Apart from the numerous indirect benefits from even pointless, menial employment, both to them as an individual and to society as a whole. People with a job, however mind-numbingly unproductive it may be, and even if it doesn't really benefit them financially any more than being on the dole, will generally feel better about themselves and so are likely to be healthier. This makes them less of a burden on society from the point of view of providing healthcare, and means they're more likely to play an active and positive role in the lives of their families and communities. They'll also be less likely to commit crime, and I don't really need to spell out to you the numerous benefits resulting from a reduction in crime rate.
At the end of the day, it's all coming out of taxes one way or another. I'd rather have happier, healthier, more active, more productive people doing worthless paper-shuffling in artificial non-jobs than those same people claiming all manner of benefits and feeling sorry for themselves. The difference in bottom-line cost probably isn't much.
Barclays (I think) have actually TRADEMARKED the term Hole In The Wall and label their machines with it now. Somebody else has claimed Cashpoint as their own. Doesn't seem right to me, what with decades of prior art having put those terms well and truly in the public domain, but I don't make the rules.
All it does is facilitate communication. People have always talked about you without you knowing it. Facebook just makes you more aware that they're doing it. As always, social etiquette will adjust slightly around it and we'll carry on just fine.
I mean, I remember when caller ID started to come in and callers would feel mildly freaked by the person answering the phone addressing them directly, without having to go through the till-then-normal procedure of identification at the start of the call. It disrupted one of those little rituals we're all more dependent on than we realise. Now we all just take it in our stride.
Similarly, you'll get used to seeing your friends talking about you, and they'll get used to the idea that they're exposing your activities to a lot of people's attention, and will probably become more discreet.
Hang on, most of Chrome was built on stuff other people did too. Webkit and the V8 Javascript engine aren't Google's work. So you can't really claim that Google outdid Microsoft from a standing start in a year, because Webkit's been under development since, ooh, the mid-nineties, and I don't know how long V8's been worked on.
I must say that as a British citizen I was amazed at the power unions have in America. Prior to dealing with them, my perception had always been that labour laws in America were much more lax than ours, and that people got screwed by their employers left, right and centre. What I didn't expect was that the unions, where present, would more than make up for this by being chokingly overbearing.
I was working for a company who were developing systems for guiding US Marine mechanics through repair procedures. Being British, we weren't allowed to play with the Marines' toys, so we ended up using the local bus company for testing stuff, as they had nearly exactly the same problems. Or so we thought. But as soon as we started trying out our gadgetry, we ran into a succession of shitstorms with the unions. "If this thing allows a novice to carry out a procedure, then all our expertise is worthless. Is this a management scheme to replace us with cheaper, less skilled mechanics?" "Er, no, we're just trying to do a bit of user testing". "Hey, Bill, try following this procedure you don't normally do" "Can't do that, that's another man's job and I can't be taking it from him". And so on and so on. These guys were hugely mistrustful of their management, and by extension, us. And I really could see where they were coming from, but boy was it frustrating for us, having come thousands of miles just to try some stuff out.
For the most part, this stuff never really happens in the UK any more, because the unions won most of their battles for better conditions a long time ago, and as a result of their efforts legislation provides a good degree of protection whether you're in a union or not. And thankfully, and whatever the right-wing press would have you think, it rarely gets in the way of Getting Stuff Done. We've struck a pretty good balance.
20KW? Wow. That's just made me think. 20KW to pull a car along at (I'm guessing) 65MPH. Meanwhile, 250W or so from my two legs will propel me at a steady 25MPH on my pushbike.
Bugatti's part of the VW group, along with about half the other car manufacturers in Europe (Seat, Skoda, Bentley, Audi, Lamborghini, and pretty soon Porsche). The whole project came about when VW's head honcho declared they'd build a car with 1000BHP that could do 400km/h. It was the first the engineers had heard of it, and for a long time it looked like they wouldn't manage it, even though they'd basically been given a blank cheque. Eventually they cracked it.
Although if you're not aware that Bugatti's part of the VW group, it's obviously not doing the job it was intended to do...
Well the story goes that it costs about three times as much to make as they ask for it. The price is pretty arbitrary and set where it is just to take the car out of reach of nearly, but not quite, everyone. The Veyron purely the result of an engineering challenge, a way of showing off what they can do when they put their minds to it. If they're hoping to get anything out of it, it's a halo effect which will make people think differently about how they build their other cars, the ones people can actually afford.
I just took an iPhone 3G to Glastonbury. I turned off WiFi and 3G, and switched it off at night, and it made it from Wednesday to Sunday morning before dying, despite me making probably hundreds of calls (most of them didn't connect). So you can get decent milage out of them if you strip back most of the functaionality. Obviously this rather defeats the purpose of having such a sophisticated device, but really, WiFi's not a lot of good to you in a field.
My friend and I travelled around Ethiopia recently. We were tooled up with all manner of nice digital photographic equipment, and between us we got some utterly amazing photographs (which still don't come anywhere near to doing the place justice, but anyway).
And yet, at one point my friend turned to me and said "Y'know what? I wish I had a Polaroid with me". And I found myself agreeing. What on earth made her say that? Simple. We'd spent a day touring around the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and at the end of it our guide invited us to his home for a coffee ceremony.
There we sat in his mud house shooting the breeze most pleasantly for a couple of hours, and after a while we noticed that his family had no photos of themselves. Why would they? They haven't the money to spare on that sort of thing. So we offered to shoot some portraits, and they were delighted. But in order for the family to get them, we've had to post them once we got back home, care of the hotel we'd been staying at because there's basically no other way to get a letter to them. Who knows if they'll ever get them?
Whereas if we'd had a Polaroid, they'd have been sorted. Sure, the quality may have been utter shit, but sometimes that's not so important. Their children were growing up around them and they'd nothing to capture the moment with.
So yeah, Polaroids are old hat, but still, there's nothing quite like 'em.
My father's 5'8", my mother's 5'2", and I'm a hair's breadth under six foot and much broader than my dad. Fair enough, my dad might possibly be a bit shorter than he could have been due to poor nutrition as a kid, but I absolutely tower over both of them.
Nutrition's the biggest factor, no doubt. I'm far bigger than either of my parents, and they're from the same town, and as far as we can tell so were their ancestors. I know that my dad had a pretty deprived childhood, so maybe he never got as big as he could have, and certainly his younger brother, who didn't have things just as bad, is something the same size as myself. Most of my friends that I grew up with seem to be just a bit bigger than their parent of the same gender, too.
But it just seems to me that genetic diversity gives you a head start. A couple of weeks ago I met a six-year-old boy whose father is from Northern Ireland and about 5'10/178cm, and mother is from Kenya, where he lives himself. I never met momma so I've no idea how tall she is. Patrick looks uncannily like a young Barack Obama, to the extent that his schoolfriends have nicknamed him Obama, but I digress. This kid was huge for a six-year-old - I'd have pegged him for about nine if I didn't know. And as I said, he's growing up in Kenya, and while he's not badly off, he's not existing on a calorie-packed Western diet, so it's not just the food.
I've no proof whatsoever, but to me it seems to happen in humans. When I think of people I know, the ones with diverse ethnic backgrounds are invariably taller than either of their parents and very often good-looking. Presumably this is because something like height is coded for on many different parts of the genome. And so if your father's small because of recessive gene a, and your mother's small because of recessive gene z, and you get a dominant A from your mother and a dominant Z from your father, then that's two fewer genes putting a ceiling on your height.
Yes, I know this is trivialising an incredibly complicated issue, so hopefully somebody with more of a clue than me can weigh in with the knowledge here.
I've just got back from Ethiopia. I don't need to tell you what a poor country that is. Millions and millions of people there have fuck all, and in their eyes I'm rich beyond their wildest dreams. It pulled me up sharp when I realised that I could make in a day's freelancing what somebody in a reasonably good job - a junior teacher, say - could make in a year. I don't mean that to sound boastful - I can make a more than reasonable amount of money doing what I do, but the point is not how much I make, but how little they do.
Kebede was the caretaker-cum-security guard of the place where I was staying. His job basically consisted of hanging around and opening the gate when one of us went through it. He was there round the clock, every single day. He slept on a bed directly above a squat toilet in a shed made from shipping containers. No heating, and Addis Ababa can get much chillier than you'd probably imagine at night. I wouldn't have kept my fucking dog in the conditions this guy had to live in. I never got to ask him, because neither his English nor my Amharic was up to it, but I'd bet he counted himself relatively fortunate.
And you know what? In a way I'd rather be him, or a subsistence farmer scraping by on $100 per annum, than the aforementioned poor bastard who has to work three shifts on minimum wage, praying the car they drive to work doesn't break down because they can't afford to fix it, just to keep their kids in shoes.
There's a particularly insidious kind of poverty that's prevalent in the US and to a lesser extent in many other developed countries that would just make you want to cry. It really traps people, steals their time, steals their health, just so they can keep their heads barely above water. The many, many Ethiopian people I met who have literally nothing more than the shirt on their backs are in some ways more fortunate, because they never expect to have anything and live in a society which is geared up to cope under these circumstances. America's a very, very difficult place to be poor.
Years back, I sat on a beach with a young Greek lady, talking of plans and careers and futures and whatnot. She told me the following yarn:
A rich American businessman is on holiday in Mexico and strikes up a conversation with a local fisherman. They come from very different worlds and both are interested in each other's lifestyle.
"So what do you do all day, buddy?", says the American.
"Well, I wake up, go out on my little boat and spend the day sitting in the sun fishing. When I'm done, I sail back in, sell most of my catch and make myself a few pesos, and keep enough of it to take home to feed my family. Then I'll have dinner with my wife and children, maybe go for a drink with my friends, come home, make love to the wife, sleep, get up the next day and do it all again." "Hey, you can do better than that. You should take your son out fishing with you. That way you could catch more fish." "And then what?" "Well, with the money you make from that, you could invest in a bigger boat, and catch even more fish." "And then what?" "Well soon enough you could buy another boat, and another, and then eventually you wouldn't need to fish at all, you could manage your fleet's operations from the shore. One day you'd be a rich man." "And what would I do with all this money?" "Well you could retire and spend your days fishing in the sun..."
Point is, if you aspire to a quiet life of comfort somewhere beautiful, do it now while you're young enough to get a good run at it. Fuck the rat race and spending your days saving up enough money to be able to do what you could have been doing all along. Time and health are finite commodities and you never know when they'll be taken off you.
Of course, if you're the sort of person that thinks that hard work is an end in itself, by all means slog on. Whatever makes you happiest.
Jeez, a beer or two at the end of the day's practically expected in my office. It's intended as a thank-you for those working a bit late. Very civil, I'm sure you'll agree.
Unfortunately, we're making a whole lot of redundancies and they were announced today.
It's purely a coincidence that the guy beside me was quietly tucking into a bottle of whisky over the course of the afternoon...
Slashdot Mirror
BBC.
Apart from the numerous indirect benefits from even pointless, menial employment, both to them as an individual and to society as a whole. People with a job, however mind-numbingly unproductive it may be, and even if it doesn't really benefit them financially any more than being on the dole, will generally feel better about themselves and so are likely to be healthier. This makes them less of a burden on society from the point of view of providing healthcare, and means they're more likely to play an active and positive role in the lives of their families and communities. They'll also be less likely to commit crime, and I don't really need to spell out to you the numerous benefits resulting from a reduction in crime rate.
At the end of the day, it's all coming out of taxes one way or another. I'd rather have happier, healthier, more active, more productive people doing worthless paper-shuffling in artificial non-jobs than those same people claiming all manner of benefits and feeling sorry for themselves. The difference in bottom-line cost probably isn't much.
Barclays (I think) have actually TRADEMARKED the term Hole In The Wall and label their machines with it now. Somebody else has claimed Cashpoint as their own. Doesn't seem right to me, what with decades of prior art having put those terms well and truly in the public domain, but I don't make the rules.
Simple - it's not about doing stuff, it's about looking like you're doing stuff.
I know the story's only a rehashed press release, but this service seems to do precisely nothing that Spotify doesn't. So what would I want with it?
All it does is facilitate communication. People have always talked about you without you knowing it. Facebook just makes you more aware that they're doing it. As always, social etiquette will adjust slightly around it and we'll carry on just fine.
I mean, I remember when caller ID started to come in and callers would feel mildly freaked by the person answering the phone addressing them directly, without having to go through the till-then-normal procedure of identification at the start of the call. It disrupted one of those little rituals we're all more dependent on than we realise. Now we all just take it in our stride.
Similarly, you'll get used to seeing your friends talking about you, and they'll get used to the idea that they're exposing your activities to a lot of people's attention, and will probably become more discreet.
Hang on, most of Chrome was built on stuff other people did too. Webkit and the V8 Javascript engine aren't Google's work. So you can't really claim that Google outdid Microsoft from a standing start in a year, because Webkit's been under development since, ooh, the mid-nineties, and I don't know how long V8's been worked on.
I must say that as a British citizen I was amazed at the power unions have in America. Prior to dealing with them, my perception had always been that labour laws in America were much more lax than ours, and that people got screwed by their employers left, right and centre. What I didn't expect was that the unions, where present, would more than make up for this by being chokingly overbearing.
I was working for a company who were developing systems for guiding US Marine mechanics through repair procedures. Being British, we weren't allowed to play with the Marines' toys, so we ended up using the local bus company for testing stuff, as they had nearly exactly the same problems. Or so we thought. But as soon as we started trying out our gadgetry, we ran into a succession of shitstorms with the unions. "If this thing allows a novice to carry out a procedure, then all our expertise is worthless. Is this a management scheme to replace us with cheaper, less skilled mechanics?" "Er, no, we're just trying to do a bit of user testing". "Hey, Bill, try following this procedure you don't normally do" "Can't do that, that's another man's job and I can't be taking it from him". And so on and so on. These guys were hugely mistrustful of their management, and by extension, us. And I really could see where they were coming from, but boy was it frustrating for us, having come thousands of miles just to try some stuff out.
For the most part, this stuff never really happens in the UK any more, because the unions won most of their battles for better conditions a long time ago, and as a result of their efforts legislation provides a good degree of protection whether you're in a union or not. And thankfully, and whatever the right-wing press would have you think, it rarely gets in the way of Getting Stuff Done. We've struck a pretty good balance.
Yeah. I mean, 65MPH on the flat would be no trouble, but I'm afraid passengers and luggage is right out of the question...
20KW? Wow. That's just made me think. 20KW to pull a car along at (I'm guessing) 65MPH. Meanwhile, 250W or so from my two legs will propel me at a steady 25MPH on my pushbike.
Aren't bikes clever?
Bugatti's part of the VW group, along with about half the other car manufacturers in Europe (Seat, Skoda, Bentley, Audi, Lamborghini, and pretty soon Porsche). The whole project came about when VW's head honcho declared they'd build a car with 1000BHP that could do 400km/h. It was the first the engineers had heard of it, and for a long time it looked like they wouldn't manage it, even though they'd basically been given a blank cheque. Eventually they cracked it.
Although if you're not aware that Bugatti's part of the VW group, it's obviously not doing the job it was intended to do...
Well the story goes that it costs about three times as much to make as they ask for it. The price is pretty arbitrary and set where it is just to take the car out of reach of nearly, but not quite, everyone. The Veyron purely the result of an engineering challenge, a way of showing off what they can do when they put their minds to it. If they're hoping to get anything out of it, it's a halo effect which will make people think differently about how they build their other cars, the ones people can actually afford.
I just took an iPhone 3G to Glastonbury. I turned off WiFi and 3G, and switched it off at night, and it made it from Wednesday to Sunday morning before dying, despite me making probably hundreds of calls (most of them didn't connect). So you can get decent milage out of them if you strip back most of the functaionality. Obviously this rather defeats the purpose of having such a sophisticated device, but really, WiFi's not a lot of good to you in a field.
I beg to differ.
My friend and I travelled around Ethiopia recently. We were tooled up with all manner of nice digital photographic equipment, and between us we got some utterly amazing photographs (which still don't come anywhere near to doing the place justice, but anyway).
And yet, at one point my friend turned to me and said "Y'know what? I wish I had a Polaroid with me". And I found myself agreeing. What on earth made her say that? Simple. We'd spent a day touring around the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and at the end of it our guide invited us to his home for a coffee ceremony.
There we sat in his mud house shooting the breeze most pleasantly for a couple of hours, and after a while we noticed that his family had no photos of themselves. Why would they? They haven't the money to spare on that sort of thing. So we offered to shoot some portraits, and they were delighted. But in order for the family to get them, we've had to post them once we got back home, care of the hotel we'd been staying at because there's basically no other way to get a letter to them. Who knows if they'll ever get them?
Whereas if we'd had a Polaroid, they'd have been sorted. Sure, the quality may have been utter shit, but sometimes that's not so important. Their children were growing up around them and they'd nothing to capture the moment with.
So yeah, Polaroids are old hat, but still, there's nothing quite like 'em.
My father's 5'8", my mother's 5'2", and I'm a hair's breadth under six foot and much broader than my dad. Fair enough, my dad might possibly be a bit shorter than he could have been due to poor nutrition as a kid, but I absolutely tower over both of them.
Nutrition's the biggest factor, no doubt. I'm far bigger than either of my parents, and they're from the same town, and as far as we can tell so were their ancestors. I know that my dad had a pretty deprived childhood, so maybe he never got as big as he could have, and certainly his younger brother, who didn't have things just as bad, is something the same size as myself. Most of my friends that I grew up with seem to be just a bit bigger than their parent of the same gender, too.
But it just seems to me that genetic diversity gives you a head start. A couple of weeks ago I met a six-year-old boy whose father is from Northern Ireland and about 5'10/178cm, and mother is from Kenya, where he lives himself. I never met momma so I've no idea how tall she is. Patrick looks uncannily like a young Barack Obama, to the extent that his schoolfriends have nicknamed him Obama, but I digress. This kid was huge for a six-year-old - I'd have pegged him for about nine if I didn't know. And as I said, he's growing up in Kenya, and while he's not badly off, he's not existing on a calorie-packed Western diet, so it's not just the food.
Just seemed like hybrid vigour to me.
I've no proof whatsoever, but to me it seems to happen in humans. When I think of people I know, the ones with diverse ethnic backgrounds are invariably taller than either of their parents and very often good-looking. Presumably this is because something like height is coded for on many different parts of the genome. And so if your father's small because of recessive gene a, and your mother's small because of recessive gene z, and you get a dominant A from your mother and a dominant Z from your father, then that's two fewer genes putting a ceiling on your height.
Yes, I know this is trivialising an incredibly complicated issue, so hopefully somebody with more of a clue than me can weigh in with the knowledge here.
Or coal, as it's also known.
Right. There's poverty and there's poverty.
I've just got back from Ethiopia. I don't need to tell you what a poor country that is. Millions and millions of people there have fuck all, and in their eyes I'm rich beyond their wildest dreams. It pulled me up sharp when I realised that I could make in a day's freelancing what somebody in a reasonably good job - a junior teacher, say - could make in a year. I don't mean that to sound boastful - I can make a more than reasonable amount of money doing what I do, but the point is not how much I make, but how little they do.
Kebede was the caretaker-cum-security guard of the place where I was staying. His job basically consisted of hanging around and opening the gate when one of us went through it. He was there round the clock, every single day. He slept on a bed directly above a squat toilet in a shed made from shipping containers. No heating, and Addis Ababa can get much chillier than you'd probably imagine at night. I wouldn't have kept my fucking dog in the conditions this guy had to live in. I never got to ask him, because neither his English nor my Amharic was up to it, but I'd bet he counted himself relatively fortunate.
And you know what? In a way I'd rather be him, or a subsistence farmer scraping by on $100 per annum, than the aforementioned poor bastard who has to work three shifts on minimum wage, praying the car they drive to work doesn't break down because they can't afford to fix it, just to keep their kids in shoes.
There's a particularly insidious kind of poverty that's prevalent in the US and to a lesser extent in many other developed countries that would just make you want to cry. It really traps people, steals their time, steals their health, just so they can keep their heads barely above water. The many, many Ethiopian people I met who have literally nothing more than the shirt on their backs are in some ways more fortunate, because they never expect to have anything and live in a society which is geared up to cope under these circumstances. America's a very, very difficult place to be poor.
Years back, I sat on a beach with a young Greek lady, talking of plans and careers and futures and whatnot. She told me the following yarn:
A rich American businessman is on holiday in Mexico and strikes up a conversation with a local fisherman. They come from very different worlds and both are interested in each other's lifestyle.
"So what do you do all day, buddy?", says the American.
"Well, I wake up, go out on my little boat and spend the day sitting in the sun fishing. When I'm done, I sail back in, sell most of my catch and make myself a few pesos, and keep enough of it to take home to feed my family. Then I'll have dinner with my wife and children, maybe go for a drink with my friends, come home, make love to the wife, sleep, get up the next day and do it all again."
"Hey, you can do better than that. You should take your son out fishing with you. That way you could catch more fish."
"And then what?"
"Well, with the money you make from that, you could invest in a bigger boat, and catch even more fish."
"And then what?"
"Well soon enough you could buy another boat, and another, and then eventually you wouldn't need to fish at all, you could manage your fleet's operations from the shore. One day you'd be a rich man."
"And what would I do with all this money?"
"Well you could retire and spend your days fishing in the sun..."
Point is, if you aspire to a quiet life of comfort somewhere beautiful, do it now while you're young enough to get a good run at it. Fuck the rat race and spending your days saving up enough money to be able to do what you could have been doing all along. Time and health are finite commodities and you never know when they'll be taken off you.
Of course, if you're the sort of person that thinks that hard work is an end in itself, by all means slog on. Whatever makes you happiest.
Thanks for that. We Won't Get Fooled Again.
I'm happy enough without.
Oh.
Yeah, it's almost like the Shuffle doesn't have a screen or something.
Oh.
Jeez, a beer or two at the end of the day's practically expected in my office. It's intended as a thank-you for those working a bit late. Very civil, I'm sure you'll agree.
Unfortunately, we're making a whole lot of redundancies and they were announced today.
It's purely a coincidence that the guy beside me was quietly tucking into a bottle of whisky over the course of the afternoon...
Torrents!