Comment Re:Oh! (Score 1) 305
If BASIC was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for...oh, no, wait...
Three seems a bit extreme/stupid. 8 or so, under close supervision, sounds reasonable to me though.
Some of this is cultural. My father was an electrical engineer, so I learned about how to wire stuff up (and about not touching the wrong wires!) and use a soldering iron and an engineer's tools from about age 4, bit by bit. He had learned the same from his father, who was in the same business. Around that time, we lived out in the fen country of eastern England, so in summer I was allowed head off with the other 4/5/6/7yr olds in the village down to the disused canal lock to go swimming. The older kids who could swim kept an eye on the younger ones, and no-one ever had any trouble. This was all pretty much regarded as normal in England of the 1950s. It never made me a leader, but I know how to swim, and I can fix stuff so it works, which seems to baffle a lot of people (not
We pair up the salesguys with a "presales engineer" who is much more techie and a product expert but less responsible for the relationship.
I spent several years as presales tech support, going out on calls with some of the best sales people in the business at the time. My job was to ensure that we knew what the client actually wanted (surprising how many of them didn't really know), and also to make sure the salesperson didn't promise something we couldn't deliver.
I learned a lot about sales from this, including the fact that as a salaried engineer, you won't get any cut of the sales commission no matter how much you contributed to the sale. At which point I left the company and went elsewhere
It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time.
Nonsense. Wave was just a threaded BB, much inferior to a News client, but graphical, so therefore cooler.
First of all, private organizations would have no incentive to build roads to nowhere.
Bullshit. Private corporations are no better at making decisions than are the institutions of government; they can just do it in secrecy, and cover up its after-effects better. The history of corporations is littered with the evidence of crassly stupid decisions taken by people whose heads are so far up their asses they might just as will climb up in after them and disappear. Just like government institutions.
It's goverments, not corporations, that kill people by the tens of millions.
Only war between governments kills on the 10,000,000 scale, but industrial accidents, corporate carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would easily kill at the 1,000,000 scale. Government accidents, carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would probably kill at the 1,000 level.
...the FDA is prohibiting beef producers from testing every single animal for mad cow disease
And just whose pockets is the FDA in? The meat producers'. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
Do you know how many people the FDA kills every year by keeping drugs off the market that are saving lives in other countries?
The same applies. Big Pharma likes it this way because it increases profits.
Insurance is one of the most regulated industries we have, that's why it's so insanely expensive.
It's so regulated because without the regulations, hardly anyone would get insurance for anything, and those who did would never have any claim allowed, just like it was in the good old days before regulation. It's so insanely expensive because the judges keep awarding insanely large sums as "compensation". The solution isn't to withdraw regulation, it's to replace the judges with some who have some common sense.
Every regulation raises the barrier to new competition, and drives up the cost of insurance policies.
No, every regulation blocks another insurance company from shafting another customer. Left alone, they will repudiate every claim and hang you out to dry.
It wasn't always this way, google for "lodge doctors" if you want to learn how we once had medicine within just about everybody's reach,
In the days when the medical fraternity still had some shreds of decency and humanity left, they did indeed provide healthcare at affordable prices. But once they started being paid 10x or 100x the average, they became too used to the extra money to be bothred their ass about caring for the poor and needy. (There are of course some notable exceptions, I'm happy to say; doctors who still regard the Hippocratic Oath with some degree of reverence.)
until government intervened to make it as expensive as possible.
And who voted in the governments who did this? The US population. And who paid for the campaigns of the politicians thereby elected? Good ol' American industry.
It's not the cops' job to keep us safe
Actually, in a civilised country, it is. The United States is an exception in that regard. In some countries they are called civic guards, and their job is to protect the people from the government.
Regulation is the mantra of the robber barons, because it's regulation that protects them from competition.
Right. Corporations love to pay politicians to regulate in favor of Business. Privatization is the mantra of extreme right-wing fascist fundamentalist nutcases and crackpots who believe corporations inherently do a job better than the state. Privatizing prisons or the police, for example, is utter lunacy because the corporations' objectives are profit, not the control of offenders or the protection of society.
Stand on the backs of the workers, demanding that they fruit of their labors be taken away and given to others... this is also known as slavery.
No, it's called Capitalism.
Your computer account is overdrawn. Please see Big Brother.
