How did you break into the industry? I've been considering it as a (slightly more) offshoring-resistant (not -proof, of course) career with respect to software development. I can kinda write good, as well, and really wouldn't mind a career in documentation.
Aside from getting 5 years of FrameMaker experience, anything else you could recommend?
Laugh if you want, but in the olden days women would come to the doctor to be gotten off by vibrators; this was the accepted treatment for "hysteria" (=general female complaints, from the (Greek?) hysteros=uterus).
Of course, the women had to come back for repeat visits:-)
(according to some "history of sex" documentary or other on the History Channel I saw once)
crazymeds.org says "for gods' sakes, don't take 5-HTP if you're on an SSRI or similar medication!"
This makes sense if you think about it. SSRIs (Selective Serontonin Reuptake Inhibitors) keep your brain from absorbing as much serontonin as it otherwise would, so more is available. If you take 5-HTP on top of that, you can get too much serontonin, and your brain is blocked from bringing the level down by the SSRI.
Yes, it's possible to have too much serontonin. Google "serontonin syndrome". It's not fatal, or even long-term damaging (AFAIK), but it's quite unpleasant.
This also means if you're not on antidepressants, experiment with your 5-HTP dosage, and lower it if you feel... funky.
tried to take his own life last winter, but only succeded in making himself worse off.
The alt.suicide.holiday FAQ used to deal with this well. By describing all of the suicide methods available in gory detail, including all of the things that could go wrong, it provided a nice anti-suicide influence on the depressed.
Reading it, a depressive could easily get the idea: "Geez, if I try this, I could end up with all of the problems I have now, plus being crippled (which is annoying and expensive), plus being on suicide watch so I can't finish the job. Why bother?"
Alas, these days that FAQ is significantly more suicide-positive - it glosses over the potential problems and focuses on the good side of there being fewer people once you're gone.
I think, rather than glurge stories of people considering suicide and then turning their lives around, we need to publish stories of those who were worse off as a result of botched attempts, to discourage the others.
The downwards spiral associated with depression can be terribly corrosive to your soul, and you might not even realize it until trying treatment.
It could be hard to hold down a job:
You see through management's BS, and call them on it regularly (rather than exercising a bit of denial, as others do). This makes them hate you.
Your unshakable faith that the future will suck causes you to not even bother trying at work. That of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You get angry at people who care about their jobs, and alienate everyone. ("So fucking what if the release gets delayed? We'll just start another one then be late on that...")
You can't get new jobs because your pessimism shines through in interviews. ("Why do you want to work here?" "There's no future in software development, so I need to be looking." "This job is more or less software development." "#&@!$") You also have no "network" because you've alienated everyone.
Of course it's easier to be depressed. When there's no possibility of a positive outcome to anything, you don't need to do anything. The downside is that it might be nice to do something someday (stay married, have kids, lose enough weight to hang-glide, etc. are what I want to do in the near future, now that I'm coming out from under the cloud).
Depends on the problems. Depression is something that easily feeds on itself, taking you in a feedback loop / downwards spiral.
The generally accepted "best" treatment for depression (AFAIK) is to use antidepressants to "lift the fog". This gets you into a state where you aren't so despondent that you won't bother trying to get better. (BTDT) Then, you go to therapy, working on the core issues that were keeping you depressed (e.g. anxiety about your ability to cope with shifts in the economy, to pick a totally random example).
Once those issues are more or less under control, you wean off of the drugs, and go on about your life (keeping an eye out for relapses, and trying to ward them off using your newfound coping techniques, before you become suicidal).
All software and hardware companies are evil in some way once they have stockholders they have to appease.
s/software and hardware//
Quite true. A sole proprietorship business acts with the ethics of the person in control (the proprietor). A partnership will act with the intersection of the ethics of the two partners, etc.
Once you get a large number of investors (a couple of VC firms) or a practically infinite number (publically traded) then the company acts with the intersection of the ethics of all those investors. Unfortunately, for any nontrivially large group of humans, this tends to be zero.
Also, having many "in control" allows dilution of responsibility in their minds - "it was a group decision to dump the toxic waste" rather than "I'm responsible for dumping the toxic waste".
Many here (myself included) don't really trust the electoral system to Do The Right Thing. There are many possible reasons people give (that I don't all agree with): outright fraud (like the direct-record voting machines), registration fraud, people are Just Stupid, gerrymandering, etc.
My reason for skepticism in the process is because of the low quality of our political discourse. Simply saturating the airwaves with FUD (circling wolves, anyone?) can win you an election. "Vote Thag, Og raise taxes. [Grunt.]"
We need to train / educate people to expect more from politicians. Imagine if the entire audience of a Presidential debate stood up after an answer and said "he didn't answer the question!" Perhaps we can get Penn & Teller to follow candidates around and call them on all the bullshit.
As a kid, you could spot me easily as someone who read a lot (and not just by the geeky appearance), because I knew a lot of words' meanings without knowing the correct pronounciation.
My favorite example is "penis" (pronounced as though the first three letters referred to the ink-using writing instrument).
it's words replaced with character homonyms that irritates me
Using homonym-shorthand also makes the writing less accessible - it's going to puzzle the deaf until they've read about it or figured it out from context. It might also confuse non-native-speakers (you can't really tell "ur" should expand to "your" without knowledge of English pronounciation).
In the dissenting opinions, the justices involved cite case law establishing that the Constitution is not to be interpreted as having any superfluous wording. (They used this argument in saying that "for public use" in the Fifth Amendment cannot have been superfluous, and this case is essentially having the effect of removing "for public use" from the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause).
The same argument could be used to get unlimited-term copyrights or patents ruled unconstitutional - if their terms were unlimited, the "for limited times" you highlight would be superfluous.
Unfortunately, 5000-year copyright and patent terms would be within the letter of the Constitution, and the only Constitutional argument we could make about those is an "intent of the Framers" one - we could argue that 5000 years is practically unlimited...
Hmmm... I wonder if we could make a "practically unlimited" argument about today's terms. Unfortunately, it would require someone to commit infringement, get prosecuted, and get their case appealed to the Supreme Court, and even then there's no guarantee of winning.
The FAQ covers this... because the same story can be reported on by more than one outlet, checking for identical links won't necessarily catch duplicate stories. It might catch some, but not all.
Interesting. I'd never gotten involved in set theory.
The articles seem to be saying that there are two kinds of infinite quantities:
Countably infinite, where there are an infinite number of things but you could enumerate them all given infinite time/space, like the set of integers.
Uncountably infinite, where there are an infinite number of things but you could never enumerate them all, even in infinite time/space, like the real numbers.
They also show that "uncountably infinite" is strictly greater than "countably infinite", which makes sense.
The article links to "continuum hypothesis", which says there are no values between countably infinite and uncountably infinite, but it has not been proven.
Are there other ways to compare infinite quantities? (I'm genuinely interested.)
This sort of logical paradox when thinking about God comes from the same logical paradoxes when throwing around infinite quantities.
This comes down to "God's lifting capacity is +\Inf, the weight of the rock He creates is also +\Inf, so which is larger?" but it's meaningless mathematically to compare two infinite quantities.
Infinity-problems also plague other theological logical arguments.
*shrug* This was true even before tech support got offshored; trying to figure out how to report real problems to front-line tech support has been a vexing game ever since PC's got good market penetration amongst the non-geek public.
My wife used to do outsourced Level 1 ISP tech support (possibly the worst job in the world) in Durham, NC, in 1998 or so. Among other things, you were required to follow the script, even if you knew what the problem was - it didn't matter if you were knowledgeable.
The best solution to all of this is to try to get good DVR penetration before the broadcast flag hits. That way, a large number of people will be affected and outraged ("what do you mean the Law & Order episodes I'd saved for a rainy day expired!").
why aren't there more companies mass-marketting and selling these?
They'd be competing against the cable companies and their DVR offerings. Plus, some of the nicest things about the project come from its open-source nature (like commercial skipping, non-DRM storage formats, etc.). If a commercial entity tried to sell a product with those features, expect them to get litigated out of existence.
Now a cable company could probably put the code (with all the nice plugins for music, weather, etc.) into their DVR offerings as an easy way to add value. However, they'd have to remove the non-content-industry-friendly features to avoid litigation, and they'd have to make it difficult to put on your own firmware (to prevent people from taking the provided source, adding the features back in, and using the full-featured version).
MythTV also never questions your sexuality, regardless of what you watch... I can record all showings of Will & Grace, or a bunch of chick flicks, without fear of recrimination from my appliance.
It is scary; these thoughts have essentially made any contemplation of the future impossible for me.
why should it not be higher still in the future?
"Why not?" is not a counteracting factor to the feedback loop.
I can't think of a single historical example of a sustained decline
Just because it hasn't happened before doesn't mean it can't or won't:
Historically, the wealthy couldn't grab too much from the masses without the masses revolting and heads rolling. With modern technology, it wouldn't take very much army to keep a population subjugated.
Historically, regulation or unions could help workers when things got too exploitative. Today, it's never been easier for the business (or parts of it) to pick up and move to other areas or other regulatory environments. This means we can't count on working-condition improvements unless the hungriest people in the world are willing to also ask for the same improvements.
Historically, people could start their own businesses to make a living or compete. Today, as huge corporations expand into more and more markets, it becomes harder and harder to compete with them. (For example, there's no way I could open a retail store anywhere within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, unless most things it carries are not carried at Wal-Mart).
It would be interesting to know if the U.S. government was as 0wned by corporations historically as they are now - maybe we just notice it more these days, or maybe they're just becoming more blatant about it.
What I really need is blind faith that it will all work out. Religious people have it easy in that regard. If only you could just make yourself think those things.
Exactly! The U.S. economy's been growing, according to GDP stats, since (early 2002?) but I don't personally know anyone who's better off.
It's at times like this that I wish economics was a more exact science. Right now there's still a lot of room for religion-style blind faith (from the belief, which I hold, that concentration of wealth is going to bring it all down, to the belief that if there was simply no regulation it would all work out, and everywhere in between).
The current theories, from what I know of them (probably not as much as real economists) smack of "uniform spherical consumers on a horizontal frictionless market surface"-style constraints. If only we had the computational power to simulate a planet-full of humans, and society's laws and norms, we could run experiments to verify the theories!
Interesting. Perhaps the concentration-of-wealth phenomenon is not as bad as I'd feared.
What worries me is the trend. The nature of stock is such that, for its price to increase, the company's profit must be growing at a faster rate than before.
Combine this with (all?) companies managing themselves so that stock price continually increases (because execs are paid mostly in stock, and won't stay more than a few years, so they don't care about the company's long-term success), and you have a situation where every publically-traded company must try to continually increase their profit growth rate, forever.
Of course, no company can grow its profits forever by simply becoming more efficient or improving its products. This results in more morally questionable tactics. What worries me are two things:
Once they accumulate enough wealth and influence, so they can bend laws in their favor (of course this has already happened to some extent), what kinds of nastiness will we get (indentured servitude?)
Are they going to "tragedy of the commons" society to death in the interim? See the Prisoner's Dilemma. As businesses scramble to lower wages, what happens when we all make $2 an hour, and a loaf of bread costs $10? (gotta keep Merita's stock price up...)
I am indeed caught up in class warfare, and it shows to anyone who cares to look. I do indeed have for-profit corporations, and their executives, with the fury of a thousand suns. Growing up poor will do that to you.
I'm a genius (by Mensa's standard, anyway), but a technical one. I can fix pretty much any embedded C bug that's fixable. However, I don't have any natural aptitude for management, or being a "shark".
Tell me how applying myself will make me rich. Go ahead. It must be laziness if I'm not independently wealthy, after all, or the world might not be fair.
Programming has no future, of course (I'm in the U.S. - bringing this back on-topic). There's a whole bunch of things I could do - I could learn accounting, market analysis, I have some aptitude for construction and auto mechanicry, etc.
However, you can't get a job in something you're self-taught in (in fact, it's pretty tough to get a job at all in anything you haven't worked in before). So I'd need to go to school for a few years, and hope the industry I choose doesn't go away in the interim (or that there won't be such a surplus of new grads that I can't get noticed).
I've got a positive savings rate, but not a large one. It's probably possible for me to save more (I could live in a trailer rather than a 1300 square foot ranch, for example). I could put off replacing the '98 Cavalier for a few more years. I could go trying to seduce a rich woman, and dump the wife I've got (as another poster has suggested).
I could start a business (which would eliminate the job-getting hurdle). I'd, again, have to dump the wife in favor of one who doesn't want kids, so that I don't have anyone to support in those lean years until the business is profitable. Hopefully it is profitable, but of course if it fails that's because I didn't apply myself enough.
Of course, the world doesn't owe me a living, or even basic survival; Darwin (actually the "invisible hand") will eliminate me without a backward glance if I can't compete. I'm just not prepared to like that yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from getting 5 years of FrameMaker experience, anything else you could recommend?
That's why I always use double-strength placebos for my depression treatment - they work great!
Of course, the women had to come back for repeat visits :-)
(according to some "history of sex" documentary or other on the History Channel I saw once)
This makes sense if you think about it. SSRIs (Selective Serontonin Reuptake Inhibitors) keep your brain from absorbing as much serontonin as it otherwise would, so more is available. If you take 5-HTP on top of that, you can get too much serontonin, and your brain is blocked from bringing the level down by the SSRI.
Yes, it's possible to have too much serontonin. Google "serontonin syndrome". It's not fatal, or even long-term damaging (AFAIK), but it's quite unpleasant.
This also means if you're not on antidepressants, experiment with your 5-HTP dosage, and lower it if you feel... funky.
Reading it, a depressive could easily get the idea: "Geez, if I try this, I could end up with all of the problems I have now, plus being crippled (which is annoying and expensive), plus being on suicide watch so I can't finish the job. Why bother?"
Alas, these days that FAQ is significantly more suicide-positive - it glosses over the potential problems and focuses on the good side of there being fewer people once you're gone.
I think, rather than glurge stories of people considering suicide and then turning their lives around, we need to publish stories of those who were worse off as a result of botched attempts, to discourage the others.
The downwards spiral associated with depression can be terribly corrosive to your soul, and you might not even realize it until trying treatment.
It could be hard to hold down a job:
- You see through management's BS, and call them on it regularly (rather than exercising a bit of denial, as others do). This makes them hate you.
- Your unshakable faith that the future will suck causes you to not even bother trying at work. That of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- You get angry at people who care about their jobs, and alienate everyone. ("So fucking what if the release gets delayed? We'll just start another one then be late on that...")
- You can't get new jobs because your pessimism shines through in interviews. ("Why do you want to work here?" "There's no future in software development, so I need to be looking." "This job is more or less software development." "#&@!$") You also have no "network" because you've alienated everyone.
Of course it's easier to be depressed. When there's no possibility of a positive outcome to anything, you don't need to do anything. The downside is that it might be nice to do something someday (stay married, have kids, lose enough weight to hang-glide, etc. are what I want to do in the near future, now that I'm coming out from under the cloud).The generally accepted "best" treatment for depression (AFAIK) is to use antidepressants to "lift the fog". This gets you into a state where you aren't so despondent that you won't bother trying to get better. (BTDT) Then, you go to therapy, working on the core issues that were keeping you depressed (e.g. anxiety about your ability to cope with shifts in the economy, to pick a totally random example).
Once those issues are more or less under control, you wean off of the drugs, and go on about your life (keeping an eye out for relapses, and trying to ward them off using your newfound coping techniques, before you become suicidal).
Quite true. A sole proprietorship business acts with the ethics of the person in control (the proprietor). A partnership will act with the intersection of the ethics of the two partners, etc.
Once you get a large number of investors (a couple of VC firms) or a practically infinite number (publically traded) then the company acts with the intersection of the ethics of all those investors. Unfortunately, for any nontrivially large group of humans, this tends to be zero.
Also, having many "in control" allows dilution of responsibility in their minds - "it was a group decision to dump the toxic waste" rather than "I'm responsible for dumping the toxic waste".
My reason for skepticism in the process is because of the low quality of our political discourse. Simply saturating the airwaves with FUD (circling wolves, anyone?) can win you an election. "Vote Thag, Og raise taxes. [Grunt.]"
We need to train / educate people to expect more from politicians. Imagine if the entire audience of a Presidential debate stood up after an answer and said "he didn't answer the question!" Perhaps we can get Penn & Teller to follow candidates around and call them on all the bullshit.
My favorite example is "penis" (pronounced as though the first three letters referred to the ink-using writing instrument).
They were (also) for privacy - the notion of having bedrooms that nobody would need to walk through to get to another room is a relatively modern one.
The same argument could be used to get unlimited-term copyrights or patents ruled unconstitutional - if their terms were unlimited, the "for limited times" you highlight would be superfluous.
Unfortunately, 5000-year copyright and patent terms would be within the letter of the Constitution, and the only Constitutional argument we could make about those is an "intent of the Framers" one - we could argue that 5000 years is practically unlimited...
Hmmm... I wonder if we could make a "practically unlimited" argument about today's terms. Unfortunately, it would require someone to commit infringement, get prosecuted, and get their case appealed to the Supreme Court, and even then there's no guarantee of winning.
The FAQ covers this... because the same story can be reported on by more than one outlet, checking for identical links won't necessarily catch duplicate stories. It might catch some, but not all.
The articles seem to be saying that there are two kinds of infinite quantities:
- Countably infinite, where there are an infinite number of things but you could enumerate them all given infinite time/space, like the set of integers.
- Uncountably infinite, where there are an infinite number of things but you could never enumerate them all, even in infinite time/space, like the real numbers.
They also show that "uncountably infinite" is strictly greater than "countably infinite", which makes sense.The article links to "continuum hypothesis", which says there are no values between countably infinite and uncountably infinite, but it has not been proven.
Are there other ways to compare infinite quantities? (I'm genuinely interested.)
This comes down to "God's lifting capacity is +\Inf, the weight of the rock He creates is also +\Inf, so which is larger?" but it's meaningless mathematically to compare two infinite quantities.
Infinity-problems also plague other theological logical arguments.
My wife used to do outsourced Level 1 ISP tech support (possibly the worst job in the world) in Durham, NC, in 1998 or so. Among other things, you were required to follow the script, even if you knew what the problem was - it didn't matter if you were knowledgeable.
The best solution to all of this is to try to get good DVR penetration before the broadcast flag hits. That way, a large number of people will be affected and outraged ("what do you mean the Law & Order episodes I'd saved for a rainy day expired!").
Now a cable company could probably put the code (with all the nice plugins for music, weather, etc.) into their DVR offerings as an easy way to add value. However, they'd have to remove the non-content-industry-friendly features to avoid litigation, and they'd have to make it difficult to put on your own firmware (to prevent people from taking the provided source, adding the features back in, and using the full-featured version).
MythTV also never questions your sexuality, regardless of what you watch... I can record all showings of Will & Grace, or a bunch of chick flicks, without fear of recrimination from my appliance.
- Historically, the wealthy couldn't grab too much from the masses without the masses revolting and heads rolling. With modern technology, it wouldn't take very much army to keep a population subjugated.
- Historically, regulation or unions could help workers when things got too exploitative. Today, it's never been easier for the business (or parts of it) to pick up and move to other areas or other regulatory environments. This means we can't count on working-condition improvements unless the hungriest people in the world are willing to also ask for the same improvements.
- Historically, people could start their own businesses to make a living or compete. Today, as huge corporations expand into more and more markets, it becomes harder and harder to compete with them. (For example, there's no way I could open a retail store anywhere within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, unless most things it carries are not carried at Wal-Mart).
It would be interesting to know if the U.S. government was as 0wned by corporations historically as they are now - maybe we just notice it more these days, or maybe they're just becoming more blatant about it.What I really need is blind faith that it will all work out. Religious people have it easy in that regard. If only you could just make yourself think those things.
It's at times like this that I wish economics was a more exact science. Right now there's still a lot of room for religion-style blind faith (from the belief, which I hold, that concentration of wealth is going to bring it all down, to the belief that if there was simply no regulation it would all work out, and everywhere in between).
The current theories, from what I know of them (probably not as much as real economists) smack of "uniform spherical consumers on a horizontal frictionless market surface"-style constraints. If only we had the computational power to simulate a planet-full of humans, and society's laws and norms, we could run experiments to verify the theories!
What worries me is the trend. The nature of stock is such that, for its price to increase, the company's profit must be growing at a faster rate than before.
Combine this with (all?) companies managing themselves so that stock price continually increases (because execs are paid mostly in stock, and won't stay more than a few years, so they don't care about the company's long-term success), and you have a situation where every publically-traded company must try to continually increase their profit growth rate, forever.
Of course, no company can grow its profits forever by simply becoming more efficient or improving its products. This results in more morally questionable tactics. What worries me are two things:
I'm a genius (by Mensa's standard, anyway), but a technical one. I can fix pretty much any embedded C bug that's fixable. However, I don't have any natural aptitude for management, or being a "shark".
Tell me how applying myself will make me rich. Go ahead. It must be laziness if I'm not independently wealthy, after all, or the world might not be fair.
Programming has no future, of course (I'm in the U.S. - bringing this back on-topic). There's a whole bunch of things I could do - I could learn accounting, market analysis, I have some aptitude for construction and auto mechanicry, etc.
However, you can't get a job in something you're self-taught in (in fact, it's pretty tough to get a job at all in anything you haven't worked in before). So I'd need to go to school for a few years, and hope the industry I choose doesn't go away in the interim (or that there won't be such a surplus of new grads that I can't get noticed).
I've got a positive savings rate, but not a large one. It's probably possible for me to save more (I could live in a trailer rather than a 1300 square foot ranch, for example). I could put off replacing the '98 Cavalier for a few more years. I could go trying to seduce a rich woman, and dump the wife I've got (as another poster has suggested).
I could start a business (which would eliminate the job-getting hurdle). I'd, again, have to dump the wife in favor of one who doesn't want kids, so that I don't have anyone to support in those lean years until the business is profitable. Hopefully it is profitable, but of course if it fails that's because I didn't apply myself enough.
Of course, the world doesn't owe me a living, or even basic survival; Darwin (actually the "invisible hand") will eliminate me without a backward glance if I can't compete. I'm just not prepared to like that yet.