You say "gatekeeping device" like it is negative. All companies I have worked for have had a system of gatekeeping that includes things like university qualifications. I don't see why this system can't be improved.

Many companies now invent their own proficiency exams. We do.

Medical graduates work in a specific setting under supervision for a period after extensive education. I don't think the conditions of their work are ideal, but many people make it through without burn out.

Although technologies are changing, there are some things that transcend technology. Concepts about like documentation, naming, decomposition, components, interfaces, concurrency, locking, algorithm efficiency, many considerations of user experience.

Right now getting hired is a gate, but having to join a guild before getting to learn would be another gate. Also the guild gate is a gate on knowledge, which is even more egregious, and its evaluations would be even more nebulous as it would be based on potential skill and not current skill. This means joining a guild is more akin to apply for college.

Companies have to abide by Labor laws and Colleges must have fair admissions, but a private guild could be much more exclusionary without the same legal repercussions.

I think medicine is more unique because it's one of the few fields that customers (patients) consistency demand quality over innovation. Do you want the treatment that works, or the new experimental one? Most people will want tried and true first. Of course there are always exceptions to this.

> Many companies now invent their own proficiency exams. We do.

Companies are not doing it to artificially restrict supply. They have no incentive to raise the cost of labour.

(On the other hand, the process could be captured by incumbent employees who do have that incentive).

(On the other hand, the process could be captured by incumbent employees who do have that incentive).

That seems to be way more common than most people want to admit. So many software engineering interviews have very little to do with the job. Worse of course is when there is no process and it seems like the whole thing is just designed to get the hiring manager friends hired.

White Light is actually a mix of colours, the rainbow. You can split it into parts with a glass prism, or in good weather a sprinkler?

Light is a bit like a wave through the air and in the blue light the waves are closer together.

The sky aboves us has a small amount of dust.

Because the blue light waves are closer together they hit more dust.

This means they are more likely to bounce towards us, so we see blue when we look up at the sky.

At sunset the blue waves are more still more likely to hit dust, and so be blocked, so we see red.

Not simple enough, but I gave it a go.

In the discussing the "acid rain scare" and Scandinavia, the situation with fish and lakes there is worthwhile understanding. I did a quick google, but my searching is probably no better than yours:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-3385-9_...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3698327/

There may or may not be be a story on acidification of lakes in the USA, but I am ignorant on that.

building a lane of high speed urban transport is really expensive.

And a rail lane has 50 times the passenger capacity of a private motor vehicle lane.

So if the problem is linking people to sfo, rail is much cheaper.

You need to get the link to rail at both ends right. Maybe you need baggage check and parking available in Marin county where you get on the train.

"Maybe you need baggage check and parking available in Marin county where you get on the train."

Does that exist anywhere ? Genuinely curious ... is there anywhere where you can check luggage at the train embark 20-30 miles prior to the airport ?

Park and ride is something I already do while traveling solo[1], but three kids, strollers, skis, whatever ... there's no way we're packing, unpacking, and packing again to do a park and ride ... we just need to drive to the airport.

Travelers who rented cars at SFO are in the same position. Like it or not, no matter how smartly we Jane Jacobs up the place, people are gonna need to drive to the airport.

[1] Marin Airporter

A number of cities do satellite airline baggage checks, primarily on the city end of airport express rail.

Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoyuan_International_Airport_...

Here's another one:

http://www.hongkongairport.com/eng/transport/to-from-airport...

    is there anywhere where you can check luggage at the 
    train embark 20-30 miles prior to the airport ?

You can do that with the CAT[1] in Vienna, IIRC.

[1] http://www.cityairporttrain.com/

It's common in urban Japan to have a courier company take your luggage to the airport a day or two before you leave, and then you can just take the train or a bus without taking up so much space on it.

Some say other things:

> If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook-...

Surely "some" say other things. But they are outliers, not the average. The average is what impacts most people's lives.

Let's imagine you care about educational outcomes and child poverty, what kinds of things would help?

Certainly free and easy access to sex education, contraception and abortion is something that is a good policy.

People, even poor people, have always, and will always want children.

Once children are born to poor parents, you need to address that poverty, or you will get poor educational outcomes for those children.

Certainly stigmatizing poor people, rather than focusing on bad luck they have had, will provoke different policy outcomes.

I didn't stigmatize poor people. If you consider stating facts of reality to be stigmatization, you are fighting reality, and that is no way to deal with it.

> rather than focusing on bad luck they have had

One of the main point of the article is precisely that being poor is not bad luck: overall, it happens because a person didn't take education seriously because they were not taught to do so by their parents.

I mean, you can say it's bad luck to be born to such parents, and I would agree there.

> LaMattina counters that pricing should be based not on R&D costs but on the value a drug delivers to patients.

I love this line. We should do it for oxygen. Your bill is pretty high because oxygen delivers a lot of value.

Pricing should be based on cost of provision. Because if it is higher in a market economy someone else can enter the market and provide at a lower cost.

The economics of drugs are different. The probability of two different labs inventing the exact same drug are pretty small. But when they do invent a drug they have a limited monopoly to make their money back. Which is a good thing, since it encourages more investment in drug development then there otherwise would be.

Amazon will sell you audio files, they won't sell them to me. I live in the wrong country.

Amazon will sell me a CD at the same price you pay, plus shipping.

Apple will sell me audio files, at a 30% premium over what they charge you.

The thing you watch in the living room will increasingly be connected to the internet, and be able to function interactively.

In the kitchen appliances will increasingly be connected to the internet and be able to download recipes.

The ingredients list your blender displays for Pesto will be transmitted in HTML. But I will write it in markdown.

Your crispy skinned pork roasting application will execute as JavaScript. I wrote it in JavaScript, I will think about writing it in Clojure next time.

ReST shows that a person can invent a technical term, write a long dissertation on what it means, clarify any ongoing misconceptions on the web, and have people use the word to mean whatever they like.

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

> REST APIs must be hypertext-driven

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819168.aspx

> Using the REST Services with .NET > In order to make use of JSON serialization in .NET

This is not new. Codd spent ages talking about why every relational database was not a relational database.

REST came to mind for me as well.

Let's assume there is a platonic ideal for REST, or for OOP. Just talking about REST over HTTP (methods, response codes, URIs) clouds that ideal, making it hard to learn about and even harder to talk about with other programmers. The same could be said about OOP with classes, structs, prototypes, etc... or as some of this article's quotes do, about OOP in Smalltalk. Over time you could look at this in terms of SCOT theory[1] and I think it would be fascinating. You could look at all of the marketing, conflict, and the effects of collective perspective shifts where things are considered "solved" but they aren't really.

My own opinion about the platonic ideal of OOP is close to Chapter 18 of Pierce's Types and Programming Languages, which suggests these attributes: 1. Multiple representation 2. Encapsulation 3. Subtyping 4. Inheritance 5. Open recursion.

To me the kernel of OOP is mainly just #1 and #2. If you don't have #3, you should have a damn good alternative. I don't attach #4 and #5 to the core definition but certainly the former should imply the latter. Another favorite is "On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited"[2], which contrasts objects and ADTs in a different framework.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo... [2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf

It's sad that in the case of REST, this is not a minor deviation, but a major violation of core principles.