There is no good solution to any of this, both governments will be pushing to the end. Ukrainian government doesn't want to lose a large chunk of territory and Russian government doesn't want to let go now, since the loss will be seen as weakness and there is a huge interest in controlling the gas supplying line to Europe. Putin's reaction to Ukraine attempts to become part of NATO was going to be met with this type of violent reaction from Putin, who doesn't want to see NATO missile launchers even closer to the western border. AFAIC the American hands are all over this one, trying hard to create yet another distraction from its failing economy. Putin was easy to manipulate to start the war, but how do you end this war? A war with Russia can turn nuclear, so that is why there are no Americans or British or German or Canadian or other visible troops there yet.
Putin has a war now that everybody understands Russia is leading, but at the same time it is not an openly declared war, you can say it is an open secret war. Putin cannot win against the West but West doesn't want to fight a real shooting war with Russia either.
Stalemate. The only losers are the people who are forced into it on all sides, be it death due to bombing or bullets or sickness or be it economic sanctions (which by the way are not declared against 'others', economic sanctions are declared against your own. So economic sanctions imposed by Putin 'against West' are actually economic sanctions by Putin against Russians, it is just that the propaganda is strong, economic education and understanding is low and there is a tribal thing going on there as well).
USA provoked another conflict that may not end and definitely will not end well, good job. Putin is throwing fresh meat into the meat grinder, good job. Ukrainians are stuck between these two, like so many others before it, too bad.
AFAIC the only quick way out of this is for Putin to be assassinated or for Ukraine to give up and for the West to fuck off. All of these are unfortunate, but the alternatives do include a possibility of a nuclear war.
Many are under the false impression that ability to drive a car without government interference is a privilege and not a human right. These people are wrong, owning a car is not a right (as in nobody owes you a car), however if you own a car and you drive the car on private property then ability to drive the vehicle is not a privilege that government should be able to revoke. Driving a car on private property is an agreement between you (the driver) and the private property owner/operator. Getting in between the private property owner/operator and car owner/driver is in violation of your human rights. It is a violation of private property right, violation of freedom of association, violation of freedom to attempt and make your living, by the way, without interference by the State.
The real problem is of-course existence of so called 'public roads'. First automotive roads were private and many are private now and there should be no public roads at all, but to the extent that they exist, the rules and licensing that happens on the State level should only be applicable to those roads.
Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.
Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.
People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.
My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.
An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.
I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.
An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.
The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?
Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.
Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).
I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.
Eh, which stuff? The head in the sand tactic only gets you so far even ostriches do not actually do that but some humans apparently rely on that not to lose footing in their narrow perception of reality.
What's so special about NEW companies? Existing companies with similar niches can fill voids if there is a demand. Consumption is the current bottleneck, not ideas nor capital.
- first of all what is 'special' is that for the first time more companies shut down in a year than were started.
Secondly, you are right, existing companies are 'filling voids', as in they consolidate because the unproductive American workers can no longer earn enough by producing something to trade with. You are saying that consumption is the bottleneck, it's never the bottleneck, the problem is lack of productivity on behalf of the American worker. All these so called 'productivity gains' in the last 40 years in America are actually inflation and not gains of productivity. Productivity in USA has been completely annihilated with the laws, taxes, inflation. If American worker was productive, American worker would be able to earn to consume. American worker cannot earn to consume because he is not productive enough to pay for productivity of others with his own productivity, thus USA has been running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits, for this exact reason.
Capital is completely dried out in the USA, you don't have capital, you have inflation - printing of the money by the Fed and borrowing by all levels of government and by the private sector, but there are no savings, which is why there are no net new companies that replace the old companies that shut down and too many old companies shut down, and all of it is because there are no savings. There is no capital, printing money does not provide capital it only steals savings from the savers, savings are punished in the USA. The low interest rates artificially forced by the Fed are not true cost of capital. The pensioners in USA can no longer afford to live on savings, so they are coming back into the work force, while the younger who should be working are getting laid off and shift from permanent jobs to one or two or more than two part time jobs, all thanks to the government unauthorised nonsense, including Obamacare. As to ideas, ideas without capital behind them are nothing at all.
Of-course humans need not apply, the mob votes in politicians that routinely increase cost of buying labour and of-course this is what happens as a response. Governments made humans extremely unproductive, I am explaining this in my comments, of-course getting moderated to nothing, but hey, probably the messenger needs to be shot in the economy where this message is unacceptable because the only acceptable messages are those, that put the blame for the complete failures of centrally governed economies on the free market capitalism.
The automation is not a problem, the problem is that there are not enough new businesses that are created. In 2014 in USA more businesses shutdown than were created for the first time probably since the foundation of the Republic. The reasons are of-course politically incorrect and have to do with the destruction of the US dollar by the government and the Federal reserve and the growth of government (all the spending, all the welfare state nonsense, the business regulations, the taxes, and of-course all the wars).
Many of the jobs need to be automated away to allow human resources to be allocated more efficiently. However many of the jobs cannot be automated practically and their automation only becomes a possibility when the cost of labour exceeds the cost of automation in the long run by a wide margin, which is what is actually happening with all the government rules, laws, taxes, welfare, wars.
You want to solve the problem? YOU DO NOT STEAL MORE with nonsense like 'basic income', you allow people to be free from the mob to create new ideas and start new businesses and there will be no shortage of jobs.
Singapore has less than 1% unemployment, there is no minimum wage but the per-capita wages are highest in the world.
Libertarianism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.
Laissez-fair capitalism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.
- wrong and wrong, libertarian and laissez-fair capitalist ideas do not require anybody to be altruistic at all, in fact the entire point is only to think about yourself and in the free market economy to think about yourself means to provide the market with solutions it pays for, thus helping the society not by being altruistic but by chasing profits, which is why free market capitalism is the most moral system - it relies on self interest and the invisible hand of the market rewards self-interest that helps the market.
Your definitions are off-base, no wonder you don't understand what is going on and your conclusions are all screwed up.
Socialist approach doesn't work and for those of you, who are mistaken about it, here is an article that shows what your socialist approach can do even to the minimum wage jobs. This is coming to all low cost restaurants near you.
Socialist approach is anti-humanist, anti-freedom, anti-human rights approach, it is an approach of theft and destruction and violence. Capitalist approach within free market environment is the only approach that relies on voluntary exchange of goods and services that are built by free people, people who do not have their rights violated by the mob.
It has to be an all or nothing free market capitalist approach because once anything remotely socialist does not stop there, it wants more and more socialism, which in turn destroys free market capitalism, destroys free markets (markets free of government intervention, thus markets based on equal rights between people, where 'right' means protection against government abuse) and destruction of free markets does not improve capitalism in any way, it diminishes capitalism and without capitalism (private ownership and operation of property) there is no capital and without capital there is no economy and without economy there is no society.
Capitalism in a free market environment means profit based economy, which is the only economy that both is good economics and it is the only moral way to run a society, the only way that allows society to function without mob based violence destroying individual rights.
Cisco is having sales problems in this depressed economy just like so many other companies due to the inflation (money printing), taxes, regulations, basic lack of freedoms that is preventing new businesses from starting and is causing existing businesses to shrink, outsource or just shut down. In 2014 more businesses shutdown than were started first time probably in history of USA.
There is no recovery, the economy is in a depression being held afloat artificially with all this money counterfeiting by the Fed. The so called recovery is based on bubbles in asset and bond markets, due to all this inflation (money printing). The companies are borrowing huge sums in the USA based on their foreign earnings ( money that was made offshore and remains there due to insane taxes in the US) that are used as the collateral to borrow in the US, so that companies can buy their stock back, pushing up the stock prices and consolidating ownership. Warren Buffet talks US policies of the welfare state and inflation up, while getting rid of the US dollars and buying up assets, like the rail roads and the mines and lands. The US dollar is on its last legs, the population feels worse financially in the so called 'recovery' in 2014 than it felt in 2008, during the peak of the financial crisis. There is no recovery, but there is a huge bubble inflated by the Fed in this depression, hiding the necessary deflation with all this inflation and preventing the real and extremely needed restructuring ( writing off of debts, shutting down most of the government and many of the zombie companies that only exist due to inflation). USA job market is horrible, the new net jobs are part time jobs. Manufacturing is gone, very little is produced and where people are still producing, the government is regulating them to death.
Cisco will probably outsource to China or India if they hire at all. Not like it is easier for them now, afted all the NSA bullshit came out.
will not stop repeating the obvious
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Patents That Kill
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· Score: -1, Insightful
Developer tool No. 1: Continuous integration...your phone starts pinging you with new emails or text messages from the continuous build mechanism telling you what needs to be fixed. Back to work, slave, the continuous build machine has new tasks for you.
- some sort of flamebait right there, in TFA. If you have something checking your code and raising flags before the code goes into testing (which may or may not catch the errors) and production, you may be spared very unpleasant production issues. When do you feel more like a 'slave', when you are asked to fix the bugs during your normal work hours or when you are woken up at night, and you have to figure out what the hell happened in production, while new transactions are coming through and you have to fix live data?
Developer tool No. 2: Frameworks...Very little programming begins from scratch these days... Sure, you could be pioneering and build everything from scratch, but that would be suicide.... You're not a craftsman -- you're a framework-tweaker...
...
Developer tool No. 3: Libraries
- let's hope that you don't have to write everything from scratch, you are much more productive as a developer if you don't have to write everything you need but can use libraries written and tested by others. As to frameworks, nobody from the outside world really forces you into any framework, it's a decision internal to the project, don't have to follow anything you don't like.
Developer tool No. 4: APIs...The old game of counting bytes has been replaced by parse-able data structures such as JSON or XML...
- not that much different from header files in C, except XML is a dumb way to move data between components in the same application.
Developer tool No. 5: Platform as a service Who builds their own website anymore? Instead, create an account on someone else's website and customize it.
- Geocities? How is this a new development?
Developer tool No. 6: Browsers There was once a time when people wrote software for desktops, software for servers, and software for devices, and it would all be different.... Now everything goes through the browser.
- yeah, the browser used to be a dumb terminal and now it is getting more and more 'intelligent'. The browser of today is just a computer, it is the VM itself running your code in it. The browser is the computer and the code you write in it is now as complex as full clients of the past.
Developer tool No. 7: Application containers Building a server used to be hard work...
most of the incompatibilities between our desktops and the server are gone.
- many apps are just written for VMs (like JVM) that's not a new development, WAR files allowed this for over a decade now.
Developer tool No. 8: Infrastructure as a service Did I mention the teams of server curators? Those guys were fun to hang out with at lunch or after work, but now they've been abstracted away into the cloud layer..... these IaaS administration Web pages won't buy you a drink after work. Of course, that saves you from ever having to get the next round.
- seriously? That's a concern?
Developer tool No. 9: Node.js and JavaScript Now it's all done in JavaScript. The browser, of course, still speaks JavaScript, but so do the server layer (Node.js) and the database layer (MongoDB and CouchDB). Even the HTML is often specified with JavaScript code for a framework like Ext JS or jQueryMobile that generates the HTML at the client.
- yeah, yeah, Javascript. I'll be using Node.js in 5 years maybe, when it is already used by a ton of real world services that
I am not laughing at your post, it's 100% correct. I just find it funny, if I left that comment it would have been moderated -23, Troll for stating the obvious truth that all government is funded through violence and armed coercion.
of-course governments have been building computerised weapons forever now, I wonder if any GNU/Linux code is found in any real life weapon systems that governments use to murder people?
Right, of-course the biggest source of bugs in the code is fairly complex business logic and coupling of data structures / models between processing components, where limitations on data that one component requires and processes are different from limitations on same/similar data processed by other components. Really in order to avoid bugs we have to have full awareness of all business logic in every step in programming, which cannot be done in large enough projects where more than one person is working on a project and project takes more time than just a few days of work.
As to how to reduce number of bugs in simple code, I say write code generators that generate simple code if that type of code is used over and over again across the application, that's my approach, but YMMV.
to pay somebody 18K after tax, employer has to pay what, 28K
- is that the 'Troll'? Only if you do not run a business and do not know what the employer's actual costs are when their employee makes that 18K net.
Is this troll? - Well, I guess a link to a Washington Post can be considered one, I give you that.
However it doesn't change the fact, 31% of Americans have 0 savings, 19 of those between 55 and 64 have 0 savings. Maybe the USA economy is a Troll with those numbers.
s 324.5 Million settlement is yet another cost on employment,
- is this the troll? So 324.5 Million dollars (or more eventually) taken from the companies is somehow not a cost of labour in USA? What is it the cost of then if not labour cost, imposed by unauthorised government rule?
Yeah, well, I guess if you are not here supporting what the court did you are a troll, there is no difference of opinion here, just those who are RIGHT and those who are TROLLS.
It should be legal to discriminate based on anything. Whether people would do it or not is irrelevant, it should be completely legal. Government making it illegal is an unauthorised power grab, usurpation of power that was not granted to government under USA Constitution.
Would some people discriminate based on race, religion sex? Sure. Would they be rewarded or punished in a free market capitalist system? They would be punished, they would not have access to the best workers (based on their prejudice), they would lose many customers, since there are plenty of people who would not patronise such establishments.
Government does not have authority but it usurped the power to dictate how people are hired and fired. Government has no role in any of it. Employers must be able to hire and fire employees, and the only thing that matters is a contract. Same with employees, if an employee wants to go work to another company and the other company is willing to have him or her, he should be able to, again, subject to the contract between the employee and the employer.
Government has no authority to prevent companies from hiring anybody, domestic or otherwise. The entire concept of national borders is broken. These borders shouldn't be there to prevent people from working. Anybody could come to America 100 years ago and the only thing that they needed to do at the border was register and go right through.
The problem is growth of cancerous government and its destructive welfare system. People feel that their money is stolen from them (they feel this rightfully) in taxes and the welfare state is created, at that point it becomes difficult to maintain individual human rights and freedoms, which are to try and build their own lives as they can best (without murdering and stealing and such). The entire problem is the rise of the welfare state, the theft via the income related taxes, the theft via inflation and laws and regulations and the subsidies from that stolen money to the people unwilling to work. That is what ended normal immigration into USA.
As to being legal not to pay workers, it's legal now, because you can have volunteers that you don't pay anything, but once you start paying the insane, horrific minimum wage laws (price controls on labour) kick in. There are unpaid interns in the White House and in Hollywood, and that's OK, but minimum wage employees in WalMart is not somehow OK.
Government has no authority to dictate any salary to anybody whatsoever, it usurped that power that it didn't have and destroyed individual freedoms.
As to people being out of work, the exact opposite is the case. Without laws that make it extremely expensive and difficult and dangerous (litigation) to hire and fire people, more people have jobs.
I am an employer, I built my own company, I would hire more people if there were no government encroaching into my individual freedoms and freedoms of people I hire to have our own contracts.
Government rules and regulations are expenses, more expenses means higher cost of labour. To hire somebody to pay them 18K after tax, a company spends 28K. The labour cost is high and yet the final after tax salary is low. Talk about people not being able to afford products...
the reason a government exists is to serve the people, not to earn a profit
- wrong. The reason that governments exist is our inertia, laziness and jealousy. Originally governments were all nobility with the power in hand to kill you.
Nobility running amok vs. people wanting to live their lives freer from that type of government is what gave rise to Constitutional monarchy, where nobility could not steal from people and kill people at will, there was finally some laws against that type of abuse.
American Republic was supposed to become a better form of government not by making a bigger government, but by protecting more of the FREEDOMS of individuals, this is the only reason to reform governments - better governance in our progression means freer individuals, which is what allowed USA to become biggest manufacturer and creditor nation on the planet before 1908 (*before politicians figured out how to use all of the wealth generated by that system to start a class warfare that eventually destroyed the most productive economy since the dawn of men*).
Goal of a company is to make profits.
Goal of a politician is to stay in power.
Making profits in a free market capitalist system means providing products and services to the willing market participants.
Staying in power for politicians means building a bigger and bigger army around himself, so that to dominate against other politicians in that version of the Game of Thrones and it has nothing to do with serving people whatsoever. Staying in power means building an army and the people are the ones that are feeding that army through stolen work and through reduced standard of living.
Profits in a free market capitalist society are the most moral goal that can be, since it does not use any coercion, it uses desire of other participants in that economy to trade with the company.
As to slavery, thievery, murder all of those concepts are government concepts first and foremost and in a free market economy people don't need governments to deal with any of it, private courts and private security is enough to deal with aberrations.
Or if you're Intel or AMD making millions of CPUs, you think about how to do your systems right.
- what does that have anything to do with the question at hand? Nothing at all, CPUs will use more power when they actually have to process something and less when they idle, what are you talking about? The only interesting question here may be that CPUs need to know about each other and distribute the load in a way that would reduce power consumption while still providing the necessary processing, but this algorithm does that exactly and it's probably simpler than setting up CPUs in such a way that they would do that work on their own without knowledge of the context of the requests that are being executed!
Because it turns out, workers are actually people, and people have value that they want respected. Which is why we have governments, in order to serve the people.
- so start your own company and give all the respect to anybody you want. No, what you are after is worse than any 'Ferenge' or whatever, you want oppression of individual freedoms by government, that is not authorised at all actually to regulate businesses.
Newsflash, something you may learn here: "regulating interstate commerce" does not provide a blanket permission to regulate business, it means preventing States from setting up monopolies, forbidding people from out of State to do business there. Regulating interstate commerce meant to UPHOLD the free market principles, not destroy them.
There should be no government regulations, the reason government usurped all this unauthorised power is laziness and jealousy of people who would rather see government steal from others to subsidise themselves than try and compete in the actual free market environment, providing fellow citizens with products and services they would be willing to trade for voluntarily.
Achieving business profits in free market capitalism is the most moral way to run an economy, since profits in a free market economy only come from voluntary exchange and participation rather than coercion that fascists and socialists (basically thieves and oppressors) want.
It's funny how people, who are probably pro-union, are so vehemently against companies (people who own and run companies) coming to their own agreements as to who they will hire and fire and not hire, etc. Government has no authority to have any role in any of this, this is an illegal (unconstitutional) power grab by the government and by the courts.
Anybody should be able to come to an agreement with any other willing party to hire or not to hire any specific person, etc. "Freedom sucks", that's what your statement is all about, you think freedom sucks and should be stolen from people.
It's not about who is dispensable or not, companies do not exist to hire people, they exist to make products / provide services that allow the owners to make money, that's the purpose of a company. Hiring employees becomes necessary when there is more work that can be done, where the cost of hired labour is lower than the value produced by that labour. If you make labour cost too high, less of it will be bought, because the value produced by that labour may not be enough to cover the cost and to make some profit, and the whole point of business is to generate profit, otherwise it's not a business but a hobby. Hobbies have their place in life too, nothing wrong with hobbies, but hobbies can lose money, while businesses can only survive if they make money. Making money is the point and labour is just like any other tool or machinery, that's exactly what happens. Labour cost competes with capital cost, make labour cost too high and capital may win, which means automating or outsourcing the labour (capital wins in this case in terms of setting up the infrastructure necessary to outsource labour).
If everybody ran their own company and nobody wanted to work for anybody else, then you'd have the exact situation where everybody was an owner and there would be no employees, but in some situation the cost of labour would be too high, and so the price offered for labour would go up. Then some people who are making less money running their own businesses than what could be offered to them to work for other employees could shut down their businesses and go work for someone else.
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all, and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
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There is no good solution to any of this, both governments will be pushing to the end. Ukrainian government doesn't want to lose a large chunk of territory and Russian government doesn't want to let go now, since the loss will be seen as weakness and there is a huge interest in controlling the gas supplying line to Europe. Putin's reaction to Ukraine attempts to become part of NATO was going to be met with this type of violent reaction from Putin, who doesn't want to see NATO missile launchers even closer to the western border. AFAIC the American hands are all over this one, trying hard to create yet another distraction from its failing economy. Putin was easy to manipulate to start the war, but how do you end this war? A war with Russia can turn nuclear, so that is why there are no Americans or British or German or Canadian or other visible troops there yet.
Putin has a war now that everybody understands Russia is leading, but at the same time it is not an openly declared war, you can say it is an open secret war. Putin cannot win against the West but West doesn't want to fight a real shooting war with Russia either.
Stalemate. The only losers are the people who are forced into it on all sides, be it death due to bombing or bullets or sickness or be it economic sanctions (which by the way are not declared against 'others', economic sanctions are declared against your own. So economic sanctions imposed by Putin 'against West' are actually economic sanctions by Putin against Russians, it is just that the propaganda is strong, economic education and understanding is low and there is a tribal thing going on there as well).
USA provoked another conflict that may not end and definitely will not end well, good job. Putin is throwing fresh meat into the meat grinder, good job. Ukrainians are stuck between these two, like so many others before it, too bad.
AFAIC the only quick way out of this is for Putin to be assassinated or for Ukraine to give up and for the West to fuck off. All of these are unfortunate, but the alternatives do include a possibility of a nuclear war.
Many are under the false impression that ability to drive a car without government interference is a privilege and not a human right. These people are wrong, owning a car is not a right (as in nobody owes you a car), however if you own a car and you drive the car on private property then ability to drive the vehicle is not a privilege that government should be able to revoke. Driving a car on private property is an agreement between you (the driver) and the private property owner/operator. Getting in between the private property owner/operator and car owner/driver is in violation of your human rights. It is a violation of private property right, violation of freedom of association, violation of freedom to attempt and make your living, by the way, without interference by the State.
The real problem is of-course existence of so called 'public roads'. First automotive roads were private and many are private now and there should be no public roads at all, but to the extent that they exist, the rules and licensing that happens on the State level should only be applicable to those roads.
Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.
Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.
People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.
My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.
An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.
I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.
An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.
The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?
Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.
Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).
I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.
Eh, which stuff? The head in the sand tactic only gets you so far even ostriches do not actually do that but some humans apparently rely on that not to lose footing in their narrow perception of reality.
What's so special about NEW companies? Existing companies with similar niches can fill voids if there is a demand. Consumption is the current bottleneck, not ideas nor capital.
- first of all what is 'special' is that for the first time more companies shut down in a year than were started.
Secondly, you are right, existing companies are 'filling voids', as in they consolidate because the unproductive American workers can no longer earn enough by producing something to trade with. You are saying that consumption is the bottleneck, it's never the bottleneck, the problem is lack of productivity on behalf of the American worker. All these so called 'productivity gains' in the last 40 years in America are actually inflation and not gains of productivity. Productivity in USA has been completely annihilated with the laws, taxes, inflation. If American worker was productive, American worker would be able to earn to consume. American worker cannot earn to consume because he is not productive enough to pay for productivity of others with his own productivity, thus USA has been running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits, for this exact reason.
Capital is completely dried out in the USA, you don't have capital, you have inflation - printing of the money by the Fed and borrowing by all levels of government and by the private sector, but there are no savings, which is why there are no net new companies that replace the old companies that shut down and too many old companies shut down, and all of it is because there are no savings. There is no capital, printing money does not provide capital it only steals savings from the savers, savings are punished in the USA. The low interest rates artificially forced by the Fed are not true cost of capital. The pensioners in USA can no longer afford to live on savings, so they are coming back into the work force, while the younger who should be working are getting laid off and shift from permanent jobs to one or two or more than two part time jobs, all thanks to the government unauthorised nonsense, including Obamacare. As to ideas, ideas without capital behind them are nothing at all.
Of-course humans need not apply, the mob votes in politicians that routinely increase cost of buying labour and of-course this is what happens as a response. Governments made humans extremely unproductive, I am explaining this in my comments, of-course getting moderated to nothing, but hey, probably the messenger needs to be shot in the economy where this message is unacceptable because the only acceptable messages are those, that put the blame for the complete failures of centrally governed economies on the free market capitalism.
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The automation is not a problem, the problem is that there are not enough new businesses that are created. In 2014 in USA more businesses shutdown than were created for the first time probably since the foundation of the Republic. The reasons are of-course politically incorrect and have to do with the destruction of the US dollar by the government and the Federal reserve and the growth of government (all the spending, all the welfare state nonsense, the business regulations, the taxes, and of-course all the wars).
Many of the jobs need to be automated away to allow human resources to be allocated more efficiently. However many of the jobs cannot be automated practically and their automation only becomes a possibility when the cost of labour exceeds the cost of automation in the long run by a wide margin, which is what is actually happening with all the government rules, laws, taxes, welfare, wars.
You want to solve the problem? YOU DO NOT STEAL MORE with nonsense like 'basic income', you allow people to be free from the mob to create new ideas and start new businesses and there will be no shortage of jobs.
Singapore has less than 1% unemployment, there is no minimum wage but the per-capita wages are highest in the world.
Libertarianism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.
Laissez-fair capitalism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.
- wrong and wrong, libertarian and laissez-fair capitalist ideas do not require anybody to be altruistic at all, in fact the entire point is only to think about yourself and in the free market economy to think about yourself means to provide the market with solutions it pays for, thus helping the society not by being altruistic but by chasing profits, which is why free market capitalism is the most moral system - it relies on self interest and the invisible hand of the market rewards self-interest that helps the market.
Your definitions are off-base, no wonder you don't understand what is going on and your conclusions are all screwed up.
Socialist approach doesn't work and for those of you, who are mistaken about it, here is an article that shows what your socialist approach can do even to the minimum wage jobs. This is coming to all low cost restaurants near you.
Socialist approach is anti-humanist, anti-freedom, anti-human rights approach, it is an approach of theft and destruction and violence. Capitalist approach within free market environment is the only approach that relies on voluntary exchange of goods and services that are built by free people, people who do not have their rights violated by the mob.
It has to be an all or nothing free market capitalist approach because once anything remotely socialist does not stop there, it wants more and more socialism, which in turn destroys free market capitalism, destroys free markets (markets free of government intervention, thus markets based on equal rights between people, where 'right' means protection against government abuse) and destruction of free markets does not improve capitalism in any way, it diminishes capitalism and without capitalism (private ownership and operation of property) there is no capital and without capital there is no economy and without economy there is no society.
Capitalism in a free market environment means profit based economy, which is the only economy that both is good economics and it is the only moral way to run a society, the only way that allows society to function without mob based violence destroying individual rights.
Cisco is having sales problems in this depressed economy just like so many other companies due to the inflation (money printing), taxes, regulations, basic lack of freedoms that is preventing new businesses from starting and is causing existing businesses to shrink, outsource or just shut down. In 2014 more businesses shutdown than were started first time probably in history of USA.
There is no recovery, the economy is in a depression being held afloat artificially with all this money counterfeiting by the Fed. The so called recovery is based on bubbles in asset and bond markets, due to all this inflation (money printing). The companies are borrowing huge sums in the USA based on their foreign earnings ( money that was made offshore and remains there due to insane taxes in the US) that are used as the collateral to borrow in the US, so that companies can buy their stock back, pushing up the stock prices and consolidating ownership. Warren Buffet talks US policies of the welfare state and inflation up, while getting rid of the US dollars and buying up assets, like the rail roads and the mines and lands. The US dollar is on its last legs, the population feels worse financially in the so called 'recovery' in 2014 than it felt in 2008, during the peak of the financial crisis. There is no recovery, but there is a huge bubble inflated by the Fed in this depression, hiding the necessary deflation with all this inflation and preventing the real and extremely needed restructuring ( writing off of debts, shutting down most of the government and many of the zombie companies that only exist due to inflation). USA job market is horrible, the new net jobs are part time jobs. Manufacturing is gone, very little is produced and where people are still producing, the government is regulating them to death.
Cisco will probably outsource to China or India if they hire at all. Not like it is easier for them now, afted all the NSA bullshit came out.
Patents and copyrights must be abolished.
Let the people compete in the market based on the trade secrets.
Of-course government institutions like FDA need to be abolished as well.
Developer tool No. 1: Continuous integration ...your phone starts pinging you with new emails or text messages from the continuous build mechanism telling you what needs to be fixed. Back to work, slave, the continuous build machine has new tasks for you.
- some sort of flamebait right there, in TFA. If you have something checking your code and raising flags before the code goes into testing (which may or may not catch the errors) and production, you may be spared very unpleasant production issues. When do you feel more like a 'slave', when you are asked to fix the bugs during your normal work hours or when you are woken up at night, and you have to figure out what the hell happened in production, while new transactions are coming through and you have to fix live data?
Developer tool No. 2: Frameworks ...Very little programming begins from scratch these days...
Sure, you could be pioneering and build everything from scratch, but that would be suicide.... You're not a craftsman -- you're a framework-tweaker...
...
Developer tool No. 3: Libraries
- let's hope that you don't have to write everything from scratch, you are much more productive as a developer if you don't have to write everything you need but can use libraries written and tested by others. As to frameworks, nobody from the outside world really forces you into any framework, it's a decision internal to the project, don't have to follow anything you don't like.
Developer tool No. 4: APIs ...The old game of counting bytes has been replaced by parse-able data structures such as JSON or XML...
- not that much different from header files in C, except XML is a dumb way to move data between components in the same application.
Developer tool No. 5: Platform as a service
Who builds their own website anymore? Instead, create an account on someone else's website and customize it.
- Geocities? How is this a new development?
Developer tool No. 6: Browsers
There was once a time when people wrote software for desktops, software for servers, and software for devices, and it would all be different.... Now everything goes through the browser.
- yeah, the browser used to be a dumb terminal and now it is getting more and more 'intelligent'. The browser of today is just a computer, it is the VM itself running your code in it. The browser is the computer and the code you write in it is now as complex as full clients of the past.
Developer tool No. 7: Application containers
Building a server used to be hard work...
most of the incompatibilities between our desktops and the server are gone.
- many apps are just written for VMs (like JVM) that's not a new development, WAR files allowed this for over a decade now.
Developer tool No. 8: Infrastructure as a service
Did I mention the teams of server curators? Those guys were fun to hang out with at lunch or after work, but now they've been abstracted away into the cloud layer..... these IaaS administration Web pages won't buy you a drink after work. Of course, that saves you from ever having to get the next round.
- seriously? That's a concern?
Developer tool No. 9: Node.js and JavaScript
Now it's all done in JavaScript. The browser, of course, still speaks JavaScript, but so do the server layer (Node.js) and the database layer (MongoDB and CouchDB). Even the HTML is often specified with JavaScript code for a framework like Ext JS or jQueryMobile that generates the HTML at the client.
- yeah, yeah, Javascript. I'll be using Node.js in 5 years maybe, when it is already used by a ton of real world services that
Ha ha ha :)
I am not laughing at your post, it's 100% correct. I just find it funny, if I left that comment it would have been moderated -23, Troll for stating the obvious truth that all government is funded through violence and armed coercion.
of-course governments have been building computerised weapons forever now, I wonder if any GNU/Linux code is found in any real life weapon systems that governments use to murder people?
Aaah, a true killer application, the year of GNU/Linux on your favourite weapon of choice :)
Right, of-course the biggest source of bugs in the code is fairly complex business logic and coupling of data structures / models between processing components, where limitations on data that one component requires and processes are different from limitations on same/similar data processed by other components. Really in order to avoid bugs we have to have full awareness of all business logic in every step in programming, which cannot be done in large enough projects where more than one person is working on a project and project takes more time than just a few days of work.
As to how to reduce number of bugs in simple code, I say write code generators that generate simple code if that type of code is used over and over again across the application, that's my approach, but YMMV.
Troll?
to pay somebody 18K after tax, employer has to pay what, 28K
- is that the 'Troll'? Only if you do not run a business and do not know what the employer's actual costs are when their employee makes that 18K net.
Is this troll? - Well, I guess a link to a Washington Post can be considered one, I give you that.
However it doesn't change the fact, 31% of Americans have 0 savings, 19 of those between 55 and 64 have 0 savings. Maybe the USA economy is a Troll with those numbers.
s 324.5 Million settlement is yet another cost on employment,
- is this the troll? So 324.5 Million dollars (or more eventually) taken from the companies is somehow not a cost of labour in USA? What is it the cost of then if not labour cost, imposed by unauthorised government rule?
Yeah, well, I guess if you are not here supporting what the court did you are a troll, there is no difference of opinion here, just those who are RIGHT and those who are TROLLS.
It should be legal to discriminate based on anything. Whether people would do it or not is irrelevant, it should be completely legal. Government making it illegal is an unauthorised power grab, usurpation of power that was not granted to government under USA Constitution.
Would some people discriminate based on race, religion sex? Sure. Would they be rewarded or punished in a free market capitalist system? They would be punished, they would not have access to the best workers (based on their prejudice), they would lose many customers, since there are plenty of people who would not patronise such establishments.
Government does not have authority but it usurped the power to dictate how people are hired and fired. Government has no role in any of it. Employers must be able to hire and fire employees, and the only thing that matters is a contract. Same with employees, if an employee wants to go work to another company and the other company is willing to have him or her, he should be able to, again, subject to the contract between the employee and the employer.
Government has no authority to prevent companies from hiring anybody, domestic or otherwise. The entire concept of national borders is broken. These borders shouldn't be there to prevent people from working. Anybody could come to America 100 years ago and the only thing that they needed to do at the border was register and go right through.
The problem is growth of cancerous government and its destructive welfare system. People feel that their money is stolen from them (they feel this rightfully) in taxes and the welfare state is created, at that point it becomes difficult to maintain individual human rights and freedoms, which are to try and build their own lives as they can best (without murdering and stealing and such). The entire problem is the rise of the welfare state, the theft via the income related taxes, the theft via inflation and laws and regulations and the subsidies from that stolen money to the people unwilling to work. That is what ended normal immigration into USA.
As to being legal not to pay workers, it's legal now, because you can have volunteers that you don't pay anything, but once you start paying the insane, horrific minimum wage laws (price controls on labour) kick in. There are unpaid interns in the White House and in Hollywood, and that's OK, but minimum wage employees in WalMart is not somehow OK.
Government has no authority to dictate any salary to anybody whatsoever, it usurped that power that it didn't have and destroyed individual freedoms.
As to people being out of work, the exact opposite is the case. Without laws that make it extremely expensive and difficult and dangerous (litigation) to hire and fire people, more people have jobs.
I am an employer, I built my own company, I would hire more people if there were no government encroaching into my individual freedoms and freedoms of people I hire to have our own contracts.
Government rules and regulations are expenses, more expenses means higher cost of labour. To hire somebody to pay them 18K after tax, a company spends 28K. The labour cost is high and yet the final after tax salary is low. Talk about people not being able to afford products...
the reason a government exists is to serve the people, not to earn a profit
- wrong. The reason that governments exist is our inertia, laziness and jealousy. Originally governments were all nobility with the power in hand to kill you.
Nobility running amok vs. people wanting to live their lives freer from that type of government is what gave rise to Constitutional monarchy, where nobility could not steal from people and kill people at will, there was finally some laws against that type of abuse.
American Republic was supposed to become a better form of government not by making a bigger government, but by protecting more of the FREEDOMS of individuals, this is the only reason to reform governments - better governance in our progression means freer individuals, which is what allowed USA to become biggest manufacturer and creditor nation on the planet before 1908 (*before politicians figured out how to use all of the wealth generated by that system to start a class warfare that eventually destroyed the most productive economy since the dawn of men*).
Goal of a company is to make profits.
Goal of a politician is to stay in power.
Making profits in a free market capitalist system means providing products and services to the willing market participants.
Staying in power for politicians means building a bigger and bigger army around himself, so that to dominate against other politicians in that version of the Game of Thrones and it has nothing to do with serving people whatsoever. Staying in power means building an army and the people are the ones that are feeding that army through stolen work and through reduced standard of living.
Profits in a free market capitalist society are the most moral goal that can be, since it does not use any coercion, it uses desire of other participants in that economy to trade with the company.
As to slavery, thievery, murder all of those concepts are government concepts first and foremost and in a free market economy people don't need governments to deal with any of it, private courts and private security is enough to deal with aberrations.
Or if you're Intel or AMD making millions of CPUs, you think about how to do your systems right.
- what does that have anything to do with the question at hand? Nothing at all, CPUs will use more power when they actually have to process something and less when they idle, what are you talking about? The only interesting question here may be that CPUs need to know about each other and distribute the load in a way that would reduce power consumption while still providing the necessary processing, but this algorithm does that exactly and it's probably simpler than setting up CPUs in such a way that they would do that work on their own without knowledge of the context of the requests that are being executed!
Because it turns out, workers are actually people, and people have value that they want respected. Which is why we have governments, in order to serve the people.
- so start your own company and give all the respect to anybody you want. No, what you are after is worse than any 'Ferenge' or whatever, you want oppression of individual freedoms by government, that is not authorised at all actually to regulate businesses.
Newsflash, something you may learn here: "regulating interstate commerce" does not provide a blanket permission to regulate business, it means preventing States from setting up monopolies, forbidding people from out of State to do business there. Regulating interstate commerce meant to UPHOLD the free market principles, not destroy them.
There should be no government regulations, the reason government usurped all this unauthorised power is laziness and jealousy of people who would rather see government steal from others to subsidise themselves than try and compete in the actual free market environment, providing fellow citizens with products and services they would be willing to trade for voluntarily.
Achieving business profits in free market capitalism is the most moral way to run an economy, since profits in a free market economy only come from voluntary exchange and participation rather than coercion that fascists and socialists (basically thieves and oppressors) want.
"Flamebait"?
Ok, let's look at the statements above:
companies ... exist ... to make money
- Flamebait, I see.
Hiring employees ... when ... the cost of hired labour is lower than the value produced by that labour.
- oh, total Flamebait.
If you make labour cost too high, less of it will be bought
- nightmarish Flamebait.
Hobbies ... can lose money, while businesses can only survive if they make money.
- that's not only a Flamebait, that's probably a Troll.
Labour cost competes with capital cost
- HERESY.
make labour cost too high... means automating or outsourcing the labour
- Oh, humanity, hyper Flamebait.
If everybody was an owner ... the price offered for labour would go up.
- Obvious Troll. Talking about supply and demand curves.
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all
- clearly Flamebait.
and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
- Awful unbelievable Flamebait.
No, you are right, /. moderators, you figured it all out.
It's funny how people, who are probably pro-union, are so vehemently against companies (people who own and run companies) coming to their own agreements as to who they will hire and fire and not hire, etc. Government has no authority to have any role in any of this, this is an illegal (unconstitutional) power grab by the government and by the courts.
Anybody should be able to come to an agreement with any other willing party to hire or not to hire any specific person, etc. "Freedom sucks", that's what your statement is all about, you think freedom sucks and should be stolen from people.
It's not about who is dispensable or not, companies do not exist to hire people, they exist to make products / provide services that allow the owners to make money, that's the purpose of a company. Hiring employees becomes necessary when there is more work that can be done, where the cost of hired labour is lower than the value produced by that labour. If you make labour cost too high, less of it will be bought, because the value produced by that labour may not be enough to cover the cost and to make some profit, and the whole point of business is to generate profit, otherwise it's not a business but a hobby. Hobbies have their place in life too, nothing wrong with hobbies, but hobbies can lose money, while businesses can only survive if they make money. Making money is the point and labour is just like any other tool or machinery, that's exactly what happens. Labour cost competes with capital cost, make labour cost too high and capital may win, which means automating or outsourcing the labour (capital wins in this case in terms of setting up the infrastructure necessary to outsource labour).
If everybody ran their own company and nobody wanted to work for anybody else, then you'd have the exact situation where everybody was an owner and there would be no employees, but in some situation the cost of labour would be too high, and so the price offered for labour would go up. Then some people who are making less money running their own businesses than what could be offered to them to work for other employees could shut down their businesses and go work for someone else.
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all, and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.