No, he didn't make it all in the dot-com boom, if that's what you're implying. This guy is incredibly conservative with his money. He's just smart -- he made solid investments.
And *you* still don't get it - this isn't just about me, or where I live or what I do.
Actually, it is -- all of your evidence is anecdotal. Because things suck for you, then it must suck for everyone. Well, got news for you -- it DOESN'T suck for everyone. In fact, it sucks a helleva lot less today than it did in previous generations. You just have this rosy colored view of 50 years ago that never existed. People considered television a luxury! People didn't buy books, they went to the library. And people saved for a damn long time to be able to afford a house. Vacations were driving to see Aunt Marge in Iowa.
when in fact the economic environment has changed *radically*.
Indeed. We have more mobility, more communication, more opportunity, more education, more nearly everything. Ironically, we also have far more whining. You're miserable because you have unrealistic expectations of things that are supposed to be handed to you.
I have a friend. Dude is about 42-43, works as a parts export manager at Honda. Dunno what he makes, but probably, eh, $60-70K. He is a millionaire -- from nothing. How did he do it? HE SAVED. He lived very modestly. He invested it. He has a wife and kids, but he still lives relatively modestly. You would never suspect he has that much money.
So did he steal the money? Did his ill-gotten gains come from the backs of the poor?
University Heights/Hillcrest is a nice area, but it is not luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. It's definitely middle/working class property.
You still don't get it. If it costs that much to live there, it doesn't matter what your general evaluation of the area is -- it's by definition luxury. I don't care if the place has rats.
San Diego property values are waaay overpriced for what you get.
What you "get" is to live in one of the nicest areas in the world.
You have *no* idea, you're fucking clueless. Call me spoiled? I've sacrificed a lot. I've paid my dues, and got basically nothing, so go to hell.
Hey, welcome to life. Sometimes it sucks, and things don't pay off right away. But sheesh, take some responsibility for your own life.
I shouldn't have to leave town when I'm an experienced professional who just wants to earn a decent living!
You know, I think I should be able to live in Brentwood or Beverly Hills or Eastside Manhattan on $30K/year. Shouldn't I be able to live when I just want to earn a decent living?
The answer, of course, is N-O. Don't cry to me that you can't afford to live there. Yes, the answer is MOVE. Previous generations have moved plenty of times, because they knew they weren't owed anything. Times change -- adapt or perish. Most areas of San Diego are freaking expensive.
Move, get roommates, save your money. Maybe you can afford to move back someday.
Ugh, bad move. You spent a few paragraphs doing a decent analytical description of how wages are set, then you get down to unions and start using a word like "deserve."
Well, I'm using "deserve" to mean "fair market value", which is all anyone "deserves".:)
Of course, this will vary because it is often hard to calculate how much revenue a person will bring in
Thank you for refuting your own point for me.:)
It's just "often hard", it's "almost always impossible" to calculate the revenue value of a worker. The exception would be people like sales people, where you can tie their salary directly to performance. But in most other things, it doesn't work that way. How much revenue does an accountant bring in? How much revenue does the guy who designs the rivet pattern for an airplane at Boeing bring in?
You simply can't calculate worth that way. The only way to do it is to roughly estimate someone's experience and value, and compare it to what other's with roughly equivalent experience and value make. So if I have a competent Java engineer with 10 years of experience that I'm paying $70,000, and I notice that the most others with that experience are being paid $50,000, then I can draw a conclusion that the engineer is costing more than he/she has to.
Really? Do you really think anybody would hesitate to use murder to eliminate a competitor?
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor? This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
"No big business?" History proves you wrong, over and over. How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM? Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
*Some* of it does, but a lot of it gets invested in ventures that *lose* money,
Losing ventures are a sign of a healthy economy -- it means people are taking risks.
A lot of it is tied up in assets and real estate that are essentially Golden Mattresses.
Assets that need maintenance. I recall in the 80s they instituted a Luxury Tax on yaughts, etc. Guess what happened? The people punished weren't the rich -- it was the people who worked on yaughts! Wood crafters, upholsterers, mechanics, etc. The lesson is that the rich don't hire the rich to maintain their assets.
I earn $30,000 a year, which is a reasonable salary but it doesn't go far in San Diego. I don't live a luxurious lifestyle, I have a modest 1BR apartment and I still can't afford a car, let alone a family. I'm sinking in debt. The simple truth is that salaries have not risen anywhere near in proportion to the cost of living.
Dude, you live in freaking San Diego, and if you're sinking in debt on $2000/month, then you're living in one of the nicer areas. What do you expect? You ARE living a luxurious lifestyle. Do you think you should have the right to live anywhere you want?
That's what I'm talking about -- you're SPOILED. The previous generation didn't expect to live in areas of luxury, they lived in middle-class areas and saved their money.
Not that Southern California real estate isn't expensive -- it is, in a lot of cases (I know, I live here). But if you can't afford it, don't live here.
The system we have now is designed to funnel the profits into the hands of a few people
Where do you think the money goes? Into mattresses? No -- it goes into investment, which creates more jobs.
professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
The world you think used to exist never existed. The reason people need two incomes now is because they SPEND MORE MONEY. It is entirely possible to live on one income, if you don't live luxuriously. The last generation simply accepted living on fewer luxuries.
True- but the question isn't what is currently true, but is what is currently true JUSTICE? I say it isn't- and the fact that this is true is proof that the higher ups are nothing but a bunch of crooks.
That's like saying "True, gravity is the law NOW, but I say that it shouldn't be!" Supply and demand isn't something artificially imposed on society.
If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains. And NOTHING can be done to stop them- because they've already bought the politicians, lawyers, and judges.
Dude, put down the Chomsky, go outside, and breathe the air. We don't have mass murder of entrepreneurs going on.
The fact is that IT companies have made millions and billions off of the work of their employees. IT employees have only been handed a small fraction of that money.
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is. Guess what? If the janitor stops taking out the trash, eventually the company stops making money. Are the janitors worth a billion dollars a year? No -- because they're paid based on the value of the work they do. They are easily replaceable.
Same for engineers. You are paid based on how unique your work is. If your work can be easily replaced by another engineer, you're low paid. If it is sufficiently unique, then you are higher paid. Supply and demand, man. Supply and demand.
Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you. Would you rather have a 20% more pay temporarily, but then no job at all when it's outsourced, or would you rather have more stability, just at a market wage?
I suggest you find out a little bit more about your hero Newton and what a closed minded arrogant wanker he actually was.
Newton was kind of a nut.:) The greatest genius who ever lived, but also a nut. My favorite quote about Newton was (paraphrase): "Alchemy and religion were his true passions, and are by far what he spent the most time on. Inventing Physics along with a large swath of Mathematics was what he did on the side for laughs."
We're making more fake paper money than we have real money (like gold and such) to back it up with.
Er, time to come out of the 19th century.:) "Money" is an incredibly complex concept that I'm not going to pretend to fully understand (there's a first for Slashdot), but the fact that it's not "backed" by a hard asset is a feature, not a bug. Tying it to a something like gold puts your economy at the whims of miners and people who stockpile gold.
Currency is an extremely carefully controlled thing. Why do you think the Fed is independent of the government? It's so the government can't start printing money whenever they want to. Currency is, in fact, backed by the US Economy, the total of all assets, and the banking system, and the amount of currency is balanced to all that.
Money (and value of any kind) is just an "idea" and a "virtual object". Since you're so far above these "foolish" idea that abstract things have any meaning, I'm sure you won't mind giving me all your money.
Your customers will let you know what they really want that your competitors have, and anything else isn't worth looking at.
That's a good recipe for mediocrity, for a number of reasons:
1) Customers are terrible at knowing what they want. They know the problem they want to solve, but don't necessarily know how to solve it.
2) Customers are not designers.
3) Customers will assume that what they're familiar with (i.e., your competition) is automatically the best way to do something.
I designed a medical system back in the day that went on to become be be considered by far the best system out there. What was my secret? I ignored what the customers said they wanted, and gave them what they needed. Not to say you totally ignore your customers, but you listen to their problems, not necessarily their solutions.
They already sell Linux on their servers, because enough customers want it that it makes sense. People want OS X, very few want Linux. If that ever changes, then Dell would offer desktop Linux.
I recall having this conversation with someone in another country about how the US's tax collection works (local/state/federal), and she didn't understand why everything wasn't federal. People abroad (and a lot of people here) don't realize that the decentralized system is what makes America's economy strong. It encourages competition among the states, and keeps them in check. Don't like the tax policy in one state? Move to another state -- and people and businesses do. It also allows experimentation among states. Apply this same argument to the city level as well.
People are also less apt to rip off the local government, because they see it as directly affecting themselves. Ripping off the federal (or even state) government feels a lot more anonymous.
Unfortunately, the US steadily goes in the direction of more central control. -sigh-
Of course, the atomic bomb is responsible for saving more lives than any other thing in history. Or do you think the lack of a World War III is just a coincidence?
The Bomb is directly responsible for Europe cleaning up its act.
Most definitely. I live on my nice hill, looking down upon the dirty, ugly metro sprawl, filled with wannabe "cool people" who are actually pathetic soulless followers chasing the latest fashion fad (e.g., goth look, peircing, tats, coffee shops, underground music, etc), who wouldn't know culture if it came up and ripped out their tongue barbell.
Because he saw what he perceived as a problem, the decline of San Francisco nightlife(*), and he did something about it. True, he's sufficiently wealthy that he had the power to do it, but there are a lot of people out there who gained sudden wealth, did nothing noteworthy with it, and slid into history unnoticed.
Dude, did you just say that he didn't like the nightlife, so opened up a nightclub, and that qualifies as doing something "noteworthy" with his money? Look at those freaking pictures! And you seriously think that history is going to "notice" him for this?
However, I now have your signature on BOTH documents. I now make sure the company IT system "forget" the first document and I've successfully screwed you.
Er, only if you're stupid enough not to keep a copy of a document that you sign.
Is if Jobs was given CEO title of Intel/Apple and a buttload of control. Anything less than that, there is no way Jobs gives up power. Jobs is a control freak -- yeah, like he's going to hand over the keys to Apple and say to Intel, "Have fun with my personality-based cult!"
Slashdot Mirror
No, he didn't make it all in the dot-com boom, if that's what you're implying. This guy is incredibly conservative with his money. He's just smart -- he made solid investments.
Actually, it is -- all of your evidence is anecdotal. Because things suck for you, then it must suck for everyone. Well, got news for you -- it DOESN'T suck for everyone. In fact, it sucks a helleva lot less today than it did in previous generations. You just have this rosy colored view of 50 years ago that never existed. People considered television a luxury! People didn't buy books, they went to the library. And people saved for a damn long time to be able to afford a house. Vacations were driving to see Aunt Marge in Iowa.
when in fact the economic environment has changed *radically*.
Indeed. We have more mobility, more communication, more opportunity, more education, more nearly everything. Ironically, we also have far more whining. You're miserable because you have unrealistic expectations of things that are supposed to be handed to you.
I have a friend. Dude is about 42-43, works as a parts export manager at Honda. Dunno what he makes, but probably, eh, $60-70K. He is a millionaire -- from nothing. How did he do it? HE SAVED. He lived very modestly. He invested it. He has a wife and kids, but he still lives relatively modestly. You would never suspect he has that much money.
So did he steal the money? Did his ill-gotten gains come from the backs of the poor?
You still don't get it. If it costs that much to live there, it doesn't matter what your general evaluation of the area is -- it's by definition luxury. I don't care if the place has rats.
San Diego property values are waaay overpriced for what you get.
What you "get" is to live in one of the nicest areas in the world.
You have *no* idea, you're fucking clueless. Call me spoiled? I've sacrificed a lot. I've paid my dues, and got basically nothing, so go to hell.
Hey, welcome to life. Sometimes it sucks, and things don't pay off right away. But sheesh, take some responsibility for your own life.
I shouldn't have to leave town when I'm an experienced professional who just wants to earn a decent living!
You know, I think I should be able to live in Brentwood or Beverly Hills or Eastside Manhattan on $30K/year. Shouldn't I be able to live when I just want to earn a decent living?
The answer, of course, is N-O. Don't cry to me that you can't afford to live there. Yes, the answer is MOVE. Previous generations have moved plenty of times, because they knew they weren't owed anything. Times change -- adapt or perish. Most areas of San Diego are freaking expensive.
Move, get roommates, save your money. Maybe you can afford to move back someday.
Well, I'm using "deserve" to mean "fair market value", which is all anyone "deserves". :)
Thank you for refuting your own point for me. :)
It's just "often hard", it's "almost always impossible" to calculate the revenue value of a worker. The exception would be people like sales people, where you can tie their salary directly to performance. But in most other things, it doesn't work that way. How much revenue does an accountant bring in? How much revenue does the guy who designs the rivet pattern for an airplane at Boeing bring in?
You simply can't calculate worth that way. The only way to do it is to roughly estimate someone's experience and value, and compare it to what other's with roughly equivalent experience and value make. So if I have a competent Java engineer with 10 years of experience that I'm paying $70,000, and I notice that the most others with that experience are being paid $50,000, then I can draw a conclusion that the engineer is costing more than he/she has to.
Thank you. I knew it was wrong, but was too lazy to figure out the right spelling. :)
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor? This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
"No big business?" History proves you wrong, over and over. How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM? Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
Losing ventures are a sign of a healthy economy -- it means people are taking risks.
A lot of it is tied up in assets and real estate that are essentially Golden Mattresses.
Assets that need maintenance. I recall in the 80s they instituted a Luxury Tax on yaughts, etc. Guess what happened? The people punished weren't the rich -- it was the people who worked on yaughts! Wood crafters, upholsterers, mechanics, etc. The lesson is that the rich don't hire the rich to maintain their assets.
I earn $30,000 a year, which is a reasonable salary but it doesn't go far in San Diego. I don't live a luxurious lifestyle, I have a modest 1BR apartment and I still can't afford a car, let alone a family. I'm sinking in debt. The simple truth is that salaries have not risen anywhere near in proportion to the cost of living.
Dude, you live in freaking San Diego, and if you're sinking in debt on $2000/month, then you're living in one of the nicer areas. What do you expect? You ARE living a luxurious lifestyle. Do you think you should have the right to live anywhere you want?
That's what I'm talking about -- you're SPOILED. The previous generation didn't expect to live in areas of luxury, they lived in middle-class areas and saved their money.
Not that Southern California real estate isn't expensive -- it is, in a lot of cases (I know, I live here). But if you can't afford it, don't live here.
Where do you think the money goes? Into mattresses? No -- it goes into investment, which creates more jobs. professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
The world you think used to exist never existed. The reason people need two incomes now is because they SPEND MORE MONEY. It is entirely possible to live on one income, if you don't live luxuriously. The last generation simply accepted living on fewer luxuries.
That's like saying "True, gravity is the law NOW, but I say that it shouldn't be!" Supply and demand isn't something artificially imposed on society.
If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains. And NOTHING can be done to stop them- because they've already bought the politicians, lawyers, and judges.
Dude, put down the Chomsky, go outside, and breathe the air. We don't have mass murder of entrepreneurs going on.
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is. Guess what? If the janitor stops taking out the trash, eventually the company stops making money. Are the janitors worth a billion dollars a year? No -- because they're paid based on the value of the work they do. They are easily replaceable.
Same for engineers. You are paid based on how unique your work is. If your work can be easily replaced by another engineer, you're low paid. If it is sufficiently unique, then you are higher paid. Supply and demand, man. Supply and demand.
Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you. Would you rather have a 20% more pay temporarily, but then no job at all when it's outsourced, or would you rather have more stability, just at a market wage?
Europe is choosing "no job" every day.
Newton was kind of a nut. :) The greatest genius who ever lived, but also a nut. My favorite quote about Newton was (paraphrase): "Alchemy and religion were his true passions, and are by far what he spent the most time on. Inventing Physics along with a large swath of Mathematics was what he did on the side for laughs."
Er, time to come out of the 19th century. :) "Money" is an incredibly complex concept that I'm not going to pretend to fully understand (there's a first for Slashdot), but the fact that it's not "backed" by a hard asset is a feature, not a bug. Tying it to a something like gold puts your economy at the whims of miners and people who stockpile gold.
Currency is an extremely carefully controlled thing. Why do you think the Fed is independent of the government? It's so the government can't start printing money whenever they want to. Currency is, in fact, backed by the US Economy, the total of all assets, and the banking system, and the amount of currency is balanced to all that.
Money (and value of any kind) is just an "idea" and a "virtual object". Since you're so far above these "foolish" idea that abstract things have any meaning, I'm sure you won't mind giving me all your money.
That's a good recipe for mediocrity, for a number of reasons:
1) Customers are terrible at knowing what they want. They know the problem they want to solve, but don't necessarily know how to solve it.
2) Customers are not designers.
3) Customers will assume that what they're familiar with (i.e., your competition) is automatically the best way to do something.
I designed a medical system back in the day that went on to become be be considered by far the best system out there. What was my secret? I ignored what the customers said they wanted, and gave them what they needed. Not to say you totally ignore your customers, but you listen to their problems, not necessarily their solutions.
They already sell Linux on their servers, because enough customers want it that it makes sense. People want OS X, very few want Linux. If that ever changes, then Dell would offer desktop Linux.
Sound like that describes lot of European policy in a nutshell. :)
I recall having this conversation with someone in another country about how the US's tax collection works (local/state/federal), and she didn't understand why everything wasn't federal. People abroad (and a lot of people here) don't realize that the decentralized system is what makes America's economy strong. It encourages competition among the states, and keeps them in check. Don't like the tax policy in one state? Move to another state -- and people and businesses do. It also allows experimentation among states. Apply this same argument to the city level as well.
People are also less apt to rip off the local government, because they see it as directly affecting themselves. Ripping off the federal (or even state) government feels a lot more anonymous.
Unfortunately, the US steadily goes in the direction of more central control. -sigh-
The Bomb is directly responsible for Europe cleaning up its act.
Tell that to Syd Barrett.
Most definitely. I live on my nice hill, looking down upon the dirty, ugly metro sprawl, filled with wannabe "cool people" who are actually pathetic soulless followers chasing the latest fashion fad (e.g., goth look, peircing, tats, coffee shops, underground music, etc), who wouldn't know culture if it came up and ripped out their tongue barbell.
I bet you're under 30, aren't you?
Dude, did you just say that he didn't like the nightlife, so opened up a nightclub, and that qualifies as doing something "noteworthy" with his money? Look at those freaking pictures! And you seriously think that history is going to "notice" him for this?
-sigh- The decline of civilization continues.
WTF is the "right to expression"?? Did it escape your notice that this is a private web site, not a government one?
You have the right to do whatever the hell the owners of the web site let you do.
Er, only if you're stupid enough not to keep a copy of a document that you sign.
Is if Jobs was given CEO title of Intel/Apple and a buttload of control. Anything less than that, there is no way Jobs gives up power. Jobs is a control freak -- yeah, like he's going to hand over the keys to Apple and say to Intel, "Have fun with my personality-based cult!"