antitrust

Yes, exactly. Thank you for this phrase. There's also a certain amount of institutional bonding (to coin another phrase) involved with these people, in that they're sort of "mother hens" who take care of everyone.

Definitely not cogs, but I'm not sure anyone is who actually belongs in a particular office. Cogs are (generally) apathetic, at least in their machine counterpart. In a team scenario, "apathetic" usually translates to some kind of burden being shifted to the group.

The book "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq describes this situation very well, and is very funny.

Some quotations from it:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56842-extension-du-doma...

And a great interview:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fic...

They were valued for both having a lot of background knowledge in their area, and having an ability for judgment about detailed problems that could only be called "wisdom."

Management kept them around like wise elders because once or twice a week there'd be some task that others could do, but not as well or as thoroughly (use of judgment, again) as these people. Thus problems got transferred to them.

The counterpart to these people are Suzannes, named after the first one I met. You can have an office full of highly technical people, but Suzanne -- who usually doesn't get paid much, and is some kind of administrative staff -- is the person everyone asks questions of nearly constantly because she knows all the ins and outs of the business. Every office has a Suzanne, and often the place won't function if he or she is out sick for a day.

Instead of sitting there doing nothing, he applied and sharpened his skills in a way that was productive for someone. His first response should be, "Can the company take credit for my time on this open-source project?" and "If this internal project is useful, can I use these skills to make anything else easier in our department?"

The risk is that he'll violate the "don't rock the boat" principle that is the bedrock of CYA. The possible benefit is that if you have two employees, and one is creatively loafing while the other is creatively applying himself or herself, you know which one will offer long-term value (and be easier on a manager, who won't have to constantly nag the person to keep them from screwing off for 40 hours a week).

Think about it this way:

If a need comes up, it's going to take months to get all the paperwork done to get new hardware.

If you have idle hardware, you're ready to go ASAP.

It's also a form of redundancy, albeit a primitive one. If equipment goes out, you have stuff you can swap out immediately.

It seems to me most political movements, whether Rush Limbaugh or Occupy Wall St or even Anonymous, are like this.

They find things that aren't working. Great. Like you say, "Get in line."

But a plan? It's either a variation of what we've already got, or a very idealistic "solution" that doesn't account for all the necessary parts of a society.

It's why people like me are so cynical. It's not apathy. It's the opposite. It's heartbreak and as a result, withdrawal in frustration, confusion and self-loathing.

There's the statute, for you armchair quarterback-lawyers out there.

Besides, DEFCON's statement was symbolic. If the NSA is watching us constantly anyway, they're going to be hacking us and us hacking them even if we and/or they are not at the conference.

Hello there, person I'm very glad entered this conversation as you did.

You're talking about a great taboo. No one wants to admit that not every precious snowflake can do exactly what they want to be a shining star. Saying that we have too many precious snowflakes, or that we shortly will, is akin to saying that and it makes people nervous.

But there are a lot of us, aren't there?

And our population plan seems to be "Reproduce however you want until nature starts killing us off."

It could be that our coming jobs shortage is the result of too many people. Our geographic area is big enough that there will always be a certain number of jobs because of the different specialized tasks necessary in each locality.

But everyone wants a kid, and it seems the people who don't plan for those kids, whether rich or poor, have the most.

This worries me more than global warming, nuclear proliferation and synthetic marijuana (mostly jk) combined.

Congress has that authority over their own salaries, and they haven't abused it.

One friend of mine suggests that we need to make adult play centers that have pitfalls, like dead drops, to keep people fit and alert. The kicker is that they would be placed in such a way that it would be necessary to traverse them to get to essentials like the DMV, liquor store, etc.

But I guess the big question is whether you think these people on drugs will create a massive amount of collateral damage or not on their way to thin themselves out? I imagine cars crashing through walls, people passing out with their stoves on and burning down their apartments, strung-out people electrocuting themselves, that kind of thing.

The fact that right now the economy stinks (P-U) and that some people who want to work, cannot, does not really have any bearing on future plans for guaranteed basic income.

This could be bad. Very popular programs never get reconsidered, even if they have bad effects.

Couldn't that cause corporations to become bloated monsters?

Like most utopian plans, this idea relies on the belief that humans will get up and do things in large numbers.

We can't even get them to voluntarily recycle and quit beating their kids.

We should neither censor ourselves (exclude something) or leap to conclusions before the full verdict is in.

As I know less than fk-all about airlines and airplanes, I'm just reading this stuff, and am trusting in others to make sure the truth comes out, whether it's un-PC or completely innocent.

In fact, I'm amazed at how few plane crashes seem to occur (knock on wood). If any nation produced truly incompetent pilots, it's less likely this would be true.

Despite dubstep being apparently totally uncool, I'm cool with that.

Wait for the bass drop.

The new vision is the application. Whether it's on a phone, or running as a web site, these are not publishing so much as services.

Perhaps it's time to fork protocols: one for publishing, one for interactive applications.

If the US had bike lanes, and bikes didn't choke traffic back to 8 mph as I see them doing every day on major streets, causing a half-mile backup[1], I think the US would be more friendly to bikes.

The problem is a sub-set of bike riders who generally are weekenders and seem to take pleasure in holding up traffic because it makes them feel important. Then in retaliation, there's a sub-set of car drivers who become enraged by this and act out typical road rage, except here it's a 2,000 lb vehicle versus a 48-lb vehicle with no external frame.

I don't think the solution is any of the following:

1. Car drivers suck 2. Bike riders suck 3. We need bike lanes!

I think it's going to require behavioral changes from both car drivers and bike riders, and probably a redesign of cities to be bike-accessible.

Back to the topic at hand: Seth's death is tragic and he will be missed. I think a lot of our rage comes from the frustration at losing someone who was such a talented contributor and also a person many of us admired for his personal traits as well.

___

[1] Montrose, Shephard, Memorial, Elgin and Richmond.

I didn't have a problem with my Acer netbook. It's slow, but not horribly slow. The main laggard factor is the 1gb RAM, which is too little for a Windows 7 install.

However, I had to remove all the crapware first. If they didn't ship with those installed, they wouldn't make money from all those juicy contracts.

Laptops and desktops are not selling well because, at the same time there have been no huge leaps in actually useful technology, manufacturers are trying to upsell us toward fancier machines that don't actually help us do anything.

At this point, a regular laptop should cost as much as a cell phone and be about as efficient. Instead, we're getting $1400 "ultra-books" that aren't so ultra that anyone actually needs one.

Not to be a cynic, but except in the case of Bill Gates, it's not clear these people were not cases of being in the right place at the right time more than any specific brilliance.