And that's fine - let's each do our own thing. Global homogeneity would be terrible. The US has a different approach than the EU. Both are objectively pretty good, so it gives some freedom to pick the one you like. Half the developers I knew when I was young live in the EU now, and most of the people I work with in the US are immigrants. Seems ideal to me.
which means its almost fully automated with a minium support staff on hand just to keep the automation running
Amazon pays its Seattle employees a total of $25 billion. That's a lot of taxes. Billions of dollars of new housing was built, so there's all that new property taxes as well. Seattle has certainly come off well from the Amazon HQ there, budget-wise. Plenty of people don't like Seattle as a big city, of course, and prefer its older, more quiet version, but in terms of dollars for the city there's no argument.
What if it's the short-term solution? Robots remotely operated by humans?
Nothing's forever, but this isn't new, and I expect this sort of job will be around for some time. Automation that needs human babysitters is as old as automation. The software I work on keeps track of both people and robots doing their job, and "robots with babysitters" is certainly a category we've had for a long time.
Sure, eventually any sort of automation may become mature enough that it only needs humans for repair/service, but that can take decades depending on the job. In the mean time, the robots still reduce the human labor needed, and as long as the overall solution costs less, it's going to be adopted by industry.
And if you're able to game-ify the job, you'll get people paying you to do your work!
"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" - Tom Sawyer
Insurance companies raise your rates enough to make a profit after any accident. Therefore, reduction in accidents means rates will have to go up to maintain profits.
There is room for some legitimate discussion there, though, because Googles diversity policy wasn't working - they weren't meeting their quota.
There's one point in Damore's memo that I have first-hand experience with (for whatever an aneecdote's worth). The job of an SDE is technical in all aspects, but it's both abstract (coding) and interpersonal (design discussion, selling people on your ideas, creating consensus). When I interviewed with Google, the focus was more on the abstract than any other place I've ineterviewed (which is a wide sample). Even the design questions weren't design discussions, they were just me talking.
That experience convinced me to walk away from Google (well, there were other danger signs too), for fear the job might actually be like that. And I'm a very nerdy introvert.
If you want to recruit more women and meet your quota, change your damn interview focus Google! Sure, a chunk of the interview needs to be purely "prove you can code", but the rest should give both sides confidence that it will be fun to collaborate on problem solving, because that's at least half of the job.
Anyway, that sort of discussion would seem useful to have, since they aren't meeting their goals with their current approach.
And this is what we don't know about the discussions that were shut down, We're they too trollish? Alternatively, were they too convincing of a viewpoint management didn't like? (I've been told in the past by a manager to stop explaining my cynicism to the new hires because management needed to abuse them while they still believed the lies.)
Plenty of Caribbean islands get water solely through desalination. The ABC islands come to mind
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
There's plenty of evidence this is true: evidence in a court case, in the form of screen shits of Google communications. Could be faked, of course, but presented under oath.
No one was fired, of course, because no one said what swb said.
And yet, if you said what swb said inside Google, you'd be blacklisted by managers, targeted by Googles peer-pressure diversity acceptance program, and possibly threatened with violence (according to the screenshots presented as evidence in the lawsuit).
None of this should be controversial, none of this should be interesting, and yet there's a whole political group in the US (well, more than one) who exist only to benefit from identity politics, so everything is offensive.
Competition is the major factor in pricing for most things (fashion excluded, but they charge what they want anyway), and when everyone's costs go up, everyone's prices go up.
I would instead fire the CEO. Think how much burguer flippers I can hire with the CEO salary?
133 burger flippers. Wow, that sure helped the economy. 317 burger flippers if you include his stock exercise (assuming full-time burger flippers making $10/hr - so maybe 2x that many part-time.)
Did you mean to suggest anything beyond your own envy?
You might argue the CEOs work for the board, but usually they are the chairmen of the board, too, and have a lot of influence on the board.
That's only true for founders. And the board does represent the shareholders, and can be replaced by vote of shareholders - this almost never happens, because the board will fire the CEO first. I've seen this happen at 3 different companies I was working for at the time - piss off the shareholders and a CEO can definitely be fired.
Corporations will do nothing of the sort - they'll pass the tax along to their customers. Nicely regressive taxation, on average. Anyway, CEOs on average get paid a trivial amount of the overall revenue of a corporation - it's nothing but envy to talk about CEO salary. And most shareholders are retirees so good luck cutting their retirement income without back-filling that from taxes.
For the most part, you don't tax a corporation, you tax its customers (who the tax is passed on to industry-wide), which is usually a regressive tax. Taxing "the shareholders" would mostly be a tax on the retired, who, to be fair, are on average more wealthy than youth), but that's not what corporate taxes usually accomplish.
Germany has the advantage of being full of Germans (but that has recently changed, and the numbers for the next generation will be interesting). In the meantime, we'd do well to copy Germany's vocational system with tight coupling of industry and education with proven results.
Why should gifts of any kind be taxed? The money was taxed when it was earned; no double-dipping! The legitimate answer (beyond "I'm envious of trust-fund babies and want their stuff") is "primogeniture is harmful to society". The tax code should strongly encourage the wealth from the grandfather to be split among many grandchildren, not concentrated into one. That still leaves the family wealthy, but most people are idiots, and thus most of those trust fund babies won't be leaving anything to their grandkids - spending is the best form of redistribution. Exceptions like the Rothschields are quite rare.
Taxing inheritance as income, but split over say 10 years, sort-of works, as the tax code is progressive. Saying the first $600k is tax-free but the rest is taxed works out about the same, which is the old system. Allowing millions to be tax free is a bit much.
There are many cases where I think the French way is a better solution, such as organized crimes. Mafiosos, gangs, paedophile rings, etc should not be afforded the same protections that an individual currently gets in the US justice system. It is simply too easy for groups to thwart justice in the US system.
How very convenient for the government! Whenever they want to get rid of someone inconvenient for them, they just call them a Mafioso, gang member, or pedophile. Problem solved!
Oddly enough, the current system does manage to jail Mafiosos and pedophile rings, despite giving full rights to those accused of crimes.
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And that's fine - let's each do our own thing. Global homogeneity would be terrible. The US has a different approach than the EU. Both are objectively pretty good, so it gives some freedom to pick the one you like. Half the developers I knew when I was young live in the EU now, and most of the people I work with in the US are immigrants. Seems ideal to me.
IMO there are 3 real criteria here:
* Sufficient infrastructure
* Some place developers would like to live
* Existing tech community
Toronto has all 3. In fact, the only 3 candidates I find credible are Toronto, Denver, and Austin.
Why is it that Washington (state) and California have some of the highest taxes in the country
There's no state income tax in WA. What was your point again?
which means its almost fully automated with a minium support staff on hand just to keep the automation running
Amazon pays its Seattle employees a total of $25 billion. That's a lot of taxes. Billions of dollars of new housing was built, so there's all that new property taxes as well. Seattle has certainly come off well from the Amazon HQ there, budget-wise. Plenty of people don't like Seattle as a big city, of course, and prefer its older, more quiet version, but in terms of dollars for the city there's no argument.
Gaming the monthly cycle used to be called "Catholic roulette". The joke when I was young was:
"Did you know there a word for people only have sex each month when she's least fertile?"
"No?"
"Parents!"
What if it's the short-term solution? Robots remotely operated by humans?
Nothing's forever, but this isn't new, and I expect this sort of job will be around for some time. Automation that needs human babysitters is as old as automation. The software I work on keeps track of both people and robots doing their job, and "robots with babysitters" is certainly a category we've had for a long time.
Sure, eventually any sort of automation may become mature enough that it only needs humans for repair/service, but that can take decades depending on the job. In the mean time, the robots still reduce the human labor needed, and as long as the overall solution costs less, it's going to be adopted by industry.
And if you're able to game-ify the job, you'll get people paying you to do your work!
"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" - Tom Sawyer
Heck, the idea had a commemorative stamp
Many families have 2 cars. Perhaps the self-driving car will also be the electric car? You know, cheap and easy for the 95% use case.
Insurance companies raise your rates enough to make a profit after any accident. Therefore, reduction in accidents means rates will have to go up to maintain profits.
There is room for some legitimate discussion there, though, because Googles diversity policy wasn't working - they weren't meeting their quota.
There's one point in Damore's memo that I have first-hand experience with (for whatever an aneecdote's worth). The job of an SDE is technical in all aspects, but it's both abstract (coding) and interpersonal (design discussion, selling people on your ideas, creating consensus). When I interviewed with Google, the focus was more on the abstract than any other place I've ineterviewed (which is a wide sample). Even the design questions weren't design discussions, they were just me talking.
That experience convinced me to walk away from Google (well, there were other danger signs too), for fear the job might actually be like that. And I'm a very nerdy introvert.
If you want to recruit more women and meet your quota, change your damn interview focus Google! Sure, a chunk of the interview needs to be purely "prove you can code", but the rest should give both sides confidence that it will be fun to collaborate on problem solving, because that's at least half of the job.
Anyway, that sort of discussion would seem useful to have, since they aren't meeting their goals with their current approach.
There is a line between discussion and Trolling.
And this is what we don't know about the discussions that were shut down, We're they too trollish? Alternatively, were they too convincing of a viewpoint management didn't like? (I've been told in the past by a manager to stop explaining my cynicism to the new hires because management needed to abuse them while they still believed the lies.)
Plenty of Caribbean islands get water solely through desalination. The ABC islands come to mind
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
There's plenty of evidence this is true: evidence in a court case, in the form of screen shits of Google communications. Could be faked, of course, but presented under oath.
No one was fired, of course, because no one said what swb said.
And yet, if you said what swb said inside Google, you'd be blacklisted by managers, targeted by Googles peer-pressure diversity acceptance program, and possibly threatened with violence (according to the screenshots presented as evidence in the lawsuit).
None of this should be controversial, none of this should be interesting, and yet there's a whole political group in the US (well, more than one) who exist only to benefit from identity politics, so everything is offensive.
Are you honestly claiming culture has no effect on how people work and live?
Competition is the major factor in pricing for most things (fashion excluded, but they charge what they want anyway), and when everyone's costs go up, everyone's prices go up.
I would instead fire the CEO. Think how much burguer flippers I can hire with the CEO salary?
133 burger flippers. Wow, that sure helped the economy. 317 burger flippers if you include his stock exercise (assuming full-time burger flippers making $10/hr - so maybe 2x that many part-time.)
Did you mean to suggest anything beyond your own envy?
You might argue the CEOs work for the board, but usually they are the chairmen of the board, too, and have a lot of influence on the board.
That's only true for founders. And the board does represent the shareholders, and can be replaced by vote of shareholders - this almost never happens, because the board will fire the CEO first. I've seen this happen at 3 different companies I was working for at the time - piss off the shareholders and a CEO can definitely be fired.
When McDs replaced cashiers with kiosks they were not, in fact, fired, but moved to kitchen work or other customer service. Non-hypothetical.
Sure, that's not always possible, but in the case of kiosks in fast-food restaurants is clearly is.
Corporations will do nothing of the sort - they'll pass the tax along to their customers. Nicely regressive taxation, on average. Anyway, CEOs on average get paid a trivial amount of the overall revenue of a corporation - it's nothing but envy to talk about CEO salary. And most shareholders are retirees so good luck cutting their retirement income without back-filling that from taxes.
For the most part, you don't tax a corporation, you tax its customers (who the tax is passed on to industry-wide), which is usually a regressive tax. Taxing "the shareholders" would mostly be a tax on the retired, who, to be fair, are on average more wealthy than youth), but that's not what corporate taxes usually accomplish.
Germany has the advantage of being full of Germans (but that has recently changed, and the numbers for the next generation will be interesting). In the meantime, we'd do well to copy Germany's vocational system with tight coupling of industry and education with proven results.
Why should gifts of any kind be taxed? The money was taxed when it was earned; no double-dipping! The legitimate answer (beyond "I'm envious of trust-fund babies and want their stuff") is "primogeniture is harmful to society". The tax code should strongly encourage the wealth from the grandfather to be split among many grandchildren, not concentrated into one. That still leaves the family wealthy, but most people are idiots, and thus most of those trust fund babies won't be leaving anything to their grandkids - spending is the best form of redistribution. Exceptions like the Rothschields are quite rare.
Taxing inheritance as income, but split over say 10 years, sort-of works, as the tax code is progressive. Saying the first $600k is tax-free but the rest is taxed works out about the same, which is the old system. Allowing millions to be tax free is a bit much.
It's a lot harder to forge a real-ID-compliant DL than an SS card, that doesn't even have a picture!
Well played, sir!
There are many cases where I think the French way is a better solution, such as organized crimes. Mafiosos, gangs, paedophile rings, etc should not be afforded the same protections that an individual currently gets in the US justice system. It is simply too easy for groups to thwart justice in the US system.
How very convenient for the government! Whenever they want to get rid of someone inconvenient for them, they just call them a Mafioso, gang member, or pedophile. Problem solved!
Oddly enough, the current system does manage to jail Mafiosos and pedophile rings, despite giving full rights to those accused of crimes.