You make it seem like the employer is somehow abusing their employees, not really. If anything the employer is being terribly foolish.
As a full time software developer I put in my 40 hours and offsite production support for the agreed upon terms of my salary. My salary is not changing (at least not if they want me to stick around) so however they want to use me in that 40 hours is their business. If that week they would want me clean the office kitchen I would certainly do it in the short term but this would be a terribly wasteful decision on their part.
They already pay me a lot of money, so they can have me writing quality software or they can put me on cleaning duty despite the fact that they could probably hire about 3-4 full time janitors for what they pay me.
This same concept applies to astroturfing which has a relatively low cost to outsource to a marketing company. The decision to waste their employees expensive time on such frivolous tasks as astroturfing is a sign of gross mismanagement of resources.
I wholeheartedly agree. Nothing brings me more satisfaction than selling somebody on a product that I believe in. Unfortunately the vast majority of sales people out there are peddling crap or scams.
I hate the rootkits, DRM and proprietary formats as much as the next Slashdotter, but I am shocked just how out of touch people are about what is really hurting Sony right now.
The average consumer of electronics is not concerned with these things. The average consumer of electronics barely knows how to hook up their BluRay player let alone even tell you what DRM means. Electronics have become a commodity item to where differential in quality between brands and features is nearly non-existent. Because of this the only driving force in the success of the product is the ability to sell it cheaper than your competitors, Eg. slave labor in China or Taiwan.
This is why Sony and any other electronics manufacturer could give fuck all about what a bunch of nerds think about their rootkits and DRM.
Isn't it obvious? They can make a lot more money here and live more comfortably than in many of their home countries. With the exception of Turkey, most of these countries are pretty tough to live in unless you are rich or royalty.
What makes an idea work is implementation, a lot of sweat, a lot of resources dumped into it, some luck (hopefully you have at least a little bit of that, otherwise sucks to be you).
Ahhh yes... pulling yourself up from your bootstraps or some such garbage.
If there is one thing I learned about business, it is that when it comes to success, hard work is probably #3 in importance. First and second is who you know and blind fucking luck respectively. People who still believe that successful wealthy people got that way from working harder than everybody else are deluding themselves.
Granted I also expect massive backstabbing if this is implemented wrong. Instead of collaboration it can very quickly devolve into theft and sabotage.
The only reason to expect something like that is if the company actually gave a significant financial incentive to employees for their innovation, and if there is one thing I learned about the IT industry in America, it is that the actual IT workers get little more than a pat on the back for innovative problem solving while some some political hack gets all the financial bonuses.
I think I'd find failing 90% of the time completely demoralising, but it's certainly true that if you never fail then you're probably not exploring really interesting possibilities.
The truly demoralising thing is working for truly moronic and disgustingly selfish pigs time and time again, company after company. The only "interesting possibility" for me is to just continue getting a paycheck and provide for my family which I love coming home to every night. This is why I choose a mediocre job precisely because I don't want to put myself in a situation where failure is a possibility.
Capitalism doesn't reward failure, despite what executives want you to think. When you fail the hungry pack of wolves will tear you apart.
Humanity is and always will be comprised of masters who own and control, and servants who serve and make due. This will always be the case forever. The relatively recent phenomenon of a middle class in human history can almost completely be attributed to exceptional increase in agricultural and industrial efficiency to the point where a large portion of the population was actually able to fatten up on the table scraps left over.
The important take away is that the middle class didn't occur because of the masters but in spite of them. In the event that the economy severely contracts, the masters will not take a cut and the middle class will be obliterated to the point of massive suffering and starvation on scales unheard of in hundreds of years.
The result will more likely be a form of Neo-Feudalism.
I'm sorry, but if someone in uniform who has the authority to arrest and detain you does that, that should be a lot more than a misdemeanor.
What do you expect from them though? They are private employees that are paid only a couple more dollars per hour than minimum wage. I hope you aren't expecting Captain America.
Monopoly + (Disciplined + Educated) Work Force + With a lot of money saved up + Improved Infrastructure = Dominate Economy
You forgot the variable: (Post war decimated industrial capacity for most of the world). That one is probably the most influential to the post war dominance of the US. They were quite literally the only major country in the war which didn't have its factories all bombed to oblivion.
Since 2009 they can simply state whatever the requirements are and they still get 100 resumes. So why not?
Regardless of the job description they will still get hundreds of applications anyway. If you have ever worked for a small company that doesn't have an actual HR department and you have to sort through applications and resumes for a position you wish to interview for then you realize VERY quickly that the overwhelming majority of applications you get for a position have little to no real qualifications for the position anyway.
There are literally entire armies of unemployed people just blindly sending their resume to anything that is even remotely related to their skillsets. You might as well be ultra-specific.
This is a disturbing trend that many employers feel like they own their employees like slaves because they happen to cut them a paycheck. That isn't how it works. Employment is a mutually beneficial contractual arrangement between two parties, the employer and the employee.
It should be be terminable by either party at any time for nearly any reason. You should have no more obligations than simply performing the work required of you for the designated amount of money for the pre-determined amount of time. Peer pressure, fear, manipulation, bullying should not be used by the employer to gain anymore control over employees.
There clearly is a double standard when it comes to literature and questionable content for minors in a book. In All Quiet on the Western Front, there were references to Russian prisoners of war being so malnourished and sickly that they no longer masturbated to pass the time.
I cannot remember the title but there was a Gary Paulsen book that I read in 8th grade for school where the two protagonists where a young teenage boy and girl who escape their lives by connecting with nature on an island. There was a paragraph in this book describing how they would take their clothes off and go swimming in the lake and how it felt completely natural and beautiful in a non-sexual way.
Why is this acceptable reading for a high school student where Enders Game is not?
Very insightful post. I agree that Apple and Foxconn are symptoms of the problems in China than the cause of them.
I would liken it to somebody having a broken arm and complaining of pain, so to fix the problem you amputate the arm. No more pain, but then the patient doesn't even have an arm anymore.
There are other costs to consider with hiring an employee vs. slave driving the ones you have until they burnout and leave. Health insurance is just one of the larger costs. Employers match SS taxes taken out of employee paychecks and they also pay for unemployment insurance by law in many states. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the work they need to carry insurance by head count to cover injuries.
Further still there are pension plans and 401k(403b) retirement plan matching that they contribute on as well. All of these individual costs with no unions and loose regulations on employment in the USA provide a powerful incentive for companies to keep headcounts small and increase the expected productivity and hours of the people they have. Globalization doesn't help either because that puts even more pressure on companies that are struggling to compete with third-world countries that pay on average only slightly above slave labor.
The interesting question then becomes, "where did all the extra money go?"
I wondered the same thing until I saw the Banana Republic like distributions of wealth and the wealth distribution trends.
I will take the excellent point in your post and go one step farther. The incredible productivity increases in the last 100 years are such that abject poverty and starvation can likely be avoided for most people, and still be great enough that not everybody actually has to work. Keynes predicted that we would all be working two hours a day and maintain our lifestyles. We have never been busier and had to work harder in history just to maintain our lifestyles.
We could all be living in collective paradise however for the insanely rich to maintain power and control over the world they need a constant and never ending pressure of inflation to constantly keep us working and dependent on them for our lifestyles which have in all reality never been cheaper to provide for in all of human history.
There is one thing though that kids like to do in the 80's that has survived and flourished to this day - hardware/robotics.
And until robots and better artificial intelligence become a fact of life in households across the world, they will continue to have that aura of mystery around them that draws kids interest.
I believe they are educating them to be consumers and not scientists,
Maybe it is because we live in a society that glorifies consumption and brutally punishes scientists and engineers? Sad as it is, you make it farther in this society by being a consumer of technology rather than a creator of it.
This entire submission misunderstands the real draw of programming. The desire to learn programming is out of an intrinsic desire in some people to create or build artifacts from resources we have obtained. Some of us are builder/creator archetypes and we are drawn to the process of creation.
If the argument held up, then the quality of carpentry would have degraded considerably with the advent of power tools. Nobody needs to hand-spin a spade to drill a large hole anymore, and while I am handy with a chisel, I can still do things faster and with better quality by using a router for certain situations. The power-tools have allowed us to put arguably better quality wood products in a MUCH faster timeframe, and all with the same sense of satisfaction that you get from a beautiful new table, cabinet or chair.
I do think however that in todays age it is a lot harder to stay focused amidst constant distractions, and it is a lot easier to find information than ever before, making us all slightly lazy from time to time. We are more prone to get frustrated and do something else, so the extreme convenience doesn't come without its faults for sure.
The founders were a diverse group of wealthy land owners from across the thirteen original colonies. They each had various personal interests for independence and all had differring opinions in the type of continental government that should have been established. The Constitution and its original amendments called for what was widely considered at the time to be the appropriate answer to the problems of constitutional monarchy and aristocratic forms of government, with various compromises to appease the regional differences in opinion at the time. Compromise of some of the more fundamental and pure aspects of Greek Democracy which were heralded as a model were considered more important in the name of national unity and strength than potentially losing the support of the wealthy backers at the time that justifiably feared open revolution and riot by the poor masses.
When he referred to the tyranny of the masses, he was directly referencing the French Revolution which was not only fearsome to monarchs and aristocrats across the world, but also wealthy merchants, bankers and land owners. This fear of events and unrest in France helped influence the Republic that is the United States today, which actively seeked to limit the power of directly elected officials. This is apparent in the various checks and balances and the way that state governments originally were involved in constitutional amendments, senatorial elections, and selection of presidential electors.
Most history books will teach you that the only reason for this obfuscation of the general vote was out of fear and hatred of a class of aristocracy and possibly monarchy forming in the country, and while this is true, it was also just as influenced by fear that the general public will elect officials that will decrease the wealth and power of large property owners and supporters of a central bank in the country.
On the whole, I agree with the premise that the average person is not qualified enough to make judgements on the quality of an elected officials ideas and actions, and that this is a huge flaw in Democracy. I do believe however that it isn't ignorant politicians that destroy a democracy, it is malicious or self serving politicians that do.
Problem 1: Politicians hold a lot of power for a temporary period of time, and this makes the position highly desirable to power seeking people. Take away the ability for a person to seek out a political appointment and this problem become a lot smaller. The ancient Greeks were close to having this right. Political appointment was based on civic obligation that some of them performed grudgingly. With the Greeks however the citizens were all well to do property and slave owners. Anybody who didn't own property was pretty much a slave to somebody.
Problem 2: The power that a politician holds makes them highly attractive allies to powerful and wealthy interests. This is primarily why only a handful of our current Federal politicians can be considered uncorrupted. Remove outside money from campaigns and this solves half the problem. The other half of the problem is that a politician can be bought off post-office in a gentlemens agreement, with cushy private sector appointments and what not. If we pay our politicians handsomely and make sure they are punished for accepting such bribes after they get out of office then you remove the very corrupting incentives that encourage politicians to vote against the electorates interests.
In this way the only people ever seeking office truly are doing so out of a desire to promote the common good and out of a patriotic sense of duty, much like voluntary military service. Does this eliminate BAD ideas? No, but it does more to curb malicious and self-serving interests than any other proposed idea to fix democracy. Democracy can survive a bad idea, not a corrupt one.
This amount is laughable. I have a few ideas for web crawler algorithms that can compile specific government data across single US government agency sites. If i were to package them into subscription based web services then I could hopefully make 50 times that by starting a business.
As a native to Pittsburgh, I can tell you that compared to other cities I have lived in, the women here are so frigid and uptight that nothing short of a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and engineers working round the clock could engineer an orgasm in them.
I follow you and I mostly agree with you on nearly everything you said, then you make this ridiculously enormous jump to everything wrong in the world is greedy government destroying liberties for power and control.
You are so close to the truth yet so far. The dirty little secret about Government and the Fed is that governments purpose is not to consolidate power, its purpose is to conceal it! It is exactly corollary to the RIAA that everybody hates and blames for everything. The whole purpose of the RIAA is so that it can do the unpopular things and take all the flak, while the individual record companies retain their dying business model and not take any heat for anti-competitive practices. The real bad guys are the record companies not the RIAA, they are a front, a facade! Nothing more.
The government and the Federal Reserve. No different in concept. The super wealthy and corporate lobbies have complete control over the government and they mold it to consolidate power that protects their cartels. A liberal believes that government can be a force for good in a true democracy, not this bastardized fascist model that we have now. I hate our government too but only what it has become and who controls it.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it seem like the employer is somehow abusing their employees, not really. If anything the employer is being terribly foolish.
As a full time software developer I put in my 40 hours and offsite production support for the agreed upon terms of my salary. My salary is not changing (at least not if they want me to stick around) so however they want to use me in that 40 hours is their business. If that week they would want me clean the office kitchen I would certainly do it in the short term but this would be a terribly wasteful decision on their part.
They already pay me a lot of money, so they can have me writing quality software or they can put me on cleaning duty despite the fact that they could probably hire about 3-4 full time janitors for what they pay me.
This same concept applies to astroturfing which has a relatively low cost to outsource to a marketing company. The decision to waste their employees expensive time on such frivolous tasks as astroturfing is a sign of gross mismanagement of resources.
I wholeheartedly agree. Nothing brings me more satisfaction than selling somebody on a product that I believe in. Unfortunately the vast majority of sales people out there are peddling crap or scams.
I hate the rootkits, DRM and proprietary formats as much as the next Slashdotter, but I am shocked just how out of touch people are about what is really hurting Sony right now.
The average consumer of electronics is not concerned with these things. The average consumer of electronics barely knows how to hook up their BluRay player let alone even tell you what DRM means. Electronics have become a commodity item to where differential in quality between brands and features is nearly non-existent. Because of this the only driving force in the success of the product is the ability to sell it cheaper than your competitors, Eg. slave labor in China or Taiwan.
This is why Sony and any other electronics manufacturer could give fuck all about what a bunch of nerds think about their rootkits and DRM.
Isn't it obvious? They can make a lot more money here and live more comfortably than in many of their home countries. With the exception of Turkey, most of these countries are pretty tough to live in unless you are rich or royalty.
What makes an idea work is implementation, a lot of sweat, a lot of resources dumped into it, some luck (hopefully you have at least a little bit of that, otherwise sucks to be you).
Ahhh yes... pulling yourself up from your bootstraps or some such garbage.
If there is one thing I learned about business, it is that when it comes to success, hard work is probably #3 in importance. First and second is who you know and blind fucking luck respectively. People who still believe that successful wealthy people got that way from working harder than everybody else are deluding themselves.
Granted I also expect massive backstabbing if this is implemented wrong. Instead of collaboration it can very quickly devolve into theft and sabotage.
The only reason to expect something like that is if the company actually gave a significant financial incentive to employees for their innovation, and if there is one thing I learned about the IT industry in America, it is that the actual IT workers get little more than a pat on the back for innovative problem solving while some some political hack gets all the financial bonuses.
I think I'd find failing 90% of the time completely demoralising, but it's certainly true that if you never fail then you're probably not exploring really interesting possibilities.
The truly demoralising thing is working for truly moronic and disgustingly selfish pigs time and time again, company after company. The only "interesting possibility" for me is to just continue getting a paycheck and provide for my family which I love coming home to every night. This is why I choose a mediocre job precisely because I don't want to put myself in a situation where failure is a possibility.
Capitalism doesn't reward failure, despite what executives want you to think. When you fail the hungry pack of wolves will tear you apart.
Steady state economy is a pipe dream.
Humanity is and always will be comprised of masters who own and control, and servants who serve and make due. This will always be the case forever. The relatively recent phenomenon of a middle class in human history can almost completely be attributed to exceptional increase in agricultural and industrial efficiency to the point where a large portion of the population was actually able to fatten up on the table scraps left over.
The important take away is that the middle class didn't occur because of the masters but in spite of them. In the event that the economy severely contracts, the masters will not take a cut and the middle class will be obliterated to the point of massive suffering and starvation on scales unheard of in hundreds of years.
The result will more likely be a form of Neo-Feudalism.
I'm sorry, but if someone in uniform who has the authority to arrest and detain you does that, that should be a lot more than a misdemeanor.
What do you expect from them though? They are private employees that are paid only a couple more dollars per hour than minimum wage. I hope you aren't expecting Captain America.
Monopoly + (Disciplined + Educated) Work Force + With a lot of money saved up + Improved Infrastructure = Dominate Economy
You forgot the variable: (Post war decimated industrial capacity for most of the world). That one is probably the most influential to the post war dominance of the US. They were quite literally the only major country in the war which didn't have its factories all bombed to oblivion.
Since 2009 they can simply state whatever the requirements are and they still get 100 resumes. So why not?
Regardless of the job description they will still get hundreds of applications anyway. If you have ever worked for a small company that doesn't have an actual HR department and you have to sort through applications and resumes for a position you wish to interview for then you realize VERY quickly that the overwhelming majority of applications you get for a position have little to no real qualifications for the position anyway.
There are literally entire armies of unemployed people just blindly sending their resume to anything that is even remotely related to their skillsets. You might as well be ultra-specific.
This is a disturbing trend that many employers feel like they own their employees like slaves because they happen to cut them a paycheck. That isn't how it works. Employment is a mutually beneficial contractual arrangement between two parties, the employer and the employee.
It should be be terminable by either party at any time for nearly any reason. You should have no more obligations than simply performing the work required of you for the designated amount of money for the pre-determined amount of time. Peer pressure, fear, manipulation, bullying should not be used by the employer to gain anymore control over employees.
Mod parent up! Cue in Pink Floyd's Dogs for dramatic effect.
There clearly is a double standard when it comes to literature and questionable content for minors in a book. In All Quiet on the Western Front, there were references to Russian prisoners of war being so malnourished and sickly that they no longer masturbated to pass the time.
I cannot remember the title but there was a Gary Paulsen book that I read in 8th grade for school where the two protagonists where a young teenage boy and girl who escape their lives by connecting with nature on an island. There was a paragraph in this book describing how they would take their clothes off and go swimming in the lake and how it felt completely natural and beautiful in a non-sexual way.
Why is this acceptable reading for a high school student where Enders Game is not?
Very insightful post. I agree that Apple and Foxconn are symptoms of the problems in China than the cause of them.
I would liken it to somebody having a broken arm and complaining of pain, so to fix the problem you amputate the arm. No more pain, but then the patient doesn't even have an arm anymore.
There are other costs to consider with hiring an employee vs. slave driving the ones you have until they burnout and leave. Health insurance is just one of the larger costs. Employers match SS taxes taken out of employee paychecks and they also pay for unemployment insurance by law in many states. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the work they need to carry insurance by head count to cover injuries.
Further still there are pension plans and 401k(403b) retirement plan matching that they contribute on as well. All of these individual costs with no unions and loose regulations on employment in the USA provide a powerful incentive for companies to keep headcounts small and increase the expected productivity and hours of the people they have. Globalization doesn't help either because that puts even more pressure on companies that are struggling to compete with third-world countries that pay on average only slightly above slave labor.
The interesting question then becomes, "where did all the extra money go?"
I wondered the same thing until I saw the Banana Republic like distributions of wealth and the wealth distribution trends.
I will take the excellent point in your post and go one step farther. The incredible productivity increases in the last 100 years are such that abject poverty and starvation can likely be avoided for most people, and still be great enough that not everybody actually has to work. Keynes predicted that we would all be working two hours a day and maintain our lifestyles. We have never been busier and had to work harder in history just to maintain our lifestyles.
We could all be living in collective paradise however for the insanely rich to maintain power and control over the world they need a constant and never ending pressure of inflation to constantly keep us working and dependent on them for our lifestyles which have in all reality never been cheaper to provide for in all of human history.
There is one thing though that kids like to do in the 80's that has survived and flourished to this day - hardware/robotics.
And until robots and better artificial intelligence become a fact of life in households across the world, they will continue to have that aura of mystery around them that draws kids interest.
I believe they are educating them to be consumers and not scientists,
Maybe it is because we live in a society that glorifies consumption and brutally punishes scientists and engineers? Sad as it is, you make it farther in this society by being a consumer of technology rather than a creator of it.
This entire submission misunderstands the real draw of programming. The desire to learn programming is out of an intrinsic desire in some people to create or build artifacts from resources we have obtained. Some of us are builder/creator archetypes and we are drawn to the process of creation.
If the argument held up, then the quality of carpentry would have degraded considerably with the advent of power tools. Nobody needs to hand-spin a spade to drill a large hole anymore, and while I am handy with a chisel, I can still do things faster and with better quality by using a router for certain situations. The power-tools have allowed us to put arguably better quality wood products in a MUCH faster timeframe, and all with the same sense of satisfaction that you get from a beautiful new table, cabinet or chair.
I do think however that in todays age it is a lot harder to stay focused amidst constant distractions, and it is a lot easier to find information than ever before, making us all slightly lazy from time to time. We are more prone to get frustrated and do something else, so the extreme convenience doesn't come without its faults for sure.
The founders were a diverse group of wealthy land owners from across the thirteen original colonies. They each had various personal interests for independence and all had differring opinions in the type of continental government that should have been established. The Constitution and its original amendments called for what was widely considered at the time to be the appropriate answer to the problems of constitutional monarchy and aristocratic forms of government, with various compromises to appease the regional differences in opinion at the time. Compromise of some of the more fundamental and pure aspects of Greek Democracy which were heralded as a model were considered more important in the name of national unity and strength than potentially losing the support of the wealthy backers at the time that justifiably feared open revolution and riot by the poor masses.
When he referred to the tyranny of the masses, he was directly referencing the French Revolution which was not only fearsome to monarchs and aristocrats across the world, but also wealthy merchants, bankers and land owners. This fear of events and unrest in France helped influence the Republic that is the United States today, which actively seeked to limit the power of directly elected officials. This is apparent in the various checks and balances and the way that state governments originally were involved in constitutional amendments, senatorial elections, and selection of presidential electors.
Most history books will teach you that the only reason for this obfuscation of the general vote was out of fear and hatred of a class of aristocracy and possibly monarchy forming in the country, and while this is true, it was also just as influenced by fear that the general public will elect officials that will decrease the wealth and power of large property owners and supporters of a central bank in the country.
On the whole, I agree with the premise that the average person is not qualified enough to make judgements on the quality of an elected officials ideas and actions, and that this is a huge flaw in Democracy. I do believe however that it isn't ignorant politicians that destroy a democracy, it is malicious or self serving politicians that do.
Problem 1: Politicians hold a lot of power for a temporary period of time, and this makes the position highly desirable to power seeking people. Take away the ability for a person to seek out a political appointment and this problem become a lot smaller. The ancient Greeks were close to having this right. Political appointment was based on civic obligation that some of them performed grudgingly. With the Greeks however the citizens were all well to do property and slave owners. Anybody who didn't own property was pretty much a slave to somebody.
Problem 2: The power that a politician holds makes them highly attractive allies to powerful and wealthy interests. This is primarily why only a handful of our current Federal politicians can be considered uncorrupted. Remove outside money from campaigns and this solves half the problem. The other half of the problem is that a politician can be bought off post-office in a gentlemens agreement, with cushy private sector appointments and what not. If we pay our politicians handsomely and make sure they are punished for accepting such bribes after they get out of office then you remove the very corrupting incentives that encourage politicians to vote against the electorates interests.
In this way the only people ever seeking office truly are doing so out of a desire to promote the common good and out of a patriotic sense of duty, much like voluntary military service. Does this eliminate BAD ideas? No, but it does more to curb malicious and self-serving interests than any other proposed idea to fix democracy. Democracy can survive a bad idea, not a corrupt one.
This amount is laughable. I have a few ideas for web crawler algorithms that can compile specific government data across single US government agency sites. If i were to package them into subscription based web services then I could hopefully make 50 times that by starting a business.
As a native to Pittsburgh, I can tell you that compared to other cities I have lived in, the women here are so frigid and uptight that nothing short of a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and engineers working round the clock could engineer an orgasm in them.
I follow you and I mostly agree with you on nearly everything you said, then you make this ridiculously enormous jump to everything wrong in the world is greedy government destroying liberties for power and control.
You are so close to the truth yet so far. The dirty little secret about Government and the Fed is that governments purpose is not to consolidate power, its purpose is to conceal it! It is exactly corollary to the RIAA that everybody hates and blames for everything. The whole purpose of the RIAA is so that it can do the unpopular things and take all the flak, while the individual record companies retain their dying business model and not take any heat for anti-competitive practices. The real bad guys are the record companies not the RIAA, they are a front, a facade! Nothing more.
The government and the Federal Reserve. No different in concept. The super wealthy and corporate lobbies have complete control over the government and they mold it to consolidate power that protects their cartels. A liberal believes that government can be a force for good in a true democracy, not this bastardized fascist model that we have now. I hate our government too but only what it has become and who controls it.