Why take the effort to chop down trees to make fuel when we already produce enough cellulose from crops (corn stalks, sawdust etc) to make a lot of biofuel? It would be more cost effective to use sawdust from wood mills, corn stalks, etc (things normally seen as waste materials) to make fuel than it would be to go out and chop down trees. Not only would you have to expend a lot of energy to chop down the trees and transport them, but you would have to process them into a more usable form. I doubt it would work well to simply coat an entire tree with a fungus and wait for it to be decomposed. You would want to grind the tree up into smaller bits to increase the surface area the fungus has to grow on .
Assuming you have sawdust and corn stalks. If you're in a part of the world where rainforest is more plentiful than either of those, and you're chopping it down anyway to make farmland...
I see a lot of bad behaviours on all sides here and have to agree with many of the posters below that it may be time to jump ship to a different company. Or if the company you work for is large enough you can transfer to a different department, just get away from where you are now.
In regards to some of your points above, I think that it is often an issue that changes are made by upper management or by someone in control/power that do not make a lot of sense to everyone else. I'd suggest taking a positive and proactive approach to this situation. You can begin by approaching the individual responsible in a friendly manner and ask something along the lines of, "It was interesting how you decided to do XYZ. I want to understand your thinking here. Can you tell me why you decided to do that?" The basic idea is to get them to open up to you. They may have a very good reason for their idea that you aren't aware of. Maybe it will make perfect sense to you afterwards, or maybe their idea is sound but how they implemented it does not make a lot of sense, or could be improved. If the later is the case then you can work with them to help improve it, maybe start with, "That's a really interesting idea. Do you think that it would be helpful if we were to move the link over here to make it more visible to users?" or something along those lines.
A good technique when you have to say something negative is to make a sandwich out of it. Start with something positive, state your negative, and finish with something positive.
Shame on your manager for passing blame. IT sends a bad message to everyone. A good leader takes responsibility for their team work even if someone else screwed up. If someone is going to get fired over it, then it's a slightly different story, but for the most part a good manager is a shit shield for their employees.
Passive-aggressive = bad, unhealthy attitude
It will only cause problems and you'll lose respect and friends
Being a whiner= bad, you can "complain" constructively so it doesn’t come across as whining. You'll get a lot more accomplished and gain recognition/status in the process.
Decreasing team moral = bad. It's not always easy to say the right thing or be "politically correct", but if you want to be a good team member you will need to do so. You want to make change for the better, but you might be hindering the change as much as anyone else. You can be "straightforward and sincere" without bringing the team down.
I agree with some of the points above. Most people want to "1. Be Happy" and "2. Make Money" but not everyone needs to be promoted to feel happy or valued.
I have to disagree that "the best way to be happy is ignore the bad stuff, focus on the good stuff, and work on making everyone else happy."
You can only ignore things for so long, and making others happy will not necessarily make you happy.
There are just some places where the management is so screwed up that you're going to be miserable if you want to have any creative control or have your input considered and valued. In this instance you either have to try to change the management, which in most situations is unlikey, or find a new job.
Again, your point that he should "Refocus your energy on making you and everyone around you happy. Forget the technology - let them make the decisions" is not always the best approach in my opinion. The author mentioned that he would be ashamed to put this project on his resume. Do you think that he wants to work for a place that does an awful job and then put that on his resume? He can't ignore what the copmany is doing if he wants to put it on his resume. What kind of reputation will it give him if he has worked for years at a company that does nothing but put out crap?
I think that many of the ideas stated above work in certain situations and with certain people. But not eveyone acts and thinks the same and not everyone can live with the same kind of work environment or make the same kinds of decisions.
Any idea where this guy did his act? I woldn't imagine that he'd get a laugh anywhere he went. Although I'd guess that his act would work a lot more places now than even a couple years ago.
Your problem may also be dependent on the size of your allowable credit (credit limit on your card). If you have one major credit card, but your max credit line with that card is $5-10k you might have a problem. If you can get your credit card to raise your limit to 20k you might have an easier time with your lease. Alternatively you can open up another two credit cards each with a 10k limit to expand your available credit.
Wow, that's really dissapointing to hear, that you have to get approval for an app before you can even test it on your own phone.
Do you get the impression that this is actually a stage for them to keep out what they consider bad products or is it just a bandwith problem with their approval process?
Congrats Shawn! I think that Robert Frost said it best:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
If this was intentionally done it's all a bit disgusting. Why can't candidates try to win on merit any more? I'm tired of all the negative attacks and lies they pedal these days. I don't need someone to tell me why I shouldn't vote for the other guy, I need them to tell me why I should vote for them and then I'll make up my own mind.
I'll add too that you don't need to credit all your ideas in general. There are three factors I can think of that play into this.
The first is the genre you're writing/idea-using within. Academic scholarship has pretty stringent standards for citation, Dave Barry's humor columns, not so much.
The second is the degree to which you depend on the idea. If some idea is at the heart of your work, you should acknowledge it gratefully (and possibly pay license fees for it, depending on the idea's status in your jurisdiction).
The third is the degree of obviousness in your genre. You don't have to cite anyone to prove that 1+1 is 2, unless your name is Peano or Russell and you're working on mathematical meta-logic. Nobody owns common knowledge.
Because karma has been floating around as an idea on moderated-discussion forums on the Internet for a long time (since the Bronze Age of the Internet, if you will), it's pretty obvious. There are also pretty low standards for citation in the webapp world.
And if you want to go further back, who's to say Slashdot didn't steal "karma" after hearing "Karma Police" one too many times, and Radiohead had "Instant Karma" in the back of their head? And John Lennon there is obviously referring to a Hindu system of beliefs that was thousands of years old and will probably outlast all of us.
My point is that there is no way to be completely original. We are all subjugated by the tyranny of profound ideas. You just have to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.
