I mostly agree with you, but organizing a bunch of stories that mention certain keywords is innovative and useful. And there is a big problem with the way the current system works: Meltwater is supposed to go negotiate some deal with the AP, even when providing content to clients who are themselves licensed to access the AP content. I think you'd see much more indie content of the mash-up variety if there were an efficient way to handle the licensing.
A basic income guarantee is a far more important idea than free higher education or affordable housing. The argument for universal healthcare is that we're going to take care of the sick whether they purchased insurance or not. What argument do you have that the market is not a good mechanism for allocating funds to housing? Or education? I guess an argument can be made for subsidizing education on the grounds that an educated populace is good for society, but making it free doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
By this definition, Ruby/Rails are pretty crappy (I kind of disagree). As a newcomer, the amount of stuff going on in a Rails app and the stack trace when there's an error are pretty overwhelming. Meanwhile, people expound on how simple and elegant Rails is. Lately I've been thinking that this is because those people started using it 5 years ago when it was small and their knowledge has built incrementally with the environment.
My other theory is that it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer because like C (and unlike Python in most cases), importing functionality from another file is implicit. That is, when you 'require' a bunch of files, there's no indication which functions are coming from where. For me, this is one of the things Python solves marvelously (it's generally considered bad form to 'import *').
Rails is pretty crappy if you ask me. It's "omakase" which is Japanese for "acts according to what DHH wants despite what the community wants". And there's a lot of magic happening that isn't explained very well. There are better frameworks in Ruby. Ruby itself doesn't take all that long to be an expert at.
Though I could argue that all the languages pretty much take the same amount of time to become an expert. Just because some languages are supposedly higher-level than others doesn't mean that the complexity they allow you to tackle (and associated challenges as a programmer or "expert") is any less.
Especially since being a good programmer is more about design, choice of interfaces, reactivity to change, etc. which are by definition language agnostic.
I firmly disagree that Ruby requires any less effort than say C, C++, Java or LISP to become an expert.
I didn't mean to say that Ruby was less complex than C, I meant to say that if you take out the magic it is comprehensable and one can be good at it quickly enough just like a straightforward language like C. I agree that learning design, etc. is the real key in any language, thanks for pointing that out, because that's what everyone should focus on.
Ruby doesn't take long to be productive in. It is an utter pain to become expert in, for any reasonable definition of "expert". Fortunately it's fun enough that I don't mind the slog.
That's kind of what I'm talking about. I've never heard of Pry. With Rails I have to learn about the 100 most common gems (devise, paperclip, mongomapper or mongoid), Pry (thanks for that), bundler, rvm, and ActionEverything before I can be productive (or understand a simple app) . With Node.js, something newer with less "maturity", I figure out npm and I'm good to go.
I really don't think it's FUD to say that Rails has gotten much bigger in the past 5 years, and it's definitely not FUD to say that as codebases and tooling grows, so does barrier to entry.
The specific thing I guess you're objecting to is that it's harder for a noob to understand implicit imports and where something is coming from if you don't know much about what you're importing. If you use a tool to solve that language deficiency, that doesn't remove the deficiency from the language. By that logic, adding an IDE to Java makes it a very concise language.
You're looking at things from the viewpoint of society. There your argument makes sense -- of course "people" will continue to work. But that argument, that we'll just continue to work on things higher up Maslow's hierarchy, doesn't hold for individuals who don't hold an ownership stake in these technological advances. Robot Mega Corp and it's owners have no need for your grandmother's scarf, so what is she going to provide in trade for her more basic needs? Not having a job could be a real problem for her.
Incidentally, minimums, where earnings less than $X are increased to $X, are terrible and break incentives near the minimum. Much better are base incomes, guaranteed uniformly to even the wealthy.
> Robot Mega Corp and it's owners have no need for your grandmother's scarf, so what is she going to provide in trade for her more basic needs?
This is assuming that the robots are owned by a monopoly or a cartel. Such a case is an obvious candidate for government to step in and break them up.
On the other hand, if the robots are owned by companies that aggressively compete with each other, how much do goods cost when they're made by robots using robot-produced raw materials? The more humans we replace by robots, the lower the cost of goods will be and the easier it is for charity or government to provide them gratis to the public.
Yes, I don't think I phrased it well, but I didn't intend to assume that there is a single Robot Mega Corp.
> The more humans we replace by robots, the lower the cost of goods will be
Most physical goods have two parts: materials and labor. Even if robots were to bring the labor cost to approximately zero, we still have the material cost. So you're right that you don't necessarily have to own the robots to successful, but you do have to own resources.
Even "resources" primarily only cost money because of the labor it takes to discover them and then remove them from the ground and refine them. In theory there are some things that are genuinely scarce (e.g. energy or specific elements) but so what? Most of them have substitutes, and the fewer labor costs have to be paid the more substitutes become viable. Have the robots mass produce wind turbines or solar panels out of low-scarcity materials, or mine space, etc.
Even in the most pessimistic case where you have a valuable scarce resource with no substitutes then you have something to tax which will produce revenue that can be used to supply necessities to the public.
I don't like this explanation at all. This fuzzy thinking works out because you knew it to work out based on your much less fuzzy understanding of the complex numbers. Similarly fuzzy thinking in a new problem domain won't work out 90% of the time.
When I worked in retail, our boss would have us send our friends across the street to our competitor's store to really screw with their employees. The theory was that this would make them less courteous to their real customers, which would send more of them our way. He always made a big deal about how courteous we were. This went on for over a year when one day we started noticing very similar "troll" customers appearing in our store and screwing with us. I'm sure you can guess what I'm going to say next: Hahaha! None of this story was true.
I'm not real rich, but I'd turn you down. Someone so selfish running around with close to a billion dollars...no. The misery you could cause! Let the researcher keep their money, they will probably offer it to someone more deserving in the next round.
Doubt it. Quite sure you'd take it with both hands.
Seeing as you work in the oil industry - the above statement does strike one as being exceedingly odd. You are in the industry for the money aren't you?
That's some serious cognitive dissonance you've got there.
Furthermore, I thought you guys pumped misery out of the ground day in, day out?
> Doubt it. Quite sure you'd take it with both hands.
Damn, now even I'm thinking I'd turn that down to teach your selfish ass a lesson.
You're confused because you're thinking about this (selfishly) as money being granted to you, and expecting your partner to do the same. Your parent (pun intended) is considering the whole relationship: Money will be redistributed from a researcher R to A and B only if A and B can agree on a fair distribution method. This will alter the balance of power between these three agents at a minimum. A and B should agree to this only if they both feel it is globally optimal; the more unfair the distribution A chooses, the more likely that this change is for the worse overall, which places increasing moral pressure on B to veto.
This isn't really something we can try, but I suspect you'd get turned down some reasonable percentage of the time (2%-10%, say) with such an offer, by people who have "all the money they need." Since to me the utility of the first few million is vastly larger than the last 500 million, I'd offer 50% just to avoid that rare case.
