Unfortunately, the hard part of every subsequent interview with other employers is "So what happened at company X? You were fired, right?"
I've been through what the author is describing, but in an on-site office position. It's horrid. They're exactly right on how these processes poison all other interactions. My boss would call me in to ask if I was going to the company picnic, but the history meant that every "Hey, can you see me in my office real quick?" was a gut-wrenching terror moment, certain that I was getting fired or told off again, or something.
It's easier to deal with than you think. Don't outright admit to a firing when the question comes up. I'm not saying make something up on the fly, because they'll smell the bullshit, but think of how you can spin your termination in a positive light. Leaving because a project was completed/cancelled or company priorities changed is generally seen positively, even if the truth is you were fired from one of those jobs for being incompatible with the rigors of the role.
If you're just coming out of a firing, the worst thing you can do is have a mea culpa moment of clarity when you're negotiating for your bottom line. You'll get the old standard, "thanks for your time", and away they go to the next person, who may have also been fired, but bent the truth in their favor to get the job.
A classic response to this is "Did anybody consider the economic impact on ferriers when the demand for horses goes down?"
And yeah, there are people projecting such impacts, but overall it's usually considered valuable to innovate. Some jobs will inevitably be left behind as older tech becomes obsolete. There's been a few different ideas on how to solve this problem, but none of them are perfect.
The money-making part of a gas station for most of the last century has almost always been the convenience store, not the gas pumps. People will still need restroom breaks and quick snacks in an electric car present/future.
> First, the language was not designed to do what people are trying to use it for
Against this point: Few languages are used for what they were designed for. Java was designed as a control language for "smart" TVs. PHP was designed for making personal homepages a little bit reactive. JS was designed for making client side pages dynamic.
And now all three are being used as server software.
That may have been an argument in setting the date, but Disney was the real driver of it. The reason it's 70 years after the death of the creator is because Mickey Mouse was in danger of becoming public domain again, so they added years to the law.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any instances of people committing murder for IP reasons.
> This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants.
Wrong.
The Centralia Mine fire has been burning since 1963.[1] The area of the mine is extremely dangerous, causing the city above to be seized by eminent domain and condemned. Poisonous, dangerously heated gases erupt from the ground at random. Chernobyl is reaching the point where the radiation levels are low enough for tourism. Centralia's mine fire will continue burning for up to 250 years. The released gasses will continue to contribute to atmospheric CO2 that entire time. The radiological components of coal combustion (radium gas being one) will continue to be released. It's already a known fact that coal power plants cause more radiation in the cities around them than nuclear plants do.
This is not the only mine fire in the state of Pennsylvania[2], let alone the only such site in the world.
As a consequence of the Centralia incident[1], a portion of Pennsylvania, USA has been rendered practically uninhabitable since 1963. The fire may continue burning for up to two hundred and fifty years. It is not the only persistent coal mine fire in that state, let alone worldwide.
I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of the Chernobyl incident or the dangers of nuclear accidents, but to provide context. Even ignoring the energy balance which show nuclear as being safer per KWH than any other tech (including wind and solar), even including the disasters of fukushima and chernobyl, Nuclear has been safer and less damaging to the environment than coal.
Wind and solar are great, I'd love to see more use and developments there. They can't compete with the energy density of coal, let alone atomics.
Exactly my thoughts. The headline "Boeing vows to beat Musk to Mars" literally translates to "Elon Musk wins". His whole goal in founding SpaceX was to foster competition in the stagnant space vehicle industry, just like the Tesla's purpose was to get other auto manufacturers to work on electric vehicles (and to convince consumers that EV doesn't mean it has to suck).
Just because one of his goals is to drive competition into the race to mars doesn't mean it's his only goal. I don't doubt he not only wants to speed up the race to mars but wants to be known as the first.
Those two sentences are contradictory. A swimming suit is not a boat, especially in "the most literal sense."
A suborbital manned spacecraft, OTOH, is a spaceship in every sense. (It's neither an orbital spaceship nor, say, an interplanetary spaceship, but it's definitely a spaceship.)
Saying they aren't is like saying a riverboat isn't a boat because it's not ocean-going.
For the moment, I suppose you can still make a case for casual use of the term "spaceship" to include suborbital flights. I doubt that will continue for very long as private orbital spacecraft and launch vehicles become less novel; the sub-orbital minor leagues probably won't be seen by most as being the "real thing".
Presumably because in this sense, the Mercury wasn't "his spaceship" as he didn't own it or the organization that produced it (like Gagarin and the Vostok, for that matter).
I'm not a Musk fanboy but I do have to admit, the minute a real, adult, aerospace company like Boeing lets Elon Musk set its direction for the future, he does win. The larger more mature company had the infrastructure in place for this for years, yet never considered it or took action on it; that makes them look timid and unoriginal. There's an analogous situation with the mainstream auto manufacturers and autonomous cars. They jump late onto a bandwagon they should've been piloting.
I still think it's a pie-in-the-sky project though. Musk compares the Mars initiative to building the Union Pacific Railroad, but the UPRR was heading somewhere full of plunder and gold, where the natives didn't even wear clothes because the weather's so nice. This operation's headed for... Mars, where for miles around, it TOTALLY SUUUUUUCKS SOOO BAD, as Louis CK might say.
Are we really so naive that we're just parroting whatever Musk's PR team says? Musk isn't doing this to further the human race, he's doing it to make money.
> 1. I would much rather Musk become rich by furthering humanity than someone making the next cat picture app
Agreed.
> 2. The companies are tackling some of the hardest problems and I think purely to make money he would have picked other easier problems to solve.
That's not necessarily true. Remember that Musk started with $165 million from sale of shares of PayPal when it was bought by eBay, so he could afford to wait a while for his companies to take off. When you have a large amount of money to invest and you're young, it makes sense to invest in things with a high up-front cost and long wait before you get a payoff--most companies aren't willing to take a risk on that kind of investment, and once it pays off, you own something with little competition and a long head start on your competitors.
And, incidentally, it puts Musk in the position of Silicon Valley's golden boy--which has numerous business advantages.
> 3. It is shortsighted to not embrace anyone pushing and striving for the important goals for humanity. Energy, transportation, space travel.
I agree, but we shouldn't do that naively. If we see Musk as being inherently good instead of as who he is, someone trying to make money, we'll be more likely to compromise our ethics because we view him as good.
Imagine a future where SpaceX sets up mines on the moon. This creates a situation where SpaceX has unprecedented control over a subset of its employees--they literally will die without the company's resources, because there aren't other options on the moon. If we naively trust Musk's intentions, we might let this happen without regulation and only add regulation after abuses for profit are discovered--which may be decades too late for the victims of the abuse. But if we realize that Musk is not ethically different from any other CEO, we will have the wisdom to preempt these kinds of problems with oversight.
Then he'd be doing more dotcom startups. Its obvious to most of us, that he's chosen the weird collection of industries he has, because of a bigger vision.
That's not necessarily true. Remember that Musk started with $165 million from sale of shares of PayPal when it was bought by eBay, so he could afford to wait a while for his companies to take off. When you have a large amount of money to invest and you're young, it makes sense to invest in things with a high up-front cost and long wait before you get a payoff--most companies aren't willing to take a risk on that kind of investment, and once it pays off, you own something with little competition and a long head start on your competitors.
And, incidentally, it puts Musk in the position of Silicon Valley's golden boy--which has numerous business advantages.
Having worked in childcare / early childhood education, I've seen it a lot. Kids younger than about 5 or 6 don't care. The boys love to play dressup and the girls love the sandbox with the toy cars. As they get older some start to fall into stereotypical gender roles... and even then it's usually obvious that they're learning from / being indoctrinated by their parents. My use of the word indoctrinated is only to indicate that sometimes these gender roles are passively learned from the parents example, but in some cases there are parents that actively enforce / teach their kids to follow gender roles. For example, I've seen a father, on arriving to collect his son, react almost with horror to see the boy in a skirt playing in the mock kitchen.
Cliche is the wrong word. Gender roles in society are a topic that spans many disciplines and has a whole lot of detail to discuss. They are a huge thing, and you're right: the gender role assigned to girls does prescribe for them a lot of child rearing practice. That said, after seeing what some kids will do to a baby doll, I can confidently assert that such play is no substitute for actual instruction.
I completely agree with you, except on the younger than 5 or 6 don't care part. Maybe don't care as much, but studies suggest that gendered socialization starts occurring before 18 months. I think that this indoctrination is more common than people realize (and realizing that it's likely happened to you can be a hard pill to swallow). Especially in areas like mine, where most families are single income, it seems like the girls are always playing with dolls, strollers, ovens.
It makes me very sad.
But people will argue that it's innate until they're blue in the face, and use it as examples to 'prove' that our brains are sexed.
Usually wrought iron, not cast iron. I have a blacksmith friend who made a large amount of iron nails when he was starting the trade, since it was good practice. He still makes them in demonstrations at Ren Faires. They're still used occasionally for horseshoes apparently, though that market from what I know has been using more and more mass-produced steel instead.
I've been through what the author is describing, but in an on-site office position. It's horrid. They're exactly right on how these processes poison all other interactions. My boss would call me in to ask if I was going to the company picnic, but the history meant that every "Hey, can you see me in my office real quick?" was a gut-wrenching terror moment, certain that I was getting fired or told off again, or something.