Right. I forgot that the only 'real' way to get into a lasting relationship is to delve deep into our past and brush the dust off of the practice of arranged marriages. Maybe we should go back to the 'good ole days' where if a girl got pregnant in highschool we stoned her to death, or at least made it so that the guy was a hero and she would spend the rest of her life as a pariah...
[ note: I say this from a USA-centric perspective, not hating on cultures that still practice this in a respectful manner. By 'this,' I mean 'arranged marriage,' not 'stoning to death.' ]
I think that you should review your own opinions with 'false dichotomy' in mind. You seem to have some very harsh judgements that you feel the need to toss around loosely. I'm almost of the mind that you're just a troll and that you're making these comments in an attempt to have some long, deep, argumentative discussion thread.
Rather than making short and harsh comments, you could frame them in a less accusatory fashion that doesn't look like you are just making the comment to hate on people and pass judgement (on large swaths of -- essentially -- faceless people, no less) in a public manner to satisfy some sort of inner urge.
If you really feel that relationships that start out based on sex always end up in failure, you could have framed that comment in a much better light that would have spawned actual discussion.
I don't mean to be hating on the people. I hate the culture of casual sex. The culture is disgusting. The people are mostly not disgusting, just misguided. I don't mean to imply that they're morally depraved people for participating in something stupid; I've certainly done my share of idiotic and embarrassing things and don't consider myself immoral for it.
Really, though, I don't care what people do, as long as it's not in my face and doesn't affect me. I'm five years out of college, so I don't really care that much. I think it's a shame what a farce college has become for most American students, but that problem comes from a lot of factors, most of which have nothing to do with sex.
There's nothing immoral about sex (for any sane definition of morality). You sound rather angry, and like you have some deep seated hangup about your own sexuality. I'd really suggest looking into seeing a professional therapist.
Sorry, let me define my terms. By "fuck buddy", I mean a girl whom I am neither monogamous with nor emotionally anchored to. We find each other fun, and love fooling around, but we are not in "a relationship" -- among other things, no public affection, and definitely no "I love you".
And some people wouldn't date a woman who isn't Catholic/Jewish/Hindu/whatever. You're within your rights to choose whom you date, but it doesn't really reflect anything about the people you're refusing as much as about yourself. How is your personal unwillingness to date such women interesting or relevant?
And some people wouldn't date a woman who isn't Catholic/Jewish/Hindu/whatever. You're within your rights to choose whom you date, but it doesn't really reflect anything about the people you're refusing as much as about yourself.
I didn't say it does.
Having a one-night-stand is stupid. Does it make someone a whore who should be ostracized? No. Is it a behavior that, in my estimation, a rational person would be ashamed of? Yes. Is it worse than the worst or stupidest thing I've done? Probably not.
So you would never date someone that slept with someone else? 'Fuck buddy' doesn't imply that it's a one-way street and that one of them is essentially a 'blow-up doll' for the other one to use just to get off.
I suspect that the primary source of the confusion here is the word "was". pw0ncakes likely means that he wouldn't date someone who was currently someone else's fuck buddy. pyre is taking it to mean that he wouldn't date someone who had ever been someone else's fuck buddy.
Or I'm way off, in which case, on with your argument :)
The definition of the term 'fuck buddy' probably varies from person to person, so how exactly do you feel you can determine whether someone that you're dating/looking to date was someone else's 'fuck buddy?'
Because suburban isolation, widespread tolerance of social alcohol dependence, a crass consumer culture, and widening wealth inequalities (leading to social class anxiety) have bred a generation of social retards who can't muster up the courage to do things properly.
[Edit: As acerbic and judgmental as this comment sounds, I admit freely that I was one of those social retards at ages 17-20, although I didn't hook up-- little interest and even less ability.]
Silicon Valley became disgustingly expensive after building substantial momentum in technology, gaining enough strength that entrepreneurs would live there in spite of the quality-of-life/cost-of-living problems.
New York needs something short of a miracle to become a startup hub. It's not "golden handcuffs" that keep people in the banks. It's the fact that the cost of rent for what would pass as an average apartment in most of the country is more than the median American's after-tax income.
Also, although finance is contracting, it's not quants who represent the bulk of the layoffs, but floor traders and M&A types. These people are useless to a startup, unless that startup wants to target the financial industry (which has sufficient resources to develop NIH syndrome, so good luck). Quants are generally being kept.
Rents are definitely artificially high here. I think it goes beyond the demand for space, and is largely due to the fact that brokers completely own the marketplace and have an incentive to price as high as possible (they take 8-12% commissions). Renters don't have a good way to understand real market prices.
Back to the topic of lack of engineers, I've always thought it'd be a good idea for multiple companies/hackers to get a large space together and share talent to work on lots of ideas simultaneously. It'd go beyond a co-working/incubator style space, and would be a way for young companies to offset the risk of early stage hiring.
Right now in NYC we need lots of companies with good sized exits for the future health of the eco-system, sharing our talent with each other is probably a good way to get to that point.
New York apartment brokers are a frivolous class of overpaid, lazy parasites who collect 12-17 percent of a year's rent for doing virtually nothing. They also handle the nasty work of ethnic screening (which is, yes, still present in the real estate industry), if you've ever heard of a "code 22" building.
Brokers for engineers (and bankers, traders) exist on the business model you described. They're called headhunters. They won't work for equity.
Headhunters generally don't work for equity you're correct. That doesn't mean that there isn't some market for it though.
The real downside on that is that (as someone who has been one) headhunters have a hard enough time as-is getting their fee occasionally from clients. If working WITH headhunters seems to be a pain in the ass, try being one and keeping the client and prospect in-line with a model that you can actually get paid on is rather difficult.
In a way, it's an admission of impotence. When you fire someone, you're saying that you don't have the resources or power to turn that person into a success at your company.
The "resources" angle is crucial. Large companies can afford to have a non-producer for 6 months and train him up to being able to contribute, and they generally should. Startups usually can't afford this.
Of course, this excludes the cases where a person is fired for doing something seriously wrong or unethical. But I imagine it's much easier to fire in those cases.
I don't think it's within my power or anyone else's to turn many people into a success if they can't grok pointers, recursion and/or abstraction and one or more of those is necessary for the job (I'm assuming a small enough startup they can't be put someplace "safe").
I'm pretty sure the abstraction bit is innate (I'm assuming they've passed high school math), and very sure I can't teach it nor is it my duty to. Pointers and recursion are not so bad (but again, in these sorts of situations I'm probably not in a position to get them up to speed on something so basic and so far reaching in effects (especially unsafe pointers)).
I think you need both. You need to detect, and rectify, problems as soon as they occur. It's much better to catch potentially badly-fit employees (which doesn't mean they're necessarily bad, but just not right for the position you're trying to fill) in the interview process. However, there are subtle problems (people who can't handle large projects, or who don't document code, or who interview well but are actually unethical) that can't be caught in the interview process at all.
This is oddly similar to the compile/run time distinction in bugs. You want to push as many of your bugs to compile time as possible (not-so-subtle plug for static typing) but it's impossible to have catch all of them in compilation; such is the nature of bugs. Similarly, you want to catch as many problems as possible in the interview process, but can't get all of them.
It depends on the circumstance. In a small startup, it's going to be a given that a certain fraction of the people you bring on are inappropriate for the company, and that you can't predict this in advance. Fire them, before they do too much damage to the codebase, morale, et cetera. In a larger company, firing is much more of a last resort, because people can always be moved around, and because if the only problem is that they aren't producing, it's probably because they weren't mentored and this can be rectified-- large companies usually have enough time and resources that they shouldn't need to fire many people, except when things are so bad that layoffs are necessary.
Indeed. I should clarify that. If you're in a very small startup, let's say 0-30 people, the chances are that most people working there have some say in the hiring process. If someone his hired and doesn't work out, most are on the same page about what's going on.
Once a company gets to the point where people are being hired and fired by managers, churn becomes an additional chaos factor that people trying to do work have to deal with.
Personally, I'd take a good understanding of functional programming as a substitute for a good understanding of pointers. I mean, the point of the exercise isn't to find out how well they know pointers (they'll rarely use them anyway). It's just a way to figure out how smart they are.
When I was doing this, groking pointers was required and functional programming unfortunately just wasn't an option. E.g. during this period LISP was anathema (even to the point where one project at the beginning of this decade died because it could only be done in something that productive but use of it was rejected for no good reason).
So my test was for understanding pointers as well as figuring out how smart they are at programming.
Plus as noted when things get ugly (e.g. in some debugging situations) groking pointers is required and as long as Johnny von Neumann's initial hack architecture rules that will remain true.
Today, I would most certainly take someone with "a good understanding of functional programming as a substitute for a good understanding of pointers", I'd just make sure a few also grok pointers and other low level stuff.
(I am so happy we have exited the Dark Age of Programming Languages.)
Back when I was doing this C and/or C++ was required (in general and for the job).
Today, I don't know what I'd do (besides ask them to do it with pointers anyway, pseudo-code is fine for this problem). Someone from a Javaschool might work out well, but they'll be lost in some harder debugging situations, so I guess I'd try to make sure they'll ask for help when it gets that messy and make sure I had some uber-programmers to support them (such as myself :-).
I have a friend whose test is to sort a linked list using any sorting algorithm (it can be bubble sort) and any language (excluding trivial calls to library functions). It's fairly hard in C, trivial in ML or Haskell, and this is the point of the test: if you're able to use a high-level language, this is a benefit.
Errr, one of the points of my test is "do you grok pointers?" Which is an hard or impossible thing for many people and is needed in some subset of programming jobs.
But I'm sure many fewer today, note that I started out with punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 and then did a lot of UNIX on PDP-11s. Fortunately I was able to play with LISP starting a couple of years after that first experience.
Today the world is almost entirely different, e.g. it's hard to buy a processor that had less L1 cache than the max address space of those machines' macroarchitecture.
ADDED: Or as I like to say, echoing someone I forget:
What's missed here is that being fired, for a lot of people, has real consequences. I don't think I'd take a job where I thought there was a 1/3 chance I'd be fired in the next 6 months.
If you're a startup, you're hiring people who understand the lack of job security. If you're a large company, there's no excuse for firing 1/3 within 6 months: you can move people around until they fit. If you're getting rid of more than 10% in the first 6 months, you're doing something wrong.
My thought: we should have a real safety net (including universal healthcare and a basic income that everyone gets, even the gainfully employed millionaires) and then allow companies to hire and fire whomever they want, because no one's life gets ruined by the loss of a job. But this would be a radical departure from the society we currently have.
Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole?
I told that plenty that make it so difficult to fire a person that they have high youth unemployment rates (e.g. France), but the above three with a strong "Protestant work ethic" might work out well. Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.
I'm inclined to think the latter will be the outcome but wonder if we have any tests of the proposition.
In Germany i think it is easy to fire employees in the first 6 months (probation period). A probation period of up to 2 years might be possible, but I am not sure (there was a lot of discussion about this some time ago).
One thing that happens is that some low-level jobs have high fluctuation. Especially as the government pays some additional money for some jobs in the first couple of months (which seems extremely absurd to me). So some clever employers fire their employees once the government subsidization has expired...
> Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole?
Britain probably qualifies to some extent, because employees cannot claim unfair dismissal if they were sacked before they'd been working for an employer for one year.
As far as I know (and I admit I don't really), don't they all make it hard to fire someone, at least after a trial period?
What about Denmark?
They're supposed to have a private sector that's way above average for Western Europe, but I don't know or remember about firing policies or if they have a dole.
Dole as in any able bodied man who isn't working can draw government payments that provide an acceptable level of living.
At will means anyone not in a contract can be fired at any time for any reason (well, you can disallow a few narrow ones like getting pregnant in most situations).
Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.
Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole.
Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.
The arch-conservative and historian part of me tells me in reply that "The Devil finds work for idle hands." For a pre-Christan example of this, look no further than Rome's initial "bread and circus" period.
The wealth gained from the Republic's Third Punic War had an ultimately disastrous result in all sorts of ways.
That said, you're absolutely right, we will someday have a true post-scarcity society, although the near total suppression of real nanotech research in the last quarter century makes me leery of predicting any dates.
Start with this item at the end of the home page: Changing the narrative in the U.S.
In short, "the establishment", e.g. existing chemists appropriated the buzz Drexler created while not actually doing what he was promoting for the usual parochial reasons plus in many cases a genuine and legitimate fear of what his style nanotech will bring about.
Right, so the failure of significant progress towards Drexler's vision must be due to some kind of secret conspiracy of physicists and chemists rather than, say, the fact that atom-by-atom assembly is ridiculously hard?
I should probably vaguely mention that my PhD work was not entirely disconnected from the idea of fabricating devices by placing individual atoms in locations with sub-nm precision. I suppose I should be offended that nobody let me in on the fact that we're supposed to be suppressing that kind of work.
It wasn't secret! See e.g. the "debate" Nobel Chemist Smalley had with Drexler in Scientific American and then I think the JACS. Smalley started out with a straw man ("fat fingers") in both, which is not a sign of honest intent.
The bottom line is "where are the grants and research centers for Drexler style nanotech"? Either he's lying about this---I'll admit most of my info about this is from him or people in his orbit---or he's mostly right.
Or let me put it this where: when you graduate, where are you going to be able to go to work on "Productive Nanosystems" in his style? Name names, this should be something you're looking for or at least aware of, or can ask about tomorrow when you go into "work".
ADDED: I know it's "ridiculously hard", for if finances hadn't gotten in the way I would have most likely eventually gotten a Ph.D. in work "not entirely disconnected from the idea of fabricating devices by placing individual atoms in locations with" atomic precision in the '90s.
Ah, it would have been easier if you'd started out saying "beyond the foreseeable state of the art" or "impossible". Then we could have discussed that issue.
However your appeal to authority (that authority being yourself) does not falsify what Drexler has said about this or his evidence.
And if you'd started out by saying "I think that full-on atomistic assembly nanotechnology isn't being taken sufficiently seriously by the scientific community" rather than "nanotechnology research has been suppressed for the past 25 years" then you'd have had a more sensible argument.
