Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 1
Capitalism didn't exist in most places and times, so naturally. But it's getting harder to get or keep a job, and if you have one, it pays less than it used to
Not every business cycle is a boom. We're just coming out of a ~15 year downturn, a bit worse than the one in the 70s, not as bad as the one in the 30s. It doesn't say much about capitalism, other than that it has business cycles.
The problem is, as more and more people are made unemployed or fall into poverty despite having jobs... gimmie a wage for not working... full-blown economic apocalypse - an utter collapse of Capitalism
You know, it's been hotter every month for the past 6 months - OMG it's the global warming, it will be 300 degrees in a decade! Either that or the seasons are cyclic, sort of like the economy. One of those.
The only serious economic issue we face is public debt. Life always seems better when you're living beyond you're means. Your standard of living is certainly higher while your running up credit card debt like crazy. The Boomers did that with the nation as a whole - running up the national debt like crazy (which did improve everyone's standard of living for a while, thus the misleading impression that they had it better). We'll be generations paying that binge off, with an appropriately lower standard of living to show for it. The US national debt is $150k per taxpayer now. That's going to be a drag on everything, and might well blow up. But that's the flaw in democracy, not capitalism.
"end products" will be electricity and ink-equivalent.
End products are what we use in daily life - doesn't matter where they're made. I expect some small measure of in-home "manufacturing", growing gradually over time. The feedstock for that will still be raw materials, however, despite being shipped to the end user.
The current revolution is in automating everything automatable, sending manufacturing jobs (and mindless clerical paper-shuffling jobs, and mindless service jobs) the way of farming jobs. Just like every previous technological step forward, it will be a good thing in the long run.
Well, if that's your standard, I do hope you're personally donating enough to the charities you feel most deserving (political groups don't count) to cover all the flaws and misbehavior any random stranger might see in you (or at least that you see in yourself).
Heh, I can't tell if you're really asking, or simply impersonating a typical 5-year old. Just in case it's the former:
Asking for fairness is asking that the world be so simple that the rules make sense to a young child. But fairness is a poor goal. A court system in which innocence or guilt is decided by the toss of a fair coin would be perfectly simple and unbiased, discriminating against no one (not even the guilty). Justice is better that fairness, and righteousness is better than justice (the principle of jury nullification).
Real life is about trade-offs and compromises to achieve the best result given the world as it is, not the world as we'd like it to be. A non-corrupt government tries keep the economy growing, and provide needed services. Treating each company the same way is not an interesting goal per se, at best it's sometimes a useful means toward those ends.
Pay for what you need. Whatever happened to that idea? Should you get extra food for the same price if you eat more? Should you get a bigger car for the same price if you have kids and need the space? Should you get a bigger apartment for the same price if you're bigger?
Meh, statistically you'll make significantly more over your lifetime if you're tall. I think you're still coming out ahead from that particular genetic lottery, without also getting free seat upgrades.
The small amount for marginal revenue forgone by an airline making special arrangements for tall passengers would be probably more than made up for by customer loyalty.
Doesn't every airline that offers economy plus (or whatever it's called) also let you upgrade with frequent flyer miles?
If you want a toy train set, just go and buy one. Passenger trains solve no problem that the US has (you'd need that extra 4 weeks off work just for one trip!).
Having adequate leg room isn't a "premium feature", it's what should simply be standard
"Economy plus" or whatever they call the seats wit normal legroom is the old-school standard. Think of is this way: you can buy a "standard seat" ticket for $350, or an "I don't care how you torture me just give me the cheapest price" ticket for $300. 90% of customers choose the torture option over the standard option, cheap bastards, but you don't have to.
The 40k MS employees likely keep another 400k in the area in work providing good and services to them, as they're paid quite well by WA standards, and most people spend all the money that comes to them.
There's no need for politicians to get kickbacks: there's nothing more powerful at the state level then bringing jobs to the state or keeping jobs in the state.
Plus WA and local governments get the property taxes not just from the buildings on the MS campus, but the 40k houses owned by MS employees, the businesses owned by those who wouldn't otherwise be in business in the area, their homes, and so on. All the sales tax for everything all those people buy, and so on. I'd bet at least 10% of MS's entire WA payroll ends up in local/state coffers, plus at least an equal amount from the satellite business created. That's a lot of funding for the state.
What economic damages? I don't get it. Are you complaining that MS bought a lot of small software companies the way every large tech firm does? Are you complaining that MS products weren't as good as you'd have liked (compared to what? IBMs offerings at the time? please).
I've never understood the burning MS hatred on Slashdot. Yes, MS had a lot of second-rate products, but so do most companies in the world!
People will complain about anything, but it pisses me off to see people who likely give nothing at all to charity complaining that someone who does isn't doing it the way they would.
Really? Evil? I don't buy it one bit. He sold a set of software products that companies wanted to buy. Products that were no fun to support, of course, or for geeks to use in many cases, but let's please not confuse "icky" with "evil".
Right now people are being beheaded in the middle east for the crime of minding their own business while having the wrong religion. That's Evil. Something like 1300 girls we're allowed to be used as sex slaves - raped over and over for years - in a developed nation because of misguided notions of political correctness. That's evil. Windows ME was merely icky.
Are you talking about "IT" or software development? I don't doubt you, but my experience with (non-contract) H1B workers has been rather the opposite - it's only the best and the brightest who the company will pay to move to the US, while the 80% work from India or China.
Gates has transferred billions from the coffers of large corporations, by way of IT products, to charitable programs that directly save lives, and improve the standard of living in the 3rd world. This is bad again why?
For instance, any math class below Calculus will probably not transfer. Any math class below Calculus is basically a high school refresher class anyway; not really college level math. Science classes without significant lab work will likely not transfer.
I still do a double-take at "college algebra". Taking algebra in high school should be considered remedial. "College algebra" should mean abstract algebra (group theory). No wonder it's hard to find competent programmers!
All this H1B complaining from people who have never hired H1Bs at a large company, or likely even worked with them. Unskilled immigration is a different story (though any immigrant who finds work is welcome in my book), but America certainly need more people with STEM degrees!
Lots of people meets those qualifications. Lots more should realize what the hiring manager is likely looking for at a big company is "5 years coding experience, knows some Java (or PHP)". Small shops need someone who can contribute right away, they often don't have the budget to get people up to speed. Big companies are usually just looking for smart people who get things done.
The biggest problem is the damn forced-use of applicant tracking systems when applying for a position with an organization. Your resume has a sufficiently close to zero probability of ever being read by a human being. And there is the proverbial purple squirrel that every laundry list of requirements seems to seek yet never find (unless they only can be found in India).
I work for a large US corp. We use an applicant tracking system. Hiring managers and internal recruiters scour it constantly looking for that one overlooked resume that the other guys might have missed. But mostly it's about LinkedIn these days: my manager sends maybe 100 emails a week to people hoping to find anyone actually looking for work. We have reqs we can't seem to fill, IMO because developers with established careers haven't figured out yet that opportunity is knocking again.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 1
It's easier here and now to "tap into Capitalism for reasonable income" than most times and places. Starting a business is still pretty straightforward - sure, health care requirement are more complex, and some industries just have to many regulations for small players, but that's not the norm. And here you don't have to worry about bribing all the right people, paying the police for protection and then paying the gang for protection, and so on.
Or if, like me, you like passive investing, it's trivially easy to invest online with only small amounts to start with now.
"Capitalism" just means that the means of production are acquired by buying then, vs military conquest or cronyism. I expect that whatever's next will still be a kind of capitalism, just more "crowdsourced". If 3D printers ever mature, owning your chunk of the means of production will be easier still. Huge corporations make sense where economies of scale come into play, but that's mostly logistics these days not manufacturing.
Re:They don't want H1-Bs for better education
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 1
WHy do you think H1Bs are cheaprer? Because you heard that once? All H1B salaries are public knowledge. At every large company I worked with, there'd be at least one of the engineers who would ferret out the salaries of all the H1Bs on the team. Guess what? They were paid competitively (salaries were lower by about what you'd expect for the legal costs involved in sponsorship).
Are there illegal H1B shops exploiting young workers? Sure there are. Bet they still get paid better then the $18k I started at, though.
Why then do you think the business has any employees in the first place. Think of the profits if they hired no one at all! It would all be profit!
Meanwhile, on this planet, to do more business you need more employees. You don't want to hire more people if you fear an upturn is temporary and you'll just have to lay them off again, but that means your business isn't expanding like it could. The lass risk adverse companies hire early on when the economy starts to grow, and over time more and more companies pile on.
Of course, TFS talks about "IT" as if that were a specific kind of job. Admin jobs are being automated away faster than the field is growing, but software development? That's the place to be.
I'm not so pessimistic. Not a big investor in bunker futures myself. It's like the debate over owning GLD (the ETF in theory backed by gold) vs owning physical gold. Yes, all the risks you highlight are real, but so is the risk of simply being robbed. I think the latter is a much greater risk, though a bit of hedging never hurts.
When you're robbed by a group, and they're openly discussing where to buy the drugs with the money their taking from you, there's little mystery.
Seriously, do you think people just make this up? How many times have you actually been robbed and/or assaulted yourself? Try delivering pizza in areas including low income neighborhoods for a few years if you want a first-hand education (well, don't, if you're female, seriously).
To be fair, the times I've been robbed in person were in fact for drug money. If I were to be robbed while delivering pizza to a space station, I'd bet on "for drug money" too!
But do remember that people living the "mid western simple life style" are perfectly capable of jokes at the expense of your expectations, too.
More specifically, trigraphs solve the problem that Stroustrup's keyboard didn't have certain punctuation characters. (OK, a keyboard he used some of the time had this problem, being a Scandi keyboard that replaced odd punctuation with needed letters.) It's not crazy at all to have a conversion from "??!" to "|" when you're writing the language on a keyboard that doesn't have a "|" character.
I believe that AND and OR are trigraphs for "&&" and "||" too - I always meant to try that, but was too lazy to hunt for the command line switch to enable them.
In C++, empty classes are a nice thing because they can' be a useful trick for overloading. (Instead of passing an enum to select function behavior at runtime, you pass an instance of a content-free class to select function behavior at compile time.) Not sure what the point would be in C - you can give a type to an arbitrary pointer, and do strongly typed enums that way?
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism didn't exist in most places and times, so naturally. But it's getting harder to get or keep a job, and if you have one, it pays less than it used to
Not every business cycle is a boom. We're just coming out of a ~15 year downturn, a bit worse than the one in the 70s, not as bad as the one in the 30s. It doesn't say much about capitalism, other than that it has business cycles.
The problem is, as more and more people are made unemployed or fall into poverty despite having jobs ... gimmie a wage for not working ... full-blown economic apocalypse - an utter collapse of Capitalism
You know, it's been hotter every month for the past 6 months - OMG it's the global warming, it will be 300 degrees in a decade! Either that or the seasons are cyclic, sort of like the economy. One of those.
The only serious economic issue we face is public debt. Life always seems better when you're living beyond you're means. Your standard of living is certainly higher while your running up credit card debt like crazy. The Boomers did that with the nation as a whole - running up the national debt like crazy (which did improve everyone's standard of living for a while, thus the misleading impression that they had it better). We'll be generations paying that binge off, with an appropriately lower standard of living to show for it. The US national debt is $150k per taxpayer now. That's going to be a drag on everything, and might well blow up. But that's the flaw in democracy, not capitalism.
"end products" will be electricity and ink-equivalent.
End products are what we use in daily life - doesn't matter where they're made. I expect some small measure of in-home "manufacturing", growing gradually over time. The feedstock for that will still be raw materials, however, despite being shipped to the end user.
The current revolution is in automating everything automatable, sending manufacturing jobs (and mindless clerical paper-shuffling jobs, and mindless service jobs) the way of farming jobs. Just like every previous technological step forward, it will be a good thing in the long run.
Well, if that's your standard, I do hope you're personally donating enough to the charities you feel most deserving (political groups don't count) to cover all the flaws and misbehavior any random stranger might see in you (or at least that you see in yourself).
Fair is for 5-year olds.
Why?
Heh, I can't tell if you're really asking, or simply impersonating a typical 5-year old. Just in case it's the former:
Asking for fairness is asking that the world be so simple that the rules make sense to a young child. But fairness is a poor goal. A court system in which innocence or guilt is decided by the toss of a fair coin would be perfectly simple and unbiased, discriminating against no one (not even the guilty). Justice is better that fairness, and righteousness is better than justice (the principle of jury nullification).
Real life is about trade-offs and compromises to achieve the best result given the world as it is, not the world as we'd like it to be. A non-corrupt government tries keep the economy growing, and provide needed services. Treating each company the same way is not an interesting goal per se, at best it's sometimes a useful means toward those ends.
Pay for what you need. Whatever happened to that idea? Should you get extra food for the same price if you eat more? Should you get a bigger car for the same price if you have kids and need the space? Should you get a bigger apartment for the same price if you're bigger?
Meh, statistically you'll make significantly more over your lifetime if you're tall. I think you're still coming out ahead from that particular genetic lottery, without also getting free seat upgrades.
The small amount for marginal revenue forgone by an airline making special arrangements for tall passengers would be probably more than made up for by customer loyalty.
Doesn't every airline that offers economy plus (or whatever it's called) also let you upgrade with frequent flyer miles?
If you want a toy train set, just go and buy one. Passenger trains solve no problem that the US has (you'd need that extra 4 weeks off work just for one trip!).
Having adequate leg room isn't a "premium feature", it's what should simply be standard
"Economy plus" or whatever they call the seats wit normal legroom is the old-school standard. Think of is this way: you can buy a "standard seat" ticket for $350, or an "I don't care how you torture me just give me the cheapest price" ticket for $300. 90% of customers choose the torture option over the standard option, cheap bastards, but you don't have to.
Fair is for 5-year olds.
The 40k MS employees likely keep another 400k in the area in work providing good and services to them, as they're paid quite well by WA standards, and most people spend all the money that comes to them.
There's no need for politicians to get kickbacks: there's nothing more powerful at the state level then bringing jobs to the state or keeping jobs in the state.
Plus WA and local governments get the property taxes not just from the buildings on the MS campus, but the 40k houses owned by MS employees, the businesses owned by those who wouldn't otherwise be in business in the area, their homes, and so on. All the sales tax for everything all those people buy, and so on. I'd bet at least 10% of MS's entire WA payroll ends up in local/state coffers, plus at least an equal amount from the satellite business created. That's a lot of funding for the state.
What economic damages? I don't get it. Are you complaining that MS bought a lot of small software companies the way every large tech firm does? Are you complaining that MS products weren't as good as you'd have liked (compared to what? IBMs offerings at the time? please).
I've never understood the burning MS hatred on Slashdot. Yes, MS had a lot of second-rate products, but so do most companies in the world!
People will complain about anything, but it pisses me off to see people who likely give nothing at all to charity complaining that someone who does isn't doing it the way they would.
Really? Evil? I don't buy it one bit. He sold a set of software products that companies wanted to buy. Products that were no fun to support, of course, or for geeks to use in many cases, but let's please not confuse "icky" with "evil".
Right now people are being beheaded in the middle east for the crime of minding their own business while having the wrong religion. That's Evil. Something like 1300 girls we're allowed to be used as sex slaves - raped over and over for years - in a developed nation because of misguided notions of political correctness. That's evil. Windows ME was merely icky.
Are you talking about "IT" or software development? I don't doubt you, but my experience with (non-contract) H1B workers has been rather the opposite - it's only the best and the brightest who the company will pay to move to the US, while the 80% work from India or China.
Gates has transferred billions from the coffers of large corporations, by way of IT products, to charitable programs that directly save lives, and improve the standard of living in the 3rd world. This is bad again why?
For instance, any math class below Calculus will probably not transfer. Any math class below Calculus is basically a high school refresher class anyway; not really college level math.
Science classes without significant lab work will likely not transfer.
I still do a double-take at "college algebra". Taking algebra in high school should be considered remedial. "College algebra" should mean abstract algebra (group theory). No wonder it's hard to find competent programmers!
All this H1B complaining from people who have never hired H1Bs at a large company, or likely even worked with them. Unskilled immigration is a different story (though any immigrant who finds work is welcome in my book), but America certainly need more people with STEM degrees!
Lots of people meets those qualifications. Lots more should realize what the hiring manager is likely looking for at a big company is "5 years coding experience, knows some Java (or PHP)". Small shops need someone who can contribute right away, they often don't have the budget to get people up to speed. Big companies are usually just looking for smart people who get things done.
The biggest problem is the damn forced-use of applicant tracking systems when applying for a position with an organization. Your resume has a sufficiently close to zero probability of ever being read by a human being. And there is the proverbial purple squirrel that every laundry list of requirements seems to seek yet never find (unless they only can be found in India).
I work for a large US corp. We use an applicant tracking system. Hiring managers and internal recruiters scour it constantly looking for that one overlooked resume that the other guys might have missed. But mostly it's about LinkedIn these days: my manager sends maybe 100 emails a week to people hoping to find anyone actually looking for work. We have reqs we can't seem to fill, IMO because developers with established careers haven't figured out yet that opportunity is knocking again.
It's easier here and now to "tap into Capitalism for reasonable income" than most times and places. Starting a business is still pretty straightforward - sure, health care requirement are more complex, and some industries just have to many regulations for small players, but that's not the norm. And here you don't have to worry about bribing all the right people, paying the police for protection and then paying the gang for protection, and so on.
Or if, like me, you like passive investing, it's trivially easy to invest online with only small amounts to start with now.
"Capitalism" just means that the means of production are acquired by buying then, vs military conquest or cronyism. I expect that whatever's next will still be a kind of capitalism, just more "crowdsourced". If 3D printers ever mature, owning your chunk of the means of production will be easier still. Huge corporations make sense where economies of scale come into play, but that's mostly logistics these days not manufacturing.
WHy do you think H1Bs are cheaprer? Because you heard that once? All H1B salaries are public knowledge. At every large company I worked with, there'd be at least one of the engineers who would ferret out the salaries of all the H1Bs on the team. Guess what? They were paid competitively (salaries were lower by about what you'd expect for the legal costs involved in sponsorship).
Are there illegal H1B shops exploiting young workers? Sure there are. Bet they still get paid better then the $18k I started at, though.
Why then do you think the business has any employees in the first place. Think of the profits if they hired no one at all! It would all be profit!
Meanwhile, on this planet, to do more business you need more employees. You don't want to hire more people if you fear an upturn is temporary and you'll just have to lay them off again, but that means your business isn't expanding like it could. The lass risk adverse companies hire early on when the economy starts to grow, and over time more and more companies pile on.
Of course, TFS talks about "IT" as if that were a specific kind of job. Admin jobs are being automated away faster than the field is growing, but software development? That's the place to be.
I'm not so pessimistic. Not a big investor in bunker futures myself. It's like the debate over owning GLD (the ETF in theory backed by gold) vs owning physical gold. Yes, all the risks you highlight are real, but so is the risk of simply being robbed. I think the latter is a much greater risk, though a bit of hedging never hurts.
When you're robbed by a group, and they're openly discussing where to buy the drugs with the money their taking from you, there's little mystery.
Seriously, do you think people just make this up? How many times have you actually been robbed and/or assaulted yourself? Try delivering pizza in areas including low income neighborhoods for a few years if you want a first-hand education (well, don't, if you're female, seriously).
Hey now, everyone knows the moon landing was faked in a sound stage on Mars. The whole space vampires thing was just an urban legend!
I'm with the sheriff on this one: if an alien is robbing my space station, it's an illegal alien in my book!
To be fair, the times I've been robbed in person were in fact for drug money. If I were to be robbed while delivering pizza to a space station, I'd bet on "for drug money" too!
But do remember that people living the "mid western simple life style" are perfectly capable of jokes at the expense of your expectations, too.
More specifically, trigraphs solve the problem that Stroustrup's keyboard didn't have certain punctuation characters. (OK, a keyboard he used some of the time had this problem, being a Scandi keyboard that replaced odd punctuation with needed letters.) It's not crazy at all to have a conversion from "??!" to "|" when you're writing the language on a keyboard that doesn't have a "|" character.
I believe that AND and OR are trigraphs for "&&" and "||" too - I always meant to try that, but was too lazy to hunt for the command line switch to enable them.
In C++, empty classes are a nice thing because they can' be a useful trick for overloading. (Instead of passing an enum to select function behavior at runtime, you pass an instance of a content-free class to select function behavior at compile time.) Not sure what the point would be in C - you can give a type to an arbitrary pointer, and do strongly typed enums that way?