You are a libertarian. You just don't like other libertarians. I don't really like other libertarians for the same sorts of reasons you probably don't. Or maybe you aren't a libertarian. It's just a meaningless label that's been co-opted by the republican party anyway.
In any case there is no reason you can't support a social welfare system and be a libertarian. Libertarians aren't anarchists (or at least they shouldn't be). Libertarians should believe in government doing the jobs that government can do better than the private sector, and libertarians are free to disagree on which jobs those are.
There are plenty of stupid shitty selfish libertarians, and there are plenty of compassionate and thoughtful libertarians, just like every other political persuasion. Although it seems as though lately many of the libertarians I can actually relate to, have started to shy away from that label as it has recently become rather toxic.
In any case, all I want to point out is that "libertarian" is a very broad philosophy that encompasses more than just the dickhead republicans who are the loudest self proclaimed libertarians at the moment. Although I would argue that you aren't a real libertarian if you don't support liberty for people outside your own demographic (e.g. gays, women, minorities, muslims, atheists, recreational drug users, polygamists, etc). It's easy to support liberty for yourself.
Because when I think of forcing democracy down people's throats, I think of ISIS...
Wait why do people have to move out? Who has to move out? Is it the people who need to live in a state where they have the freedom to control what other people put into their bodies?
The next thing you know, they'll be forcing freedom of speech down everyone's throats and taking away the freedom to silence others.
If you treat the words "liberty" and "religious extremism" as interchangeable, they are literally identical to ISIS. What is this world coming to?
My primary point was that X being Microsoft Exchange or any of the other big tools that Microsoft markets towards Scenario B is ripe for problems since those low skilled admins will create a lot of problems that fewer higher skilled admins would have prevented.
Sure there are lots of jobs like that. My job is like that.
And the fact that you're comparing 10 high skilled versus 2 high skilled plus 8 lower skilled also highlights the problem because in reality the comparison would more likely be:
5 high skilled admins to do job X.
1 high skilled admins and 40 low skilled admins to do job X.
1 good high skilled admin is usually worth at least 10 low skilled admins.
Sure. For jobs like that you just don't hire low skilled workers, because it is not economically efficient. But if you can make a job a little easier, you should be able to hire at least slightly less skilled workers or at least fewer workers of equal skill.
All I am saying is that if you make a job easier to the point where it is actually easier (i.e.not just perception), that is a good thing. This is in contrast to the suggestion that making jobs easier is not good, because it lowers wages.
And yes, whether you can *actually* make job X easier is always an open question. If you can only make Job X seem easier (but not actually easier) then you shouldn't do that because having bad information just wastes resources (e.g. time, money, etc).
The implication was that there is an equivalence between the relationship between (knives->surgery : software->IT). He is implying both that surgery is more than just using a knife and it's opposite. This is what's known as a contradiction. And I was trying to highlight this contradiction.
If I Bob says "I hate all mammals" and Sally says to Bob "But dolphins are mammals", is she implying that Bob hates dolphins or that Bob doesn't hate dolphins. It could be either or both. It's ambiguous.
I realize you are trying desperately to "get me", but this is getting really boring for me.
My advice to you is to just read what people actually say rather than inferring extra meaning from what they said based on what kind of tone you feel like they have.
And you'll entirely miss the point by focusing on that and not acknowledging that, at the end of the day, that knife allows you to cut and carve without knowing anything about metallurgy
I didn't miss this point. In fact I reiterated it. You need to learn to read.
I rather like the idea of being able to throttle my connection to have it not count toward my data cap. It would be nice if I could actually decide when this happens, rather than having T-Mobile decide.
It's actually impossible to offer unlimited data. This would require infinite bandwidth.
A restaurant can offer "all-you-can-eat", but they probably can't offer "unlimited food", because food is a limited resource.
As far as I can tell, "unlimited data" in the world of cellular means that they will never cut your data off or charge you more money for going over a certain amount of data. There will always be a limit to your bandwidth whether artificial or from physics.
People just need to get used to the idea that datarate is as important a spec as gigabytes when getting a data plan.
It's easy to offer "unlimited" data plans if the data rate is low enough.
It's not that we shouldn't worry about the buggy whip manufacturers. It's that we should worry more about a stagnant economy where buggy whip manufacturers have nothing to worry about (other than the dead end society they live in).
If we cured cancer tomorrow, all the oncologists would be out of a job. Is there really anybody (even the oncologists) that shouldn't be celebrating?
As a software engineer I am constantly trying to make my own job obsolete. If one day we actually succeed, I might be a little sad, but that would mean that the ultimate goal of the entire field of computer science (i.e. automation) has been fully realized.
The data fed to the software (by the human) is the software's input, whatever the software does with that software is its output (e.g. work); the position, pressure, and direction of force (e.g. data) fed to the knife (by the human) is the knife's input, the resulting cut is the knife's output (e.g. work). In both scenarios, the human does the work of inputting the data and the tool does the work of providing a result, how is that disingenuous?
I will entertain this ridiculous example of a knife having input and output. In this example the knife is a very dumb tool. If it had any sort of logic at all it would be something like "while (true) beSharp();". If a tool does nearly everything for you (i.e. a robot surgeon rather than a knife), then you don't need as highly skilled a person to do the job competently.
I trust a bozo with a calculator to come up with an accurate value for sin(57.678 degrees) more than I trust Albert Einstein with a pencil and paper. That's because the tool (the calculator) does nearly all the work of calculating the result of the Taylor series. The only job for human is to enter the input correctly.
Even doing math by hand has inputs and outputs. The inputs and outputs are the result of every single intermediate arithmetic operation. Arithmetic/taylor series and calculators are both tools. One requires a person very good at arithmetic and the other doesn't.
And the whole point of knives is cutting. That's why we have people who are good at carving turkeys without having a clue how to forge a blade, and it's why you are able to cut your steak without understanding metallurgy.
Yes the whole point of a knife is cutting. If all you need to do is cut, then a knife will allow any idiot to achieve the goal of cutting.
Of course there's more to surgery and, speaking of disingenuous, it's funny you'd imply that I ever claimed otherwise.
I made no such implication. You inferred it. I was caliming that the person I was responding to made this implication. Try to pay attention.
There is also a lot more to Windows IT than simply knowing how to use the tools; and I'm not speaking as a windows IT worker here, just using common sense; as in any field, it's not just knowing how to use the tools
It is not *only* using tools, but it is not *a lot* more than just using tools. What counts as *a lot* is subjective, but I think salaries are a good (albeit imperfect) measure of how much skill a job requires. The more people that can do it, the less the job will pay. The easier it is, the more people that will be able to do it.
On your typical corporate (e.g. Windows) network, you're dealing with a lot more moving parts than the typical human body, so I think the comparison is fair,
I don't think this is even a coherent comparison. We actually fully understand computers having intentionally designed them at every level from transistors to the high level software architecture. There is not a single piece of computer technology that is no completely understood by a human.
I will ignore that fact that nothing in a computer is "moving" except for fans and disk drives and take this metaphorically. Computers currently have tens of billions of transistors We don't even completely understand how a single cell works, and the human body is a system of tens of trillions of cells, and hundreds of trillions of microbes. We definitely not understand the human body to the degree to which we understand computers (i.e. 100% perfectly), we don't even know how much more there is to know about human biology.
And, clearly, if Linux admins are still higher paid than Windows admins, while those of us with any real aptitude for maintaining computer systems often find the task easier to do in Linux, that simply says that nobody working in Windows IT really knows what they're doing enough
I am not making any claims about how hard or easy or how much skill is required to be a windows admin. All I am asking is this:
Scenario A: It requires 10 highly skilled admins to do job X.
Scenario B: It requires 2 highly skilled admins and 8 low skilled admins to do job X.
Isn't Scenario B better? The person I originally responded to seemed to be suggesting that Scenario A was better because it meant 10 people were highly paid rather than just 2.
The post you were replying to was making no such comparison but, rather, implying that eas-of-use of the tools required for the job in now way indicated possession of the required skills, id est, you still missed the point.
...by comparing what we were talking about (windows IT) with surgery. Are you really that fucking stupid?
And no I didn't miss the point. I fully acknowledge the dumb and irrelevant point that was being made. But comparing a knife as a tool vs software as a tool is a bit disingenuous considering software actually does the work *for* the human. The whole point of software is automation. That's why you can have people who are good at using photoshop without a having any clue how the math behind a Gaussian blur works, and it's why you are able to google things without understanding Markov chains.
There is a lot more to surgery than just knowing how a knife works. There is apparently not all that much more to Windows IT than knowing how to use Windows admin software.
A shallow understanding of the way some things work is necessary to being productive. If a library has a good API I can use it's functionality effectively without understanding exactly how it works. There have been plenty of bad libraries with bad APIs that have forced me to learn exactly how they work, but I wouldn't consider this effective use of my time.
Some things are very important to understand in detail, and some things are not.
In fact part of the art of writing a good library or a good API is making it so that people can use it without knowing the implementation details.
Obviously a "deep" understanding is better than a "shallow" understanding. But usually the tradeoff is broad vs. narrow.
Of all the resources one might consider important to save in the endeavor of software development CPU cycles, memory usage, etc. I would argue that the most limited resource is the man hours of engineers' time. It's not a question of *should* the engineer have a deep understanding of XYZ, the question is, what things are the most important for the engineer to spend time working on and developing an understanding of.
I take the fact that you think I am trying to sound smart as a compliment.
I find it ironic that you criticize me for trying to bring philosophy into a discussion where it doesn;t belong, but you are the one bringing up (what you think are) logical fallacies in my position.
Indeed, I'm also highly mechanically skilled, just not where it requires very detailed fine motor skills (such as assembling very tiny and delicate parts) amongst other skills; of course I understand that a person can be skiled in multiple fields. Speaking of assumptions...
Please note that I explicitly refrained from making any assumptions about what you think. I specifically try to avoid falling into the trap that you can't stop falling into.
Indeed, I'm always learning new languages and programming techniques and philosophies; as well, I had to learn a new set of tools and assemblies to work on the new car I recently bought. If my skills were static, as you wish to imply I think they are, this would not have been possible.
If you think I was trying to imply your skills were static, I think you need to reread what I said.
Back to my point, however: Never underestimate the value of expertise, even in a field that has been made highly accessible. there will always be a use for an expert to maintain that accessibility, and to handle use cases the previous experts did not consider.
When is it OK to underestimate anything? Is it ok to underestimate the value of expertise in heating up a Big Mac?
Back to my point, which is the absurdity of comparing the expertise of a surgeon to a windows IT guy.
I don't think anyone is saying that you should have N levels of abstraction in software designed to control a single servo from an embedded computer. There is a time and a place to be abstract, and a time and place to be explicit.
That said, there are benefits to software abstraction even in some low level code. Abstraction allows you to reuse logic that would otherwise be duplicated. All that duplicated logic needs to be tested and maintained.
Rather than hard coding all this stuff you could do something that abstracts the general pattern which is no doubt reused all over the place, and separate out the common logic from the logic specific to that particular thermometer/servo.
If you have a good compiler, the abstracted code often gets turned into very similar (or even the same) machine code.
You seem to be making a lot of very narrow assumptions interpreting what I said. I am not going to go into all the logical fallacies you are probably making with your reasoning, because I don't feel it's worth my time, and I don't like make assumptions about what people are thinking.
But I'll offer up a few hints...
1. The fact that not every high skilled person is high skilled in every possible skill, does not imply that every high skilled person is/ can be only skilled at one thing.
2. The skills that "people" have are not static. Even if it were true that every person's skills never changed througout their lifetime, the skillset of society would be constantly changing as people died and new people are born.
3. The skills people choose to acquire can be influenced by technology and economics. If a certain skill commands a high salary, it incentivizes more people to acquire that skill. If the demand for a skill is lowered or the supply of that skill is raised due to better technology making the skill easier to have (like windows IT), then the lower salary would disincentivize more ambitious people from acquiring this skill and/or encourage less ambitious people to acquire this new skill that has been made easier to acquire and within their reach.
Right up until you meet the limits of what a low skilled person can do.
There is always a limit to what a person of any skill level can do. All I am suggesting is that raising that limit is a good good thing, even if it means accomplishing a task pays less money.
For example I don't think it's a bad thing that any idiot can look at google maps and have a very accurate set of directions. I think it would be worse if getting good directions required a very highly skilled and well compensated cartographer.
First of all I didn't say that MS's software is easy to use. I merely suggested that *if* MS software was easier to use (requiring less skill/effort for the same result), that that would be a good thing. Chill (the person I was responding to, seems to be suggesting the opposite is true (i.e. it's better if the software is harder to use).
Second of all, I would say that the job of software is precisely to make hard things easy. If the goal was to create a jet powered bike, then good software would generate a good design, rather than simply a design calling for the 2 to be duct taped together. You don't even need software to come up with a bad design, humans alone are perfectly capable of doing this without any help.
I guess what I am asking is for you to think about what I am saying in a more meaningful way rather than the trivially incoherent way that you have decided to interpret what I said.
If I asked "What came first, the chicken or the egg?". An answer one might give is "Obviously the egg came first because lots of prehistoric animals had eggs before chickens ever existed". I am asking you not to give this answer.
I don;t think the post I was replying to is a good explanation because it seems to suggest that making things easier (require less skilled labor) is bad because it leads to lower pay for those jobs. I disagree with this assertion, but I am not even sure if he is making it, which is why I was asking.
In a world with relatively few people that are very highly skilled, I think it makes sense to have those skilled people doing things like surgery. I think I can live with a less skilled windows IT admin.
Being proficient in different tools (e.g assembly, c++, python), doesn't give you more or less understanding, it just helps you understand different things.
Being able to write good python code means you are probably good at abstracting solutions to problems, which is a very useful skill.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a libertarian. You just don't like other libertarians. I don't really like other libertarians for the same sorts of reasons you probably don't. Or maybe you aren't a libertarian. It's just a meaningless label that's been co-opted by the republican party anyway.
In any case there is no reason you can't support a social welfare system and be a libertarian. Libertarians aren't anarchists (or at least they shouldn't be). Libertarians should believe in government doing the jobs that government can do better than the private sector, and libertarians are free to disagree on which jobs those are.
There are plenty of stupid shitty selfish libertarians, and there are plenty of compassionate and thoughtful libertarians, just like every other political persuasion. Although it seems as though lately many of the libertarians I can actually relate to, have started to shy away from that label as it has recently become rather toxic.
In any case, all I want to point out is that "libertarian" is a very broad philosophy that encompasses more than just the dickhead republicans who are the loudest self proclaimed libertarians at the moment. Although I would argue that you aren't a real libertarian if you don't support liberty for people outside your own demographic (e.g. gays, women, minorities, muslims, atheists, recreational drug users, polygamists, etc). It's easy to support liberty for yourself.
Because when I think of forcing democracy down people's throats, I think of ISIS...
Wait why do people have to move out? Who has to move out? Is it the people who need to live in a state where they have the freedom to control what other people put into their bodies?
The next thing you know, they'll be forcing freedom of speech down everyone's throats and taking away the freedom to silence others.
If you treat the words "liberty" and "religious extremism" as interchangeable, they are literally identical to ISIS. What is this world coming to?
I would say it depends on what X is.
Of course it does
My primary point was that X being Microsoft Exchange or any of the other big tools that Microsoft markets towards Scenario B is ripe for problems since those low skilled admins will create a lot of problems that fewer higher skilled admins would have prevented.
Sure there are lots of jobs like that. My job is like that.
And the fact that you're comparing 10 high skilled versus 2 high skilled plus 8 lower skilled also highlights the problem because in reality the comparison would more likely be:
5 high skilled admins to do job X.
1 high skilled admins and 40 low skilled admins to do job X.
1 good high skilled admin is usually worth at least 10 low skilled admins.
Sure. For jobs like that you just don't hire low skilled workers, because it is not economically efficient. But if you can make a job a little easier, you should be able to hire at least slightly less skilled workers or at least fewer workers of equal skill.
All I am saying is that if you make a job easier to the point where it is actually easier (i.e.not just perception), that is a good thing. This is in contrast to the suggestion that making jobs easier is not good, because it lowers wages.
And yes, whether you can *actually* make job X easier is always an open question. If you can only make Job X seem easier (but not actually easier) then you shouldn't do that because having bad information just wastes resources (e.g. time, money, etc).
The implication was that there is an equivalence between the relationship between (knives->surgery : software->IT). He is implying both that surgery is more than just using a knife and it's opposite. This is what's known as a contradiction. And I was trying to highlight this contradiction.
If I Bob says "I hate all mammals" and Sally says to Bob "But dolphins are mammals", is she implying that Bob hates dolphins or that Bob doesn't hate dolphins. It could be either or both. It's ambiguous.
I realize you are trying desperately to "get me", but this is getting really boring for me.
My advice to you is to just read what people actually say rather than inferring extra meaning from what they said based on what kind of tone you feel like they have.
And you'll entirely miss the point by focusing on that and not acknowledging that, at the end of the day, that knife allows you to cut and carve without knowing anything about metallurgy
I didn't miss this point. In fact I reiterated it. You need to learn to read.
I rather like the idea of being able to throttle my connection to have it not count toward my data cap. It would be nice if I could actually decide when this happens, rather than having T-Mobile decide.
It's actually impossible to offer unlimited data. This would require infinite bandwidth.
A restaurant can offer "all-you-can-eat", but they probably can't offer "unlimited food", because food is a limited resource.
As far as I can tell, "unlimited data" in the world of cellular means that they will never cut your data off or charge you more money for going over a certain amount of data. There will always be a limit to your bandwidth whether artificial or from physics.
People just need to get used to the idea that datarate is as important a spec as gigabytes when getting a data plan.
It's easy to offer "unlimited" data plans if the data rate is low enough.
It's not that we shouldn't worry about the buggy whip manufacturers. It's that we should worry more about a stagnant economy where buggy whip manufacturers have nothing to worry about (other than the dead end society they live in).
If we cured cancer tomorrow, all the oncologists would be out of a job. Is there really anybody (even the oncologists) that shouldn't be celebrating?
As a software engineer I am constantly trying to make my own job obsolete. If one day we actually succeed, I might be a little sad, but that would mean that the ultimate goal of the entire field of computer science (i.e. automation) has been fully realized.
The data fed to the software (by the human) is the software's input, whatever the software does with that software is its output (e.g. work); the position, pressure, and direction of force (e.g. data) fed to the knife (by the human) is the knife's input, the resulting cut is the knife's output (e.g. work). In both scenarios, the human does the work of inputting the data and the tool does the work of providing a result, how is that disingenuous?
I will entertain this ridiculous example of a knife having input and output. In this example the knife is a very dumb tool. If it had any sort of logic at all it would be something like "while (true) beSharp();". If a tool does nearly everything for you (i.e. a robot surgeon rather than a knife), then you don't need as highly skilled a person to do the job competently.
I trust a bozo with a calculator to come up with an accurate value for sin(57.678 degrees) more than I trust Albert Einstein with a pencil and paper. That's because the tool (the calculator) does nearly all the work of calculating the result of the Taylor series. The only job for human is to enter the input correctly.
Even doing math by hand has inputs and outputs. The inputs and outputs are the result of every single intermediate arithmetic operation. Arithmetic/taylor series and calculators are both tools. One requires a person very good at arithmetic and the other doesn't.
And the whole point of knives is cutting. That's why we have people who are good at carving turkeys without having a clue how to forge a blade, and it's why you are able to cut your steak without understanding metallurgy.
Yes the whole point of a knife is cutting. If all you need to do is cut, then a knife will allow any idiot to achieve the goal of cutting.
Of course there's more to surgery and, speaking of disingenuous, it's funny you'd imply that I ever claimed otherwise.
I made no such implication. You inferred it. I was caliming that the person I was responding to made this implication. Try to pay attention.
There is also a lot more to Windows IT than simply knowing how to use the tools; and I'm not speaking as a windows IT worker here, just using common sense; as in any field, it's not just knowing how to use the tools
It is not *only* using tools, but it is not *a lot* more than just using tools. What counts as *a lot* is subjective, but I think salaries are a good (albeit imperfect) measure of how much skill a job requires. The more people that can do it, the less the job will pay. The easier it is, the more people that will be able to do it.
On your typical corporate (e.g. Windows) network, you're dealing with a lot more moving parts than the typical human body, so I think the comparison is fair,
I don't think this is even a coherent comparison. We actually fully understand computers having intentionally designed them at every level from transistors to the high level software architecture. There is not a single piece of computer technology that is no completely understood by a human.
I will ignore that fact that nothing in a computer is "moving" except for fans and disk drives and take this metaphorically. Computers currently have tens of billions of transistors We don't even completely understand how a single cell works, and the human body is a system of tens of trillions of cells, and hundreds of trillions of microbes. We definitely not understand the human body to the degree to which we understand computers (i.e. 100% perfectly), we don't even know how much more there is to know about human biology.
And, clearly, if Linux admins are still higher paid than Windows admins, while those of us with any real aptitude for maintaining computer systems often find the task easier to do in Linux, that simply says that nobody working in Windows IT really knows what they're doing enough
I am not making any claims about how hard or easy or how much skill is required to be a windows admin. All I am asking is this:
Scenario A: It requires 10 highly skilled admins to do job X.
Scenario B: It requires 2 highly skilled admins and 8 low skilled admins to do job X.
Isn't Scenario B better? The person I originally responded to seemed to be suggesting that Scenario A was better because it meant 10 people were highly paid rather than just 2.
The post you were replying to was making no such comparison but, rather, implying that eas-of-use of the tools required for the job in now way indicated possession of the required skills, id est, you still missed the point.
...by comparing what we were talking about (windows IT) with surgery. Are you really that fucking stupid?
And no I didn't miss the point. I fully acknowledge the dumb and irrelevant point that was being made. But comparing a knife as a tool vs software as a tool is a bit disingenuous considering software actually does the work *for* the human. The whole point of software is automation. That's why you can have people who are good at using photoshop without a having any clue how the math behind a Gaussian blur works, and it's why you are able to google things without understanding Markov chains.
There is a lot more to surgery than just knowing how a knife works. There is apparently not all that much more to Windows IT than knowing how to use Windows admin software.
A shallow understanding of the way some things work is necessary to being productive. If a library has a good API I can use it's functionality effectively without understanding exactly how it works. There have been plenty of bad libraries with bad APIs that have forced me to learn exactly how they work, but I wouldn't consider this effective use of my time.
Some things are very important to understand in detail, and some things are not.
In fact part of the art of writing a good library or a good API is making it so that people can use it without knowing the implementation details.
Obviously a "deep" understanding is better than a "shallow" understanding. But usually the tradeoff is broad vs. narrow.
Of all the resources one might consider important to save in the endeavor of software development CPU cycles, memory usage, etc. I would argue that the most limited resource is the man hours of engineers' time. It's not a question of *should* the engineer have a deep understanding of XYZ, the question is, what things are the most important for the engineer to spend time working on and developing an understanding of.
I take the fact that you think I am trying to sound smart as a compliment.
I find it ironic that you criticize me for trying to bring philosophy into a discussion where it doesn;t belong, but you are the one bringing up (what you think are) logical fallacies in my position.
Indeed, I'm also highly mechanically skilled, just not where it requires very detailed fine motor skills (such as assembling very tiny and delicate parts) amongst other skills; of course I understand that a person can be skiled in multiple fields. Speaking of assumptions...
Please note that I explicitly refrained from making any assumptions about what you think. I specifically try to avoid falling into the trap that you can't stop falling into.
Indeed, I'm always learning new languages and programming techniques and philosophies; as well, I had to learn a new set of tools and assemblies to work on the new car I recently bought. If my skills were static, as you wish to imply I think they are, this would not have been possible.
If you think I was trying to imply your skills were static, I think you need to reread what I said.
Back to my point, however: Never underestimate the value of expertise, even in a field that has been made highly accessible. there will always be a use for an expert to maintain that accessibility, and to handle use cases the previous experts did not consider.
When is it OK to underestimate anything? Is it ok to underestimate the value of expertise in heating up a Big Mac?
Back to my point, which is the absurdity of comparing the expertise of a surgeon to a windows IT guy.
I am really starting to get the impression that you are a "highly skilled" windows IT admin...
I don't think anyone is saying that you should have N levels of abstraction in software designed to control a single servo from an embedded computer. There is a time and a place to be abstract, and a time and place to be explicit.
That said, there are benefits to software abstraction even in some low level code. Abstraction allows you to reuse logic that would otherwise be duplicated. All that duplicated logic needs to be tested and maintained.
Rather than hard coding all this stuff you could do something that abstracts the general pattern which is no doubt reused all over the place, and separate out the common logic from the logic specific to that particular thermometer/servo.
If you have a good compiler, the abstracted code often gets turned into very similar (or even the same) machine code.
You seem to be making a lot of very narrow assumptions interpreting what I said. I am not going to go into all the logical fallacies you are probably making with your reasoning, because I don't feel it's worth my time, and I don't like make assumptions about what people are thinking.
But I'll offer up a few hints...
1. The fact that not every high skilled person is high skilled in every possible skill, does not imply that every high skilled person is/ can be only skilled at one thing.
2. The skills that "people" have are not static. Even if it were true that every person's skills never changed througout their lifetime, the skillset of society would be constantly changing as people died and new people are born.
3. The skills people choose to acquire can be influenced by technology and economics. If a certain skill commands a high salary, it incentivizes more people to acquire that skill. If the demand for a skill is lowered or the supply of that skill is raised due to better technology making the skill easier to have (like windows IT), then the lower salary would disincentivize more ambitious people from acquiring this skill and/or encourage less ambitious people to acquire this new skill that has been made easier to acquire and within their reach.
Right up until you meet the limits of what a low skilled person can do.
There is always a limit to what a person of any skill level can do. All I am suggesting is that raising that limit is a good good thing, even if it means accomplishing a task pays less money.
For example I don't think it's a bad thing that any idiot can look at google maps and have a very accurate set of directions. I think it would be worse if getting good directions required a very highly skilled and well compensated cartographer.
Well it seems that the scenario you are talking about is the one where the software doesn't allow a low-skilled person to do the job.
First of all I didn't say that MS's software is easy to use. I merely suggested that *if* MS software was easier to use (requiring less skill/effort for the same result), that that would be a good thing. Chill (the person I was responding to, seems to be suggesting the opposite is true (i.e. it's better if the software is harder to use).
Second of all, I would say that the job of software is precisely to make hard things easy. If the goal was to create a jet powered bike, then good software would generate a good design, rather than simply a design calling for the 2 to be duct taped together. You don't even need software to come up with a bad design, humans alone are perfectly capable of doing this without any help.
I guess what I am asking is for you to think about what I am saying in a more meaningful way rather than the trivially incoherent way that you have decided to interpret what I said.
If I asked "What came first, the chicken or the egg?". An answer one might give is "Obviously the egg came first because lots of prehistoric animals had eggs before chickens ever existed". I am asking you not to give this answer.
I don;t think the post I was replying to is a good explanation because it seems to suggest that making things easier (require less skilled labor) is bad because it leads to lower pay for those jobs. I disagree with this assertion, but I am not even sure if he is making it, which is why I was asking.
In a world with relatively few people that are very highly skilled, I think it makes sense to have those skilled people doing things like surgery. I think I can live with a less skilled windows IT admin.
No it's an example of a question being asked.
Being proficient in different tools (e.g assembly, c++, python), doesn't give you more or less understanding, it just helps you understand different things. Being able to write good python code means you are probably good at abstracting solutions to problems, which is a very useful skill.
If MS made their software easy enough to use that a low skilled person can do it, isn't that a good thing?