Just an FYI, it's called an accident for a reason,
My daughter recently completed a driver's ed class, which I thought was very well done. One of the things she was taught is that in driving, there is no such thing as an accident. You are referring to a collision. Good drivers are those that do not participate in, cause, or contribute to collisions. The mindset that they are trying to impart is that for the most part, collisions are caused by someone. They are not random events or acts of god.
While that is quite likely the case, the insurance companies put a lot of effort and expense into the risk models, and it's unlikely that those models are far wrong. People with lots of tickets are statistically more likely to get into accidents. If they weren't, some insurance company would figure it out, and price their insurance lower to get more money, because, as you note, they want more money.
The same logic holds for under 25 males, people with bad credit, etc. These are used to price your insurance, BECAUSE THEY WORK from a statistical standpoint. Insurance is all about stats. The logic also likely holds for some sets of ethnic/demographic groups, but there are a lot of legal restrictions on what you can use in the models. Hence, zip code gets used, which is a pretty good proxy for ethnicity and economic status.
As a side note on that last point, I worked for a few years developing collections recovery models. We did some work with census data and zip codes. We found that zip code captured most of the predictive signal that was available from ethnicity and economic status, of which there is plenty.
Why is it that those with the fewest scruples, the sleazy underhanded salesman, the executive who cheats and lies and tries to sleep with every female in the building, the ones who are selfish and the least committed to the company--why are these the ones who are rewarded and get to live the high life
Because sociopathy is a successful trait as far as obtaining the things you discuss. It doesn't mean they are any happier than you.
May I suggest a couple of things? One, read this: on narcissism. I am not saying this to insult you or criticize you - I have this issue myself. But think for a moment about the inherent judgment you are making - that intelligence = worth, and lesser intelligence = lesser worth. How do you expect people to react to you if you project this value system? A conversation need not be stimulating to be pleasant. If you walk away from all conversations that aren't stimulating, the people you are walking away from may not enjoy the experience, which will lead to fewer and less fulfilling conversations in the future.
Second, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a pretty good explication of the simple mechanics of how to be likeable. Each of these people you are bored with probably likes at least one thing that you like also (assuming that you like sex ). What kind of restaurants do they like, what hobbies do they have, what are their kids up to? This is the social lubrication of life. When I'm trying to get to know a co-worker, I'll ask them, "What do you like to do for fun?"
One counter example will serve - Jack Welch. He grew GE enormously, and took a huge amount home. He arguably earned it by creating enormous shareholder wealth. He is possible the exception that validates the rule.
A huge percentage of the population today is stuck in jobs they do not like.
One thing to realize about this is what Marx wrote about 150 years ago about alienation of labor. He said, and I think it's true, that to work for anyone else inherently renders that work less satisfying. This means that the essential nature of -any- economy is that production is less satisfying than we would like. This is true whether it's a capitalist, socialist, or communist society. To work for The Man sucks, and always will.
I'm not the OP, but the 'pure techies' that I have seen stalled in IT have the following traits:
1) poor people skills - unable to relate to or communicate well with their customers, perrs and management 2) poor understanding of and alignment with the goals of the employing organization 3) narrow tech focus, often combined with tech fanaticism or bigotry. This includes Windows, Linux, and mac bigots. 4) lack of interest and action towards learning areas that are extensions of what you already know. 5) lack of basic project management capabilities - inability to push an initiative to completion over barriers with little management involvement.
I'm pretty technical, but in every area I'm technical in, there are people around me who are far more skilled. I make twice what they do, and have for close to 20 years, because of the above attributes. In particular, 1,2,and 5 really matter. I'm valuable ( I think) because I'm a good translatoer between the people who can get the point tasks done and the people who need the point tasks done.
I think it's helped me in getting along with the deep technoids that I am fascinated with, and have continued to educate myself in various aspects of technology, including networking, system administration, hardware, and development. This past month, I built a hadoop cluster and am learning Scala, in order to build a prototype of a new application for our division. The driver for this is that our company has a mainframe job for a core product that takes 2 hours to run over a relatively static dataset. My boss would like to demonstrate a new technology approach to solving this problem, that will let us compete better on this product. It would be a bonus if we could replace a $2M/year mainframe charge with a $500k one time expense for building a 100 node cluster. And the side benefit is that it's pretty fucking cool. But I digress.
My point is, the pure techies I know don't have the relationship with their boss to hear about these business problems, the initiative and cross disciplinary understanding to understand how the solution would need to come together, and the organizational skills to push it forward. The pure managers wouldn't know how to approach the problem, figure out how to apply map-reduce to an existing linear computing process, or to build a 10 node apparatus from scavenged near dead equipment. I manage to keep employed because I can bridge this, and perhaps in some small part because I make a point of taking management fishing once or twice a year on my boat.
You're making the common error that atheism is some positivistic belief. It's not, at least for me. It's simply the absence of a belief in a supernatural being. Show me any evidence, and I'll be happy to consider changing my position. But I don't go around believing in things that aren't required to explain the world around me, like the Easter Bunny, Zeus, Jahweh, or Christ dying to save me from a variety of behaviors.
As the saying goes, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Look at it a different way. You're asserting that a proposition for which there is no evidence should be treated as equally likely as the null hypothesis, that your proposition is false. If this is truly your position, then you should believe in all gods, because they are equally as likely, and cumulatively perhaps more likely than the null hypothesis.
I'm not one to defend scientology, but the practices you list are not unheard of in American Christian sects. Mormons kick people out of their church and require the congregation actively shun the person all the time. Bible belt Christians regularly picket homes and workplaces of abortion doctors.
All religions practice a certain amount of coercion and control. It's the nature of the beast.
The key really is, how do create a social mechanism to prevent excessive concentrations of wealth, without creating a defacto concentration of wealth?
I think you're framing the problem incorrectly. I think the question should be, how do we make sure that enough wealth is distributed such that society can reasonably function, and that we feel decent about how we are treating the least fortunate among us?
Focusing on the concentration at the top is just jealousy. The ethical concern is at the bottom of the pyramid, in my view.
If the wealthy are prudent, they will remember the lessons of the French Revolution and Russia in 1917, and make sure that they pass enough around so that people can live. If they don't, then they run the risk of having their wealth appropriated, either piece-meal through taxes, or in total, through revolution. I do not suggest that is what morally -should- happen, merely that history indicates it -will- happen.
On the flip side, I'm hopeful that WhiteHouse.org's programmers and sysadmins will also contribute to the codebase with fixes and improvements of their own. This could end up being very beneficial for the Drupal community.
I think it will be a huge positive for Drupal's use in the business world. That alone will be beneficial to the Drupal Community.
You're certainly right the Drupal has a lot of visibility. On the other hand, is it the end of the world if Whitehouse.gov gets exploited? If we can assume that the site is reasonably managed, and does not have a direct pipeline from the front end web server into the CIA's servers, then the likely worst result would seem to be that misinformation would be published. This isnt' good, but it would probably get detected fairly quickly by partisans. We're not talking missle launch systems here.
If Drupal helps the government interact better and communicate better with us, and reduces their costs for doing so, I think the security risk is probably reasonable. That said, I'd be surprised if Drupal is particularly weak. We don't hear much about exploits. The top link from a google of "drupal exploit" is dated 2005.
Lets ask the question a different way: Should the whitehouse use an open source webserver like Apache or Tomcat for the webserver, or should they use IIS? Should they run on open source Linux, or Windows Server? Or should they write their own webserver and OS, to avoid the hacking risk that an opensource system creates?
If they do that, report it to the card issuer (VISA/MC) . The card issuers are quite firm about how the people who use their cards are treated. Retaliatory behavior not supported by a court judgement could result in the vendor losing their capability to take credit cards. That's a healthy sized hammer.
Well, I was speaking more to the dangers of alcoholism, liver damage, interaction with other drugs, etc. Pure alcohol poisoning is a relatively rare occurrence. For the more common negative effects of alcohol, there isn't much difference between beer, wine and liquor. Three beers is about like three glasses of wine, which is about like three shots of whiskey.
In the case of pot, in the US there is much hue and cry over the reputedly greater strength of modern pot, and there are claims by the antis that this increase in strength makes pot much more dangerous now. Anyone who has smoked pot for 30 years or so (ahem) can tell you that this simply isn't so. There was plenty of quite strong pot available back then, and the effect is quite similar to the strong pot available today. Further, the claims made about the strength of the pot available today border on ludicrous. I have seen accounts of pot that claim it is 25% THC. THC is a clear, oily liquid. For this to be true, the material in the baggy would have to have the consistency of pudding. It tangibly does not. But I digress. Must be the pot...
If pot were legalized, my suspicion is that products would be made available in a variety of strengths, as most people would prefer a medium strength to allow them to control the level of the effect. I further suspect that there would be little market for the strongest material. "One Hit" pot isn't as much fun as a milder blend. Or so I've been told.:-)
I don't know about GP's preferences, but what -I- like about iTunes is that it is the one application that my wife and kids never ask me for help with. That says something significant about the user design.
First of all, no serious business is using Windows as a server. Sorry but you just discredited yourself with that alone.
I do work for fortune 200 companies. Every one of them I have worked at uses Windows for servers. This includes the likes of Boeing, HP, Capital One Bank, Bank of America, the London Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Charles Schwab. HCA, Accenture, Ford, Toyota, and more. Most of them use IIS, SQL Server, and build.NET applications. Exchange and Active Directory are everywhere. MSFT servers, like it or not are pervasive in the business world. Not necessarily dominant, as big apps tend to get built on other platforms. But they are everywhere, running real systems that handle real money. You are the one discrediting yourself if you really don't know or believe this.
Smart sysadmins do their own penetration testing. We do. The higher ups make us use a CA product which doesn't work as well in my experience as the open source tools. It tends to be 6 months behind.
Slashdot Mirror
Just an FYI, it's called an accident for a reason,
My daughter recently completed a driver's ed class, which I thought was very well done. One of the things she was taught is that in driving, there is no such thing as an accident. You are referring to a collision. Good drivers are those that do not participate in, cause, or contribute to collisions. The mindset that they are trying to impart is that for the most part, collisions are caused by someone. They are not random events or acts of god.
Insurance companies jsut want extra money.
While that is quite likely the case, the insurance companies put a lot of effort and expense into the risk models, and it's unlikely that those models are far wrong. People with lots of tickets are statistically more likely to get into accidents. If they weren't, some insurance company would figure it out, and price their insurance lower to get more money, because, as you note, they want more money.
The same logic holds for under 25 males, people with bad credit, etc. These are used to price your insurance, BECAUSE THEY WORK from a statistical standpoint. Insurance is all about stats. The logic also likely holds for some sets of ethnic/demographic groups, but there are a lot of legal restrictions on what you can use in the models. Hence, zip code gets used, which is a pretty good proxy for ethnicity and economic status.
As a side note on that last point, I worked for a few years developing collections recovery models. We did some work with census data and zip codes. We found that zip code captured most of the predictive signal that was available from ethnicity and economic status, of which there is plenty.
Then why did the same results happen on the first trial, when neither group had seen the track before?
Trading != investment banking. Quantitative trading in particular.
Why is it that those with the fewest scruples, the sleazy underhanded salesman, the executive who cheats and lies and tries to sleep with every female in the building, the ones who are selfish and the least committed to the company--why are these the ones who are rewarded and get to live the high life
Because sociopathy is a successful trait as far as obtaining the things you discuss. It doesn't mean they are any happier than you.
May I suggest a couple of things? One, read this: on narcissism. I am not saying this to insult you or criticize you - I have this issue myself. But think for a moment about the inherent judgment you are making - that intelligence = worth, and lesser intelligence = lesser worth. How do you expect people to react to you if you project this value system? A conversation need not be stimulating to be pleasant. If you walk away from all conversations that aren't stimulating, the people you are walking away from may not enjoy the experience, which will lead to fewer and less fulfilling conversations in the future.
Second, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a pretty good explication of the simple mechanics of how to be likeable. Each of these people you are bored with probably likes at least one thing that you like also (assuming that you like sex ). What kind of restaurants do they like, what hobbies do they have, what are their kids up to? This is the social lubrication of life. When I'm trying to get to know a co-worker, I'll ask them, "What do you like to do for fun?"
One counter example will serve - Jack Welch. He grew GE enormously, and took a huge amount home. He arguably earned it by creating enormous shareholder wealth. He is possible the exception that validates the rule.
Agreed. I think Islam and Christianity are relatively unique in their intolerance of other faiths.
Western religion is dominated by a bunch of old men who are troubled that somewhere, someone is having fun.
A huge percentage of the population today is stuck in jobs they do not like.
One thing to realize about this is what Marx wrote about 150 years ago about alienation of labor. He said, and I think it's true, that to work for anyone else inherently renders that work less satisfying. This means that the essential nature of -any- economy is that production is less satisfying than we would like. This is true whether it's a capitalist, socialist, or communist society. To work for The Man sucks, and always will.
I'm not the OP, but the 'pure techies' that I have seen stalled in IT have the following traits:
1) poor people skills - unable to relate to or communicate well with their customers, perrs and management
2) poor understanding of and alignment with the goals of the employing organization
3) narrow tech focus, often combined with tech fanaticism or bigotry. This includes Windows, Linux, and mac bigots.
4) lack of interest and action towards learning areas that are extensions of what you already know.
5) lack of basic project management capabilities - inability to push an initiative to completion over barriers with little management involvement.
I'm pretty technical, but in every area I'm technical in, there are people around me who are far more skilled. I make twice what they do, and have for close to 20 years, because of the above attributes. In particular, 1,2,and 5 really matter. I'm valuable ( I think) because I'm a good translatoer between the people who can get the point tasks done and the people who need the point tasks done.
I think it's helped me in getting along with the deep technoids that I am fascinated with, and have continued to educate myself in various aspects of technology, including networking, system administration, hardware, and development. This past month, I built a hadoop cluster and am learning Scala, in order to build a prototype of a new application for our division. The driver for this is that our company has a mainframe job for a core product that takes 2 hours to run over a relatively static dataset. My boss would like to demonstrate a new technology approach to solving this problem, that will let us compete better on this product. It would be a bonus if we could replace a $2M/year mainframe charge with a $500k one time expense for building a 100 node cluster. And the side benefit is that it's pretty fucking cool. But I digress.
My point is, the pure techies I know don't have the relationship with their boss to hear about these business problems, the initiative and cross disciplinary understanding to understand how the solution would need to come together, and the organizational skills to push it forward. The pure managers wouldn't know how to approach the problem, figure out how to apply map-reduce to an existing linear computing process, or to build a 10 node apparatus from scavenged near dead equipment. I manage to keep employed because I can bridge this, and perhaps in some small part because I make a point of taking management fishing once or twice a year on my boat.
You're making the common error that atheism is some positivistic belief. It's not, at least for me. It's simply the absence of a belief in a supernatural being. Show me any evidence, and I'll be happy to consider changing my position. But I don't go around believing in things that aren't required to explain the world around me, like the Easter Bunny, Zeus, Jahweh, or Christ dying to save me from a variety of behaviors.
As the saying goes, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Look at it a different way. You're asserting that a proposition for which there is no evidence should be treated as equally likely as the null hypothesis, that your proposition is false. If this is truly your position, then you should believe in all gods, because they are equally as likely, and cumulatively perhaps more likely than the null hypothesis.
Of course, the 10% tithe that members pay does -NOT- go to said humanitarian services.
Please don't ruin a good flame fest by being mature and reasonable.
I'm not one to defend scientology, but the practices you list are not unheard of in American Christian sects. Mormons kick people out of their church and require the congregation actively shun the person all the time. Bible belt Christians regularly picket homes and workplaces of abortion doctors.
All religions practice a certain amount of coercion and control. It's the nature of the beast.
If you are religious, you have already disavowed the relevance of logic, so feel free to resolve your disbelief any way that you like.
Yes, but the carriers still have to pay for the coverage over the rest of the country. The cities are dense, but Nebraska and Montana aren't.
Europe has many more customers in a much smaller geographic area. I wonder if it isn't a lot cheaper to service them.
The key really is, how do create a social mechanism to prevent excessive concentrations of wealth, without creating a defacto concentration of wealth?
I think you're framing the problem incorrectly. I think the question should be, how do we make sure that enough wealth is distributed such that society can reasonably function, and that we feel decent about how we are treating the least fortunate among us?
Focusing on the concentration at the top is just jealousy. The ethical concern is at the bottom of the pyramid, in my view.
If the wealthy are prudent, they will remember the lessons of the French Revolution and Russia in 1917, and make sure that they pass enough around so that people can live. If they don't, then they run the risk of having their wealth appropriated, either piece-meal through taxes, or in total, through revolution. I do not suggest that is what morally -should- happen, merely that history indicates it -will- happen.
On the flip side, I'm hopeful that WhiteHouse.org's programmers and sysadmins will also contribute to the codebase with fixes and improvements of their own. This could end up being very beneficial for the Drupal community.
I think it will be a huge positive for Drupal's use in the business world. That alone will be beneficial to the Drupal Community.
You're certainly right the Drupal has a lot of visibility. On the other hand, is it the end of the world if Whitehouse.gov gets exploited? If we can assume that the site is reasonably managed, and does not have a direct pipeline from the front end web server into the CIA's servers, then the likely worst result would seem to be that misinformation would be published. This isnt' good, but it would probably get detected fairly quickly by partisans. We're not talking missle launch systems here.
If Drupal helps the government interact better and communicate better with us, and reduces their costs for doing so, I think the security risk is probably reasonable. That said, I'd be surprised if Drupal is particularly weak. We don't hear much about exploits. The top link from a google of "drupal exploit" is dated 2005.
Lets ask the question a different way: Should the whitehouse use an open source webserver like Apache or Tomcat for the webserver, or should they use IIS? Should they run on open source Linux, or Windows Server? Or should they write their own webserver and OS, to avoid the hacking risk that an opensource system creates?
If they do that, report it to the card issuer (VISA/MC) . The card issuers are quite firm about how the people who use their cards are treated. Retaliatory behavior not supported by a court judgement could result in the vendor losing their capability to take credit cards. That's a healthy sized hammer.
Well, I was speaking more to the dangers of alcoholism, liver damage, interaction with other drugs, etc. Pure alcohol poisoning is a relatively rare occurrence. For the more common negative effects of alcohol, there isn't much difference between beer, wine and liquor. Three beers is about like three glasses of wine, which is about like three shots of whiskey.
In the case of pot, in the US there is much hue and cry over the reputedly greater strength of modern pot, and there are claims by the antis that this increase in strength makes pot much more dangerous now. Anyone who has smoked pot for 30 years or so (ahem) can tell you that this simply isn't so. There was plenty of quite strong pot available back then, and the effect is quite similar to the strong pot available today. Further, the claims made about the strength of the pot available today border on ludicrous. I have seen accounts of pot that claim it is 25% THC. THC is a clear, oily liquid. For this to be true, the material in the baggy would have to have the consistency of pudding. It tangibly does not. But I digress. Must be the pot...
If pot were legalized, my suspicion is that products would be made available in a variety of strengths, as most people would prefer a medium strength to allow them to control the level of the effect. I further suspect that there would be little market for the strongest material. "One Hit" pot isn't as much fun as a milder blend. Or so I've been told. :-)
Or my kids are smarter about computers than your friends are. Or I'm grouchier. :-)
I don't know about GP's preferences, but what -I- like about iTunes is that it is the one application that my wife and kids never ask me for help with. That says something significant about the user design.
First of all, no serious business is using Windows as a server. Sorry but you just discredited yourself with that alone.
I do work for fortune 200 companies. Every one of them I have worked at uses Windows for servers. This includes the likes of Boeing, HP, Capital One Bank, Bank of America, the London Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Charles Schwab. HCA, Accenture, Ford, Toyota, and more. Most of them use IIS, SQL Server, and build .NET applications. Exchange and Active Directory are everywhere. MSFT servers, like it or not are pervasive in the business world. Not necessarily dominant, as big apps tend to get built on other platforms. But they are everywhere, running real systems that handle real money. You are the one discrediting yourself if you really don't know or believe this.
Smart sysadmins do their own penetration testing. We do. The higher ups make us use a CA product which doesn't work as well in my experience as the open source tools. It tends to be 6 months behind.