Benjo

Maybe I'm too cynical or listen too much to the Lessig crowd, but I think ignoring campaign contributions is naive. The government does see the problem, or at least individuals in the government do. But what politician wants to stand up for this and risk potential campaign contributions, knowing they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass legislation anyway?

One can look at this conflict two ways: 1) the politician's personal gain versus the overall benefit to the country or 2) short term benefit of immediate legislation versus long term benefit of future legislation versus reelection. Viewpoint 1 is more cynical and viewpoint 2 is more naive. In reality, it's a spectrum and each legislator has to make both tradeoffs in addition to their personal beliefs and understanding of the system. But, in my opinion both these tradeoffs are bad for the efficiency of an economy. This conflict of interest is the root cause of problems like this and discussion of solutions is almost pointless if we're not trying to address that root cause.

A female coworker who was also a close friend of mine sent me an issue, asking me if it was related to an issue I had debugged. It was, and the issue was not assigned, so I took it and closed it as duplicate.

She was pissed. She wanted to know if it was a simple issue so she could assign it to herself, close it easily and get credit for it. (Not that our group really used that as a performance metric.) She actually said to me: "That was really unprofessional you ass!" I tried to gently suggest that she might be taking it too personally. If I had realized she wanted to close the issue herself, I probably would have let her. I just closed it myself because it was faster.

Later she told me that she had read in a book that women tend to become more emotionally invested in their work than men do. I told her I was glad she had read that in a book.

I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, I read Introvert Advantage, both of which were informative. But mostly I watched a lot of videos by Lance Mason. He has a background as an engineer, so he was able to express social concepts in a way that made a lot of sense to me.

I ended a relationship recently, partly because we had huge communication issues. Her thoughts were always close to the surface, I tended to think about things for hours before finding the courage or words to express ideas that were important to me. When I finally managed to say out loud what I'd been mulling over, she didn't always take me very seriously or even let me finish my thought before jumping in with hers. This of course made it even harder to open up to her again. I tried earnestly to explain to her that I needed quiet time daily to process my thoughts and that interruptions were lethal to my ability to communicate. In the end she never seemed to accept that this was a fundamental part of my personality and not some excuse I was giving her. Often she would make sarcastic comments like "Have you had enough quiet time today?" These relatively innocuous comments hurt me more than most of our arguments, simply because it communicated to me that she truly didn't understand me or what I needed to be happy. Maybe we could have established that communication, but the relationship had gone on too long for that kind of refactoring.

After the relationship ended, I suddenly had ten times the social energy. I thought I was burnt out of performing comedy, but suddenly had more then enough energy. I took the time to study social skills and took a hard look at my life and my emotional state. It became clear to me that being introverted had closed me off to not only her, but to all my friends and even family. I realized that my closest friends actually made me LESS social, simply because of the attitudes they held towards meeting new people and society in general.

So I started cutting them out of my life. I began a new effort of being more social. I limited my "deep thought introverted" time to when I was actually alone. When I was socializing, I made sure that I extroverted the entire time. If I felt the urge to check my phone or zone out of the conversation, I recognized that my energy had run out, excused myself and left. I made new friends who viewed me as a social, outgoing person. Their expectations of me helped my momentum. I forced myself to be open with people. I ignored my tendency to withhold personal information, embarrassing stories, or questions that might make me look stupid. I started bantering more with coworkers that I hadn't been close to before. I started reinforcing the believe that I shouldn't feel the need to hide anything about myself.

I was a little confused by the new amounts of social energy I had. My girlfriend had taken up a lot of my time, but after our breakup, I was able to maintain a schedule with at least twice the social hours as previously. Where was I getting all this energy? I realized that what was draining me wasn't being social, it was being uncomfortable. It was the awkward situations, not social situations in general, that were sapping my energy. I couldn't tell the difference because I was in a situation where 90% of my social interactions were uncomfortable for one reason or another. In my relationship, I was constantly worried about giving her the time she wanted to spend with me while giving my time to process my thoughts and work on projects. In general, I was always trying to follow a train of thought in my head, even when out with friends, or in a meeting, or in a friendly conversation, instead of being present and happy to interact with someone else.

The biggest benefit to this change in my life has been the increased sensitivity to my own emotional state, including how much control I had over my own happiness at any given time by means of my own posture, facial expression and state of mind. I realized that just wearing a stupid grin on my face made my happier than any of my academic or professional accomplishments. It was as if my introversion had muted me to my own emotional state. I began to recognize that humans are essentially emotional antennas. Evolution has conditioned us to subcommunicate volumes of information to each other. The emotional state of a person is broadcast and received by everyone around them. Extroverts are much more sensitive to this than introverts. Suddenly I realized why smalltalk, politeness, and so many other things I had never given much value were so important. Other people felt the effects of these things a hundred times more than I had. And they couldn't help it anymore than I could help being introverted.

The reverse of this is also true, by learning to recognize this, I began to pick up much more how other people were feeling. Connecting with people and making them happy begin to give me as much satisfaction as I've ever had from programming or making something work. I'm beginning to reconsider whether technical work is good for my emotional state, or if I am even cut out to be happy while doing it.

Am I truly an introvert? Yes, I still believe I am pretty strongly introverted by nature. Do I think all introverts are closed off? No. I think most introverts, even those more introverted than me, are more successful than I was at maintaining at least a few close friendships. I do believe that learning how to be comfortable in ones own skin is critical to being a happy person. I certainly didn't give this problem nearly as much attention as I should have. If you take anything away from this, I hope that you will consider if you should be giving it more attention in your life as well.

I guess this version of the punchline could hit through a language barrier though?

The author left a follow-up comment:

my point isn't that that female coders aren't interested -- it's that I am not interested, and a lot of day-job-coders aren't interested

So regardless of your interpretation, she wasn't trying to speak for all women. Personally I think it's a stretch to draw that conclusion.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/119/

The government already provides incentives to individuals who don't murder people, and businesses who don't hire child workers. There's lots of profit to be made in building an army and stealing from others, but we discourage it as a society because it doesn't result in a net benefit. There are plenty of fines for fraud and other transactions that are deemed to be not in the best interest of society, no matter how much profit they generate for the actor. Where is the break-even point on this spectrum as far as you are concerned?

The winners are still picked by market forces. The losers are picked by the scientific evidence and the decision making processes of our democracy. The market is set up to penalize actors who take from the common good. "Subsidy" is a misnomer, think of it as a sumptuary tax or a fine. These taxes can be left in place indefinitely, since the goal is to discourage use.

In practice of course, goverment is too heavily influenced by those who currently happen to have the most resources. As a result, they are incapable of correctly evaluating the true value of immediate energy output versus future greenhouse gas levels. It makes the question of how to solve the energy problem moot, because there's no way to implement that solution under the current political conditions.

A human had answered "missing a hand," which created context that means "What is a leg" could be interpreted as "he was missing a leg". Initially Alex did give him credit, before realizing that Wattson couldn't have been using that context.

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/02/ibms-watson-tied-f...

Wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality, especially in the bottom quintiles.

The basis for IP law is to encourage the production of creative works. The moral imperative is to allow science and art to improve people's lives. IP law should be a practical set of rules to create a free market for these works.

Does the current system do this? Not very well. Neither does infringement in most cases.

One of the most crucial IT reforms proposed by Kundra relates to startups. Kundra said the administration wants to make it easier for federal government to work with the small, agile technology companies that are constantly iterating.

At some level this type of thinking lets government off the hook. Philanthropy by the ultra rich is not a solution to government waste and won't solve the fundamental problems in the US government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Singapore

It may just be an anecdote but it seems like a reasonable system to me.

EDIT: had the wrong dollar amount.