The real missing question is right there, in the headline: "The World Isn't Prepared for Retirement". What the fucking!!!???
"The world" is very well prepared for retirement, thank you very much. This, like mass assassinations, is very much a USA-only problem and the solution is, again just like in the mass assassinations case, very much fucking obvious for everybody but USA: you fucking collect taxes, and you pay fucking retirement pensions out of these taxes. Problem solved; no need to understand stock versus mutual funds, compound interests or stock versus public debt evolution.
"With good managers and executives, you could make outsourcing work"
That's an oxymoron, since "good managers and executives" would know outsourcing was a bad idea to start with. So almost by definition, you know they are bad managers and executives since they pushed for outsourcing (and that wouldn't be a surprise, since, see principle #1, "managers are morons").
"Agile, the idea, is total bullshit. Its execu-speak at its worst. Just fucking grade-a unproductive hot air"
It is not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's some developers thinking the problems they saw around you came from managers that didn't see the problems they were facing so, if only someone from the trenches could show to them...
Reality is, of course, that those managers are fully aware where the problems came from (if even unconsciously) and damn and hell if they want them solved, since those very problems are what give them job security to start with. Can you imagine an organization that *really* worked on the principles of agilism? Proper communication, no silos, recognition and rewarding where it's due, openly affront problems, letting those who know to take decisions... 90% of mid management (and probably executive-level too) would find themselves out of work overnight and without any valuable aptitudes for employability. Naaaah... better I fight for my fiefdom, corporate misalignment be damned, better I isolate those that know from those that decide, better I fill my agenda with meetings with others like me talking a lot about things we don't have the ability to make happen, nor the slightest hope to gain such ability in the future, so everybody thinks we are needed and that we are doing something important...
"Problem is -âoeagileâ is often used as a management code word for âoeunderstaffed, overworked, and unsupportedâ."
Problem is, as always it is, that managers are morons.
Well, in fact they are *not* morons, but clever people that cleverly respond to their environment -that's the fundamental difference with the minions. Minions see -and look for, what is needed. Managers offer what is wanted -at face value. Do you want me to shoot you on your head? There. Done.
But, anyway, managers are always and without possible dispute, the real and absolute culprit.
Now, back to the main issue: this is no news. It's been known for ages that a good team will offer a good result even against the methology imposed by (fucking moronic -all of them, that is) managers. On the other hand, on not so good teams (aka, most of them) no amount of methodology (fucking moronic -all of them, that is) managers throw at them will work.
To compose the problem, "the system" has perfected itself on past decades so, while, say, back in the 80's, you might end up with a performant team basically by sheer luck, nowadays "the system" makes that impossible.
"The felony murder rule applies if police kill an innocent bystander as the result of the commission of a felony."
Which, no doubt is as legal as it takes (in USA, at least). Quite a different thing is the justice acumen of scapegoating the actions of an agent of the law (which should be not only law-abiding to the t but, even more, exemplar) to a third party. Yes, children have the tendency to deflect blame; adults shouldn't.
"It's all relative, and of course I'm not referring to anywhere except the US, because that is the only area that TFA is relevant. In the US, there are hundreds of metro areas to choose from, and about 1/3rd of them are great choices for both job market and cost of living if you ask me."
You didn't see my point, did you? 1) The home price differences is perfectly extrapolable to other countries. 2) Home price is higher at some places and lower on some others for very different reasons, but they all end up being offer and demand: move (on average) to a cheaper place and the place will stop being cheap. Be married and you not only will need to find a job for you in that new place but for your couple too. Be married and with children and you simply won't want to move every few years to a different home if you can avoid it. Since money runs faster than people, price imbalance always will be, on average, against people's odds. The only solution would be if there were no price differences at all but then, as soon as there were an imbalance in other front (say, some State gets a head on employment opportunities) you will be back at square one because prices will follow.
"This is a total fail on your part. Yes, there absolutely are cases where selling off a business unit is better for the future growth of the company"
Which plays a very secondary place on shares' price. I know quite well what happened in the Nokia case, but you seem to have lost perspective: while the mobile unit sell was good for Nokia in the short run, it was obviously a bad strategic movement because it took away their only realist chance for a big cash cow in the future. In fact, current stock price is about half that of the first half of 2000's and 1/5 its 2007 peak. It was bad for the business, everybody knew it was bad for the business and still the stock market pushed up its shares -because it seemed good for next quarter perspectives.
While the stock market doesn't follow exactly a "the winner takes all" model, it approaches it: if this month you think there are chances for Company A to outpace Company B, you move your money to A even if you knew for sure it will go bankrupt in three months; you'll do the same next month and the month after that so, in the end, you never bet for a "race winner" but for the horse that will lead the next few paces; when that horse is busted, you pick another horse (and by "you" I mean again the "average you", which in USA most probably means healthcare/retirement founds). Since this is the average, publicly traded companies are basically forced to think in the short run or else their shares will plummet no matter how good perspectives are long run. That also explains why there are such high money movement or quarter announcements -they are not that valuable in the long run, but are paramount to decide where will you put your money in the next short weeks/months.
"Yep commutes are bad, but that's fixable by living somewhere where your commute goes against the general flow of traffic. It's what I do."
Apples to oranges. While you can be tactically right, you can't be statistically right (which is what matters here): there's no way the "average you" can go against the general flow of traffic. Things get more difficult, even at the individual "you" level, once you happen to be married.
"Actually, loans in general are the reason housing prices are so unreasonable"
Completely right, and the reason why universal basic income would be such a terrible idea.
"This still happens to this day in every country where people don't take out mortgages"
And where's that country where people don't take a mortage to buy their home, may I know?
"Move to a place that doesn't have insanely high cost of living"
Again, something impossible at the average level, even more impossible when you are married, in a world where the two members of a couple need to work to make ends meet. The most you can get at is an eternal game of cat-and-mouse but then, money moves much more quickly and with less pain than people, so it's a game people is doomed to lose.
"Where you live paycheck to paycheck in New York, San Francisco, or LA, you won't have to do that in any city that is at right around 100 on the cost of living index"
I don't live in USA but then, I moved to my country's "capital city" which also can be compared like "New York / everywhere else". Do you think I moved just for fun? Yes, cost of living at my native town is quite lower than that of capital city but, then, I can make a meagre income at capital city that at least allows me living paycheck to paycheck; my native town is absolutely cheaper, but relatively more expensive, since I wasn't able to take home even a paycheck to paycheck income there.
If you think of it that's *exactly* why cost of living at capital city is higher. Again, what might be a solution for yourself, doesn't and can't scalate.
"The value of a company is calculated on the short term profit of the company, not on the investment in future development [...] then I'd have to give you a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance"
No, I think I will have to give *you* a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance. Just like in the case of living wages, money can move more quickly than -in this case, corporate strategies, which means jumping ships becomes a sustainable strategy for investors. That even was almost a "sport" back in the eighties: you can invest on dismantling a company, grab the short term profits (short term being days/weeks/months, not seconds, as it is today), and then move your money to the next company. Rinse and repeat and you'll get a whole trade market thinking about their next quarter at best because, otherwise, you won't get a dime of traders' money.
"If Apple sold off their iphone business segment to raise their short term profit, do you really think the value of their stock would increase in the short term, at all?"
It, of course, would depend on those pesky little details, but that's exactly what happened when Nokia sold their phone business unit, so yes, that can be not only thought, but backed with data from real world.
"Regardless of what changes need to be done on the law enforcement side, this is the correct punishment for the swatters. What they did was completely uncalled for and shows a complete disrespect for other people."
Do you know what else is completely uncalled for and shows a complete disrespect for other people? Your comment.
Therefore you deserve paying life-time in prison and a million fine, right?
Uh... nope. You know why? Because there's that thingie called "proportionality". In your case, calling you "fucktard" is probably a penalty harsh enough to pay for your crimes.
"The cops would not have even been there to potentially kill anyone, were it not for the initial crime of filing the false report."
You are right. And then, a "false report" punishment should be far, far away from live conviction and a million fine.
Do you know who may deserve live prison and a million fine? A killer -an offense that seems to fit much better to the cops that in fact killed somebody without a resemblance of menace to their, or others', integrity, than to the teenager.
Not at all since I basically don't give a damn about all your one-liners on "oh, how clever I am, how much above the average mass I am" with not that much of substance. Others will read and form an opinion on themselves.
" Prior generations also saw technology as a way to eliminate jobs and increase profits. And yet we are all better off for it today."
As you know, past performance is no indication of future's.
"The main pattern I notice is that you seem to believe that eliminating jobs and increasing profit is inherently a bad thing"
In fact, it is: it's morally despicable. That it helped part of humankind to increase their living standards is just a (well, not "just": it has been a hughe) side effect.
Let's go to extremes: war has brought us a lot (a hughe lot) of advances on basically all fronts. It still is inherently a bad thing (not telling that the egotistic search of profits is as bad a thing as war, but stating the obvious: bad things can bring good side effects and still be bad things).
"we will have plenty of jobs and wealth in the future."
There *will* be plenty of wealth. The interesting thing is *who* will get it. It's not only that past decades have increased inequality but -and that's something most people seem not to be aware of, that's been the standard for most of our History. In fact, the big redistribution of wealth has only been a thing of about a century somewhere between XIX and XX, peaking at the short decades between the end of WWII and 1980 (and even then, just for less than a third of global population). It is not that we are *moving* to big inequality, but just *returning* to our traditional standard of big inequality.
And regarding jobs, I don't own a crystal ball, but not understanding this time is most probably different is ludicrous. In the past new technologies brought us more jobs in the end (and this is another interesting point: "in the end". Industrial revolution increasing the standard of live *after no less than two generations* was of no help for those poor souls that, i.e., had to work in a mine while 9 y.o.) because people were still the "intelligent part" of the equation and they were those in command of the new technologies. This time, and for the first time in History, it *is* the technology the one that will get in command, not the masses. Where in the past you had an elite "inventing/developing" the technologies that would allow the masses to increase their productivity (and even a shorter elite getting most of the profits), now it is an elite "inventing/developing" the technologies that will allow *the technology itself* to increase its productivity (and, again, even a shorter elite reaping most of the profits) -and that's in a world that is at its population peak.
The solution is obvious, while seemingly unacceptable -specially to US mentality, where anything resembling "communism" == "swear words": shared/governmental ownership/control of (basic) means of production.
If you think of it, it's not a novelty at all but just an extension of already stablished trends: government already has a strong grasp of things like military, education, healthcare (and a big share of post-WWII development, everywhere but USA, was pushed by government-owned companies, and even in USA by government subsidized companies, a trend "liberals" have been strongly working to reverse for their own profits in last decades)... so it's only a matter of extending its grasp and adding things like food and shelter. The transition is also obvious: progressively moving emphasis on taxes to consumerism (VAT) and labour (income taxes) to production (corporate taxes) and financial (taxes on stock profits). This way it won't matter if increases in productivity end up in increased labour of not, if wealth gets redistributed or concentrated. Oh, and forget about that stupidity about universal basic income (which is a trap because it looks more palatable to US mentality -it involves moving money around, which is a very capitalist thing, therefore not a communist thing, therefore acceptable). Money on itself doesn't equate wealth (something even Adam Smith knew). UBI just means inflation (despite results of very controlled / artificial so called "experiments")
"Crocodiles (believed to be descended from dinosaurs) also can't recognize the taste of toxic plants..."
Are you fucking kidding me!!!???
They are strict carnivores! Why in hell they would give a damn about a plant, toxic or otherwise!?
Ooooh! but they tested (so they say) about crocodillian ability to discern toxic food (not only plants)... Crocodillians come from a lineage about 200M year old -they haven't find ANY damn thing that makes them real sick so, why they should bother!?
"You're absolutely right to blame the bean counters"
No, it's much deeper than that: it is entrenched into IT culture and the promotion system and even Peter with his Principle was wrong.
First, you have youngster, that as the youngsters they are, are full of shit (that's not a problem on itself, it's just human nature): they simply don't pay attention to what their elders learnt, so each generation on IT reinvents the wheel from anew and, of course fail into the same mistakes. Then, in order to gain the ability to do "big things" you need to climb the corporate ladder and you won't do that out of your technical acumen (which can't even be recognized as those around of you -and above you, lack it almost completely) but because of your "social abilities", which critically includes the ability to please your (clueless) higher ups, something much easier to do when you are clueless yourself and you expend your time and focus on learning how to better sucking up the proper people than about the subtleties of your supposed job. Rinse and repeat, and you are ready for the next generation of clueless youngster starting a new cycle.
So, no, Peter's Principle is not at work because, on IT, people is not promoted because they are good on their old position till they find their level of incompetence: they get promoted for the totally wrong reasons, disregarding their abilities on their previous one. And then, the most common way of breaking up Peter's Principle, starting the hierarchy anew on some middle point, is also flawed because MBAs which start their career right into IT's middle management are even more clueless than their ranks.
Then, as you say, if for some miracle someone can and want to break the chain, he finds there's no pool of good professionals to take people from, basically at any cost because the system neither nurtures them, nor have any ability to recognize them.
I agree with point 1: to make the software easy to install (and first-time test). There's a long history of good software that gets passed over by not so good one just because it's easier on the very first hours/days.
The others? not so much: having a software secure by default is in fact quite easy even without the need of an interactive feedback.
Just tie it only to loopback and let it produce a random password that gets logged on an only-root-can-read file (or at least to a 0700 owned by the user launching it).
I see you are in the mood of nitpicking, don't you?
>> From there I moved to the "known fact" that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go faster than light in a vacuum > > Absolutely, your statement is false.
So you know I didn't act that way? Because my statement is, please re-read "From there I moved to..." Your reading comprehension is not that great, is it? (see? I can nitpick too).
And even taking the effort of understanding what you are talking about, didn't tell you nothing the fact that I put "known fact" between quotation marks?
Now, going back to your assertions, it seems you read something but you didn't understand it enterily. Yes, there might be tachions, but still no mass can jump from speed A to speed B without acceleration, which in turn means that no mass can be moved from below speed of light to above speed of light (that's the meaning of "exceeding") without passing by speed of light -which no mass can do because it takes and infinite amount of energy. So, no, no-thing can go faster than light in vacuum.
See? and that's even without needing to say that the negative result of the involved square root lacks physical meaning and can be dropped away, just like you do in any other acceleration problem, even on newtonian dynamics.
"But it's not clear to me that Einstein is famous because of his science, per se."
No, of course Einstein hasn't become a popular icon *only* because of his science.
"There are plenty of other people who were/are arguably better scientists."
Fame *never* has to do with how good one is at something alone. Even within the technical real (science, in this case) is not about how good but about how much impact, and Einstein's impact is tremendous: for one, he dwarved Newton's work, no less; but he also showed direct proof of brownian movement, he opened the door for quantum mechanics with his study on black body radiation, he was critical on A-bomb development, etc. Much of his work not only impacted the scientific community but inspired the layman too offering a new view of the Universe; he was also involved in politics *and* he was a bit weird looking (our mental image of a "scientist" today is basically "Einstein").
"Einstein was closely associated with the atomic bomb (E=mc^2) - which was a very big deal at that time. And Einstein was also Jewish at a time when Jewish people had just been persecuted with an unprecedented intensity"
That may help explaining his status today, but let's not forget that he was already basically a "rock start" back in the twenties and thirties (and he got his Nobel in 1921), long before A-bomb and Jewish issues.
An anecdote (since I'm Spanish): Einstein traveled to Madrid in 1923 (you see, 1923!); his visit made in all newspapers, he was received by the Spanish king and it's said that a roasted chesnuts street seller (a poor, probably analphabet woman) recognized him and exclaim "Hail the automobile inventor!"
By your own account, your son is not asking you about relativity: he is asking why Einstein is so famous (and he is 9 year old).
The proper answer is, then, because he ranked to the top of his field, just like (put here whatever TV competition he is fan of, Disney young singers or whatever). When you get to the top of your field, you get famous. Full stop.
Now, if you really want to introduce him into Einstein's, I can tell how I introduced myself, but I was eleven or twelve back then, which I think makes the situation a world apart.
I happened to start thinking about the relativity principle, the original one, Galileo's (no memory of how I stumbled onto it, though) and felt fascinated by the old man in his ship, trying to decide from within his cabin if the ship was moving or not. From there I moved to the "known fact" that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go faster than light in a vacuum (you can disgress a bit here talking about Mach's aether and Michelson-Morley experiment if you want to), and how would the world look like if that were true (I probably had read some of the old mental experiments about trains and watches coming and going, but I've forgotten when or where, probably because all this became obscured on my memory by my read, years later, of both Russell's 'ABC of Relativity' and Einstein's 'The meaning of Relativity' -*you* should read them and you would probably wouldn't be asking this question.
Once I got satisfied about special, I moved to the general starting also on"known" facts (taken by me as granted, back then): energy and mass are somehow equivalent (E=m*c^2) and gravity and acceleration look very much the same but can they in fact be set appart? (hint: gravitity looks "spherical" from the perspective of an observer under a heavy field). Oh, another interesting fact: there can also be black holes under newtonian physics, as long as C stands constant and nothing can run faster than light (in a vacuum -oh! and why does light runs faster in a vacuum than through transparent matter? does something can go faster than light -on said matter? Mr Cerenkov left a message).
The fact is, that though you cannot *demonstrate* Einstein's Special or General theories of Relativity without advanced maths (you can't demonstrate Newton's either), you can *exhibit* them on a credible manner, specially the special one (pun intended), on a two dimensional field, just using basic geometry, so a child can have a grasp of them.
That only means you don't use vests. I do: great on either-chilling-or-frying aircon office environments. In fact I don't use pocketwatches and it is the smartphone which goes to the vest pocket but the argument stands.
"No, but why would you call a server rack a "private cloud"? What weird, pretentious nonsense is that?"
The pretentiousness, if any, is not in the "private" part, but in the "cloud" one.
I've been in the "cloud thingie" basically from the beginning and I've seen how the term has derived from something quite significant to the vague term it quite quickly became but then, if it allows for self servicing on demand of IT resources (mainly infrastructure, but everything above can also work), then I certainly call it "cloud", private or otherwise so, yes, a, say, internal openstack deployment, sensibly configured and used, I would call an "internal cloud" even if in the end is not much more than an on-premises rack (or a bunch of them).
"The curse of all of this is that good teams have always naturally done things that lead to good product, and then some folks comes along"
Not "some folks", but "some folks with authority", aka "management". Of course, everybody can impact a project/service/product/whatever but, of course too, the higher the individual in the corporate ladder, the higher his impact on the results. And it's my opinion that if the average level ot IT people is lame, the higher you climb the corporate ladder the more unfit for the position the people tend to be (I could write quite a lot on why this is the case, but it would be to long and I don't feel in the mood).
"So 'continuous blah' and 'devops' and 'agile' are all afflicted by the curse of being the consultancy of the month"
There would be no "consultancy of the month" if the one paying for such consultancy knew things better (so see above).
"No future in ops means nobody studies it. Who does Amazon hire in 30 years to keep it all going?"
If they are clever (and corps don't tend to be too clever), they'll train their own people. If they don't, it'll end up more or less like Asimov's Empire nuclear facilities on the Foundation's saga: some magic tricks that nobody can repair much less enhance. But hey, it they manage to rise to monopoly position, it won't matter as nobody will have the knowledge to challenge their position, either.
"CI isn't such a bad thing, but CD tends to mean 'to production' for a lot of folks."
That's because it's either "to production" or it is not CD at all.
Of course, "to production" may mean different things to different people. For a VAR/COTS mill it means, "that's what we are going to sell to our next customer", for an internal team, it will mean "deployed and tested to our production servers" but, still, "delivery" means "delivery"; if it's not delivered, then it can't be D, continuous or otherwise.
"Also, while CI isn't in and of itself a bad thing, it does encourage a lot of organizations to skimp on vluable QA"
Bad managers are always bad managers. Where in "continuous" is hidden the concept "let's take critical steps out of our flow"? Hint: nowhere.
For the ones in the know it has been always the same: let's think out a good process matching our goals, let's test it to be valid, let's take out people from the process where people adds no value, rinse and repeat. That's "continuous whatever". Now: start with a bad process and all that "continuous" can add is "fucking it faster" -which, provided you have good brains at the rudder, could be a good thing on itself except, of course, you have bad processes in place because you have bad brains at the rudder to start with.
And then, there is the "devops" thingie. Look at the "agile manifesto" and all the other "foundational" concepts on these fields. All of them go to the same thing: "let's understand this is still not a "proper" engineering -and maybe never will be, but more a craftmanship, so let's understand this is more about people and empowering people than it is about processes -just the opposite to taylorism". But then, this is not a "silver bullet", because there are no "silver bullets" and where the risk of taylorism is siloism and the unability of letting your most valuable craftsmen to provide you the most value (and, in the most extreme cases, letting your people dealing with procedures and paperwork so much as the output of real value being reduced to zero), the risk of "agilism" as empowering people, is empowering the wrong people -which given the lame state of current IT, both at the technical and managerial level will be "most of them" and it may be the case that, given Sturgeon's law, there's no way to avoid that at a scale.
"Also, by the same mistaken thought, they don't need maintenance branches anymore"
Again, it depends: a VAR/COTS requires maintenace branches, an internal product/service probably does not and a SaaS offer may or may not, depending on those pesky details.
Slashdot Mirror
"The real missing question?"
The real missing question is right there, in the headline: "The World Isn't Prepared for Retirement". What the fucking!!!???
"The world" is very well prepared for retirement, thank you very much. This, like mass assassinations, is very much a USA-only problem and the solution is, again just like in the mass assassinations case, very much fucking obvious for everybody but USA: you fucking collect taxes, and you pay fucking retirement pensions out of these taxes. Problem solved; no need to understand stock versus mutual funds, compound interests or stock versus public debt evolution.
"With good managers and executives, you could make outsourcing work"
That's an oxymoron, since "good managers and executives" would know outsourcing was a bad idea to start with. So almost by definition, you know they are bad managers and executives since they pushed for outsourcing (and that wouldn't be a surprise, since, see principle #1, "managers are morons").
"Agile, the idea, is total bullshit. Its execu-speak at its worst. Just fucking grade-a unproductive hot air"
It is not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's some developers thinking the problems they saw around you came from managers that didn't see the problems they were facing so, if only someone from the trenches could show to them...
Reality is, of course, that those managers are fully aware where the problems came from (if even unconsciously) and damn and hell if they want them solved, since those very problems are what give them job security to start with. Can you imagine an organization that *really* worked on the principles of agilism? Proper communication, no silos, recognition and rewarding where it's due, openly affront problems, letting those who know to take decisions... 90% of mid management (and probably executive-level too) would find themselves out of work overnight and without any valuable aptitudes for employability. Naaaah... better I fight for my fiefdom, corporate misalignment be damned, better I isolate those that know from those that decide, better I fill my agenda with meetings with others like me talking a lot about things we don't have the ability to make happen, nor the slightest hope to gain such ability in the future, so everybody thinks we are needed and that we are doing something important...
"Problem is -âoeagileâ is often used as a management code word for âoeunderstaffed, overworked, and unsupportedâ."
Problem is, as always it is, that managers are morons.
Well, in fact they are *not* morons, but clever people that cleverly respond to their environment -that's the fundamental difference with the minions. Minions see -and look for, what is needed. Managers offer what is wanted -at face value. Do you want me to shoot you on your head? There. Done.
But, anyway, managers are always and without possible dispute, the real and absolute culprit.
Now, back to the main issue: this is no news. It's been known for ages that a good team will offer a good result even against the methology imposed by (fucking moronic -all of them, that is) managers. On the other hand, on not so good teams (aka, most of them) no amount of methodology (fucking moronic -all of them, that is) managers throw at them will work.
To compose the problem, "the system" has perfected itself on past decades so, while, say, back in the 80's, you might end up with a performant team basically by sheer luck, nowadays "the system" makes that impossible.
"The felony murder rule applies if police kill an innocent bystander as the result of the commission of a felony."
Which, no doubt is as legal as it takes (in USA, at least). Quite a different thing is the justice acumen of scapegoating the actions of an agent of the law (which should be not only law-abiding to the t but, even more, exemplar) to a third party. Yes, children have the tendency to deflect blame; adults shouldn't.
"It's all relative, and of course I'm not referring to anywhere except the US, because that is the only area that TFA is relevant. In the US, there are hundreds of metro areas to choose from, and about 1/3rd of them are great choices for both job market and cost of living if you ask me."
You didn't see my point, did you?
1) The home price differences is perfectly extrapolable to other countries.
2) Home price is higher at some places and lower on some others for very different reasons, but they all end up being offer and demand: move (on average) to a cheaper place and the place will stop being cheap. Be married and you not only will need to find a job for you in that new place but for your couple too. Be married and with children and you simply won't want to move every few years to a different home if you can avoid it. Since money runs faster than people, price imbalance always will be, on average, against people's odds. The only solution would be if there were no price differences at all but then, as soon as there were an imbalance in other front (say, some State gets a head on employment opportunities) you will be back at square one because prices will follow.
"This is a total fail on your part. Yes, there absolutely are cases where selling off a business unit is better for the future growth of the company"
Which plays a very secondary place on shares' price. I know quite well what happened in the Nokia case, but you seem to have lost perspective: while the mobile unit sell was good for Nokia in the short run, it was obviously a bad strategic movement because it took away their only realist chance for a big cash cow in the future. In fact, current stock price is about half that of the first half of 2000's and 1/5 its 2007 peak. It was bad for the business, everybody knew it was bad for the business and still the stock market pushed up its shares -because it seemed good for next quarter perspectives.
While the stock market doesn't follow exactly a "the winner takes all" model, it approaches it: if this month you think there are chances for Company A to outpace Company B, you move your money to A even if you knew for sure it will go bankrupt in three months; you'll do the same next month and the month after that so, in the end, you never bet for a "race winner" but for the horse that will lead the next few paces; when that horse is busted, you pick another horse (and by "you" I mean again the "average you", which in USA most probably means healthcare/retirement founds). Since this is the average, publicly traded companies are basically forced to think in the short run or else their shares will plummet no matter how good perspectives are long run. That also explains why there are such high money movement or quarter announcements -they are not that valuable in the long run, but are paramount to decide where will you put your money in the next short weeks/months.
"Yep commutes are bad, but that's fixable by living somewhere where your commute goes against the general flow of traffic. It's what I do."
Apples to oranges. While you can be tactically right, you can't be statistically right (which is what matters here): there's no way the "average you" can go against the general flow of traffic. Things get more difficult, even at the individual "you" level, once you happen to be married.
"Actually, loans in general are the reason housing prices are so unreasonable"
Completely right, and the reason why universal basic income would be such a terrible idea.
"This still happens to this day in every country where people don't take out mortgages"
And where's that country where people don't take a mortage to buy their home, may I know?
"Move to a place that doesn't have insanely high cost of living"
Again, something impossible at the average level, even more impossible when you are married, in a world where the two members of a couple need to work to make ends meet. The most you can get at is an eternal game of cat-and-mouse but then, money moves much more quickly and with less pain than people, so it's a game people is doomed to lose.
"Where you live paycheck to paycheck in New York, San Francisco, or LA, you won't have to do that in any city that is at right around 100 on the cost of living index"
I don't live in USA but then, I moved to my country's "capital city" which also can be compared like "New York / everywhere else". Do you think I moved just for fun? Yes, cost of living at my native town is quite lower than that of capital city but, then, I can make a meagre income at capital city that at least allows me living paycheck to paycheck; my native town is absolutely cheaper, but relatively more expensive, since I wasn't able to take home even a paycheck to paycheck income there.
If you think of it that's *exactly* why cost of living at capital city is higher. Again, what might be a solution for yourself, doesn't and can't scalate.
"The value of a company is calculated on the short term profit of the company, not on the investment in future development [...] then I'd have to give you a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance"
No, I think I will have to give *you* a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance. Just like in the case of living wages, money can move more quickly than -in this case, corporate strategies, which means jumping ships becomes a sustainable strategy for investors. That even was almost a "sport" back in the eighties: you can invest on dismantling a company, grab the short term profits (short term being days/weeks/months, not seconds, as it is today), and then move your money to the next company. Rinse and repeat and you'll get a whole trade market thinking about their next quarter at best because, otherwise, you won't get a dime of traders' money.
"If Apple sold off their iphone business segment to raise their short term profit, do you really think the value of their stock would increase in the short term, at all?"
It, of course, would depend on those pesky little details, but that's exactly what happened when Nokia sold their phone business unit, so yes, that can be not only thought, but backed with data from real world.
"Regardless of what changes need to be done on the law enforcement side, this is the correct punishment for the swatters. What they did was completely uncalled for and shows a complete disrespect for other people."
Do you know what else is completely uncalled for and shows a complete disrespect for other people? Your comment.
Therefore you deserve paying life-time in prison and a million fine, right?
Uh... nope. You know why? Because there's that thingie called "proportionality". In your case, calling you "fucktard" is probably a penalty harsh enough to pay for your crimes.
"The cops would not have even been there to potentially kill anyone, were it not for the initial crime of filing the false report."
You are right. And then, a "false report" punishment should be far, far away from live conviction and a million fine.
Do you know who may deserve live prison and a million fine? A killer -an offense that seems to fit much better to the cops that in fact killed somebody without a resemblance of menace to their, or others', integrity, than to the teenager.
"No hard feelings I hope."
Not at all since I basically don't give a damn about all your one-liners on "oh, how clever I am, how much above the average mass I am" with not that much of substance. Others will read and form an opinion on themselves.
" Prior generations also saw technology as a way to eliminate jobs and increase profits. And yet we are all better off for it today."
As you know, past performance is no indication of future's.
"The main pattern I notice is that you seem to believe that eliminating jobs and increasing profit is inherently a bad thing"
In fact, it is: it's morally despicable. That it helped part of humankind to increase their living standards is just a (well, not "just": it has been a hughe) side effect.
Let's go to extremes: war has brought us a lot (a hughe lot) of advances on basically all fronts. It still is inherently a bad thing (not telling that the egotistic search of profits is as bad a thing as war, but stating the obvious: bad things can bring good side effects and still be bad things).
"we will have plenty of jobs and wealth in the future."
There *will* be plenty of wealth. The interesting thing is *who* will get it. It's not only that past decades have increased inequality but -and that's something most people seem not to be aware of, that's been the standard for most of our History. In fact, the big redistribution of wealth has only been a thing of about a century somewhere between XIX and XX, peaking at the short decades between the end of WWII and 1980 (and even then, just for less than a third of global population). It is not that we are *moving* to big inequality, but just *returning* to our traditional standard of big inequality.
And regarding jobs, I don't own a crystal ball, but not understanding this time is most probably different is ludicrous. In the past new technologies brought us more jobs in the end (and this is another interesting point: "in the end". Industrial revolution increasing the standard of live *after no less than two generations* was of no help for those poor souls that, i.e., had to work in a mine while 9 y.o.) because people were still the "intelligent part" of the equation and they were those in command of the new technologies. This time, and for the first time in History, it *is* the technology the one that will get in command, not the masses. Where in the past you had an elite "inventing/developing" the technologies that would allow the masses to increase their productivity (and even a shorter elite getting most of the profits), now it is an elite "inventing/developing" the technologies that will allow *the technology itself* to increase its productivity (and, again, even a shorter elite reaping most of the profits) -and that's in a world that is at its population peak.
The solution is obvious, while seemingly unacceptable -specially to US mentality, where anything resembling "communism" == "swear words": shared/governmental ownership/control of (basic) means of production.
If you think of it, it's not a novelty at all but just an extension of already stablished trends: government already has a strong grasp of things like military, education, healthcare (and a big share of post-WWII development, everywhere but USA, was pushed by government-owned companies, and even in USA by government subsidized companies, a trend "liberals" have been strongly working to reverse for their own profits in last decades)... so it's only a matter of extending its grasp and adding things like food and shelter. The transition is also obvious: progressively moving emphasis on taxes to consumerism (VAT) and labour (income taxes) to production (corporate taxes) and financial (taxes on stock profits). This way it won't matter if increases in productivity end up in increased labour of not, if wealth gets redistributed or concentrated. Oh, and forget about that stupidity about universal basic income (which is a trap because it looks more palatable to US mentality -it involves moving money around, which is a very capitalist thing, therefore not a communist thing, therefore acceptable). Money on itself doesn't equate wealth (something even Adam Smith knew). UBI just means inflation (despite results of very controlled / artificial so called "experiments")
"Crocodiles (believed to be descended from dinosaurs) also can't recognize the taste of toxic plants..."
Are you fucking kidding me!!!???
They are strict carnivores! Why in hell they would give a damn about a plant, toxic or otherwise!?
Ooooh! but they tested (so they say) about crocodillian ability to discern toxic food (not only plants)... Crocodillians come from a lineage about 200M year old -they haven't find ANY damn thing that makes them real sick so, why they should bother!?
Stuff that matter, they say...
"You're absolutely right to blame the bean counters"
No, it's much deeper than that: it is entrenched into IT culture and the promotion system and even Peter with his Principle was wrong.
First, you have youngster, that as the youngsters they are, are full of shit (that's not a problem on itself, it's just human nature): they simply don't pay attention to what their elders learnt, so each generation on IT reinvents the wheel from anew and, of course fail into the same mistakes. Then, in order to gain the ability to do "big things" you need to climb the corporate ladder and you won't do that out of your technical acumen (which can't even be recognized as those around of you -and above you, lack it almost completely) but because of your "social abilities", which critically includes the ability to please your (clueless) higher ups, something much easier to do when you are clueless yourself and you expend your time and focus on learning how to better sucking up the proper people than about the subtleties of your supposed job. Rinse and repeat, and you are ready for the next generation of clueless youngster starting a new cycle.
So, no, Peter's Principle is not at work because, on IT, people is not promoted because they are good on their old position till they find their level of incompetence: they get promoted for the totally wrong reasons, disregarding their abilities on their previous one. And then, the most common way of breaking up Peter's Principle, starting the hierarchy anew on some middle point, is also flawed because MBAs which start their career right into IT's middle management are even more clueless than their ranks.
Then, as you say, if for some miracle someone can and want to break the chain, he finds there's no pool of good professionals to take people from, basically at any cost because the system neither nurtures them, nor have any ability to recognize them.
I agree with point 1: to make the software easy to install (and first-time test). There's a long history of good software that gets passed over by not so good one just because it's easier on the very first hours/days.
The others? not so much: having a software secure by default is in fact quite easy even without the need of an interactive feedback.
Just tie it only to loopback and let it produce a random password that gets logged on an only-root-can-read file (or at least to a 0700 owned by the user launching it).
"as a criminal your goal is to do crime big enough to live well but small enough that the authorities moves onto easier targets."
Or really big enough that you can bribe governments and still have spares for you.
It might be the case that Gates knows a thing or two about that.
I see you are in the mood of nitpicking, don't you?
>> From there I moved to the "known fact" that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go faster than light in a vacuum
>
> Absolutely, your statement is false.
So you know I didn't act that way? Because my statement is, please re-read "From there I moved to..." Your reading comprehension is not that great, is it? (see? I can nitpick too).
And even taking the effort of understanding what you are talking about, didn't tell you nothing the fact that I put "known fact" between quotation marks?
Now, going back to your assertions, it seems you read something but you didn't understand it enterily. Yes, there might be tachions, but still no mass can jump from speed A to speed B without acceleration, which in turn means that no mass can be moved from below speed of light to above speed of light (that's the meaning of "exceeding") without passing by speed of light -which no mass can do because it takes and infinite amount of energy. So, no, no-thing can go faster than light in vacuum.
See? and that's even without needing to say that the negative result of the involved square root lacks physical meaning and can be dropped away, just like you do in any other acceleration problem, even on newtonian dynamics.
"But it's not clear to me that Einstein is famous because of his science, per se."
No, of course Einstein hasn't become a popular icon *only* because of his science.
"There are plenty of other people who were/are arguably better scientists."
Fame *never* has to do with how good one is at something alone. Even within the technical real (science, in this case) is not about how good but about how much impact, and Einstein's impact is tremendous: for one, he dwarved Newton's work, no less; but he also showed direct proof of brownian movement, he opened the door for quantum mechanics with his study on black body radiation, he was critical on A-bomb development, etc. Much of his work not only impacted the scientific community but inspired the layman too offering a new view of the Universe; he was also involved in politics *and* he was a bit weird looking (our mental image of a "scientist" today is basically "Einstein").
"Einstein was closely associated with the atomic bomb (E=mc^2) - which was a very big deal at that time. And Einstein was also Jewish at a time when Jewish people had just been persecuted with an unprecedented intensity"
That may help explaining his status today, but let's not forget that he was already basically a "rock start" back in the twenties and thirties (and he got his Nobel in 1921), long before A-bomb and Jewish issues.
An anecdote (since I'm Spanish): Einstein traveled to Madrid in 1923 (you see, 1923!); his visit made in all newspapers, he was received by the Spanish king and it's said that a roasted chesnuts street seller (a poor, probably analphabet woman) recognized him and exclaim "Hail the automobile inventor!"
"...You could even get the smaller ball to "orbit" the larger one if you gave it just the right velocity in the right direction."
Oh, but the little ball *always* end up going towards the big one, but I read the Moon is getting further from Earth with time, not nearer.
And where do the Earth and the Moon rest upon? I can't see any stretched bedsheet beneath them -or are they elephants, all the way down?
And what the hell has all this to do with Einstein? I thought Newton settled all that!
By your own account, your son is not asking you about relativity: he is asking why Einstein is so famous (and he is 9 year old).
The proper answer is, then, because he ranked to the top of his field, just like (put here whatever TV competition he is fan of, Disney young singers or whatever). When you get to the top of your field, you get famous. Full stop.
Now, if you really want to introduce him into Einstein's, I can tell how I introduced myself, but I was eleven or twelve back then, which I think makes the situation a world apart.
I happened to start thinking about the relativity principle, the original one, Galileo's (no memory of how I stumbled onto it, though) and felt fascinated by the old man in his ship, trying to decide from within his cabin if the ship was moving or not. From there I moved to the "known fact" that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go faster than light in a vacuum (you can disgress a bit here talking about Mach's aether and Michelson-Morley experiment if you want to), and how would the world look like if that were true (I probably had read some of the old mental experiments about trains and watches coming and going, but I've forgotten when or where, probably because all this became obscured on my memory by my read, years later, of both Russell's 'ABC of Relativity' and Einstein's 'The meaning of Relativity' -*you* should read them and you would probably wouldn't be asking this question.
Once I got satisfied about special, I moved to the general starting also on"known" facts (taken by me as granted, back then): energy and mass are somehow equivalent (E=m*c^2) and gravity and acceleration look very much the same but can they in fact be set appart? (hint: gravitity looks "spherical" from the perspective of an observer under a heavy field). Oh, another interesting fact: there can also be black holes under newtonian physics, as long as C stands constant and nothing can run faster than light (in a vacuum -oh! and why does light runs faster in a vacuum than through transparent matter? does something can go faster than light -on said matter? Mr Cerenkov left a message).
The fact is, that though you cannot *demonstrate* Einstein's Special or General theories of Relativity without advanced maths (you can't demonstrate Newton's either), you can *exhibit* them on a credible manner, specially the special one (pun intended), on a two dimensional field, just using basic geometry, so a child can have a grasp of them.
That only means you don't use vests. I do: great on either-chilling-or-frying aircon office environments. In fact I don't use pocketwatches and it is the smartphone which goes to the vest pocket but the argument stands.
"No, but why would you call a server rack a "private cloud"? What weird, pretentious nonsense is that?"
The pretentiousness, if any, is not in the "private" part, but in the "cloud" one.
I've been in the "cloud thingie" basically from the beginning and I've seen how the term has derived from something quite significant to the vague term it quite quickly became but then, if it allows for self servicing on demand of IT resources (mainly infrastructure, but everything above can also work), then I certainly call it "cloud", private or otherwise so, yes, a, say, internal openstack deployment, sensibly configured and used, I would call an "internal cloud" even if in the end is not much more than an on-premises rack (or a bunch of them).
"The curse of all of this is that good teams have always naturally done things that lead to good product, and then some folks comes along"
Not "some folks", but "some folks with authority", aka "management". Of course, everybody can impact a project/service/product/whatever but, of course too, the higher the individual in the corporate ladder, the higher his impact on the results. And it's my opinion that if the average level ot IT people is lame, the higher you climb the corporate ladder the more unfit for the position the people tend to be (I could write quite a lot on why this is the case, but it would be to long and I don't feel in the mood).
"So 'continuous blah' and 'devops' and 'agile' are all afflicted by the curse of being the consultancy of the month"
There would be no "consultancy of the month" if the one paying for such consultancy knew things better (so see above).
"No future in ops means nobody studies it. Who does Amazon hire in 30 years to keep it all going?"
If they are clever (and corps don't tend to be too clever), they'll train their own people. If they don't, it'll end up more or less like Asimov's Empire nuclear facilities on the Foundation's saga: some magic tricks that nobody can repair much less enhance. But hey, it they manage to rise to monopoly position, it won't matter as nobody will have the knowledge to challenge their position, either.
"I've seen that private cloud; it happens to be on-site at the customer premises. It looked a lot like a server rack to me..."
Do you think a public cloud looks much different than a server rack, only on other's datacenter?
"CI isn't such a bad thing, but CD tends to mean 'to production' for a lot of folks."
That's because it's either "to production" or it is not CD at all.
Of course, "to production" may mean different things to different people. For a VAR/COTS mill it means, "that's what we are going to sell to our next customer", for an internal team, it will mean "deployed and tested to our production servers" but, still, "delivery" means "delivery"; if it's not delivered, then it can't be D, continuous or otherwise.
"Also, while CI isn't in and of itself a bad thing, it does encourage a lot of organizations to skimp on vluable QA"
Bad managers are always bad managers. Where in "continuous" is hidden the concept "let's take critical steps out of our flow"? Hint: nowhere.
For the ones in the know it has been always the same: let's think out a good process matching our goals, let's test it to be valid, let's take out people from the process where people adds no value, rinse and repeat. That's "continuous whatever". Now: start with a bad process and all that "continuous" can add is "fucking it faster" -which, provided you have good brains at the rudder, could be a good thing on itself except, of course, you have bad processes in place because you have bad brains at the rudder to start with.
And then, there is the "devops" thingie. Look at the "agile manifesto" and all the other "foundational" concepts on these fields. All of them go to the same thing: "let's understand this is still not a "proper" engineering -and maybe never will be, but more a craftmanship, so let's understand this is more about people and empowering people than it is about processes -just the opposite to taylorism". But then, this is not a "silver bullet", because there are no "silver bullets" and where the risk of taylorism is siloism and the unability of letting your most valuable craftsmen to provide you the most value (and, in the most extreme cases, letting your people dealing with procedures and paperwork so much as the output of real value being reduced to zero), the risk of "agilism" as empowering people, is empowering the wrong people -which given the lame state of current IT, both at the technical and managerial level will be "most of them" and it may be the case that, given Sturgeon's law, there's no way to avoid that at a scale.
"Also, by the same mistaken thought, they don't need maintenance branches anymore"
Again, it depends: a VAR/COTS requires maintenace branches, an internal product/service probably does not and a SaaS offer may or may not, depending on those pesky details.