I don't recall that being completely debunked. If anything, the opposite. Not that it's a good thing, but it takes a certain sort of person to willfully resist the orders of a "legitimate" authority. An unfortunate downside for those who have a respect for the rule of law...

If you don't make any effort to appreciate how difficult and important skillful management is, how can you expect understanding from the other side of the aisle? Just because someone is over a team or has the word "manager" in their title doesn't mean they know what they are doing any more than a half of the coders out there -- be honest, at least half the code you read is garbage. It doesn't mean that coding is a trivial skill any more than management is a trivial skill. If anything, it proves the opposite.

From the links, bicycle fatalities accounts for about 2% of traffic fatalities each year. I highly doubt that as much as 2% of travelers are using bicycles.

In my experience, you only need one person in that team to be competent -- a decent project manager can plan for an incompetent coder, and an good coder can direct an incompetent project manager.

The real problem is if both are incompetent. And since competency varies from project to project, even within the same person...

I wish I had mod points to boost this up. This is exactly why I went to B-school.

By any objective measure, the US has less poverty and disease than pretty much any time/place in history. (Unless of course, you define poverty as the lowest paid 5% of the population, but then there isn't much anyone can do to eliminate that -- there will always be a bottom 5% of earners.)

Our biggest problem right now is indeed social unrest, and I think its fair to attribute that to capitalism. For the first time in history, effectively our entire economy is focusing on "Wants" and not "Needs" due to unprecedented productivity gains. That will likely shift the moral foundation of what money represents, strengthening it as a way to keep score among socially conscious, and further reducing its initial role as an abstraction of value provided to the community.

Sadly, a lot of our technological advances originate (or are refined to the point of being actually functional) from military projects such as this. We're all communicating over one of them right now.

Somehow I doubt the contributors to "Journal of Youth and Adolescence" are focused experts in human aggression. I similarly wouldn't put much confidence in any paper they published regarding how well children are able to code complex database applications.

The US Military has a large body of research they've conducted over the past 60 years in exactly how to cultivate and control aggression in youths, which is why our soldiers are some of the most lethal on the planet. They also have a similarly large body of research on how to inhibit it -- its instructive how relatively few war crimes have been committed by US Soldiers over the past decade in our many myriad wars.

My layman's summary of their research? Video games are excellent training simulators for violence, but don't actually cause aggression. Aggression is cultivated/controlled through supervised training (or lack thereof). Very similar to Milgram's findings in the 60s.

Dave Grossman's books do a pretty good job of explaining this research in an relatively accessible way.

I think its important to point out that it isn't intelligence that is being selected against -- there are plenty of intelligent (albeit ignorant) people breeding up a storm.

It bothers me tremendously that this is the case. I believe the following to be true:
1) Natural Selection / Evolution are true, and select for "better" traits over "worse" ones.
2) Knowledge is power, and Education is a good thing.

So when I see what appears to be a selection against education in birth rates, my conclusion is that something about our educational system is broken. I don't know what that is specifically, but I'm not really open to challenging the above 2 assumptions right now. Maybe that makes me ignorant?

Arbitrary handwaving is not helpful or interesting.

The real issue here isn't a lack of trust -- it's a lack of maturity.

Life isn't fair. All the democracy in all the world isn't going to make it so. All the progressive mandates and sweeping government programs/reforms won't make it so. All the freedom and conservative/religious values won't make it so.

The reason everyone feels betrayed is because, down deep in their hearts, they think that life should be fair, and they should get "what they deserve," despite everything going on around them. Maturity is recognizing that bad stuff is gonna happen to you, it isn't your fault, and thats okay. Thats why you have friends, family, and a small local community. That is who is supposed to pick you up when you fall down, just like you pick them up when they fall.

The rub is that being a part of a community requires commitment, maturity, and humility. You can't be a member of a community when its convenient for you, and then not when its a hassle. You have to be willing to forget your grudges and help other members of the community, even those you may not personally like very much. You have to be grateful for the help that others give, and recognize you haven't earned it. You have to be able to swallow your pride, accept help from others, and recognize you don't deserve it.

I don't blame the political system for our current "woes". I blame a citizenship with collective emotional maturity of a 13-year-old girl, constantly screaming "That's not fair! I'm not a little kid any more!"

That's like saying that you have a sales person who knows some Perl, so why do you need software engineers?

It worries me that this was flagged as insightful.

This.

I think a lot of CIOs, and IT managers of all stripes, don't understand that there is a difference between just "keeping things working" and actually adding value to the organization as it pursues its market strategy. Typically, I try to spend at least half my time looking for ways for IT to actually add value to other silos. This involves a lot of "fuzzy people" time, learning what those roles do, and how the people in those roles "feel" about their work. When you spend the time to get to know your company, you discover not only ways to make things substantially better for everyone, but you also discover those pesky metrics that demonstrate the value you bring to the bottom line.

In summary, a lot of IT should be very non-technical, very visible, and have results that can be easily quantified into added value and productivity for the company -- exactly what a CEO wants to see out of any department. Its the difference between being good, and being great.

I think it might be a bit hyperbolic to start checking everything off as present so quickly. Most of those metrics, as presented, are subjective at best. I'm not going to get into all of them, but as a single example "Religion and Government are Intertwined" could hardly be considered "checked". If you seriously believe that to be the case, I invite you review 17th century European history. Now THAT was an intertwining of government and religion. Our current situation could be more accurately viewed, historically, as a possible accidental bumping of elbows in a crowded hallway, followed by a curt "excuse me, passing through."

Thats not to say these things don't exist in the micro, or aren't even commonplace among fragmented demographics within the US. But there is hardly uniformity at the national level, especially among political ideologies.