car.
Last, you make a case for mass transit being bad. To me, that is the same as making a case to improve it for people who do choose to or have to use it.
It is not to waste MORE time commuting, but to cut down the two hours that would've been spent driving to the thirty minutes sitting on a rail. That increases the radius at which businesses can attract employees. Theoretically, this reduces the need to opening up more branches in different cities for the purpose of attracting talent.
From the employees' standpoint, increased mobility is still a plus, assuming that working does not occupy 100% of your time. I, for one, would like to see beaches and amusement parks even if I work in the middle of nowhere.
Yea public transportation is a joke, but this is a step to fix it. No progress would be made if people dismiss it at every level.
Would you say "no" to the question? Just because it's got no novelty factor doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
As someone who strongly prefers not to drive and does not have a car, YES. I live in NYC, which while having not such a great subway system, has a system I appreciate being able to use every day.
I just hope this doesn't displace automobiles completely. Cars/highways definitely allow us much more freedom that I don't want to see creep away.
I think the point is that this will allow people to work MORE than an hour's drive away from home.
"I supported your bill but because of the harassment will not again". Why is this senator publicly letting personal affairs affect legislation? I hope he is never re-elected.
HTML you can learn in about 30 minutes. The rest of it takes significantly more investment of time. To me, "knowing HTML" is about as worthy of a title as "knowing how to use a calculator" is.
If you're looking for someone who can create static pages for you, the title should be "Web Designer". And that will net you people with a whole range of skill sets. Ideally be specific about what you want to be made or be specific about all the skills you require.
I think you two are addressing two distinct, though both equally frustrating, aspects of the same situation. There's:
To solve (1), you need more competition and/or more regulation. We all see the bandwidths that more infrastructurally advanced nations enjoy and know that it should be possible for us to have that too.
To solve (2), solve (1). (2) is really just a problem of perception - we're outraged that these monopolies are free to price as they want and have no power to stop it. With more competition (even a couple of competitors in each area), we can vote against these pricing strategies with our money if necessary. But as it is, (2) is not actually, inherently evil or bad for society.
I think you missed the memo that even if you can take organ transplants more easily, you still can't find organs more easily.
Bad news: your would-be donor started chain smoking, thinking he'd easily get a lung replacement, and developed cancer even faster than you did.
Certainly not immortalized as heroic actions, but they should be immortalized through documentary nonetheless. This is an opportunity to allow us to see the effects of war that we've never had before. If done right, this could serve as a valuable history lesson.
Drats... tricked again. Just yesterday I thought employment was returning.
Oh the CEO...
I thought there were plans to internally use MySQL for OS functionality. I don't remember what features exactly though.
I'm still very confused. You're saying these guys have abstracted away the concept of a storage device.
You HAVE to open it first. So you're saying the OS now knows you magically want to work with an image of a cat instead of that other image of a dog you have.
You HAVE to write to it. OS also knows you wanted to flip the cat to the right and give it a cool pirate's hat.
You HAVE to close it after usage. Hmm... So I no longer have to write destructors for my image-manip classes. If there's no difference in the amount of coding required and if there's no difference to the underlying operations performed (abstraction still means the OS has to perform fopen/fprintf/fclose eventually), what's the point?