This entire article creeps me out. The whole system described is to encourage people to have no life outside of work.
No family, no community engagement, nothing like that. Come to work for breakfast, stay until dinner, and only sleep at your apartment. Oh sure, you're not required to, but the workaholics who do it sure love the attention lavished on them, and organizations generally reward them for it.
Honestly, half of the Bay Area has become a dysfunctional ghetto of childless twenty-somethings. Work-wise, this area is the least diverse place I have ever encountered in my life. And the description given of Yahoo exemplifies it.
It's a toxic, and ultimately unsustainable culture.
... and I'm not even going to get started on my opinion of Marissa Meyer.
... it appears that your only statement is that there are bad people. I would agree; it seems that quite a number of them have found their way into various US government departments.
Ooh, low class... like those filthy manual workers, right? Or sailors... they swear all the time. Not to forget those filthy colonials from the antipodes and their gutter mouth. That you used the term 'low class' indicates that your opinion is nothing but a meaningless and self righteous value judgement (because you're not low-class, right?).
Let's get it straight... it's not 1850 anymore. Swearing is not a marker of anything, and well chosen swearing does add something. It indicates frustration, and the point of the repeated swearing here is to convey repeated 'oh my fucking god, I can't believe this stupid shit is happening over and over again, I feel like I'm taking fucking crazy pills here'. It works. Without it, you would need separate clauses denoting that you're frustrated, otherwise the whole thing would sound too mild, like someone objecting to a minor and mostly irrelevant point.
Swearing also jolts groupthinking fools out of their comfort zone. Chances are if you're in an organization where nobody swears, then you're in an organization where it's taboo to say lots of things, and that is unquestionably bad.
If sharing this in your organisation is a career limiting move, may I suggest that your organisation is irretrievably fucked (see what I did there) and only cares about superficial garbage. Such organisations are doomed and tend to be stacked with useless ladder-climbers.
My advice; share the article with relevant people if they need education about doorslams. If people complain, tell them that they're shooting the messenger and should pay attention to what they're actually doing, instead of wasting their shareholders' money enforcing bullshit that serves no purpose except for making useless, self-righteous moral defenders feel better.
The ideal solution is to never hire self righteous moral defenders because they actively wreck the culture of organisations. Objecting to swearing is a clear case of intolerant asshats choosing to be offended. To avoid these losers in your company, swear when conducting the interview, and if they're so utterly thick and self-righteous that they show offense, stop the interview immediately and show them the door.
The person a couple of posts back nailed it when they said this:
"His word choices are not hate speech or discriminatory so the fact that they may offend your sensibilities has precisely zero relevance to anything."
... and finally, I thought the article was great. I'm sharing it at work with the product team. Since our product team is free of idiots, I'm pretty sure this won't be a career limiting move.
From the article:
"While using more than 256 colors in GIF is in most cases a bad practice, and should be limited to certain technical cases where extreme size can be tolerated"
Why would anybody do this, ever (aside from intellectual curiosity)? GIF is a dead format except for very simple small-palette logos, or simple animations.
It was one of those rare formats that everyone knew sucked when it was popular, and we were just itching for it to die. Now it's (mostly) dead, the world is better, and I can't imagine why anyone would ever use it for anything that wasn't a flat-color logo.
In CA where I live, I suspect they're not going to any effort to analyse addresses at all beyond what the automatic system provides.
My parents live in Australia, where apartment number is written before street number. They sent some mail labelled the Australian way:
e.g. 140/1542 Happy Sunshine Street
instead of:
1542 Happy Sunshine Street, Apt 140
Every single piece of mail addressed as such was returned to Australia after getting to the USA. By international standards, the USPS is pretty useless. I avoid using them when an alternative is available.
Utter rot. Babies should be eating 'crap' (nice pejorative by the way) that comes in a package if their mother is unable to breast feed. Many many women are physically unable to breast feed.
The alternatives are wet-nursing (good luck finding one of those in most cultures these days), or attempting to make a formula equivalent from available foods, which will probably kill the baby.
I will readily agree that when a baby can be breast fed, it should be in an ideal world. However, there are many factors that prevent even that in the real world; the mother having to work to earn enough money for the family to survive happens very frequently in many countries.
The number of seemingly wilfully ignorant people spouting 'crap' (to repeat the pejorative) about a simple subject that they clearly know absolutely nothing about in this thread is disturbing.
Utterly useless and completely ignorant advice for a mother with an infant who is unable to breast feed. Small babies can't eat 'foods' as we know them; they can only drink. It's a shame to see people who are so out of touch with nature and society that they don't even know how human reproduction works.
My wife breast-fed all of our children until over 18 months, but I know several mothers who are simply unable to breast feed. It's such a common problem that there is a serious job title called 'lactation consultant'.
In the good old days, if a mother was unable to feed, the infant either fed from another woman, or died; we're talking about 20% infant mortality from malnutrition. That is the problem that formula was invented to solve. And no, you can't make your own from available foods; if you do that, your baby will most likely die.
Expect further irrational responses like the Boston Lockdown, while factors that kill several orders of magnitude more people continue to be ignored.
What is worse is that the conditions for this aren't top-down driven. In aggregate, Americans seem to me to be addicted to fear, are hopelessly unable to think about risk, and want security theatre. Security theatre needn't be implemented rationally, because its purpose is to be theatre, not to be effective.
The thing that people should fear is the secondary effects of security theatre. To implement security theatre, you need most of the apparatus of a police state (i.e. large numbers of police that can be mobilized at a moments notice for flimsy reasons). The mindset supporting such theatre also allows politicians to engage in military adventurism in the name of 'safety' or 'freedom'.
It's obvious at this time that clear statistics and rational, measured approaches to risk don't sway people. I suspect about the only thing that might at this point is satire. The whole security theatre effect is driven by emotion, and people dislike being the butt of jokes more than they like the rush they get from fear.
Perhaps we can invent some perjorative like 'wingnut' or 'moonbat', but for fear junkies, then make jokes about them.
Life must be especially complicated for you, considering that each of your assertions are flat out wrong.
Facebook, Google, and Microsft not profitable? Seriously dude, just google them; they're very profitable (technically MS lost money last year, but that was entirely due to a one-off asset writedown, and they've made gobs of cash every other year).
I advise meditating on 'force HTTPS everywhere' for a little while. The idea has a great number of pros, and almost no cons.
In general, leaking information to intermediate parties about what you're doing is bad, because they can use it against you, even if you have nothing to hide. At least with SSL, they only know the sites you're visiting, and can't see or fiddle with the content.
"In their 1963 book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz laid out their case for a different explanation of the Great Depression. Essentially, the Great Depression, in their view, was caused by the fall of the money supply. Friedman and Schwartz write: "From the cyclical peak in August 1929 to a cyclical trough in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a third." The result was what Friedman calls the "Great Contraction" — a period of falling income, prices, and employment caused by the choking effects of a restricted money supply. Friedman and Schwartz argue that people wanted to hold more money than the Federal Reserve was supplying. As a result people hoarded money by consuming less. This caused a contraction in employment and production since prices were not flexible enough to immediately fall."
Here's a video of Milton Friedman (he won a Nobel Prize for this work) explaining how monetary contraction caused the great depression:
"By 1933, the quantity of money in the United States had gone down by a third." ... "For every 3 dollars of currency and deposits that people had had in 1929, only 2 dollars were left."
One thing people often forget about deflation is that a general decline in the level of prices also includes labour prices and interest rates. It is characterised by zero interest rates, falling prices, falling wages, and because wages are 'sticky-down', high unemployment. You really do not want to live in a deflationary economy unless you have a large pile of cash. It's miserable.
A second, and in my view, more valid definition of deflation is a contraction of the money supply. Ben Bernanke (current Fed Chairman) is an expert on causes of the great depression, and has been doing everything he can to ensure that the US money supply does not shrink.
One thing missing in this debate is any mention of the precautionary principle. I suspect that this type of problem (in which a large number of factors, none of which cause major problems on their own, combine to cause major problems) will become more common over time as more unintended consequences of our actions interact.
Hopefully some group of nations at least bans neonicotinoids for a period. That way, we should be able to make some inferences about whether their removal helps solve the problem.
Also, do not be deceived by "data science": it's mostly a bullshit term, and translates roughly to "programmer who knows basic statistics"
This is utter rubbish; I really wish people would keep quiet about things they know nothing about. I suggest that you have never actually discussed a domain with a data scientist if you think it's "basic statistics".
In our dev. shop, we have a lot of great programmers, but none of them can touch our data scientist when it comes to working out what our tens of millions of users are actually doing and what their salient attributes are.
As for the data scientist needing to 'implement their theories', that's what the developers are for. The data scientist does the analysis, then works with the developers to implement systems that incorporate the results. Neither group is capable of the other's work.
Please keep defending America with your caps lock key on the internet.