The wealthy need not spend their money in ways that create jobs. They can buy land - which drives up the price of land for the ones who don't have it yet - they can buy goods from overseas and luxury goods - the production of which doesn't create very many jobs.
A flatter distribution of income creates more jobs producing things that benefit more people: the more important a part of the market the lower to middle class is, the more productive power goes to address their needs.
Those aren't rungs. Those are bars. If those ditches are worth being dug at all, it's worth paying someone a basic decent wage to do it. And the market for such things is dictated as much by the pressures of the race to the bottom as by the actual value of the labor performed: it's a fallacy to assume that the low wage is only a function of low need - translate that logic, again, to the outflow of IT jobs.
I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed for a good look at the demographics and realities of mininum wage workers.
Personally, I feel that our ditch diggers should be able to earn a decent living wage with the ability to afford the basics - decent housing, basic medical care, and a baseline education for their children - and be able to get it with 40 hours a week of work. Supposedly, we're now more productive than ever. Instead of letting people work less, it's created a work-inflationary environment.
The taxation curve is completely screwed up, for one thing. There was once a time in which the tax rate for the bulk of Americans was negligible, and the richest of the rich paid as much as 85% income tax. Now the situation is practically reversed. I don't believe that it makes sense to grudgefully soak the rich and give to everyone else, nor do I think it wrong that there is some wage differential for more valued, more demanding work. But the way that CEO's can defer compensation in a way that directly - directly - soaks their workers (just look at what's been happening with executive pay while layoffs and benefit rollbacks are under full swing) - is just wrong. We need to go back to the patterns of income distribution that we had back in the 1950's. And even ditch diggers should be able to have a life where they can see their kids in the evenings, and get them medical care if they need it.
And, if you're going to play the old "hard scrapple" line, then one could argue that any one naive enough to think the IT boom could last forever and clamoured into an overcrowded yet overpaid field that had every reason to be outsourced, made some "serious errors in vocational choice."
The truth is, in a way, that you don't think of minimum wage and unskilled labor types as "real people."
11K a year is about minimum wage, BTW. So the people in most US cities who are making your lattes, flipping your burgers, and bagging your groceries are expected to live off of that.
(Ultimately, it should be hoped that living costs will come down in those US cities, but the monkey wrench in the works is housing: people are not willing to sell their homes for less than they paid for it, and with low interest rates on financing, they haven't felt a reason to yet.)
And as I noted upstream, the rate of conviction of innocents in the US - even in capital cases, where the standard of confidence of guilt should be very strong - is disturbingly high. I'm a civil libertarian to the nth degree, but insofar as video surveillence in public space is not the same thing as the assumption of guilt (any more than a cop walking the beat is) I'm all for cctv surveillence. Yes, even if it means that Office O'Malley gets a shot of me adjusting the family jewels.
I'll add to your comment that, before CCTV, police would investigate according to their pre-existing biases, prejudices and assumptions. Profiling by race and other factors can lead to investigations that go completely in the wrong direction - and still wind up with the conviction of an innocent.
In the US, the conviction rates for people later proven to be innocent is disturbingly high - largely because of the investigatory bias. I think that CCTV would lead to the conviction of fewer innocent people, as much as to the conviction of more of the truly guilty. I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places, so I have no qualms about the surveillance from that perspective.
I think that the question is about someone who wants to work in the design and engineering of new protocols, not someone who wants to use off-the-shelf tools. If all the inquirer wants is to just be another network tech in a server room somewhere, then he doesn't need college. If he wants to design applications that use all the features of IP:v6, then he should get maybe a Master's. If he wants to design the heir to IP:v6, then he should study a lot of theory and go for a PhD.
The trouble with Slashdot is that sometimes there's a lack of awareness of the gap between the tool-users and the tool-makers - the former, probably due to something of an inferiority complex, are pretty unaware of the realities of the latter.
I did read your entire post, and it still was wrong. Because Schadenfreude is only appropriate when it hits the target. Only a tiny fraction of the misery and expense and waste that this worm is going to cause, is going to happen to SCO. It's not like having your website DDOS'ed is that big a deal, but the costs of massive emails virus floods scaled globally is a cost that we all bear.
If the story was "disgruntled hacker urinates on SCO's servers, sparking a fire which burns down their building - there were no injuries," then I would share your perspective - peeing on servers is bad, but I wouldn't be too critical. But this gets more "innocents" than anything else.
The bulk of the expense of dealing with this trojan will not be taken up by SCO. No, it will be taken up by the thousands and thousands of companies whose IT departments now have to deal with it.
This is like cheering the destruction of the two towers because you don't like things that are rectangle-shaped.
Re:Technology is inherently bad
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
More like, technology is a reflection of the desires and intentions of the people who control it, and the people who can afford and control most space technology are avaracious, nationalistic, paranoid and short-sighted men.
I actually think you've misread deconstruction (there was never an "ism," really - the "ist" was like the "ist" in "artist" or "trombonist", not the "ist" in "communist" or "Royalist".) Meaning is seen as a process, and a dynamic and unstable one. You actually are echoing deconstructionist skepticism, rather than attacking it.
Because a book that isn't being written or read has *no* meaning at all. There is no text without that active and unstable act of writing it, and there's no perception of it without the active and unstable act of reading it.
But a cigar is never just a cigar. A cigar is the history of the tobacco industry, the work made to produce it and the conditions of those workers, the marketing culture of the cigar industry, the pricing constraints created by import restrictions, the health effects it has and its relationship to other forms of tobacco, the symbolic power of the cigar and its association with old-guard power, masculinity, Sgt. Rock, J. Jonas Jameson, Arnold Schwartzenegger and the like.
A cigar doesn't have to be a penis to be much more than a cigar.
Wow. Thanks for that informative reference, it really does go a long way to vindicating the publishers of Social Text, who at least admitted ahead of time that they weren't physicists and were taking someone from an outside discipline at his word. The people who published the Bogdanov papers have no such excuse.
Assuming that he doesn't read French, I actually doubt that. It's probably comparable - several hundred hours of study to get a basis in the field in either case.
I think you overstate the radicalness of academic politics, by, erm, conflating it with the radicalness of inquiry.
For example, Edward Said wrote very critical pieces of the role of colonialist thinking in the framing of the study and discussion of the Middle East. He described an ongoing "orientalism" - a sort of intellectual sub-structure which, in the guise of being the study of a different culture, really served to justify colonial relationships.
He was also a strong critic of Israeli policy in Palestine, but his actual political ideology was moderate: he advocated a secular democracy, blended capitalism, etc. If you looked at the tone of his critique, you might think he was an extremist, but in terms of policy implications, he - and most academics dismissed as "lefty radicals" - was actually fairly middle-of-the-road.
Anyone who invests the time can learn the skills of criticism. Not unlike programming, math, or physics.
I've heard engineers brag "well, if I just sat around reading Tolstoy and Doestoevsky and Heidegger and writing about it, I could be a literary critic, too!" To which the only sensible response is that if one (I was about to say "I", but, in fact, I did, so there's no if) studied mathematics and physics, I could be a physicist. In other words, duh.
I was prepared for a philistine reaction to a barely-understood domain, but instead the piece was earnest, honest and clear-eyed.
Most cultural studies academics are aware the problems of empty jargonizing, a reaction to it set in a while ago, and things are getting better. Part of the problem is that critical theory in practice is just that - practice, not new research, in working with texts. There's the same sort of inflationary pressures going on with people trying to make their work look as important as possible.
But there's a great deal of baby in the bathwater that's being thrown out. Sokal's best contribution was the recommendation that a metaphor used in criticism should be more, not less, accessible than the subject of the metaphor (if you're using x to explain y, x should be more, not less, comprehensible than y).
Ultimately, it should also be recognized that art, literature, and culture are a different type of domain from physics, even if it sometimes borrows its rhetoric. In one way, however, there's a similarity: the claim that there's "no right answer" in criticism is only true in the way that "nothing is ever proven true, only not yet falsified" in empirical science. In both cases, although in different ways, it's about comparing models.
Slashdot Mirror
The wealthy need not spend their money in ways that create jobs. They can buy land - which drives up the price of land for the ones who don't have it yet - they can buy goods from overseas and luxury goods - the production of which doesn't create very many jobs.
A flatter distribution of income creates more jobs producing things that benefit more people: the more important a part of the market the lower to middle class is, the more productive power goes to address their needs.
Those aren't rungs. Those are bars. If those ditches are worth being dug at all, it's worth paying someone a basic decent wage to do it. And the market for such things is dictated as much by the pressures of the race to the bottom as by the actual value of the labor performed: it's a fallacy to assume that the low wage is only a function of low need - translate that logic, again, to the outflow of IT jobs.
I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed for a good look at the demographics and realities of mininum wage workers.
Personally, I feel that our ditch diggers should be able to earn a decent living wage with the ability to afford the basics - decent housing, basic medical care, and a baseline education for their children - and be able to get it with 40 hours a week of work. Supposedly, we're now more productive than ever. Instead of letting people work less, it's created a work-inflationary environment.
The taxation curve is completely screwed up, for one thing. There was once a time in which the tax rate for the bulk of Americans was negligible, and the richest of the rich paid as much as 85% income tax. Now the situation is practically reversed. I don't believe that it makes sense to grudgefully soak the rich and give to everyone else, nor do I think it wrong that there is some wage differential for more valued, more demanding work. But the way that CEO's can defer compensation in a way that directly - directly - soaks their workers (just look at what's been happening with executive pay while layoffs and benefit rollbacks are under full swing) - is just wrong. We need to go back to the patterns of income distribution that we had back in the 1950's. And even ditch diggers should be able to have a life where they can see their kids in the evenings, and get them medical care if they need it.
And, if you're going to play the old "hard scrapple" line, then one could argue that any one naive enough to think the IT boom could last forever and clamoured into an overcrowded yet overpaid field that had every reason to be outsourced, made some "serious errors in vocational choice."
The truth is, in a way, that you don't think of minimum wage and unskilled labor types as "real people."
Who cleans your office? Do you think they are part-time employees working their way through college?
11K a year is about minimum wage, BTW. So the people in most US cities who are making your lattes, flipping your burgers, and bagging your groceries are expected to live off of that.
(Ultimately, it should be hoped that living costs will come down in those US cities, but the monkey wrench in the works is housing: people are not willing to sell their homes for less than they paid for it, and with low interest rates on financing, they haven't felt a reason to yet.)
There's a word for this. It's called hegemony. It has repercussions far, far greater than this.
That geeks only are aware of it when it affects those few IP rules that they care about, is sort of sad.
Ladies and Gentleman, we have just witnessed the genesis of a new art form: pornographic musical theater.
And as I noted upstream, the rate of conviction of innocents in the US - even in capital cases, where the standard of confidence of guilt should be very strong - is disturbingly high. I'm a civil libertarian to the nth degree, but insofar as video surveillence in public space is not the same thing as the assumption of guilt (any more than a cop walking the beat is) I'm all for cctv surveillence. Yes, even if it means that Office O'Malley gets a shot of me adjusting the family jewels.
I'll add to your comment that, before CCTV, police would investigate according to their pre-existing biases, prejudices and assumptions. Profiling by race and other factors can lead to investigations that go completely in the wrong direction - and still wind up with the conviction of an innocent.
In the US, the conviction rates for people later proven to be innocent is disturbingly high - largely because of the investigatory bias. I think that CCTV would lead to the conviction of fewer innocent people, as much as to the conviction of more of the truly guilty. I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places, so I have no qualms about the surveillance from that perspective.
I think that the question is about someone who wants to work in the design and engineering of new protocols, not someone who wants to use off-the-shelf tools. If all the inquirer wants is to just be another network tech in a server room somewhere, then he doesn't need college. If he wants to design applications that use all the features of IP:v6, then he should get maybe a Master's. If he wants to design the heir to IP:v6, then he should study a lot of theory and go for a PhD.
The trouble with Slashdot is that sometimes there's a lack of awareness of the gap between the tool-users and the tool-makers - the former, probably due to something of an inferiority complex, are pretty unaware of the realities of the latter.
I did read your entire post, and it still was wrong. Because Schadenfreude is only appropriate when it hits the target. Only a tiny fraction of the misery and expense and waste that this worm is going to cause, is going to happen to SCO. It's not like having your website DDOS'ed is that big a deal, but the costs of massive emails virus floods scaled globally is a cost that we all bear.
If the story was "disgruntled hacker urinates on SCO's servers, sparking a fire which burns down their building - there were no injuries," then I would share your perspective - peeing on servers is bad, but I wouldn't be too critical. But this gets more "innocents" than anything else.
You are an ass.
The bulk of the expense of dealing with this trojan will not be taken up by SCO. No, it will be taken up by the thousands and thousands of companies whose IT departments now have to deal with it.
This is like cheering the destruction of the two towers because you don't like things that are rectangle-shaped.
More like, technology is a reflection of the desires and intentions of the people who control it, and the people who can afford and control most space technology are avaracious, nationalistic, paranoid and short-sighted men.
When your peeve-count reaches the 7 digits, you aren't talking about pets. You're talking about the mother of all peeve zoos.
I actually think you've misread deconstruction (there was never an "ism," really - the "ist" was like the "ist" in "artist" or "trombonist", not the "ist" in "communist" or "Royalist".) Meaning is seen as a process, and a dynamic and unstable one. You actually are echoing deconstructionist skepticism, rather than attacking it.
Because a book that isn't being written or read has *no* meaning at all. There is no text without that active and unstable act of writing it, and there's no perception of it without the active and unstable act of reading it.
But a cigar is never just a cigar. A cigar is the history of the tobacco industry, the work made to produce it and the conditions of those workers, the marketing culture of the cigar industry, the pricing constraints created by import restrictions, the health effects it has and its relationship to other forms of tobacco, the symbolic power of the cigar and its association with old-guard power, masculinity, Sgt. Rock, J. Jonas Jameson, Arnold Schwartzenegger and the like.
A cigar doesn't have to be a penis to be much more than a cigar.
Wow. Thanks for that informative reference, it really does go a long way to vindicating the publishers of Social Text, who at least admitted ahead of time that they weren't physicists and were taking someone from an outside discipline at his word. The people who published the Bogdanov papers have no such excuse.
Since the physicist has already studied statistics, I assume, can we then assume the sociology PhD at least has calculus under his/her belt?
Also, a PhD in sociology means field work. In terms of time/effort required, it's again comparable.
I've known PhD candidates in both sciences and humanities. All were smart, all worked hard. End of story.
Assuming that he doesn't read French, I actually doubt that. It's probably comparable - several hundred hours of study to get a basis in the field in either case.
I think you overstate the radicalness of academic politics, by, erm, conflating it with the radicalness of inquiry.
For example, Edward Said wrote very critical pieces of the role of colonialist thinking in the framing of the study and discussion of the Middle East. He described an ongoing "orientalism" - a sort of intellectual sub-structure which, in the guise of being the study of a different culture, really served to justify colonial relationships.
He was also a strong critic of Israeli policy in Palestine, but his actual political ideology was moderate: he advocated a secular democracy, blended capitalism, etc. If you looked at the tone of his critique, you might think he was an extremist, but in terms of policy implications, he - and most academics dismissed as "lefty radicals" - was actually fairly middle-of-the-road.
Anyone who invests the time can learn the skills of criticism. Not unlike programming, math, or physics.
I've heard engineers brag "well, if I just sat around reading Tolstoy and Doestoevsky and Heidegger and writing about it, I could be a literary critic, too!" To which the only sensible response is that if one (I was about to say "I", but, in fact, I did, so there's no if) studied mathematics and physics, I could be a physicist. In other words, duh.
I was prepared for a philistine reaction to a barely-understood domain, but instead the piece was earnest, honest and clear-eyed.
Most cultural studies academics are aware the problems of empty jargonizing, a reaction to it set in a while ago, and things are getting better. Part of the problem is that critical theory in practice is just that - practice, not new research, in working with texts. There's the same sort of inflationary pressures going on with people trying to make their work look as important as possible.
But there's a great deal of baby in the bathwater that's being thrown out. Sokal's best contribution was the recommendation that a metaphor used in criticism should be more, not less, accessible than the subject of the metaphor (if you're using x to explain y, x should be more, not less, comprehensible than y).
Ultimately, it should also be recognized that art, literature, and culture are a different type of domain from physics, even if it sometimes borrows its rhetoric. In one way, however, there's a similarity: the claim that there's "no right answer" in criticism is only true in the way that "nothing is ever proven true, only not yet falsified" in empirical science. In both cases, although in different ways, it's about comparing models.
That's not science, that's religion. These are classic arguments ad hominem, and (negative) appeals to authority.
If you can unproblematically quit it, it isn't really addiction.