27 Democratic senators have co-sponsored the bill, along with 43 Republicans. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1693/cosponsors?pageSort=alphaByParty) It passed the House by a vote of 388-25. (14 Republican no votes and 11 Democratic no votes). Even if President Trump vetoes the bill, the margins in the House and Senate are sufficient to override his veto and pass the bill into law.
This seems like a bipartisan effort to me. Isn't that what we always say we want from our politicians?
I think you have misinterpreted the Quarterly profit chart. I believe that it is quarterly profit, before tax, at an annualized rate, rather than profit for just that quarter.
Unless you think the effective tax rate on US corporations is already over 75% of profits, the explanation is that the quarterly profit chart is annualized. That would imply an effective tax rate of 15%, which seems much more like the expected numbers.
In any event, the amount of additional profit that can be confiscated is less than $2T per year, which works out to less than $6000/yr for every resident of the United States.
A national ID card does not seem to be a sufficient condition to make a country a totalitarian state. State Senator Moore's statement may be true (most totalitarian regimes may require a national ID card). That does not mean that all countries that require a national ID card are totalitarian.
The social security card acts as a national ID card in the US. You are not required to have it, but you must have one to be able to work legally, or perform any number of mundane activities, such as open a bank account or get credit. It is a weak form of national ID card, since it contains no information that can be used to verify that the holder is the person named on the card. According to press reports I have read, forgeries are easy to obtain.
Lets see... 10,000 employees, on average, costing the corp ~$200k each... that's... $20 billion a year... in salaries/benefits/office space/etc. Are they even making that much? Are they paying their workers with ``profits'' from stock sales?
10,000 employees at $200k each is $2 billion a year, not $20 billion a year. Google is making enough to cover those costs even if they double the number of employees and do not increase revenue at all. You can look at a summary of their revenue, and their expenses as a portion of revenue here: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/061108/goog10-q.html
The best way to find out what you should be making is to get some job offers from other employers. If you are underpaid, then you will probably not have too much difficulty getting a better offer. This will also give you the opportunity to negotiate, without fear, with your present employer.
On the other hand, if you are better-paid than average, it will be hard to find a better paying job.
One of the best bosses I ever had told me (among other people), "If you don't think you are being paid enough, look for another job that will pay you what you think you are worth. You will soon find out if you are right." I eventually took his advice, got another offer, and my employer countered.
And don't be shy about asking prospective employers for what you think you are worth. They won't hesitate to tell you if your expectations are out of line. If they say "OK" too quickly, you know you set your price too low.
I will assume that the audience for the design documents is other programmers who have not worked on the project since its inception. With that in mind, the most useful design documents are:
1. Short. Hundreds of pages of detailed design are useless without context. Short documents can and should provide context and pointers to other documents (or code) that will explain the details. If the document is more than about six pages long, it will be ignored by most programmers.
2. One of many. It is obvious that you cannot describe a complex system in six pages. Try to write many design documents that are short. The documents can be a hierarchy. There should be a top level document, that refers to the individual elements that make up the system. Each element can be described in its own document. Each element's subelements can be described in their own documents, and so on, down to the lowest level that it is interesting to document.
3. Describe major functions and interfaces. The document should tell what the system (element or subelement) does, and where the reader can learn more about the elements that implement the functions and interfaces.
4. Describe things that don't change much. One of the problems (as noted by other posters) with most design documents is that they are not kept up-to-date. The solution is to write documents about things that don't change much, such as the overall system design and interfaces. And if the overall system design or interfaces do change, then you can usually persuade people to update the documents.
In my view, good software design documents provide context and pointers to the authoritative documentation. Most programmers (myself included) do not trust any documentation that is too detailed, since it is usually wrong.
It seems to me that the most likely problem with this system will be that the cost of operating it will exceed the cost of operating a car. They cite a cost of $0.38/passenger mile. My car costs:
That's $0.08/mile less than their cost. And that leaves out the fact that my marginal cost to transport other people is zero, where this system will presumably charge extra for each person.
The other problem is it looks like the bandwidth (people/minute along a route) is low. The pictures show a single track. I doubt that their pods move faster than a car. So you are limited to the carrying capacity of a single lane. At peak times, there will be a substantial queuing delay as you either wait for a pod, or wait for the pod to enter the track.
If you want to replace cars, you have to either save the traveller time or money or provide more convenience. Except in very densely populated areas, it is hard to beat the car in any one of those categories. For that reason, mass transit (in the US) rarely succeeds unless it is supported by government subsidies, so that the system can compete on cost.
Your post was thoughtful and informative. You might also want to look at the administrative costs for the school districts themselves. The state and federal DoE are just conduits for money.
Following the link you provided, I added up the administrative salary costs for LA Unified. Out of a budget of $5.9B (which is $8100/student), about $550M was for administrative personel (supervisors, superintendents, administrators, and clerical workers). This is 9% of the district's budget, but excludes the cost of benefits. Although that data is not broken out as nicely, it probably adds another 3% (benefits are listed as about 30% of all salaries). That's 12% for administrative personel, and that does not include the maintenance costs for buildings to house the administrators (after all, not all of them work in the schools).
For comparison, my oldest son went to an unsubsidized private school. Four years ago, the (high school) tuition was $4000/year. The quality of education was by no means the best, but it was comparable to some of the better LAUSD schools. They paid the teachers less and had fewer administrators. They did not cherry-pick students, but they did get to kick out troublemakers.
My youngest son goes to an LAUSD school. The teachers take vacation during the school year (something that I never saw at my oldest son's school), and one day each week they let the kids out an hour early so the teachers have time for professional development. Abuse of sick time is so rampant that LAUSD has a program that pays teachers a bonus if _they_ have good attendance. According to the link you provided, the average teacher salary at LAUSD is $53000/yr. Teacher pay seems pretty good to me.
From the data, I would say LAUSD spends too much on administration. A number like 5% would be far more reasonable.
I would also be willing to bet that teacher pay does not correlate with student achievement. I would guess that if you studied the entire United States, you would find that teacher pay correlates positively with union strength and negatively with student achievement. If anyone knows of a study on that point, I would be grateful for the education.
As several posters have pointed out, the statement that "market conditions are not right for an IPO" is just a smokescreen. As they say, the market conditions are the more favorable now than any time in the last 3 years, and with the Federal Reserve ready to start moving interest rates up after the November election, conditions are not like to get any better.
Google is faced with a few problems, and a challenge:
1. It is being dropped by Yahoo! as a its algorithmic search provider. This will have a minor effect on Google's revenue and profit.
2. MSN is developing its own search engines (for paid advertisements and algorithmic search). While Slashdotters will deride Microsoft's efforts in these areas, it will be additional competition that Google cannot ignore.
3. Out of the three biggest portals (Yahoo!, MSN and AOL), Google is supply advertisements to the least healthy one: AOL.
4. Google realizes that algorithmic search is on the way to becoming a commodity. The difference in quality of the results is becoming minor. There is not a lot of money to be made there because people do not pay much to see or be seen in algorithmic results.
5. The money is in the advertising results that are shown with the algorithmic results. (No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and Google does make most of its money through ads.) There are two ways to get people to see those ads: get them to come directly to your own site, or get those advertisements to the sites that people visit. Most normal people (i.e., not people who read Slashdot) go to portals.
So the challenge for Google is to become a portal. Becoming a portal means offering a lot of services beside "search in a box". It means news, chat rooms, music, games, auctions, free email, the list goes on and on. Google recognizes this. That is why it has added other products, such as news and free email. But building a portal from scratch takes a lot of time and money. If Google were planning to make itself into a portal, it would launch its IPO and use the money to build a portal.
Which brings me to my theory. Some portal is negotiating with Google to buy Google. There are only two portals big enough: AOL and MSN. AOL is a declining portal, but it already has a deal with Google, and terms of that deal apparently include a partial ownership stake in Google if Google goes public. Microsoft has piles of cash, has missed chances to buy an algorithmic search engine in the past, and regrets that failure. It sure would be easier for Microsoft to buy Google than build another Google.
In summary, my theory is that Microsoft is trying to buy Google, and Google is seriously considering accepting the offer. Microsoft wins by getting a terrific search engine and ad machine, and Google wins by getting a lot of money for its employees, a permanent partnership with best available portal, and the opportunity to stay focused on search.
If it happens, the "popping" sound that you will hear all over America will be the heads of Slashdotters exploding when their favorite search engine is owned by their favorite villain.
Energy companies are finding it cheaper to buy electricity on the open market instead of generating their own.
If a supplier finds it cheaper to buy from someone else rather than produce his own, it indicates either: (a) the supplier is a less efficient producer. Someone else is able to do it more cheaply., or (b) the cost of building new capacity is so high that the cash flow from the new capacity does not justify the cost to build it.
If the problem is (a), then as a consumer, you want the supplier to outsource the work to someone else, because you get a cheaper product.
If the problem is (b) and the demand for the product is increasing in the long run, then as a consumer you will likely start to face spot shortages and price spikes caused by those shortages, since the outside supplier will eventually have less and less excess capacity to sell.
California has had experience with (b) in two markets, the electric power market and the gasoline market. In the former, the power outages were caused by high demand and insufficient generation capacity (only part of which was due to attempts to manipulate the spot price of energy). The major culprit was the length of time it took to get State regulatory approval to build new power plants. When Gov. Davis finally realized there was a problem, he relaxed the approval process and dozens of new plants were built.
The gasoline market suffers from regulatory restraint as well. Since 1985, not a single new oil refinery has been built in CA. Ten have closed. (See this for info. Now, refineries are running at over 90% capacity, rather than the 65% capacity they ran at in the mid-80s. Every time a refinery has a problem, the supply is out-stripped by demand and prices spike. The refiners, needless to say, love this. The are making huge profits because the government has imposed an almost complete barrier to new competition. (Presumably there is some price of gas at which it would be profitable to run the regulatory gauntlet.) The situation will get worse, since it is expected that in the new 5 years about 10% of CA refining capacity will be closed down.
As the two examples suggest, regulation of the market between suppliers and consumers is not the issue. The issue is government regulation by of the suppliers which restricts capacity. The government has some legitimate reasons for those regulations (such as protecting the environment), but their citizens must accept the consequences of growing demand and static supply. Those consequences will include outages, shortages and higher prices.
I have received counter offers three times, and accepted twice. In both cases that I accepted, the decision worked out well for me.
When evaluating offers and counter offers, my advice is that you look at the advantages and disadvantages of each offer exactly as if you were going to be a new employee at each job. This means consider all the aspects of each position and assess which will be best for you. The fact that one is an offer and the other is a counter offer is irrelevant.
The only caveat is the one that others have mentioned. Factor in your current manager's personality. Some managers recognize that getting an offer and receiving a counter offer is just a negotiation. Other managers will take the fact that you went looking for another offer as a personal insult, and hold it against you forever. If your manager is the former type, then you have nothing to worry about in accepting the counter offer. If your manager is the second type, then factor in the likely reprisal (which, as others have said, may include unfavorable reviews, poor raises or even dismissal in the not-so-distant future).
In my particular cases, the first time I received a counter offer, it was for a lesser pay increase, but more interesting work than the outside offer. I accepted the counter offer and happily stayed at the company for another six years.
The second time I received a counter offer, it was for a promotion to match a promotion offered by another division of the same company. The counter offer was accompanied by the threat, "If you leave now, you will never work in this department again." I left, never did work at that department again, and never regretted the choice.
The third time I received a counter offer, the counter offer did not involve an matching pay increase. Instead, they offered a job to my wife. (She was laid off from her previous job, and that is what prompted my search for a higher paying position as a contractor). I stayed, my wife took the job, and all three of us (my wife, our employer, and I) were happy with the outcome.
And don't worry about offending the company you turn down, if you should decide to accept the counter offer. In the last case, three and a half years later I wound up working for the company that I turned down.
Most managers recognize that offers and counter offers are a negotiation, and treat them as such. If the people making you the offers and counter offers are treating them as a negotiation, then you can make your choice without fear. If they don't treat them that way, then you probably don't want to work for them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
27 Democratic senators have co-sponsored the bill, along with 43 Republicans. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1693/cosponsors?pageSort=alphaByParty) It passed the House by a vote of 388-25. (14 Republican no votes and 11 Democratic no votes). Even if President Trump vetoes the bill, the margins in the House and Senate are sufficient to override his veto and pass the bill into law.
This seems like a bipartisan effort to me. Isn't that what we always say we want from our politicians?
I think you have misinterpreted the Quarterly profit chart. I believe that it is quarterly profit, before tax, at an annualized rate, rather than profit for just that quarter.
The chart you provide at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... shows the after tax annual profit for US corporations ($1.7T), which is similar to the after tax annual profit shown by https://www.statista.com/stati... for 2000-2016 ($1.6T in 2016).
Unless you think the effective tax rate on US corporations is already over 75% of profits, the explanation is that the quarterly profit chart is annualized. That would imply an effective tax rate of 15%, which seems much more like the expected numbers.
In any event, the amount of additional profit that can be confiscated is less than $2T per year, which works out to less than $6000/yr for every resident of the United States.
Among the totalitarian regimes that require people to possess (but not necessarily carry) a national ID are:
Belgium
Germany
Greece
Netherlands
Poland
South Korea
Spain
</sarcasm>
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_identity_car
A national ID card does not seem to be a sufficient condition to make a country a totalitarian state. State Senator Moore's statement may be true (most totalitarian regimes may require a national ID card). That does not mean that all countries that require a national ID card are totalitarian.
The social security card acts as a national ID card in the US. You are not required to have it, but you must have one to be able to work legally, or perform any number of mundane activities, such as open a bank account or get credit. It is a weak form of national ID card, since it contains no information that can be used to verify that the holder is the person named on the card. According to press reports I have read, forgeries are easy to obtain.
10,000 employees at $200k each is $2 billion a year, not $20 billion a year. Google is making enough to cover those costs even if they double the number of employees and do not increase revenue at all. You can look at a summary of their revenue, and their expenses as a portion of revenue here: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/061108/goog10-q.html
They are making a handsome profit.
The best way to find out what you should be making is to get some job offers from other employers. If you are underpaid, then you will probably not have too much difficulty getting a better offer. This will also give you the opportunity to negotiate, without fear, with your present employer.
On the other hand, if you are better-paid than average, it will be hard to find a better paying job.
One of the best bosses I ever had told me (among other people), "If you don't think you are being paid enough, look for another job that will pay you what you think you are worth. You will soon find out if you are right." I eventually took his advice, got another offer, and my employer countered.
And don't be shy about asking prospective employers for what you think you are worth. They won't hesitate to tell you if your expectations are out of line. If they say "OK" too quickly, you know you set your price too low.
I will assume that the audience for the design documents is other programmers who have not worked on the project since its inception. With that in mind, the most useful design documents are:
1. Short. Hundreds of pages of detailed design are useless without context. Short documents can and should provide context and pointers to other documents (or code) that will explain the details. If the document is more than about six pages long, it will be ignored by most programmers.
2. One of many. It is obvious that you cannot describe a complex system in six pages. Try to write many design documents that are short. The documents can be a hierarchy. There should be a top level document, that refers to the individual elements that make up the system. Each element can be described in its own document. Each element's subelements can be described in their own documents, and so on, down to the lowest level that it is interesting to document.
3. Describe major functions and interfaces. The document should tell what the system (element or subelement) does, and where the reader can learn more about the elements that implement the functions and interfaces.
4. Describe things that don't change much. One of the problems (as noted by other posters) with most design documents is that they are not kept up-to-date. The solution is to write documents about things that don't change much, such as the overall system design and interfaces. And if the overall system design or interfaces do change, then you can usually persuade people to update the documents.
In my view, good software design documents provide context and pointers to the authoritative documentation. Most programmers (myself included) do not trust any documentation that is too detailed, since it is usually wrong.
It seems to me that the most likely problem with this system will be that the cost of operating it will exceed the cost of operating a car. They cite a cost of $0.38/passenger mile. My car costs:
Gas: $0.10/mile
Maintenance: $0.05/mile
Depreciation: $0.10/mile
Insurance: $0.05/mile
That's $0.08/mile less than their cost. And that leaves out the fact that my marginal cost to transport other people is zero, where this system will presumably charge extra for each person.
The other problem is it looks like the bandwidth (people/minute along a route) is low. The pictures show a single track. I doubt that their pods move faster than a car. So you are limited to the carrying capacity of a single lane. At peak times, there will be a substantial queuing delay as you either wait for a pod, or wait for the pod to enter the track.
If you want to replace cars, you have to either save the traveller time or money or provide more convenience. Except in very densely populated areas, it is hard to beat the car in any one of those categories. For that reason, mass transit (in the US) rarely succeeds unless it is supported by government subsidies, so that the system can compete on cost.
Your post was thoughtful and informative. You might also want to look at the administrative costs for the school districts themselves. The state and federal DoE are just conduits for money.
Following the link you provided, I added up the administrative salary costs for LA Unified. Out of a budget of $5.9B (which is $8100/student), about $550M was for administrative personel (supervisors, superintendents, administrators, and clerical workers). This is 9% of the district's budget, but excludes the cost of benefits. Although that data is not broken out as nicely, it probably adds another 3% (benefits are listed as about 30% of all salaries). That's 12% for administrative personel, and that does not include the maintenance costs for buildings to house the administrators (after all, not all of them work in the schools).
For comparison, my oldest son went to an unsubsidized private school. Four years ago, the (high school) tuition was $4000/year. The quality of education was by no means the best, but it was comparable to some of the better LAUSD schools. They paid the teachers less and had fewer administrators. They did not cherry-pick students, but they did get to kick out troublemakers.
My youngest son goes to an LAUSD school. The teachers take vacation during the school year (something that I never saw at my oldest son's school), and one day each week they let the kids out an hour early so the teachers have time for professional development. Abuse of sick time is so rampant that LAUSD has a program that pays teachers a bonus if _they_ have good attendance. According to the link you provided, the average teacher salary at LAUSD is $53000/yr. Teacher pay seems pretty good to me.
From the data, I would say LAUSD spends too much on administration. A number like 5% would be far more reasonable.
I would also be willing to bet that teacher pay does not correlate with student achievement. I would guess that if you studied the entire United States, you would find that teacher pay correlates positively with union strength and negatively with student achievement. If anyone knows of a study on that point, I would be grateful for the education.
I have found useful results at AllTheWeb
As several posters have pointed out, the statement that "market conditions are not right for an IPO" is just a smokescreen. As they say, the market conditions are the more favorable now than any time in the last 3 years, and with the Federal Reserve ready to start moving interest rates up after the November election, conditions are not like to get any better.
Google is faced with a few problems, and a challenge:
1. It is being dropped by Yahoo! as a its algorithmic search provider. This will have a minor effect on Google's revenue and profit.
2. MSN is developing its own search engines (for paid advertisements and algorithmic search). While Slashdotters will deride Microsoft's efforts in these areas, it will be additional competition that Google cannot ignore.
3. Out of the three biggest portals (Yahoo!, MSN and AOL), Google is supply advertisements to the least healthy one: AOL.
4. Google realizes that algorithmic search is on the way to becoming a commodity. The difference in quality of the results is becoming minor. There is not a lot of money to be made there because people do not pay much to see or be seen in algorithmic results.
5. The money is in the advertising results that are shown with the algorithmic results. (No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and Google does make most of its money through ads.) There are two ways to get people to see those ads: get them to come directly to your own site, or get those advertisements to the sites that people visit. Most normal people (i.e., not people who read Slashdot) go to portals.
So the challenge for Google is to become a portal. Becoming a portal means offering a lot of services beside "search in a box". It means news, chat rooms, music, games, auctions, free email, the list goes on and on. Google recognizes this. That is why it has added other products, such as news and free email. But building a portal from scratch takes a lot of time and money. If Google were planning to make itself into a portal, it would launch its IPO and use the money to build a portal.
Which brings me to my theory. Some portal is negotiating with Google to buy Google. There are only two portals big enough: AOL and MSN. AOL is a declining portal, but it already has a deal with Google, and terms of that deal apparently include a partial ownership stake in Google if Google goes public. Microsoft has piles of cash, has missed chances to buy an algorithmic search engine in the past, and regrets that failure. It sure would be easier for Microsoft to buy Google than build another Google.
In summary, my theory is that Microsoft is trying to buy Google, and Google is seriously considering accepting the offer. Microsoft wins by getting a terrific search engine and ad machine, and Google wins by getting a lot of money for its employees, a permanent partnership with best available portal, and the opportunity to stay focused on search.
If it happens, the "popping" sound that you will hear all over America will be the heads of Slashdotters exploding when their favorite search engine is owned by their favorite villain.
Apparently, the same part as in "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
I think the words "not" and "no" confuse judges. They think it means "unless I think it's OK".
If a supplier finds it cheaper to buy from someone else rather than produce his own, it indicates either: (a) the supplier is a less efficient producer. Someone else is able to do it more cheaply., or (b) the cost of building new capacity is so high that the cash flow from the new capacity does not justify the cost to build it.
If the problem is (a), then as a consumer, you want the supplier to outsource the work to someone else, because you get a cheaper product.
If the problem is (b) and the demand for the product is increasing in the long run, then as a consumer you will likely start to face spot shortages and price spikes caused by those shortages, since the outside supplier will eventually have less and less excess capacity to sell.
California has had experience with (b) in two markets, the electric power market and the gasoline market. In the former, the power outages were caused by high demand and insufficient generation capacity (only part of which was due to attempts to manipulate the spot price of energy). The major culprit was the length of time it took to get State regulatory approval to build new power plants. When Gov. Davis finally realized there was a problem, he relaxed the approval process and dozens of new plants were built.
The gasoline market suffers from regulatory restraint as well. Since 1985, not a single new oil refinery has been built in CA. Ten have closed. (See this for info. Now, refineries are running at over 90% capacity, rather than the 65% capacity they ran at in the mid-80s. Every time a refinery has a problem, the supply is out-stripped by demand and prices spike. The refiners, needless to say, love this. The are making huge profits because the government has imposed an almost complete barrier to new competition. (Presumably there is some price of gas at which it would be profitable to run the regulatory gauntlet.) The situation will get worse, since it is expected that in the new 5 years about 10% of CA refining capacity will be closed down.
As the two examples suggest, regulation of the market between suppliers and consumers is not the issue. The issue is government regulation by of the suppliers which restricts capacity. The government has some legitimate reasons for those regulations (such as protecting the environment), but their citizens must accept the consequences of growing demand and static supply. Those consequences will include outages, shortages and higher prices.
I have received counter offers three times, and accepted twice. In both cases that I accepted, the decision worked out well for me.
When evaluating offers and counter offers, my advice is that you look at the advantages and disadvantages of each offer exactly as if you were going to be a new employee at each job. This means consider all the aspects of each position and assess which will be best for you. The fact that one is an offer and the other is a counter offer is irrelevant.
The only caveat is the one that others have mentioned. Factor in your current manager's personality. Some managers recognize that getting an offer and receiving a counter offer is just a negotiation. Other managers will take the fact that you went looking for another offer as a personal insult, and hold it against you forever. If your manager is the former type, then you have nothing to worry about in accepting the counter offer. If your manager is the second type, then factor in the likely reprisal (which, as others have said, may include unfavorable reviews, poor raises or even dismissal in the not-so-distant future).
In my particular cases, the first time I received a counter offer, it was for a lesser pay increase, but more interesting work than the outside offer. I accepted the counter offer and happily stayed at the company for another six years.
The second time I received a counter offer, it was for a promotion to match a promotion offered by another division of the same company. The counter offer was accompanied by the threat, "If you leave now, you will never work in this department again." I left, never did work at that department again, and never regretted the choice.
The third time I received a counter offer, the counter offer did not involve an matching pay increase. Instead, they offered a job to my wife. (She was laid off from her previous job, and that is what prompted my search for a higher paying position as a contractor). I stayed, my wife took the job, and all three of us (my wife, our employer, and I) were happy with the outcome.
And don't worry about offending the company you turn down, if you should decide to accept the counter offer. In the last case, three and a half years later I wound up working for the company that I turned down.
Most managers recognize that offers and counter offers are a negotiation, and treat them as such. If the people making you the offers and counter offers are treating them as a negotiation, then you can make your choice without fear. If they don't treat them that way, then you probably don't want to work for them anyway.