It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.
Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.
Other blogging services don't have Posterous' remarkable ease of use. The prior lack of themes has been a turnoff for potential users--now that they're here, it's a no-brainer for those folks.
It's a lot more efficient for the journalist to maintain integrity in the authoring of information than it is to have every reader scrutinize that information for a lack of it.
It does carry a higher risk of transmitting an STD from one person to another, yes. So I'm wrong to say that it has "nothing" to do with it. But in terms of epidemiology, the higher risk of transmission associated with a given form of sex is insignificant compared to having many partners. Spread, not risk of transmission, is by far the dominant factor here, even if they're not entirely separable. Sort of like the difference between scalability and performance.
> She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later I discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.
That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.
She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.
Your making the claim that the above implies _nothing_ about her capacity for domain competence is a bit much. I thought it was a near-perfect diagnostic of her incompetence, and I'd be curious if anyone can sketch the profile of a very competent programmer, alive today, that doesn't have an inkling of the above fact. I don't think you can.
The problem is that you're conflating incompetence with a lack of capacity for competence. In other words, the mere fact of not knowing something implies that one can never know it. If that were true, nobody would know anything.
What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.
I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.
I haven't bothered checking Politico since the 2008 U.S. election. They were horrifyingly fixated on covering the horse race, with a big spot on the front page dedicated to who "won" the day. Iirc, they also build the partisan split directly into their information architecture and staff, another big no-no as far as I'm concerned. This sort of thing is what's ruining our politics.
In theory, I would be interested in a site with a tight focus on low-level politics, but Politico ain't it.
To my knowledge, the Thatcher quote has nothing to do with their health care system, and it would appear she was an advocate of the NHS, not an opponent.
Our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for nearly 50 years. It has enabled us to repay debt and cut taxes. The resulting success of the private sector has generated the wealth and revenues which pay for better social services—to double the amount being spent to help the disabled, to give extra help to war widows, and vastly to increase spending on the national health service. More than 1 million more patients are being treated each year and there are 8,000 more doctors and 53,000 more nurses to treat them.
That is the record of eleven and a half years of Conservative Government and Conservative principles. All these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Leader of the Opposition, who has no alternative policies.
I'm sorry, but the idea that the boycott is somehow threatening freedom of speech is utterly absurd.
> A boycott is a ban and bans on other people’s opinions are stupid and childish.
I don't know if this was a massive logical slip-up on Berkun's part or what, but: nobody's banning Mackey's opinion. As far as I'm aware, copies of the Wall Street Journal containing that article are not being burned, nor is the website being hacked to prevent anyone from reading it.
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with guaranteeing that people should keep patronizing your business if you say something that rankles them.
Absolutely and I agree. I don't usually post ambiguous quotes but the grandparent reminded me of that quote which I liked.
I'd also say banning whole foods is somewhat analogous to people who are 'banning' non-organic products by shopping at whole foods in the first place. They are speaking with their dollars about a position they are against (genetically engineered products). If Whole Foods the company has a culture/leadership which is against health care reform, people are certainly free and rational to ban Whole Foods if they feel strongly about the issue.
Voted you back up. Fwiw, I was trying to respond to the general sentiment that this was a free speech issue, and the quote made for a good place to do so. Thanks for clarifying your stance. In retrospect, I should have used less strong language--"utterly absurd" wasn't necessary, as I can see how one might regard it a free speech issue.
It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.
Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.