Helplessness. I have many projects to work upon but have no money in bank. Have not enough money to get a company registered and charge money from the clients so had to accept the job offer.
The only good thing I found in my job was the possibilities of polishing my skills as an entrepreneur and learn about current trends in B2B marketing.
I have a hard time thinking this is a bad thing. While people should be free to study whatever entertains them, I think most of these majors contribute little to making the world a better place or making us better people.
Two exceptions, in theory, are History and Philosophy, because knowledge in these areas has the potential to improve the quality of thought and discourse. However, the views of most people on these subjects seem to be so guided by partisan identities that it's not clear that mere education can overcome that. People refuse to reason well because they want to fit in with their friends and family.
Like it or not we need excellent educators in ALL the humanities. That requires people with deep and diverse ways of being able to teach HOW to do it in as many different ways as possible. That means we need more exposure to more people. Discourse is hard and demanding.
Hell, being able to communicate and know without a doubt your message has been received is hard and demanding, but most people can't be bothered to admit it.
Are you sure we need ALL the humanities. There are an effectivly infinite number of potential avenues of exploration in the humanities (as in the sciences), so we cannot possibly host all of them. In general, I am in favor of letting academics self organize which areas get the attention and support at the ground level, but part of this is that some subjects will naturally lose interest and die off.
Without naming names, there are certain fields within the academic humanities that I think worthy of this die off (insert rant on postmodernism) to both free up resources and let the good parts be absorbed into adjacent fields.
"While history, English, and the rest have faded, only one set of humanities fields without a foot in the sciences has clearly held its own: the much newer (and smaller) disciplines the statistical agency joins together as ethnic, gender, and cultural studies."
History, English, Philosophy, Communication, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, Linguistics, Political Sciences...
The cultural/gender studies I tend to lump in as subsets of those major subjects. I used to laugh at them coming from a Sciences background only to find that any advancement I could make filled me with doubt that the world was ready to use it responsibly.
These fields are critical. We have no chance of being able to really breakthrough our major problems as a species without being able to understand what it means to be human, or even what the same damn mundane things look like from another culture or person's point of view.
Trying to hand off something so portentous as something like halfway successful ubiquitous facial recognition to a society so poor in the humanities as our society today is like letting an infant learn to walk in a minefield. If we can't even coexist with the people around us without trying to strip everyone of civil rights, or getting into pissing matches about borders, we've got a long way to go before we start messing around with massively disruptive technologies with high social impacts. The recent social media fiascos and trends toward weaponized disinformation causing panic and hysteria should be evidence enough that we as people need to pull back and shore up the basics so we can at least ATTEMPT to try to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.
For heaven sake, with enough attention to detail, and a convincing enough Facebook profile, you can influence the sentiments of MASSES of people. It doesn't matter whether truth or lies... It gets said all the same. During Lincoln's time as President, he said something very poignant during the lead up to the Gettysburg address when he was staying at the Wills House, composing the Gettysburg Address.
>"In my position, it is important that I should not say foolish things...[If you can help it! Is exclaimed from the audience]...It very often happens the only way to help it is to say nothing at all!"
Imagine the horror he would experience to find out that we as a people have devised a technology that forces EVERYONE, not just one in a position of power to have to express the same torturous care in crafting our communications lest our "foolishthings" exact a cost through bloodshed or imprisonment?
None of that can be done without good communication, understanding, and empathy for your fellow man. We all don't have to agree, and war will always happen, but Goddamnit, we should be able to formulate a better excuse than "It's the war on <insert nebulous concept here>". That can only be done with a thorough understanding of the ways we communicate as people, cultures, artisans, polities, etc.
And EVERYONE has a duty to know this stuff, or at least be aware enough of it to keep themselves safe from those who would use it against them.
If we can't even coexist with the people around us without trying to strip everyone of civil rights, or getting into pissing matches about borders, we've got a long way to go before we start messing around with massively disruptive technologies with high social impacts. The recent social media fiascos and trends toward weaponized disinformation causing panic and hysteria should be evidence enough that we as people need to pull back and shore up the basics so we can at least ATTEMPT to try to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.
If the idea is for people to pull back from seeking credible opportunities and shore up "the basics" of History, English, Philosophy, Art, Art History, ... -- this is elitist and unrealistic. History provides little support for the idea, that societies pro-actively prepare themselves in this way. For most people, "the basics" are and always will be about working for a living.
The question of whether it's worth studying the humanities is orthogonal to the question of how many people we graduate into them.
Philosophy is a good test case. How many people should leave college each year to be philosophers, or even philosophy professors? Probably not very many (though I would be interested if you have a different answer); but that doesn't mean lots of people should not study philosophy.
Many people play golf. Yet few are professional golfers or golf instructors.
But, we can do with 10x less humanities majors. Even if we start that process now though, it'll be decades before it's reasonable again.
> to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.
I have actually studies Philosophy, and uh. I found it disappointing. It sounds good. We should be able to just reason our way to the next great paradigm shift, and adapt to it intentionally, in a controlled fashion. In order to do that we should study the past.
Except, when it comes to mathematical philosophy, there's 2 kinds of humanities majors:
Humanities majors that first got a PhD in mathematics (or some other scientific field). These have large contributions, but ... mostly to failed mathematical endeavors, like the axiom of choice and proving Turing wrong. But ... great contributions, it would be very wrong to say people like this didn't contribute. Note that pretty much every last antiquity philosopher we know falls in this category. I would also like to point out that it takes pretty exceptional people to achieve this. Most math professors can't do it. Most philosophy professors can't do this.
Pure humanities majors ... these have had many theories about math, physics even machine learning. Almost without exception, they were wrong. And worse, some of these people were great impediments to progress because they managed to get high positions in important universities ... and used them to sabotage advances, so there is an argument to be made that their sum total contributions are actually negative.
Studying the past doesn't work because of the same reason that a lot of statistical models fail. If you have data points A and B, "predicting" anything between A and B can work pretty well. However, what you want to do in the humanities, when you have A, B, C, D and then predict E ... that fails spectacularly more often than not. Again, same in statistics as in philosophy.
We shall drop any concept of middle-class and lets get back to slave-master society already then. I'm almost sure we'll have more people contributing to making the world a better a place then.
I think you make his point. In feudal societies, the majority of the people were stuck in devoting their lives to survival-oriented tasks, while only a privileged few could dedicate themselves to higher pursuits. And let's not forget that traditionally "STEM" was also reserved to the leisure classes.
Now, in 2018, we have unthinkable prosperity compared to the feudal era. And yet, there is now this constant political pressure to get rid of the middle-class and have most people dedicate their lives to survival (a.k.a. "employability"). Don't take a year off work or it will look weird on your CV! Don't let the kids play freely, they must prepare for their Ivy League admissions! Etc, etc.
Isn't it the main purpose of technology to free humanity of labor, so that we can pursue higher interests? And yet, technology seems to demand that everyone works for technology now. Must have a fucking STEM degree! (I do, btw). Weird, no?
I have a startup which builds a web-based enterprise product. A year ago we launched a companion app that provides a fraction of the functionality of the desktop application, just enough to help our customers extract the key information they need when they're on the road.
All of a sudden a few days Apple decides we have to implement in-app payments. I explained them that this is an enterprise product for an arcane industry and that our customers require quotations/invoices raised to their procurement department and would not pay several hundred to several thousand dollars through the app. They insist we have to implement in-app payments despite not helping our customers nor our business. We don't have automated billing at all, not even on our desktop product. The requested change means months of development for no value (at this point).
No way to appeal. We can currently not update our app and if we don't implement in-app payments in an unspecified time our current version will be pulled too.
Can you elaborate on this, because this is what I understand (from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about Apple's review process):
You can't provide your app at no cost on the App Store.
You can't provide your app for a cost on the App Store, if you don't include in-app payments.
Or is it the case that you want to allow your customers to make nominal purchases through the app, and Apple say these must be processed through in-app payments?
>>>>>is it the case that you want to allow your customers to make nominal purchases through the app, and Apple say these must be processed through in-app payments?
Yes!!
Customers will not be bypassing the app store, they're bypassing the in-app payment infrastructure. But Apple want to allow only in-app payments.
Do you have any mentions of registering/purchasing in-app? I'd remove those, including any links leading to your website, and only show a login screen. I bet they'd let that pass. I think their main goal is making sure the possibility of registrations/purchases outside of IAP is near-zero.
Somewhat related. I wonder how often someone would plant false information that would cause a panic sell-off, then buy on the dip, before everyone realise that it was a lie? It's like the opposite of inside information. (Does this particular scheme have a name?)
* Edit:
A quick googling suggests this is fairly prevalent. Must be keeping the SEC busy.
A recent one is Musk going "I'm thinking of making Tesla private at $420 per share" - regardless of whether he's going through with it or not, it bumped the price of Tesla stock up by 10%, and people made a lot of money off of that.
This is actually the quasi-solution to a lot of problems. e.g.
If you've got a database full of your employee's info, populate it with made-up info for a bunch of fake employees. When you use the database, use some secret method to distinguish which employees are real (maybe the sum of their employee ID number and birthdate is divisible by 197). If you ever get hacked and the database is stolen, good luck to the hackers selling a database where 99.5% of the info is fake.
If you're a defense contractor, add a bunch of made-up project files for fake programs, complete with plans, designs, drawings, etc. If a foreign government manages to break in and steal them, they'll still have to try to figure out what's real and what's fake.
For press releases, it's a lot simpler. You compose the press release and pre-upload it for release after an embargo date. But the salient details are obfuscated. "Our net income for this quarter were [ $1 million dollars | $100,000 | a loss of $500,000 ]." "We will be [ constructing a new facility in Phoenix, AZ | purchasing and renovating a facility in Boise, ID | demolishing our warehouse in Denver, CO ]" etc. When the embargo is up, instead of just automatically releasing the pre-prepared press release, you simply edit out the fake info then give the OK to release it.
Security through obscurity isn't true protection. But it can make the thieves' jobs a lot harder.
