2) Why are people so against jury duty? Yes, it's inconvenient but so what? We need more intelligent people willing to participate.
You can't be fired for time off for jury duty, but you don't have to be paid, either. There are a ton of people where, if they got stuck on a jury for a week, would be in a world of hurt financially. Can't really blame them. I'm fortunate enough that I do still get salary, so, since I never actually get picked, it's basically a day off where I don't have to answer my cell phone.
Another important point, not mentioned, is that of diminishing returns, At what point does the extra time required for exercise, including preparation, travel, showering, laundry, etc. take up more of a person's life than it is likely to extend it by? If someone spends an hour at the gym, 4 days a week (plus another hour for travelling, showering, etc) that is 400 hours a year. That is hours taken not from your *life* but from your quality time: after sleeping, chores, work, commuting, etc. That could easily be 25% of all your discretionary leisure time. So over 40 years of working, that amount of exercise would need to extend your life by an additional 10 years just to make up for the "lost" quality time you spent doing it.
Or maybe you find a like-minded significant other, and turn your workouts INTO quality time? Ditto if you have kids old enough to work out with you.
"There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk,"
Spoken like a true statistician. However, the statement is provably false. Rhabdomyolysis in the Crossfit community is a thing. There are levels of exercise that expose you to risk, however extreme they might be.
The problem with Crossfit is that you're doing *someone else's* workout. I work out more than most crossfitters, but I'm doing my own routine, that's easily adjustable for things like "that exercise hurts X joint" and "my whatever is sore today" - not trying to keep up with a class.
That said, at some point, knowing when NOT to work out and take a break becomes just as important as working out.
Open office designs are just stupid. Mostly the bosses who are these big extroverts (who also seem to have their own office) who thrive on personal interaction, debates and general open communication...
Yeah, and I have Asperger's, so an open plan office is essentially a "hostile work environment" for me. This is going to be fun in a few weeks, when I'm moving to a different team at work - there are NO areas whatsoever that are acceptable to anyone on the Autism spectrum anywhere near where I'll be moving to. Since Asperger's is considered a disability under the ADA, it's going to be interesting to see what happens when I point this out... Offices here are "VP+ only", and even if they put me in one (or put in one cubicle), I'd have to deal with a constant stream of "how come YOU get an office/real cubicle" 500 times/day.
I'm somehow not surprised that as an American, you would get that exactly backwards. The end of that program would mean the best students India just spent time and money educating will no longer have the option of taking all that government-paid expertise and leaving India for the United States with it.
So yes, by all means threaten to cancel the H-1B program...then watch Indian officials laugh in your face and invite you to kiss their ass.
It would probably be more effective to just implement a similar law in the US. What percentage of the Indian upper/middle class' positions are dependent upon outsourced high-tech jobs that would become illegal to outsource?
Well, I guess if the companies can't be properly classified, they need to be split up so that they can be.
Goes back to what I've been saying for years: No single entity should be allowed to do more than one of: - Create content - Provide transport for content - Provide last-mile service Do that, and it fixes almost all of this, because the last two are pure carriers, and the one with the natural monopoly (last-mile) has no real incentive to not connect as many transport providers as possible.
Purge any submission to the system of a gender identifier... women's or men's anything... remove names in case that is factored... literally provide nothing in the submission that would definitively define a gender.
Then see what it does.
Another interesting experiment would be to leave the gender identifiers in the training data, but make sure it's carefully balanced. Then test it by stacking it so that the only qualified candidates are all one gender, then see if the computer would hire unqualified candidates just to provide a politically correct result.
Interestingly it is "economy" cars that have higher rates than expensive cars - which supports my theory that the demographic is likely an important factor, not just the vehicle.
I've noticed this, too, but I think you've got it kind of backwards. I think many crashes are caused by simple poor judgment skills (which also covers things like DUI, phone use, etc.), and those (lack of) skills define the demographic, not the other way around. IOW, if you have poor judgement, you're less likely to be able to hold a better job, and thus likely to have to drive a cheaper car. I suspect this is the main reason insurance companies like to do credit checks.
The cynic in me wonders whether Amazon is really doing this due to the huge amount of higher-margin revenue they get from AWS that other retailers don't have. They might be able to absorb the cost without raising prices, while if they can get the min wage raised, it would really put the squeeze on other retailers. Maybe causing them to have to raise prices, which would drive more customers to Amazon, and help drive competition out of business.
But if you want to take smart people away from their shiny modern languages and dev stacks, and ask them to put up with bureaucracy, then you need to pay them at least commensurate salaries to what they'd get elsewhere (if not MORE).
These are really stories about banks not wanting to pay talented devs to put up with their BS.
No, they're not going to pay well. Why do think they're doing this (from TFS):
Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks.
Can't wait for all the banking systems to melt down a few years later
Interestingly, as much as we all hate subscription models from companies like Abode and Microsoft, those subscription models do give these companies more of an incentive to focus on stability, efficiency, and security instead of features. Of coarse, they will probably just profit more and do less overall development but stability and quality will get better with fewer new "features" added.
Do you have any idea how much support subscriptions for Cisco/F5/Palo Alto/EMC gear cost per year? Hundreds of thousands a year for two smallish data centers' worth. They STILL can't get it stable.
(As I'm writing this, my VP just walked by telling someone, "OK, it's escalated to EMC".)
We've been trained to be a consuming society of disposable goods. The latest and greatest feature will always be more important than something that is reliable and durable for the long haul.
It's not just consumer stuff.
The network team I'm a part of has been dealing with more and more frequent outages, 90% of which are due to bugs in software running our devices. These aren't fly-by-night vendors either, they're the "no one ever got fired for buying X" ones like Cisco, F5, Palo Alto, EMC, etc.
10 years ago, outages were 10% bugs, and 90% human error, now it seems to be the other way around. Everyone's chasing features, because that's what sells, so there's no time for efficiency/stability/security any more.
If this becomes at all widespread, it won't be long before someone develops a device that spoofs these things to make it look like you're doing exactly what these companies want in order to give you a discount. Just slap the fitbit on the DiscountWrist(tm), and go about your business as usual.
As long as the device costs less than about a year's worth of discounts, they'd sell like hotcakes.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. I think this must be the most hard to learn lesson in human history.
You're right... The more hours you force someone to work, the more unhappy and stressed they'll be, making the employer pay for it via reduced productivity and increased turnover.
We always have a hard time hiring good people for our team in IT. I guarantee if we had a 4-day week (at least now, while everyone else still has 5), they'd be lining up around the block to get in the door.
Public speaking is an important skill, but it has nothing to do with, say, math. So should a kid get a bad grade in algebra because he gets nervous in front of a classroom?
No, you shouldn't get a bad grade because you have an anxiety disorder, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to still get up there and do it. It just means that the grader needs to be aware of the issue and not give a bad grade because they're nervous.
I have Asperger's AND chronic anxiety, and my Sr year in high school, the teacher had us up there TEACHING units of second year AP calculus, with a test-equivalent grade riding on our classmates' peer evaluation of our performance. It sucked the first time or two, but it turned out to be a lot of fun after that.
In which case any reasonable doctor will prescribe the drug to treat whatever condition it's cheaply available for.
My doctor has done this for me, since I have a high deductible on my insurance. For condition X (which I had) it was only available at ~$50/pill, but he prescribed it for condition Y, which was $1/pill.
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to faceless corporate overlords to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
Exactly. Google et al response will be "we'll pay you for links to your content, here's an invoice for putting your website on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or nth page of search results"
Actually, Google's (and other search engines, at least) response to this should be, "we're never paying for links. If you ever bother us about paying for links, we'll handle it by removing your base domain from our database completely, and you can languish in obscurity until you die because no one can find you."
If you don't think you're being paid enough, find another job. I don't like this idea that the government is going to get into the business of micromanaging how much companies pay their employees. A minimum wage is one standard for all, but to begin taxing companies as a way of penalizing them for not paying their employees enough: hello socialism.
The problem with "just find another job" at the rock bottom of the pay scale is that any other job they find is going to put them in the same boat. You have a whole class of people that are desperate, and basically have to take whatever bend-over-and-take it paycheck they can get.
One of the big benefits of UBI would be the elimination of this class of people, so that employers can't get away with this crap any more.
I don't like government meddling, either, but I also don't like supporting social safety net programs with my taxes so that big companies can use it as a subsidy.
Slashdot Mirror
2) Why are people so against jury duty? Yes, it's inconvenient but so what? We need more intelligent people willing to participate.
You can't be fired for time off for jury duty, but you don't have to be paid, either. There are a ton of people where, if they got stuck on a jury for a week, would be in a world of hurt financially. Can't really blame them. I'm fortunate enough that I do still get salary, so, since I never actually get picked, it's basically a day off where I don't have to answer my cell phone.
Another important point, not mentioned, is that of diminishing returns, At what point does the extra time required for exercise, including preparation, travel, showering, laundry, etc. take up more of a person's life than it is likely to extend it by? If someone spends an hour at the gym, 4 days a week (plus another hour for travelling, showering, etc) that is 400 hours a year. That is hours taken not from your *life* but from your quality time: after sleeping, chores, work, commuting, etc. That could easily be 25% of all your discretionary leisure time. So over 40 years of working, that amount of exercise would need to extend your life by an additional 10 years just to make up for the "lost" quality time you spent doing it.
Or maybe you find a like-minded significant other, and turn your workouts INTO quality time? Ditto if you have kids old enough to work out with you.
"There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk,"
Spoken like a true statistician. However, the statement is provably false. Rhabdomyolysis in the Crossfit community is a thing. There are levels of exercise that expose you to risk, however extreme they might be.
The problem with Crossfit is that you're doing *someone else's* workout. I work out more than most crossfitters, but I'm doing my own routine, that's easily adjustable for things like "that exercise hurts X joint" and "my whatever is sore today" - not trying to keep up with a class.
That said, at some point, knowing when NOT to work out and take a break becomes just as important as working out.
Open office designs are just stupid.
Mostly the bosses who are these big extroverts (who also seem to have their own office) who thrive on personal interaction, debates and general open communication...
Yeah, and I have Asperger's, so an open plan office is essentially a "hostile work environment" for me. This is going to be fun in a few weeks, when I'm moving to a different team at work - there are NO areas whatsoever that are acceptable to anyone on the Autism spectrum anywhere near where I'll be moving to. Since Asperger's is considered a disability under the ADA, it's going to be interesting to see what happens when I point this out... Offices here are "VP+ only", and even if they put me in one (or put in one cubicle), I'd have to deal with a constant stream of "how come YOU get an office/real cubicle" 500 times/day.
I'm somehow not surprised that as an American, you would get that exactly backwards. The end of that program would mean the best students India just spent time and money educating will no longer have the option of taking all that government-paid expertise and leaving India for the United States with it.
So yes, by all means threaten to cancel the H-1B program...then watch Indian officials laugh in your face and invite you to kiss their ass.
It would probably be more effective to just implement a similar law in the US. What percentage of the Indian upper/middle class' positions are dependent upon outsourced high-tech jobs that would become illegal to outsource?
Well, I guess if the companies can't be properly classified, they need to be split up so that they can be.
Goes back to what I've been saying for years: No single entity should be allowed to do more than one of:
- Create content
- Provide transport for content
- Provide last-mile service
Do that, and it fixes almost all of this, because the last two are pure carriers, and the one with the natural monopoly (last-mile) has no real incentive to not connect as many transport providers as possible.
This always happens when you forget to check for a full tank of gas before a long trip.
It actually sounds like someone forgot to Check Yo Stagin'!!
Purge any submission to the system of a gender identifier... women's or men's anything... remove names in case that is factored... literally provide nothing in the submission that would definitively define a gender.
Then see what it does.
Another interesting experiment would be to leave the gender identifiers in the training data, but make sure it's carefully balanced. Then test it by stacking it so that the only qualified candidates are all one gender, then see if the computer would hire unqualified candidates just to provide a politically correct result.
Interestingly it is "economy" cars that have higher rates than expensive cars - which supports my theory that the demographic is likely an important factor, not just the vehicle.
I've noticed this, too, but I think you've got it kind of backwards. I think many crashes are caused by simple poor judgment skills (which also covers things like DUI, phone use, etc.), and those (lack of) skills define the demographic, not the other way around. IOW, if you have poor judgement, you're less likely to be able to hold a better job, and thus likely to have to drive a cheaper car. I suspect this is the main reason insurance companies like to do credit checks.
The cynic in me wonders whether Amazon is really doing this due to the huge amount of higher-margin revenue they get from AWS that other retailers don't have. They might be able to absorb the cost without raising prices, while if they can get the min wage raised, it would really put the squeeze on other retailers. Maybe causing them to have to raise prices, which would drive more customers to Amazon, and help drive competition out of business.
You do realize when driving first started it was a right. Somehow the courts ruled away your rights.
No they didn't...
I can drive all I want without any license, speed limits, vehicle standards, etc. - on my own private property.
Driving on taxpayer-funded public roads, however, is not a right.
But if you want to take smart people away from their shiny modern languages and dev stacks, and ask them to put up with bureaucracy, then you need to pay them at least commensurate salaries to what they'd get elsewhere (if not MORE).
These are really stories about banks not wanting to pay talented devs to put up with their BS.
No, they're not going to pay well. Why do think they're doing this (from TFS):
Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks.
Can't wait for all the banking systems to melt down a few years later
A process mistake would affect workers and robots the same way so is irrelevant to the joke.
Maybe not... an experienced human line worker might actually notice and flag a bad process. An industrial robot, not so much.
When is the last time gaming was held up by processing?
Factorio? Kerbal Space Program? Dwarf Fortress? Any game that does heavy simulation?
Interestingly, as much as we all hate subscription models from companies like Abode and Microsoft, those subscription models do give these companies more of an incentive to focus on stability, efficiency, and security instead of features. Of coarse, they will probably just profit more and do less overall development but stability and quality will get better with fewer new "features" added.
Do you have any idea how much support subscriptions for Cisco/F5/Palo Alto/EMC gear cost per year? Hundreds of thousands a year for two smallish data centers' worth. They STILL can't get it stable.
(As I'm writing this, my VP just walked by telling someone, "OK, it's escalated to EMC".)
We've been trained to be a consuming society of disposable goods. The latest and greatest feature will always be more important than something that is reliable and durable for the long haul.
It's not just consumer stuff.
The network team I'm a part of has been dealing with more and more frequent outages, 90% of which are due to bugs in software running our devices. These aren't fly-by-night vendors either, they're the "no one ever got fired for buying X" ones like Cisco, F5, Palo Alto, EMC, etc.
10 years ago, outages were 10% bugs, and 90% human error, now it seems to be the other way around. Everyone's chasing features, because that's what sells, so there's no time for efficiency/stability/security any more.
If this becomes at all widespread, it won't be long before someone develops a device that spoofs these things to make it look like you're doing exactly what these companies want in order to give you a discount. Just slap the fitbit on the DiscountWrist(tm), and go about your business as usual.
As long as the device costs less than about a year's worth of discounts, they'd sell like hotcakes.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. I think this must be the most hard to learn lesson in human history.
You're right... The more hours you force someone to work, the more unhappy and stressed they'll be, making the employer pay for it via reduced productivity and increased turnover.
We always have a hard time hiring good people for our team in IT. I guarantee if we had a 4-day week (at least now, while everyone else still has 5), they'd be lining up around the block to get in the door.
Public speaking is an important skill, but it has nothing to do with, say, math. So should a kid get a bad grade in algebra because he gets nervous in front of a classroom?
No, you shouldn't get a bad grade because you have an anxiety disorder, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to still get up there and do it. It just means that the grader needs to be aware of the issue and not give a bad grade because they're nervous.
I have Asperger's AND chronic anxiety, and my Sr year in high school, the teacher had us up there TEACHING units of second year AP calculus, with a test-equivalent grade riding on our classmates' peer evaluation of our performance. It sucked the first time or two, but it turned out to be a lot of fun after that.
In which case any reasonable doctor will prescribe the drug to treat whatever condition it's cheaply available for.
My doctor has done this for me, since I have a high deductible on my insurance. For condition X (which I had) it was only available at ~$50/pill, but he prescribed it for condition Y, which was $1/pill.
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to faceless corporate overlords to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
Fixed that for you... :(
Exactly. Google et al response will be "we'll pay you for links to your content, here's an invoice for putting your website on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or nth page of search results"
Actually, Google's (and other search engines, at least) response to this should be, "we're never paying for links. If you ever bother us about paying for links, we'll handle it by removing your base domain from our database completely, and you can languish in obscurity until you die because no one can find you."
> We are told we need single-family houses to make us happy and wealthy - so we buy single-family houses.
Is that why we buy them? I bought mine so I wouldn't have to share walls with inconsiderate assholes.
Also, a single-family home allows me to do things I enjoy that would make ME an inconsiderate asshole if I shared walls/floors/ceilings with someone.
If you don't think you're being paid enough, find another job. I don't like this idea that the government is going to get into the business of micromanaging how much companies pay their employees. A minimum wage is one standard for all, but to begin taxing companies as a way of penalizing them for not paying their employees enough: hello socialism.
The problem with "just find another job" at the rock bottom of the pay scale is that any other job they find is going to put them in the same boat. You have a whole class of people that are desperate, and basically have to take whatever bend-over-and-take it paycheck they can get.
One of the big benefits of UBI would be the elimination of this class of people, so that employers can't get away with this crap any more.
I don't like government meddling, either, but I also don't like supporting social safety net programs with my taxes so that big companies can use it as a subsidy.
> It sure as fuck isn't because it tastes good.
You DO realize that there is good tasting alcohol, right?
Why would drink the stuff that tastes like crap??
No there's not... Ethanol is ethanol, and it's awful.
There's just ways of covering up the taste that work better than others.