Here's the actual legislation if anyone wants to look through it. Seems like a pretty bullshit law. If you refuse to submit your device to search, it's an automatic 90-day suspension of your license.
I think that decades from now, or maybe even further down the road, historians will start to take a large amount of interest in stuff like this. Not because there's anything particularly important in those posts, but instead to get an idea of what people were like and how their concerns were similar or different to present times, in much the same way we look at old letters from dozens or even hundreds of years ago.
One of my favorite courses in college was actually a history class that involved nothing of dates, important people, or memorable events. Instead it focused entirely on the common people and how they lived and went about their lives. It gave me a much greater appreciation for history and is something that really stuck with me. The humanities usually get a hard time from the STEM side, but when they're well taught I believe that they're as valuable educationally as any of the other courses that I took.
There are a load of YouTube videos of people screwing with scammers. Some of my favorite are where they manage to get the scammers to lock themselves out of their own computers in addition to just wasting their time. But this kind of thing has been going on for far, far longer. I'm sure anyone of age remembers the P-P-P-Powerbook from back in the day. One of my personal favorites is this similar take involving ANUS brand laptops shipped COD that were actually several boxes full of junk equipment and dead hardware with a shipping cost of several thousand dollars.
I was kind of curious so I did some quick Google searches.
There was one article based on a report about which states are most susceptible to corruption. The top state was curiously enough North Dakota which apparently is due to the fact that they have few laws or regulations in place designed to prevent it. Texas was 1 of 16 states with a passing grade in that report.
Another article discussed the results of a study that looked at convictions for federal anti-corruption laws to establish rankings. Here the most corrupt state was Mississippi. I had to click through to the study since Texas wasn't in either the top or bottom 10, but it's listed as the 18th least corrupt state in the rankings.
FiveThirtyEight also has their own article from a few years back that delves into the topic. Texas does have a lot of corruption convictions, but on a per capita basis, it's in the top third. In this assessment, Louisiana is the most corrupt based on convictions per capita, Kentucky had the worst reporter rating, and Georgia is indicated in having the greatest lack of laws to prevent corruption. Oregon, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are respectively the least corrupt states based on those same categories.
In conclusion, you can apparently measure corruption in several ways and get a variety of results. Texas seems to be pretty middle of the pack in an overall sense.
I agree with your sentiment, but considering that Tesla is the manufacturer, they should get to dictate where you can buy their vehicles. I don't believe that they should be required to offer them through dealers if they don't want to do so. If you'd argue that if a dealership wanted to obtain and then sell the vehicles through a third party, then I'd agree that Tesla should have no ground to prevent them from doing so, but I wouldn't force Tesla to do business with them directly.
I think that in the long run they'd sell more vehicles if they worked with dealers, but if they don't want to, that's their own business. I'm not a stock holder (well at least not directly, and possibly not through any fund) so I really don't care if they lose money for their own foolishness. Right now I don't think they can meet demand so they don't lose anything by not working with dealerships.
Does it really matter whether it was the big government that came first or the companies that decided to buy it when the problem is exactly the same: big government that has the power to do something like this in the first place.
It's like arguing over whether it's the cruel overlord's lash or cane is worse. Get rid of the cruel overlord and you don't have to worry about it.
If it needs a crank to work, how is perpetual motion? I suppose it could work its own crank, but the head nun warned us about such things back in the day.
I think the problem is that CFS is just a diagnosis for a set of symptoms. It appears that some people can treat the condition through psychological means. Others have had success through adjustments to their diet. I believe that there's a very real possibility that there are multiple rare conditions that can manifest these same symptoms.
If you can empirically demonstrate a treatment that works for some percentage of people suffering from these symptoms, you can start to examine the differences between the people for whom the treatment is effective and those for whom it is not in order to isolate the underlying cause. That doesn't help everyone, but it might help some people and it lets others know the look elsewhere for answers.
The other problem is that no one wants to be mentally ill or even thought of that way. Mental illness is for crazy people! Even people with mental illnesses aren't crazy enough to want to be called mentally ill. Maybe it's not as bad now that they won't lobotomize you, but there's a pretty fucked up history of how we've approached treating the mentally ill, so it's hard to blame anyone for not wanting to be regarded that way, even if they are.
None of those countries are socialist. The Prime Minister of Denmark had to explain that to the very intelligent kids at Harvard not all that long ago. All of the Scandinavian countries are capitalist countries with high income tax rates that are paid for by a larger percentage of population as well as a VAT. Also, up until recently, they all had much lower corporate income tax rates than the U.S. They didn't raise theirs either, we just cut ours to a similar level that they have.
Those countries also have several various other factors that are distinct to each, but also not socialist. For example, Sweden has a voucher system for schools and as a result a large number of charter schools. Norway doesn't have a government mandated minimum wage. I wonder if you'd like to see the U.S. implement those socialist policies?
I suppose if you want to relabel free market capitalism as socialism I can't really stop you, but you may want to wrap some copper wire around Marx and put a magnet on his tombstone so that you can generate electricity while he spins in his grave.
No, but assuming that the productivity of other job positions around that person also improved about 50 times, the real value of their labor increased as a result of everything else being less expensive to produce. The amount of dollars you earn is utterly irrelevant when you fail to consider what you can purchase with them. Despite all of the people claiming the middle class is being destroyed, real median income has been slowly rising.
Automation is never going to significantly improve the wages of the people employing it in and of itself. The only possible way that can happen is if they are the only ones in possession of the improvements and no one else is capable of replicating those techniques and the workers can't be replaced by someone else who will accept less pay. As soon as anyone else figures out how to get the same improvements, competition drives prices back down. There's additional money to be made in the short term while that process occurs, but a rank and file worker isn't going to become extremely wealthy unless they own their own their own business.
Some people like to call this process a race to the bottom, but they only look at it from the perspective of the people racing downward. Everyone who's not involved in that particular race is the beneficiary of less expensive goods and services. As all industries undergo this continually (everyone is busy running in their own separate race) it produces more wealth. You can grumble that it isn't equally shared, but it's largely inconsequential.
I said that Ihonestlywouldn't be surprised. I'm talking about my own feelings on the matter. I could have said that I genuinely wouldn't be surprised just as easily. I'm quite sure I can gauge my own feelings accurately enough. What's the alternative, that it would come as a great shock to me if this author were writing stories based on payment received? If you think that I'm claiming that the author is honestly or truly corrupt, then it would be you who is confused by words or being deliberately obtuse. The only claim I make is on my own feelings about this content.
Do I have any evidence to believe that this particular author is guilty of anything? No, and frankly it's not really worth my time to do additional research. I just merely suspect that it's possible based on the titles of some other articles that he's written. Why do I believe that such is possible. The answer is because it wouldn't be the first time it's happened. There was a scandal just last year over a large number of YouTube creators being paid shills for a company and promoting a service in dishonest ways. I think there's a good deal of difference between popular YouTubers and professional journalists, but simply being trained to act in an ethically responsible manner is no guarantee of it. Plenty of
Best case scenario, this guy is an idiot for creating an obvious marketing piece for free which just encourages more companies to engage in this type of otherwise useless attention seeking. In a worse case, he's a corrupt idiot that abuses the trust of his audience by creating paid promotions. A cursory glance at the titles of other articles by this author suggests to me that he writes a fair number of pieces that are little more than advertisements. If he wanted a more honest experience, why not spend a week (or even just several days if that's all he can spare) in VR for himself, or speak with and interview researchers who may have studied the effects of prolonged VR exposure and use? You know, something that might be more informative and not look like an advertisement.
Why write an article about what someone admits is a publicity stunt? It's only going to encourage more of this type of idiotic and otherwise purposeless behavior. Sure maybe if it's some random kid that did it out of their own genuine curiosity and you've stumbled across the blog post or silly YouTube video that they made about it, but this is really just a marketing piece.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out that a little bit of money changed hands over this either. In looking at the other articles by the author, it seems like a few of them are just blatant product shilling pieces based on the titles: "Netgear's new router aims to make you a better gamer by lowering lag", "Microsoft’s ‘Phantom White’ Xbox controller is gorgeous and available to preorder", and "Corsair’s $100 lapboard has a built-in joystick for casual gaming in the living room".
I'm prepared to give a fair bit, but when you angrily agree then double down on your anger, it gets pretty tedious.
Why do you assume I'm angry? I don't mean to be cliche, but are you just yelling "you mad bro?" on the internet or something. I just think you're wrong. You said:
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept.
Then you go on to point out a pretty good definition for merit, even explain that it isn't limited to technical ability, and I agree with all of this. I believe that you disproved your own claim. Perhaps I failed to convey that in a convincing or understandable manner.
To get super rich? Yes. That's down to a mixture of factors including a huge amount of luck.
You don't have to get super rich to be successful. I'm quite happy with the limited amount of success that I've achieved in life. I'd certainly like more, but I don't feel I need to be super rich. I don't doubt that going from rich to super rich is probably down to a lot of luck, but it's the people who are already successful to some degree that are getting lucky. Otherwise you'd see bums on the street getting super rich just as often as entrepreneurs. We don't, so it's not just a matter of pure luck or coincidence.
Oh so now it's good behaviour not value generation. Yep! So well defined and obvious that even you can't seem to keep track of it.
They're the same thing in the context of my argument. If you believe that value generation is good, then actions (behaviors) which generate value are by definition good behavior. You can measure good behavior by other forms of morality if you'd like, it's pretty likely that you'll find what might be described as good behavior under one moral code is considered abhorrent by another. If you want to argue that value generation isn't good, that's fine, but businesses operate under those principles and the ones that don't tend not to stick around for very long.
I just don't understand your particular issue with the idea of merit or a meritocracy. You seem to be able to wrap your head around what could constitute merit as well as situations which deviate from rewarding people based on merit being negative. Do you just reject that what would constitute meritorious actions in a business context as immoral behavior, therefore leading you to reject the idea of merit entirely? Is your argument that it's just too impossible to nail down exactly what merit is such that a meritocracy can't be implemented? I'd argue that you'd be wrong, if you did, but I really don't understand what you're trying to say. In absence of understanding I can only try to speculate why you wrote what you did.
For example, if an employer throws away the applications of minorities, then it's not a level playing field is it. And that HAS happened. Heck it's even been caught on camera. YOU just benefitted from racism. You didn't know it, but you did.
You might think so at first, because hey, you got a job you might not have otherwise received, but in reality you haven't benefited. You now work at a company that is willing to reject hiring talented employees because of skin color or some other characteristic that isn't meaningful to performance. That means you're going to be working with less skillful co-workers and that the competition is going to have a leg up on the company you work for because they hire more skilled employees. I would not want to work at such a place or be dragged down with it. Would you?
Sure, guys like you believe that we live in a Meritocracy, it makes you feel better about your selfishness, bigotry and racism: "Why those ghetto people are undeserving, they should do what I did. They're just lazy" But society as a whole was giving you XP boosts, extra loot, early access in the RPG of Life and you didn't even know it.
Now it's your bigotry that's showing. I'd look very carefully at the attitudes that lead to people living in ghettos and keeping them there. You'll find that there are plenty of people who manage to escape the unfortunate environment or situation that they were born into and that the poor attitudes and life choices that lead to ghettos don't care whether you're black or white. I'm sure that you're familiar with people who are referred to as trailer park trash. A pejorative typically used for white people, but essentially it's just a way of saying white ghetto. Why did they fail to receive all of these benefits, boosts, etc. that you think everyone else received? Black or white, ghetto or tailer park, it doesn't matter. One set of beliefs will keep you trapped where you've started, the other will allow you to escape and ensure a better start for your own children.
If you work hard and seek to create a world where merit is more important, then you will be more successful than when you started. Those who sit around blaming others for the world being unfair aren't going to improve and unfortunately they'll come to believe that their continued misery is only a manifestation of their beliefs and trap themselves further. Those people aren't undeserving, but they deserve exactly what they got. Perhaps you'll have an easier time in life because your parents worked hard to improve their own lives and by extension yours, but there's no shortages of cases where children squander all of the opportunity they're given and it amounts to nothing. Perhaps they're so wealthy that it's almost impossible for them to destroy the advantage that they had in their own lifetime, but given long enough to live and they would.
America is built on people rising far above their birth conditions, and as a result is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. We've limited our potential as a nation only to the extent that we've failed to act as a meritocracy. If a close family member of yours needed surgery, would you not try to find the most qualified doctor you possibly can to perform it? Or would you base your selection on whether or not that person comes from some group that you consider more deserving? The problem isn't that meritocracy is bad, it's that we don't have enough of it. Do you think fighting inequality with inequality will help anything?
I fail to see the harm. The Linux Foundation gets a big chunk of cash for letting some corporate sponsors get a little publicity. Seems like they’re better off than before, not to mention that in their quest to self-promote, those companies are also talking about open software. I don’t know if it gets much better than that.
What’s the emotional response even supposed to be then? If you tell people that something is inevitable they’re not going to care. In that case you don’t care about cutting carbon emissions, you start planning with how to best deal with the consequences.
None of what you wrote isn’t true outside of some struggle you seem to have with the notion of merit or meritocracy. I’ve only pointed out that you shouldn’t be as confused as your are or consider it to be as nebulous as you do.
Difficult to measure doesn’t mean it isn’t useful or practical. You probably can’t define exactly what constitutes “quality” either, but I still bet you use it as a factor when deciding what to purchase.
It seems like you can fathom the idea of merit being tied to value generation which is maybe the fairest way to measure it. Value generation doesn’t care where you’re from, who your parents were, where you went to school, or anything else that might bias a person against you. So why are you so hung up about using that as the basis for hiring or firing decisions? You might argue that a person merely got lucky as the article does, but if someone has heads come up twenty times in a row, there’s a better explanation than luck.
Similarly, people who ignore anything but technical skills will be limited just like a team that only values offense isn’t guaranteed to win any championships. People make poor decisions all the time. A meritocracy ensures that over a long enough period of time, good behavior is rewarded. Maybe you think it takes too long for people to get their just deserts, but the average person can’t run around being a prick all day without it catching up to them.
Based on your signature my only real guess is that meritocracy is a dirty word for you because the kind of people you don’t agree with politically always bag on about it. Guess what, they drink water and breathe air as well. You’re not going to start shunning those activities are you? Even if you don’t agree with someone due to ideological differences, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything. You likely use a merit based approach in your own daily decision making. If you aren’t, what are you doing that you think is a better approach?
Hydrogen fuel cells already exist. If this technology is effective and becomes common place you’ll see a larger amount of usage and the hydrogen economy will expand. Make something cheap and plentiful and it will become popular in the marketplace.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
What's so difficult to understand. You can consult the dictionary to find the definition. Merriam-Webster gives three:
(1) the qualities or actions that constitute the basis of one's deserts,
(2) a praiseworthy quality, and
(3) character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem.
A meritocracy is the practice of hiring, retaining, and promoting individuals based on their qualities and conduct that make them deserving of that as opposed to family connections, kickbacks, etc. When the best baseball players are given the best contracts, that's a meritocracy. When they're kept out of the league because they're black, then clearly there's not a system of selection based on merit. The recent college admission scandal is another prime example. If you admit people solely on the basis of their academic ability, you have a meritocracy. When it becomes a matter of bribes, then clearly the selection criteria is not based on any character or conduct that makes a student deserving of admission.
The thing is once you are in a job with other people, merit isnt just about *technical* merit. Metit is about your ability broadly speaking to generate value for the company you work at.
What's wrong with that notion? The whole purpose of a business is to generate value. Those that don't, don't stay in business. This also means that there isn't just one way to be valuable. If you're a good manager who can effectively coordinate a large group of people to work together successfully or an excellent salesman who can bring in new customers, those are also valued. Should those qualities be less rewarded simply because they're not technical?
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from. Bad working environments tend to concentrate bad people because the good people cycle out faster and the bad people stay.
Of course they do, because other businesses that hire based on merit want the best people they can employ. This naturally means that when a business starts to fail, that the best people will typically leave soonest. This isn't really a problem though. Eventually companies that don't provide value cease to exist. They get replaced by companies that are better. Hiring employees based on merit tends to be a better strategy. You can get away with a few bad decisions in a large enough company, but for a small business it will be far more deleterious.
And that is the point where merit becomes a whole load more than "can code well" and so on. Engineering is a team sport and teams do not work well with lone wolves no matter how skilled.
That goes back to measuring merit based on value generated. A person who's an unskilled asshole will probably be fired quickly (unless they're someone's nephew, but then we're not talking about merit) but a really skilled person who brings a lot of value through their technical competencies can get away with being more of a jerk. People who can't get along well with others will tend to gift shifted to positions where they can't cause as much damage, but still might provide value to the company. If that person is a net negative in terms of value production, then they should be fired on those merits as well. When you keep them around, you're not operating on merit either.
The heart of the problem is that you can't just look up a number to measure someone's merit. Further, people are deceptive and will try to make themselves appear more meritorious than they really are, and on the other side you have people that are making biased decisions colored by their own hidden internal thought processes and motivations. This makes it difficult to pull off
Do you actually believe half of the shit you spout? The top states by GDP closely correlate with the states based on population. The top 10 states by GDP have 56.29% of the country's GDP. Those states also have 53.25% of the population. If you look at the election results for 2016, 6 of those 10 states went for Trump.
Then you act like anyone who doesn't live in one of those blue states is some kind of simpleton that couldn't possibly manage without your superior knowledge of how they should live their lives. Could you be more sanctimonious? Go read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed. Maybe you'll learn something and come to your senses.
Yeah, but it's genetics. They'll filter out to the rest of humanity over time as well. Unless they alter themselves to the extent that they're a different species.
What exactly are those? I went to his website https://betoorourke.com/ which contains absolutely nothing on his positions. There are only links to a store (one of which is placed prominently), applying for a job in his campaign, and a donating to his campaign. Is this serious?
This guy isn't exactly giving me a reason to even consider him as a serious candidate. Also, he couldn't even beat the Zodiac killer so by the transitive property of politics that I've just invented, he wouldn't unseat Trump, so I'm not interested.
Let’s see if the kids will give up the conveniences in their lives that are necessitated by what they propose. Skipping out of school is viewed as a perk as far as kids go (I don’t suspect that today’s youth are any different from my generation) so right now I don’t place much value on their actions. It’s similar to the Kony 2012 slacktivism that’s easy to subscribe to because it carries no personal cost. I wonder how many would start walking to school instead of driving, hold on to their four year old phone for another four years because it’s still good, or not go on their family ski trip that they fly cross-country to every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the actual legislation if anyone wants to look through it. Seems like a pretty bullshit law. If you refuse to submit your device to search, it's an automatic 90-day suspension of your license.
I think that decades from now, or maybe even further down the road, historians will start to take a large amount of interest in stuff like this. Not because there's anything particularly important in those posts, but instead to get an idea of what people were like and how their concerns were similar or different to present times, in much the same way we look at old letters from dozens or even hundreds of years ago.
One of my favorite courses in college was actually a history class that involved nothing of dates, important people, or memorable events. Instead it focused entirely on the common people and how they lived and went about their lives. It gave me a much greater appreciation for history and is something that really stuck with me. The humanities usually get a hard time from the STEM side, but when they're well taught I believe that they're as valuable educationally as any of the other courses that I took.
There are a load of YouTube videos of people screwing with scammers. Some of my favorite are where they manage to get the scammers to lock themselves out of their own computers in addition to just wasting their time. But this kind of thing has been going on for far, far longer. I'm sure anyone of age remembers the P-P-P-Powerbook from back in the day. One of my personal favorites is this similar take involving ANUS brand laptops shipped COD that were actually several boxes full of junk equipment and dead hardware with a shipping cost of several thousand dollars.
I was kind of curious so I did some quick Google searches. There was one article based on a report about which states are most susceptible to corruption. The top state was curiously enough North Dakota which apparently is due to the fact that they have few laws or regulations in place designed to prevent it. Texas was 1 of 16 states with a passing grade in that report.
Another article discussed the results of a study that looked at convictions for federal anti-corruption laws to establish rankings. Here the most corrupt state was Mississippi. I had to click through to the study since Texas wasn't in either the top or bottom 10, but it's listed as the 18th least corrupt state in the rankings.
One article that did report Texas as corrupt (it only came in 15th) was one which cited a report that looked at laws in systems each state has in place to prevent or curtail corruption. In this case the worst rated state was Wyoming.
FiveThirtyEight also has their own article from a few years back that delves into the topic. Texas does have a lot of corruption convictions, but on a per capita basis, it's in the top third. In this assessment, Louisiana is the most corrupt based on convictions per capita, Kentucky had the worst reporter rating, and Georgia is indicated in having the greatest lack of laws to prevent corruption. Oregon, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are respectively the least corrupt states based on those same categories.
In conclusion, you can apparently measure corruption in several ways and get a variety of results. Texas seems to be pretty middle of the pack in an overall sense.
I agree with your sentiment, but considering that Tesla is the manufacturer, they should get to dictate where you can buy their vehicles. I don't believe that they should be required to offer them through dealers if they don't want to do so. If you'd argue that if a dealership wanted to obtain and then sell the vehicles through a third party, then I'd agree that Tesla should have no ground to prevent them from doing so, but I wouldn't force Tesla to do business with them directly.
I think that in the long run they'd sell more vehicles if they worked with dealers, but if they don't want to, that's their own business. I'm not a stock holder (well at least not directly, and possibly not through any fund) so I really don't care if they lose money for their own foolishness. Right now I don't think they can meet demand so they don't lose anything by not working with dealerships.
Does it really matter whether it was the big government that came first or the companies that decided to buy it when the problem is exactly the same: big government that has the power to do something like this in the first place.
It's like arguing over whether it's the cruel overlord's lash or cane is worse. Get rid of the cruel overlord and you don't have to worry about it.
If it needs a crank to work, how is perpetual motion? I suppose it could work its own crank, but the head nun warned us about such things back in the day.
I think the problem is that CFS is just a diagnosis for a set of symptoms. It appears that some people can treat the condition through psychological means. Others have had success through adjustments to their diet. I believe that there's a very real possibility that there are multiple rare conditions that can manifest these same symptoms.
If you can empirically demonstrate a treatment that works for some percentage of people suffering from these symptoms, you can start to examine the differences between the people for whom the treatment is effective and those for whom it is not in order to isolate the underlying cause. That doesn't help everyone, but it might help some people and it lets others know the look elsewhere for answers.
The other problem is that no one wants to be mentally ill or even thought of that way. Mental illness is for crazy people! Even people with mental illnesses aren't crazy enough to want to be called mentally ill. Maybe it's not as bad now that they won't lobotomize you, but there's a pretty fucked up history of how we've approached treating the mentally ill, so it's hard to blame anyone for not wanting to be regarded that way, even if they are.
None of those countries are socialist. The Prime Minister of Denmark had to explain that to the very intelligent kids at Harvard not all that long ago. All of the Scandinavian countries are capitalist countries with high income tax rates that are paid for by a larger percentage of population as well as a VAT. Also, up until recently, they all had much lower corporate income tax rates than the U.S. They didn't raise theirs either, we just cut ours to a similar level that they have.
Those countries also have several various other factors that are distinct to each, but also not socialist. For example, Sweden has a voucher system for schools and as a result a large number of charter schools. Norway doesn't have a government mandated minimum wage. I wonder if you'd like to see the U.S. implement those socialist policies?
I suppose if you want to relabel free market capitalism as socialism I can't really stop you, but you may want to wrap some copper wire around Marx and put a magnet on his tombstone so that you can generate electricity while he spins in his grave.
No, but assuming that the productivity of other job positions around that person also improved about 50 times, the real value of their labor increased as a result of everything else being less expensive to produce. The amount of dollars you earn is utterly irrelevant when you fail to consider what you can purchase with them. Despite all of the people claiming the middle class is being destroyed, real median income has been slowly rising.
Automation is never going to significantly improve the wages of the people employing it in and of itself. The only possible way that can happen is if they are the only ones in possession of the improvements and no one else is capable of replicating those techniques and the workers can't be replaced by someone else who will accept less pay. As soon as anyone else figures out how to get the same improvements, competition drives prices back down. There's additional money to be made in the short term while that process occurs, but a rank and file worker isn't going to become extremely wealthy unless they own their own their own business.
Some people like to call this process a race to the bottom, but they only look at it from the perspective of the people racing downward. Everyone who's not involved in that particular race is the beneficiary of less expensive goods and services. As all industries undergo this continually (everyone is busy running in their own separate race) it produces more wealth. You can grumble that it isn't equally shared, but it's largely inconsequential.
I said that I honestly wouldn't be surprised. I'm talking about my own feelings on the matter. I could have said that I genuinely wouldn't be surprised just as easily. I'm quite sure I can gauge my own feelings accurately enough. What's the alternative, that it would come as a great shock to me if this author were writing stories based on payment received? If you think that I'm claiming that the author is honestly or truly corrupt, then it would be you who is confused by words or being deliberately obtuse. The only claim I make is on my own feelings about this content.
Do I have any evidence to believe that this particular author is guilty of anything? No, and frankly it's not really worth my time to do additional research. I just merely suspect that it's possible based on the titles of some other articles that he's written. Why do I believe that such is possible. The answer is because it wouldn't be the first time it's happened. There was a scandal just last year over a large number of YouTube creators being paid shills for a company and promoting a service in dishonest ways. I think there's a good deal of difference between popular YouTubers and professional journalists, but simply being trained to act in an ethically responsible manner is no guarantee of it. Plenty of
Best case scenario, this guy is an idiot for creating an obvious marketing piece for free which just encourages more companies to engage in this type of otherwise useless attention seeking. In a worse case, he's a corrupt idiot that abuses the trust of his audience by creating paid promotions. A cursory glance at the titles of other articles by this author suggests to me that he writes a fair number of pieces that are little more than advertisements. If he wanted a more honest experience, why not spend a week (or even just several days if that's all he can spare) in VR for himself, or speak with and interview researchers who may have studied the effects of prolonged VR exposure and use? You know, something that might be more informative and not look like an advertisement.
Why write an article about what someone admits is a publicity stunt? It's only going to encourage more of this type of idiotic and otherwise purposeless behavior. Sure maybe if it's some random kid that did it out of their own genuine curiosity and you've stumbled across the blog post or silly YouTube video that they made about it, but this is really just a marketing piece.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out that a little bit of money changed hands over this either. In looking at the other articles by the author, it seems like a few of them are just blatant product shilling pieces based on the titles: "Netgear's new router aims to make you a better gamer by lowering lag", "Microsoft’s ‘Phantom White’ Xbox controller is gorgeous and available to preorder", and "Corsair’s $100 lapboard has a built-in joystick for casual gaming in the living room".
I'm prepared to give a fair bit, but when you angrily agree then double down on your anger, it gets pretty tedious.
Why do you assume I'm angry? I don't mean to be cliche, but are you just yelling "you mad bro?" on the internet or something. I just think you're wrong. You said:
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept.
Then you go on to point out a pretty good definition for merit, even explain that it isn't limited to technical ability, and I agree with all of this. I believe that you disproved your own claim. Perhaps I failed to convey that in a convincing or understandable manner.
To get super rich? Yes. That's down to a mixture of factors including a huge amount of luck.
You don't have to get super rich to be successful. I'm quite happy with the limited amount of success that I've achieved in life. I'd certainly like more, but I don't feel I need to be super rich. I don't doubt that going from rich to super rich is probably down to a lot of luck, but it's the people who are already successful to some degree that are getting lucky. Otherwise you'd see bums on the street getting super rich just as often as entrepreneurs. We don't, so it's not just a matter of pure luck or coincidence.
Oh so now it's good behaviour not value generation. Yep! So well defined and obvious that even you can't seem to keep track of it.
They're the same thing in the context of my argument. If you believe that value generation is good, then actions (behaviors) which generate value are by definition good behavior. You can measure good behavior by other forms of morality if you'd like, it's pretty likely that you'll find what might be described as good behavior under one moral code is considered abhorrent by another. If you want to argue that value generation isn't good, that's fine, but businesses operate under those principles and the ones that don't tend not to stick around for very long.
I just don't understand your particular issue with the idea of merit or a meritocracy. You seem to be able to wrap your head around what could constitute merit as well as situations which deviate from rewarding people based on merit being negative. Do you just reject that what would constitute meritorious actions in a business context as immoral behavior, therefore leading you to reject the idea of merit entirely? Is your argument that it's just too impossible to nail down exactly what merit is such that a meritocracy can't be implemented? I'd argue that you'd be wrong, if you did, but I really don't understand what you're trying to say. In absence of understanding I can only try to speculate why you wrote what you did.
For example, if an employer throws away the applications of minorities, then it's not a level playing field is it. And that HAS happened. Heck it's even been caught on camera. YOU just benefitted from racism. You didn't know it, but you did.
You might think so at first, because hey, you got a job you might not have otherwise received, but in reality you haven't benefited. You now work at a company that is willing to reject hiring talented employees because of skin color or some other characteristic that isn't meaningful to performance. That means you're going to be working with less skillful co-workers and that the competition is going to have a leg up on the company you work for because they hire more skilled employees. I would not want to work at such a place or be dragged down with it. Would you?
Sure, guys like you believe that we live in a Meritocracy, it makes you feel better about your selfishness, bigotry and racism: "Why those ghetto people are undeserving, they should do what I did. They're just lazy" But society as a whole was giving you XP boosts, extra loot, early access in the RPG of Life and you didn't even know it.
Now it's your bigotry that's showing. I'd look very carefully at the attitudes that lead to people living in ghettos and keeping them there. You'll find that there are plenty of people who manage to escape the unfortunate environment or situation that they were born into and that the poor attitudes and life choices that lead to ghettos don't care whether you're black or white. I'm sure that you're familiar with people who are referred to as trailer park trash. A pejorative typically used for white people, but essentially it's just a way of saying white ghetto. Why did they fail to receive all of these benefits, boosts, etc. that you think everyone else received? Black or white, ghetto or tailer park, it doesn't matter. One set of beliefs will keep you trapped where you've started, the other will allow you to escape and ensure a better start for your own children.
If you work hard and seek to create a world where merit is more important, then you will be more successful than when you started. Those who sit around blaming others for the world being unfair aren't going to improve and unfortunately they'll come to believe that their continued misery is only a manifestation of their beliefs and trap themselves further. Those people aren't undeserving, but they deserve exactly what they got. Perhaps you'll have an easier time in life because your parents worked hard to improve their own lives and by extension yours, but there's no shortages of cases where children squander all of the opportunity they're given and it amounts to nothing. Perhaps they're so wealthy that it's almost impossible for them to destroy the advantage that they had in their own lifetime, but given long enough to live and they would.
America is built on people rising far above their birth conditions, and as a result is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. We've limited our potential as a nation only to the extent that we've failed to act as a meritocracy. If a close family member of yours needed surgery, would you not try to find the most qualified doctor you possibly can to perform it? Or would you base your selection on whether or not that person comes from some group that you consider more deserving? The problem isn't that meritocracy is bad, it's that we don't have enough of it. Do you think fighting inequality with inequality will help anything?
I fail to see the harm. The Linux Foundation gets a big chunk of cash for letting some corporate sponsors get a little publicity. Seems like they’re better off than before, not to mention that in their quest to self-promote, those companies are also talking about open software. I don’t know if it gets much better than that.
What’s the emotional response even supposed to be then? If you tell people that something is inevitable they’re not going to care. In that case you don’t care about cutting carbon emissions, you start planning with how to best deal with the consequences.
None of what you wrote isn’t true outside of some struggle you seem to have with the notion of merit or meritocracy. I’ve only pointed out that you shouldn’t be as confused as your are or consider it to be as nebulous as you do.
Difficult to measure doesn’t mean it isn’t useful or practical. You probably can’t define exactly what constitutes “quality” either, but I still bet you use it as a factor when deciding what to purchase.
It seems like you can fathom the idea of merit being tied to value generation which is maybe the fairest way to measure it. Value generation doesn’t care where you’re from, who your parents were, where you went to school, or anything else that might bias a person against you. So why are you so hung up about using that as the basis for hiring or firing decisions? You might argue that a person merely got lucky as the article does, but if someone has heads come up twenty times in a row, there’s a better explanation than luck.
Similarly, people who ignore anything but technical skills will be limited just like a team that only values offense isn’t guaranteed to win any championships. People make poor decisions all the time. A meritocracy ensures that over a long enough period of time, good behavior is rewarded. Maybe you think it takes too long for people to get their just deserts, but the average person can’t run around being a prick all day without it catching up to them.
Based on your signature my only real guess is that meritocracy is a dirty word for you because the kind of people you don’t agree with politically always bag on about it. Guess what, they drink water and breathe air as well. You’re not going to start shunning those activities are you? Even if you don’t agree with someone due to ideological differences, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything. You likely use a merit based approach in your own daily decision making. If you aren’t, what are you doing that you think is a better approach?
Hydrogen fuel cells already exist. If this technology is effective and becomes common place you’ll see a larger amount of usage and the hydrogen economy will expand. Make something cheap and plentiful and it will become popular in the marketplace.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
What's so difficult to understand. You can consult the dictionary to find the definition. Merriam-Webster gives three: (1) the qualities or actions that constitute the basis of one's deserts, (2) a praiseworthy quality, and (3) character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem.
A meritocracy is the practice of hiring, retaining, and promoting individuals based on their qualities and conduct that make them deserving of that as opposed to family connections, kickbacks, etc. When the best baseball players are given the best contracts, that's a meritocracy. When they're kept out of the league because they're black, then clearly there's not a system of selection based on merit. The recent college admission scandal is another prime example. If you admit people solely on the basis of their academic ability, you have a meritocracy. When it becomes a matter of bribes, then clearly the selection criteria is not based on any character or conduct that makes a student deserving of admission.
The thing is once you are in a job with other people, merit isnt just about *technical* merit. Metit is about your ability broadly speaking to generate value for the company you work at.
What's wrong with that notion? The whole purpose of a business is to generate value. Those that don't, don't stay in business. This also means that there isn't just one way to be valuable. If you're a good manager who can effectively coordinate a large group of people to work together successfully or an excellent salesman who can bring in new customers, those are also valued. Should those qualities be less rewarded simply because they're not technical?
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from. Bad working environments tend to concentrate bad people because the good people cycle out faster and the bad people stay.
Of course they do, because other businesses that hire based on merit want the best people they can employ. This naturally means that when a business starts to fail, that the best people will typically leave soonest. This isn't really a problem though. Eventually companies that don't provide value cease to exist. They get replaced by companies that are better. Hiring employees based on merit tends to be a better strategy. You can get away with a few bad decisions in a large enough company, but for a small business it will be far more deleterious.
And that is the point where merit becomes a whole load more than "can code well" and so on. Engineering is a team sport and teams do not work well with lone wolves no matter how skilled.
That goes back to measuring merit based on value generated. A person who's an unskilled asshole will probably be fired quickly (unless they're someone's nephew, but then we're not talking about merit) but a really skilled person who brings a lot of value through their technical competencies can get away with being more of a jerk. People who can't get along well with others will tend to gift shifted to positions where they can't cause as much damage, but still might provide value to the company. If that person is a net negative in terms of value production, then they should be fired on those merits as well. When you keep them around, you're not operating on merit either.
The heart of the problem is that you can't just look up a number to measure someone's merit. Further, people are deceptive and will try to make themselves appear more meritorious than they really are, and on the other side you have people that are making biased decisions colored by their own hidden internal thought processes and motivations. This makes it difficult to pull off
Do you actually believe half of the shit you spout? The top states by GDP closely correlate with the states based on population. The top 10 states by GDP have 56.29% of the country's GDP. Those states also have 53.25% of the population. If you look at the election results for 2016, 6 of those 10 states went for Trump.
Then you act like anyone who doesn't live in one of those blue states is some kind of simpleton that couldn't possibly manage without your superior knowledge of how they should live their lives. Could you be more sanctimonious? Go read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed. Maybe you'll learn something and come to your senses.
Why not just test it out with rats first? Set up a secret project in the labs at the National Institute of Mental Health and see how it turns out.
Yeah, but it's genetics. They'll filter out to the rest of humanity over time as well. Unless they alter themselves to the extent that they're a different species.
Sounds like the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
and his thoughtful and nuanced policy positions
What exactly are those? I went to his website https://betoorourke.com/ which contains absolutely nothing on his positions. There are only links to a store (one of which is placed prominently), applying for a job in his campaign, and a donating to his campaign. Is this serious?
This guy isn't exactly giving me a reason to even consider him as a serious candidate. Also, he couldn't even beat the Zodiac killer so by the transitive property of politics that I've just invented, he wouldn't unseat Trump, so I'm not interested.
Let’s see if the kids will give up the conveniences in their lives that are necessitated by what they propose. Skipping out of school is viewed as a perk as far as kids go (I don’t suspect that today’s youth are any different from my generation) so right now I don’t place much value on their actions. It’s similar to the Kony 2012 slacktivism that’s easy to subscribe to because it carries no personal cost. I wonder how many would start walking to school instead of driving, hold on to their four year old phone for another four years because it’s still good, or not go on their family ski trip that they fly cross-country to every year.