Maybe most power plants do. But most power plants aren't nuke plants. So when they fail after 50-100 years, they don't nuke a quarter of Japan. Or Europe. Fukushima and Chernobyl did. Damn right they're not smartphones.
I'd pay $6200 annual rent (GBP40K / 10 years) to live in an awesome pad, even if it meant living in Swansea. Though it probably costs a fortune to heat it.
It's a goddamn crime that the list of those supporting this heinous, un-American tyranny is topped with giant corporations. Multinational corporations. Foreign corporations.
These foreign non-people should have absolutely no influence over the laws set by the government of the United States. The legitimate government is by, of and for the people, not the people's property like corporations.
The Constitution does not give the government any power to represent corporations. But even from the beginning the Constitution has needed amendments that spelled out for corrupt government officials the limits to its power that were not already spelled out: the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights shouldn't have been necessary, because the powers it prohibits aren't granted in the original document. But obviously it was necessary; obvious when it was written and passed, and obvious ever since as it must be constantly invoked when government reaches across its bounds. It's clear by now that we need to amend the Constitution to spell out that corporations aren't people. That they don't have rights, that the government can restrict their actions with the existing powers government has.
There is already such an amendment in the works. Closing in on 200,000 people have already signed on supporting it. You should too. If you're a person, anyway. Why suffer being a second class citizen behind corporations that aren't even people?
Any equator, meridian or other line is infinitely thin.
I don't know about any mysterious field there. But Mayans were indeed excellent astronomers and calendarmakers. The ecliptic plane does intersect the galactic equator, and the Mayans reportedly marked those lines and that point, fairly prominently in their astronomy. Many ancient cultures, including all over the Eastern Hemisphere, marked days as special when the Sun rose or set at some point aligned with some other sky object, often marked with a calendarical artifact. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Maya noted the day that the Sun rose at that point along the horizon, even if that day were in the distant past (and/or future; these are cycles, as the Mayans knew).
So is that day 12/21/2012? Or is this latest hooey 100% hooey?
Maybe not entirely off-topic, since this story is from the "mayans-predicted-them-of-course dept." but someone sent me some "Real Mayan 2012" hooey, which said (among the unfalsifiable new-age woo) this possibly falsifiable, possibly astronomical statement:
[Dec. 21, 2012] will be the start of a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator and the Earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy."
At sunrise on December 21, 2012 for the first time in 26,000 years the Sun rises to conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic.
I'd like to debunk this shinola the only way that's conclusive (to me): rejecting the science. I couldn't even find a definition of "the solar meridian", though Google points to pages using it to mean a line from wherever the Sun is in the sky to the observer's zenith, and some other meanings related to a definition of the Greenwich Prime Meridian for defining standard time, and some uses meaning a semicircumpolar North-South line on the Sun itself, none of which seem to apply. So:
1. What is the solar median? 2. Can it cross the galactic equator (as seen from Earth)? Will it on 12/21/2012? 3. When the Sun rises anywhere (as seen from somewhere on Earth) on 12/21/12, will it rise close to the intersection of the galactic equator and the (Earth's) plane of the ecliptic? 4. Will 1 and 2 happen at the same time?
Hippies weren't into necrophilia, incest or pedophilia. They were generally against alcohol and tobacco, and for the legalization of drugs that don't kill anyone. The many alternative suggestions to the capitalism we have include plenty by hippies that are better, along with many others, even if some alternatives are worse. No hippie ever tried to force software or anything else on anyone.
The point I made that you just dismissed is that the post to which I replied said the article is about the person, citing its title, so ad hominems are acceptable. But the article is not about the person, but about why their message was correct. So ad hominems are wrong. As is yours. You might as well say that since Stallman insists on growing out a beard that's certainly not for everyone, he's wrong about software, too. Fallacy.
As for what was correct, it's clear that Stallman's "paranoid" predictions about the abuse of people depending on software were correct. The correctness of his predictions about the value of free/open software in preventing that abuse are hard to decide, because free/open software is the small minority, since people didn't heed his warnings, so we can't know whether we'd have less abuse. We can argue about it, as we're doing, but you can't say it's not a valid argument. Expecially not on the fallacious basis you're trying.
I agree with you, but most word processing users in the 1980s agreed that WordPerfect was better than Word was, and even through the early 1990s. By the time Word for Windows was better than WordPerfect was, the MS desktop monopoly had already shoved WordPerfect into a corner where it had to retain all its legacy features, however bad, because only users who wouldn't change were still resisting the MS monopoly power.
No, it's not about Stallman, the messenger. It's about why the messenger was right. It's about the message, and how that message's prediction has been shown accurate.
Stallman hasn't been "paranoid about everything". He has been scared of the abuse of people by closed software, and his fears now are being proven justified.
His other views, even on child pornography, are irrelevant to that. Because we're not interested in Stallman; we're interested in what he said that was (and is) right. Because he was among the first to say it, was right about it despite widespread ridicule and even condemnation, and what he's right about is important.
RMS is a technohippie, an archetypical one. The hippies were right about everything: Sex Drugs Rock & roll Vietnam, and war in general Nixon, and politicians in general Capitalism (as practiced, not as they lie to us in school about it) Religion, and dogma in general Computers Freedom
If you actually had to ask the Supreme Court, Sun or Netscape about how MS used its monopoly to crush those companies, I might be willing to explain it to you, but you were so obnoxious about it that I won't waste my time talking about it with you. Look it up.
Because unions have a vested interest in the education of their members that employers clearly do not. Employers have failed to do this, and society has failed to do it adequately. Training by employers is of course going to tie labor to a specific employer, while training by unions should give labor the mobility among employers that capital has gained to outcompete labor.
The present roles of unions and employers has been extremely bad for the unions. The lobbying model is a game rigged for employers against unions.
Unions should do whatever they can to improve labor conditions, which includes education. I am not saying that unions should pay for the development of the curriculum; the public and private institutions should pay, out of the cost of tuition and taxes (which should pay for tuition).
Again, look at the UAW: if it had trained its members in automation starting in the 1970s instead of relying on lobbying, its members could have gained a lot more from the growth since then that has been driven by automation, instead of losing to the foreign labor that did it. Offering free education to grow its membership in more productive jobs would have swelled its ranks, rather than see it abandoned and even widely vilified. And an educational partnership with employers could have been a big part of cooperation which could have helped avert the bust the American car corps just went through, which nearly destroyed all union contracts through bankruptcy and did exact major, perhaps crippling, concessions.
The car industry through the 1960s was as high tech and good paying as is the telecom industry today. The education turning point at which the UAW failed to turn in the 1970s is fast approaching the CWA. If the CWA took charge of the trade education it could ensure it steers its members and the industry on a sustainable, growing course. Or it could insist on doing only what US unions have done for generations, and continue doing what US unions have done for generations: steadily die.
Well, it seems we disagree about the certainty that the US will collapse within 20 years, and whether China will have an existential crisis within the next 10-20. We will see.
It's been nice talking with you. A rare pleasure to both agree and disagree on Slashdot without losing the civility, which gave an interesting discussion. Talk to you again sometime.
I expect the grid to simply become too expensive, and possibly sometimes too unreliable, to rely on within the next 20 years, even in the NYC metro area. If it fails completely, that's what the boat is for. By "the grid" I do mean power/water/sewage/telecom, but also just the entire civilization including government services, police, hospitals, etc. The non-utility "grid" stuff would probably stay intact here for longer than most anywhere else.
If and when the grid does actually totally fail, I'll have my boat and my grid-independent tech (and skills). Some of the 6-8 billion people will probably survive the collapse, as our species always has, and I intend to be among them (with my offspring). And if we don't it won't be from failure to try.
China is barely holding its population together with the huge amounts of capital taken from outside, and its integration into our global system. Just the EU recession has pushed some parts of China to the brink, with the continued US consumer recession undermining it too. Expectations of better living are far more widespread in China than fulfillment, and the slacking of growth is stressing those cracks. Now is also before the environmental/health damage from China's growth comes home to roost, which will just get worse. The interdependency on any specific country isn't the issue, but rather the dependency on fully functional (and "open" to Chinese mercantilism) globalism. Nobody has the kind of tech yet that can cope with the majority of Chinese people living the way people now do in its coastal megalopolis, and probably it won't arrive in energy/resource efficiency and reliable scalability until after China's tidal stresses do its system a lot of damage - among the external stresses on it. Really I'm not that optimistic about China's success without the success of the globalism that has made its current status quo, and the continued propping up of it by China confirms that China's own rulers see it more or less that way, too.
It's true, but the other skills you learn apart from the technical skills are important, too. Not just in being a real adult, able to deal with the complexities of work and life, but also in communications skills, longterm planning, self-direction, that are important for the job. It should be optional, but it should be doable without stalling your career. The better interns in a school should be able to get some work that pays even a little, while the free tuition should give them the ability to take part time, low pay work in their trade or outside it. Developing that kind of balance is another place that unions can help, from experience and out of self interest in developing the labor pool rather than merely exploiting it to compete with graduated workers.
I think EU citizenships through countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece (if they stay in the EU) will soon become a lot easier to get, the way they were before the credit bubble. The debt is collapsing there the worst, but the people there have a much longer experience with real collapse, survival and recovery.
I don't know about the real strategic value of learning Chinese, since that sets you up to compete with the huge labor surplus that is the main change globalism has brought to the economy. And from what I've learned dealing with Chinese nationals (labor, management and especially owners), since you're not actually Chinese you will have to be a lot better than any Chinese person with whom you compete. Your status as American, if you have actual competitive work experience, actually probably makes you better than an equivalent Chinese, apart from any possible social network connections you won't have. Though maybe my view of the "American premium" is really the "New York City premium", as that's what I have and what I've seen valued by Chinese nationals.
And of course the whole system can collapse. China's system is probably even more rickety than the US, since there's so many more people all looking for their piece of the pie, and less indoctrinated to trust the system (outside of the urban/factory layer the Communist Party has got people bought into). Which is why actual independence from any grid is my plan, executed in a way that exploits the grid for fun and profit in the most likely case that the grid remains hospitable to me.
True, except that plumbers and electricians aren't trained and certified like that. Only the licensed one; most of the people working for them have no formal training and no certification. Then they do all the work that the licensed professional is supposed to be doing. The license is just a liability control, to revoke if their corner cutting goes wrong enough times.
And their work is extremely sub-optimal. Especially when expansion, upgrade and maintenance of the plumbing or electrical work in needed, or anything unconventional would be better than the default. This is why theory as well as practice are essential to a quality professional.
The same is true of the MBAs running IT projects. Their degree is mostly just indoctrination into a manager class. None of them have project management skills unless forced in a hiring drought to slum as a project manager. None of them have real investment skills beyond either pure market ideology or direct instrument trading experience.
In fact so much of American education has become "talk the talk" training, hazing to indoctrinate into collusion with industry abuses and simple hiring clubs that it's tempting to ignore it as a model for where IT should go. Most of the best IT people I've known have taught themselves whatever they know, and most of the worst had some kind of certification. All this argues for reforming education overall, a tremendous undertaking that the aristocracy is already subverting into more grand theft and down-dumbing.
A good model would redirect the many business subsidies into paying for free public education for anyone passing the entrance exams. A curriculum beyond a 20% of fulltime liberal arts core (to counterbalance the urge to toxic overspecialization) in trades delivered by trade unions (labor), with degree exams delivered by trade associations (owners) or by even higher education institutions (next employers), all vetted and certified by the government. That format would allow internships to integrate well with the education, not as an afterthought that's mostly free labor for the crappiest tasks. And naturally segue into actual hiring.
We're heading there already, without the free public tuition part assured, and without the hand of labor orgs in the curriculum. The bosses are getting to set all the standards, which is as shortsighted and unbalanced as all of society's practices they've seized. Get the labor orgs responsible for quality in their membership, and cooperation with the bosses in producing the new labor generations, and the whole society, with the economy that measures it, running far smoother and more productively.
Every network tech should know (at least 25% of) Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated, just as any structured programmer should know K&R's The C Programming Language. Whether they learn that as part of "computer science" or trade training depends on what they're learning to use the basic (if extensive) knowledge for. The more beyond that they know puts them on the spectrum of tech -> engineer -> scientist. There should be national standard certifications reflecting that knowledge, just like diplomas from highschool, college and grad school. But just as scientists aren't simply "extreme engineers", neither are network engineers necessarily less trained than computer scientists.
And all of them, techs/engineers/scientists need actual work experience to weight and refine their academic training into a useful skillset.
If unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA) taught network engineering skills to members it would make a bigger union and a better workforce. Maybe make one's tuition payable out of one's union dues, with discounts for grades above 50%ile. Trade schools should be run out of the revenue of the trade, not out of the public pocket as a subsidy to that industry. The public should be in the business only of certifying minimum education standards, properly primarily educating applicants through highschool, and stimulating the incoming student body size to ensure strategic industries have a raw labor pool on which to grow and compete.
If the United Autoworkers had opened robotics and engineering schools for members in the 1980s instead of resisting automation, we'd have a better organized, educated and productive workforce, and a stronger domestic industry - and better cars.
If these unions were strong enough and offered better benefits, their membership would grow enough that we could have competing unions instead of the monopoly. Then strikes and other labor negotiations would bottom line at what's actually better for the industry's workforce as a whole, instead of just the members of that union.
You're right, but again "the 1%" is not a statistical definition but a rhetorical one. The people we're talking about are in the region of the 400 richest people (by whatever definition, Forbes' or otherwise) and some depth around them; "the 0.1%" is more accurate but not as effective rhetorically. And indeed even the literal 1% by wages are mostly fully bought into the full oligarchy and its abuses, dependent on them for their income.
I'm hedging myself (and my family) against both collapse and continued success of the 1%. I work in the energy efficiency automation industry. My own home is on track to be net-zero energy within a few years, and a platform for grid independence a few years later. I have access to EU and some other foreign citizenships, and can trade my work for either money or sustenance to anyone with any information infrastructure. Within a dozen years I'll have a seagoing vessel independent of power grids, and probably a barge-deployable house. All of those projects do me very well while the current civilization lurches around its current trend, and if civilization becomes more risk than benefit I can cut the cords.
The 1% is real, even if its definition is necessarily vague. The 1%'s overreach might well strangle its own throat ("the capitalist will sell the rope used to hang him" - Marx), or it might preserve a niche in which I can continue to thrive. It's important to keep the snake clearly in sight, and well in hand when necessary, even if you can use its venom as medicine.
The way I saw it as a Sybase developer at the time was that Microsoft forked Sybase into a version that wasn't as good for the most demanding customers, but was adequate for fitting into the DB tier for most Web apps. Sybase should have known that Microsoft's version would outcompete the original, based on the basic market structure even if not recognizing their own lame marketing power. Sybase gave away the Web market right when it became the market for databases.
However, in the database market, Microsoft wouldn't have been able to outcompete Sybase without the MS business SW monopoly. Consider: did Oracle, with its superior marketing prowess and superior product (and even superior ruthless CEO) kill Sybase? No, because it didn't have the monopoly position to leverage its DB into.
It's not necessarily a value judgment of credit or blame when Microsoft finds an opportunity to crush a competitor, regardless of the means by which it crushes it. But when the means depends on an MS monopoly, that's where MS wins, and without that monopoly to start with, MS nearly always loses.
No, exactly. Gates didn't have leverage, but that's the deal he got. In fact Gates waited until the main IBM negotiators were temporarily off the job (vacation or something), then got that sweetheart deal from their temporary substitutes and closed the deal. He was helped by his father, William H. Gates II, and his mother, who were two of the top corporate lawyers in the country - and by the same lawyer his parents hooked him up with who argued against the monopoly charges before the Supreme Court 20 years later. IBM underestimated Gates, and the PC market, just the way you just did.
As for how are the developer tools, that are sold by the company that sells the OS, suites and database for which the tools are used to develop, extensions of that SW monopoly? Ask the Supreme Court. Ask Sun. Ask Netscape. Ask a MS developer who isn't a surrendered slave to the MS master.
The US solar panel association split a couple of months ago, with US-only companies leaving the original org because its Chinese owned or controlled member corps were preventing the org from getting the US government to oppose China's dumping. The new org has already got the US government working on fighting the dumping.
Dumping happens. This is what it looks like. And this is what it looks like when the US government actually defends the country from foreign competitors attacking us unfairly.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe most power plants do. But most power plants aren't nuke plants. So when they fail after 50-100 years, they don't nuke a quarter of Japan. Or Europe. Fukushima and Chernobyl did. Damn right they're not smartphones.
I'd pay $6200 annual rent (GBP40K / 10 years) to live in an awesome pad, even if it meant living in Swansea. Though it probably costs a fortune to heat it.
It's a goddamn crime that the list of those supporting this heinous, un-American tyranny is topped with giant corporations. Multinational corporations. Foreign corporations.
These foreign non-people should have absolutely no influence over the laws set by the government of the United States. The legitimate government is by, of and for the people, not the people's property like corporations.
The Constitution does not give the government any power to represent corporations. But even from the beginning the Constitution has needed amendments that spelled out for corrupt government officials the limits to its power that were not already spelled out: the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights shouldn't have been necessary, because the powers it prohibits aren't granted in the original document. But obviously it was necessary; obvious when it was written and passed, and obvious ever since as it must be constantly invoked when government reaches across its bounds. It's clear by now that we need to amend the Constitution to spell out that corporations aren't people. That they don't have rights, that the government can restrict their actions with the existing powers government has.
There is already such an amendment in the works. Closing in on 200,000 people have already signed on supporting it. You should too. If you're a person, anyway. Why suffer being a second class citizen behind corporations that aren't even people?
Any equator, meridian or other line is infinitely thin.
I don't know about any mysterious field there. But Mayans were indeed excellent astronomers and calendarmakers. The ecliptic plane does intersect the galactic equator, and the Mayans reportedly marked those lines and that point, fairly prominently in their astronomy. Many ancient cultures, including all over the Eastern Hemisphere, marked days as special when the Sun rose or set at some point aligned with some other sky object, often marked with a calendarical artifact. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Maya noted the day that the Sun rose at that point along the horizon, even if that day were in the distant past (and/or future; these are cycles, as the Mayans knew).
So is that day 12/21/2012? Or is this latest hooey 100% hooey?
Maybe not entirely off-topic, since this story is from the "mayans-predicted-them-of-course dept." but someone sent me some "Real Mayan 2012" hooey, which said (among the unfalsifiable new-age woo) this possibly falsifiable, possibly astronomical statement:
I'd like to debunk this shinola the only way that's conclusive (to me): rejecting the science. I couldn't even find a definition of "the solar meridian", though Google points to pages using it to mean a line from wherever the Sun is in the sky to the observer's zenith, and some other meanings related to a definition of the Greenwich Prime Meridian for defining standard time, and some uses meaning a semicircumpolar North-South line on the Sun itself, none of which seem to apply. So:
1. What is the solar median?
2. Can it cross the galactic equator (as seen from Earth)? Will it on 12/21/2012?
3. When the Sun rises anywhere (as seen from somewhere on Earth) on 12/21/12, will it rise close to the intersection of the galactic equator and the (Earth's) plane of the ecliptic?
4. Will 1 and 2 happen at the same time?
Hippie hygiene isn't causing the superinfections that now kill people every day, and threaten pandemics.
Hippies weren't into necrophilia, incest or pedophilia. They were generally against alcohol and tobacco, and for the legalization of drugs that don't kill anyone. The many alternative suggestions to the capitalism we have include plenty by hippies that are better, along with many others, even if some alternatives are worse. No hippie ever tried to force software or anything else on anyone.
You're a fool.
Overly Critical Guy is overly critical.
The point I made that you just dismissed is that the post to which I replied said the article is about the person, citing its title, so ad hominems are acceptable. But the article is not about the person, but about why their message was correct. So ad hominems are wrong. As is yours. You might as well say that since Stallman insists on growing out a beard that's certainly not for everyone, he's wrong about software, too. Fallacy.
As for what was correct, it's clear that Stallman's "paranoid" predictions about the abuse of people depending on software were correct. The correctness of his predictions about the value of free/open software in preventing that abuse are hard to decide, because free/open software is the small minority, since people didn't heed his warnings, so we can't know whether we'd have less abuse. We can argue about it, as we're doing, but you can't say it's not a valid argument. Expecially not on the fallacious basis you're trying.
I agree with you, but most word processing users in the 1980s agreed that WordPerfect was better than Word was, and even through the early 1990s. By the time Word for Windows was better than WordPerfect was, the MS desktop monopoly had already shoved WordPerfect into a corner where it had to retain all its legacy features, however bad, because only users who wouldn't change were still resisting the MS monopoly power.
No, it's not about Stallman, the messenger. It's about why the messenger was right. It's about the message, and how that message's prediction has been shown accurate.
Stallman hasn't been "paranoid about everything". He has been scared of the abuse of people by closed software, and his fears now are being proven justified.
His other views, even on child pornography, are irrelevant to that. Because we're not interested in Stallman; we're interested in what he said that was (and is) right. Because he was among the first to say it, was right about it despite widespread ridicule and even condemnation, and what he's right about is important.
RMS is a technohippie, an archetypical one. The hippies were right about everything:
Sex
Drugs
Rock & roll
Vietnam, and war in general
Nixon, and politicians in general
Capitalism (as practiced, not as they lie to us in school about it)
Religion, and dogma in general
Computers
Freedom
If you actually had to ask the Supreme Court, Sun or Netscape about how MS used its monopoly to crush those companies, I might be willing to explain it to you, but you were so obnoxious about it that I won't waste my time talking about it with you. Look it up.
Goodbye.
Because unions have a vested interest in the education of their members that employers clearly do not. Employers have failed to do this, and society has failed to do it adequately. Training by employers is of course going to tie labor to a specific employer, while training by unions should give labor the mobility among employers that capital has gained to outcompete labor.
The present roles of unions and employers has been extremely bad for the unions. The lobbying model is a game rigged for employers against unions.
Unions should do whatever they can to improve labor conditions, which includes education. I am not saying that unions should pay for the development of the curriculum; the public and private institutions should pay, out of the cost of tuition and taxes (which should pay for tuition).
Again, look at the UAW: if it had trained its members in automation starting in the 1970s instead of relying on lobbying, its members could have gained a lot more from the growth since then that has been driven by automation, instead of losing to the foreign labor that did it. Offering free education to grow its membership in more productive jobs would have swelled its ranks, rather than see it abandoned and even widely vilified. And an educational partnership with employers could have been a big part of cooperation which could have helped avert the bust the American car corps just went through, which nearly destroyed all union contracts through bankruptcy and did exact major, perhaps crippling, concessions.
The car industry through the 1960s was as high tech and good paying as is the telecom industry today. The education turning point at which the UAW failed to turn in the 1970s is fast approaching the CWA. If the CWA took charge of the trade education it could ensure it steers its members and the industry on a sustainable, growing course. Or it could insist on doing only what US unions have done for generations, and continue doing what US unions have done for generations: steadily die.
Well, it seems we disagree about the certainty that the US will collapse within 20 years, and whether China will have an existential crisis within the next 10-20. We will see.
It's been nice talking with you. A rare pleasure to both agree and disagree on Slashdot without losing the civility, which gave an interesting discussion. Talk to you again sometime.
I expect the grid to simply become too expensive, and possibly sometimes too unreliable, to rely on within the next 20 years, even in the NYC metro area. If it fails completely, that's what the boat is for. By "the grid" I do mean power/water/sewage/telecom, but also just the entire civilization including government services, police, hospitals, etc. The non-utility "grid" stuff would probably stay intact here for longer than most anywhere else.
If and when the grid does actually totally fail, I'll have my boat and my grid-independent tech (and skills). Some of the 6-8 billion people will probably survive the collapse, as our species always has, and I intend to be among them (with my offspring). And if we don't it won't be from failure to try.
China is barely holding its population together with the huge amounts of capital taken from outside, and its integration into our global system. Just the EU recession has pushed some parts of China to the brink, with the continued US consumer recession undermining it too. Expectations of better living are far more widespread in China than fulfillment, and the slacking of growth is stressing those cracks. Now is also before the environmental/health damage from China's growth comes home to roost, which will just get worse. The interdependency on any specific country isn't the issue, but rather the dependency on fully functional (and "open" to Chinese mercantilism) globalism. Nobody has the kind of tech yet that can cope with the majority of Chinese people living the way people now do in its coastal megalopolis, and probably it won't arrive in energy/resource efficiency and reliable scalability until after China's tidal stresses do its system a lot of damage - among the external stresses on it. Really I'm not that optimistic about China's success without the success of the globalism that has made its current status quo, and the continued propping up of it by China confirms that China's own rulers see it more or less that way, too.
It's true, but the other skills you learn apart from the technical skills are important, too. Not just in being a real adult, able to deal with the complexities of work and life, but also in communications skills, longterm planning, self-direction, that are important for the job. It should be optional, but it should be doable without stalling your career. The better interns in a school should be able to get some work that pays even a little, while the free tuition should give them the ability to take part time, low pay work in their trade or outside it. Developing that kind of balance is another place that unions can help, from experience and out of self interest in developing the labor pool rather than merely exploiting it to compete with graduated workers.
None of that is what I said - indeed, the opposite. At least I think so, based on your unintelligible post.
Your post is so illiterate and stupid that I expect you're not good at anything.
I think EU citizenships through countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece (if they stay in the EU) will soon become a lot easier to get, the way they were before the credit bubble. The debt is collapsing there the worst, but the people there have a much longer experience with real collapse, survival and recovery.
I don't know about the real strategic value of learning Chinese, since that sets you up to compete with the huge labor surplus that is the main change globalism has brought to the economy. And from what I've learned dealing with Chinese nationals (labor, management and especially owners), since you're not actually Chinese you will have to be a lot better than any Chinese person with whom you compete. Your status as American, if you have actual competitive work experience, actually probably makes you better than an equivalent Chinese, apart from any possible social network connections you won't have. Though maybe my view of the "American premium" is really the "New York City premium", as that's what I have and what I've seen valued by Chinese nationals.
And of course the whole system can collapse. China's system is probably even more rickety than the US, since there's so many more people all looking for their piece of the pie, and less indoctrinated to trust the system (outside of the urban/factory layer the Communist Party has got people bought into). Which is why actual independence from any grid is my plan, executed in a way that exploits the grid for fun and profit in the most likely case that the grid remains hospitable to me.
True, except that plumbers and electricians aren't trained and certified like that. Only the licensed one; most of the people working for them have no formal training and no certification. Then they do all the work that the licensed professional is supposed to be doing. The license is just a liability control, to revoke if their corner cutting goes wrong enough times.
And their work is extremely sub-optimal. Especially when expansion, upgrade and maintenance of the plumbing or electrical work in needed, or anything unconventional would be better than the default. This is why theory as well as practice are essential to a quality professional.
The same is true of the MBAs running IT projects. Their degree is mostly just indoctrination into a manager class. None of them have project management skills unless forced in a hiring drought to slum as a project manager. None of them have real investment skills beyond either pure market ideology or direct instrument trading experience.
In fact so much of American education has become "talk the talk" training, hazing to indoctrinate into collusion with industry abuses and simple hiring clubs that it's tempting to ignore it as a model for where IT should go. Most of the best IT people I've known have taught themselves whatever they know, and most of the worst had some kind of certification. All this argues for reforming education overall, a tremendous undertaking that the aristocracy is already subverting into more grand theft and down-dumbing.
A good model would redirect the many business subsidies into paying for free public education for anyone passing the entrance exams. A curriculum beyond a 20% of fulltime liberal arts core (to counterbalance the urge to toxic overspecialization) in trades delivered by trade unions (labor), with degree exams delivered by trade associations (owners) or by even higher education institutions (next employers), all vetted and certified by the government. That format would allow internships to integrate well with the education, not as an afterthought that's mostly free labor for the crappiest tasks. And naturally segue into actual hiring.
We're heading there already, without the free public tuition part assured, and without the hand of labor orgs in the curriculum. The bosses are getting to set all the standards, which is as shortsighted and unbalanced as all of society's practices they've seized. Get the labor orgs responsible for quality in their membership, and cooperation with the bosses in producing the new labor generations, and the whole society, with the economy that measures it, running far smoother and more productively.
Every network tech should know (at least 25% of) Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated, just as any structured programmer should know K&R's The C Programming Language. Whether they learn that as part of "computer science" or trade training depends on what they're learning to use the basic (if extensive) knowledge for. The more beyond that they know puts them on the spectrum of tech -> engineer -> scientist. There should be national standard certifications reflecting that knowledge, just like diplomas from highschool, college and grad school. But just as scientists aren't simply "extreme engineers", neither are network engineers necessarily less trained than computer scientists.
And all of them, techs/engineers/scientists need actual work experience to weight and refine their academic training into a useful skillset.
If unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA) taught network engineering skills to members it would make a bigger union and a better workforce. Maybe make one's tuition payable out of one's union dues, with discounts for grades above 50%ile. Trade schools should be run out of the revenue of the trade, not out of the public pocket as a subsidy to that industry. The public should be in the business only of certifying minimum education standards, properly primarily educating applicants through highschool, and stimulating the incoming student body size to ensure strategic industries have a raw labor pool on which to grow and compete.
If the United Autoworkers had opened robotics and engineering schools for members in the 1980s instead of resisting automation, we'd have a better organized, educated and productive workforce, and a stronger domestic industry - and better cars.
If these unions were strong enough and offered better benefits, their membership would grow enough that we could have competing unions instead of the monopoly. Then strikes and other labor negotiations would bottom line at what's actually better for the industry's workforce as a whole, instead of just the members of that union.
You're right, but again "the 1%" is not a statistical definition but a rhetorical one. The people we're talking about are in the region of the 400 richest people (by whatever definition, Forbes' or otherwise) and some depth around them; "the 0.1%" is more accurate but not as effective rhetorically. And indeed even the literal 1% by wages are mostly fully bought into the full oligarchy and its abuses, dependent on them for their income.
I'm hedging myself (and my family) against both collapse and continued success of the 1%. I work in the energy efficiency automation industry. My own home is on track to be net-zero energy within a few years, and a platform for grid independence a few years later. I have access to EU and some other foreign citizenships, and can trade my work for either money or sustenance to anyone with any information infrastructure. Within a dozen years I'll have a seagoing vessel independent of power grids, and probably a barge-deployable house. All of those projects do me very well while the current civilization lurches around its current trend, and if civilization becomes more risk than benefit I can cut the cords.
The 1% is real, even if its definition is necessarily vague. The 1%'s overreach might well strangle its own throat ("the capitalist will sell the rope used to hang him" - Marx), or it might preserve a niche in which I can continue to thrive. It's important to keep the snake clearly in sight, and well in hand when necessary, even if you can use its venom as medicine.
The way I saw it as a Sybase developer at the time was that Microsoft forked Sybase into a version that wasn't as good for the most demanding customers, but was adequate for fitting into the DB tier for most Web apps. Sybase should have known that Microsoft's version would outcompete the original, based on the basic market structure even if not recognizing their own lame marketing power. Sybase gave away the Web market right when it became the market for databases.
However, in the database market, Microsoft wouldn't have been able to outcompete Sybase without the MS business SW monopoly. Consider: did Oracle, with its superior marketing prowess and superior product (and even superior ruthless CEO) kill Sybase? No, because it didn't have the monopoly position to leverage its DB into.
It's not necessarily a value judgment of credit or blame when Microsoft finds an opportunity to crush a competitor, regardless of the means by which it crushes it. But when the means depends on an MS monopoly, that's where MS wins, and without that monopoly to start with, MS nearly always loses.
No, exactly. Gates didn't have leverage, but that's the deal he got. In fact Gates waited until the main IBM negotiators were temporarily off the job (vacation or something), then got that sweetheart deal from their temporary substitutes and closed the deal. He was helped by his father, William H. Gates II, and his mother, who were two of the top corporate lawyers in the country - and by the same lawyer his parents hooked him up with who argued against the monopoly charges before the Supreme Court 20 years later. IBM underestimated Gates, and the PC market, just the way you just did.
As for how are the developer tools, that are sold by the company that sells the OS, suites and database for which the tools are used to develop, extensions of that SW monopoly? Ask the Supreme Court. Ask Sun. Ask Netscape. Ask a MS developer who isn't a surrendered slave to the MS master.
Just this month the WTO upheld a 2009 US anti-dumping tariff on imported Chinese tires.
The US solar panel association split a couple of months ago, with US-only companies leaving the original org because its Chinese owned or controlled member corps were preventing the org from getting the US government to oppose China's dumping. The new org has already got the US government working on fighting the dumping.
Dumping happens. This is what it looks like. And this is what it looks like when the US government actually defends the country from foreign competitors attacking us unfairly.