All of the stuff you care about fits easily in a 2-year vocational degree. I have no problem supporting "those people"s code (wow, what language choice) when they didn't take art history, or learn Latin, or do chemistry lab work.
I don't think a 3-month course can cut it, but that's a different topic. (And, honestly, most the people I've worked with straight out of college had learned nothing at all useful in their 4 years of study - a combination of tool-specific stuff for the wrong tools and overly abstract stuff).
Wealth generates value. Money doesn't - it doesn't even hold its value. Keeping dollars around for short-term needs is using the tool for its job. Accumulating a pile of dollars is a naive mistake.
Well, I'll say to you what I say to everyone who complains of overpopulation: you first. Everyone has the right to pursue their own path to happiness. There's plenty of food and land to go around - the rest is politics.
Bill's Plan is to give away most of his money before he dies. I believe it's much less than 1 Billion he will give to his heirs. The Gates Foundation has done significant and meaningful charity work that's had a real effect: certainly malaria deaths have fallen, by somewhere around 100k a year. That's a Hell of a thing.
I give money to some of the same charities, because they're trying to solve the longer-term problem, to help people need less charity in the future. I'm just a drop in the bucket, but at least I'm not a fucking hypocrite when I suggest that people should give to good causes.
If most of the resources of an economy are devoted to producing frivolous luxury items for rich people
That hasn't been an issue since before the industrial revolution. That was rather the point of the revolution. The 1% may have twice as much stuff as the rest of us -- twice as many houses and cars and furniture -- OK, fine that 1% of all stuff "wasted", so what? If you've been to Walmart ever, you know it's not the rich eating twice their share of food. If you're rich and spend your money on expensive frivolities, you eventually stop being rich.
It's not really any man's place to demand that another give away what's he has earned. As far as suggest, sure, but the Dalai Lama makes better arguments than you do, and far more powerful people take him seriously than read Slashdot.
Anyway, first: don't be a hypocrite. Lead the life you believe others should lead. Be an example of the righteous life. Otherwise, you're just one more asshole.
I work with an extremely diverse crowd, and always have - or did you mean a "diverse" set of white Americans? Relative to the cost of living in NYC, I think West Coast mid-career programming jobs pay OK compared to run-of-the-mill investment banker jobs (especially considering the EA-style workweeks those guys have), or for that matter corporate lawyer jobs.
Where I work, the number of senior tech-track jobs and senior engineering managers is roughly the same - many companies are lagging in that regard, but then again there aren't many of us with 20+ years of experience (eventually it should be nearly half).
But then, if you want to get paid more, you have to do more than sit in a corner and bang out code by yourself. There's only so much one person can do: technical leadership is different from management, but it's still work few people will ever be good at. Still, if you're at all successful in this field you'll make six figures if you go where the jobs are - very few professions can say that.
What the US sells as "chocolate" in cheap stores is a chocolate-flavored snack - engineered to be affordable to the masses back when chocolate was something only the rich could have. You can certainly get real chocolate too, but it's not the mass-market product here.
Spoken like someone with no money. What do you pay your rent with? Do you barter with silver or maybe in your case, copper coins? Maybe salt? Still currency, still money. You are ignorant. Grow up.
Money is only relevant as the temporary medium of exchange: a real step up from the inefficiency of barter. It's not wealth, and shouldn't be confused with wealth. You can buy wealth with money, or you can buy chocolate, or a stupid status symbol: whatever makes you happiest (I recommend wealth). But holding onto very many dollars is silly.
. Also, programmers don't all work at big software houses in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the discrepancy between the requirements and the pay is much more pronounced at smaller companies and in other parts of the country.
And coal miner pay really sucks in areas with no coal mines. Deep sea fishing jobs pay really well, but you're not going to find one in Kansas. Want a career as a physicist? Which 5 years are you spending at the LHC? If you want to be paid, you must first find someone to value the service you're offering.
Have you looked at what most layers actually make (those that can ever find work), and at what age they actually pull ahead of developers in lifetime earnings less schooling costs? Ditto doctors that don't have a much-in-demand specialty. Bankers? Only investment bankers make the big money you're thinking of, and try finding that job outside of a couple of cities. And managers? Most large companies have a technical track these days, as the industry matures.
But in any case, the pay of coders from the companies owned by the billionaires making these donations is quite high.
The language needs to more tightly align with normal spoken and written language and maths use.
No, no it really, really doesn't. Every terrible blight upon the landscape of programming languages have come from this same, horrible mistake. The difficult part of programming is organizing your thoughts, not learning the language.
Teach using a simple language that makes it clear what the computer is doing, preferably a language without a lot of confusing cruft in it, though it seems all the common high-level languages have crazy historical baggage these days. Plus the point of this is to make people employable so for goodness sake use a popular language in industry.
Simple proof of how defective programmers and the computer industry, is the querty keyboard, seriously still making excuses for non-alphabetic keyboards when teaching alphabetic order is one of the first lessons learned when learning to bloody write. Any one who tries to excuse that is a fool.
The purpose of a keyboard it to make it easy to type quickly, not to make it easy to learn to type, obviously. Qwerty was that for mechanical typewriters. Dvorak may make more sense today, but again: employability. Stick with what employers will want.
That's cheap compared to paying programmers enough to make the job desirable.
Where the heck do you work? Find a better job! (Or realize the all first jobs suck.)
Look at some of the donors: Facebook, Google, and MS all pay quite well. There's very few careers that pay better without going into business for yourself. I'm quite OK with heart surgeons making more than me, really.
This should be the next Dr Who villain's catchphrase
Doctor Who has had several "corporate villain" stories over the years - and they're some of my favorites. In one you meet a worker who's struggling to pay the burial tax on his father, is behind on his tax payments, is forced to work double shifts, but the extra taxes on the stimulants make that a losing proposition, and is about to jump to his death but is worried about who will pay the suicide tax.
Of course, all these "taxes" go straight to the company running the place. It's a good object lesson to anyone who thinks "more government" is somehow the answer to "too much corporate control of government" - recipe for dystopia, right there.
(BTW, only the non-Canon Peter Cushing doctor is "Dr. Who", it's strictly "Doctor Who" otherwise [/fanboy]).
The short version is The Little Schemer, (and its sequel, The Seasoned Schemer), by F&F. Doesn't get as deep into CS Fundamentals, but is a quick introduction to the world of lambda and functional programming.
The Tea Party groups have a high statistical rate for tax fraud. The IRS investigates people who don't pay their taxes. Image that.... right wingers who don't want to pay taxes.
If that were true, surely the IRS would have simply cooperated with the ongoing investigation instead of destroying evidence. Imagine that... a political leader abusing the power to tax to have a chilling effect on his critics. Or don't you think the parties will be flipped the next time this happens?
I made sending out resumes work once - I tried to make 3 contacts a day, and it took six months - got to the West Coast that way. But now that I got my resume right on LinkedIn, I get a couple of contacts a month from recruiters with no effort on my part. (Look carefully at job descriptions/requirements, find any phrasing that appears commonly, use that exact phrasing.)
. Shocking as this might be, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck
To live paycheck-to-paycheck as an adult is to fail at life, or at least to fail at being an adult. Adulthood means responsibility, which for most of us primarily means financial responsibility.
Alternatively, the spouse.
IMO, the only good reason not to move to a better city for your line of work is because your spouse has a better career, and you're following his or her job around the country instead. Of course, not wanting to move with no job lined up is totally understandable, but to not even look for work in a hot market - well, it's fine to have other priorities, sure, but you chose not to have your career as a priority, don't blame others for that.
To be fair, the lambda expressions were added at the same time and with the same method names as the linq addition. No one sane would call "map" "select" unless it was driven by a DB-facing change. But yeah, a professional developer should grok lambda - I blame the Java schools.
Sure, mischaracterize the Tea Party however you need to demonize them. Claim they're all white, then edit out all the non-white faces in the news stories. The hate-on the mainstream media has had for them from day 1 is evidence that they were a grassroots movement: there's nothing the media hates more than people thinking unapproved thoughts.
If you believe that "keep throwing out the incumbents until they get the message" doesn't work, then frankly you don't believe in democracy. If you're entirely bitter an cynical about politics, you're not making the world a better place by telling people discussing politics to give up.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the stuff you care about fits easily in a 2-year vocational degree. I have no problem supporting "those people"s code (wow, what language choice) when they didn't take art history, or learn Latin, or do chemistry lab work.
I don't think a 3-month course can cut it, but that's a different topic. (And, honestly, most the people I've worked with straight out of college had learned nothing at all useful in their 4 years of study - a combination of tool-specific stuff for the wrong tools and overly abstract stuff).
They have all the wealth and power - I don't think they're the ones with the problem.
Wealth generates value. Money doesn't - it doesn't even hold its value. Keeping dollars around for short-term needs is using the tool for its job. Accumulating a pile of dollars is a naive mistake.
Well, I'll say to you what I say to everyone who complains of overpopulation: you first. Everyone has the right to pursue their own path to happiness. There's plenty of food and land to go around - the rest is politics.
Bill's Plan is to give away most of his money before he dies. I believe it's much less than 1 Billion he will give to his heirs. The Gates Foundation has done significant and meaningful charity work that's had a real effect: certainly malaria deaths have fallen, by somewhere around 100k a year. That's a Hell of a thing.
I give money to some of the same charities, because they're trying to solve the longer-term problem, to help people need less charity in the future. I'm just a drop in the bucket, but at least I'm not a fucking hypocrite when I suggest that people should give to good causes.
If most of the resources of an economy are devoted to producing frivolous luxury items for rich people
That hasn't been an issue since before the industrial revolution. That was rather the point of the revolution. The 1% may have twice as much stuff as the rest of us -- twice as many houses and cars and furniture -- OK, fine that 1% of all stuff "wasted", so what? If you've been to Walmart ever, you know it's not the rich eating twice their share of food. If you're rich and spend your money on expensive frivolities, you eventually stop being rich.
It's not really any man's place to demand that another give away what's he has earned. As far as suggest, sure, but the Dalai Lama makes better arguments than you do, and far more powerful people take him seriously than read Slashdot.
Anyway, first: don't be a hypocrite. Lead the life you believe others should lead. Be an example of the righteous life. Otherwise, you're just one more asshole.
I work with an extremely diverse crowd, and always have - or did you mean a "diverse" set of white Americans? Relative to the cost of living in NYC, I think West Coast mid-career programming jobs pay OK compared to run-of-the-mill investment banker jobs (especially considering the EA-style workweeks those guys have), or for that matter corporate lawyer jobs.
Where I work, the number of senior tech-track jobs and senior engineering managers is roughly the same - many companies are lagging in that regard, but then again there aren't many of us with 20+ years of experience (eventually it should be nearly half).
But then, if you want to get paid more, you have to do more than sit in a corner and bang out code by yourself. There's only so much one person can do: technical leadership is different from management, but it's still work few people will ever be good at. Still, if you're at all successful in this field you'll make six figures if you go where the jobs are - very few professions can say that.
What the US sells as "chocolate" in cheap stores is a chocolate-flavored snack - engineered to be affordable to the masses back when chocolate was something only the rich could have. You can certainly get real chocolate too, but it's not the mass-market product here.
Spoken like someone with no money. What do you pay your rent with? Do you barter with silver or maybe in your case, copper coins? Maybe salt? Still currency, still money. You are ignorant. Grow up.
Money is only relevant as the temporary medium of exchange: a real step up from the inefficiency of barter. It's not wealth, and shouldn't be confused with wealth. You can buy wealth with money, or you can buy chocolate, or a stupid status symbol: whatever makes you happiest (I recommend wealth). But holding onto very many dollars is silly.
Giving money to help others makes the world a better place, and is praiseworthy. Complaining about others doing so isn't helping.
. Also, programmers don't all work at big software houses in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the discrepancy between the requirements and the pay is much more pronounced at smaller companies and in other parts of the country.
And coal miner pay really sucks in areas with no coal mines. Deep sea fishing jobs pay really well, but you're not going to find one in Kansas. Want a career as a physicist? Which 5 years are you spending at the LHC? If you want to be paid, you must first find someone to value the service you're offering.
Have you looked at what most layers actually make (those that can ever find work), and at what age they actually pull ahead of developers in lifetime earnings less schooling costs? Ditto doctors that don't have a much-in-demand specialty. Bankers? Only investment bankers make the big money you're thinking of, and try finding that job outside of a couple of cities. And managers? Most large companies have a technical track these days, as the industry matures.
But in any case, the pay of coders from the companies owned by the billionaires making these donations is quite high.
The language needs to more tightly align with normal spoken and written language and maths use.
No, no it really, really doesn't. Every terrible blight upon the landscape of programming languages have come from this same, horrible mistake. The difficult part of programming is organizing your thoughts, not learning the language.
Teach using a simple language that makes it clear what the computer is doing, preferably a language without a lot of confusing cruft in it, though it seems all the common high-level languages have crazy historical baggage these days. Plus the point of this is to make people employable so for goodness sake use a popular language in industry.
Simple proof of how defective programmers and the computer industry, is the querty keyboard, seriously still making excuses for non-alphabetic keyboards when teaching alphabetic order is one of the first lessons learned when learning to bloody write. Any one who tries to excuse that is a fool.
The purpose of a keyboard it to make it easy to type quickly, not to make it easy to learn to type, obviously. Qwerty was that for mechanical typewriters. Dvorak may make more sense today, but again: employability. Stick with what employers will want.
That's like 0.1% of their worth. It would be like me "lavishing" 60$ on them.
And did you give $60? Thought not.
People needing assistance are helped no less if the donor is well off.
"Compassion is not about sacrifice" - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th (and likely final) Dalai Lama.
That's cheap compared to paying programmers enough to make the job desirable.
Where the heck do you work? Find a better job! (Or realize the all first jobs suck.)
Look at some of the donors: Facebook, Google, and MS all pay quite well. There's very few careers that pay better without going into business for yourself. I'm quite OK with heart surgeons making more than me, really.
This should be the next Dr Who villain's catchphrase
Doctor Who has had several "corporate villain" stories over the years - and they're some of my favorites. In one you meet a worker who's struggling to pay the burial tax on his father, is behind on his tax payments, is forced to work double shifts, but the extra taxes on the stimulants make that a losing proposition, and is about to jump to his death but is worried about who will pay the suicide tax.
Of course, all these "taxes" go straight to the company running the place. It's a good object lesson to anyone who thinks "more government" is somehow the answer to "too much corporate control of government" - recipe for dystopia, right there.
(BTW, only the non-Canon Peter Cushing doctor is "Dr. Who", it's strictly "Doctor Who" otherwise [/fanboy]).
The short version is The Little Schemer, (and its sequel, The Seasoned Schemer), by F&F. Doesn't get as deep into CS Fundamentals, but is a quick introduction to the world of lambda and functional programming.
They're kind of a dull read. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and some version of Scheme will be interesting, challenging, and informative.'
Perhaps a congressional investigation could sort out the truth of the matter, so that we're not forming opinions on a lack of evidence?
The Tea Party groups have a high statistical rate for tax fraud. The IRS investigates people who don't pay their taxes. Image that.... right wingers who don't want to pay taxes.
If that were true, surely the IRS would have simply cooperated with the ongoing investigation instead of destroying evidence. Imagine that ... a political leader abusing the power to tax to have a chilling effect on his critics. Or don't you think the parties will be flipped the next time this happens?
Your history of hate speech critical of Islam has been noted (which is actually illegal in the UK IIRC).
I made sending out resumes work once - I tried to make 3 contacts a day, and it took six months - got to the West Coast that way. But now that I got my resume right on LinkedIn, I get a couple of contacts a month from recruiters with no effort on my part. (Look carefully at job descriptions/requirements, find any phrasing that appears commonly, use that exact phrasing.)
. Shocking as this might be, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck
To live paycheck-to-paycheck as an adult is to fail at life, or at least to fail at being an adult. Adulthood means responsibility, which for most of us primarily means financial responsibility.
Alternatively, the spouse.
IMO, the only good reason not to move to a better city for your line of work is because your spouse has a better career, and you're following his or her job around the country instead. Of course, not wanting to move with no job lined up is totally understandable, but to not even look for work in a hot market - well, it's fine to have other priorities, sure, but you chose not to have your career as a priority, don't blame others for that.
To be fair, the lambda expressions were added at the same time and with the same method names as the linq addition. No one sane would call "map" "select" unless it was driven by a DB-facing change. But yeah, a professional developer should grok lambda - I blame the Java schools.
The GOP has more racial, age, and gender diversity now IIRC. What that implies for diversity of thought is an open question, but I'm hopeful.
Sure, mischaracterize the Tea Party however you need to demonize them. Claim they're all white, then edit out all the non-white faces in the news stories. The hate-on the mainstream media has had for them from day 1 is evidence that they were a grassroots movement: there's nothing the media hates more than people thinking unapproved thoughts.
If you believe that "keep throwing out the incumbents until they get the message" doesn't work, then frankly you don't believe in democracy. If you're entirely bitter an cynical about politics, you're not making the world a better place by telling people discussing politics to give up.