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Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?

A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Or something that balances it with their viewpoint: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-t... This submission is just a pile of inflammatory linkbait that offers nothing new to the people that would agree with it, and enrages those who disagree by using such caustic language.

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> "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?

That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business should be expected to do so.

Given that, people do need to suck it up and learn new skills. The article made a good argument for that, and did it in the context of the new reality.

Some people won't be able to develop new needed skills, for various reasons. For some people technology and society will just move faster than they can keep up with. Others have some other impediment. As this trend continues, we need to get better as a society at dealing with those people.

The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worldwide were to refuse to invest in education in any way, the rational business decision would be to take this on themselves, or risk having no workforce with which to remain competitive. From this point of view, our enormous societal investment in education looks a lot like a subsidy.

Businesses pay taxes and spark huge amounts of taxable activity in the course of operating — that's how they pitch in (even discounting the non-tax benefits that businesses provide to society). If society is not providing education with those tax dollars, that would be society's choice.

I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's.

"... in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's."

If a business wants to be successful they should invest in employee training IMO. I'm one of these recent college grads with "no marketable skills".

The company I'm with needs iOS developers. They could conceivably try to find qualified people, but that would be time-consuming, expensive and far from guaranteed that they'd find anyone (as there is little iOS developers where I live). Instead, by allowing me to teach myself to build apps, they have someone who will hopefully be making them money in a few weeks/months at a fraction of the price of an experienced developer (if they could find one). This point ties back into the article's observation that people are graduating with unneeded/bullshit degrees.

I would be interested to see some quantification of the total cost to educate a company's work force, compared with its tax burden (and the "taxable activity" it sparks, if that is quantifiable in some way), for a number of different types of companies. Has anyone seen data like this? Doing some napkin-style calculations it seems like I could convince myself of either conclusion.

The 'business lobby' is almost 100% against providing education, which is a significant part of the reason that neither the public nor private sector is doing an adequate job.

Business and society don't operate apart from each other.

People can leave their jobs at-will, which makes it is lower-risk to employ people your competitors trained than to train them yourself.

But it is higher-risk to be unable to find anyone employable than it is to train people yourself. So the system depends on a surplus of already-trained workers, which someone needs to provide, or everyone suffers.

Well then businesses could just start offering contracted jobs with fixed lengths rather than "at-will employment" (aka: "leave/be fired for the lulz employment").

>That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart.

I bet they and the lady at Rite-Aid regularly read Forbes magazine, right? Don't kid yourself--this article is meant for the echo-chamber. And that's why I think it's a waste of space.

The discussion can be started anywhere. Most helpful when it eventually (if it hasn't already) trickles down to the non-Forbes reading masses. If nothing else the article seeds a talking point for Forbes readers.

Yes, I believe three things have to be true:

1) We have to be clear that to be employed you need new skills (trades or science or engineering)

2) We have to find a way to encourage both the creation of skills training programs and a way to enable folks to take advantage of them.

3) We should start providing resources so that kids in school today understand that we're not 'forcing' them to go to school, they should go to school so that they can find gainful employment later (or entry into a tradeskill program).

Serious business.

The "blame tech" theme is what struck me - in all its appalling wrongness (see my sharply critical comments on some vapid assumptions made in a like piece that ran on HN yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770994).

>A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills.

Queue the recent discussion about rampant cheating in college. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254

> Queue

I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct.

I have seen grammar and spelling comments given in the spirit of helpfulness, but this was not one of them, and adds nothing.

My comment adds very little more than that, but I'd like to remind people that many very smart engineers and business workers have a terrible grasp of formal English, yet they get the job done and more. WalterBright's comment was short, but pointed to more information, and was a potentially useful comment. The discussion should be about the content of his comment.

The fact that he used the wrong word is virtually irrelevant, we all knew what he meant. Yes, if you have a strong grasp of formal English you do make yourself seem more credible, especially in a formal context. But it's not the thing to focus on. Not here.

S/N on HN is amazingly high, but it is still a casual forum, and we should all cut each other generous slack.

Written with helpful intention. :)

derleth, I can't reply to your reply to the above reply. (Follow?)

As I pointed out, you have edited your reply, with no indication that it was edited.

Your original reply was not helpful. You were taking the opportunity to ridicule someone, with sarcasm. Your current version (assuming no further edits) would at best have no downvotes. Your original version deserved every downvote it got (none of which were supplied by me).

I assume you yourself know this, otherwise you wouldn't have done the edit.

EDIT: added the following: "I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct."

The fact that one word is shorter in this case is not what made the original usage wrong. Length had nothing to do with it. It was merely wrong.

So attempting to help someone learn English isn't helpful? That seems odd.

You didn't even tell him the right word -- if you wanted to help him learn English, you might say something to the effect of:

queue -- noun. A first-in, first-out data structure, such as a supermarket line, or processes to be scheduled naively.

cue -- verb. To prepare for, to bring up, to introduce, typically used as a command. Also noun. an indication that it is time to do something, cf. "that's our cue!". Also used in the phrase "on cue", meaning timely.

Ah, I see. I misspelled cue as queue. That was a mistake. I erroneously thought the original comment meant I should have used the word "see".

I stand corrected.

The thing that bugs me here is that if you honestly consider it, in some situations either word could be used for more or less the same effect.

For example: "Cue the complaints". Surely "Queue the complaints.", meaning that the complaints should start lining up, gets across the same meaning (which is of course "oh great, here come complaints").

This doesn't always work of course ("That's our queue" has an entirely different meaning), however where I see most complaints about "mis-usage", either actually works.

Surely "Queue the complaints."

But that's simply invalid English, as 'queue' is a noun, not a verb. Enqueue is the verb form, and nobody would ever say, "enqueue the complaints." :-)

  2queue
  verb \ˈkyü\
  queued queu·ing or queue·ing
  Definition of QUEUE
  transitive verb
  : to arrange or form in a queue (see 1queue)

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queue

Commonly heard used in the phrase "Queue up".

Besides, verbing weirds language. ;)

"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial."

"Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I am trying to be helpful: I'm trying to help someone learn English. How is that negative?

I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."

'Queue' is not quite a direct replacement for 'see', there is an additional nuance that what follows it is obvious or inevitable, which is why I used it.

I also understand that many HN readers are not native English speakers, and have varying levels of mastery of the language. I would also agree that obscure usage of high falutin' words for the purpose of peacocking is annoying.

But using them to add color and nuance is appropriate.

"I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."

In the way that you used it, I believe it was wrong.

"Cue whatever ..." comes from movie and other media production, as in "Cue the Gimp!" It's a notice that the actor playing the Gimp should assume his next physical location in the production and be ready to act. See scythe's explanation.

This kind of mistake is very common, and comes from having heard phrases without having seen them in print. We then fit whatever written word we're most familiar with, or assume, on to the phrase. I'm guessing that's what happened here.

The analogue is reading an unfamiliar name or word and then, never having heard it in speech, not knowing how to pronounce it. This happens to me enough to notice.

It's probably clear enough that the word you were searching for is cue, but it strikes me that in the age of Instapaper, ReadItLater and their ilk, your use of queue isn't entirely off the mark.

The British "queue up" when joining a line in wait for something. As do my print jobs. The comment is submitting a topic for next consideration, so what's wrong the usage here?

Its traditionally "Cue" which can be a reminder , so "Cue the current thread" means "take a look at this current thread" not "get in line for this thread".

I say this having read the original term phonetically and not even realizing the mistake which is likely common and really didn't need to be editorialized.

An indication that you edited this would have been helpful. My other reply to you makes less sense now.

Yours in helpfulness, -- sixtofour

Thanks for revising your comment. Unfortunately I had already downvoted it.

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