milfot

The idea of 'primitive cultures' historically was used to intimate that certain groups were closer to animals, hence sub-human, and usurp them out of their land.

Wiki says "The term is generally no longer used in mainstream writing as it is widely considered racist and many groups, including Survival International, have campaigned to stamp it out. The term continues to be used in everyday speech among older inhabitants of former colonial powers and by far right groups, particularly those with a white supremacist ideology."

Many (most?) US-icans from 2013 are unable to grow their own food, find clean drinking water, build tools and shelter, hunt, fight etc. Primitive is a judgment against the technology or skills required to survive in the world you inhabit on a daily basis. So if it is has racist undertones and is entirely non-descriptive / non-meaningful.. why use it?

Edit: In response to child comment (thanks), to make clear I was referring to the parent comment, not the article. It was the characterisation of 'superior technologies' and 'primitive' people I was responding to.

..and one hand makes no sound, obviously.

is it just me or does this actually sound like a good idea?

History may now be being written by different people than in previous eras. In oz, 100 years or so of pro British army brainwashing was undone with one line in one movie.. shoot straight, ya bastards.

its not about karma. what is right resonates.

that doesn't make it right..

ah, i totally agree.. my anecdote was meant in support of your experience.

Particularly bad.. incentivisation schemes create proxies for success and inevitably get gamed. Why bother with all the hard stuff when you can shortcut your way to success?

Good incentives are life really.. look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I believe most people work because they have to, but most people who work hard, work hard because they want to. The pay off is growth, progress, self-actualisation.

As an aside, this is why I question the whole gamification thing. The best games life-ify the game. Why would you want to remove meaning and complexity from work?

France would ask air force one to divert?

i consciously draw letters.

and my old man was forced to write right handed.. i am not sure what they called the method where the teacher would crack your knuckles with a yard stick if you messed up, but that is how he was taught. most perfect, effortless bloody handwriting of anyone i knew. with either hand.

learning can be painful. not learning might be worse.

It is taken on faith by the media because these statements ARE TRUE until proven otherwise in the courts! You think these sorts of attitudes are confined to management? If the guy on the ground thinks it is true, it is true. And especially as they are guys that are highly unlikely to be investigated and with whom the courts can be extremely lenient.

I fully understand that this is case of little boys playing cops and robbers and making the rules up as they go.. but they are playing with real guns.

that is the really amazing thing about wikipedia.. it is still getting better!

(i keep trying to find some way to contribute, but apparently i know less about everything that i know about than someone else.. so i just donate)

i object to the characterisation of such opinions as strong. they are not strong, they are weak. weak for their justification, weak for their referencing and weak for the world view which informs them.

(but i totally agree with you)

good point

but maybe this is a different thing conceptually i think i would call that a stamp or a seal ..sort of like a wax imprint of a key

maybe the public key should be called a lock.. lock and key makes sense to me

appreciate your points, software is a very different beast and it is probably true that the incentive structure is incidental to saas..

i just happen to think this is the reason for its success

also for a while i used, and loved, zipcar in london and i guess i saw the possibilities..

Yeah, all good points. I don't think this should stop tesla trying, or rather, it would be a shame if they were prevented from trying.

i believe it is a matter of restructuring both risks and incentives to make the downstream match the upstream, as you say.. for example, with the saas approach, for say 5k a year, your 5k profit over 5 years per user (add 5k for R&D and 5k for a facelift) turns into 20k profit over 10 years.. and the user gets a guaranteed service - the user and manuf. interests align..

The bigger issue I think, in terms of turning around the current approach, is actually a cultural one in which a car is a personal 'fetish' object rather than the cumulative efforts of a supply chain bundled into a personal transport service.

I did say saas for cars, i wasn't totally clear, hence the extra note.. not trying to be antagonistic. a couple of big reasons saas took off so quickly..

1.major cost of delivering a big product with little or no involvement / feedback from customer. 2.customer gets to pay for only the useful life of the service

That is.. saas is a method for sharing risk and aligning usage goals. i am quite definitely not talking about any mandatory structure.

btilly mentioned the effect incentives have on the dealership model, I was trying to suggest if the car manufacturing business had a vested (client based) interest in the full lifetime of the car they may design for longevity and upgradeability rather than simply sales and parts.

so.. not leasing.

so a manufacturer which is providing lifetime service and updates would be ok? this actually sounds like a fantastic way to break the new car incentive model..

saas style car-as-a-service.. or aaas for the yanks

as a non-american - fuck you obama.. but I guess you know that already

i have no faith in our leader.. (rupert)

http://johnquiggin.com/2013/06/16/urbanization-in-china/

clarification by a guy who does numbers for a living..

ha, beat me to it, was just writing this!

my own take is each person asks individually (through a service) and the company is then forced to respond via an automated method (or set up an api) to deal with the deluge of requests (sound familiar?)

sure, wasn't saying it was.. and you just committed the same indiscretion. a hack is only a hack if it does something.

let's say it is a potentially very effective idea for CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE..

emphasis due to you kind of missing the point - arguing about the legality of such a thing is pure misdirection imho

maybe, maybe not point is, it is a very effective idea for civil disobedience

Good points. Just as an aside, I often hear people repeat the mantra that government needs secrecy, but have yet to hear a justification which is worth the many rampant abuses covered by its cloak.

My own government has of late been justifying its own abuses by claiming commercial-in-confidence with the private partnerships it is operating, not to mention they just exempted parliamentary privileges from FOI.

The British committed acts of genocide in virtually every colony. Just because they were not as efficient as the Germans, don't think they were not every bit as depraved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/secret-massacre-slaughter-...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/05/kenyan-mau-mau-p...

First off, the generator is awesome! Second, (and i cannot remember who famously said this, sorry) the best description of any system is its results...

What does it matter whether they knew or did not know? The end result is the same, they are going to lose my (future) data!

We frequently exceed this level of spec for an average size house.. by a long way. However, simple commercial work can often get away with lesser levels of specification as they are generally dealing with typical construction methods and 'volume' contractors and consultants.

Using the standard construction methods is kind of like including stdio.h. The better the knowledge and experience of the contractor, the more advanced the library, but the more complex the docs. In a typical set of docs, it is probably 50/50/50 legal vs contractual vs actual description of the building.

"with modern CAD systems it is entirely analogous to generating a new report from a database" (not analogous - they are actually databases with a cadd layer on top)

But I would love for this to be true! It is amazing how much is still done manually, or even by hand in the construction industry. There are very few firms who have attempted to fully integrate automation into their processes.

I still end up having to explain eom half the time.. kind of kills the intended brevity.

I wonder if we could also request a RAQE without being rude.. (response to all questions expected). My pet email hate.