Not really, if I bug my colleagues anymore, they'll realize I'm not working that much.
6 karma · joined May 24, 2012
IMO there is a LOT of untapped potential in the human brain yet and going to chips for speed upgrades looks ridiculous.
I know I'm far below the potential I had when I was 10 in terms of raw intelligence, and I believe many people could've been a few thousand times smarter if we had only tried making them smart.
Going to chips when we haven't even learned to train our brains looks ridiculous to me.
Racism imho is one of the minor issues though, I'm far more concerned by the police state aspects of the US than the cultural details (such as everyone is fat woohooo).
I believe we totally agree him and me on the main point: neither China nor the US have a clean record and they're more or less each as dirty as the other.
America's motto is not "rape countries for oil" - it's not "censor the internet" and it's not "IP infringement is more important than violence".
The thing is, both countries are really bad, and I don't believe anyone american or chinese can simply say that one country is better than the other.
Yes there are awesome places everywhere, including where I live or in the USA or in China for that matter.
What I mean is if we're going to talk about countries, we take country-wide data and not cherrypick.
The various movements of the 60s and 70s are completely impossible in the western world now, the brainwashing is far too advanced for that.
Unionization doesn't make sense in communism. It amounts to revolution. Try a revolution in the US and call me back when you've completed your twentieth mandatory cavity search for security purposes.
I don't think you saw much of Gitmo on Youtube, even less today - luckily with the patriot act, anyone who pisses off the govt will get his own personal gitmo experience.
At least China doesn't pretend they respect the human rights - I think that's what the article was about, and fundamentally right.
Not like Western countries didn't invade Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to put governments that favor them instead.
The japanese and the chinese is an entirely different story that would take books to cover, it isn't quite relevant as I don't remember the mexicans brutally invading the US of A.
Furthermore medicare and that kind of crap is rapidly becoming better than what's available for free in the US, do remember China comes from much lower and will most likely improve a lot still, while the US is clearly in decline.
So as much as you're correct in pointing out that China has its own issues, they're not the same issues, and some people will rightfully choose China over the USA.
As a modestly rich European, I think my family would be much safer in China than in the US, and overall the Europe is still much better than both.
Sure, by voting for one of two parties that have existed for centuries and been sponsored by the same 1% for as long.
You have the potential to watch your fellow americans brainwashed a bit more everyday into accepting their function as modern slaves with less and less benefits and more and more stress.
In the US the government controls the entire internet, as well as every information every company holds, including facebook, twitter, google and apple - as well as Intel and Microsoft.
The PRC and the US both have "legitimate" ways to detain any citizen or non-citizen at any time, for any reason, and often do.
I would like to insist that there is NO difference on that specific point since the patriot act.
SOPA and PIPA aren't govt related, they're big content's attempt at having it's own control channel over the internet.
By the way, you forget the positive aspects of China, like those emphasized in the article: In a communist country, there's real security.
My grandparents were in USSR in the 70's, and many like them said they had absolutely NO FEAR AT ALL letting their kids play outside.
That's right dream on. You'll never get that in the US, unless you have your own security.
While this is all propaganda and the article clearly avoids some details, the truth is the situation is really bad and Chinese people have no reason to look up to the US, as much as US people have no reason to look down on China.
Right now, as an European, I'd rather live in China than in the US.
In the end, once you have something to show, noone cares about your resumé and they all want you on board because you have shown that you can deliver and are a low-risk, high-return investment.
What in my opinion doesn't match with those offers is their part of the bargain - they want a super motivated multitool expert . for peanuts ...
By the way. you have to realize that's all resumé warfare, they think you're going to exaggerate and they hope at best that you can code .Net, have touched RoR twice, used Toad for Oracle three times and had to implement a very small web frontend for basic purposes - and maybe that you had to design birthday cards in Illustrator.
Seems more likely with 2-3 years experience, doesn't it ?
Analysis Paralysis is inevitable as long as you want to write the RIGHT thing.
As soon as you accept "good enough, we'll upgrade later if necessary", you start moving towards the right thing.
Anything that says perfect, adequate, right, correct, etc. is wrong and leads to the dark side.
My point of view is I'm offering great value and if they don't want it, someone else does and I couldn't care less.
In the worst case, I'll take the opportunity to go get a better rate elsewhere.
On the other hand, I don't have a very high rate yet and it's much too easy for me to find another job to be really worried.
As you said, I believe far more in having too much work than in reducing your rates (I currently have enough paid work for at least 8 billable days ).
But truly it is scary.
I lose days just reading HN, Paul Graham, Rodgers and that's after closing 20 tabs of webcomics, hardware and software news etc.
I think the only way out is as PG said it, actively fighting it - shutdown your computer, close them tabs, work on a good old console only linux, destroy skynet ?
My take is that in the end, we're all animals, but our self-awareness enables us to manipulate ourselves into doing what we want ( a bit like some article about pavlovian start your computer, fire up git and all that - don't remember who or when) - i.e. by consciously addicting ourselves to what we want to be doing.
I should get into that a bit more though -- seeing how I still read HN etc.
It's the same price as a CD if you count out one and a half links in the retail chain.
It's expensive enough to make one hesitate. IMO it should cost what it brings the artists today, +15% for distribution and everything would be fine, we'd all buy tons of music @ 1.15 bucks a CD and everyone would be happy.
Ads can be a major pain, and any business that requires them is probably going to fail, intolerance to ads is building up as ads are more and more agressive.
Switching to DDG because of ads wouldn't make much sense, they'll get their own ads when they have to pay for servers, too.
I'm not particularly disapointed with google search, and if I try something I don't like, I won't try it again unless a friend tells me it's changed a lot.
That business is clearly one-shot, either v1 is good or you're going to have to fight uphill against a bad rep of your own making.