For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience at all, with the possible exception of the As. I suppose tech is in some ways an unusually functional industry overall, but all the leaders I've seen who weren't particularly smart but had people skills have failed pretty miserably. The successful ones have been almost universally the ones who are very smart (categorically as smart or usually smarter than their underlings) _and_ had excellent people skills.
As I said, it's entirely possible that tech (or at least the quality of company I've worked at) is something of an anomaly, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as unrepresentative: it's not controversial at all that the importance of intelligence is rising fairly rapidly in the modern economy and tech may be more representative of the present and future than you'd think at first glance.
I've worked in finance in a finance capacity and tech in a technical capacity. There isn't much of a difference (at least in the sub-areas I've worked). Getting a job is different than holding it. My impression is that useless people get culled MUCH more quickly in finance because the work is frequently more transparent to those in a position to fire you, along with the labor supply and demand in the two industries.
I think people are simply conflating GPA and intelligence. This is especially true given the study is from the NE liberal arts schools who funnel into finance regardless of their major. My math/econ double major was completely irrelevant during my 3 month training program where the brightest person in the room was an english lit major.
> I think people are simply conflating GPA and intelligence
Yes, this is a very good point that I elided a little in my comment: I actually just wrote a different comment on this post about me not including my GPA on my resume because it reflected the fact that I miscalculated how much I could take on vs my actual intelligence (I ended up with a low-3s GPA and three degrees (all considered fairly challenging) in four years).
But I don't think that, at the population level, it's a conflation to recognize that the _correlation_ between intelligence and GPA (ceterus paribus) is pretty significant. The risk is in reducing the candidate to too few features, but that's not inherent to including the feature in your overall assessment.
Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.
Statements like this, that allege some group is being victimized, makes scapegoats out of those with more resources.
Yes we're all "economically coerced", by the need to produce economic resources in order to consume economic resources.
It's like Bastiat said 160 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble - from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others."
That is just another factor of the desirability of the job that impacts how much one needs to pay to find enough employees. Other factors also involve where the jobs are located (if you are in the middle of nowhere, even with much cheaper costs of living, you may need to pay significantly more to convince someone with the desired skills to move to the middle of nowhere) and the long term potential (really good work that only lasts for a short time may not be worth moving for unless it pays significantly more).
I've never worked at a McDonalds, but I've done my time out in the hot sun and honestly when I look at these poor bastards standing in front of a pot of boiling grease all day I wonder if I wouldn't go back to the farm.
Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.
Ive done both and i much prefer McDonalds, theres just more in common between McDonalds workers than the people working on farms who can be sketchy or not even speak English and the kind of work at McDonaldd doesnt mean you are constantly utilized whereas in farming u are pretty much physically exhausted by halfway
I'd rather pick fruit for minimum wage than operate an industrial dishwasher for minimum wage. It won't be 90-something degrees and 90-something percent humidity every day on the farm. It's a toss-up which is worse, the dish-room or the grill.
The worst case is about the same. The average day is better picking fruit.
It's not that simple with farming, unfortunately. Worker pay is necessarily based on individual productivity, which can only increase so much [0]. Margins are razor thin for producers to begin with. The vast majority of profits are captured by the manufacturing and distribution. This is why the IRS taxes farm workers and farm employers differently from any other kind of commercial activity.
Political lobbying and in the USA's case the way the agricultural sates have representation far in excess of their population when compared to the metro areas
At least in theory, once the loss due to lack of sufficient number of workers exceeds the cost of raising the wages they should go up and at the cost of margins or increased prices. This should offer nobody a competitive advantage because every farm is likely facing the same issue.
Sadly employers behave like raising wages was not even an option. I guess that's human nature - money going from you pocket is a more tangible expense/loss than money not going into your pocket due to lost profits/opportunity.
They mention this in the article. The wages that the growers are willing to pay aren't capturing the interest of the locals or even the immigrant workers (since they have comparable jobs back home).
It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.
Very young person so possibly impulsive; started college at age 12 so might not have developed enough emotional intelligence to avoid doing these things.
I mean, Bloomberg is pointing fingers, I'm just trying to understand why an anti-DDoS firm would be DDoSing other firms..
EDIT: Also, "Marshal Webb, 18, whose Hamilton, Ohio home was raided this week by FBI agents as part of the LulzSec investigation". Maybe he did it or maybe not, but if he did, it wouldn't be the first time
Per his LinkedIn[0] he started college at age 16. He's 23 now. The fact that he started college 2 years early, seven years ago, made him decide to DDoS a huge DNS provider? That's quite a leap...
See my edit. You have fingers pointed at him, an unusual coincidence, and a background of being arrested by the FBI due to DDoS attacks he did when he was 16. Would you really be "surprised" if you find out he was the culprit, given these priors?
I'm not a judge nor a jury, I'm not stating he is guilty, just that that's more likely that a random guy attacking the firm
I was speaking to some chemists recently that claimed some U.S. nutritional supplements have human hair as an ingredient. They went on to mention that the hair is often sourced from China and lately has tested for higher levels of heavy metals.
I can not verify the above claim from an internet search. But does anyone know why the protein in hair might be more beneficial as a supplement than other forms of protein ?
That's a pretty common myth spread by articles like this one[0]. Wikipedia's article on Cysteine debunks it[1]:
The majority of L-cysteine is obtained industrially by hydrolysis of animal materials, such as poultry feathers or hog hair. Despite widespread belief otherwise, there is little evidence that human hair is used as a source material and its use is explicitly banned in the European Union.
Makes sense too, since ~50 billion chickens are slaughtered per year, the amount of poultry feathers available for processing probably dwarfs the amount of human available.
There is a Dutch television programme that does research on ingredients of common food products, to check where the ingredients come from. Sometimes based of speculation, but they tend to back it up with scientific research.
One of the suppliers actually confirms that human hair is being used in production, and being sold to bakeries around the world. While European bakeries claim to only use the l-cystein from animal sources, this video tends to show otherwise.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1009014925493075969
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1008999468492918784