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Four Outrages Techies Need To Know About the State of the Union
Mr.Intel writes "Last night's State of the Union Address contained ten things (and four outrages) technical professionals need to know about the President's plans, and how his policies might affect you, your employer, and your family well into the future."
I read the article, I don't see anything specific to techies. Actually that whole article headline sounds like an article out of People magazine. What's going on here?
Outrage 8: I was outraged at Outrage 2 (and some other stuff!)? Is this guy serious? The whole article just seems to be some incoherent and ill-constructed rant. As a Non-US citizen, is there some deep and meaningful message in the drivel that I'm not understanding?
I must be blind b/c I couldn't find the link to the article. I googled the post's title and found this article: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/10-things-and-4-outrages-techies-need-to-know-about-president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address/9930 In case someone is equally blind as me, I hope that helps.
The same old tired promises we've been hearing since 1790.
FTFY.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
...was the President's jest that a benefit of high speed rail was the absence of a pat down. If he realizes this bothers people... why not actually address privacy rights and the out-of-control TSA in his SOTU speech instead of bringing it up and throwing it aside?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The logic that we need to compete with workers who are poorly paid, who live and work in an environmental nightmare, is ridiculous.
I am troubled by the wording of the headline. Am I alone in this regard?
Self awareness - try it!
That article is an opinion piece. Just because that crap is on ZDnet doesn't make it news of nerds.
At 27, I'm a "millennial." My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it. Keep the Boomers' parents on it. They paid in and didn't give us this situation. They passed on the baton of leadership to the Boomers around Bush Sr. and the Boomers hit prime time in the Clinton and Bush years.
I say "f#$%" them, as a generation. They want to be able to default $500k mortgages and enjoy generous pensions and Social Security when they won't even let my generation discharge a few 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans **in bankruptcy court**. They want to turn Generation X into beasts of burden to fund their benefits while my generation wallows in disproportionate unemployment?
Screw them. The revenues from taking them off the potential Social Security and Medicare rosters would more than pay off our debt in under a decade.
Education has two functions:
(1) Give children sufficient information to make them better (as people and citizens of communities, cities, states, nations, and the world) than the prior generation.
(2) Give children the information required to enter the job market.
Education, and the children and teachers within, are not nor have they ever been tasked with shouldering the burden of the most in-debt and luxury-addicted nation in the world. They way education is being sold today, and now solidified by a president who's desperate to get support from the money-minded, is that we can create a Uber-WorkForce by hyper-educating, hyper-tracking, and hyper-testing our children.
"Invest in the most profitable areas of education now and we'll be rich in the future! MONEY!!!! LUXURY!!!"
This is genuinely impossible. Education cannot be treated as a competition ("Race to the Top", "Pay According to Results") and be expected to stay honest. Without honesty, we can't tell if new ideas are working. Moreover, children will eventually become normal, ordinary people with interests in love, humor, entertainment, politics, history, music, and so on... their K-12 over-education in science, technology, engineering, and math will not change them into a new generation of work-slaves.
Putting the pressure, money, and focus on such a goal will be a complete waste. Focus on making them good *people* first and foremost (education in *real* history, philosophy [including religion], sociology) while also educating them in the various ways they can earn sufficient money to live their happy lives and the rest takes care of itself.
And for the sake of cutting off some argument at the pass, I'm not advocating the cutting of STEM funding-- I'm saying that STEM subjects should not be over-invested... particularly at the cost of the education that is there to create a better society. Maybe one that doesn't allow itself to get into the mess we're in right now.
The goal of education is make good people who can be productive in the job market, not workers who are passable human beings.
Now exactly why much of that matters to most "techies" is beyond me. Really most of it doesn't mattter to most techies.
However it does draw eyes to the website. And I noticed there was a Michele Bachmann ad here on slashdot last night, and this seems to go well with her sales pitch as well. Since president lawnchair has already caved to everything that the GOP has asked for to date, they need to find something to get excited about for the future.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You have an awfully low opinion of assembly line workers. I would encourage you to meet one. Then you'd appreciate the physical effort required to meet an extremely strict work schedule, and maintain attention and energy for an entire work day in less than comfortable conditions.
Sure, it's not an intellectually demanding field, and we suffer an intelligence deficit as a result of most jobs not stimulating intellect, but these people worked hard for their meager pay.
The real issue with manufacturing jobs is labor rights -- in other countries. By allowing manufacturing to go overseas we lose control over employers and they are free to create sweatshop conditions. There have been some good signs in that this issue is becoming an item often addressed in trade agreements, but keeping a manufacturing base here in this country is important so that we can continue to be good example of how to employ physical/dexterity labor without abusing workers.
If we just let other countries with low standards completely take over manufacturing, there will be no progress towards more complex automation. Slaves are still cheaper for most tasks than either autonomous or piloted robot labor -- automation itself has not reached the economy of scale needed to truly end the need for "industrial revolution" style jobs. And AI will take longer than scaling up robot production, so there will be a need for piloting, and the world won't starve for lack of a few good "button pushers."
Someone had to do it.
The same old tired promises we've been hearing since 2007. Where's the beef?
Not at Taco Bell, apparently.
Here are my thoughts on the matter.
First off, the biggest obstacle to American success is China and their unfair trade practices. By keeping their currency pegged to the US dollar at artificially low rate they are creating trade barriers to real free trade. One argument to let them get away with it is that they are a developing nation. This is false, even before they opened up to western trade China had a huge infrastructure developed. They had railroads, canals, heavy industry, chemical plants, and universities producing large numbers of well trained engineers and scientists. They had advantages many nations in Africa would envy. They need to be treated as a first rate economic nation. Another side effect that China's policies have is that it can drive down wages and development in true developing countries by under bidding them on products. I don't think this is what anyone intends. China must be forced to change.
Another obstacle is NAFTA. The theory behind NAFTA was that Mexico would provide low end goods to the US and Canada at wages better than the Mexicans had had before NAFTA. The US and Canada would sell expertise and high end manufacturing equipment to help US manufacturing. One provision Mexico had to meet before signing NAFTA was "land reform". This land reform threw some 1/3 of the Mexican farm labor force off the land, who then headed to the border cities such as Juarez to work in the factories or the US as illegal immigrants. The brutally drove down the cost of labor in MEXICO and the US. Mexican factories merely substituted cheap labor for more efficient manufacturing. And since this "land reform" occurred before NAFTA was signed the disingenuous argument is that NAFTA had nothing to do with this effect. NAFTA must go, all it did was enrich corporations and not people. NAFTA is a poster child for globalization's failure.
I have been questioning now is the conventional economic wisdom that the tight coupling of economies since this latest financial crisis. We are in a situation now where a crisis in one country can affect a host of others. Much like mountain climbers roped together, if one climber falls the entire string of climbers may plunge to their deaths. There needs to be "firewalls" between nations to prevent, slow, or buffer the effects of a crisis. Some may argue that this may be inefficient, I will argue that destroying the global economy is even worse.
Overall I think that Capitalism and conventional economic theory has failed. We need to revisit the basic assumptions of how economies must be run. Two things I think we should do are
1) have economies and financial systems that serve people, not vice versa
2) With my respects to Mr. Dubcek, develop Capitalism with a human face. Corporations are not people and should not be treated as such, and the people running the corporations should not be allowed to hide behind the corporation. There must be accountability.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You need to realize that grouping all people of a certain age into a "generation", and accusing all of them is silly.
I have disagreed with a lot of the stuff done by the government for over 40 years. It's not my fault.
Why is this listed as news? This is entertainment at best, and pretty poor entertainment at that. If I wanted useless drivle like this, I would be watching any of the major TV channel tabloidainment shows instead of reading slashdot.
Cmdr Taco owes me 10 minutes.
Disturbingly, that's not as 100% true as you think. There are some cases of local laws in various places also being privately held copyrighted material and/or "trade secrets" of various organizations. The most common example of this are laws covering zoning and construction written by local engineering forms which then charge money for copies. The bigger concern isn't petty local corruption like that, however, it's actually things like case law and various binding legal interpretations by the legislative and executive branch. Case law has traditionally largely only been accessible by contracting with private firms with virtual monopolies on republishing them. Aside from that, we're increasingly seeing (or not seeing) more and more binding decisions being made by secret courts and various executive offices which in some cases aren't even accessible by Congress. We're also more and more seeing what amounts to superuser permissions to create binding policy equivalent to laws being handed off to more and more agencies.
Consider no fly lists. We know that certain people aren't allowed on airplanes. We don't know which people, and we don't know why, and we don't know which things we might do that might get us put on the list, or on other lists which we don't even know about. The rationale in that particular example is that flying is a privilege, not a right, and therefore having it taken away is not a punishment. Clearly that's a load of nonsense. Traveling about the country is certainly a right, and removing of the more convenient ways to do that is a curtailment of that right. If that argument is faulty, that means that it's acceptable to refuse registered voters entrance to polling places because it only inconveniences them and they can find another way to vote. Even if being able to board planes is a privilege and not a right, removal of privileges that everyone enjoys by default still qualifies as a punishment by any sane definition.
You need to do some research. The only high speed rail the USA has is the Acela line, which is run by Amtrak. It brings in an absolute *ton* of money. It is full all the time, self sustaining, and brings major profits to the states it runs through. The cost of getting this type of line through the entire USA is negligible for the amount of money (and jobs) it would bring to each of the states. While not as fast as those in Europe and Japan, it is being upgraded to those speeds and will allow for more passengers (and profit). There is zero credibility to any claims made that high speed rail in the USA would be unprofitable, rarely used, and a money drain. The only example we have is the Amtrak Acela line, and it is huge success in every aspect.
Just to shed some facts on the rhetoric: PolitiFact tracks all of the promises Obama made during the campaign and categorizes them. At present, the results are:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/
Promise Kept: 134
Compromise: 34
Promise Broken: 34
Stalled: 71
In The Works: 220
Not Yet Rated: 2
"Promise Kept" means he promised it, and has already delivered it largely in-tact (example: Lily Ledbetter Fairl Pay Act). "Compromise" means that he promised it, and managed to get it through congress, but had to compromise or water it down to get it passed (example: a lot of the stuff related to Healthcare). "Promise Broken" means that he promised it, but didn't even try or gave up (example: having a public review period for all bills before signing them). "Stalled" means he's still supporting it, but hasn't been making much progress (difficulties in implementation, congressional obstruction, etc) (example: closing Guantanamo). "In The Works" means that he's pushing it, but it hasn't yet made it to through congress (example: eliminating oil and gas tax loopholes).
Consider that net result as positively or negatively about him as you prefer.
... in Siberia, where Putin killed a fish with a speargun. He later claimed it was killed by Ukrainian separatists.