In an interview with Matt Haughey the $5 membership fee and advertising are discussed:

The $5 signup fee isn't subscription revenue [since it's a one-time thing]. It's mostly just putting a huge hurdle in front of having to deal with new users. 'Cause it's such a pain. The last ten years have shown that any time there's press, like the New York Times writes something about us, 300 people sign up and then wreak havoc for a while, and then go away. [Without barriers to entry] it would just be a nightmare.

Most of the revenue appears to come from ask metafilter since it is well placed for those seeking answers and services:

It's been really successful. I'm really lucky with the way Ask Metafilter works. Every question's about a topic that's easy to match ads to. The other weird thing is, ads aren't even shown to members. Members asking about what kind of digital cameras they should get want honest answers. But non-members searching for digital cameras online get [to Ask Metafilter] in that search.

Metafilter is one of the more interesting older websites on the internet. It has been around for a while and survived the early runs on trolling that younger folks and older folks that should know better do. It is interesting that it is successful in the manner it is. (reply)

Fivethirtyeight breaks down the current unemployment numbers and finds that those without a high school diploma have probably had their jobs shed as part of the current recession. The unemployment rates for different educational groups are:

Less than high school diploma: 15.2%
High School Graduates, no college: 10.1%
Some college or associate degree: 8.5%
Bachelor's degree or higher: 4.9%

The recent interactive New York Times flash app showed a similar story with white women that had four year degrees having the lowest unemployment rate. It continues:

Either the economy needs to start creating jobs for those with less than a college education or the workforce needs to increase the number of people with higher education.

Most tasks that can be done twice with minimum variations between in put and output are now automated. The digitization of nearly every industry courtesy of the cheap microchip and relatively cheap software and hardware has meant most industries - and especially manufacturing - have seen massive productivity improvements through automation at the expense of employment for those without degree's.

One of the ways for dealing with it is to speed up education for children so that when they leave high school they have a two year degree. Basically before they become nineteen they are already degree educated and ready to either go to university for post-graduate studies or are ready to enter the workforce with a more specialized education. (more)

Fred and Patrick at the pub on Thursday night for happy hour. The laughing was probably at PHPs expense. Java developers are that juvenile. Most of the discussion was about technical issues and languages. (reply)

We went to a Mayme Kratz exhibition at the Lisa Sette Gallery recently. Her art is a series of acrylic layers in soft colors that have organic material embedded deeply within them. The material either glows through or is cut such that is it shows in sharp relief. They are very soft, pleasant and quite beautiful artworks. (reply)

Very interesting article about using environments to define behavior. While the stand out example is of reducing errors in medication being handed out through nurses where a vest that means they cannot be interrupted; there was another example directly relevant to software where the method of a silent cockpit in commercial airlines was adopted:

The IT group decided to try an experiment--they established 'quiet hours' on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to tackle more complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to the change in the Path. ... And the division VP attributed the success to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: "I do not think we could've made the deadline without it".

Software engineers use the ipod for that purpose, endeavouring to shut out the world and get to focus on the task at hand. The alternate is pair programming where you enjoy distraction with another developer as you work on a solution but where the chatter and interruptions are about the work you are doing.

Our company has moved over to Agile where it is being adopted at all levels of the organization. One of the issues that hasn't been resolved is the cube farm where the engineers work. I have not thought up a solution to that yet. We are sticking our scrum boards up in the cube farm area now, where they were isolated in a conference room down the hall previously, but as to what to do with the cubes - I don't know. Apparently we can do what we want with the area but I haven't been able to think of anything, and neither has anyone else so far it seems. (reply)

We were up in North Scottsdale yesterday and decided to revisit Sol y Sambra which was a tapas restaurant we had been to previously. It was closed. Not only that it had been closed a year and a half or so. (reply)

At the previous place I worked we had a particularly large project with detailed spec crossing multiple powerpoint presentations of UI design. We ended up pasting it on the wall at the end of the cubicles - about 60 pages or so. I don't think I should post it here on this blog, I have photos of it, but I am not sure if the previous company would come after me or not for posting company sensitive information. I am guessing not as it is out in production now, but who knows.

Anyway, the point of the story is that the spec pages didn't move nicely from left to right, they grew out. As people finished a page of spec they posted it to the out edge of the scrum wall, so as the project continued we ended up with a hole in the middle of the wall defined by the absence of spec pages. I thought it was a nice emergent behavior from making the spec a physical item in the project. (reply)

When Australia was newly federated the Labor Party shared the most policy with the Deakinist Liberal Party. They formed alliances in the early days even. However, the first Labor Parliamentarians acted like the wheeling dealing politicians of old and were quickly wedged or maneuvered out of parliament by the other parties and politicians.

As a result the Labor Party developed the pledge whereby Labor politicians would vote the same way as the Labor party executive determined. This changed Australian politics entirely as Labor was now a voting bloc. Judith Brett writes:

The insurmountable barrier between the Deakinite Liberals and the Labor Party was not Labor's policies not its attitude toward the state, but the nature of the party's organization: the demands which it made on its members to subordinate their own views and judgements to the collective will of the party and the implications this had for parliamentary government.

The problems Labor's organisation posed for the Liberals was particularly apparent in Labor's hostility to alliances. Labor simply refused to play the parliamentary game as it had hitherto been played, and parliamentary leaders found themselves stalled at every turn as they tried to put together workable majorities in the usual way.

This voting as a bloc in the way the party executive requires is known as the pledge and has led to Australian politics being dominated by absolute party discipline. The conscience vote - which Labor does not allow - is the rarity and exception. The horse trading that the American Congress would do where party dissent was tolerated is unheard of in Australia. It is becoming rare in the United States too though. James Fallows commented that in an overhead conversation in Congress:

"GOP member: 'I'd like this in the bill.'

"Dem member response: 'If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?'

"GOP member: 'You know I can't vote for the bill.'

"Dem member: 'Then why should we put it in the bill?'

While the Republican Party only has enough votes for a filibuster in the Senate in order to stop bills coming up for debate, that is a more a convention than a constitutional or legislated rule. But it does seem to show that the Republican Party is able to maintain party discipline - I am not sure where from though; there is no Executive in power and I don't see the US party structures outside of Congress as that strong. The recent purity test was ignored for instance. So I am not sure where it is coming from.

More A speech by Petro Georgiou describes the history of the pledge.

More Cyclical link to John Barrdear who argues that it is fund raising enabling this. (reply)