Curt Doolittle

Form: Short Note

  • SOFT SKILLS You know, I’m really proud of our “Skills” system. ( I suppose I cou

    SOFT SKILLS

    You know, I’m really proud of our “Skills” system. ( I suppose I could turn it into a personality-type system with the right questions. 🙂

    We break skills into: 1) like/dislike (equally weighted), 2) soft (equally weighted), 3) hard (weighted) and 4) ‘Desirable’ (a multiplier for the skills a service company weighs most highly).

    So, I was trying to explain the weights to everyone. And I said, think of hard skills this way: for us OO Javascript is probably the most valuable hard skill. Say, desirability 10. Php is less scarce, so it’s say an 8. Unix a 7. SQL a 6, and cobol, say, 0.

    Likewise there are soft skills. In this company, I think it’s an asset to be short. Why? Do you really have to ask? THere are important soft skills like politeness and ability to dress one’s self. And those are just normal things. They don’t need to have a multiplier, but you need to have them. Say, given my incompetence with Russian, speaking English is worth a multiplier of say 5.

    Then we have say, extremely important soft skills like: “Likes Nirvana”, “Drinks Hoegaarden”, “Buys beer for co-workers”, and “Attracts really hot girls” to our table. Now, these are seriously valuable soft skills that significantly contribute to workplace performance, in immeasurable ways.

    They laughed. It was fun. The feature is awesome tho. ‘Cause you could actually do it. And more. I get to tell travel around the world with Max Romanenko telling clients similar silly nonsense for a living. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-05 07:48:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    Northern California County votes to secede, form new state called “Jefferson”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-05 04:56:00 UTC

  • AWESOME TIMES 1) The product is…. utterly amazing. I love products with richne

    AWESOME TIMES

    1) The product is…. utterly amazing. I love products with richness and depth. It is …. awe inspiring to work on it. I find most software today is beautiful but mediocre – taking advantage of increases in user interfaces created by the touch experience, but not actually adding depth to any meaningful business software, which mostly is still stuck in the 90’s.

    2) I’ve had a few very useful insights over the past two months.

    a) My hunch that I could attack postmodernism via mathematics played out.

    b) What I didn’t expect is that I would further my argument on the morality of calculability (preservation of causality in monetary exchanges). I have been struggling to develop an argument with this for two years.

    c) I’ve been able to ‘correct’ the ‘calculation and incentives and property’ argument used by libertarians in the battle against socialism in order to focus us on Postmodernism now that socialism is dead.

    d) I ended up with a pretty good theory of truth. That I think is out of scope for my book but useful as a separate bit of work. If I can distill it down and it still feels like it fits, I’ll use it. But right now the book is pretty much on-topic and I don’t want to add unnecessary weight to it unless I really need to. I can see that I might when I get around to it. But right now I’m not sure.

    3) My major investment will at least survive until Christmas. lol. I had expected to lose a few million more this year. 🙂 And I’m not quite done with creating a new revenue stream yet. 🙂 lol

    4) I have wonderful friends that I love and get to share the experience of life with.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-03 09:51:00 UTC

  • THE BEAUTY OF THE BRAIN We are terribly simple in our reasoning ability: “We are

    THE BEAUTY OF THE BRAIN

    We are terribly simple in our reasoning ability:

    “We are trying to deal with an increasingly complex and chaotic world with biological brains that are fundamentally unsuited to the task. We can only deal with three to five variable/topics/tasks at a time – yet we live in a world where we are often faced with hundreds at the same time,” he said.

    “We therefore need augmentation, a symbiotic relationship with our machines – a partnership if you will – to help us cope and prosper as we go into the future.”

    IBM-DARPA SyNAPSE

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-02 12:57:00 UTC

  • PRESERVATIVES Ok, so the damned BREAD at lunch must have been loaded with preser

    PRESERVATIVES

    Ok, so the damned BREAD at lunch must have been loaded with preservatives, ’cause my ears are ringing like I had front-speaker seats at a Kiss concert, gravity seems to be coming from random directions, and almost all my nouns seem to have run away and hidden from the verbal cat.

    I bet I can write some really silly nonsense without trying about right now…. sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-02 09:37:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://t.co/uerV2OF5DE

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-01 15:09:00 UTC

  • HEILBRONER You know, I read ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ many years ago. And I tho

    HEILBRONER

    You know, I read ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ many years ago. And I thought that given his style and sympathy for Marxism that I’d read his book on Marxism.

    And I would really like to say something intelligent here. But the fact of the matter is, that the guy is a great historian. And he doesn’t understand economics AT ALL.

    I mean. I can’t even read it. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

    Ack.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-31 11:52:00 UTC

  • WHY NOT BASIC ECONOMICS IN THE CORE? (Re-posted from elsewhere) You know, math a

    WHY NOT BASIC ECONOMICS IN THE CORE?

    (Re-posted from elsewhere)

    You know, math and economics can be taught as very simple stories. As narratives. Why you can get out of school reading Chaucer, but not knowing how to balance a checkbook, the power of compound interest, the basic currency system, and simple macro economics, is just …. completely beyond me. It’s like, they want us to be ignorant. (And no. I don’t mean that. I’m not a conspiracy nut. I just think it’s ideological not practical.) This stuff isn’t magic. The narrative doesn’t even require algebra. You can draw it as pictures without numbers. We’re all slaves to this system and all but a few of us are ignorant of it.

    It’s freaking criminal.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-29 13:51:00 UTC

  • INTERNATIONAL STUDY: BANNING FIREARMS INCREASES VIOLENT CRIME AND MURDER Harvard

    http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdfAN INTERNATIONAL STUDY: BANNING FIREARMS INCREASES VIOLENT CRIME AND MURDER

    Harvard Study.

    Sorry. That’s how it is. Guns are Good.

    (I always have this feeling that people who are against guns want not to be accountable for their actions, utterances, or emotions. And I just can’t grasp how it’s possible to ignore the data. Heterogeneous societies have more crime, homogeneous societies have less. Homogeneous societies are redisributive. Heterogeneous societies are not. The problem is diversity not guns. That’s just how it is.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-29 02:31:00 UTC

  • BROOKINGS GETS ON BOARD. Told ya so. Economics is largely demographics

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/08/the-nation-will-need-another-7%c2%bd-to-8-years-to-restore-full-employment/Oooh!

    BROOKINGS GETS ON BOARD.

    Told ya so. Economics is largely demographics.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-28 14:02:00 UTC