I agree with many of the above posts: We play video games for recreation as a form of escapism and mental exercise. If we could do the things in video games - live another life, have super powers, fight terrorists with the backing of a shadow government, and so on - we would. Potentially. Unless we're having a lazy day. So the idea of my life activities being gamified and affecting my recreational play is actually a violation of my game space. It's a way to penalize me for not changing my life to suit the game du jour.... and if they make me pay for that, perform certain activities that provide benefit to corporations, political parties, or governments, that's sticking the knife in and twisting it. Even things that are supposed to benefit me personally - like public work projects, social projects, or personal fitness - that I don't associate with the game itself - feels like a shackle. It's a fine I have to pay to play the game, and NOT in any way an enhancement.
At least, that's how it is in western culture.
I think many of the above folks have not considered:
- The degree to which products, people, and brands are commoditized in asian nations
- How the above commoditization is considered normal, if not expected
- The level of competitiveness that some asian cultures place on games
- How the combination of the above 3 come together to make it ludicrously easy for providers to monetize video game
- The size of these populations when it comes to video games and what that means for target markets in the future
For these target markets, video games are not recreation specifically, any more than football is recreation for a college football hopeful, with the added pressure of maintaining a separate and likely much more engaging social life around it. These sorts of tie-ins are considered value adds to these players. "I was already going to drink GAMER/X FUEL brand energy drink, and now I get bonus XP with a code? Awesome!" It's not necessarily considered a detriment to develop a brand loyalty because of these sorts of tie-ins, but could even be a sort of badge of honor, like name brand loyalty was in the 1980's US (anyone remember cola wars?)
As more and more of the chinese population enters the market, I wouldn't be surprised to see the focus of video games especially swing in this direction. Just because it's not as popular or lucrative in the US, who cares, there's 20x the market elsewhere, and money follows the market.
The thing is, manufacturing jobs won't come back, because they're gone. In the 70's and 80's, it took 200 people to do what 3 machines running 24/7 with almost no error do now. Even if you were to set up a new factory, you'd have like 40 jobs where you used to have 1000 - enough to actually support a reasonable town. So point 1,
1. You aren't bringing the jobs back.
Here's another amusing point: even if we do get jobs, the value of them will be based against the value of that job globally - so long as businesses and currency is still traded globally, so until we have really brought the quality of life and cost of living to some sort of equilibrium world wide, these jobs will never provide the value they used to. Back when we didn't have to compete with other countries for this work, it was viable. That's no longer the case and it won't ever be. We avoid manufacturing now because it's simply not the best return on investment for a business OR an employee. So point 2,
2. Manufacturing work doesn't make enough money for the business or employee to incentivize companies or workers to do it in the US in past large numbers.
Last, you mentioned vocational skills. Surprising many who haven't looked into it, we do have some vocational training and even government programs to make it cheap and relatively available. The problem? If you churn out 70-200, let's say, air conditioner repairman from the same school, in the same location, every 6 months, you're not going to have enough jobs available for them. The only way that would work is if you got trained and then were required to move at least 20 miles from any other graduate at any point in time. So point 3,
3. Vocational training doesn't work at scale because it saturates the local markets past the point of available jobs
The end tally is this: Neither manufacturing nor vocational jobs have the ability or potential to support a nationwide middle class, nor provide economic mobility to enter the middle class in numbers greater than what we have today, with all likelihood of them actually decreasing in the future.
In layman's terms, manufacturing can't support a large middle class population.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Advocating to bring back factory work, you may as well advocate to bring back rat catchers, switchboard operators and video rental stores for all the good it'll do the middle class. The reality is that we're moving towards a more maintainable, fully service-based economy and that necessitates higher levels of education to meet the ever rising bar for good paying skilled jobs if we want to maintain a large middle class. For good or for ill, the college degree is fast becoming the old highschool diploma as far as job hunting goes.
It's the standard triangle. You can cut from one at the increased detriment of the others. As long as the others are finite resources you always have to cut somewhere. The problem so many developers can't understand is that the 'where' is a business problem, not a theoretical engineering issue.
If it's more important to remain under budget, or be first to market, yeah, quality might suffer big time, and it's easy to ignore the academic's concept of a perfect engineering development lifecycle with a full QA and test system that, by it's very nature, must be more expensive than the actual production system itself (because it's the production system PLUS extra bits for testing).
Companies learn to handle this fairly well - or they go out of business. They gauge the severity and frequency of errors their users are willing to tolerate to keep them around the top of the maximized profit curve.
This means that as much as you want to refactor all that crap code, it just doesn't pay out to the company. It means that while you'd love a perfect QA test environment, 3 VM's the lead dev set up on one of spare dev systems is going to have to be good enough because the money for the hardware isn't there. You'd love to make a fully functional semi-autonomous system to manage common issues, instead of making devs work a rotating on-call shift but it's not financially worth it.... and so on.
What so many of us don't understand is that our job as software devs or other technical engineers is NOT to make a high-functioning, beautifully coded, well maintained product. Our job, the reason we were hired, is to build revenue for the company. Anything else is just a byproduct of work towards that goal. If you can make more money with an app that crashes every hour than you would from spending 3 months testing it, then that's what you do.
Not that it doesn't irritate me too, every time one of my products is pushed out the door without a proper shakedown, but you gotta face reality.
Having worked with a chinese company that did this sort of thing before, the 'easiest' way to do it is just use the same assembly line, machinery, and workers to roll off a duplicate version with the exact same materials from the exact same material providers.
I have very little insight into the world of fashion, but I do know that since there are no laws against creating the exact same dress, shirt, purse, or whatever, luxury brands tend to plaster their name or logo all over their products. You can't copy the name because that's trademarked.
As a result, you have folks seeing the popularity of an item making knockoffs. These vary in quality, of course, but in some cases, they're made from the exact same materials, in the exact same plant that the originals are made. The only difference is they have to print a different brand name on them or risk criminal activities, so a Coach bag becomes a "Loach" bag, with the mark spelled out in the same font with an extra curvy 'L'. Sure, technological devices are usually protected by more than trademark - patents and such which are often ignored by certain eastern markets - but since a piece of paper half a world a way isn't an actual barrier to producing a physical product, so it often comes down to the same thing.
The funny thing here is that even with off brands that may exceed the quality of the item, the original brand is still much more highly prized. Why? Because of marketing generating a social expectation that a 'genuine' object affords prestige. It could just be that it's expensive, or that it's advertisements paradoxically indicate that you must both be beautiful enough to wear it and simultaneously that you must wear it to be beautiful (like Abercrombie & Fitch, for example). It says, "Even if it's not as high quality, I both went through the trouble to find it AND paid more, and I passed through the filter that says I'm worth owning this, and that says something positive about me as a person!"
Sound like any company you know? Starts with an A, ends with A -pple, nothing in the middle?
This is just Apple selling it's product not as a piece of technology, but as a lifestyle accessory, as they've done ever since they realized that was the way to success. The claims of technological merit are just fluff, but necessary fluff to keep up their brand pretension and justify their walled garden environments.
I'll summarize it for you all though. In order to avoid a situation where the majority are unsustainably poor and ready to revolt, we'll need to meet the following criteria:
- Every country in the world needs to be at about the same technological level at about the same time
- Every government in the world (and all the people within them) embrace strong socialist beliefs that make current socialist states look like anarchists
- We need to abolish the concept that work is directly related to value, and in turn, diminish the concept that scarcity and demand have real impact on value.
- We have to accept that there is going to be a sizable number of people in the world who add no value to society or the world, and simply exist as consumers
The average person would have a trade skill that they use when they feel like it, perhaps no more than 1-3 hours a week, live in a house or home they like, and their things (clothing, devices, transportation, food etc) would be freely given to them with only limits placed on quantity by need - for example, no one needs more than 1 car, but you might - from time to time- need a truck or a motorcycle. There'd be no such thing as money, private ownership of property (items & land) is almost completely gone, and naturally limited resources would be metered out by some merit plus popularity based system, so not everyone would have a starship, for example.... but the reality is that we're probably going to have to go through at least one, if not more cycles of horrific violence or strife, to the point that it forces us to radically redefine our thoughts and behaviors. We're just too caught up in concepts of justice-as-defined-by-the-beholder, us-vs-them, and so on to do it right now.
Pretty sure the description indicated that it's a locking mechanism similar to that in clothing stores. You have a plastic chit with a magnet in the right place, slide it over the 'locking disc' and it slides off. Obviously the 'phone-free zone' would have ushers or whomever at it's borders, applying and removing the 'yondr' case, in the same way they might hand out and collect 3-d glasses at a movie theater. Why have a complex, error-prone technical solution when a manual solution is cheaper, easier, and more reliable?
From the article, this is not an estimate of upper max based on species capability, biological understanding of the aging process, or knowledge and subsequent realistic & accepted explanation of the limitations. They just graphed the current max age on a year by year basis and noticed that the last 20 years or so, there seems to be a plateau. At least in the countries that keep good track of age of citizens over the last 150 years or so.
Even with poor or missing data, we can see that if we used this same technique in say, 1700, the expected max age would look a bit different. At one time, our expected max age was 30!
Using a study like this to claim knowledge about the limits of age is like using a crime statistics study in the us to prove that certain minority groups are *genetically* prone to be criminals, and about exactly as useful.
As mankind progresses and continues to innovate in the fields of medicine, biology, sociology, psychology, and technology, we'll keep pushing this limit, perhaps in fits and starts, but it'll continue to advance. That is, unless there's some difficult-to-impossible ACTUAL limitation that we hit. A study of statistics like this might hint at *a* current barrier, but this doesn't identify, describe, or explain it. It certainly can't claim it's the *final* barrier.
The problem isn't email or voice mail or voice mail called 'voice memos'. It's people, man. It's always been people.
Look, if you're bad at communication - either producing it or receiving it - you're bad at it. Having a smart phone app that you use to take notes during your commute (plus the ambient noise and pauses from distraction) that you send out at 7 pm, expecting your employees to have linked their personal phone to company email and IM services, and ready to listen and respond... it's not going to fix things, it'll just move the apparent source of conflict around, spread it out, exacerbate it, obfuscate it, or some combination of the above.
In any given day, the amount of time you should devote to whole-group communication should probably never be more than 15 minutes. If it's taking longer than that, try fixing that issue first, because that IS an issue. Get better at communicating, not just filling pages or airwaves with low-info-density content.
Here's a hint to achieving this: there is no technological mechanism that yet exists which is as information rich as a simple 2-way, face to face meeting. Even video chat isn't as good. You want to communicate with most efficiency, you need to do face to face. So schedule meetings at least a day before (and if you can't, then fix your scheduling problem too!), sit down, look them in the eye, remain focused, and then get back to work.
I had to work under a lead who had "Design Pattern Prejudice". Every class had to be named based on the pattern it took after, and everything had to come from factory factories that worked off interfaces to abstract parents at every step, everything had to be immutable, and in any given review, he'd point to a section of code and ask what design pattern this followed. If you couldn't specify one, he'd fail the review, and if you could, he'd want you to rewrite it to use at least 2 or 3 more patterns.
Granted, he'd spend a whole week writing code, fail to complete any of his issues, and check in around 40 new classes & interfaces, but not one of them had any business logic in them at all, and then demand everyone refactor their code to use his new architecture.
We only got things done when we started ignoring him.
"It's incredible that this community is still going so strong after so long."
I checked the Tiobe index and I guess they're right, it IS on the rise. They're almost more popular than Visual Basic.Net, but they've got a ways to go to catch up to Perl.
To be fair though, they've more than doubled in popularity since a low in early 2015, going from sub 1% to over 2%!
The problem scope:
Some people in any given society are given to illegal and violent actions that cause harm to the society they're in and the people and infrastructure within it. We don't want them to do those things.
There's two real solutions:
- Make people think in a different way which precludes this sort of behavior
- Eliminate the root cause(s) which engender this sort of behavior.
Technology can't really help much here, not as the magic bullet people desire. These are all long term issues where 'technology' can help, but no one in the world is very good at making people think in specific ways or changing how societies work, even when they're the guys in power. In the end, eliminating poverty, sickness, and not just need, but the larger human problem of 'want' are very hard issues indeed. They won't fit in sound bites or a single person's elected term.
Which brings us to the the bigger problem: the current round of political turds are trumpeting their curealls when they're really only addressing symptoms:
- Identify individuals prior to their negative activity and remove them from society
- Remove any tools which could be used to harm society from society
Technology may be able to say something about theses in the short term; loss of privacy and elimination of encryption may allow law enforcement to track criminals more effectively. To be fair though, mandatory lobotomies for presumed anti-social/society individuals would also work pretty well, if you consider medical science to be a technology. All the blathering about the ill-defined 'assault weapons' while handguns are the deadly weapon of choice - and the majority of firearm deaths are from suicides to boot? It's all just hot air. No interest in solving problems, only winning political points. It's the same security theater we see in the airports writ large across the nation. Lots of visible frenetic activity but results - nope. Lots of hand-waving and sound bites instead.
Not that I want to be all negative, I do have one constructive suggestion for these short term issues. A guideline that will help us reel in these claims that, for example, encryption should be criminalized, and 2 hours in a security line at every public venue is considered reasonable. The guideline is this:
Do not believe, for a second, that you can eliminate terrorism, domestic or otherwise. Instead, realize that the best you can do is mitigate the risk.
Look, as soon as we say we're going to eliminate it, that no cost is too high to make the world safe for every citizen, there's no end. It's like citing the will of god in a religious debate, you can never refute it, and it's an 'answer' that can be used to justify any deed, no matter how horrible. If you instead focus on managing the risk, putting an actual value on it, and using that metric to assign resources, you'll come up with a more reasonable solution.
Maybe hire an economist to explain the hard facts without any sort of emotional or moral outrage?
There's a broad category of self-assessment taxes you're supposed to be paying : use tax and their ilk.
State laws almost always indicate that it is the responsibility of the purchaser to account for this. Generally, they require that you pay the taxable difference by percent between the point of purchase and the state of residence.
Example 1: You purchase a good on the internet from out of state. You pay no (sales) tax on it at the time of purchase , but if you were to buy it in your state, you'd be assessed a 10% tax. You now owe your state a 10% tax.
Example 2: You live in one state, but purchase a car in another. Autos are taxed at 10% in your state, and at 5% in the state where you purchased it. The tax for the state of purchase IS collected, but you still owe 5% tax in your state.
The reason this doesn't come up very often is that most of these sums are very very small. Certainly far smaller than the cost of litigation to investigate, find proof, and litigate remuneration of those sums. The states still want that money! They can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover two dollars from an individual, but they're willing to spend a hundred thousand if it brings in millions. So they target specific retailers because it IS cost effective for them to force THEM to collect the sales tax as if they were in-state sellers. Thus Amazon now collects per-state tax.
The short version is that the state wants money, and they'll keep creating laws until they can both legally take it, and it's cost effective (and easy) to do so. The same idea drives universal fingerprinting/ID and encryption backdoor initiatives. There are laws that cover the situation, but they're too hard to enforce. So they add more laws simply so it's easier to enforce the other ones.
I was surprised to find out that the most comfortable position for me at a desk for long periods of time is actually with the top of the desk more or less in line with the middle of my sternum. From shoulder to wrist, my arms are almost entirely horizontal.
No idea of the ergonomics of it, but I seem to be managing to avoid fatigue and feel comfortable, even if I usually have to resort to putting the chair to the lowest level.
Remember - the studies show that standing desks may actually incur more, and more serious health problems, much more quickly than sitting - in weeks instead of months or years. We DO know sitting for long periods of time is bad, but as per a previous slashdot story. there's no indication standing all day is any better.
I wrote about this before here too, but the summary is this: the idea that standing desks provide health benefits is based more on well-intentioned ignore-proof-or-lack-thereof feel-good rationalization than the anti-vaxxer movement.
Just make sure if you're getting a standing desk like this or others, that you're not just buying into hype. Remember how it went when everyone raved about how awesome Ruby was?... yeah.
The summary version is this:
- Sitting too much is associated with certain health risks that take a long time to appear and are common with a sedentary lifestyle (so may not be caused only by sitting)
- Standing too much is associated with certain health risks that occur fairly rapidly (relative to sitting)
- We don't really know how much standing is enough to ward off the dangers of sitting,
- We don't know how much standing is too much and will result in health problems.
There's probably an optimal healthy point, but we don't have any studies that show where that optimal healthy point is on average, much less how it needs to be adjusted for an individual. The only real advice to come out of this is that you should take a break and walk around every once in a while and outside of work, maintain an active lifestyle with exercise and properly sized nutritious meals.
A quick perusal above shows where people's heads are at on the 'right to be forgotten':
"We enjoyed that right until google came up. before that, everybody could simply be forgotten by moving to the next village"
"Before that, if you wanted to be forgotten, you simply moved and adopted a new name."
No, it was not a 'right' then, as there was nothing in the law to provide it, nor was it considered an unstated right assumed by society.
No, you were not forgotten, rather, new individuals were ignorant.
No, name changes were public record and so too were most criminal complaints – simply not having a trivial way to search them does not equate being inaccessible, and certainly not to being ‘Forgotten’.
Why target google searches alone? Shouldn’t someone need to go through the police records, newspaper archives (and any microfiche for places still using that at the time of the offense), magazines, comedians routines, and song lyrics (if the crime was public enough) - and any recordings thereof – to eliminate the references? As per 1984, you’re going to need a whole department working 24/7 to censor or rewrite all the data there ever was if you’re really pushing for ‘forgotten’ status.
Really though, this isn’t about a right. It’s about restriction of rights. What advocates of this restriction are really trying to do is eliminate access by society at large to public records. Since the very nature of public records is that they are publically accessible, they’re instead attacking the ability to search the records, in an attempt to make the data useless. Basically, it’s the same sort of political machinations you see in attempts to do end-runs around laws in US politics today: so called sanctuary cities deciding not to check the residency status of illegal aliens, or requiring state ID to vote to drive away minorities. It’s folks deliberately doing an end-run around the law.
What it really comes down to is this: If we’re not supposed to do something, be it identify someone as an ex-convict or other, then why can we do it through every other channel allowed except for a single one singled out simply because of it’s current popularity and ease of use?
My problem is with the strongly opinionated frameworks. You know, the ones where you use framework 'X' and now you have a 'X'-website or 'X' application? Where the framework's author makes the majority of architectural and project organization decisions. Sure, they make 80% of the common usage patterns easy, but that almost always results in making 10% of what's left hard and the remaining 10% near-if-not impossible.
In a world where the programmer makes the rules, this is fine - they can find some awkward workaround, like forcing a second login or putting validation logic only on the client side. Unfortunately, in the business world, the customer is the one making the rules, and the customer always wants 100% of the product working the way they want it to work.
They seem to flourish - at least until the next fad framework - thanks to their low barrier to entry and focus on the intuitive space the article author references.
Hipster coder though? I don't know. Almost every dev I know has some subset of interest in new languages, frameworks, libraries, and so on. It's their toy language or pet project. In fact, the biggest violators I see are actual experienced programmers who do know what they ought to, but don't want to spend time reinventing that same tired ground when they just want to play around.
In fact, not having to reinvent that same solution is exactly what they're interested in.
That's why you'll find a Karaf server running a Camel app in a Microsoft shop, even though there's no one left at the company who knows OSGI. Or find an external build script dependency in the form of a Rust script from out of nowhere. The people who should know better just want to play, and the easiest way to do that is to make it part of their day to day job.
What this article and experience tell me is that more than ever, we're in need of technically-competent managers who can evaluate, triage, and reign in individual developer output and provide focus.
At least, in a business environment, where product delivery, support, and maintenance are more important than playing around.
I've noted that businesses that have historically shown high growth and apparent long term stability seem to be looking for "T-shaped" employees. These are employees who know a little about a lot (a wide horizontal) and a lot about a little (a narrow vertical). Specialization is good, but you have to know enough to be able to respecialize in anything else quickly, which means dabbling in a bit of everything so that it's at least familiar.
Basically, a jack of all trades AND a master of one.
To use your analogy, you don't need to know how to rebuild the motor in order to drive the car, but you should be aware of all the parts and how they operate, so that way when something makes a noise, you not only know what it likely is, you either know how to fix it (or if it even needs fixing) and where to start looking for the information on how to fix it - even if you lack the tools or experience to do so.
That's my experience as well, at least, as of the middle 90's. Why use a mainstream, commercial language, when you could use a theoretically complete one? One where they recognize that features like "output" and "input" are dirty exceptions that spoil the purity of your program when you're trying to get a good hard proof using Hoare logic.
Better not clutter up the syntax either by using confusing, pre-existing symbols to form constructs, not when you can add whole new symbols requiring a special (APL) keyboard!
I remember having a TA once challenge me - I had written an algorithm to operate iteratively, rather than recursively, because I had noticed the program would run out of memory if I did it the other way when fed large data sets - because to him, recursion was theoretically perfect and not using it was a personal affront. The fact that my code worked and his crashed after 4-5 minutes didn't matter.
To paraphrase a professor of mine, "There's absolutely no reason for a computer scientist to use a computer."
This sort of attitude was pretty rampant all throughout my college career, fairly startling having already been employed in the industry for some years prior. No concept of real world usage at all, or worse, some strange bias against it.
For example, every time I see or hear Donald Trump, or hear about his standing in polls, I experience waves of nausea, get headaches, become irritable, and have troubles thinking anything other than 'dark' thoughts.
I know a lot of people who have the same allergic reaction, and I think it's only fair that we make the US a Donald Trump free zone, to end this sort of suffering.
Their definition of male and female is indicated to be 'sex' - that is, biological gender, as opposed to the social concept of gender. Pretty clearly stated.
What they're attempting to do is find out if there are any consistent trends within each group of biological genders that contrast with each other, that can be used to indicate a difference between biological genders. As they found none, speculation on what a trans-woman's brain would be, if they had found it is as useful as speculating on the type of hat a tyrannosaurus rex would prefer, if they had access to hats and the desire to wear them.
That is to say, completely pointless, on a number of levels.
It doesn't prove that. It doesn't disprove it either. It makes no claims on that whatsoever.
Interestingly, this phrase shows up early in the article: “Nobody has had a way of quantifying this before,” which indicates that previous claims were invalid, based on supposition and assumption rather than data. They were at best, theories, in the scientific sense of the word, but lacked a mechanism to test.
Should you assume that previous claims were valid, even without proof, I can see how you might come to the conclusion that we lack the tools to derive differences. If you ignore the idea that these things could be impacted more by chemical, environmental or cultural factors, and that brain structure contains an inherent representation of male-like vs female-like brains, it is a pretty reasonable assumption.
Except that the article then goes on to point out that all the things previously claimed to indicate gender did not have reliability: there was no inherent consistency or commonality between results, except when you zoom out far enough to indicate a generic trend (one that cannot be used to reliably identify a brain as 'male' or 'female'). Again from the article:
"Some modest disparities have been reported: On average, for example, men tend to have a larger amygdala, a region associated with emotion. Such differences are small and highly influenced by the environment."
So, the previous claims are considered invalid, and the assumption - assuming I'm not painting a straw man - requires them to be true, and reliable. Instead, they are not, and while it doesn't discount the assumption, it does make it more unlikely to be true.... personally speaking, I believe 'genderness' as it relates to social norms rather than biological ones, is predicated primarily on those same social norms and cultural values, rather than biological, which serve as a tertiary influence after cultural and environmental factors. If that were not the case, then it would be unimportant for a trans-individual to look and dress in a stereotypical gender-specific way, except to serve as a label to others. There's nothing that says you're not unless you dress like your culture's stereotype of , except insecurity and social pressures. Nothing except what an individual allows inside themselves.
Is there really a problem with it being primarily a psychological state? It's equally valid, isn't it?
Is there business value in retaining, training, and developing individuals who will become domain experts with cross-functional expertise and proficiency with working within your business structure?
Well, of course. That's a hypothetical question.
The real question: is that value greater than the cost to retain them vs. the cost of hiring multiple underpaid, low quality workers, perhaps from another country?
This is going to different industry to industry, and company to company. Those selling software as a service may find their short term apparent advantage results in a severe disadvantage over the long term. Those releasing products may see great gains in that same long term view, with a painful short term as their teams are brought up to date.
If any of these trends/are/ true on average, though, then the good companies will survive and the bad ones will go under in a socioeconomic version of natural selection.
In either scenario, there will still be other companies that value long term employees, and those that don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with many of the above posts: We play video games for recreation as a form of escapism and mental exercise. If we could do the things in video games - live another life, have super powers, fight terrorists with the backing of a shadow government, and so on - we would. Potentially. Unless we're having a lazy day. So the idea of my life activities being gamified and affecting my recreational play is actually a violation of my game space. It's a way to penalize me for not changing my life to suit the game du jour. ... and if they make me pay for that, perform certain activities that provide benefit to corporations, political parties, or governments, that's sticking the knife in and twisting it. Even things that are supposed to benefit me personally - like public work projects, social projects, or personal fitness - that I don't associate with the game itself - feels like a shackle. It's a fine I have to pay to play the game, and NOT in any way an enhancement.
At least, that's how it is in western culture.
I think many of the above folks have not considered:
- The degree to which products, people, and brands are commoditized in asian nations
- How the above commoditization is considered normal, if not expected
- The level of competitiveness that some asian cultures place on games
- How the combination of the above 3 come together to make it ludicrously easy for providers to monetize video game
- The size of these populations when it comes to video games and what that means for target markets in the future
For these target markets, video games are not recreation specifically, any more than football is recreation for a college football hopeful, with the added pressure of maintaining a separate and likely much more engaging social life around it. These sorts of tie-ins are considered value adds to these players. "I was already going to drink GAMER/X FUEL brand energy drink, and now I get bonus XP with a code? Awesome!" It's not necessarily considered a detriment to develop a brand loyalty because of these sorts of tie-ins, but could even be a sort of badge of honor, like name brand loyalty was in the 1980's US (anyone remember cola wars?)
As more and more of the chinese population enters the market, I wouldn't be surprised to see the focus of video games especially swing in this direction. Just because it's not as popular or lucrative in the US, who cares, there's 20x the market elsewhere, and money follows the market.
The thing is, manufacturing jobs won't come back, because they're gone. In the 70's and 80's, it took 200 people to do what 3 machines running 24/7 with almost no error do now. Even if you were to set up a new factory, you'd have like 40 jobs where you used to have 1000 - enough to actually support a reasonable town. So point 1,
1. You aren't bringing the jobs back.
Here's another amusing point: even if we do get jobs, the value of them will be based against the value of that job globally - so long as businesses and currency is still traded globally, so until we have really brought the quality of life and cost of living to some sort of equilibrium world wide, these jobs will never provide the value they used to. Back when we didn't have to compete with other countries for this work, it was viable. That's no longer the case and it won't ever be. We avoid manufacturing now because it's simply not the best return on investment for a business OR an employee. So point 2,
2. Manufacturing work doesn't make enough money for the business or employee to incentivize companies or workers to do it in the US in past large numbers.
Last, you mentioned vocational skills. Surprising many who haven't looked into it, we do have some vocational training and even government programs to make it cheap and relatively available. The problem? If you churn out 70-200, let's say, air conditioner repairman from the same school, in the same location, every 6 months, you're not going to have enough jobs available for them. The only way that would work is if you got trained and then were required to move at least 20 miles from any other graduate at any point in time. So point 3,
3. Vocational training doesn't work at scale because it saturates the local markets past the point of available jobs
The end tally is this: Neither manufacturing nor vocational jobs have the ability or potential to support a nationwide middle class, nor provide economic mobility to enter the middle class in numbers greater than what we have today, with all likelihood of them actually decreasing in the future.
In layman's terms, manufacturing can't support a large middle class population.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Advocating to bring back factory work, you may as well advocate to bring back rat catchers, switchboard operators and video rental stores for all the good it'll do the middle class. The reality is that we're moving towards a more maintainable, fully service-based economy and that necessitates higher levels of education to meet the ever rising bar for good paying skilled jobs if we want to maintain a large middle class. For good or for ill, the college degree is fast becoming the old highschool diploma as far as job hunting goes.
It's the standard triangle. You can cut from one at the increased detriment of the others. As long as the others are finite resources you always have to cut somewhere. The problem so many developers can't understand is that the 'where' is a business problem, not a theoretical engineering issue.
If it's more important to remain under budget, or be first to market, yeah, quality might suffer big time, and it's easy to ignore the academic's concept of a perfect engineering development lifecycle with a full QA and test system that, by it's very nature, must be more expensive than the actual production system itself (because it's the production system PLUS extra bits for testing).
Companies learn to handle this fairly well - or they go out of business. They gauge the severity and frequency of errors their users are willing to tolerate to keep them around the top of the maximized profit curve.
This means that as much as you want to refactor all that crap code, it just doesn't pay out to the company. ... and so on.
It means that while you'd love a perfect QA test environment, 3 VM's the lead dev set up on one of spare dev systems is going to have to be good enough because the money for the hardware isn't there.
You'd love to make a fully functional semi-autonomous system to manage common issues, instead of making devs work a rotating on-call shift but it's not financially worth it.
What so many of us don't understand is that our job as software devs or other technical engineers is NOT to make a high-functioning, beautifully coded, well maintained product. Our job, the reason we were hired, is to build revenue for the company. Anything else is just a byproduct of work towards that goal. If you can make more money with an app that crashes every hour than you would from spending 3 months testing it, then that's what you do.
Not that it doesn't irritate me too, every time one of my products is pushed out the door without a proper shakedown, but you gotta face reality.
Having worked with a chinese company that did this sort of thing before, the 'easiest' way to do it is just use the same assembly line, machinery, and workers to roll off a duplicate version with the exact same materials from the exact same material providers.
That's not always the way, but it is the easiest.
I have very little insight into the world of fashion, but I do know that since there are no laws against creating the exact same dress, shirt, purse, or whatever, luxury brands tend to plaster their name or logo all over their products. You can't copy the name because that's trademarked.
As a result, you have folks seeing the popularity of an item making knockoffs. These vary in quality, of course, but in some cases, they're made from the exact same materials, in the exact same plant that the originals are made. The only difference is they have to print a different brand name on them or risk criminal activities, so a Coach bag becomes a "Loach" bag, with the mark spelled out in the same font with an extra curvy 'L'. Sure, technological devices are usually protected by more than trademark - patents and such which are often ignored by certain eastern markets - but since a piece of paper half a world a way isn't an actual barrier to producing a physical product, so it often comes down to the same thing.
The funny thing here is that even with off brands that may exceed the quality of the item, the original brand is still much more highly prized. Why? Because of marketing generating a social expectation that a 'genuine' object affords prestige. It could just be that it's expensive, or that it's advertisements paradoxically indicate that you must both be beautiful enough to wear it and simultaneously that you must wear it to be beautiful (like Abercrombie & Fitch, for example). It says, "Even if it's not as high quality, I both went through the trouble to find it AND paid more, and I passed through the filter that says I'm worth owning this, and that says something positive about me as a person!"
Sound like any company you know? Starts with an A, ends with A -pple, nothing in the middle?
This is just Apple selling it's product not as a piece of technology, but as a lifestyle accessory, as they've done ever since they realized that was the way to success. The claims of technological merit are just fluff, but necessary fluff to keep up their brand pretension and justify their walled garden environments.
As I posted before in 2013, again in 2013 and latest in 2015
I'll summarize it for you all though. In order to avoid a situation where the majority are unsustainably poor and ready to revolt, we'll need to meet the following criteria:
- Every country in the world needs to be at about the same technological level at about the same time
- Every government in the world (and all the people within them) embrace strong socialist beliefs that make current socialist states look like anarchists
- We need to abolish the concept that work is directly related to value, and in turn, diminish the concept that scarcity and demand have real impact on value.
- We have to accept that there is going to be a sizable number of people in the world who add no value to society or the world, and simply exist as consumers
The average person would have a trade skill that they use when they feel like it, perhaps no more than 1-3 hours a week, live in a house or home they like, and their things (clothing, devices, transportation, food etc) would be freely given to them with only limits placed on quantity by need - for example, no one needs more than 1 car, but you might - from time to time- need a truck or a motorcycle. There'd be no such thing as money, private ownership of property (items & land) is almost completely gone, and naturally limited resources would be metered out by some merit plus popularity based system, so not everyone would have a starship, for example. ... but the reality is that we're probably going to have to go through at least one, if not more cycles of horrific violence or strife, to the point that it forces us to radically redefine our thoughts and behaviors. We're just too caught up in concepts of justice-as-defined-by-the-beholder, us-vs-them, and so on to do it right now.
Pretty sure the description indicated that it's a locking mechanism similar to that in clothing stores. You have a plastic chit with a magnet in the right place, slide it over the 'locking disc' and it slides off. Obviously the 'phone-free zone' would have ushers or whomever at it's borders, applying and removing the 'yondr' case, in the same way they might hand out and collect 3-d glasses at a movie theater. Why have a complex, error-prone technical solution when a manual solution is cheaper, easier, and more reliable?
From the article, this is not an estimate of upper max based on species capability, biological understanding of the aging process, or knowledge and subsequent realistic & accepted explanation of the limitations. They just graphed the current max age on a year by year basis and noticed that the last 20 years or so, there seems to be a plateau. At least in the countries that keep good track of age of citizens over the last 150 years or so.
Even with poor or missing data, we can see that if we used this same technique in say, 1700, the expected max age would look a bit different. At one time, our expected max age was 30!
Using a study like this to claim knowledge about the limits of age is like using a crime statistics study in the us to prove that certain minority groups are *genetically* prone to be criminals, and about exactly as useful.
As mankind progresses and continues to innovate in the fields of medicine, biology, sociology, psychology, and technology, we'll keep pushing this limit, perhaps in fits and starts, but it'll continue to advance. That is, unless there's some difficult-to-impossible ACTUAL limitation that we hit. A study of statistics like this might hint at *a* current barrier, but this doesn't identify, describe, or explain it. It certainly can't claim it's the *final* barrier.
The problem isn't email or voice mail or voice mail called 'voice memos'. It's people, man. It's always been people.
Look, if you're bad at communication - either producing it or receiving it - you're bad at it. Having a smart phone app that you use to take notes during your commute (plus the ambient noise and pauses from distraction) that you send out at 7 pm, expecting your employees to have linked their personal phone to company email and IM services, and ready to listen and respond ... it's not going to fix things, it'll just move the apparent source of conflict around, spread it out, exacerbate it, obfuscate it, or some combination of the above.
In any given day, the amount of time you should devote to whole-group communication should probably never be more than 15 minutes. If it's taking longer than that, try fixing that issue first, because that IS an issue. Get better at communicating, not just filling pages or airwaves with low-info-density content.
Here's a hint to achieving this: there is no technological mechanism that yet exists which is as information rich as a simple 2-way, face to face meeting. Even video chat isn't as good. You want to communicate with most efficiency, you need to do face to face. So schedule meetings at least a day before (and if you can't, then fix your scheduling problem too!), sit down, look them in the eye, remain focused, and then get back to work.
I had to work under a lead who had "Design Pattern Prejudice". Every class had to be named based on the pattern it took after, and everything had to come from factory factories that worked off interfaces to abstract parents at every step, everything had to be immutable, and in any given review, he'd point to a section of code and ask what design pattern this followed. If you couldn't specify one, he'd fail the review, and if you could, he'd want you to rewrite it to use at least 2 or 3 more patterns.
Granted, he'd spend a whole week writing code, fail to complete any of his issues, and check in around 40 new classes & interfaces, but not one of them had any business logic in them at all, and then demand everyone refactor their code to use his new architecture.
We only got things done when we started ignoring him.
"It's incredible that this community is still going so strong after so long."
I checked the Tiobe index and I guess they're right, it IS on the rise. They're almost more popular than Visual Basic .Net, but they've got a ways to go to catch up to Perl.
To be fair though, they've more than doubled in popularity since a low in early 2015, going from sub 1% to over 2%!
The problem scope:
Some people in any given society are given to illegal and violent actions that cause harm to the society they're in and the people and infrastructure within it. We don't want them to do those things.
There's two real solutions:
- Make people think in a different way which precludes this sort of behavior
- Eliminate the root cause(s) which engender this sort of behavior.
Technology can't really help much here, not as the magic bullet people desire. These are all long term issues where 'technology' can help, but no one in the world is very good at making people think in specific ways or changing how societies work, even when they're the guys in power. In the end, eliminating poverty, sickness, and not just need, but the larger human problem of 'want' are very hard issues indeed. They won't fit in sound bites or a single person's elected term.
Which brings us to the the bigger problem: the current round of political turds are trumpeting their curealls when they're really only addressing symptoms:
- Identify individuals prior to their negative activity and remove them from society
- Remove any tools which could be used to harm society from society
Technology may be able to say something about theses in the short term; loss of privacy and elimination of encryption may allow law enforcement to track criminals more effectively. To be fair though, mandatory lobotomies for presumed anti-social/society individuals would also work pretty well, if you consider medical science to be a technology. All the blathering about the ill-defined 'assault weapons' while handguns are the deadly weapon of choice - and the majority of firearm deaths are from suicides to boot? It's all just hot air. No interest in solving problems, only winning political points. It's the same security theater we see in the airports writ large across the nation. Lots of visible frenetic activity but results - nope. Lots of hand-waving and sound bites instead.
Not that I want to be all negative, I do have one constructive suggestion for these short term issues. A guideline that will help us reel in these claims that, for example, encryption should be criminalized, and 2 hours in a security line at every public venue is considered reasonable. The guideline is this:
Do not believe, for a second, that you can eliminate terrorism, domestic or otherwise. Instead, realize that the best you can do is mitigate the risk.
Look, as soon as we say we're going to eliminate it, that no cost is too high to make the world safe for every citizen, there's no end. It's like citing the will of god in a religious debate, you can never refute it, and it's an 'answer' that can be used to justify any deed, no matter how horrible. If you instead focus on managing the risk, putting an actual value on it, and using that metric to assign resources, you'll come up with a more reasonable solution.
Maybe hire an economist to explain the hard facts without any sort of emotional or moral outrage?
There's a broad category of self-assessment taxes you're supposed to be paying : use tax and their ilk.
State laws almost always indicate that it is the responsibility of the purchaser to account for this. Generally, they require that you pay the taxable difference by percent between the point of purchase and the state of residence.
Example 1: You purchase a good on the internet from out of state. You pay no (sales) tax on it at the time of purchase , but if you were to buy it in your state, you'd be assessed a 10% tax. You now owe your state a 10% tax.
Example 2: You live in one state, but purchase a car in another. Autos are taxed at 10% in your state, and at 5% in the state where you purchased it. The tax for the state of purchase IS collected, but you still owe 5% tax in your state.
The reason this doesn't come up very often is that most of these sums are very very small. Certainly far smaller than the cost of litigation to investigate, find proof, and litigate remuneration of those sums. The states still want that money! They can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover two dollars from an individual, but they're willing to spend a hundred thousand if it brings in millions. So they target specific retailers because it IS cost effective for them to force THEM to collect the sales tax as if they were in-state sellers. Thus Amazon now collects per-state tax.
The short version is that the state wants money, and they'll keep creating laws until they can both legally take it, and it's cost effective (and easy) to do so. The same idea drives universal fingerprinting/ID and encryption backdoor initiatives. There are laws that cover the situation, but they're too hard to enforce. So they add more laws simply so it's easier to enforce the other ones.
I was surprised to find out that the most comfortable position for me at a desk for long periods of time is actually with the top of the desk more or less in line with the middle of my sternum. From shoulder to wrist, my arms are almost entirely horizontal.
No idea of the ergonomics of it, but I seem to be managing to avoid fatigue and feel comfortable, even if I usually have to resort to putting the chair to the lowest level.
Remember - the studies show that standing desks may actually incur more, and more serious health problems, much more quickly than sitting - in weeks instead of months or years. We DO know sitting for long periods of time is bad, but as per a previous slashdot story. there's no indication standing all day is any better.
I wrote about this before here too, but the summary is this: the idea that standing desks provide health benefits is based more on well-intentioned ignore-proof-or-lack-thereof feel-good rationalization than the anti-vaxxer movement.
Just make sure if you're getting a standing desk like this or others, that you're not just buying into hype. Remember how it went when everyone raved about how awesome Ruby was? ... yeah.
I posted about this last year, here https://ask.slashdot.org/comme...
The summary version is this:
- Sitting too much is associated with certain health risks that take a long time to appear and are common with a sedentary lifestyle (so may not be caused only by sitting)
- Standing too much is associated with certain health risks that occur fairly rapidly (relative to sitting)
- We don't really know how much standing is enough to ward off the dangers of sitting,
- We don't know how much standing is too much and will result in health problems.
There's probably an optimal healthy point, but we don't have any studies that show where that optimal healthy point is on average, much less how it needs to be adjusted for an individual. The only real advice to come out of this is that you should take a break and walk around every once in a while and outside of work, maintain an active lifestyle with exercise and properly sized nutritious meals.
A quick perusal above shows where people's heads are at on the 'right to be forgotten':
"We enjoyed that right until google came up. before that, everybody could simply be forgotten by moving to the next village"
"Before that, if you wanted to be forgotten, you simply moved and adopted a new name."
No, it was not a 'right' then, as there was nothing in the law to provide it, nor was it considered an unstated right assumed by society.
No, you were not forgotten, rather, new individuals were ignorant.
No, name changes were public record and so too were most criminal complaints – simply not having a trivial way to search them does not equate being inaccessible, and certainly not to being ‘Forgotten’.
Why target google searches alone? Shouldn’t someone need to go through the police records, newspaper archives (and any microfiche for places still using that at the time of the offense), magazines, comedians routines, and song lyrics (if the crime was public enough) - and any recordings thereof – to eliminate the references? As per 1984, you’re going to need a whole department working 24/7 to censor or rewrite all the data there ever was if you’re really pushing for ‘forgotten’ status.
Really though, this isn’t about a right. It’s about restriction of rights. What advocates of this restriction are really trying to do is eliminate access by society at large to public records. Since the very nature of public records is that they are publically accessible, they’re instead attacking the ability to search the records, in an attempt to make the data useless. Basically, it’s the same sort of political machinations you see in attempts to do end-runs around laws in US politics today: so called sanctuary cities deciding not to check the residency status of illegal aliens, or requiring state ID to vote to drive away minorities. It’s folks deliberately doing an end-run around the law.
What it really comes down to is this: If we’re not supposed to do something, be it identify someone as an ex-convict or other, then why can we do it through every other channel allowed except for a single one singled out simply because of it’s current popularity and ease of use?
My problem is with the strongly opinionated frameworks. You know, the ones where you use framework 'X' and now you have a 'X'-website or 'X' application? Where the framework's author makes the majority of architectural and project organization decisions. Sure, they make 80% of the common usage patterns easy, but that almost always results in making 10% of what's left hard and the remaining 10% near-if-not impossible.
In a world where the programmer makes the rules, this is fine - they can find some awkward workaround, like forcing a second login or putting validation logic only on the client side. Unfortunately, in the business world, the customer is the one making the rules, and the customer always wants 100% of the product working the way they want it to work.
They seem to flourish - at least until the next fad framework - thanks to their low barrier to entry and focus on the intuitive space the article author references.
Hipster coder though? I don't know. Almost every dev I know has some subset of interest in new languages, frameworks, libraries, and so on. It's their toy language or pet project. In fact, the biggest violators I see are actual experienced programmers who do know what they ought to, but don't want to spend time reinventing that same tired ground when they just want to play around.
In fact, not having to reinvent that same solution is exactly what they're interested in.
That's why you'll find a Karaf server running a Camel app in a Microsoft shop, even though there's no one left at the company who knows OSGI. Or find an external build script dependency in the form of a Rust script from out of nowhere. The people who should know better just want to play, and the easiest way to do that is to make it part of their day to day job.
What this article and experience tell me is that more than ever, we're in need of technically-competent managers who can evaluate, triage, and reign in individual developer output and provide focus.
At least, in a business environment, where product delivery, support, and maintenance are more important than playing around.
I've noted that businesses that have historically shown high growth and apparent long term stability seem to be looking for "T-shaped" employees. These are employees who know a little about a lot (a wide horizontal) and a lot about a little (a narrow vertical). Specialization is good, but you have to know enough to be able to respecialize in anything else quickly, which means dabbling in a bit of everything so that it's at least familiar.
Basically, a jack of all trades AND a master of one.
To use your analogy, you don't need to know how to rebuild the motor in order to drive the car, but you should be aware of all the parts and how they operate, so that way when something makes a noise, you not only know what it likely is, you either know how to fix it (or if it even needs fixing) and where to start looking for the information on how to fix it - even if you lack the tools or experience to do so.
That's my experience as well, at least, as of the middle 90's. Why use a mainstream, commercial language, when you could use a theoretically complete one? One where they recognize that features like "output" and "input" are dirty exceptions that spoil the purity of your program when you're trying to get a good hard proof using Hoare logic.
Better not clutter up the syntax either by using confusing, pre-existing symbols to form constructs, not when you can add whole new symbols requiring a special (APL) keyboard!
I remember having a TA once challenge me - I had written an algorithm to operate iteratively, rather than recursively, because I had noticed the program would run out of memory if I did it the other way when fed large data sets - because to him, recursion was theoretically perfect and not using it was a personal affront. The fact that my code worked and his crashed after 4-5 minutes didn't matter.
To paraphrase a professor of mine, "There's absolutely no reason for a computer scientist to use a computer."
This sort of attitude was pretty rampant all throughout my college career, fairly startling having already been employed in the industry for some years prior. No concept of real world usage at all, or worse, some strange bias against it.
There's a lot of countries that could take him. I'm thinking of that really smelly one. You know the one I'm talking about.
For example, every time I see or hear Donald Trump, or hear about his standing in polls, I experience waves of nausea, get headaches, become irritable, and have troubles thinking anything other than 'dark' thoughts.
I know a lot of people who have the same allergic reaction, and I think it's only fair that we make the US a Donald Trump free zone, to end this sort of suffering.
Their definition of male and female is indicated to be 'sex' - that is, biological gender, as opposed to the social concept of gender. Pretty clearly stated.
What they're attempting to do is find out if there are any consistent trends within each group of biological genders that contrast with each other, that can be used to indicate a difference between biological genders. As they found none, speculation on what a trans-woman's brain would be, if they had found it is as useful as speculating on the type of hat a tyrannosaurus rex would prefer, if they had access to hats and the desire to wear them.
That is to say, completely pointless, on a number of levels.
It doesn't prove that. It doesn't disprove it either. It makes no claims on that whatsoever.
Interestingly, this phrase shows up early in the article: “Nobody has had a way of quantifying this before,” which indicates that previous claims were invalid, based on supposition and assumption rather than data. They were at best, theories, in the scientific sense of the word, but lacked a mechanism to test.
Should you assume that previous claims were valid, even without proof, I can see how you might come to the conclusion that we lack the tools to derive differences. If you ignore the idea that these things could be impacted more by chemical, environmental or cultural factors, and that brain structure contains an inherent representation of male-like vs female-like brains, it is a pretty reasonable assumption.
Except that the article then goes on to point out that all the things previously claimed to indicate gender did not have reliability: there was no inherent consistency or commonality between results, except when you zoom out far enough to indicate a generic trend (one that cannot be used to reliably identify a brain as 'male' or 'female'). Again from the article:
"Some modest disparities have been reported: On average, for example, men tend to have a larger amygdala, a region associated with emotion. Such differences are small and highly influenced by the environment."
So, the previous claims are considered invalid, and the assumption - assuming I'm not painting a straw man - requires them to be true, and reliable. Instead, they are not, and while it doesn't discount the assumption, it does make it more unlikely to be true. ... personally speaking, I believe 'genderness' as it relates to social norms rather than biological ones, is predicated primarily on those same social norms and cultural values, rather than biological, which serve as a tertiary influence after cultural and environmental factors. If that were not the case, then it would be unimportant for a trans-individual to look and dress in a stereotypical gender-specific way, except to serve as a label to others. There's nothing that says you're not unless you dress like your culture's stereotype of , except insecurity and social pressures. Nothing except what an individual allows inside themselves.
Is there really a problem with it being primarily a psychological state? It's equally valid, isn't it?
Is there business value in retaining, training, and developing individuals who will become domain experts with cross-functional expertise and proficiency with working within your business structure?
Well, of course. That's a hypothetical question.
The real question: is that value greater than the cost to retain them vs. the cost of hiring multiple underpaid, low quality workers, perhaps from another country?
This is going to different industry to industry, and company to company. Those selling software as a service may find their short term apparent advantage results in a severe disadvantage over the long term. Those releasing products may see great gains in that same long term view, with a painful short term as their teams are brought up to date.
If any of these trends /are/ true on average, though, then the good companies will survive and the bad ones will go under in a socioeconomic version of natural selection.
In either scenario, there will still be other companies that value long term employees, and those that don't.