"The Peter Principle", yeah, my uncle bought this book when it was "new", when he was studying his MBA. A good read.

Also in the book was "Peter's Parry", with parry having the meaning "to dodge". If you know you're going to suck in the higher role, how do you back off? Sadly, there's also a huge bias against people knowing their skill set limitations and saying no. "How can you refuse a promotion?!!??".

Another solution is parallel tracks. If you don't want to promote your developer into a management track (going from technical skills to more organizational and people skills) what's a parallel track for promoting her as an engineer? Senior engineer is bandied around a lot, but how about architecture roles, platform evangelist, etc, to keep them in roles with skill sets closer to what they've shown.

To be honest, you should be glad you got out with just $50. I'm in a location where Comcast is pretty much my only option (thanks FCC) and I feel I'm getting hosed for more than that on every bill.

Rebates have other purposes.

One differentiation from a normal plain price cut is info. In this case, you're a Comcast customer and they have said info, but in the general buying-from-a-store sense its a good source of buyer info. if i bought, say, a ShopVac and I had a mail-in rebate, then ShopVac has the name and mailing address of a ShopVac customer. They're now free to use that information in certain ways, such as junk mail, sending me mail for add-ons, etc.

Second is price discrimination. If somebody wants to give me 200 for this, I don't want to get in his way. If someone will only pay 150, well, I have a 50 rebate card he can send in for. There's some effort in the rebate card and maybe the guy who paid 200 loses the receipt or just doesn't want to bother with mailing it in. That's an extra 50 for the seller, called producer surplus.

Back when Joel Spolsky wrote more, he had an excellent primer on pricing. It's written from a producer point of view, but it's a a good read for consumers as well. If you know about producer surplus, you know where you can start negotiating on prices as a buyer.

Im a white guy, so take any "I know how to solve diversity problems" with a grain of salt, but one reason I'm able to be in tech is scholarships and grants.

I didn't have a lot of money growing up, and once I got to college, a state school since i couldn't afford much else, I got a free ride from grants and scholarships. Since then, I've paid years and years of taxes in payroll tax, house tax, sales tax, etc. Back then, i noticed a lot more diversity in my classes. I got my first job as a reference from a Mexican engineer who knew another Mexican engineer at the place I'd end up working. I sublet from two other Mexican engineers that went to Motorola There were a few black electrical engineers, a few female CEs, etc.

Now, it's very very expensive to go to school. If you were just on the "hey, i can barely afford to go to college" divide before, you're now on the no-I-sure-can't other side. In the US, who's more likely to be on the bad side of the can-I-afford-college question? Minorities. It's not Bull-Connor-with-a-firehose racism, but it's a filter on minorities, an extra burden on just some of us that skews numbers. And that will carry over to the next gen. Those who can't become engineers now will likely have less well paying jobs, less good school systems for their kids, and less money for kids tuition. Cycles are had to break and you really need to stop them as early as you can.

Not sure how "announcement of website to allow people to walk away" leads into refusal. Oh, it must be seamless? Are you an engineer? Do you realize the complexity of decoupling two things? If you mix salt and sugar into a bowl, are you then evil when you say you can't divide them?

Please explain how iPhone corporate is supposed to know when you drop a SIM into another phone? Or are you supposed to call Apple if you move SIMs now? Which will lead to people complaining about how Apple is being a speedbump into moving SIMs from one phone to another.

This is more complex than people think. Apple doesn't do itself favors sometimes when it hides complexity. This is one such time. People think there's some Illuminati thing going on, when complexity is just hard.

Jokes aside, but I've been doing HTTP/web stuff since 1994 or so, I'm very familiar with telnet hostname 80 :) I've even sent HTTP .9 requests for a production server.

Anyone have NCSA Mosaic for a Commodore 64?

Thanks Apple for SMS service hijacking!

I think Occam's razor applies here. You can either read it as "EVIL APPLE, take over SMS to screw people OVER!!!!!" or you can read it as "Apple tried to make imessage a seamless extension on SMS, and got them a little too intermixed". I kind of see it more as the latter. Witness this with the issue with SMS/google account intermixing in Google Hangouts.

No one cared when Romney rolled out Romneycare in his own state.

Even better than that.

Originally, the idea of the ACA it came from the hyper conservative Heritage Foundation. It follows conservative values, in that people are responsible for providing somewhat for their own heath care, instead of dumping it on the ER. Once Obama rolled it out, the Heritage Foundation railed against their own plan, calling it unAmerican.

Romney enacted a version of the ACA, and thought it was one of the cornerstones of his governorship - many feel that the bill that is on his desk in his official governor's portrait was ACA/Obamacare/Romneycare. Yet he ran against it when Obama came out with his version. I kind of wish that Obama had called on Romney to defend ACA in front of the Supreme Court. At the time, Romney was the executive with the most success with the ACA, it would have been funny to see if he stuck to his guns or talked about how horrible his own plan was.

I read that Mississippi, long a horrible state when it came to people's health, liked the ACA/Romneycare. In 2007, they tried to get ahead of the curve and enact their own state insurance exchanges. A couple years later, when it became an Obama initiative they crushed it, both losing the money spent, and money possibly coming from the feds. Anything to not have a Democratic Party victory/Obama victory.

I had heard this too, in a Probate Case. It really works well when you have things of asymmetrical value. Dividing money is easy. Figuring out the relative worth of baseball cards to a rug wasn't so much in the Probate case.

Because it was put to sleep by "The Phantom Menace"

-- Stephen Colbert

One of the most f**ked countries is Liberia. Founded by the US, the capitol is Monrovia, as in James Monroe, 'Merican President. It's been screwed for a while, partially because of western intervention. They are paying, in money and in lives. They don't have the capital to support a huge antiviral campaign in the scale that is needed in the time scale that is needed.

The US is not the sole reason for Liberia being f**ked. It's not even the main reason. But it is part, and since we do have a partial responsibility, we should have a partial responsibility to help their current crisis. We're not (yet) paying in lives in the scale that Liberia is, but we can pay in capital.

True. And the Titanic wasn't a navigation fault - too fast for conditions, bad design, and substandard steel plates. Hubris trumps tech most of the time.

Im going to respond to this, and then drop myself from this thread. We can have our own flame war elsewhere. I think we both see the world so differently that we're not going to convince each other of much, and we'll bore the slashdot readers that are not us.

You say you don't want quotas and then you talk about what is and is not a good mix.

Not a contradiction. We're arguing different semantics here. Quota, as usually used in diversity, is a required number, a required percentage. We both agree that a required number is bad. I argue that you still must have metrics. Just as anything at your work, you need to see current status and are to be able to make adjustments. You differ on this part, which is fine, but I have no contradiction. if you want to argue that the definition of "quota" is does not, as commonly used, have a requirement, it's just a percentage measurement, then fine, but my argument is the same, with different words.

I am not my race or my sex.

You are not SOLELY your race or gender. I agree with that. But part of your personality is defined by that. Not 100%, and the percentage differs from individual to individual. But it does define a part of you. Your personality is based on those experiences you find so marvelous in yourself. Those experiences have as part other people in them. In this world, how people act towards you is defined by your race and gender. This is baked into humans, as we see chimps make clans and war and all that. We too make clans, sometimes based on race and gender. To argue otherwise, i feel, is a bit naive. A big part of how the world acts towards you is race and gender. A big part of your personality is therefore based on race and gender. Not all, but a chunk.

If you have a room full of people who have a myriad of qualities but all have the same "white male" qualities, then there is a huge part missing, because no one will have the parts that are black, or female. There's a hole there. You may not think the hole is important, that's fine. but others do. And you're arguing that hole doesn't exist, which i think is an error.

If you filled a room with white guys you are very unlikely to have even ONE guy like me.

As said before in both my grandparent post, and above, this is both true and irrelevant. You will have some common white male characteristics, to a varying degree with each man there, but none will have the black or Asian or female characteristics. We are trying to capture those missing experiences. That you have additional very cool features is good for some level of diversity, but not the types of experiences we're talking about.

I am no more my race then I am my height.

Ask a little person if height doesn't affect things. hard to drive a car, hard to shop, people act differently towards you. How people act towards you affects your personality. Ask a guy 6'8" on how to design airline seats. Your experiences help you design a world that fit more of us than one with just guys of normal height.

Race and gender are moronic ways to classify people.

True, but it's what humans do. If you want to solve real world problems you have to consider what humans actually do in this world, which means the moronic reaction to race and gender. In the US (which I'm assuming you're from for some reason) race is also tied tightly to socioeconomic stratum.

Race is totally meaningless

Tell that to Trayvon Martin's parents. Or the people of Ferguson Missouri. See above for what I believe should happen (race is meaningless) vs what has happened (Rodney King, poll tax, etc).

I've Bloviated way too long and beginning to wear out my welcome. Please read Bomb the Suburbs by William "Upski" Wimsatt if you can. It's about a white boy who at one point thought pretty much as you did, but then realizing that being a white guy gave him a tailwind that helped him over the years.

This obessession with sex and race quotas are counter productive if your goal is better work. If you want greater diversity then look for a diversity of talent, mentality, and psychology.

The quota thing is (or should be) a red herring when it comes to things like this.

You don't force absolute numbers, by quotas. In the world this should be, you measure what your mix currently is, and if it's not a good mix, you work to better that mix. You have an engineering firm, and you don't see enough women. Do you have a minimum quota for women? No, you sponsor engineering events for women. You have a mentorship program for girls in school. You buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms kits and have a Robot-off at your daughter's school. You work. You grind. You realize that you need to till the soil a bit to get the benefits that you've been enjoying.

The trick with diversity is, it feeds on itself. if you work at it now, long term it will kind of work itself out. Daughters see their mom working as engineers. Black kids see their dads work as programmers. Down the road you see the numbers hit the target without you doing anything at all.

Sadly the idea that a corporation might do something to help the world and not focus solely on next months' balance sheet seems to be an anathema now.

But quotas are easier, so people just do quotas. People who want true diversity rail against quotas. They help, but they do harm as well. Someone in a position over their head doesn't do as much pulling in new people. Part of the cycle is network. Anne brings in Brenda, brings in Cathy. If Anne sucks, she's not going to be able to pull in Brenda. You want Anne to be good, so you get that good cycle going where it just works itself out.

And as a white guy myself, I think you're getting it wrong on diversity. I can say I'm 1 in 1,000,000 myself (we can have a unique-off later). But how unique you are is irrelevant. It means that your ONE set of viewpoints is unique. Diversity is having multiple sets of viewpoints, each unique, each with some validity. After the Trayvon Martin incident, people were talking about smartphone apps for black teenagers. One was a GPS map of gang territory so they wouldn't get shot walking home. Another was an app, like a deadman's switch, to contact friends in case of being shot or arrested. Do you, as a unique white man, have that experience to need and write those apps? Does your team of 5 white guys have the ability to write the GPS gang territory app? My guess is you've never though of it. You've been lucky, you never had to worry about it. But my sister has a bullet in her back from a gang drive by, A GPS app of gang territory with warnings about gang colors may have helped her way back then, though she doesn't even have a smartphone now.

I think white guys (such as me) can't really talk about how cool they are. It's like a drunk guy trying to detect if you can drive. Always remember that the even if you think you're good and can walk straight, your idea of "straight" is coming from an intoxicated perspective.