sethg

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661.
by sethg 17y ago
I have a friend who told similar horror stories about working for Meditech. I hope she's escaped to a better job by now.
662.
by sethg 17y ago
The problem "is mainly that computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients," the report's lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, said... So the software works for the only inter
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by sethg 17y ago
IIUC this has long been an issue in archeology: for example, a small committee of scholars had exclusive access to the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades, and the scholars dragged their feet on publishing the complete text, until someone reverse-
664.
by sethg 17y ago
Perhaps, in the case of data-intensive work, grants should be given in pairs: one research team gets paid to collect the data, and another team gets paid to analyze it.
665.
by sethg 17y ago
I think this is an overstatement. If I say "the mass of an electron is X and this is how I did the experiment to determine X", you can repeat all the steps of the same experiment without looking at my original lab notebook. The more dubiou
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by sethg 17y ago
If this one study were the only evidence of global warming, it wouldn't justify redirecting the global economy's resources, even if we had all the raw data .
667.
by sethg 17y ago
If an African-American speaks African-American Vernacular English to his friend at the barbershop, it's probably not a mistake. If an African-American speaks that dialect to a hiring manager in a job interview, it probably is. (Obviously yo
668.
by sethg 17y ago
In the long run competition drives the price down to marginal cost. You sell products for more than their marginal cost by either innovating techniques to keep your costs lower than your competitor's costs (Wal-Mart does a lot of this) o
669.
by sethg 17y ago
Kids can certainly engage in rational thought at a young age, but when your three-year-old is screaming "WANT CANDY!", it's not a good time for a rational explanation for why the child is better off waiting for healthy food at dinner time.
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by sethg 17y ago
You soften them up for the news by telling them "I worked like a dog to provide for you".
671.
by sethg 17y ago
But some parents — particularly those weary of never-say-no techniques and child-rearing books suggesting that children should call the shots — I have three sons, aged seven, five, and three, and... well, let's just say that I have become
672.
by sethg 17y ago
Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."
673.
by sethg 17y ago
I couldn't get beyond the second paragraph; asserting that your main character is a Super Genius living in a Perfect World is not a good way to make me care about what happens to him. One SF author (Damon Knight?) once said that when he h
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Steelworkers' union to set up worker-owned co-ops(economix.blogs.nytimes.com)
1 points by sethg 17y ago|0 comments
675.
by sethg 17y ago
The author admits that one feature present in Go and missing from Algol-68 is proper closures. I would consider this an extremely significant deficit in Algol-68, not just one item to bury in a laundry-list comparison.
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by sethg 17y ago
Charles C. Mann (the author that the OP quotes) mentions this in the introduction to 1491 (the book that the essay is excerpted from). He says he calls the native Americans "Indians" because most of them prefer that label. (Of course, wh
677.
by sethg 17y ago
Look at it this way: if I'm unemployed but I can get a $100K job, and I get an offer for a $75K job, I'm leaving $25K on the table--not just a one-time loss but a permanent reduction in income. If another month of job-searching, burning th
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by sethg 17y ago
The entire Justice Department (not just the IRS) has a budget authority of about $25 billion, out of a budget with roughly $2.5 trillion in receipts and $3 trillion in outlays. So if the government not only eliminated the IRS but eliminated
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by sethg 17y ago
It seems to me that the problem the OP describes is not confined to governments. If some layer or department of a large company's bureaucracy is consuming about 1.5% of its revenues (just as the Australian tax office consumes about 1.5% of
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by sethg 17y ago
Even if the land itself is un-arable, one could always do raised-bed gardening with fresh topsoil. I do wonder about the economics: many of farms that currently supply Detroit are presumably hundreds of miles away, so Detroit consumers have
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by sethg 17y ago
You don't need "extensive experience with parsers" to do what the OP is describing. Lex and yacc (and their moral equivalents in other languages) were written precisely so that a programmer of ordinary skill could write a parser and feel
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by sethg 17y ago
Why then is it fine for the government to debase the currency, and therefore destroy the value of any accounts held in that currency? The value of the currency depends on what I can exchange it for. If the US dollar's value relative to
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by sethg 17y ago
Banks, more so than most enterprises, are stepchildren of the state. You can't charter a bank without "government intervention", because a bank's stability, and hence its ability to attract depositors, depends on things like access to cr
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by sethg 17y ago
Expansion of the money supply is not "counterfeit" money, although there are circumstances where it is a bad idea. Counterfeiting is when a private citizen decides to, as it were, expand the money supply with his or her own printing pres
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by sethg 17y ago
If the government imposed a small tax on stock purchases and other financial transactions, with the tax level rising according to the number of intermediaries and the amount of leverage, then working in an organization through which lots of
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by sethg 17y ago
As I understand it, most economists (certainly, most economists whose opinions matter to central bankers) believe that a small rate of inflation, perhaps 1-2% annually, is a Good Thing, since it encourages savers to invest in productive c
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by sethg 17y ago
I've never been to Seattle but it wouldn't surprise me if, in general, the homeless tend to congregate in or near major train stations. They're open 24/7; they're warm; the opportunities for panhandling are good (because of the number of p
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by sethg 17y ago
My wife, a former chemistry TA, would probably answer that question with one word: "Cheating." She fears for the day she wakes up on a gurney and sees one of her former pre-med students.
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by sethg 17y ago
I agree. If the situation escalates to the point where you can't avoid legal action (e.g., your contact accuses you of doing something corrupt), it would be useful to have a paper trail for your side of the story.
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by sethg 17y ago
A "restraining order" semantic relationship (preferably, a three-part relationship: X has taken out a restraining order against Y, as officially documented by Z) would actually be useful, unlike this "date" and "crush" silliness. Likewise "

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