Actuary is a good path worth a lot of money, but the training is brutal and so is the cut rate. I got a degree in math and was making 90K as a software developer within 4 years. I took a bit of a hit at the end of the.com bubble and then back to normal. Unfortunately, I wouldn't wish the politics of most IT environments on anyone.
Take your pick, though. Any job that pays well is going to have it's commensurate load of shit to deal with. Actuaries have brutal training and testing to endure. Doctors go through Internship Hell. IT people pretty live in Hell for their entire career...what you think Dilbert is funny because it isn't true?:)
If you're good at Math and Science, here is your first most important job: work out a plan for retiring comfortably at 40 right after you get out of school. It is a completely achievable goal if you manage your expectation, and giving some thought to what you want to do in the long-term will be worth more than any salary.
Figure out the budget and figure 3-5% salary increase each year, then look at costs, and how much you'll pay to live, travel, and have fun. Then get the one major investment--a home--figured out (how much a month and what maturity), and adjust the prices for each of those things until you find what you are happy with. It will tell you how much money you actually need and you will be a lot more efficient than most people starting out that have visions of high payed jobs dancing in their heads. It's not really that hard and the estimate will be wrong, but you will be a decade ahead of many people because most people chase the big dollar signs for quite a few years before they decide to look at the horizon and see if they are driving their financial life off a cliff or into a desert. Perhaps the worst situation is "waiting to live". That situation where you sacrifice a lot of your current happiness for some goal in the future that you have no concrete plan to reach. Budget for current happiness.
Once you have a ballpark number, THEN you can adjust your reality and then you can make an intelligent choice of money vs. joy with regard to occupation and then you will have a good context for deciding which of the many options listed in this thread and available elsewhere are worth it. But again, if you just wanted money, IT is a typical example of where to find it.
He comes of like a typical Microsoft employee. Halo was well-executed and enjoyable, but it was derivative. His retort doesn't even make sense to me. It's basically, "How dare you call us derivative and catering to the masses, bitch? We'll pwn you with our highly original side-scrolling game that involves a plumber and flowers and shit!"
Ya. You just supported Miyamoto's point pretty much better than anything other than making that game you describe, pal.
"Catching cold" is accurate. You lose 60-80% of body heat through your head in cold weather without a hat. Heating your body is a significant energy stress on your body, so if you are in a cold weather situation without a hat, your caloric requirements go way up. Running your immune system has energy requirements as well, but on a scale of priorities, preventing immediate death by freezing is higher than maintaining your immune system at 100%. So if you put a very heavy load on your body for heating, you lose efficiency in the immune system and because pathogens are very efficient customers, this can easily put you below the threshold where you are not catching all the shots that are fired at you.
At which point you catch a cold.
In the elderly this is seen most clearly because their heating system starts to wear out and becomes much less efficient. Which is why many elderly people complain of being hot or cold all the time, and why so many older people die from pneumonia from something simple like being caught in the rain on a chilly day. The cold wet clothes leech energy right out of their system and the immune system takes a big hit which allows sickness to take hold and then they don't have the strength to bounce back.
Second Life is not a game any more than a telephone line is a conversation. Games are entertaining diversions. When they become more than that, they become art, employment, or both. Second Life is not a game. It is a new medium for creative expression. Your computer is the brush, Second Life is the canvas, and the Internet is the distribution mechanism. When computers first came out, some people created games, but just because someone invented a new way to create content, you didn't see people saying, "In the future, games will involve writing programs." That's retarded because any sane person will tell you that only sick individuals think programming is fun enough to make a game called Robot Odyssey that involves programming robots to solve a series of progressively more difficult tasks...
(I'm a 15 year software developer, so I'm being a bit facetious here--but still, I know what I do for a living is not a game and if I build something in Second Life or create a mod for Wow, I am not playing a game even though I might later play a game with what I built--also, Robot Odyssey was awesome.)
Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input? Nothing changes by staying the same.
You have you ever thought that this what we call open-source and that talking less and actually doing something about the problem is what it's all about. Oh, it's not Microsoft's fault when they build crappy software that does not meet the needs of the user. Sure, it's not. It's our fault for not paying them hundreds of dollars to beta test their proprietary software and then being persistently vocal and spending our valuable time offering them some pointers when we could be spending that time earning enough money for a house or college for the kids or...fuck you.
I think what they are talking about is the point where IT type tasks mature to the point of an appliance. Imagine you go to the store and for $300 you pick up a cube which has an on button, it connects to a network jack or maybe we run LAN through the power cord in 10 years. When you plug it in, it is on the network and available through a "phone number" which is now your IPV6 number with some domain name alias of your choosing. The device is entirely solid state which makes it extremely reliable, it has adequate storage for anything you could reasonably want to put on it. It has power and data redundancy and there's a nationwide service that can have it repaired and back to you in just a couple of days but the failure rates are so low that no one really cares (probably lower than the failure rate on a TV because that is sensitive to a bunch of factors due to the electron gun). So basically, having a presence on the web will be as trivial as having a phone number in the past, and all of those icky tasks related to storing and preserving your digital data will be simplified to the point where you need the IT equivalent of a Maytag Man once in a great while. When things are that simple and you give people a choice, "Do you want all your cool digital stuff upstairs in your study or do you want it out somewhere on some other person's server?" people are going to say, "If it's a no brainer to maintain, I want it close to me because it's my stuff."
There are two major obstacles to that right now. One is the technical aspect of sufficient storage at a cheap cost on hardware that has great reliability at low maintanence cost. That one is in the process of being solved. The other is wanting people to be able to find you on the network. Once everyone has a cube of data like this in house and it's on the web, it's irrelevant where it is because a Google will index and crawl all that stuff at your disgression in an easy to set UI setting. Then the only choice will be, do I want my stuff close to me or far away, and the answer to that question is always simple. People want their stuff close. So that is exactly what will happen.
My main point is that you have to look at where the technology is going and assume that the difficult things of the present will become simpler and simpler in the future, which is how things have always gone. Once there were mainframes and the notion that everyone would have a computer in house was insane because of the huge costs. But now look. That's exactly what we have. What follows is the natural progression of that. I still claim there will be a continuing need for global and centralized indexing services, but the data will become more and more distributed (and redundant) at an astonishing rate. And then you'll have something that looks like a gigantic neural network. Guess what happens next!?
The most important part of what you just said is that it doesn't take long for people to realize how screwed up the mass layoff was, and then a good portion of that 40% gets reabsorbed back into the machine. So people are worrying that these people will saturate "the market" but in all likelihood, firing half your workforce does absolutely nothing to teach you how to be 40% more efficient. Which means unless some radical transformation in management occurs (and as you just pointed out that's extremely unlikely), IBM will be just as inefficient before but now making 40% less of their customers happy and earning 40% less revenue, which means they'll go, "Oh, shit!" and have a mass hiring in short order.
As far as market saturation while they figure that out, you'd really need to take a look at the qualifications of these people and what work they are suited to as far as where they can realistically go to fill a job (where the employer agrees on their credential and pay level and so do they). Then maybe we could talk about the short-term impact of a glut of IT workers in those particular areas of IT, but again I predict it is just a transitory thing. And I suspect what some other people said is just exactly right. The perceived move to increase efficiency will drive up the stock in the short-term, some bigwigs will cash out, and then the reality of my first paragraph will set in and things will return to (normal - a couple hundred million in bigwig pockets).
And of course, flooding a market temporarily drives average salaries down, which means you can rehire your people at a 15% discount and thus you see just how it works. 100K employees * 15% ($50K median salary at time of layoff) * 1.5 year rehire loop = 1.125 billion dollars. If upper management did their homework, the revenue lost over the period is offset by the short-term float of the stock on investor optimism about the reorganization and there you go: about a billion dollars to spread around to the high rollers as they make a graceless exit, fat wallet in tow.
Progress can be made and health care for everyone is not impossible. But abuses of that system must be curtailed. An example of abuse is one individual consuming enough health care resources to provide a basic level of health care to 20 others because they have some rare disease (congenital or otherwise) or they treated their body poorly (drug use, obesity, etc.). Another abuse is any individual that is sitting on billions of dollars in wealth or is making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. There's no justification for huge disparities like that.
Can we have fair health care for everyone? Of course. But people need to think long-term about costs and change needs to be made. Let me put this as simply as possible: socialized health care is based on the idea that it is our duty and it is right that we provide a basic equality of health care to all. But that is not how our society functions and it is not how people really function. For almost everyone, "Me" comes first, or more pointedly, "My child" comes first. I am not saying there's something wrong with prioritizing the life of your child, but it points to the fact that we want to say, "Everyone deserves decent health care," which is an equality statement.
But we don't really believe that and we don't act that way. We pay some people tons of money and we give some people great healthcare. We prioritize the lives of our loved ones as more important than others. We put some people in facilities and we put others on the street. The debate on this issue and lack of resolution is due to the fact that we're largely hypocritical in what we say is right as compared to what we act out as "right". We want to think we're good people, so if people say, "Should everyone have decent health care?" we say, "Oh, yes. Of course." And then we turn around and ask for a $400,000 transplant to prolong a loved one's life so that we can have 6 more months with them.
Balanced healthcare is certainly possible. But not when you have such a vastly imbalanced amount of wealth and privilege. What we currently have is the best that you can get without large social change. And what we have right now is 5% of the people have 95% of the high quality health care. The other 95% of the population gets the remaining 5%. The likely negative outcome of our current path is a small echelon of our population will become virtually immortal and with such vast resources that the remaining 5% care is enough to provide best of class care at today's level to everyone. That's the pattern that's repeated again and again in history with wealth and power, so I doubt it will be any different here. The more positive outcome would be that technology so thoroughly solves issues of comfort and mortality that cost goes to 0 and everyone has whatever they need. Which would make Earth Heaven and cause the vast majority of Christians no end of confusion!
People don't believe all men are equal and they don't act that way. Everyone tries to "get ahead". What does that mean? It means we are all acting out the belief that we can become better, more deserving, and more privileged than others. The fallacy here is the same thing as saying an adult is better than a child. Just because you gain knowledge and skill and wealth doesn't mean you're intrinsically better or more deserving than the person that hasn't gotten as far as you yet. In fact, when it comes to our children, we instinctively do the opposite. We put them, the child that has accomplished less in the world ahead of ourselves. But in "adult" society everyone has had their fair chance and if you're not as wealthy or privileged as the next guy, it's because he's intrinsically "better". That's what the distribution of wealth and privilege says in our society and it is no different in health care. The punch line for this is when I say "our society", I'm referring to the country that I know very well: mine--the U.S. You're totally right that other nations are a good deal more successful at this health care issue, and I think it is because they are not nearly as rabidly capitalist as the U.S.
By saying no to procedures that can save a person's life but entail too great a cost. It's exactly like having a budget. You have the money to buy that new car, but you look at your finances and say that you will do without. Only in this case, it's not a new car. It's a new heart, or an expensive cancer treatment.
Now many people reading what I just said are probably thinking, "That's inhuman." These are people's lives, not cars. Well, I'm sorry but this is exactly why health care costs are spiraling out of control. Just like the United States being a debtor nation because people cannot say, "No."
I worked in health care as an analyst and application developer for 3 years. For one: it's a nightmare to use technology to do anything because the systems are hugely complicated and entangled in an enormous amount of rules, regulations, qualifications, exceptions, and so on. For two: we have all the statistical information necessary to classify diseases and injuries by cost and come up with a budget that says, "We can treat that, but the cost is too great given the statistical occurrence of the problem, so we can not treat you."
The outcry against that would be tremendous. But I can tell you for a fact that this is exactly what happens on a battlefield. Any battlefield: a corporate takeover, war between nations, etc. People make brutal choices that have a huge negative impact on peoples' lives all the time. A company buys another because it is expedient and then they let go of 50% of the workers. We don't like that, but we accept it.
But if someone says to most people, "I'm sorry but we cannot treat 30% of these problems. We have the money on hand in the short-term, but in the long-term it will break the system for all of us." People are not altruistic. People will not accept the fact that they have cancer and are going to die because the treatment is available but too statistically expensive. People will not accept the fact that they need some expensive heart surgery because they have been pouring fat and sugar into their bodies for years and now it's time for someone to pay for that abuse.
Many people don't take responsibility for themselves, because we don't have a system that requires it. We put people in prison and relieve them of the responsibility of food and shelter and making adult ethical choices. We provide expensive treatments for people that need emergency treatment because an emergency has occurred as a result of years of abusing themselves. And so on.
We're not going to fix a damn thing until we get better at saying, "No" in the short-term when it is absolutely necessary for a sustainable long-term. And that's true in all aspects of society. Health care, the environment, economics, education, whatever. It's all the same single cause. Most people can't make personal short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. Debtor nation. The one's that can, don't spend much time talking about these things because it goes nowhere. They can't solve other people's problems. People need to take responsibility for themselves or the few that already do have to carry everyone else.
before we see a press release claiming a breakthrough in power generation: "By placing horses in a giant wheel that is connected to a turbine and then racing them, scientists have found a way to generate all the power we need on a steady supply of oats and barley. Also generates lots of gambling revenue for the state."
This illustrating that the reason for overpopulation is peoples' fear of a miserable old age. A fine reason to burden the planet with 7 addition replacement units for yourself and your wife.
The rationale here is not correct in my experience. I've been in IT for 10 years. I barely tolerate it, but I manage because I don't have a family to look after, I'm payed extremely well, and I won't have to do it much longer. As a man, I find the latest and greatest toys to be about the most irritating thing in the universe because experience tells me that the latest and greatest is the buggiest most unreliable crap that will make my life a hassle. I know plenty of men that have said see ya later to IT as well and for pretty much the described reason. A relentless schedule with lots of chaos, unclear deliverables, management that can't handle the pressure on them and pass it to their employees, and unrealistic hours for an activity that requires a high degree of mental activity...that's many IT workplaces.
I don't know why the trend observed exists or even if it's accurate. I do know that I've worked with a female developer one time in 10 years on quite a few teams and she was the husband of another developer and they'd both come over from India. No idea what that data point means either. But personally, if I were a woman, I'd be into another job the first time my male manager treats the team like crap and provides completely unclear random objects and then looks at me disapprovingly as if it's my failing he hasn't managed to create an actual schedule in 3 years...
Uhm...anyhoo! Once you get a distribution in any work area that is predominantly one gender, it gets weird and difficult to balance out because gender starts to become an issue. I worked in health care and there were some areas which were all female and some were all male and that's how those areas stayed year after year with a few oddball exceptions.
We have a big brain that allows us to compensate for any number of environmental and genetic disadvantages. The result is that natural selection applies to us primarily in cognitive areas. Basically, all of our genetic shortcomings are balanced by technology. Therefore randomness is propagated and environmental factors have a far more limited impact on our genes.
There are lots of fat people because fewer people die from it in a society that uses vehicles for most moving around and doesn't move very much otherwise. There's no "natural" selection for it anymore. There's only cultural selection. In other words, we will evolve toward whatever is "in" with our culture, if that consensus emerges as a stable factor for a few generations.
This isn't the whole story. Efficiency is very important because it determines what amount of surface area you need for a particular amount of power. It does us very little good to invent a virtually cost free type of solar power if the surface area (land) requirements are enormous (in which case it is far from free because no matter how cheap the material, maintenance will be a bitch).
If the cheapest alternative is to cover a geographically significant area of land with collectors, the alteration in albedo would have a noticeable impact on weather, as well as flora and fauna in the region. It's true that it is a mistake to focus only on efficiency, but only to a point. Also, as I alluded to above efficiency is directly related to the materials cost component of $/watt.
The scientists in solar energy (most that I know) are concerned with efficiency for good reason. And that reason is economics.
Grim for us all as well as the games. I've played most of the MMOG's, and even when I'm playing them, I still miss the experience of games like PlanetScape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Elder Scrolls is decent, but I think the best hope for CRPG's is in the console market. Some excellent titles have been released.
My prediction is that we will see a resurgence of the genre after the MMOG furor subsides and virtual economies work themselves out. Then stand-alone RPG's will be seen as a pleasant retro or "getting away from it all" diversion from the mainstream "Online! Online! Online!".
That's what I think, anyway. I frequently find online games totally annoying and go looking for a quality RPG experience that doesn't require 5-25 random people with varying levels of maturity from 6 to 45.
Tropical rainforests in shambles. Now replaced with corn field and little plaque mentioning historical significance of the site. We care so much and hold on with such fervor to the things that don't need to last, and we punt on the things that do.
You take your kid hunting with a rifle and say, "Oh, look. A female dear." If they then proceed to blow away the deer without pause--not ready for lifelike violence video games. If they ask you a question like, "Do you think that dear is a mommy?" Parenting job done. Take them to a petting zoo where they can feed a deer some leaves, and then let them play what they want.
Point being, you want the ability to make moral judgements in place so they have a framework to put game violence in context as "NOT WHAT YOU DO IN THE SCHOOLYARD".
Can anyone can comment on the likelihood of us ever having this. At some point, with a technology like this, doesn't it seem that we could build energy self-sufficient buildings at very minimal additional cost, and wouldn't the coal and other industries that make a pretty penny off electricity generation for the consumer be very opposed to this?
What's a good analog for this, historically?
Given all the recent developments, it seems like within 10 years we're done with that whole bigass powerplant thing. I can already meet almost all of my energy needs with solar-powered shingles on my roof. This just makes the bar even lower and more no-brainer.
I am also a mathematician and I can tell you that the concern is whether or not our "minute" impact will tip the system over a threshold and toward a chaotic attractor which represents an undesirable state (e.g. a shift of the jetstream to a lower potential state which results in altered rainfall or temperature patterns in agricultural areas of the world).
What you said about the Butterfly Effect is correct but deals with the impact of small random fluctuations on a chaotic system. In this situation the planned alteration is highly non-random (a consistent reduction in energy potential of the jetstream), and the inevitable consequence of success is a gradual and significant increase in the magnitude of the change. The Butterfly Effect is not the correct model for non-random state changes of increasing magnitude.
In other words, the quoted person is thinking about a valid concern, but used the wrong model to express it. The concern is still valid however. Will our actions disturb a delicate balance in nature of which we are not yet aware? We just don't know. Experiments of this scope are not the ones that you want to go the wrong way, so I sincerely hope that this company and the government spends as much time determining how to calculate the limit of what we allow ourselves to pull from the jetstream as we do figuring out how to do it.
There's validity to the clarity through verbosity idea. But it is also true that some creative solutions transform a huge mess of unclarity into a short and simple solution. By this I am saying that creative and "creative" are not the same. There are plenty of examples of "too clever for its own good", yes. Recently, I started working with a small company that has a newly minted development manager with development experience working for a large company. He is incredibly risk averse. As an example, I came in and made an assessment and fixed something right at the core of the application we were working on. He was incredibly resistant and worried about this creative solution. In the end, quality concerns became so great that I was asked to make the changes. Dozens of deeper system issues disappeared.
As a more senior developer, I don't look for "clever" solutions. I look for the creative resolutions which are both clear and significant improvements and I discard the ones that fail that litmus test no matter how "pretty" they might seem. That's a highly developed level of skill, and stifling that good example of creativity is what takes the joy out of IT. And it's not necessary. You simply need management with the maturity and wisdom to trust their people and discern between "clever enough to cost us millions" to "creative enough to save us millions".
So, the solution here is you need better management. Management that can distinguish between what's good and what's really bad, and management that nurtures that same ability in its creative people. Some people are just good. They just come to this as a natural progression of their work and a desire to do it the best way possible. Others need guidance. Either way, those are the people that you want.
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Actuary is a good path worth a lot of money, but the training is brutal and so is the cut rate. I got a degree in math and was making 90K as a software developer within 4 years. I took a bit of a hit at the end of the .com bubble and then back to normal. Unfortunately, I wouldn't wish the politics of most IT environments on anyone.
Take your pick, though. Any job that pays well is going to have it's commensurate load of shit to deal with. Actuaries have brutal training and testing to endure. Doctors go through Internship Hell. IT people pretty live in Hell for their entire career...what you think Dilbert is funny because it isn't true? :)
If you're good at Math and Science, here is your first most important job: work out a plan for retiring comfortably at 40 right after you get out of school. It is a completely achievable goal if you manage your expectation, and giving some thought to what you want to do in the long-term will be worth more than any salary.
Figure out the budget and figure 3-5% salary increase each year, then look at costs, and how much you'll pay to live, travel, and have fun. Then get the one major investment--a home--figured out (how much a month and what maturity), and adjust the prices for each of those things until you find what you are happy with. It will tell you how much money you actually need and you will be a lot more efficient than most people starting out that have visions of high payed jobs dancing in their heads. It's not really that hard and the estimate will be wrong, but you will be a decade ahead of many people because most people chase the big dollar signs for quite a few years before they decide to look at the horizon and see if they are driving their financial life off a cliff or into a desert. Perhaps the worst situation is "waiting to live". That situation where you sacrifice a lot of your current happiness for some goal in the future that you have no concrete plan to reach. Budget for current happiness.
Once you have a ballpark number, THEN you can adjust your reality and then you can make an intelligent choice of money vs. joy with regard to occupation and then you will have a good context for deciding which of the many options listed in this thread and available elsewhere are worth it. But again, if you just wanted money, IT is a typical example of where to find it.
"Squiddy. Coming in quick."
He comes of like a typical Microsoft employee. Halo was well-executed and enjoyable, but it was derivative. His retort doesn't even make sense to me. It's basically, "How dare you call us derivative and catering to the masses, bitch? We'll pwn you with our highly original side-scrolling game that involves a plumber and flowers and shit!"
Ya. You just supported Miyamoto's point pretty much better than anything other than making that game you describe, pal.
"Catching cold" is accurate. You lose 60-80% of body heat through your head in cold weather without a hat. Heating your body is a significant energy stress on your body, so if you are in a cold weather situation without a hat, your caloric requirements go way up. Running your immune system has energy requirements as well, but on a scale of priorities, preventing immediate death by freezing is higher than maintaining your immune system at 100%. So if you put a very heavy load on your body for heating, you lose efficiency in the immune system and because pathogens are very efficient customers, this can easily put you below the threshold where you are not catching all the shots that are fired at you.
At which point you catch a cold.
In the elderly this is seen most clearly because their heating system starts to wear out and becomes much less efficient. Which is why many elderly people complain of being hot or cold all the time, and why so many older people die from pneumonia from something simple like being caught in the rain on a chilly day. The cold wet clothes leech energy right out of their system and the immune system takes a big hit which allows sickness to take hold and then they don't have the strength to bounce back.
Second Life is not a game any more than a telephone line is a conversation. Games are entertaining diversions. When they become more than that, they become art, employment, or both. Second Life is not a game. It is a new medium for creative expression. Your computer is the brush, Second Life is the canvas, and the Internet is the distribution mechanism. When computers first came out, some people created games, but just because someone invented a new way to create content, you didn't see people saying, "In the future, games will involve writing programs." That's retarded because any sane person will tell you that only sick individuals think programming is fun enough to make a game called Robot Odyssey that involves programming robots to solve a series of progressively more difficult tasks...
(I'm a 15 year software developer, so I'm being a bit facetious here--but still, I know what I do for a living is not a game and if I build something in Second Life or create a mod for Wow, I am not playing a game even though I might later play a game with what I built--also, Robot Odyssey was awesome.)
I think what they are talking about is the point where IT type tasks mature to the point of an appliance. Imagine you go to the store and for $300 you pick up a cube which has an on button, it connects to a network jack or maybe we run LAN through the power cord in 10 years. When you plug it in, it is on the network and available through a "phone number" which is now your IPV6 number with some domain name alias of your choosing. The device is entirely solid state which makes it extremely reliable, it has adequate storage for anything you could reasonably want to put on it. It has power and data redundancy and there's a nationwide service that can have it repaired and back to you in just a couple of days but the failure rates are so low that no one really cares (probably lower than the failure rate on a TV because that is sensitive to a bunch of factors due to the electron gun). So basically, having a presence on the web will be as trivial as having a phone number in the past, and all of those icky tasks related to storing and preserving your digital data will be simplified to the point where you need the IT equivalent of a Maytag Man once in a great while. When things are that simple and you give people a choice, "Do you want all your cool digital stuff upstairs in your study or do you want it out somewhere on some other person's server?" people are going to say, "If it's a no brainer to maintain, I want it close to me because it's my stuff."
There are two major obstacles to that right now. One is the technical aspect of sufficient storage at a cheap cost on hardware that has great reliability at low maintanence cost. That one is in the process of being solved. The other is wanting people to be able to find you on the network. Once everyone has a cube of data like this in house and it's on the web, it's irrelevant where it is because a Google will index and crawl all that stuff at your disgression in an easy to set UI setting. Then the only choice will be, do I want my stuff close to me or far away, and the answer to that question is always simple. People want their stuff close. So that is exactly what will happen.
My main point is that you have to look at where the technology is going and assume that the difficult things of the present will become simpler and simpler in the future, which is how things have always gone. Once there were mainframes and the notion that everyone would have a computer in house was insane because of the huge costs. But now look. That's exactly what we have. What follows is the natural progression of that. I still claim there will be a continuing need for global and centralized indexing services, but the data will become more and more distributed (and redundant) at an astonishing rate. And then you'll have something that looks like a gigantic neural network. Guess what happens next!?
The most important part of what you just said is that it doesn't take long for people to realize how screwed up the mass layoff was, and then a good portion of that 40% gets reabsorbed back into the machine. So people are worrying that these people will saturate "the market" but in all likelihood, firing half your workforce does absolutely nothing to teach you how to be 40% more efficient. Which means unless some radical transformation in management occurs (and as you just pointed out that's extremely unlikely), IBM will be just as inefficient before but now making 40% less of their customers happy and earning 40% less revenue, which means they'll go, "Oh, shit!" and have a mass hiring in short order.
As far as market saturation while they figure that out, you'd really need to take a look at the qualifications of these people and what work they are suited to as far as where they can realistically go to fill a job (where the employer agrees on their credential and pay level and so do they). Then maybe we could talk about the short-term impact of a glut of IT workers in those particular areas of IT, but again I predict it is just a transitory thing. And I suspect what some other people said is just exactly right. The perceived move to increase efficiency will drive up the stock in the short-term, some bigwigs will cash out, and then the reality of my first paragraph will set in and things will return to (normal - a couple hundred million in bigwig pockets).
And of course, flooding a market temporarily drives average salaries down, which means you can rehire your people at a 15% discount and thus you see just how it works. 100K employees * 15% ($50K median salary at time of layoff) * 1.5 year rehire loop = 1.125 billion dollars. If upper management did their homework, the revenue lost over the period is offset by the short-term float of the stock on investor optimism about the reorganization and there you go: about a billion dollars to spread around to the high rollers as they make a graceless exit, fat wallet in tow.
Digustingly clear isn't it?Progress can be made and health care for everyone is not impossible. But abuses of that system must be curtailed. An example of abuse is one individual consuming enough health care resources to provide a basic level of health care to 20 others because they have some rare disease (congenital or otherwise) or they treated their body poorly (drug use, obesity, etc.). Another abuse is any individual that is sitting on billions of dollars in wealth or is making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. There's no justification for huge disparities like that.
Can we have fair health care for everyone? Of course. But people need to think long-term about costs and change needs to be made. Let me put this as simply as possible: socialized health care is based on the idea that it is our duty and it is right that we provide a basic equality of health care to all. But that is not how our society functions and it is not how people really function. For almost everyone, "Me" comes first, or more pointedly, "My child" comes first. I am not saying there's something wrong with prioritizing the life of your child, but it points to the fact that we want to say, "Everyone deserves decent health care," which is an equality statement.
But we don't really believe that and we don't act that way. We pay some people tons of money and we give some people great healthcare. We prioritize the lives of our loved ones as more important than others. We put some people in facilities and we put others on the street. The debate on this issue and lack of resolution is due to the fact that we're largely hypocritical in what we say is right as compared to what we act out as "right". We want to think we're good people, so if people say, "Should everyone have decent health care?" we say, "Oh, yes. Of course." And then we turn around and ask for a $400,000 transplant to prolong a loved one's life so that we can have 6 more months with them.
Balanced healthcare is certainly possible. But not when you have such a vastly imbalanced amount of wealth and privilege. What we currently have is the best that you can get without large social change. And what we have right now is 5% of the people have 95% of the high quality health care. The other 95% of the population gets the remaining 5%. The likely negative outcome of our current path is a small echelon of our population will become virtually immortal and with such vast resources that the remaining 5% care is enough to provide best of class care at today's level to everyone. That's the pattern that's repeated again and again in history with wealth and power, so I doubt it will be any different here. The more positive outcome would be that technology so thoroughly solves issues of comfort and mortality that cost goes to 0 and everyone has whatever they need. Which would make Earth Heaven and cause the vast majority of Christians no end of confusion!
People don't believe all men are equal and they don't act that way. Everyone tries to "get ahead". What does that mean? It means we are all acting out the belief that we can become better, more deserving, and more privileged than others. The fallacy here is the same thing as saying an adult is better than a child. Just because you gain knowledge and skill and wealth doesn't mean you're intrinsically better or more deserving than the person that hasn't gotten as far as you yet. In fact, when it comes to our children, we instinctively do the opposite. We put them, the child that has accomplished less in the world ahead of ourselves. But in "adult" society everyone has had their fair chance and if you're not as wealthy or privileged as the next guy, it's because he's intrinsically "better". That's what the distribution of wealth and privilege says in our society and it is no different in health care. The punch line for this is when I say "our society", I'm referring to the country that I know very well: mine--the U.S. You're totally right that other nations are a good deal more successful at this health care issue, and I think it is because they are not nearly as rabidly capitalist as the U.S.
Now many people reading what I just said are probably thinking, "That's inhuman." These are people's lives, not cars. Well, I'm sorry but this is exactly why health care costs are spiraling out of control. Just like the United States being a debtor nation because people cannot say, "No."
I worked in health care as an analyst and application developer for 3 years. For one: it's a nightmare to use technology to do anything because the systems are hugely complicated and entangled in an enormous amount of rules, regulations, qualifications, exceptions, and so on. For two: we have all the statistical information necessary to classify diseases and injuries by cost and come up with a budget that says, "We can treat that, but the cost is too great given the statistical occurrence of the problem, so we can not treat you."
The outcry against that would be tremendous. But I can tell you for a fact that this is exactly what happens on a battlefield. Any battlefield: a corporate takeover, war between nations, etc. People make brutal choices that have a huge negative impact on peoples' lives all the time. A company buys another because it is expedient and then they let go of 50% of the workers. We don't like that, but we accept it.
But if someone says to most people, "I'm sorry but we cannot treat 30% of these problems. We have the money on hand in the short-term, but in the long-term it will break the system for all of us." People are not altruistic. People will not accept the fact that they have cancer and are going to die because the treatment is available but too statistically expensive. People will not accept the fact that they need some expensive heart surgery because they have been pouring fat and sugar into their bodies for years and now it's time for someone to pay for that abuse.
Many people don't take responsibility for themselves, because we don't have a system that requires it. We put people in prison and relieve them of the responsibility of food and shelter and making adult ethical choices. We provide expensive treatments for people that need emergency treatment because an emergency has occurred as a result of years of abusing themselves. And so on.
We're not going to fix a damn thing until we get better at saying, "No" in the short-term when it is absolutely necessary for a sustainable long-term. And that's true in all aspects of society. Health care, the environment, economics, education, whatever. It's all the same single cause. Most people can't make personal short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. Debtor nation. The one's that can, don't spend much time talking about these things because it goes nowhere. They can't solve other people's problems. People need to take responsibility for themselves or the few that already do have to carry everyone else.
before we see a press release claiming a breakthrough in power generation: "By placing horses in a giant wheel that is connected to a turbine and then racing them, scientists have found a way to generate all the power we need on a steady supply of oats and barley. Also generates lots of gambling revenue for the state."
resource...like China.
This illustrating that the reason for overpopulation is peoples' fear of a miserable old age. A fine reason to burden the planet with 7 addition replacement units for yourself and your wife.
The rationale here is not correct in my experience. I've been in IT for 10 years. I barely tolerate it, but I manage because I don't have a family to look after, I'm payed extremely well, and I won't have to do it much longer. As a man, I find the latest and greatest toys to be about the most irritating thing in the universe because experience tells me that the latest and greatest is the buggiest most unreliable crap that will make my life a hassle. I know plenty of men that have said see ya later to IT as well and for pretty much the described reason. A relentless schedule with lots of chaos, unclear deliverables, management that can't handle the pressure on them and pass it to their employees, and unrealistic hours for an activity that requires a high degree of mental activity...that's many IT workplaces.
I don't know why the trend observed exists or even if it's accurate. I do know that I've worked with a female developer one time in 10 years on quite a few teams and she was the husband of another developer and they'd both come over from India. No idea what that data point means either. But personally, if I were a woman, I'd be into another job the first time my male manager treats the team like crap and provides completely unclear random objects and then looks at me disapprovingly as if it's my failing he hasn't managed to create an actual schedule in 3 years...
Uhm...anyhoo! Once you get a distribution in any work area that is predominantly one gender, it gets weird and difficult to balance out because gender starts to become an issue. I worked in health care and there were some areas which were all female and some were all male and that's how those areas stayed year after year with a few oddball exceptions.We have a big brain that allows us to compensate for any number of environmental and genetic disadvantages. The result is that natural selection applies to us primarily in cognitive areas. Basically, all of our genetic shortcomings are balanced by technology. Therefore randomness is propagated and environmental factors have a far more limited impact on our genes.
There are lots of fat people because fewer people die from it in a society that uses vehicles for most moving around and doesn't move very much otherwise. There's no "natural" selection for it anymore. There's only cultural selection. In other words, we will evolve toward whatever is "in" with our culture, if that consensus emerges as a stable factor for a few generations.
Bring on the big breasted beefy bimbos!This isn't the whole story. Efficiency is very important because it determines what amount of surface area you need for a particular amount of power. It does us very little good to invent a virtually cost free type of solar power if the surface area (land) requirements are enormous (in which case it is far from free because no matter how cheap the material, maintenance will be a bitch).
If the cheapest alternative is to cover a geographically significant area of land with collectors, the alteration in albedo would have a noticeable impact on weather, as well as flora and fauna in the region. It's true that it is a mistake to focus only on efficiency, but only to a point. Also, as I alluded to above efficiency is directly related to the materials cost component of $/watt.
The scientists in solar energy (most that I know) are concerned with efficiency for good reason. And that reason is economics.Grim for us all as well as the games. I've played most of the MMOG's, and even when I'm playing them, I still miss the experience of games like PlanetScape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Elder Scrolls is decent, but I think the best hope for CRPG's is in the console market. Some excellent titles have been released.
My prediction is that we will see a resurgence of the genre after the MMOG furor subsides and virtual economies work themselves out. Then stand-alone RPG's will be seen as a pleasant retro or "getting away from it all" diversion from the mainstream "Online! Online! Online!".
That's what I think, anyway. I frequently find online games totally annoying and go looking for a quality RPG experience that doesn't require 5-25 random people with varying levels of maturity from 6 to 45.
Dumb.
Point being, you want the ability to make moral judgements in place so they have a framework to put game violence in context as "NOT WHAT YOU DO IN THE SCHOOLYARD".
What's a good analog for this, historically?
Given all the recent developments, it seems like within 10 years we're done with that whole bigass powerplant thing. I can already meet almost all of my energy needs with solar-powered shingles on my roof. This just makes the bar even lower and more no-brainer.
What you said about the Butterfly Effect is correct but deals with the impact of small random fluctuations on a chaotic system. In this situation the planned alteration is highly non-random (a consistent reduction in energy potential of the jetstream), and the inevitable consequence of success is a gradual and significant increase in the magnitude of the change. The Butterfly Effect is not the correct model for non-random state changes of increasing magnitude.
In other words, the quoted person is thinking about a valid concern, but used the wrong model to express it. The concern is still valid however. Will our actions disturb a delicate balance in nature of which we are not yet aware? We just don't know. Experiments of this scope are not the ones that you want to go the wrong way, so I sincerely hope that this company and the government spends as much time determining how to calculate the limit of what we allow ourselves to pull from the jetstream as we do figuring out how to do it.
According to the article, it depends on which part you eat. Liver = you sicko! Hair pie = OMG, you sicko! Hooves = you're fine.
Everybody likes and wants air. QED.
There's validity to the clarity through verbosity idea. But it is also true that some creative solutions transform a huge mess of unclarity into a short and simple solution. By this I am saying that creative and "creative" are not the same. There are plenty of examples of "too clever for its own good", yes. Recently, I started working with a small company that has a newly minted development manager with development experience working for a large company. He is incredibly risk averse. As an example, I came in and made an assessment and fixed something right at the core of the application we were working on. He was incredibly resistant and worried about this creative solution. In the end, quality concerns became so great that I was asked to make the changes. Dozens of deeper system issues disappeared.
As a more senior developer, I don't look for "clever" solutions. I look for the creative resolutions which are both clear and significant improvements and I discard the ones that fail that litmus test no matter how "pretty" they might seem. That's a highly developed level of skill, and stifling that good example of creativity is what takes the joy out of IT. And it's not necessary. You simply need management with the maturity and wisdom to trust their people and discern between "clever enough to cost us millions" to "creative enough to save us millions".
So, the solution here is you need better management. Management that can distinguish between what's good and what's really bad, and management that nurtures that same ability in its creative people. Some people are just good. They just come to this as a natural progression of their work and a desire to do it the best way possible. Others need guidance. Either way, those are the people that you want.