>>Unions are on their deathbed for a damn good reason
You can't more wrong. It took 30 years of concentrated efforts by "business" and corrupt government to weaken the unions. The fact hat it took so long for a well-financed, organized, vicious assault to semi-succeed clearly demonstrates that workers still understand how useful unions are.
Your arrogance illustrates a lot of what is wrong with the state of CS in the U.S. today. A bunch of arrogant, uneducated, "self-taught" "web developers" running around creating one crappy useless tech after another. You will go away like the "VB programmers" of the 90s, so enjoy it while it lasts.
>>recession isn't an excuse. There is always some work available for a young fine fella who isn't afraid to work hard and enjoy the results.
Really? You are a smelly piece of excrement. You have no effin idea how hard it is out there in a recession worst in a generation. Stick your tongue up your behind, get out of your parents' basement, and feel the real world smashing your face. Burn in hell.
>> I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class.
I can only imagine the terrible, unmaintainable, disorganized spaghetti code you wrote, as well as the amateurish and inefficient ways in which you solved some of the common CS problems which they teach you in school. The "self-taught" ones are the worst. They know a thing or two, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They can't grasp that they know very little.
Not sure what you are talking about. I have personally seen NetBeans used by a large company (who is also a defense contractor, albeit not for this project) as their main Java IDE. The project was mission-critical transportation control system. Incidentally, it was about 2 years ago, around your point of reference. So, I'd say that assuming the IDE is buggy just because it appears to you that it creates "thousands of temp dirs" which you have no idea why is very far fetched. NetBeans is a nice, stable IDE which thousand of people and companies use on a daily basis.
Thanks for simplistic high school level economics lecture. You are conveniently omitting the factor of scale. One or two orders of magnitude of manufacturing jobs are lost for every "mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineer" job created. Also, manufacturing jobs can be made attractive again if you slap punishing tariffs on chinese dumping and corporations that facilitate it.
I don't think anyone argues about complete halt of technological progress, but making it orderly and less harmful to society is certainly needed. Instead of blindly throwing people on the street by the million and giving them the moronic advice to "adapt", we should provide those people with a few years of social support and "useful" job training, paid for largely by the companies doing the firing. We are supposedly living in a human society and not in the jungle.
Another foul-mouthed "liebrtarian" douchebag responding to an insightful argument by mindlessly bashing the government.
Corporations can be much more evil than government could ever be. Government employees are civil servants working for salary. They might have some interest in expanding their power, but not nearly as much as a privateer crazy about profit, who would bite your throat for an extra buck. In terms of Godwin's law, Nazis would get many times more Jews killed if they paid per head and let "private corporations" handle the affair. People and corporations crazy with greed are an order of magnitude more evil and any government could ever hope to be.
>>Europe (is it flamebait to say they are better because they are away from US unions?)
Probably yes, because:
1) Workers in good old Europe have stronger unions than the withering joke the U.S. has.
2) European workers enjoy a terrific safety net which looks like the great wall of china compared to the spider web the U.S. wage slaves have. Never underestimate explosion of creativity in a geek who feels safe for economic future of his family.
When a private corporation attempts to dictate to a sovereign state which policies the state should adopt, there is something terribly wrong with the world.
One of the points the article highlights is that in Chinese culture, blatant cheating and shameless plagiarism is fine. It's just being "smart" to get ahead. Nice culture to force your hard-working population to compete with.
How about a radical idea of treating employees as people, with respect and dignity, and they will treat you likewise in return? I know I'm stepping a little above the topic, as you asked what to do when you do fire people suddenly without a cause. Please bear with me and don't "escort me out" yet. The way employees are treated in the U.S nowadays is despicable. It would be unacceptable just a few decades ago in this very country, and it is still unacceptable in many parts of the world. An executive firing employees without good cause would and should be roughed up good after work to freshen their understanding of "immoral". American society should make it socially unacceptable, with after-work consequences, to fire people without a good cause, regardless of "laws' bought by corporations in the last decades.
You are just covering up the issue. The GOP was caught paying bloggers. This is the issue at hand. When you have "proof" of "Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and the US government" buying bloggers, feel free to make it public. Until then, what we are discussing is the Republican party buying political support online, and nothing else.
Nonsense. Generalizations, also known as "rules", are a cornerstone of human thinking process. At the same time, as you should have known from grade school, rules have "exceptions". These do not invalidate the rule; just enumerate a relatively small number of cases when the rule does not apply.
What free market fundamentalists like you fail you comprehend is that we humans have a relatively short lifespan. Life is too short to wait a decade for the mythical "competition" to maybe sorta improve the airline market. Free marketeers remind me of a religion. Those, too, promise that all wrongs will be fixed a few decades later once your life ends and you are in heaven. Maybe, but I'd rather have them fixed in this life, and soon. For the last 30 years, lunatic free market policies have caused crisis after crisis while making life worse for working people. It's time to dump this discredited, outdated religion for a 21st century pragmatic approach that actually makes life better for those who work, rich scum squealing notwithstanding.
We don't care what it's called. The current order in the U.S. is really fascism, yet no one cares. Using republican-demonized words like socialism and populism doesn't scare anyone.
The law and the constitution you refer to were written by a bunch of self-appointed rich landowners who were not even democratically elected, thus being stacked overwhelmingly in their favor and against the people doing actual work. Shove it. The majority will do as it pleases.
In a human society based on common humanitarian reason instead of unfair, arcane, outdated laws the executives would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
It's technological progress that results in improved living standards. It has nothing to do with capitalism. Soviet Union improved its living standards tremendously from 50s to 80s. So did many other non-capitalist countries.
By the way, capitalism died in 2008. The U.S. may let its rotting corpse slowly destroy its society entirely, or it may embrace progressive policies like Europe and even lead the way to a better society.
Console gaming does avoid most of the hardware problems of the PC side, and is fine for some kinds of games such as sports. However, it mostly sucks for game types like first person shooters and strategy games. If you are into the latter types, then you don't have much of a choice but a PC.
It's interesting how many Westerners criticize capitalism (rightfully), yet state at the end that they are still pro-capitalism, and that the pitfalls they are complaining about must be a "perverted", "not-true" capitalism. It will probably take a decade or two more of ruthless exploitation, mass unemployment, and shameless corporate cheating and welfare for the folks to begin to comprehend that this is the climax of capitalism, the "me-first", "screw-everybody-else" philosophy. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
This has always puzzled me about lie-bertarians. To a dispassionate eye, the line appears to be so random and convenient only for the small-medium capitalists who incidentally provide the basis for this ideology to begin with. Why is it government function to protect only property, and human rights (which conveniently exclude the rights to basic food, shelter, job, and health care) ? And why the property is so sacred, of all the things a human being needs, such as "true" freedom (not just freedom to die from hunger), good health, or a family?
Except that the work on the same project was done TEN times at TEN TIMES THE COST. Either the client pays for 10 projects itself, or, if the client only pays the winner, then investors take the hit, who pass it to workers and other members of the society in many ways. Ultimately, the cost is paid by the society either way. You would be much better off developing one or two projects under socialism instead.
Yes, socialism has its inefficiencies, but capitalism has its own problems that rival or exceed those of socialism. Just look at the crisis we are living through right now.
We don't necessarily want to go there because it would be somewhat ugly for all the countries involved, but it would actually hurt U.S. creditors more than the U.S. They say, "if you owe the banks one thousand dollars, you have a problem; but if you owe the banks one billion dollars, the banks have a problem." The U.S. creditors are sitting on nothing more than a huge pile of paper promises by the U.S. to pay. If U.S. defaults, the major consequences would be a large jump in prices on imports, including oil and electronics. It would hurt the U.S. quite a bit, but it would be nothing compared to what would happen to major creditors' economies. China, Japan, etc. economies would collapse, with widespread civil unrest, wars, and starvation. Europe would also be hurt a lot. And the creditors know this. So no, they would not try to force U.S. to pay a large portion of the debt anytime soon even if U.S. starts slowly winding down purchases of foreign crap.
It would be in the long term interest of all involved parties for U.S. to slowly pay off its debt by gradually re-balancing its economy to manufacture more and to buy less chinese junk.
Competition won't solve this, only strict public REGULATION can. The problem with competition is that it assumes (wrongly) that some players are better than others. However, currently in the U.S. all corporations are about equally evil. Be it Microsoft, Apple, Google, Verison etc., overall they all mistreat their employees, customers, and the public(by not paying their share of taxes). When all market players are equally bad, competition is worthless. You need public regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Unions are on their deathbed for a damn good reason
You can't more wrong. It took 30 years of concentrated efforts by "business" and corrupt government to weaken the unions. The fact hat it took so long for a well-financed, organized, vicious assault to semi-succeed clearly demonstrates that workers still understand how useful unions are.
>>Highly polarized, closed-minded, hating opposing
>>viewpoints with generalities, getting nothing done.
>>Congratulations.
That is exactly how your post sounds.
Your arrogance illustrates a lot of what is wrong with the state of CS in the U.S. today. A bunch of arrogant, uneducated, "self-taught" "web developers" running around creating one crappy useless tech after another. You will go away like the "VB programmers" of the 90s, so enjoy it while it lasts.
>>recession isn't an excuse. There is always some work available for a young fine fella who isn't afraid to work hard and enjoy the results.
Really? You are a smelly piece of excrement. You have no effin idea how hard it is out there in a recession worst in a generation. Stick your tongue up your behind, get out of your parents' basement, and feel the real world smashing your face. Burn in hell.
>> I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class.
I can only imagine the terrible, unmaintainable, disorganized spaghetti code you wrote, as well as the amateurish and inefficient ways in which you solved some of the common CS problems which they teach you in school. The "self-taught" ones are the worst. They know a thing or two, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They can't grasp that they know very little.
Not sure what you are talking about. I have personally seen NetBeans used by a large company (who is also a defense contractor, albeit not for this project) as their main Java IDE. The project was mission-critical transportation control system. Incidentally, it was about 2 years ago, around your point of reference. So, I'd say that assuming the IDE is buggy just because it appears to you that it creates "thousands of temp dirs" which you have no idea why is very far fetched. NetBeans is a nice, stable IDE which thousand of people and companies use on a daily basis.
Thanks for simplistic high school level economics lecture. You are conveniently omitting the factor of scale. One or two orders of magnitude of manufacturing jobs are lost for every "mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineer" job created. Also, manufacturing jobs can be made attractive again if you slap punishing tariffs on chinese dumping and corporations that facilitate it.
I don't think anyone argues about complete halt of technological progress, but making it orderly and less harmful to society is certainly needed. Instead of blindly throwing people on the street by the million and giving them the moronic advice to "adapt", we should provide those people with a few years of social support and "useful" job training, paid for largely by the companies doing the firing. We are supposedly living in a human society and not in the jungle.
Another foul-mouthed "liebrtarian" douchebag responding to an insightful argument by mindlessly bashing the government.
Corporations can be much more evil than government could ever be. Government employees are civil servants working for salary. They might have some interest in expanding their power, but not nearly as much as a privateer crazy about profit, who would bite your throat for an extra buck. In terms of Godwin's law, Nazis would get many times more Jews killed if they paid per head and let "private corporations" handle the affair. People and corporations crazy with greed are an order of magnitude more evil and any government could ever hope to be.
>>Europe (is it flamebait to say they are better because they are away from US unions?)
Probably yes, because:
1) Workers in good old Europe have stronger unions than the withering joke the U.S. has.
2) European workers enjoy a terrific safety net which looks like the great wall of china compared to the spider web the U.S. wage slaves have. Never underestimate explosion of creativity in a geek who feels safe for economic future of his family.
When a private corporation attempts to dictate to a sovereign state which policies the state should adopt, there is something terribly wrong with the world.
How many of those patents are legitimate, and not fraudulent of plagiarizing?
"Rampant Fraud Threatens China's Brisk Ascent"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
One of the points the article highlights is that in Chinese culture, blatant cheating and shameless plagiarism is fine. It's just being "smart" to get ahead. Nice culture to force your hard-working population to compete with.
How about a radical idea of treating employees as people, with respect and dignity, and they will treat you likewise in return? I know I'm stepping a little above the topic, as you asked what to do when you do fire people suddenly without a cause. Please bear with me and don't "escort me out" yet. The way employees are treated in the U.S nowadays is despicable. It would be unacceptable just a few decades ago in this very country, and it is still unacceptable in many parts of the world. An executive firing employees without good cause would and should be roughed up good after work to freshen their understanding of "immoral". American society should make it socially unacceptable, with after-work consequences, to fire people without a good cause, regardless of "laws' bought by corporations in the last decades.
You are just covering up the issue. The GOP was caught paying bloggers. This is the issue at hand. When you have "proof" of "Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and the US government" buying bloggers, feel free to make it public. Until then, what we are discussing is the Republican party buying political support online, and nothing else.
Nonsense. Generalizations, also known as "rules", are a cornerstone of human thinking process. At the same time, as you should have known from grade school, rules have "exceptions". These do not invalidate the rule; just enumerate a relatively small number of cases when the rule does not apply.
What free market fundamentalists like you fail you comprehend is that we humans have a relatively short lifespan. Life is too short to wait a decade for the mythical "competition" to maybe sorta improve the airline market. Free marketeers remind me of a religion. Those, too, promise that all wrongs will be fixed a few decades later once your life ends and you are in heaven. Maybe, but I'd rather have them fixed in this life, and soon. For the last 30 years, lunatic free market policies have caused crisis after crisis while making life worse for working people. It's time to dump this discredited, outdated religion for a 21st century pragmatic approach that actually makes life better for those who work, rich scum squealing notwithstanding.
We don't care what it's called. The current order in the U.S. is really fascism, yet no one cares. Using republican-demonized words like socialism and populism doesn't scare anyone.
The law and the constitution you refer to were written by a bunch of self-appointed rich landowners who were not even democratically elected, thus being stacked overwhelmingly in their favor and against the people doing actual work. Shove it. The majority will do as it pleases.
In a human society based on common humanitarian reason instead of unfair, arcane, outdated laws the executives would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
It's a good start. They should also urgently look into widespread H1B fraud and blatant age discrimination in computer industry to name a few.
How about something not only completely useless, but harmful, like bankers?
It's technological progress that results in improved living standards. It has nothing to do with capitalism. Soviet Union improved its living standards tremendously from 50s to 80s. So did many other non-capitalist countries.
By the way, capitalism died in 2008. The U.S. may let its rotting corpse slowly destroy its society entirely, or it may embrace progressive policies like Europe and even lead the way to a better society.
Console gaming does avoid most of the hardware problems of the PC side, and is fine for some kinds of games such as sports. However, it mostly sucks for game types like first person shooters and strategy games. If you are into the latter types, then you don't have much of a choice but a PC.
It's interesting how many Westerners criticize capitalism (rightfully), yet state at the end that they are still pro-capitalism, and that the pitfalls they are complaining about must be a "perverted", "not-true" capitalism. It will probably take a decade or two more of ruthless exploitation, mass unemployment, and shameless corporate cheating and welfare for the folks to begin to comprehend that this is the climax of capitalism, the "me-first", "screw-everybody-else" philosophy. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
This has always puzzled me about lie-bertarians. To a dispassionate eye, the line appears to be so random and convenient only for the small-medium capitalists who incidentally provide the basis for this ideology to begin with. Why is it government function to protect only property, and human rights (which conveniently exclude the rights to basic food, shelter, job, and health care) ? And why the property is so sacred, of all the things a human being needs, such as "true" freedom (not just freedom to die from hunger), good health, or a family?
Except that the work on the same project was done TEN times at TEN TIMES THE COST. Either the client pays for 10 projects itself, or, if the client only pays the winner, then investors take the hit, who pass it to workers and other members of the society in many ways. Ultimately, the cost is paid by the society either way. You would be much better off developing one or two projects under socialism instead.
Yes, socialism has its inefficiencies, but capitalism has its own problems that rival or exceed those of socialism. Just look at the crisis we are living through right now.
Mindless bashing of socialism is pointless.
We don't necessarily want to go there because it would be somewhat ugly for all the countries involved, but it would actually hurt U.S. creditors more than the U.S. They say, "if you owe the banks one thousand dollars, you have a problem; but if you owe the banks one billion dollars, the banks have a problem." The U.S. creditors are sitting on nothing more than a huge pile of paper promises by the U.S. to pay. If U.S. defaults, the major consequences would be a large jump in prices on imports, including oil and electronics. It would hurt the U.S. quite a bit, but it would be nothing compared to what would happen to major creditors' economies. China, Japan, etc. economies would collapse, with widespread civil unrest, wars, and starvation. Europe would also be hurt a lot. And the creditors know this. So no, they would not try to force U.S. to pay a large portion of the debt anytime soon even if U.S. starts slowly winding down purchases of foreign crap.
It would be in the long term interest of all involved parties for U.S. to slowly pay off its debt by gradually re-balancing its economy to manufacture more and to buy less chinese junk.
Competition won't solve this, only strict public REGULATION can. The problem with competition is that it assumes (wrongly) that some players are better than others. However, currently in the U.S. all corporations are about equally evil. Be it Microsoft, Apple, Google, Verison etc., overall they all mistreat their employees, customers, and the public(by not paying their share of taxes). When all market players are equally bad, competition is worthless. You need public regulation.