Faulty assumptions in your chain of reasoning that render it null:
You assume that the only thing holding back the widespread adoption of electric cars is a lack of grid capacity, and not the high price and low performance of those vehicles. There's no evidence to support this, anywhere.
Even if that were true, there's no reason to believe that the addition of a couple of inefficient wind farms to one state's grid would even match the power needs of the suddenly omnipresent electric cars.
Even if we needed less oil, that wouldn't necessarily translate into less foreign oil. If foreign nations sell cheaper than domestic producers, we'll just buy less domestic oil.
Not living in Magical Unicorn Fairy Princess Reality Mirrors My Contrived Example Land does not make one narrow minded.
But George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, hailed the decision, saying it was 'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'
Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country, unless those windmills are going to be attached to cars, it's not going to have any impact at all on oil consumption. Only about 2.5% of US electricity generation is via oil, and almost none of that is from MA. If you want to argue that having taxpayer subsidize inefficient electricity production is a good thing, fine, we can have that argument, but don't pretend it has anything to do with decreasing consumption of oil.
Well, not everyone's name is publicly associated with their home address, especially now that many people don't have landlines that would put them in the phone book.
The "if they need anonymity, they're doing something bad" argument is a poor fallacy that's been exposed multiple times. It's the online version of "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you need privacy?" Why should someone who wants to write a blog about shady dealings at their work be forced to put themselves at risk? Or even just something that their bosses wouldn't like ? There's no intrinsic need for identity to be associated with the registration of a domain name.
Yes, a court order can (in some cases) strip off the anonymity protections, but not all. For example, InvisiHosting doesn't require that a customer give us any personal information, we allow untraceable payments, and we delete logs daily, so even if a court order comes down, there's no guarantee that someone will be exposed. Still, that same argument applies to warrants to investigate a private residence, and I don't think you're arguing that everyone should just expose all their private behavior to the world, just because cops could go in their house if they're suspected of a crime. If someone's behavior doesn't even meet the laughable criteria for the cops to get a warrant, why should their identity be exposed to the world?
As far as hacks go, that's not necessarily true. If a registrar gets hacked, that's a much huger deal than the stripping of anonymity from domains. If someone's hosting account gets hacked, there's no guarantee that there will be any personal info there, that's on the user. If the server they're hosted on gets hacked, same thing. Most hosts don't keep customer records on their hosting boxes.
I'm the owner of an anonymous hosting company, InvisiHosting.com, and I'd like to comment briefly on the distaste for anonymous domain registration.
ICANN regulations require the listing of accurate data in a WHOIS record, with a threat of revocation if inaccurate data is not corrected. That means that anyone who has a domain name, who doesn't have a company to register it under, has to have their real name, address, email and phone number listed in the WHOIS record. While most registrars are pretty lax in enforcing this, it still leaves normal, good people faced with having to put information that they wouldn't necessarily want public. Anonymous registration makes this unnecessary.
Many people have very very good reasons for not wanting to be associated with a website. Whistleblowers, pranksters, bloggers, etc, all could face serious legal or social repercussions if they data they make public is attached back to them. Many of my non-American customers would be arrested or sued for exercising nothing more than the freedom of speech that the rest of us are accustomed to.
If this idea really takes hold, and ANONWHOIS lists are actually used to spam score email, real spammers will just find a registrar that doesn't enforce ICANN policy too strictly (Joker, GoDaddy, etc...), throw up fake data, and the list would be left penalizing honest people who simply don't want their name attached to their domain.
I've read everything of his that I can get my hands on, with the exception of his YA stuff (started straight on the adult stuff from my old man's collection when I was a kid, never went back), and yes, I think my assessment is true (although you might be right about Puppet Masters).
I Will Fear No Evil is probably the worst book I've ever read. It's the fucking Gone Fishin' of the literary world. The 2nd half of Stranger was unreadable. JOB sucked. Number of the Beast sucked. Friday sucked. I _want_ Heinlein to be good, I really do. I gave him plenty of chances, but, with very few exceptions, he failed to deliver. I mean, I get that it was a different time, and that you had to pepper your stories with a little sex to make them more palatable to the kind of people who were buying pulp sci fi, but Christ, I'd like a little bit of actual sci fi in my books, not just "Johnny fucked his mom in space again".
Avoid Heinlein. He's only got like 3 good books anyway (Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress [best sci fi book ever], and half each of Stranger and Cat), and subjecting anyone to that convoluted, Oedipus-driven Lazarus Long shit at an early age is either going to turn them off the genre, or make them try to mount their mothers.
Finally, parents can know ahead of time if their kids are destined to grow up into whiny little John Hughes emo assholes, and vacuum the little bitch out before they have to end up paying for 20 years worth of Hot Topic clothes.
I've been looking into this myself lately (US resident, hate the fact that the free market is quickly becoming an extinct beast here), and fwiw, Estonia and Hong Kong are at the top of my list. Estonia b/c they have a flat tax (20%), and are pretty libertarian-leaning currently (although their PM's party just narrowly avoided defeat in this last election, so keep an eye out). Hong Kong is a little crowded, and there's the whole China thing to deal with, but for the most part, the Reds respect the "two systems, one country" policy that's kept Hong Kong prosperous.
I make about 25% more than I did when I was working a 9-5, and I was getting paid slightly above the area average for a web developer at the time. For me, and I may be the exception, going out on my own was a fantastic decision from both a financial and a personal perspective.
Unless you're in Austin, and then stay the fuck out of my territory and keep your day job.
In all seriousness, I started, and continue to run, a moderately successful dev company on my own via 100% Craigslist clients. I began by building up a small, but consistent client base while still at my 9-5, and then, when the time was right, I struck out on my own.
I would advise against places like rentacoder and getafreelancer and elance, etc... More often than not, with those joints, you're competing against Eastern European or Indian programming companies that charge like $8/hr, and the client base on those sites is more cost-conscious than quality-conscious. You'll waste a ton of time.
Also, for what it's worth, _never_ utilize the services of a site that makes you pay for it. More often than not, they're not worth the money you spend on them.
The question of un-degreed workers in IT is actually an awesome example of labor economics (I'm excluding engineers and chip designers and such from this, because I know nothing about that field). Large companies, which tend to be successful and have their behavior emulated by their smaller competitors, use a college degree as a way to immediately cut the size of the applicant pool for any given job. Sorting through applicants takes the time of HR people, which costs money, and makes it take longer to fill the position, so a college degree provides a pretty useful brightline. It makes economic sense for them to do so, because they don't need to worry about finding diamonds in the un-degreed rough, and their experience has told them that, in general, a degreed applicant, while costing more, has better productivity returns than a non-degreed applicant.
Smaller companies have, in the past, emulated this behavior. However, as time has passed, as a way to gain a competitive edge, more and more have begun to take long, hard looks at un-degreed candidates for a couple of reasons:
IT is an industry that is particularly accessible to those without formal training and, especially with the variety of open source projects out there, people can have a wealth of experience before they ever get their first job. This increases the chance that there's a very high-value employee without a degree.
You can pay entry level people without a degree less than you would pay someone with a degree, while at the same time, getting a lot of hard work out of them, at little to no loss in quality. Employers are _always_ looking to save money on staff, and small businesses have enough of an incentive to take small risks in return for a potential high productivity payout.
The lower pay level is temporary, so don't go thinking that just because you don't have a degree, you're gonna get jizzed for the rest of your life. Non-degreed employees experience an initial loss of income, but over time, likely within 5 or 10 years, the value of experience plus your own ability to negotiate your employment contracts will normalize your income.
A degree doesn't really mean that much anymore. Liberal arts especially, but even many CS degrees are losing their practical relevance to employers. How many hours does a CS student spend in classes that are relevant to web development, or system administration? How many jobs are there that require you to write a compiler? CS students can go their entire college careers without programming in anything but C and Java, and never even looking at a command line. Yes, there are some principles that you learn in a CS course that are useful down the road, but that's knowledge that can easily be duplicated outside of a college environment.
Myself, I don't have a degree, and I've held lead developer and system administrator jobs that have paid me competitive rates. I'm now the owner of a small development shop, and the lack of college degree doesn't matter one bit. My advice, if you're going to roll without a degree, is to not stop looking for that first, entry-level job, and to work your ass off at it. Put in extra hours, be a fucking superstar, and put on as many hats as you can. If you're a developer, learn systems stuff. If you're a systems guy, learn to do development, or design, or SOMETHING. Without a degree, you are your major selling point, and the more you know how to do, the more attractive you are to employers.
It's a poll of 800 people, and they don't tell you a damn thing about the demographic makeup of the poll. Is it possible that 23% of East Texans think Obama's a Muslim? Sure, but like 98% of East Texas has 11 fingers and toes anyway, so who cares.
But, the real point is that this is a bullshit poll, and nothing can be drawn from it. It's like polling prisoners at Attica and then putting out a report saying "85% of New Yorkers like to fuck little boys in the mouth".
Right, that's why it's a conditional. My assertion is that one vote doesn't matter. However, even if I'm wrong about that, and one vote DOES matter, it'd be better if someone didn't cast that vote than if they did, so my core argument that people shouldn't vote isn't damaged by a negation of the 2nd or 3rd bullet point independently of the other. To defeat my claim, you'd have to prove (or, since this is stupid/. comment threat politics arguing, assert) that both points are false. It's just a way of covering my bases.
Re: making my vote mean more, I live in Texas. My vote is less valuable than that of people who live in California.
And I hope that Lindsay Lohan gets a hot lesbian girlfriend and comes over to let me watch them eat whipped cream out of eachother's assholes, but I think we'll both be disappointed.
* It's an endorsement of democracy and small-r republican government, systems which have clearly failed in that they promote majoritarian tyranny and lowest-common-denominator rule.
* Your vote doesn't matter, no matter how much Puffy says it does. No single vote does. Sure, in the aggregate, they count, but the actual implication to one person not voting is non-existent.
* Even if enough people don't vote, enough to alter the outcome of an election, that's a good thing. People pay a lot of attention to turnout numbers. If there's a significant drop in the number of voters over previous elections, that structural criticism is worth more than your vote would likely be.
* When you vote, you're accepting the idea that everyone's vote is, and should be, equal, when clearly it's not. Think about it this way: 1/2 the people in this country are, definitionally, of below average intelligence, and even the average isn't that great. We wouldn't let those people make decisions about science or technology, because they simply don't have the necessary knowledge base to do so. Why let them on political matters? Are they less effected by science and tech matters than they are politics? Few enough people have put enough effort into forming a coherent personal political philosophy, fewer still have gone beyond that to keep abreast of what's going on in the world around them. That's not necessarily a criticism, not everyone has time for keeping up on whatever dumbass thing Biden or Obama say on any given day, they have lives to lead and kids to raise and bills to pay and shit. Some people's votes are worth more than others. They just are. We recognize that not everyone's opinions are equal in every other facet of our existence. That we don't in politics is to the detriment of us all.
* If you don't vote, I will give you $20 (offer is void where prohibited).
Huh? No I'm not. I'm making far more than the starting salary for my position in 2001. Yes, IT wage growth took a hit post-bubble burst, but that's because a.) the economy tanked, all those startups went away, and the irrational pay scales that we'd adopted during the bubble were all of the sudden obviously making no business sense, and b.) there's been an increase in the number of IT workers due to the relatively high salaries and low barriers to entry in the industry. I highly doubt I'll lose 40% of my income in the next 4 years, unless Obama wins and taxes it all away (+5 political snark!). Why? Because I keep myself current, and I continually upgrade my skillset to make myself valuable to potential employers/customers.
Why do we need to fix unions? It's a fundamentally broken system that inhibits the freedom of all parties, employer and employee, and creates an artificial zero-sum relationship on a lot of issues. I don't _need_ to unionize, nor do I want to. Why would you decide that what you want is more important than what I want, and impose your choice on me? That's what happens when an industry unionizes, everyone who DOESN'T want to join the union gets screwed, because there are laws in place that protect unions, and make it straight illegal for employers to get around them.
I really hope that last bit about us being smart and honest, and employers being dumb and stupid is satirical. There are a lot of dumb, mean, dishonest IT professionals, and there are a lot of really awesome, totally smart employers. In fact, most employers probably are fairly smart, or at the least, very good at addressing the needs of their industry. It's fucking hard to run a business, and it involves wearing a lot of different hats. Most people who get to the point where they're able to employ people have already succeeded to that point, which sort of belies the concept that they're evil and stupid.
If there was only ONE company that hired IT people, you might have an argument. However, there are MANY companies that need IT personnel, and they can't all collude. In fact, one of the reasons that the salaries in the IT industry are fairly good is that there IS a large demand for our services, which means that in many cases, whether they know it or not, multiple companies bid for our services in the form of varied compensation contracts. If your argument were true, then employers could just offer you minimum wage, and you'd be forced to accept it.
I also reject the concept that the employee/employer relationship is asymmetrical where it matters. Sure, employers often have more money to spend on things like lawyers, but when it comes down to it, they are YOUR customer. They're purchasing your labor, and have to make you an offer that you're willing to accept. They can't force you to sell your labor at any price lower than what you're willing to work for. They're not doing it because they like you and think you're a special sunflower, they're doing it because they believe that the skillset that you bring to the company will result in a level of productivity that justifies the expense.
I also disagree with your statement that paying attention to your contract isn't enough. Sure, some employer contracts are full of confusing legalese, but it's not difficult to hire an attorney to make sure that you're not being screwed. In fact, if you're signing a contract that you're not sure about and you _didn't_ hire a lawyer to take a look at it, then you sort of deserve what you get. Your job is likely to be your single largest financial investment. You'll spend more of your time working than you do any other single activity. If you're not willing to do the effort to make sure that your desires are being fulfilled via your contractual relationship with your employer, then stupid on you. Furthermore, I don't _need_ lobbyists and government interference to make sure that I have good working conditions and salaries. If I don't like them, I quit. No employment contract in the country will turn you into an indentured servant, unable to leave the Company Town. Everyone else has that same right, and will exercise it if they see fit. If a company is shitty enough, they'll just keep losing employees, and either go out of business or be forced to adapt and improve their conditions. In the meantime, there's no compulsory employment.
As to collusion, so what? There is such an insane demand for our services that there's no possible way that any individual can be shut out of the work force. So some consulting companies won't hire you, oh well. There's 10,000 print shops that need an admin. This is an employees market. We're not hurting for jobs, because the nature of the economy is such that what we do is actually critical to the success of any given business.
You don't think IT is getting paid enough? Or is it that YOU aren't getting paid enough? IT as an industry does pretty well when it comes to salaries. If you have an objection to the payment structure at YOUR company, leave. Find another job at a company whose conditions meet your desires.
I also find it amusing that, while you're insistent that the people whose job it is to gauge your value are under-valuing your productivity, you find that you have the necessary knowledge to make the blanket statement that execs are over-compensated. Sure, some are. So are some IT people. Which ones? We don't know. The responsibilities of an exec are far different than those of an IT worker, and the impacts to their decisions are often far more wide-reaching than those in IT. Execs make good money because their job is to grow the business. If an exec's decisions make the company $100 million more than they would have (a figure which isn't at all unlikely in large businesses), it's in the company's, and YOUR, best interests to pay that exec a lot of money.
I think you mis-understand my point. I'm not claiming that younger IT workers are categorically better than older guys. I've worked with a lot of people who've been significantly older than me who blew me completely out of the water in just about every possible way. I've also worked with a lot of people who are just working because they haven't been bad enough to get fired, and THOSE are the ones I'm talking about. With a union, those guys would be getting paid as much as the really really amazing IT professionals, simply because they've managed to to stick around. What kind of message does that send to other workers?
I don't see the supervisor leaning on the shovel as inefficient. In fact, I'm probably one of the more management-friendly people you'd meet. I see two supervisors, one clearly superior to the other, getting paid the same amount, and I see THAT as inefficient, which it unarguably is. If you're paying more than you have to per unit of productivity, that's inefficient, and it's bad for morale. I see paying people based on anything other than their actual value as inefficient, and I think that it'd be damn near communistic to allow some people's choices to prevent me from working under whatever conditions I agree to. Unions would make IT suck, the same way they made every other industry they've gotten their hands on suck.
I cannot think of a single thing that would make employers and customers abandon US IT more than if we unionized. We'd be signing our own death warrants. It's _already_ incredibly easy to fire up e-lance, and grab a Romanian and Indian developer, even if there are the quality and language issues. If we unionize, we'll only increase their incentive to do so by burdening them with all of the baggage that comes along with having unionized employees.
Unions rely on the ability to have a monopoly on labor (and violence, and backing from the government for their violence, but those aren't relevant to my point). With manufacturing jobs, where the physical presence of the employee is a requirement, their hold over an industry is far greater than it would be over IT services, since it's very very easy to utilize non-local labor that doesn't care about the fact that there's a union that went on strike.
Furthermore, I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales. That'd remove a lot of the incentive for new, young developers who are just _better_ than their older co-workers to excel at their jobs. They'd be locked into their pay level. It'd also make it MUCH harder to fire shitty employees.
I also reject the concept that there CAN be a single IT voice to represent us all. We're a fairly diverse group of people, from all backgrounds and with all goals in life. The incentives of, say, a sysadmin working for a NOC are not the same as a web developer working for a small business. They have different sets of priorities, both of which are completely valid to their particular situation. Say, for example, that the NOC guy is a little older, has some kids, and wants benefits, while the young kid doesn't care, and just wants as fat of a paycheck as he can get. How do you resolve those competing, equally valid desires? As it stands now, we negotiate our own contracts according to our desires. With unions, we'd be locked into the choices made by other people.
Another problem with unions, highlighted by this article, is that they're often ideological tools of the leadership. I don't have a problem with H1-B visas (except that I think they're too restrictive) or offshoring. I think both things are awesome. It's the market at work, and forces us all to be competitive at SOME level, whether that be on quality or price or reliability or whatever. Competing against a guy in India or a new Chinese H1-B immigrant is no different than competing against a college kid. The idea that we need political protection from that is absurd.
We also shouldn't ignore the negative impact that unionization of IT would have on the economy. You want to see the long-term effects of unionization? Take a look at the auto industry. Completely saddled with legacy labor costs imposed by union contracts, they're in many cases simply unable to compete on price. Unions are little more than mechanisms for imposing arbitrary minimums and caps on the costs of doing business, which decreases the flexibility of businesses when responding to changing market conditions. The only reason that Japanese automakers hire anyone over here is because we force them to by law.
There's nothing that a union can give you that you can't achieve for yourself by paying attention to your contract. Do you want a guarantee that you'll never be asked to work more than 40 hours in a week? Put it in your contract. Do you want cash instead of benefits? Put it in your contract. Do you want to get paid better? Don't work for less. You make the choices that you want to make, and don't impose them on the rest of us. We'll do likewise, and we'll all be happier.
I've flown without ID since 9/11, and it hasn't been a hassle before, and it won't be now. You just tell the TSA employee manning the metal detector line that you don't have any form of photo ID, they look at you funny, sometimes make a snide remark, pat you down, search your carry ons, and then let you go.
All of the airport ID checks are security theater, not just this recent change in regulation. Identity in very few cases conveys any sense of risk. If I know that a guy is named John Smith, and he's REALLY REALLY named John Smith, that doesn't tell me a damn thing about whether or not he's going to blow up a plane, or stab a flight attendant, or do whatever else gets to the Allah Virgin Merit Badge nowadays. Identity is only useful when you can correlate a person to a threat level. The "No Fly" list is, I guess, supposed to be a way to make that correlation, but it's obvious that it's a failure, and really, it'd be near impossible to create any kind of database that made ID-based security features meaningful without a far greater level of privacy invasion than the average citizen is used to, because it's not just enough to compile a list of bad guys, you have to compile another list of guys that are A-OK.
That is very poor logic. Congress cut more than $5M from the budget Bush proposed. But the question isn't what percentage they are missing from what they have or how much was cut: the real question is "how much does it cost to run Fermilab?" If that number is larger than what they are getting, it isn't going to work. Are you saying that you know for sure that it could be done for $320 M?
I disagree. I think that the question isn't "How much does it cost to run Fermilab", but "How much does it cost to run Fermilab _efficiently_". And yes, I am saying that I know for sure that it could be run at its current levels for less than $320 million. There's no way that operation is running as efficiently as it could be. The size of the bureaucracy alone prevents that.
Quite frankly, the fact that a small cut kept them from running is evidence that they are being tight with their money. If they weren't, they'd just tighten the belts & keep working.
Well, first off, that's what they were doing. They were laying off a small part of their work force, it's not like it was going to close out tomorrow. They _were_ cutting some of the extraneous fat of the organization. Second, according to the article anyway, the $5 million isn't a solution, it's a stop gap. They're still going to be doing layoffs. Finally, HOW they ran out of money doesn't impact the usefulness of a $5 million injection. If they wasted the hell out of the first $320 million or if they watched every dime, the impact of $5 million on the situation NOW is exactly the same.
Please list a private particle accelerator lab that has been operated more efficiently.
Are there private particle accelerator labs? That's awesome! But, I was more making a statement about the efficiency of government funded institutions in general than particle labs specifically.
How have they failed in setting the books right? Could you run it cheaper?
Not having access to their finances, I can't point out the waste, but I'm sure it's there. And yes, I could probably run it better if it weren't for the whole "I don't know a damn thing about particle physics" problem that I have.
$160K/employee (most of whom have PhDs) is nothing.
They have 2000 employees. I highly doubt that most of them have PhD's. Some do, yes, but in an organization that big, a very large percentage of the employees are going to be support staff based around the institution. Secretaries, facilities managers, janitors, IT staff, etc.... If half of the people employed by Fermilab are PhD's, I'd be stunned.
I'm sure it is much more in many companies and universities.
Well, universities don't really help you, because they're government funded. For companies though, I'll bet that you're wrong for the most part. Companies that have a very high budget/employee ratio are generally those with high production costs that get translated into higher cost products. Companies that DO have very high paid employees pay them that much because they produce at least that much value for the company, so it's not a question of dragging on the budget.
Dude, I know that "ZOMFG I H8 BUSHZZZZZ" is the knee jerk reaction to like 40% of the shit on here, but seriously, how does this have anything to do with him? Fermilab's budget doesn't come out of his bank account, he doesn't cut them a check every month, and he doesn't raise money for them, so who cares what his donors think? Congress does the appropriations in this country (specifically, all bills that involve spending HAVE to originate in the House of Representatives), and Congress' funding source is, well, all of us. They take our money and spend it on shit, they don't hold bake sales and fundraisers. Would that they did, that'd be fantastic, but, alas, they just straight jack the money.
There are plenty of really good reasons to hate Bush, just as there are plenty of good reasons to hate all politicians, but at least point your anger in the right direction. This is just stupid.
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Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country, unless those windmills are going to be attached to cars, it's not going to have any impact at all on oil consumption. Only about 2.5% of US electricity generation is via oil, and almost none of that is from MA. If you want to argue that having taxpayer subsidize inefficient electricity production is a good thing, fine, we can have that argument, but don't pretend it has anything to do with decreasing consumption of oil.
Stupid hippie.
Well, not everyone's name is publicly associated with their home address, especially now that many people don't have landlines that would put them in the phone book.
The "if they need anonymity, they're doing something bad" argument is a poor fallacy that's been exposed multiple times. It's the online version of "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you need privacy?" Why should someone who wants to write a blog about shady dealings at their work be forced to put themselves at risk? Or even just something that their bosses wouldn't like ? There's no intrinsic need for identity to be associated with the registration of a domain name.
Yes, a court order can (in some cases) strip off the anonymity protections, but not all. For example, InvisiHosting doesn't require that a customer give us any personal information, we allow untraceable payments, and we delete logs daily, so even if a court order comes down, there's no guarantee that someone will be exposed. Still, that same argument applies to warrants to investigate a private residence, and I don't think you're arguing that everyone should just expose all their private behavior to the world, just because cops could go in their house if they're suspected of a crime. If someone's behavior doesn't even meet the laughable criteria for the cops to get a warrant, why should their identity be exposed to the world?
As far as hacks go, that's not necessarily true. If a registrar gets hacked, that's a much huger deal than the stripping of anonymity from domains. If someone's hosting account gets hacked, there's no guarantee that there will be any personal info there, that's on the user. If the server they're hosted on gets hacked, same thing. Most hosts don't keep customer records on their hosting boxes.
NetSol looks closely at registrant data.
I've read everything of his that I can get my hands on, with the exception of his YA stuff (started straight on the adult stuff from my old man's collection when I was a kid, never went back), and yes, I think my assessment is true (although you might be right about Puppet Masters).
I Will Fear No Evil is probably the worst book I've ever read. It's the fucking Gone Fishin' of the literary world. The 2nd half of Stranger was unreadable. JOB sucked. Number of the Beast sucked. Friday sucked. I _want_ Heinlein to be good, I really do. I gave him plenty of chances, but, with very few exceptions, he failed to deliver. I mean, I get that it was a different time, and that you had to pepper your stories with a little sex to make them more palatable to the kind of people who were buying pulp sci fi, but Christ, I'd like a little bit of actual sci fi in my books, not just "Johnny fucked his mom in space again".
Avoid Heinlein. He's only got like 3 good books anyway (Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress [best sci fi book ever], and half each of Stranger and Cat), and subjecting anyone to that convoluted, Oedipus-driven Lazarus Long shit at an early age is either going to turn them off the genre, or make them try to mount their mothers.
Finally, parents can know ahead of time if their kids are destined to grow up into whiny little John Hughes emo assholes, and vacuum the little bitch out before they have to end up paying for 20 years worth of Hot Topic clothes.
Up next, the Goth gene!
Sell your kids, and then take the money and pay someone else to clean up your cables for you.
I've been looking into this myself lately (US resident, hate the fact that the free market is quickly becoming an extinct beast here), and fwiw, Estonia and Hong Kong are at the top of my list. Estonia b/c they have a flat tax (20%), and are pretty libertarian-leaning currently (although their PM's party just narrowly avoided defeat in this last election, so keep an eye out). Hong Kong is a little crowded, and there's the whole China thing to deal with, but for the most part, the Reds respect the "two systems, one country" policy that's kept Hong Kong prosperous.
I make about 25% more than I did when I was working a 9-5, and I was getting paid slightly above the area average for a web developer at the time. For me, and I may be the exception, going out on my own was a fantastic decision from both a financial and a personal perspective.
Unless you're in Austin, and then stay the fuck out of my territory and keep your day job.
In all seriousness, I started, and continue to run, a moderately successful dev company on my own via 100% Craigslist clients. I began by building up a small, but consistent client base while still at my 9-5, and then, when the time was right, I struck out on my own.
I would advise against places like rentacoder and getafreelancer and elance, etc... More often than not, with those joints, you're competing against Eastern European or Indian programming companies that charge like $8/hr, and the client base on those sites is more cost-conscious than quality-conscious. You'll waste a ton of time.
Also, for what it's worth, _never_ utilize the services of a site that makes you pay for it. More often than not, they're not worth the money you spend on them.
Smaller companies have, in the past, emulated this behavior. However, as time has passed, as a way to gain a competitive edge, more and more have begun to take long, hard looks at un-degreed candidates for a couple of reasons:
The lower pay level is temporary, so don't go thinking that just because you don't have a degree, you're gonna get jizzed for the rest of your life. Non-degreed employees experience an initial loss of income, but over time, likely within 5 or 10 years, the value of experience plus your own ability to negotiate your employment contracts will normalize your income.
Myself, I don't have a degree, and I've held lead developer and system administrator jobs that have paid me competitive rates. I'm now the owner of a small development shop, and the lack of college degree doesn't matter one bit. My advice, if you're going to roll without a degree, is to not stop looking for that first, entry-level job, and to work your ass off at it. Put in extra hours, be a fucking superstar, and put on as many hats as you can. If you're a developer, learn systems stuff. If you're a systems guy, learn to do development, or design, or SOMETHING. Without a degree, you are your major selling point, and the more you know how to do, the more attractive you are to employers.
It's a poll of 800 people, and they don't tell you a damn thing about the demographic makeup of the poll. Is it possible that 23% of East Texans think Obama's a Muslim? Sure, but like 98% of East Texas has 11 fingers and toes anyway, so who cares.
But, the real point is that this is a bullshit poll, and nothing can be drawn from it. It's like polling prisoners at Attica and then putting out a report saying "85% of New Yorkers like to fuck little boys in the mouth".
Shit.
I never said I was in the top half.
Right, that's why it's a conditional. My assertion is that one vote doesn't matter. However, even if I'm wrong about that, and one vote DOES matter, it'd be better if someone didn't cast that vote than if they did, so my core argument that people shouldn't vote isn't damaged by a negation of the 2nd or 3rd bullet point independently of the other. To defeat my claim, you'd have to prove (or, since this is stupid /. comment threat politics arguing, assert) that both points are false. It's just a way of covering my bases.
Re: making my vote mean more, I live in Texas. My vote is less valuable than that of people who live in California.
And I hope that Lindsay Lohan gets a hot lesbian girlfriend and comes over to let me watch them eat whipped cream out of eachother's assholes, but I think we'll both be disappointed.
Why not?
* It's an endorsement of democracy and small-r republican government, systems which have clearly failed in that they promote majoritarian tyranny and lowest-common-denominator rule.
* Your vote doesn't matter, no matter how much Puffy says it does. No single vote does. Sure, in the aggregate, they count, but the actual implication to one person not voting is non-existent.
* Even if enough people don't vote, enough to alter the outcome of an election, that's a good thing. People pay a lot of attention to turnout numbers. If there's a significant drop in the number of voters over previous elections, that structural criticism is worth more than your vote would likely be.
* When you vote, you're accepting the idea that everyone's vote is, and should be, equal, when clearly it's not. Think about it this way: 1/2 the people in this country are, definitionally, of below average intelligence, and even the average isn't that great. We wouldn't let those people make decisions about science or technology, because they simply don't have the necessary knowledge base to do so. Why let them on political matters? Are they less effected by science and tech matters than they are politics? Few enough people have put enough effort into forming a coherent personal political philosophy, fewer still have gone beyond that to keep abreast of what's going on in the world around them. That's not necessarily a criticism, not everyone has time for keeping up on whatever dumbass thing Biden or Obama say on any given day, they have lives to lead and kids to raise and bills to pay and shit. Some people's votes are worth more than others. They just are. We recognize that not everyone's opinions are equal in every other facet of our existence. That we don't in politics is to the detriment of us all.
* If you don't vote, I will give you $20 (offer is void where prohibited).
Huh? No I'm not. I'm making far more than the starting salary for my position in 2001. Yes, IT wage growth took a hit post-bubble burst, but that's because a.) the economy tanked, all those startups went away, and the irrational pay scales that we'd adopted during the bubble were all of the sudden obviously making no business sense, and b.) there's been an increase in the number of IT workers due to the relatively high salaries and low barriers to entry in the industry. I highly doubt I'll lose 40% of my income in the next 4 years, unless Obama wins and taxes it all away (+5 political snark!). Why? Because I keep myself current, and I continually upgrade my skillset to make myself valuable to potential employers/customers.
Why do we need to fix unions? It's a fundamentally broken system that inhibits the freedom of all parties, employer and employee, and creates an artificial zero-sum relationship on a lot of issues. I don't _need_ to unionize, nor do I want to. Why would you decide that what you want is more important than what I want, and impose your choice on me? That's what happens when an industry unionizes, everyone who DOESN'T want to join the union gets screwed, because there are laws in place that protect unions, and make it straight illegal for employers to get around them.
I really hope that last bit about us being smart and honest, and employers being dumb and stupid is satirical. There are a lot of dumb, mean, dishonest IT professionals, and there are a lot of really awesome, totally smart employers. In fact, most employers probably are fairly smart, or at the least, very good at addressing the needs of their industry. It's fucking hard to run a business, and it involves wearing a lot of different hats. Most people who get to the point where they're able to employ people have already succeeded to that point, which sort of belies the concept that they're evil and stupid.
If there was only ONE company that hired IT people, you might have an argument. However, there are MANY companies that need IT personnel, and they can't all collude. In fact, one of the reasons that the salaries in the IT industry are fairly good is that there IS a large demand for our services, which means that in many cases, whether they know it or not, multiple companies bid for our services in the form of varied compensation contracts. If your argument were true, then employers could just offer you minimum wage, and you'd be forced to accept it.
I also reject the concept that the employee/employer relationship is asymmetrical where it matters. Sure, employers often have more money to spend on things like lawyers, but when it comes down to it, they are YOUR customer. They're purchasing your labor, and have to make you an offer that you're willing to accept. They can't force you to sell your labor at any price lower than what you're willing to work for. They're not doing it because they like you and think you're a special sunflower, they're doing it because they believe that the skillset that you bring to the company will result in a level of productivity that justifies the expense.
I also disagree with your statement that paying attention to your contract isn't enough. Sure, some employer contracts are full of confusing legalese, but it's not difficult to hire an attorney to make sure that you're not being screwed. In fact, if you're signing a contract that you're not sure about and you _didn't_ hire a lawyer to take a look at it, then you sort of deserve what you get. Your job is likely to be your single largest financial investment. You'll spend more of your time working than you do any other single activity. If you're not willing to do the effort to make sure that your desires are being fulfilled via your contractual relationship with your employer, then stupid on you. Furthermore, I don't _need_ lobbyists and government interference to make sure that I have good working conditions and salaries. If I don't like them, I quit. No employment contract in the country will turn you into an indentured servant, unable to leave the Company Town. Everyone else has that same right, and will exercise it if they see fit. If a company is shitty enough, they'll just keep losing employees, and either go out of business or be forced to adapt and improve their conditions. In the meantime, there's no compulsory employment.
As to collusion, so what? There is such an insane demand for our services that there's no possible way that any individual can be shut out of the work force. So some consulting companies won't hire you, oh well. There's 10,000 print shops that need an admin. This is an employees market. We're not hurting for jobs, because the nature of the economy is such that what we do is actually critical to the success of any given business.
You don't think IT is getting paid enough? Or is it that YOU aren't getting paid enough? IT as an industry does pretty well when it comes to salaries. If you have an objection to the payment structure at YOUR company, leave. Find another job at a company whose conditions meet your desires.
I also find it amusing that, while you're insistent that the people whose job it is to gauge your value are under-valuing your productivity, you find that you have the necessary knowledge to make the blanket statement that execs are over-compensated. Sure, some are. So are some IT people. Which ones? We don't know. The responsibilities of an exec are far different than those of an IT worker, and the impacts to their decisions are often far more wide-reaching than those in IT. Execs make good money because their job is to grow the business. If an exec's decisions make the company $100 million more than they would have (a figure which isn't at all unlikely in large businesses), it's in the company's, and YOUR, best interests to pay that exec a lot of money.
I think you mis-understand my point. I'm not claiming that younger IT workers are categorically better than older guys. I've worked with a lot of people who've been significantly older than me who blew me completely out of the water in just about every possible way. I've also worked with a lot of people who are just working because they haven't been bad enough to get fired, and THOSE are the ones I'm talking about. With a union, those guys would be getting paid as much as the really really amazing IT professionals, simply because they've managed to to stick around. What kind of message does that send to other workers?
I don't see the supervisor leaning on the shovel as inefficient. In fact, I'm probably one of the more management-friendly people you'd meet. I see two supervisors, one clearly superior to the other, getting paid the same amount, and I see THAT as inefficient, which it unarguably is. If you're paying more than you have to per unit of productivity, that's inefficient, and it's bad for morale. I see paying people based on anything other than their actual value as inefficient, and I think that it'd be damn near communistic to allow some people's choices to prevent me from working under whatever conditions I agree to. Unions would make IT suck, the same way they made every other industry they've gotten their hands on suck.
I cannot think of a single thing that would make employers and customers abandon US IT more than if we unionized. We'd be signing our own death warrants. It's _already_ incredibly easy to fire up e-lance, and grab a Romanian and Indian developer, even if there are the quality and language issues. If we unionize, we'll only increase their incentive to do so by burdening them with all of the baggage that comes along with having unionized employees.
Unions rely on the ability to have a monopoly on labor (and violence, and backing from the government for their violence, but those aren't relevant to my point). With manufacturing jobs, where the physical presence of the employee is a requirement, their hold over an industry is far greater than it would be over IT services, since it's very very easy to utilize non-local labor that doesn't care about the fact that there's a union that went on strike.
Furthermore, I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales. That'd remove a lot of the incentive for new, young developers who are just _better_ than their older co-workers to excel at their jobs. They'd be locked into their pay level. It'd also make it MUCH harder to fire shitty employees.
I also reject the concept that there CAN be a single IT voice to represent us all. We're a fairly diverse group of people, from all backgrounds and with all goals in life. The incentives of, say, a sysadmin working for a NOC are not the same as a web developer working for a small business. They have different sets of priorities, both of which are completely valid to their particular situation. Say, for example, that the NOC guy is a little older, has some kids, and wants benefits, while the young kid doesn't care, and just wants as fat of a paycheck as he can get. How do you resolve those competing, equally valid desires? As it stands now, we negotiate our own contracts according to our desires. With unions, we'd be locked into the choices made by other people.
Another problem with unions, highlighted by this article, is that they're often ideological tools of the leadership. I don't have a problem with H1-B visas (except that I think they're too restrictive) or offshoring. I think both things are awesome. It's the market at work, and forces us all to be competitive at SOME level, whether that be on quality or price or reliability or whatever. Competing against a guy in India or a new Chinese H1-B immigrant is no different than competing against a college kid. The idea that we need political protection from that is absurd.
We also shouldn't ignore the negative impact that unionization of IT would have on the economy. You want to see the long-term effects of unionization? Take a look at the auto industry. Completely saddled with legacy labor costs imposed by union contracts, they're in many cases simply unable to compete on price. Unions are little more than mechanisms for imposing arbitrary minimums and caps on the costs of doing business, which decreases the flexibility of businesses when responding to changing market conditions. The only reason that Japanese automakers hire anyone over here is because we force them to by law.
There's nothing that a union can give you that you can't achieve for yourself by paying attention to your contract. Do you want a guarantee that you'll never be asked to work more than 40 hours in a week? Put it in your contract. Do you want cash instead of benefits? Put it in your contract. Do you want to get paid better? Don't work for less. You make the choices that you want to make, and don't impose them on the rest of us. We'll do likewise, and we'll all be happier.
icanhas5yearplan?
I've flown without ID since 9/11, and it hasn't been a hassle before, and it won't be now. You just tell the TSA employee manning the metal detector line that you don't have any form of photo ID, they look at you funny, sometimes make a snide remark, pat you down, search your carry ons, and then let you go.
All of the airport ID checks are security theater, not just this recent change in regulation. Identity in very few cases conveys any sense of risk. If I know that a guy is named John Smith, and he's REALLY REALLY named John Smith, that doesn't tell me a damn thing about whether or not he's going to blow up a plane, or stab a flight attendant, or do whatever else gets to the Allah Virgin Merit Badge nowadays. Identity is only useful when you can correlate a person to a threat level. The "No Fly" list is, I guess, supposed to be a way to make that correlation, but it's obvious that it's a failure, and really, it'd be near impossible to create any kind of database that made ID-based security features meaningful without a far greater level of privacy invasion than the average citizen is used to, because it's not just enough to compile a list of bad guys, you have to compile another list of guys that are A-OK.
Dude, I know that "ZOMFG I H8 BUSHZZZZZ" is the knee jerk reaction to like 40% of the shit on here, but seriously, how does this have anything to do with him? Fermilab's budget doesn't come out of his bank account, he doesn't cut them a check every month, and he doesn't raise money for them, so who cares what his donors think? Congress does the appropriations in this country (specifically, all bills that involve spending HAVE to originate in the House of Representatives), and Congress' funding source is, well, all of us. They take our money and spend it on shit, they don't hold bake sales and fundraisers. Would that they did, that'd be fantastic, but, alas, they just straight jack the money.
There are plenty of really good reasons to hate Bush, just as there are plenty of good reasons to hate all politicians, but at least point your anger in the right direction. This is just stupid.