Is there a word for: “excited to meet new people, train in a new place, and freeze to death, all at the same time.” That’s how I feel.
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Scree
noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.
Where the jobs are
While America continues to create market-dominating companies like Apple or Google, the number of American jobs they provide doesn’t compare with market-dominating American companies of the past like General Electric or Ford.
The reason why is simple: While much of the design and management happens in America, most of the physical products are manufactured in low-wage economies like China. Those factories that remain in America are highly automated, so that our manufacturing employment plummets even as our manufacturing output continues to rise. America still makes a lot of stuff, it’s just not made by people.
~ Doug Muder, from Where the Jobs Are and Why
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Photo gallery for this series
This post presents a gallery of ALL images in this series. You can click on any to enlarge; you can even click on the first, sit back, and it’ll run them all as a slide show. The gallery is dynamic so it will automatically grow…
Oil limits and the economy
While the press treats these issues as separate stories, they are in fact very closely connected, related to the fact that we are reaching limits in many different directions simultaneously. The economy is the coordinating system that ties together all available resources, as well as the users of these resources. It does this almost magically, by figuring out what prices are needed to keep the system in balance—how much materials of which types are needed, given what consumers can afford to pay.
~ Gail Tverberg, from Oil Limits and the Economy: One Story, Not Two
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5 things about kids
My coaching style was akin to playing a game of “whack-a-mole” at an arcade, quickly reacting to every behavior deviation I was unswervingly causing due to my lack of experience.
~ Brett Klika from, «http://brettklika.com/5-things-about-kids/»
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Escalating bad faith
This is part of a pattern in which all sides are acting in bad faith, and have been for decades. (And it’s not the only example, as I’ll discuss next week. Signing statements are another.) It creates a vicious cycle in which each escalation challenges the other side to either accept a defeat that seems illegitimate or to escalate further. There seems to be no obvious place for this to stop.
~ Doug Muder from, Escalating Bad Faith, Part I
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Can you name a design pattern?
A Design Pattern? You mean from the ’90s?
~ Robert C. Martin from, A Little About Patterns.
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Religious liberty and marriage equality
In my view, one basic principle is: No one should be forced to participate in a religious ritual. That’s why I don’t want teachers leading prayers in public school classrooms, especially when the children are too young to make a meaningful choice about opting out. For the same reason, it would be wrong to sue a priest who refused to perform a Catholic marriage ritual for a marriage his church did not sanction.
~ Doug Muder from, Religious Liberty and Marriage Equality
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Making yourself work
But many others put off their dream careers, or stay in jobs they like, because they’re afraid to figure this out. Being in a job, or staying in college, means that you have someone else imposing work and deadlines on you, and you’ll get fired (or dropped from school) if you don’t do the work. So you put off doing the work until you can’t anymore because of the fear of being fired.
~ Leo Babauta from, Making Yourself Work
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Arrogant, slow and dogmatic
What does it mean to be a software craftsman? You can read the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship and draw conclusions; but if you posed that question to different people across the software industry, you’d hear any number of different responses. And to some degree, they’re all true. Descriptions are ultimately bound to perspective, and there appear to be divergent perspectives on the software craftsmanship movement. What follows are three descriptions that are commonly wielded against the software craftsmanship community, accompanied by an explanation of the craftsman’s perspective on the same issue.
~ Paul Pagel from, What the heck?!
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Trick question: when did slavery end?
The reason slavery was able to last so long is that the 13th Amendment has a loophole. (Did you notice it? It went right past me.) The loophole is “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. So if you can rig the local laws and get the cooperation of the local law enforcement and court system, you can convict people of “crimes” pretty much whenever you want.
~ Doug Muder from, Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor
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Energy return on energy invested
Eventually, the civilization hit a period of stagflation, typically lasting 50 or 60 years, as the population hit the carrying capacity of the land, and as additional workers did not add proportionately more output. When this happened, the wages of common workers tended to stagnate or decrease, resulting in increased wage disparity. The price of food tended to spike. To counter these problems, the amount of government services rose, as did the amount of debt.
~ Gail Tverberg from, Diminishing Returns, Energy Return on Energy Invested, and Collapse
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Democracy by coincidence
Forget for a moment the specific arguments for or against gun control: Does that resemble any process you studied in civics class? Do you think that’s what Lincoln had in mind when he talked about “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”?
There are plenty of other examples where the public has a definite opinion, but has been unable to get the result it wants: getting the NSA to stop tracking our phone calls, sending some bankers to jail after the known crimes of the housing bubble, or even things I disagree with, like prayer in public schools. One current issue is raising the minimum wage: It’s popular, but so far that hasn’t made much difference.
~ Doug Muder from, Democracy By Coincidence
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History of physical fitness
Fitness, as we know it today, seems to be a relatively modern invention – something that started vaguely in the 70s with jogging and Jazzercise. But physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that, to a time where people wouldn’t have thought of it as working out, but rather a way of life. Centuries and millennia ago, they did not have all the machines and weights and gyms that we have today, and yet they were in better shape than we are. To understand why this is, how we got to our modern fitness culture, and what we have lost along the way, it’s helpful to take a look at the history of exercise.
~ Erwan Le Corre from, The History of Physical Fitness
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The third wave of IT engineering
Just as human society still envelops everything from pre-agricultural tribes, farming communities, and factory sweat-shops to information-based commerce, in different parts of the globe, so IT today straddles all three `waves’ of development from manual chaos to goal-oriented self-repair in different organizations.
~ Mark Burgess from, CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering
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Restoring the Constitution is now a liberal issue
Other than photo ID, these are all things the Founders could have written into the Constitution, but they didn’t. And that should tell you something: Levin’s book isn’t about restoring anybody’s “original vision”; it’s about radically reshaping the American government into something it never was and was never intended to be.
Contrast this with the proposals in retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ new book Six Amendments. Only one of Stevens’ amendments — adding a phrase to the Eighth Amendment to define the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment — would change what Stevens’ argues was the Founders’ original intent. (Hanging and the firing squad were common in the founding era.) He composed the other five to reverse the drift of wrong-headed judicial interpretation.
~ Doug Muder from, Restoring the Constitution Is Now a Liberal Issue
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Programming sucks
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
System administration sucks too:
… And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
~ Peter Welch from, Programming Sucks
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hear! hear!
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The continuum of aggression
Men look at Elliot Rodger and say, “I would never do something like that.” Women look at his victims and say, “That could totally happen to me.”
~ Doug Muder from, #YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression
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The realization that men and women fundamentally think about, and understand, aggression differently, is probably the single most “wait wat?” moment that I had in 2014.
Seriously.
My brain — and that of every guy I’ve asked — has different categories of violence; Murder is a “no way, no how, would I murder a woman” category. But every woman I’ve asked has “aggression” organized into one big continuum. Rhetorical: Does that strike you as a huge difference in the way men and women view the world? Does is perhaps suggest something about how the male half of the species treats the female half?
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Confirmation bias
If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.
The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.
~ David McRaney from, Confirmation Bias
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Do you want to be someone or do something?
There comes a point in every man’s life where he must decide if he will strive to be somebody important, or if he will work to do something important. Sometimes these pursuits go hand-in-hand; often they do not.
Research has shown time and time again that kids of our modern age aspire for what’s perceived as a more glamorous life than one of service and lasting legacy. In fact, the top three career aspirations of today’s 5- to 11-year-olds are sports star, music star, and actor. Just 25 years ago, that same survey turned up teacher, doctor, and banker.
~ Brett McKay from, John Boyd’s Roll Call
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