The problem is that it has a lot to do with universities.
Are CEOs and other corporations cutting workers or using foreign labor? Yes.
But universities and the education industry are also culprits encouraging the excess education deserves more money.
Just ask yourself this one question. Should a person with a master's degree be paid more than someone with a high school education?
I don't see any reason that should be the case except that the person with a master's degree has some talent/skills that allow them to do a job that a person with a high school education cannot.
It might generally work out that way. But there is no intrinsic reason.
We really don't need so many educated people. Note I said need, as in job. It's great for people to be generally educated, but they are no more deserving of a job or more money. My brother-in-law is a prime example of the product of this mindset. He's not the brightest kid, but took political science and wants to write public policy. He's having a hard time finding such a job.
There even a lot of education inflation. A lot of professions from nurses to teachers now need a bachelor degree and often post grad work. Are these teachers any better than the ones I had? I don't see the evidence for it? But they manage to negotiate in their contract that a master degree gets you more money or whatever.
All this does is drive students into more student debt and time, while providing little value to society.
Yes, corporations are a problem, but the education industry is also a problem.
I think that is absolutely key. The prerequisites as it were.
Scrum is a very optimal process once you have all those key things you mention.
If there's one thing about Agile that is key: People BEOFRE Process.
If you look at all your prerequisites, so many of them rely on people.
People need to buy into it. Including customers. That's not very applicable for many industries.
You need a general architecture in place. That needs a good architect and time to build it out.
You need a team of skilled self-starting developers. OK, that's pretty much the hardest part in any company. It's not for random contractors or people....
Scrum like many process issues is an optimizer. But if you don't even have the basics, it's not going to help very much.
But when there are multiple powerful entities vying for power, you have to deal with that.
I'm under no illusions as to the actions of America. They do some pretty messed up things. They also live all at the expense of others.
But you need to go one step further and ask. If they're not 'in charge' what would the other empire in charge look like?
I'll still put my money with the Americans right now. It could change in the future of course.
There are a lot of countries that just don't do very much actively in the world and are great places to live. I live happily in one of them (Canada). There are plenty of places to live much better than the USA.
It's just a reality that the world has countries vying for power. That is the thrust of what I'm saying.
Just like in WW2, what would you have done against Hitler? No, as flawed as Britain/America/Allies were at the time, most of us would choose to have the allies win than the Nazis.
Or now. America is screwed up. But would people want ISIS to rise up. A state whose ideology includes slavery, rape, religious tyranny, ethnic cleansing, destruction of anything non-Islamic...
Yeah, it's not a good choice. I'd much rather the world be full of Canada's and Denmarks. But that's not the world we live in. And Canada/Denmark at this point in our history aren't really capable of standing up to any bad country/empire vying for power.
Not having power means you can have a certain morality, but never lose sight of the reality that when it comes to the powers vying for control, you should have an idea of which one is preferable.
I just had this conversation last night. I'm Muslim, at least culturally. I don't really believe anymore.
I don't know too many people who think people who join ISIS just like to kill people. Yes, they want their way of life, and they get their people to join their fight. We have our way of life, and we get our people to join our fight. Yes, people have reasons. Yes, the leaders rally people around causes, sometimes even with bad/alterior motives. Yes, the average person normally just wants to live their life.
But in the end, what does this all matter? They're killing, raping, enslaving people. Does it matter what made someone a monster? I don't think so. Even if someone is born purely genertically a sociopathic murderer, that is what they are. You can do what you can to prevent that kind of person from being born/created, but once there, that is what they are. People in ISIS are killing people on mass, enslaving people, raping young girls and women, all the while thinking they have a right as per their religion.
What is evil? What is moral? You don't need to get all philosophical. It's been had 1000 times before. In WW2, the Germans bombed London. But the allies did the same to Germany. Who is really evil? I'm going to opt out of that discussion for this post.
When my relatives sit there and blame everything on the US. The US created ISIS they say. The US created Al-Queda and Sadaam Hussein. It's all done for oil and Israel...
Unless you're a real libertarian/anarchist, you should come to accept one simple rule in life. You will be living under someone's rule. And being in charge is freakin hard. When Syrians were rising against Assad, the demand on our world leaders was to support the rebels. Well turns out that gave the opportunity for ISIS to rise as rebels. What a mind-fuck of a choice. I personally tend to be a little isolationist in these respects for that reason, but it has to be acknowledged that it means I'd let a Rawandan Genocide happen. Unless you're preapred to be the boss and take over and rule a region for a century or massively invest in it, don't jump in. In these global conflicts, all you can do pick the best/least bad ruler.
Just like in WW2, you have to kind of put the tactics used on the backburner. Not totally of course,but you enter a blackhole of immorality. War is sick and depraved and it reduces all of us. You can't be Ghandi about things. Non-violence only works against nice enemies like colonialists, and even then, backrupt colonialists who were pulling out anyways:P All you can ask yourself is would you rather have had the Nazi ideology win or the Allies?
Would you rather be ruled by Putin? Would you rather be ruled by ISIS? Would you rather be ruled by Saudi Arabia? Would you rather be ruled by USA.
I'm not even American, but the choice is pretty plain to see in my eyes. At this point in history, give me American Rule any day of the week. Although, I'll say the Chinese are winning me over to some extent.
There are technical reasons why things be done for cheaper. For example if Netflix partners with ISPs to colocate content within the ISP, then it is actually cheaper for the ISP to deliver Netflix. Netflix data isn't traveling outside their network anymore.
As long as: 1. Netflix works reasonably with all ISPs to do the same thing. 2. The ISPs work reasonably with all video streaming servics (if they offer such a thing).
It's also a matter of having multiple forms of security. After a few years, I signed up for Google's two-factor authentication. So if I am on signing in from a new location, it sends a text message to my phone with a code.
I happen to like this system. It's very convenient. In my day to day use, it never even appears.
If they could add finger printing to the process without making it more annoying, it would just be another good level of security.
All true, and this really where society has hit that fan.
You can't have two vastly differently set of rules for different parts of society.
To private sector workers: You're on your own. You compere globally with 6 billion people. You compete for jobs with everyone including people making pennies on the dollar.
To public sector/government protected (doctors, lawyers): We'll keep your salaries high by restricting access We will make sure your work can't be outsourced
What's especially troublesome is seeing how people have begun to internalize this mindset.
Ever heard a public sector worker talk about free trade? That's just reality and private sector workers must deal with it. I did X years of school. Of course I should get more money than an auto-worker! They'd never think of not being able to buy an IPhone and being restricted to buying a blackberry just because they're Canadian.
Any system that relies on the super-morality of people is bound to fail. History can attest to that.
No group of people be it engineers, priests, scientists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police officers. politicians... are 'good' enough to be some kind of moral vanguard.
Can an individual be a standout? Of course. On both the positive or negative side.
The best you can do is make sure the conditions people operate it are good enough and the consequences bad enough that a reasonable person would choose to do the right thing.
You can relatively easily prosecute the engineers because well... they were the ones to implement it and would know what impact things would have.
The hard part is in getting management because at the end of the day, they typically apply pressure and can claim ignorance.
They should really have a serious clause in there along the lines of negligence whereby management can be held to account for applying undue pressure and not taking enough due diligence to make sure it was not impacting quality.
And it should be a harsh punishment.
Like it or not, engineers just don't have the same kind of clout as doctors or lawyers or other regulated professions.
It's kind of sad when you hear people talk to software developers and say they're not real engineers who are held to account...
I've worked in some engineering oriented firms. I'd say you face the same issue you do as a developer. Your 'boss' is a corporation or venture capital firm out to make money. You are just an employee.
Now engineers do some some areas where they have more independence. Normally in fields like power, civil engineering... often in cases where they have strong bodies.
But for a corporate and product company like VW... there's not much difference.
Actually the regulation to 'fix' this is pretty simple.
Just have the regulator drive the car in mixed conditions like a normal person (highway, city...) and have it as a second number called 'real-world test'.
Just because on the whole you think something is needed, doesn't mean it is not what it is.
Wars are state sanctioned killing. Taxes are state sanctioned theft/extortion. Police are a state sanctioned gang.
You can twiddle the words a bit, but you do recognize half the truth when you say "they're the cost". Whenever somebody says it is the cost, then you know someone is being hurt. If they weren't it wouldn't be a cost.
As someone who lived in some rather lawless areas. The police are a better gang than an actual gang. Taxes are better than a lack of roads, schools, healthcare.
But please, why fight the definition of what is being done to someone. You're arguing that the cost is worth it. Stick with that argument instead of pretending like civilization has no cost and government isn't doing harm to people.
The only argument is that you think it is worth it. Which I'd agree with. But you can and should recognize that government is force and oppressive. It just happens to be worth it.
I've come to appreciate corporate speak. I find it hugely amusing.
That's really how it works. They read some new trend. They create a program on it. They fund that program.
That's how things get done at these companies.
I've been complaining for years about our build system and how much manual work goes into deploying a build, but no one wanted to change anything.
Suddenly we get funding for *The Cloud*. Next thing you know, in order to get onto the cloud, we need to fix everything that needed fixing all that time. In comes, Jenkins, Maven, configuration abstractions, refactoring...
All funded because some buzzword made it into the business magazines and this caused the executives to make sure they are doing something with that buzzword to not be left behind from their peers who are doing buzzword.
Oh I'm sure it even frustrates executives who know what they're doing or those that come from a technical background. So learn to love the buzzwords:)
There's also the question of what jobs are needed to be done, who will do them, and what people expect out of the 'system'.
We can sit around and talk philosophically about values and how people like to work... It's relatively easy to imagine doing a job you get some fulfillment from. I write software. I'd still write software in a world of a basic income.
Would people be farm labor, miners, night shift nurses... to a level productive enough to keep our society prosperous? I have no idea.
We can barely get people in the Western world to do farm work. Not just in the USA. But even in Canada. Even if it pays okay. Our track record for wanting to work for work that NEEDS to get done is not overwhelming.
Now could a guaranteed income alter working conditions and ways of working to fill those jobs? Maybe. I don't know. It's possible. Automation of these jobs is also possible, so humans aren't needed.
But that's a big transition.
We've probably had the technical ability to organize society so everyone works and gets a good life since the industrial revolution. No surprise communism came about when it did.
But the technical ability is the easy part. The social and political order is much harder.
It's the same question communism faced (I'm not using communism as a negative here. It is what it is).
Who decides who gets a comfortable researcg job in Moscow, and who get sent to the mines in siberia?
Assuming society still needs what is in the mines in Siberia, someone has to do it.
Either we'll force people into it Society lacks the resources and becomes poorer because of it. We find some group to exploit to do the labor (slavery, foreign labor, random...) We find some way to make that work attractive.
I don't know the answers, but anyone who thinks this is easy to answer is kidding themselves. Think through the process in all the implementation and all the transitions that need to occur. Think of every product/service we consume as a society and the entire supply chain and see if everyone can work.
Even if you can find the end state to be happy, most of the time the transition can make or break something. What if people revolt. Do we use force? Do we have war?...
That all said. I am glad Finland is working on it gradually. If there is a place to experiment with it is a small, educated, developed state like Finland.
I worked warehouses, fast food... when I was in high school. For the most part, the work load was relatively equal. I didn't really stack skids any faster than the next guy. Plus you kind of have this we're all minimum wage workers mindset. I miss it to an extent.
Whereas in tech right now, paying all people 70k for example would simply not work. Work is not so evenly distributed. When shit hits the fan, everyone knows who is going to get called. Or who does a lot more of the work.
Could we change tech to make it more of a standard pay structure? Maybe. Maybe the top folks could work a lot less. People I've talked to in accounting and other white collar fields would say the same thing.
The other thing of course is for a business to actually look at the bottom line and then see what kind of impact a wage increase / treating your employees well would have. Better productivity, lower turnover...
I don't know of any business that runs at 100% efficiency at all levels. It just doesn't happen. And if you are going to have some notion of 'waste' you might as well spend it on your employees.
Where I work right now, they would never think of this. But here's the thing. They spend lots and lots of money on IT projects. It almost seems like they don't care how much something costs... as long as it is accounted for. Which means, they won't spend the extra 20k to keep the best employees or make sure working conditions are right or that employees are knowledge of the product.
But they will spend ungodly amounts of money on a new project or massive numbers of contractors...
In the grand scheme of things, they could spend a lot less money and get better results... but as I've learned, so much of business is not about being efficient, but about accounting for spending.
Like right now, we have an end of year budget we have to spend or we lose it for the next fiscal year. So what do we do we people? We create a project everyone knows is not needed and run with it, and we know it will be cancelled next year.
This is business. My point here is not to rant about how inefficient most business are. It is to point out that actually spending some money on employees doesn't cost very much relative to the amount of waste going on in most companies and could have intangible benefits to productivity, morale, retention, PR...
And lets recall this is not a fast food joint or something. This is a payments company which previously paid its employees around 48k as a minimum. This is common for office style work.
Who knows. The answer really is get the government out of it by removing the regulations mandating dealerships. Let the market decide what the best solutions are.
There is no need for such laws. We have laws against monopoly, unfair competition, safety...
I myself still don't feel comfortable buying large items or even clothing online. I need to try it out and prefer to have a local store in case I need to return it...
Even with cars, I like to have a good relationship with my dealer. I've had a few warranty claims that could have been debatable. The fact that I had a good relationship with my dealer meant they knew I wasn't some scammer and they pushed for the repair work to be done under warranty. I'd probably still buy it at the dealer even if it costs be like $500-$1000 more. For the cost of a 25k-30k vehicle purchase, it is worth the piece of mind. heck, I probably pay more in taxes to the government than the dealer makes. That's a little absurd.
It is a lot more complicated. Would we have had the Internet without government funding?
The basic technology of the Internet isn't really that complicated It is a really valid argument that technology evolves and as computers/networking developed, we would have developed something like the internet.
Heck, I'm seeing this now in Canada. I've worked in Industry that has links with government. More and more team ups with universities... Oddly, I don't really see anything ground breaking that is actually put to use in technology. Nothing that isn't already being done in industry or just an evolutionary state. I would question the idea that government investment in basic science drives innovation.
But an interesting question must be asked. Somehow so much technology is in areas that had a lot of government investment in the military or other major institutions. Bringing lots of highly skilled people together, with funding and institutions and perhaps importantly targeted goals.
I'd say an industrial policy probably drives innovation a lot more than government funding of basic science.
Now again, fund basic science research for the sake of it. Just don't expect it to result in innovation and a great economy.
As a Canadian, this kills me every time it hits the media. Invest more in education! Invest more in universities. Invest more in R&D... The innovation economy!
Meanwhile... Nortel collapse. Blackberry collapse. Plant closures. ATI bought out...
I would argue that every since the industrial revolution it has been possible for thinkers to legitimately ponder a world of enough for everyone. I don't think its a surprise that communism came about when it did.
Even today, who'd argue our problem is we don't produce enough stuff?
The problem today as it was when communism was first tried out is organizing people to accept the system and transitioning to it. That's the hard problem. We saw the results of communism. Those in charge didn't use the power to make life better for all. They prodded and exploited. They went to war. They went to space. They forced people into labor. They oppressed and killed dissenters... Given all that power, those in charge didn't use it to make life nice nice.
It's a very real question. There's all kinds of social science that talks about a large percentage of those in power being sociopaths. People don't generally think of everyone fairly or individuals. People don't generally want to see everyone is equal to them. Oh they do in the abstract, but so far not in practice.
Or would be people be bored and destructive without work or purpose? Who the hell knows.
I'd say it is far less an economic question and far more a social/political question.
Economics is a science in that respect. You're also right that the repeatability of events make it very poor in practice. It should rightly be regarded within the restrictions of that as opposed to the 'conclusions' people draw from it relying on the success of the physical sciences.
People who study the Great Depression can be as brilliant and analytical is anyone else, but they ultimately have no way to prove that *the problem* was the money supply and if only they had increased it, it would have been avoided.
The laws governing it and pretty much everything related to it (sociology, politics...) are essentially man made. You can come up with all the analysis you want with respect to the business cycle and someone can validly say:
Well that's just your system. What if we brought in communism and simply gave everyone enough and made everyone work? An extreme example, but it applies to every minor law and social rule.
You'd have a whole new set of laws to work within. The socio-political laws have just such a great impact. Not just communism. But every law, group of power...
Practically speaking, economics is a very hard science to practice due to all the variables and lack of repeatability. How can you rely on it to any degree as science if you cannot even follow the basics of the scientific method?
Combine this with the large degree of flexibilty in the very rules that bound the system and for all practical purposes, people are right to treat it very lighly as a science.
The more you delve into gender issues, the more you realize just how wrong people can be.
Just the other day, I was reading the globeandmail and they had some ground breaking research that men might not like to work long hours at the office fighting to bring home the big bucks. They might actually like to spend time with their families!
Shocking! Men aren't just alpha dogs battling to be the alpha male of the patriarchy!
I say it sarcastically, but the researcher was genuinely surprised at the findings.
It's the same with women. Lots of women are aggressive, bullies...
This is not to say there are not trends. Maybe 30% of men like the aggressive 'alpha male' environment at work.
Is Uber technically illegal in many jurisdictions? Probably.
Yet, there are many ways to change the law and one of the ways is for a lot of people to just ignore it. That's what people do with laws they don't actually consider valid (drugs, various traffic laws...)
Heck, even governments just ignore the 'law' when they consider the courts too timid to intervene. Oh we can have a living constitution or reread the law in a different light to allow what we want to happen.
What Uber is doing is not that crazy relative to what goes on in most countries with all sorts of laws.
You can sit there are demand that UBER change the law and then operate. Well the same can be said about ObamaCare, drug laws, national security... Why don't these damn politicians change the laws clearly or amend the constitution before going ahead with their programs? That's the whole purpose of an amendment. Yet, rather than follow the process, they just proceed with their program knowing the courts are too timid to really enforce it or that they've decided to reinterpret the law to let it happen.
I like to see how this plays out, but I don't think Uber's approach is really all that different to how many of us (people, politicians, companies) approach regulatory type laws.
We tend to just ignore them and see how the powers that be respond. Heck, lots of people do drugs knowing the police won't really prosecute them unless something else happens.
Good on Uber I say. It kind of forces the government to change regulation to deal with it or turn a blind eye.
I chuckled because of the rather advanced example you give.
I taught high school computer science as well as mathematics.
Sometimes people who are in university or in the educated work force forget the rest of the population.
There is a huge tie in between programming and algebra. You'd have your mind blown if half the kids could actually understand what a variable is.
It is such a common thing for us in the field to understand. And perhaps Algebra came easy to us. But ask any teacher and they will tell you that it is actually a very difficult concept for a lot of students especially in non-academic streams.
I'd actually be interested in seeing if we can teach Algebra by computer science. They'll be able to see tangible results of variables.
They specifically designed a system to cheat the emissions test. It's like saying bank robbers were warned they were robbing a bank.
Unless VW is some kind of wild west company, nothing gets done in large corporations like this without a project, funding, management buy in, probably management pressure.
Fundamentally, the issue is greater than the hiring decision of one person.
It really depends on the structure of your organization. I'm a developer who really needs to understand the domain of what I'm working in. But that takes a lot of time and effort. Party it is my personality. Partly, it is that I come from a history of small companies.
Today I work at a bank. While I'm valued for my need to know the domain. The truth it, I don't need to know. They have a BA for this. An architect for that. Separate teams and engagements for this and that. I could literally be a simple coder here.
Similarly, when I had worked for tech companies, I always wanted technical managers. Now at the bank, I'd rather have a non-technical manager who can work with all the corporate antics that go on. You need to engage all these teams, get funding for every project, fight back against other teams, motivate people... to a far greater degree I'd even thought productively possible.
Sure many times the very best can always do everything. The developer who can code backend and UI very well. The manager who can do people management and technical knowledge well...
But those people are few and far between. For the general case, you need to look at your organization and decide what matters more and hire accordingly.
Of course all this falls apart when there's just no budget for multiple people and people are looking for a superheros to solve their resourcing problems.
I wasn't born when the smoking controversy occurred.
But I really wonder about the attitude of society in general towards such products.
Does the average person know that coke is filled with calories that can make your fat? I'd adventure to say of course. This is doubly true for anyone bothering to read health studies.
I'd love to venture back in time and see if people who were smoking actually thought it wasn't harmful. I'm not saying if they knew it caused a specific cancer or something, but that they were doing something pretty harmful to their body.
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The problem is that it has a lot to do with universities.
Are CEOs and other corporations cutting workers or using foreign labor? Yes.
But universities and the education industry are also culprits encouraging the excess education deserves more money.
Just ask yourself this one question.
Should a person with a master's degree be paid more than someone with a high school education?
I don't see any reason that should be the case except that the person with a master's degree has some talent/skills that allow them to do a job that a person with a high school education cannot.
It might generally work out that way. But there is no intrinsic reason.
We really don't need so many educated people. Note I said need, as in job. It's great for people to be generally educated, but they are no more deserving of a job or more money. My brother-in-law is a prime example of the product of this mindset. He's not the brightest kid, but took political science and wants to write public policy. He's having a hard time finding such a job.
There even a lot of education inflation. A lot of professions from nurses to teachers now need a bachelor degree and often post grad work. Are these teachers any better than the ones I had? I don't see the evidence for it? But they manage to negotiate in their contract that a master degree gets you more money or whatever.
All this does is drive students into more student debt and time, while providing little value to society.
Yes, corporations are a problem, but the education industry is also a problem.
I think that is absolutely key.
The prerequisites as it were.
Scrum is a very optimal process once you have all those key things you mention.
If there's one thing about Agile that is key: People BEOFRE Process.
If you look at all your prerequisites, so many of them rely on people.
People need to buy into it. Including customers. That's not very applicable for many industries.
You need a general architecture in place. That needs a good architect and time to build it out.
You need a team of skilled self-starting developers. OK, that's pretty much the hardest part in any company. It's not for random contractors or people. ...
Scrum like many process issues is an optimizer. But if you don't even have the basics, it's not going to help very much.
There's a lot of ideal things.
But when there are multiple powerful entities vying for power, you have to deal with that.
I'm under no illusions as to the actions of America. They do some pretty messed up things. They also live all at the expense of others.
But you need to go one step further and ask. If they're not 'in charge' what would the other empire in charge look like?
I'll still put my money with the Americans right now. It could change in the future of course.
There are a lot of countries that just don't do very much actively in the world and are great places to live. I live happily in one of them (Canada). There are plenty of places to live much better than the USA.
It's just a reality that the world has countries vying for power.
That is the thrust of what I'm saying.
Just like in WW2, what would you have done against Hitler? No, as flawed as Britain/America/Allies were at the time, most of us would choose to have the allies win than the Nazis.
Or now. America is screwed up. But would people want ISIS to rise up. A state whose ideology includes slavery, rape, religious tyranny, ethnic cleansing, destruction of anything non-Islamic...
Yeah, it's not a good choice. I'd much rather the world be full of Canada's and Denmarks. But that's not the world we live in. And Canada/Denmark at this point in our history aren't really capable of standing up to any bad country/empire vying for power.
Not having power means you can have a certain morality, but never lose sight of the reality that when it comes to the powers vying for control, you should have an idea of which one is preferable.
I just had this conversation last night. I'm Muslim, at least culturally. I don't really believe anymore.
I don't know too many people who think people who join ISIS just like to kill people.
Yes, they want their way of life, and they get their people to join their fight.
We have our way of life, and we get our people to join our fight.
Yes, people have reasons.
Yes, the leaders rally people around causes, sometimes even with bad/alterior motives.
Yes, the average person normally just wants to live their life.
But in the end, what does this all matter?
They're killing, raping, enslaving people.
Does it matter what made someone a monster? I don't think so.
Even if someone is born purely genertically a sociopathic murderer, that is what they are.
You can do what you can to prevent that kind of person from being born/created, but once there, that is what they are.
People in ISIS are killing people on mass, enslaving people, raping young girls and women, all the while thinking they have a right as per their religion.
What is evil? What is moral? You don't need to get all philosophical. It's been had 1000 times before. In WW2, the Germans bombed London. But the allies did the same to Germany. Who is really evil?
I'm going to opt out of that discussion for this post.
When my relatives sit there and blame everything on the US. The US created ISIS they say. The US created Al-Queda and Sadaam Hussein. It's all done for oil and Israel...
Unless you're a real libertarian/anarchist, you should come to accept one simple rule in life. You will be living under someone's rule. And being in charge is freakin hard. When Syrians were rising against Assad, the demand on our world leaders was to support the rebels. Well turns out that gave the opportunity for ISIS to rise as rebels. What a mind-fuck of a choice. I personally tend to be a little isolationist in these respects for that reason, but it has to be acknowledged that it means I'd let a Rawandan Genocide happen. Unless you're preapred to be the boss and take over and rule a region for a century or massively invest in it, don't jump in. In these global conflicts, all you can do pick the best/least bad ruler.
Just like in WW2, you have to kind of put the tactics used on the backburner. Not totally of course ,but you enter a blackhole of immorality. War is sick and depraved and it reduces all of us. You can't be Ghandi about things. Non-violence only works against nice enemies like colonialists, and even then, backrupt colonialists who were pulling out anyways :P
All you can ask yourself is would you rather have had the Nazi ideology win or the Allies?
Would you rather be ruled by Putin?
Would you rather be ruled by ISIS?
Would you rather be ruled by Saudi Arabia?
Would you rather be ruled by USA.
I'm not even American, but the choice is pretty plain to see in my eyes. At this point in history, give me American Rule any day of the week.
Although, I'll say the Chinese are winning me over to some extent.
There are technical reasons why things be done for cheaper.
For example if Netflix partners with ISPs to colocate content within the ISP, then it is actually cheaper for the ISP to deliver Netflix. Netflix data isn't traveling outside their network anymore.
As long as:
1. Netflix works reasonably with all ISPs to do the same thing.
2. The ISPs work reasonably with all video streaming servics (if they offer such a thing).
It's also a matter of having multiple forms of security.
After a few years, I signed up for Google's two-factor authentication. So if I am on signing in from a new location, it sends a text message to my phone with a code.
I happen to like this system. It's very convenient. In my day to day use, it never even appears.
If they could add finger printing to the process without making it more annoying, it would just be another good level of security.
All true, and this really where society has hit that fan.
You can't have two vastly differently set of rules for different parts of society.
To private sector workers:
You're on your own.
You compere globally with 6 billion people.
You compete for jobs with everyone including people making pennies on the dollar.
To public sector/government protected (doctors, lawyers):
We'll keep your salaries high by restricting access
We will make sure your work can't be outsourced
What's especially troublesome is seeing how people have begun to internalize this mindset.
Ever heard a public sector worker talk about free trade? That's just reality and private sector workers must deal with it.
I did X years of school. Of course I should get more money than an auto-worker!
They'd never think of not being able to buy an IPhone and being restricted to buying a blackberry just because they're Canadian.
Any system that relies on the super-morality of people is bound to fail. History can attest to that.
No group of people be it engineers, priests, scientists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police officers. politicians... are 'good' enough to be some kind of moral vanguard.
Can an individual be a standout? Of course. On both the positive or negative side.
The best you can do is make sure the conditions people operate it are good enough and the consequences bad enough that a reasonable person would choose to do the right thing.
But there lies the problem.
You can relatively easily prosecute the engineers because well... they were the ones to implement it and would know what impact things would have.
The hard part is in getting management because at the end of the day, they typically apply pressure and can claim ignorance.
They should really have a serious clause in there along the lines of negligence whereby management can be held to account for applying undue pressure and not taking enough due diligence to make sure it was not impacting quality.
And it should be a harsh punishment.
Like it or not, engineers just don't have the same kind of clout as doctors or lawyers or other regulated professions.
It's kind of sad when you hear people talk to software developers and say they're not real engineers who are held to account...
I've worked in some engineering oriented firms. I'd say you face the same issue you do as a developer. Your 'boss' is a corporation or venture capital firm out to make money. You are just an employee.
Now engineers do some some areas where they have more independence. Normally in fields like power, civil engineering... often in cases where they have strong bodies.
But for a corporate and product company like VW... there's not much difference.
Actually the regulation to 'fix' this is pretty simple.
Just have the regulator drive the car in mixed conditions like a normal person (highway, city...) and have it as a second number called 'real-world test'.
Just because on the whole you think something is needed, doesn't mean it is not what it is.
Wars are state sanctioned killing.
Taxes are state sanctioned theft/extortion.
Police are a state sanctioned gang.
You can twiddle the words a bit, but you do recognize half the truth when you say "they're the cost". Whenever somebody says it is the cost, then you know someone is being hurt. If they weren't it wouldn't be a cost.
As someone who lived in some rather lawless areas.
The police are a better gang than an actual gang.
Taxes are better than a lack of roads, schools, healthcare.
But please, why fight the definition of what is being done to someone. You're arguing that the cost is worth it. Stick with that argument instead of pretending like civilization has no cost and government isn't doing harm to people.
The only argument is that you think it is worth it.
Which I'd agree with. But you can and should recognize that government is force and oppressive. It just happens to be worth it.
I've come to appreciate corporate speak. I find it hugely amusing.
That's really how it works.
They read some new trend.
They create a program on it.
They fund that program.
That's how things get done at these companies.
I've been complaining for years about our build system and how much manual work goes into deploying a build, but no one wanted to change anything.
Suddenly we get funding for *The Cloud*.
Next thing you know, in order to get onto the cloud, we need to fix everything that needed fixing all that time. In comes, Jenkins, Maven, configuration abstractions, refactoring...
All funded because some buzzword made it into the business magazines and this caused the executives to make sure they are doing something with that buzzword to not be left behind from their peers who are doing buzzword.
Oh I'm sure it even frustrates executives who know what they're doing or those that come from a technical background. :)
So learn to love the buzzwords
There's also the question of what jobs are needed to be done, who will do them, and what people expect out of the 'system'.
We can sit around and talk philosophically about values and how people like to work... It's relatively easy to imagine doing a job you get some fulfillment from. I write software. I'd still write software in a world of a basic income.
Would people be farm labor, miners, night shift nurses... to a level productive enough to keep our society prosperous? I have no idea.
We can barely get people in the Western world to do farm work. Not just in the USA. But even in Canada. Even if it pays okay. Our track record for wanting to work for work that NEEDS to get done is not overwhelming.
Now could a guaranteed income alter working conditions and ways of working to fill those jobs? Maybe. I don't know. It's possible. Automation of these jobs is also possible, so humans aren't needed.
But that's a big transition.
We've probably had the technical ability to organize society so everyone works and gets a good life since the industrial revolution. No surprise communism came about when it did.
But the technical ability is the easy part.
The social and political order is much harder.
It's the same question communism faced (I'm not using communism as a negative here. It is what it is).
Who decides who gets a comfortable researcg job in Moscow, and who get sent to the mines in siberia?
Assuming society still needs what is in the mines in Siberia, someone has to do it.
Either we'll force people into it
Society lacks the resources and becomes poorer because of it.
We find some group to exploit to do the labor (slavery, foreign labor, random...)
We find some way to make that work attractive.
I don't know the answers, but anyone who thinks this is easy to answer is kidding themselves. Think through the process in all the implementation and all the transitions that need to occur. Think of every product/service we consume as a society and the entire supply chain and see if everyone can work.
Even if you can find the end state to be happy, most of the time the transition can make or break something. What if people revolt. Do we use force? Do we have war? ...
That all said. I am glad Finland is working on it gradually. If there is a place to experiment with it is a small, educated, developed state like Finland.
I don't think so.
I worked warehouses, fast food... when I was in high school.
For the most part, the work load was relatively equal. I didn't really stack skids any faster than the next guy. Plus you kind of have this we're all minimum wage workers mindset. I miss it to an extent.
Whereas in tech right now, paying all people 70k for example would simply not work. Work is not so evenly distributed. When shit hits the fan, everyone knows who is going to get called. Or who does a lot more of the work.
Could we change tech to make it more of a standard pay structure? Maybe. Maybe the top folks could work a lot less.
People I've talked to in accounting and other white collar fields would say the same thing.
The other thing of course is for a business to actually look at the bottom line and then see what kind of impact a wage increase / treating your employees well would have. Better productivity, lower turnover...
I don't know of any business that runs at 100% efficiency at all levels. It just doesn't happen. And if you are going to have some notion of 'waste' you might as well spend it on your employees.
Where I work right now, they would never think of this. But here's the thing. They spend lots and lots of money on IT projects. It almost seems like they don't care how much something costs... as long as it is accounted for. Which means, they won't spend the extra 20k to keep the best employees or make sure working conditions are right or that employees are knowledge of the product.
But they will spend ungodly amounts of money on a new project or massive numbers of contractors...
In the grand scheme of things, they could spend a lot less money and get better results... but as I've learned, so much of business is not about being efficient, but about accounting for spending.
Like right now, we have an end of year budget we have to spend or we lose it for the next fiscal year. So what do we do we people? We create a project everyone knows is not needed and run with it, and we know it will be cancelled next year.
This is business. My point here is not to rant about how inefficient most business are. It is to point out that actually spending some money on employees doesn't cost very much relative to the amount of waste going on in most companies and could have intangible benefits to productivity, morale, retention, PR...
And lets recall this is not a fast food joint or something. This is a payments company which previously paid its employees around 48k as a minimum. This is common for office style work.
And just for some research. It is not a end all policy.
http://www.fastcompany.com/304...
Apparently, some feel it is unfair as some more talented workers who shoulder more than the load didn't get a greater jump in salary.
Who knows. The answer really is get the government out of it by removing the regulations mandating dealerships. Let the market decide what the best solutions are.
There is no need for such laws. We have laws against monopoly, unfair competition, safety...
I myself still don't feel comfortable buying large items or even clothing online. I need to try it out and prefer to have a local store in case I need to return it...
Even with cars, I like to have a good relationship with my dealer. I've had a few warranty claims that could have been debatable. The fact that I had a good relationship with my dealer meant they knew I wasn't some scammer and they pushed for the repair work to be done under warranty. I'd probably still buy it at the dealer even if it costs be like $500-$1000 more. For the cost of a 25k-30k vehicle purchase, it is worth the piece of mind. heck, I probably pay more in taxes to the government than the dealer makes. That's a little absurd.
It is a lot more complicated.
Would we have had the Internet without government funding?
The basic technology of the Internet isn't really that complicated
It is a really valid argument that technology evolves and as computers/networking developed, we would have developed something like the internet.
Heck, I'm seeing this now in Canada. I've worked in Industry that has links with government. More and more team ups with universities... Oddly, I don't really see anything ground breaking that is actually put to use in technology. Nothing that isn't already being done in industry or just an evolutionary state.
I would question the idea that government investment in basic science drives innovation.
But an interesting question must be asked. Somehow so much technology is in areas that had a lot of government investment in the military or other major institutions. Bringing lots of highly skilled people together, with funding and institutions and perhaps importantly targeted goals.
I'd say an industrial policy probably drives innovation a lot more than government funding of basic science.
Now again, fund basic science research for the sake of it. Just don't expect it to result in innovation and a great economy.
As a Canadian, this kills me every time it hits the media.
Invest more in education! Invest more in universities. Invest more in R&D... The innovation economy!
Meanwhile... ...
Nortel collapse.
Blackberry collapse.
Plant closures.
ATI bought out
I would argue that every since the industrial revolution it has been possible for thinkers to legitimately ponder a world of enough for everyone. I don't think its a surprise that communism came about when it did.
Even today, who'd argue our problem is we don't produce enough stuff?
The problem today as it was when communism was first tried out is organizing people to accept the system and transitioning to it. That's the hard problem. We saw the results of communism. Those in charge didn't use the power to make life better for all. They prodded and exploited. They went to war. They went to space. They forced people into labor. They oppressed and killed dissenters... Given all that power, those in charge didn't use it to make life nice nice.
It's a very real question. There's all kinds of social science that talks about a large percentage of those in power being sociopaths. People don't generally think of everyone fairly or individuals. People don't generally want to see everyone is equal to them. Oh they do in the abstract, but so far not in practice.
Or would be people be bored and destructive without work or purpose? Who the hell knows.
I'd say it is far less an economic question and far more a social/political question.
Economics is a science in that respect.
You're also right that the repeatability of events make it very poor in practice. It should rightly be regarded within the restrictions of that as opposed to the 'conclusions' people draw from it relying on the success of the physical sciences.
People who study the Great Depression can be as brilliant and analytical is anyone else, but they ultimately have no way to prove that *the problem* was the money supply and if only they had increased it, it would have been avoided.
The laws governing it and pretty much everything related to it (sociology, politics...) are essentially man made. You can come up with all the analysis you want with respect to the business cycle and someone can validly say:
Well that's just your system. What if we brought in communism and simply gave everyone enough and made everyone work? An extreme example, but it applies to every minor law and social rule.
You'd have a whole new set of laws to work within.
The socio-political laws have just such a great impact. Not just communism. But every law, group of power...
Practically speaking, economics is a very hard science to practice due to all the variables and lack of repeatability. How can you rely on it to any degree as science if you cannot even follow the basics of the scientific method?
Combine this with the large degree of flexibilty in the very rules that bound the system and for all practical purposes, people are right to treat it very lighly as a science.
This is just too true.
The more you delve into gender issues, the more you realize just how wrong people can be.
Just the other day, I was reading the globeandmail and they had some ground breaking research that men might not like to work long hours at the office fighting to bring home the big bucks. They might actually like to spend time with their families!
Shocking! Men aren't just alpha dogs battling to be the alpha male of the patriarchy!
I say it sarcastically, but the researcher was genuinely surprised at the findings.
It's the same with women. Lots of women are aggressive, bullies...
This is not to say there are not trends.
Maybe 30% of men like the aggressive 'alpha male' environment at work.
Maybe only 20% of women.
Who knows of the actual numbers.
It's really interesting actually.
Is Uber technically illegal in many jurisdictions? Probably.
Yet, there are many ways to change the law and one of the ways is for a lot of people to just ignore it. That's what people do with laws they don't actually consider valid (drugs, various traffic laws...)
Heck, even governments just ignore the 'law' when they consider the courts too timid to intervene. Oh we can have a living constitution or reread the law in a different light to allow what we want to happen.
What Uber is doing is not that crazy relative to what goes on in most countries with all sorts of laws.
You can sit there are demand that UBER change the law and then operate. Well the same can be said about ObamaCare, drug laws, national security... Why don't these damn politicians change the laws clearly or amend the constitution before going ahead with their programs? That's the whole purpose of an amendment. Yet, rather than follow the process, they just proceed with their program knowing the courts are too timid to really enforce it or that they've decided to reinterpret the law to let it happen.
I like to see how this plays out, but I don't think Uber's approach is really all that different to how many of us (people, politicians, companies) approach regulatory type laws.
We tend to just ignore them and see how the powers that be respond. Heck, lots of people do drugs knowing the police won't really prosecute them unless something else happens.
Good on Uber I say. It kind of forces the government to change regulation to deal with it or turn a blind eye.
I chuckled because of the rather advanced example you give.
I taught high school computer science as well as mathematics.
Sometimes people who are in university or in the educated work force forget the rest of the population.
There is a huge tie in between programming and algebra. You'd have your mind blown if half the kids could actually understand what a variable is.
It is such a common thing for us in the field to understand. And perhaps Algebra came easy to us. But ask any teacher and they will tell you that it is actually a very difficult concept for a lot of students especially in non-academic streams.
I'd actually be interested in seeing if we can teach Algebra by computer science. They'll be able to see tangible results of variables.
Isn't this kind of a non-story.
They specifically designed a system to cheat the emissions test.
It's like saying bank robbers were warned they were robbing a bank.
Unless VW is some kind of wild west company, nothing gets done in large corporations like this without a project, funding, management buy in, probably management pressure.
Fundamentally, the issue is greater than the hiring decision of one person.
It really depends on the structure of your organization.
I'm a developer who really needs to understand the domain of what I'm working in. But that takes a lot of time and effort. Party it is my personality. Partly, it is that I come from a history of small companies.
Today I work at a bank. While I'm valued for my need to know the domain. The truth it, I don't need to know. They have a BA for this. An architect for that. Separate teams and engagements for this and that. I could literally be a simple coder here.
Similarly, when I had worked for tech companies, I always wanted technical managers. Now at the bank, I'd rather have a non-technical manager who can work with all the corporate antics that go on. You need to engage all these teams, get funding for every project, fight back against other teams, motivate people... to a far greater degree I'd even thought productively possible.
Sure many times the very best can always do everything.
The developer who can code backend and UI very well.
The manager who can do people management and technical knowledge well...
But those people are few and far between. For the general case, you need to look at your organization and decide what matters more and hire accordingly.
Of course all this falls apart when there's just no budget for multiple people and people are looking for a superheros to solve their resourcing problems.
I wasn't born when the smoking controversy occurred.
But I really wonder about the attitude of society in general towards such products.
Does the average person know that coke is filled with calories that can make your fat? I'd adventure to say of course. This is doubly true for anyone bothering to read health studies.
I'd love to venture back in time and see if people who were smoking actually thought it wasn't harmful. I'm not saying if they knew it caused a specific cancer or something, but that they were doing something pretty harmful to their body.