12-14-2020, 10:21 AM
(12-14-2020, 06:48 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-14-2020, 04:38 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I don't cluck like a chicken or talk smack or make empty promises or empty threats...
In my note to Eric above, there is one commonality I didn’t note between you, CH86, Eingize and and Xenakis. You are all tribal thinkers. Whether it is roundheads, boomers, capitalists or blues, you have each chosen someone to feel xenophobic about, to blame everything wrong on. As I am pretty much all of the above, I have to be against tribal thinking? Can you blame me for wanting to solve problems that the supposedly better cultures have not solved?
You spend a note saying you don’t cluck like a chicken by clucking like a chicken? You are not going to convince me you are free of squawking that way. Perhaps if you stopped squawking?
Some people get things right most of the time. Some people get things right at the most important times. Some people get a few things right on occasion. Some are right only on trivialities or their limited area of expertise. Some people are wrong almost all the time. Some people attempt to deceive, and don't get away with it. I have yet to know anyone right all the time.
CH86 sees the Boomer elite of executives, and, yes, many of them are awful. They are excessively demanding, and they are often full of themselves. Nothing has ever humbled them, and anyone who doesn't fit the fairy-tale pattern of success gets no second chance even if one never did anything wrong. Once on the fast track, Boomers elites have usually set things up so that they are responsible to nobody. Can X get away with that? I doubt it. The 4T is likely to have a political consensus that demands that money earned easily be taxed heavily, that ostentation consumption be taxed heavily. Exorbitant salaries and conspicuous consumption may go from evidence of the success of the few to a sign of hardship for others. Classic X'er seems low in cognitive abilities, to put it tamely. Xenakis and Einzige seem heavily invested in having fully incorporated an ideology. Marxism does that, as it allows one to fill one's life learning the fine points of the ideology. Xenakis' ideology leads to Donald Trump.
Quote:Yes, violence has been needed at times. It is not at all clear this is one of those times. Violence won’t cure the bug, fix the economy or stop global warming. Non violent protest is driving Black Lives Matter. The Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, bad cops and Wolverine Watchman are trying to use violence to keep the clock from turning, trying to keep the worst aspects of the Agricultural Age alive, working for unraveling greed and stagnation over crisis sacrifice for the common good and focus. Changing the law and strictly enforcing it will do much. For the most part, the violent excursions have already been turned back. It might be just the cooler weather, but the violence seems to have been met so far.
We will have a Hegelian synthesis between law and order and responsible policing. The discussion is essential. Those who want violence are discreditable when they get what they want. I see some realities that we will have to deal with: the end of scarcity, the technological singularity, and of course global warming. We will need to change much of what many of us see as some indelible 'American way of life' that we have long taken for granted. Note well: we have yet to see the greatest danger of global warming; we are the frogs in the "warm bath stage" of the slowly-warming pot of water, and we may be lulled to sleep fairly soon. When the water gets painfully hot we will be too injured to leap out into comparative safety. I look at the projections for 2080-2100 of climate, and I see major disruptions of climatic patterns as well as inundation of some of the world's richest farmland on which now live perhaps two billion peasant farmers in places like China, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Egypt. Stalin may have collectivized farms, with those refusing to join his collective farms being liquidated -- but those who accepted the new serfdom would survive as employees of the world's largest plantation. King Neptune will destroy the farmland, leaving former peasant farmers with nothing but hunger and dislocation.
Mr. Xenakis sees wars as the result of a Malthusian contest between overpopulation for the expected standard of living and economic growth... but people will get desperate when they lose the only way that they know for earning a living and find no replacement. Join the Army or starve? That is all too easy a choice.
Quote:How you describe a potential interaction with your brother shows you are not familiar with how engineers work. On the projects I’ve worked anyway, each engineer is responsible to make his own function work, and to define as simple and clean an interface with the functions the other engineers are working on. It isn’t about power trips.
Rugged individualism is a myth. Know well the origin of the word idiot: someone out by himself, failing to connect and cooperate with others. Corporate employers may say all they want about individualism, but on the job... they want workers cooperating. Nobody needs or wants cut-throats except for a Mafia-style organization that has its own brutal means of enforcing the rules.
Quote:I still remember one project I was on where I was 90% coded on my personal Mac, never having got on the custom hardware which for the most part hadn’t been built yet. I was just missing the memory map. How the software talks to the hardware is through the memory map, the addresses you write to or read to change or interpret the state of the hardware. The requirements were determined by the human interface, the screens by which the operator communicated with the software. I had to derive what the software had to do by looking at what the screens were supposed to do, and guess what the memory map would look like. In short, I had no requirements as such. Thus, I didn’t have to write test plans to make sure I was meeting each requirement. Whee! I wound up doing most of the code with no one knowing much about what I was doing. I’d like to say the code worked fine the first time it was started, but the first time failed.
Everything must be tested, and part of the test is the acid test of someone doing something really dumb, like dividing by zero, asking for the square root of a negative number, getting the arc-sine or arc-cosine of a number x not between -1 and 1 inclusively... those are mathematical traps, and those are fairly obvious. Writing code is one job, and testing it is another. You do not have one person doing both. It is good accounting practice to ensure that the person who makes transactions is not the one who records the transactions.
Quote:I also remember how my mother forced us kids to learn typing. Why would a guy have to learn typing? That was women’s work. That was what secretaries were for. What sort of job would require a male to do typing? At the time she was bigger than I was. Ah, well. I wound up doing my share of typing and then some.
We all think that our handwriting is unique and a great expression of ourselves. Well, I have seen some dreadful handwriting.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
