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[Truean]

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daniel-gross/infrastructure-jobs-program-next-decade-201411918.html

Why can't you just give people shovels? Shit I've done stuff like that....

[Vector]

Is it what they're selling, or what we're buying?

"If we raise a child in a particular environment, nearly seamless in its universal condemnation of her looks, behavior, motion, thoughts, emotions, needs, personality, smell, skin color, shape, and ability to cogitate, is it her fault for failing to break out on her own impetus?"

The environment is abusive.  I do not blame the child.

[Vactor]

The question then is why does this environment exist? How did it ever gain a foothold? If as it turns out, young men are afflicted too with body image and societal image issues, then who is them and who is us? Or could it be that the lot of us are instinctively driven to compete within our society, to be the best in the metrics of attraction, to garner ourselves the most desirable mate, in order to insure the advantage to our eventual children.  This deep desire is a strong string to pluck at to gain our attention and money.

I understand the concept of the wealthy grey haired white guy settled into his nest of wealth, dictating the flows of culture to strengthen his grip.  But I look at Cosmo, a corporation owned in part by a huge array of shareholders, ordinary people's personal retirement investments included, what would it gain by such social engineering that couldn't more easily be gained by publishing something other than tripe.

To give an analogy, Fox news didn't create lower and middle class social conservatives, it just gave them idioms and talking points so they could sound knowledgeable in casual conversation, or regurgitate for the news reporter.  It may help organize their voting efforts, but I really doubt Fox News has converted many with its programs.

[Bauglir]

I'm not sure if that's really a valid defense, though. I mean, I agree, I doubt there's a conspiracy, and I would be happy to agree that Cosmo (or any other magazine) isn't the root of the problem. But the thing is, they are still a problem. There's a cycle here; Cosmo (or similar) prints the articles it does because they're profitable; the articles are profitable because they exist in a culture where people are made to feel ashamed of things that they shouldn't; the shame is generated by the ubiquity of the sorts of articles Cosmo prints. Obviously, the magazine isn't the only issue here. In a culture that didn't have these issues, such a magazine would never get off the ground and flourish to the point where it contributes to the social conditions that are the thing people have an actual problem with.

Perhaps unfortunately, the only step in that cycle over which anybody can reasonably be expected to exercise control is in determining what articles the magazine prints. That is, I think, why it is the step people talk about resolving, even though, in an ideal world, it would resolve itself.

EDIT: Oh lord, I am like the most pretentious right now.

[Solifuge]

Oh, and also, Cosmo fails again:

Here's the advice women get when they want to be promoted!  Huzzah!

For fuck's sake.  I can write a better list than that, and I've never been employed.

It sounds, for all the world, like precisely the sort of advice these kind of magazines give women to help them make friends, find a man, and so on. It boils down to "You're not being promoted because you're not attractive enough," as though that were the one thing that women should focus on and be good at.

I hear the echos of my grandparent's generation in the voice of this article. Blegh.

[Heron TSG]

Of course Cosmo would put that in an article. If they keep convincing women to focus on their looks and societal standing, they'll keep looking for tips to improve both. (Something Cosmo purports to provide.)

It's like a money machine made of something indescribable!

[Andir]

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daniel-gross/infrastructure-jobs-program-next-decade-201411918.html

Why can't you just give people shovels? Shit I've done stuff like that....

The part I hate about all this is that they are jobs... not long term, not sustainable.  Just jobs.  Sure, the shit needs to get done, but dumping a pile of cash every few years just doesn't cut it.  After the jobs are done, where are those people going to find work?  Is the city going to hire more people to do work they already couldn't afford?  Ugh.

[Heron TSG]

As the article said, it's not that the jobs will produce a massive effect right now. It's that the product created by the jobs will have a massive effect.

[G-Flex]

The question then is why does this environment exist? How did it ever gain a foothold?

It's self-reinforcing. Media and corporate culture have a tendency to find a cultural trend they can exploit, exploit it (encouraging it to be worse in the process), leading to those tendencies being amplified in the next generation of consumers. It's a feedback loop sort of thing: Those selling initially exploit some preexisting condition, but push the envelope more and more, encouraging it to become more and more exaggerated.

To give an analogy, Fox news didn't create lower and middle class social conservatives, it just gave them idioms and talking points so they could sound knowledgeable in casual conversation, or regurgitate for the news reporter.  It may help organize their voting efforts, but I really doubt Fox News has converted many with its programs.

To further the analogy: Fox News didn't create lower/middle class social conservatives, but it encourages them to be more conservative, and encourages more people to become conservative; they use an existing trend for their own gain while encouraging the trend to become more pronounced in itself.

[Nadaka]

Our infrastructure has been sorely neglected for 30 years. Most of our bridges, tunnels and highways were designed to last 40 to 50 years with regular maintenance. That maintenance has not been performed regularly and they are now past their expected lifespan. We need to have been spending on infrastructure for 30 years and we need to catch up, and then keep up with it. It is a very good way for the government to spend money, not only because we have neglected it, but it puts people to work now. The push to catch up can put a lot of people to work now, and when the time comes to trim down to normal maintenance, the economy should have a chance to recover and accept those people back into other construction jobs.

[G-Flex]

Our infrastructure has been sorely neglected for 30 years. Most of our bridges, tunnels and highways were designed to last 40 to 50 years with regular maintenance. That maintenance has not been performed regularly and they are now past their expected lifespan. We need to have been spending on infrastructure for 30 years and we need to catch up, and then keep up with it.

I apologize for this, but:

[Vector]

I understand the concept of the wealthy grey haired white guy settled into his nest of wealth, dictating the flows of culture to strengthen his grip.

I dislike conspiracies, but I am a theorist.

Degradation of women sells.  In a world where pure muscle mass and protection would be exchanged for protective services from the dangers of the wild and other humans for woman and children, a woman might have a reason to seem lesser and weaker.  A myth to play on the sympathies and sensitivities of others.  Gender roles created to divvy up everything that would need to be done in a household, thus creating a strict enforcement of heterosexuality (source: Levi-Strauss via Gale Rubin); and polygamy in order to gain large families, which in turn allowed the lone man to do less work and give more labor to the wives under his protection (who, of course, would be fighting among themselves to please him and thus generate a better inheritance for their sons, who would be expected to provide for their mothers).  Thus a creation of an inequality of labor.  As they say, "A man's work is from sun to sun; a woman's work is never done."  And to explain this imbalance (which anyone would grab on to for a little more survival, in a world of great drudgery--egalitarianism of any sort is a relatively new concept), the further devaluing of work allocated to the female gender role.

We live in a world of great equalizers, and these cycles are no longer necessary, but they are what we have inherited.  With our nostalgia of the past for its completed certainty and our fear of the future, we rely on old patterns rather than seek out the new.

That's my best guess, anyway.  I'll admit that I'm not too educated on the subject.

[Kay12]

Our infrastructure has been sorely neglected for 30 years. Most of our bridges, tunnels and highways were designed to last 40 to 50 years with regular maintenance. That maintenance has not been performed regularly and they are now past their expected lifespan. We need to have been spending on infrastructure for 30 years and we need to catch up, and then keep up with it.

I apologize for this, but:

I hate that guy. Especially when my copy of SC2000 locked his maintenance to 101% which was supposedly too little... /derail

[G-Flex]

I understand the concept of the wealthy grey haired white guy settled into his nest of wealth, dictating the flows of culture to strengthen his grip.

I dislike conspiracies, but I am a theorist.

The thing is that it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. A corporation simply trying to make as much money as possible likely will do so by exploiting the weaknesses of culture and individuals, and in doing so will often encourage them.

A lot of bad and destructive things in the world are done without a whole lot of intentionality behind them.

[Kay12]

My personal opinion on the matter is that it's your time.  If you want to put it under a restrictive license so the rest of the world cannot benefit from the knowledge... that's your call.  I feel as though Software should only be copyright protected anyway (opposed to copyright + patent).  If you blatantly copy someone's work without their permission and use it as your own then you should be brought up on copyright violations.  If you take my model for setting up classes (or objects on screen) and make it better, more power to you... as long as you don't just copy/paste.  With software development (as you are aware) you can pretty much rewrite anything to make it look like a new implementation.  That alone is why I generally lean on sharing with requests for credit given.

Disclaimer: I work for a very large company doing internal development and pretty much everything I do will never be seen by the public anyway.

I have hardly any say on the business of the company though... I just make programs and program accessories. Personally, outside business though... I consider open source to produce better software. I don't care about the philosophy that much, although I can understand why free software should be advocated in the world of patent trolling and copyright trials... I hate these things! >__<