While it probably wouldn't be a problem to re-write the test with different questions, there is a question of testing the validity and reliability of the new items.
The original has been in use since the 70's and has had the validity and reliability demonstrated multiple times. New questions that seem the same might actually not get at the same constructs as well or might have something else going on. Generally instruments like this aren't modified casually.
In my work (psychology and public health research) we have had to modify widely used measures and when we have replaced one question with a seemingly identical question in the past, sometimes there're we're hidden gotchas that changed the responses enough that it was clear that despite our best efforts, the new questions didn't get at the same constructs as the old ones.
All that said, I don't think it would be an issue in this case to change the questions a bit, but I do wonder if legally that would be sufficient to protect against copyright claims.
This guy has proven, incontrovertibly, that he has no fucking aptitude WHAT SO EVER at public relations, customer service, marketing, being a decent human being, etc. and so on.
You and everyone else trying to say that he was just being blunt about "control the customer" are missing that.
Yes, real professionals in the field absolutely do know how to manage a customer's expectations and, to some extent, their mood and responses. This guy is just a bully, and I believe he meant the term literally - he wanted to control the customer as in beat on him until Dave with a V was cowed, backed down, and meekly took what this guy felt like giving him.
I think this guy might have one time tried to read a book on sales, saw the term "call control" or "customer management" and didn't bother reading past that, assuming that it just meant "beat the shit out of people to get what you want."
Seriously, don't be naive - there's literally zero evidence that this guy has any clue what he's doing, or in fact that he's even a decent human being. None.
Except that this guy demonstrated zero professionalism, zero ability to even understand basic customer service skills, zero empathy with another human being. When he says control the customer, he meant, literally, control as in domination.
Look at every single thing this guy has done and it's very, very obvious he's a completely abusive shitheel who believes in a very strong hierarchy where big guys shit on little guys and that's *right*.
Every single statement he's made has been to the effect of "I'm sorry you were someone able to crush me, if I'd known that I wouldn't have started with you" and emphatically not "I'm sorry I was being an asshole to my customer, and I'm going to try to do better."
Further, there is evidence that he abused his wife/girlfriend (court documents have been found), that he's lying about some of the things he claims have contributed to his recent bad day (a friend of his died - an excuse he's used several times before), that he's behaved exactly like this in the past, over a course of years.
Even more damning is his response going forward: he's being a dick to everyone, insisting that it's everyone else's fault, and now looking to capitalize on just how huge a dick the entire internet now knows him to be.
The only saving grace here is that unlike many other people who have his same wiring (I'm not saying "sociopath" but yeah, basically "sociopath"), he is a complete fucking moron when it comes to learning how to effectively manipulate people and make them feel good about it.
This guy is clearly a bully, and he displays classic bully obsequiousness when he gets the shit kicked out of him by someone with more power. It's the only language he understands, as has been made ABUNDANTLY obvious by everything that's come out about him.
On the flip side, there's literally zero evidence that he knows how to behave like a normal human being. Nobody is coming forward to defend this guy - except for people who don't know him who feel bad that he's been set upon by the Internetz. He has had no friends speak up, nobody in the industry he supposedly has so many connections in has spoken up, not even to say, "Well, yeah, he was being a dick here but he's not always like that."
There certainly is a concept of controlling the call in customer service, but you cannot honestly tell me that you think this guy was using the term "control" in this way after everything he's said and done.
You've been to the future and you've seen the winner already?
Fuck telling us about the KFC contest, tell us about any upcoming big tragedies so we can save some lives! I guess if things have been pretty calm the winning numbers for all the various state lotteries will work.
I worked for an organization from day 1 and was involved in every project we ever worked on. After several years there, that organization wound up merging with another organization and I decided it was time for me to move on.
It's been almost a year since I left, and every day I get 2-3 emails asking me for information, and as a way for them to not feel embarrassed for asking, they actually created a 1/10th time paid position for me and the job title is, literally, "Institutional Memory."
I go in for a couple of hours every few weeks and do a data dump with one team or another, and they're slowly starting to amass documentation as to what was done and why it was done that way.
At my new job the first thing I did when I came onboard was to set us up with an internal wiki for every single project we have and everyone puts notes on the projects, why they're doing things the way they are, etc. on that. It's a good way to have as much of a paper trail as possible.
"You're not going to be doing those things during working hours once you find that job."
And your thinking is that therefore you shouldn't do those things during working hours when you actually can? I don't mean this in a mean way, but that's depressing as hell. Life is there to be enjoyed - why torture yourself when you have a chance to NOT follow the dictates of work?
"When you've been out of work for over a year and are impoverished as a result, you'd be a fool to turn almost any job down."
And yet, even still, it shouldn't take you 8 hours a day, every day, to find *anything*. Your time would be much better spent panhandling, to be honest, if after a full year of looking for literally ANYTHING you haven't found anything. Or collecting cans, or dumpster diving or SOMETHING that's productive rather than foolishly wasting more than the necessary amount of time each day looking for work.
My point remains: Spending 8 hours a day looking for work is absurd, and suggesting that it is realistic for anyone to actually do is bad and likely to lead to anyone who takes it seriously being ashamed when they fail to live up to it. There are much more productive things to do with your time after you've spent 2-3 hours in an honest job search daily, and you'd be vastly better off mentally and physically doing them.
That's actually horrible, stupid, ridiculous advice and will actually fuck you over completely if you follow it.
There are only so many leads available in your area, only so many job openings you might qualify for. Saying "You should spend 8 hours a day looking for work" is stupid because there may not *be* 8 hours worth of stuff to look through daily. Then people who foolishly try to follow that advice will feel guilty as if they aren't doing enough to find work if they can't figure out how to look for work after the first couple of hours, making an already stressful situation even worse.
I live in Chicago. I'm employed, but when I was out of work for a brief period, I spent maybe 2-3 hours a day looking for positions because that's all it took to exhaust the listings, touch base with places that had indicated an interest, make calls to people I know to say I was in the market, etc. Even before the Internet, it took maybe 4-5 hours - tops - to handle all that kind of stuff.
For much of the rest of the day I spent my time brushing up on rusty skills and learning new ones that might also be useful.
Oh, and also having a life. Doing things to relax, like going for long walks, reading, spending time with friends, teaching my dog tricks, etc. Because, you see, I'm not a slave, I am not my job, my job is just something I have to facilitate a life, not the other way around.
If it takes you 8 hours a day to look for work in this day and age, you're either incredibly unchoosy about where you work (applying to everything in any industry and in any location) or you're just really not very efficient. Neither of those make you sound like a desirable employee.
It's not all skittles and beer running your own shop - there are certainly benefits to it, but there are also down sides.
You have to *work* to get business. You have to compete against possibly dozens or hundreds of other people with similar skills, who will often work for less because they might be hungry, too - I know where I live (Chicago) - you can't spit without finding someone who is an out of work web geek. You will still need to prove your skills to prospective clients - show a portfolio, provide references, etc. You often have to wait 2-3 months to get paid. You have to do all the work AND manage a business AND still go out and get more business so you always have something in the pipe.
I started my own shop for a rather niche market that my weird background has suited me quite well for, and about 90% of the business I get is from word of mouth and prospective clients contacting me but it's STILL a lot of work.
So given the givens, I'd say it's a good idea to keep up the freelancing while also looking for a "real" job and figuring out how to make yourself more attractive to potential employers. The two activities aren't mutually exclusive, just time intensive.
Eric Cantor has stated that his number one goal, and the number one goal of the Republican party, is to make sure that Barack Obama is a one term President. Period.
Not creating jobs. Not getting the economy back on track. Not balancing the budget.
Eric Cantor made that statement and other Republican "leaders" agreed with it.
I'm sorry, but your opinion that Democrats and Republicans are equally extreme is factually incorrect. The Republicans have stated that they are willing to run this country (and the rest of the world) into the ground in order to avoid giving Barack Obama a win.
There are extremists in both parties, I don't disagree. However, the extremists in the Democratic party are by and large fringe groups. With the Republicans they're running the show.
This is not to say the Democrats don't have flaws - god knows they do - but equally extreme? That's pure intellectual dishonesty.
Slavery is alive and well in the US. See the prison system.
Don't believe me? Well, let's look at the facts:
We have over 1,000,000 inmates in US prisons these days. Many are there for non-violent offenses (drug stuff). It's an established fact that black "offenders" are more likely to be convicted, and if convicted given a longer sentence than white "offenders."
We take away their right to vote when they are in prison. We also make it virtually impossible to find a job once you've gotten out of prison.
Many prisons are run by for-profit organizations that pay prisoners pennies an hour (and often make them pay for their own incarceration), but sell their output for millions to billions of dollars annually.
Anyone who imagines that racism or slavery are dead in the US is completely delusional.
Hell, I value the fun discussions with my friends about what kind of crazy things we would do with $100,000,000, the day dreams about winning, and the jolt of adrenaline when checking for a (hah!) winner more than I value a dollar.
For $1 a week I get to have all that and marginally support my local schools. Not many things as fun you can have for under 15 cents a day...
With Vegas, too, it's actually quite easy to come out ahead:
- Go to a casino that gives you a free drink if you put $20 in a machine. Put $20 into a dollar slot, get your free drink, play a single game, cash out and move on to the next casino (or to a different part in that casino). Do it with friends, do it while people watching and it's a good time had for quite a low cost.
- Go to a decent hotel/casino, put a few thousand dollars on deposit, enjoy your "free" suite on the house - nobody says you have to gamble.
The problem isn't tests like this, but people who are bad parents.
A good parent could, if they even bothered with this kind of testing, use it in concert with their child's natural inclinations and interests to help suggest things the child might have more potential at, or expose them to those things. For a child who is very performance/mastery oriented, being pointed at something they could enjoy AND potentially be great at would be a boon.
A bad parent would use the results of such a test to browbeat their kid into doing things or to attack them for any failure to achieve the best possible results.
I was once a developer and project manager for a consulting firm that serviced a multitude of clients in various for-profit industries. The money was great, the work was occasionally challenging, but at the end of the day I really didn't feel like I was contributing anything worthwhile with my life or accomplishing anything useful. Yay, some software that I was only tangentially involved in creating helped Big Advertising Firm cut costs fractionally by improving their workflow. Whee.
A friend of mine who was working for a not-for-profit asked me if I would be willing to volunteer some time to help one organization get set up with a web presence (it was a domestic violence survivors organization) to help facilitate outreach and fundraising. I did, and they then put me in contact with another NPO that worked with youth kicked out of their home.
Flash forward another couple of years (I went back to school in the meantime and got an advanced degree in something other than CS) and I wound up working for a university as part of a research team that focused on turning social psychology studies into useful interventions and results-based educational programs. My role there was to be a kind of process expert - I would look at research projects that were very man-hour intensive and prone to high rates of error and find ways to automate processes where I could and reduce the possibility of error etc. Took one project that had 10 staff working 50-60 hours/week each down to only needing 4 staff with a much more sensible 35 hours. Reduced the rate of assessments with more than 10 errors from over 75% to under 5%, and the rate of assessments with more than 5 errors from 90% down to 8%. The total costs of the project dropped by more than half, meaning that those funds could be routed to other projects.
Did that for 2 years and now I'm working in the criminal justice system doing something similar for jails and prisons - finding ways to reduce the administrative overhead that mental health professionals have to deal with so they can spend more time working with inmates constructively and less time filling out colossal amounts of paperwork. I also helped design and develop a system for connecting parolees more efficiently with social service NGOs in their neighborhood to help better re-integrate after release and it looks like recidivism has dropped substantially for the first year out - hopefully the longer term results are just as cheery.
I spend maybe 50% of my day programming, 25% in meetings and the rest on a mix of administrative type overhead (mostly helping facilitate projects through the often insane bureaucracy).
Programming makes me *happy* now in a way that it hadn't for years because I'm doing it in aid of something that matters.
The pay isn't the greatest - I make now about 80% or so of what I could make were I doing private sector stuff with my years of experience. The benefits are phenomenal, however - at the university I had *60* paid days off per year, tuition reimbursement, incredible medical benefits and an awesome pension plan. Where I am now I have less vacation (5 weeks/year), but equally amazing pension, medical bennies, and a promotion track that's extremely clear. I also have less bullshit to deal with in a lot of ways - working in a jail or prison environment we usually are more focused on getting the job done than we are on bullshit office politics, though that might be more a function of working with engineers.
So, a girl who with cerebral palsy and who was 16 at the time was whipped by her father - and you think she's a "horrible person" for blackmailing him about it?
For fuck's sake, she was 16 years old then, is 23 now, and was raised in an obviously abusive household while he is a motherfucking federal judge and you think they're *equally bad*? Are you impaired?
The strategy is pretty sound if you make a few assumptions:
- Most manufacturers of components want Apple's business because they know it's *safe* and reasonably profitable
- Most manufacturers of these kinds of components are willing to share with Apple (and their other big customers) what kinds of things are coming down the pipeline in the next 1-2-3 years
- There won't be something that appears out of nowhere that's mindbogglingly amazing and ready to be manufactured without at least some advance notice.
- Apple has enough cash on hand, brand cachet, and momentum that if they were to release something that was "good but not insanely great" they could survive it relatively unscathed (as long as they didn't keep doing that) because people would still buy it.
These assumptions seem pretty reasonable to me. The Apple strategy also protects them against things like the quake + tsunami in Japan, the flooding of Thailand, and other issues that will come up and force competitors to raise prices.
I think the change came about because, back then, you could have a single individual do some really neat (and useful) stuff that would push the limited hardware beyond its limits. You also had nowhere near the number of people working on stuff then as you do now, so it was more possible for something really amazing to stand out rather than get lost in the crowd.
Nowadays it takes a team to design neat and practical stuff that has the potential to come anywhere near the limits of the hardware. For things a single individual or small group could make that would push the limits, like improved search algorithms or whatever, they wouldn't just be "neat tricks" but absolutely ground breaking.
For my money, I think the next area with real wow factor potential is going to be fabrication/3d printing. There are some really neat tricks going on - like printers capable of making most of the components necessary to build a copy of themselves, printers making organ tissue, food, circuits, etc. Some of those are really REALLY neat.
There's a difference between ruthlessly efficient code that squeezes every last drop out of the hardware vs. relatively efficient code that's good enough vs. what the fuck were these people thinking ridonkulously inefficient code that has so much extraneous cruft in it that it that it strains cutting edge hardware for even mundane tasks.
I agree that the ridiculously inefficient code shouldn't be allowed, but I don't think that ruthless efficiency as in the days of old is actually worth it at this point - in the olden days it was cheaper to be super efficient because hardware was expensive, now it isn't.
That said, I think any developer worth their salt should at least be familiar with optimization techniques so that when new platforms with more limited power become available (smaller devices than phones, etc.) they can be efficient. But it's not something that is worth it by and large for the vast majority of uses out there today.
To be honest, I think the reason the tablet and phone markets were "lost" (if they were/are) is NOT because of developers not optimizing, but because there wasn't a focus on the end-user experience.
Sure, reducing bloat will speed things up a little, but it's not just about speed and responsiveness. For example, look at Siri and the response from many in the android community:
"It's just a chat bot with speech recognition and the ability to work with other apps! Android has had all of those things forever!"
Then why weren't these things integrated into something useful for the end user if it's so obvious? Answer: Most android developers simply don't think like an end user or prioritize user experience much, much lower than it should be.
And it happens *repeatedly* - techie types keep forgetting that they're making tools for people to use, and that the people who are users rather than makers of tools don't want the same things makers want.
Bloat has little, if anything, to do with this whole thing.
And I do want to say, Apple does a pretty good job supporting the makers of tools as well - I develop smartphone apps, and my experience developing for iOS (and marketing my apps) has been vastly better than my experience developing for android. Again, it's the user experience - there's tons of support for iOS developers, there's good support for marketing and the business aspect, and even though the approval process can sometimes be bizarre, I will take selling via iTunes over the android marketplace anytime, and so will the vast majority of my paying customers.
Again, bloat isn't the issue. The geek in me wants to see more elegant solutions than "just throw more power at it" but I also know that ultimately that's not super relevant, ESPECIALLY as low power phone hardware is getting more and more powerful and any performance limitations are made less and less relevant.
It's not a matter of losing the ability to optimize, it's a matter of whether the trade-off in programmer time spent optimizing is going to be worth it when we now can easily throw more CPU and memory at a problem.
I think it would be a net reduction in heat into the atmosphere because geothermal energy is already getting out but isn't serving any useful purpose when it does. So, using what gets out for useful purposes and then cutting back on the stuff we use to generate energy already will mean less extra heat pumped into the atmosphere. Secondly, less heat because fewer greenhouse gasses are released in the process of obtaining energy, so less retained heat.
Thirdly, on your whole catastrophic scenario thing - the sun pelts the earth with some ridiculous amount of energy constantly. The human race uses something like 15 terawatts (that's 1.5x10^13 watts) per year. The sun hits us with something like 1.2x10^17 watts per *second*. So, every second, we're absorbing 4 orders of magnitude (roughly) more energy from the sun than we release in a year, and have been doing so for several billion years, and our oceans haven't boiled away yet; therefore it seems logical to assume that being more efficient about energy use would delay or be irrelevant to oceanic boiling.
Mind you, these are just my own guesses based off of not being a complete idiot and having a vague understanding of how things work from my distant high school past, with any numbers used being pulled from my memory or being the easiest ones picked up from a quick googling.
I don't mean dietary obesity, but financial and resource obesity.
What do you call someone who consumes far more food than their body needs? A fat fuck.
What do you call someone who hoards far more resources than they need to take care of themselves for the foreseeable future? A success!
Why do people look at the Buffets, Gates and Forbes of the world differently than they do the massively overweight guy who's stuffing his face with the fourth Whopper of the day?
It takes more effort to be a vegetarian than it does to be an omnivore, both to specifically seek out foods that are vegetarian and also to prepare the meals.
If you can show me a way to be vegetarian while also getting proper nutrition, not requiring more time for shopping, prep and cooking, I'd give it a go. But as it is right now, it seems like a lot more work on something that isn't super important to me (past being reasonably healthy) since for me food is mostly just fuel rather than something I want to spend a large part of my life thinking about.
Actually, I think the power difference between tiers of gear is OK, but what needs tuning is the way the random dungeon grouping handles people with different levels of gear.
For example, right now it is perfectly possible for DPS in mostly 378 gear to be put into a dungon with a tank that has gear barely meeting the level requirements of the dungeon. This leads to a situation where the tank is being screamed at to GO GO GO and they aren't learning anything other than that well geared players are often dicks.
What should happen is groups should be formed based on the gear level of all members. If everyone has roughly similar gear levels in a group it's much more likely everyone will get along - if everyone has ridiculously great gear they will just blast through, no fuss, no muss. If everyone is in fresh 85 quest greens and blues the tank will be under less pressure to pull everything, the healers will be cut some slack, and the dps will hopefully be willing to use their aggro dumps and CC when they can.
The problem isn't the power differential with the gear, it's that geared people want to run with geared people usually so they can go fast, while undergeared people want to learn and run with people who are patient.
The other issue that comes up is that there is a HUGE gulf between people who run with PUGs and people who are in decent guilds.
In my guild, people are incredibly patient with people who are learning their role and class and gearing up. When someone gets a healer or tank to 85, we form groups specifically to go through each of the dungeons to explain the fights and what each role ought to be focusing on at that point. DPS is usually a bit different - the class leader for that class will spend an hour or so helping new DPS figure out a solid rotation, go over their extra abilities (CC, interrupts, decurses, etc). When I hit 85 on my paladin, I got several crafted items given to me and they quickly helped me get up to speed for heroics and troll dungeons prior to raiding.
With pugs, though, you essentially have people screaming at everyone for any mistake (real or imagined), hurling abuse for no reason other than to do it, and constantly insisting that everyone just GO GO GO despite not everyone knowing what they're supposed to do of knowing about gimmicks in the fights. Plus you have people abusing the system - if they're a hybrid class that can tank, even if they aren't geared or spec to tank, they will sign in as a tank just to get a faster queue. It's just totally toxic.
There is no universe in which Starbucks, the coffee of choice for soccer moms and middle-aged former yuppies, makes anyone look cool, or in which anyone actually imagines that starbucks makes them look cool.
The reason sbux succeeds despite having mediocre coffee is roughly the same as the reason mcdonalds succeeds: they're "good enough," "quick enough," "convenient enough" and "consistent enough."
Maybe when sbux first began showing up there was some small amount of cachet, but they're just another brand right now.
A much, much better example of marketing that succeeded at making doofuses feel cool would be American Apparel. The clothing that company offered was fantastically ugly, looked good on no one, and was ridiculously expensive. Yet the marketing played it up as so cool it doesn't even know it's cool/only for the super-sexy people, and a certain segment bought into it hardcore.
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While it probably wouldn't be a problem to re-write the test with different questions, there is a question of testing the validity and reliability of the new items.
The original has been in use since the 70's and has had the validity and reliability demonstrated multiple times. New questions that seem the same might actually not get at the same constructs as well or might have something else going on. Generally instruments like this aren't modified casually.
In my work (psychology and public health research) we have had to modify widely used measures and when we have replaced one question with a seemingly identical question in the past, sometimes there're we're hidden gotchas that changed the responses enough that it was clear that despite our best efforts, the new questions didn't get at the same constructs as the old ones.
All that said, I don't think it would be an issue in this case to change the questions a bit, but I do wonder if legally that would be sufficient to protect against copyright claims.
Except here's the thing:
This guy has proven, incontrovertibly, that he has no fucking aptitude WHAT SO EVER at public relations, customer service, marketing, being a decent human being, etc. and so on.
You and everyone else trying to say that he was just being blunt about "control the customer" are missing that.
Yes, real professionals in the field absolutely do know how to manage a customer's expectations and, to some extent, their mood and responses. This guy is just a bully, and I believe he meant the term literally - he wanted to control the customer as in beat on him until Dave with a V was cowed, backed down, and meekly took what this guy felt like giving him.
I think this guy might have one time tried to read a book on sales, saw the term "call control" or "customer management" and didn't bother reading past that, assuming that it just meant "beat the shit out of people to get what you want."
Seriously, don't be naive - there's literally zero evidence that this guy has any clue what he's doing, or in fact that he's even a decent human being. None.
Except that this guy demonstrated zero professionalism, zero ability to even understand basic customer service skills, zero empathy with another human being. When he says control the customer, he meant, literally, control as in domination.
Look at every single thing this guy has done and it's very, very obvious he's a completely abusive shitheel who believes in a very strong hierarchy where big guys shit on little guys and that's *right*.
Every single statement he's made has been to the effect of "I'm sorry you were someone able to crush me, if I'd known that I wouldn't have started with you" and emphatically not "I'm sorry I was being an asshole to my customer, and I'm going to try to do better."
Further, there is evidence that he abused his wife/girlfriend (court documents have been found), that he's lying about some of the things he claims have contributed to his recent bad day (a friend of his died - an excuse he's used several times before), that he's behaved exactly like this in the past, over a course of years.
Even more damning is his response going forward: he's being a dick to everyone, insisting that it's everyone else's fault, and now looking to capitalize on just how huge a dick the entire internet now knows him to be.
The only saving grace here is that unlike many other people who have his same wiring (I'm not saying "sociopath" but yeah, basically "sociopath"), he is a complete fucking moron when it comes to learning how to effectively manipulate people and make them feel good about it.
This guy is clearly a bully, and he displays classic bully obsequiousness when he gets the shit kicked out of him by someone with more power. It's the only language he understands, as has been made ABUNDANTLY obvious by everything that's come out about him.
On the flip side, there's literally zero evidence that he knows how to behave like a normal human being. Nobody is coming forward to defend this guy - except for people who don't know him who feel bad that he's been set upon by the Internetz. He has had no friends speak up, nobody in the industry he supposedly has so many connections in has spoken up, not even to say, "Well, yeah, he was being a dick here but he's not always like that."
There certainly is a concept of controlling the call in customer service, but you cannot honestly tell me that you think this guy was using the term "control" in this way after everything he's said and done.
You've been to the future and you've seen the winner already?
Fuck telling us about the KFC contest, tell us about any upcoming big tragedies so we can save some lives! I guess if things have been pretty calm the winning numbers for all the various state lotteries will work.
I worked for an organization from day 1 and was involved in every project we ever worked on. After several years there, that organization wound up merging with another organization and I decided it was time for me to move on.
It's been almost a year since I left, and every day I get 2-3 emails asking me for information, and as a way for them to not feel embarrassed for asking, they actually created a 1/10th time paid position for me and the job title is, literally, "Institutional Memory."
I go in for a couple of hours every few weeks and do a data dump with one team or another, and they're slowly starting to amass documentation as to what was done and why it was done that way.
At my new job the first thing I did when I came onboard was to set us up with an internal wiki for every single project we have and everyone puts notes on the projects, why they're doing things the way they are, etc. on that. It's a good way to have as much of a paper trail as possible.
"You're not going to be doing those things during working hours once you find that job."
And your thinking is that therefore you shouldn't do those things during working hours when you actually can? I don't mean this in a mean way, but that's depressing as hell. Life is there to be enjoyed - why torture yourself when you have a chance to NOT follow the dictates of work?
"When you've been out of work for over a year and are impoverished as a result, you'd be a fool to turn almost any job down."
And yet, even still, it shouldn't take you 8 hours a day, every day, to find *anything*. Your time would be much better spent panhandling, to be honest, if after a full year of looking for literally ANYTHING you haven't found anything. Or collecting cans, or dumpster diving or SOMETHING that's productive rather than foolishly wasting more than the necessary amount of time each day looking for work.
My point remains: Spending 8 hours a day looking for work is absurd, and suggesting that it is realistic for anyone to actually do is bad and likely to lead to anyone who takes it seriously being ashamed when they fail to live up to it. There are much more productive things to do with your time after you've spent 2-3 hours in an honest job search daily, and you'd be vastly better off mentally and physically doing them.
That's actually horrible, stupid, ridiculous advice and will actually fuck you over completely if you follow it.
There are only so many leads available in your area, only so many job openings you might qualify for. Saying "You should spend 8 hours a day looking for work" is stupid because there may not *be* 8 hours worth of stuff to look through daily. Then people who foolishly try to follow that advice will feel guilty as if they aren't doing enough to find work if they can't figure out how to look for work after the first couple of hours, making an already stressful situation even worse.
I live in Chicago. I'm employed, but when I was out of work for a brief period, I spent maybe 2-3 hours a day looking for positions because that's all it took to exhaust the listings, touch base with places that had indicated an interest, make calls to people I know to say I was in the market, etc. Even before the Internet, it took maybe 4-5 hours - tops - to handle all that kind of stuff.
For much of the rest of the day I spent my time brushing up on rusty skills and learning new ones that might also be useful.
Oh, and also having a life. Doing things to relax, like going for long walks, reading, spending time with friends, teaching my dog tricks, etc. Because, you see, I'm not a slave, I am not my job, my job is just something I have to facilitate a life, not the other way around.
If it takes you 8 hours a day to look for work in this day and age, you're either incredibly unchoosy about where you work (applying to everything in any industry and in any location) or you're just really not very efficient. Neither of those make you sound like a desirable employee.
It's not all skittles and beer running your own shop - there are certainly benefits to it, but there are also down sides.
You have to *work* to get business. You have to compete against possibly dozens or hundreds of other people with similar skills, who will often work for less because they might be hungry, too - I know where I live (Chicago) - you can't spit without finding someone who is an out of work web geek. You will still need to prove your skills to prospective clients - show a portfolio, provide references, etc. You often have to wait 2-3 months to get paid. You have to do all the work AND manage a business AND still go out and get more business so you always have something in the pipe.
I started my own shop for a rather niche market that my weird background has suited me quite well for, and about 90% of the business I get is from word of mouth and prospective clients contacting me but it's STILL a lot of work.
So given the givens, I'd say it's a good idea to keep up the freelancing while also looking for a "real" job and figuring out how to make yourself more attractive to potential employers. The two activities aren't mutually exclusive, just time intensive.
Barack Obama is, more or less, a Goldwater Republican - but the right wing is to batshit crazy that they think he's somewhere left of Karl Marx.
Eric Cantor has stated that his number one goal, and the number one goal of the Republican party, is to make sure that Barack Obama is a one term President. Period.
Not creating jobs. Not getting the economy back on track. Not balancing the budget.
Eric Cantor made that statement and other Republican "leaders" agreed with it.
I'm sorry, but your opinion that Democrats and Republicans are equally extreme is factually incorrect. The Republicans have stated that they are willing to run this country (and the rest of the world) into the ground in order to avoid giving Barack Obama a win.
There are extremists in both parties, I don't disagree. However, the extremists in the Democratic party are by and large fringe groups. With the Republicans they're running the show.
This is not to say the Democrats don't have flaws - god knows they do - but equally extreme? That's pure intellectual dishonesty.
Slavery is alive and well in the US. See the prison system.
Don't believe me? Well, let's look at the facts:
We have over 1,000,000 inmates in US prisons these days. Many are there for non-violent offenses (drug stuff). It's an established fact that black "offenders" are more likely to be convicted, and if convicted given a longer sentence than white "offenders."
We take away their right to vote when they are in prison. We also make it virtually impossible to find a job once you've gotten out of prison.
Many prisons are run by for-profit organizations that pay prisoners pennies an hour (and often make them pay for their own incarceration), but sell their output for millions to billions of dollars annually.
Anyone who imagines that racism or slavery are dead in the US is completely delusional.
Hell, I value the fun discussions with my friends about what kind of crazy things we would do with $100,000,000, the day dreams about winning, and the jolt of adrenaline when checking for a (hah!) winner more than I value a dollar.
For $1 a week I get to have all that and marginally support my local schools. Not many things as fun you can have for under 15 cents a day...
With Vegas, too, it's actually quite easy to come out ahead:
- Go to a casino that gives you a free drink if you put $20 in a machine. Put $20 into a dollar slot, get your free drink, play a single game, cash out and move on to the next casino (or to a different part in that casino). Do it with friends, do it while people watching and it's a good time had for quite a low cost.
- Go to a decent hotel/casino, put a few thousand dollars on deposit, enjoy your "free" suite on the house - nobody says you have to gamble.
Cheap in the way a Grouponer is cheap!
The problem isn't tests like this, but people who are bad parents.
A good parent could, if they even bothered with this kind of testing, use it in concert with their child's natural inclinations and interests to help suggest things the child might have more potential at, or expose them to those things. For a child who is very performance/mastery oriented, being pointed at something they could enjoy AND potentially be great at would be a boon.
A bad parent would use the results of such a test to browbeat their kid into doing things or to attack them for any failure to achieve the best possible results.
I was once a developer and project manager for a consulting firm that serviced a multitude of clients in various for-profit industries. The money was great, the work was occasionally challenging, but at the end of the day I really didn't feel like I was contributing anything worthwhile with my life or accomplishing anything useful. Yay, some software that I was only tangentially involved in creating helped Big Advertising Firm cut costs fractionally by improving their workflow. Whee.
A friend of mine who was working for a not-for-profit asked me if I would be willing to volunteer some time to help one organization get set up with a web presence (it was a domestic violence survivors organization) to help facilitate outreach and fundraising. I did, and they then put me in contact with another NPO that worked with youth kicked out of their home.
Flash forward another couple of years (I went back to school in the meantime and got an advanced degree in something other than CS) and I wound up working for a university as part of a research team that focused on turning social psychology studies into useful interventions and results-based educational programs. My role there was to be a kind of process expert - I would look at research projects that were very man-hour intensive and prone to high rates of error and find ways to automate processes where I could and reduce the possibility of error etc. Took one project that had 10 staff working 50-60 hours/week each down to only needing 4 staff with a much more sensible 35 hours. Reduced the rate of assessments with more than 10 errors from over 75% to under 5%, and the rate of assessments with more than 5 errors from 90% down to 8%. The total costs of the project dropped by more than half, meaning that those funds could be routed to other projects.
Did that for 2 years and now I'm working in the criminal justice system doing something similar for jails and prisons - finding ways to reduce the administrative overhead that mental health professionals have to deal with so they can spend more time working with inmates constructively and less time filling out colossal amounts of paperwork. I also helped design and develop a system for connecting parolees more efficiently with social service NGOs in their neighborhood to help better re-integrate after release and it looks like recidivism has dropped substantially for the first year out - hopefully the longer term results are just as cheery.
I spend maybe 50% of my day programming, 25% in meetings and the rest on a mix of administrative type overhead (mostly helping facilitate projects through the often insane bureaucracy).
Programming makes me *happy* now in a way that it hadn't for years because I'm doing it in aid of something that matters.
The pay isn't the greatest - I make now about 80% or so of what I could make were I doing private sector stuff with my years of experience. The benefits are phenomenal, however - at the university I had *60* paid days off per year, tuition reimbursement, incredible medical benefits and an awesome pension plan. Where I am now I have less vacation (5 weeks/year), but equally amazing pension, medical bennies, and a promotion track that's extremely clear. I also have less bullshit to deal with in a lot of ways - working in a jail or prison environment we usually are more focused on getting the job done than we are on bullshit office politics, though that might be more a function of working with engineers.
So, a girl who with cerebral palsy and who was 16 at the time was whipped by her father - and you think she's a "horrible person" for blackmailing him about it?
For fuck's sake, she was 16 years old then, is 23 now, and was raised in an obviously abusive household while he is a motherfucking federal judge and you think they're *equally bad*? Are you impaired?
The strategy is pretty sound if you make a few assumptions:
- Most manufacturers of components want Apple's business because they know it's *safe* and reasonably profitable
- Most manufacturers of these kinds of components are willing to share with Apple (and their other big customers) what kinds of things are coming down the pipeline in the next 1-2-3 years
- There won't be something that appears out of nowhere that's mindbogglingly amazing and ready to be manufactured without at least some advance notice.
- Apple has enough cash on hand, brand cachet, and momentum that if they were to release something that was "good but not insanely great" they could survive it relatively unscathed (as long as they didn't keep doing that) because people would still buy it.
These assumptions seem pretty reasonable to me. The Apple strategy also protects them against things like the quake + tsunami in Japan, the flooding of Thailand, and other issues that will come up and force competitors to raise prices.
I think the change came about because, back then, you could have a single individual do some really neat (and useful) stuff that would push the limited hardware beyond its limits. You also had nowhere near the number of people working on stuff then as you do now, so it was more possible for something really amazing to stand out rather than get lost in the crowd.
Nowadays it takes a team to design neat and practical stuff that has the potential to come anywhere near the limits of the hardware. For things a single individual or small group could make that would push the limits, like improved search algorithms or whatever, they wouldn't just be "neat tricks" but absolutely ground breaking.
For my money, I think the next area with real wow factor potential is going to be fabrication/3d printing. There are some really neat tricks going on - like printers capable of making most of the components necessary to build a copy of themselves, printers making organ tissue, food, circuits, etc. Some of those are really REALLY neat.
There's a difference between ruthlessly efficient code that squeezes every last drop out of the hardware vs. relatively efficient code that's good enough vs. what the fuck were these people thinking ridonkulously inefficient code that has so much extraneous cruft in it that it that it strains cutting edge hardware for even mundane tasks.
I agree that the ridiculously inefficient code shouldn't be allowed, but I don't think that ruthless efficiency as in the days of old is actually worth it at this point - in the olden days it was cheaper to be super efficient because hardware was expensive, now it isn't.
That said, I think any developer worth their salt should at least be familiar with optimization techniques so that when new platforms with more limited power become available (smaller devices than phones, etc.) they can be efficient. But it's not something that is worth it by and large for the vast majority of uses out there today.
To be honest, I think the reason the tablet and phone markets were "lost" (if they were/are) is NOT because of developers not optimizing, but because there wasn't a focus on the end-user experience.
Sure, reducing bloat will speed things up a little, but it's not just about speed and responsiveness. For example, look at Siri and the response from many in the android community:
"It's just a chat bot with speech recognition and the ability to work with other apps! Android has had all of those things forever!"
Then why weren't these things integrated into something useful for the end user if it's so obvious? Answer: Most android developers simply don't think like an end user or prioritize user experience much, much lower than it should be.
And it happens *repeatedly* - techie types keep forgetting that they're making tools for people to use, and that the people who are users rather than makers of tools don't want the same things makers want.
Bloat has little, if anything, to do with this whole thing.
And I do want to say, Apple does a pretty good job supporting the makers of tools as well - I develop smartphone apps, and my experience developing for iOS (and marketing my apps) has been vastly better than my experience developing for android. Again, it's the user experience - there's tons of support for iOS developers, there's good support for marketing and the business aspect, and even though the approval process can sometimes be bizarre, I will take selling via iTunes over the android marketplace anytime, and so will the vast majority of my paying customers.
Again, bloat isn't the issue. The geek in me wants to see more elegant solutions than "just throw more power at it" but I also know that ultimately that's not super relevant, ESPECIALLY as low power phone hardware is getting more and more powerful and any performance limitations are made less and less relevant.
It's not a matter of losing the ability to optimize, it's a matter of whether the trade-off in programmer time spent optimizing is going to be worth it when we now can easily throw more CPU and memory at a problem.
I think it would be a net reduction in heat into the atmosphere because geothermal energy is already getting out but isn't serving any useful purpose when it does. So, using what gets out for useful purposes and then cutting back on the stuff we use to generate energy already will mean less extra heat pumped into the atmosphere. Secondly, less heat because fewer greenhouse gasses are released in the process of obtaining energy, so less retained heat.
Thirdly, on your whole catastrophic scenario thing - the sun pelts the earth with some ridiculous amount of energy constantly. The human race uses something like 15 terawatts (that's 1.5x10^13 watts) per year. The sun hits us with something like 1.2x10^17 watts per *second*. So, every second, we're absorbing 4 orders of magnitude (roughly) more energy from the sun than we release in a year, and have been doing so for several billion years, and our oceans haven't boiled away yet; therefore it seems logical to assume that being more efficient about energy use would delay or be irrelevant to oceanic boiling.
Mind you, these are just my own guesses based off of not being a complete idiot and having a vague understanding of how things work from my distant high school past, with any numbers used being pulled from my memory or being the easiest ones picked up from a quick googling.
The problem is obesity.
I don't mean dietary obesity, but financial and resource obesity.
What do you call someone who consumes far more food than their body needs? A fat fuck.
What do you call someone who hoards far more resources than they need to take care of themselves for the foreseeable future? A success!
Why do people look at the Buffets, Gates and Forbes of the world differently than they do the massively overweight guy who's stuffing his face with the fourth Whopper of the day?
It takes more effort to be a vegetarian than it does to be an omnivore, both to specifically seek out foods that are vegetarian and also to prepare the meals.
If you can show me a way to be vegetarian while also getting proper nutrition, not requiring more time for shopping, prep and cooking, I'd give it a go. But as it is right now, it seems like a lot more work on something that isn't super important to me (past being reasonably healthy) since for me food is mostly just fuel rather than something I want to spend a large part of my life thinking about.
Actually, I think the power difference between tiers of gear is OK, but what needs tuning is the way the random dungeon grouping handles people with different levels of gear.
For example, right now it is perfectly possible for DPS in mostly 378 gear to be put into a dungon with a tank that has gear barely meeting the level requirements of the dungeon. This leads to a situation where the tank is being screamed at to GO GO GO and they aren't learning anything other than that well geared players are often dicks.
What should happen is groups should be formed based on the gear level of all members. If everyone has roughly similar gear levels in a group it's much more likely everyone will get along - if everyone has ridiculously great gear they will just blast through, no fuss, no muss. If everyone is in fresh 85 quest greens and blues the tank will be under less pressure to pull everything, the healers will be cut some slack, and the dps will hopefully be willing to use their aggro dumps and CC when they can.
The problem isn't the power differential with the gear, it's that geared people want to run with geared people usually so they can go fast, while undergeared people want to learn and run with people who are patient.
The other issue that comes up is that there is a HUGE gulf between people who run with PUGs and people who are in decent guilds.
In my guild, people are incredibly patient with people who are learning their role and class and gearing up. When someone gets a healer or tank to 85, we form groups specifically to go through each of the dungeons to explain the fights and what each role ought to be focusing on at that point. DPS is usually a bit different - the class leader for that class will spend an hour or so helping new DPS figure out a solid rotation, go over their extra abilities (CC, interrupts, decurses, etc). When I hit 85 on my paladin, I got several crafted items given to me and they quickly helped me get up to speed for heroics and troll dungeons prior to raiding.
With pugs, though, you essentially have people screaming at everyone for any mistake (real or imagined), hurling abuse for no reason other than to do it, and constantly insisting that everyone just GO GO GO despite not everyone knowing what they're supposed to do of knowing about gimmicks in the fights. Plus you have people abusing the system - if they're a hybrid class that can tank, even if they aren't geared or spec to tank, they will sign in as a tank just to get a faster queue. It's just totally toxic.
There is no universe in which Starbucks, the coffee of choice for soccer moms and middle-aged former yuppies, makes anyone look cool, or in which anyone actually imagines that starbucks makes them look cool.
The reason sbux succeeds despite having mediocre coffee is roughly the same as the reason mcdonalds succeeds: they're "good enough," "quick enough," "convenient enough" and "consistent enough."
Maybe when sbux first began showing up there was some small amount of cachet, but they're just another brand right now.
A much, much better example of marketing that succeeded at making doofuses feel cool would be American Apparel. The clothing that company offered was fantastically ugly, looked good on no one, and was ridiculously expensive. Yet the marketing played it up as so cool it doesn't even know it's cool/only for the super-sexy people, and a certain segment bought into it hardcore.