1. Hire contractor.
2. 6 months to train them up.
3. 6 months of actual work from them.
4. 6 months using them to train their replacement.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Given the sheer amount of time it takes to get someone effective in a large bureaucratic organization, it is *mind-boggling* that critical staff positions end up being held by contractors who have to do the contractor dance. Most companies have tricks they use to avoid the contractor dance (reclassifying something as an SOW, rather than hourly position, for example), but that's just another dodge to avoid actually hiring someone and giving them employee protections.

Most large projects take *years* to get to fruition - if you're going to use contractors for anything other than dumb, grunty labor that takes a tech only a week to get up to speed in, you're abusing people and destroying value.

We're missing a number here - how many requests were *made*?

http://cdn.bgr.com/2013/11/app...

The data for the US is almost laughably vague. It could very well be that 1000 requests were made, and 1000 requests were granted.

100% success rate in complying with requests sounds pretty cozy to me...

So how does one learn how to colonize space without "slinging meat bags" out there?

You do that part last.

Assume for a moment that it'll take 500 more years to actually get things together enough where we can send robot fleets to the moon to build habitable modules there. *Then* start training your meat bags...or start off by sending a colony of dogs or cats to survive there. In any case, you don't spend the next 500 years wasting effort on meat bags, you focus on the technology that needs to come *first*.

Actually, I'll make one more caveat - if you did want to practice the whole meat bag support thing, you'd want to start off with a manned mission to the bottom of the marianas trench, to establish a human colony there. You'll get a real quick idea of just how much stuff you need to prep before supporting a colony for any amount of time.

You're right - we don't get to blame Obama for everything until he's out of office, and then we can spend two terms doing so. Obviously people blaming him now are simply jumping the gun.

That being said, we shouldn't have a manned space flight program. It's a ridiculous luxury item, and frankly, even the moon shot was more about hubris and cold war competition than actual science.

Space flight is important, space exploration is important, but slinging meat bags into space is decidedly *not* important.

...why aren't we sending more robotic probes? Putting meat bags in space is completely overrated - we need to get better at developing the robust systems necessary for autonomous and semi-autonomous probes.

I know this is a swift kick in the nut sack for all those astronaut wannabes in the air force out there, but frankly, the quickest way to get meat bags somewhere else is to have a bunch of mechanical devices head out there first and build the infrastructure necessary to support meat bags. The sheer inefficiency of manned space exploration is phenomenal, and if it is going to have a place, it's gotta come after we've laid the necessary groundwork with unmanned probes.

The idea that anyone can make a living directly off of content generation is going to be a particularly quaint 20th century phenomenon as the years go by. Even without the corporate driven market disruption, content creators of the present and the future continue to face increasing competition from the heartless and cold past.

Eventually, and soon, content generation for pay is going to be something primarily sponsored by wealthy patrons, rather than the mass media buying public.

For consumers, the difficulty will be deciding which content to view, not which content they can afford.

...and I've got no idea what the internet looks like to mere mortals anymore.

I'm almost afraid to turn it off and see just how bad it's gotten out there.

Back in 2012, the average rate was 9.26%

http://clarityray.com/Content/...

I have to imagine adblocking has only gotten more common since.

Does it really take that much to predict that if you breed horse in pens with 3 foot ceilings and keep them in them all the time, in a few generations you are going to get short horses ?

Only if the tall horses are unable to breed in that environment. You might get tall horses that have sex laying down.

Apply selective pressures to the plants you grow, seeding the ones you want for durability, taste, color...lather, rinse repeat.

The real challenge would be to predict what natural selective pressures might exist in any given environment - even if you're looking at a constant geography, anything from weather, or even other life forms, can provide unpredictable selective pressures that will nix your prediction.

...on the one hand, this is going to mean more candidates for job openings I have. On the other hand, Microsoft and Nokia are certainly using this opportunity to get rid of bottom performers...

Both of those numbers are huge hits, and I'm sure they're losing some good talent along with the bad, but sifting through to figure out which is which is going to be a real challenge.

...looks like the free market worked this time?

Offer made without government interference...offer rejected without government interference...

Or does someone think that Rupert Murdoch can just force Time Warner to take the deal?

,,,the Commerce Clause.

It seems that the federal government isn't satisfied with imposing its will on every state in the union, but once something touches the united states, even only tangentially, we apparently have jurisdiction there too :)

Government isn't the answer, it's the problem.

streisandeffect.com

I guess our problem is that we haven't been able to accurately discern between *publishing* and *publishing something useful*. We've built an economy based on how many papers you can shove through the system, without regard to their quality. Build a system with certain incentives, and you'll get fairly predictable outcomes.

It seems like it would take some pretty severe sanctions, and perhaps bounties for those who exposed fraud, before it will really stop.

...but we've only got a "shortage" of it if we think we have a shortage of K-5 Basketball Polishers as well.

Just because it's possible for a job to exist, doesn't mean that there needs to be a certain amount of those jobs.