There was a widespread claim a few years back that there was a half-million shortage of Software Engineers that would reach one million by 2020. I cry bullshit on that, as it is quite difficult for many coders to find work - guys with grey hair such as myself, women, latinos, African Americans and those who specialize in coding other than web or mobile apps.
I only got back to work when I totally gave up on getting into mobile or web then hung out my shingle as a driver and embedded coder. That's worked out well but what I _really_ like a about coding?
"Check this out Mom. See what happens when I click _this_ button?" "Yes...."
But consider that my own degree is in Physics yet I do just fine. That blog cited the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics for both figures but I have been unable to find the original publication - if there even is one. I emailed a specific individual at the BLS who was in that general line of statisticsifying but got no response. Later this week I'll send a few dead trees to them.
My own take is that hiring managers and recruiters are completely unable to judiciously select the right candidates to interview due to - as I've read repeatledy, no citation but RSN I'll have one - that job board posts for coders result in on the average one thousand applications.
Surely that would make your own eyeballs bleed.
The Balkanizations of languages, applications - web back end, front end, mobile, embedded, systems, MIS even nuclear weapons design - results in it being very very difficult for the right coders to connect to the right companies. That and the fact that Google Trends convinced me that the single most-consistently searched-for keyword is "jobs" resulted in my building what - by 2020 I hope - will be a comprehensive list of links directly to the Jobs or Careers Portals of every Computer Industry that hires through its own website. BEHOLD:
(The exceedingly basic web design is intended to enable my site to work well for the ancient boxes and browsers found in the developing world, most rural public libraries as well as those owned by low-income people.)
About a month from now I'll form a Non-Profit Corporation to take over the operation of Soggy Jobs. The IRS takes about a year to approve 501(c)(3) Tax-Deductible Status, at which point I'll apply for charitable grants from Google.org, employment- and economic development-oriented philanthropists, and government employment and economic development agencies.
That will enable me to hire - just at first - an Entry-Level SQA Engineer, a Journey-Level Back End Developer and a Senior Front End Developer; I've got lots of plans for modern boxes and browsers that I shan't divulge until they... wait for it... Beta.
After the IRS approves my deductible status I'll form subsidiaries in most industrialized nations then apply for their non deductible statuses. That's going to be really complicated and will require some cash as I'll have to retain a bunch of non-profit corp formation attorneys.
San Francisco consistently gets the most hits. My most-loved page is that for
From time to time I read - especially here at/. - that string theory is bogus because it is not falsifiable.
G-d Almighty Himself didn't create the Universe for the benefit of scientists. Just because a theory cannot be falsified, does not mean it is incorrect. It means we just don't know.
At first I understood quantum mechanics well enough to get good grades on my problem sets and exams, but I regarded it as delusional because I was heavily into the deterministic Newtonian idea of The Clockwork Universe.
He was able to give me a deep insight into QM without ever once doing a derivation or even simple arithmetic. For the most part it was purely conceptual discussions of the two-slit experiment.
What convinced me of quantum indeterminism in the end was Feynman pointing out that the two-slit also works for electrons, not just photons, and that one can use Shot Noise to determine when individual electrons are leaving the hot wire filament used to produce them.
Even if you send over just one electron at a time, you still get the rippled interference pattern at the detector.
It turns out that an antiparticle going back in time is exactly the same as a regular particle going forward in time. Just by watching an individual particle, or only a few of them, you cannot determine which direction time is going on.
It's only when you have enough particles for their measure of entropy to make sense that you can determine which direction time is going in. Entropy ALWAYS increases with time, so if you watch a system of particles, and their entropy is steadily decreasing, they are going backwards.
I've never heard anyone mention it, but what about smaller systems of particles, where entropy can be measured, but whose entropy fluctuates? Does time go back and forth? I don't know.
"MAYBE THERE'S JUST ONE ELECTRON!" Feynman once shouted.
We don't think that's the case - that just one electron goes from the beginning of the Universe to the end, then returns as a positron - because if there were significant amounts of antimatter in the Universe, we would expect there to be lots of 0.511 MeV gamma rays in the cosmic radiation but there is not.
I am STILL stymied by a question he asked once:
"Why does a mirror reverse left-and-right but not up-and-down?"
The CEO of a company - whether public or not - is expected to make certain decisions completely on his or her own.
Like the captain of a ship. Consider that all the captains of the US missile submarine fleet have the authority to nuke President Putin back to the stone ages should the sub ever lose communications with their commanders in the Pentagon.
Like the captain of a ship, the CEO of a company can be relieved of command, should - NOT the stockholders but THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS - feel he or she is doing a bad job.
Like say, when the Apple board tossed Steve Jobs out on his ear, put Woz out to pasture, scouted around for a more multinational kinda brand-oriented guy, brought in John Scully, who proceeded to lay off four thousand of my coworkers back when I was doing MacTCP QA for Apple, because he'd never actually used a computer in his entire life before hiring on at the Cupertino Fruit Company.
Rly. I still have my Apple Employee Loan-to-Own PowerMac 8500. That tradition got started specifically because of Scully not knowing how to use a computer. That was actually a common problem back in the day. Actually it still is; I know of some guy whose computer was running real slow, because he hide NINE Internet Explorer toolbars. But I digress.
Now suppose Timmy-baby really wasn't doing his job, but the board backed him. Then the job of the shareholders would be to elect a new board. That's one of the things they often do at these shareholder meetings. It would be up to a vote of the board to replace the CEO.
As for those who object to Apple's green policies. Consider how many citizens of the People's Republic of China work for Apple, or for one of Apple's suppliers such as FoxConn. I expect that - indirectly - far more people work for Apple in the PRC than do in the whole rest of the world put together.
The air in China used to be pretty clean because the people lived in a very simple manner, they didn't own many consumer products, they all dressed in olive drab and rode bicycles to work and school. Even Ambassador George Herbert Walker Bush rode his bike to the embassy in Peking!
While nominally still Communist, actually it is quite likely the closest to unfettered capitalism of anywhere on the planet. Without the slightest thought towards urban planning, there are factories everywhere, everyone who has a good job has a nice car, and a nice place to live. Thus they had that one hundred mile long traffic jam that lasted a week.
China gets most of its energy from coal. It is plentiful there. They import coal as well; there is a controversial proposal to build a coal terminal where I now live in Vancouver, Washington, so coal mined in Montana can be loaded onto cargo ships then transported to China.
This had the eventual result that I recently saw the most amazing photograph. I don't have a link but maybe I can dig it up then post it in a reply.
The smog is so thick in many Chinese cities that one cannot see the sky, certainly not the sunrise.
So along the busy streets, in the early mornings, they have installed very large video screens that show the rising Sun.
The photo I saw, the video on that screen was so beautiful, but the smog was so thick that the people couldn't see more than maybe thirty feet. That's why the life expectancy in Beijing has gone down by fifteen years.
I don't know that Tim Cook is worrying about his Chinese employees, or those of his Chinese vendors, but if he wants FoxConn to keep assembling iDevices, they can't all be dropping dead of emphysema can they? Grandpa Crawford died of that, he spent his last five years on a portable oxygen tank. It's a nasty way to go.
"No Mom, your computer isn't slow. It's a G4 iMac. You have 1.2 GB of memory. You are never going to run out of gigabytes." (That's how my mother refers to her disk drive.
"The people who write most software these days, they have really, really fast machines, with lots of memory and tons of gigabytes. They don't take care to make their software run fast anymore. It's a real problem."
When I use Mom's mouse to resize an OpenOffice window, the corner of the window lags quite far - not noticably but severely so - behind the motions of the mouse.
Now consider my own product QuickLetter from Working Software, that in 1992 was quick and snappy on a Mac Plus with 4 MB of memory, and what was it? An 8 MHz 68000? Or was it 6 MHz?
I don't know the clock of the G4 in Mom's iMac, but it is several hundred megahertz at least.
It is quite common for me these days to find web pages that take ten minutes to fully download. When I looked into ordering Comcast Business Class Cable Internet, I needed to view three pages - their homepage, then their business internet offerings, then their pricing.
Each page took a full hour to download. This because mom still uses dialup earthlink. It works fine for her occasional email to aunt peggy. I expect that comcast's web designers never actually tested their own site over dialup, despite trying to sell cable internet to dialup users.
Solr claims to be yet strictly fails to be a drop-in search engine for your website.
A former employer of mine, who didn't have a clue about Linux, Java or Open Source, bet the farm on Solr speeding up the report generation for his online service.
I don't want to tell you who this employer is because they provide a valuable service to the business community. But the owner of the company is a raging alcoholic, who devoted at least an hour at the end of each day for not having gotten Solr up and running yet, despite his not having lifted a finger to evaluate it before committing to the project.
If there is the slightest error in Solr's configuration, and you have logging enabled, it spews Java exception stack traces, but does not give you the first clue as to what you did wrong.
Stack traces are for developers not end-users, M'Kay? How about a diagnostic message?
I repeatedly asked for help on Stackoverflow but no one ever answered my questions. All I ever found were questions from other desperate Solr users, for the most part unanswered.
Before you commit to a technology, or your new bride, or your vote for a political candidate, put it or their name into google along with "sucks" just for grins.
for example, at the time "Solr sucks" got 600,000 hits.
It is appalling that software like that would be released to end users with the claim it is production quality software.
From time to time I see Solr coding gigs on the job boards. I never apply, I just say "You are doomed" to myself. Perhaps I should do the right thing, by sending a polite email to the hiring manager, suggesting he select some other solution to his problem.
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
A friend of mine was at one time a dot-com millionaire, but he managed to blow it all on hats.
Throughout the dot-com crash, his company website had two or three open positions. The job requisitions were updated regularly - that is, they weren't always the same job. Sometimes he needed engineering, sometimes QA, sometimes sales.
So I dropped him a dime and said "Aren't you busted?" and he replied "Yeah but as long as our creditors think we're still in business, they hope to get repaid. If we weren't hiring they might send the sheriff around to seize our office furniture."
I've been asked this same question in interviews twice:
write a C function to reverse a C-string in place.
I expect most slashbots can supply a correct answer, but a good friend of mine who has many years of experience as a visual basic coder, and who does know some basic C, is unable to answer the question.
When I supplied my answer, the company owner said "I see you have an eye for efficiency". I found that puzzling. Perhaps that's why I got the job.
I've interviewed with google a few times. I won't tell you any of their interview questions, that would be rude, but I will tell you that their HR recruiters - all in-house, not third-party headhunters - all screen new candidates by asking the very same, very basic three computer science questions. Anyone who has done one single algorithms class, and worked a year at a good coding job should be able to answer all three questions, but I expect that many prospective candidates cannot.
What they teach in a Computer Science degree are some of the more common or interesting algorithms, algorithm analysis and design, some operating system theory, say how to write a mouse driver as did my friend at UC Santa Cruz.
So you get out on the workforce looking for your first job, and you see that the craigslist "sof / qa / dba" section wants someone who knows PHP, Javascript and MySQL.
So you buy some books and learn those, maybe you get the job, but eventually you go looking for another job. They want C#.Net, Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server.
I now have a vast number of technical books, and a hard time getting a job because I've never written an Android App.
How about on-the-job training? There were at least at one time some companies that did it. That's how I learned Java, Python, Smalltalk, Postscript and UNIX Sysadmin. But on the job training is very uncommon these days, because employers want "someone who can hit the ground running".
If you paid your new hire to spend his or her first week reading an O'Reilly book, then the next month paired up with a more experienced coder, you'd find that there is no shortage of workers, rather there is a surplus.
marijuana is completely legal and grows wild all over creation?
While Albert Hoffman had yet to discover it in 1776, LSD was perfectly legal from his discovery during world war II until 1965.
Now we find that the conservatives work vigorously to prevent the cultivation of industrial hemp. I'm not talking about The Evil Weed. I'm talking about the plant that you make the kind of paper out of, that you write declarations of independence on. Hemp paper lasts forever, and is a lot cheaper and better for the environment than paper made from wood.
This despite that most other countries actually encourage hemp cultivation. It won't be long at all before the american paper industry collapses, because we won't be able to compete with Canadian hemp paper.
Women should not be permitted to wear pants?
Mentally ill people are burned at the stake as witches?
I know lots of people from right-wing families, who got lots of help with their businesses and so are now quite wealthy, quite often through no fault of their own.
I personally feel very strongly that I must succeed on my own merits, so actually for most of my career I've been self-employed. But I never got any real help from anyone other than, if I'm really lucky, the occasional helpful advice.
I learned the very, very hard way that accountants and attorneys are a compete waste of my valuable time. They are willing to give me real bad advice in return for an hour of their fees, but they only give good advice to those with deep pockets.
Consider say Ronald Reagan. He was very poor when he was a child, but quite wealthy as an adult. But then as adult, he did everything in his power, to enable the already rich, to get even richer, while at the same time knocking down the poor people. For example one of his very first acts as president was to deny food stamps to college students.
My mother's father committed suicide when she was just seven, in 1948. While he was quite wealthy, being a suicide his life insurance didn't pay out. At they time her family owned a fine mansion. They had to sell it, give away or throw away most of their possessions, then take what they could pack in a truck to my grandmother's childhood home in iowa until they all could recover.
Hence my mother quite adamantly refusing to give me so much as twenty-five cents per week. To expensive you see.
"So mom. I'd like to buy you a good quality turntable with a USB port, so I can digitize grandpa speelmon's collection of monophonic 78 RPM classical records."
"No mike. I'm just going to throw all those records out."
"WHAT? BUT THOSE WERE GRANDA'S RECORDS!"
"They can't possibly be worth anything to anyone. I'm just going to toss them."
"How about giving them to your sister?"
To have any hope of my mother not getting me arrested or committed to a mental instutition, I have had to learn to just let her destroy my inheritance from all of my granparents, as well as my father.
My mother has lots of money, and splits her will evenly between me and my sister, but that's it: the will quite clearly states we each get half.
OK... so who gets what?
My friend Maria has disowned her two sisters, because the two of them snatched up all of their father's possessions when he died.
Similarly with my friend Charles: "We don't actually want to have the dining room table back. We'd just like to eat off it sometimes."
I don't know but I expect granpa speelmon's 78s would be worth maybe fifty grand to a collector. But the money is not the point; I would never sell them, I would do my best to ensure they stayed in our family through successive generations.
"Mom? Do you know where dad's slide collection is?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Those were just pictures of Europe," she calmly replied.
"JUST PICTURES OF EUROPE?" actually what upsets me most is that I cannot remember what many of my childhood friends even looked like, but I'm sure dad photographed at least some of them.
"You could have sold dad's photos to a stock photography company for ten grand!" Actually more like a couple hundred grand. Dad could have been a national geographic photographer had he but lifted a finger.
My first two years at Caltech, my total tuition, fees, room, board and books were just ten grand for a top private school.
I transferred to UC Santa Cruz where I later graduated. At that time, tuition, room, board, books and fees came to about three grand.
Fast forward today today. I don't know the actual numbers but my understanding is that UCSC now costs somewhere around fifteen grand. That has a lot to do with the fact that the UC Regents can set their own salaries. The California legislature, government, the UC Students, the courts and what have you, have no control over the UC regent salaries.
There is no damn good reason that Caltech actually needs to charge anyone anything to study there. It has more money in its endowment than G-d Almighty Himself.
Despite that, towards the end of my time there, they announced a collossal tuition increase, so as to be more in line with what other top schools like Stanford were charging at the time.
That never made any sense to any of us, but there it is.
So anyway, my McDonalds manager friend really did put himself through school. He did not qualify for need-based financial aid.
Rather, he attended the local community college for his first two years, which was at the time dirt cheap, then later transferred to UC Berkeley.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
It was several years ago that I read this in the news. I don't recall where I read it, but it was in a dead-tree newspaper.
Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?
I should have mentioned that my father is also at fault, but only in his own way.
Were I to have ever asked him for an allowance, he would have just said "Go ask your mother".
Now in many ways he was a wonderful father. That's how I got accepted to study astronomy at Caltech.
My father taught me to pound nails the very instant I was strong enough to hold his hammer in two hands. I had to wait a long time before he would trust me with his circular power saw. Now I own HIS father's contractor's table saw, I am very good at carpentry so if coding ever doesn't work out I could do construction.
He did that in much the same way as little girls were taught to type, you know, in case their husband ever abandoned them.:-/
Anyway:
"Dad!!! Dad!!! the ice cream man is coming!! Can I buy an ice cream?"
He would just whip out his wallet and hand me a few dollar bills, without counting them, without ever expecting to be paid back.
That was nice at the time, but to this very day I have a problem with binge-purchasing. It is very difficult for me to keep much cash in my wallet for any length of time.
Really what should have happened, is that THE TWO OF THEM should have agreed on some reasonable allowance, then if I wanted an ice cream, I would be expected to pay for it out of my allowance.
For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"
That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!
To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.
The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.
I expect you know very well that just about all software costs less than a penny per unit to deliver into the hands of customers.
As I recall, in 2002 the Oxford Semiconductor OXFW911 Firewire/IDE storage bridge chip cost eight bucks apiece, when purchased in quantity. It was a little small than a dime.
For eight bucks, you got a 32-bit ARM7TDMI microprocessor, 64 kB of Flash for your firmware, 1800 bytes (yes, really: BYTES) of RAM, an IDE core for talking to your disk drive, a Firewire link-layer core (for talking the logical 1394A protocol), and a serial UART that was thrown in just for grins.
Now that was in 2002. What would that same chip cost now, if it were designed and manufactured today? Probably about ten cents.
However I expect the logic diagram, the physical design of the chip - that is, the mask pattern that is printed onto the silicon wafer - the verification of the design before manufacturing, a few rounds of bad silicon and design revision, cost tens of millions of dollars.
So in reality, it is quite possible that DARPA, or one of its contractors, could blow a billion dollars on the design of a chip, that when actually cast into silicon was a very small chip. The price of manufacturing just one chip is, for the most part, it's "real estate". That is, the physical area, like one square centimetre.
The wholesale price of the chip is then determined for the most part by how many you make. There are HUGE economies of scale in silicon manufacturing.
You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.
But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.
Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.
A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.
However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.
When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.
"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"
"No Mike."
"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."
"No Mike."
I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!
The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."
She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.
I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.
I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.
But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.
The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.
Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.
I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.
But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.
However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.
If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.
Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.
When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.
Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.
It occurred quite a long time ago, but at the time no solution was proposed.
Regular steel bolts have hexagonal heads that are flat on top. Bolts made of high-strength steel are marked with three - if I recall correctly - radial lines.
You can see that it would be easy and cheap to mark a regular steel bolt with those three lines, then sell it for the high-strength premium.
This caused at least on death: a worker who was torquing a bolt while building the first Saturn car factory snapped the head off a bolt and fell to his death.
An Army general commented that when he took his battalions tanks out for training in the desert, their tracks were littered with bits of broken off bolts, as well as the occasional tank tread.
What they actually did about this was to test samples of bolt shipments, but such testing was very expensive and so could not provide good coverage.
However it has been years since I last heard about it. Has the counterfeit bolt problem been solved? If so how?
That's why, if you watch TV, you should use broadcast, or watch streaming media over the internet with The Onion Router.
If you have cable, or your use Dish network, your provider can tell what shows you watch and when. In principle they could tell when you change channels in the middle of the show, either because you dislike or disagree with what you are watching, or are excited about something else.
Obama already experimented with individually-targeted TV ads during his 2008 campaign. During this year's congressional elections everyone will be doing it.
I will be writing up a submission about it but if you want to do it yourself, be my guest. I read about it in The Columbian the other day, the Vancouver Washington paper.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a widespread claim a few years back that there was a half-million shortage of Software Engineers that would reach one million by 2020. I cry bullshit on that, as it is quite difficult for many coders to find work - guys with grey hair such as myself, women, latinos, African Americans and those who specialize in coding other than web or mobile apps.
I only got back to work when I totally gave up on getting into mobile or web then hung out my shingle as a driver and embedded coder. That's worked out well but what I _really_ like a about coding?
"Check this out Mom. See what happens when I click _this_ button?" "Yes... ."
"I wrote that!" "OH MIKEY!"
Mikey Likes To Make His Momma Proud.
I have traced that million-coder shortage claim to the Obama Administration's Official Whitehouse Blog from 2013, which reported that there would be openings for 1.4 Million coders in 2020, but that there would only be 400,000 new CS graduates.
But consider that my own degree is in Physics yet I do just fine. That blog cited the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics for both figures but I have been unable to find the original publication - if there even is one. I emailed a specific individual at the BLS who was in that general line of statisticsifying but got no response. Later this week I'll send a few dead trees to them.
My own take is that hiring managers and recruiters are completely unable to judiciously select the right candidates to interview due to - as I've read repeatledy, no citation but RSN I'll have one - that job board posts for coders result in on the average one thousand applications.
Surely that would make your own eyeballs bleed.
The Balkanizations of languages, applications - web back end, front end, mobile, embedded, systems, MIS even nuclear weapons design - results in it being very very difficult for the right coders to connect to the right companies. That and the fact that Google Trends convinced me that the single most-consistently searched-for keyword is "jobs" resulted in my building what - by 2020 I hope - will be a comprehensive list of links directly to the Jobs or Careers Portals of every Computer Industry that hires through its own website. BEHOLD:
(The exceedingly basic web design is intended to enable my site to work well for the ancient boxes and browsers found in the developing world, most rural public libraries as well as those owned by low-income people.)
About a month from now I'll form a Non-Profit Corporation to take over the operation of Soggy Jobs. The IRS takes about a year to approve 501(c)(3) Tax-Deductible Status, at which point I'll apply for charitable grants from Google.org, employment- and economic development-oriented philanthropists, and government employment and economic development agencies.
That will enable me to hire - just at first - an Entry-Level SQA Engineer, a Journey-Level Back End Developer and a Senior Front End Developer; I've got lots of plans for modern boxes and browsers that I shan't divulge until they... wait for it... Beta.
After the IRS approves my deductible status I'll form subsidiaries in most industrialized nations then apply for their non deductible statuses. That's going to be really complicated and will require some cash as I'll have to retain a bunch of non-profit corp formation attorneys.
San Francisco consistently gets the most hits. My most-loved page is that for
It can only disprove false ones.
From time to time I read - especially here at /. - that string theory is bogus because it is not falsifiable.
G-d Almighty Himself didn't create the Universe for the benefit of scientists. Just because a theory cannot be falsified, does not mean it is incorrect. It means we just don't know.
At first I understood quantum mechanics well enough to get good grades on my problem sets and exams, but I regarded it as delusional because I was heavily into the deterministic Newtonian idea of The Clockwork Universe.
He was able to give me a deep insight into QM without ever once doing a derivation or even simple arithmetic. For the most part it was purely conceptual discussions of the two-slit experiment.
What convinced me of quantum indeterminism in the end was Feynman pointing out that the two-slit also works for electrons, not just photons, and that one can use Shot Noise to determine when individual electrons are leaving the hot wire filament used to produce them.
Even if you send over just one electron at a time, you still get the rippled interference pattern at the detector.
It turns out that an antiparticle going back in time is exactly the same as a regular particle going forward in time. Just by watching an individual particle, or only a few of them, you cannot determine which direction time is going on.
It's only when you have enough particles for their measure of entropy to make sense that you can determine which direction time is going in. Entropy ALWAYS increases with time, so if you watch a system of particles, and their entropy is steadily decreasing, they are going backwards.
I've never heard anyone mention it, but what about smaller systems of particles, where entropy can be measured, but whose entropy fluctuates? Does time go back and forth? I don't know.
"MAYBE THERE'S JUST ONE ELECTRON!" Feynman once shouted.
We don't think that's the case - that just one electron goes from the beginning of the Universe to the end, then returns as a positron - because if there were significant amounts of antimatter in the Universe, we would expect there to be lots of 0.511 MeV gamma rays in the cosmic radiation but there is not.
I am STILL stymied by a question he asked once:
"Why does a mirror reverse left-and-right but not up-and-down?"
The CEO of a company - whether public or not - is expected to make certain decisions completely on his or her own.
Like the captain of a ship. Consider that all the captains of the US missile submarine fleet have the authority to nuke President Putin back to the stone ages should the sub ever lose communications with their commanders in the Pentagon.
Like the captain of a ship, the CEO of a company can be relieved of command, should - NOT the stockholders but THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS - feel he or she is doing a bad job.
Like say, when the Apple board tossed Steve Jobs out on his ear, put Woz out to pasture, scouted around for a more multinational kinda brand-oriented guy, brought in John Scully, who proceeded to lay off four thousand of my coworkers back when I was doing MacTCP QA for Apple, because he'd never actually used a computer in his entire life before hiring on at the Cupertino Fruit Company.
Rly. I still have my Apple Employee Loan-to-Own PowerMac 8500. That tradition got started specifically because of Scully not knowing how to use a computer. That was actually a common problem back in the day. Actually it still is; I know of some guy whose computer was running real slow, because he hide NINE Internet Explorer toolbars. But I digress.
Now suppose Timmy-baby really wasn't doing his job, but the board backed him. Then the job of the shareholders would be to elect a new board. That's one of the things they often do at these shareholder meetings. It would be up to a vote of the board to replace the CEO.
As for those who object to Apple's green policies. Consider how many citizens of the People's Republic of China work for Apple, or for one of Apple's suppliers such as FoxConn. I expect that - indirectly - far more people work for Apple in the PRC than do in the whole rest of the world put together.
The air in China used to be pretty clean because the people lived in a very simple manner, they didn't own many consumer products, they all dressed in olive drab and rode bicycles to work and school. Even Ambassador George Herbert Walker Bush rode his bike to the embassy in Peking!
While nominally still Communist, actually it is quite likely the closest to unfettered capitalism of anywhere on the planet. Without the slightest thought towards urban planning, there are factories everywhere, everyone who has a good job has a nice car, and a nice place to live. Thus they had that one hundred mile long traffic jam that lasted a week.
China gets most of its energy from coal. It is plentiful there. They import coal as well; there is a controversial proposal to build a coal terminal where I now live in Vancouver, Washington, so coal mined in Montana can be loaded onto cargo ships then transported to China.
This had the eventual result that I recently saw the most amazing photograph. I don't have a link but maybe I can dig it up then post it in a reply.
The smog is so thick in many Chinese cities that one cannot see the sky, certainly not the sunrise.
So along the busy streets, in the early mornings, they have installed very large video screens that show the rising Sun.
The photo I saw, the video on that screen was so beautiful, but the smog was so thick that the people couldn't see more than maybe thirty feet. That's why the life expectancy in Beijing has gone down by fifteen years.
I don't know that Tim Cook is worrying about his Chinese employees, or those of his Chinese vendors, but if he wants FoxConn to keep assembling iDevices, they can't all be dropping dead of emphysema can they? Grandpa Crawford died of that, he spent his last five years on a portable oxygen tank. It's a nasty way to go.
"No Mom, your computer isn't slow. It's a G4 iMac. You have 1.2 GB of memory. You are never going to run out of gigabytes." (That's how my mother refers to her disk drive.
"The people who write most software these days, they have really, really fast machines, with lots of memory and tons of gigabytes. They don't take care to make their software run fast anymore. It's a real problem."
When I use Mom's mouse to resize an OpenOffice window, the corner of the window lags quite far - not noticably but severely so - behind the motions of the mouse.
Now consider my own product QuickLetter from Working Software, that in 1992 was quick and snappy on a Mac Plus with 4 MB of memory, and what was it? An 8 MHz 68000? Or was it 6 MHz?
I don't know the clock of the G4 in Mom's iMac, but it is several hundred megahertz at least.
It is quite common for me these days to find web pages that take ten minutes to fully download. When I looked into ordering Comcast Business Class Cable Internet, I needed to view three pages - their homepage, then their business internet offerings, then their pricing.
Each page took a full hour to download. This because mom still uses dialup earthlink. It works fine for her occasional email to aunt peggy. I expect that comcast's web designers never actually tested their own site over dialup, despite trying to sell cable internet to dialup users.
Solr claims to be yet strictly fails to be a drop-in search engine for your website.
A former employer of mine, who didn't have a clue about Linux, Java or Open Source, bet the farm on Solr speeding up the report generation for his online service.
I don't want to tell you who this employer is because they provide a valuable service to the business community. But the owner of the company is a raging alcoholic, who devoted at least an hour at the end of each day for not having gotten Solr up and running yet, despite his not having lifted a finger to evaluate it before committing to the project.
If there is the slightest error in Solr's configuration, and you have logging enabled, it spews Java exception stack traces, but does not give you the first clue as to what you did wrong.
Stack traces are for developers not end-users, M'Kay? How about a diagnostic message?
I repeatedly asked for help on Stackoverflow but no one ever answered my questions. All I ever found were questions from other desperate Solr users, for the most part unanswered.
Before you commit to a technology, or your new bride, or your vote for a political candidate, put it or their name into google along with "sucks" just for grins.
for example, at the time "Solr sucks" got 600,000 hits.
It is appalling that software like that would be released to end users with the claim it is production quality software.
From time to time I see Solr coding gigs on the job boards. I never apply, I just say "You are doomed" to myself. Perhaps I should do the right thing, by sending a polite email to the hiring manager, suggesting he select some other solution to his problem.
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
At the top of every single page on the site, are prominent links to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear.
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
A friend of mine was at one time a dot-com millionaire, but he managed to blow it all on hats.
Throughout the dot-com crash, his company website had two or three open positions. The job requisitions were updated regularly - that is, they weren't always the same job. Sometimes he needed engineering, sometimes QA, sometimes sales.
So I dropped him a dime and said "Aren't you busted?" and he replied "Yeah but as long as our creditors think we're still in business, they hope to get repaid. If we weren't hiring they might send the sheriff around to seize our office furniture."
I've been asked this same question in interviews twice:
write a C function to reverse a C-string in place.
I expect most slashbots can supply a correct answer, but a good friend of mine who has many years of experience as a visual basic coder, and who does know some basic C, is unable to answer the question.
When I supplied my answer, the company owner said "I see you have an eye for efficiency". I found that puzzling. Perhaps that's why I got the job.
I've interviewed with google a few times. I won't tell you any of their interview questions, that would be rude, but I will tell you that their HR recruiters - all in-house, not third-party headhunters - all screen new candidates by asking the very same, very basic three computer science questions. Anyone who has done one single algorithms class, and worked a year at a good coding job should be able to answer all three questions, but I expect that many prospective candidates cannot.
What they teach in a Computer Science degree are some of the more common or interesting algorithms, algorithm analysis and design, some operating system theory, say how to write a mouse driver as did my friend at UC Santa Cruz.
So you get out on the workforce looking for your first job, and you see that the craigslist "sof / qa / dba" section wants someone who knows PHP, Javascript and MySQL.
So you buy some books and learn those, maybe you get the job, but eventually you go looking for another job. They want C# .Net, Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server.
I now have a vast number of technical books, and a hard time getting a job because I've never written an Android App.
How about on-the-job training? There were at least at one time some companies that did it. That's how I learned Java, Python, Smalltalk, Postscript and UNIX Sysadmin. But on the job training is very uncommon these days, because employers want "someone who can hit the ground running".
If you paid your new hire to spend his or her first week reading an O'Reilly book, then the next month paired up with a more experienced coder, you'd find that there is no shortage of workers, rather there is a surplus.
marijuana is completely legal and grows wild all over creation?
While Albert Hoffman had yet to discover it in 1776, LSD was perfectly legal from his discovery during world war II until 1965.
Now we find that the conservatives work vigorously to prevent the cultivation of industrial hemp. I'm not talking about The Evil Weed. I'm talking about the plant that you make the kind of paper out of, that you write declarations of independence on. Hemp paper lasts forever, and is a lot cheaper and better for the environment than paper made from wood.
This despite that most other countries actually encourage hemp cultivation. It won't be long at all before the american paper industry collapses, because we won't be able to compete with Canadian hemp paper.
Women should not be permitted to wear pants?
Mentally ill people are burned at the stake as witches?
c'mon, help me out here I'm begging you!
I know lots of people from right-wing families, who got lots of help with their businesses and so are now quite wealthy, quite often through no fault of their own.
I personally feel very strongly that I must succeed on my own merits, so actually for most of my career I've been self-employed. But I never got any real help from anyone other than, if I'm really lucky, the occasional helpful advice.
I learned the very, very hard way that accountants and attorneys are a compete waste of my valuable time. They are willing to give me real bad advice in return for an hour of their fees, but they only give good advice to those with deep pockets.
Consider say Ronald Reagan. He was very poor when he was a child, but quite wealthy as an adult. But then as adult, he did everything in his power, to enable the already rich, to get even richer, while at the same time knocking down the poor people. For example one of his very first acts as president was to deny food stamps to college students.
-eritance.
My mother's father committed suicide when she was just seven, in 1948. While he was quite wealthy, being a suicide his life insurance didn't pay out. At they time her family owned a fine mansion. They had to sell it, give away or throw away most of their possessions, then take what they could pack in a truck to my grandmother's childhood home in iowa until they all could recover.
Hence my mother quite adamantly refusing to give me so much as twenty-five cents per week. To expensive you see.
"So mom. I'd like to buy you a good quality turntable with a USB port, so I can digitize grandpa speelmon's collection of monophonic 78 RPM classical records."
"No mike. I'm just going to throw all those records out."
"WHAT? BUT THOSE WERE GRANDA'S RECORDS!"
"They can't possibly be worth anything to anyone. I'm just going to toss them."
"How about giving them to your sister?"
To have any hope of my mother not getting me arrested or committed to a mental instutition, I have had to learn to just let her destroy my inheritance from all of my granparents, as well as my father.
My mother has lots of money, and splits her will evenly between me and my sister, but that's it: the will quite clearly states we each get half.
OK... so who gets what?
My friend Maria has disowned her two sisters, because the two of them snatched up all of their father's possessions when he died.
Similarly with my friend Charles: "We don't actually want to have the dining room table back. We'd just like to eat off it sometimes."
I don't know but I expect granpa speelmon's 78s would be worth maybe fifty grand to a collector. But the money is not the point; I would never sell them, I would do my best to ensure they stayed in our family through successive generations.
"Mom? Do you know where dad's slide collection is?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Those were just pictures of Europe," she calmly replied.
"JUST PICTURES OF EUROPE?" actually what upsets me most is that I cannot remember what many of my childhood friends even looked like, but I'm sure dad photographed at least some of them.
"You could have sold dad's photos to a stock photography company for ten grand!" Actually more like a couple hundred grand. Dad could have been a national geographic photographer had he but lifted a finger.
that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation immeditately, does not mean I am delusional or incorrect.
You might as well have just invoked Godwin's Law.
That's just like appealing to authority, for example "C++ sucks because Richard Stallman prefers C and Java".
Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.
Give me a fucking break.
My first two years at Caltech, my total tuition, fees, room, board and books were just ten grand for a top private school.
I transferred to UC Santa Cruz where I later graduated. At that time, tuition, room, board, books and fees came to about three grand.
Fast forward today today. I don't know the actual numbers but my understanding is that UCSC now costs somewhere around fifteen grand. That has a lot to do with the fact that the UC Regents can set their own salaries. The California legislature, government, the UC Students, the courts and what have you, have no control over the UC regent salaries.
There is no damn good reason that Caltech actually needs to charge anyone anything to study there. It has more money in its endowment than G-d Almighty Himself.
Despite that, towards the end of my time there, they announced a collossal tuition increase, so as to be more in line with what other top schools like Stanford were charging at the time.
That never made any sense to any of us, but there it is.
So anyway, my McDonalds manager friend really did put himself through school. He did not qualify for need-based financial aid.
Rather, he attended the local community college for his first two years, which was at the time dirt cheap, then later transferred to UC Berkeley.
Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract
The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".
When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.
I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
YOUR.
MOVE.
Sigh.
Kids these days...
It was several years ago that I read this in the news. I don't recall where I read it, but it was in a dead-tree newspaper.
Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?
I should have mentioned that my father is also at fault, but only in his own way.
Were I to have ever asked him for an allowance, he would have just said "Go ask your mother".
Now in many ways he was a wonderful father. That's how I got accepted to study astronomy at Caltech.
My father taught me to pound nails the very instant I was strong enough to hold his hammer in two hands. I had to wait a long time before he would trust me with his circular power saw. Now I own HIS father's contractor's table saw, I am very good at carpentry so if coding ever doesn't work out I could do construction.
He did that in much the same way as little girls were taught to type, you know, in case their husband ever abandoned them. :-/
Anyway:
"Dad!!! Dad!!! the ice cream man is coming!! Can I buy an ice cream?"
He would just whip out his wallet and hand me a few dollar bills, without counting them, without ever expecting to be paid back.
That was nice at the time, but to this very day I have a problem with binge-purchasing. It is very difficult for me to keep much cash in my wallet for any length of time.
Really what should have happened, is that THE TWO OF THEM should have agreed on some reasonable allowance, then if I wanted an ice cream, I would be expected to pay for it out of my allowance.
For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"
That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!
To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.
The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.
Actually that is precisely what the US Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is for.
Perhaps money changed hands.
The key words here are "PER UNIT".
I expect you know very well that just about all software costs less than a penny per unit to deliver into the hands of customers.
As I recall, in 2002 the Oxford Semiconductor OXFW911 Firewire/IDE storage bridge chip cost eight bucks apiece, when purchased in quantity. It was a little small than a dime.
For eight bucks, you got a 32-bit ARM7TDMI microprocessor, 64 kB of Flash for your firmware, 1800 bytes (yes, really: BYTES) of RAM, an IDE core for talking to your disk drive, a Firewire link-layer core (for talking the logical 1394A protocol), and a serial UART that was thrown in just for grins.
Now that was in 2002. What would that same chip cost now, if it were designed and manufactured today? Probably about ten cents.
However I expect the logic diagram, the physical design of the chip - that is, the mask pattern that is printed onto the silicon wafer - the verification of the design before manufacturing, a few rounds of bad silicon and design revision, cost tens of millions of dollars.
So in reality, it is quite possible that DARPA, or one of its contractors, could blow a billion dollars on the design of a chip, that when actually cast into silicon was a very small chip. The price of manufacturing just one chip is, for the most part, it's "real estate". That is, the physical area, like one square centimetre.
The wholesale price of the chip is then determined for the most part by how many you make. There are HUGE economies of scale in silicon manufacturing.
You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.
But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.
Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.
A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.
However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.
When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.
"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"
"No Mike."
"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."
"No Mike."
I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!
The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."
She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.
I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.
I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.
But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.
The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.
Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.
I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.
But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.
However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.
If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.
Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.
When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.
Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.
It occurred quite a long time ago, but at the time no solution was proposed.
Regular steel bolts have hexagonal heads that are flat on top. Bolts made of high-strength steel are marked with three - if I recall correctly - radial lines.
You can see that it would be easy and cheap to mark a regular steel bolt with those three lines, then sell it for the high-strength premium.
This caused at least on death: a worker who was torquing a bolt while building the first Saturn car factory snapped the head off a bolt and fell to his death.
An Army general commented that when he took his battalions tanks out for training in the desert, their tracks were littered with bits of broken off bolts, as well as the occasional tank tread.
What they actually did about this was to test samples of bolt shipments, but such testing was very expensive and so could not provide good coverage.
However it has been years since I last heard about it. Has the counterfeit bolt problem been solved? If so how?
That's why, if you watch TV, you should use broadcast, or watch streaming media over the internet with The Onion Router.
If you have cable, or your use Dish network, your provider can tell what shows you watch and when. In principle they could tell when you change channels in the middle of the show, either because you dislike or disagree with what you are watching, or are excited about something else.
Obama already experimented with individually-targeted TV ads during his 2008 campaign. During this year's congressional elections everyone will be doing it.
I will be writing up a submission about it but if you want to do it yourself, be my guest. I read about it in The Columbian the other day, the Vancouver Washington paper.