I think he was claiming that the income in question wasn't really really widening as a gap.
All of the numbers under discussion are well under the top 1%, and are, in fact, barely pushing top 10%.
From my perspective being able to get into the top 10% of wage earners with 30 years experience, or 25 and a masters or some luck etc. is pretty reasonable. Where the US especially seems to be having problems is the people who make 350K+ per year are growing wealth much faster than everyone else. Now you can certainly get to that pay bracket as a computer scientist or software engineer, but that would be rare.
This industry is so volatile and capricious that it's impossible to know what's going to be worth while and what isn't
True. But there are some crazy old guys who don't believe in using the interent, and that building your website to support mobile is a waste.
You can viably be and older person in management or a technical area and do fine. What you can't do is decide that all this 'innovation' is really bad for the industry and bury your head in the sand. Being wrong about the next big thing is different than believing that there should be no next big thing. Being in academia we have a lot of the guys who believe in using pine mail, solaris 8, opposing the existence of the internet and so on, because to them progress is the enemy of their understanding. That's a bad place to be intellectually.
Tax revenue as a percent of GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Germany 40%, US 27.
Government spending as a percent of GDP (includes previous chart sort of) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
Germany 43. US 39.
Tax rates in the current economic climate don't mean much. To balance all the US governments (and sub entities) books you'd need to collect revenue at the same rate as the germans, which would increase taxes by 44%. The Germans to cover all spending would need to increase their taxes by 7.5%. And in the end your total government spendings would differ by 10%.
And then any assets they do have are taken as they are forced into bankruptcy, and then the government is left footing the bill. Because the government is insuring these visits there is a layer of socialized medicine happening, except that the hospitals and governments then fight over how much money should be paid and so on.
The thing is, if you're poor in the US, or old, you get medicare or medicaid which are both, on the scale of things decent enough. It's the people who are not quite poor and not quite old, or not fully employed or that have to rely on an insurance company actually paying that are screwed. It's a weird system.
The tradeoff is that you have better insurance. Lose your job? Still have healthcare. Vacation? Guaranteed more than you'll ever get in the US, and if you don't take it your boss will make you. In the US if you take all your vacation you can be looking at finding a new job with a lot of employers.
If you're relatively low skill (waiter waitress type job) you can get paid a lot more in europe than the US. The downside is that paying for restaurants can be a lot more expensive than the US.
On average the US is better off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_per_capita_personal_income) in terms of disposable income. But a lot of that wealth is concentrated towards people who are doing well. If you can be in the top 1% it's better to be an american than a german. if you're in the bottom 20 or 30%, german rather than american. Everyone in between those points is more of a lifestyle choice. Some people would prefer 5 weeks vacation and are happy taking trains to travel, some people prefer the freedom of their own car and working more.
Ya it seems like it's in thousands. Per hour figures would be crazy high. It would be pretty rare for an under 25 starting developer to be making 140k a year.
I pay 7k in tuition as a domestic student. Foreign students pay 20k. And that's in canada.
You might be thinking of postdoctoral fellows, they aren't really students, they're researchers, but they're not permanent researchers (it's more of a travel around and learn stuff phase of academic development).
I know a LOT of grad students in the US etc. And none of them get free tuition. You do get paid enough money that will hopefully cover your expenses and leave you enough to not starve to death on if you're domestic in some places, although we have a lot of US nationals looking at our programmes because they end up with less debt being foreign students here than getting MSc's or PhD's in comp sci in the US. But foreign students only get enough money to get free tuition if they get major scholarships or if their home country is footing the bill (which in the case of chinese nationals happens a lot).
This was the chancellor or something along those lines' house. It might be the doctor didn't think was worth 1.4 million but when he heard 850 he changed his tune.
As a grad student... you're forgetting one important point
Grad student still have to pay tuition. Which far exceeds their TA pay and research stipend usually. They also have to have lifestyles here, which, combined with tuition, far exceed their TA pay.
Where I am (in canada) foreign tuition is about 20k. Combined funding with general (coursework average) based scholarships might be 20k. So you still need to live for 4 years. Because that funding is not technically guaranteed you have to show you have something like 150k.
Obviously some schools have the budgets to not have that situation, but then they're looking for the best of the best, and if some dude from india is more likely to produce results than you are then so much the better for good results.
You can actually buy relatively inexpensive devices (smart pens or smart paper) to accomplish this if you don't want a tablet laptop, but yes, I'm in a similar boat, although tablets didn't exist when I was an undergrad.
If tablets are made as toys for rich kids they aren't going to have value in the classroom. True, you could take a tablet or a mobile phone type device and make it into a useful learning aid, but by itself they aren't necessarily, and if the accessories and tools added to it really make it into a device for you to sit on your couch with, well guess what, that's not an in classroom device.
I think if you look at surface, from the limited preview I've seen, MS is going the route of a slate form factor with a novelty keyboard. That's a laptop in a different box, and it's thinking about a 'tablet' as a serious content creation rather than just content consumption device.
In that sense the summary doesn't 'get it'. Surface isn't a tablet. It's a laptop in a tablet form factor with a novelty keyboard. Bill gates poo poo'd slates (ipad), but MS never really made those. They promoted convertible tablets, which is a clunky implementation of surface.
And also in that sense, I think you and everyone else are in agreement. By itself an iPad isn't a learning device for most people. We can disagree (or simply not really be sure) about what exactly you need to do to an iPad to make it into a learning device though. If the people who make them continue to use them as they are, then they aren't going to be anything more than toys or a custom software job on a toy. If you take a slate device and put a keyboard on it is it really a 'tablet' or a 'notebook'? Isn't the distinction just getting wrapped up in competing companies terminology?
If they were regular employees of a company they'd take part of the summer off and highschoolers would come in and replace them for the small amount of time they're available.
Because they're illegal, and have no benefits and no holiday time they work, or they starve. But that work needs to be done the other 8-10 months of the year that highschool and university students are supposed to be in school.
By virtue of getting US education they can get immigration much more easily, but they are in fact, paying customers. Many of them (these days the ones from china and india) see far more opportunity in their home countries than in the US or Canada, but they view their education systems as having either insufficient capacity or as being corrupt, both of which are true.
BBC is is what you want an independent academically styled institution to be. The truth will out so to speak.
The Cameron and Harper governments are both not fond of the BBC or CBC news arms respectively, because as arms length organizations interested in facts gets in the way of their narratives. But of course that happens to every government to some degree. When you give people free speech and tenure they'll say things you don't like. The BBC over the years has made the case very that they are interested in reporting facts, and the public on the whole, including the public outside the UK generally recognize that.
In the particular hot spots of the world right now Xinhua and Al Jazeera and Russian state news agencies have special access in that the people in question don't want to make enemies of China/Russia or the arab people. They're already enemies of the UK so shooting BBC reporters wouldn't be much of an added burden for them.
The 'programming' arms of BBC and CBC, that bid for olympics and TV shows and so on are probably legitimately not needed at a public level anymore. There was a time when you wanted to ensure quality programming was available to anyone on the cheapest TV and Radio options available, but I think the time and mechanism for that have moved on, at least from how they're doing things now.
The issue would be if, for example, Steve jobs secret LLC bought the house for 1.3 million and then re-sold it to the doctor who performed his surgery for 850k and that was significantly different from market rates.
From the looks of it they bought and sold for 850k on a property appraised before the 2008 crash at 1.3-1.4 mill.
depends on whether or not he sold the home at market rates or reasonably close thereto.
Just because it's a mansion doesn't mean it's actually worth a lot. We just had a friend of the family die who owned a property with 3 buildings on it, where similar properties down the street were going in the 2-2.5 million range, the one in question got just under 500k. Because as it turns out, no one had updated the electrical system since the switchover from 25 to 60 Hz power, and 75 years of bats living in ceilings doesn't do buildings any favours. Who knew?
If you read the TFA's (and god are there a lot of them) the house was, pre 2008, appraised at between 1.3 and 1.4 million. And was the mansion for the university chancellor. Jobs bought it for 850k. Which, considering memphis has seen year over year price drops of easily double digits wouldn't be a huge shock. (http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Tennessee/Memphis-heat_map/). Also keep in mind that the Steve jobs LLC probably paid cash.
From TFA, Eason paid 850K, which is the same as the LLC paid, I think.
So what I would read into this is that housing prices for Million plus dollar homes in memphis crashed by 40% from 2008 to 2009, or at least expensive house prices crashed, and then there was the specific house in question, which, having been a chancellors mansion for the university might have only a limited clientèle of people who would actually want it. (Location maybe? I've never been to TN let alone memphis so the address means nothing to me).
So sure, Steve probably got himself a deal from the government who were and are desperate for money on a house that wasn't going up in value any time soon. Whether or not it was actually an unfair deal is much harder to say. When housing prices are falling expect to get less than you were asking, and less than you appraised for.
It's possible microsoft, having been in business a while, isn't as starved for technical people as it is for people who can explain what all the technical people just did. Making a product doesn't do you any good if you can't communicate what that product does, and how it would be useful.
Or they changed job requirements part way through and are still interested in you for a related position but not the specific job they were looking for before.
Whether it was the Israelis, Americans, both, or including Canada/France/UK/Germany/AUS/NZ/JAPAN is a legitimate question. But this isn't a legal proceeding, and the precise culpability of any particular government or branch thereof isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand.
By themselves conventions aren't going to actually prevent anything. They're only useful in a situation after the fact where you can say 'well you agreed to this, and then didn't follow it' or for a higher tier of government to prevent a lower from misbehaving if it's so inclined (so the president commanding the CIA to stop torturing sort of thing).
I think the big difference with the internet and computers in general is that the whole private sector is going to have a vested interest in treating all hacking attempts as hostile as time goes forward. We can see after stuxnet and flame that security companies are viewing this as just another sort of hack to harden against. Right now it's rare enough the security companies and microsoft are pretty bad at stopping government organized hacks. But that will have to change, or else they won't have any sales outside the US.
My point was anyone walking into a store speaking Korean you could demand they prove they are not from the peoples republic of Korea as nationals of said entity are forbidden from sales. Being a refugee from North Korea would still mean you are prohibited from buying an iPad as you are still a national of that country.
Speaking farsi by itself doesn't prevent you from buying an iPad. Being an Iranian national does.
You aren't allowed to sell to Iranian nationals or to anyone who will give it to an iranian national. If they're speaking farsi there's very good odds they're Iranian.
Also, EVERY company that does business within a country is obliged to comply with it's laws. Rules prohibit apple from selling iPads to Iranian nationals or to anyone who would transfer the product to an iranian national or re-export it to Iran, they are responsible for complying with said rules. Or else.
Strictly speaking it should be happening at anyone who sells electronics.
That is what the law says. That no one else is enforcing it on video doesn't mean they don't have it in their agreement and won't refuse to sell to you.
But computing cluster guys might be quite content with a proprietary driver that gets the job done, where the open source community isn't pleased with this solution.
Although having been in the GPU computing business relatively recently. You do actually want regular driver updates, or at least did at one point, since you want to take advantage of language features and performance improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was claiming that the income in question wasn't really really widening as a gap.
All of the numbers under discussion are well under the top 1%, and are, in fact, barely pushing top 10%.
From my perspective being able to get into the top 10% of wage earners with 30 years experience, or 25 and a masters or some luck etc. is pretty reasonable. Where the US especially seems to be having problems is the people who make 350K+ per year are growing wealth much faster than everyone else. Now you can certainly get to that pay bracket as a computer scientist or software engineer, but that would be rare.
This industry is so volatile and capricious that it's impossible to know what's going to be worth while and what isn't
True. But there are some crazy old guys who don't believe in using the interent, and that building your website to support mobile is a waste.
You can viably be and older person in management or a technical area and do fine. What you can't do is decide that all this 'innovation' is really bad for the industry and bury your head in the sand. Being wrong about the next big thing is different than believing that there should be no next big thing. Being in academia we have a lot of the guys who believe in using pine mail, solaris 8, opposing the existence of the internet and so on, because to them progress is the enemy of their understanding. That's a bad place to be intellectually.
Tax revenue as a percent of GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Germany 40%, US 27.
Government spending as a percent of GDP (includes previous chart sort of)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
Germany 43. US 39.
Tax rates in the current economic climate don't mean much. To balance all the US governments (and sub entities) books you'd need to collect revenue at the same rate as the germans, which would increase taxes by 44%. The Germans to cover all spending would need to increase their taxes by 7.5%. And in the end your total government spendings would differ by 10%.
And then any assets they do have are taken as they are forced into bankruptcy, and then the government is left footing the bill. Because the government is insuring these visits there is a layer of socialized medicine happening, except that the hospitals and governments then fight over how much money should be paid and so on.
The thing is, if you're poor in the US, or old, you get medicare or medicaid which are both, on the scale of things decent enough. It's the people who are not quite poor and not quite old, or not fully employed or that have to rely on an insurance company actually paying that are screwed. It's a weird system.
The tradeoff is that you have better insurance. Lose your job? Still have healthcare. Vacation? Guaranteed more than you'll ever get in the US, and if you don't take it your boss will make you. In the US if you take all your vacation you can be looking at finding a new job with a lot of employers.
If you're relatively low skill (waiter waitress type job) you can get paid a lot more in europe than the US. The downside is that paying for restaurants can be a lot more expensive than the US.
On average the US is better off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_per_capita_personal_income) in terms of disposable income. But a lot of that wealth is concentrated towards people who are doing well. If you can be in the top 1% it's better to be an american than a german. if you're in the bottom 20 or 30%, german rather than american. Everyone in between those points is more of a lifestyle choice. Some people would prefer 5 weeks vacation and are happy taking trains to travel, some people prefer the freedom of their own car and working more.
Ya it seems like it's in thousands. Per hour figures would be crazy high. It would be pretty rare for an under 25 starting developer to be making 140k a year.
Like hell we do.
I pay 7k in tuition as a domestic student. Foreign students pay 20k. And that's in canada.
You might be thinking of postdoctoral fellows, they aren't really students, they're researchers, but they're not permanent researchers (it's more of a travel around and learn stuff phase of academic development).
I know a LOT of grad students in the US etc. And none of them get free tuition. You do get paid enough money that will hopefully cover your expenses and leave you enough to not starve to death on if you're domestic in some places, although we have a lot of US nationals looking at our programmes because they end up with less debt being foreign students here than getting MSc's or PhD's in comp sci in the US. But foreign students only get enough money to get free tuition if they get major scholarships or if their home country is footing the bill (which in the case of chinese nationals happens a lot).
That's what it seems like happened.
This was the chancellor or something along those lines' house. It might be the doctor didn't think was worth 1.4 million but when he heard 850 he changed his tune.
That's more of a university level problem than a grade school one.
In grade school you're trying to teach kids to read and do math, and that sort of thing.
As a grad student... you're forgetting one important point
Grad student still have to pay tuition. Which far exceeds their TA pay and research stipend usually. They also have to have lifestyles here, which, combined with tuition, far exceed their TA pay.
Where I am (in canada) foreign tuition is about 20k. Combined funding with general (coursework average) based scholarships might be 20k. So you still need to live for 4 years. Because that funding is not technically guaranteed you have to show you have something like 150k.
Obviously some schools have the budgets to not have that situation, but then they're looking for the best of the best, and if some dude from india is more likely to produce results than you are then so much the better for good results.
You can actually buy relatively inexpensive devices (smart pens or smart paper) to accomplish this if you don't want a tablet laptop, but yes, I'm in a similar boat, although tablets didn't exist when I was an undergrad.
Well it depends.
If tablets are made as toys for rich kids they aren't going to have value in the classroom. True, you could take a tablet or a mobile phone type device and make it into a useful learning aid, but by itself they aren't necessarily, and if the accessories and tools added to it really make it into a device for you to sit on your couch with, well guess what, that's not an in classroom device.
I think if you look at surface, from the limited preview I've seen, MS is going the route of a slate form factor with a novelty keyboard. That's a laptop in a different box, and it's thinking about a 'tablet' as a serious content creation rather than just content consumption device.
In that sense the summary doesn't 'get it'. Surface isn't a tablet. It's a laptop in a tablet form factor with a novelty keyboard. Bill gates poo poo'd slates (ipad), but MS never really made those. They promoted convertible tablets, which is a clunky implementation of surface.
And also in that sense, I think you and everyone else are in agreement. By itself an iPad isn't a learning device for most people. We can disagree (or simply not really be sure) about what exactly you need to do to an iPad to make it into a learning device though. If the people who make them continue to use them as they are, then they aren't going to be anything more than toys or a custom software job on a toy. If you take a slate device and put a keyboard on it is it really a 'tablet' or a 'notebook'? Isn't the distinction just getting wrapped up in competing companies terminology?
If they were regular employees of a company they'd take part of the summer off and highschoolers would come in and replace them for the small amount of time they're available.
Because they're illegal, and have no benefits and no holiday time they work, or they starve. But that work needs to be done the other 8-10 months of the year that highschool and university students are supposed to be in school.
Students aren't immigrants.
They're paying customers.
The article confuses the two.
By virtue of getting US education they can get immigration much more easily, but they are in fact, paying customers. Many of them (these days the ones from china and india) see far more opportunity in their home countries than in the US or Canada, but they view their education systems as having either insufficient capacity or as being corrupt, both of which are true.
BBC is is what you want an independent academically styled institution to be. The truth will out so to speak.
The Cameron and Harper governments are both not fond of the BBC or CBC news arms respectively, because as arms length organizations interested in facts gets in the way of their narratives. But of course that happens to every government to some degree. When you give people free speech and tenure they'll say things you don't like. The BBC over the years has made the case very that they are interested in reporting facts, and the public on the whole, including the public outside the UK generally recognize that.
In the particular hot spots of the world right now Xinhua and Al Jazeera and Russian state news agencies have special access in that the people in question don't want to make enemies of China/Russia or the arab people. They're already enemies of the UK so shooting BBC reporters wouldn't be much of an added burden for them.
The 'programming' arms of BBC and CBC, that bid for olympics and TV shows and so on are probably legitimately not needed at a public level anymore. There was a time when you wanted to ensure quality programming was available to anyone on the cheapest TV and Radio options available, but I think the time and mechanism for that have moved on, at least from how they're doing things now.
The issue would be if, for example, Steve jobs secret LLC bought the house for 1.3 million and then re-sold it to the doctor who performed his surgery for 850k and that was significantly different from market rates.
From the looks of it they bought and sold for 850k on a property appraised before the 2008 crash at 1.3-1.4 mill.
depends on whether or not he sold the home at market rates or reasonably close thereto.
Just because it's a mansion doesn't mean it's actually worth a lot. We just had a friend of the family die who owned a property with 3 buildings on it, where similar properties down the street were going in the 2-2.5 million range, the one in question got just under 500k. Because as it turns out, no one had updated the electrical system since the switchover from 25 to 60 Hz power, and 75 years of bats living in ceilings doesn't do buildings any favours. Who knew?
If you read the TFA's (and god are there a lot of them) the house was, pre 2008, appraised at between 1.3 and 1.4 million. And was the mansion for the university chancellor. Jobs bought it for 850k. Which, considering memphis has seen year over year price drops of easily double digits wouldn't be a huge shock. (http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Tennessee/Memphis-heat_map/). Also keep in mind that the Steve jobs LLC probably paid cash.
From TFA, Eason paid 850K, which is the same as the LLC paid, I think.
So what I would read into this is that housing prices for Million plus dollar homes in memphis crashed by 40% from 2008 to 2009, or at least expensive house prices crashed, and then there was the specific house in question, which, having been a chancellors mansion for the university might have only a limited clientèle of people who would actually want it. (Location maybe? I've never been to TN let alone memphis so the address means nothing to me).
So sure, Steve probably got himself a deal from the government who were and are desperate for money on a house that wasn't going up in value any time soon. Whether or not it was actually an unfair deal is much harder to say. When housing prices are falling expect to get less than you were asking, and less than you appraised for.
It's possible microsoft, having been in business a while, isn't as starved for technical people as it is for people who can explain what all the technical people just did. Making a product doesn't do you any good if you can't communicate what that product does, and how it would be useful.
Or they changed job requirements part way through and are still interested in you for a related position but not the specific job they were looking for before.
when would this require reasonable doubt?
Whether it was the Israelis, Americans, both, or including Canada/France/UK/Germany/AUS/NZ/JAPAN is a legitimate question. But this isn't a legal proceeding, and the precise culpability of any particular government or branch thereof isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand.
By themselves conventions aren't going to actually prevent anything. They're only useful in a situation after the fact where you can say 'well you agreed to this, and then didn't follow it' or for a higher tier of government to prevent a lower from misbehaving if it's so inclined (so the president commanding the CIA to stop torturing sort of thing).
I think the big difference with the internet and computers in general is that the whole private sector is going to have a vested interest in treating all hacking attempts as hostile as time goes forward. We can see after stuxnet and flame that security companies are viewing this as just another sort of hack to harden against. Right now it's rare enough the security companies and microsoft are pretty bad at stopping government organized hacks. But that will have to change, or else they won't have any sales outside the US.
My point was anyone walking into a store speaking Korean you could demand they prove they are not from the peoples republic of Korea as nationals of said entity are forbidden from sales. Being a refugee from North Korea would still mean you are prohibited from buying an iPad as you are still a national of that country.
Speaking farsi by itself doesn't prevent you from buying an iPad. Being an Iranian national does.
You aren't allowed to sell to Iranian nationals or to anyone who will give it to an iranian national. If they're speaking farsi there's very good odds they're Iranian.
Also, EVERY company that does business within a country is obliged to comply with it's laws. Rules prohibit apple from selling iPads to Iranian nationals or to anyone who would transfer the product to an iranian national or re-export it to Iran, they are responsible for complying with said rules. Or else.
Strictly speaking it should be happening at anyone who sells electronics.
That is what the law says. That no one else is enforcing it on video doesn't mean they don't have it in their agreement and won't refuse to sell to you.
Yep.
But computing cluster guys might be quite content with a proprietary driver that gets the job done, where the open source community isn't pleased with this solution.
Although having been in the GPU computing business relatively recently. You do actually want regular driver updates, or at least did at one point, since you want to take advantage of language features and performance improvements.