In this and many other topics, people have become way too bi-partisan to be taken seriously. Either you're in one camp, or the opposite.
But truth be told, in most cases where there are two diametrically opposed camps, they are both full of shit.
What do Zuckerberg and Gates and other drop-outs know about education? Did they study it? Do they have teaching experience? Why do we assume that rich people know something about the world? The only skill we know they have is getting rich.
But likewise, there certainly is more that can be done about education. The success of Khan Academy shows that a different approach is possible and can be successful. Teachers are actually among those looking for better ways to teach all the time. But they suffer from both beaurocratic quagmire and the usual academic delay in everything (i.e. the teachers now were trained on average two decades ago. The current state of the art is taught in universities today, and will enter the schools in a few years, and in about a decade the first teachers from that cohort will be in positions to make decisions).
We can improve education. But not everything needs to be "disrupted" just because disruption is a successful Silicon Valley business model (and only if you ignore the many, many failed startups that didn't disrupt anything except themselves).
I was playing those games in the 80s and 90s, and enjoyed them a lot.
Today, I probably wouldn't. Because gaming has evolved and I have grown up. I don't think being hard for the sake of being hard is a virtue.
But what I do enjoy are games that are not holding your hand. I like open world games for exactly this reason. I like games that don't spoon-feed you the story, but at the same time are forgiving to mistakes. At the moment I'm playing Subnautica and it doesn't even have an in-game map - but if you die, you respawn back at your base with minimal losses. Many other games have evolved to be like that - instead of forcing you to save the game every 30 seconds, they let you die without punishing you too harshly.
I'm also a big fan of Nethack, with its one-life-that's-it system.
It all depends on the game and what it tries to accomplish. The problem with Nintendo-era jump-n-run games, for example, was that they forced you to replay the same part of the game a hundred times just because at the end of the sequence you failed that one jump again and again. A better game would start you closer and closer to the point where you fail the more often you need to replay, so it becomes less tedious and you can focus on the part that actually challenges you.
I'm also not a fan of adaptive difficulty. Who the fuck came up with that? I used to play Doom and its successors on the hardest difficulty initially, then after dying a lot start a game with medium difficulty, and the skills I learnt at hard made it really enjoyable. In the first Eldar Scrolls games or LOTRO etc. I very much enjoyed working my way up and then being able to beat enemies that used to be difficult to a pulp with a grin, and that was satisfying. Then with Skyrim they added adaptive difficulty and all enemies were tough but not too tough. No more satisfaction of taking down an overwhelming enemy through cunning and luck, and no more satisfaction of beating a low-level one to a pulp.
A lot of things are better in games today than they used to be, and a lot of things went downhill. And sometimes a game comes along that cherry-picks the right choices from both sets and that is when everything just works and creates a masterpiece.
There were a couple surprises that I didn't expect much from but that turned out to be special.
Movies:
"The Shape of Water" - was something I had no expectations for and it surprised me with its beauty. The story is well done, the characters are relateable and very well played, and the sheer beauty of both visuals and audio is breathtaking.
"Dealt" - is a documentary, it's ok done, but if you don't know already about Richard Turner, watch this to get a glimpse into what the guy can do and that is just amazing.
"Johnny English Strikes Again" - didn't expect much as I find Mr. Bean sometimes funny but mostly... well... not a fan. But the movie actually had me laughing throughout. And since it never tries to be anything but a funny movie, that's a full 100% mission accomplished.
The MCU - I like the movies. They aren't groundbreaking and nobody will talk about them in 20 years, but they are solid popcorn cinema. If you just want to relax and enjoy some entertainment, they deliver. I usually pick them for evenings where I want to make sure I'm not disappointed by watching something that might turn out great, but may also be a waste of time. You know what you get with the Marvel movies.
Books:
"Three Body Problem" - all three books of the trilogie was just mindblowing. Absolutely astonishing SciFi. I'm reading it for the 2nd time now, and that's a huge compliment as I very rarely read books again. I've become disappointed with SciFi recently, especially due to what happened to SciFi in the movies, but this is visionary SciFi with the same level of not-being-afraid-of-big-events that Game of Thrones exhibits, and so many fantastically crafted twists that once you see them and recover from the surprise, everything clicks and you see how all the small hints you missed come together. Wonderful writing, and that's the translation. I can only imagine how much better the (chinese) original must be.
Thanks for the analysis. This is exactly what I wondered about. Sad that commentators on/. need to point these things out, such things should be part of the articles about the study.
Nobody. There will be no such employees. Registrars will simply take down any domain that gets a request against it, after the one doing it fills a form that he is really sure that the domain is doing something bad.
That, exactly, is the problem with these rulings. They ignore how the result will be applied in the real world.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just take the stairs if you're in a hurry? Maybe it's different in Japan or there are a few locations where this doesn't hold true, but I'm assuming that there's a perfectly good set of stairs that can be used instead of escalators.
That assumption is the problem. I usually take the stairs (faster plus excercise) but especially in deep subway systems there very often aren't open stairs available. For example, St. Petersburg (Russia) has a deep subway system, and rarely are there open stairs. The typical exit looks like this: http://www.saint-petersburg.co...
I don't remember Tokyo, it's been over 10 years. But their subway system was excellent back then and very well thought out. And japanese people are very disciplined on public transport, so if this can work anywhere, it's there.
Hell yes, friends of friends - but still not "random people". Acquaintances, distant friends, whatever. Again, I don't know about your social circles, but my friends of friends I might not trust with my car, but I'd be surprised if they pulled a fast one on me over something like that. What did he pay them? $50 maybe?
No, you completely misunderstood the anecdote. If you were right, that slave-wage-paying CEO would've never thought he can get away with it, he wouldn't have tried. The fact that he is surprised about not being able to get qualified workers for a ridiculous salary is the point of the story. He should have the idea of paying a proper salary by himself, but he didn't. Because the job market does not work. Too many jobs pay pathetic salaries but people are still forced to take them because the alternative is worse.
The guy just happens to be looking in a field where there happen to be more jobs than qualified people, so for once the strategy doesn't work.
He didn't pay random people, he paid friends. I don't know about your friends, but I generally trust mine to not pull a fast one on me over some change.
Workers already reduce their effective work time to around this level.
They just don't do it by going home early. They do it by standing around the water cooler, by long bathroom breaks, smoking breaks, watching Netflix at their desk, by having unproductive meetings, or by padding the serious work with bullshit work.
The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.
This. There was a private conversion between CEOs recently in my area, told to me by my boss who was there. One guy complained loudly about not being able to find trained workers. Another CEO calmly corrected him saying that he would have no trouble at all finding them if he paid them proper salaries.
The brilliance of UBI is in this one thing: It removes fear of survival as a factor in wage negotiations. It allows people to walk away from jobs that are in the "are you kidding me?" category.
I actually did this years ago, and it was a dramatic improvement for me, both personally and professionally. I could afford to give up the pay and needed more time for my personal life, so it was an easy decision to make, and I would do it again if I could (right now I can't, but I'm hoping for another opportunity in the future).
People dramatically overestimate the amount of work being done in the hours beyond employees "want to be here" time. Fridays especially are days in which very little gets done in many companies. When I was working 4 days a week, I got maybe 90-95% of the work of a full work-week done, not 80% as you'd expect. And I did that feeling much more relaxed, not more hurried. And I could do a lot more on weekends. And I had more time to relax whenever weekends weren't perfect. You know, sometimes shit happens on a weekend, and it ruins your whole weekend. With 3 days instead of 2, there's always at least one day left you can enjoy.
My personal experience says that a 32-hour week is vastly superior to a 40-hour week in all respects. Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society, and everybody would profit. Employees would get more money per hour, companies would get more work done per currency unit, everyone would be less stressed, stress is a major health factor, so healthcare costs would drop - I see not one reason why we aren't doing it. Well, stupidity, like most things in the world today, but aside from that?
What we seem to have lost in this age is the ability of differentiated, graded responses. Everyone is either "omg, my hero!" or "that fraud, he's so evil!". There is no inbetween. Not in politics, not in economics and not in YouTubers.
It's a really sad situation, really. These people desperately need help, but they would refuse any help offered, and turn it around along the lines of "don't be patronizing to me!" or - a new favorite - a gross misuse of the word "mansplaining".
Sometimes, you just want to have a good friend who is a shrink and wordlessly leave his business card.
What saddens me the most, however, is how this constant barrage of oversensitive bullshit helps to bury real issues. I regularily say this in discussions about "rape culture" - when you start to call people looking at you the wrong way "rape", then you discredit and diminish the term that should be reserved for a serious an traumatizing crime.
Is there really no middle ground between "don't be a sexist asshat" and "everyone must wear a burka"?
Not if you try to solve the problem with hard rules.
We've had this with the definition of "porn" at the level of the highest court, and the best they could come up with was "I'll know it when I see it". The same is true here.
because walking around naked in public is already illegal in most place
And I sometimes wonder why, but that's a different discussion. Yes, we live in a society still suffering from abrahemic self-hate and denial of the physical, but where you have rules, you will find that they are soft rules in context and interpreted.
There are words you shouldn't say on TV, but those are soft rules. Profanity filters in online games are an attempt to turn them into hard rules and they are a spectacular failure, with both false positives and easy circumvention.
Under no circumstances should they be engaged in a way that causes you to waste time thinking on their behalf. That is allowing yourself to succumb to their form of psychological abuse.
They will also frustrate you more by simply refusing every alternative you offer until you snap. Then they use that to a) claim that it proves they were right, b) attack your character and c) feel themselves superior to you.
It's not ok to show a woman in underwear if you try to sell a chair (and the scantily clad woman is just decoration / an object to draw attention to the ad)
But it works. And because it works, you have just created a rule with a strong incentive to work around it. So she will show a bit less skin, but still be sexy. Then you forbid that... at the end, you end up with the Burka because you're scared of women.
As soon as it is someones job/duty/responsibility, only a tiny, tiny fraction of them has the maturity to one day stand up and say "job is done, everything that needed to be fixed has been fixed, please fire me".
There's also an echo-chamber problem. When you deal with subject X the whole day, then things that are only remotely related appear to you to be more closely related than they are to outsiders.
Some, not all. The famous Standard Oil or AT&T were both split up by government intervention, not by market forces.
Also while true that perhaps switching to a new product becomes too expensive, you must also consider that new clients don't have this problem, so if a better product comes along it might win the marked when enough old peoples die off.
The cost of not being on Facebook, even for a new user, is much higher than zero.
That ignores the fact that railways don't get you everywhere, but cars do.
I moved cities two years ago, and was practically forced to change my commute from train to car. My previous location of both house and workplace enabled me to commute by train easily and I enjoyed it. Read books on the train, half an hour, it was very nice. New location, train is still nearby, but workplace isn't near any train station. It would take me 90 minutes to go by one train, then another train, then a bus. Even in the worst traffic, I'm door-to-door in those 90 minutes, and on typical days in about half that.
But if I could enter a tunnel at the edge of the city, and exit it somewhere near my workplace to drive the last few miles - sign me up.
That is the idea. To combine the advantages of personal cars and public underground.
EIGHT VEHICLES PER SECOND
That means moving at 120 km/h with half a metre between cars. Technically possible, but challenging (autonomous driving, of course, not manual). But if you go double-track, that's more than a car's length between cars. Not much unlike a crowded highway, minus all the lane changes and all that. Possible.
Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers. Catch even half of the plastic from those rivers, and you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
I'm not saying the system is flawless. I said it is ironical. Yes, the system is being abused and massively. But in addition to large corporations, there are quite a few IPs which are still in the hands of their authors or their heirs. Tolkien, Heinlein, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
In this and many other topics, people have become way too bi-partisan to be taken seriously. Either you're in one camp, or the opposite.
But truth be told, in most cases where there are two diametrically opposed camps, they are both full of shit.
What do Zuckerberg and Gates and other drop-outs know about education? Did they study it? Do they have teaching experience? Why do we assume that rich people know something about the world? The only skill we know they have is getting rich.
But likewise, there certainly is more that can be done about education. The success of Khan Academy shows that a different approach is possible and can be successful. Teachers are actually among those looking for better ways to teach all the time. But they suffer from both beaurocratic quagmire and the usual academic delay in everything (i.e. the teachers now were trained on average two decades ago. The current state of the art is taught in universities today, and will enter the schools in a few years, and in about a decade the first teachers from that cohort will be in positions to make decisions).
We can improve education. But not everything needs to be "disrupted" just because disruption is a successful Silicon Valley business model (and only if you ignore the many, many failed startups that didn't disrupt anything except themselves).
I was playing those games in the 80s and 90s, and enjoyed them a lot.
Today, I probably wouldn't. Because gaming has evolved and I have grown up. I don't think being hard for the sake of being hard is a virtue.
But what I do enjoy are games that are not holding your hand. I like open world games for exactly this reason. I like games that don't spoon-feed you the story, but at the same time are forgiving to mistakes. At the moment I'm playing Subnautica and it doesn't even have an in-game map - but if you die, you respawn back at your base with minimal losses. Many other games have evolved to be like that - instead of forcing you to save the game every 30 seconds, they let you die without punishing you too harshly.
I'm also a big fan of Nethack, with its one-life-that's-it system.
It all depends on the game and what it tries to accomplish. The problem with Nintendo-era jump-n-run games, for example, was that they forced you to replay the same part of the game a hundred times just because at the end of the sequence you failed that one jump again and again. A better game would start you closer and closer to the point where you fail the more often you need to replay, so it becomes less tedious and you can focus on the part that actually challenges you.
I'm also not a fan of adaptive difficulty. Who the fuck came up with that? I used to play Doom and its successors on the hardest difficulty initially, then after dying a lot start a game with medium difficulty, and the skills I learnt at hard made it really enjoyable. In the first Eldar Scrolls games or LOTRO etc. I very much enjoyed working my way up and then being able to beat enemies that used to be difficult to a pulp with a grin, and that was satisfying. Then with Skyrim they added adaptive difficulty and all enemies were tough but not too tough. No more satisfaction of taking down an overwhelming enemy through cunning and luck, and no more satisfaction of beating a low-level one to a pulp.
A lot of things are better in games today than they used to be, and a lot of things went downhill. And sometimes a game comes along that cherry-picks the right choices from both sets and that is when everything just works and creates a masterpiece.
I didn't even notice any media on it, and I don't care.
I liked it. You didn't. That's ok, but the topic explicitly asked for personal opinions and that was and still is mine.
There were a couple surprises that I didn't expect much from but that turned out to be special.
Movies:
"The Shape of Water" - was something I had no expectations for and it surprised me with its beauty. The story is well done, the characters are relateable and very well played, and the sheer beauty of both visuals and audio is breathtaking.
"Dealt" - is a documentary, it's ok done, but if you don't know already about Richard Turner, watch this to get a glimpse into what the guy can do and that is just amazing.
"Johnny English Strikes Again" - didn't expect much as I find Mr. Bean sometimes funny but mostly... well... not a fan. But the movie actually had me laughing throughout. And since it never tries to be anything but a funny movie, that's a full 100% mission accomplished.
The MCU - I like the movies. They aren't groundbreaking and nobody will talk about them in 20 years, but they are solid popcorn cinema. If you just want to relax and enjoy some entertainment, they deliver. I usually pick them for evenings where I want to make sure I'm not disappointed by watching something that might turn out great, but may also be a waste of time. You know what you get with the Marvel movies.
Books:
"Three Body Problem" - all three books of the trilogie was just mindblowing. Absolutely astonishing SciFi. I'm reading it for the 2nd time now, and that's a huge compliment as I very rarely read books again. I've become disappointed with SciFi recently, especially due to what happened to SciFi in the movies, but this is visionary SciFi with the same level of not-being-afraid-of-big-events that Game of Thrones exhibits, and so many fantastically crafted twists that once you see them and recover from the surprise, everything clicks and you see how all the small hints you missed come together. Wonderful writing, and that's the translation. I can only imagine how much better the (chinese) original must be.
Thanks for the analysis. This is exactly what I wondered about. Sad that commentators on /. need to point these things out, such things should be part of the articles about the study.
Nobody. There will be no such employees. Registrars will simply take down any domain that gets a request against it, after the one doing it fills a form that he is really sure that the domain is doing something bad.
That, exactly, is the problem with these rulings. They ignore how the result will be applied in the real world.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just take the stairs if you're in a hurry? Maybe it's different in Japan or there are a few locations where this doesn't hold true, but I'm assuming that there's a perfectly good set of stairs that can be used instead of escalators.
That assumption is the problem. I usually take the stairs (faster plus excercise) but especially in deep subway systems there very often aren't open stairs available. For example, St. Petersburg (Russia) has a deep subway system, and rarely are there open stairs. The typical exit looks like this: http://www.saint-petersburg.co...
I don't remember Tokyo, it's been over 10 years. But their subway system was excellent back then and very well thought out. And japanese people are very disciplined on public transport, so if this can work anywhere, it's there.
Hell yes, friends of friends - but still not "random people". Acquaintances, distant friends, whatever. Again, I don't know about your social circles, but my friends of friends I might not trust with my car, but I'd be surprised if they pulled a fast one on me over something like that. What did he pay them? $50 maybe?
No, you completely misunderstood the anecdote. If you were right, that slave-wage-paying CEO would've never thought he can get away with it, he wouldn't have tried. The fact that he is surprised about not being able to get qualified workers for a ridiculous salary is the point of the story. He should have the idea of paying a proper salary by himself, but he didn't. Because the job market does not work. Too many jobs pay pathetic salaries but people are still forced to take them because the alternative is worse.
The guy just happens to be looking in a field where there happen to be more jobs than qualified people, so for once the strategy doesn't work.
He didn't pay random people, he paid friends. I don't know about your friends, but I generally trust mine to not pull a fast one on me over some change.
Workers already reduce their effective work time to around this level.
They just don't do it by going home early. They do it by standing around the water cooler, by long bathroom breaks, smoking breaks, watching Netflix at their desk, by having unproductive meetings, or by padding the serious work with bullshit work.
The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.
This. There was a private conversion between CEOs recently in my area, told to me by my boss who was there. One guy complained loudly about not being able to find trained workers. Another CEO calmly corrected him saying that he would have no trouble at all finding them if he paid them proper salaries.
The brilliance of UBI is in this one thing: It removes fear of survival as a factor in wage negotiations. It allows people to walk away from jobs that are in the "are you kidding me?" category.
I actually did this years ago, and it was a dramatic improvement for me, both personally and professionally. I could afford to give up the pay and needed more time for my personal life, so it was an easy decision to make, and I would do it again if I could (right now I can't, but I'm hoping for another opportunity in the future).
People dramatically overestimate the amount of work being done in the hours beyond employees "want to be here" time. Fridays especially are days in which very little gets done in many companies. When I was working 4 days a week, I got maybe 90-95% of the work of a full work-week done, not 80% as you'd expect. And I did that feeling much more relaxed, not more hurried. And I could do a lot more on weekends. And I had more time to relax whenever weekends weren't perfect. You know, sometimes shit happens on a weekend, and it ruins your whole weekend. With 3 days instead of 2, there's always at least one day left you can enjoy.
My personal experience says that a 32-hour week is vastly superior to a 40-hour week in all respects. Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society, and everybody would profit. Employees would get more money per hour, companies would get more work done per currency unit, everyone would be less stressed, stress is a major health factor, so healthcare costs would drop - I see not one reason why we aren't doing it. Well, stupidity, like most things in the world today, but aside from that?
Don't have mod points today, but mod parent up.
What we seem to have lost in this age is the ability of differentiated, graded responses. Everyone is either "omg, my hero!" or "that fraud, he's so evil!". There is no inbetween. Not in politics, not in economics and not in YouTubers.
It's a really sad situation, really. These people desperately need help, but they would refuse any help offered, and turn it around along the lines of "don't be patronizing to me!" or - a new favorite - a gross misuse of the word "mansplaining".
Sometimes, you just want to have a good friend who is a shrink and wordlessly leave his business card.
What saddens me the most, however, is how this constant barrage of oversensitive bullshit helps to bury real issues. I regularily say this in discussions about "rape culture" - when you start to call people looking at you the wrong way "rape", then you discredit and diminish the term that should be reserved for a serious an traumatizing crime.
Is there really no middle ground between "don't be a sexist asshat" and "everyone must wear a burka"?
Not if you try to solve the problem with hard rules.
We've had this with the definition of "porn" at the level of the highest court, and the best they could come up with was "I'll know it when I see it". The same is true here.
because walking around naked in public is already illegal in most place
And I sometimes wonder why, but that's a different discussion. Yes, we live in a society still suffering from abrahemic self-hate and denial of the physical, but where you have rules, you will find that they are soft rules in context and interpreted.
There are words you shouldn't say on TV, but those are soft rules. Profanity filters in online games are an attempt to turn them into hard rules and they are a spectacular failure, with both false positives and easy circumvention.
Under no circumstances should they be engaged in a way that causes you to waste time thinking on their behalf. That is allowing yourself to succumb to their form of psychological abuse.
They will also frustrate you more by simply refusing every alternative you offer until you snap. Then they use that to a) claim that it proves they were right, b) attack your character and c) feel themselves superior to you.
It's not ok to show a woman in underwear if you try to sell a chair
(and the scantily clad woman is just decoration / an object to draw
attention to the ad)
But it works. And because it works, you have just created a rule with a strong incentive to work around it. So she will show a bit less skin, but still be sexy. Then you forbid that... at the end, you end up with the Burka because you're scared of women.
One thing at a time... one thing at a time...
This is the core problem.
As soon as it is someones job/duty/responsibility, only a tiny, tiny fraction of them has the maturity to one day stand up and say "job is done, everything that needed to be fixed has been fixed, please fire me".
There's also an echo-chamber problem. When you deal with subject X the whole day, then things that are only remotely related appear to you to be more closely related than they are to outsiders.
I stand corrected. Interesting article.
monopolies tend to go away after a few years
Some, not all. The famous Standard Oil or AT&T were both split up by government intervention, not by market forces.
Also while true that perhaps switching to a new product becomes too expensive, you must also consider that new clients don't have this problem, so if a better product comes along it might win the marked when enough old peoples die off.
The cost of not being on Facebook, even for a new user, is much higher than zero.
That ignores the fact that railways don't get you everywhere, but cars do.
I moved cities two years ago, and was practically forced to change my commute from train to car. My previous location of both house and workplace enabled me to commute by train easily and I enjoyed it. Read books on the train, half an hour, it was very nice. New location, train is still nearby, but workplace isn't near any train station. It would take me 90 minutes to go by one train, then another train, then a bus. Even in the worst traffic, I'm door-to-door in those 90 minutes, and on typical days in about half that.
But if I could enter a tunnel at the edge of the city, and exit it somewhere near my workplace to drive the last few miles - sign me up.
That is the idea. To combine the advantages of personal cars and public underground.
EIGHT VEHICLES PER SECOND
That means moving at 120 km/h with half a metre between cars. Technically possible, but challenging (autonomous driving, of course, not manual). But if you go double-track, that's more than a car's length between cars. Not much unlike a crowded highway, minus all the lane changes and all that. Possible.
Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers. Catch even half of the plastic from those rivers, and you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
I'm not saying the system is flawless. I said it is ironical. Yes, the system is being abused and massively. But in addition to large corporations, there are quite a few IPs which are still in the hands of their authors or their heirs. Tolkien, Heinlein, etc.
We need to fix the system. But not abandon it.