>> There is no magical "tool" which can correctly guess what is hidden
>> behind a solid object.
>
> No, but if you have a picture that shows what's behind a solid object,
> then you can in fact mask out the object.

Sure. That I can believe. Doing it from just one photo isn't so easy.

>>> I don't think this is the "usual case".
>>
>> Usually what you know about a thing is utterly dwarfed by what you don't
>> know. The question is whether you know the important facts - which is
>> usually a matter of chance.
>
> That's not been my experience.  It is possible to seek out the important
> facts before making a decision.
>
> Business intelligence systems do exactly that, in fact.

Doesn't BI involve paying vast sums of money to /collect/ the necessary 
information?

>> Statements like this make me wonder where this vast endless source of
>> "easy" counter-examples is... It's as if the entire world knows
>> something that I don't.
>
> How to properly use google?<scnr>

You laugh, but this is actually non-trivial.

If I had a penny for all the times I've been utterly frustrated in my 
efforts to find information using Google, I'd be very rich by now. 
(Obviously I can't think of a single concrete example right now. That 
would be too useful...)

>> As I say, I get the impression (I'm not sure precisely why) that it's
>> mainly targeted at high-powered business executives in upper management.
>> (These are the people who are usually obsessed with "networking", for
>> example.) Since I am not one of those people, perhaps this isn't an
>> appropriate tool for me, which is why it looks useless when I look at
>> it.
>>
>> (Alternatively, perhaps I'm just mistaken...)
>
> Yep, you are.  I'm certainly not a 'high powered business executive in
> upper management", but I do happen to have worked with a lot of people in
> several different fields.

OK, fair enough.

> Well, there's also the question of your unwillingness to go where the
> work is

I live in a city with a population of 200,000 people, and an 
unemployment rate well below the national average. /Clearly/ there are 
jobs here. I just need to find them.

> or your unwillingness to believe that anyone on the planet who
> works a "normal" job makes enough to live on.

Uh, when did I say that?

> Heck, I was laid off last May.  I didn't work again until October, and
> it's been contract work ever since.  A couple of really tight months
> financially, but we haven't lost the house and are still paying all the
> bills.

Then clearly you are a far better person than I am.

One time my sister got laid off. 5 days later, she was on the phone 
complaining that of the 3 written job offers she had received from the 5 
interviews she attended, she couldn't decide which one sounded the nicest.

She went to more interviews in 5 days than I've been to in my entire 
working life. But then, she has skills that people actually want, and 
she apparently knows how to find those people, so...

>>> Oooh, he's got teeth, this one does. ;)  That's a fair question.
>>
>> Back atcha. ;-)
>
> It always makes me smile when you take a stand on something.  Even when
> the stand isn't necessarily logical in my view.  You have changed in that
> regard, and it's a good change.  :)

It's good to be righteous. It's not so good when you're actually wrong. :-/

>> So there's a lot of people /on/ the site.
>
> And it stands to reason if it were a waste of time, people wouldn't spend
> time on the site, would they?  (The point of LinkedIn isn't to waste
> time, it's to build a professional network.  Facebook, OTOH, is
> essentially there for people to waste time on so they can be the
> 'product' sold to advertisers - the two aren't really equivalent).

Yeah, I'm really not seeing how Facebook is still in business. It must 
cost /millions/ to run all those servers. And yet, their idea of 
"targeted adverts" is about as precise as a blunderbuss. It just seems 
like some day somebody is going to figure out the emperor's magical 
invisible suite is actually non-existent...

>> I don't get the whole "networking" thing. I mean, hypothetically I can
>> see why it might work. But I have no idea how you'd go about this in the
>> real world, nor do I directly know of any instances where this has been
>> a successful approach for somebody. Maybe I haven't seen networking
>> succeed because I don't do any networking and I don't know anybody else
>> that does, IDK... It just seems a slightly strange concept.
>
> Well, I've had it work for me in the past.  In fact, the contract work
> I'm doing right now is due to networking - I applied for a position with
> a local company, and while I wasn't hired by that company, someone
> external to the company involved in the selection process saw my CV and
> gave me a call for another project she was working on.
>
> I've been working "for" her (as an independent contractor) ever since.
>
> The job before the one I was laid off from (or rather, the company), I
> met a recruiter at a user group meeting who introduced me to the hiring
> manager at the company - and I was originally going to contract to them,
> but they bought the contract out and hired me directly.
>
> So there's two examples.

OK.

>> For example, how do you know that "millions" have found it useful? Not,
>> say, "thousands"? The number of people on the site is not necessarily
>> the number who have actually found it beneficial.
>
> It stands to reason that if it weren't beneficial, people would stop
> using it.  After all, you didn't find it beneficial, and you stopped
> using it.  That's actually a perfectly natural reaction.
>
> So are you assuming you're the only one who stopped using it because you
> didn't find it beneficial?

We'd need to see numbers for how many people signed up, and how many 
people subsequently left.

My profile is still live on the system. It looks like I'm still a 
Linked-In user. And yet, I haven't used it in 3 years. So don't use /my/ 
presence as an indicator of usefulness.

How many of the other profiles are ghosts? I guess that's the opportune 
question...

Regarding Facebook: How many of those profiles are for somebody's cat? ;-)

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