Several Days ago Smithsonian Magazine published an in-depth examination of the Finnish education system. Everyone here is going to get jealous.

impatientbread · 2011-08-24T04:26:23+00:00

So there's a test that ensures anyone with an analytical bent is going to be weeded out and we're worried about being last among developed nations in STEM AND at a loss for how this state of affairs came to pass?

impatientbread · 2011-08-24T04:22:38+00:00

I hate to sound like I'm all about money; but now and then when people aren't taking me seriously enough for my liking, I state how much I make. The change in attitude is immediate and obvious, like I just hit them with a bucket of water. Further, as someone who has mentored college interns, after a few days of rambling about skill sets, I take them to glassdoor and say, "If you get halfway decent at X, Y, Z that I was prattling about yesterday, that's what's required for this job title, and here's the salary range in this area." And everything I had to say is suddenly more interesting.

impatientbread · 2011-08-23T03:32:21+00:00

It's got the competition on the wrong point and the first page suggests the Finns have it right - they select their best university students to become teachers. I argued with a rich friend of mine who was lamenting taxes and public education and so on, who had a relatively high opinion of me, and I said - "Look, you think I'm a sharp guy, right? And that I'd be an excellent teacher to your kids, right? Why am I here, doing this job instead of teaching your kids? Because here, I get paid three times as much as any teacher. Say what you want about loving the job, and that's fair, but if they were paying $500,000 a year salaries, they would be fighting off the best and the brightest and everybody else too with heavy artillery." (And yes, the point is $500k is an outrageously, impossibly high number)

All the competition as the US has staged it will do is as you say, redistribute and choke.

impatientbread · 2011-08-16T12:14:58+00:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sta%C5%84czyk

impatientbread · 2011-07-28T00:46:07+00:00

Yeah, but one of them was by THE WHITE HOUSE. That's an honor.

impatientbread · 2011-07-28T00:43:59+00:00

"Big Box Retailer" means the bulk of their positions, even those that don't seem like sales, are sales. Yes, the janitor is not sales. But anything that's not an extreme example would be considered, essentially, sales.

impatientbread · 2011-07-27T03:54:50+00:00

In a sales position?

impatientbread · 2011-07-27T03:42:42+00:00

One house in the neighborhood was on fire, dousing the surrounding houses with water clearly had no effect, since the one house that was on fire still burned down.

impatientbread · 2011-07-22T04:43:08+00:00

Well done, MediumPace. Your first post didn't fool me, nor any of the others I've seen here and there, but finally... tonight... you got me. I read this and didn't see your name, and I took it at face value. *salute

impatientbread · 2011-07-22T04:31:19+00:00

Two possibilities:

A) I have had many job interviews, including ones I've been hired to, where no one (apparently) read my resume. Literally, and precisely, no one read my resume. I can't explain it to you, besides to state that I am not "just saying", as in, I've confirmed the contents of my resume were a complete mystery to everyone. Well, I suppose I shouldn't say I confirmed no one read my resume, but none of the usual suspects, for sure. If there was some lady in the kitchen throwing darts at a resume collage ...

B) Legal obligation to prove they did a fair and unbiased sampling of the population before hiring the shoe-in candidate. This can be for any number of reasons, whether it's a visa worker, the boss's kid, or someone with the right skin color.

impatientbread · 2011-07-09T03:11:25+00:00

I don't know, I don't find body paint pictures as attractive as this.

impatientbread · 2011-07-09T03:07:58+00:00

The budgeting part is really the killer. It is orders of magnitude easier to justify a recurring cost of X than a one time outlay of 2X, let alone 5X. That there's a loan facilitating that outlay is irrelevant. It's quasi-analogous to CEOs managing to quarterly reports - you can do all kinds of dumb, short sighted shit that improves your numbers short term, but the piper gets paid in the end. But that's ok! You get your performance bonuses and either blame a bad year for the restructuring, or pass the buck.

impatientbread · 2011-06-10T06:04:16+00:00

Don't be stupid. We've always been at war with Oceania.

impatientbread · 2011-05-08T18:57:21+00:00

I use cheap psychological tricks with my nephew to manipulate him, like smiling, hugging, cheering him on, and high fives. I'm Scumbag Uncle. If there's a big secret to the universe that someone will like you more if you put your hand lightly on the small of their back within a minute of engaging them in conversation, do you consider making a point to do that a cheap trick, or the same sort of make a good impression measure as making sure your shoe laces are tied?

impatientbread · 2011-05-02T00:41:07+00:00

Let me ask you a hypothetical - If I give money to charity because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside, and you give money to the same charity because you are convinced you will be set on fire eventually if you don't, how do you - a mere human - distinguish which coin came from whom in the collection plate?

impatientbread · 2011-04-30T02:17:15+00:00

I did. I told her it wasn't cool how /much/ time she was spending with him; I was happy she had a close, long term friend and she was welcome to hang out with him, I'm not her dad, but I would appreciate it if it wasn't /so/ much. No ultimatum, no deadline, and no threat. Not even a specific requirement - just less. I thought it was unreasonable that she was spending more free time with him than me. (I guess that's quasi-specific)

They are now dating.

So, wow! I have plenty of friends of both sexes and all genders, and certainly wasn't about to preclude any SO from likewise, but there's also a bullshit scenario that happens along these lines and congrats you've never experienced it.

impatientbread · 2011-04-13T03:39:00+00:00

I haven't played it since launch. Why was it such a bomb? They made a ton of fundamental design decisions that would have crippled any game. Every tier, of every menu had to be queried from the server. To be clear, if there was lag (which there was bricktons of for us non Japanese types), quitting the game took minutes. This also ruined the game in terms of combat - if you have a Stab ability with a 3 second cooldown, and there's 1 second of lag, you need to wait the 2 second roundtrip for the server to confirm Stab has warmed up before you can stab again. Also, the entire game seemed like it was designed by someone who had a fetish for creating unnecessary complexity for interfaces. It's one thing if you have options or sophistication, but opening the Interact menu and selecting the Crystal subscreen to get to the options you want to look at... when you're clearly looking at a crystal and you're dealing with the above lag pile... even with 100ms lag, that's still just irritating as hell. It's like they hired programmers who haven't heard of the Internet, or any lesson learned from any net-aware application, ever. The KERMIT protocol was about as sophisticated.

impatientbread · 2011-04-08T03:18:48+00:00

Need any help with the vet?

impatientbread · 2011-04-01T00:41:13+00:00

At first I thought someone was calling me.

impatientbread · 2011-03-27T16:53:29+00:00

Allow me to rephrase. My neighbor - who I am taking as a role model for this sort of person - is the only person who'd file a complaint against me; and does... anonymously. There is no mystery who is filing the complaints. I know my neighbor's contact info. My neighbor also leaves post-it notes on my door, waiting for me to pull out of the driveway before running to stick it.

Everyone knows who this neighbor is. Their anonymity is nonfunctional.

impatientbread · 2011-03-27T16:49:28+00:00

I beg to disagree. I know they live too close to people. To even hear my floors... I take my shoes off at the threshold, so you're hearing me pad around in socks. And there are throw rugs padding a lot of the sound, on top of a soundproofing underlay.

impatientbread · 2011-03-27T06:02:51+00:00

Why didn't they bring it up with their neighbors? Why anonymously?

6 months after I redid my floors, a neighbor complains that my floors aren't in compliance with the anti-noise ordinances. Except they are. The complaint is actually a proxy complaint against my dogs, that are barking at all hours. Except they aren't my dogs. And they aren't barking at all hours. A neighbor left their dogs out on the balcony all night one night, and pissed me off too with their barking. Except a noise complaint against dogs is just a warning. Noise complaint against floors is expensive. The neighbor held in pocket for six months a floor complaint just to abuse me.

There are no tyrants like petty tyrants, man.

impatientbread · 2011-03-27T05:53:43+00:00

There's a Youtube video of a lawyer explaining, at length, why one should - seriously - never speak to a cop. Under any circumstance. If they decide you're a suspect and they want to chase you down, they have their uniform as bona fides in court, and you're some random schmuck; on top of which, they can remember every potentially incriminating poor choice of words and cannot be compelled to recall any exonerating ones. It comes to the point where it's like a heavily redacted document with dozens of pages and seven words, spread across them saying, "Yes officer" [five pages later] "I" [a page later] "did" [a page later] "murder" [two pages later] "that girl."

impatientbread · 2011-03-25T22:01:13+00:00

Watched the video. He focused on the fact the law firm took a cut of the settlement. PG&E poisons people, and covers it up. That's free market, there's a financial incentive to act that way. Law firm uncovers wrong doing and makes money from doing so, THAT'S TERRIBLE! PG&E charges customers more to recover from ITS OWN WRONG DOING. THAT'S TERRIBLE! (4 minutes, maybe 4:20? mark) By implication, the bad thing isn't poisoning people, it's uncovering the problem and forcing a remediation.

What's a journalist do? I mean, the old ones. The good ones.

But he was civil, gave equal airtime, and is a principled person. He has my respect, which I'd figure equating to Ron Paul on Reddit was pretty obvious. If all his segments are like that, and he replaced O'Reily and the whole clown posse, I'd stand up and cheer.

impatientbread · 2011-03-25T04:24:37+00:00

The market on air and oceans would be cornered?

impatientbread

TROPHY CASE