I'd recommend a standing desk to anyone with the willpower to make it through the transition.
And I'd recommend a sit-stand desk to anyone at all. Even if you don't stand all the time (I don't), being able to spend part of your day standing will make you feel better without discomfort, in fact being able to switch back and forth is more comfortable than sitting.
Then it's not the same as mine. I've also followed the company from the beginning... and I have the benefit of the insider view.
Unless your insider view involved board meetings making top-level executive decisions, I'm not impressed.
Obviously not, but you may not realize how open the company is internally. Larry Page stands up in front of the entire company every week, for example, and takes -- and answers -- live questions. There are no negative consequences for asking hard questions, and hard questions do get asked. Sometimes the executives duck or dance around them, but not very often, and questions that aren't really answered continue getting asked until they do get answered.
In addition to that, other than things like acquisitions there are very few "top-level executive decisions" at Google. Most decisionmaking is driven from the bottom up.
You're probably still not impressed. Whatever. I'm just giving you my perspective and opinion. I would think that an intelligent insider's viewpoint would be of use to you; you're certainly free to dismiss it, whether or not that makes any sense. Time will tell, and I'm quite confident that the future will bear out my statements.
YouTube was a very obvious acquisition. What YouTube needed to survive and grow was low-cost scalability and a way to monetize the views it was getting. What Google had was massive data centers and network connectivity, plus a proven revenue model.
YouTube managed to grow to epic proportions before Google had to "save" them, as you imply. They also good have slapped ads onto their service at any time without Google buying them out.
Not according to YouTube employees who made the transition.
...when the main problem isn't really sitting down, but being STILL in the same position hour after hour.
This is why it's not a "standing desk" but a "sit-stand desk". The idea is that you alternate between sitting and standing, changing position every hour or two.
My basis is the same as yours, except not from the inside, and not from just three years.
Then it's not the same as mine. I've also followed the company from the beginning... and I have the benefit of the insider view.
The tipping point came when they bought YouTube for an obscene amount of money (at the time). You don't spread your tendrils in such fashion throughout the industry just because you like technology.
YouTube was a very obvious acquisition. What YouTube needed to survive and grow was low-cost scalability and a way to monetize the views it was getting. What Google had was massive data centers and network connectivity, plus a proven revenue model. YouTube also needed a better search engine, and Google was interested in finding ways to index and search non-textual content. It was an ideal match, technologically.
There are reasons why the Founding Fathers rejected direct democracy.
First, they wouldn't see how a direct democracy (i.e.: where everybody decides and vote about everything) could scale on a larger scale than classical Greek city-states and small communities. (Where the dozen, maybe hunderd of decision-making citizen simply gather and discuss together).
Their solution back then was instead to keep the Greek city-state model (have a small bunch of people gather together) except that each one of the gathering people is representative of whole regions/populations/etc. (instead of managing to gather every single person of the huge population in a town's central plazza).
Thus was birthed representative democracy.
It might have sounded good back then, but you see the effect now: the representatives tend to prefer representing whomever pays them the best. Power is back in the hand of the elite and big corporation, only with a thick political layer inbetween.
Well technology marshes on, since founding father, communication technologies have simply been on a constant growth. A rather explosive growth.
Thus later on, you can see whole countries like Switzerland that function on a direct democracy. They have moved on from "Landsgemeinde" (the Hlevetic equivalent of greek city-state gathering in the central place) to direct voting accross the whole country, both in election booth and with voting-by-post.
So even if switzerland is bigger than a greek city-state (currently more than 7m people), thanks to the modernization that existed back then (post & phone & railroad) it has since then been able to coordinate country-wide votation and election very regularily (every few months).
The process is completely open and any one can watch and check.
Now Switzerland is still smaller than other European country or even huge continent-sized countris (like USA, Russia or China, for exemple). But, guess what, technology is STILL marching on and has come up with things like internet and cryptology.
(These are already put into production in some parts of Switzerland. Mainly for expatriate and in a few small commune).
And with these technologies, direct democracy can even scale up to larger populations.
The fear of your founding father about democracy being not practical on anything but smaller greek city-state is simply deprecated by technology.
Other fears against direct democracy usually include that people are stupid and might react stupidly due to mass panic, or because they are selfish and only think about quick personnal profit. Imagine if one would vote about a law for definitely supressing any tax however. People will never vote for tax! The state will go bankrupt!
Politicans know better, let's have them take the actual decision, and have only people voting for politician based on approximate general tendency of them.
Well you've seen the result in TFA's study: Politicians do know better, they specially know better how to earn more money by abiding to the highest paying oligarch.
Meanwhile, direct democracies like Switzerland DO VOTE about taxes, and guess what, big surprise: THEY HAVE VOTED FOR TAX INCREASES, SEVERAL TIME.
Thinking that "sheple don't know, politicians know better" is a horribly condescending paternalistic approach.
Yes, voting blunder can sometime happen (see votation about Minarets, about life-sentences or, more recently, the problems between EU and Switzerland regarding migration freedoms). But they can be mitigiated. At the heart, the main problem is information, if "people don't know" perhaps, instead of deciding for them, you might try to inform them so they make an enlightened decision? Modern communication mean can do help a lot here. Mass media like Press, Radio, TV have been around for decades. Internet is newer and offers even more possibilities for communication (including for minorities which might lack the budget to do it on Mass Media).
Also, patience and time help. People new to Swiss politics might wonder that everything is so slow. Well, it helps staying calm and thinking a bit, and nut rush some policies in a hurry. All the various checks and controls help to diminish the risk that some law is enacted due to mass panic (see you Patriot Act). In Switzerland, it has often happened that a people's motion has been submitted regarding a pressing problem, and by the time it goes through the pipeline, politics had time to adjust and propose a better, "less stupid beause I react" proposition to submit during the same vote. It has often happened that the people committee asking for the vote retract their own proposition because they find the new one better and people only end up voting for/against the one by the state.
And there are also internal checks, Switzerland is a signatory of the human rights convention and other similar international treaties. If any new law is deemed to contradict such international law, the new law can't be enacted (see Switzerland's voting blunder about life-sentences).
Meanwhile, USA has such wonders as Patriot Act, DMCA, etc. law that clearly only profit the corporations or organisation which paid the representative for.
With the advent of the internet, voting could be done online, and most people could do it at home (and those who cannot afford or do not own a computer could use public computers set up at their local town hall where they vote now).
Voting IS done online. Currently not enabled everywhere. But's that already a possibility for swiss people abroad, and some comune start to enable it locally too.
The president can be the candidate with the purely majority vote.
Due to Duverger's Law, when there's a single voting round for a single key position (or for a single exclusive composition of a group), system will inevitably degenerate into a bi-partisan mess (see USA), because voting for a less popular 3rd party ends up being "throwing your vote away". And that sucks because usually the two finalist end up being always opposing each other while not doing much useful actually (again see USA).
One solution is to introduce 2-rounds voting (as in France): this dissociates the "trying to support an interesting 3rd party" and "voting against the bigger evil candidate" into 2 separate rounds. You don't "waste a vote" by casting for a 3rd party, you'll have plenty of opportunity to vote for the lesser evil on the next round.
Meanwhile, here in switzerland, the top of the executive is held by a *group of 7 persons* (with "president" being a simply honorific title for protocol purpose passed around in a circle each year). It's a group of person of mixed partisanship.
Currently, that's the only indirect voting system in switzerland (citizen vote for parliament, which is of proprotionnal composition, and the parliament functions as a "electoral college" by electing a similarily proportionned group of 7). But there's no major problems into introducing direct election. (People directly vote for parties and presidential candidate. Group proportion is based on party votes, and then places are populated by candidates based on popularity within party).
Google's primary goal is the technology, the profits and competitive advantage are a means to that end, not the other way around.
They are empire building. The technology is a means to that end.
The basis for your claim is?
The basis for my claim is three years of seeing how the company operates and what decisions it makes, and how, from the inside.
Probably the same thing that spurs paranoia about automated taxes today. The government knows enough about us that they could easily auto-file/fill our forms every year but people are afraid of admitting how much is known about us.
The most crime-ridden location in the US is 80% white. Both violent and non-violent.
And there is black flight. Most definitely.
At least, won't everyone who's paid a middle to upper middle class wage, buys a house and saves for retirement eventually be a millionaire?
If you want to retire at 65 and have enough money to live a decent life for 30 years after that, you need pretty close to a million dollars plus a paid-off house. And, frankly, it's not that hard to accumulate a million dollars of net worth over a ~40-year career, assuming reasonable returns on your retirement account and modest appreciation on your home. I'm actually targeting net assets of two million for retirement, given that it's still 20 years away and I expect that inflation will roughly halve the value of the dollar between now and then.
Procedural rules trump right and wrong.
What's that meme going around say? Something like, "Everything Hitler did was legal - everything Schindler did was illegal."
aside: you. You who is just jumping up and down to invoke Godwin's Law. Wiki it.
1. Kids shoot up schools. Why schools? Why not shopping malls before Christmas or movie theaters during blockbuster premiers?
1) Kids are in school 30%-40% of their waking lives. It's normal that a disproportionate amount of everything that happens to them happens at school.
2) They don't really shoot up schools. Statistically a kid is much more likely to be shot outside of school than in school. It's just that "school shootings" have become a thing for the media, so the threshold at which one will become a national news story is much lower than, say, a bunch of gang members shooting each other in a drive-by shooting, or a bunch of teens being killed in a car accident. Despite the impression you get from the media, if you want your kids to be safe from shootings, you're better off sending them to school. Normalize for the time they spend in school (#1 above) and statistically they're even safer.
3) When a shooting happens at a school, the vast majority of victims are other kids simply because of the demographics of the people in the area. So it gets classified as kids shooting kids. When a shooting happens outside of a school, the majority of victims are adults. So it gets classified as a "regular" shooting incident even if a significant number of kids were victims
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
