MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.

You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.

His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.

Of course, it is the GOP sole characteristic to not look up facts. The rest of the political spectrum (from the middle all the way to the far left) may have many flaws, but ignoring facts and figures is not one of them.

Here are the figures for you, straight out of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

The US has the lowest tax rate of all developed countries. So right there your argument is already wrong.

I don't know where you get this from and it is really funny to see how hard you strive to pin a clear failure of the free market (healthcare is not a freely traded good) on your big government bugaboo.

Clearly you've reached a conclusion first (big government is always bad) and now you are forcing the facts into it.

I don't want big government but nor do I want small government. I want government of just the right size to provide (1) decent public education to all (equality of opportunity, not outcome), (2) decent public infrastructure, (3) enough defense that we can be secure in the world (but not so much that we can go in expeditions to Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction), (4) healthcare to all since a civilized country does not let sick or hungry people die and (5) enough police that I can go to the corner store without fear of being mugged.

If you look at the list above, government is too small for all of those except (3). Those are facts. The rest is ideology.

Or you can create a second value called

x_base=x-1

and instead of computing

x+1-1

you compute

x_base+1

with no extra subtraction and now you count like humans do.

Oops.

how about

if (parityA=(parityB xor parityC))

is that an extra bug? of course not. It's a buggy construct which luckily gets caught often by the type checker, but still shouldn't be there.

Any language that states as a goal: omission or elimination of potentially-harmful constructs, but keeps the awful C construct:

if (x = 3)
{ ...
}

is not really serious about elimination of harmful constructs.

...on a SIMD architecure. GPUs still run the same program (or at best a few programs) over groups of cores. GPUs are quite a bit aways from supporting multicore style MIMD parallelism.

Spoken like a true noob that never had to hire anyone. Hiring is imperfect even under the best of circumstances. You don't believe me? the best hiring process known to man, which takes several years of assessments, relies in numerous tests, and candidates are chosen by a dedicated committee of experts whose compensation is directly tied to performance often results in disastrous hires. It is called the sports draft and every year there are plenty of draft busts in all sports. If those people with (comparatively) unlimited resources still make mistakes, what hope does a company have on a one day interview? Bad people will be hired, that is a fact of life.

Correct, the number is over a thousand millionaire Microsoft employees from the early days.

It's actually the complete opposite. Applying numbers to a subjective measure forces you to tease out biases and explicitly state the reasons behind your subjective conclusions. Placing numbers to it is the best thing you can do provided you remember where the numbers came from and keep in mind at all times how noisy they can be, so you never follow them blindly.

I said fire 1% rather clearly, the other 5% left of their own accord for whatever reasons (retirement being one of them). It's called churn.

In a perfect world yes. However sometimes you need strong incentives to have managers do the right thing in a world where time is a finite resource.

It is also less demoralizing if the slackers are let go once a year, as part of a transparent process.

Not really. Most departments have enough turn-around that you will be hiring 5 people a year, every year.

Stack ranking works great if you use it to get rid of the bottom 1% every year. Surely in a department with 100 people there is at least one hire who didn't turn out great.

The problem is when it is applied at a 10% threshold. It is not hard after a few hiring/firing rounds to end up with teams of over 10 people all of which are very good, yet stack ranking still demands that you fire the "bottom" perfectly OK person-decile.

This is exactly why I liked 3D in this movie (I'm a 3D hater too). It wasn't on your face the entire time reminding you every other scene about how they can get things to fly at you.

The script is weak, but the minimalist aspects of it are interesting. The movie has exactly two actors plus a handful of voices over the radio.