Over on Dice, contributor Bennet Haselton writes....

On news tonight - an informational black hole formed at Dice headquarters in New York today. John Smallberries, NIST Underdirector for Strategic Initiatives said, "It appears that a company, Dice Holdings, tried to post their normal daily Bennet Haselton article. When they did that, they neglected to measure the amount of negative information that this article contained and failed to isolate it properly. The amount of negative information was so great that it started absorbing any intelligence that was close to it and the process now seems to have formed a closed loop. We know that, if not stopped, the resulting absorption of intelligence from the rapidly expanding stupid horizon around what we are now calling a "Haselton-type neginfo black hole" could potentially destroy civilization. We continue to search for an answer. The only positive news that we have to offer is that the black hole seems to be growing relatively slowly, as the investment banking community in New York has already driven away most of the intelligence that could feed the hole. We've attempted to send volunteer scientists across the threshold in an attempt to find a way to shut this phenomenon down. None of them have returned. We extend our sincerest condolences to theses brave scientist's families and continue to look for a solution to this dire emergency. I have no further comment at this time."

A rising tide may not lift all boats. Let's say that rather than giving your hybrid to all neighbors, you give it to the world. Now everyone in the world raises yields by 50 bpa. And now, you've glutted the market and the price per bushel is so low no one makes a profit, so the farmers go bust. Or the farmers agree to destroy commodities to keep the price up. That happened with dairy products during the great depression. Dairy farmers produced too much, prices collapsed, farmers could no longer buy feed for their cattle, and went out of business, destroying their herds in the process. This brought about farm price support programs.

The moral of the story? If you want a rising tide for boats when supply increases, demand has to rise, as well. As you have failed to address the demand side and assume an infinitely elastic market, you lose, economically-speaking.

Next time, we'll introduce you to the concept of inequitable distribution of market gains, so you can understand that rising tides do not lift all boats equitably, so even if a rising tide does raise all the boats, a majority of the fleet's captain's can still all feel poorer as a result of the process. Remember that, at the core, we're still dealing with human psychological processes here. Even if you raise the boats, relative level matters - especially if you want to look at rational models of effort vs. probability of reward.

Which, if any, particular Disney princesses do you rate as "mindless bimbos"?

All of them? Because they're essentially sold characters who do not protest being sold? I thought selling people was wrong. But not these people. As such, they help to send a message that it is fine for some humanoids (or parts of their aspects) to be commoditized. Bad message on many levels... even worse for kids, who do not need to learn to use other people as commoditized tools for their own pleasure.

OK, that's harsh. But maybe one could uplevel this discussion a bit to point out that in a society where just about anything is commoditized, it might be a good idea to question that assumption, first.

We pay attention because Sweden is frequently held up as a model for the US by American progressives.

Yeah. Because American progressives have so much power these days... Snort. Try again...

Or informative... or pathetic... I'm not quite sure which - I don't play that many Swedish games (which, according to the PP, might be a good thing).

Fortunately, those in Gamergate care about stopping shitty behavior on both sides.

Tee hee. Right. Snort... Because we do that with more invective, more scorched-earth activity like doxxing and death threats against people who had the temerity to voice an opinion that someone didn't like. Maybe people never taught you folks this: YOU SHOULDN'T MAKE DEATH THREATS, ONLINE OR ELSEWHERE! The fact that it is done doesn't make it right. At least that's how I'd explain it to a five year-old, which seems to be the moral level of many in your "community".

This week on AskHR!

When will the 5 year old be replaced by a 1H-B because it's cheaper?

This is a simple question for any HR professional! It's very obvious when you think about it. You're assuming that all engineers are equivalent - they're not! Each of them have different cost functions and must be handled as an individual on that basis! As such, the H1-B will replace the five year-old when the H1-B cheaper than a five year-old. And the easiest way for that to happen is if the H1-B in question is a five year-old! As, I said, simple... At least for an HR Professional like me!

Remember to send your questions to AskHR! Everyone who asks a question gets entered into a drawing for a free pink slip! Not that you weren't already in that lottery, but... May the odds be ever in your favor.

However I doubt that I would like my colleagues and Linkedin business contacts to know about my: racing hamster, gunpowder musket and jedi religion hobbies.

But that means you aren't being authentic! And how can you be passionate about your work if you're not authentically passionate? Once Facebook enters the workplace, it's only a matter of time until your social and work life will be entwined even more! And you'll be able to tell all of your "real world" friends about how awesomes your workspace is! And HOW MUCH YOU LOVE YOUR JOB! And to make sure, the company will put out guidelines as to how many posts you output per week (on your "own" time, if there's any left) you need to post to show your dedication to social interaction within the company! Show your authentic selfie! ON! FACEBOOK AT WORK!!!

OK. Sarcasm mode off. How did we get to a point where companies are actually talking about stuff like passion as a requirement for work? I have passion for women and my music and the skilled craft I pursue. But for a job? Well, let's just say it's fine to put in a day and a half's work for a day's pay, huh? Why ask us to fake passion for you, too? But I guess that's what whores always get asked for. And in the end, all of us who trade labor for money are that. Maybe we could look for a better economic system that didn't allow some to make unreasonable demands on others? But I guess that's just me...

A MS cert does not trump a computing degree.

It depends on how much the five year-old costs compared to someone with a computing degree.

Everyone knows it's Lisp all the way down until you get the the atoms, then it's this weird probabilistic stuff.

Well that's good, but what the hell does it have to do with this subject? People who throw Malcolm Gladwell articles are like monkeys and their Malcolm Gladwell articles.

Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.

Wow! They must be able to run pretty fast to catch it! Look out 2016 Olympics, here comes the Japanese train riders!

Most of those kids were at University High, a school that I actually know little about. And what I say here may be wildly apochryphal. God knows, there are probably folks who actuallly went there lurking here (and so, they should chime in). But I digress...

As my feeble recollection recalls (this was almost 40 years ago, you know) Uni High (as it was known by the natives) was a research vehicle for the Education Department at the University, where latest theories were sometimes field-tested. All I know is that a lot of the university's staff and teacher's kids went there and there were some percentage of townies, as well. Not a magnet school, per se, but certainly home to some extremely bright kids. They got to actually take classes via PLATO (something I would have killed for in high school) and sometimes they had PhD's teaching them (although mostly it was the teaching corps sporting MA's and going for the PhD that got put doing the scut work of actually teaching). Other than that, good high school in the state, certainly a bit better than the other schools in Chambana. That is all...

Just because people are crazy in one area of their life, it doesn't mean they can't turn out great work. That's why quite a few geniuses are people whom you probably couldn't stand to be with for very long. As for mathematicians? Newton? Erdos?

The math (or lack thereof) will speak for itself. If nothing else, it will be another glimpse inside a mind that came up with some of the most groundbreaking mathematical work of the last century.

I took online courses on PLATO and wrote simple games for it. The hardware was laughable by today's standards - plasma screens that glowed orange text (and lines!) from a dark blue background with touch input provided on about a 1/2" grid coupled with hideously clunky keyboards having their own special function keys - but it was reasonably reliable and allowed some of the first really large scale research on CHI.

Not that anyone other than researchers actually gave a crap about that last part.

But the system was fun to write programs for. It had a pretty OK language for the day, called TUTOR, that contained necessary primitives to make it Turing complete along with others to let you write onto the screen in a variety of ways. Again, pretty primitive by today's standards, but enough to teach programming with - they were debugging the interpreter (I think Fortran) and I played with it once. Pretty advanced for the time with breakpoints being highlighted.

And of course this is back in the late 1970's. Before the PC was a gleam in IBM's eye. The whole thing ran as on a huge CDC 6600 running a custom OS (as many were, in those days). Odd instruction set by an even odder designer you may have heard of - guy named Seymour Cray. Quirkier than hell with 60-bit words, 18-bit address space, and 6-bit bytes (yes, we spoke octal). But that was back in the day when minicomputers were eating the lunch of the mainframe boys. CDC, whom the University of Illinois partnered with to productize the system, couldn't muster the resources or talent to market this system while swirling down the toilet.

And, like so many things in computing, we see progress, good ideas thwarted by, well, nothing but the fact that people are short-sighted and, if something doesn't make a buck for someone, we drop it on the floor. So it goes...