Re:The thing about the dot-com boom...
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Dotcom Era Fads
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· Score: 1
I doubt it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I expect to see yet another boom/bust cycle out of the net yet. Probably not as big but longer reaching. Also I'd expect genetics and nanotech to each have boom/bust cycles during most of our lifetimes. Who knows what other technology might spark such cycles.
I remember the first time I used the web. It was with an all text browser over a 2400 baud connection back before there really was a Netscape. I didn't really see how it was any different than Gopher. At the time there wasn't all that many websites and there wasn't yet a real index or search engine so it really seemed like a Gopher clone.
Of course it didn't take long to figure out some interesting uses the web had over Gopher. I had an interesting website that used RIP graphics. It only worked if you were dialed-in using RIPTerm and using a text browser. Still it predated Flash by a lot. At that point I hadn't even used a graphical browser yet so I thought it was pretty clever having graphics and animations.
In a way I agree with you.. but there are laws keeping me from doing some rather nasty tricks I could do to jump ahead. If there are going to be such laws then there should be laws controlling my enemies also.
I for one don't mind breaking laws but most people do. I can't help as seeing the entire system as a means to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful and gradually rape everyone not brash enough to flaunt the law and mistreat others. There are good reasons not to allow anything goes playing to get ahead in the world. It pushes people towards violence, stealing, lies, etc. Every step away from primal behavior is just a lie pulled over the eyes of the more innocent in society.
I'm not opposed to the idea of no laws at all. I'm smart, paranoid, physically impressive (tall/strong), and know lots of ways to fight. In primal competition I could do much better than I am doing now. However, it wouldn't be to great for the majority of others in the world.. nor can I make myself believe it'd be the most effecient strategy for the entire society.
I never blame the Morlocks but it's not exactly a good way of living for the Eloi. I guess I see both your argument and my own doomed to fail. If you are going to fail anyway why not have a more pleasent time during the effort?:)
I have karma points to burn anyway. Sadly, they can't be cashed in for money.;) I'll also agree that yes the intelligent figure out that life sucks.. but will argue enough to say that that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to make it suck less.
I wouldn't try to make everyone equal but I do think the system is badly out of balance now. People who would work are kept from working. Even intelligent people (myself included) find it hard to compete because we don't play the games that many business people and lawyers play (thinking Enron).
Just because some of us won't play those games doesn't mean we're not intelligent enough to know them. To me at least there is a differnce between being smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, and charismatic and being a greedy ripoff artist like many of the business world are. I've owned and ran companies before and had some success but I'll never be as succesful as some because I refuse to use their tactics.
I don't really like the concept of welfare. Charity to those who can't work and jobs for those who can.. it doesn't make sense to pay people who could work not to work. That isn't effecient. Someone earlier in the discussion said it'd be socialist for the government to provide jobs but IMO it's not nearly as foolish as just making people choose between being on welfare and starving.
Sure, merchant/managers are needed. I have no problem with that. What irks me is when managers fatten their own pockets while the people working for them don't get enough to live. A fair split of the profits is one thing. Upper managers having three homes while the people doing the work can't make their rent is wrong.
Any employee working full-time, even if only a janitor, should be given enough to cover the cost of living for themselves and a moderate sized family. If more highly trained or productive people make more that is fine but they should never forget the people on the bottom. Obviously, if a worker just doesn't work when expected that is different. There are people who deserve to be let go but whole classes of employees shouldn't be treated as trash.
To some degree the concept of a minimum wage is supposed to address this problem but it isn't very effective. Partly because the minimum wage often doesn't meet the cost of living and partly because companies try to shift the additional costs to the customers rather than slimming their own profit margins any. Obviously, this causes the cost of living to rise which again makes the minimum wage inadequate. Of course not all companies act this way but the ones that do are often held up as shining examples.
So I guess the point I'm slowly getting to is that I wouldn't cap how rich people could get but I'd try to make it very hard for people to fall through the cracks at the bottom.. and I'd finance that by taxing the rich. They are free to continue getting richer and richer but as they do it should pull everyone else up with them. Obviously you have to be fair. You shouldn't tax the rich so much as to completely flipflop the situation but as of now I don't think that is much of a risk.
Of course most of the tax money is misused anyway.. which is a whole different discussion I'm afriad.
See how much your money is worth if you have nobody actually making things and growing food. Merchants and managers have their place in the world (they certainly help in regulating distribution) but they aren't any more valuable than the people actually producing. There is no reason for them to become rich while the producers become poor. That this happens is definately an indication that the system isn't properly balanced. I'd expect in a properly balanced system that those who became rich would be both producers and merchants. People who create and then sell what they create themselves. Sometimes that happens but it's not the majority of the cases.
I like to share my content (hundreds of gigs of everything, webbased chat, etc) in that way but have so far never lived anywhere with all that many users. I'm planning on moving again soon (to a large city) so maybe when I find a good job I'll try buying a better antenea and seeing what I can get. I was working for a while on my own P2P software but I probably wouldn't bother with that unless there were actually enough other users to make it useful.;)
Re:How about this Idea.
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MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 1
After I got my first cellphone and found out my house was in roaming (grrr) I starting building such a project. With my limited resources the phone was more the size of a PDA (based off LART: http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/) but that was still pretty cool. Even with a laptop and some VoIP software you can try this out. I was using Jabber for making connections but you can do it using normal methods. Sit in the park with your WiFi equiped laptop near a hotspot and a microphone. The main problems so far are latency and that you can't get to far from your hotspot. I hope as the technology improves those problems will be fixed.
Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?
on
MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Mesh networks aren't a dumb idea. It'd just be a dumb idea to design them to use the same scheme for local routing and distant routing. As long as you have the sense to tie together local meshes by some more effecient means to other local meshes it's a perfectly sensible design. Changing the basic layout of the Net in such a way may require changing some usage habits but it works just fine and with work like this going on will no doubt get better over time. In the future I think people will keep a lot more of their traffic in the local mesh which will help build local communities back up. You'll still use distant resources but you won't use distant resources for local uses nearly as often. Local news, chat, file sharing, etc will be handled within the local mesh. A good caching proxy server between the mesh and the Net will no doubt greatly reduce the wait for web, ftp, and similar resources frequently requested. I use a 1Gb proxy on my LAN and it slashes bandwidth use dramaticlly. I'd probably try something closer to 50-100Gb for a local mesh's proxy server.
The method I was playing with was WiFi for local meshes and microwave wireless for longer haul and finally normal old wired methods for crossing large distances (between cities).
Re:So if you run kazaa through something like this
on
MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 1
Especially if you use encrypted traffic. SSL wrapped traffic tunneling through http would be rather hard to id. You could go by load but even that won't work because some people.. including myself.. download hundreds of megs of data a day from actual websites.;)
They'd be better off just building bandwidth hog controls into the protocol.. as it mentions they are working on.
I think this would be useful to broadband providers to start. Especially if they drive the price down a little (already I could replicate their hardware for less.. unless they are using really good anteneas) this, as the article said, would be great for last-mile connections. An ISP could put up static access points here and there and hand these out to their customers rather than running DSL or something similar. I've lived in areas with WISP's and the service and price is actually pretty good. One area I lived had competing WISP's.. one used WiFi and the other used some sort of microwave setup (they were very hush hush but I'm snoopy). I was supposed to have a job at the WiFi setup but they changed their mind at the last minute (after I'd already moved to take the job.:P) so I was a bit disappointed. Sounded really fun to work on.
Meanwhile I think local geeks will be ever improving their own WiFi mesh.. so eventually they'll be competing with ISPs. I don't think they'll be exactly competing though.. I think the local mesh will become popular for something like P2P networking. Local chat, news, file sharing.
It's against my morals to attack someone based on their nationality? I have as many friends in other countries as in my own. I certainly am not going to try to kill anybody just because my government tells me I should.
I have a Robin Hood complex. I always would rob from the rich.. never the poor or lower middle class. I'd probably give most of the money away too.
No doubt that is another reason I'm not so well off. At times that I am making money I tend to give away my extra to people in need rather than saving it up. I'd rather put the money in the hands of people that need it rather than bankers.
I happened to get knocked out of the system about 3/4's the way through college. I had a roommate die and I had to take care of alerting his friends and packing his stuff and various other tasks. I tried to bow out of the semester but the school wouldn't let me and I had a nervous breakdown so essentially I got all 0's. Totally ruined my grants and scholarships and made it so I couldn't afford to go anymore.. not to mention severely shreading my GPA. So I probably can't go back to college.. at least not until I can pay for it out of pocket.
There are big cracks to fall through and most people just don't care. I'm clever enough that I can always keep from really falling through but it does make it difficult to climb back up. For people less adaptable I can't see how they could ever get back to a normal life other than stealing or selling drugs or something to earn enough money to make the jump.
Being the geek I am the whole process has led me to investigate what I'd call nomad technologies. Things that make being a homeless bum easier and possibly even more enjoyable than a normal life. Such things still cost money (obviously) but do allow people to live much cheaper if they are flexible. I've even considered the idea of going back to horses and living in gypsy wagons. Maybe with some solar panels to recharge my computers batteries.
Obviously, you don't know many immigrants and have never had to deal with the INS (or whatever they are called now). Definately a painful experience.
You'll also find that immigrants often are better networked than most of us. They will usually already have some friend or family that has made the move.. or other immigrants of past will try to help them because they know how hard the effort can be. If anything IMO that is one reason these people deserve to do well.. they are willing to work hard and help each other. A shame the rest of America doesn't remember those things.
I've obviously had more experience with these things than you have so maybe you'll stop bitching about my opinions.
Will look into AmericCorps. I hadn't really heard of them before.
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
What the shit do I need public schools, police, or highways for? I have no kids (And won't as long as I'm poor), I have nothing worth stealing and am to scary to have any other crime commited against, and I don't have a car and would be happier walking someplace than driving anyway. I'd much rather have help getting a job, or rent/utils assistance when needed, or even decent medical coverage.;)
Neither of my schools ever offered to let my financial aid cover living expenses. My friend who's school had something like a credit card that drew from financial aid could buy food with it from the school cafeteria but it didn't cover rent or utilities. Sounds like whatever you've done it's the better plan. Unfortunately, there is no way in hell I can get more financial aid at this point. Bummer.
I considered the Peacecorps before but they sounded like they wanted people that had degrees and I don't really want to go to third world countries anyway. I'd be perfectly happy staying in the US doing things to help my fellow citizens.
Again I wonder why they don't offer jobs instead of welfare if they are going to give you money anyway. A shame they wouldn't pay me to work on a community garden, teach kids to read, or even develop opensource software.:)
How did you manage to get the govt to foot your college bill and living expenses? Even with grants etc I always had to pay my own rent, utils, food, and various other expenses.
I'd join the military if they had a branch that only defended.. and to me that doesn't mean attacking other countries 'in defense'. I don't believe in attacking other countries and I'm not willing to do so even to get a paycheck. (Which is why I get really angry at all these military people having a fit at being sent to Iraq.. well fuck I didn't want to go so I never took the govt's money even if I really could have used it.. they did take the money so let them go.)
Unfortunately, I've fallen so far that yes I know how hard it is.. and yes I've done it. Housing assistance is even harder. I've yet to manage to get that even when unemployed and homeless. Somehow I didn't qualify. I'm really not sure why.
Being evicted is probably one of the worse things I've been through. Having to move when you are unemployed and really have no other place to go. That and having the utiltiies shut off constantly as I strugled to stay above water. Every time they'd shut off the utilities my food would spoil.. so I'd have to buy more food.. which made it harder to pay the bills to begin with. It was these two bills (rent and utils) that totally trashed my credit while unemployed. I'd never used credit cards and the only loan I ever had was for school. Nobody really cared that a 20-something might be starving or homeless. Call various places for assistance and 'Do you have kids?' was the first and last thing they'd ask. No kids.. then well fuck off. I can see why a lot of people in this situation might choose to have a baby.
Almost as bad is when you're looking for work. The only way to get a job is to lie. You wrote software? Sorry, Taco Bell (Walmart, QuikTrip, etc) isn't interested in hiring you.. never mind that you could do the work as well or better than the teenagers working there. Or for a good job you have to lie and suddenly claim that you have a PhD in astrophysics from Big Ralph's University so that you can get a job doing the same thing you've done for years.. despite it having nothing whatsoever to do with astrophysics.
Why anybody would want to live in welfare I don't know. It's a hellish life. I'd much rather work a decent job even at less than great wages. $10/hr * 40 hours a week would be a start.. if I could get such a job that lasted longer than 6 months. I hate finishing projects and being thrown back out into this job market.
Being pressured into low bids is worse than the suck.:P
The problem is that if you don't somebody else will. So if you bid $4000 for a job that'll take 400 hours there is always someone that will bid $400 for the same job. Often as not the company doesn't care who will do the better job or that the $400 bid is unlikely to ever finish.. they'll just take the lowest bid. So then you end up either not getting any jobs or being one of the poor saps bidding $1/hr for work.
Even $1/hr wouldn't be so bad (it's something for your resume at least) if the clients realized they were getting a deal and would cut you some slack but no.. they pile it on all the more if it's cheap. They don't seem to respect you if your working cheap. They know they have you by the balls.
How do corporations and the rich pay the vast majority of taxes? They don't produce anything. Corporations don't exist except on paper and thus can produce nothing more than Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny. The rich seldom are found out there building stuff, providing services, etc. Everything they have is taken from the lower classes. If they pay a portion of what they take back to the government it can hardly be considered much of a burden for them considering they're still rich.
I have nothing against people making money or becoming rich but I think the extent to which that is happening in the USA is undermining the whole structure. Most people don't make much money so they want to buy cheaper products. The rich then are faced with either cutting their own profit margin or finding a way to make the products cheaper. They get the bright idea to send the jobs to Mexico, India, or whatever. This removes US jobs and makes people have even less money to spend. All those unemployed people are no longer producers. The cycle keeps going.. gradually moving imaginary wealth (money) to the rich and putting ever greater groups of the population in unemployment and underemployment (not using their abilities to the best) which is removing the true wealth of the country. How long can this last? We trample on blue collar workers, then trample on white collar workers.. what is left? The only thing that is keeping the system going is that there are some social programs to help redistribute wealth back to the poor. However, this isn't creating new jobs for the poor or raising the median wage so it's not really restoring the real wealth of the country. We're a rich country so it'll take a long time to bleed to death.. but that doesn't mean it won't happen eventually if things aren't changed. The rich should be paying the vast amount of taxes and those taxes should be distributed much better than they are being distributed. I wouldn't put tariffs or laws limiting products from other coutnries or sending jobs to other countries but I do think tax dollars should be spent creating jobs here. If somebody is unemployed give them a job that uses their skills as much as possible. If they are untrained let them do manual labor or train them for what you do need. If they are already trained then send them to do what needs doing. Surely that is better than just handing out welfare money. People will have more pride, will cost little (if anything) more than they do on welfare, and the real wealth of the country is maintained. Better job placement would also be a good use of tax dollars. Jobs are out there but can be difficult to find. Offer free retraining to fit the jobs availble. Such things aren't good enough currently. When I lost my job as an admin/programmer and asked about training they offered useless stuff (to me) like learning to use M$ Office. Perhaps maybe even make it illegal to discriminate against overtrained people when hiring. It can be hard to get a job in a new area if people see that you're past experience has been in something they think of as advanced. That applies to people that have been programmers, managers, etc. They just don't get hired much to work at Taco Bell or gardeners etc. A real problem if their job experience is in a market that is shrinking.
The way things look now I expect to see a lot of geeks moving abroad to take the jobs they used to have here. They may be paid less but they'll still be working and often the cost of living is cheaper in those areas. This to will deplete the wealth of the US. A lot that don't move may drop into less innovative jobs. All those skilled workers lost. All that innovation given up. It's those thaat create wealth.. not having more coins to clink in your pocket.
Try it. Bid your $600 and watch the spec for the project grow more and more complex until you can't possibly write the software in the time it'd take you to earn $600 working at Taco Bell. I'm all for opensource but I've found underbidding a dangerous thing to do.
You're better off working for yourself. Investigate the needs of companies, write the software to fulfill those needs, and then sell it off for $600 a copy. If you want to opensource the software then great but you don't even need to tell your clients that unless they ask. Just sell it like a shrinkwrapped product and you'll do much better.
It's tempting to underbid and take on crazy jobs when you're unemployed but as often as not you end up further in debt because of it. You'll be better off on foodstamps.
This is the United States. When we don't like something we first whine, whimper, and complain.. we keep doing that way to long.. then eventually we go postal and kill, steal, and break stuff.
What we really need is something of a geek union.. not (just) for jobs.. but for political power. Get enough of our population to join that we can do things like just shut down large sections of the Internet in protest. We need enough people that we have members in every major company throughout the world.. enough people that if the people in IT shut down the servers for a day they just can't be fired for doing it.. because nobody (that wasn't a member) would know how to turn the servers back on. Just stop the Net, stop inventing new stuff, stop fixing stuff, etc.. give the world a week of that and see how they like it.
Close Google for a day or two and see how many people notice. They use opensource software a lot so they'd be a good example. If only someone could convince them to do it.
That's what probably should be done. Just unplug all servers that run opensource software for a few days. See how well the world adjusts. Of course everyone would probably think it was another worm and would fail to notice.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I expect to see yet another boom/bust cycle out of the net yet. Probably not as big but longer reaching. Also I'd expect genetics and nanotech to each have boom/bust cycles during most of our lifetimes. Who knows what other technology might spark such cycles.
I remember the first time I used the web. It was with an all text browser over a 2400 baud connection back before there really was a Netscape. I didn't really see how it was any different than Gopher. At the time there wasn't all that many websites and there wasn't yet a real index or search engine so it really seemed like a Gopher clone.
Of course it didn't take long to figure out some interesting uses the web had over Gopher. I had an interesting website that used RIP graphics. It only worked if you were dialed-in using RIPTerm and using a text browser. Still it predated Flash by a lot. At that point I hadn't even used a graphical browser yet so I thought it was pretty clever having graphics and animations.
In a way I agree with you.. but there are laws keeping me from doing some rather nasty tricks I could do to jump ahead. If there are going to be such laws then there should be laws controlling my enemies also.
:)
I for one don't mind breaking laws but most people do. I can't help as seeing the entire system as a means to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful and gradually rape everyone not brash enough to flaunt the law and mistreat others. There are good reasons not to allow anything goes playing to get ahead in the world. It pushes people towards violence, stealing, lies, etc. Every step away from primal behavior is just a lie pulled over the eyes of the more innocent in society.
I'm not opposed to the idea of no laws at all. I'm smart, paranoid, physically impressive (tall/strong), and know lots of ways to fight. In primal competition I could do much better than I am doing now. However, it wouldn't be to great for the majority of others in the world.. nor can I make myself believe it'd be the most effecient strategy for the entire society.
I never blame the Morlocks but it's not exactly a good way of living for the Eloi. I guess I see both your argument and my own doomed to fail. If you are going to fail anyway why not have a more pleasent time during the effort?
I have karma points to burn anyway. Sadly, they can't be cashed in for money. ;) I'll also agree that yes the intelligent figure out that life sucks.. but will argue enough to say that that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to make it suck less.
I wouldn't try to make everyone equal but I do think the system is badly out of balance now. People who would work are kept from working. Even intelligent people (myself included) find it hard to compete because we don't play the games that many business people and lawyers play (thinking Enron).
Just because some of us won't play those games doesn't mean we're not intelligent enough to know them. To me at least there is a differnce between being smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, and charismatic and being a greedy ripoff artist like many of the business world are. I've owned and ran companies before and had some success but I'll never be as succesful as some because I refuse to use their tactics.
I don't really like the concept of welfare. Charity to those who can't work and jobs for those who can.. it doesn't make sense to pay people who could work not to work. That isn't effecient. Someone earlier in the discussion said it'd be socialist for the government to provide jobs but IMO it's not nearly as foolish as just making people choose between being on welfare and starving.
Sure, merchant/managers are needed. I have no problem with that. What irks me is when managers fatten their own pockets while the people working for them don't get enough to live. A fair split of the profits is one thing. Upper managers having three homes while the people doing the work can't make their rent is wrong.
Any employee working full-time, even if only a janitor, should be given enough to cover the cost of living for themselves and a moderate sized family. If more highly trained or productive people make more that is fine but they should never forget the people on the bottom. Obviously, if a worker just doesn't work when expected that is different. There are people who deserve to be let go but whole classes of employees shouldn't be treated as trash.
To some degree the concept of a minimum wage is supposed to address this problem but it isn't very effective. Partly because the minimum wage often doesn't meet the cost of living and partly because companies try to shift the additional costs to the customers rather than slimming their own profit margins any. Obviously, this causes the cost of living to rise which again makes the minimum wage inadequate. Of course not all companies act this way but the ones that do are often held up as shining examples.
So I guess the point I'm slowly getting to is that I wouldn't cap how rich people could get but I'd try to make it very hard for people to fall through the cracks at the bottom.. and I'd finance that by taxing the rich. They are free to continue getting richer and richer but as they do it should pull everyone else up with them. Obviously you have to be fair. You shouldn't tax the rich so much as to completely flipflop the situation but as of now I don't think that is much of a risk.
Of course most of the tax money is misused anyway.. which is a whole different discussion I'm afriad.
See how much your money is worth if you have nobody actually making things and growing food. Merchants and managers have their place in the world (they certainly help in regulating distribution) but they aren't any more valuable than the people actually producing. There is no reason for them to become rich while the producers become poor. That this happens is definately an indication that the system isn't properly balanced. I'd expect in a properly balanced system that those who became rich would be both producers and merchants. People who create and then sell what they create themselves. Sometimes that happens but it's not the majority of the cases.
I like to share my content (hundreds of gigs of everything, webbased chat, etc) in that way but have so far never lived anywhere with all that many users. I'm planning on moving again soon (to a large city) so maybe when I find a good job I'll try buying a better antenea and seeing what I can get. I was working for a while on my own P2P software but I probably wouldn't bother with that unless there were actually enough other users to make it useful. ;)
After I got my first cellphone and found out my house was in roaming (grrr) I starting building such a project. With my limited resources the phone was more the size of a PDA (based off LART: http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/) but that was still pretty cool. Even with a laptop and some VoIP software you can try this out. I was using Jabber for making connections but you can do it using normal methods. Sit in the park with your WiFi equiped laptop near a hotspot and a microphone. The main problems so far are latency and that you can't get to far from your hotspot. I hope as the technology improves those problems will be fixed.
Mesh networks aren't a dumb idea. It'd just be a dumb idea to design them to use the same scheme for local routing and distant routing. As long as you have the sense to tie together local meshes by some more effecient means to other local meshes it's a perfectly sensible design. Changing the basic layout of the Net in such a way may require changing some usage habits but it works just fine and with work like this going on will no doubt get better over time. In the future I think people will keep a lot more of their traffic in the local mesh which will help build local communities back up. You'll still use distant resources but you won't use distant resources for local uses nearly as often. Local news, chat, file sharing, etc will be handled within the local mesh. A good caching proxy server between the mesh and the Net will no doubt greatly reduce the wait for web, ftp, and similar resources frequently requested. I use a 1Gb proxy on my LAN and it slashes bandwidth use dramaticlly. I'd probably try something closer to 50-100Gb for a local mesh's proxy server.
The method I was playing with was WiFi for local meshes and microwave wireless for longer haul and finally normal old wired methods for crossing large distances (between cities).
Especially if you use encrypted traffic. SSL wrapped traffic tunneling through http would be rather hard to id. You could go by load but even that won't work because some people.. including myself.. download hundreds of megs of data a day from actual websites. ;)
They'd be better off just building bandwidth hog controls into the protocol.. as it mentions they are working on.
I think this would be useful to broadband providers to start. Especially if they drive the price down a little (already I could replicate their hardware for less.. unless they are using really good anteneas) this, as the article said, would be great for last-mile connections. An ISP could put up static access points here and there and hand these out to their customers rather than running DSL or something similar. I've lived in areas with WISP's and the service and price is actually pretty good. One area I lived had competing WISP's.. one used WiFi and the other used some sort of microwave setup (they were very hush hush but I'm snoopy). I was supposed to have a job at the WiFi setup but they changed their mind at the last minute (after I'd already moved to take the job. :P) so I was a bit disappointed. Sounded really fun to work on.
Meanwhile I think local geeks will be ever improving their own WiFi mesh.. so eventually they'll be competing with ISPs. I don't think they'll be exactly competing though.. I think the local mesh will become popular for something like P2P networking. Local chat, news, file sharing.
Sounds cool (wish I could have gone to MIT *drool*) but how does that impact security? They actually trust all students not to do /very bad things/?
It's against my morals to attack someone based on their nationality? I have as many friends in other countries as in my own. I certainly am not going to try to kill anybody just because my government tells me I should.
I have a Robin Hood complex. I always would rob from the rich.. never the poor or lower middle class. I'd probably give most of the money away too.
No doubt that is another reason I'm not so well off. At times that I am making money I tend to give away my extra to people in need rather than saving it up. I'd rather put the money in the hands of people that need it rather than bankers.
I happened to get knocked out of the system about 3/4's the way through college. I had a roommate die and I had to take care of alerting his friends and packing his stuff and various other tasks. I tried to bow out of the semester but the school wouldn't let me and I had a nervous breakdown so essentially I got all 0's. Totally ruined my grants and scholarships and made it so I couldn't afford to go anymore.. not to mention severely shreading my GPA. So I probably can't go back to college.. at least not until I can pay for it out of pocket.
There are big cracks to fall through and most people just don't care. I'm clever enough that I can always keep from really falling through but it does make it difficult to climb back up. For people less adaptable I can't see how they could ever get back to a normal life other than stealing or selling drugs or something to earn enough money to make the jump.
Being the geek I am the whole process has led me to investigate what I'd call nomad technologies. Things that make being a homeless bum easier and possibly even more enjoyable than a normal life. Such things still cost money (obviously) but do allow people to live much cheaper if they are flexible. I've even considered the idea of going back to horses and living in gypsy wagons. Maybe with some solar panels to recharge my computers batteries.
Obviously, you don't know many immigrants and have never had to deal with the INS (or whatever they are called now). Definately a painful experience.
You'll also find that immigrants often are better networked than most of us. They will usually already have some friend or family that has made the move.. or other immigrants of past will try to help them because they know how hard the effort can be. If anything IMO that is one reason these people deserve to do well.. they are willing to work hard and help each other. A shame the rest of America doesn't remember those things.
I've obviously had more experience with these things than you have so maybe you'll stop bitching about my opinions.
Will look into AmericCorps. I hadn't really heard of them before.
;)
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
What the shit do I need public schools, police, or highways for? I have no kids (And won't as long as I'm poor), I have nothing worth stealing and am to scary to have any other crime commited against, and I don't have a car and would be happier walking someplace than driving anyway. I'd much rather have help getting a job, or rent/utils assistance when needed, or even decent medical coverage.
Neither of my schools ever offered to let my financial aid cover living expenses. My friend who's school had something like a credit card that drew from financial aid could buy food with it from the school cafeteria but it didn't cover rent or utilities. Sounds like whatever you've done it's the better plan. Unfortunately, there is no way in hell I can get more financial aid at this point. Bummer.
:)
I considered the Peacecorps before but they sounded like they wanted people that had degrees and I don't really want to go to third world countries anyway. I'd be perfectly happy staying in the US doing things to help my fellow citizens.
Again I wonder why they don't offer jobs instead of welfare if they are going to give you money anyway. A shame they wouldn't pay me to work on a community garden, teach kids to read, or even develop opensource software.
How did you manage to get the govt to foot your college bill and living expenses? Even with grants etc I always had to pay my own rent, utils, food, and various other expenses.
I'd join the military if they had a branch that only defended.. and to me that doesn't mean attacking other countries 'in defense'. I don't believe in attacking other countries and I'm not willing to do so even to get a paycheck. (Which is why I get really angry at all these military people having a fit at being sent to Iraq.. well fuck I didn't want to go so I never took the govt's money even if I really could have used it.. they did take the money so let them go.)
Unfortunately, I've fallen so far that yes I know how hard it is.. and yes I've done it. Housing assistance is even harder. I've yet to manage to get that even when unemployed and homeless. Somehow I didn't qualify. I'm really not sure why.
Being evicted is probably one of the worse things I've been through. Having to move when you are unemployed and really have no other place to go. That and having the utiltiies shut off constantly as I strugled to stay above water. Every time they'd shut off the utilities my food would spoil.. so I'd have to buy more food.. which made it harder to pay the bills to begin with. It was these two bills (rent and utils) that totally trashed my credit while unemployed. I'd never used credit cards and the only loan I ever had was for school. Nobody really cared that a 20-something might be starving or homeless. Call various places for assistance and 'Do you have kids?' was the first and last thing they'd ask. No kids.. then well fuck off. I can see why a lot of people in this situation might choose to have a baby.
Almost as bad is when you're looking for work. The only way to get a job is to lie. You wrote software? Sorry, Taco Bell (Walmart, QuikTrip, etc) isn't interested in hiring you.. never mind that you could do the work as well or better than the teenagers working there. Or for a good job you have to lie and suddenly claim that you have a PhD in astrophysics from Big Ralph's University so that you can get a job doing the same thing you've done for years.. despite it having nothing whatsoever to do with astrophysics.
Why anybody would want to live in welfare I don't know. It's a hellish life. I'd much rather work a decent job even at less than great wages. $10/hr * 40 hours a week would be a start.. if I could get such a job that lasted longer than 6 months. I hate finishing projects and being thrown back out into this job market.
Being pressured into low bids is worse than the suck. :P
The problem is that if you don't somebody else will. So if you bid $4000 for a job that'll take 400 hours there is always someone that will bid $400 for the same job. Often as not the company doesn't care who will do the better job or that the $400 bid is unlikely to ever finish.. they'll just take the lowest bid. So then you end up either not getting any jobs or being one of the poor saps bidding $1/hr for work.
Even $1/hr wouldn't be so bad (it's something for your resume at least) if the clients realized they were getting a deal and would cut you some slack but no.. they pile it on all the more if it's cheap. They don't seem to respect you if your working cheap. They know they have you by the balls.
How do corporations and the rich pay the vast majority of taxes? They don't produce anything. Corporations don't exist except on paper and thus can produce nothing more than Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny. The rich seldom are found out there building stuff, providing services, etc. Everything they have is taken from the lower classes. If they pay a portion of what they take back to the government it can hardly be considered much of a burden for them considering they're still rich.
I have nothing against people making money or becoming rich but I think the extent to which that is happening in the USA is undermining the whole structure. Most people don't make much money so they want to buy cheaper products. The rich then are faced with either cutting their own profit margin or finding a way to make the products cheaper. They get the bright idea to send the jobs to Mexico, India, or whatever. This removes US jobs and makes people have even less money to spend. All those unemployed people are no longer producers. The cycle keeps going.. gradually moving imaginary wealth (money) to the rich and putting ever greater groups of the population in unemployment and underemployment (not using their abilities to the best) which is removing the true wealth of the country. How long can this last? We trample on blue collar workers, then trample on white collar workers.. what is left? The only thing that is keeping the system going is that there are some social programs to help redistribute wealth back to the poor. However, this isn't creating new jobs for the poor or raising the median wage so it's not really restoring the real wealth of the country. We're a rich country so it'll take a long time to bleed to death.. but that doesn't mean it won't happen eventually if things aren't changed. The rich should be paying the vast amount of taxes and those taxes should be distributed much better than they are being distributed. I wouldn't put tariffs or laws limiting products from other coutnries or sending jobs to other countries but I do think tax dollars should be spent creating jobs here. If somebody is unemployed give them a job that uses their skills as much as possible. If they are untrained let them do manual labor or train them for what you do need. If they are already trained then send them to do what needs doing. Surely that is better than just handing out welfare money. People will have more pride, will cost little (if anything) more than they do on welfare, and the real wealth of the country is maintained. Better job placement would also be a good use of tax dollars. Jobs are out there but can be difficult to find. Offer free retraining to fit the jobs availble. Such things aren't good enough currently. When I lost my job as an admin/programmer and asked about training they offered useless stuff (to me) like learning to use M$ Office. Perhaps maybe even make it illegal to discriminate against overtrained people when hiring. It can be hard to get a job in a new area if people see that you're past experience has been in something they think of as advanced. That applies to people that have been programmers, managers, etc. They just don't get hired much to work at Taco Bell or gardeners etc. A real problem if their job experience is in a market that is shrinking.
The way things look now I expect to see a lot of geeks moving abroad to take the jobs they used to have here. They may be paid less but they'll still be working and often the cost of living is cheaper in those areas. This to will deplete the wealth of the US. A lot that don't move may drop into less innovative jobs. All those skilled workers lost. All that innovation given up. It's those thaat create wealth.. not having more coins to clink in your pocket.
Try it. Bid your $600 and watch the spec for the project grow more and more complex until you can't possibly write the software in the time it'd take you to earn $600 working at Taco Bell. I'm all for opensource but I've found underbidding a dangerous thing to do.
You're better off working for yourself. Investigate the needs of companies, write the software to fulfill those needs, and then sell it off for $600 a copy. If you want to opensource the software then great but you don't even need to tell your clients that unless they ask. Just sell it like a shrinkwrapped product and you'll do much better.
It's tempting to underbid and take on crazy jobs when you're unemployed but as often as not you end up further in debt because of it. You'll be better off on foodstamps.
This is the United States. When we don't like something we first whine, whimper, and complain.. we keep doing that way to long.. then eventually we go postal and kill, steal, and break stuff.
What we really need is something of a geek union.. not (just) for jobs.. but for political power. Get enough of our population to join that we can do things like just shut down large sections of the Internet in protest. We need enough people that we have members in every major company throughout the world.. enough people that if the people in IT shut down the servers for a day they just can't be fired for doing it.. because nobody (that wasn't a member) would know how to turn the servers back on. Just stop the Net, stop inventing new stuff, stop fixing stuff, etc.. give the world a week of that and see how they like it.
Close Google for a day or two and see how many people notice. They use opensource software a lot so they'd be a good example. If only someone could convince them to do it.
That's what probably should be done. Just unplug all servers that run opensource software for a few days. See how well the world adjusts. Of course everyone would probably think it was another worm and would fail to notice. ;)