Insulting Clients

[threaded]

One of my clients employs a lot of so called "Social Employees", i.e. not for their skills but because the government subsidises the jobs.

In principle I am all in favour of such things, but when they get promoted to be Sys Admins or into Management all sorts of interesting things occur.

Which, unfortunately, I have to charge for.

Which is nice.

[The Late, Great JC]

One of my clients employs a lot of so called "Social Employees", i.e. not for their skills but because the government subsidises the jobs.

In principle I am all in favour of such things, but when they get promoted to be Sys Admins or into Management all sorts of interesting things occur.

Which, unfortunately, I have to charge for.

Which is nice.

Really? How interesting.

[planetit]

Really? How interesting.

No it isn't.

[The Late, Great JC]

No it isn't.

OK, yes you're quite correct, no it isn't.

[insight14]

Which, unfortunately, I have to charge for.

You don't need any more money for pies.

[AlfredJPruffock]

Aye Threaded

BTW you might recall a recent thread regarding a quote from Jesus, in which you mentioned that the parable about My Fathers mansions had some connection to the system of finite and infinite numbers , could you expand in in Readers Digest terms what you meant as I was interested in your concept ?

[Lucifer Box]

You don't need any more money for pies.

I'm not so sure - have you seen the cost of pies in Denmark recently?

[OwlHoot]

Aye Threaded

BTW you might recall a recent thread regarding a quote from Jesus, in which you mentioned that the parable about My Fathers mansions had some connection to the system of finite and infinite numbers , could you expand in in Readers Digest terms what you meant as I was interested in your concept ?

He was talking about Cantor's theory of transfinite sets. Essentially it shows that there are different "orders" of infinity, the lowest being so called "countable" sets, whose elements can be matched one-to-one with the set of positive integers.

Infinite proper subsets of positive integers, for example squares 1, 4, 9, .. can be matched in this way, as can the set of all rational fractions (m/n with m and n both integers), and many other sets.

This bamboozles many people, because many of these sets appear to be either sparser than the integers, i.e. proper subsets of them (the 1, 4, 9 example), or vastly more prolific (in the case of fractions) and include _them_ as a proper subset (1/1, 2/1, ..).

However, some sets cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the integers, and Cantor proved that the set of all real numbers was an example.

In the context of Cantor's theory, the "size" of an infinite set is called its cardinality, and the sequence of cardinality for increasing orders of infinity is denoted by the Hebrew letter alpha - The positive integers have cardinality aleph0, the real numbers aleph1, and so on. A cardinality can be identified as a power of the preceding one, e.g. formally aleph1 = 2^aleph0.

For a long while people wondered if this was the complete sequence of possible cardinalities, or whether there were "intermediate" ones. But in the 1960s a guy called Cohen showed that this was undecidable, i.e. demonstrably unprovable using the existing axioms of set theory. But I think most "mainstream" axiomatic set theories in use today assume the sequence is complete.

Not surprisingly, despite being a sound as a bell, Cantor's theory generates more kookery than any other maths topic on the internet (with the possible exception of the endless "Is 0.999.. the same as 1?" debate).

Sadly Cantor himself went a bit loopy in later life, although whether pondering on infinite sets was a contributory factor I don't know. But like Darwin, he certainly faced some hostility and ridicule when his theory was published.

[threaded]

OwlHoot: Succinctly put.

[Bovvered]

...when they get promoted to be Sys Admins...

Personally I would consider Sys Admin to be a severely painful kick in the b0110ck$!!!