And only the military Hummers last 300K miles the commercial version doesn't even come close
I've got a good friend who's a Hummer dealer. Most people who own H1's aren't going to drive them like that, regardless. But the H2's are numerous and get a lot of use to study, and he regularly sees trades now, with vehicles in great shape and sporting way over 150,000 miles on them. The H3's, which are much smaller, lighter, and easier to maintain, will probably behave like most other GM light trucks, and last a conscientuous owner well into the 200,000+ neighborhood before they're in the mood for a different vehicle (which usually happens long before the vehicle actually wears out). And if you're going to talk about non-conscientuous owners, then you have to apply that same logic to Prius owners that hop curbs, do tons of stop-and-go driving, and other things that will lower the life cycle averages there. What if both numbers are half-way-or-so wrong? What if you lower the Prius numbers to $2.00 and raise the Hummer number to $2.00? Doesn't that still make for a fascinatingly different take on this than the religiously-held perspective that most people seem to have?
And Linux, not being a commercial corporation, is the computer system built by the people for the people. When you hear someone talk about how much they like Linux, they are doing it from genuine beliefs, as opposed to asswipe asstroturfers such as your fine self. Choke!
I'm sure that Novell, and Red Hat, and IBM, and Dell and other corporations that make money off of enabling large operations (rather than hobbyists and academics) to use Linux would probably be surprised to hear that they are not "commercial corporations." Also, you may want to brush up on "astroturfing" and understand that just because someone points out that someone else is being a fanboy with a decidely unworldly, narrow view of what it means to understand the O/S user landscape that doesn't make them paid shills for a company someplace. You're just as confused on that topic as the OP was on his, I guess.
Damn, this entire campaign sounds like one fucking sad attempt at trolling.
Really? Because for years, I've been seeing posts and articles on slashdot that talk in terms of winning people over from MS to Linux. Unless that continually played tune is also trolling, then I don't think that MS trying to understand the different stripes of people that are (or might consider) using Linux is anything other than basic market research. Not all of the Ubuntu crowd may consider themselves to be "winning" someone away from Mandriva, but I'm sure that language gets used sometimes. Just like people in the Firefox camp often talk about winning a larger share of browser users away from MS.
What part of "on the ladder of social control" did you miss?
So, your "ladder of social control" doesn't actually HAVE any control? Which is it? Are all people subject to that control (where YOU, not the article say "nobody" wants creative people popping up an odd times), suppressed or not? Well? If you say they are, then it's as simple as you being very wrong and you don't get out enough. If that's not what you're saying, then what the hell do you mean by "nobody" and what IS your ladder of social control if in fact it doesn't have that degree of control? You can't have it both ways, and in trying to, your analysis doesn't resonate with reality - no matter how well it resonates with the article. Don't you get it? The people who disagreed with your take on the article can't debate the article, but they can debate you. The article isn't in a position to clarify or alter its statements about the nature of the "plight of the working world," but you ARE, and BEFORE I wrote one word in this thread, you were already complaining about being "slammed" because someone disagreed with you. I don't find your analysis consistent with the many tech/IT operations with which I interact, but I do frequently bump into people who proclaim an understanding of large social and corporate trends... many of whom form these opinions from a very limited exposure to the wider world, and whom have an idealogical bent towards socialism, and see everything through that lens. And when they haven't personally seen it, they imagine it through that lens. You are describing the condition of the working world as though you have a view of it, or its trends, in their entirety. And your take on it, as identified by others, seems to include villainous managers, financers, investors, among whose ranks "nobody" (your words) wants to see something that I see managers, financers, investors, and CEOs embracing and rewarding every day.
The point of TFA and my initial analysis was that creativity-friendly managers are increasingly uncommon. My original analysis identified the larger reasons why this is becoming the case.
You do know, right, that your original "analysis" is still there where people can read it? Your analysis includes phrases like "the plight of the working world." That, right there, is so far removed from reasoned, credible, worldly analysis that it serves nicely to calibrate all of the rest of your comments. There is no single identifiable state or condition in which working people operate or exist. It is a sweeping generalization. From the dictionary:
That is a completely correct use of that term in this context, and your only reaction is to scream "flamebait!" Are you not sensing the irony, there? Even a little bit? Don't use wholly inclusive phrases and images, backpedal later to suggest that you really means "some" or "not all," and then say someone is flaming you when they point out your own words to you.
See? Nothing but personalization, flamebait, and plain wrong.
In my first comment in this thread, the post to which I responded (yours) includes you saying, "You so wanted to make this a personal attack ("Grow up") that you missed it again, and ended up talking about yourself."
Now, never mind the childlike "talking about yourself" jab (which is a little embarassing, isn't it, since obviously the person to whom you responded was very deliberately talking about you)... the thing that got you all personal and whiny, and complaining about being personally "targeted" was that someone used the phrase "grow up" in response to your previous remarks. And indeed, those remarks are churlish, juvenile, uninformed, and adolescently paranoic. That is not a "personal attack," that's a specific response to the content you posted. It's a qualification of your comments. ANY response to highly opinionated, distorted set of remarks, like yours, is going to have to be based on the information you provide, or the perceptions you appear to present. There is no other context on which to evaluate your position except your sweeping generalizations.
But it seems you have thought about it, and despite thinking about it, have still formed the original picture of the world that you described. Like others, I obviously saw your comment as very much NOT insightful, but rather as a rationalization for feeling sorry for yourself about what you see as the lack of opportunity in the IT field. Doesn't matter WHAT you mean, it only matters that you chose words that say that. And you did. The "plight of the working world" is code for "a bad situation for all workers that can be fixed" by addressing the other things that you continue on to bring up. For example, you say: "Nobody along the ladder of social control inside of a corporation wants a creative or imaginative star who will probably surface at the least convenient moment and disrupt their carefully planned business projections."
Which is utter crap. "Nobody?" Not a single person, nowhere, in any company? Nobody? Let's assume that's really how you see it. That your experience in the world is so limited, and your imagination so limited, that you can't see past how cranky are about, probably, one or two annoying bosses you've had in the past. That, right there, is what caused the prior poster to say, "grow up," and well he should have. A grown up shrugs that stuff off and just moves on. You say that one cannot move onto a setting where creativity is rewarded because you assert that nobody wants it. That the "plight of the working world" is to not have that sort of opportunity. Don't you HEAR yourself? Can't you imagine reading your own post from someone else's point of view, and imagine that person saying to herself, "Get over it already, and just work somewhere else!" The phrase "grow up" is no more of a personal attack against you than your own very broad attack against every person who manages a staff (or, oppresses them, it seems, from your point of view). Read your own words, note that someone said "grow up," and then read your response to THAT... where you immediately start calling the other person "wrong" and start whining about being personally "slammed." Anyone (including me, because that's when I noticed the thread) would correctly assume that you were at that point anxious to make this personal, rather than admit that not every employee everywhere is in a "plight," even though that would kill some of the drama in your original post. Now, though, I see that there's more to it, since you can't conceive of an otherwise disinterested third party (me) wondering why you can't hear your own tone, and see how your melodramatic painting of corporate IT staffing is just plain false, and ignores the wider reality. That is the only substance that matters, here - your pronouncements of gloom and oppression vs. reality, and it's that to which people responded.
You haven't refuted antyhing. You've made personal attack after personal attack after personal attack. That's all you know how to do.
My very first response to you was a refutation, and you took it like an invertebrate. The resulting thread was me pointing out how anxious you are to talk about ANYTHING but the topic at hand, which I've brought up routinely in different contexts, and which you tap-dance around in order to avoid admitting that your original sentiment was absurd. See the several specific points made above, to which you simply reply "you're wrong," rather than actually addressing.
You, DD, and NDP, three relatively uncommon posters, all came out of the woodwork on Saturday and, with the exception of one token post in another discussion made by you, specifically targetted me.
You do realize how actually, demonstrably paranoid that line of thinking is, right? For your own sake, do you realize that? I have never heard of those users, have never communicated with them, don't read their comments, and I certainly didn't "come out of the blue." I've posted thousands of times. And I frequently post specifically to counter the claims of people whose twisted world view imagines dark conspiracies of business owners and evil financiers controlling what you have for lunch and whether you're allowed to do a better spreadsheet than the guy in the next cubicle. You are fabricating the "targeting" that you describe, just like you've fabricated the perceptions that informed your first comment. Since you're stating an imagined conspiracy between three slashdot users with an air of fact, you've pretty well waived any claim on reality in the rest of your comments, which are drenched in the same tone and have an equally tenuous grip on reality. I'm all the more glad to have engaged you in conversation, because now people reading your comments will see that the same guy painting some slave-like picture of the modern IT workplace is the guy who also thinks that complete strangers are getting together behind his back to "target" him. That's factually incorrect, and you have to deal with that, and then ask yourself if you've formed other opinions based on equally invalid perceptions. Really.
So your point, now, is that it is not the case that management, as a class, acts in a particular way? Because that is exactly contrary to your previous ramblings. Regardless of which hair you want to split (now, as opposed to your previous sweeping pronouncement about the condition of the IT landscape), you are now allowing for the fact that not every employee or manager or the relationships or their circumstances are the same. Shame it only took you a dozen or so times copying/pasting the phrase "you're wrong" before you corrected yourself.
So, now that you admit that there isn't a limit to the sort of creative potential that a talented IT person can put to work (since, as you now admit, there are places where that's an option), what is the entire point of your original rant, which you now contradict? IT people who want to do something more creative, and have the talent to do so, can just go someplace where that's the corporate culture. They, and their creativity-friendly new managers, will get along great. And this, of course, is exactly the scenario that you said isn't reality, which is why I and other people countered what you said. Your hissy fit about having what you said countered is the thing that drew appropriate comments about how you're conducting your conversation.
By the way, inserting platitudes such as "as long as they are properly compensated for their work" is just another reminder of how eagerly you hang onto a sense of victimization to try to score rhetorical points. There is only one person controlling what an IT person makes in an economy that can't hire enough good ones: the IT person him/herself. If you don't have the creativity and talent to find a job that rewards and it wants it, then you have too choices: realize that you don't have it, or whine that the world owes you the same living as people that do have it. You've made a pretty consistent case for what camp you're in.
Instead resources is spend on killing each other and wut not.
True. Now that there is talk of a cooperative effort in space, the rape and death squads in the Sudan will see that they someplace else to spend their money!
With all due respect, sometimes you have to spend money on defense against people who actually do want to kill you - and reducing that threat helps to create an atmosphere more conducive to international cooperation on great works like space exploration. A stable global economy and free trade is the single greatest asset to large multinational science projects, and since there are regimes/movements that consider such efforts to be antithetical to their creed, and which consider democracy to be actually evil (and they act upon that premise).
Nothing would make me happier than to see Japan, for example, able to turn more/all of its engineering brilliance towards this sort of thing. But right across the water from them is a country like North Korea, testing missles pointed right at them, and requiring Japan to put considerable energy into defense against their crazy neighbor. No amount of agreement between the countries mentioned, for example, will make it less important to be prepared for trouble from a place like that.
Some are, to some extent, but feel free to ignore that to support your rant.
But YOU said: "The ultimate authority of the almighty dollar, the ability to profile the workgroup and monetize it quarter by quarter, the ability to make it absorb losses and give up profit on demand, the ability to control promotions and maintain authority over the social order has crept slowly into the IT world."
You do not qualify those statements, you are speaking of "the IT world" as a whole. You can't have it both ways and then complain when someone calls you on it.
Some do so illegally but feel free to ignore that to support your rant.
But YOU said: "In the minds of the venture capitalists and the stock brokers who, ultimately, allow the business venture to exist..." and "Profit is not evil. How (most) people (most commonly) use profit is evil."
You are fond of making sweeping statements about "the venture capitalists" (referred to as a whole), or what "most" people do, but when someone reflects your own thoughts back at you - pointing out your sweeping generalizations and refuting them - you cannot personally handle it by any means other than saying "you're wrong" and calling it a personal attack (lest you have to confront the notion that you were talking out of your ass on the subject at hand). Essentially, you have a smug superiority complex, but it's fragile, brittle, and doesn't hold up well in the face of a discussion of any substance. You're welcome to make comments about what managers (as a class) do, or what "the venture capitalists" as a homogenous group do - but don't have a fit when someone immediately points out that you sound, to say the least, a little bit paranoid in your perspective, and that your initial tone (railing agains the shackles within which poor put-upon IT staffers work) set the tone and content for all responses that followed. Don't complain about something, and then act hurt when multiple people point out that your complaints are groundless.
Not everybody has the resources to start their own company - but many people are capable of harnessing the strengths of their existing workplace.
And those people are the ones that are creative enough and persuasive enough to have no problem at all getting the upper part of the food chain seeing that creativity and entrepeneurial spark as an asset. The people who have that creativity and level of creative skill are not the ones who complain about The Man enslaving them in their cubicles. Those people tend to leap right out of that setting and into roles other than DBA, firewall admin, or CAT5-puller.
I think you're confusing "don't need" with "don't have." But you're close.
when everything you said (and continue to say) was (and is) wrong
But you're still obviously aware that your original whiny rant was just silly, because you won't say anything other than "you're wrong." Let's see:
1) Companies are on employee-controlling power trips, right? No. Companies are in control of their companies. Employees work there, and exchange their time for their pay and other benefits. Don't like it? Leave. There is no "control" over you, ever, at all. There is only you exchanging your time for a paycheck, or choosing to go do something else. Your response to any mentioning of this reality has been, and probably will still be "you're wrong," and of course you won't bother to explain why you say that, because... you know it's actually correct.
2) People running companies, or the investors that fund them, make too much money, right? No. Despite your sophomoric inuendo (like, asking how much is "enough" or "too much" money, without proposing how you would define those things - because doing so would suggest that you want to regulate earnings) and assertions that everyone else is "wrong," you really don't have anything constructive to say. You just don't like it when someone else makes a lot of money off of the company they found, run, or invest in. Don't like it? Leave. Start your own business, operating on the premise that neither you nor your investors will make any more money than a typical IT staffer. Good luck with that.
3) Relative to the original topic, you maintain that indeed, IT staffers aren't allowed to be creative, because that's some sort of threat to the management status quo. Wrong. And, unlike you, I'll actually say why: because if the person giving them money every week wants to give them money for that activity, that's what they'll talk about, and expect. And if you've got something so creative to offer, and are so lacking in the persuasive skills (um, for example, you handle every debate by just stamping your feet and saying "you're wrong" to people who point out your wrongness, naive perspective, or who don't think that socialism is the ideal entrepeneurial framework) that you can't get people to buy into your creative wonderfullness, then go somewhere where the threshold for "creative" is lower, or where the people with the money are more receptive to your position. In other words, as usual, leave. Or start your own company.
But I'm sure you already have started your own company, and all of the "poor-me, the PHB keeps me chained in my cubicle and tells me what verbs I'm allowed to use while I make minimum wage and he's a millionaire" stuff - that was just educational rhetoric or trolling.
Because, any attempt on your part at substance would probably result in more empty rhetoric about The Man and Evil Profits keeping you from being creative with their money, and how you should be in charge of how much profits a company or an investor should be allowed to make, etc, rather than, say... something of actual substance. That's OK, there was no substance to it in the first place, and you're just reminding us all how vapid and whiny your first comments were anyway.
Guess what? You keep saying that, but you do nothing to actually say way, or in what way. I'm specifically addressing your ramblings, all you're doing is trotting out the fine rhetorical skills of a two-year-old by saying "you're wrong."
How about saying, "you're wrong because despite what I said about being pigeon-holed, controlled serfs working for people that don't have ideas as good as mine, that's not really what I meant - here's what I really meant..."
But that's OK. Stamping your feet the way you do pretty much tells your audience all they need to know about your view of the world and your sense of entitlement.
Do you seriously view "less money" as an all or nothing thing?
Nah, the GP has it right. You're whining.
You seem to think that the people getting the paychecks should be telling the people who write the paychecks what their priorities should be. Here's a clue: if you don't like it, just talk some people into lending you the money to start your own business. Then, you can hire people who will tell you how to run your business, just like you think it should be done. And since (as you seem to think), the people you hire will know better than you what your priorities should be and how the company should be run, all will be perfect. Then, since you won't be needed, and you obviously don't think that you, as the founder of the company, or the people that loaned you the money to start it, should be making any money, you can just leave, or demote yourself back down into the regular ranks of your new Workers Paradise.
That'll work out just great - can't wait to see your new company and its products/services - because there's no company with better products than a company that has the IT people setting the overall strategy and managing the operations and finances.
A template that allows people to slap a meta redirect into the header is strength that they hope Google will still respect? If you want to play those games, host your own site. The point of these blog-o-spaces is to let people do the easy stuff, not monkey with redirection. On the other hand, I can see how it might take, oh... at least 10 minutes to write a filter that would block the meta redirects on their side of things. That is a lot to ask, even in the face of being Google-blacked.
Haven't these people ever played an RTS? It's easy to control a squadron of units -you just offload the tactical decisions to the units themselves and deliver only high level, strategic commands.
The problem is that, unlike an RTS game, actual drones (the type someone in the field might need to directly operate or rely upon, say for surveilance in a tactical setting) in actual combat-ish or other sensitive roles are working with a range of variables that wildly outnumbers the things that can happen in a game universe. If the drones or similar semi-autonomous units in a game universe were coded to accurately exhibit the types of behaviors, and encounter the range of unexpected hostility/weather/lighting etc that actually happens in real life, those games would cease to be as playable.
They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels
Do you ever actually listen to "public" radio? A few hours of listening during drive time here in the DC area will have you hearing commercials from large associations, corporations, and other underwriting entities (as well as vanity donors) that want the exposure. If public radio's use of licensed material is a part of what brings the audience that those advertisers want to reach, then paying what the producers of that material ask is just a cost of attracting those big-ticket ads and donations.
Anyone who thinks that just because such stations are non-profits that they don't want all the audience and ad revenue they can get is completely misunderstanding the nature of the beast. They have payrolls to meet, and they have to compete to hire the people they want to hire. Just like any other business, they have facilities to pay for, web sites to run, etc... and they want cash. They attract a lot of their cash through advertising, and they price the advertising according to the audience they can deliver to the advertisers. If that means they broadcast, or stream from their web sites, stuff that costs them money in order to then sell that audience to advertisers, then so be it. Gotta spend it to make it.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
On the other hand, unless you want this to be a tool only for and by the government, you've got to get businesses comfortable with it. Banks. Retailers. Airlines. Anonymity (of the you-can't-track-my-pr0n-use, or the posting-as-a-troll, or the PRC-can't-ID-the-rebel variety) is antithetical to trustworthy transactions, and without money changing hands, the plumbing is WAY less useful to the huge swaths of the economy that would fund (indirectly) the growth and adoption of such a thing.
"Where prudent" and "as necessary" etc., are completely subjective. People who like to rip off movies have one set of priorities, and people who administer your payroll or need to transmit your cancer meds prescription are looking at it from a very different perspective.
You honestly think the only good journalists are the ones that get paid?
No, I think that someone who actually has the communications, research, and social skills to be an actually good journalist, and wants to devote a full week of their waking hours to that activity, pretty much has to make it a paying career so that they can eat and whatnot. There are plenty of dumb, idealogically motivated, lazy, and other-bad-things people paid to write/produce "news"-ish material. You'll notice I didn't describe them all as being better than all non-career writers/reporters. I'm talking about what drives a wide swath of the audience of a particular outlet (say, Wired) to collaborate on a story. It's vanity, or social needs, or a mission/position of some sort... not the burning desire to be an objective, thoughtful reporter. Because if they had that desire, they'd be looking for that as their day job, instead of whatever else they're doing.
Why would you refer to someone who is NOT these things as a professional? Being in the mainstream media and being honest are not the same thing. Have a journalist's credentials and access do not equate to having integrity.
the Fiji coup attempt on Wikipedia was covered about as quickly and accurately as on regular news outlets
Doesn't matter how well an unusual event's coverage is enhanced by popular contributions. In a difficult spot, or one that doesn't have the infrastructure in place to support the usual channels, it makes sense to have the people "on the ground" call it like they see it. Of course, the same thing could be said about news "contributions" from the ground in Lebanon recently (where the "people on the ground" staged and "reported" all sorts of distortions). When there's political turmoil or crisis, the people who live in the middle of it are rarely in a position or inclined to report the whole picture. That's fine - but it has to be recognized for what it is.
From these incidents, I've learned that I can't trust any one news source
To the extent that it's because that one news source doesn't have the basic information, then you definitely need to turn to more sources. To the extent that they do have the information, and are deliberately spinning it (as in your good example of war coverage), then I would argue that those people should not be considered professional journalists, but rather activists. And yes, most of the people with the airtime are just that, you're right.
Is this really any worse than people who are paid to fake expertise in the subject of the story they were told to write?
Yes. Because someone who is intimate with the subject and has a personal interest in how it is spun will be handling it differently than someone who must get to know something about it in order to write about it, but who is not writing because of a specific agenda.
Because most people, honestly, do not know that they're not very good at most everything. People don't have the critical thinking skills to separate quality work (say, reporting/editorial work) from amateurishness, and so they fancy themselves just as able to do anything that an experienced professional can do, if the subject matter is interesting to them. This is bolstered, these days, by 'reality' TV shows that make celebrities out of addled-brained twits, and by grade school warm-and-fuzziness that goes to great lengths to proclaim everyone a star at everything, regardless of actual merit, capacity, charm, motivation, DNA, or hard work.
Collaborative "reporting" attracts only those people that have some vested interest or an axe to grind. That vested interest distorts most people's sense of whether their own opinion is valid or objective, and makes their contributions highly suspect (in terms of actual journalism). Someone truly objective is practicing a true skill/profession, and if they're any good at it, they're usually going to be looking for an actual job at it. And what makes someone who IS a professional journalist skip on over to a collaborative arena, for no pay, to work on some other material? Personal vested interest in that topic area, and the resulting lack of objectivity on that particular topic.
So, you've got either serious, capable people who are good journalists, and capable communicators/researchers who are off on a project that isn't part of their career, per se... or, you've got what amounts to activists and fan boys who are solely motivated by the outcome of the reporting, usually as characterized by a glorious dollup of spin... or, you've got people who think they've got more to offer on this front than they really do, and get social validation from having their hands in it - and everyone's too politically correct to tell them that they're really not very good at it, actually. And since operations like Wired are really just looking to build more brand loyalty and eyeballs on their site, of course they're going to position this get-other-people-to-do-the-work effort as being a vital, fresh, hip, we're-really-all-journalists shrine to Web 2.0. Balls, I say.
Slashdot Mirror
And only the military Hummers last 300K miles the commercial version doesn't even come close
I've got a good friend who's a Hummer dealer. Most people who own H1's aren't going to drive them like that, regardless. But the H2's are numerous and get a lot of use to study, and he regularly sees trades now, with vehicles in great shape and sporting way over 150,000 miles on them. The H3's, which are much smaller, lighter, and easier to maintain, will probably behave like most other GM light trucks, and last a conscientuous owner well into the 200,000+ neighborhood before they're in the mood for a different vehicle (which usually happens long before the vehicle actually wears out). And if you're going to talk about non-conscientuous owners, then you have to apply that same logic to Prius owners that hop curbs, do tons of stop-and-go driving, and other things that will lower the life cycle averages there. What if both numbers are half-way-or-so wrong? What if you lower the Prius numbers to $2.00 and raise the Hummer number to $2.00? Doesn't that still make for a fascinatingly different take on this than the religiously-held perspective that most people seem to have?
And Linux, not being a commercial corporation, is the computer system built by the people for the people. When you hear someone talk about how much they like Linux, they are doing it from genuine beliefs, as opposed to asswipe asstroturfers such as your fine self. Choke!
I'm sure that Novell, and Red Hat, and IBM, and Dell and other corporations that make money off of enabling large operations (rather than hobbyists and academics) to use Linux would probably be surprised to hear that they are not "commercial corporations." Also, you may want to brush up on "astroturfing" and understand that just because someone points out that someone else is being a fanboy with a decidely unworldly, narrow view of what it means to understand the O/S user landscape that doesn't make them paid shills for a company someplace. You're just as confused on that topic as the OP was on his, I guess.
Damn, this entire campaign sounds like one fucking sad attempt at trolling.
Really? Because for years, I've been seeing posts and articles on slashdot that talk in terms of winning people over from MS to Linux. Unless that continually played tune is also trolling, then I don't think that MS trying to understand the different stripes of people that are (or might consider) using Linux is anything other than basic market research. Not all of the Ubuntu crowd may consider themselves to be "winning" someone away from Mandriva, but I'm sure that language gets used sometimes. Just like people in the Firefox camp often talk about winning a larger share of browser users away from MS.
What part of "on the ladder of social control" did you miss?
... many of whom form these opinions from a very limited exposure to the wider world, and whom have an idealogical bent towards socialism, and see everything through that lens. And when they haven't personally seen it, they imagine it through that lens. You are describing the condition of the working world as though you have a view of it, or its trends, in their entirety. And your take on it, as identified by others, seems to include villainous managers, financers, investors, among whose ranks "nobody" (your words) wants to see something that I see managers, financers, investors, and CEOs embracing and rewarding every day.
So, your "ladder of social control" doesn't actually HAVE any control? Which is it? Are all people subject to that control (where YOU, not the article say "nobody" wants creative people popping up an odd times), suppressed or not? Well? If you say they are, then it's as simple as you being very wrong and you don't get out enough. If that's not what you're saying, then what the hell do you mean by "nobody" and what IS your ladder of social control if in fact it doesn't have that degree of control? You can't have it both ways, and in trying to, your analysis doesn't resonate with reality - no matter how well it resonates with the article. Don't you get it? The people who disagreed with your take on the article can't debate the article, but they can debate you. The article isn't in a position to clarify or alter its statements about the nature of the "plight of the working world," but you ARE, and BEFORE I wrote one word in this thread, you were already complaining about being "slammed" because someone disagreed with you. I don't find your analysis consistent with the many tech/IT operations with which I interact, but I do frequently bump into people who proclaim an understanding of large social and corporate trends
You do know, right, that your original "analysis" is still there where people can read it? Your analysis includes phrases like "the plight of the working world." That, right there, is so far removed from reasoned, credible, worldly analysis that it serves nicely to calibrate all of the rest of your comments. There is no single identifiable state or condition in which working people operate or exist. It is a sweeping generalization. From the dictionary:
That is a completely correct use of that term in this context, and your only reaction is to scream "flamebait!" Are you not sensing the irony, there? Even a little bit? Don't use wholly inclusive phrases and images, backpedal later to suggest that you really means "some" or "not all," and then say someone is flaming you when they point out your own words to you.
See? Nothing but personalization, flamebait, and plain wrong.
In my first comment in this thread, the post to which I responded (yours) includes you saying, "You so wanted to make this a personal attack ("Grow up") that you missed it again, and ended up talking about yourself."
Now, never mind the childlike "talking about yourself" jab (which is a little embarassing, isn't it, since obviously the person to whom you responded was very deliberately talking about you)... the thing that got you all personal and whiny, and complaining about being personally "targeted" was that someone used the phrase "grow up" in response to your previous remarks. And indeed, those remarks are churlish, juvenile, uninformed, and adolescently paranoic. That is not a "personal attack," that's a specific response to the content you posted. It's a qualification of your comments. ANY response to highly opinionated, distorted set of remarks, like yours, is going to have to be based on the information you provide, or the perceptions you appear to present. There is no other context on which to evaluate your position except your sweeping generalizations.
But it seems you have thought about it, and despite thinking about it, have still formed the original picture of the world that you described. Like others, I obviously saw your comment as very much NOT insightful, but rather as a rationalization for feeling sorry for yourself about what you see as the lack of opportunity in the IT field. Doesn't matter WHAT you mean, it only matters that you chose words that say that. And you did. The "plight of the working world" is code for "a bad situation for all workers that can be fixed" by addressing the other things that you continue on to bring up. For example, you say: "Nobody along the ladder of social control inside of a corporation wants a creative or imaginative star who will probably surface at the least convenient moment and disrupt their carefully planned business projections."
Which is utter crap. "Nobody?" Not a single person, nowhere, in any company? Nobody? Let's assume that's really how you see it. That your experience in the world is so limited, and your imagination so limited, that you can't see past how cranky are about, probably, one or two annoying bosses you've had in the past. That, right there, is what caused the prior poster to say, "grow up," and well he should have. A grown up shrugs that stuff off and just moves on. You say that one cannot move onto a setting where creativity is rewarded because you assert that nobody wants it. That the "plight of the working world" is to not have that sort of opportunity. Don't you HEAR yourself? Can't you imagine reading your own post from someone else's point of view, and imagine that person saying to herself, "Get over it already, and just work somewhere else!" The phrase "grow up" is no more of a personal attack against you than your own very broad attack against every person who manages a staff (or, oppresses them, it seems, from your point of view). Read your own words, note that someone said "grow up," and then read your response to THAT... where you immediately start calling the other person "wrong" and start whining about being personally "slammed." Anyone (including me, because that's when I noticed the thread) would correctly assume that you were at that point anxious to make this personal, rather than admit that not every employee everywhere is in a "plight," even though that would kill some of the drama in your original post. Now, though, I see that there's more to it, since you can't conceive of an otherwise disinterested third party (me) wondering why you can't hear your own tone, and see how your melodramatic painting of corporate IT staffing is just plain false, and ignores the wider reality. That is the only substance that matters, here - your pronouncements of gloom and oppression vs. reality, and it's that to which people responded.
You haven't refuted antyhing. You've made personal attack after personal attack after personal attack. That's all you know how to do.
My very first response to you was a refutation, and you took it like an invertebrate. The resulting thread was me pointing out how anxious you are to talk about ANYTHING but the topic at hand, which I've brought up routinely in different contexts, and which you tap-dance around in order to avoid admitting that your original sentiment was absurd. See the several specific points made above, to which you simply reply "you're wrong," rather than actually addressing.
You, DD, and NDP, three relatively uncommon posters, all came out of the woodwork on Saturday and, with the exception of one token post in another discussion made by you, specifically targetted me.
You do realize how actually, demonstrably paranoid that line of thinking is, right? For your own sake, do you realize that? I have never heard of those users, have never communicated with them, don't read their comments, and I certainly didn't "come out of the blue." I've posted thousands of times. And I frequently post specifically to counter the claims of people whose twisted world view imagines dark conspiracies of business owners and evil financiers controlling what you have for lunch and whether you're allowed to do a better spreadsheet than the guy in the next cubicle. You are fabricating the "targeting" that you describe, just like you've fabricated the perceptions that informed your first comment. Since you're stating an imagined conspiracy between three slashdot users with an air of fact, you've pretty well waived any claim on reality in the rest of your comments, which are drenched in the same tone and have an equally tenuous grip on reality. I'm all the more glad to have engaged you in conversation, because now people reading your comments will see that the same guy painting some slave-like picture of the modern IT workplace is the guy who also thinks that complete strangers are getting together behind his back to "target" him. That's factually incorrect, and you have to deal with that, and then ask yourself if you've formed other opinions based on equally invalid perceptions. Really.
So your point, now, is that it is not the case that management, as a class, acts in a particular way? Because that is exactly contrary to your previous ramblings. Regardless of which hair you want to split (now, as opposed to your previous sweeping pronouncement about the condition of the IT landscape), you are now allowing for the fact that not every employee or manager or the relationships or their circumstances are the same. Shame it only took you a dozen or so times copying/pasting the phrase "you're wrong" before you corrected yourself.
So, now that you admit that there isn't a limit to the sort of creative potential that a talented IT person can put to work (since, as you now admit, there are places where that's an option), what is the entire point of your original rant, which you now contradict? IT people who want to do something more creative, and have the talent to do so, can just go someplace where that's the corporate culture. They, and their creativity-friendly new managers, will get along great. And this, of course, is exactly the scenario that you said isn't reality, which is why I and other people countered what you said. Your hissy fit about having what you said countered is the thing that drew appropriate comments about how you're conducting your conversation.
By the way, inserting platitudes such as "as long as they are properly compensated for their work" is just another reminder of how eagerly you hang onto a sense of victimization to try to score rhetorical points. There is only one person controlling what an IT person makes in an economy that can't hire enough good ones: the IT person him/herself. If you don't have the creativity and talent to find a job that rewards and it wants it, then you have too choices: realize that you don't have it, or whine that the world owes you the same living as people that do have it. You've made a pretty consistent case for what camp you're in.
Instead resources is spend on killing each other and wut not.
True. Now that there is talk of a cooperative effort in space, the rape and death squads in the Sudan will see that they someplace else to spend their money!
With all due respect, sometimes you have to spend money on defense against people who actually do want to kill you - and reducing that threat helps to create an atmosphere more conducive to international cooperation on great works like space exploration. A stable global economy and free trade is the single greatest asset to large multinational science projects, and since there are regimes/movements that consider such efforts to be antithetical to their creed, and which consider democracy to be actually evil (and they act upon that premise).
Nothing would make me happier than to see Japan, for example, able to turn more/all of its engineering brilliance towards this sort of thing. But right across the water from them is a country like North Korea, testing missles pointed right at them, and requiring Japan to put considerable energy into defense against their crazy neighbor. No amount of agreement between the countries mentioned, for example, will make it less important to be prepared for trouble from a place like that.
Some are, to some extent, but feel free to ignore that to support your rant.
But YOU said: "The ultimate authority of the almighty dollar, the ability to profile the workgroup and monetize it quarter by quarter, the ability to make it absorb losses and give up profit on demand, the ability to control promotions and maintain authority over the social order has crept slowly into the IT world."
You do not qualify those statements, you are speaking of "the IT world" as a whole. You can't have it both ways and then complain when someone calls you on it.
Some do so illegally but feel free to ignore that to support your rant.
But YOU said: "In the minds of the venture capitalists and the stock brokers who, ultimately, allow the business venture to exist..." and "Profit is not evil. How (most) people (most commonly) use profit is evil."
You are fond of making sweeping statements about "the venture capitalists" (referred to as a whole), or what "most" people do, but when someone reflects your own thoughts back at you - pointing out your sweeping generalizations and refuting them - you cannot personally handle it by any means other than saying "you're wrong" and calling it a personal attack (lest you have to confront the notion that you were talking out of your ass on the subject at hand). Essentially, you have a smug superiority complex, but it's fragile, brittle, and doesn't hold up well in the face of a discussion of any substance. You're welcome to make comments about what managers (as a class) do, or what "the venture capitalists" as a homogenous group do - but don't have a fit when someone immediately points out that you sound, to say the least, a little bit paranoid in your perspective, and that your initial tone (railing agains the shackles within which poor put-upon IT staffers work) set the tone and content for all responses that followed. Don't complain about something, and then act hurt when multiple people point out that your complaints are groundless.
Not everybody has the resources to start their own company - but many people are capable of harnessing the strengths of their existing workplace.
And those people are the ones that are creative enough and persuasive enough to have no problem at all getting the upper part of the food chain seeing that creativity and entrepeneurial spark as an asset. The people who have that creativity and level of creative skill are not the ones who complain about The Man enslaving them in their cubicles. Those people tend to leap right out of that setting and into roles other than DBA, firewall admin, or CAT5-puller.
If you really want to survive in emergency situations, just be wide enough to float.
I don't need substance
I think you're confusing "don't need" with "don't have." But you're close.
when everything you said (and continue to say) was (and is) wrong
But you're still obviously aware that your original whiny rant was just silly, because you won't say anything other than "you're wrong." Let's see:
1) Companies are on employee-controlling power trips, right? No. Companies are in control of their companies. Employees work there, and exchange their time for their pay and other benefits. Don't like it? Leave. There is no "control" over you, ever, at all. There is only you exchanging your time for a paycheck, or choosing to go do something else. Your response to any mentioning of this reality has been, and probably will still be "you're wrong," and of course you won't bother to explain why you say that, because... you know it's actually correct.
2) People running companies, or the investors that fund them, make too much money, right? No. Despite your sophomoric inuendo (like, asking how much is "enough" or "too much" money, without proposing how you would define those things - because doing so would suggest that you want to regulate earnings) and assertions that everyone else is "wrong," you really don't have anything constructive to say. You just don't like it when someone else makes a lot of money off of the company they found, run, or invest in. Don't like it? Leave. Start your own business, operating on the premise that neither you nor your investors will make any more money than a typical IT staffer. Good luck with that.
3) Relative to the original topic, you maintain that indeed, IT staffers aren't allowed to be creative, because that's some sort of threat to the management status quo. Wrong. And, unlike you, I'll actually say why: because if the person giving them money every week wants to give them money for that activity, that's what they'll talk about, and expect. And if you've got something so creative to offer, and are so lacking in the persuasive skills (um, for example, you handle every debate by just stamping your feet and saying "you're wrong" to people who point out your wrongness, naive perspective, or who don't think that socialism is the ideal entrepeneurial framework) that you can't get people to buy into your creative wonderfullness, then go somewhere where the threshold for "creative" is lower, or where the people with the money are more receptive to your position. In other words, as usual, leave. Or start your own company.
But I'm sure you already have started your own company, and all of the "poor-me, the PHB keeps me chained in my cubicle and tells me what verbs I'm allowed to use while I make minimum wage and he's a millionaire" stuff - that was just educational rhetoric or trolling.
Wow. That's about all I can say.
Obviously!
Because, any attempt on your part at substance would probably result in more empty rhetoric about The Man and Evil Profits keeping you from being creative with their money, and how you should be in charge of how much profits a company or an investor should be allowed to make, etc, rather than, say... something of actual substance. That's OK, there was no substance to it in the first place, and you're just reminding us all how vapid and whiny your first comments were anyway.
Guess what, you're wrong.
Guess what? You keep saying that, but you do nothing to actually say way, or in what way. I'm specifically addressing your ramblings, all you're doing is trotting out the fine rhetorical skills of a two-year-old by saying "you're wrong."
How about saying, "you're wrong because despite what I said about being pigeon-holed, controlled serfs working for people that don't have ideas as good as mine, that's not really what I meant - here's what I really meant..."
But that's OK. Stamping your feet the way you do pretty much tells your audience all they need to know about your view of the world and your sense of entitlement.
Do you seriously view "less money" as an all or nothing thing?
Nah, the GP has it right. You're whining.
You seem to think that the people getting the paychecks should be telling the people who write the paychecks what their priorities should be. Here's a clue: if you don't like it, just talk some people into lending you the money to start your own business. Then, you can hire people who will tell you how to run your business, just like you think it should be done. And since (as you seem to think), the people you hire will know better than you what your priorities should be and how the company should be run, all will be perfect. Then, since you won't be needed, and you obviously don't think that you, as the founder of the company, or the people that loaned you the money to start it, should be making any money, you can just leave, or demote yourself back down into the regular ranks of your new Workers Paradise.
That'll work out just great - can't wait to see your new company and its products/services - because there's no company with better products than a company that has the IT people setting the overall strategy and managing the operations and finances.
A template that allows people to slap a meta redirect into the header is strength that they hope Google will still respect? If you want to play those games, host your own site. The point of these blog-o-spaces is to let people do the easy stuff, not monkey with redirection. On the other hand, I can see how it might take, oh... at least 10 minutes to write a filter that would block the meta redirects on their side of things. That is a lot to ask, even in the face of being Google-blacked.
Haven't these people ever played an RTS? It's easy to control a squadron of units -you just offload the tactical decisions to the units themselves and deliver only high level, strategic commands.
The problem is that, unlike an RTS game, actual drones (the type someone in the field might need to directly operate or rely upon, say for surveilance in a tactical setting) in actual combat-ish or other sensitive roles are working with a range of variables that wildly outnumbers the things that can happen in a game universe. If the drones or similar semi-autonomous units in a game universe were coded to accurately exhibit the types of behaviors, and encounter the range of unexpected hostility/weather/lighting etc that actually happens in real life, those games would cease to be as playable.
They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels
Do you ever actually listen to "public" radio? A few hours of listening during drive time here in the DC area will have you hearing commercials from large associations, corporations, and other underwriting entities (as well as vanity donors) that want the exposure. If public radio's use of licensed material is a part of what brings the audience that those advertisers want to reach, then paying what the producers of that material ask is just a cost of attracting those big-ticket ads and donations.
Anyone who thinks that just because such stations are non-profits that they don't want all the audience and ad revenue they can get is completely misunderstanding the nature of the beast. They have payrolls to meet, and they have to compete to hire the people they want to hire. Just like any other business, they have facilities to pay for, web sites to run, etc... and they want cash. They attract a lot of their cash through advertising, and they price the advertising according to the audience they can deliver to the advertisers. If that means they broadcast, or stream from their web sites, stuff that costs them money in order to then sell that audience to advertisers, then so be it. Gotta spend it to make it.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
On the other hand, unless you want this to be a tool only for and by the government, you've got to get businesses comfortable with it. Banks. Retailers. Airlines. Anonymity (of the you-can't-track-my-pr0n-use, or the posting-as-a-troll, or the PRC-can't-ID-the-rebel variety) is antithetical to trustworthy transactions, and without money changing hands, the plumbing is WAY less useful to the huge swaths of the economy that would fund (indirectly) the growth and adoption of such a thing.
"Where prudent" and "as necessary" etc., are completely subjective. People who like to rip off movies have one set of priorities, and people who administer your payroll or need to transmit your cancer meds prescription are looking at it from a very different perspective.
You honestly think the only good journalists are the ones that get paid?
No, I think that someone who actually has the communications, research, and social skills to be an actually good journalist, and wants to devote a full week of their waking hours to that activity, pretty much has to make it a paying career so that they can eat and whatnot. There are plenty of dumb, idealogically motivated, lazy, and other-bad-things people paid to write/produce "news"-ish material. You'll notice I didn't describe them all as being better than all non-career writers/reporters. I'm talking about what drives a wide swath of the audience of a particular outlet (say, Wired) to collaborate on a story. It's vanity, or social needs, or a mission/position of some sort... not the burning desire to be an objective, thoughtful reporter. Because if they had that desire, they'd be looking for that as their day job, instead of whatever else they're doing.
beacon of honesty and trust
Why would you refer to someone who is NOT these things as a professional? Being in the mainstream media and being honest are not the same thing. Have a journalist's credentials and access do not equate to having integrity.
the Fiji coup attempt on Wikipedia was covered about as quickly and accurately as on regular news outlets
Doesn't matter how well an unusual event's coverage is enhanced by popular contributions. In a difficult spot, or one that doesn't have the infrastructure in place to support the usual channels, it makes sense to have the people "on the ground" call it like they see it. Of course, the same thing could be said about news "contributions" from the ground in Lebanon recently (where the "people on the ground" staged and "reported" all sorts of distortions). When there's political turmoil or crisis, the people who live in the middle of it are rarely in a position or inclined to report the whole picture. That's fine - but it has to be recognized for what it is.
From these incidents, I've learned that I can't trust any one news source
To the extent that it's because that one news source doesn't have the basic information, then you definitely need to turn to more sources. To the extent that they do have the information, and are deliberately spinning it (as in your good example of war coverage), then I would argue that those people should not be considered professional journalists, but rather activists. And yes, most of the people with the airtime are just that, you're right.
Is this really any worse than people who are paid to fake expertise in the subject of the story they were told to write?
Yes. Because someone who is intimate with the subject and has a personal interest in how it is spun will be handling it differently than someone who must get to know something about it in order to write about it, but who is not writing because of a specific agenda.
Why is this happening?
Because most people, honestly, do not know that they're not very good at most everything. People don't have the critical thinking skills to separate quality work (say, reporting/editorial work) from amateurishness, and so they fancy themselves just as able to do anything that an experienced professional can do, if the subject matter is interesting to them. This is bolstered, these days, by 'reality' TV shows that make celebrities out of addled-brained twits, and by grade school warm-and-fuzziness that goes to great lengths to proclaim everyone a star at everything, regardless of actual merit, capacity, charm, motivation, DNA, or hard work.
Collaborative "reporting" attracts only those people that have some vested interest or an axe to grind. That vested interest distorts most people's sense of whether their own opinion is valid or objective, and makes their contributions highly suspect (in terms of actual journalism). Someone truly objective is practicing a true skill/profession, and if they're any good at it, they're usually going to be looking for an actual job at it. And what makes someone who IS a professional journalist skip on over to a collaborative arena, for no pay, to work on some other material? Personal vested interest in that topic area, and the resulting lack of objectivity on that particular topic.
So, you've got either serious, capable people who are good journalists, and capable communicators/researchers who are off on a project that isn't part of their career, per se... or, you've got what amounts to activists and fan boys who are solely motivated by the outcome of the reporting, usually as characterized by a glorious dollup of spin... or, you've got people who think they've got more to offer on this front than they really do, and get social validation from having their hands in it - and everyone's too politically correct to tell them that they're really not very good at it, actually. And since operations like Wired are really just looking to build more brand loyalty and eyeballs on their site, of course they're going to position this get-other-people-to-do-the-work effort as being a vital, fresh, hip, we're-really-all-journalists shrine to Web 2.0. Balls, I say.