Exactly... and never mind that the auto industry, telecom industry, most of our current computing technology, plastics, and so on are also directly the result of government money, mostly in the form of either grants or the space program.
Plus, many the same companies that got their start using government money but no longer need it because they are sustainably profitable, continue to collect subsidies... while funneling profit money into purchasing lobbyists and politicians. THAT should be earning the ire of anyone complaining about companies receiving government subsidies, rather than companies that are creating new industries with government subsidies... because the latter are using the subsidies for what they're meant for.
But the ash in the upper atmosphere, the lightest and finest stuff, tends not to cross the equator, so the southern hemisphere won't suffer the serious crop failures that the northern hemisphere will. Given how much of North America's food (and Europe's food, these days) comes from South America, the resulting famine will only be bad, rather than catastrophic.
This is where you're wrong. Even just major crop failures in the continental US would be enough to lead to catastrophic famine world wide, because everyone is so interdependent, and because we're already on the verge anyway. A lot of US food production goes toward countering shortfalls in Russia (one of Eastern Washington's largest markets for wheat, never mind that wheat is a thirsty crop and Eastern Washington is near desert, for example)... and the volcanic winter wouldn't be limited to the US, it would span the northern hemisphere. It most certainly would not wipe our species out, but there's not even a remote chance that our society would survive it.
I agree with this. Most of the "agile" teams I've been part of just pretend that all it takes is sprints + scrum meetings to be agile. They throw any pretense at engineering out the window and rely largely on hacking in its most pejorative sense to get things done, which usually means ignoring quality and putting in a lot more hours.
Most teams I've been stuck in have also been more obsessed with who owns what and how many hours and story points everyone's working than on how much functionality they're implementing, and at the same time largely ignoring even any pretext at there being a team involved.
When working with nonlinear video editing, compositing, and color grading, the GPU is the biggest bottleneck in most laptops. The CPU is a secondary limiter, but most of the high end professional video software out there use the GPU heavily.
There are a few exceptions, a small number of high end applications like Edius and Clarisse are primarily optimized around using the CPU instead of the GPU, but they're getting increasingly rare these days.
Add to that the fact that with most infectious diseases, the symptoms that would make it evident that they are ill are unlikely to manifest just on the flight. Most of the time, there's a gestation period of a few days to a week before the person who caught shows symptoms, and in some cases they can pass it on before they become symptomatic.
That's the biggest problem with relying on quarantine. Either you always quarantine every incoming international flight until you make sure that no one on board has something nasty, or you just wait until you detect it naturally, in which case you already have a pandemic. We were lucky that this one was a disease that doesn't travel well from host to host.
It makes me wonder if they're bringing out these stupid bills because they want to appease voters but know there's no chance of them actually passing because of white house veto.
It's a combination of pure idiocy, ideology, and corruption.
Idiocy, because that's quite simply what it is.
Ideology, because they place their political agenda over everything else.
Corruption, because their political agenda is whatever gets them the biggest bribes.
Agreed. One thing I've noticed is that computer geeks think that they know everything just because they can write working code, which fills me with contempt, especially if I end up inheriting their code and discovering that it's amazon-quality (not sure it's possible to get lower quality than that).
Most of the CS folks I've met are among the most scientifically illiterate folks I know. My standards for scientific literacy are higher than most people's though, because my degree is in biophysics.
This kind of crap is like that junk science about autism and vaccines. Once that stuff gets out there, it is very difficult to get people to stop repeating it, even after it gets discredited. And this kind of disinformation has real-world consequences when people rely on it, including U.S. Senators making speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
That's the real problem. The Koch brothers bought some airtime on fox to say that climate scientists are supporting anthropogenic climate change for the money, when in fact their funding is based on their doing verifiable research instead.
However, stupid people decide who's credible based on whether or not it's what they're saying is what stupid people want to hear.
The media royally fucked things up even more by claiming to be "balanced" - i.e. giving the deniers equal air time so as to show integrity, instead of giving the deniers what they deserved: show us some real, verifiable data, or just go fuck yourself. Even NPR made this colossal blunder of false journalistic integrity. Giving airtime to liars isn't balance, it's lying.
Well... Amazon did successfully patent the one-click checkout idea, as obvious as that was.
And they tried to patent shooting products with a white background.
Obviously, our patent system is basically as bogus as AT&T's attempts to claim that it innovates, only the patent office is still pretending that it's not complete BS.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
The government is basically OWNED by the corporations these days. There's really not much difference between the two any longer, and they're both violently and blatantly working to destroy american lives. They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're quite happy to destroy america for money any more.
I would also suggest switching your career to politics, as that career path doesn't seem to care much about criminal history.
Indeed, one might even conclude that a criminal history is a prerequisite for politics, while in the rest of the world, you're guilty until proven guilty.
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
While slight off topic, I agree. Predistination is an excuse for idiots to do stupid things without thinking.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this
You nailed it. That's the biggest factor. Most people who stay in this industry are idiots who work a crazy amount of overtime and do spectacularly bad work. It's 99% machismo. And 99% of the time it's the small number of people working sane hours who are doing almost all of the work, plus fixing the idiots' constant disasters.
And like you, have many years of experience supporting this.
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
When I read the stories about companies offering to freeze women's embryos so that they could work more, I realized that it was tech companies basically admitting that they were sweatshops, but still trying to pretend that they were worth something. They're full of shit.
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this.
If I'd known that the industry would be like this, I'd have avoided it like the plague. It's a waste of time, life, money, and talent. I'm building a client base for my own start up in order to get out.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
Mine's similar. This industry is basically dominated by seat-warming ass-lickers, not talented developers.
Yes, it's basically a blatant admission that they're sweatshops, and that the way to get ahead at both companies is to work long hours and not take vacations, rather than to actually be productive and do quality work.
Depends on the employer. Maybe if you have a bunch of $11/hour monkeys working for you all they care about are butts in seats. My upper management wants to see project deadlines hit. They don't care what or how we get it done.
Most US employers want asses in seats, because they're too stupid to have learned that people working 60+ hour weeks are impeding progress rather than facilitating it.
a pretty standard cop thing...I too am not a big fan of the police, but that's a hateful slander of the majority police who work hard and are good people.
If they were good people who were working hard to do their jobs, they'd be prosecuting this deputy for killing someone while breaking the law, not standing idly by while he gets off scot free while they go and ticket and arrest citizens who do the same thing.
But in the scenario I'm talking about, it's during their workday, so it's not off hour work. PST, EST, GMT, and IST can pretty much set it up so that the outgoing shift overlaps a few hours with the incoming shift. Gives you 24 hour coverage, but keeps your support from working late at night, when people are less effective and more prone to mistakes.
You're making far too much sense for an american company. What you're suggesting is logical, and therefore won't happen often.
That's one reason to have a percentage of your tech support in places where it isn't a holiday, or at least spread the time zones out through North America and Europe as to minimize the number of hours worked on the holiday itself
That's one reason to have a percentage of your tech support in places where it isn't a holiday, or at least spread the time zones out through North America and Europe as to minimize the number of hours worked on the holiday itself
Amazon actually dislikes having its staff in foreign countries, because amazon can't force their dumbasses... I mean, employees to carry pagers in foreign countries without paying a penalty anytime an employee gets an out-of-shift page.
Translation: it's harder for companies to exploit their workers outside of the us than inside, and american employees don't value themselves as much as non-american employees.
Step 1: be a salaried employee.
Step 2: produce good results
Your hours will still matter, of course, but not as much.
Step 2 is obviously bullplop, since it's blindingly obvious that advancement in most american craporations is based on ass-licking rather than competence and productivity.
The sweatshop culture of america is a direct result of this.
That's only partially true. Mono had development support from Microsoft, and unlike Java.NET and C# have been officially open standards for a long time, because Microsoft submitted the specs to ECMA.
In this case, the Republicans are opposed to regulations that would make the market more competitive, so they are using free market rhetoric to oppose free market competition. This is a shameful stance for them to take, and goes against the very principles they claim to stand for.
The real failure here isn't the corrupt, self-serving republicans. It's the sheer idiocy of the people who still vote for them in spite of the fact that the republicans are in favor of things that hurt everyone in the country, like comcrap's monopoly.
That's not to say that the democrats are any better; they get bribes from the same lobbyists as the republicans, after all. If america were a nation of educated people, neither party would get any votes.
The fact that you COULD observe it, doesn't mean you actually will. Thus, until you actually observe it yourself, your knowledge of reality is still coming through faith.
That's not at all correct. It's based on reason.
When a competent scientist publishes a result, they also publish the methods that they used to achieve it. Part of the scientific process is to validate them by having 3rd parties reproduce those results. That becomes evidence.
Incredibly stupid people will claim that because it's not proven it must be wrong, but science is rarely cut and dried as the religious imbeciles want everyone to believe. When 98% of the scientific community says that there is a 90+% chance that we're right about a given assertion or hypothesis, then I believe it, because I understand the rigor of the scientific process, not because of faith in some vague, amorphous all powerful being that you really shouldn't think about because thinking about it leads to thinking and thinking leads to free will, and people with free will who can think stop believing in religious foolishness and stop giving money to the corrupt church.
The only thing I still find surprising about Obama is that people continued to have any respect for him after his administration's response to Deepwater Horizon. His administration facilitated BP's blatant attempts to lie to the public, break a legion of laws about their cleanup procedures, and didn't bother to take advantage of BP's history of negligence to prosecute them. The same idiot's been pandering back and forth regarding the Keystone XL pipeline even though it's useless for the economy, a climate fustercluck in the works, and given its manufacturer's track record a guaranteed ecological disaster... yet he was more interested in his reelection campaign money to do the sensible thing and kill it.
For anyone else, insider trading will get arrested... if you're in the federal government, not only are you protected from punishment for violating insider trading laws, but you actually have rules and regulations in place to facilitate your insider trading.
Some of those rules and regs include not allowing federal agencies to consider company track records when reviewing bids, and some of them require giving the feds early access to contract grant information so that they can make insider trades.
It's also an example of a technology company's arrogance. They're too stupid to understand that they're not breaking new ground (when I joined there, my first impression was that their technology was antique by government contracting standards), but they're arrogant enough to think that they're innovative.
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Exactly... and never mind that the auto industry, telecom industry, most of our current computing technology, plastics, and so on are also directly the result of government money, mostly in the form of either grants or the space program.
Plus, many the same companies that got their start using government money but no longer need it because they are sustainably profitable, continue to collect subsidies... while funneling profit money into purchasing lobbyists and politicians. THAT should be earning the ire of anyone complaining about companies receiving government subsidies, rather than companies that are creating new industries with government subsidies... because the latter are using the subsidies for what they're meant for.
But the ash in the upper atmosphere, the lightest and finest stuff, tends not to cross the equator, so the southern hemisphere won't suffer the serious crop failures that the northern hemisphere will. Given how much of North America's food (and Europe's food, these days) comes from South America, the resulting famine will only be bad, rather than catastrophic.
This is where you're wrong. Even just major crop failures in the continental US would be enough to lead to catastrophic famine world wide, because everyone is so interdependent, and because we're already on the verge anyway. A lot of US food production goes toward countering shortfalls in Russia (one of Eastern Washington's largest markets for wheat, never mind that wheat is a thirsty crop and Eastern Washington is near desert, for example)... and the volcanic winter wouldn't be limited to the US, it would span the northern hemisphere. It most certainly would not wipe our species out, but there's not even a remote chance that our society would survive it.
I agree with this. Most of the "agile" teams I've been part of just pretend that all it takes is sprints + scrum meetings to be agile. They throw any pretense at engineering out the window and rely largely on hacking in its most pejorative sense to get things done, which usually means ignoring quality and putting in a lot more hours.
Most teams I've been stuck in have also been more obsessed with who owns what and how many hours and story points everyone's working than on how much functionality they're implementing, and at the same time largely ignoring even any pretext at there being a team involved.
When working with nonlinear video editing, compositing, and color grading, the GPU is the biggest bottleneck in most laptops. The CPU is a secondary limiter, but most of the high end professional video software out there use the GPU heavily.
There are a few exceptions, a small number of high end applications like Edius and Clarisse are primarily optimized around using the CPU instead of the GPU, but they're getting increasingly rare these days.
Add to that the fact that with most infectious diseases, the symptoms that would make it evident that they are ill are unlikely to manifest just on the flight. Most of the time, there's a gestation period of a few days to a week before the person who caught shows symptoms, and in some cases they can pass it on before they become symptomatic.
That's the biggest problem with relying on quarantine. Either you always quarantine every incoming international flight until you make sure that no one on board has something nasty, or you just wait until you detect it naturally, in which case you already have a pandemic. We were lucky that this one was a disease that doesn't travel well from host to host.
It makes me wonder if they're bringing out these stupid bills because they want to appease voters but know there's no chance of them actually passing because of white house veto.
It's a combination of pure idiocy, ideology, and corruption.
Idiocy, because that's quite simply what it is.
Ideology, because they place their political agenda over everything else.
Corruption, because their political agenda is whatever gets them the biggest bribes.
Agreed. One thing I've noticed is that computer geeks think that they know everything just because they can write working code, which fills me with contempt, especially if I end up inheriting their code and discovering that it's amazon-quality (not sure it's possible to get lower quality than that).
Most of the CS folks I've met are among the most scientifically illiterate folks I know. My standards for scientific literacy are higher than most people's though, because my degree is in biophysics.
This kind of crap is like that junk science about autism and vaccines. Once that stuff gets out there, it is very difficult to get people to stop repeating it, even after it gets discredited. And this kind of disinformation has real-world consequences when people rely on it, including U.S. Senators making speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
That's the real problem. The Koch brothers bought some airtime on fox to say that climate scientists are supporting anthropogenic climate change for the money, when in fact their funding is based on their doing verifiable research instead.
However, stupid people decide who's credible based on whether or not it's what they're saying is what stupid people want to hear.
The media royally fucked things up even more by claiming to be "balanced" - i.e. giving the deniers equal air time so as to show integrity, instead of giving the deniers what they deserved: show us some real, verifiable data, or just go fuck yourself. Even NPR made this colossal blunder of false journalistic integrity. Giving airtime to liars isn't balance, it's lying.
Well... Amazon did successfully patent the one-click checkout idea, as obvious as that was.
And they tried to patent shooting products with a white background.
Obviously, our patent system is basically as bogus as AT&T's attempts to claim that it innovates, only the patent office is still pretending that it's not complete BS.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon ... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
The government is basically OWNED by the corporations these days. There's really not much difference between the two any longer, and they're both violently and blatantly working to destroy american lives. They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're quite happy to destroy america for money any more.
I would also suggest switching your career to politics, as that career path doesn't seem to care much about criminal history.
Indeed, one might even conclude that a criminal history is a prerequisite for politics, while in the rest of the world, you're guilty until proven guilty.
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
While slight off topic, I agree. Predistination is an excuse for idiots to do stupid things without thinking.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this
You nailed it. That's the biggest factor. Most people who stay in this industry are idiots who work a crazy amount of overtime and do spectacularly bad work. It's 99% machismo. And 99% of the time it's the small number of people working sane hours who are doing almost all of the work, plus fixing the idiots' constant disasters.
And like you, have many years of experience supporting this.
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
When I read the stories about companies offering to freeze women's embryos so that they could work more, I realized that it was tech companies basically admitting that they were sweatshops, but still trying to pretend that they were worth something. They're full of shit.
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this.
If I'd known that the industry would be like this, I'd have avoided it like the plague. It's a waste of time, life, money, and talent. I'm building a client base for my own start up in order to get out.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
Mine's similar. This industry is basically dominated by seat-warming ass-lickers, not talented developers.
Yes, it's basically a blatant admission that they're sweatshops, and that the way to get ahead at both companies is to work long hours and not take vacations, rather than to actually be productive and do quality work.
Depends on the employer. Maybe if you have a bunch of $11/hour monkeys working for you all they care about are butts in seats. My upper management wants to see project deadlines hit. They don't care what or how we get it done.
Most US employers want asses in seats, because they're too stupid to have learned that people working 60+ hour weeks are impeding progress rather than facilitating it.
a pretty standard cop thing ...I too am not a big fan of the police, but that's a hateful slander of the majority police who work hard and are good people.
If they were good people who were working hard to do their jobs, they'd be prosecuting this deputy for killing someone while breaking the law, not standing idly by while he gets off scot free while they go and ticket and arrest citizens who do the same thing.
But in the scenario I'm talking about, it's during their workday, so it's not off hour work. PST, EST, GMT, and IST can pretty much set it up so that the outgoing shift overlaps a few hours with the incoming shift. Gives you 24 hour coverage, but keeps your support from working late at night, when people are less effective and more prone to mistakes.
You're making far too much sense for an american company. What you're suggesting is logical, and therefore won't happen often.
That's one reason to have a percentage of your tech support in places where it isn't a holiday, or at least spread the time zones out through North America and Europe as to minimize the number of hours worked on the holiday itself
That's one reason to have a percentage of your tech support in places where it isn't a holiday, or at least spread the time zones out through North America and Europe as to minimize the number of hours worked on the holiday itself
Amazon actually dislikes having its staff in foreign countries, because amazon can't force their dumbasses... I mean, employees to carry pagers in foreign countries without paying a penalty anytime an employee gets an out-of-shift page.
Translation: it's harder for companies to exploit their workers outside of the us than inside, and american employees don't value themselves as much as non-american employees.
Step 1: be a salaried employee.
Step 2: produce good results
Your hours will still matter, of course, but not as much.
Step 2 is obviously bullplop, since it's blindingly obvious that advancement in most american craporations is based on ass-licking rather than competence and productivity.
The sweatshop culture of america is a direct result of this.
Mono had to make its own way.
That's only partially true. Mono had development support from Microsoft, and unlike Java .NET and C# have been officially open standards for a long time, because Microsoft submitted the specs to ECMA.
In this case, the Republicans are opposed to regulations that would make the market more competitive, so they are using free market rhetoric to oppose free market competition. This is a shameful stance for them to take, and goes against the very principles they claim to stand for.
The real failure here isn't the corrupt, self-serving republicans. It's the sheer idiocy of the people who still vote for them in spite of the fact that the republicans are in favor of things that hurt everyone in the country, like comcrap's monopoly.
That's not to say that the democrats are any better; they get bribes from the same lobbyists as the republicans, after all. If america were a nation of educated people, neither party would get any votes.
The fact that you COULD observe it, doesn't mean you actually will. Thus, until you actually observe it yourself, your knowledge of reality is still coming through faith.
That's not at all correct. It's based on reason.
When a competent scientist publishes a result, they also publish the methods that they used to achieve it. Part of the scientific process is to validate them by having 3rd parties reproduce those results. That becomes evidence.
Incredibly stupid people will claim that because it's not proven it must be wrong, but science is rarely cut and dried as the religious imbeciles want everyone to believe. When 98% of the scientific community says that there is a 90+% chance that we're right about a given assertion or hypothesis, then I believe it, because I understand the rigor of the scientific process, not because of faith in some vague, amorphous all powerful being that you really shouldn't think about because thinking about it leads to thinking and thinking leads to free will, and people with free will who can think stop believing in religious foolishness and stop giving money to the corrupt church.
The only thing I still find surprising about Obama is that people continued to have any respect for him after his administration's response to Deepwater Horizon. His administration facilitated BP's blatant attempts to lie to the public, break a legion of laws about their cleanup procedures, and didn't bother to take advantage of BP's history of negligence to prosecute them. The same idiot's been pandering back and forth regarding the Keystone XL pipeline even though it's useless for the economy, a climate fustercluck in the works, and given its manufacturer's track record a guaranteed ecological disaster... yet he was more interested in his reelection campaign money to do the sensible thing and kill it.
So, you clearly are stating that the state of Wyoming made the wrong decision here, by supporting the Cult of the Dollar.
For anyone else, insider trading will get arrested... if you're in the federal government, not only are you protected from punishment for violating insider trading laws, but you actually have rules and regulations in place to facilitate your insider trading.
Some of those rules and regs include not allowing federal agencies to consider company track records when reviewing bids, and some of them require giving the feds early access to contract grant information so that they can make insider trades.
It's also an example of a technology company's arrogance. They're too stupid to understand that they're not breaking new ground (when I joined there, my first impression was that their technology was antique by government contracting standards), but they're arrogant enough to think that they're innovative.