"Find another job" requires that someone else not be capable or willing to do it on their own.
So does "start a business".
But if you're running your own business, you simply have to convince your clients that you're worth $30'000.00. Maybe plus a little overhead to cover the other business expenses.
Er, no. If you want to run your own business and earn the _equivalent_ of a $30k salary, you're going to be charging your customers as if your salary was more like $50-60k/yr. Not only to cover all those expenses that would otherwise be covered by an employer, but to allow for the times when you have no revenue coming in.
When you work for someone else, and they lose 10% of the clients, they fire 7% of the employees. When you work for yourself, and you lose 10% of your clients, you make 7% less money. That's way less drastic.
Not if you're in the 93% of employees that aren't fired. Which is better odds than being in the 50%+ of small businesses that fail within a year or two of starting.
Incidentally, losing 10% of your customers could mean losing 1% or your revenue, or 50% of your revenue, depending on which 10% of your customers you lose.
And you had the control to maybe manage it, or to at least see it coming most of the time. And it's often your own fault for screwing up the job. It happens, and it's perfectly normal. And you learn to get over it, and to grow from it.
All of which applies equally to being an employee. When employers go downsizing, they don't just throw darts at a list of names.
As for your first question, you don't have to do anything better than someone else.
Your words, not mine:
Pick something that you can do, that you can do better than someone who doesn't do it ten times per week.
You can be a 14 year-old, with $5 in your pocket, and zero skill. No you won't be able to sell stock portfolios nor investment plans. But you can sell painting services.
That lack of 15 year olds - or, indeed, typical unemployed people - earning $100k/yr painting rooms demonstrates how specious your example is.
Also, one person painting forty rooms a week is a massively optimistic number. Assuming 12 hour days, that's 90 minutes to travel, setup, paint, clean and pack up. Not forgetting having to actually find 40 people every week who need a room painted, and aren't having it done by next door's kid for half the price, or themselves for "free".
You are trying to handwave away the single most important - and difficult - parts of running your own business: identifying a market, then finding and retaining customers. There's also the other big problem that most new businesses have - staying solvent - but that's relatively minor.
Making a blanket assertion these things are "easier" than finding a new job, is drawing a very long bow indeed. Especially since they require skills that probably have nothing to do with our hypothetical unemployed person's area of expertise (especially on Slashdot).
That's all it takes. You get to charge for that -- not because they can't do it themselves, but because they don't want to be responsible for doing it themselves.
And what if you can't find anything you can do better than someone else ? Or enough someone else's ?
That's all it takes. You get to charge for that -- not because they can't do it themselves, but because they don't want to be responsible for doing it themselves.
Perhaps you can highlight how this strategy is any different to finding a job working for someone else, and thus support your original criticism of people who aren't their own bosses ?
The biggest thing about owning a business, the thing that most people find completely unacceptable, is being responsible for someone else's benefit. But that's what people pay for. With the exception of rocket launches, nuclear explosions, and large financial institutions, nothing you can do actually has any serious consequences.
Maybe not for them. For you and possibly your family, however, the consequences of screwing up can be vast - especially in countries like the US where the social safety net ranges from dismal to nonexistant.
So you don't have to worry about failure. Worst case: you lose the one customer. You have ten more.
You still haven't explained how your strategy guarantees that first customer, let alone ten of them. Nor how "start a business" is any more valid a solution than "find another job".
Which is really suboptimal, because it takes a lot less cost to manufacture humans.
It would take somewhere in the ballpark of half a million dollars to manufacture a human suitable for the mission. Do you really think the price of a mass-produced robot is going to be that high ? Not to mention building the robot will take a few weeks, or maybe months, whereas building the human will take 25-30 years.
Unfortunately, you know what is also at an all-time high of popularity? Divorce.
The difference between "then" and "now", is that "then" people who got married but shouldn't have had to stick it out in misery (or, at best, contentment) for the rest of their lives. "Now", they get divorced and try to _enjoy_ the rest of their lives, because divorce is no longer the social and legal "nuclear option" it used to be.
Why do you even care about other people's attitudes towards marriage ? Do you think how "sacred" your marriage is, is measured by how other people feel about it ?
Behold, one of the fundamental problems with today's world:
If a drug slipped by that happens to cause severe problems in some patients 10 years down the road, then they should be able to sue someone. Everyone may have been as careful as possible, but there was still something overlooked, or some mistake made, and that has consequences.
Translation: "It's *always* someone's fault and, goddamnit, they owe me money for it!"
drive aliases. Basically the file system in Windows sucks. There are a ton of cool file systems in unix land but unless you want to really break tons of stuff AFAIK you are stuck with NTFS on Windows, no journaling FS in 7 like MS promised.
NTFS has had journalling since it was introduced in 1993.
Real multitasking. The amount of things that make Windows unresponsive is mind boggling. Pop in a CD/DVD, try and print, explore the network, etc. Okay if you must, make ONE thing unresponsive, don't kill my whole OS trying to find all the printers on the network. I have 4 CPU's and 4GB of RAM etc and it's SLOW!!! WTF!
No idea what's wrong with your system, but I have no trouble multitasking on my Windows PCs after putting in a CD, while it prints, or while the network browser populates, and that was also true back in 1996, when I first started using NT 4.0.
I also don't think people from first world countries like the UK, Germany, France, Spain, etc have as hard of a problem getting visas.
Not really. It's damn near impossible to get a US visa that allows you to work without an employer to sponsor you - which tends to be difficult since most of the time it costs them thousands, of not tens of thousdands, of dollars in application fees and attourney's fees.
I was fortunate - as an Australian citizen I qualify for an E-3 Visa, so the cost to my employer (for the Visa at least) was practically zero, thus meaning I was transferred rather than replaced. Only a few thousand immigrants per year fit into this category, however.
Votes are weighted by contribution to the budget. The taxes you pay, minus fedaral-related (contractors included) salary and/or benefits, are your contribution. If your contribution is positive, that is the weight of your vote.
Awesome idea. In only a generation or two we could be right back to fuedalism !
Somehow, I think they're getting a better deal moving to the US, which means that the US is paying these people more than other countries (or other countries have laws in place preventing them from working there).
It's not so much that the salaries in the US are higher (compared to other Western countries at least), it's that the cost of living is so low (outside of a handful of places like Manhattan).
I took about a 15% pay cut when my company transferred me to one of our US offices. However, my costs for rent and food have more than halved, and consumer goods in general (furniture, clothes, electronics, etc) cost anything from 20% - 80% less, so in real terms I'm ahead.
I'm just hoping I can get a good chunk of change saved up and sent home to pay off my mortgage before the US Dollar tanks.
I know a guy that has an office full of Aluminium iMacs that only run Windows - he likes the design, especially the space saving and the quality of the screens. It was the best all-in-one machine he could find.
Wow. That's (especially proportionally speaking) a lot of money to spend for aesthetics. What kind of business was it ?
If you're doing something like OpenFiler clusters on BackBlaze 90TB 5U Storage Pods for $90/TB and 720 TB/rack you have a different point of view.
Yes. The point of view that the performance and integrity of the data storage technology is unimportant. I doubt you'll have much luck selling that to most enterprises.
Your first faulty premise is that redundancy can (and/or should) be moved into the application.
Your second faulty premise is that what works for Google works for everyone.
Superfetch? You're kidding, right? Real VMs were doing this long before MS figured it out. Unused RAM has always been used as disk cache in proper VMs. Only MS was stupid enough to need an *executable* (smartdrv.exe) to accomplish this most fundamental of tasks.
Are you a traveller from the past ? Smartdrv hasn't been relevant to most people for nearly *twenty years*.
I hold that windows isn't a true multi user OS until 90% of the software that runs on it can be used by a limited account.
I hold that your assertion is utter stupidity.
Ob: Car Analogy. It's like arguing an electric car doesn't exist until 90% of gas stations can do a battery swap.
Look at any *nix. not only can you run one app under multiple users at the same time(something most windows app fail at) but all those apps are limited the privilieges of the user in question.
Most windows apps run multiple instances fine. This isn't 1995 any more. And they're all limited by the privileges of the user in question.
Slashdot Mirror
"Find another job" requires that someone else not be capable or willing to do it on their own.
So does "start a business".
But if you're running your own business, you simply have to convince your clients that you're worth $30'000.00. Maybe plus a little overhead to cover the other business expenses.
Er, no. If you want to run your own business and earn the _equivalent_ of a $30k salary, you're going to be charging your customers as if your salary was more like $50-60k/yr. Not only to cover all those expenses that would otherwise be covered by an employer, but to allow for the times when you have no revenue coming in.
When you work for someone else, and they lose 10% of the clients, they fire 7% of the employees. When you work for yourself, and you lose 10% of your clients, you make 7% less money. That's way less drastic.
Not if you're in the 93% of employees that aren't fired. Which is better odds than being in the 50%+ of small businesses that fail within a year or two of starting.
Incidentally, losing 10% of your customers could mean losing 1% or your revenue, or 50% of your revenue, depending on which 10% of your customers you lose.
And you had the control to maybe manage it, or to at least see it coming most of the time. And it's often your own fault for screwing up the job. It happens, and it's perfectly normal. And you learn to get over it, and to grow from it.
All of which applies equally to being an employee. When employers go downsizing, they don't just throw darts at a list of names.
As for your first question, you don't have to do anything better than someone else.
Your words, not mine:
Pick something that you can do, that you can do better than someone who doesn't do it ten times per week.
You can be a 14 year-old, with $5 in your pocket, and zero skill. No you won't be able to sell stock portfolios nor investment plans. But you can sell painting services.
That lack of 15 year olds - or, indeed, typical unemployed people - earning $100k/yr painting rooms demonstrates how specious your example is.
Also, one person painting forty rooms a week is a massively optimistic number. Assuming 12 hour days, that's 90 minutes to travel, setup, paint, clean and pack up. Not forgetting having to actually find 40 people every week who need a room painted, and aren't having it done by next door's kid for half the price, or themselves for "free".
You are trying to handwave away the single most important - and difficult - parts of running your own business: identifying a market, then finding and retaining customers. There's also the other big problem that most new businesses have - staying solvent - but that's relatively minor.
Making a blanket assertion these things are "easier" than finding a new job, is drawing a very long bow indeed. Especially since they require skills that probably have nothing to do with our hypothetical unemployed person's area of expertise (especially on Slashdot).
So you never try new software on your computer? How odd.
That's not what I said at all.
That's all it takes. You get to charge for that -- not because they can't do it themselves, but because they don't want to be responsible for doing it themselves.
And what if you can't find anything you can do better than someone else ? Or enough someone else's ?
That's all it takes. You get to charge for that -- not because they can't do it themselves, but because they don't want to be responsible for doing it themselves.
Perhaps you can highlight how this strategy is any different to finding a job working for someone else, and thus support your original criticism of people who aren't their own bosses ?
The biggest thing about owning a business, the thing that most people find completely unacceptable, is being responsible for someone else's benefit. But that's what people pay for. With the exception of rocket launches, nuclear explosions, and large financial institutions, nothing you can do actually has any serious consequences.
Maybe not for them. For you and possibly your family, however, the consequences of screwing up can be vast - especially in countries like the US where the social safety net ranges from dismal to nonexistant.
So you don't have to worry about failure. Worst case: you lose the one customer. You have ten more.
You still haven't explained how your strategy guarantees that first customer, let alone ten of them. Nor how "start a business" is any more valid a solution than "find another job".
There's nothing stopping the vast majority from from starting their own business.
Sure there is - a lack of customers.
At that point I got what she meant, and told her that theoretically we could. And said "What you are describing is communism."
She is also describing a lack of scarcity.
Which is really suboptimal, because it takes a lot less cost to manufacture humans.
It would take somewhere in the ballpark of half a million dollars to manufacture a human suitable for the mission. Do you really think the price of a mass-produced robot is going to be that high ? Not to mention building the robot will take a few weeks, or maybe months, whereas building the human will take 25-30 years.
What are you going to do when your software supplier stops making new releases for the hardware you've got? Thrown it away?
Keep using it. I buy things for what they *can do*, not what they *might do at some point in the future*.
Unfortunately, you know what is also at an all-time high of popularity? Divorce.
The difference between "then" and "now", is that "then" people who got married but shouldn't have had to stick it out in misery (or, at best, contentment) for the rest of their lives. "Now", they get divorced and try to _enjoy_ the rest of their lives, because divorce is no longer the social and legal "nuclear option" it used to be.
Why do you even care about other people's attitudes towards marriage ? Do you think how "sacred" your marriage is, is measured by how other people feel about it ?
Behold, one of the fundamental problems with today's world:
If a drug slipped by that happens to cause severe problems in some patients 10 years down the road, then they should be able to sue someone. Everyone may have been as careful as possible, but there was still something overlooked, or some mistake made, and that has consequences.
Translation: "It's *always* someone's fault and, goddamnit, they owe me money for it!"
drive aliases. Basically the file system in Windows sucks. There are a ton of cool file systems in unix land but unless you want to really break tons of stuff AFAIK you are stuck with NTFS on Windows, no journaling FS in 7 like MS promised.
NTFS has had journalling since it was introduced in 1993.
Real multitasking. The amount of things that make Windows unresponsive is mind boggling. Pop in a CD/DVD, try and print, explore the network, etc. Okay if you must, make ONE thing unresponsive, don't kill my whole OS trying to find all the printers on the network. I have 4 CPU's and 4GB of RAM etc and it's SLOW!!! WTF!
No idea what's wrong with your system, but I have no trouble multitasking on my Windows PCs after putting in a CD, while it prints, or while the network browser populates, and that was also true back in 1996, when I first started using NT 4.0.
Win95 didn't kill the Amiga, the new owners did, coupled with the first viable alternative that was available at the time...Linux.
Linux killed the Amiga ? In 1995 ? When its cutting edge GUI was fvwm95 ?
Now *that's* comedy.
I also don't think people from first world countries like the UK, Germany, France, Spain, etc have as hard of a problem getting visas.
Not really. It's damn near impossible to get a US visa that allows you to work without an employer to sponsor you - which tends to be difficult since most of the time it costs them thousands, of not tens of thousdands, of dollars in application fees and attourney's fees.
I was fortunate - as an Australian citizen I qualify for an E-3 Visa, so the cost to my employer (for the Visa at least) was practically zero, thus meaning I was transferred rather than replaced. Only a few thousand immigrants per year fit into this category, however.
Votes are weighted by contribution to the budget. The taxes you pay, minus fedaral-related (contractors included) salary and/or benefits, are your contribution. If your contribution is positive, that is the weight of your vote.
Awesome idea. In only a generation or two we could be right back to fuedalism !
Somehow, I think they're getting a better deal moving to the US, which means that the US is paying these people more than other countries (or other countries have laws in place preventing them from working there).
It's not so much that the salaries in the US are higher (compared to other Western countries at least), it's that the cost of living is so low (outside of a handful of places like Manhattan).
I took about a 15% pay cut when my company transferred me to one of our US offices. However, my costs for rent and food have more than halved, and consumer goods in general (furniture, clothes, electronics, etc) cost anything from 20% - 80% less, so in real terms I'm ahead.
I'm just hoping I can get a good chunk of change saved up and sent home to pay off my mortgage before the US Dollar tanks.
Why is belief in God anti-logical or anti-reason?
Same reasons belief in Santa or the Easter Bunny is.
I am an agnostic myself but I fail to see how you could teach the history of Europe while ignoring religion.
Same way you describe the traditions of Christmas without teaching them they have to leave milk and cookies out on Christmas Eve.
I know a guy that has an office full of Aluminium iMacs that only run Windows - he likes the design, especially the space saving and the quality of the screens. It was the best all-in-one machine he could find.
Wow. That's (especially proportionally speaking) a lot of money to spend for aesthetics. What kind of business was it ?
When you can pick up 4GB of RAM memory for a song, why not load the whole OS into memory?
On any remotely modern OS, the whole OS is *already* "loaded into memory" if you have enough of it. It's called a disk cache.
If you're doing something like OpenFiler clusters on BackBlaze 90TB 5U Storage Pods for $90/TB and 720 TB/rack you have a different point of view.
Yes. The point of view that the performance and integrity of the data storage technology is unimportant. I doubt you'll have much luck selling that to most enterprises.
Your first faulty premise is that redundancy can (and/or should) be moved into the application.
Your second faulty premise is that what works for Google works for everyone.
Superfetch? You're kidding, right? Real VMs were doing this long before MS figured it out. Unused RAM has always been used as disk cache in proper VMs. Only MS was stupid enough to need an *executable* (smartdrv.exe) to accomplish this most fundamental of tasks.
Are you a traveller from the past ? Smartdrv hasn't been relevant to most people for nearly *twenty years*.
Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent.
IME, most developers do an atrociously bad job of administering their own machines, even when they're sure they're doing a great job.
Exhibit A: Most developers like to keep their systems updated with the latest and greatest software, libraries, OSes, etc.
The kind of rigorous thinking required is identical.
The knowledge and experience bases are *massively* different.
How can a competent developer not understand operating system concepts?
Easily, if they're not developing things where "operating system concepts are relevant".
Secondly, "understanding operating system concepts" and "understanding systems administration concepts" are very different things.
A few years ago, a 1ghz P3 with 512mb and a 17" CRT was considered high end, and people would be very happy to have one...
Hint: we just clocked over to 2010, not 2000.
I hold that windows isn't a true multi user OS until 90% of the software that runs on it can be used by a limited account.
I hold that your assertion is utter stupidity.
Ob: Car Analogy. It's like arguing an electric car doesn't exist until 90% of gas stations can do a battery swap.
Look at any *nix. not only can you run one app under multiple users at the same time(something most windows app fail at) but all those apps are limited the privilieges of the user in question.
Most windows apps run multiple instances fine. This isn't 1995 any more. And they're all limited by the privileges of the user in question.
However, I do congratulate MS for addrressing many issues in the adminjstrative domain in recent years, now they are only 20 years behind in security.
Which security features do you feel Windows is missing that every other OS had 20 years ago ?