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Wall Street's Collapse Is Computer Science's Gain
dcblogs writes "Thanks to Wall Street's implosion, the chairman of Stanford University's Computer Science Department says he is seeing more interest from students in computer science. Ditto at Boston College. Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust as students turned to hedge fund majors. And are computer science grads getting jobs? The professor at one university program that graduates about 45 students a year with CS degrees, wrote in a comment: 'Last year 87% of our seniors were employed before graduation. The median starting salary was $58,500. A majority of CIS students had multiple job offers. From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS.'"
Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust
Busts can spoil a career in any field, really.
Here I was finally thinking I'd get a raise this year because of labor shortage!
Listen kids, there is no future in IT. Plumbers and lawyers is where it is at.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It always depresses me to see how many college students have no idea who they are, and just float about on the breeze of the moment, going for the buck instead of what they already see a passion for doing. They weren't reflecting upon their lives as a teenager, they weren't deciding what makes their hearts go faster, they were just assuming that someday their Fairy Career Mother would pop out of a cloud to tell them what they should do for the next forty years.
[
"From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS.'"
Where have you been sitting lately?
This can be logically stated as Post Hoc.
A occurs before B.
Therefor A is the cause of B.
Just because the markets are hurting right now doesn't make students more likely to apply for a career in CS or IT. Heck you can do far more broader things with a business degree or an MBA than you can with a degree in CS.
The problem is, there aren't a ton of jobs for CS grads. Proprietary software is failing, and most companies now have a good senior sysadmin, and computer repair is clogged up with high school students. Not to mention that a lot of "code monkey" jobs can easily be shipped to where labor is cheap. So, where exactly do these people think they will be employed when most, if not all proprietary software companies have failed?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Is discouraging competition a part of your career strategy? Do you calculate a return-on-investment from this?
Great. so now we can look forward to these same imbeciles doing software and hardware that brings the world down a few notches, as if that helps the current state of affairs, what with nothing but cheap, crap software and die-young-stay-pretty hardware.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Careers&articleId=9115616&taxonomyId=10
Employment rates at graduation are often incredibly skewed. Frequently only those with jobs will report the fact; a lot of people who still haven't found one won't. I picked the law school I went to partially based on its "percentage employed 6 months after graduation" number, plus it's median salary number. It wasn't until I graduated that I realized how fake the number was.
If I had to do it all over again I'd probably major in pharmacy. Good money, good job security, good hours.
We just had a career fair for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students, and the organizers mentioned to me that it was the busiest they've ever seen. Not that there are any more students in the department.
My theory is that all the students originally planning to go into finance/consulting realized they might actually have to get jobs in the real economy, doing more than Excel and Powerpoint (investment banking). This was during the week of the Lehman/AIG collapse.
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Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
well on the plus side, if more people take it up then there might be a reduction in these....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H1B_visa
yeah, riiight.
I thought golf studies was a ridiculous degree, but hedge fund studies? Financial mathematics, sure; economics, likewise; and a degree which combines the two is perfectly reasonable, if liable to drive the mathematically inclined nuts and the mathematically disinclined to drink. But "hedge funds" sounds awfully specific for a major.
Look on the bright side, we'll get a bailout in a couple of years
Yee-Haw!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
From the article:
Yeah, and businesses also want people with 10+ years J2EE experience. What they want isn't necessarily what they can get. And if you have ALL of the above, technical skills, marketing skills, negotiation skills, and management and industry training, the only positions you should be considering are CEO and CTO. With those negotiation skills, you should get them.
That's an overcrowded field. Everybody on craigslist is trying it already.
From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals . . . in CS.'"
Damn, looks like I should keep playing!
How the heck is CS as a science supposed to gain anything from the flock of people who select their subject of study based on which gives the best money/effort ratio at the moment?
These are just the kind of people who spend the minimum possible amount of work to get a grade. I wouldn't think they would be interested in CS. Instead, I would imagine that they would be interested in software engineering (management) so they can land a low level manager job straight out of school.
At my school, there are more companies coming to the career fair looking for CS/SE employees than we have graduates from the program. Too bad being a professor is the only job I can think of where I possibly wouldn't want to kill myself and every single person I've ever had to work with.
From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS in India.
..How many of these guys actually will be in it because they like it, not because of the cash, because in my experience those in it for the cash are most often clueless useless persons while those with enthusiasm and passion, even with having no formal education at all, are by far the absolutely best IT folks.
I worked at a recruiting firm that specializes in IT for the last two years, and let me tell you, we could not find enough programmers, specifically in Java. The firms we were working with constantly were upping the pay to try and attract workers to our city but in general, the demand for labor was much, much higher than the supply.
You can work in finance and have a CS degree. There is work to do when it comes to managing risk and tons of information to track and analyze. If you are math or CS oriented and you like playing the stock market, it is an interesting area to be in.
Now this probably isn't the best time to find one of these jobs, but assuming the economy doesn't collapse completely, hedge funds and others are still hiring.
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
Finance is one of the biggest consumers of IT and development resources. My first job out of college was at a hedge fund as a IT developer. Many people don't realize that finance is heavily computer and information driven these days. The days of people working on gut feeling is dying out. At the hedge fund, there was only two traders who actually traded in financial instruments. The rest of the non-support people were analysts who came up with strategies based on models and information provided to them by quants and programmed into their infrastructure by CS people. Their infrastructure was maintained by IT people.
My point is that finance going downhill is bad for IT and CS because that's one of the most information driven sectors outside of software and hire a lot of CS people out of college.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I think this is very partial and out of touch. You can't generalize from the *top* school situation.
Also, I suspect the surge on enrollment is due to massive lay-off from IT corps serving Financial corps.
"Last year 87% of our seniors were employed before graduation"
Since this data was collected before the Global Financial Apocalypse, how is it any indication of the industry's resilience to a Wall Street Collapse? Let's wait and see what happens to next year's students...
Google alone has hired 10,000 new employees over the past year. Microsoft has added 11,000. I know people who have no CS degrees at all, but who have managed to get some relevant experience on their resumes (usually something web 2.0-ish) being fought over in signing-bonus bidding wars, because everyone who isn't Microsoft or Google is desperate to find some good talent out of the pool that's left.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
2007: "IT? That's sooo 2000! They all lost their jobs in the dot-com bust! Finance is where it's at!"
2008: "Finance? That's sooo 2007! They all lost their jobs in the Wall Street bust! IT is where it's at!"
Do you really want those people?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Since at least the dot-com era and maybe before, there's been a demand for entry-level software developers. It's the subject of Steve McConnell's essay Orphans Preferred. Companies like pulling cheap labor from colleges and grinding the people down until they either burn out or get wise and fight back at the bullshit, at which point the company replaces the burnouts and malcontents with the next wave of suckers.
A gain in college CS programs is not a net gain for the field of CS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the actual beneficial gains in CS have not been made due to substantially increased student CS populations, or even as a corollary. Yes, it's had it's part in small breakthroughs, but in my eyes a lot of those small breakthroughs haven't brought on strictly by academia, and a lot of the big breakthroughs have been pushed by corporations - again, not academia. Seems academia has been largely "me too, let's do what's hot in business" when it comes to CS for the past decade+.
And it certainly can not help the CS graduates themselves. More CS graduates means lower wages. There's already a hardly any "computer science" related jobs out there, even in academia. Sure, there's business programming out in the corporate world, but those wages would also decrease
There are already too many people who want to work in IT/CS and have the degree, but are unable to do so due to the glut of IT workers. This is just going ot make it worse for recent grads.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Isn't it a bit premature to be talking about the fallout of the Wall Street debacle, as it relates to college enrollment?
I mean, what does he have to base it off? A two week to 30 day trend?
Attributing last semesters enrollment to something that hadn't even happened yet (at least, it hadn't been properly attributed to Wall Street) is kind of .... Umm..... I dunno HOW to put it.
--Toll_Free
"It always depresses me to see how many college students have no idea who they are, and just float about on the breeze of the moment, going for the buck instead of what they already see a passion for doing."
Considering the high cost of education. Can you really blame them for chasing dollars?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
We do not need more tards in Computer Science. Even after the down-turn after the dot.com bust, we got these people who can't for their fucking life understand what a pointer is, writing the crappiest code everywhere they go.
We need quality, not quantity. The more we get tards who just go and graduate into something because it's "the next thing in getting $$$", the lesser the quality of work being performed.
Ugh.
I was sitting in Mass last Sunday listening to this priest drone on about helping the poor. The social Gospel - I get it. Here was this guy that went from the comfort of his middle class home, into the comfort of the seminary and then onto the comfort of parish life. His needs have always been met. He has never experienced scratching out a living, hustling or cutting corners to get by. Like many educated middle class white people he assumes that all others that look like him shared the same gilded upbringing. The fact is that most people haven't experienced this Leave it to Beaver sort of existence. Most of us took some knocks just to put together a decent existence. And for this it seems all we get asked is to give more and more.
I want to know one thing. At what point is it no longer my fucking problem? Is there some point where I'm off the hook? If I write a check for $5,000 am I done? I look at my check every two weeks and gasp at the deductions. And let's not forget about the yearly tribute to the IRS. It never seems to end. Someone always seems to have their hand out with some hard luck story. At what point is it no longer my fucking problem?
I was back in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio last week for my 25th class reunion. It was a great event and it was fun to talk old times. Being in Cleveland was apropos with all this $700 billion bailout talk as a result financial institutions giving out bad loans to the underclass. Cleveland is a textbook example of what happens when you give home loans to a class of people that are fiscally irresponsible and not deserving of a home loan. Furthermore Cleveland is also a text book example of rampant dependency of social welfare programs. If you want to know how we made out on LBJ's War on Poverty go to Cleveland. Poverty won..
It's not for lack of trying that poverty won out. The intentions were good but the notion that you can give a layabout a check for nothing and expect him to run out and get a job in short order is simply delusional. We have been proving this on a daily basis since about 1965. These are more misguided middle class assumptions like I hear every Sunday from Fr. Social Justice. If we just help out poor DeShawn to get back on his feet again he will surely find himself a job and start providing for those 16 bastards he has fathered in his 20 years of pathetic existence. Excuse me while I sarcastically snort.
I was standing on the street that I grew up on and I counted about 40 houses with for sale signs, most of which were abandoned and boarded up. In the 20 years that I grew up on that street I don't ever remember more than 2 housed being for sale at once and none where ever abandoned. Shit, if a cigarette butt was dropped some old DP would be out there cleaning up. The street was a mix of people of Irish and various Eastern European extractions. Everyone was blue collar. No one was rich and most came from a dirt poor existence.
The neighbors to the right of us emigrated from Lithuania shortly after WWII. In Lithuania they were considered intellectuals. Stalin's thugs killed everyone they knew. They escaped to Brazil and then eventually came to America where they became factory workers. They never picked the language very well and stuck with their own kind but they were good neighbors. She's still alive and alone on that street. Now she's surrounded by a different kind of thug that has zero appreciation for what she endured. Her house has been broken into several times. She's afraid but does not want to move into a nursing home and she cannot sell her house in this market. She's 94 years old.
The sad part of it is that this was a good neighborhood up until about the mid 90's. It was around this time that lending institutions were being coerced or willing participating in high risk loans targeted at poor minorities and when we say minorities here it does not included Asians. Really in Cleveland when we say minorities we are talking about blacks of Southern extraction that initially came here for the industrial work but sta
Cut the military budget in half. Arrogant white trash who like their country being the 'world police' will get over it eventually.
Blar.
So Wall Street collapses and CS interest grows.... all in how many weeks?
Sure buddy..... I suspect this is just more hype to try and get more CS students.
Create a non-existent band wagon in the hope a real one will happen?
we must preserve computer science as a bastion of holier-than-thou ego junkies who fill the void in their lives with a constant need to primp their supposed technical superiority
dude: the only thing worse than an incompetent programmer is a competent programmer who thinks sunlight shines out of his ass. your attitude sucks
i'd much rather deal with a humble computer idiot on my team than a preening egomaniac like yourself, no matter how good you can program
adjust your ego, please. it makes you suck worse than the "tards" you look down on, jackass
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And we'd be overrun by our enemies in how long? Isolationism simply cannot work when there are intercontinental missiles and airliners...
Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust as students turned to hedge fund majors.
And we see how well THAT turned out. Hopefully they will stay unemployed now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Legal drugs are quite a bit cheaper than illegal ones so less money would go out. Compare current aspirin prices vs. cocaine. Which is cheaper to produce if they both legal? Legalization would also allow domestic production to compete against the imports, further reducing the outflow.
I think GP's point was that if you restricted your "Defense" budget to defence it wouldn't need to be nearly so big.
but with the best intentions in the world, to make sure everyone could have a goddam house.
Oh rubbish, the only intention is to make money (literally). The debt spiral has to increase exponentially (Running at 10%+ per year) to survive. That means selling debt to exponentially more people each year. Eventually, you have to find a way to persuade everyone to take on debt. How?
Tulips?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
A good time had by all; The Roaring Twenties?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties
This time it was housing in America. In fact, it's irrelevant. The real cause is the fundamental nature of bank credit. When you take out a loan, new money is created, this new money "boosts" the economy, the stock markets. It's really mostly inflation. But along with the money, which doesn't change, you also get debt, which increases exponentially. So there is a boom which has to be followed by a bust, the longer the boom, the bigger the bust and to continue the boom, more and more people have to take out new loans... Remind you of anything?
Eventually you run out of people... And it crashes anyway... You even read about it in the newspapers, they're giving loans to people who have no income... WTF? ... If you've read any Austrian economics, you can see the crash coming a mile off.
Deleted
Far from peak oil alone, we now see peak nearly every commodity on the planet. For the first time in perhaps a century, those who produce the raw materials are now firmly in the driver seat of the economy. In the USA, it means that the wheat belt is now politically more important than the lawyer belt. Sure, the banking sector is going down the drain and Washington is trying to salvage it, but ultimately, those who produce the grain and the gold are doing quite well right now.
Obama's plan of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle through conservation isn't going to work unless he either plans on killng alot of people or starting a global depression.
For every gallon of gas or bushel of wheat that Americans consume less, there are plenty of Chinese and Indians to use that gas and eat that wheat. There's never going to be a time in the forseable future where urban centers will again hold sway. There's so many people out there, capable of manufacturing, that those who own the food and the raw materials can choose who gets them and at what price.
This whole idea of digital content being worth a lot has just gone down the tubes with New York. If you want real wealth, forget about software. Start a farm or buy shares in a mine.
This is my sig.
Cut the military budget in half. Arrogant white trash who like their country being the 'world police' will get over it eventually.
We should cut the military budget. This will make it easier for red states to resist Chairman Obama's socialist mandates. He can't really have a socialist state without a big army to keep pieces of it from breaking away, can he?
This is my sig.
I think you mean "loss."
The dotcom boom brought about massive numbers of totally disinterested programmers who were only there for the perception of the money it was supposed to bring them and were thus only as good as a minimally passing grade required them to be.
Worse, fairweather career chasers are always stuck behind the curve. It takes a couple of years for the media to pick up on a starting boom. Then it takes them four years to get the degree based qualification (admittedly less to get the MCSEs etc. that then got such a terrible reputation). That means they usually manage to turn up right around the end of any given boom... or often a little after... and bitch about how much they hate this career that was supposed to be an easy way out for them, all the while taking the few remaining jobs from the people who do want to be there.
Combine terrible "just enough to qualify" attitudes, diluting overall quality, and creating a massive imbalance of supply over demand when the field's hurting the worst, pushing salaries even lower... and I left wondering if there's a single way computer science actually gains, as opposed to loses, from these people?
Yes, Wall Street has had them for the last little over half a decade. And the sickening little idiots have leeched everything out of that market and crashed it around their own ears. They were also there, en masse, in the real estate industry. You remember the raging a-holes who figured they'd get BMWs and a huge paycheck out of raping anyone who wanted to buy a home during a housing boom.
Please, for the love of everything holy, nerdy, or whatever you subscribe to... don't encourage them back in to our field.
Go out to schools, colleges, career fairs...
Tell them all about the long hours of unpaid overtime. Tell them all about management that doesn't get technical reality. Tell them about the stresses. Tell them about how tough the lean years were after the dotcom boom and how that's a cycle that will keep coming back.
Then carefully only talk up the parts that'll appeal to those with a genuine love. Tell them about how they will get the latest IDEs and graphics suites paid for. Tell them how they'll get the satisfaction of seeing their own name in the back of a game manual. Tell them how their embedded code could end up, admittedly unheralded, saving lives in some critical application.
But, for the love of God, don't make the mistake of thinking fairweather career chasers are something we want back in the industry.
I'm sure I'll be labeled as a troll here, but I really loathe the grouping of IT and CS. While there is a little bit of union of the two, your majority of IT 'professionals' are corporate help desk drones who wouldn't know a byte from a cow and consider memory and disk space to be the same thing. For the most part the skill sets are completely different as are the job markets. You can probably turn any business major into an IT professional, you can't say the same thing for CS, at least if its a traditional CS program. Most of IT does not program, they do trouble tickets or screw up project management all day. Oh sure, there are some exceptions. Usually 1 or 2 in an IT department who actually know a thing or two at a CS level, but that's about it.
Where I graduated we had 3 programs. MIS, CS, and Comp Eng (CE). CS and CE shared some classes, MIS didn't. Don't mean to belittle, they each have there place, but lets not muddy the waters too much with direct comparisons. Especially when talking about job hiring ratios and starting salary. Not too many people who had a major that including something along hte line of Excel 101 start at $60k/year.
I'm not sure if you can count the influx of all these idiots as a good thing. CS could be better without them. The worst thing about the tech boom was the influx of all the inept yutzes calling themselves programmers.
unfortunately the rest of the world expects and desires it from us. Waiting for us to do something is cheaper than givng money and soldiers to the UN.
First, $20B > zero, which is what the government gets now from the drug trade.
Second, as other posters pointed out, it would also reduce police spending by several biilion dollars and allow them to focus on crimes that might actually affect you!
Yes... had you read my post before deciding that you despise me, you'd have noticed in the first sentence that I'm still in college. I work like this because I'm an intern. I don't expect the world to give me anything if I'm not willing to work hard for it. The flip side being that I'm busting my butt now so that I don't have to later. I enjoy my life as well, and I can spend more time enjoying it if I get a good job with good pay from the labor of my 'brow.
By the by, the company that I work for is owned by a gentleman that retired and started a company as something to do; he doesn't take a cent from the company, and works 9-5 every day. I get paid, very well, by the hour for those nights and weekends.
I understand venting and all, but perhaps you lashed out at the wrong person? If not, I'm very sorry that you feel that way and are leaving an occupation that you love because of people like me.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
It wasn't a stick and you weren't just standing there, you were staring at our ass.
As everyone knows, the best form of defense is humanitarian intervention ;)
Requiem for the American Dream
+1 for truth
I am not sure why people always confuse CS and IT, they couldn't be more different. CS majors learn a lot of theory, a lot of math, and then some electrical engineering, logic, and finally, programming. They train in courses like linear algebra, systems architecture, programming language concepts, etc. and learn stuff about compiler design and worry about system scalability, etc.
IT people, on the other hand, learn stuff like how to install windows and practical uses of the "ping" and "traceroute" command, etc.
Both have their place, to be sure, but they are opposite ends of the spectrum. Also, if they *are* going to be confused, slashdot is the last place where it should happen!
But only as a tool to fill jobs that cannot be filled with local resources.
That is a loophole that makes the Grand Canyon look small.
It is used to bypass citizens by:
* Policy that disqualifies every citizen by impossibility or hunting for a disqualification that will stick
* Policy that includes attributes that pass EEOC but are H1B/L1 targeted such as the use of languages not typically spoken by citizen applicants
It takes away the ability to vote with one's feet save for cleaning The Inevitable Mess after they come in.
Perhaps you should wonder why your citizens/subjects(or however it is called) are given second class status outside of finance, courtesy of Ms. Thatcher the Butcher.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And what do you think the market being flooded with new comp sci majors will do? byebye to getting 100k a year as a sr unix admin. Hello 50k a year college grad who is just happy to have a job.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
As a percentage of GDP we spend a *lot* less now than we did back in the 1960's (17% to 45%). It is entitlements, now 60% of our 3 trillion budget, that is killing the US. So 17% on something the Constitution requires is too much, whereas 60% on something the Constitution is silent on is not enough. Got it.
As for 'World Police,' yeah, go ask Rwandans and those in Darfur how America sitting back and letting the 'world community' deal with evil has worked out for them.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
While I am all for individual freedom, there is the personal responsibility issue. You are forgetting the whole lesson of this financial crisis. In modern America, responsibility has been replaced with the Nanny State protecting us from our bad choices. If drugs were legalized, all of the drug addicts - and if China's legalization of opium in the 1800's tells us anything, there will be lots of drug addicts - would need treatment. And guess who would pay for that? Yes, the American taxpayer, rather than, say, the dumbasses who got addicted. I'm guessing any tax revenues raised on drugs would quickly be outspent by Congress on prevention and treatment programs.
Freedom without responsibility is bound to take away someone else's freedom - usually the taxpayer's.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
It seems to me that the last time there was a major enrollment of those with little interest in IT other than financial gain, the job and wage market went down the toilet. Employers find themselves with a great number of IT workers to choose from, but unfortunately most of them have little experience beyond books, and little interest to learn more.
Most of the best IT geeks I know are good not only because of good schooling (and sometimes without), but also because of a driving interest which causes them the learn new concepts which often translates to better workplace skills (sometimes offset by those that recommend or waste time on weird solutions that don't pan out).
to make sure everyone could have a goddam house
Actually, it was more those taking advantage of the "American Dream" concept to sell people houses and other luxuries beyond their means. In many cases it was because you're selling people $400,000-$500,000 houses on a "$200,000-$300,000 income." Plenty of interest to rake in during the short-term, but things tap themselves out in the long-term.
Actually, there's not a lot of reasons those same people couldn't have had houses, just not the houses (and other luxuries) that they were being financed for. This also combined to drive up housing costs, perpetuating a cycle which eventually imploded.
However, IMHO this all had a lot more to do with foolishness, greed, and sloth than with "Good Intentions."
IT spending (this includes spending on software and services) tends to be strongly correlated with the performance of the aggregate economy except that it tends to be more volatile than the economy. Based on this observation, if we are indeed heading into a recession, there will be less jobs for CS people in the coming years. Therefore, while possibly more employable than say junior finance people, finding good jobs in CS still might get tough. Nonetheless, IMHO, you will always be better off studying a major that you feel passionate about. Short term market volatility should not affect one's career choice. A career spans 40-50 years. Market downturns and upturns last only a few years. If you do what you care most about, you will usually have a strong motivation to stay on the top of the subject and this will help you get the jobs even at the time when not everyone can get one.
This always happens when the economy is down, in many fields. People who aren't enticed out into the working world by lots of easy money jobs will take the time (when they're not making money anyway) to retrain. I doubt this is happening with CS more than with other fields.
from an influx of people who are motivated by greed?
I am not convinced that the "bailout" is necessary, nor that it will have the desired results. The evidence points to something too terrifying to believe, but too credible to be dismissed out of hand: our government is driven by criminal sociopaths whose sole aim is to enrich themselves without regard to our fellow citizens, our nation, or the world as a whole. The Executive and Legislative branches of our government appear to be driven and directed by the overwhelming financial influence of groups, both foreign and domestic, such as the Banking, Finance and Insurance sectors, the defense industry and its dependents (including firearms manufacturers), and the petrochemical and energy sectors, among numerous others.
What is a sociopath? In dictionary definitions we find that a sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. They are interested only in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the effects of their behavior on others.
Tell me if this does not describe the long chain of presumably intelligent and highly educated people who built and operated the business model that has resulted in the crisis that motivates the bailout. How can we consider the supporters of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000) or the repealers of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act) as anything other than sociopaths? With their fanatical adherence to Free Market fundamentalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_friedman#Chile and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_fundamentalism) they have caused economic damage to our nation and the world comparable to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/badguys/061025/the_cost_since_911_1.htm), and very likely much more. Why have we allowed this? Where were our senators and congressmen? On whom are we supposed to rely when our own representatives pass suicidal legislation whose financial damage is comparable to the worst terrorist attack in human history? Far from stopping such calamities, we are being stirred into a panic in a reprehensible effort to force us to pay for the fraud and irresponsibility of sociopathic businessmen and politicians.
Fear and imminent large scale damage have been invoked yet again, just as they were in 2002-2003 when we were pushed into a completely unjustified (and unbelievably expensive: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html?_r=1&scp=21&sq=financial%20cost%20of%209/11&st=cse&oref=slogin) war against a third-rate dictator who represented absolutely no threat to us. Our deceitful politicians now claim they were the victims of "flawed intelligence," which apparently consisted of nothing more than the unsubstantiated claims of the notorious swindler and opportunist, Ahmed Chalabi and his self-interested cronies. Is history repeating itself? Are the same lying, cheating, thieving, murderous war criminals robbing us of the largest single disbursement of all time by filling our ears with lies and our hearts with unwarranted terror? Are financial institutions toppling due to their abysmal judgment and incompetence? If so, shouldn't the free market fanatics be cheering their demise? Shouldn't we all be pleased that "free markets correct themselves," and allow the corrupt and the foolish to go under?
No! We are told. Doing nothing is even worse than the colossally stupid act of sorting all existing loans in the nation and using taxpayer dollars to purchase several million of the absolute worst from the resulting list. Politicians and economists have even had the temerity to sugge
I have enjoyed reading the opinions and expressed concerns regarding drug legalization, here tonight.
But, there are three main areas where drugs impact the Economy:
Costs of the drugs. I have bought kilos of coke in Bogota, and kilos of great weed in Mexico, and the price/cost differential between the source and the domestic, consumer Market, is astounding. The US produces many tons of codeine here. It's actually a by-product of one of the ingredients of Coca-Cola. And that means that the same source of the codeine, is also all about heroin, or the refined, less efficacious pain killer, morphine. The notion that legalization would divert the same bottom-line 'expenses' [In terms of 'street' consumption] to foreign criminals is absolutely false and misleading. Less-efficient morphine and 'alternatives' like 'Demerol' are only used in the US because the FBI criminalized heron in the Twenties (1926, I think, look it up, google Harry Anslinger). Heroin is far more efficient in pain management. That means a lower burden on Health Care expenses, also, if it were legally available in the US medical industry.
Law Enforcement. Okay, assuming we can ignore, for now, the notion that the War on Drugs is chiefly about establishing hegemony in the trade, and a steady source of for-profit incarcerated individuals for Wackenhut and other beneficiaries of the 'three-strike' laws, the savings in manpower, and other budgetary aspects, would be staggering. This would allow two things, besides real dollar savings: Diverting of manpower toward crimes with victims, and a huge resulting savings in incarceration. [The US taxpayer is underwriting the profits of private enterprise in the Prison Business, under the current paradigm.] As well, parts of the current law enforcement budget could be diverted towards intervention and treatment, which, besides being a necessary effort, would also lower the costs on the current Health Care system, and would allow the Churches to go back to preaching, and butt out of social policy.
Civil impact changes would be too broad for a quick summary like this. But, obviously, the lowered price of drugs, themselves, and the reality that drugs would be regulated insofar as content, purity and manufacturing safety are concerned, would lower the overall impact of drug use on total expendable income in the US by factors that might be difficult to imagine, at first. Drug legalization would involve the use of the same mechanisms of judicial and insurance realities, as well as the ability of individual States to regulate how, where and when they would be made available, as well as civil penalties for irresponsible usage, etc.
Is it a be all, end all? I seriously doubt it. I have been clean & sober for well over a decade. I don't recommend drug use. But I also don't recommend the criminalization of drug use, at all. It should be an individual's choice, with rights and responsibilities in the exercise of that choice. The 'right' being the ability to know that something is what it purports to be, and that help is available if someone needs to walk away from something they can't, apparently 'handle.' And the 'responsibility' is obvious: That the exercise of choice does not negatively impact others. Just my 2 cents, that's all.
..are what we need for Infrastructure renewal.
Then again, we first need the money invested so all of M.E., C.E., E.E., ChemE., etc., looking for more excitement can pitch in with our years in both CS and traditional Engineering.
They won't have much competition as people graduating now are not entering the industry, and won't have any industry experience over the next few years. They should do quite well.
AKA "The Business Cycle".
Under Fractional Reserve Banking, boom/bust is the only way it goes. Smaller booms and busts usually, but boom/bust nevertheless.
Now that 95% of money is credit, and the only guaranteed money is cash; notes and coins. It's potentially a long long way down.
Now... If you fancy changing the banking system and denying banks the ability to lend fractionally, the business cycle and the boom/bust nature of credit will change completely.
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The situation for US IT job seekers, and US IT workers, is worse than ever, and will go downhill even faster after the elections. Both candidates plan to further glut the market with guest workers.
If this this article is correct, the situation will get even worse.
Thankfully, the article is purely speculative.
Drug traffickers are.
During prohibition powerful mafias grew out of the lucrative business of providing people what they wanted.
Anybody overlooking the obvious similarities must be blind, deaf and dumb.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Mexico tried some degree of legalization (for possession of small amounts of drug for personal use), as well as some other measures that would have loosened unnecessary prosecutions,during the previous government, but the US protested in such strong terms that the legislation was quickly withdrawn from the Mexican legal process.
It has also been suggested that Afghanistan poppy production should be bought by the occupying countries (mostly US & UK) but the puritanical, idiotic approach to the matter by both these governments has meant that poppy production continues unabated in Afghanistan, feeding terrorism worldwide.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The amount of money wasted in law enforcement as well as the loses due to drugs related crime I am sure easily are bigger than any seizures performed by any government.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If I had followed my passion I would be a bad piano teacher living hand to mouth day to day.
As it happens I decided to do what I was good at, even well knowing I didn't really love it, and right now I have been unemployed for several months but have enough savings that allow me to travel around the world during these difficult times.
I agree that you should think about what you will do with your life, I don't agree that is should necessarily mean you do what you love.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Professionalism is not spelled "passion".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Let me tell you a little tale.
Just before I was made redundant, I had a conversation with one of my would to be Indian replacements (hello Mumbai!) and he literally told me he was afraid of doing his work because realized the consequences of doing something wrong.
No wonder. He was very enthusiastic, bright and proactive, but nothing can prepare you for dealing with systems that handle processes and services in a global scale from which millions of dollars *per hour* may depend on.
Oh no, wait, there is a thing that can prepare you for it: experience.
Last thing I knew about my former department the service have degraded and the company was close to suffer a real meltdown (as a matter of fact we had two during the month I was still there after my redundancy was announced, our would to be replacements had caused it, our old timers, all with redundancy notices served, fixed the problems).
You *must* take experience into consideration depending on the position, not to do so is an outrageous dereliction of duty that no enthusiastic person will be able to patch when disaster strikes.
I'm an Electrical Engineering Masters student that is finishing up this Fall. I have plenty of internship-type experience but none directly related to want I want to do (Control Systems). I went directly from undergrad to grad and have never held anything like a regular 8-5. All that said I have just finished my job hunt process (that took about a month) and I've been inundated with offers. I'm not saying this to brag but rather to ease some fears. There is still a healthy market for technical college grads with average communication skills. The market is extremely frightening for those of us faced with the prospect of moving back in with mom and dad but you really can get any job you want. Here is what i did
- don't stay local! look around the country and move to wherever the best job is. any company worth working for has paid relocation and you don't have to stay there forever.
- if you've held a security clearance list that on your resume no matter what job you're applying for. it means you'll pass their background check without a doubt
- it doesn't matter if your internship experience is totally unrelated, you've worked in a professional setting and you know how it works. don't downplay it just because you weren't doing the exact same type of work.
- put your hobbies on your resume! i've had 20 minute chats with interviewers about my love of basketball, linux, and tex typesetting.
- you're a young person interested in technology. when most kids today are management majors and most IT,CS,Engineering professionals are getting ready to retire you are worth something, you will find a job.
people in IT that are good have been playing with computers since they were kids. Anyone that suddenly got worried they are not going to win the lottery in hedge fund management is unlikely to be happy as a programmer or system administrator. Good programmers are people that actually like to make stuff and to see how stuff works, they are not people that sit around scheming how to cook the books so they can get a fat bonus.
On the other hand, I greatly look forward to the coming interviews.
Peace, or Not?
Plumbers can't make 5 times what they make in Peru just because they live in the US.
Why they can, because they're surrounded by high wage earners who can afford spending more money on services (and expect quality in return). I can see your point applied to the less knowlegde-intensive manufacturing jobs, though. Hence, a motto of the post-industrual world: if you lack talent, go for services.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I write computer applications for the energy industry. We see the exact same thing there too. When times are good money-seeking students flock to the industry. They do the work, but dont make the great discoveries beacause their heart isnt really in it. Same with computers.
this "...there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS." has always been true.
It's the subsequent steps vary between hard and harder. Like raises, promotions, living wage, &c.
you want more capable computer programmers
ok, fine
but you don't paint a picture of what a "capable" computer programmer is like
what you paint a picture of is a frustrated fragile mess. if you were truly CAPABLE, you would be able to HANDLE the messes you encounter. your definition of capability excludes an extremely important skillset you obviously are woefully substandard on
when you are a programmer, you have to work on a team. the programming is difficult enough. you also have to successfully navigate the various bullshit you get from your fellow programmers without creating more problems with a poor attitude, or even worse, getting so full of anger you become a ticking time bomb of impotent rage
furthermore, encountering substandard bullshit is not your personal cross to bear. everyone, EVERYONE in their life encounters mediocrity, in every field. they are able to deal with the bullshit of mediocrity. why not you? is the proper response to scream and moan like a toddler who doesn't get their toy when you see a mess? that's you, asswipe, a toddler: a child unable to deal with their environment as an adult. THAT'S YOU. you fail. you are a substandard programmer on that measure
personal mental hygiene is valuable skillset for a programmer. you have none. you are just as substandard as the programmers whose technical failures you despise, and just as toxic to getting things done. your a terror to work with. a passive aggressive festering bunghole who everyone must avoid, not an asset, a fount of wisdom people feel glad to turn to for advice
the ones who stay at the top, as opposed to the ones who burn out, bitter, disappointed, and despised, are the ones who can keep it in perspective, and understand that this horrible you mess you see is not some sort of temporary situation, but a standard one, across all professions, in all time periods, and going forward, forever. mediocrity is a huge part of the human condition. learn to accept that, or know nothing about your life and your profession
get USED to it. deal with it. learn so it doesn't get to you SO FUCKING EASILY
you obviously are not someone who is going to stay at the top. you're a burn out waiting to happen. go, program like a hermit, don't leave your basement, refrain from social contact. that is your fate, because your mental hygiene is zero. you've allowed yourself to become a festering bunghole of rage
you are solely responsible for how rotten and miserable your life is, because your attitude sucks. you can derive pleasure from being someone people go to for help. rather than a fixer who cleans up messes in a blind rage. it's how you appraoch what is rewarding in your field. currently, you simply apply pleasure from being a fucking know-it-all, damn the others around you. ok, you're so fucking smart. so if you're so fucking smart, how come you're such a mess? not so smart after all. your attitude is not the responsibility of the rejects you have encountered and their rotten code. it is YOUR failure
fix yourself, asswipe. you are worse than 10 of the pathetic programmers you describe. i really, sincerely mean that. your attitude is more toxic to the health of a project than their poor programming skills
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Under Fractional Reserve Banking, boom/bust is the only way it goes. Smaller booms and busts usually, but boom/bust nevertheless.
Why? Describe the process you're suggesting, and why it wouldn't happen without fractional reserves.
Now that 95% of money is credit, and the only guaranteed money is cash; notes and coins. It's potentially a long long way down.
How do you get 95%? AFAICS, even M0:M3 doesn't get to 95%. In what way are notes and coins guaranteed?
Now... If you fancy changing the banking system and denying banks the ability to lend fractionally, the business cycle and the boom/bust nature of credit will change completely.
You'd have to create an awful lot of new M0. Someone would still have the impossibly difficult decision 'how much?'. And I don't see how this would end boom and bust.
In some ways money - even M0 - IS credit. You do something in the economy (grow some wheat, say) which entitles you to some consumption in return. You get little bits of paper to prove this. Later, you redeem these bits of paper for something you want (a chicken, say). Between the two transactions you're effectively 'owed' a chickens-worth by the rest of the economy. This is an awful lot like credit. In that time, the dollar could be inflated to worthlessness, the chicken price could skyrocket or the whole world could switch to Bashtravian Pogglebeads as currency - so it's not like there's no possibility of the loan going 'bad'.
Why? Describe the process you're suggesting, and why it wouldn't happen without fractional reserves.
Full reserve banking. Money which is lent out to one party is taken away from the lender for the period of the loan. With fractional reserve lending, the original lender still has access to their money through the bank's reserve, almost doubling the money with each loan. Then there's a race against the debt.
With 100% reserve lending, money is removed from the lender and given to the borrower, the lender no longer has access to the money. It's gone, and if the borrower defaults, the lender loses their money permanently. The money has moved, not grown. Therefore the act of lending itself doesn't cause a boom.
No boom, no bust.
How do you get 95%? AFAICS, even M0:M3 doesn't get to 95%. In what way are notes and coins guaranteed?
1 trillion in physical currency, and M3 estimated 14 trillion. ~95%
The ratio of the total amount of money to notes and coins.
http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply
Notes and coins are "legal tender" and must be accepted as payment for a debt, they also don't evaporate in a puff of debt, only in the puff of a government.
You'd have to create an awful lot of new M0. Someone would still have the impossibly difficult decision 'how much?'. And I don't see how this would end boom and bust.
Really. What's the world worth? Everything... Imagine holding it in your left hand. In your right, you have all the money in the world... 1 cent.
Basically this is what Europe did when they switched to the Euro... Not so difficult. Course the Euro is just as fiat as the dollar. The actual amount doesn't really matter, as long as the smallest unit usefully represents the smallest thing one can buy.
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We should cut the military budget. This will make it easier for red states to resist Chairman Obama's socialist mandates. He can't really have a socialist state without a big army to keep pieces of it from breaking away, can he?
You do know that the red states are pretty much the same as the welfare states with only a couple exceptions, right? You're pegging the wrong party as socialists. The republicans don't like paying for their welfare and expect the rest of us to do it for them, but they would howl like banshees if we ever tried to cut off their welfare payments. This includes the military, given its extremely excessive budget, but, again, the Republican welfare queens are the ones who keep increasing it to put more of their buddies on the dole.
Seriously, you might consider pulling your head out of your ass and looking around once in a while. You'll look less stupid if you don't keep repeating the same old blatantly false propaganda that your Dear Leaders keep shoveling down your throat, "comrade".
If you only learn one thing in your life, it should be "actions speak louder than words". I learned that when I was a little child, so I never fell for any idiotic cults or scams as you obviously have.
No, the rest of the world wants you to fuck off and stop making everything worse.
Full reserve banking. Money which is lent out to one party is taken away from the lender for the period of the loan. With fractional reserve lending, the original lender still has access to their money through the bank's reserve, almost doubling the money with each loan. Then there's a race against the debt.
Presumably, most people would hand their savings to money managers who buy bonds, shares, mortgage backed securities and so on, just as they do now. Of course, people might find it convenient to trade with these in place of money...so you'd need careful legislation to prevent an equivalent to fractional reserve banking from being reinvented. Banks, of course, would have become little more than boxes full of cash, with strong locks on them, and a collection of secure vans to ferry it around for you.
Yes, under FRB, the amount of money in existence grows with each loan. But why is this a problem? The final amount of money in existence depends on the reserve ratio and M0....both of which are (as close to as matters) under the control of the monetary authorities. The central bank can stuff up the management of these, of course - but they can stuff up the management of M0 even without fractional reserve banking. Print a little more money than is justified by economic performance and population growth and you have a monetary boom and subsequent bust. Fail to print enough and you have deflation, a strong incentive to put money under mattresses rather than lend for investment, big problems for business that must repay loans increasing in real value (you can't have negative nominal interest rates), and a continuing redistribution of wealth towards the rich.
Also remember that the price level depends on the velocity of money, not just the quantity in existence. If a large enough number of people take a little more savings out from under their mattresses - or just spend their income a little more quickly than usual - then the economy experiences something indistinguishable from a rise in the money supply. The process should be familiar: firms each see this as greater demand in their own industry, raw material and labour prices are bid up as firms across the economy work extra-hard and compete for them, the price of all goods rises, people realise their extra income is a mirage as inflationary expectations pick up, demand stops rising, pay doesn't keep up with inflation expectations, demand falls.....monetary boom and bust.
Federal income tax redistributes funds from productive bluestates and hands them out as gifts to the loser redstates.
The redstates seem ignorant of this fact, as they are of many facts.
Broad Brush!
Blar.
Yeah, consider how GDP rose and consider WHO gets the entitlements....poor white trash who vote Republican and hate on Liberals.
Blar.