There is very good coverage in the US for kids whose parents are under a certain income threshold. It sucks to jump from that to $20 copays, $80 dental bills (after insurance), and 80/20 hospital bills. It's downright cippling when your pay is barely more then it was before. Your also locked out if your are "lucky" enough to be on a crappy healthcare plan when your income goes down. You can't drop insurance and then get the excellent gov. provided insurance for your kids.
And God forbid you live in Texas or some similar hellhole.
Been there, done that, left Texas when the company dropped Humana as a provider.
Also lost Florida KidCare when I got my current job, I believe I am paying $12Kish per year out of pocket for my wife and 2 kids' sucky insurance that's got way more out of pocket component to it than KidCare had.
My last call to a "professional Licensed electrician" got me a fairly reasonable quote of $150 to run a wire from the breaker box through the attic to a new hot-tub installation. Then I asked him to make it 10 gauge instead of 12, and the quote increased to $250, when a box of 10 gauge wire that would make the run only cost about $30 (and the 12 gauge cost about $25).
Now, take these same guys and hand them a drawing that involves more than 3 types of conductors, what do you think happens?
With contractors as gatekeepers on home construction and renovation, it doesn't matter that the industry can't unify home automation. If you're not running the wires yourself, $10K for the components is going to be the cheap part of the system.
It's folks that aren't poor but don't get benefits from other sources that are left out in the US. The poor and the elderly already have socialize medicine.
Well, it's not the best total system, but it's a nice net to have. When I was suddenly unemployed for a few months a few years back, that socialized medicine got my kid a prescription he needed, free of charge, and paid our pediatrician (same one we normally use) for us.
Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" applies to a lot of things in the US economy, including your life's accumulated wealth when a couple of things go not according to plan.
Did you forget to escape your sarcasm tags or something? It's much easier to let someone else handle all the I/O for you and you just pull in libraries to perl or python or what have you.
I did all my own tech assembly work when through-hole was the only option. As the years wore on, my eyesight got worse and the parts got smaller, rapidly taking me out of the tech arena - which is fine, but I can still do through hole, whereas mounting an 0402 is... unrealistic for me.
Not many people can afford full time staff to maintain their lives both personally and professionally. He has people so desperate to work with him that they train for years to understand his unique communication.
That depends on when and where you judge them - I had a 1.2Mpixel Kodak camera that was quite good and cost competitive at the time, of course it sucks in every category by today's standards, but for what was available in 1997, it was really good.
Kodak has also come out with some of the best high-end products on the market, but nosebleed high end does not make a big company (Apple is pedestrian high-end, you don't even have to make $100K/year to own Apple products as toys.)
It's easy to take potshots at a target as large as Kodak, but no single failure brought them down. I think the biggest part of their problem was that other competent companies entered their space and didn't allow them to survive... sure there were co-development and co-marketing agreements, but Kodak didn't win big enough, consistently enough, and Chapter 11 is a clear indicator that they failed to shrink gracefully.
But I'm not a creationist, so I'll chalk it up to his willingness to fight and his access to good healthcare. And maybe random dumb luck.
I've worked in and around medical devices and healthcare for 2 decades, and in that time I've seen a whole lot of "use it or lose it" principle in halting disease progression. It is certainly no guarantee, but odds are better that you will be able to keep doing something if you keep doing it. Basically, "bed rest" is evil and should be avoided at every opportunity.
A whole lot of "good healthcare" is social support, keeping the patient active - sort of the opposite of your typical ICU experience.
ALS is well understood to be a "highly variable" disease. Meaning, they know that they don't know what it's going to do - sucks when a loved one gets it because there's always that "glimmer of hope" that it will stop before it kills them, but in 99% of cases, that's not true at the 5 year mark.
Guy's done what's required to warrant obscene amounts of care being provided to him. He's offered value in return for it in the form of cash and his sick smart brain.
Yes, that, and being born in the UK where he would receive a similar level of care if he were a penniless dolt.
In the U.S. cash and societal value might make the difference of live or die, for him.
In most of the "developing world," he would have to have been born into the richest of families to even hope for basic medical care that would have kept him alive.
He also has access to an amazing amount of healthcare. Not many people can afford full time staff to maintain their lives both personally and professionally. He has people so desperate to work with him that they train for years to understand his unique communication.
Money and people who care do help, but a neighbor of mine came down with a related disease 3 years ago, she died 1 year ago, and not for lack of a caring family with the resources to do anything possible.
When your diaphragm is paralyzed, it's over, or at least very unpleasant to continue. Hawking has been unusually lucky that his disease did not spread to basic autonomic, or extensive cognitive functions, as it all too often does.
I'm curious, what would you do if none of the applicants had a connection to your company? Or the ones that did had unfavorable, irrelevant or no feedback? In the latter case, I think many people's tendency would be to choose applicant with the connection even though it provided no useful information.
Well, that has happened too, and you do the best you can with what you've got. I'm thinking of one hiring cycle where we were looking for 2 software engineers and everyone that had any references we knew the references were bad. I ended up doing about a dozen interviews and picked the best two of those, one was o.k. and the other turned out not so great (and, as it turned out, they made reverse impressions for the first two weeks, during the first two weeks the good one seemed a problem and the dud seemed to be doing o.k.)
At the time, we already had one software engineer who was hired through reference, who literally blew the other two away... It isn't always possible, but when it is, it's been a better bet than the interview process for me.
I found it most amusing at the $100M/yr company that had 6 VPs, bringing down anywhere from $400K->$2.5M/year in published total compensation, except for the company's technical founder and VP of R&D, he drew $60K/yr salary, no stock - his choice, I think he only came in a couple of days a week, and he made plenty of money in previous plays, but still, a real Rodney Dangerfield moment for my R&D career, even worse than when I hired on and R&D was the ugly stepchild of the VP of reimbursement.
How about I take pictures of the once-fertile farmland that the EPA turned into a desolated desert and drove 70,000 people out of work and out of the area? Think they would highlight that one?
Um.... I'm no expert, but what did that farmland look like before humans irrigated it? And, what were the environmental costs associated with the irrigation project?
In one particular case I have in mind, we needed a competent electrical engineer, somebody who could apply V=IR, read schematics, solder, use an oscilloscope, etc. That's what we got, with about 20 man-hours invested in the candidate search. His resume was just one in a pile of over 400, but one of his former employers was one of our business partners, quick call to his ex-manager (whom we knew and trusted) gave us the information we needed to make a good, safe decision.
There was no requirement for the next messiah who would lead the company to the promised land, it's not what we were looking for, and it would have been a waste of time to look for one: low odds of finding one, lower odds of correctly identifying them from among the pretenders, and I'm not sure that a messianic electrical engineer would have made much difference at that juncture.
As you said, with a sad/scary tinge of reality in it.
The last time the USA had a civil war, we killed off two percent of our total population.
Some of my ancestors' children died in that war, and some survived to collect pensions (Tennessee, we had soldiers on both sides), I don't think any of my ancestors could have been described as wealthy.
I stuck with a $1B market cap company for 2+ years, while I was there there was zero upward mobility from the technical ranks to anything above manager. New directors & above were all imported as part of a sort of strategic personnel acquisition game. The open position above me was only created to try to lure someone from another company, since he wasn't interested, it was never filled.
Same here. But honestly you probably don't want to be in the top 1% for income; those people are always the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
So you decide to go ahead and make things even more unfair? That practice is indicative of a lazy asshole manager, one who has absolutely no business whatsoever being in charge of a night shift at Denny's, let alone an engineering group.
And, rather than rely on the word of trusted colleagues business associates and hire what I can be reasonably sure to be a competent engineer, I am supposed to decide based on what? A 2 hour acting session? When you can get actual personal references, it is a valid method to reduce risk to the company, which is what a Manager should be doing, instead of rolling the dice and picking somebody who can produce a decent resume and not screw up during a brief interview.
Is it fair to the brilliant young kid who was number 287 in the pile? Absolutely not, but my position isn't defending the impossible, my position is to do the best I can for our company with the limited knowledge and resources available. Sorry if you're the brilliant young kid, go get your break somewhere else like I did - it will happen eventually.
I've been sitting on top of the technical stool since 1997.
Software Architect. Enterprise Architect. Technical Lead. Principal Engineer. Technical Director. Chief Scientist. Let's call these upper-stool technical positions.
Yep, I've had 4/6 of those titles. Along with "Director of Software Development" and "VP of R&D". Best I've ever been offered is 0.5% ownership in companies with a valuation in the $10M range (and, before you state that $50K in stock is a sweet deal, just try to cash that out of privately held companies.) Also, note that those stock offers were for positions with primarily management roles, nothing with a "Tech track" tint on it. If any of them had turned into the "Next Facebook," sure, I'd be booking Virgin Galactic flights for me and the fam, and doing talk show appearances for $10K/day - but there are 1000 flops to zero valuation (probably more) for every company that has even 1% of Facebook's success.
No sour grapes here, Tech Track pays well, and more reliably than Sales or any number of other things, just don't delude yourself that you're going to move into the upper 1% while on a tech track.
Slashdot Mirror
There is very good coverage in the US for kids whose parents are under a certain income threshold. It sucks to jump from that to $20 copays, $80 dental bills (after insurance), and 80/20 hospital bills. It's downright cippling when your pay is barely more then it was before. Your also locked out if your are "lucky" enough to be on a crappy healthcare plan when your income goes down. You can't drop insurance and then get the excellent gov. provided insurance for your kids.
And God forbid you live in Texas or some similar hellhole.
Been there, done that, left Texas when the company dropped Humana as a provider.
Also lost Florida KidCare when I got my current job, I believe I am paying $12Kish per year out of pocket for my wife and 2 kids' sucky insurance that's got way more out of pocket component to it than KidCare had.
I'll say it again:
Ever pay a contractor to run a wire?
My last call to a "professional Licensed electrician" got me a fairly reasonable quote of $150 to run a wire from the breaker box through the attic to a new hot-tub installation. Then I asked him to make it 10 gauge instead of 12, and the quote increased to $250, when a box of 10 gauge wire that would make the run only cost about $30 (and the 12 gauge cost about $25).
Now, take these same guys and hand them a drawing that involves more than 3 types of conductors, what do you think happens?
With contractors as gatekeepers on home construction and renovation, it doesn't matter that the industry can't unify home automation. If you're not running the wires yourself, $10K for the components is going to be the cheap part of the system.
save more energy than they cost.
Ever pay a contractor to run a wire?
It's folks that aren't poor but don't get benefits from other sources that are left out in the US. The poor and the elderly already have socialize medicine.
Well, it's not the best total system, but it's a nice net to have. When I was suddenly unemployed for a few months a few years back, that socialized medicine got my kid a prescription he needed, free of charge, and paid our pediatrician (same one we normally use) for us.
Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" applies to a lot of things in the US economy, including your life's accumulated wealth when a couple of things go not according to plan.
Did you forget to escape your sarcasm tags or something? It's much easier to let someone else handle all the I/O for you and you just pull in libraries to perl or python or what have you.
http://qt.gitorious.org/qtonpi
soldering SMT stuff is really easy
Speak for yerself, whippersnapper.
I did all my own tech assembly work when through-hole was the only option. As the years wore on, my eyesight got worse and the parts got smaller, rapidly taking me out of the tech arena - which is fine, but I can still do through hole, whereas mounting an 0402 is... unrealistic for me.
Take that, Arduino.
Not many people can afford full time staff to maintain their lives both personally and professionally. He has people so desperate to work with him that they train for years to understand his unique communication.
That's what grad students are for!
At age 21, you are a grad student - barely.
Kodak lost because they offered garbage products.
That depends on when and where you judge them - I had a 1.2Mpixel Kodak camera that was quite good and cost competitive at the time, of course it sucks in every category by today's standards, but for what was available in 1997, it was really good.
Kodak has also come out with some of the best high-end products on the market, but nosebleed high end does not make a big company (Apple is pedestrian high-end, you don't even have to make $100K/year to own Apple products as toys.)
It's easy to take potshots at a target as large as Kodak, but no single failure brought them down. I think the biggest part of their problem was that other competent companies entered their space and didn't allow them to survive... sure there were co-development and co-marketing agreements, but Kodak didn't win big enough, consistently enough, and Chapter 11 is a clear indicator that they failed to shrink gracefully.
Does XBMC run on Raspberry Pi?
Does it run on Raspberry Pi?
But I'm not a creationist, so I'll chalk it up to his willingness to fight and his access to good healthcare. And maybe random dumb luck.
I've worked in and around medical devices and healthcare for 2 decades, and in that time I've seen a whole lot of "use it or lose it" principle in halting disease progression. It is certainly no guarantee, but odds are better that you will be able to keep doing something if you keep doing it. Basically, "bed rest" is evil and should be avoided at every opportunity.
A whole lot of "good healthcare" is social support, keeping the patient active - sort of the opposite of your typical ICU experience.
ALS is well understood to be a "highly variable" disease. Meaning, they know that they don't know what it's going to do - sucks when a loved one gets it because there's always that "glimmer of hope" that it will stop before it kills them, but in 99% of cases, that's not true at the 5 year mark.
Guy's done what's required to warrant obscene amounts of care being provided to him. He's offered value in return for it in the form of cash and his sick smart brain.
Yes, that, and being born in the UK where he would receive a similar level of care if he were a penniless dolt.
In the U.S. cash and societal value might make the difference of live or die, for him.
In most of the "developing world," he would have to have been born into the richest of families to even hope for basic medical care that would have kept him alive.
He also has access to an amazing amount of healthcare. Not many people can afford full time staff to maintain their lives both personally and professionally. He has people so desperate to work with him that they train for years to understand his unique communication.
Money and people who care do help, but a neighbor of mine came down with a related disease 3 years ago, she died 1 year ago, and not for lack of a caring family with the resources to do anything possible.
When your diaphragm is paralyzed, it's over, or at least very unpleasant to continue. Hawking has been unusually lucky that his disease did not spread to basic autonomic, or extensive cognitive functions, as it all too often does.
I'm curious, what would you do if none of the applicants had a connection to your company? Or the ones that did had unfavorable, irrelevant or no feedback? In the latter case, I think many people's tendency would be to choose applicant with the connection even though it provided no useful information.
Well, that has happened too, and you do the best you can with what you've got. I'm thinking of one hiring cycle where we were looking for 2 software engineers and everyone that had any references we knew the references were bad. I ended up doing about a dozen interviews and picked the best two of those, one was o.k. and the other turned out not so great (and, as it turned out, they made reverse impressions for the first two weeks, during the first two weeks the good one seemed a problem and the dud seemed to be doing o.k.)
At the time, we already had one software engineer who was hired through reference, who literally blew the other two away... It isn't always possible, but when it is, it's been a better bet than the interview process for me.
I found it most amusing at the $100M/yr company that had 6 VPs, bringing down anywhere from $400K->$2.5M/year in published total compensation, except for the company's technical founder and VP of R&D, he drew $60K/yr salary, no stock - his choice, I think he only came in a couple of days a week, and he made plenty of money in previous plays, but still, a real Rodney Dangerfield moment for my R&D career, even worse than when I hired on and R&D was the ugly stepchild of the VP of reimbursement.
How about I take pictures of the once-fertile farmland that the EPA turned into a desolated desert and drove 70,000 people out of work and out of the area? Think they would highlight that one?
Um.... I'm no expert, but what did that farmland look like before humans irrigated it? And, what were the environmental costs associated with the irrigation project?
In one particular case I have in mind, we needed a competent electrical engineer, somebody who could apply V=IR, read schematics, solder, use an oscilloscope, etc. That's what we got, with about 20 man-hours invested in the candidate search. His resume was just one in a pile of over 400, but one of his former employers was one of our business partners, quick call to his ex-manager (whom we knew and trusted) gave us the information we needed to make a good, safe decision.
There was no requirement for the next messiah who would lead the company to the promised land, it's not what we were looking for, and it would have been a waste of time to look for one: low odds of finding one, lower odds of correctly identifying them from among the pretenders, and I'm not sure that a messianic electrical engineer would have made much difference at that juncture.
Well, my friend, that was a joke
As you said, with a sad/scary tinge of reality in it.
The last time the USA had a civil war, we killed off two percent of our total population.
Some of my ancestors' children died in that war, and some survived to collect pensions (Tennessee, we had soldiers on both sides), I don't think any of my ancestors could have been described as wealthy.
I stuck with a $1B market cap company for 2+ years, while I was there there was zero upward mobility from the technical ranks to anything above manager. New directors & above were all imported as part of a sort of strategic personnel acquisition game. The open position above me was only created to try to lure someone from another company, since he wasn't interested, it was never filled.
Same here. But honestly you probably don't want to be in the top 1% for income; those people are always the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
http://amultiverse.com/2011/10/24/eat-the-rich/
Shoot for somewhere in the top 5% and you might not end up wearing a bad sweater, eh?
The top 0.1% is still 300,000 U.S. Americans, do you really think we're going to put that many up against the wall?
So nepotism is the best way to fill positions?
When it works... and 2 degrees of separation is hardly nepotism.
So you decide to go ahead and make things even more unfair? That practice is indicative of a lazy asshole manager, one who has absolutely no business whatsoever being in charge of a night shift at Denny's, let alone an engineering group.
And, rather than rely on the word of trusted colleagues business associates and hire what I can be reasonably sure to be a competent engineer, I am supposed to decide based on what? A 2 hour acting session? When you can get actual personal references, it is a valid method to reduce risk to the company, which is what a Manager should be doing, instead of rolling the dice and picking somebody who can produce a decent resume and not screw up during a brief interview.
Is it fair to the brilliant young kid who was number 287 in the pile? Absolutely not, but my position isn't defending the impossible, my position is to do the best I can for our company with the limited knowledge and resources available. Sorry if you're the brilliant young kid, go get your break somewhere else like I did - it will happen eventually.
I've been sitting on top of the technical stool since 1997.
Software Architect. Enterprise Architect. Technical Lead. Principal Engineer. Technical Director. Chief Scientist. Let's call these upper-stool technical positions.
Yep, I've had 4/6 of those titles. Along with "Director of Software Development" and "VP of R&D". Best I've ever been offered is 0.5% ownership in companies with a valuation in the $10M range (and, before you state that $50K in stock is a sweet deal, just try to cash that out of privately held companies.) Also, note that those stock offers were for positions with primarily management roles, nothing with a "Tech track" tint on it. If any of them had turned into the "Next Facebook," sure, I'd be booking Virgin Galactic flights for me and the fam, and doing talk show appearances for $10K/day - but there are 1000 flops to zero valuation (probably more) for every company that has even 1% of Facebook's success.
No sour grapes here, Tech Track pays well, and more reliably than Sales or any number of other things, just don't delude yourself that you're going to move into the upper 1% while on a tech track.