Barnson.org

Pete Ashdown, owner of Xmission Internet Services in Salt Lake City, former senatorial candidate, and all-around good guy, penned a piece in response to recent efforts to expand oil extraction in the US. Here’s an excerpt:

Carter proposed that U.S. automakers attain a whopping 48-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency by 1995. He demanded that we curtail imported oil by imposing fees. Finally, Carter proposed windfall taxes on oil companies to fund alternative energy and a goal of generating 20 percent of our power from solar by 2000. What happened? It would be nice to see an explanation from Hatch, since he was a three-year senator in 1979. His explanation not forthcoming, my presumption is Carter’s visionary energy goals were tossed on the trash heap, along with the solar panels he’d installed on the White House, when Ronald Reagan moved in. America then increased dependency on foreign oil and forfeited automobile innovation to Japan. Middle East oil-rich dictatorships went on to become even wealthier and more entrenched… A small patch of Alaskan wilderness, coastal drilling, oil-shale magic, nuclear power subsidies, less regulation on fabulously wealthy companies – these will make us energy independent and gasoline inexpensive again? … This country retooled its entire industrial sector nearly overnight in order to fight World War II. America fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to land on the moon in under a decade. Yet become energy independent with renewable technology in the same amount of time? Sorry, we’ll leave that kind of innovation to advanced countries like Brazil, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. Solving our energy problems by loosing the reins on the oil, gas and coal companies is a deal that requires us to forget 30 years of history. This bargain ignores the hidden health costs of polluted air and water and insists that consumption of energy is not correlated to the price. In spite of their feel-good commercials, these companies are not here to solve our energy and pollution problems. They’re here to make a profit.

Unlike Ashdown, I believe nuclear power to be a viable, effective, clean method of power production with minimal environmental side-effects. I think we need to be spending more money developing nuclear power.

But like Ashdown, I believe allowing oil companies free reign on protected reserves is not a long-term solution. Demand for oil is outstripping supply. We live in the age of Peak Oil, and we must create new technologies based upon renewable — or at least extremely-abundant — resources to power our needs for the twenty-second century and beyond.

Additional US oil exploration is a Band-Aid on the severed artery of oil independence.

So this morning, I commented to a co-worker that managers should be less interested in obeisance and kowtowing from their charges, and more interested in listening and coordinating.

“That’s right,” says Dave, “they should just stop, collaborate, and listen“.

My account has gotten 20 or so “Status Undeliverable” emails in the last 3 hours.. saying “Sorry, your email did not get through.” – from all sorts of places.

Is my account sending out emails to others? And how do I stop this?

Eek!!

OH.. and while it lasts.. (completely unrelated) It will be yanked down soon, but click below for 4 minutes of the unaired pilot for BUFFY – The Animated Series.

You know, I remember as a kid that I used to be bored on Saturdays. As an adult, my entire Saturday is booked a week in advance, and virtually nothing for me personally.

Not whinin’, just remarking.

I’ve been involved in a few discussions online lately, wherein I found myself in the odd position of attempting to explain actual Latter-day Saint doctrine to a member of the LDS church who refused to believe me, the scriptures, historical leaders, or affirmations by present leaders.

The topic in question this time was Creationism. The LDS position is that there was no death in the world before the Fall of mankind, the Fall brought about physical (and spiritual death), and the Atonement can return mankind to the exalted state in which he existed prior to the Fall. You would find very few Sunday School, Priesthood, or Relief Society classes in which that doctrine would be disputed.

However, such a doctrine, at the very least, precludes abiogenetic evolution of humankind, and possibly animals. Periodically, LDS leaders have reaffirmed the Divine creation of mankind in a way that precludes the “theory” of evolution. Right around every ten years since 1909 they’ve released another statement that they have no opposition to “true” science, but where a scientific theory appears to contradict revelation from God, one should trust the revelation over the flawed scientific theory.

Online LDS apologists cannot be convinced of this fact of LDS doctrine that would be readily affirmed in any classroom in LDS meetinghouses on a Sunday, and which has the repeated endorsement of the highest leaders of their church. The apologists would have one believe these statements don’t actually mean what they clearly state. While doing some hunting for some way to reason with the unreasonable, I came across a wonderful clarification from a fellow named “Cinepro” that helpfully nailed down the definition of “doctrine” according to online LDS apologists.

(From http://blog.mediumcouncil.org/?p=22 )

• You are bound to believe the things required by the temple recommend questions (if you want to go to the temple).
• You cannot public disagree with any doctrine held by a current apostle.

• New “doctrines” do not have to be reconcilable to old “doctrines”.
• Old doctrines taught by apostles that have not be renounced or contradicted by later apostles may well have expired without further action.
• There is an “unwritten order of things” both doctrinal and procedural that you may be held to.
• The current brethren may be “speaking as men” but you can take no action on this fact. This only applies to dead apostles.
• The scriptures are not necessarily a doctrinal bind since non scriptural commentary on the scriptures by later brethren my change or obsolete the scripture.

Nailed it!

No way!

http://www.evildeadthemusical.com/

Wow. I totally need to get to Toronto before September rolls around!

Matthew,

I have a process on Fedora 8, let’s call it sslexplorer (namely because that’s what it is.) I want to run a cron job every five minutes to make sure it’s running.

I type in crontab -e */5 * * * * “/etc/init.d/sslexplorer start” >/dev/null 2>&1

Is this correct? Are my quotes needed? Should I write a script that queries sslexplorer status and only starts it if it’s stopped?

If so, how much would it cost to have you write such a script for me? I’ll swap names with you on Sam’s baby, so he can name it Matthew Stephen Graber…

Thanks Weed

Got free tickets to see Mötley Crüe tonight at the Usana Amphitheater. Never was a fan of the band in high school, though, which was the last time I remember hearing about them (circa 1991 or so). Ahh, well, I’ll be the guy standing and singing “watermelon” to all the lyrics ‘cuz I don’t know them.

I’m sure you all have heard that Google unleashed the Beta version of Knol. Knol is Google’s response to Wikipedia. Google is going to try and compete with Wikipedia by paying subject matter experts to post encyclopedia-like reports. Payment will come from % share of ad clicks. Google is attempting to validate the credibility through payment and having others both rate, review and comment on the submissions.

I think I know why this is happening.

Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but it’s almost as though entering a Google search has gotten to the point at which a searcher is expecting one of the top 5 return hits to include a wikipedia link. Meaning, when you enter a search term, such as “labia”, you are inherently expecting a number of returns to pop, with a wikipedia link to be a grounding return. This way, amongst the 12B+ searchable web pages, the wikipedia return link operates as the normal, routine, trusted response amongst those other awkward links…(libiaplasty?). I have become conditioned to expect this, to see Wikipedia in the top searches.

Google pulling or diminishing the ranking of return would be obvious. And what’s happened is that Google has become almost a linked gateway to the true information beyond. It’s getting that way for YouTube as well. Put in any search term on Google and I’m waiting for wikipedia and YouTube within the top 5.

Thus, Google, as well as the other 2 search providers become weakened as the gateway to information. They become the gateway to Wikipedia and YouTube.

To be a competitive employer in Bangalore, India, in 2008, you need to offer a salary that is around 55%-75% of USA salaries. See India Grows Up. This is happening all across the IT sector outsourced to India.

When companies began outsourcing in the late 1990’s, the cost differential was incontestable. You could hire ten highly-qualified engineers for the cost of one engineer in the USA. On any balance sheet, moving certain operations to India made perfect sense. I’d like to offer my perspective on what this wage inflation in India means for global companies like UltraMegaCorp.

There are costs of doing business across the globe. These include meetings at weird hours, employees swinging shifts around to match up more of their co-workers, being tired or late on a regular basis, a time-gap and slowdown in development due to not having engineers local to each other, and communication barriers of language, culture, and expectations. This last bit is critical: what I say and what I mean are usually two different things. English has evolved as the technical language of choice among co-workers, but the huge variety of accents means that written English is the de-facto tech language. When you need to relay time-critical information, often a quick back-and-forth dialog can take the place of a long stream of electronic mail.

I’ll be the first to admit that many of my Indian counterparts seem just as eager and knowledgeable in my field as I am. They are motivated, helpful, communicative, and work really hard. I have been regularly impressed by the ability of some of my Indian co-workers to dive in and come out with a brilliant solution to a complex problem without needing much, if any, hand-holding by more experienced engineers State-side.

Then, just like in the USA, there are the four out of five who aren’t all that. Some people suck at the job. Some are newbies who can’t get a handle on their duties. Some have a bad attitude toward the work The difference is that in the USA, those people get their asses fired. Then they go to work somewhere that the Peter Principle isn’t so obviously working against them.

My complaint today is that lately UltraMegaCorp has been simply relegating those people to my team. I’m not happy having fourteen useless engineers and only three guys I can depend on working with me.

IMHO, the days of widespread wage inflation in Bangalore are drawing to a close. The city has turned into a new Silicon Valley, paying wages which, given US Dollar and Indian Rupee exchange rates, are close enough to those paid in California that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to outsource there anymore. You can pay less for engineers in Middle America.

In the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, though, US companies aren’t giving up hope. One easy target for outsourcing is saturated, but a wealth of engineering expertise exists in third-tier markets like China and Eastern Europe, as well as additional non-Bangalore targets in India with a wealth of untapped talent.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, really. I think it’s a great thing. Although I don’t feel as secure in my State-side job, this natural progression of outsourcing driving up local wages and lifestyles in second-world countries up to first-world Western standards will have the inevitable result of improving the overall human condition. I’m a Humanist; I’m in favor of helping Humanity, and think this is a logical, needs-driven, capitalist method of bringing it about.

On the other hand, I think that our short-sighted focus on reducing immigration in the USA is a policy that is going to kill our competitiveness in the long run. We want the best and the brightest of the world to want to come here; we want to expand the H-1B program and other incentives to encourage highly intelligent, motivated, and educated people from around the world to see the USA as the place to go for a great job in a great environment. Yet we’ve reduced our H1B placements to a quarter of their levels in 2000, and have introduced drastic measures to limit legal and illegal immigration. Our entire stock of H1B visas went in less than 24 hours this year, almost every one snapped up by placement companies who rate candidates based upon how much the candidate could pay rather than their merit as an engineer.

Where am I going with all this?

In the late 1990s, the US was inundated with tech workers. Between tech colleges cranking out applicants looking for a quick buck in the tech sector and a quarter of a million people a year immigrating to the USA under the H1B program, we had a glut of technology workers, and a market willing to scoop them up the moment they got off the airplane or walked off the stage at graduation. Those days ended in the Dot-Com-Bubble-Bust of the early 2000’s, and although the winnowing of the field was painful — as my string of failed dot-com employers attest — today, many of those remaining in IT are the dedicated ones who love the job and are pretty good it.

I’m frustrated with the current state of the tech sector in Bangalore. The rise in wages, and steadily increasing demand, has led to an overall decrease in quality and quantity of work. As in the US, there are a few stand-outs and superstars who make up for a lot of their co-workers, but the quality of system administrator right now is on-par with what I experienced in the late 1990s in the US: too many who are in it for the money, and not enough love for the job.

I love being a system administrator. I didn’t just fall into the job; I wanted to do this, this exact thing, for a living. Tuning, optimizing, deploying, strategizing, purchasing, getting bloody knuckles from wrestling sheet metal and carpal tunnel from writing systems automation scripts and technical documentation. This messy job isn’t for the physically or mentally weak, nor is it a bastion for failed programmers, but a haven for people who really want to get down to the metal and fix what other people break and are willing to get dirty doing it.

I’m a mechanic, but for computers rather than automobiles. And I am thankful every day that the market values my skills at a reasonable living wage.

Let the damn Bangalore Bubble burst already, and let’s get on with wrangling systems rather than fighting incompetent, unmotivated co-workers. I want to work with more of the competent, reliable types who are willing to ride out the bad times for the love of the job, and not the hordes of useless sysadmin wannabes who are only interested in their next 15% pay raise.