Bernie is not really a Socialist. He's more of a social democrat, which is NOT the same thing. He's not pushing for a system where we have a state controlled economy. We already have some state control of some small factors in the economy (or big ones if you count the military which is essentiallly the biggest jobs program in the country). Expanding to have more socialized medicine, expanding medicare, having more safety nets, or even just higher taxes, is not the same as socialism.
If you don't like those ideas, then great. Have a serious debate about them. But to just label them as "socialism" is incorrect and demeans any argument you are trying to make. This is just as wrong as when someone on the left calls a new crime bill "fascist", which is also an incorrect word to use.
Many states are trying to restrict these. Voter ID laws, disenfranchisement, etc. There are many people who do not want any muslims in the US. I had my mother say "they shouldn't allow those" when we drove past a mosque. Due process in the US is based upon being able to afford a decent lawyer. Black men are more often jailed than white men for the same crime - we give bigger penalties for cheap crack possession than for expensive cocaine possession.
Under your definition, California protects all rights. No state in the US is trying to ban guns, there is a difference between banning and having regulation. But if you're going to be silly and claim that California ignores some rights then I will just apply that same logic to other states where rights are not equally protected for all citizens.
Which taxes? Apply it equally to all income, from wages to capital gains on investments? Or do you mean merely sales tax which already is mostlly a flat tax?
There's an American foible where everyone thinks that someday they will be incredibly wealthy, so that they don't want to tax the wealthy more in case this bites them in the ass in the future. This is bullshit though, when I end up in a higher tax bracket than the previous year because I'm making more money, I say "hurray for me!"
A plan for housing is necessary. A lot of housing developers don't give a shit about that, they just want their profits ASAP. So they want to build either more upscale single family homes or upscale multistory condos. That just makes the housing problem worse. We need places for those lower and middle class people to live, and the free market will NOT solve that problem on its own. The land is scarce so developers want to build outwards but that just makes the problems worse. We need high density housing (affordable or not), building up and not outwards, but we can't do that when there's no transportation infrastructure to support the higher density.
Despite claims that California is not friendly to businesses, most big tech companies don't want to move away and new tech companies want to start here. I wish they were somewhere else, the Bay Area is full and the Los Angeles area is full. Let's be honest here, California is too full and doesn't have enough water for the residents we already have. But then, the US is full, we really have more people that are sustainable. The world is too full as well. We really need to get rid of the grow-grow-grow mentality. We need to stop being prudes and refusing to talk about birth control around the world unless it's abstinence only. Until the world turns around and stops thinking me-me-me all the time we're doomed.
(And of course the whole "doomed" thing will be rejected by the evangelical right who believe that the world can only end by the rapture so any attempt to conserve, reduce, or plan is ungodly. Unfortunately those people have an outweighted influence in government.)
Nobody has been seriously talking about bringing Socialism to this country, that's either just a scare tactic or someone not knowing what Socialism means. Now we might have socialized services but that is not the same thing at all.
The problem is that we have a few generations who were brought up to learn that unions were a gateway to socialism and socialism was a gateway to communism and communism was a gateway to atheism. So any vague hint of worker's rights or government programs will cause some people to cry that Zombie Marx is walking the land looking for brains to eat.
It's a bit of a stretch to say California has the highest tax rate in the nation. It has a bottom rate of 1% which is less than many red states, but a top rate of 13.3% for those making more than a million dollars in income. Different charts put California at different slots because it depends upon how you slice the numbers. You can look at the tax Zuckerberg pays, or the average tax, or the median tax. Then you add in property tax, and California starts to look a lot better than places like New York and New Jersey. If you combine sales and income tax, California probably comes in 5th.
If you're going to debate, then don't just spout campaign style platitudes but use some facts.
Not many states are respecting all rights. Lots of red states are quite happy to restrict or attempt to restrict rights; the right to vote while not being white, the right to due process even if poor, the right to abortion, the right to have an unpopular religion, and so forth. While California has flaws you will not find a flawless place to build a new company. Better to look for the advantages in a location.
And don't forget that California is a huge state. We've got deep blue and deep red and they make lots of noise, but overall it's somewhat centrist with a slight left lean. The previous governor was pretty much a left leaning centrist, and the one before that was a right leaning centrist, and it keeps going that way for awhile.
Lots of reasons, people pick their favorites and think it's the most important maybe. I think there's a tendency to have a pay-as-you-go model so that the entire project isn't funded fully up front and that leads to issues down the road because the project hasn't been fully planned. And full planning isn't done ahead of time because it costs actual money to do the planning. I may be wrong though, but I see these failure in companies at times.
What worked in the past? We had lots of bridges and dams built in the thirties (Golden Gate bridge, Oakland bridge, Hoover dam, etc). But we were also getting out of the great depression as well. Not all of this had federal funding but they did have state funding with broad support of the public. Getting people to work was also seen as a good thing, even if the government paid for it, which is not today's general political attitude where public works projects are usually unpopular. The bridges also had tolls and the dams generated electricity as well. We also had the federal highway system under Eisenhower, but again we had a lot of people back from WWII ready for work. The highway system was a great boon to the economy too, both in building it and having it, so the public was in favor.
Maybe the important factor is to have broad public support (which the high speed rail never had) and to have a visible economic benefit.
They had to start building somewhere though. Eventually the finished line would have passed through Merced and Bakersfield. If they had started in San Jose (uncertain, there were arguments about whether it should be a terminus or not) and then it ended in Chowchilla when the funding was cut, it would have been just as silly if not more so.
This seems to be the same story in many newer projects in the US. Someone is always anxious to undercut to get the bid and then overcharge later to get the money. Proper long term project planning isn't done so that there's inevitably an "overrun" in time and money. And it makes no difference if the project is in a red or a blue state either. It makes me wonder how we ever managed to get big and complex projects done in the past.
Well, the cars sold in the US are typically made from parts coming from several countries, with components assembled in several countries, and generally only final assembly counting as to which country it is made in. Some Japanese cars are mostly made in the US or even have final assembly in the US.
My experience at companies that make products is that very often overseas contract manufacturers are used when there are lots of them to be made, but local US manufacturers are used to make small lots of products such as for early testing or limited runs. And then there's often some sort of local in-house manufacturing step, such as final assembly, installation of software, customization, etc. The US manufacturers are convenient because they're close and you can easily visit them when there's a problem or you need a quick turnaround, but the cost is significantly higher.
Often the difference isn't necessarily about labor costs. Most of these manufacturers are automated and most of the labor comes from setting things up. The traditional assembly line that wants an unskilled worker is relatively rare.
No one ever wonders "how come rich people commit fewer crimes?" or "why do white people commit crimes against their white neighbors instead of driving across time to the black neighborhood?"
Given that this is slashdot, I don't know what's worse. That this earlier AC is being sincere and is really that deluded, or that this is just another troll trying to wind people up.
Static analysis tools are really great at figuring out that you're overwriting past the end of an array or allocated block. Even if it's a false positive there's always a way to flag it or tweak to code so that it doesn't show as a warning anymore.
One snag I've seen over the years is that a lot of programmers don't think that it's worth their time (or not their job) to write code that is maintainable over the long run. If it compilers and runs and QA isn't complaining then they think that's all there is to it. Quashing warnings and keeping static analysis happy is indeed a major part of the job. (If you're in a startup and being paid to deliver a demo with new features every Friday then you can possibly be excused from this, but still try to sneak in some quality when the boss isn't looking.)
A good process should always be "zero warnings" before code is committed, or send automatic emails to the offender if the build shows warnings, or whatnot. Once you start letting some warnings through then people stop paying attention. I'm amazed in some occasions that after figuring out a bug from the field that there was a warning pointing to it the whole time; and the dev usually has an excuse that there are so many warnings that it slipped past.
Sure, 99% of the warnings will be meaningless but you don't want the 1% that get through be discovered by crashes that the customer finds first.
The snag is with third party libraries that typically come with tons of warnings when compiled (we statically link it all together in a single build most places I've worked). But that's where you tweak the build to only exclude warnings on those problematic libraries instead of excluding globally.
I think you just need a static analysis tool that you can run quickly on your code. The ones I used in the past you had to commit the code first and wait overnight, though they say there are improvements so you can do it at your desk. From there it's a small jump to just reverifying just on the changed files. The static analysis tools do a good job and find a lot of bugs (and some false positives) that code reviewers often overlook.
So just go to the web. You don't need an "app" for this. If you don't already know who has bulls for your breed of cows then you're a noob and need to start socializing with other ranchers.
From a contracting agency, the contractors usually make less or similar money to a full time employee. And not just from overseas agencies but the local US based agencies too. The high fee per worker that agencies charge doesn't all go to the worker. If you want to make good money as a contractor then you should probably be independent, otherwise if you're forking over huge chunks of your fee to an agency then you may as well have been a full time employee instead.
Not necessarily highly lucrative, often it is just a whim of some executive at the time. The idea itself may be stupid, and all the department managers have found a way to say we cannot do it. So they bring in a contractor to do the job, because no one else is willing to touch it with a 100ft pool.
I've seen where a department is really bad with a certain task or is spending too much money doing it. So the idea is that money can be saved by contracting it out to a different company. Then you take the department that's not doing very well at the task and put them in charge of coordinating with the third party. Then it starts to screw up. Ie, the department wasn't very good at the task because they were still acting like a startup and never got around to having requirements and creating specifications before the work starts. So now they don't have suitable documentation to give to the outside company so that they can do a good job. It ended up being more expensive and taking more time overall.
Yet it all started with the naive idea of "we can save money if we let someone else do the task". Never mind that once it failed someone attempted it a second time a year later...
Question: How do you take the risk out of a project? Answer: By planning it out. You do the R&D, Proof of Concept Studies, Project Scope and Decomposition review, and Market analysis on the hard pieces first.
And that's the hard part. This I think is what separates a company that acts like a startup and one that acts like it wants to do a proper job for the long term. In the middle is the painful growing process that most companies have to get past.
What I see funny is when a contracting agency (manufacturer, designer, etc) is hired to do the new projects rather than use them for the existing products that just need to be maintained. Especially if you go overseas you end up with more workers who aren't as good but for less cost. Probably this comes from the mistake of seeing all workers as identical.
Politics affects this too. And naivete. One thing contracting houses do is marketing. They sound great on paper and they can start as soon as you want. Only after the check clears it's sometimes not working out like you hoped.
It can vary a lot depending upon the company. I 've seen contractors hired to work on the spiffy new projects so that employees weren't taken off of the dull routine maintenance of older projects. Often I see contractors hired (often friends of friends of a manager) because they're easier to get on the books than to get a full time employee even though the actual cost might be greater. Sometimes and it frustrated me that there would be underqualified people screwing up projects despite never having gone through the normal interview process; and I'd be cleaning up after them because my time was less valuable than giving some basic training about how to check in code properly. In some places though the contractors were good, integrated into a team instead of being in a silo, and treated like anyone else.
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Bernie is not really a Socialist. He's more of a social democrat, which is NOT the same thing. He's not pushing for a system where we have a state controlled economy. We already have some state control of some small factors in the economy (or big ones if you count the military which is essentiallly the biggest jobs program in the country). Expanding to have more socialized medicine, expanding medicare, having more safety nets, or even just higher taxes, is not the same as socialism.
If you don't like those ideas, then great. Have a serious debate about them. But to just label them as "socialism" is incorrect and demeans any argument you are trying to make. This is just as wrong as when someone on the left calls a new crime bill "fascist", which is also an incorrect word to use.
Many states are trying to restrict these. Voter ID laws, disenfranchisement, etc. There are many people who do not want any muslims in the US. I had my mother say "they shouldn't allow those" when we drove past a mosque. Due process in the US is based upon being able to afford a decent lawyer. Black men are more often jailed than white men for the same crime - we give bigger penalties for cheap crack possession than for expensive cocaine possession.
Under your definition, California protects all rights. No state in the US is trying to ban guns, there is a difference between banning and having regulation. But if you're going to be silly and claim that California ignores some rights then I will just apply that same logic to other states where rights are not equally protected for all citizens.
Which taxes? Apply it equally to all income, from wages to capital gains on investments? Or do you mean merely sales tax which already is mostlly a flat tax?
There's an American foible where everyone thinks that someday they will be incredibly wealthy, so that they don't want to tax the wealthy more in case this bites them in the ass in the future. This is bullshit though, when I end up in a higher tax bracket than the previous year because I'm making more money, I say "hurray for me!"
I had a boss in the 90s who told me that if you actually pay taxes then you're not making enough money yet.
A plan for housing is necessary. A lot of housing developers don't give a shit about that, they just want their profits ASAP. So they want to build either more upscale single family homes or upscale multistory condos. That just makes the housing problem worse. We need places for those lower and middle class people to live, and the free market will NOT solve that problem on its own. The land is scarce so developers want to build outwards but that just makes the problems worse. We need high density housing (affordable or not), building up and not outwards, but we can't do that when there's no transportation infrastructure to support the higher density.
Despite claims that California is not friendly to businesses, most big tech companies don't want to move away and new tech companies want to start here. I wish they were somewhere else, the Bay Area is full and the Los Angeles area is full. Let's be honest here, California is too full and doesn't have enough water for the residents we already have. But then, the US is full, we really have more people that are sustainable. The world is too full as well. We really need to get rid of the grow-grow-grow mentality. We need to stop being prudes and refusing to talk about birth control around the world unless it's abstinence only. Until the world turns around and stops thinking me-me-me all the time we're doomed.
(And of course the whole "doomed" thing will be rejected by the evangelical right who believe that the world can only end by the rapture so any attempt to conserve, reduce, or plan is ungodly. Unfortunately those people have an outweighted influence in government.)
Nobody has been seriously talking about bringing Socialism to this country, that's either just a scare tactic or someone not knowing what Socialism means. Now we might have socialized services but that is not the same thing at all.
The problem is that we have a few generations who were brought up to learn that unions were a gateway to socialism and socialism was a gateway to communism and communism was a gateway to atheism. So any vague hint of worker's rights or government programs will cause some people to cry that Zombie Marx is walking the land looking for brains to eat.
Well, there's Oz for one. Though it's taken a bit of a dive after the Wizard left.
It's a bit of a stretch to say California has the highest tax rate in the nation. It has a bottom rate of 1% which is less than many red states, but a top rate of 13.3% for those making more than a million dollars in income. Different charts put California at different slots because it depends upon how you slice the numbers. You can look at the tax Zuckerberg pays, or the average tax, or the median tax. Then you add in property tax, and California starts to look a lot better than places like New York and New Jersey. If you combine sales and income tax, California probably comes in 5th.
If you're going to debate, then don't just spout campaign style platitudes but use some facts.
Not many states are respecting all rights. Lots of red states are quite happy to restrict or attempt to restrict rights; the right to vote while not being white, the right to due process even if poor, the right to abortion, the right to have an unpopular religion, and so forth. While California has flaws you will not find a flawless place to build a new company. Better to look for the advantages in a location.
And don't forget that California is a huge state. We've got deep blue and deep red and they make lots of noise, but overall it's somewhat centrist with a slight left lean. The previous governor was pretty much a left leaning centrist, and the one before that was a right leaning centrist, and it keeps going that way for awhile.
He didn't like the movie Prometheus.
More commonly called a "massif" though.
Lots of reasons, people pick their favorites and think it's the most important maybe. I think there's a tendency to have a pay-as-you-go model so that the entire project isn't funded fully up front and that leads to issues down the road because the project hasn't been fully planned. And full planning isn't done ahead of time because it costs actual money to do the planning. I may be wrong though, but I see these failure in companies at times.
What worked in the past? We had lots of bridges and dams built in the thirties (Golden Gate bridge, Oakland bridge, Hoover dam, etc). But we were also getting out of the great depression as well. Not all of this had federal funding but they did have state funding with broad support of the public. Getting people to work was also seen as a good thing, even if the government paid for it, which is not today's general political attitude where public works projects are usually unpopular. The bridges also had tolls and the dams generated electricity as well. We also had the federal highway system under Eisenhower, but again we had a lot of people back from WWII ready for work. The highway system was a great boon to the economy too, both in building it and having it, so the public was in favor.
Maybe the important factor is to have broad public support (which the high speed rail never had) and to have a visible economic benefit.
They had to start building somewhere though. Eventually the finished line would have passed through Merced and Bakersfield. If they had started in San Jose (uncertain, there were arguments about whether it should be a terminus or not) and then it ended in Chowchilla when the funding was cut, it would have been just as silly if not more so.
This seems to be the same story in many newer projects in the US. Someone is always anxious to undercut to get the bid and then overcharge later to get the money. Proper long term project planning isn't done so that there's inevitably an "overrun" in time and money. And it makes no difference if the project is in a red or a blue state either. It makes me wonder how we ever managed to get big and complex projects done in the past.
It was a great commercial that essentially said "don't be a jerk". This greatly upset the jerks for some reason.
Well, the cars sold in the US are typically made from parts coming from several countries, with components assembled in several countries, and generally only final assembly counting as to which country it is made in. Some Japanese cars are mostly made in the US or even have final assembly in the US.
My experience at companies that make products is that very often overseas contract manufacturers are used when there are lots of them to be made, but local US manufacturers are used to make small lots of products such as for early testing or limited runs. And then there's often some sort of local in-house manufacturing step, such as final assembly, installation of software, customization, etc. The US manufacturers are convenient because they're close and you can easily visit them when there's a problem or you need a quick turnaround, but the cost is significantly higher.
Often the difference isn't necessarily about labor costs. Most of these manufacturers are automated and most of the labor comes from setting things up. The traditional assembly line that wants an unskilled worker is relatively rare.
No one ever wonders "how come rich people commit fewer crimes?" or "why do white people commit crimes against their white neighbors instead of driving across time to the black neighborhood?"
Given that this is slashdot, I don't know what's worse. That this earlier AC is being sincere and is really that deluded, or that this is just another troll trying to wind people up.
Static analysis tools are really great at figuring out that you're overwriting past the end of an array or allocated block. Even if it's a false positive there's always a way to flag it or tweak to code so that it doesn't show as a warning anymore.
One snag I've seen over the years is that a lot of programmers don't think that it's worth their time (or not their job) to write code that is maintainable over the long run. If it compilers and runs and QA isn't complaining then they think that's all there is to it. Quashing warnings and keeping static analysis happy is indeed a major part of the job. (If you're in a startup and being paid to deliver a demo with new features every Friday then you can possibly be excused from this, but still try to sneak in some quality when the boss isn't looking.)
A good process should always be "zero warnings" before code is committed, or send automatic emails to the offender if the build shows warnings, or whatnot. Once you start letting some warnings through then people stop paying attention. I'm amazed in some occasions that after figuring out a bug from the field that there was a warning pointing to it the whole time; and the dev usually has an excuse that there are so many warnings that it slipped past.
Sure, 99% of the warnings will be meaningless but you don't want the 1% that get through be discovered by crashes that the customer finds first.
The snag is with third party libraries that typically come with tons of warnings when compiled (we statically link it all together in a single build most places I've worked). But that's where you tweak the build to only exclude warnings on those problematic libraries instead of excluding globally.
I think you just need a static analysis tool that you can run quickly on your code. The ones I used in the past you had to commit the code first and wait overnight, though they say there are improvements so you can do it at your desk. From there it's a small jump to just reverifying just on the changed files. The static analysis tools do a good job and find a lot of bugs (and some false positives) that code reviewers often overlook.
So just go to the web. You don't need an "app" for this. If you don't already know who has bulls for your breed of cows then you're a noob and need to start socializing with other ranchers.
From a contracting agency, the contractors usually make less or similar money to a full time employee. And not just from overseas agencies but the local US based agencies too. The high fee per worker that agencies charge doesn't all go to the worker. If you want to make good money as a contractor then you should probably be independent, otherwise if you're forking over huge chunks of your fee to an agency then you may as well have been a full time employee instead.
Not necessarily highly lucrative, often it is just a whim of some executive at the time. The idea itself may be stupid, and all the department managers have found a way to say we cannot do it. So they bring in a contractor to do the job, because no one else is willing to touch it with a 100ft pool.
I've seen where a department is really bad with a certain task or is spending too much money doing it. So the idea is that money can be saved by contracting it out to a different company. Then you take the department that's not doing very well at the task and put them in charge of coordinating with the third party. Then it starts to screw up. Ie, the department wasn't very good at the task because they were still acting like a startup and never got around to having requirements and creating specifications before the work starts. So now they don't have suitable documentation to give to the outside company so that they can do a good job. It ended up being more expensive and taking more time overall.
Yet it all started with the naive idea of "we can save money if we let someone else do the task". Never mind that once it failed someone attempted it a second time a year later...
Question: How do you take the risk out of a project?
Answer: By planning it out. You do the R&D, Proof of Concept Studies, Project Scope and Decomposition review, and Market analysis on the hard pieces first.
And that's the hard part. This I think is what separates a company that acts like a startup and one that acts like it wants to do a proper job for the long term. In the middle is the painful growing process that most companies have to get past.
What I see funny is when a contracting agency (manufacturer, designer, etc) is hired to do the new projects rather than use them for the existing products that just need to be maintained. Especially if you go overseas you end up with more workers who aren't as good but for less cost. Probably this comes from the mistake of seeing all workers as identical.
Politics affects this too. And naivete. One thing contracting houses do is marketing. They sound great on paper and they can start as soon as you want. Only after the check clears it's sometimes not working out like you hoped.
It can vary a lot depending upon the company. I 've seen contractors hired to work on the spiffy new projects so that employees weren't taken off of the dull routine maintenance of older projects. Often I see contractors hired (often friends of friends of a manager) because they're easier to get on the books than to get a full time employee even though the actual cost might be greater. Sometimes and it frustrated me that there would be underqualified people screwing up projects despite never having gone through the normal interview process; and I'd be cleaning up after them because my time was less valuable than giving some basic training about how to check in code properly. In some places though the contractors were good, integrated into a team instead of being in a silo, and treated like anyone else.