The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad.

I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools. I made 80 thousand dollars. He made 80 million dollars.

The Chinese leadership strikes me as pragmatic. If they thought the harm from Global Warming would be more costly than carbon emission cuts, they would make them.

But neither China nor India wants to remain poor. Any poor country is likely to benefit much more from development than the harm development will cause through additional carbon emissions (unless it's the Maldives). And neither countries' regimes can benefit from buying the votes of a green constituency with expensive projects of uncertain value. Rather, their legitimacy is strengthened by delivering increased living standards, and that is just what they intend to do.

The author is disingenuous to claim that these countries are acting in the service of of "planetary suicide", the breathless accusations of western green activists to the contrary. The Chinese leadership is well-educated. They can read the IPCC reports. They know what the likely consequences are. Planetary suicide is not among them.

Their leaders also know it's a hell of a lot better to be not-poor than poor. They think they are making a rational decision by frustrating the western green lobby's plans. And I'm pretty sure they are right. It's going to take a hell of a lot bigger bribe than $100 billion to convince them otherwise.

This has led to the follow theorem of mine, which describes /b/ perfectly:

Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.

Yeah, much in the same way that the South ca 1860 must've felt a lot freer and friendlier than, say, New York, provided you were white.

Also, if you were upper class Englishman presumably no one bothered you on entry to India ca 1920, or made a fuss if you got a bit drunk. I suppose police would be quite nice to you as well. And all the natives seemed so friendly and happy.

I grew up in Taiwan, so I think I can shed some light on this. IMHO "the average" Taiwanese student will work harder than the average American student, but not by a supremely gross margin as this article would imply.

The bottom-barrel students never end up in American colleges, after all.

The chief difference is cultural - in Asia intellectualism is celebrated and demanded. Parents don't push their kids to football, they push them to academic achievement. Not being able to make it into college isn't worn as a badge of honor, it's downright shameful. I have personally known people who've shipped their kids away from home to some backwater third-rate academy, just so they can hide the fact that the kid couldn't get into any school locally.

Beyond parental pressure, peer pressure also largely pushes people to academic achievement. Having high marks won't get you beat up - in fact it commands respect (within reason). Having poor marks likewise isn't cool like it is here, but is similarly embarrassing.

Keep in mind though, that this has some consequences that academics who opine about the lack of American work ethic consistently fail to mention:

- Appreciation and participation in the arts, both as a college study, and as extracurriculars, is ridiculously low. People who study the humanities are looked down upon, I even know one guy who got disowned for it.

- Social integration takes a backseat, often to disastrous results later. In Taiwan is it not irregular for a middle school child (age 12 or so) to be at some form of school for 14 hours a day. There's literally only spare time to eat and sleep (and sometimes not even). Socialization is minimal, and add this onto the culture of living with your parents well into your 20s, it produces some seriously socially inept people.

Japan is already dealing with these consequences - look up "hikkikomori" if you're interested.

Thanks for posting the detailed write-up, but I don't believe that the facts warrant this conclusion.

The fact remains that PastryKit is open source, but close-licensed - by which I mean the frontend source code is transmitted when you access the website by necessity, but owned entirely by Apple.

Honestly, Apple is behaving much like Plurk just a few days ago. Their frontend source code was lifted, unpacked, analyzed, and repackaged for another product. Frustrated by having their intellectual property repurposed without permission or license, a takedown order was appropriate.

While I'm all for analyzing techniques like those found in PastryKit and am sort of a "rah! rah! open source!" guy in general, Apple was well within their rights to request a takedown. It sucks that they did, because I'd love to read up on this sometime and learn from it, but that's how these things tend to go.

That said, whether you agree with me or not, I don't think that this takedown notice is any reason to suggest that "Apple is terrified of iPhone web apps being as good as native apps."

Only they were different leaders.

Traditionally PRC had two factions. The Maoists and the rivals, let's call them the pragmatists. The Maoists were bent on communist doctrines and making great leaps. The pragmatists were more into what already works. The heads of the pragmatists were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Shaoqi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_xiaoping

The famine as you mentioned was attributed in part to Mao's radical policies, and because so Mao stepped down while Liu Shaoqi took his chair for a few years. While Liu was in power he played with capitalist policies similar to those in place today (this was the early 60s), Mao got paranoid and ousted him and Deng, and cultural revolution was launched in part to undo their popularity. Liu died in house arrest.

After Mao died in the late 70s, Deng took over and finally switched to market economy. The current line of leaders descended from his faction of pragmatists. Maoism is pretty much dead in China, a new split in the party is between the populists and the princelings, much more similiar to the dichotomy of liberals and conservatives in the west.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_Chinese_leadersh...