Well, basically agreed, but: Someone with authority ranting at me like that for insane reasons upset me so much that I was constantly distracted and started having health problems. So I can't even dignify that kind of ranting with my presence. I got out of the industry after that, halved my salary and regained my health, but I assume those practices continue. The people who remained and were rewarded the most at that company wrote very bad code indeed (re: grandparent's directive).

"get better at estimating how long your tasks will take"

At my last programming job, the head of engineering took all my time estimates for a project and arbitrarily cut them in half, because "we're smarter than most companies".

"Employ a lot of people, give profits to pork&barrel govt suppliers."

For example: Flibe Energy, whose shill video you linked to, and whose master plan is to pull down a few hundred million in U.S. military contracts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flibe_Energy#Military

These "corporate conspiracy" arguments are self-defeating when they come from another corporation in the same industry.

The Slashdot frenzy for Thorium reactors which do not exist anywhere in the world, except as a hypothetical, is constantly astounding. It's nigh-equivalent to denying the round Earth, evolution, or global warming. Sure, they may exist "soon" if your definition of "soon" is on the order of a century. India has had a 3-stage plan for Thorium reactors since the 1950's and they're currently about halfway through that plan, according to its handlers:

"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme

That's an oft-repeated myth. The fact is that India has just recently entered Phase II of their 3-stage nuclear program (spanning at least a century in total).

"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected '3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time'.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three_stage_nuclear_power_programme

Glad to hear your comments on that, but I do disagree; I don't think the problem in this case is centralization -- in fact, really the opposite, as the U.S. is among the most non-centralized countries when it comes to education policy. The fact that the federal government can't set education goals is almost unique among modernized countries, and is among the first things I would point to that seem really oddball.

The countries that are currently the top performers education-wise have nationwide education policies and very well-respected national unions cooperating to shape those policies (considered equivalent to doctor and lawyer bars). Among the advantages are that the university education programs can actually focus on the content everyone will have to teach (as opposed to here in the U.S. where they can only talk about it in the abstract, because there's no telling where you'll land and what you'll have to teach). The canonical example most people point to these days is Finland, but there are others.

http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2013/sarjala.cfm

As a college educator, I basically agree. But what I can't avoid pointing out that the system is currently set up for exactly the opposite: "open admission" community colleges where everyone with a high school diploma is guaranteed admission, and state financial aid that covers the entire bill (well, allegedly -- most don't complete the program in 2 years, but no one informs them of that until "sunk cost" settles in). See Tennessee moving in that direction this week (link).

The political pressure is to show everyone getting college degrees. The economic incentive on the schools is of course, moire students are more funding. The long-term result seems to be degrading the requirements and expectations (down to the pre-existing depressing high school level). The vast majority of people in community colleges are helpless at 7th-grade algebra (and, I'm pretty sure after graduation).

So it seems like an enormous waste of resources. But I guess the US is so overwhelmingly wealthy we can do this and not really notice. The momentum is certainly driving further in that direction.

"500,000+ welders are injured annually."

Impossible; there aren't 500,000 welders in the U.S. There aren't even 400,000. (In 2006: 393,000 per American Welding Society).

http://www.aws.org/w/a/research/outlook.html

If we add up all the OSHA injuries of all types from all construction & manufacturing industries (incl. manufacturing of food, textiles, paper, plastics, etc.), the grand total of all injury types in a year is less than 200,000 (197,000 by my count). So 500,000 welding accidents in a year is total fantasy.

http://stats.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/case/ostb3593.pdf

"Social scientists will be able to understand and predict the interactions of people the way physicists understand and predict the interactions of objects."

The fact that this is a century-old Asimovian fantasy that's gone nowhere aside (in the late 80's I was being taught that chaos theory had killed that hope; consider a hundred thousand attempts at predicting the stock market)...

Do social scientists even know how to do math? I was in a scholarly seminar a few weeks ago (the only STEM person in the room, everyone else was social scientists), and was nearly shouted out of the room when I did a spit-take on an sample published paper held up that involved a sample size of 8 sociology students keeping journals for two weeks. One of the other participants said out loud that she had know idea what the point was of another paper because it was quantitative (i.e., involved numbers) instead of qualitative (i.e., subjective opinions by the researcher). As far as I can see recently the whole discipline appears to be a "null field".

"Psychology works very similar. You can't predict what an individual person will do, but look at enough of them and you'll be able to predict what will happen if you have good enough data. YOU may have "free will" and the freedom to do what you want but as a mass we may still follow strict laws, like everything else in nature."

I think this is raw, Asimovian geek fantasy. Do you have a citation for this assertion? Social uprisings catch people by total surprise every generation. No one can predict the stock market, as much as the desire is there.

The fact that people (and thus societies) are engaged in conscious feedback loops means that they're qualitatively different from masses of dumb particles.

And I should also have mentioned -- The time when I was teaching at another college, interviewed for a full-time position, and pointed out my very high evaluations and observations as evidence of exceptional teaching. At which point the Dean laughed in my face and said, "We can get anyone off the street to come in and teach classes for us, we don't care about that."

"many researchers focus on research and are terrible at and hostile to teaching"

But that's where the incentives are, the criteria for promotion. I was told at a small faculty meeting last week at our college that teaching and service are flat-out totally ignored for tenure and promotion decisions, only published papers are counted (despite the written rule being otherwise). Although I'm not on that track (and glad of it), it's hard to blame people who literally get fired if they focus on teaching too much. That's one of the structures that should definitely be changed.

The following might to tangential to this particular incident, but do keep in mind that a major part of today's case law is that the government can file a proceeding where the money itself is the defendant, i.e., no human person ("you") is recognizable in the case. Historically that was used in cases where the owner was unknown, but in the drug-war era it's used for asset forfeiture even when the owner is known. If I had to prioritize things to get upset about, it would be that ongoing nightmare in our legal system.

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

Let's say Republican Senator Susan Collins took this position instead. Then: No issue and no uproar.

The problem is not that Rice is a Republican, it's that she was a part of the most terrifying Republican administration in history, and oversaw defense of torture and mass-surveillance wiretapping programs.

Business leaders and politicians go through this all the time -- The way to get around this one is to publicly *apologize*, and release a statement like, "It was one time, almost a decade ago, I was confused and I'm sorry, my views have evolved". Maybe a $1,000 donation to a gay-rights organization.

But Eich didn't do that. He never explained the donation that I could see. Which I would interpret as saying that he STILL sticks to his opinion on the issue, and would rather resign from his leadership than have to say that he was wrong about it. So don't let the door hit you on the ass leaving.