Former Republican running as a Democrat, former Democrat running as a Republican... this is by far the most screwed up election in our nation's history, and I'm including the "Who am I? Why am I here?" election....
1) Amazon took a gamble. They knew what they were doing and they were counting on winning the court case to keep the $$$, then appearing to capitulate to end users and locking it down a bit more (to appear to be "listening" to their customers). Amazon did this by design. They were jerks, but it's the way businesses work. Get the money if you can, then fight giving it back. They counted on customers just paying it to be done with it (and they are not the only ones that have done this).
It certainly seems to be the way that Amazon works. I repeatedly got bitten by the instant purchase option for Amazon Instant Video, which allowed me to accidentally purchase things that were free on Prime streaming. I complained about it, and they refunded it, but the fact that none of their means of disabling those purchases actually solves the problem (and the fact that many were explicitly overridden for Instant Video) told me that they wanted people to accidentally make purchases and have to complain if they wanted a refund, under the assumption that most people wouldn't bother to complain for a couple of bucks.
I eventually gave up and wrote some custom CSS to remove the buy buttons.
Oh, so that means your laptop doesn't support InstantGo/Connected Standby, which requires soldered RAM for security reasons (to prevent cold boot attacks).
How is socketed RAM a security issue? More to the point, how is InstantGo not just a Microsoft knock-off of Apple's "dark wake" (which was supported long before soldered RAM, but which I think does require an SSD)?
The entire concept is nonsensical. It's a fairly fundamental truth that information cannot be destroyed. Self-destructing messages are basically the same problem as DRM; you have the data, you have a key, you're allowed to use the data to unlock the key, but only under somebody else's terms. If you trust the endpoint to be absolutely secure against tampering, the problem is trivial, but you don't need anything more than a simple "ask the server whether the data should be wiped before showing it" mechanism. If you don't trust the endpoint to be absolutely secure against tampering, then the problem is basically impossible, because any response from the server can be faked.
At best, you might come up with some screwball scheme involving a time-stamped response from the server that has to be within the last 30 seconds or else the app refuses to show the message (to prevent replay), but even then, if somebody can tamper with the device, they can patch out the check. Or you can make the app store nothing locally, and depend on the server to either provide the message or not do so, of course, but even then, there's no way to avoid the analog hole.
Those sorts of mistakes could just as easily be made by somebody straight out of school. The problem is not the age of the people in question, but rather that only one set of eyes ever looked at the code in question....
Which is why all modern operating systems are written in either Fortran, Cobol, or Algol. No, wait....:-)
The error in the GP's post was not in assuming that the skills that older folks learned in school are useless. They almost certainly are. The error was in assuming that the older folks didn't learn a single thing while working in the field.
New college hires typically graduate with fewer than 600 total CS contact hours—45-50 semester hours (which are about 50 minutes apiece) times 15 weeks per semester. Even if they spend twice as much time outside of class that they spend inside of class, that would still mean that they spend more time doing CS-related work in their first year of employment than they spent on CS coursework in their entire four years of college.
Most programmers learn continuously while on the job. Their skills are relatively up-to-date by virtue of the fact that they're using them to solve real-world problems every day. And experience enables older programmers to recognize antipatterns that new college hires (NCHs) would probably miss, saving lots of time redesigning it later.
The real problem with ageism is that there's actually a decent reason for it. Most companies don't need a hundred architects; they need a few architects and a lot of code monkeys. Most older programmers don't want to be code monkeys, and companies are wary of hiring them code monkeys, because they assume that the employees won't stay very long. They are probably right. And there are only two ways to fix that problem:
Create exponential growth of CS majors so that there are always a hundred newbies for every over-50 programmer.
Encourage most programmers to retire early so that there are always a hundred newbies for every over-50 programmer.
Well, that's not entirely true. You can certainly have an organization where everybody is senior, as long as you're willing to accept that you're going to get careful, deliberate implementation of features, and accept that you can't just have somebody toss a quick A/B test together, because they're going to want to implement it right or not at all. The result is a very different type of technology company with very different products from what we normally see in the market today. It is anybody's guess how that would work in practice, because as far as I know, nobody has dared to try it, with the possible exception of certain research labs that aren't/weren't product-focused.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, you know. Just because there's no legitimate cause for age discrimination doesn't mean it won't happen. And stronger job protection, an earlier retirement age, and stronger Social Security will help whether there's cause or not.
At that price, it must be a UC. My advice would be to move to Tennessee and find yourself a job doing... anything—waiting tables, even—enough to put a roof over your head. After a year, you'll be eligible for in-state tuition. Apply to UT Martin. It's a good school, your credits will probably all transfer, and you'll only pay a little over $2k per semester, so your grants would just about cover your tuition. You'd just have to scrape up a few hundred bucks plus money for books, food, and housing. And food and housing are pretty cheap there, too. Once you have your job, you can either find work there or move back and find work wherever you are currently.
Or heck, go to any other state's biggest state universities and (assuming you've been there long enough to qualify for in-state tuition) you'd still be paying less per year than you're currently paying per semester.
Medicaid has low asset limits, since he lives off savings he won't qualify until a few weeks before his suicide.
Actually, asset rules may or may not apply, depending on where you live.
For example, in California, Medi-Cal disregards all property/assets if you are eligible based on your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI). So if you're making less than 138% of the federal poverty level, you are eligible for Medi-Cal regardless of how much property you own. The only people who are covered by the asset caps in California are people with income above that limit, but who (potentially) qualify for Medi-Cal anyway because of being elderly, disabled, requiring long-term care, or being in CalWORKs or foster care.
If you aren't sure whether those limits apply, contact your local Medicaid administrator organization (e.g. Medi-Cal). They can advise you on whether you qualify.
And your eligibility for social services absolutely is based on your recent financial records.
The key word here is recent—not the period beginning 15 months ago and ending 6 months ago. If that is happening, talk to the people in your local legal aid office to determine whether your rights are being violated.
I know too many people who have been institutionalized (and subsequently mistreated there) to discount his concerns as you have done.
I haven't discounted the concern. It's a real concern; it is simply secondary to other, more serious concerns, such as ensuring that the person doesn't jump off a building. If someone truly is a danger to himself/herself, that person should be temporarily institutionalized until such time as doctors can find a combination of medicines that resolves that problem. Institutionalization is for their protection, not for punishment. Seeing it as punishment is the surest way to ensure that people never get help, and continue to spiral downwards until they give up. Real depression is not something you can solve on your own, and it is potentially very unsafe to try to do so.
In fact, the best thing that this person can do is to investigate the local mental health facilities, determine which ones are least likely to mistreat him/her, and then voluntarily commit himself/herself in one of them. The act of voluntary self-commitment usually ensures that the patient can walk out at any time and choose a different facility if he/she is being mistreated. More importantly, that gets the patient into a private facility, which is probably more likely to treat the patients with respect than a state-run facility.
Finally, I would add that mistreating mental health patients is a crime. If you're in a position where you know about that sort of mistreatment, it is your civic duty to report it to appropriate authorities (hospital management, police, AMA, NCBH, state licensing boards, etc.) so that the people responsible are taken out of a position where they can cause harm. Please do so, because the longer we allow abusive caregivers to work with mental health patients, the more people will advise patients to avoid getting treatment out of fear that they will be abused. You can help break the cycle.
Lots of folks put money in various managed funds for retirement. They don't touch the money, but behind the scenes, some fund manager is buying and selling stocks to try to keep the fund in the black. In may cases, those transactions are taxed just like you were buying and selling the stocks yourself, rather than having the taxes deferred until you take the money out. The difference between the capital gains tax rates and full income tax rates can make the difference between having enough money to retire and not, particularly given that all of us who are younger than 50 are pretty much assuming that Congress will have stolen all the money from Social Security without paying it back long before any of us retire.
Also, the fact that home sales are treated as capital gains allows for exemptions to capital gains on the sale of your primary residence. This can make the difference between someone being able to afford to move and being stuck in one place because the taxes would diminish the value of their home by so much that they wouldn't be able to buy another one. With that said, it used to be a one-time exemption, and now it is every two years. That's way too often to allow somebody to take a $250,000 exemption, IMO. I'm not saying we should necessarily roll it back to the pre-1997 rules, but the size of the current loophole is just plain ridiculous.
Job? I've tried. They want kids fresh out of school who will work twice the hours for the money. 15 years of experience from my last job is not of much value to anyone else when they can just hire some kids or H1-Bs cheap. Plus, I have no degree Hell I didn't even finish high school. I've worked and worked and worked for all these years and have nothing to show for it. So I am looking at GED and starting all that stuff and trying to pass it all and somehow afford college? At my age? With what money? I haven't been in school of any kind in decades and my mind is not up to it.
If you're in tech, most companies don't care about a degree as long as you know your stuff. As for hiring kids and H1-Bs, most companies don't abuse H1-Bs, and most companies do hire workers who aren't straight out of school. Just don't apply for junior positions, because you'd be overqualified.
Also, Medicaid is not based on the previous year's income. It is based on the current monthly income. If you call below a certain line, you qualify. And if your state has signed on for expanded coverage (e.g. California), you might qualify for Medicare at even higher levels. And even if you don't qualify for Medicare, if you're currently making less than 400% of the poverty line, you can get discounts on health insurance in the form of tax credits. That $300 per month you quoted is roughly the California rate before low-income subsidies, not after. If you don't take the discount when paying your insurance bills, you'll get that money back in the form of a tax credit when you pay your taxes next year. Either way, the net effect is the same.
Finally, if you're serious about that last part, talk to somebody. There's a difference between being sad and feeling hopeless. The latter is a medical problem, and is treatable. Get health insurance, then go talk to a medical professional. First, they will help you recover your hope, and second, that hope will help you get a job. The reality is that clinical depression will make it much harder to get a job, so get help first, then apply for jobs.
Nobody even wants to interview a 50+ person, let alone hire them.
If you haven't already, try applying at:
Google
iXsystems
Apple
All three companies have jobs in your field, and they're more than willing to interview people who aren't fresh out of college, particularly for low-level stuff, where the college kids often just won't cut it.
Also, make sure you have a LinkedIn profile. Most recruiters these days do their work through LinkedIn, so if you aren't there, they probably don't know about you.
Finally, take the time to learn how to write iOS apps. There's a very vibrant market for that skill, and many iOS teams are in desperate need of adult supervision (managers), so if you have any interest in management, that would help, too. And if you can do device drivers, iOS programming should be a trivial skill to pick up.:-)
Not that big a premium..... At that rate, people who can barely afford it would be considerably better off putting it on a credit card even if they have failed to pay their bills and are facing a borderline extortionate 30% credit card APR. The usual and customary cost difference for monthly billing is more on the order of 3-5%.
First, that's 800 miles on a flat surface. Add in some mountains, and your range will probably be a lot less.
Second, you're assuming a single driver. Lots of young families go on road trips in which one person drives for a few hours, and then they trade off.
Third, that's not 11 hours nonstop. That's 11 hours without a charge. Those aren't the same thing. If they happen to have a charging station at the places where you stop for food, great, but otherwise, you'll have to make two stops with your electric car—one hour for a full charge, plus up to another hour for food. So now let us compare two families making that identical 11-hour trip, one in a car with a 300-mile range, and one in a car with an 800-mile range.
Family 1:
8:00: 4 hours driving
12:00: 1 hour for lunch
1:00: 5 hours driving
6:00: 1 hour for supper
7:00: 2 hours driving
9:00: has 11 hours to recover
Family 2:
8:00: 4 hours driving
12:00: 1 hour for lunch
1:00: 1 hours recharging
2:00: 4 hours driving
6:00: 1 hour for supper
7:00: 1 hour recharging
8:00: 3 hours driving
11:00: has 9 hours to recover
Guess which family will get enough sleep to drive safely.... Hint: It's not the family driving the car with the 300-mile range. Range limits are only a safety feature if charging is nearly instant (under 5 minutes). At an hour for a full charge, assuming all else is equal, they have the exact opposite result.
This is why you stop taxing companies, and instead tax the money on its way out of the companies, on its way into the investors' pockets. Set a limit after which all capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Make it high enough to allow for folks investing for retirement, but low enough to catch folks who are earning nontrivial amounts of money in the form of capital gains that are really glorified earned income (e.g. C*O bonuses).
Also, you'd need to tax all capital gains on U.S. stocks by foreign investors. Not sure how you'd do that, but it would be necessary as part of shifting the tax burden up one layer of abstraction.
Lowest price? Only if you don't include used copies (which, for movies, would be a pretty silly thing to not include). There was one movie that I wanted to buy on Blu-Ray that Amazon did this with. I moved it to my "items to buy later" list. After six months, it was still a Prime exclusive, so I gave up and bought a "Like New" copy from a third-party Amazon merchant for less than half what Amazon was charging for a new copy. So not only did they fail to entice me to come back to Prime (which I dumped for Netflix), but they also lost the profit that they would have made on that title (except for their commission on the Amazon Marketplace sale).
The main application of this would likely be automotive manufacturing. For almost everything else, you're going to replace the device after a few years anyway, so unless the batteries are removable (which is by far the exception rather than the rule for rechargeable batteries), there's no real benefit to having the batteries last forever.
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Former Republican running as a Democrat, former Democrat running as a Republican... this is by far the most screwed up election in our nation's history, and I'm including the "Who am I? Why am I here?" election....
It certainly seems to be the way that Amazon works. I repeatedly got bitten by the instant purchase option for Amazon Instant Video, which allowed me to accidentally purchase things that were free on Prime streaming. I complained about it, and they refunded it, but the fact that none of their means of disabling those purchases actually solves the problem (and the fact that many were explicitly overridden for Instant Video) told me that they wanted people to accidentally make purchases and have to complain if they wanted a refund, under the assumption that most people wouldn't bother to complain for a couple of bucks.
I eventually gave up and wrote some custom CSS to remove the buy buttons.
How is socketed RAM a security issue? More to the point, how is InstantGo not just a Microsoft knock-off of Apple's "dark wake" (which was supported long before soldered RAM, but which I think does require an SSD)?
The difference plus interest, but otherwise, yes.
The entire concept is nonsensical. It's a fairly fundamental truth that information cannot be destroyed. Self-destructing messages are basically the same problem as DRM; you have the data, you have a key, you're allowed to use the data to unlock the key, but only under somebody else's terms. If you trust the endpoint to be absolutely secure against tampering, the problem is trivial, but you don't need anything more than a simple "ask the server whether the data should be wiped before showing it" mechanism. If you don't trust the endpoint to be absolutely secure against tampering, then the problem is basically impossible, because any response from the server can be faked.
At best, you might come up with some screwball scheme involving a time-stamped response from the server that has to be within the last 30 seconds or else the app refuses to show the message (to prevent replay), but even then, if somebody can tamper with the device, they can patch out the check. Or you can make the app store nothing locally, and depend on the server to either provide the message or not do so, of course, but even then, there's no way to avoid the analog hole.
Not really. It's basically just interpreted C with classes, plus sigils ($), minus the need for variable declarations (but with C typecasting).
You're thinking of Emacs. C-x M-c M-facebook.
At Apple, IL7 means BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse out front. I'm told that it used to mean the Peppermill back in the day.
Those sorts of mistakes could just as easily be made by somebody straight out of school. The problem is not the age of the people in question, but rather that only one set of eyes ever looked at the code in question....
Which is why all modern operating systems are written in either Fortran, Cobol, or Algol. No, wait.... :-)
The error in the GP's post was not in assuming that the skills that older folks learned in school are useless. They almost certainly are. The error was in assuming that the older folks didn't learn a single thing while working in the field.
New college hires typically graduate with fewer than 600 total CS contact hours—45-50 semester hours (which are about 50 minutes apiece) times 15 weeks per semester. Even if they spend twice as much time outside of class that they spend inside of class, that would still mean that they spend more time doing CS-related work in their first year of employment than they spent on CS coursework in their entire four years of college.
Most programmers learn continuously while on the job. Their skills are relatively up-to-date by virtue of the fact that they're using them to solve real-world problems every day. And experience enables older programmers to recognize antipatterns that new college hires (NCHs) would probably miss, saving lots of time redesigning it later.
The real problem with ageism is that there's actually a decent reason for it. Most companies don't need a hundred architects; they need a few architects and a lot of code monkeys. Most older programmers don't want to be code monkeys, and companies are wary of hiring them code monkeys, because they assume that the employees won't stay very long. They are probably right. And there are only two ways to fix that problem:
Well, that's not entirely true. You can certainly have an organization where everybody is senior, as long as you're willing to accept that you're going to get careful, deliberate implementation of features, and accept that you can't just have somebody toss a quick A/B test together, because they're going to want to implement it right or not at all. The result is a very different type of technology company with very different products from what we normally see in the market today. It is anybody's guess how that would work in practice, because as far as I know, nobody has dared to try it, with the possible exception of certain research labs that aren't/weren't product-focused.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, you know. Just because there's no legitimate cause for age discrimination doesn't mean it won't happen. And stronger job protection, an earlier retirement age, and stronger Social Security will help whether there's cause or not.
That approach will always work eventually. Of course, things will get pretty hot on the way down....
Err... once you have your degree, you can either find work there or move back....
At that price, it must be a UC. My advice would be to move to Tennessee and find yourself a job doing... anything—waiting tables, even—enough to put a roof over your head. After a year, you'll be eligible for in-state tuition. Apply to UT Martin. It's a good school, your credits will probably all transfer, and you'll only pay a little over $2k per semester, so your grants would just about cover your tuition. You'd just have to scrape up a few hundred bucks plus money for books, food, and housing. And food and housing are pretty cheap there, too. Once you have your job, you can either find work there or move back and find work wherever you are currently.
Or heck, go to any other state's biggest state universities and (assuming you've been there long enough to qualify for in-state tuition) you'd still be paying less per year than you're currently paying per semester.
Actually, asset rules may or may not apply, depending on where you live.
For example, in California, Medi-Cal disregards all property/assets if you are eligible based on your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI). So if you're making less than 138% of the federal poverty level, you are eligible for Medi-Cal regardless of how much property you own. The only people who are covered by the asset caps in California are people with income above that limit, but who (potentially) qualify for Medi-Cal anyway because of being elderly, disabled, requiring long-term care, or being in CalWORKs or foster care.
If you aren't sure whether those limits apply, contact your local Medicaid administrator organization (e.g. Medi-Cal). They can advise you on whether you qualify.
The key word here is recent—not the period beginning 15 months ago and ending 6 months ago. If that is happening, talk to the people in your local legal aid office to determine whether your rights are being violated.
I haven't discounted the concern. It's a real concern; it is simply secondary to other, more serious concerns, such as ensuring that the person doesn't jump off a building. If someone truly is a danger to himself/herself, that person should be temporarily institutionalized until such time as doctors can find a combination of medicines that resolves that problem. Institutionalization is for their protection, not for punishment. Seeing it as punishment is the surest way to ensure that people never get help, and continue to spiral downwards until they give up. Real depression is not something you can solve on your own, and it is potentially very unsafe to try to do so.
In fact, the best thing that this person can do is to investigate the local mental health facilities, determine which ones are least likely to mistreat him/her, and then voluntarily commit himself/herself in one of them. The act of voluntary self-commitment usually ensures that the patient can walk out at any time and choose a different facility if he/she is being mistreated. More importantly, that gets the patient into a private facility, which is probably more likely to treat the patients with respect than a state-run facility.
Finally, I would add that mistreating mental health patients is a crime. If you're in a position where you know about that sort of mistreatment, it is your civic duty to report it to appropriate authorities (hospital management, police, AMA, NCBH, state licensing boards, etc.) so that the people responsible are taken out of a position where they can cause harm. Please do so, because the longer we allow abusive caregivers to work with mental health patients, the more people will advise patients to avoid getting treatment out of fear that they will be abused. You can help break the cycle.
Lots of folks put money in various managed funds for retirement. They don't touch the money, but behind the scenes, some fund manager is buying and selling stocks to try to keep the fund in the black. In may cases, those transactions are taxed just like you were buying and selling the stocks yourself, rather than having the taxes deferred until you take the money out. The difference between the capital gains tax rates and full income tax rates can make the difference between having enough money to retire and not, particularly given that all of us who are younger than 50 are pretty much assuming that Congress will have stolen all the money from Social Security without paying it back long before any of us retire.
Also, the fact that home sales are treated as capital gains allows for exemptions to capital gains on the sale of your primary residence. This can make the difference between someone being able to afford to move and being stuck in one place because the taxes would diminish the value of their home by so much that they wouldn't be able to buy another one. With that said, it used to be a one-time exemption, and now it is every two years. That's way too often to allow somebody to take a $250,000 exemption, IMO. I'm not saying we should necessarily roll it back to the pre-1997 rules, but the size of the current loophole is just plain ridiculous.
Have you looked into student loans? Or Pell grants?
If you're in tech, most companies don't care about a degree as long as you know your stuff. As for hiring kids and H1-Bs, most companies don't abuse H1-Bs, and most companies do hire workers who aren't straight out of school. Just don't apply for junior positions, because you'd be overqualified.
Also, Medicaid is not based on the previous year's income. It is based on the current monthly income. If you call below a certain line, you qualify. And if your state has signed on for expanded coverage (e.g. California), you might qualify for Medicare at even higher levels. And even if you don't qualify for Medicare, if you're currently making less than 400% of the poverty line, you can get discounts on health insurance in the form of tax credits. That $300 per month you quoted is roughly the California rate before low-income subsidies, not after. If you don't take the discount when paying your insurance bills, you'll get that money back in the form of a tax credit when you pay your taxes next year. Either way, the net effect is the same.
Finally, if you're serious about that last part, talk to somebody. There's a difference between being sad and feeling hopeless. The latter is a medical problem, and is treatable. Get health insurance, then go talk to a medical professional. First, they will help you recover your hope, and second, that hope will help you get a job. The reality is that clinical depression will make it much harder to get a job, so get help first, then apply for jobs.
If you haven't already, try applying at:
All three companies have jobs in your field, and they're more than willing to interview people who aren't fresh out of college, particularly for low-level stuff, where the college kids often just won't cut it.
Also, make sure you have a LinkedIn profile. Most recruiters these days do their work through LinkedIn, so if you aren't there, they probably don't know about you.
Finally, take the time to learn how to write iOS apps. There's a very vibrant market for that skill, and many iOS teams are in desperate need of adult supervision (managers), so if you have any interest in management, that would help, too. And if you can do device drivers, iOS programming should be a trivial skill to pick up. :-)
Not that big a premium..... At that rate, people who can barely afford it would be considerably better off putting it on a credit card even if they have failed to pay their bills and are facing a borderline extortionate 30% credit card APR. The usual and customary cost difference for monthly billing is more on the order of 3-5%.
First, that's 800 miles on a flat surface. Add in some mountains, and your range will probably be a lot less.
Second, you're assuming a single driver. Lots of young families go on road trips in which one person drives for a few hours, and then they trade off.
Third, that's not 11 hours nonstop. That's 11 hours without a charge. Those aren't the same thing. If they happen to have a charging station at the places where you stop for food, great, but otherwise, you'll have to make two stops with your electric car—one hour for a full charge, plus up to another hour for food. So now let us compare two families making that identical 11-hour trip, one in a car with a 300-mile range, and one in a car with an 800-mile range.
Family 1:
Family 2:
Guess which family will get enough sleep to drive safely.... Hint: It's not the family driving the car with the 300-mile range. Range limits are only a safety feature if charging is nearly instant (under 5 minutes). At an hour for a full charge, assuming all else is equal, they have the exact opposite result.
This is why you stop taxing companies, and instead tax the money on its way out of the companies, on its way into the investors' pockets. Set a limit after which all capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Make it high enough to allow for folks investing for retirement, but low enough to catch folks who are earning nontrivial amounts of money in the form of capital gains that are really glorified earned income (e.g. C*O bonuses).
Also, you'd need to tax all capital gains on U.S. stocks by foreign investors. Not sure how you'd do that, but it would be necessary as part of shifting the tax burden up one layer of abstraction.
Lowest price? Only if you don't include used copies (which, for movies, would be a pretty silly thing to not include). There was one movie that I wanted to buy on Blu-Ray that Amazon did this with. I moved it to my "items to buy later" list. After six months, it was still a Prime exclusive, so I gave up and bought a "Like New" copy from a third-party Amazon merchant for less than half what Amazon was charging for a new copy. So not only did they fail to entice me to come back to Prime (which I dumped for Netflix), but they also lost the profit that they would have made on that title (except for their commission on the Amazon Marketplace sale).
The main application of this would likely be automotive manufacturing. For almost everything else, you're going to replace the device after a few years anyway, so unless the batteries are removable (which is by far the exception rather than the rule for rechargeable batteries), there's no real benefit to having the batteries last forever.