Well, since you can't read a dictionary, here you go:

Creative (noun)
1) one who is creative; especially : one involved in the creation of advertisements
2) creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising

I assume he was going with the first meaning.

I will absolutely turn down a position if they care so little about their employees and their productivity to give them substandard equipment. I am never going to sit around for a spinning disk hard drive to load my applications again, or deal with a computer with under 16 GB of RAM. If a company is going to complain about $1000 in yearly hardware purchases so I can have a new laptop every three years, two decent monitors, and noise cancelling headphones, how are they going to treat me as an employee? When I am approached for a job I take effort to notice the quality of the equipment I see their current employees using. I have never seen an employee with bad equipment treated well by their employer, and rarely see employees with amazing equipment treated poorly.

Perhaps you don't have trouble attracting employees, but if you treat your employees poorly you will have trouble attracting good employees. Most people have never worked at a company where almost all their coworkers are top notch, so they don't even know what they are missing.

And regardless of a company's respect of their employees, it is simply unproductive to give people slow hardware. Shaving $500 per year in hardware costs per employee is less than 1% of even a low paid IT worker. I have seen the result of 4 year old laptops that weren't even top of the line when they were new. It involves a lot of wasted time waiting for apps to load and dealing with constant crashes or reboots.

While I do agree this is the most likely solution, it is not a fact that this will be necessary. Increasing research and education spending would have a positive impact on our economy. A better economy increases tax revenue, which could balance the budget without cutting any programs. The Clinton administration did not balance the budget by being fiscally conservative, they just rode the wave of the technology boom (although it is debatable if the budget was every truly balanced). A new technology wave from the biotech sector, to pick one possible example, could have a similar effect in the near future. But only if we spend the necessary research dollars.

The way things are going now it is becoming more likely that another country will take advantage of the next technology boom, not the US.

How does social welfare spending have anything to do with whether military spending should be cut? My spending on a new tablet, phone, and computer every other year is dwarfed by my mortgage, grocery bill, and car/life/health insurance payments. But if I lost my job, I would skip buying the iPad Air 3 long before I would skip paying my mortgage.

Military spending as a percentage of our total budget is not that important. US military spending as a percentage of worldwide military spending is much more important. I would still feel quite secure if our military budget was twice that of the 2nd highest spender in the world, and that would still cut our military spending by over 40%. It would also allow us to increase NASA funding by 15x its current level, although I wouldn't advocate putting all of the savings there.

Thousands of people die in the US from the flu each year. Tens of thousands during years when H3N2 variants are prevalent. Since only a few Americans have died from Ebola this year, it is quite likely that a thousand or even close to ten thousand times more Americans die from the flu this year than from Ebola.

I think its safe to say the flu will kill more Americans this year than Ebola will this century, or more likely this millennium.

Well color me identifiably disappointed. We had better discussions from Slashdot posts than Gladwell gave in this interview.

I am curious of how these interviews are run. I assumed the questions are compiled and then sent to the interviewee who then has as much time to respond as he needs. That way he can provide a thoughtful and complete response since there would be no further dialogue.

But Gladwell's answers are what you would expect during a back and forth discussion. This is what you would find in an in-person interview where the interviewer asks follow-up questions and starts a meaningful dialogue. But without further questions, each of these responses are hollow and meaningless. I am very disappointed, because while I don't agree with everything Gladwell writes he at least is normally thought provoking.

He doesn't necessarily have to take a managerial role, but he does have to understand he will probably reach a relatively low ceiling of pay / responsibilities if he doesn't. One man can only be so valuable with only his own labor. Taking on managerial roles allows skilled people to become a force multiplier, which increases their value.

But if someone is willing to cap out at around $125k (Chicagoland salary) then they can continue being a purely technical resource until retirement if they are really good and keep learning.

Of course toddlers are socialized to desire given things based on sex. It starts within days of birth. Girls are in the pink clothes, boys are in the blue clothes. Girls are more commonly told "you are so pretty" and boys are more commonly told "you are so smart." Girls get a princess castle, boys get a truck. The very fact that Babies R Us even has a boys and girls section for infants and toddlers shows the socialization starts that young.

I'm not saying socialization is the only reason boys and girls are different, but saying toddlers are immune to this socialization is dishonest.

You could still vote for individuals. When they hand out seats to the parties based on proportions, the individuals with the most votes in that party would get the seats.

That is exactly the point the guy was trying to make. They won't do it for minimum wage, which is all they would get because companies are used to having an almost infinite supply of migrant labor. But once pay starts to hit $20-$25 per hour, people would flock to the job. I have a high school friend who works as a garbage man making $70k per year with an amazing pension. He would never do the job for $10/hr, but there was a high enough salary that got him to choose the career.

While that is true for the vast majority of tech workers, for those top 5% of tech workers everyone wants this often isn't the case. The people designing and architecting large enterprise systems or creating new products in start-ups have as much or even more responsibility than their managers. When I am consulting for large corporations any managers under C-level are just window dressing compared to their systems architects. I'm sure those directors make a much larger salary, however.

Acceptable salary ranges and standards of living are very subjective. You could just as easily say that anyone who is making enough money to feed their family shouldn't be dissatisfied when almost a billion people on the planet are starving (including 50 million even in America who are considered food insecure).

The poster you are referring was not only dissatisfied, he also correctly took the steps necessary to correct the problem. So he isn't just some person complaining about his lot in life. Now the only thing he is upset about is that skilled STEM workers have to move to other job roles to make the money he thinks they deserve. I tend to agree with him. As long as you believe his story, it seems even now that he has a $300k salary position he still feels he was as useful in his old role as he is in his new role (or else he shouldn't have been dissatisfied with his old salary).

No one is saying self driven cars are going to be gone immediately after autonomous cars are common. It will take decades before most of them are off the roads. Your old beater probably won't make it another 30 years, and if it does it will be the exception. If the predictions made in the article start coming true, you will start to find it hard to even find a house with a garage. Regulations stopping you from parking a car on the street will become as common as regulations stopping you from stabling your horse on the street. Within 50 years the vast majority of people would simply have no place to keep a car.

That is if renting cars becomes as ubiquitous as the article suggests.

Human drivers will probably exist on the same roads as autonomous cars for many decades, perhaps even forever. Cars started becoming common at about 1900, and by the early 1910s cars outnumbered horse buggies, but horse buggies were still being used in the 1930s. It will likely be the same with autonomous cars. Even after driverless cars are common, it will probably take at least a couple decades for the majority of cars to not require drivers.

I am on the side of people who just enjoy driving. I miss the mustang I gave up when I had children, and I still refuse to own a sedan with under 250 hp because it would be boring. But just how early cars where that much better than horses, autonomous cars will be too practical to not take over.

Once the home renovations start the change will become even more dramatic. There may not be any use for garages even in suburban homes, as a quick text could get you a car within minutes. Garages may become as common as stables within 50 years.

1) It was also the result of the government funding a massive push to educate the workforce in the post-secondary education system. If you look at 1910, which was an era where big business was running things, 2.7% of the population was college educated. By 1990 it was almost double that.

The notion that industrious people created the middle class is laughable. It was clearly a partnership between the public sector which educated the workforce and the private sector that took this new workforce and created a booming economy.

2) You seem to have some belief that the ruling class is different than the industrious people you keep mentioning. Politicians and business owners make up the ruling class.

3) Yes, government regulations clearly have their costs. There is no such thing as a system with no drawbacks. But any system without regulations is going to turn into an oligarchy in short order.

4) No, we trade liberty for comfort all the time, and it is a good thing. Absolute statements are almost always ridiculous. We trade some liberties to create functioning societies because those societies give us more benefits than the few liberties we gave up.

5) If you think work is not a burden you must never have done back breaking labor. Some work is most definitely a burden.