Does it really matter that STEM education may be a scam? Does it matter than vendor specific certifications are a type of scam? Is the entire job market for STEM educated people a scam?
The common thread is that these are not things you can do something about. Why are you worrying about how the world is not conforming to your vision of the universe and simply accept what you cannot change externally. Be the change you want to see happen because that is all you can control. For the rest I suggest gaming these corrupt systems to the limit without losing your integrity. Get the STEM degree so you can get to your goal. Get the vendor specific certifications to get yourself trusted and hired. The job market is very unfair so I have no qualms getting worthless pieces of paper if it will gain trust from prospective employers that you know what you are doing, even when you doubt yourself. If in getting these worthless pieces of paper I seek out to learn all I can and accidentally stumble on some awesome technique or, better yet, something earth shattering, the journey will be well worth it. It is in the journey through the labors and pressures of education and work that we can discover our strength and potential if we want to do so.
That reminds me of Differential Equations. I could always calculate the answer of any problem but I never had any understanding of how mathematicians even derive that solution from the beginning. I assume it is the same with all mathematics.
You are acting like Card had NOT waved the white flag and said "I surrender, you won!". By saying "With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state." he is admitting he has lost and reluctantly is holding a white flag on this issue. I doubt you will hear the same crap from Card on this issue. BTW, there are a lot of other Mormons who will NEVER admit defeat and will fight hard against same-sex marriage until they die.
>The racist views of pre-1900 authors and Shakespeare can be more easily dismissed because our society as a whole has decided those beliefs are wrong > and no longer relevant in the big picture.
WHEN did our society decide those beliefs are wrong? Society, as a whole, DID NOT take that view until a turning point was reached. Believe it or not Card's opinion on the matter was actually in tune with a majority of people of his society until now. He recognizes that he has lost the war and he is checkmated. The question now is do we get revenge on him for that or take him at his word. He is a *ss-hat but I will give him the benefit of a doubt on just this issue since he was wise enough to admit defeat.
So your suggestion is to immediately pull the plug for those student in need of financial aid and those heavy in debt due to government students loans remain peasants of the federal government while those family that can use their money and influence to get their intellectually inferior children, on the average, through colleges?
And where would these peasants, without degrees, go to work when just about every job opening has 5 or more people applying for it? Do you think an entire generations of people would sit back and watch this happen without any adverse political action?
I worked my way through my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science, paying for my tuition and books myself, but that was back in the 90s. I wouldn't be able to do that now. My suggestion for the working class student, which is a bit radical, is work a year after high school while studying hard on MOOCs so they can CLEP out much of the core curriculum the next year and finish the core in a cheaper community college. If it is difficult to get re-entry into the community college for the year gap then take just one non-CLEPable course per semester while spending your free time on the MOOC courses for CLEPing.
I think MOOCs, used correctly, can save a student a year's worth of tuition and books or more. That is a major reduction in the cost of a degree.
Natural gas is already cheaper than gasoline but the cost to switch my car to natural gas is cost prohibitive. It is possible to have cheaper fuels and not be able to use them effectively because all of the infrastructure is set up to use the now more expensive fuel source. America is not set up to take advantage of any fuel sources than the ones we have been using for over 50 years. When we buy cars the majority of them run ONLY on gasoline, coal fired power plants are set up to ONLY run on coal, a majority of house are set up to ONLY accept electrical power from power lines and cooking devices are either to run ONLY on electricity or ONLY on natural gas or propane.
There is one advantage to solar power. Even at $3/watt the best thing about solar is not being dependent on getting your power from easily knocked down poles. It is just this simple, after a major storm power is out for hours, days, even weeks as power lines have to be strung on existing or new power poles. With adequate protection an array of solar cells could be back in service within hours while those with portable generators have to deal with diminishing fuel supplies and possible theft. What is easier to steal and more valuable to thieves, a portable generator or a roof full of solar cells?
You seem to question whether we should invest in alternative energy technology R&D, as if we can simply chose not to do it for the next few decades. I assure you that we eventually WILL do it. It is simply a matter of time and who will do it. The USA is not the world and if us Americans are too fearful and stupid to do it others will. Germany is already into solar, which is strange considering they get far less solar energy than Nevada and far less land to set up solar collecting surfaces. China is building conventional and alternative energy plants just to have the electrical energy to power their fast growing cities.
Right now my bet will be some other country developing cheap alternative energy technology and not the USA. We American will likely not do it because we still have cheap fossil fuels and no political will to kill corporate welfare to companies providing this fuel. Many Americans seem to think that when someone proposes R&D in alternative energy that they think it means massive "handouts" to alternative energy companies and subsidizing this energy source not really knowing that the fossil fuels are subsided by the government in the form of incentive payments for drilling and mining and supporting despicable governments in oil rich countries with money, aid, and even military action if needed.
What our government is doing is killing off our American liberty by millions of paper cuts. Pass a well-intentioned law that restricts a freedom for "the good of the children", which seems good at the time, it becomes is a paper cut on our liberty. Nothing serious. No right is 100% absolute. We have to protect the children with bad parents. We have to protect people from their own stupidity. Think of the children and their safety. We want to be safe. We want to be protected.
A few laws, another regulation, doesn't really hurt at the time. It is the millions of US Federal, State, and Local laws and rules that start to erode liberty. Liberty, freedom, is a state that the human race is a natural state but one that our race is not totally used to. Liberty is not safe, nor comfortable, nor cheap, nor easy to live with. Liberty is very powerful. With the awesome power of liberty comes great responsibility for a free society. When a free society find itself becoming comfortable and becomes afraid of the baser elements of its society that is when the greatest temptation to curtail liberty starts. One restriction piles upon another, and another, and another, and another, and so on until you have a really no liberty what so ever. Even the rule of law is eroded by more and more bad laws until even the government breaks such laws with impunity and rapidity. We are not there yet but the trajectory is all too clear that we are proceeding down this path rapidly.
At this rate within 3 generations we Americans would no longer be able "to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense (and) promote the general welfare" for our country (from the US Constitution preamble). The Nanny-State and Crony Capitalism is corroding America from the inside out. Within 3 generation, with the current trends, the richest 0.01% of Americans, about 30,000 people, will have the money and power to do anything they like. They will nearly be above the law. They will tell us how to live, what to do, and be our "big brother" if they so choose. They and the other 30,000 uber rich people of the world could rule the world to their whim. All 60,000 people could live in one town somewhere. John Galt style, and become the default capital of the world. At that point freedom is nearly dead.
It is like we see everything is running fine, then we develop technology to give machines a little more power, check to see if everything is OK and rinse and repeat. One day will we give machines too much power and it will be too late? When are we going to cross this line when machines and technology take over us? In the effort for machines to protect us will they kill any human that resists "the greater good" like in "I Robot"? Will it be like "The Matrix" when humans serve machines? Is is possible to live in peaceful symbiosis with a machine race that is stronger, faster, and smarter than we are and still maintain control over our own lives? At what point should we stand up and say "No More!"? When we reach that point will we be able to stop? Will we be so addicted to technology that we will not be able to stop when we need to?
As always the political people keep looking at this issue in the short term, not the long term, with "sound good" assumptions that may be dead wrong. At this point you need to look at your adversary's weaknesses. The GOP's weakness is their hesitation to change is the key. Therefore the assumption that the Republicans wouldn't come up with something this effective independently by 2016 is wrong, they would, unless you make the system open source and allows improvements to be made at a faster rate than they can cope with the changes, much like someone trying to shoot an accelerating target without "leading the target". The GOP historically has been slow to embrace change, with some rare and noteworthy exceptions. If anything the GOP tends to be more reactionary than the Democrat party. At least some of the Democrats know that what worked for 2012 maybe not work the same for 2014 or 2016.
I believe that is the point many people have made concerning our education system. America's education system is not one system but thousands of different public school systems. The decentralization of school systems can allow each system to educate based upon the needs of the community, if done correctly. It allows limited experimentation in education. What has happened is that the federal government is trying to get centralized control of the systems by "No Child Left Behind" (now nicknamed by teachers "No Child Can Get Ahead") and other such laws due to the abject failure of some of local public school systems to teach these basic concepts: reading, writing, math (from number through algebra and geometry), and a little science. We have a culture now of putting down public school teachers instead of supporting them. As a result public school teachers are stressed and find themselves unable to excel at their job due to politics. It is now such a difficult job that few of the brightest students ever think of becoming a teacher.
But hasn't the US always had this idea of "screw the poor"? I submit that blaming people for their own poverty has always been the American way. In the 18th and 19th Centuries the idea was to take those less fortunate and throw them land in the middle of hostile Indian territory. We didn't even have to give these people anything to get them to go, just the idea of "Manifest Destiny" and they would pool their resources to trek in the most hostile lands imaginable in the hopes of being land owners or getting rich off of the gold rush.
Why does the author seem to argue for increased immigration? He says we need more tax paying immigrants and their children to pay for Social Security in the future but the number of jobs available is effectively decreasing per capita in the country and we all know unemployed people, natives and immigrants, are a net drain on our government services. So if we restrict immigration to stabilize or decrease our supply of labor to meet the current demand for labor we will have to massively cut Social Security benefits to stabilize it.
Edison being a jerk was an understatement! Edison was practically at war against anything Tesla invented. Tesla invented Modulated Carrier Wave radio, Radar (for World War ONE), Radio Remote control (also for World War ONE), A/C Power, Transformers, Fluorescent Lighting, the 3 Phase Electric Motor, the Electric Induction Motor, the Tesla Coil, and nearly invented a practical wireless power distribution system, and more! Edison was against ALL of these inventions. Edison even spent a good deal of money and capital to try to block Tesla's inventions.
Had Tesla invented fusion powered space ships with artificial gravity and FTL drive capability that cost less than $1000 and ran on water Edison would have used his fortune to stamp it out as well.
Seriously??? Then you don't remember the MS/Apple PC war of the late 1980's. The MacIntosh, developed by Apple when Steve Jobs and "Woz" were in charge, was the first well marketed home computer that could run, at that time, graphical complex software (albeit in Black/White) and other demanding software packages like Mathematica or anything that requires a Windows 95 like GUI. The Amiga could do it too but Commodore's marketing people damaged the Amiga brand so badly that the Amiga was put it into a permanent vegetative state before 1990. The PC's OS, DOS, at the time was limited to using 640Kb RAM, even on PC that had 1024Kb of RAM or more, which severely limited software functionality. It wasn't until Windows 3.x and 95 came out that the selection of personal computers were brand preference. Microsoft was forced to create a GUI interface in a big part due to Apple's MacIntosh.
I describe version control using a real world example. Company A is having a problem with their warehouse management system crashing every time a bunch of programmers change "stuff" for the month. The system would be down for days while the programmers try to back changes out of the system. Version control software makes it possible to store the previous setups. If the system crashes after a bunch of updates are put into their warehouse management system again, you can go to the version control software and restore the previous known good setup and get the system up within an hour.
Then they say "Oh, it is just like a backup".
Then I say it is better than a backup because with a monthly backup, the point where you save the system, you have to restore the ENTIRE system and that can take a few hours to maybe a day or two. Version control software can back out changes in the code ONE AT A TIME. You will be able to bring the system up, with some needed changes, often before the warehouse even opens. You can't do that with a restore from backup.
Then they get the idea that version control is far better than backup software. That is what most people understand. We in Slashdot know that version control does so much more than that.
If you say there is a skilled IT worker shortage then why don't you say there is a large carat diamond shortage?
I say there is no skilled IT worker shortage, there is only a shortage of IT workers that can do senior level work for junior or mid level wages.
Isn't it strange that when there is no shortage of qualified IT workers that are desperate for work wages go down but when there is a shortage of these professionals average wages refuse to go up. Even in this so-called IT worker shortage the average wages in most IT specialties have not returned to where they were twelve years ago adjusted for inflation.
Just like large carat diamonds if you really wanted the best IT workers you should have to pay for it instead of moaning to Uncle Sam to bail you out. Any company that advertises that they will pay any American or Green Card IT worker 50-70% more than the average wage will have resumes sent to them by the palate. Pay them double the average and you can siphon off the best and most committed and hardest working workers from other companies.
I would suggest retraining in an IT specialty that has a slower rate of change while staying relevant to today's IT needs. With programming it seems to be that by the time you learn a programming language it is already obsolete. Network and Server technology skills become obsolete as a slower rate, a rate that you can use to stay current.
The reason for this strategy is that past learning can inhibit future learning on similar subjects. When the programming languages, like Perl, Ruby, and PHP, are variants of a root language, C, then the differences in the new variant are harder for me to learn and remember because now I have to learn NOT use how previous variants did something. The same is true, at least for me, in learning Linux. I know UNIX but learning different variants of Linux gets me stuck sometimes. My question with Linux is always "where did they put file"? I know the concept of UNIX/Linux and I know what files and scripts are available but not always where are.
More like 150 years, after almost all of the evolution opponents die off. In fact every person I have met so far who are opposed to evolution are doing so for religious reasons, not out of an earnest scientific point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it really matter that STEM education may be a scam? Does it matter than vendor specific certifications are a type of scam? Is the entire job market for STEM educated people a scam?
The common thread is that these are not things you can do something about. Why are you worrying about how the world is not conforming to your vision of the universe and simply accept what you cannot change externally. Be the change you want to see happen because that is all you can control. For the rest I suggest gaming these corrupt systems to the limit without losing your integrity. Get the STEM degree so you can get to your goal. Get the vendor specific certifications to get yourself trusted and hired. The job market is very unfair so I have no qualms getting worthless pieces of paper if it will gain trust from prospective employers that you know what you are doing, even when you doubt yourself. If in getting these worthless pieces of paper I seek out to learn all I can and accidentally stumble on some awesome technique or, better yet, something earth shattering, the journey will be well worth it. It is in the journey through the labors and pressures of education and work that we can discover our strength and potential if we want to do so.
That reminds me of Differential Equations. I could always calculate the answer of any problem but I never had any understanding of how mathematicians even derive that solution from the beginning. I assume it is the same with all mathematics.
You are acting like Card had NOT waved the white flag and said "I surrender, you won!". By saying "With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state." he is admitting he has lost and reluctantly is holding a white flag on this issue. I doubt you will hear the same crap from Card on this issue. BTW, there are a lot of other Mormons who will NEVER admit defeat and will fight hard against same-sex marriage until they die.
>The racist views of pre-1900 authors and Shakespeare can be more easily dismissed because our society as a whole has decided those beliefs are wrong
> and no longer relevant in the big picture.
WHEN did our society decide those beliefs are wrong? Society, as a whole, DID NOT take that view until a turning point was reached. Believe it or not Card's opinion on the matter was actually in tune with a majority of people of his society until now. He recognizes that he has lost the war and he is checkmated. The question now is do we get revenge on him for that or take him at his word. He is a *ss-hat but I will give him the benefit of a doubt on just this issue since he was wise enough to admit defeat.
But..But..But...That would hurt the profit margins of private prisons and how would law enforcement get "tough on crime" with less criminals?
So your suggestion is to immediately pull the plug for those student in need of financial aid and those heavy in debt due to government students loans remain peasants of the federal government while those family that can use their money and influence to get their intellectually inferior children, on the average, through colleges?
And where would these peasants, without degrees, go to work when just about every job opening has 5 or more people applying for it? Do you think an entire generations of people would sit back and watch this happen without any adverse political action?
I worked my way through my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science, paying for my tuition and books myself, but that was back in the 90s. I wouldn't be able to do that now. My suggestion for the working class student, which is a bit radical, is work a year after high school while studying hard on MOOCs so they can CLEP out much of the core curriculum the next year and finish the core in a cheaper community college. If it is difficult to get re-entry into the community college for the year gap then take just one non-CLEPable course per semester while spending your free time on the MOOC courses for CLEPing.
I think MOOCs, used correctly, can save a student a year's worth of tuition and books or more. That is a major reduction in the cost of a degree.
Natural gas is already cheaper than gasoline but the cost to switch my car to natural gas is cost prohibitive. It is possible to have cheaper fuels and not be able to use them effectively because all of the infrastructure is set up to use the now more expensive fuel source. America is not set up to take advantage of any fuel sources than the ones we have been using for over 50 years. When we buy cars the majority of them run ONLY on gasoline, coal fired power plants are set up to ONLY run on coal, a majority of house are set up to ONLY accept electrical power from power lines and cooking devices are either to run ONLY on electricity or ONLY on natural gas or propane.
There is one advantage to solar power. Even at $3/watt the best thing about solar is not being dependent on getting your power from easily knocked down poles. It is just this simple, after a major storm power is out for hours, days, even weeks as power lines have to be strung on existing or new power poles. With adequate protection an array of solar cells could be back in service within hours while those with portable generators have to deal with diminishing fuel supplies and possible theft. What is easier to steal and more valuable to thieves, a portable generator or a roof full of solar cells?
You seem to question whether we should invest in alternative energy technology R&D, as if we can simply chose not to do it for the next few decades. I assure you that we eventually WILL do it. It is simply a matter of time and who will do it. The USA is not the world and if us Americans are too fearful and stupid to do it others will. Germany is already into solar, which is strange considering they get far less solar energy than Nevada and far less land to set up solar collecting surfaces. China is building conventional and alternative energy plants just to have the electrical energy to power their fast growing cities.
Right now my bet will be some other country developing cheap alternative energy technology and not the USA. We American will likely not do it because we still have cheap fossil fuels and no political will to kill corporate welfare to companies providing this fuel. Many Americans seem to think that when someone proposes R&D in alternative energy that they think it means massive "handouts" to alternative energy companies and subsidizing this energy source not really knowing that the fossil fuels are subsided by the government in the form of incentive payments for drilling and mining and supporting despicable governments in oil rich countries with money, aid, and even military action if needed.
Who is critiquing those that critique?
What our government is doing is killing off our American liberty by millions of paper cuts. Pass a well-intentioned law that restricts a freedom for "the good of the children", which seems good at the time, it becomes is a paper cut on our liberty. Nothing serious. No right is 100% absolute. We have to protect the children with bad parents. We have to protect people from their own stupidity. Think of the children and their safety. We want to be safe. We want to be protected.
A few laws, another regulation, doesn't really hurt at the time. It is the millions of US Federal, State, and Local laws and rules that start to erode liberty. Liberty, freedom, is a state that the human race is a natural state but one that our race is not totally used to. Liberty is not safe, nor comfortable, nor cheap, nor easy to live with. Liberty is very powerful. With the awesome power of liberty comes great responsibility for a free society. When a free society find itself becoming comfortable and becomes afraid of the baser elements of its society that is when the greatest temptation to curtail liberty starts. One restriction piles upon another, and another, and another, and another, and so on until you have a really no liberty what so ever. Even the rule of law is eroded by more and more bad laws until even the government breaks such laws with impunity and rapidity. We are not there yet but the trajectory is all too clear that we are proceeding down this path rapidly.
At this rate within 3 generations we Americans would no longer be able "to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense (and) promote the general welfare" for our country (from the US Constitution preamble). The Nanny-State and Crony Capitalism is corroding America from the inside out. Within 3 generation, with the current trends, the richest 0.01% of Americans, about 30,000 people, will have the money and power to do anything they like. They will nearly be above the law. They will tell us how to live, what to do, and be our "big brother" if they so choose. They and the other 30,000 uber rich people of the world could rule the world to their whim. All 60,000 people could live in one town somewhere. John Galt style, and become the default capital of the world. At that point freedom is nearly dead.
It is like we see everything is running fine, then we develop technology to give machines a little more power, check to see if everything is OK and rinse and repeat. One day will we give machines too much power and it will be too late? When are we going to cross this line when machines and technology take over us? In the effort for machines to protect us will they kill any human that resists "the greater good" like in "I Robot"? Will it be like "The Matrix" when humans serve machines? Is is possible to live in peaceful symbiosis with a machine race that is stronger, faster, and smarter than we are and still maintain control over our own lives? At what point should we stand up and say "No More!"? When we reach that point will we be able to stop? Will we be so addicted to technology that we will not be able to stop when we need to?
As always the political people keep looking at this issue in the short term, not the long term, with "sound good" assumptions that may be dead wrong. At this point you need to look at your adversary's weaknesses. The GOP's weakness is their hesitation to change is the key. Therefore the assumption that the Republicans wouldn't come up with something this effective independently by 2016 is wrong, they would, unless you make the system open source and allows improvements to be made at a faster rate than they can cope with the changes, much like someone trying to shoot an accelerating target without "leading the target". The GOP historically has been slow to embrace change, with some rare and noteworthy exceptions. If anything the GOP tends to be more reactionary than the Democrat party. At least some of the Democrats know that what worked for 2012 maybe not work the same for 2014 or 2016.
I believe that is the point many people have made concerning our education system. America's education system is not one system but thousands of different public school systems. The decentralization of school systems can allow each system to educate based upon the needs of the community, if done correctly. It allows limited experimentation in education. What has happened is that the federal government is trying to get centralized control of the systems by "No Child Left Behind" (now nicknamed by teachers "No Child Can Get Ahead") and other such laws due to the abject failure of some of local public school systems to teach these basic concepts: reading, writing, math (from number through algebra and geometry), and a little science. We have a culture now of putting down public school teachers instead of supporting them. As a result public school teachers are stressed and find themselves unable to excel at their job due to politics. It is now such a difficult job that few of the brightest students ever think of becoming a teacher.
In Korea you can't even get into Elementary school if you haven't mastered MineCraft.
Students, your first MineCraft assignment is to build a cat fountain.
USA! USA! USA!
But hasn't the US always had this idea of "screw the poor"? I submit that blaming people for their own poverty has always been the American way. In the 18th and 19th Centuries the idea was to take those less fortunate and throw them land in the middle of hostile Indian territory. We didn't even have to give these people anything to get them to go, just the idea of "Manifest Destiny" and they would pool their resources to trek in the most hostile lands imaginable in the hopes of being land owners or getting rich off of the gold rush.
Why does the author seem to argue for increased immigration? He says we need more tax paying immigrants and their children to pay for Social Security in the future but the number of jobs available is effectively decreasing per capita in the country and we all know unemployed people, natives and immigrants, are a net drain on our government services. So if we restrict immigration to stabilize or decrease our supply of labor to meet the current demand for labor we will have to massively cut Social Security benefits to stabilize it.
This looks to me to be a Catch-22.
Edison being a jerk was an understatement! Edison was practically at war against anything Tesla invented. Tesla invented Modulated Carrier Wave radio, Radar (for World War ONE), Radio Remote control (also for World War ONE), A/C Power, Transformers, Fluorescent Lighting, the 3 Phase Electric Motor, the Electric Induction Motor, the Tesla Coil, and nearly invented a practical wireless power distribution system, and more! Edison was against ALL of these inventions. Edison even spent a good deal of money and capital to try to block Tesla's inventions.
Had Tesla invented fusion powered space ships with artificial gravity and FTL drive capability that cost less than $1000 and ran on water Edison would have used his fortune to stamp it out as well.
Seriously??? Then you don't remember the MS/Apple PC war of the late 1980's. The MacIntosh, developed by Apple when Steve Jobs and "Woz" were in charge, was the first well marketed home computer that could run, at that time, graphical complex software (albeit in Black/White) and other demanding software packages like Mathematica or anything that requires a Windows 95 like GUI. The Amiga could do it too but Commodore's marketing people damaged the Amiga brand so badly that the Amiga was put it into a permanent vegetative state before 1990. The PC's OS, DOS, at the time was limited to using 640Kb RAM, even on PC that had 1024Kb of RAM or more, which severely limited software functionality. It wasn't until Windows 3.x and 95 came out that the selection of personal computers were brand preference. Microsoft was forced to create a GUI interface in a big part due to Apple's MacIntosh.
I describe version control using a real world example. Company A is having a problem with their warehouse management system crashing every time a bunch of programmers change "stuff" for the month. The system would be down for days while the programmers try to back changes out of the system. Version control software makes it possible to store the previous setups. If the system crashes after a bunch of updates are put into their warehouse management system again, you can go to the version control software and restore the previous known good setup and get the system up within an hour.
Then they say "Oh, it is just like a backup".
Then I say it is better than a backup because with a monthly backup, the point where you save the system, you have to restore the ENTIRE system and that can take a few hours to maybe a day or two. Version control software can back out changes in the code ONE AT A TIME. You will be able to bring the system up, with some needed changes, often before the warehouse even opens. You can't do that with a restore from backup.
Then they get the idea that version control is far better than backup software. That is what most people understand. We in Slashdot know that version control does so much more than that.
If you say there is a skilled IT worker shortage then why don't you say there is a large carat diamond shortage?
I say there is no skilled IT worker shortage, there is only a shortage of IT workers that can do senior level work for junior or mid level wages.
Isn't it strange that when there is no shortage of qualified IT workers that are desperate for work wages go down but when there is a shortage of these professionals average wages refuse to go up. Even in this so-called IT worker shortage the average wages in most IT specialties have not returned to where they were twelve years ago adjusted for inflation.
Just like large carat diamonds if you really wanted the best IT workers you should have to pay for it instead of moaning to Uncle Sam to bail you out. Any company that advertises that they will pay any American or Green Card IT worker 50-70% more than the average wage will have resumes sent to them by the palate. Pay them double the average and you can siphon off the best and most committed and hardest working workers from other companies.
I would suggest retraining in an IT specialty that has a slower rate of change while staying relevant to today's IT needs. With programming it seems to be that by the time you learn a programming language it is already obsolete. Network and Server technology skills become obsolete as a slower rate, a rate that you can use to stay current.
The reason for this strategy is that past learning can inhibit future learning on similar subjects. When the programming languages, like Perl, Ruby, and PHP, are variants of a root language, C, then the differences in the new variant are harder for me to learn and remember because now I have to learn NOT use how previous variants did something. The same is true, at least for me, in learning Linux. I know UNIX but learning different variants of Linux gets me stuck sometimes. My question with Linux is always "where did they put file"? I know the concept of UNIX/Linux and I know what files and scripts are available but not always where are.
More like 150 years, after almost all of the evolution opponents die off. In fact every person I have met so far who are opposed to evolution are doing so for religious reasons, not out of an earnest scientific point of view.