The number of hours people need to work to obtain the basics has been dropping for a long time.
We have raised our standards in some area. Many people insist on having their own car vs using public transportation and a bicycle. Many people insist on having a private house tho shared dwellings were normal until the 1950s even in the united states.
Food has dropped a bit in quality but has dropped much more in price.
What hasn't and won't drop in price are rare, limited, and unique things.
Land in a premium location. Collectibles. Time spent with attractive people (tho attractive people have become more common).
We really do give a lot of things away free as long as we don't have to admit that they are free. The government pays farmers and ranchers to NOT grow crops and animals so the prices won't drop too much.
We have a small percentage of the population taking much more than it did in the past (nine times more than even only 30 years ago). For the most part, that share of resources is parked unused in very low risk positions and is basically 'extracted" from the rest of society.
But the basics (simple clothing, food, shelter, and even 90% of health care) are cheap.
We need smaller, automated nuclear power which automatically shuts down by design where it is literally impossible for it to screw up.
And then it still will a few more times over the next century. But then the lost areas will be a mile in radius rather than 12.5 miles to 50 miles in radius.
1) Stop shipping U.S. jobs to india and replacing those here with H1B's. H1B's should be reserved for brilliant and rare candidates who are truly in short supply.
2) Stop being so evil with Windows 10. Seriously- rip a lot of stuff out.
3) Develop something cool that actually needs more power. My computers have been at 5% to 10% CPU for the last 15 years except when playing currently released video games.
Well.. to be fair, I've seen people try Agile... and call it Agile... but I recognized they were really doing Waterfall.
Oh! oh! got another one.
Customizing SAP is known to produce failure.
So the bright executives forbade any customization! All they allowed were "Gap fills".
Some of the gap fills were 30,000 line programs.
There were over 1100 gap fills.
The project delivery date slipped from 2012 to (last I hear) 2030.
But they are not "customizing it"!
To be Agile, it really needs to follow the entire methodology. Now if it is really impossible to follow agile in a real world environment- then that's still Agile's problem even if they were not technically following Agile.
You know, we could apply this to older programs. We could take the routines and refactor them into smaller pieces... we could call them "sub" routines. What's cool is that you could iterate it and further refactor those into even lower level subroutines.
The single best methodology I ever used was R.U.P. from IBM.
It identified and placed high risk first. It had a set of shared documents which the team actually used since they made sense and were useful. It had time boxes and naturally supported controlling scope creep.
We never had a late project. And we identified two projects as impossible in the 1st stage before a lot of work was done. It was a lovely and successful methodology to work with.
On the article. BigO time for debugging is exponential. You really can't change that. If you do twice as much work in the same time period by whatever method, debugging will take 4 times as long.
We had an agile group for a project. It was very expensive. It delivered a product that only functioned well in the development environment. This was partially political and a lot of arrogance. We TOLD them the customers wouldn't pay for that level of environment but they thought the customers would comply. It wasn't a horrible process and they kept their scrums to 15 minutes every morning. The entire project relied on a new, risky technology which was discontinued by the provider (Adobe) about 2 months after the 30 million dollar project was completed (so then they had to drop millions more redeveloping it in HTML5).
From what I saw, agile did not protect from scope creep and it had problems with chunks that difficult to decompose enough to fit in one build cycle.
Seriously, while some women can get an abortion without consequences, it's not many. Most have emotional damage around sex, intimacy, and pregnancy for the rest of their reproductive years. Some have problems the rest of their lives.
That seems to fit the definition of damaged goods. It's no different than any other trauma. They could have been attacked by a dog, or hit by a car, or etc.
In a rational world, given two females equal in every other way, why choose the one who is going to have land mines to deal with? In the real world, we don't find out that information until after we've already fallen in love so we just have to deal with the consequences.
I'd say the multiple mass extinctions argue against that.
Animals overbreed. New invasive species drive out existing species and take over ecological slots quickly on a geological time scale.
There is a balance- but it's not stable long term. In the short and mid term, it's often driving by one species eating too many resources and so it starves off in large numbers.
"Sheppard Krech III's book The Ecological Indian sets out to probe the basis and historical validity of the idea that people of native descent are, and always have been, caring towards the environment, a characteristic commonly claimed by or attributed to them. With a series of empirical case studies he investigates whether their ideas and actions were always those of ecologists and conservationists. He finds that the Ecological Indian proposition is of doubtful validity, concluding that, for example, Indians needlessly killed many buffalo, set fires that got out of control, and over-exploited deer and beaver for their skins.
For me, this chapter provides the book's most serious challenge to The Ecological Indian. While Indians had uses for every part of the buffalo, their practice of slaughtering whole herds, at a buffalo jump or in an enclosure, sometimes produced more carcasses than a group could possibly use. As a result, waste occurred. He documents instances of Indians leaving animals to rot, utilising only the cows, or taking only the tongues and the humps. However, the overkilling did not cause the extermination of the species, which only came after non-Indians and Metis hunted them commercially for fresh meat, pemmican and hides. "
Indians were not really ecologically aware until the 19th century.
They were not into any naturally sustainable processes. As their population grew, they would have had the same problem.
Could it also be that animals just have shorter generations and the first few generations did poorly ( I remember reading stories about badly mutated animals) but ultimately radiation is just a selective pressure so after 30 generations, those that do well in radiation have come to dominate the population. Because their generations are one year long, they don't die from the effects of radiation before the ones who are doing better can reproduce. It would be hard for humans to survive 18 years to reproduce (as well as other species that must mature for multiple years before reproducing).
I've never had a "knockoff" coke that didn't taste like swill. Even the best is equivalent to "new coke" or "diet coke".
Actually, I was looking pretty hard-- checking kroger, heb, and randalls each week. While competitors regularly charged 25 cents per 12 oz can, coke went thru a nearly 9 month period where they were $4.50 per 12 (about $37 cents per can). Pent up demand was so high that when it started going on sale again, people stripped the shelves within hours each day.
Perhaps it was a regional test to see if people would adjust to the new price and start buying it again. From the reaction, I think it failed.
How hard can it be for soda companies to figure that out.
$2.79 for a drink for a meal that costs $8???
McDonalds has the right idea.
Same thing in the stores. Coke seems to want $4.50/12 pack these days. Other brands want $3.00. So I don't buy coke products anymore even tho I love coke products.
Nope, there are videos on Youtube of seminars where they teach how to prove that you've done a qualified job search and found no workers to fill them. Even has procedures to escalate workers who meet the qualifications to a manager who can find a reason to disqualify them.
My experience with IBM was that they were highly skilled but also they were too expensive ($200/hr billed vs $30/hr offshore/$60 onshore billed for Infosys) to consider replacing skilled employees with IBM employees. They did replace low skill positions (like computer operators) because they gained economies of scale (one operator could work on 12 companies). But they did not replace programmers or analysts.
For older technology they were highly competent. For newer technology they were not competent. They were always training on our time.
They always said yes to every project which managers loved until the projects failed. You need to learn that when infosys personnel people say "I'll do my best" an american would say, "We probably can't make that deadline even working overtime" and think "WTF!?!? Are you batshit crazy? That's impossible."
One BIG thing to learn when Infosys specifically is brought in to "help" you is that 90% of your staff is on the chopping block within 5 years.
When Infosys walks in the door, unless you are the lead in the area and have superior business side skills, you should be walking out the door. Today- not tomorrow-- unless you want a nice severance package.
But don't underestimate their competence with technology once it's about 3 years old. Unlike most U.S. companies they pay for continuous formal training and certification for their staff. They DO catch up.
And from a business perspective, it's great to be able to "turn on" and "turn off" resources without paying unemployment and without spending 17 hours interviewing candidates over three months. Instead the new person is there-- next week.
And if all you need is "construction" coding by "code monkeys" combined with unit testing they fill that need as well as u.s. resources. If you are working for a company and you are a "code monkey"-- even a very good one- you need to think about a new job when they come onboard. Business analysts usually survive. But not programmers unless they are top 1% or have some very obscure specialty knowledge (and even then they are often hired by infosys for a year or two at best).
BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOUR COMPANY HIRES INFOSYS. YOUR JOB WITH THEM IS PROBABLY ENDING in 3 to 5 YEARS.
That's really only true if buying products produced by a subsect of humans which are less expensive due to structural pay differences in their native countries is also unethical.
Enough knowledge has been transferred to other countries that if local companies do not hire remotely, then they will be driven out of business or forced to relocate overseas by cheaper competition.
There is no good solution except allowing wages to equalize and removing some of the barriers to capitalism which prevent us from buying products which are sold overseas much less expensively than locally. For example movies are about 1/10th the price, blood pressure medicine is about 1% the price, etc. Some can't be fixed-- housekeeping and lawn staff is about 3% of the price.
Unfortunately, under good growth projections (which don't look to hold for the coming 12-18 months) it will be 2045 before china approaches wage parity and 2065 before india approaches wage parity.
Slashdot Mirror
We really are.
The number of hours people need to work to obtain the basics has been dropping for a long time.
We have raised our standards in some area. Many people insist on having their own car vs using public transportation and a bicycle. Many people insist on having a private house tho shared dwellings were normal until the 1950s even in the united states.
Food has dropped a bit in quality but has dropped much more in price.
What hasn't and won't drop in price are rare, limited, and unique things.
Land in a premium location.
Collectibles.
Time spent with attractive people (tho attractive people have become more common).
We really do give a lot of things away free as long as we don't have to admit that they are free. The government pays farmers and ranchers to NOT grow crops and animals so the prices won't drop too much.
We have a small percentage of the population taking much more than it did in the past (nine times more than even only 30 years ago). For the most part, that share of resources is parked unused in very low risk positions and is basically 'extracted" from the rest of society.
But the basics (simple clothing, food, shelter, and even 90% of health care) are cheap.
His testimony simply saying 'well it works" isn't usable because of his vested interest.
Unless someone else can duplicate the results, it's not really scientific data and shouldn't be admissible.
Consider VW diesel engines. You can't trust software unless you can validate it.
Nuclear technology is great.
Except when you have humans in the loop.
Then .. it's pretty terrible.
We need smaller, automated nuclear power which automatically shuts down by design where it is literally impossible for it to screw up.
And then it still will a few more times over the next century. But then the lost areas will be a mile in radius rather than 12.5 miles to 50 miles in radius.
1) Stop shipping U.S. jobs to india and replacing those here with H1B's. H1B's should be reserved for brilliant and rare candidates who are truly in short supply.
2) Stop being so evil with Windows 10. Seriously- rip a lot of stuff out.
3) Develop something cool that actually needs more power. My computers have been at 5% to 10% CPU for the last 15 years except when playing currently released video games.
And besides, it's a well known cliched joke/truism that is mostly true still even when quibbling.
I have a windows phone.
It's worked quite well for me and been about 80 dollars a month cheaper plus it has unlimited music bandwidth.
It cost me $120 to buy - out right -.
I was on Iphone's first. But AT&T got way too pricy.
Then i was on Android. But Sprint got way too pricy.
Anyway, currently have soundforge, pandora, waze, my bank app, a finance app to track my stocks, etc.
Admittedly, one reason i went to windows was fewer virii at the time. So if virus intrusion has become a problem, then that's one point lost.
Well.. to be fair, I've seen people try Agile ... and call it Agile... but I recognized they were really doing Waterfall.
Oh! oh! got another one.
Customizing SAP is known to produce failure.
So the bright executives forbade any customization! All they allowed were "Gap fills".
Some of the gap fills were 30,000 line programs.
There were over 1100 gap fills.
The project delivery date slipped from 2012 to (last I hear) 2030.
But they are not "customizing it"!
To be Agile, it really needs to follow the entire methodology. Now if it is really impossible to follow agile in a real world environment- then that's still Agile's problem even if they were not technically following Agile.
You know, we could apply this to older programs. We could take the routines and refactor them into smaller pieces... we could call them "sub" routines. What's cool is that you could iterate it and further refactor those into even lower level subroutines.
Wow... this could change programming!
The single best methodology I ever used was R.U.P. from IBM.
It identified and placed high risk first.
It had a set of shared documents which the team actually used since they made sense and were useful.
It had time boxes and naturally supported controlling scope creep.
We never had a late project. And we identified two projects as impossible in the 1st stage before a lot of work was done.
It was a lovely and successful methodology to work with.
On the article. BigO time for debugging is exponential. You really can't change that. If you do twice as much work in the same time period by whatever method, debugging will take 4 times as long.
We had an agile group for a project. It was very expensive. It delivered a product that only functioned well in the development environment. This was partially political and a lot of arrogance. We TOLD them the customers wouldn't pay for that level of environment but they thought the customers would comply. It wasn't a horrible process and they kept their scrums to 15 minutes every morning. The entire project relied on a new, risky technology which was discontinued by the provider (Adobe) about 2 months after the 30 million dollar project was completed (so then they had to drop millions more redeveloping it in HTML5).
From what I saw, agile did not protect from scope creep and it had problems with chunks that difficult to decompose enough to fit in one build cycle.
Seriously, while some women can get an abortion without consequences, it's not many. Most have emotional damage around sex, intimacy, and pregnancy for the rest of their reproductive years. Some have problems the rest of their lives.
That seems to fit the definition of damaged goods. It's no different than any other trauma. They could have been attacked by a dog, or hit by a car, or etc.
In a rational world, given two females equal in every other way, why choose the one who is going to have land mines to deal with? In the real world, we don't find out that information until after we've already fallen in love so we just have to deal with the consequences.
I'd say the multiple mass extinctions argue against that.
Animals overbreed. New invasive species drive out existing species and take over ecological slots quickly on a geological time scale.
There is a balance- but it's not stable long term. In the short and mid term, it's often driving by one species eating too many resources and so it starves off in large numbers.
You are absolutely correct.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/...
"Sheppard Krech III's book The Ecological Indian sets out to probe the basis and historical validity of the idea that people of native descent are, and always have been, caring towards the environment, a characteristic commonly claimed by or attributed to them. With a series of empirical case studies he investigates whether their ideas and actions were always those of ecologists and conservationists. He finds that the Ecological Indian proposition is of doubtful validity, concluding that, for example, Indians needlessly killed many buffalo, set fires that got out of control, and over-exploited deer and beaver for their skins.
For me, this chapter provides the book's most serious challenge to The Ecological Indian. While Indians had uses for every part of the buffalo, their practice of slaughtering whole herds, at a buffalo jump or in an enclosure, sometimes produced more carcasses than a group could possibly use. As a result, waste occurred. He documents instances of Indians leaving animals to rot, utilising only the cows, or taking only the tongues and the humps. However, the overkilling did not cause the extermination of the species, which only came after non-Indians and Metis hunted them commercially for fresh meat, pemmican and hides. "
Indians were not really ecologically aware until the 19th century.
They were not into any naturally sustainable processes. As their population grew, they would have had the same problem.
Too many humans (even indians) is the problem.
I think you are right.
Plus it's perfect setup for adaptation.
Fresh stock from surrounding areas.
Mild selective pressures in low radiation zones.
High selective pressures in high radiation zones.
30 to 40 generations to adapt.
High litter sizes for the ones who do well (6 to 9 per birth vs 1:1 for humans)
Could it also be that animals just have shorter generations and the first few generations did poorly ( I remember reading stories about badly mutated animals) but ultimately radiation is just a selective pressure so after 30 generations, those that do well in radiation have come to dominate the population. Because their generations are one year long, they don't die from the effects of radiation before the ones who are doing better can reproduce. It would be hard for humans to survive 18 years to reproduce (as well as other species that must mature for multiple years before reproducing).
just speculating...
I think your second sentence is wrong.
Shouldn't it read, "Stop using.. it."
I did years ago.
I have set up a fake name account to communicate with one person who is facebook only. When it's burned, I'll set up another fake name account.
Most people I know who still use facebook only use stub accounts.
I've never had a "knockoff" coke that didn't taste like swill. Even the best is equivalent to "new coke" or "diet coke".
Actually, I was looking pretty hard-- checking kroger, heb, and randalls each week. While competitors regularly charged 25 cents per 12 oz can, coke went thru a nearly 9 month period where they were $4.50 per 12 (about $37 cents per can). Pent up demand was so high that when it started going on sale again, people stripped the shelves within hours each day.
Perhaps it was a regional test to see if people would adjust to the new price and start buying it again. From the reaction, I think it failed.
Close except that whether or not taxes are raised corporations will shed the jobs, offshore the jobs.
Externalizing costs and reducing labor costs are just one of the things corporations do.
The effect of taxes on jobs is minimal compared to the effects of their basic corporate nature.
I worked in the restaurant industry. The soda costs the store about 2 cents per glass. The rest is markup.
It allows them to lower the food cost (which has very little profit).
Spirits have a high markup but not as high as soda.
How hard can it be for soda companies to figure that out.
$2.79 for a drink for a meal that costs $8???
McDonalds has the right idea.
Same thing in the stores. Coke seems to want $4.50/12 pack these days. Other brands want $3.00. So I don't buy coke products anymore even tho I love coke products.
And because corporations spend a lot of money on anti-union propaganda. Don't underestimate that.
Nope, there are videos on Youtube of seminars where they teach how to prove that you've done a qualified job search and found no workers to fill them. Even has procedures to escalate workers who meet the qualifications to a manager who can find a reason to disqualify them.
Search for lou dobbs and h1b visa. It'll turn up.
I think you mean- look for a new job and then quit when you find one.
I disagree with the second (sabotage) for personal reasons.
But so many people do neither.
They ride it out to the end working hard but not getting certifications or updated experience.
My experience with IBM was that they were highly skilled but also they were too expensive ($200/hr billed vs $30/hr offshore/$60 onshore billed for Infosys) to consider replacing skilled employees with IBM employees. They did replace low skill positions (like computer operators) because they gained economies of scale (one operator could work on 12 companies). But they did not replace programmers or analysts.
You are spot on with regards to your points 1-3.
My experience with Infosys was different.
For older technology they were highly competent. For newer technology they were not competent. They were always training on our time.
They always said yes to every project which managers loved until the projects failed. You need to learn that when infosys personnel people say "I'll do my best" an american would say, "We probably can't make that deadline even working overtime" and think "WTF!?!? Are you batshit crazy? That's impossible."
One BIG thing to learn when Infosys specifically is brought in to "help" you is that 90% of your staff is on the chopping block within 5 years.
When Infosys walks in the door, unless you are the lead in the area and have superior business side skills, you should be walking out the door. Today- not tomorrow-- unless you want a nice severance package.
But don't underestimate their competence with technology once it's about 3 years old. Unlike most U.S. companies they pay for continuous formal training and certification for their staff. They DO catch up.
And from a business perspective, it's great to be able to "turn on" and "turn off" resources without paying unemployment and without spending 17 hours interviewing candidates over three months. Instead the new person is there-- next week.
And if all you need is "construction" coding by "code monkeys" combined with unit testing they fill that need as well as u.s. resources. If you are working for a company and you are a "code monkey"-- even a very good one- you need to think about a new job when they come onboard. Business analysts usually survive. But not programmers unless they are top 1% or have some very obscure specialty knowledge (and even then they are often hired by infosys for a year or two at best).
BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOUR COMPANY HIRES INFOSYS. YOUR JOB WITH THEM IS PROBABLY ENDING in 3 to 5 YEARS.
That's really only true if buying products produced by a subsect of humans which are less expensive due to structural pay differences in their native countries is also unethical.
Enough knowledge has been transferred to other countries that if local companies do not hire remotely, then they will be driven out of business or forced to relocate overseas by cheaper competition.
There is no good solution except allowing wages to equalize and removing some of the barriers to capitalism which prevent us from buying products which are sold overseas much less expensively than locally. For example movies are about 1/10th the price, blood pressure medicine is about 1% the price, etc. Some can't be fixed-- housekeeping and lawn staff is about 3% of the price.
Unfortunately, under good growth projections (which don't look to hold for the coming 12-18 months) it will be 2045 before china approaches wage parity and 2065 before india approaches wage parity.