16 is legal here, and is the driver's license age. If she can drive, you can bang her. If she drives to your house, show you a license that says she's 18, and you bang her, and she's like 15 but looks like some fucking amazon, you have a pretty good case in court.

I didn't say to teach people project management in class, although I could do that too--not that it'd be a good idea.

The absolute core of project management is the hierarchical decomposition of things into smaller, complete things. A WBS breaks down the single deliverable of a finished product into all of its parts, assembled to produce exactly 100% of the project, and each of which is further broken down in the exact same way until something recognizable and fully-understood is produced. Risk breakdown structures categorize and expand upon risks--technical, political, external, cost risks, and so forth.

Most people do not have this particular skill; most engineers come up with a short list of things which need doing, breaking problems down into an abstract pile of things. The skill of hierarchical decomposition is one that everyone should learn as a method for analysis of absolutely anything. You should use other methods in tandem, and can use their output to build a more complete hierarchy; but hierarchical decomposition is the only top-down method to break a single problem into its component parts. The rest are all bottom-up.

OzPeter,

Soulskill has apologized. Repeatedly, and professionally. Accept it and move on.

I have told a lot of people that a short study of project management--just a crash course from a book--would be valuable because of the context for hierarchical decomposition. Project Managers break down projects. A project's scope is broken down into a work breakdown structure (WBS) by listing the project as the top node (whole), and then breaking it into its deliverable parts--including project management, testing, and so forth, as well as solid deliverables--and then further breaking those down, until you have fully-identifiable work packages. Risks are broken down the same way in a Risk Breakdown Structure.

I encourage you to watch this ten-minute video, which explains a WBS in a way I find accurate, concise, and easily-understood. It's very approachable, in plain English language. You'll undoubtedly see that this is an excellent approach to absolutely anything you want to do; it seems obvious but, as you say, it's not a natural skill.

Steam irons use a heated water reservoir to store steam. US irons use a hot plate through which cold water is injected. A steam iron can produce a constant stream of steam for a good half-hour, and doesn't cool when steaming... except in the US, where it can produce steam for about 10 seconds, then needs 10 more minutes to heat back up.

I agree with the PM. I think he reached his conclusions through faulty means, but that doesn't make his conclusions wrong.

He is an idiot, and his position is founded on sand; I think the position that everyone should be a computer programmer is also founded on sand, but I actually understand *why*.

This important distinction is missed by the general public, and so public policy is a popularity contest. Smart people incorrectly think X, people get behind the guy. In the case of coding skills and technology in education, it's computer nerds thinking they understand market economy, sociology, and primary education. Being able to code in AWK, Sed, and Bash have proved more useful to me than C, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Java Script, C#, and even Python--as useful as Python and C# are (don't ask me why, but I actually like C#); I still don't think these are primary skills. My idea of primary skills are the base skills of learning that will allow students leaving high school to recognize that awk might be useful, and spend an afternoon learning it inside and out.

What you just said makes no sense and has nothing to do with safety.

Yeah I've been wishing it wasn't so ridiculously hard to change mains voltage. If only we could distribute at 220V, or get 220V feed lines to build 220V circuits. Europe has all these 15 amp appliances like steam irons that you can't get in the US because you'd need 30-35 amps to run them--they're 15A at 220V. Same appliances in America are low-power (1800W), and operate as if they're severely defective.

High-voltage, low-current is the way to go. We have 20 amp bedroom circuits; we don't need 20V 120A circuits.

You see what I mean, folks? Assholes. They show up everywhere.

Her defense wasn't delayed by injustice; it was delayed by assholes. Injustice is a thing, a concept, one not entirely tied to reality; it is an abstract aligned to our moral beliefs. We don't consider the vicious treatment of pedophiles in America injustice because we hate them, even though empirically we can make some arguments about mental health and the fermentation of social pressures forcing people with an internal sickness into hiding, stress, and then the shape of something they could have avoided with proper social support. We consider victimization of Jews injustice because we've started this moral narrative about how hating on Jews is bad.

The fact of the matter is it's people who made decisions about their regards toward and actions about race that delayed this Ph.D. defense. It's assholes. It's people who decided to bar this from being heard. Injustice is a diffuse thing, like the injustice of a court system which executes more blacks than whites on similar evidence; it lifts blame off the participants and onto the mode of society or of misfortune. We pretend these actors don't exist, or at least that they aren't directly responsible for their actions, even though the victims are directly burdened by them. That nebulous ideal is immaterial to the consequences of society; the fact that people went along with it instead of using their human reason and empathy to decide against these happenings is squarely the fault of those people, not the fault of the speculation about what those people did.

What happened wasn't wrong; *you* were wrong for doing it.

The only way to ensure the possibility of a good paying job is to match labor supply with labor demand; that is, to make sure there aren't 100,000,000 computer programmers and 4,000,000 programming jobs.

"Keeping the US Economy competitive" is ludicrous. It's like eating shitloads of donuts to keep a sumo wrestler competitive: your body gets sick and you die, and all you really need is good sumo skills to wrestle people in your weight class successfully.

The US economy won't be competitive if it's completely and totally ill from a glut of computer science specialists and the constant suppression of salaries by state-subsidized college education. If the US economy runs well, a well-tuned machine with all of the parts correctly built and sized for need, it will outperform any other economy on earth. An arms race to stockpile perishable goods we have no intent nor ability to use before they expire is only going to make us a poor and shaky economy weak in the things we sacrifice for stacking up tons of tomatoes that are going to rot away next month.

Yeah, but if you're talking about ground shipping, $4 is about what you pay to ship a cube a foot on a side.

The title is ludicrous. "Court orders UberPop to be banned in all of Italy" really? Who is going to do the banning? It seems to me the court didn't actually order anyone to ban UberPop, so oh well.

Brainstorming sessions don't require large, complex diagrams because large, complex diagrams come out of decision-making processes, and brainstorming is an idea-generating process. Generating ideas in the same meeting in which you make decisions inevitably leads to poor decisions; meetings are for exactly one of exchanging information, generating alternatives, or making decisions.