Their first concern is to not get shot in the head. Teaching kids that they need to obey lawful orders and recognize unlawful ones is the right approach. If your rights are violated you deal with it later, not when a nervous person holding a gun is telling you what to do.
This. Specially for inexperienced teenagers who, for whatever fucksake reasons (biological maturity, society, etc) might (will) lack the social, communication and cognitive skills for de-escalation and negotiation that adults (should/typically) have.
Consent and litigate later, or know how to not consent without getting killed. OTH, if a 200+lbs person in a position of power wants to strangle a 100lbs handcuffed crying teenager on the back of his patrol car, there is nothing that kid can do.
^^^ And I say this because I witnessed it on a park right in front of my house. I was sitting on a bench in front of my house near a tree when a patrol car stopped there (some investigation going on, whatever.) The car parked, the officer, a gorilla of a man, got out of the driver's seat, went to the back and started chocking the shit out of this kid.
He stopped when his partner nodded to him that there were people (me) watching. They took off, God knows where.
I'm not making this shit up, and this was with my house in one of the supposedly nice, upper middle class neighborhoods in South Florida. Just imagine the type of crap that occurs in less affluent neighborhoods.
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
Accelerated, more sophisticated automation didn't by itself led to a shrinking of the middle class. It is not even the primary factor.
Globalization did that. A middle class that was not educationally prepare to move out of what I call "manual/rudimentary" manufacturing, and a national difficulty to operate efficiently, those two played a significant role.
Remember, middle class used to denote blue collar jobs.
But those jobs started to go bye bye quite some time ago. It even preceded 2000's globalization and contemporary automation. The blue-collar middle class built around the auto industry was hurt significantly when it got to compete against Japanese auto makers. Middle class jobs built around the semi conductor industry got severely affected when it could not compete against Taiwanese and Japanese semiconductors.
In the early 90's, way before I got into college I used to work as an electronic welder out in Burbank, CA. Nice gig, but you know what, that type of job went somewhere else. A lot of people back then did not realize the seismic change, and were not equipped to re-adapt.
It used to be the case that Grandpa would work in a good gig, a decent gig, that provided everything he needed, savings, a car and a house. Dad then would work on the same. And then the son. Nothing wrong with that. One generation would pick the trades of the previous one.
That continuity started to break around the late 70's, early 80's, with a full spinal breakage by the late 90's. That generational-job continuity I refer to was possible because there was no industrial competition to speak off. The end of that was inevitable.
The younger generations (some X's and most millennials) are better equipped to make the transition. It's the people within the 35-45 bracket who came out unprepared, those are the ones that are going to be limping for some time, maybe forever.
Automation has very little to do with it because, without globalization, those people displaced by automation would have gone to do something else with little external pressure off international competition.
The country is going to adapt, but a lot of people are going to be limping economically till that happens.
When journalists start to attack the company because the guy at the top is happy that he's getting laid that begins to sound like journalists engaging in personal attacks.
It's all about context. There is a suggested story that is painting Uber's corporate culture as one that engages in sexism, all that embedded in alleged questionable practices. As a result, it is worthy of investigation.
If the guy was just getting laid left and right like Tony Stark but the company is relatively free of controversy (in particular controversy that can be construed as illegal) untangled completely from the guy's personal life, then you have a point.
To me, this type of reaction just affirms that there is something systematically and systemically psycho going on there.
At that point I can see some people deciding to return the favor.
Depend on the type of people. Not every biologically grown-up person acts like a 4th grader.
Now when they describe things the company is actually doing that are anti-consumer then I think they are doing their job. If drivers are actually attacking passengers then of course it should be reported and the company should take action to investigate and discipline the drivers if they are guilty.
> That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life.
The journalists sure don't mind digging into theirs...
Journalists are supposed to report things, and in the case of high-profile cases, behavior within the confines and image of the business that could be construed as problematic, questionable and/or sexist.
Uber could simply choose to file a defamation suit if it has what it needs to prove a defamation took place. Companies, like individuals, can choose how to act according to the validity of their arguments or counter-arguments (or they can act like 4th graders.)
what if the digging reveals that they were getting money from cab companies & taxi driver unions?
or maybe they have close friends/relatives that own/drive taxis?
In that case that is not personal dirt digging, or digging into a person's personal life. The former has very specific parameters that limit the search towards that which is relevant to the issue at hand. The later is a free-for-all McCarthyan fishing expedition that digs up everything, private sexual lives, problems with in-laws, personality flaws, all stuff that has nothing to do with reporting alleged business bad practices.
We have been there before, we know how that worked out. So why people cab be so obtuse and refuse to see the difference?
So?
I am not saying Uber is or is not a bad company.
What I am saying is that the press is not beyond question.
That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life. Dig into journalists' public records, things that could show, say, they are not objective, but on payroll by, say, cab unions or Uber's competitors.
Something relevant and noteworthy to the public. Personal life, in particular fishing for personal life "dirt" as they call it? We already went through Mccarthyism and past ad-hominem practices such as the FBI trying to defame MLK.
Ad-hominems are supposed to be an invalid form of counter-argument, or that's ok when it comes to journalists?
Testing during an interview is not fair to the candidate.
Testing during an interview is the norm with good tech employers.
Rarely do the tests reflect the reality of the job and for some insane reason it's seen as cheating to use the Internet to solve the problem when, in the real world, that's exactly how they should be solving it.
OTH, testing to see if a developer actually knows how to write simple programs without the use of the interweebz is perfectly reasonable. Seeing how so many "developers" flunk to write a semi-complex for loop or flunk at explaining why a SQL cartesian join is typically a very bad idea completely legitimizes (in my eyes) the practice of testing.
Meaning, there is an expectation of being aware of problems that can occur - by accident or stupidity (3rd party or yours) - with any non-trivial setup, including troubleshooting network problems that causes Apache to proxy among several PHP boxes (if you distribute horizontally) or why or database connections get truncated/closed prematurely (damned unknown firewall) or why your system is so slow (until you fire up snoop or something like that and you detect a shit-ton of re-transmitted packages because the NIC on your database server is running full duplex while the NIC on your PHP box is running half-duplex).
Shouldn't the switch rectify that by buffering ?
Yes, but when it does, what does the "dev" do? Would he/she even know where/what to look for? Would he/she even had a notion of something going wrong, a notion good enough with which to ask the appropriate questions to appropriate liaisons?
Or would he/she sit helplessly waiting for a "guru" to do some magic (sometimes forever... I've seen it happen)?
Presumably OP is interviewing for sysadmin positions maintaining LAMP installations, not developing LAMP based services.
Either that or OP is just as clueless as his candidates
One cannot make non-trivial LAMP based service development without having at least an awareness of deployment and installation issues. Hell, that holds for any stack (RoR, JEE,.NET).
The only way that we have found for being able to assess a candidate's suitability for work at our company is to write tests that suit the job, and then ask the candidates to demonstrate their skills. We've had people with all sorts of qualifications relevant to the LAMP architecture not know the basics of regex, sql, bash, etc. Let alone what ARP is.
ARP as in ethernet ip-mac mapping ? How exactly is that relevant to a LAMP job ?
If you do LAMP jobs, chances are you will be doing some of the installation and configuration of infrastructure yourself. Meaning, some sysadmin work will be involved.
Meaning, there is an expectation of being aware of problems that can occur - by accident or stupidity (3rd party or yours) - with any non-trivial setup, including troubleshooting network problems that causes Apache to proxy among several PHP boxes (if you distribute horizontally) or why or database connections get truncated/closed prematurely (damned unknown firewall) or why your system is so slow (until you fire up snoop or something like that and you detect a shit-ton of re-transmitted packages because the NIC on your database server is running full duplex while the NIC on your PHP box is running half-duplex).
Developing is not just writing code. It is deployment. It is testing, and ZOMG, support of the shit we write and deploy.
I for one harbor suspicions of any person that claims web/enterprise development experience (Java,.NET, RoR, PHP, whatever) and yet doesn't know (or at least show some awareness of) the basic protocols that make up the interweebz.
Because if they do, then they are not the type of people one can rely on to make shit work when shit inevitably breaks.
Be very afraid of coding without deployment awareness.
I'm still trying to figure out what my comment about Joan -- white Joan -- had anything to do with Kelly. Yes, I walked on egg shells around Kelly from then on.
It's called solipsism. You can't really negotiate with a solipsistic person since even abstractions that obviously are intended to show them things about others invariably, in their minds, come back to them.
Word of advice, though, from experience in dealing with these types of people. The best defense is to make it clear you are a hard target. By hard I mean, you will defend yourself and make it costly even if they nominally win the fight. No one wants to suffer at best a pyrrhic victory.
"social justice" is based on the extremely faulty assertion that everybody is the same and that absolutely every trait or preference you may have is culturally constructed.
No, social justice is based on the premise that significant institutionalized injustice was committed until very recently whose consequences still linger. How effective (or just) remediation is, that is a related but different subject.
I hope they are working on ANY AND ALL IMPORTANT drills (IN STRICT, OBJECTIVE ORDER OF PRIORITY AND LIKELIHOOD OF EVENT). That's what would have saved lives in 2011.
> This is not $70 millions in non-taxable charities, but an investment on a money machine in the sports/entertainment industry.
Yes, he bought a business, so he'll pay income tax on any income that is generated. If he buys T-shirts for $10 each and sells them for $25 each, that's a $15 profit he'll be taxed on.
If he buys hot dogs for $2 and sells them for $8, that's a $6 profit on which he'll pay taxes.
If he buys a team for a billion dollars and over 15 years he gets his billion back plus $500 million more, that's a $500 million profit he'll pay taxes on.
The billion he apent buying the team is money he ALREADY earned from Microsoft, so he ALREADY paid taxes on it. Of course he doesn't have to pay income taxes on the same money again when spends it on a team. It's INCOME tax, not SPENDING tax. The article is just clickbait for the uninformed and gullible, silently assuming he should have to pay income tax over and over on the same money. How many times he should be taxed on that money the author doesn't say.
Wait, what? $70 million per year for the next 15 years (future tense) is money he already made (past tense)?
A billion over FIFTEEN YEARS. Amounts to about $70 million a year.
Considering that Ballmer is worth north of twenty Billion, we're not actually talking about a huge tax break here.
What we are talking about is an article that combines fifteen years of tax deductions in order to put that magic "B" in the title to get people excited....
We shouldn't need a 'B' to get excited. A billion is a billion whether it gets paid in a year or 15. And $70 million in taxes is $70 million no matter how you cut it. Under what type of cynic logic can this be justified?
This is not $70 millions in non-taxable charities, but an investment on a money machine in the sports/entertainment industry.
That would be fair to say, if we (Americans) were free to emigrate to the countries that H1-Bs are being brought in from. We're not. The markets for labor and capital are both far from free (see 'capital controls' regarding the later).
There is some truth is that H1-B influx puts a damp in job hunting. But, from experience, if a programmer feels constantly threatened by that influx to the point of seeing his salary (or even employment opportunities) nosediving, I would question said's person's skills.
The real good engineers in India either come here already in scholarships or transition very quickly from H1-B to resident status. And these are not the majority. The bulk of H1-B are just average/below average (with a good chunk being just atrocious coders) with very little work experience (most of it limited to web development), facing cultural barriers in communication and delivery of work.
This is not a diss or intended as an insult to them. It is just a function of many things that affect their society (and I suspect that the quality of work will improve over the decades.)
If you (the generic "you") are threatened by that, by the current quality of work presented by offshore/H1-B teams, then you are replaceable and possibly not that great at software/IT. Don't blame them. Blame your skills.
If you know your shit well, you will have no shortage of $$$ and work. That is a fact. Do the type of work that cannot be easily offshored/replaced/commoditized, and you will be fine.
The guys getting 250k a year from Google are basically the SF version of high-end guys making 120-140 a year here in FL. Same take home and everything.
Bingo. This was my #1 reason I forego the idea of relocating from SoFla to the Valley. One thing that I would add is that said programmer in Tampa can buy a *real* house in a decent school district as a head-of -household with with a stay-at-home spouse.
In San Francisco, forget it. The equivalent programmer could only afford a whole in a wall, or have to have his/her spouse work in the same field just to be able to buy a *real* house in a good school district.
Denver, Dallas or Seattle are much better options to relocate, money-wise.
That's how criminal negligence already works, when's the last time a corporation was tried in court for murder?
It shouldn't. The individuals along the chain of command and supervision that committed the murder should be tried in civil court, and the corporation should be tried for damages in civil court if the corporation is found to have fostered a system that permitted the crime to occur in the first place.
I'm talking about enforcing contracts. My company orders a million dollars of widgets from Acme and they're never delivered. Who's responsible?
Acme. You do not need corporate personhood to sue Acme.
I don't want to sue an individual,
If the "corporation" is a single-person entity that is not incorporated for limited liability, that's your option (and one would ask why you would order a million dollar of widgets from said commercial entity.)
I'm never seeing my money back if that's the only option available.
Any intelligent business entity would never entered into a contract under such conditions. Also, contracts spell out responsibilities (who pays what and how much when defaulting a contract), in a document enforced by the law.
And under some conditions, the individual can be sued in a criminal court of law if he/she is found to have not acted in good faith.
And if I did, some poor employee for Acme is going to lose their second car and probably have to sell their house.
If the company is a single-person entity, yeah, pretty much. If it is a LLC, then you go after the corp's asset. And if it is a corporation, you go after the corporation's assets.
You do not need corporate personhood. It is a stupid American legal aberration. How the hell do you think developed countries like Japan or Germany that do not have such a notion handle violation of contracts or trials against corporations?
Corporate personhood refers to the ability to hold a corporation liable for debts and crimes.
We were able to do that without that legal shenanigans (just like other countries do).
Are you suggesting I should be able to sue chimps but not corporations?
1. False dichotomy.
2. A better suggestion would be to sue individuals on whose behalf, by virtue of negligence or criminality, a corporation became liable for debts and crimes (specially crimes.)
But hey, you can ignore #2 and embrace #1 if that's your thing.
You have no idea how this stuff works. There's not a grey area - classified material is stored on air-gapped networks, and no, any machine which has ever been on the internet is not connecting to that network.
It is slashdot. Everyone here is an expert at bashing crap they don't know:/
Slashdot Mirror
Their first concern is to not get shot in the head. Teaching kids that they need to obey lawful orders and recognize unlawful ones is the right approach. If your rights are violated you deal with it later, not when a nervous person holding a gun is telling you what to do.
This. Specially for inexperienced teenagers who, for whatever fucksake reasons (biological maturity, society, etc) might (will) lack the social, communication and cognitive skills for de-escalation and negotiation that adults (should/typically) have.
Consent and litigate later, or know how to not consent without getting killed. OTH, if a 200+lbs person in a position of power wants to strangle a 100lbs handcuffed crying teenager on the back of his patrol car, there is nothing that kid can do.
^^^ And I say this because I witnessed it on a park right in front of my house. I was sitting on a bench in front of my house near a tree when a patrol car stopped there (some investigation going on, whatever.) The car parked, the officer, a gorilla of a man, got out of the driver's seat, went to the back and started chocking the shit out of this kid.
He stopped when his partner nodded to him that there were people (me) watching. They took off, God knows where.
I'm not making this shit up, and this was with my house in one of the supposedly nice, upper middle class neighborhoods in South Florida. Just imagine the type of crap that occurs in less affluent neighborhoods.
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
Accelerated, more sophisticated automation didn't by itself led to a shrinking of the middle class. It is not even the primary factor. Globalization did that. A middle class that was not educationally prepare to move out of what I call "manual/rudimentary" manufacturing, and a national difficulty to operate efficiently, those two played a significant role.
Remember, middle class used to denote blue collar jobs.
But those jobs started to go bye bye quite some time ago. It even preceded 2000's globalization and contemporary automation. The blue-collar middle class built around the auto industry was hurt significantly when it got to compete against Japanese auto makers. Middle class jobs built around the semi conductor industry got severely affected when it could not compete against Taiwanese and Japanese semiconductors.
In the early 90's, way before I got into college I used to work as an electronic welder out in Burbank, CA. Nice gig, but you know what, that type of job went somewhere else. A lot of people back then did not realize the seismic change, and were not equipped to re-adapt.
It used to be the case that Grandpa would work in a good gig, a decent gig, that provided everything he needed, savings, a car and a house. Dad then would work on the same. And then the son. Nothing wrong with that. One generation would pick the trades of the previous one.
That continuity started to break around the late 70's, early 80's, with a full spinal breakage by the late 90's. That generational-job continuity I refer to was possible because there was no industrial competition to speak off. The end of that was inevitable.
The younger generations (some X's and most millennials) are better equipped to make the transition. It's the people within the 35-45 bracket who came out unprepared, those are the ones that are going to be limping for some time, maybe forever.
Automation has very little to do with it because, without globalization, those people displaced by automation would have gone to do something else with little external pressure off international competition.
The country is going to adapt, but a lot of people are going to be limping economically till that happens.
When journalists start to attack the company because the guy at the top is happy that he's getting laid that begins to sound like journalists engaging in personal attacks.
It's all about context. There is a suggested story that is painting Uber's corporate culture as one that engages in sexism, all that embedded in alleged questionable practices. As a result, it is worthy of investigation.
If the guy was just getting laid left and right like Tony Stark but the company is relatively free of controversy (in particular controversy that can be construed as illegal) untangled completely from the guy's personal life, then you have a point.
To me, this type of reaction just affirms that there is something systematically and systemically psycho going on there.
At that point I can see some people deciding to return the favor.
Depend on the type of people. Not every biologically grown-up person acts like a 4th grader.
Now when they describe things the company is actually doing that are anti-consumer then I think they are doing their job. If drivers are actually attacking passengers then of course it should be reported and the company should take action to investigate and discipline the drivers if they are guilty.
No argument here, I agree with your paragraph.
> That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life.
The journalists sure don't mind digging into theirs...
Journalists are supposed to report things, and in the case of high-profile cases, behavior within the confines and image of the business that could be construed as problematic, questionable and/or sexist.
Uber could simply choose to file a defamation suit if it has what it needs to prove a defamation took place. Companies, like individuals, can choose how to act according to the validity of their arguments or counter-arguments (or they can act like 4th graders.)
what if the digging reveals that they were getting money from cab companies & taxi driver unions? or maybe they have close friends/relatives that own/drive taxis?
In that case that is not personal dirt digging, or digging into a person's personal life. The former has very specific parameters that limit the search towards that which is relevant to the issue at hand. The later is a free-for-all McCarthyan fishing expedition that digs up everything, private sexual lives, problems with in-laws, personality flaws, all stuff that has nothing to do with reporting alleged business bad practices.
We have been there before, we know how that worked out. So why people cab be so obtuse and refuse to see the difference?
So? I am not saying Uber is or is not a bad company. What I am saying is that the press is not beyond question.
That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life. Dig into journalists' public records, things that could show, say, they are not objective, but on payroll by, say, cab unions or Uber's competitors.
Something relevant and noteworthy to the public. Personal life, in particular fishing for personal life "dirt" as they call it? We already went through Mccarthyism and past ad-hominem practices such as the FBI trying to defame MLK.
Ad-hominems are supposed to be an invalid form of counter-argument, or that's ok when it comes to journalists?
Yes, but when it does,
Re-quoting myself. I meant to say "Yes, but when it does not".
Testing during an interview is not fair to the candidate.
Testing during an interview is the norm with good tech employers.
Rarely do the tests reflect the reality of the job and for some insane reason it's seen as cheating to use the Internet to solve the problem when, in the real world, that's exactly how they should be solving it.
OTH, testing to see if a developer actually knows how to write simple programs without the use of the interweebz is perfectly reasonable. Seeing how so many "developers" flunk to write a semi-complex for loop or flunk at explaining why a SQL cartesian join is typically a very bad idea completely legitimizes (in my eyes) the practice of testing.
Shouldn't the switch rectify that by buffering ?
Yes, but when it does, what does the "dev" do? Would he/she even know where/what to look for? Would he/she even had a notion of something going wrong, a notion good enough with which to ask the appropriate questions to appropriate liaisons?
Or would he/she sit helplessly waiting for a "guru" to do some magic (sometimes forever... I've seen it happen)?
Presumably OP is interviewing for sysadmin positions maintaining LAMP installations, not developing LAMP based services. Either that or OP is just as clueless as his candidates
One cannot make non-trivial LAMP based service development without having at least an awareness of deployment and installation issues. Hell, that holds for any stack (RoR, JEE, .NET).
ARP as in ethernet ip-mac mapping ? How exactly is that relevant to a LAMP job ?
If you do LAMP jobs, chances are you will be doing some of the installation and configuration of infrastructure yourself. Meaning, some sysadmin work will be involved.
Meaning, there is an expectation of being aware of problems that can occur - by accident or stupidity (3rd party or yours) - with any non-trivial setup, including troubleshooting network problems that causes Apache to proxy among several PHP boxes (if you distribute horizontally) or why or database connections get truncated/closed prematurely (damned unknown firewall) or why your system is so slow (until you fire up snoop or something like that and you detect a shit-ton of re-transmitted packages because the NIC on your database server is running full duplex while the NIC on your PHP box is running half-duplex).
Developing is not just writing code. It is deployment. It is testing, and ZOMG, support of the shit we write and deploy.
I for one harbor suspicions of any person that claims web/enterprise development experience (Java, .NET, RoR, PHP, whatever) and yet doesn't know (or at least show some awareness of) the basic protocols that make up the interweebz.
Because if they do, then they are not the type of people one can rely on to make shit work when shit inevitably breaks.
Be very afraid of coding without deployment awareness.
AFAIK both Bill Gates and Steve Balmer don't control Microsoft anymore.
This is a new Microsoft with a new CEO, so we should at least give them the benefit of the doubt.
You are asking too much from the emo-hordes that inhabit the /. realms.
It's called solipsism. You can't really negotiate with a solipsistic person since even abstractions that obviously are intended to show them things about others invariably, in their minds, come back to them.
Word of advice, though, from experience in dealing with these types of people. The best defense is to make it clear you are a hard target. By hard I mean, you will defend yourself and make it costly even if they nominally win the fight. No one wants to suffer at best a pyrrhic victory.
Best advice ever.
"social justice" is based on the extremely faulty assertion that everybody is the same and that absolutely every trait or preference you may have is culturally constructed.
No, social justice is based on the premise that significant institutionalized injustice was committed until very recently whose consequences still linger. How effective (or just) remediation is, that is a related but different subject.
"While that's true"
*** citation needed
Diversity of things that matter, may be important, but diversity of eye, hair, and skin color may be unimportant.
They are not. We have recent history to prove otherwise.
I hope they are working on ANY AND ALL IMPORTANT drills (IN STRICT, OBJECTIVE ORDER OF PRIORITY AND LIKELIHOOD OF EVENT). That's what would have saved lives in 2011.
There. Fixed that for you.
Please remind me how their is no corruption in your country again.
^^^ The textbook definition of an ad hominem.
> This is not $70 millions in non-taxable charities, but an investment on a money machine in the sports/entertainment industry.
Yes, he bought a business, so he'll pay income tax on any income that is generated. If he buys T-shirts for $10 each and sells them for $25 each, that's a $15 profit he'll be taxed on.
If he buys hot dogs for $2 and sells them for $8, that's a $6 profit on which he'll pay taxes.
If he buys a team for a billion dollars and over 15 years he gets his billion back plus $500 million more, that's a $500 million profit he'll pay taxes on.
The billion he apent buying the team is money he ALREADY earned from Microsoft, so he ALREADY paid taxes on it. Of course he doesn't have to pay income taxes on the same money again when spends it on a team. It's INCOME tax, not SPENDING tax. The article is just clickbait for the uninformed and gullible, silently assuming he should have to pay income tax over and over on the same money. How many times he should be taxed on that money the author doesn't say.
Wait, what? $70 million per year for the next 15 years (future tense) is money he already made (past tense)?
*sighs*
A billion over FIFTEEN YEARS. Amounts to about $70 million a year.
Considering that Ballmer is worth north of twenty Billion, we're not actually talking about a huge tax break here.
What we are talking about is an article that combines fifteen years of tax deductions in order to put that magic "B" in the title to get people excited....
We shouldn't need a 'B' to get excited. A billion is a billion whether it gets paid in a year or 15. And $70 million in taxes is $70 million no matter how you cut it. Under what type of cynic logic can this be justified?
This is not $70 millions in non-taxable charities, but an investment on a money machine in the sports/entertainment industry.
That would be fair to say, if we (Americans) were free to emigrate to the countries that H1-Bs are being brought in from. We're not. The markets for labor and capital are both far from free (see 'capital controls' regarding the later).
There is some truth is that H1-B influx puts a damp in job hunting. But, from experience, if a programmer feels constantly threatened by that influx to the point of seeing his salary (or even employment opportunities) nosediving, I would question said's person's skills.
The real good engineers in India either come here already in scholarships or transition very quickly from H1-B to resident status. And these are not the majority. The bulk of H1-B are just average/below average (with a good chunk being just atrocious coders) with very little work experience (most of it limited to web development), facing cultural barriers in communication and delivery of work.
This is not a diss or intended as an insult to them. It is just a function of many things that affect their society (and I suspect that the quality of work will improve over the decades.)
If you (the generic "you") are threatened by that, by the current quality of work presented by offshore/H1-B teams, then you are replaceable and possibly not that great at software/IT. Don't blame them. Blame your skills.
If you know your shit well, you will have no shortage of $$$ and work. That is a fact. Do the type of work that cannot be easily offshored/replaced/commoditized, and you will be fine.
The guys getting 250k a year from Google are basically the SF version of high-end guys making 120-140 a year here in FL. Same take home and everything.
Bingo. This was my #1 reason I forego the idea of relocating from SoFla to the Valley. One thing that I would add is that said programmer in Tampa can buy a *real* house in a decent school district as a head-of -household with with a stay-at-home spouse. In San Francisco, forget it. The equivalent programmer could only afford a whole in a wall, or have to have his/her spouse work in the same field just to be able to buy a *real* house in a good school district.
Denver, Dallas or Seattle are much better options to relocate, money-wise.
Plenty of mentally and physically handicapped people hold down jobs of varying levels of sophistication.
On the other hand, if you can't fend for yourself then you should have fewer rights and probably should be treated as a child.
Barring voting and access to booze, smokes and pr0n, I didn't know that children had less rights than adults. Who knew?
That's how criminal negligence already works, when's the last time a corporation was tried in court for murder?
It shouldn't. The individuals along the chain of command and supervision that committed the murder should be tried in civil court, and the corporation should be tried for damages in civil court if the corporation is found to have fostered a system that permitted the crime to occur in the first place.
I'm talking about enforcing contracts. My company orders a million dollars of widgets from Acme and they're never delivered. Who's responsible?
Acme. You do not need corporate personhood to sue Acme.
I don't want to sue an individual,
If the "corporation" is a single-person entity that is not incorporated for limited liability, that's your option (and one would ask why you would order a million dollar of widgets from said commercial entity.)
I'm never seeing my money back if that's the only option available.
Any intelligent business entity would never entered into a contract under such conditions. Also, contracts spell out responsibilities (who pays what and how much when defaulting a contract), in a document enforced by the law.
And under some conditions, the individual can be sued in a criminal court of law if he/she is found to have not acted in good faith.
And if I did, some poor employee for Acme is going to lose their second car and probably have to sell their house.
If the company is a single-person entity, yeah, pretty much. If it is a LLC, then you go after the corp's asset. And if it is a corporation, you go after the corporation's assets.
You do not need corporate personhood. It is a stupid American legal aberration. How the hell do you think developed countries like Japan or Germany that do not have such a notion handle violation of contracts or trials against corporations?
Corporate personhood refers to the ability to hold a corporation liable for debts and crimes.
We were able to do that without that legal shenanigans (just like other countries do).
Are you suggesting I should be able to sue chimps but not corporations?
1. False dichotomy.
2. A better suggestion would be to sue individuals on whose behalf, by virtue of negligence or criminality, a corporation became liable for debts and crimes (specially crimes.)
But hey, you can ignore #2 and embrace #1 if that's your thing.
You have no idea how this stuff works. There's not a grey area - classified material is stored on air-gapped networks, and no, any machine which has ever been on the internet is not connecting to that network.
It is slashdot. Everyone here is an expert at bashing crap they don't know :/