If you wanted to prove someone has talent, you would point to them pushing out noteworthy things on a consistent basis. Sure, someone can be very talented but have only a single thing to their name, but it's just as likely they got lucky.
> If you wanted to prove someone has talent, you would point to them pushing out noteworthy things on a consistent basis.
That's not a very good proof. If anything, that would show that they are productive. "Noteworthy" is very subjective, and it's not a measure of talent, though there can be correlation. If I have a big marketing team, I can make something noteworthy by someone's standards.
> Sure, someone can be very talented but have only a single thing to their name, but it's just as likely they got lucky.
Notch is talented. He got lucky with Minecraft. That doesn't make him any less talented. And now that he's "famous", his odds for being lucky have increased since he now has a bigger audience, more connections, more money - basically more opportunities.
I'd say Minecraft was grown in spite of the way Notch works. The way he works has been the bane of a lot of modders, who are (arguably) the reason his game is so successful.
> In my opinion the important part is that you are doing something meaningful to you as an individual. [...] ...the world would be so much better off if we just had everyone doing this.
You can't separate yourself from humanity as a whole. That's like saying your liver should do something meaningful for itself as an organ, and if it ends up helping your body, all the better. We don't work individually. Humans require other humans, and all of our motivations and desires are influenced by this requirement.
Notch may not have begun Minecraft with the larger gaming community in mind, but he certainly continued development in some small part because of it.
Wouldn't Tramadol be classified as a psychotropic just by virtue of it inhibiting your central nervous system?
As someone who takes Tramadol for pain, it does have an odd effect when I'm tired: I find I become less tired, as if the Tramadol is making me ignore my fatigue. Oxycodone, on the other hand, causes me to be more drowsy. This might be what the farmers are talking about.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but opiates are grown from opium poppy plants, so that would be a good place to start if you actually wanted an abundance to feed to animals. Tramadol, however, is an opioid, which is a term that encompasses both opiates and synthetic opiate-like drugs -- of which Tramadol falls in the latter.
> This is a case where two people did something unusual in a work environment and garnered the attention of their coworkers. That's expected.
Did this ever say it was in their office? All it said was they were hula-hooping to some music and the response from the bench-full of male employees was embarrassing. If it were outdoors, it wouldn't be unusual.
Either way, in what world do you see something out of the ordinary — but not strange — happening at work and line up to gawk at it?
> It's unexpected that you think it necessarily implies sexual objectification.
It's certainly possible for a bench-full of 20-something programmers to sexually objectify someone. Julie was made to feel uncomfortable, and since she's the best eye witness to the event we've got, there's no reason to doubt her testimony.
Not everything needs to be picked apart. Sometimes, if a bunch of guys are gawking at women, that's what they're doing. You don't need to stick up for them.
> GitHub's response neither confirms nor denies any part of the story.
Well, they do say:
We know we have to take action and have begun a full
investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective
immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave,
as has the referenced GitHub engineer. The founder’s wife
discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or
firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in
the office.
So it's not like they're completely silent. They said both the referenced founder and employee have been put on leave and the wife, who apparently was allowed in the office before this, is no longer. They didn't flat-out admit to anything, but it's not like they're totally silent.
"We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation." == "We need to do something about this"
"While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer." == "We don't know what to do yet but we're trying to prevent variables from changing"
"The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office." == "If she said anything along those lines, she had no authority to do so, and misrepresented herself and her role at GitHub"
Yes, it's legalese, but it's not actually saying or admitting anything that anybody didn't already know. It's filling the silence that would otherwise breed directionless slander and conspiracy.
It's manipulative, but arguably well intentioned, and can possibly lead to a more constructive outcome than the free-form slather that would have occurred in a communication vacuum.
It's not throwing him under the bus. It's distancing him from the investigation. That's both to protect him, in case things favor his story, and to protect the company, if it turns out he was in the wrong.
In both cases, they wouldn't want him having any potential influence on the investigation. To do that, his power within the company needs to be suspended until a conclusion is reached. The parties investigating (likely HR and the other founders) must be able to do their job without fear of retaliation from the accused founder, that would taint the decision.
Because that is what the lynch mob is screaming for and anything else would be labelled as aiding and abetting sexism and discrimination against women by some people?
If I was the person accused, and I was not guilty, I would request to relinquish all responsibility pending investigation to ensure there was no reasonable way anyone could claim I'd interfered with the investigation when it cleared me.
Of course it can also mean the opposite - my point is merely that suspending someone pending investigation says nothing at all about guilt.
No matter how many times this is pointed out, people will continue to demonstrate their complete lack of understanding behind the "bail outs"; essentially asset swaps that earned the US Treasury a small profit.
That would be a good analogy if we couldn't transfer money online. But, you know, we can.
The whole point of Bitcoin that's been touted in pretty much every thread, hoisted up by Libertarians like a giant flag, is that it's unregulated. And now, they're all discovering why we regulated in the first place.
Not that there haven't been failures, but in the US, bank customers -- as opposed to bank shareholders or investors -- are a fairly protected class.
In 2008(?), Lehman investors were fucked, WaMu shareholders were fucked, but as a WaMu customer I was not inconvenienced in the slightest. My money was safe and I was able to freely access it every day during the transition to Chase ownership.
Now, I don't think that it is fair to compare MtGox to a bank. It was really an exchange for investors to speculate on fluctuations in exchange rates, so in the regulated financial industry you'd probably be just as fucked.
I think the take-home message from the failure of MtGox is that your risks don't just come from the volatility of the market you are investing in. You could lose your money through a crash in the market, yes, but you could also lose your money through the incompetence or malfeasance of your investment partners, through having your password stolen and your account hacked, through losing your private keys, ... If you only consider one type of risk, you will understate your total risk, and not hedge against it effectively.
It's this kind of thinking that really irks me. "Well, my $100 still adds up to $100, so it's all there."
Yeah, you money is there. Maybe it holds the same value as yesterday, or tomorrow. But over time, your taxes will go up, prices of things you buy will go up, inflation will rise, and the spending power of your $100 will become less and less.
Every bank failure, financial meltdown, and economic downturn robs your money of value. When a meltdown happens, and the FED has to prints more money to cover it up, your dollar loses value. When the price of merchandise goes up, because fees go up, because bank insurance premiums rise, because they keep losing your money, your dollar loses value.
It may happen slowly and indirectly, but make no mistake, you are losing you money. The best way to cook a frog is to do it slowly, so the frog doesn't jump out of the pot.
actually the latest banking disaster was largely due to a decade prior of deregulation, and the economies of other counties who came through it best had retained a lot of their regulation (Canada).
