Looking good. Soon I'll just be waiting for the announcement that they have sped things up 10X, and I might finally be able to let go of my Python ennui.
No doubt you should be annoyed, but you should direct most of that ire at the troika than at Greece. The money that went to "bailout" Greece really made its way to EU lenders by way of Greece. A real bailout would have consisted of of policies and loans that went to rebuilding the Greek economy, not toward squeezing every last drop of tax revenue from the few Greeks who are still employed and pay taxes.
Truth. German and Greek taxpayers are paying back rich creditors that made dumb loans. The Greek people get especially screwed. The current shot-callers have little interest in long-term political stability and the well-being of citizens. They just want their money back and are glad to turn this into a morality play. What makes it worse is that Germany is just about the worst actor to be preaching from the pulpit of economic morality. They have benefitted multiple times in the past from debt forgiveness and the chance to rebuild. There was a time when the world realized the error of exacting retribution through economic penalties. Hence the willingness of allies (primarily the US) to dump tons of capital into rebuilding Germany, even after they started WWII. Then a ton more debt was forgiven later since Germany could NOT afford to service their debt and build their economy- a deal Greece would kill for. Instead Greece wants to run a slightly lower surplus so they can provide services, a social safety net and some stimulus... bastards /s.
Greece would kill for those kinds of terms I think.
the people in charge of policy back then cared about long-term political and economic stability, the people in charge today mostly care about getting saved from their stupid investments.
I don't think you need to do much more than add more tax brackets and increase them. The top bracket really should be approaching like 90% for income in excess of $1M a year... IE. the tax brackets and rates should generate an income return that looks somewhat like a sigmoidal curve... if you've looked at biology this usually results (or is a result of) stable equilibria.
Germany (and lots of Europe) was rebuilt at great expense and with considerable willingness to forgive debts or reparations, because, quite rightly, the world realized impsosing draconian penalties on Germany after wwi was a major factor leading to wwii. Even since the end of the wwii, Germany had to have debt forgiven and be bailed out more than once for reckless economic policy. Now I feel like whoever is calling the shots are not just being hypocritical, but downright shortsighted. Greece messed up, but they've paid a hefty price, just tell the creditors they're SOL and are going to have to accept a haircut, forgive a majority of the debt and move on.
for most positions training a "green" hire is probably like 20% new, transferrable skills (PLs, frameworks, etc.), and 80% highly specific, and less broadly applicable domain knowledge. That includes things things like figuring out your process, or even who to go to for what. Besides, the best employees probably are the ones that want to learn new things, so if you land the perfect candidate that doesn't need any "training" he might be more likely to leave since he's probably doing the same "boring" thing he was doing at his last job...
When I interviewed with them, it seemed the interviewers had quite a large effect on how each session went. I had four great interviews, and two that were unpleasant. This had very little to do with how challenging the questions were and a lot more to do with the style of the interviewer.
One of my interviewers at Google asked me to implement a balanced tree insert on the whiteboard in C. After doing so he immediately told me it wouldn't work. I searched futilely for a minute or two to find the problem before he condescendingly pointed out I had left out a semicolon on one of my statements...
Another in the same interview got in my face (this should be easy) when he thought it was taking me too long too multiply two numbers like 637 and 41 during an estimating problem. I understand the point of most of these questions is quick and dirty estimation (600 x 40), but seriously...
I don't know how true this is, but my mom used to live on Lake Michigan when she was ~7 and used to tell me how gross the lakes were before the Clean Water Act, and how amazing the turn-around. If so, it's a nice example for the jaded that government can do some things right.
The scenery and pictures don't do much to elicit a reaction from me. There are quite a few natural places as bleak and "hellish" as the landscape he describes, some that people actually appreciate for their austere "beauty". I'd like to know more about the impact on wildlife and people, maybe what it looked like before and after.
not sure, but what jury is going to be sympathetic to someone getting paid a 500k salary (higher than her peers) and receiving such generous severance?
these kinds of problems may cause the array to fail, but won't necessarily lose data, right? If you have a ZFS pool and a faulty controller causes the pool to fail, ie. "losing" three disks in a raidz2 vdev, my guess is that you would just replace the faulty card and reimport the pool and chances are things would be OK... no?
6 of 1, half a dozen of the other? I agree there are things about the new software that are not as good as the old. OTH, it's really hard to maintain feature-parity on launching a new rewrite. I think a lot of this stuff will eventually get there. For the most part I'm liking the new Photos app.
Also, OS X has only been getting better IMO. They just need to do a release cycle where they work on polish, which I believe they intend to do.
Heh, the takeaway I've gotten from some of Stross's novels is that AI makes "capitalism" indistinguishable, at least from the point of human beings, from a centrally-planned managed economy. So there could be a future in which AI's become sufficiently advanced at serving human needs that we all live as komrades in a utopian communist society.
It always struck me that socialism is the economic system that in theory appears to be closest/compatible with democracy. Then again, I think what has actually become obvious is that mixed economies are what seem to work, to which I'd add not just having rules, but changing them often enough to prevent gaming of the system. So maybe in a sense messy is good not just because the real-world requires messy solutions, but because you got to keep people on their toes. Let's face it, laissez-faire or pure socialism, the weak point in either case is people subverting the system.
I remember when I was applying to graduate schools I was waiting to go to my last (fourth) recruitment interview, but I was pretty sure I wanted to go to the third school I had visited. Well I wasn't back for more than a day from the last recruitment trip when I called up that third school to ask them when I should show up and what paperwork I needed to fill out... it wasn't until about two years later that I realized I couldn't remember receiving an official acceptance letter or phone call from them...
To be a bit contrarian though... there is a useful aspect associated with using labels, even in political/economic discussions, in a way that is similar to ascribing names to things called "design patterns" so that one can communicate concepts more tersely.
If done in good faith, I think it's legitimate to start with approximate labels, like "libertarian", and the arguing parties can then proceed to make their position clearer if necessary. Hopefully, this saves time.
Also, I think it's fair to describe someone that believes in the importance of "workers should own the means of production" as a marxist (at least it's more accurate than socialist or communist).
Yes, but automation is getting better. "Historically always been the case" is a deceptive panacea. It isn't inconceivable to imagine that it might start eating into knowledge-based work even more, continually shrinking the percentage of the population that is employable regardless of talent or education. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (10 hour work weeks anyone?), unfortunately, the current world economy isn't set up to handle this transition well.