battlebot

Compliance cost.

We citizens have very little say in the machinery. That is the biggest problem we face these days. Regular people have no agency at all and there is a sneering elite that runs things from the coasts who believe everyone else is a sheep to be sheared for them.

This reads like a Faustian bargain. I've seen this sort of stuff happen over and over to my colleagues, it was worst in the late '90s and early '00s. As much as I wanted to work for a startup once in my life, I learned that the only way to do "startup" is if you are the founder. Practically everyone else is along for the ride.

The US used to have a steady IPO market but that has dried up in recent years. I have read that 2017 might brighten things a bit, but we'll see.

Costco pays $17/hr. vs. Sam's what? I don't even know. < $15/hr. Maybe $14/hr? Okay, it was in the article, $11.52!

It would help considerably if every business school in the nation wasn't following the exact same idiotic playbook.

You know what's even worse at trying to surface? When you saved your company millions of dollars! I'm not talking theoretical dollars here, I'm talking about last year X cost $Million, and this year due to my finding out some egregious mistakes and fixing them, that cost was measurably less by seven figures, and no one bothers to tell that story to the higher ups! I just wonder what these people do all day? Darn few managers I have ever worked with seemed able to even tie their shoes properly.

Meanwhile, I had to sit through an all hands meeting where some dingy broad got a 5 figure award for cooking up an Access database that some asshat manager used for like a week!

Franz Kafka could not dream this up!

The biggest thing the US needs is a management overhaul.

Don't hold your breath. Even superstars are fungible these days.

And yet isn't it just slightly odd how software consulting rates were the same 17 years ago as they are now? And there was all that inflation in the interim...hmmm...

No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos.

The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it.

This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.

Or maybe you're just reading fake news.

I bet taking a few months off from work would also lead to most of those things.

I pretty much just ignore all of these reports and articles because of everything you just said. And I hate to change the subject, but studies done in every other subject are the exact same way. I'm in no way impugning the research and hard work of people out there who are doing an honest and forthright job and are trying to serve humanity. It's just that I've been to a lot of these same rodeos and well, I've seen some astounding breaches of ethics. Maybe someone down the line isn't trying to deceive the public, but the public is in fact being deceived, is it not? And now we have the bigger problem of we can't trust major news outlets and sources of information. So here we are.

Oh, so I am without the ability to reason? Hardly.

You can't prove a negative "we don't have any evidence" is a fallacy.

Ask yourself: Why are there no conservative voices in the climate science field? Why is only one certain type of political class so obsessed with it?

Where are the skeptical scientists of any political stripe hiding out? If these people are all in 100% agreement on this matter it tells me that much more is going on than just science because not even in math and physics do we see that level of agreement going on! It's only in this one area where there is no room to speak one's mind.

The "evidence" you speak of is all based on models. I have seen some of these, been in presentations where they were discussed, and have shaken my head in wonderment that these models are taken so seriously.

Climate science is a religion, there's no mistaking the behaviors of the people involved in it. They even want to pass laws now to limit anyone asking questions!

My biggest concern about data science is that a lot of people who lack basic skills at doing science are racing into the field. My other concern is that this happened because an article said that there would be a huge demand for data scientists in the future, a matter I am also skeptical of. Repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.

Well said. I would add that journalistic ethics have reached a new low. Astoundingly new low. On the other hand, I was not alive in the 1890s during the era of "yellow journalism" where everyone with a printing press was turning out nothing but bullshit on an hourly basis and hawking it to unsuspecting rubes.

Turns out there is good money in just making up crap and printing it.

No it doesn't. Smart people are among the easiest to fool. You simply appeal to their intellect and flatter them.

Like Climate Science? I have never seen so much bullshit and bullshit artists in one place except for DC, which is all bullshit all the time. Academia is the same, almost 100% bullshit these days--not much real science going on outside of medical research, physics, math, stuff you can't readily fake or make up as you desire. The software business runs on unbelievable amounts of bullshit and bullshit's brother, hype.

I know exactly how and why it happens, too. It's human nature to want to be liked and be successful. It is human nature to go with the flow when funding is at stake. It is human nature to want to be accepted by one's peers and to impress one's superiors. Also, it is extremely hard to innovate these days when so many people are out there doing the exact same things as you are.

Unfortunately, all that behavior has taken humanity down some dark paths before.

Convenience is how they get to you. Just say no to convenience.

It has a cyberpunk ring to it.

I have witnessed that very thing more times than I like to admit. I fail to understand what, other than sheer greed, motivates tech people to help build these police states. It's going to come back at us in terrible ways. Technology doesn't care whether it kills us all, it is completely value neutral. Only we can make the right choices.

I once worked at a place that was bidding on surveillance tech for some public transit systems in Australia and the cavalier attitude that management had about privacy was sad, to say the least. They just didn't think it was their job at all to decide what is right or make any ethical judgements whatsoever. To them, mass surveillance was merely a way to make a lot of money and that's all. They didn't care who got hurt when that tech eventually makes it to less democratic nations to be used to suppress and destroy the human spirit.

Well, that company went under, but others succeeded.

They can never achieve that without political reform that removes collectivism and replaces it with individualism and I'm not even sure that is possible with 1.5 Billion people or whatever they are up to now.

I wish at the very least that our tech companies would stop abetting these crimes against humanity. We should be trying to liberate these people, not use tech to forever enslave them. It's sick.

If that were so, then why is the majority the ones all in agreement? The people who are skeptics are few. Doesn't sound like any Catholic Church I am aware of.

My point was they don't have to pay off all those loans at one time, which is what accrual accounting assumes. It is a false argument, in other words.

As far as inflation goes--you're making the original commenter's point about why the Fed is bad. They inflate away debt, in other words, it was all a confidence game. We get paid in deflated dollars and wonder aloud why the change in our pockets is worthless.

You think someone with a doctorate is a layman? We're educated people, we can form our own opinions, thanks.

Sorry you got downvoted to hell, but certain subjects are echo chamber religion with a lot of folks. It's just how it is. I don't know how some people can be so open-minded to scientific inquiry one the one hand, but when it comes to the matter of climatology, they treat skeptics as sub-human heretics.

I tend to think it is a deep-seated personality flaw that a lot of people have but don't realize they have. They think they are more open-minded that they actually are.

I'm heartened knowing that not long ago, the majority of people believed the sun revolved around the earth and anyone who dared to speak against that "settled science" was excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

Here's a question: Are you at all comfortable with the realization that a website as bad as Business Insider is carrying your story? Understanding, of course, that the grand majority of the stories on that site are out and out clickbait garbage.

Not sure "exurb" is a real thing--most people living that far out have wells and leech fields and the density is pretty low.

Practically every person who sits on our city council is involved with real estate--either sales or development. It is rotten to the core because of their conflicts of interest.