fschmidt
@fschmidt
Best posts made by fschmidt
Latest posts made by fschmidt
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RE: Clerks (administration workers) and documents
@morbiuswilters said:
@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
@OzPeter said:
This showed me that there are severe limits to how much effort people will put into thinking about how they do their job. They'd rather take the manually intensive long way than exploring the more intelligent simple way. I'm not sure why this is, but it is possible that it is due to a lack of curiosity - or curiosity focussed in a narrow viewpoint.
i always had a theory that the thing which distinguishes programmers from non-programmers is their level of curiosity, and their distribution of effort - programmers prefer investing effort into thinking how to make the process/work itself as effortless as possible, while "other people" prefer not thinking when they don't have to, so they tend to invest the effort into the inneffective method. the amout of effort required might actually be the same (or larger for programmers, even) when it's a one-time process, but in the long run, with enough repetitions, we win.I have a theory that what separates programmers from non-programmers is a completely undeserved sense of intellectual superiority.
You would be one to know.
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RE: Used book WTF
@boomzilla said:
@KattMan said:
E-books should be less, the fact they are not and sometimes even more proves that the publishers are just greedy bastards.
Fuck you and your retarded understanding of economics. The fact that you're bitching about this is just proof that you're a greedy bastard. NTTAWWT.
What was that thing that they teach you in Neoclassical Economics 101? Oh yeah, that its premises rely on certain assumptions, the main one being that there are an infinite number of buyers and sellers of a uniform good in the market. So let's see: are there an infinite number of sellers of a given proprietary ebook? No. Are there even enough sellers that we could call the market for this ebook "perfect competition" without bursting out in laughter? No. So how many sellers are there then? Why, only a couple, often only one. That's an oligopoly (or monopoly in the latter case), which allows sellers to charge above what the equilibrium price would be under perfect competition, and thus to extract a rent from consumers. That means that the arguments you're making rest on faulty premises, and are thus flawed. In other words:
1. Fuck you and your retarded understanding of economics. The fact that
you're bitching about this is just proof that you're a greedy bastard.2. Seriously, do you people think before you open your goddamn mouths? That retarded shit might fly at the American Enterprise Institute but it won't here.
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RE: Online ticket buying surcharge
@boomzilla said:
@Cassidy said:
I'd have thought it was the cheapest option for the seller since it's transferring printing costs and associated delivery risks to the customer. I can see it's the most convenient to the customer, but the pricing looks like it's purely a money-spinner for the supplier.
It's just another demonstration of the fact that the value of something is what people are willing to pay for it, not the value of its inputs. Suck it, Marxists.
[url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193]Oh really?[/url]
@Someone who actually read Marx said:
There are obvious difficulties with Marx’s arguments. One of
them is that so many of the contemporary world’s goods and commodities
are now virtual (in the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to
see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet,
so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much more
quickly by reading than by listening – the surplus value you’re adding
to is mainly your own.This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things
arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly
powerful explanatory tool in the digital world... When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the
contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus
value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online
check-in and bag drop at airports, for example. Online check-in is a
process which should genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport
experience, thereby costing you less time: time you can spend doing
other things, some of them economically useful to you. But what the
airlines do is employ so few people to supervise the bag drop-off that
there’s no time-saving at all for the customer. When you look, you see
that because airlines have to employ more people to supervise the
non-online-checked-in customers – otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on
time – the non-checked-in queues move far more quickly. They’re
transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also
doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus
value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal
with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your
surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is
constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and
transactions all around us. -
RE: TRWTF - There I said it
@Anketam said:
*Note this post only applies to USA*
Currently there have been court cases over whether or not a defendent has to turn over their password for an encrypted hard drive so that law enforcement can search it for potential evidence that could be used to convict you. Many have gone the route of law enforcement cant force you to give up the password (hard to be conclusive since a number of the cases are still in appeal processes by both sides), if law enforment cannot get your password for criminal level evidence there is no way companies could deny a job opportunity based off of you not giving your password to your facebook account.
here is one that is still getting appealed:
Edit: Found an update on the status of the case:
This is irrelevant as to whether it's illegal for an employer to ask for a password. The government may have to grant you certain rights, but employers don't. Remember, America is a country where employees have the "freedom" of working for a boss that bans them from taking bathroom breaks. Asking for Facebook passwords is par for the course.
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RE: EA Origin
Well what do you expect, it's closed source. Closed source software never does anything right. You're always registering and activating and having to prove that you gave money to some crap company that hires idiot programmers.
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RE: Customer service needs some refactoring
@Kittemon said:
Total time spent on the phone: 27 minutes, 55 seconds.
Total time spent actually speaking to a rep: about 45 seconds, non-consecutively, with three or four minutes on hold in between.If you know how M/M/c queuing systems work, this isn't surprising. Your employer probably didn't want to spend a decent amount of money on support since it generally isn't profitable. Therefore the utilization of the support system is probably very close to or above 1. The average waiting time increases exponentially the closer utilization gets to 1 (it diverges for utilization >= 1). When utilization is greater than 0.9, the average waiting time is usually much greater than the average service time. Doesn't change the WTFery of your situation, but now you know why.
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RE: Pre-employment drug screening.
Here's why:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Drug-Free_Workplace_Act_of_1988
Federal grantees and contractors don't want to lose out on government money.
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RE: Corporate policies
Wow, I had no idea that so many of you enjoyed being exploited by your employers.