In other words, a bunch of anti-government, pro-Market people are using the government to ensure that the USPS cannot operate under Free Market rules. In order to "prove" that government doesn't work.
A very good summation.
Or was it a bunch of anti-union people abused their power to give an unwanted "gift" to the postal union in order to "prove" that unions are just greedy abusers of power?
With that argument, you could say photocopying a book is an abstraction of routing control of atoms, simply controlling where the various atoms that ink is composed of are placed on the paper. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I don't think that argument would hold up in court.
Actually, it's not incorrect to say that reading a book is an abstraction of routing control of electrons. Also associated protons and neutrons as comprising the atoms of the book, which move as you flip a page.
And now we've got a bunch of anti-government extremists trying to kill this important service, using poison pill benefit funding requirements and anti-competitive restrictions.
In other words, a bunch of anti-government, pro-Market people are using the government to ensure that the USPS cannot operate under Free Market rules. In order to "prove" that government doesn't work.
Please explain which parts are flamebait? I do not propose a solution, only state a fact. We know that poor people commit more crimes, some to survive and some to make themselves feel better about themselves (empowered.) That's not an indictment of poor people, it's an indictment of a system that creates poor people.
Now, if I declared that I had a solution and that it was the only solution, that would be flamebait. It would also almost certainly be bullshit.
I don't know that poor people commit more crimes. Some criminals are forced into crime because they need something that they can't legally get true, some people commit crimes because they think they're too clever to play by the rules. Some become top-level executives or go into government.
I think where the whole concept went sour was right about at "original idea". There is no such thing as an original idea - all ideas have been influenced by the ideas of others, even when it is subconscious; and everything has been thought of before, just not necessarily patented.
That sort of depends on how original you need an "original idea" to be. Sir Isaac Newton after all, noted that whatever insight he had came from building on the insights of those who came before, but he still gets credit for his own researches done done on top of that. I'm aware of the Jeremiad that there's nothing new under the sun, but he was a sour old coot. It may not be new somewhere in a galaxy far away, but we tend towards the local view for the most part.
Patent protection's most famous benefit was in the proposition for someone with an idea but no resources to benefit from enlisting someone who had resources but no idea without said someone taking the idea and running away with it. An additional advantage for low-capital products would be to protect one's reputation against inferior knock-offs, but trademarks address that issue, too.
There is no such thing as a natural ownership of any kind of knowledge.
Also wrong. You can "own" knowledge without owning it exclusively. I own knowledge on how to operate my DVD player, for example - something others in this household never bothered to acquire. The patent system was designed so that people could make their exclusive knowledge patently known without losing the benefit of keeping it secret. One reason why a patent is supposed to be on knowledge that's not obvious or commonly (patently) known (and therefore not exclusive).
Most people think it's a good idea to be able to protect one's original thought while promoting it for personal gain. Where the whole concept went sour is when we started allowing patents on things that were either broad concepts (especially without explicit illustrations) or obvious to everyone. Such as adding "on the Internet" to anything anyone ever did over the last 10-20 millennia or more.
This comes up every now and then, and it honestly looks like the majority of 3d printing patents are legitimate, original inventions that the owners created.
Take the "soluble print materials that support a structure whie it's being printed"; that's genius, I would never have come up with that.
I've got an idea! Why not make a wax support structure and MELT it! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-wax_casting)
IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Oddly, I remember half the people in IT (literally) being out of work nominally overnight. Most of them had to go into other fields then, because there were no jobs. So if the unemployment rate is half what it ought to be, it may well be at least in part because half the people left the job market some time ago, and they haven't been replaced at the same rate that they were being produced back in the dot-com bubble.
I was there. Spent 3+ years with virtually no income at all during the early 2000's. I got over it. Then Bush Recession II came along and I got whacked again. But that was then, this is now. We've lost a LOT of people, some of which are good riddance, some, not. But I'm a pretty dour person, and I'm feeling better than I have in a long time.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Me too, but most of them are bullshit.
Most of EVERYTHING is bullshit. I get plenty of that as well. But when recruiting departments from some of the biggest names in the business call me personally (and in one case, 2 separate divisions), I can't help but feel that the tide has started moving the other way. These are companies that not only bulk-hire H1-Bs, but normally expect the masses to crowd outside their doors begging for scraps. So when they approach me, I'm inclined to think there's actually some real demand on the supply/demand equation again.
Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
6 figure salaries in an area where cost of living makes that a lot of money. But don't let your ignorance stop you from commenting.
How can I help but be ignorant? If you're really offering premium salaries, one would expect that you'd mention it. Sadly, most of the people complaining about no available talent are looking for rock-star talent at Wal-Mart wages, based on what I see offered versus the requirements. You're not going to attract candidates if you don't advertise your virtues.
It's already illegal to pay H1-Bs less than their domestic counterparts. How would you propose closing that loophole then? Some things just can't be fixed by passing laws.
It is an unfortunate thing, but a lot of times people pass more laws instead of enforcing the ones that already exist. All that really does it promote contempt for law in general.
But I would amend the current restriction a bit, to require that H1-Bs pay 10-20% more than the local market rate instead of the same. Like I said, a premium position should be worth a premium salary even without legal intervention. If it isn't, I question the need for imported talent.
Well, as a "young kid", I've actually been there when people argued whether procedural programming was better than spaghetti code, commercially implemented one of the very first OO compiler system products, seen the retreat of batch and offline processes and the rise of online apps, from TSO to minicomputers, to PCs to CORBA, to HTTP to AJAX to smartphone/tablet. I've seen RISC assemblers and CISC assemblers, including the IBM zSeries set that incorporates entire core standard C library functions in a single machine-language instruction. Not to mention sorts and searches. I've worked with RPN stack-based languages, C/Pascal -style languages, concurrent-programming languages, Smalltalk and APL and more, and if you think that the syntactical differences are all that mattered, I pity you; almost every major language offered unique features that until you got your head properly wrapped around couldn't be truly exploited for its own particular worth.
Just about each of these technologies was considered ground-breaking in its day, and just about all of them have been used as justification for dropping the "dinosaur" programmers in favor of new blood "properly" trained in them. But even in a field as notoriously Not Invented Here as IT is, things build on other things. And a lot of times, knowing how the older technology works can give you insights into the new stuff that people with shallower experience wouldn't realize.
This headline will just serve as an excuse for people to post rants about how their talent is being overlooked because of the foreigners invading our shores while ignoring the fact that many people who try to work as programmers are just terrible (see: fizzbuzz).
Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
I've seen this a few places. Though I where I live it seems like there really is a serious shortage of C#/SQL/ASP.Net developers. Look at the job boards of any major city and those are some of the most proliferated spots that recruiters just cannot seem to fill fast enough (or at all) these days.
Please do not equate number of job postings with actual job availability. Many postings are headhunter duplications. Some are false postings to present the appearance of meeting legal requirements or for PR purposes.
I actually happen to agree with the theoretical basis for the H1-B. Which is to allow foreign workers to supply skills that we have in short supply. Although being in short supply would imply that someone, somewhere is failing on the job.
But if that's really what H1-Bs were, the laws of Supply and Demand would mandate that people with these allegedly rare skills would be in a buyer's market and demanding a premium income. Instead we see H1-B wages routinely less than their domestic counterparts.
If we closed just that one loophole it would make a world of difference.
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
The problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough. Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
I was thinking the relevance of experience in technical fields decays over time, like a radioactive half life.
I worked with a guy that tested software for missiles in the 60's... and didn't know you could use modifier keys (shift, ctrl...) with mouse clicks.
Some people basically stop learning once they leave school. Some don't. I spent time today correcting code done by a younger offshore worker who doesn't know the technology nearly as well as I do. And the technology in question is mostly less than 5 years old.
I've been observing a downward spiral in quality of web applications, sites and services for some years now. Old school programmers/developers wouldn't make some of the bone-headed mistakes I keep encountering. How can we suddenly have so many incompetant people doing this work? Easy - they know how to write code, but do not have the wisdom to avoid drop-through logic, non-intuitive interfaces, extremely fragile code, etc.
Gotta be a mill somewhere, cranking out code monkeys who are paid by the deadline, not but the quality of their work.
The deadliest words in IT are "All You Have To Do Is..." Everyone thinks the job can be done faster and cheaper than it can, then management doubles down and hires the cheapest resources they can on the smallest budgets with the least amount of time. Scripting languages haven't helped - they get pages in front of eyeballs faster, because they don't require you get it all right before you can compile. But all that really does is push off a lot of nasty errors until they're uncovered in production because the actual amount of work to make a reliable, secure application is pretty much independent of the language you use.
We COULD have apps that weren't total crashing trash that leaked confidential information if we were willing to pay for them. We're not. We want Lower Prices Everyday. We just want the developers to "Git 'er Dun!" And we're getting what we pay for.
I don't know that it's a race to the bottom. A news story this morning mentioned that wages had remained stagnant since 2001. Except 2001 you could be trained chimpanzee that knew HTML and make $100k a year. So maybe we're just finally purging all of the bullshit employees from the dot-com employment orgy.
All together I don't have that much sympathy. Most of those graybeards are libertarians who don't believe in any protectionism so... welcome to the free market.
You're out of date and off the mark. The dot-com drones long ago left the building. IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Afterall, the pyramids weren't built in a day, even if our modern society pretty much lacks the vision to do or look forward to anything further away than the next weekend.
The pyramids were built using slave labor on the orders of an unelected absolute monarch. I hope you're not suggesting this is an example we can learn from.
Actually, there is considerable doubt these days that the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. Based on nearby burials, it has been suggested, in fact, that the workers were construction professionals and may have been supplied with beer. Rather like their modern-day counterparts.
Though these days we've replaced the divine absolute monarch with CEOs.
B. There's this stuff called "software" that is really good at tracking numbers automatically.
A popular myth. While the statement is literally true, what people are interested in isn't (supposedly) "tracking the numbers", it's "maximizing profit". And we've gotten really, really good at calculating "profit" from incomplete sets of numbers and conditions. Bean-counter blindness, if you will. If your accountants don't factor in the number of customers that the toxic effluents of your factory kill off, you may be suffering from this ailment, for example.
Myself, I could live with 50-odd sets of rate and (simple) rules for determining online tax charges. However, locally, we have cities and townships, counties and Enterprise zones, some of them only a few blocks in scope, and that's excluding "sweetheart" deals made with individual companies. I'd just as soon not have to break it down that fine.
Hint: the republican party is not a homogenous hive mind. Using your same logic you run male prostitution rings from your apartment because one democrat did.
Of course it's not a hive mind. They have Rush. If you don't follow him, you're a RINO. Or, if you're lucky, a "maverick".
Democrats, on the other hand, exist because they found anarchy to be too well-organized for their tastes.
As a Ron Paul supporter until after the republican primaries (since he wasn't on the Presidential ballot), this pisses me off. He has betrayed his own support base.
Ron Paul is swimming in all sorts of irony. He's a Republican because he's a pragmatist and it's easier to get elected Republican than Libertarian, even though it's an ideological betrayal. And yet at the same time, the Republicans are failing all over the place, because they won't be pragmatists and won't betray their ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
A very good summation.
Or was it a bunch of anti-union people abused their power to give an unwanted "gift" to the postal union in order to "prove" that unions are just greedy abusers of power?
With that argument, you could say photocopying a book is an abstraction of routing control of atoms, simply controlling where the various atoms that ink is composed of are placed on the paper. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I don't think that argument would hold up in court.
Actually, it's not incorrect to say that reading a book is an abstraction of routing control of electrons. Also associated protons and neutrons as comprising the atoms of the book, which move as you flip a page.
And I'm patenting that!
And now we've got a bunch of anti-government extremists trying to kill this important service, using poison pill benefit funding requirements and anti-competitive restrictions.
In other words, a bunch of anti-government, pro-Market people are using the government to ensure that the USPS cannot operate under Free Market rules. In order to "prove" that government doesn't work.
Please explain which parts are flamebait? I do not propose a solution, only state a fact. We know that poor people commit more crimes, some to survive and some to make themselves feel better about themselves (empowered.) That's not an indictment of poor people, it's an indictment of a system that creates poor people.
Now, if I declared that I had a solution and that it was the only solution, that would be flamebait. It would also almost certainly be bullshit.
I don't know that poor people commit more crimes. Some criminals are forced into crime because they need something that they can't legally get true, some people commit crimes because they think they're too clever to play by the rules. Some become top-level executives or go into government.
Man, these 3-hour work days are killing me!
George Jetson
So... Do they have collapsible flying cars as well?
I think where the whole concept went sour was right about at "original idea". There is no such thing as an original idea - all ideas have been influenced by the ideas of others, even when it is subconscious; and everything has been thought of before, just not necessarily patented.
That sort of depends on how original you need an "original idea" to be. Sir Isaac Newton after all, noted that whatever insight he had came from building on the insights of those who came before, but he still gets credit for his own researches done done on top of that. I'm aware of the Jeremiad that there's nothing new under the sun, but he was a sour old coot. It may not be new somewhere in a galaxy far away, but we tend towards the local view for the most part.
Patent protection's most famous benefit was in the proposition for someone with an idea but no resources to benefit from enlisting someone who had resources but no idea without said someone taking the idea and running away with it. An additional advantage for low-capital products would be to protect one's reputation against inferior knock-offs, but trademarks address that issue, too.
There is no such thing as a natural ownership of any kind of knowledge.
Also wrong. You can "own" knowledge without owning it exclusively. I own knowledge on how to operate my DVD player, for example - something others in this household never bothered to acquire. The patent system was designed so that people could make their exclusive knowledge patently known without losing the benefit of keeping it secret. One reason why a patent is supposed to be on knowledge that's not obvious or commonly (patently) known (and therefore not exclusive).
Most people think it's a good idea to be able to protect one's original thought while promoting it for personal gain. Where the whole concept went sour is when we started allowing patents on things that were either broad concepts (especially without explicit illustrations) or obvious to everyone. Such as adding "on the Internet" to anything anyone ever did over the last 10-20 millennia or more.
This comes up every now and then, and it honestly looks like the majority of 3d printing patents are legitimate, original inventions that the owners created.
Take the "soluble print materials that support a structure whie it's being printed"; that's genius, I would never have come up with that.
I've got an idea! Why not make a wax support structure and MELT it! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-wax_casting)
IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Oddly, I remember half the people in IT (literally) being out of work nominally overnight. Most of them had to go into other fields then, because there were no jobs. So if the unemployment rate is half what it ought to be, it may well be at least in part because half the people left the job market some time ago, and they haven't been replaced at the same rate that they were being produced back in the dot-com bubble.
I was there. Spent 3+ years with virtually no income at all during the early 2000's. I got over it. Then Bush Recession II came along and I got whacked again. But that was then, this is now. We've lost a LOT of people, some of which are good riddance, some, not. But I'm a pretty dour person, and I'm feeling better than I have in a long time.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Me too, but most of them are bullshit.
Most of EVERYTHING is bullshit. I get plenty of that as well. But when recruiting departments from some of the biggest names in the business call me personally (and in one case, 2 separate divisions), I can't help but feel that the tide has started moving the other way. These are companies that not only bulk-hire H1-Bs, but normally expect the masses to crowd outside their doors begging for scraps. So when they approach me, I'm inclined to think there's actually some real demand on the supply/demand equation again.
Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
6 figure salaries in an area where cost of living makes that a lot of money. But don't let your ignorance stop you from commenting.
How can I help but be ignorant? If you're really offering premium salaries, one would expect that you'd mention it. Sadly, most of the people complaining about no available talent are looking for rock-star talent at Wal-Mart wages, based on what I see offered versus the requirements. You're not going to attract candidates if you don't advertise your virtues.
It's already illegal to pay H1-Bs less than their domestic counterparts. How would you propose closing that loophole then? Some things just can't be fixed by passing laws.
It is an unfortunate thing, but a lot of times people pass more laws instead of enforcing the ones that already exist. All that really does it promote contempt for law in general.
But I would amend the current restriction a bit, to require that H1-Bs pay 10-20% more than the local market rate instead of the same. Like I said, a premium position should be worth a premium salary even without legal intervention. If it isn't, I question the need for imported talent.
Well, as a "young kid", I've actually been there when people argued whether procedural programming was better than spaghetti code, commercially implemented one of the very first OO compiler system products, seen the retreat of batch and offline processes and the rise of online apps, from TSO to minicomputers, to PCs to CORBA, to HTTP to AJAX to smartphone/tablet. I've seen RISC assemblers and CISC assemblers, including the IBM zSeries set that incorporates entire core standard C library functions in a single machine-language instruction. Not to mention sorts and searches. I've worked with RPN stack-based languages, C/Pascal -style languages, concurrent-programming languages, Smalltalk and APL and more, and if you think that the syntactical differences are all that mattered, I pity you; almost every major language offered unique features that until you got your head properly wrapped around couldn't be truly exploited for its own particular worth.
Just about each of these technologies was considered ground-breaking in its day, and just about all of them have been used as justification for dropping the "dinosaur" programmers in favor of new blood "properly" trained in them. But even in a field as notoriously Not Invented Here as IT is, things build on other things. And a lot of times, knowing how the older technology works can give you insights into the new stuff that people with shallower experience wouldn't realize.
This headline will just serve as an excuse for people to post rants about how their talent is being overlooked because of the foreigners invading our shores while ignoring the fact that many people who try to work as programmers are just terrible (see: fizzbuzz).
Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
I've seen this a few places. Though I where I live it seems like there really is a serious shortage of C#/SQL/ASP.Net developers. Look at the job boards of any major city and those are some of the most proliferated spots that recruiters just cannot seem to fill fast enough (or at all) these days.
Please do not equate number of job postings with actual job availability. Many postings are headhunter duplications. Some are false postings to present the appearance of meeting legal requirements or for PR purposes.
I actually happen to agree with the theoretical basis for the H1-B. Which is to allow foreign workers to supply skills that we have in short supply. Although being in short supply would imply that someone, somewhere is failing on the job.
But if that's really what H1-Bs were, the laws of Supply and Demand would mandate that people with these allegedly rare skills would be in a buyer's market and demanding a premium income. Instead we see H1-B wages routinely less than their domestic counterparts.
If we closed just that one loophole it would make a world of difference.
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
The problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough. Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
I was thinking the relevance of experience in technical fields decays over time, like a radioactive half life.
I worked with a guy that tested software for missiles in the 60's... and didn't know you could use modifier keys (shift, ctrl...) with mouse clicks.
Some people basically stop learning once they leave school. Some don't. I spent time today correcting code done by a younger offshore worker who doesn't know the technology nearly as well as I do. And the technology in question is mostly less than 5 years old.
I've been observing a downward spiral in quality of web applications, sites and services for some years now. Old school programmers/developers wouldn't make some of the bone-headed mistakes I keep encountering. How can we suddenly have so many incompetant people doing this work? Easy - they know how to write code, but do not have the wisdom to avoid drop-through logic, non-intuitive interfaces, extremely fragile code, etc.
Gotta be a mill somewhere, cranking out code monkeys who are paid by the deadline, not but the quality of their work.
The deadliest words in IT are "All You Have To Do Is..." Everyone thinks the job can be done faster and cheaper than it can, then management doubles down and hires the cheapest resources they can on the smallest budgets with the least amount of time. Scripting languages haven't helped - they get pages in front of eyeballs faster, because they don't require you get it all right before you can compile. But all that really does is push off a lot of nasty errors until they're uncovered in production because the actual amount of work to make a reliable, secure application is pretty much independent of the language you use.
We COULD have apps that weren't total crashing trash that leaked confidential information if we were willing to pay for them. We're not. We want Lower Prices Everyday. We just want the developers to "Git 'er Dun!" And we're getting what we pay for.
I don't know that it's a race to the bottom. A news story this morning mentioned that wages had remained stagnant since 2001. Except 2001 you could be trained chimpanzee that knew HTML and make $100k a year. So maybe we're just finally purging all of the bullshit employees from the dot-com employment orgy.
All together I don't have that much sympathy. Most of those graybeards are libertarians who don't believe in any protectionism so... welcome to the free market.
You're out of date and off the mark. The dot-com drones long ago left the building. IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Afterall, the pyramids weren't built in a day, even if our modern society pretty much lacks the vision to do or look forward to anything further away than the next weekend.
The pyramids were built using slave labor on the orders of an unelected absolute monarch. I hope you're not suggesting this is an example we can learn from.
Actually, there is considerable doubt these days that the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. Based on nearby burials, it has been suggested, in fact, that the workers were construction professionals and may have been supplied with beer. Rather like their modern-day counterparts.
Though these days we've replaced the divine absolute monarch with CEOs.
B. There's this stuff called "software" that is really good at tracking numbers automatically.
A popular myth. While the statement is literally true, what people are interested in isn't (supposedly) "tracking the numbers", it's "maximizing profit". And we've gotten really, really good at calculating "profit" from incomplete sets of numbers and conditions. Bean-counter blindness, if you will. If your accountants don't factor in the number of customers that the toxic effluents of your factory kill off, you may be suffering from this ailment, for example.
Myself, I could live with 50-odd sets of rate and (simple) rules for determining online tax charges. However, locally, we have cities and townships, counties and Enterprise zones, some of them only a few blocks in scope, and that's excluding "sweetheart" deals made with individual companies. I'd just as soon not have to break it down that fine.
You missed the part where mega merchant charges you $3 for shipping.
"Free Shipping on Orders over $25".
I think OpenOffice/LibreOffice can be interfaced with a number of programming languages
It can. And even more APIs. Almost all of which are cryptic, cumbersome and/or poorly documented.
It can be worth it once you learn how ... assuming you have enough sanity left.
Hint: the republican party is not a homogenous hive mind. Using your same logic you run male prostitution rings from your apartment because one democrat did.
Of course it's not a hive mind. They have Rush. If you don't follow him, you're a RINO. Or, if you're lucky, a "maverick".
Democrats, on the other hand, exist because they found anarchy to be too well-organized for their tastes.
As a Ron Paul supporter until after the republican primaries (since he wasn't on the Presidential ballot), this pisses me off. He has betrayed his own support base.
Ron Paul is swimming in all sorts of irony. He's a Republican because he's a pragmatist and it's easier to get elected Republican than Libertarian, even though it's an ideological betrayal. And yet at the same time, the Republicans are failing all over the place, because they won't be pragmatists and won't betray their ideology.