Re:"hacking charisma"
on
Hacking Charisma
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not complete BS, but I think it's more learned by observation than taught. I was very socially awkward growing up but I also just sat back and observed people. When I got to college I made a point to modify some of my habits around people based on those observations and my college experience was a whole lot better than my high school experience. The short of it was that I just realized what type of things that I was doing that made people react badly and stopped them. It also didn't hurt that I lost 40 lbs, worked out every day, got contacts and got rid of my braces.
Seriously though, the #1 thing that I learned to do was just stop talking so much. I geek out with programmers on programming stuff. People run away when you do that in other settings.
The new Tivo Roamio pretty much does this already. Pay $2.50 / month for a cable card and use the Tivo box directly. It integrates with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime video and others as well as live tv. You can search for programs on all services at the same time and choose where you watch it (or if you will buy it from Amazon). It's pretty much awesome.
I get the "everything on demand" that Apple is shooting for is slightly different, but the bulk of this fight has already been fought by Tivo for you.
The biggest thing about frameworks is that they are supposed to give people the ability to learn one way of doing things that provides a structure to solve just about every use case for a particular type of problem and in doing so, make it easier for teams to collaborate. That's why Rails and it's clones have taken off so much. You learn rails and you can jump from project to project without having to figure out exactly why/how each individual programmer decided to do things differently. Additionally, they automate a lot of the repetitive processes and code that people continuously reinvent.
For web projects, this is great but it's not without it's problems. Web projects GENERALLY follow the same type of behavioral requirements, so in 95% of cases a framework can handle it well. The down side is when people get MARRIED to their frameworks and start ignoring good architecture in favor of the best way to do things within the framework. The creator of rails itself, DHH, is the single worst offender in this regard because he advocates doing almost nothing in the database itself which is like building a person with only one leg.
Frameworks aren't for every problem and a lot of successful web projects get mired down into a huge main app and then spend a couple of years having to refactor parts of it out into services. The key word there is successful though, because they can afford to take the time to refactor because they got to market and made money. Rails gets you to market quickly with all of the capabilities that you need to get the job done. Successful app after successful app have been launched with Rails as it's backbone and that's EXACTLY what it's supposed to do for you.
However, if you're dealing with an existing application or an enterprise scenario where you will be integrating with a legacy database or throwing an existing user base at a rebuilt system...it is not the right place for a framework. In those scenarios you're effectively already at the "successful now refactor" stage.
Actually, critical thinking leads to the opposite. The immediate, easy answer is that it's all just fantasy. If that's where you stop then you aren't thinking critically. In fact, if that's where you stop you are thinking dismissively and boosting your self esteem by believing that all of those people are just dumber than you and never came across the obvious conclusion that your deep thought process lead to.
When you assume that some members of that group are rational human beings (just some, we don't want to break your self esteem yet) then you have to ask WHY? Why do these people congregate, give of their time and their money for their whole lives to this? Then you have to ask why they get together and discuss it in detail in small groups outside of church? This isn't Scientology, you can walk away whenever you want to.
The reality is that many of these people have had their lives changed in ways they can't explain and they get together to share their experiences, try to understand them, and try to tell other people so that they can be helped in the exact same way.
You have a series of assumptions made about faith and they begin with and if else statement. If God is real or if God is not. When God changes your life beyond any other feasible explanation, you have that answer and your assumptions about church / faith are a lot less harsh.
I was an atheist for 6 years. Then I started to doubt and at my lowest point I asked God for help with somebody I was unable to overcome myself for 2 years. And he did and has continued to. 10 years later I now volunteer at my church, host a Bible study at my house and apparently post about God on Slashdot.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
The idea that questions about evolution are only raised to advanced religious doctrine is a bit of a religious doctrine in and of itself. Literally the moment that anybody questions anything main stream the immediate response is that those people must be backwoods religious extremists. You see it EVERYWHERE. Somebody raises questions about monetary policy and excessive spending and people immediately go straight to conservative therefore religious. Anybody had the gall to suggest that it was possible for some people to be predisposed to have a negative reaction to something in a vaccine you'd immediately hear "right-wing-religious-nut-job" thrown into the conversation somewhere.
At some point public branding began happening that if you ever dare to discuss an issue, point out flaws, or raise dare I say "valid" discussion points that your question was invalid simply by invoking "right-wing-religious-nut-job" in the conversation.
The sheer fact that so many people immediately use that as a go-to rather that even thinking of defending any questions would seem to indicate that those people feel their own doctrine is being questioned, which makes the idea of those people calling others extremist nut jobs kind've ironic.
One of my all time favorite quotes:
"The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - Dwight Whitney Morrow
There's a lot of people who believe themselves to be intelligent who cannot allow themselves to try to see things from another angle. Nobody holds a viewpoint strongly without having a good reason for doing so. If more people recognized that and tried to understand the other side you'd see a lot less vocal hostility.
Odds are very good that if you feel strongly about something there are a whole lot of times where you're right and a whole lot of times where you're also wrong.
Seriously. It's one of the most in demand fields in the entire country. There is not a shortage of people there is a shortage of GOOD people. There are lots of "I can haz program" people out there but most companies don't want to spend the time letting them gain experience to eventually solve problems...they want people who can jump in and work. Most companies are not looking for people straight out of college with no real experience. They're looking for senior people who can come in and solve problems immediately.
Mythical man month has established the value of senior level people.
Considering that children with autism almost always have major digestive issues and will usually see dramatic behavioral improvement by moving to a strict gluten free, casein free diet that does not surprise me in the slightest. I will be very interested to hear what comes of this.
The funny thing is that scarcity can solve garbage
on
Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
Studies constantly show that people are HIGHLY price/cost motivated and if municipalities simply offered either:
a) Free recycling pickup and paid only garbage pickup or b) Financially rewarded recycling pickup
The primary job need would become recycling pickup instead of garbage man. At that point the job is a relatively clean job in which people get to be outside all day collecting everybody's clean, sorted recyclables instead of their pile of stuff that got toss in the trash. I've even heard whole foods is experimenting with some cost effective technology that will extract the liquid from other forms of waste, which would go a long way toward reducing smell issues and separating out the other stuff for reuse.
The price impact here would really need to be minimal overall for the incentive to motivate people and the less sensitive people are to price changes the harder it would be to create such a shift.
I guess the biggest concern is the rate of slide more than anything else. What Tesla wants to do here isn't innovative...that's the issue. Everybody with eyes would have done it that way if they were allowed to as because they weren't all existing players around the country have invested in the most effective way to play with the rules that we have.
As happens with union arrangements, if a company is tied down by those agreements and a new competitor pops up that does things more efficiently with fewer people the older company probably wants to do it that way too...but they can't because they are playing by the rules. They will either be run out of business because they couldn't adjust or they will hit chapter 11 to get them out of those agreements so that they can adjust.
Either way though, societal impact has to be considered. Almost any arrangement that leads to lower efficiency while contributing to dramatically larger employment is bad for the company but good for the economy at large because the greater good is massive employment. It might to be efficient and as a programmer that will bother me but it needs to happen that way.
When we start to shift towards money generating efficiency with minimal employment the unfortunate result is extremely high unemployment and job loss.
I'm all for efficiency but there has to be a point in society where we reward and encourage high employment models.
I dealt with this from the reverse perspective. I was the sole programmer taking over all operations of a 300,000 user business and trying to prevent the business from shutting down because of the terrible job the previous consultants did. My life was triage. We had a lot of trouble hiring people because they saw what was going on and everybody was worried about jumping into an unstable situation.
In the middle of this year long "what were you thinking" style repair the boss decided he wanted a mobile app and hired a local company to build it. The only problem was that the company was pretty terrible.
They had 1 really excellent designer, 1 programmer who was about a green as they come and 1 sales guy who go in really good with a VP. The programmer wanted to make a mobile app that directly connected to our main database. His "alternative" was to have the mobile app send raw SQL over the wire to a single PHP page that would spit out the response.
Incompetent does not begin to describe it. I took this to my boss. Explained exactly what you have to have in place from an infrastructure perspective to create an API that a mobile app could utilize. Exactly how much time that would take and exactly what we had pending that needed to be done prior to implementing a mobile app. I also told him what I could rearrange in the timeline to get to it sooner, how much simpler it would be in the short term to implement a responsive design, explained the complexities involved with mobile app development and API versioning. Also mentioned that I was extremely concerned about the level of competence of their programmer but that their designer was extremely talented and knowledgable.
Deaf ears. I'd been selling out my life for the previous year saving this man from bankruptcy and "sales guy" convinced him that I was protecting my turf. All he cared about was "yes" and I found out later that he didn't think I was working hard enough anyway...
Eventually, I left for a much better opportunity, the company wasted a boat load of money on an app that never materialized.
Moral of the story, "going to management" only works if you have management that will listen to you. If they won't then they go with whoever tells them what they want to hear.
Here is the issue: Car dealerships laws are the equivalent of unions for sales people. If you want Tesla to get to set a precedent and be able to go around these rules then you're going to see similar moves by just about every other manufacturer out there which will do a ton of damage to local economies nationwide. Especially small towns.
Car manufacturers are basically an oligopoly and in an oligopoly, regulations are somewhat necessary. While I'm not a big fan of encroaching on the free market, there are areas where you have to (utilities for example).
Tesla can make awesome cars. Tesla can save the planet. Tesla can get big investments from the government and build infrastructure all over the country...but if Tesla gets to rewrite the rulebook "because Tesla" you're going to tear down a whole lot of economies.
I drive a Volt right now and I'm a big Tesla fan too, but what Tesla is trying to do is equivalent of running onto a soccer field, picking up the ball and running it into the net...then complaining that they aren't allowed to do it that way.
How is this a Republican thing? The car dealer regulations are a national thing that has been around for years which is the entire reason car dealerships exist. Everybody else has played by those rules for years even though the rules themselves are fairly stupid. Companies like GM have unions on one end and car dealerships on the other end completely milking them dry.
Like it or not this is a huge issue nationwide and Tesla is looking for special treatment. It's not big bad republicans getting in the way of progress here. Tesla is crying because they don't want to play by the same rules everybody else has to and trying to pretend they are innovative because of it.
You are experimenting with something that nobody wants changed except somebody in your management who is determined. You paid somebody for a new design and dag gummit, you are going to use it.
That's the problem. Just kill it. You don't have to understand why we like it this way...just know that we like it this way. That's all that should matter.
Talk to him. Plainly, just explain the issues you're having and what you're trying to get done to go over it with him. Ideally, get it in email form.
One of two things are possible here. He either did a quick "get it done" job to just get it over with really fast and move on...OR he potentially just has it setup using an approach you aren't familiar with. Even explain the issues to your boss if need be so that your boss can help to get you some of his time to go over this stuff.
There is good code and bad code...but there's also "different" code. I've seen many a developer absolutely lose their minds because something wasn't done the way they wanted it to be done even though it was a perfectly valid approach. That might not be the case in this situation, but as developers we can get a little set in our ways and a little OCD sometimes.
Keeping "respected guy" at a distance isn't going to help anybody. Absolute worst case, explain to your boss that in order to avoid breaking anything else you need him to at the very least, document how he did things. More than likely you'll ask respected guy for help and he'll have a look and either explain things or apologize. If things are tied together enough that when you change one thing, something else breaks then they are probably tied together for a reason. It would be odd for them not to be.
This. My last job was at an after market buy/sell/trade website where I got to take over the whole project mid-rebuild after the previous staff walked out/botched the job/etc. The user base was under constant attack from phishing, fraud, scams doing literally everything you could imagine including hacking accounts. The users complained about it constantly, people were losing trust in the site.
The owners only concerns were that I add new functionality. One of them wanted me to build a blog in the midst of all this. Also were totally willing to sell user information to ad companies if it meant better ad deals.
The core of the entire business was the part that was under attack. Being the only programmer there and realizing that there would not be a job left to complain about if I didn't do what needed to be done, I finally just started doing everything once all attempts at communicating the level of importance had failed. Built and integrated security features that had been present in the previous platform. Developed anti-phishing tools. Added intrusion detection for accounts. Built my own anti-spam system. By the time I was done with it, user complaints had nearly stopped and people were significantly more comfortable. Trading went back up. Crisis was over.
Owners didn't think I was working hard enough.
In the end I collected enough numbers to measurably illustrate the impact that my work had on the company, so I resigned with an awesome resume addition in hand that promptly landed me a muuuuuuuch better job with a better company.
Moral of the story: Do your due diligence. Try to communicate the importance. If you can provide numbers that put things in perspective for somebody more business minded - do it. At the end of the day though, owners who don't understand probably won't care. In this particular situation, if I didn't take the action that I did the company would have gone under. Others may be different though, so you need to be able to measure the cost of a breach in financial terms because that is the ONLY thing the owners will care about.
Totally agree on immigration. The biggest issue with illegal immigration is that most taxes in the country are only paid by legal citizens (excluding sales based taxes) so it's effectively cheaper to live and work in the US illegally than legally. The Fair Tax that would eliminate the income tax, replace it with sales tax and pay out a monthly stipend to every legal US citizen to offset that tax against basic needs.
It pretty much turns immigration into a non-issue.
Web programming jobs are highly remote-work oriented and a basic knowledge of javascript is required for just about all of them. If you're a purely client side developer, clearly it's important.
Outside of that though, saying "Javascript EXPERT! Eleventy-billion years experience!" does absolutely nothing for a server side developer unless that job happens to revolve specifically around Node.js (in which case the job will probably just say Node.js).
Know a server side language well, deeply. Know databases. Basic competence with Javascript is all that is required outside of that. If you don't know any Javascript, it will probably disqualify you for most web position but on the scale of determining factors it's probably around a 2 in terms of level of importance.
True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.
While that might work initially, other businesses see that and make decisions to never get involved because of it. There is no situation short of bad working conditions where unions have any actual benefit long term. In the short term, people might be able to extract higher wages but in the long term they'll both kill the business and drive others away.
There is a reason that almost all new manufacturing in the US is located in the south east and it's not because all of those businesses thought union heavy environments were a great place to take their businesses.
That's not the reason for decline in income. The reason for decline in income is lack of jobs because of all of the cheaper off-shore labor and increased the supply of workers in the US. Wage laws, regulations, and an environment generally unfriendly towards manufacturing ultimately drove any industry that doesn't HAVE to operate in the US OUT of the US to places that were happy to have the jobs at all.
If you had all of those jobs back and a thriving manufacturing industry again, the supply of workers would be much thinner, unemployment would be virtual non-existent unless by choice and because of that the wages / compensation would increase in order to attract and retain people. All we've done in the US is drive away a lot of jobs. There's plenty of places in the US where income levels are just fine and those are the areas where there is demand.
You create demand, the income levels will take care of themselves.
The Boeing thing has been especially interesting. As they've started things up in SC, Union workers have come down from Seattle trying to get people to organize to try to convince people that they aren't making enough. The general response they're getting is that most people are just happy to have a job...which is a point that a lot of people tend to forget when they start talking about wanting "more" vs wanting "anything".
In order to bet well on a framework, you have to pair general population with investment psychology. For example, let's look at Code Igniter.
CodeIgniter is a PHP framework. There are A LOT of PHP frameworks. The reason there are a lot of PHP frameworks is because of the language and the community. Most other languages are specifically built for web development, so the frameworks in them add all of the tools you need to handle web development more efficiently. Because PHP has so many of those tools, everybody rolls their own framework. As PHP frameworks become more mature, you start to see speed issues because unlike Java/Python/Ruby/.NET ALL of those PHP files have to get loaded on every request, creating a lot of disk I/O. It's server-suicide to use a PHP framework without APC configured. This leads to a conundrum of framework maturity vs framework speed in the PHP space. The language needed 5.3 and 5.4 to make frameworks REALLY feasible.
But without even getting into all of those details, the sheer fact that there are dozens upon dozens of frameworks in the language is generally a HUGE red flag. If there are that many choices, nobody has got it right. If there isn't one, distinct, clear leader in the space then there isn't going to be an ecosystem AROUND the framework contributing to plugins, etc. Additionally the framework fragmentation will generally mean that you will have a very hard time finding people who use the language who already know that framework. I spent 5 years as a CakePHP developer and I've lived everything I just described.
The end result is that if you want to use a framework PHP itself is a bad choice because there isn't a great option. PHP is great for many things, it's just a valid point in the framework discussion. Because of the level of framework fragmentation your choice of framework is basically "how do I want to organize my code" as the only actual benefit...which really is almost the same thing as just rolling your own.
If you look at other languages:
Ruby has Rails Python has Django.NET has MVC Groovy has Grails
For the last 2 years, I've been using Ruby on Rails. For one thing, it's basically the standard bearer for web frameworks. Within the ruby ecosystem, pretty much EVERYTHING makes sure that it works smoothly with Rails. It was really the clear choice from the time that I was making choices the only thing that prevented me from using it was the very stubborn "but I already know PHP" line. I looked at Groovy so I could deploy on Java infrastructure, but jRuby solves that problem for Ruby as well. If I was in a.NET shop, the choice would be MVC and if I was using Python it would be Django. Until PHP gets a "main" framework, there will not be a good framework option for PHP. Laravel seems to be going the right direction though, so that's one to keep an eye on.
In the front-end space, anything Flash based has pretty much always been a bad idea unless there is no alternative. Front-end web development should generally always follow a philosophy of graceful degradation, meaning everything should work without javascript and javascript should be used to enhance the experience with only a few exceptions on the actual-in-browser-application front. jQuery made graceful degradation EASY while also emphasizing compatibility (you could use jquery and prototype at the same time, that wasn't the case with most JS tools) and as such, took over in popularity.
The short answer to all of that is simply this: the market leader leads for a reason. Look for the market leader that works across the broadest set of platforms and you'll generally find your answer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not complete BS, but I think it's more learned by observation than taught. I was very socially awkward growing up but I also just sat back and observed people. When I got to college I made a point to modify some of my habits around people based on those observations and my college experience was a whole lot better than my high school experience. The short of it was that I just realized what type of things that I was doing that made people react badly and stopped them. It also didn't hurt that I lost 40 lbs, worked out every day, got contacts and got rid of my braces.
Seriously though, the #1 thing that I learned to do was just stop talking so much. I geek out with programmers on programming stuff. People run away when you do that in other settings.
The new Tivo Roamio pretty much does this already. Pay $2.50 / month for a cable card and use the Tivo box directly. It integrates with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime video and others as well as live tv. You can search for programs on all services at the same time and choose where you watch it (or if you will buy it from Amazon). It's pretty much awesome.
I get the "everything on demand" that Apple is shooting for is slightly different, but the bulk of this fight has already been fought by Tivo for you.
The biggest thing about frameworks is that they are supposed to give people the ability to learn one way of doing things that provides a structure to solve just about every use case for a particular type of problem and in doing so, make it easier for teams to collaborate. That's why Rails and it's clones have taken off so much. You learn rails and you can jump from project to project without having to figure out exactly why/how each individual programmer decided to do things differently. Additionally, they automate a lot of the repetitive processes and code that people continuously reinvent.
For web projects, this is great but it's not without it's problems. Web projects GENERALLY follow the same type of behavioral requirements, so in 95% of cases a framework can handle it well. The down side is when people get MARRIED to their frameworks and start ignoring good architecture in favor of the best way to do things within the framework. The creator of rails itself, DHH, is the single worst offender in this regard because he advocates doing almost nothing in the database itself which is like building a person with only one leg.
Frameworks aren't for every problem and a lot of successful web projects get mired down into a huge main app and then spend a couple of years having to refactor parts of it out into services. The key word there is successful though, because they can afford to take the time to refactor because they got to market and made money. Rails gets you to market quickly with all of the capabilities that you need to get the job done. Successful app after successful app have been launched with Rails as it's backbone and that's EXACTLY what it's supposed to do for you.
However, if you're dealing with an existing application or an enterprise scenario where you will be integrating with a legacy database or throwing an existing user base at a rebuilt system...it is not the right place for a framework. In those scenarios you're effectively already at the "successful now refactor" stage.
Everything has it's place.
And it means that you can't move to a new network unless you can move everybody you know to that network with you.
Actually, critical thinking leads to the opposite. The immediate, easy answer is that it's all just fantasy. If that's where you stop then you aren't thinking critically. In fact, if that's where you stop you are thinking dismissively and boosting your self esteem by believing that all of those people are just dumber than you and never came across the obvious conclusion that your deep thought process lead to.
When you assume that some members of that group are rational human beings (just some, we don't want to break your self esteem yet) then you have to ask WHY? Why do these people congregate, give of their time and their money for their whole lives to this? Then you have to ask why they get together and discuss it in detail in small groups outside of church? This isn't Scientology, you can walk away whenever you want to.
The reality is that many of these people have had their lives changed in ways they can't explain and they get together to share their experiences, try to understand them, and try to tell other people so that they can be helped in the exact same way.
You have a series of assumptions made about faith and they begin with and if else statement. If God is real or if God is not. When God changes your life beyond any other feasible explanation, you have that answer and your assumptions about church / faith are a lot less harsh.
I was an atheist for 6 years. Then I started to doubt and at my lowest point I asked God for help with somebody I was unable to overcome myself for 2 years. And he did and has continued to. 10 years later I now volunteer at my church, host a Bible study at my house and apparently post about God on Slashdot.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
The idea that questions about evolution are only raised to advanced religious doctrine is a bit of a religious doctrine in and of itself. Literally the moment that anybody questions anything main stream the immediate response is that those people must be backwoods religious extremists. You see it EVERYWHERE. Somebody raises questions about monetary policy and excessive spending and people immediately go straight to conservative therefore religious. Anybody had the gall to suggest that it was possible for some people to be predisposed to have a negative reaction to something in a vaccine you'd immediately hear "right-wing-religious-nut-job" thrown into the conversation somewhere.
At some point public branding began happening that if you ever dare to discuss an issue, point out flaws, or raise dare I say "valid" discussion points that your question was invalid simply by invoking "right-wing-religious-nut-job" in the conversation.
The sheer fact that so many people immediately use that as a go-to rather that even thinking of defending any questions would seem to indicate that those people feel their own doctrine is being questioned, which makes the idea of those people calling others extremist nut jobs kind've ironic.
One of my all time favorite quotes:
"The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - Dwight Whitney Morrow
There's a lot of people who believe themselves to be intelligent who cannot allow themselves to try to see things from another angle. Nobody holds a viewpoint strongly without having a good reason for doing so. If more people recognized that and tried to understand the other side you'd see a lot less vocal hostility.
Odds are very good that if you feel strongly about something there are a whole lot of times where you're right and a whole lot of times where you're also wrong.
Seriously. It's one of the most in demand fields in the entire country. There is not a shortage of people there is a shortage of GOOD people. There are lots of "I can haz program" people out there but most companies don't want to spend the time letting them gain experience to eventually solve problems...they want people who can jump in and work. Most companies are not looking for people straight out of college with no real experience. They're looking for senior people who can come in and solve problems immediately.
Mythical man month has established the value of senior level people.
Considering that children with autism almost always have major digestive issues and will usually see dramatic behavioral improvement by moving to a strict gluten free, casein free diet that does not surprise me in the slightest. I will be very interested to hear what comes of this.
http://www.wearefeelinglucky.c...
Studies constantly show that people are HIGHLY price/cost motivated and if municipalities simply offered either:
a) Free recycling pickup and paid only garbage pickup
or
b) Financially rewarded recycling pickup
The primary job need would become recycling pickup instead of garbage man. At that point the job is a relatively clean job in which people get to be outside all day collecting everybody's clean, sorted recyclables instead of their pile of stuff that got toss in the trash. I've even heard whole foods is experimenting with some cost effective technology that will extract the liquid from other forms of waste, which would go a long way toward reducing smell issues and separating out the other stuff for reuse.
The price impact here would really need to be minimal overall for the incentive to motivate people and the less sensitive people are to price changes the harder it would be to create such a shift.
I guess the biggest concern is the rate of slide more than anything else. What Tesla wants to do here isn't innovative...that's the issue. Everybody with eyes would have done it that way if they were allowed to as because they weren't all existing players around the country have invested in the most effective way to play with the rules that we have.
As happens with union arrangements, if a company is tied down by those agreements and a new competitor pops up that does things more efficiently with fewer people the older company probably wants to do it that way too...but they can't because they are playing by the rules. They will either be run out of business because they couldn't adjust or they will hit chapter 11 to get them out of those agreements so that they can adjust.
Either way though, societal impact has to be considered. Almost any arrangement that leads to lower efficiency while contributing to dramatically larger employment is bad for the company but good for the economy at large because the greater good is massive employment. It might to be efficient and as a programmer that will bother me but it needs to happen that way.
When we start to shift towards money generating efficiency with minimal employment the unfortunate result is extremely high unemployment and job loss.
I'm all for efficiency but there has to be a point in society where we reward and encourage high employment models.
I dealt with this from the reverse perspective. I was the sole programmer taking over all operations of a 300,000 user business and trying to prevent the business from shutting down because of the terrible job the previous consultants did. My life was triage. We had a lot of trouble hiring people because they saw what was going on and everybody was worried about jumping into an unstable situation.
In the middle of this year long "what were you thinking" style repair the boss decided he wanted a mobile app and hired a local company to build it. The only problem was that the company was pretty terrible.
They had 1 really excellent designer, 1 programmer who was about a green as they come and 1 sales guy who go in really good with a VP. The programmer wanted to make a mobile app that directly connected to our main database. His "alternative" was to have the mobile app send raw SQL over the wire to a single PHP page that would spit out the response.
Incompetent does not begin to describe it. I took this to my boss. Explained exactly what you have to have in place from an infrastructure perspective to create an API that a mobile app could utilize. Exactly how much time that would take and exactly what we had pending that needed to be done prior to implementing a mobile app. I also told him what I could rearrange in the timeline to get to it sooner, how much simpler it would be in the short term to implement a responsive design, explained the complexities involved with mobile app development and API versioning. Also mentioned that I was extremely concerned about the level of competence of their programmer but that their designer was extremely talented and knowledgable.
Deaf ears. I'd been selling out my life for the previous year saving this man from bankruptcy and "sales guy" convinced him that I was protecting my turf. All he cared about was "yes" and I found out later that he didn't think I was working hard enough anyway...
Eventually, I left for a much better opportunity, the company wasted a boat load of money on an app that never materialized.
Moral of the story, "going to management" only works if you have management that will listen to you. If they won't then they go with whoever tells them what they want to hear.
I think I speak for everyone here when saying...I would really like to read that report.
Here is the issue: Car dealerships laws are the equivalent of unions for sales people. If you want Tesla to get to set a precedent and be able to go around these rules then you're going to see similar moves by just about every other manufacturer out there which will do a ton of damage to local economies nationwide. Especially small towns.
Car manufacturers are basically an oligopoly and in an oligopoly, regulations are somewhat necessary. While I'm not a big fan of encroaching on the free market, there are areas where you have to (utilities for example).
Tesla can make awesome cars. Tesla can save the planet. Tesla can get big investments from the government and build infrastructure all over the country...but if Tesla gets to rewrite the rulebook "because Tesla" you're going to tear down a whole lot of economies.
I drive a Volt right now and I'm a big Tesla fan too, but what Tesla is trying to do is equivalent of running onto a soccer field, picking up the ball and running it into the net...then complaining that they aren't allowed to do it that way.
How is this a Republican thing? The car dealer regulations are a national thing that has been around for years which is the entire reason car dealerships exist. Everybody else has played by those rules for years even though the rules themselves are fairly stupid. Companies like GM have unions on one end and car dealerships on the other end completely milking them dry.
Like it or not this is a huge issue nationwide and Tesla is looking for special treatment. It's not big bad republicans getting in the way of progress here. Tesla is crying because they don't want to play by the same rules everybody else has to and trying to pretend they are innovative because of it.
How is Abiogenesis? I'm just curious.
You are experimenting with something that nobody wants changed except somebody in your management who is determined. You paid somebody for a new design and dag gummit, you are going to use it.
That's the problem. Just kill it. You don't have to understand why we like it this way...just know that we like it this way. That's all that should matter.
Talk to him. Plainly, just explain the issues you're having and what you're trying to get done to go over it with him. Ideally, get it in email form.
One of two things are possible here. He either did a quick "get it done" job to just get it over with really fast and move on...OR he potentially just has it setup using an approach you aren't familiar with. Even explain the issues to your boss if need be so that your boss can help to get you some of his time to go over this stuff.
There is good code and bad code...but there's also "different" code. I've seen many a developer absolutely lose their minds because something wasn't done the way they wanted it to be done even though it was a perfectly valid approach. That might not be the case in this situation, but as developers we can get a little set in our ways and a little OCD sometimes.
Keeping "respected guy" at a distance isn't going to help anybody. Absolute worst case, explain to your boss that in order to avoid breaking anything else you need him to at the very least, document how he did things. More than likely you'll ask respected guy for help and he'll have a look and either explain things or apologize. If things are tied together enough that when you change one thing, something else breaks then they are probably tied together for a reason. It would be odd for them not to be.
This. My last job was at an after market buy/sell/trade website where I got to take over the whole project mid-rebuild after the previous staff walked out/botched the job/etc. The user base was under constant attack from phishing, fraud, scams doing literally everything you could imagine including hacking accounts. The users complained about it constantly, people were losing trust in the site.
The owners only concerns were that I add new functionality. One of them wanted me to build a blog in the midst of all this. Also were totally willing to sell user information to ad companies if it meant better ad deals.
The core of the entire business was the part that was under attack. Being the only programmer there and realizing that there would not be a job left to complain about if I didn't do what needed to be done, I finally just started doing everything once all attempts at communicating the level of importance had failed. Built and integrated security features that had been present in the previous platform. Developed anti-phishing tools. Added intrusion detection for accounts. Built my own anti-spam system. By the time I was done with it, user complaints had nearly stopped and people were significantly more comfortable. Trading went back up. Crisis was over.
Owners didn't think I was working hard enough.
In the end I collected enough numbers to measurably illustrate the impact that my work had on the company, so I resigned with an awesome resume addition in hand that promptly landed me a muuuuuuuch better job with a better company.
Moral of the story: Do your due diligence. Try to communicate the importance. If you can provide numbers that put things in perspective for somebody more business minded - do it. At the end of the day though, owners who don't understand probably won't care. In this particular situation, if I didn't take the action that I did the company would have gone under. Others may be different though, so you need to be able to measure the cost of a breach in financial terms because that is the ONLY thing the owners will care about.
Outside of that, C.Y.A.
Totally agree on immigration. The biggest issue with illegal immigration is that most taxes in the country are only paid by legal citizens (excluding sales based taxes) so it's effectively cheaper to live and work in the US illegally than legally. The Fair Tax that would eliminate the income tax, replace it with sales tax and pay out a monthly stipend to every legal US citizen to offset that tax against basic needs.
It pretty much turns immigration into a non-issue.
Web programming jobs are highly remote-work oriented and a basic knowledge of javascript is required for just about all of them. If you're a purely client side developer, clearly it's important.
Outside of that though, saying "Javascript EXPERT! Eleventy-billion years experience!" does absolutely nothing for a server side developer unless that job happens to revolve specifically around Node.js (in which case the job will probably just say Node.js).
Know a server side language well, deeply. Know databases. Basic competence with Javascript is all that is required outside of that. If you don't know any Javascript, it will probably disqualify you for most web position but on the scale of determining factors it's probably around a 2 in terms of level of importance.
Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.
Defect fixing is indeed somewhat scalable.
I don't have mod points, but you are correct sir.
While that might work initially, other businesses see that and make decisions to never get involved because of it. There is no situation short of bad working conditions where unions have any actual benefit long term. In the short term, people might be able to extract higher wages but in the long term they'll both kill the business and drive others away.
There is a reason that almost all new manufacturing in the US is located in the south east and it's not because all of those businesses thought union heavy environments were a great place to take their businesses.
That's not the reason for decline in income. The reason for decline in income is lack of jobs because of all of the cheaper off-shore labor and increased the supply of workers in the US. Wage laws, regulations, and an environment generally unfriendly towards manufacturing ultimately drove any industry that doesn't HAVE to operate in the US OUT of the US to places that were happy to have the jobs at all.
If you had all of those jobs back and a thriving manufacturing industry again, the supply of workers would be much thinner, unemployment would be virtual non-existent unless by choice and because of that the wages / compensation would increase in order to attract and retain people. All we've done in the US is drive away a lot of jobs. There's plenty of places in the US where income levels are just fine and those are the areas where there is demand.
You create demand, the income levels will take care of themselves.
The Boeing thing has been especially interesting. As they've started things up in SC, Union workers have come down from Seattle trying to get people to organize to try to convince people that they aren't making enough. The general response they're getting is that most people are just happy to have a job...which is a point that a lot of people tend to forget when they start talking about wanting "more" vs wanting "anything".
In order to bet well on a framework, you have to pair general population with investment psychology. For example, let's look at Code Igniter.
CodeIgniter is a PHP framework. There are A LOT of PHP frameworks. The reason there are a lot of PHP frameworks is because of the language and the community. Most other languages are specifically built for web development, so the frameworks in them add all of the tools you need to handle web development more efficiently. Because PHP has so many of those tools, everybody rolls their own framework. As PHP frameworks become more mature, you start to see speed issues because unlike Java/Python/Ruby/.NET ALL of those PHP files have to get loaded on every request, creating a lot of disk I/O. It's server-suicide to use a PHP framework without APC configured. This leads to a conundrum of framework maturity vs framework speed in the PHP space. The language needed 5.3 and 5.4 to make frameworks REALLY feasible.
But without even getting into all of those details, the sheer fact that there are dozens upon dozens of frameworks in the language is generally a HUGE red flag. If there are that many choices, nobody has got it right. If there isn't one, distinct, clear leader in the space then there isn't going to be an ecosystem AROUND the framework contributing to plugins, etc. Additionally the framework fragmentation will generally mean that you will have a very hard time finding people who use the language who already know that framework. I spent 5 years as a CakePHP developer and I've lived everything I just described.
The end result is that if you want to use a framework PHP itself is a bad choice because there isn't a great option. PHP is great for many things, it's just a valid point in the framework discussion. Because of the level of framework fragmentation your choice of framework is basically "how do I want to organize my code" as the only actual benefit...which really is almost the same thing as just rolling your own.
If you look at other languages:
Ruby has Rails .NET has MVC
Python has Django
Groovy has Grails
For the last 2 years, I've been using Ruby on Rails. For one thing, it's basically the standard bearer for web frameworks. Within the ruby ecosystem, pretty much EVERYTHING makes sure that it works smoothly with Rails. It was really the clear choice from the time that I was making choices the only thing that prevented me from using it was the very stubborn "but I already know PHP" line. I looked at Groovy so I could deploy on Java infrastructure, but jRuby solves that problem for Ruby as well. If I was in a .NET shop, the choice would be MVC and if I was using Python it would be Django. Until PHP gets a "main" framework, there will not be a good framework option for PHP. Laravel seems to be going the right direction though, so that's one to keep an eye on.
In the front-end space, anything Flash based has pretty much always been a bad idea unless there is no alternative. Front-end web development should generally always follow a philosophy of graceful degradation, meaning everything should work without javascript and javascript should be used to enhance the experience with only a few exceptions on the actual-in-browser-application front. jQuery made graceful degradation EASY while also emphasizing compatibility (you could use jquery and prototype at the same time, that wasn't the case with most JS tools) and as such, took over in popularity.
The short answer to all of that is simply this: the market leader leads for a reason. Look for the market leader that works across the broadest set of platforms and you'll generally find your answer.