Let's say a company has 1 million shares. I have one share. I don't have much influence. If I collectively work with half a million other people with once share, then we have the power of someone with a 50% stake in the company.
This is very similar to government elections except that some people get more than once vote. That doesn't change the fact that someone with 1 vote has only a small amount of influence.
No I have never owned stock. I spend all my money on my mortgage. I don't doubt that most investors with small shares bother proxy voting. Maybe they feel it is not worth their time to do the research to make an informed decision that would affect them. That doesn't mean that they can't participate if they wanted to. Lots of people don't bother voting in political elections either for the same reason.
You are saying that often a program *can* be made faster by also making it better. I am not disputing this. The most obvious example of this is choosing an algorithm that is asymptotically efficient.
But even once you get to the point where you wouldn't change a single character, there are usually still things to can do to increase speed but at the cost of modularity, scalability, maintainability.
Owning 4 shares in a company gives me about as much say as a voter in an election. No I don;t get to decide who the senator of my state is, but I do have influence over it, even if that influence is small. All the voters added up completely determines the outcome. It's not important that the smallest shareholder always affects the outcome of every decision, it only matters that this is possible. Just like I don't need to cast the deciding vote in an election for my vote to count.
It depends on your definition of a *total* rewrite. Does every single line of code need to change for it to count as a rewrite? It is very likely that the number of lines changed will be > 0 and less than 100%. If you change 95% of the code, that's pretty much a rewrite in my opinion.
Yes changing software always introduces the potential for new bugs. Lots of software is written by and used by only one company. This software even if used for a very long time is not necessarily well tested. A rewrite of a companies database code could consist of ditching a custom database and replacing it with an enterprise database which works better and has been tested more.
Is this a rewrite? Well it is in the sense that almost none of the old code is still there. It isn;t in the sense that most of the new code is actually existing and well tested code.
I do lots of "rewriting" for my job. I take chunks of old code that are 15 years old and full of bugs that have never been caught, and port them to Qt usually reducing the size of the code by a factor of 10 and leveraging the fact that Qt has platform independent classes for stuff like ByteArrays, TCP sockets, Linked Lists, DataStreams, etc. This not only allows the code to run on 64 bit targets, but also fixes a bunch of problems. There really isn't any reason to keep custom written buffer or network logic that was kludgey to begin with. If I end up changing 1% or 99% of the lines of code then so be it. I usually end up in the 90% range.
Usually you don't want the new code to do everything the old code did. You want the new code to do what the old code was supposed to do.
You can write super fast code that uses goto, global variables, etc. Yes you can write very slow code that's full of bugs but that's not the point. My point is that the fastest code is going to be more prone to having bugs. The easiest to maintain code is going to be slightly suboptimal (slower than the fastest code).
The point of his statement was that software should be written in a way where it is easy to understand and maintain. It is much easier to make "hard to understand code" than it is to understand "hard to understand code".
If you are smarter when debugging, then you are already following his advice, because you are not "clever as can be" when writing it, because you are less clever writing it than when you are debugging it.
He is suggesting you *shouldn't* be "as clever as can be" when writing code, *because* it will be much harder to debug.
The shareholders are the collective owners of the company. They are the boss. They can have as much influence on what internal projects get worked on as they want. By deciding not to be involved, they are making an implicit decision to allow this to be handled by people lower in the totem pole. The owners typically decide on budgets which either allow for total rewrites or not. The engineers/engineering department can ask for more money to do a good job, and these requests are either approved or denied at a higher level.
Sometimes the shareholders don't care about anything until it becomes a problem that affects profits. Sometimes they get involved sooner if they have a larger interest in the company succeeding.
Small shareholders typically do not participate in votes or they can grant their voting power to other shareholders.
No not every single shareholder can have a say in the day to day operation. But in aggregate they are the highest entity on the totem pole. They have the power to decide to do or not to do a software rewrite if they choose not to abdicate this power. The managers, even the CEO, is just executing the will of the shareholders. They don't have the power to authorize a software rewrite without the approval of the shareholders, if it is going to be a large expense (at least not without negative consequences).
If doing a software rewrite is somehow a small expense (i.e. fits in the allowable budget), then doing it is no problem for anyone, so it will probably get done.
The real issue is that these airlines are usually publicly owned. They care about profits and rewriting all the infrastructure code is expensive and might even stop normal operation (resulting in higher costs). When shareholders do the math for what makes most financial sense, it is usually to keep sticking on more duct tape until duct tape no longer works. At some point a full rewrite makes the most financial sense, and that's when it will happen.
Even when an airline is just stupid and only wants duct tape forever. All it takes is for one airline to do the rewrite and reap the benefits of better efficiency. That airline should in theory be able to have much more efficient scheduling of resources and less downtime. This allows them to make higher profits and/or undercut their competitors. Other airlines will see the benefits and follow suit. The ones that can't update their software will be consumed by the ones that can.
On the other side of the spectrum, constantly rolling out infrastructure rewrites is pretty inefficient as well. There is some optimal lifecycle for these sorts of things (e.g. 20 years ?). Too far over or under, and you are not making as much profit as you could have been.
old code is plenty fast. It's just full of bugs, non-scalable, unmaintainable, and platform dependent. When we had slow computers speed was the only thing that mattered. Now we have fast computers and maintainability, scalability, and platform independence is worth a few lost clock cycles.
Old code is fast, but not if you count the time it takes to write, maintain, rewrite, and all the time spend debugging and rebooting computers and restarting services when things don't work.
Brian Kernighan put it eloquently:
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
Even if Nvidia linux support is better today, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Even if people buy Nvidia for their current linux setups, that doesn't mean that they aren't rooting for AMD. AMD seems to have more ambition to have better linux support, they just have farther to go.
It may be true that AMD is not seeing a return on their investment *yet*, but it's a pretty typical property of investments that returns are delayed. If AMD starts to take the lead in linux support, I don't see any reason that all these people buying NVIDIA for their linux setups won't switch to AMD.
AMD is a big company. They understand how investments work.
Freedom of privacy in public was never a freedom to begin with.
Freedom to store your own experiences into memory has always been a natural freedom that only death or brain damage could take away from you. Now this natural freedom is being augmented with technology.
Strategy1: Don't do things you want kept secret in public. This is not anything new. You will just have a higher chance of getting noticed if you are doing something particularly interesting than in the past.
Strategy2: Develop thicker skin to the idea that you have no privacy in public, and just live your life. If you are not committing crimes, then the worst that can happen is that someone has a picture of your underwear or something. This isn't embarrassing unless you allow it to embarrass you. Keep in mind that everyone else's underwear will be showing too, and the novelty of seeing someone's underwear will likely wear off in the future. Look at how scandalous it was to see someone's ankles in the past. Obviously people can see more private things than your underwear, but this is just a metaphor and the same principle applies.
"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"
How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a camera and attached it to his roof. It just records your house all day. How would you feel about it?
I would not feel good about it. However, I am not sure I would feel much worse knowing my neighbor was constantly monitoring the top of my house rather than the side of my house. I am positive that my fear of hypothetical neighbors spying on me is a good reason to create laws regulating something that has not happened yet.
Why not wait to see what the danger is before regulating it? Human governments are already experts at coming up with regulations that are obsolete by decades. Why make this mistake even worse by passing regulations on a future that hasn't even happened yet? Do we not have any other problems in the present to deal with?
What kinds of flows of people, if they were allowed to happen, in your mind would would make *this* possible? Can you give any specific examples like (If china allowed people to leave, or If the US had an open borders immigration policy, etc)?
Why do you think shareholders are willing to pay CEOs so much money, especially considering that the salary of the CEO is deducted from their own profits? Charity?
Many CEOs are crap. By the same token many regular workers are crap too.
The reason CEOs get paid more is because the owners of the company (i.e. the shareholders) feel it is necessary to pay them that much. The shareholder don't give a shit about the CEO. They care about corporate profits (from which the CEO's salary is deducted).
If the shareholders felt they could pay a CEO $50,000 and get the same performance, they would absolutely do that. It means more money for them. Usually a CEOs salary is small potatoes compared to the corporate profits. Most shareholders are willing to pay high salaries to have a better selection of good CEOs, with a relatively small effect on corporate profits.
There is nothing stopping you from undercutting all the CEOs out there. You can offer to be CEO for only $500,000. If you can convince the shareholders you will do as good a job, they will fire their existing CEO in a heartbeat to get more profit. The problem is that you probably won't be convincing to them, despite the general perception of incompetence of CEOs lately.
If you feel that you are better at determining if CEOs are incompetent than other people, you can make a killing by simply investing in companies with good underpaid CEOs and selling short on companies with incompetent overpaid CEOs.
Life is not black and white. Good vs. bad decisions aren't black and white. CEOs aren't incompetent or geniuses on average. Some are geniuses and some are idiots, and the average is somewhere in the middle.
Shareholders who hire an incompetent CEO who nose dives the company is like me hiring an expensive plumber who breaks a pipe and floods my house. It happens sometimes. Does it mean all plumbers are overpaid? No, and that's why I can;t go to the next plumber and ask him to accept half his normal rate because my last plumber fucked up.
If 99% of plumbers or CEOs were fuck ups, they would not be able to command such a high salary. People would simply pay random people off the street minimum wage to run the companies and fix their pipes. They can't do any worse a job than professionals, and you can pay them 1/10th the price.
H1B does and doesn't hand more power to corporations. It's like the advantage of a college education. Yes it gives you more power, but the existence of college educations also means that you need one just to compete. So yes corporations can hire cheaper workers, but when all the corporations do this it makes production cheaper, and now all these corporations need to lower prices to be competitive.
H1B helps foreign workers and American corporations at the expense of International corporations and American workers, but this is because American workers already had an advantage over foreign workers, and foreign corporations had an advantage over american corporations.
The advantage corporations have over workers is a problem, but it is not one that should be solved by restricting the labor market. It should be solved by removing corporations status as persons and stopping the "too big to fail" policies by allowing big companies to fail and causing their shareholders to suffer the fianancial losses associated with their poor decisions (e.g. picking stupid CEOs). It is helping poorly run companies with tax money that is facilitating poor decisions. It creates a moral hazard. If comapnies were allowed to fail again, I guarantee there would be a sharp incline in better decision making, because all of a sudden better decision making is the only way to make more money, and as the saying goes "A fool and his money are soon parted"
These artificial limitations on what and with who US companies can work with are just creating a wall between US and other countries.
The wall is full of holes. Companies can still sell equipment to a middleman that then resells to Russia. Even if this is forbidden, it is completely unenforceable if the middleman is not a US company.
I am an American software developer. If someone is willing to do the same job as me for half the price, then that means that the skill I'm selling is not worth the price I am trying to sell it for. I don't feel entitled to an inflated salary by virtue of the fact that I am American.
Anyone coming here to work is now also required to have the same higher cost of living that I have. If they are telecommuting from India and enjoy relatively high wages + lower cost of living, that's awesome. There is nothing stopping me from moving to India and doing the same thing.
It's not the market being pushed down. It's the market converging to it's true value.
We can feel entitled to higher salaries as a birthright if we want, but it is not going to help us. We can rely on our past dominance for only so long. What we should do is focusing on being better (i.e. being more productive for less cost), rather than working to keep our foreign competitors out of the market. If you can do twice as much work as 2 typical Indian programmers, then you deserve twice their salary.
I actually get tax free lunches when I am sent away for business. I think the rationale is that I am now forced (by my job, my job being defined by my boss) to go to a remote location where I am unable to eat my own home cooked meals (which are healthy and very inexpensive) and instead forced to eat comparable food at restaurants (which is very expensive).
In this case do you suppose the IRS has decided my lunches are necessary and tax free or do you think this was done by my boss, who has claimed it as such?
In many instances this is true in healthcare. But this is the exception to the rule. MOst of the things we put on the government credit card are not things that save us money in the long term. They are things that we have decided we are unwilling to live without. But by doing this our biggest expense becomes interest payments. If we could simply live within our means for a while, it would mean that all the money we are spending on interest could be spent on stuff.
I am not even advocating privatizing everything. I am advocating smart utilization of government resources. I am advocating what John Stewart constantly says on his show. I want value for the money we spend in washington. For lots of the things we buy, we are not getting good value, first and foremost being our interest payments.
The biggest cost savings would be to abolish social security and medicare. Once you decide that saving people is more important than small government and financial freedom, then we need to decide the most fair way to distribute government resources towards care and research. One way that seems pretty fair is democracy, although it doesn't always work.
I'm not saying it's flawless. I am saying that a consumption tax has 1 less flaw than the existing system.
Now on to specifics:
Yes you would tax consumption of medical services if it where still a commercial service. It is important to have the prices of all services reflect their true cost. In order to support the poor, a prebate could be given out to people, raising everyone's income to some minimum level. Ideally single payer healthcare would simply be paid for with the consumption tax money.
Yes rich people are good at dodging taxes. But instead of dodging one tax (income tax), they would be forced to try to dodge a consumption tax everytime they purchased something. This means getting every single vendor to conspire with you to break the law. Instead of finding 1 shady accountant, you need to find countless shady vendors.
Gifts have the same problem in both systems, so switching systems is just a wash in that area. I don't see the problem with inflation.
Do you think its worth the IRS's time to pursue 8 year olds for capital gains made by trading dessert cups on the underground schoolyard dessert cup markets? Why they might have dollars of undeclared income! Couple that with their allowance.../faceplam
No it's obviously not worth the IRS's time to pursue 8 year olds. What a stupid question. Kids don't have any undeclared income. Their allowance is probably really small, and many poor kids don't even get an allowance.
Maybe google could simply require their employees to eat lunch at the cafeteria (like how firefighters are forced to live at the station), and now it is no longer a form of payment to the employee, but an "obligation".
You decide the way we decide anything subjective in a democracy... with democracy.
If most people have friends and relatives that have suffered from brain related illnesses, then it becomes very important. If most people don't know anyone with mental illness, then it becomes less important. Maybe everyone knows someone with Alzheimers, but they are just much more scared of other things like cancer and heart disease.
If people don't like the laws that get passed (i.e. the way the money is spent), then they elect new representatives to make new laws. Its not a perfect system, but I don't have any better ideas.
I don't see why mentioning the national debt means I am being influenced by republicans. I also said we should raise taxes and I even quoted Obama.
Yes we owe most of the debt to "ourselves", but that's not the right way to look at it. We could say that 100% of the world's debt is held by other people in the world, so really no debt is ever bad because it's just internal "world debt", and therefore no debt is ever bad, but this can't be true.
When we create excessive debt (i.e. increase the money supply) we make people in general feel liek they have more wealth than they actually do. They start building mansions and say "I will pay for my retirement with all the money I make flipping houses". Then we end up with a bunch of useless mcmansions and a generation of people who need the next generation to support them, because we spent the money on houses rather than on investing it for a rainy day.
obviously this is just a silly example, but I don't think it is too far off from reality.
Yes I do think it is very important. I think it would probably even be beneficial to spend more than $2/person/year.
I just disagree that being in opposition to spending the money means that people don't care about suffering. They may simply care more about suffering in different areas, or simply want to decide for themselves which causes are worthy (e.g. charity).
Also, government programs have a reputation for wasting money. Something might be a very good cause, but that doesn't mean the government will solve it by throwing money at it. I am not saying the private sector is always better. I am just saying that there is some probability the money will just be squandered, and that needs to be factored into the equation. Many government programs are so important that they are worth doing even if X% will be squandered.
You say the money is coming out of our paycheck either way, but that's not the whole truth. We are ridiculously in debt. There is over $50K of US debt for every citizen.
Every $1 we spend now is $10 we need to repay later. We are consuming more than we are producing, and we are paying for it with a credit card. This isn't about democrats vs republicans. Taxes vs. spending cuts. What are doing now is unsustainable. We need to raise taxes to pay off the debt faster *and* cut spending. I believe Obama called this "a balanced approach".
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You must have an interesting definition for the word "popular".
Let's say a company has 1 million shares. I have one share. I don't have much influence. If I collectively work with half a million other people with once share, then we have the power of someone with a 50% stake in the company.
This is very similar to government elections except that some people get more than once vote. That doesn't change the fact that someone with 1 vote has only a small amount of influence.
No I have never owned stock. I spend all my money on my mortgage. I don't doubt that most investors with small shares bother proxy voting. Maybe they feel it is not worth their time to do the research to make an informed decision that would affect them. That doesn't mean that they can't participate if they wanted to. Lots of people don't bother voting in political elections either for the same reason.
You are saying that often a program *can* be made faster by also making it better. I am not disputing this. The most obvious example of this is choosing an algorithm that is asymptotically efficient.
But even once you get to the point where you wouldn't change a single character, there are usually still things to can do to increase speed but at the cost of modularity, scalability, maintainability.
Owning 4 shares in a company gives me about as much say as a voter in an election. No I don;t get to decide who the senator of my state is, but I do have influence over it, even if that influence is small. All the voters added up completely determines the outcome. It's not important that the smallest shareholder always affects the outcome of every decision, it only matters that this is possible. Just like I don't need to cast the deciding vote in an election for my vote to count.
It depends on your definition of a *total* rewrite. Does every single line of code need to change for it to count as a rewrite? It is very likely that the number of lines changed will be > 0 and less than 100%. If you change 95% of the code, that's pretty much a rewrite in my opinion.
Yes changing software always introduces the potential for new bugs. Lots of software is written by and used by only one company. This software even if used for a very long time is not necessarily well tested. A rewrite of a companies database code could consist of ditching a custom database and replacing it with an enterprise database which works better and has been tested more.
Is this a rewrite? Well it is in the sense that almost none of the old code is still there. It isn;t in the sense that most of the new code is actually existing and well tested code.
I do lots of "rewriting" for my job. I take chunks of old code that are 15 years old and full of bugs that have never been caught, and port them to Qt usually reducing the size of the code by a factor of 10 and leveraging the fact that Qt has platform independent classes for stuff like ByteArrays, TCP sockets, Linked Lists, DataStreams, etc. This not only allows the code to run on 64 bit targets, but also fixes a bunch of problems. There really isn't any reason to keep custom written buffer or network logic that was kludgey to begin with. If I end up changing 1% or 99% of the lines of code then so be it. I usually end up in the 90% range.
Usually you don't want the new code to do everything the old code did. You want the new code to do what the old code was supposed to do.
You can write super fast code that uses goto, global variables, etc. Yes you can write very slow code that's full of bugs but that's not the point. My point is that the fastest code is going to be more prone to having bugs. The easiest to maintain code is going to be slightly suboptimal (slower than the fastest code).
The point of his statement was that software should be written in a way where it is easy to understand and maintain. It is much easier to make "hard to understand code" than it is to understand "hard to understand code".
If you are smarter when debugging, then you are already following his advice, because you are not "clever as can be" when writing it, because you are less clever writing it than when you are debugging it.
He is suggesting you *shouldn't* be "as clever as can be" when writing code, *because* it will be much harder to debug.
The shareholders are the collective owners of the company. They are the boss. They can have as much influence on what internal projects get worked on as they want. By deciding not to be involved, they are making an implicit decision to allow this to be handled by people lower in the totem pole. The owners typically decide on budgets which either allow for total rewrites or not. The engineers/engineering department can ask for more money to do a good job, and these requests are either approved or denied at a higher level.
Sometimes the shareholders don't care about anything until it becomes a problem that affects profits. Sometimes they get involved sooner if they have a larger interest in the company succeeding.
Small shareholders typically do not participate in votes or they can grant their voting power to other shareholders.
No not every single shareholder can have a say in the day to day operation. But in aggregate they are the highest entity on the totem pole. They have the power to decide to do or not to do a software rewrite if they choose not to abdicate this power. The managers, even the CEO, is just executing the will of the shareholders. They don't have the power to authorize a software rewrite without the approval of the shareholders, if it is going to be a large expense (at least not without negative consequences).
If doing a software rewrite is somehow a small expense (i.e. fits in the allowable budget), then doing it is no problem for anyone, so it will probably get done.
The real issue is that these airlines are usually publicly owned. They care about profits and rewriting all the infrastructure code is expensive and might even stop normal operation (resulting in higher costs). When shareholders do the math for what makes most financial sense, it is usually to keep sticking on more duct tape until duct tape no longer works. At some point a full rewrite makes the most financial sense, and that's when it will happen.
Even when an airline is just stupid and only wants duct tape forever. All it takes is for one airline to do the rewrite and reap the benefits of better efficiency. That airline should in theory be able to have much more efficient scheduling of resources and less downtime. This allows them to make higher profits and/or undercut their competitors. Other airlines will see the benefits and follow suit. The ones that can't update their software will be consumed by the ones that can.
On the other side of the spectrum, constantly rolling out infrastructure rewrites is pretty inefficient as well. There is some optimal lifecycle for these sorts of things (e.g. 20 years ?). Too far over or under, and you are not making as much profit as you could have been.
old code is plenty fast. It's just full of bugs, non-scalable, unmaintainable, and platform dependent. When we had slow computers speed was the only thing that mattered. Now we have fast computers and maintainability, scalability, and platform independence is worth a few lost clock cycles.
Old code is fast, but not if you count the time it takes to write, maintain, rewrite, and all the time spend debugging and rebooting computers and restarting services when things don't work.
Brian Kernighan put it eloquently: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
Even if Nvidia linux support is better today, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Even if people buy Nvidia for their current linux setups, that doesn't mean that they aren't rooting for AMD. AMD seems to have more ambition to have better linux support, they just have farther to go.
It may be true that AMD is not seeing a return on their investment *yet*, but it's a pretty typical property of investments that returns are delayed. If AMD starts to take the lead in linux support, I don't see any reason that all these people buying NVIDIA for their linux setups won't switch to AMD.
AMD is a big company. They understand how investments work.
Freedom of privacy in public was never a freedom to begin with.
Freedom to store your own experiences into memory has always been a natural freedom that only death or brain damage could take away from you. Now this natural freedom is being augmented with technology.
Strategy1: Don't do things you want kept secret in public. This is not anything new. You will just have a higher chance of getting noticed if you are doing something particularly interesting than in the past.
Strategy2: Develop thicker skin to the idea that you have no privacy in public, and just live your life. If you are not committing crimes, then the worst that can happen is that someone has a picture of your underwear or something. This isn't embarrassing unless you allow it to embarrass you. Keep in mind that everyone else's underwear will be showing too, and the novelty of seeing someone's underwear will likely wear off in the future. Look at how scandalous it was to see someone's ankles in the past. Obviously people can see more private things than your underwear, but this is just a metaphor and the same principle applies.
"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"
How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a camera and attached it to his roof. It just records your house all day. How would you feel about it?
I would not feel good about it. However, I am not sure I would feel much worse knowing my neighbor was constantly monitoring the top of my house rather than the side of my house. I am positive that my fear of hypothetical neighbors spying on me is a good reason to create laws regulating something that has not happened yet.
Why not wait to see what the danger is before regulating it? Human governments are already experts at coming up with regulations that are obsolete by decades. Why make this mistake even worse by passing regulations on a future that hasn't even happened yet? Do we not have any other problems in the present to deal with?
What kinds of flows of people, if they were allowed to happen, in your mind would would make *this* possible? Can you give any specific examples like (If china allowed people to leave, or If the US had an open borders immigration policy, etc)?
Why do you think shareholders are willing to pay CEOs so much money, especially considering that the salary of the CEO is deducted from their own profits? Charity?
Many CEOs are crap. By the same token many regular workers are crap too.
The reason CEOs get paid more is because the owners of the company (i.e. the shareholders) feel it is necessary to pay them that much. The shareholder don't give a shit about the CEO. They care about corporate profits (from which the CEO's salary is deducted).
If the shareholders felt they could pay a CEO $50,000 and get the same performance, they would absolutely do that. It means more money for them. Usually a CEOs salary is small potatoes compared to the corporate profits. Most shareholders are willing to pay high salaries to have a better selection of good CEOs, with a relatively small effect on corporate profits.
There is nothing stopping you from undercutting all the CEOs out there. You can offer to be CEO for only $500,000. If you can convince the shareholders you will do as good a job, they will fire their existing CEO in a heartbeat to get more profit. The problem is that you probably won't be convincing to them, despite the general perception of incompetence of CEOs lately.
If you feel that you are better at determining if CEOs are incompetent than other people, you can make a killing by simply investing in companies with good underpaid CEOs and selling short on companies with incompetent overpaid CEOs.
Life is not black and white. Good vs. bad decisions aren't black and white. CEOs aren't incompetent or geniuses on average. Some are geniuses and some are idiots, and the average is somewhere in the middle.
Shareholders who hire an incompetent CEO who nose dives the company is like me hiring an expensive plumber who breaks a pipe and floods my house. It happens sometimes. Does it mean all plumbers are overpaid? No, and that's why I can;t go to the next plumber and ask him to accept half his normal rate because my last plumber fucked up.
If 99% of plumbers or CEOs were fuck ups, they would not be able to command such a high salary. People would simply pay random people off the street minimum wage to run the companies and fix their pipes. They can't do any worse a job than professionals, and you can pay them 1/10th the price.
H1B does and doesn't hand more power to corporations. It's like the advantage of a college education. Yes it gives you more power, but the existence of college educations also means that you need one just to compete. So yes corporations can hire cheaper workers, but when all the corporations do this it makes production cheaper, and now all these corporations need to lower prices to be competitive.
H1B helps foreign workers and American corporations at the expense of International corporations and American workers, but this is because American workers already had an advantage over foreign workers, and foreign corporations had an advantage over american corporations.
The advantage corporations have over workers is a problem, but it is not one that should be solved by restricting the labor market. It should be solved by removing corporations status as persons and stopping the "too big to fail" policies by allowing big companies to fail and causing their shareholders to suffer the fianancial losses associated with their poor decisions (e.g. picking stupid CEOs). It is helping poorly run companies with tax money that is facilitating poor decisions. It creates a moral hazard. If comapnies were allowed to fail again, I guarantee there would be a sharp incline in better decision making, because all of a sudden better decision making is the only way to make more money, and as the saying goes "A fool and his money are soon parted"
These artificial limitations on what and with who US companies can work with are just creating a wall between US and other countries.
The wall is full of holes. Companies can still sell equipment to a middleman that then resells to Russia. Even if this is forbidden, it is completely unenforceable if the middleman is not a US company.
I am an American software developer. If someone is willing to do the same job as me for half the price, then that means that the skill I'm selling is not worth the price I am trying to sell it for. I don't feel entitled to an inflated salary by virtue of the fact that I am American.
Anyone coming here to work is now also required to have the same higher cost of living that I have. If they are telecommuting from India and enjoy relatively high wages + lower cost of living, that's awesome. There is nothing stopping me from moving to India and doing the same thing.
It's not the market being pushed down. It's the market converging to it's true value.
We can feel entitled to higher salaries as a birthright if we want, but it is not going to help us. We can rely on our past dominance for only so long. What we should do is focusing on being better (i.e. being more productive for less cost), rather than working to keep our foreign competitors out of the market. If you can do twice as much work as 2 typical Indian programmers, then you deserve twice their salary.
I actually get tax free lunches when I am sent away for business. I think the rationale is that I am now forced (by my job, my job being defined by my boss) to go to a remote location where I am unable to eat my own home cooked meals (which are healthy and very inexpensive) and instead forced to eat comparable food at restaurants (which is very expensive).
In this case do you suppose the IRS has decided my lunches are necessary and tax free or do you think this was done by my boss, who has claimed it as such?
In many instances this is true in healthcare. But this is the exception to the rule. MOst of the things we put on the government credit card are not things that save us money in the long term. They are things that we have decided we are unwilling to live without. But by doing this our biggest expense becomes interest payments. If we could simply live within our means for a while, it would mean that all the money we are spending on interest could be spent on stuff.
I am not even advocating privatizing everything. I am advocating smart utilization of government resources. I am advocating what John Stewart constantly says on his show. I want value for the money we spend in washington. For lots of the things we buy, we are not getting good value, first and foremost being our interest payments.
The biggest cost savings would be to abolish social security and medicare. Once you decide that saving people is more important than small government and financial freedom, then we need to decide the most fair way to distribute government resources towards care and research. One way that seems pretty fair is democracy, although it doesn't always work.
I'm not saying it's flawless. I am saying that a consumption tax has 1 less flaw than the existing system.
Now on to specifics:
Yes you would tax consumption of medical services if it where still a commercial service. It is important to have the prices of all services reflect their true cost. In order to support the poor, a prebate could be given out to people, raising everyone's income to some minimum level. Ideally single payer healthcare would simply be paid for with the consumption tax money.
Yes rich people are good at dodging taxes. But instead of dodging one tax (income tax), they would be forced to try to dodge a consumption tax everytime they purchased something. This means getting every single vendor to conspire with you to break the law. Instead of finding 1 shady accountant, you need to find countless shady vendors.
Gifts have the same problem in both systems, so switching systems is just a wash in that area. I don't see the problem with inflation.
Do you think its worth the IRS's time to pursue 8 year olds for capital gains made by trading dessert cups on the underground schoolyard dessert cup markets? Why they might have dollars of undeclared income! Couple that with their allowance... /faceplam
No it's obviously not worth the IRS's time to pursue 8 year olds. What a stupid question. Kids don't have any undeclared income. Their allowance is probably really small, and many poor kids don't even get an allowance.
What is this facepalm you speak of?
Whooooosh
Maybe google could simply require their employees to eat lunch at the cafeteria (like how firefighters are forced to live at the station), and now it is no longer a form of payment to the employee, but an "obligation".
You decide the way we decide anything subjective in a democracy... with democracy.
If most people have friends and relatives that have suffered from brain related illnesses, then it becomes very important. If most people don't know anyone with mental illness, then it becomes less important. Maybe everyone knows someone with Alzheimers, but they are just much more scared of other things like cancer and heart disease.
If people don't like the laws that get passed (i.e. the way the money is spent), then they elect new representatives to make new laws. Its not a perfect system, but I don't have any better ideas.
I don't see why mentioning the national debt means I am being influenced by republicans. I also said we should raise taxes and I even quoted Obama.
Yes we owe most of the debt to "ourselves", but that's not the right way to look at it. We could say that 100% of the world's debt is held by other people in the world, so really no debt is ever bad because it's just internal "world debt", and therefore no debt is ever bad, but this can't be true.
When we create excessive debt (i.e. increase the money supply) we make people in general feel liek they have more wealth than they actually do. They start building mansions and say "I will pay for my retirement with all the money I make flipping houses". Then we end up with a bunch of useless mcmansions and a generation of people who need the next generation to support them, because we spent the money on houses rather than on investing it for a rainy day.
obviously this is just a silly example, but I don't think it is too far off from reality.
Yes I do think it is very important. I think it would probably even be beneficial to spend more than $2/person/year.
I just disagree that being in opposition to spending the money means that people don't care about suffering. They may simply care more about suffering in different areas, or simply want to decide for themselves which causes are worthy (e.g. charity).
Also, government programs have a reputation for wasting money. Something might be a very good cause, but that doesn't mean the government will solve it by throwing money at it. I am not saying the private sector is always better. I am just saying that there is some probability the money will just be squandered, and that needs to be factored into the equation. Many government programs are so important that they are worth doing even if X% will be squandered.
You say the money is coming out of our paycheck either way, but that's not the whole truth. We are ridiculously in debt. There is over $50K of US debt for every citizen.
Every $1 we spend now is $10 we need to repay later. We are consuming more than we are producing, and we are paying for it with a credit card. This isn't about democrats vs republicans. Taxes vs. spending cuts. What are doing now is unsustainable. We need to raise taxes to pay off the debt faster *and* cut spending. I believe Obama called this "a balanced approach".