I don't know what the hell to think about Obama anymore. The guy we elected was smart, charismatic, capable, articulate; he ran a brilliant campaign that took out the heavily favored Hilary Clinton. He came across as a man with the intelligence, principles, and pragmatism to fix the nations problems... or at least not fuck it up as catastrophically as George W. Bush did. So where the hell did that guy go?

I remember the early Obama speeches when he wasn't just a speaker but an orator, he the fire of a black preacher... he had conviction. That was the inspiring thing about him. Yeah it was pretty words, but he seemed to really believe it. Now he just seems to mouth the speeches, like they're just empty words put there by his speechwriters. At times when people ask him questions he seems barely able to articulate an answer and to fumble for words... more and more, he's that barely-keeping-it-together guy we saw during the second debate against Romney. He seems dejected, run-down... and increasingly it seems like the administration can't do a damn thing right. They're as bad as Bush ever was on drone strikes and warrantless surveillance- worse, in fact- Guantanamo isn't shut, the VA is a clusterfuck, Iraq is falling apart again, the response to the Crimea was half-assed... and now this?

I still like the guy, as a person. I think he means well. But I get the impression that he's burned out, disengaged and depressed, that he spends his days staring at the ceiling of the Oval Office and counting the days until his Presidential Library opens and he gets to take lucrative speaking gigs. And that meanwhile, with the Commander in Chief checked out, the various special interests and agendas are having a field day, and doing what they do best- turning government of the people, for the people, and by the people into the plaything of moneyed special interests, the uber-rich, and the military-industrial complex. Anyway, that's my theory. I think he means well, and he came in trying to fight the machine, but it was one man against an entire machine. And the machine ultimately broke him.

I just want to double-check- are we absolutely, 100% positive that this is a legitimate news story, and not a leaked script for a sequel to Zoolander or the latest Austin Powers movie?

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/...

There is unquestionably a lot of wasteful military spending, but complete disengagement isn't necessarily the answer. If Obama had moved to support the Syrian moderates earlier- instead of just saying he'd support them and doing fuck-all- then perhaps the Syrian extremists wouldn't have taken over a third of Iraq. If Obama had negotiated to keep on troops in Iraq, perhaps the country wouldn't have fallen apart so quickly. If Obama hadn't completely walked away from Iraq, then maybe Maliki wouldn't have pushed the Sunnis out of power, leaving the country receptive to a takeover by Sunni militants. Powell's Pottery Barn principle also applies here: you break it, you buy it. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq. Ok, *certainly* we shouldn't have gotten involved. But we did; and it wasn't just a George Dubya Bush thing, pretty much the whole country either supported him, or else was indifferent enough to go along with it. Yes, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites goes back centuries... but under Saddam they weren't slaughtering each other. The fact that they are now is in large part due to U.S. intervention. As much as Obama and the rest of the U.S. would like to walk away from this disastrous mess, we got involved. We broke it, now we own it.

The idea that there's a technological fix for every problem is a very American attitude, and this idea seems particularly widespread in military circles. The fact of the matter is that the CIA is incompetent, and no amount of technology in the world can fix the fact that our intelligence agency is run by idiots. To cite just a few examples, the CIA screwed up on WMD in Iraq, failed to anticipate the Arab Spring, was caught off-guard by Putin's invasion of Crimea, and despite repeated warnings from the Kurds and others, failed to anticipate the recent moves by ISIS to take territory in Iraq. To be fair, predictions are hard, especially about the future. And it's hard to take credit for crises averted, or things that go on behind the scenes, so it may well be that the CIA occasionally does something right and we don't hear about it. All the same, these idiotic glasses seem to sum up everything that's wrong with the CIA. What next, will they try assassinating someone with an exploding cigar? Oh, wait...

True. He may not even be able to.

I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.

Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!

Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.

This is a problem in two ways. First, one of those groups- the leadership and administration- is in charge of determining how the pie is cut. Unsurprisingly, over time we find that the people who cut the pie end up with larger and larger slices, and the people doing the baking, rolling the dough, grinding the flour and cutting up the pumpkins (it is a pumpkin pie in our example, because I like pumpkin pie, and if you don't, you can write your own pie-based metaphor) get less and less. Good leadership and management are critical to the success of an organization, but administrative bloat just increases the paperwork and make life more difficult for everyone else. Now the guy rolling the dough has to fill out a bunch of forms and get a performance review, and the guy buying the flour has to go through a complicated procurement process instead of just going down to the store. So this creates inefficiency and waste within the university.

The other issue is the degree to which university education is itself wasteful. We're fed the line that we need more PhDs to be competitive. This is a vicious lie, spread by self-serving academics. One recent article found that only 15% of biology PhDs got a tenure-track job within 5 years of receiving their PhD. I don't know what the figure is these days, but I guarantee you that with the economic downturn and the surge of grad school enrollment after the financial crisis, that percentage went down. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system that rejects 85% of people and keeps only the 15% who are good if the cut is made early. The problem is that you're forcing people to invest 5-6 years in a PhD (perhaps on top of a couple years of MS), and then another 5 years as a postdoc... and then you're casting them off. Training up a bunch of people to do jobs they will never realistically get to do is exploitative, cruel, and wasteful. It reminds me of a parable told by Zhuangzi, about a student who paid a great deal to a teacher to be taught the art of dragon-slaying... he graduates only to find that there's no market for his highly specialized skills, because he can't find any dragons. Grad school is a lot like that.

Graduate school primarily exists to serve one need- not the need of a student for education, not the need of society for a highly educated workforce- the need of academia for cheap labor. Graduate students exist to help teach courses and run experiments, cheaply. They are the cheap, hard-working, moderately skilled migrant fruit-picker of academia. Recently I was given this advice on a grant proposal: don't hire a postdoc, they're expensive and if they're actually any good at all, they'll just try to get a job and leave. For the same price, you get two grad students, and they're guaranteed to stick around for the duration of the PhD. Great. So instead of throwing a lifeline to some dumb bastard of a postdoc who was stupid enough to go into academia, we're going to instead create two new people who will in a few years go on to compete with the first poor fuck in the impossible quest for a tenure track job. But the incentives are structured by the university and the granting agency so that we will end up doing just that.

That's my reward for being in the 15%. I get to go from being the exploited, to the exploitee. No longer a whore, but madam of my own whorehouse. Hopefully I'll still be able to look myself in the mirror in a few years. I try to rationalize what I'm doing by saying hey, at least I'm honest. I tell prospective students just what they're in for. I will never, ever say "in a few years there will be a lot of retirements, and a lot of jobs will become available". They've been saying that for 20 years, and they'll say it for another 20, and it will never, ever happen. And if I ever say that, please shoot me. But there's a problem. Grad students are naive. They're kids. They're young, dumb, idealistic; they think they're invincible. And this generation was told they're all specially uniquely wonderful, and the world exists to grant them their hearts' desire. You give them the reality- the world is cruel, the system is designed to exploit them, not to see them succeed- and they won't listen. It's the Lake Wobegon Effect: everyone is above average. Tell them that only 15% of the PhDs get that research job, and 85% of students think they'll be in the 15%. It's the remaining 15% of students who have the self-awareness to realize that they aren't necessarily going to get a job, they have hope.

No, read it as....
"Normally, stiffness and strength declines with the [decline in] density of any [single] material;" ...because of that follows next:
"that's why when bone density decreases, fractures become more likely."

In my department, the faculty work in a run-down, dilapidated old building. Offices are barely large enough to hold weekly meetings with undergraduates, and it's difficult to get the lab space you need to do research. Half a dozen postdocs and graduate students are crammed into a single office. The building is infrequently cleaned- the walls, bathrooms and offices are filthy- and they don't even empty the trash cans in the offices anymore. The workers went on strike to get something like a 1.5% annual raise- which is not a raise by any stretch of the imagination when you factor in inflation. It just means your salary isn't cut.

Meanwhile, administration gets a shiny fancy new building, with huge meeting rooms and offices, and the head of the university gets a big fat raise- and they were already paid about ten times what a starting faculty member would make.

A good administrator is worth their weight in gold. They make things happen, they facilitate research and teaching, and make it easier for everyone else to do their job. But bad administration... bad adminstration is like a parasite. They turn things around. Instead of supporting the university, they see the rest of the university as working to support them. Instead of focusing on doing groundbreaking research, they want faculty to get government grants which pay overhead- i.e., support for administration. Somehow, there's never enough for the people who actually make things happen. But there's always enough for the people at the top of the university hierarchy. It reminds me a lot of that scene in 'Animal Farm' where the milk goes into the pigs' slop;

My salary has been steadily increasing and I certainly haven't found that there are skilled developers sitting idle at home. I can collect a small fortune in placement fees, if only I know some out-of-work developers I wouldn't be ashamed to recommend.

The simple fact from where I am standing is: There is a lot of work and there are not enough skilled people to do it yet we are only using 50% of the population.

But the sector has a massive negative image. Not even so much anti-women as anti-human. If you don't fight for yourself you won't get raises by just doing a good job and managers will happily have you do 80 hours with no compensation if they can get away with it. So a LOT of good developers I know have started their own businesses to get out of the rat race. You really got to love coding to stay with it when you can make money in consulting.

But part of the problem is the gigantic hatred you see on this site and sites like tweakers any time a story of this kind comes up. "The girls are getting some money, UNFAIR!". Crybabies. There are tons of initiatives to promote coding in general, plenty of competitions if you so wish, plenty of events to visit often with booth babes. No booth boys.

Let it go! Or at least accept that if this news story makes your blood boil, you got issues. And your issues are poisoning your work place or are even the reason you can't find a job despite your leet skills.

Nobody with real skills fears competition. If you see a new employee as anything but "FINALLY, some HELP, here is ticket 1000-9999, I take the remaining 1 million until you are up to speed", you are not a developer, real developers don't have enough spare time to worry about their jobs.

I think you've got it; the intent is the key thing, and that's what's being overlooked here. The reason that the N-word is acceptable as term of endearment / generic pronoun / verb in African-American English is the intent. It's not that white people couldn't use the word in a way that was affectionate or neutral. In the time of Huckleberry Finn, for example, it was roughly equivalent to saying "some black dude". But times have changed and in recent history, it is almost always used as a derogatory term by white people. That's why the apparent double-standard exists. When a black person says the word they mean one thing, when a white person says it they almost always mean something different- it's meant to belittle, hurt, marginalize. It's not that it can't be a good word when used by a white person, it's just that 99 times out of 100, it's used with an evil intent.

Getting back to the Redskins... what's the intent here? Sports names are totems. The team choosing the name is looking for a name that conveys things like strength, power, pride, or other virtues. NFL teams include lots of predatory animals- the Bears, Lions, Falcons, Panthers, Bengals, Jaguars, Colts, Broncos, Rams, and Eagles. They also include groups of people- Vikings, Buccaneers, Raiders, Chiefs, Redskins- known for their fighting prowess. Certainly in the past, the name has been used hurtfully. But using it for a team name means something different- it's meant to invoke qualities like strength, courage and independence, and the ability to kick the other guys' ass. Whatever else people have said of Native Americans over the years, I don't think anyone has ever disputed their fighting abilities.

Last point... give me a fucking break here with all the political correctness. I'm part Native American and all Democrat, I couldn't possibly care any less about the Washington Redskins. And you know what? It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, either. If you've ever been to a native reservation you'll see the real crime. Years ago I visited the Navajo Nation and what I saw was that there were lots of people with few employment opportunities, without running water or electricity or phones, high levels of alcoholism, and crime... a Third World nation in the middle of the most powerful country on earth, only with fewer opportunities than many Third World nations. The crime isn't what we CALL Native American peoples, it's how we treat them. If you really want to make a difference, stop whining about football teams and call attention to the way Native Americans have been and are being treated. I think that goes the same for everyone else. Who cares if you never use an ethnic slur, if you go about oblivious to the inequalities in our society? Getting rid of racist words doesn't make us less racist, it just makes it easier to forget about the real crimes perpetrated against minorities.

This treatment is a huge step forward. Finally- mice that can recognize sarcasm.

Low carbohydrate diets may have benefits for the brain as well. They are now recognized as a powerful tool for treating epilepsy and there are reports that in cases it can actually cure the disorder. Some people with bipolar II have found that low carbohydrate diets can be more effective than drugs for managing the disorder. There is also evidence that low-carbohydrate diets can be used to treat Alzheimer's.

The disturbing implication here is that if switching from a high-carbohydrate Western diet can fix brain disorders, then maybe the Western diet and in particular low-fat diets are causing a lot of these problems in the first place. Certainly there's not much evidence that cutting fat out of diets has made us any healthier.

Me too! :D Ignore the cowards.