People often forget to weight performance against programmer productivity.
That's exactly when you want to use a library, framework, etc.
Personally, I've become a fan of Doctrine 2, which does all the nice object-orientation and other stuff and I still have a SQL database behind it all with its power and performance. Not to mention the crazy stuff you can do with good queries.
SQL is 40 years old. In that time, dozens of programming languages, patterns and styles have come and gone. And SQL is still here, exactly because it doesn't care if your language is OO, functional, redundant, brainfuck or agile deployment for optimized synergies with next generation engagement framework whatever.
A database needs to concern itself with the data, not with the programming patterns of the application.
Every hype ever has always followed the same pattern. First it is the second coming of christ (or, for hypes prior to 0 AD, the first). Then, it is the solution to all your problems and everyone uses it for everything. You can't get venture capital, employment or a marriage without it. After a while, people realize that for some strange reason, sliced bread is really cool, but it isn't really the best armour and the roof is always leaking and the wheels could really be more round. Every stone table / bard / newspaper / Twitter / microtelepathy chip then sings the song of crash and burn, while some tech geeks silently figure out just what it is really good for and what not. In the end, we get sliced bread for breakfast and the rest of our lives goes back to what it used to before.
If your application is really, really simple and you need truly massive amounts of throughput, then NoSQL is no doubt the way to go.
Somewhere between 1% and 10% of the shops doing NoSQL really fall into that category. Maybe as many again might, with enough growth.
Many years ago, long before NoSQL was a thing, I was the sysadmin of one of the largest e-commerce operations in my country. We had enough users and data and throughput that a big consulting company that was tasked with developing the next-gen system for us proposed that we buy not one, but two Sun E10k. At that time, pretty much the biggest commercial machine money could buy. The current system ran on six quad-core Dell servers. Because we had optimized the living daylights out of it, with custom shared memory kernel modules for data exchange, a highly customized database installation (we were Europe's largest installation of this system, so we had pretty much every vendor support we could wish for) and, most importantly, an exceptionally well-crafted design and implementation.
You can throw NoSQL at your problem for maximum scalability. But everything in this world comes with a prize tag. You sacrifice all the advantages of SQL. As I said: The use of NoSQL very often means moving problems that a good SQL database solves for you into code. So it means more code with more potential bugs, all in order to re-invent the wheel because you think you can make it more round.:-)
But again: For a few percentage of cases, it is the right way to go, I am not saying it's all nonsense. Just saying it's a hype and it'll calm down.
As a big fan of SQL database, I've been watching this NoSQL hype for a few years now, and I'm still not impressed.
No doubt, there are a few scenarios where a conventional database isn't the best solution. But quite honestly, 90% of the people jumping on the bandwaggon would be served just as well with an SQL database - except that like so many things, you need to do it right.
I'm no database expert (but I know a couple), so my SQL isn't perfectly optimized and stuff, but even with a little bit of interest I see that putting some effort into your database and query design pays off massively.
And I've seen enough cases where someone scraped their SQL database and went NoSQL for absolutely no good reason. You think you're huge and SQL is too slow? Unless you just sold to FB or Google for a couple billions, you very likely are not as huge as you think. I'm running a PostGIS database doing fairly complex geography calculations on non-trivial datasets, and it's blazing fast, and whenever it isn't one hour with an SQL expert and some experimenting makes it so, because it always, with no exception, turns out that my SQL or my database design is at fault, not the database itself.
If you've got a billion users, I will grant you that you have special needs. But every NoSQL use I have seen has been a case of people moving database work to software code instead, mostly because programmers are plenty and cheap, while experienced database experts are not.
So I'm still amused and very little impressed, and I'm certain NoSQL will go the way of Java or every other hype ever - for a while it's everyone's darling, then people realize it still doesn't give us AI and it can't make coffee, and will start to figure out where it actually is the best solution and stop using it for everything else.
still found 100,000 incidents per year. That says a lot.
Indeed it is, and much more than I had expected.
It's very difficult to compare across countries
That is true. However, since cultural and data differences between western countries are not that massive, we can exclude gun ownership as a dramatic factor. Maybe it makes a difference, maybe not, but if it does, the difference is smaller than whatever effect those other factors have.
The topic is certainly complex and doesn't yield to easy answers, else we would have much more agreement between different POVs.
USA: 5.22 per 100,000 nearest western country: Liechtenstein (2.81) - it's so tiny that it could be a statistical fluke, with 40k people, that 2.81 per 100,000 is one homicide. so nearest realistic western countries: Finland (2.49), then Scotland (2.16) and every other western country is below 2.0
More than twice the homicide rate of other western countries. If that's a cultural thing, I don't like your culture.:-)
fun fact: Afghanistan less fewer homicides (3.44 per 100,000)
But of course, you are right, it is difficult to compare. Could be due to race issues (most murder victims are young black, murdered by other young black, if I recall correctly) - but France also has a considerable population of young, poor black people living in low-income urban sprawls.
It is tricky. Especially because change is tricky. In my country, strict gun control works, because it means guns are really hard to come by, and have been for decades, even if you don't care if it's legal or not. In the US, if you guys introduced strict gun control tomorrow, then all the criminals would have guns and the honest people wouldn't.
being armed is actually a strong psychological counterweight to anger and violence.
That's true. I've held and fired a couple different guns in my life, and knowing you hold a deadly weapon in your hand does make you more alert.
But that is you and me. Psychological effects are by their nature subjective.
The Russian public has bought into Putin's nationalist rhetoric.
And you think they are the only ones being manipulated?
Back at a certain time during the Cold War, the government was afraid that the maniac in charge of the other side would launch WW3 for no reason but being an idiot and wanting to appear all macho in internal politics. The government of the USSR. The madman in question was called Reagan.
Both sides here are telling their story, from their perspective. In the west it may be easier to find dissenting media, but to be honest, the mainstream media is largely telling the same story and does precious little investigation or fact-checking.
If you want to get a different perspective, it is really easy: Hop on Skype and talk to a few russians. Don't trust the media.
But it is not a binary thing. You're not an irresponsible asshole until your 25th birthday and then you wake up and are a responsible adult.
At age 16, you can be expected to understand that your "fun" is causing misery to other people. At 16, you can understand that you're not alone on the planet and that you're part of a society.
Maybe your understanding is not as refined as that of an adult, maybe you do shit that you'll laugh about ten years later, but you are old enough to understand basic concepts of responsibility and consequences and that if you fuck up other people, they'll come over and kick your ass.
Maybe you cannot weigh consequences properly yet, but you are not alien to the concept of consequences anymore. At 6 you can claim that, but not at 16.
I found a few. I admit I did underestimate the number, though let's not forget that "he pulled a gun and the robber ran away" does not mean the robbery would've happened otherwise. If guns were such a dramatic factor in decreasing crime, then other countries with stricter gun laws should have higher crime rates, right? But they don't.
But there are many irresponsible gun owners, and they're the problem. If they would only endanger themselves, I wouldn't mind. Heck, I'm all for idiots removing themselves from the gene pool. But like drunk drivers, irresponsible gun owners are dangerous to others.
So, if you were to come across data that says otherwise, you'd be intellectually honest enough to change your mind?
Certainly.
From your statistics, there's about 1200 accidental deaths caused by firearms in the US. The self-defense instances are more tricky. Most of the pro-gun sites seem to be using numbers from the 90s, when crime was considerably higher than today. And let's also not forget that the use of a firearm in self-defense does not automatically mean a crime was prevented that would have otherwise happened, because people without guns also prevent crimes. It is even more difficult to find out how many crimes were prevented, but that's the number that matters.
IMHO the best approach to get away from speculations is to look at other countries. Preferably western countries similar to the US. Unsurprisingly, the USA is not dramatically different from european countries when it comes to crime rate, income and other key factors.
I'm too lazy to look for 20 sources, this here has a sortable list which the other 4 I looked up didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For gun deaths, both intentional and accidental, the US does not compare favourable to comparable nations, but resembles countries like Uruguay, South Africa and Venezuela.
Unless you live under the delusion that all of Europe lives in slavery, the causal link between freedom, security, self-defense against crime, etc. and gun ownership is doubtful. Many countries manage to have the same or lower crime rates without paying the same price.
That said, I admit I underestimated the number of actual self-defense instances.
I believe that the brave, armed citizen preventing a crime is a rare event. It's an urban legend, on that the gun lobby always brings up in the same way that the lottery shows you the lucky winner and forgets to mention that millions of other people lost. They need the winner to continue what's essentially a scam.
It's not an event that never happens, I'm sure there are some cases. But I'm fairly certain more people die in accidents involving guns then there are crimes prevented by armed citizens.
I can't point to a statistic showing it nicely, it's what I believe based on numerous statistics I've seen over the years.
And remember one thing: Criminals are criminals BECAUSE THEY DON'T FOLLOW THE LAWS ALREADY.
This is not about criminals.
It's about your kid son finding the gun you thought you had hidden so well he'd never find it (kids are damn good in finding things they're not supposed to find) and not understanding how dangerous it is until a familiar bang sound notifies you that you need to call your wife and get going on producing a new heir to the family fortune.
The equivalent, seemingly small glitch in a smart gun could be the difference between life and death
Because no small glitch has ever happened in the opposite direction, causing a weapon to fire where you didn't want it to. Oh, wait, that happens thousands of times a year.
Like all things security, in the end the math is simple. X people die if we do A, Y people die if we do B. If A > B we should pick Y, if B > A we should pick X.
But security is highly emotional. That's why people took the car instead of the plane after 9/11 and as a result, more people died in the additional traffic than had died in the WTC. When Joe Redneck could (maybe, theoretically) saved his family from (potential, alleged) deadly danger, but then the safety feature malfunctioned - that's a nightmare and we get emotional. That the same safety feature prevented ten times the number of accidental deaths is a statistical number that we don't get emotional about.
Many scientists believe that we already are in the middle of a mass extinction event. For the past 50 or so years, the rate at which species go extinct has been 100-1000 times the natural rate.
When we think of "extinction events", we picture a meteor hitting earth and everything dying. But that's not how these things work. They are "events" only on a geological time-scale. All of the mass-extinction events actually took thousands upon thousands of years, and sometimes millions.
Lying while holding office should be a crime. Look at this clown:
teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming'
Yeah, it's only 97% of the scientists in the field that hold this view, and of the remaining 3% most are in doubt of details or conclusions, the number of real scientists who think that there is no such thing as global warming or that humans have nothing to do with it can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
If we want to improve our politics, the first thing we need to do is get rid of the crooks. There are enough idiots and misguided well-meaning fools in politics, we can't afford to have lying bastards in office.
And here I was thinking that the usage of the word "evolved" in the sentence immediately following (but conveniently left out in the choice quote) would make it clear that "is not designed" is used as a figure of speech.
there are some people that need significantly less downtime, even a few that need none whatsoever.
There is no human being on this planet that needs zero downtime when doing any kind of job that involves more than physical presence for an extended amount of time.
Keep in mind they're very, very productive.
Really? The "very, very productive" people in every company I have ever visited were just creating a very good illusion of being busy. busy != productive. The really productive people are quite often the ones where everyone is wondering wtf they are doing all day. Maybe you were never lucky enough to work in a good environment, but I have. I've worked with people that I rarely saw doing anything, but that always had every task finished on time. They had plenty of downtime, because they could manage time and priorities and the fact that downtime is essential to extreme performances is really not a secret. It actually works the same for both muscles and brains - recovery time is an essential part of the process.
It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc.
In the corporate world, even though few talk about it, it is basically the same. Most of the work assigned to the average office worker is non-essential in the sense that it can be done today, tomorrow or next week. In addition, a good work environment also encourages regular breaks, talk with co-workers and other "non-work" activities.
This has two positive effects that the min/maxer efficiency fanatics consistently ignore: First, burst capacity is available from non-idle employees, because whatever they are doing at the moment can be dropped with no or little harm done. Second, a lot of information flows inside companies along non-official channels, from employee to employee around the coffee machine, etc. Allowing these activities creates a thicker mesh of information flows.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
Exactly. If you make people busy 100% of the time, they will perform at a lower efficiency, and the total productivity is very likely to remain unchanged.
I wonder how many CEOs actually believe in this drivel...
Too many, because they themselves run on high-octane fuel all day, and the ass-kissers below them take care of their mistakes and fix things so the big boss has false feedback on his own performance. Combined with rather common narcistic or psychotic tendencies, resulting in a lack of comprehension that other people cannot or do not want to work under the same amount of constant pressure, this leads to a dramatic misjudgement of what a regular worker ought to deliver.
I've seen it several times that managers expect their underlings to stay longer, work more, try harder, completely ignoring that they expect the same amount of effort for a fraction of the pay.
Slashdot Mirror
People often forget to weight performance against programmer productivity.
That's exactly when you want to use a library, framework, etc.
Personally, I've become a fan of Doctrine 2, which does all the nice object-orientation and other stuff and I still have a SQL database behind it all with its power and performance. Not to mention the crazy stuff you can do with good queries.
I do. Re-read my original posting, and this time until the end. :-)
Because it's a database.
SQL is 40 years old. In that time, dozens of programming languages, patterns and styles have come and gone. And SQL is still here, exactly because it doesn't care if your language is OO, functional, redundant, brainfuck or agile deployment for optimized synergies with next generation engagement framework whatever.
A database needs to concern itself with the data, not with the programming patterns of the application.
Java hasn't exactly gone away.
Which is exactly what I'm saying.
Every hype ever has always followed the same pattern. First it is the second coming of christ (or, for hypes prior to 0 AD, the first). Then, it is the solution to all your problems and everyone uses it for everything. You can't get venture capital, employment or a marriage without it. After a while, people realize that for some strange reason, sliced bread is really cool, but it isn't really the best armour and the roof is always leaking and the wheels could really be more round. Every stone table / bard / newspaper / Twitter / microtelepathy chip then sings the song of crash and burn, while some tech geeks silently figure out just what it is really good for and what not. In the end, we get sliced bread for breakfast and the rest of our lives goes back to what it used to before.
Until the next hype.
If your application is really, really simple and you need truly massive amounts of throughput, then NoSQL is no doubt the way to go.
Somewhere between 1% and 10% of the shops doing NoSQL really fall into that category. Maybe as many again might, with enough growth.
Many years ago, long before NoSQL was a thing, I was the sysadmin of one of the largest e-commerce operations in my country. We had enough users and data and throughput that a big consulting company that was tasked with developing the next-gen system for us proposed that we buy not one, but two Sun E10k. At that time, pretty much the biggest commercial machine money could buy. The current system ran on six quad-core Dell servers. Because we had optimized the living daylights out of it, with custom shared memory kernel modules for data exchange, a highly customized database installation (we were Europe's largest installation of this system, so we had pretty much every vendor support we could wish for) and, most importantly, an exceptionally well-crafted design and implementation.
You can throw NoSQL at your problem for maximum scalability. But everything in this world comes with a prize tag. You sacrifice all the advantages of SQL. As I said: The use of NoSQL very often means moving problems that a good SQL database solves for you into code. So it means more code with more potential bugs, all in order to re-invent the wheel because you think you can make it more round. :-)
But again: For a few percentage of cases, it is the right way to go, I am not saying it's all nonsense. Just saying it's a hype and it'll calm down.
As a big fan of SQL database, I've been watching this NoSQL hype for a few years now, and I'm still not impressed.
No doubt, there are a few scenarios where a conventional database isn't the best solution. But quite honestly, 90% of the people jumping on the bandwaggon would be served just as well with an SQL database - except that like so many things, you need to do it right.
I'm no database expert (but I know a couple), so my SQL isn't perfectly optimized and stuff, but even with a little bit of interest I see that putting some effort into your database and query design pays off massively.
And I've seen enough cases where someone scraped their SQL database and went NoSQL for absolutely no good reason. You think you're huge and SQL is too slow? Unless you just sold to FB or Google for a couple billions, you very likely are not as huge as you think. I'm running a PostGIS database doing fairly complex geography calculations on non-trivial datasets, and it's blazing fast, and whenever it isn't one hour with an SQL expert and some experimenting makes it so, because it always, with no exception, turns out that my SQL or my database design is at fault, not the database itself.
If you've got a billion users, I will grant you that you have special needs. But every NoSQL use I have seen has been a case of people moving database work to software code instead, mostly because programmers are plenty and cheap, while experienced database experts are not.
So I'm still amused and very little impressed, and I'm certain NoSQL will go the way of Java or every other hype ever - for a while it's everyone's darling, then people realize it still doesn't give us AI and it can't make coffee, and will start to figure out where it actually is the best solution and stop using it for everything else.
still found 100,000 incidents per year. That says a lot.
Indeed it is, and much more than I had expected.
It's very difficult to compare across countries
That is true. However, since cultural and data differences between western countries are not that massive, we can exclude gun ownership as a dramatic factor. Maybe it makes a difference, maybe not, but if it does, the difference is smaller than whatever effect those other factors have.
The topic is certainly complex and doesn't yield to easy answers, else we would have much more agreement between different POVs.
But since you mentioned homicide:
http://chartsbin.com/view/1454
USA: 5.22 per 100,000
nearest western country: Liechtenstein (2.81) - it's so tiny that it could be a statistical fluke, with 40k people, that 2.81 per 100,000 is one homicide.
so nearest realistic western countries: Finland (2.49), then Scotland (2.16) and every other western country is below 2.0
More than twice the homicide rate of other western countries. If that's a cultural thing, I don't like your culture. :-)
fun fact: Afghanistan less fewer homicides (3.44 per 100,000)
But of course, you are right, it is difficult to compare. Could be due to race issues (most murder victims are young black, murdered by other young black, if I recall correctly) - but France also has a considerable population of young, poor black people living in low-income urban sprawls.
It is tricky. Especially because change is tricky. In my country, strict gun control works, because it means guns are really hard to come by, and have been for decades, even if you don't care if it's legal or not. In the US, if you guys introduced strict gun control tomorrow, then all the criminals would have guns and the honest people wouldn't.
being armed is actually a strong psychological counterweight to anger and violence.
That's true. I've held and fired a couple different guns in my life, and knowing you hold a deadly weapon in your hand does make you more alert.
But that is you and me. Psychological effects are by their nature subjective.
The Russian public has bought into Putin's nationalist rhetoric.
And you think they are the only ones being manipulated?
Back at a certain time during the Cold War, the government was afraid that the maniac in charge of the other side would launch WW3 for no reason but being an idiot and wanting to appear all macho in internal politics. The government of the USSR. The madman in question was called Reagan.
Both sides here are telling their story, from their perspective. In the west it may be easier to find dissenting media, but to be honest, the mainstream media is largely telling the same story and does precious little investigation or fact-checking.
If you want to get a different perspective, it is really easy: Hop on Skype and talk to a few russians. Don't trust the media.
But it is not a binary thing. You're not an irresponsible asshole until your 25th birthday and then you wake up and are a responsible adult.
At age 16, you can be expected to understand that your "fun" is causing misery to other people.
At 16, you can understand that you're not alone on the planet and that you're part of a society.
Maybe your understanding is not as refined as that of an adult, maybe you do shit that you'll laugh about ten years later, but you are old enough to understand basic concepts of responsibility and consequences and that if you fuck up other people, they'll come over and kick your ass.
Maybe you cannot weigh consequences properly yet, but you are not alien to the concept of consequences anymore. At 6 you can claim that, but not at 16.
I found a few. I admit I did underestimate the number, though let's not forget that "he pulled a gun and the robber ran away" does not mean the robbery would've happened otherwise. If guns were such a dramatic factor in decreasing crime, then other countries with stricter gun laws should have higher crime rates, right? But they don't.
I agree.
But there are many irresponsible gun owners, and they're the problem. If they would only endanger themselves, I wouldn't mind. Heck, I'm all for idiots removing themselves from the gene pool. But like drunk drivers, irresponsible gun owners are dangerous to others.
So, if you were to come across data that says otherwise, you'd be intellectually honest enough to change your mind?
Certainly.
From your statistics, there's about 1200 accidental deaths caused by firearms in the US.
The self-defense instances are more tricky. Most of the pro-gun sites seem to be using numbers from the 90s, when crime was considerably higher than today. And let's also not forget that the use of a firearm in self-defense does not automatically mean a crime was prevented that would have otherwise happened, because people without guns also prevent crimes. It is even more difficult to find out how many crimes were prevented, but that's the number that matters.
IMHO the best approach to get away from speculations is to look at other countries. Preferably western countries similar to the US. Unsurprisingly, the USA is not dramatically different from european countries when it comes to crime rate, income and other key factors.
I'm too lazy to look for 20 sources, this here has a sortable list which the other 4 I looked up didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For gun deaths, both intentional and accidental, the US does not compare favourable to comparable nations, but resembles countries like Uruguay, South Africa and Venezuela.
Unless you live under the delusion that all of Europe lives in slavery, the causal link between freedom, security, self-defense against crime, etc. and gun ownership is doubtful. Many countries manage to have the same or lower crime rates without paying the same price.
That said, I admit I underestimated the number of actual self-defense instances.
Not every death has a purpose.
I believe that the brave, armed citizen preventing a crime is a rare event. It's an urban legend, on that the gun lobby always brings up in the same way that the lottery shows you the lucky winner and forgets to mention that millions of other people lost. They need the winner to continue what's essentially a scam.
It's not an event that never happens, I'm sure there are some cases. But I'm fairly certain more people die in accidents involving guns then there are crimes prevented by armed citizens.
I can't point to a statistic showing it nicely, it's what I believe based on numerous statistics I've seen over the years.
Given that a few hundred kids get shot every year, there's a damn lot of irresponsible parents with firearms around.
After all, civilians are almost always closer to the place & time of crime than the police.
Which is why we get news about brave armed civilians preventing crimes nearly every day, right? Wait, we don't. Maybe there's a flaw in your theory?
And remember one thing: Criminals are criminals BECAUSE THEY DON'T FOLLOW THE LAWS ALREADY.
This is not about criminals.
It's about your kid son finding the gun you thought you had hidden so well he'd never find it (kids are damn good in finding things they're not supposed to find) and not understanding how dangerous it is until a familiar bang sound notifies you that you need to call your wife and get going on producing a new heir to the family fortune.
The equivalent, seemingly small glitch in a smart gun could be the difference between life and death
Because no small glitch has ever happened in the opposite direction, causing a weapon to fire where you didn't want it to. Oh, wait, that happens thousands of times a year.
Like all things security, in the end the math is simple. X people die if we do A, Y people die if we do B. If A > B we should pick Y, if B > A we should pick X.
But security is highly emotional. That's why people took the car instead of the plane after 9/11 and as a result, more people died in the additional traffic than had died in the WTC. When Joe Redneck could (maybe, theoretically) saved his family from (potential, alleged) deadly danger, but then the safety feature malfunctioned - that's a nightmare and we get emotional. That the same safety feature prevented ten times the number of accidental deaths is a statistical number that we don't get emotional about.
This is how we are headed to an extinction event.
Many scientists believe that we already are in the middle of a mass extinction event. For the past 50 or so years, the rate at which species go extinct has been 100-1000 times the natural rate.
When we think of "extinction events", we picture a meteor hitting earth and everything dying. But that's not how these things work. They are "events" only on a geological time-scale. All of the mass-extinction events actually took thousands upon thousands of years, and sometimes millions.
Lying while holding office should be a crime. Look at this clown:
teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming'
Yeah, it's only 97% of the scientists in the field that hold this view, and of the remaining 3% most are in doubt of details or conclusions, the number of real scientists who think that there is no such thing as global warming or that humans have nothing to do with it can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
If we want to improve our politics, the first thing we need to do is get rid of the crooks. There are enough idiots and misguided well-meaning fools in politics, we can't afford to have lying bastards in office.
Design by random chance is still design.
No, it is not.
And here I was thinking that the usage of the word "evolved" in the sentence immediately following (but conveniently left out in the choice quote) would make it clear that "is not designed" is used as a figure of speech.
there are some people that need significantly less downtime, even a few that need none whatsoever.
There is no human being on this planet that needs zero downtime when doing any kind of job that involves more than physical presence for an extended amount of time.
Keep in mind they're very, very productive.
Really? The "very, very productive" people in every company I have ever visited were just creating a very good illusion of being busy. busy != productive. The really productive people are quite often the ones where everyone is wondering wtf they are doing all day. Maybe you were never lucky enough to work in a good environment, but I have. I've worked with people that I rarely saw doing anything, but that always had every task finished on time. They had plenty of downtime, because they could manage time and priorities and the fact that downtime is essential to extreme performances is really not a secret. It actually works the same for both muscles and brains - recovery time is an essential part of the process.
It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc.
In the corporate world, even though few talk about it, it is basically the same. Most of the work assigned to the average office worker is non-essential in the sense that it can be done today, tomorrow or next week. In addition, a good work environment also encourages regular breaks, talk with co-workers and other "non-work" activities.
This has two positive effects that the min/maxer efficiency fanatics consistently ignore: First, burst capacity is available from non-idle employees, because whatever they are doing at the moment can be dropped with no or little harm done. Second, a lot of information flows inside companies along non-official channels, from employee to employee around the coffee machine, etc. Allowing these activities creates a thicker mesh of information flows.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
Exactly. If you make people busy 100% of the time, they will perform at a lower efficiency, and the total productivity is very likely to remain unchanged.
I wonder how many CEOs actually believe in this drivel...
Too many, because they themselves run on high-octane fuel all day, and the ass-kissers below them take care of their mistakes and fix things so the big boss has false feedback on his own performance. Combined with rather common narcistic or psychotic tendencies, resulting in a lack of comprehension that other people cannot or do not want to work under the same amount of constant pressure, this leads to a dramatic misjudgement of what a regular worker ought to deliver.
I've seen it several times that managers expect their underlings to stay longer, work more, try harder, completely ignoring that they expect the same amount of effort for a fraction of the pay.