Not sure where you're getting your numbers from but they're WAY off:
Wow, I really did mistake the numbers I was gathering for my post. Those were not sales, they were total cars sold. And the numbers were in the millions, not billions.
14.5 million new cars were sold in the US in 2012 (source), and 40.5 million used cars sold (source). Considering the average price of a new car is now about $30k (source) and the price of a used car sale is about $10k (source), that puts the actual size of the market at the values listed below.
$435 billion new car market vs $405 billion used car market. 14.5 million new car sales vs 40.5 million used car sales.
$22 billion new video game market vs $2.5 billion used game market 500 million new game sales vs 125 million used game sales source
While the difference is not as drastic as my original incorrect values suggested, the difference is still enormous. The used car market is about the same as the new car market, but for video games it is 1/10th the size.
Game consoles need to standardize like DVD players.
We are getting pretty close to that with this new generation. The XBox One and PS4 have very similar hardware, and it will probably be much easier to create multiplatform games for them. The memory bandwidth and need for more caching on the xbox one is just about the only major difference.
While many people on Slashdot keep claiming that the used game market is significant when compared to the new game market, they are all completely wrong. That is not my subjective opinion, it is a fact taken from the actual evidence: The size of the used game market.
The new car market is 14.5 billion, vs a 40.5 billion used car market. That is a healthy used market. The new games market is about 22 billion vs a 2.5 billion used game market. While Gamestop may make most of its money on used games, the used game market is pretty trivial. Very, very, very few people make their game purchases based on how much they will be able to sell them for.
Some people do take into account the projected depreciation of their new car when they purchase a car. But even then, most people don't (which is actually a reasonable decision if you plan on keeping your car for 10 years or more).
Almost no one takes into account the value of a game on the used game market when they buy a new game. The game makers know this, which is why they know (through their market research) that putting more DRM and licensing restrictions on games will not hurt sales.
The inflation adjusted median wage hasn't appreciably changed in 40 years. This is indefensible.
Actually it has. When you account for the increases in payroll taxes paid for by employers and increases to other benefits like health insurance, employees make about 10% more than they did in 1970. And any gains for median wages against inflation are outstanding, since prices for any product that doesn't have unlimited supply is likely to raise along with any income gains by median wage workers.
Notice how the boss didn't write the software. He didn't do anything of value besides provide the funds.
Providing the funds is the most important part of the transaction. I can easily find programmers to write a website, but finding someone willing to pay these programmers is much more difficult. From what I can tell it is far more common for people think about now instead of the future, which makes those who invest very valuable. Some people invest by starting their own company, some people invest in themselves by growing their skillsets, and some people invest in companies started by others (in fact many people do all three).
These investments are what raise someone's worth, not hard work by itself. And all of these activities will significantly raise your worth unless done poorly (investing in a poor company, investing in a degree in basket weaving, etc.). The work you do from 9-5 is not going to increase your worth much unless you are actively investing in yourself by learning new skills and taking jobs that provide valuable experience. Your worth is most likely going to go up by investing some of your wages. That is as true today as it was 50 years ago.
I have worked at start up companies and have done consulting for small companies, and I have never even seen a small company that was a success because of some random employee doing an outstanding job. It was the vision and execution of the business owner, or a select few treasured employees with their own stake in the company, that made it a success. The rest of the employees just filled the seats and did about the same work that anyone else in their salary range would do. There are most certainly exceptions, but I doubt there are many.
Over the same period, worker productivity doubled and CEO compensation increased 700 times.
But why did productivity double? Productivity and wages rose together until the 70s because the productivity gains came from the effort of workers. Increased education was the primary contributing factor.
In the past few decades, however, the productivity gains are not coming from the average worker. They are coming from the elite expertise of the upper middle class and the investments made by the wealthy. A secretary in the 70s was much better at her job than a secretary in the 30s because she was probably much more educated. A secretary today is not more productive than a secretary in the 70s because she is so much better at her job. She is more productive because her boss invested in better CRM software. Therefore the financial gains are rightfully going to the business owner who paid for the software and the software developers who wrote the software, not to the secretary.
We definitely need to improve the level of wealth distribution in this society because too much disparity is harmful. But don't confuse this with a desire to be fair, because an argument can easily be made that it is more fair for the wealthy to keep their money.
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20 In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70
If you look at only take home pay you are correct that wages have not gone up when adjusted for inflation. But wages are not the only factor in employee compensation.
First off, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by employers have gone up since 1970. All employees have gotten an inflation adjusted 2.7% raise since 1970 based purely on this.
Second, health care premiums paid by employers have been going up significantly in the past 40 years. Currently the average employer pays $2.12 per hour for employee health benefits (source), which is about 10% of their earnings. I couldn't find exact statistics on 1970, but based on trends for the past 10 years and total health expenditure increases over the past 40 years, it was probably closer to 3-4% of earnings in 1970. So just health benefits have given average workers an estimated 6.3% inflation adjusted raise since 1970.
So if wages have stayed constant over the past 40 years, total compensation for the median worker has actually risen by about 9%. This is pretty impressive since it is very hard for median wages to ever outpace inflation (since when everyone makes more money, prices of most things go up to match). That makes your numbers more like this:
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20 In 2010 the average worker earned $21.43
I would agree that we have a problem with what people spend their money on in 2013 compared to what it was spent on in 1970. And those decisions are making us struggle more than the last couple generations. But that is a different discussion.
And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large.
It is true that there are ways governments could spend the money in a way that each citizen would gain more than $61.61 in wealth. But most studies I have been able to find in a 10 minute Google search show the effect to be closer to $1 of infrastructure spending boosting economic output by $2. Here is one example I found on my search.
So even if taking all of Bill Gate's money would give $123.22 to each Indian, that would still not have some huge impact.
But if there is a shortage of IT workers then most companies just hold off on upgrading their old systems because they would have to pay too much.
You're deliberately conflating the wealth creating profession of software development with the maintenance profession of information technology administration to hide the emptiness of your argument.
I said old systems, not old hardware. Companies hold onto old CRM and ERP systems, and plenty of other software systems because they don't want to pay for something better. Even more common, in my experience, is for companies to try and modify their business processes to match new software systems instead of doing the necessary customizations and integrations to make them work better. This is a major cause of a lack in user buy in and in just overall poor implementations.
And I'm wondering what an actual economist would say of your characterization. You've explicitly described the demand curve as elastic - raise the price, they buy fewer programmers, lower the price, they buy more. But almost by definition, shortages are impossible in that situation without some kind of external restriction. They want more, more, more, but for some reason they're unwilling to pay the higher price such vociferous demand requires.
I am not sure how anything you said here differs with what I said. Without some kind of external restriction, like the VISA system, there would be absolutely no shortage. Companies would just ship over a million more immigrants each year and pay as little as they could get away with. That would obviously be disastrous for our economy, so thankfully we have external restrictions to our primarily free market system.
While obviously this is just one factor in our country's success (along with education, handling entitlements, etc.), the Information Technology industry has been a major driver of our country's success for at least the last three decades. Failing to keep our lead in this industry would have disastrous effects on our economy, IMHO. And we cannot rely just on US talent if our corporations are going to compete with the rest of the world. We only have about 5% of the world's population, and probably less than 40% of the worlds smartest and most educated people (based on number of Nobel Prizes won; I couldn't think of a better measure).
Our percentage of the world's smartest and most educated people is going to continue to drop as other countries catch up, so the amount of foreign born employees our companies will need will continue to go up. So yes, I believe our country will fail to be a world leader if we fail to attract the world's best and brightest (and those "only" in the top 20-30%) in the future.
So allow H1B's to prop up poorly run corporations that make inefficient hiring decisions?
Some small to medium sized business that doesn't understand the usefulness of a better website or more efficient CRM system is not necessarily a poorly run business. I have worked with many great business owners who do their job very well but just don't understand computers and their usefulness. My consulting company works with a lot of them. These companies, and their customers, would not run as well if they had to spend a considerable amount more on IT solutions (because they would often stick with paper-based solutions).
Most progressives understand that supply and demand does not always work to better our country. That is why we have trust busting laws and other regulations. A successful VISA program is something that any successful country needs to have. It needs to let in enough people that our country's companies get the work that they need to compete with a global economy, but not let in so many that our economy is crushed by the weight of a truly free market.
For most [competent] companies, the ROI of an IT system is much greater than the marginal difference in IT worker wages, or else they wouldn't be implementing them in the first place.
Well if our country took your viewpoint, at least in 100 years the United States will be able to look back on a century of decline and find comfort knowing that the only reason we failed was because our companies weren't competent enough to make the correct decisions. [Sarcasm] That moral high ground is much more important than actually creating government policies that account for the human frailty and greed that actually go into many important corporate decisions. [/Sarcasm]
If an industry colludes to either suppress wages or change laws to increase the labor pool (lowering certification and licensing standards or H-1Bs) wages won't reflect supply and demand trends
I completely agree with that. In fact, it was pretty much the entire point of my post. But the rest of my post was dealing with whether or not this is still a good thing for the country. If US companies had to deal with the supply and demand of only US IT workers, but the rest of the world was able to use the entire global supply and demand of IT workers, I think it would do great harm to our country.
I understand that this is just my opinion, but I think it is a pretty reasonable one.
IT is not the same as CS. If you need an IT worker, you hire people with Vo-Tech degrees and outside certifications, you're not looking for someone with a college degree.
What does your simplistic definition of IT have to do with my post? The IT industry commonly includes jobs ranging from CIO to software developer to network administrator.
... to realize that if the wages for STEMs have remained stagnant this past decade, there can't be a shortage. It's soooo blindingly obvious...
While I am not a fan of our H1B program, stagnant wages do not mean there is no a shortage. If there is a shortage of Doctors then the wages will go up because everyone wants to live forever. If there is a shortage of Lawyers then wages will go up because no one wants to be a pro se defendent. But if there is a shortage of IT workers then most companies just hold off on upgrading their old systems because they would have to pay too much.
If we stopped the H1B program, wages for IT would certainly go up. But innovation and improvements in IT would go down because companies would have to be much more careful about where they spend their money. Foreign companies wouldn't have to worry about this, because they would still have access to cheap labor, and US companies would start falling behind (or at least lose some of their edge).
So there is a shortage of IT workers. There is a shortage of IT workers that companies would be willing to pay. And that is a problem not only for these companies, as it would become a problem for the whole country if we turned off the spigot and lost our lead in tech to the rest of the world.
I don't know what the real answer for this is, because as I said before I think our current system isn't a very good solution. But the solution, and even correct diagnosis of the problem, are not as "blindingly obvious" as you make it seem.
That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% interest. Fuck that bank.
Anyone can get $57,500 in student loans from Stafford loans. Since it cannot be discharged, you can get it even if you declared bankruptcy yesterday. The subsidized portion is 3.4% interest and the unsubsidized portion is 6.8% (not 13%). In this case you only have to make $10k per year; $8k if you spend your first two years in community college. Even if you do have to take out the full amount, your after college income only has to be about $6k/yr more to account for your $300k monthly college loan payment.
Of course it is cheaper to find the cheapest carrier and buy your phone outright, but then you are forced to suffer with worse service. I use Verizon as my carrier not because of the phones they offer, but because I have tried US Cellular, Sprint, and AT&T (well, my fiance has AT&T) and Verizon simply offers the best service. US Cellular had the best voice network (in my area at least) but Verizon's data access is simply unparalleled. No other network has as good of 4G coverage in the chicagoland area, and that is basically all I use my phone for.
I have never tried the cheaper carriers, but if Sprint and AT&T can't keep up with Verizon then I doubt the smaller carriers like Cricket Wireless can. So comparing the No Contract Cell Plans with the larger carrier's plans is like comparing a Lexus with a Ford Focus. Obviously the Focus is cheaper, and it is even a great car IMHO, but if you desire a Lexus level of quality then it is no substitution.
Fraud has nothing to do with whether or not someone used clever wording to not technically lie. If your intent was to deceive, that is enough to qualify as being fraudulent.
And your friend was obviously committing fraud. He was successful because of poor policies at Sears, but the existance of those poor policies does not mean he has no fault. It is like saying that you aren't committing theft if you steal from a house that didn't have locked doors.
Also, even if it isn't prosecutable, it is still fraud. If someone gets away with murder because of a lack of evidence, he still committed murder. He just wouldn't be guilty in a court of law.
It may take 20 years, or it may take 200, but eventually everything a human witnesses will be recorded in a fashion that can be backed up and disseminated. Even people who don't want to will be forced to. Who would want to hire one of the only guys who doesn't have photographic memory and is not a walking encyclopedia?
The real issue is why aren't people admitting that living in a world where everything is recorded is going to be the new reality, and that society has to figure out how to adapt the that instead of buying tin foil hats and trying to deny the change.
If it is trivial why do they put so much effort into squishing it?
They aren't really trying to hurt the used gaming industry, they are trying to combat piracy. And from what I can tell the only successful way to do that is to create some kind of always online requirement to games. This has a side effect of also erradicaing the second hand gaming market, but that isn't the intent.
My guess is that game companies have seen the effect that always on DRM has had on the sales of Steam games, and have realized that your assumptions are not accurate at all. As Zenin also said, I don't think many gamers sell their games. The only people I know who sell games are kids and 20-30 year olds who still work in retail.
The new car market is 14.5 billion, vs a 40.5 billion used car market. That is a healthy used market. The new games market is about 22 billion vs a 2.5 billion used game market. While Gamestop may make most of its money on used games, but the used game market is pretty trivial. Very, very, very few people make their game purchases based on how much they will be able to sell them for.
Unless.. this is a hedge against the imminent online sales tax. When - not if - when is happens, their business model is almost toast. They still don't have the overhead of retails stores and they'll be able to offer 30% discounts. BUt...
Amazon is so much cheaper and more convenient than in-store alternatives that an extra 6.25% (IL tax rate) is not going to stop people from saving 25-40% on their purchases online. It will certainly cut into their sales, just like anything that would raise their prices for most people by a small percentage. But their business model is certainly not toast.
Its usually not that the developer thinks he is a better sysadmin than the actual sysadmin, it is that the developer is frustrated that the sysadmin won't help because it is a distraction from day to day operations. It is much easier to support the needs of standard users than it is to properly support the needs of developers (and testers). We often need to create our own private networks, create and destroy computer instances constantly, have virtual machines with dozens of OS/software configurations for testing, have servers with externally routable IPs, etc. A sysadmin would probably do a better job than a developer at doing these tasks, but usually they just don't want to deal with it. So the developer does it (often poorly) and then the sysadmin and developer fight over the results.
That is the only cause of developer / IT conflict that I have ever seen.
Yes they were both Chapter 7, the most common form of bankruptcy. 70% of bankruptcies are chapter 7, and 97% of these are non-business so business related bankruptcies are not skewing the numbers.
No offense but you're entire post was anecdotal. I've dealt with dozens of people looking to do the same thing and its never worked out for them.
My experience was anecdotal, but there is plenty of statistics that back up that most bankruptcies are quite easy and almost everything is dischargeable.
According to uscorts.gov the average bankruptcy has $115k in assets and $211k in liabilities. $202,361 of that debt is discharged on average, or almost 96%. That means in your average bankruptcy, someone who owes $211k will still owe $9000 by the end of the bankruptcy. That $9k is usually student loans, domestic support obligations, and taxes.
People still lose any assets that they have significant amount of equity in, such as a house or car. But you can always keep a house or car if you don't have too much equity (less than $30k in your home equity for a couple in IL, $100k in CA).
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure where you're getting your numbers from but they're WAY off:
Wow, I really did mistake the numbers I was gathering for my post. Those were not sales, they were total cars sold. And the numbers were in the millions, not billions.
14.5 million new cars were sold in the US in 2012 (source), and 40.5 million used cars sold (source). Considering the average price of a new car is now about $30k (source) and the price of a used car sale is about $10k (source), that puts the actual size of the market at the values listed below.
$435 billion new car market vs $405 billion used car market.
14.5 million new car sales vs 40.5 million used car sales.
$22 billion new video game market vs $2.5 billion used game market
500 million new game sales vs 125 million used game sales
source
While the difference is not as drastic as my original incorrect values suggested, the difference is still enormous. The used car market is about the same as the new car market, but for video games it is 1/10th the size.
Game consoles need to standardize like DVD players.
We are getting pretty close to that with this new generation. The XBox One and PS4 have very similar hardware, and it will probably be much easier to create multiplatform games for them. The memory bandwidth and need for more caching on the xbox one is just about the only major difference.
While many people on Slashdot keep claiming that the used game market is significant when compared to the new game market, they are all completely wrong. That is not my subjective opinion, it is a fact taken from the actual evidence: The size of the used game market.
The new car market is 14.5 billion, vs a 40.5 billion used car market. That is a healthy used market.
The new games market is about 22 billion vs a 2.5 billion used game market. While Gamestop may make most of its money on used games, the used game market is pretty trivial. Very, very, very few people make their game purchases based on how much they will be able to sell them for.
Some people do take into account the projected depreciation of their new car when they purchase a car. But even then, most people don't (which is actually a reasonable decision if you plan on keeping your car for 10 years or more).
Almost no one takes into account the value of a game on the used game market when they buy a new game. The game makers know this, which is why they know (through their market research) that putting more DRM and licensing restrictions on games will not hurt sales.
The inflation adjusted median wage hasn't appreciably changed in 40 years. This is indefensible.
Actually it has. When you account for the increases in payroll taxes paid for by employers and increases to other benefits like health insurance, employees make about 10% more than they did in 1970. And any gains for median wages against inflation are outstanding, since prices for any product that doesn't have unlimited supply is likely to raise along with any income gains by median wage workers.
Notice how the boss didn't write the software. He didn't do anything of value besides provide the funds.
Providing the funds is the most important part of the transaction. I can easily find programmers to write a website, but finding someone willing to pay these programmers is much more difficult. From what I can tell it is far more common for people think about now instead of the future, which makes those who invest very valuable. Some people invest by starting their own company, some people invest in themselves by growing their skillsets, and some people invest in companies started by others (in fact many people do all three).
These investments are what raise someone's worth, not hard work by itself. And all of these activities will significantly raise your worth unless done poorly (investing in a poor company, investing in a degree in basket weaving, etc.). The work you do from 9-5 is not going to increase your worth much unless you are actively investing in yourself by learning new skills and taking jobs that provide valuable experience. Your worth is most likely going to go up by investing some of your wages. That is as true today as it was 50 years ago.
I have worked at start up companies and have done consulting for small companies, and I have never even seen a small company that was a success because of some random employee doing an outstanding job. It was the vision and execution of the business owner, or a select few treasured employees with their own stake in the company, that made it a success. The rest of the employees just filled the seats and did about the same work that anyone else in their salary range would do. There are most certainly exceptions, but I doubt there are many.
Over the same period, worker productivity doubled and CEO compensation increased 700 times.
But why did productivity double? Productivity and wages rose together until the 70s because the productivity gains came from the effort of workers. Increased education was the primary contributing factor.
In the past few decades, however, the productivity gains are not coming from the average worker. They are coming from the elite expertise of the upper middle class and the investments made by the wealthy. A secretary in the 70s was much better at her job than a secretary in the 30s because she was probably much more educated. A secretary today is not more productive than a secretary in the 70s because she is so much better at her job. She is more productive because her boss invested in better CRM software. Therefore the financial gains are rightfully going to the business owner who paid for the software and the software developers who wrote the software, not to the secretary.
We definitely need to improve the level of wealth distribution in this society because too much disparity is harmful. But don't confuse this with a desire to be fair, because an argument can easily be made that it is more fair for the wealthy to keep their money.
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70
If you look at only take home pay you are correct that wages have not gone up when adjusted for inflation. But wages are not the only factor in employee compensation.
First off, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by employers have gone up since 1970. All employees have gotten an inflation adjusted 2.7% raise since 1970 based purely on this.
Second, health care premiums paid by employers have been going up significantly in the past 40 years. Currently the average employer pays $2.12 per hour for employee health benefits (source), which is about 10% of their earnings. I couldn't find exact statistics on 1970, but based on trends for the past 10 years and total health expenditure increases over the past 40 years, it was probably closer to 3-4% of earnings in 1970. So just health benefits have given average workers an estimated 6.3% inflation adjusted raise since 1970.
So if wages have stayed constant over the past 40 years, total compensation for the median worker has actually risen by about 9%. This is pretty impressive since it is very hard for median wages to ever outpace inflation (since when everyone makes more money, prices of most things go up to match). That makes your numbers more like this:
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $21.43
I would agree that we have a problem with what people spend their money on in 2013 compared to what it was spent on in 1970. And those decisions are making us struggle more than the last couple generations. But that is a different discussion.
And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large.
It is true that there are ways governments could spend the money in a way that each citizen would gain more than $61.61 in wealth. But most studies I have been able to find in a 10 minute Google search show the effect to be closer to $1 of infrastructure spending boosting economic output by $2. Here is one example I found on my search.
So even if taking all of Bill Gate's money would give $123.22 to each Indian, that would still not have some huge impact.
You're deliberately conflating the wealth creating profession of software development with the maintenance profession of information technology administration to hide the emptiness of your argument.
I said old systems, not old hardware. Companies hold onto old CRM and ERP systems, and plenty of other software systems because they don't want to pay for something better. Even more common, in my experience, is for companies to try and modify their business processes to match new software systems instead of doing the necessary customizations and integrations to make them work better. This is a major cause of a lack in user buy in and in just overall poor implementations.
And I'm wondering what an actual economist would say of your characterization. You've explicitly described the demand curve as elastic - raise the price, they buy fewer programmers, lower the price, they buy more. But almost by definition, shortages are impossible in that situation without some kind of external restriction. They want more, more, more, but for some reason they're unwilling to pay the higher price such vociferous demand requires.
I am not sure how anything you said here differs with what I said. Without some kind of external restriction, like the VISA system, there would be absolutely no shortage. Companies would just ship over a million more immigrants each year and pay as little as they could get away with. That would obviously be disastrous for our economy, so thankfully we have external restrictions to our primarily free market system.
huh? H1B's are going to save the country?
While obviously this is just one factor in our country's success (along with education, handling entitlements, etc.), the Information Technology industry has been a major driver of our country's success for at least the last three decades. Failing to keep our lead in this industry would have disastrous effects on our economy, IMHO. And we cannot rely just on US talent if our corporations are going to compete with the rest of the world. We only have about 5% of the world's population, and probably less than 40% of the worlds smartest and most educated people (based on number of Nobel Prizes won; I couldn't think of a better measure).
Our percentage of the world's smartest and most educated people is going to continue to drop as other countries catch up, so the amount of foreign born employees our companies will need will continue to go up. So yes, I believe our country will fail to be a world leader if we fail to attract the world's best and brightest (and those "only" in the top 20-30%) in the future.
So allow H1B's to prop up poorly run corporations that make inefficient hiring decisions?
Some small to medium sized business that doesn't understand the usefulness of a better website or more efficient CRM system is not necessarily a poorly run business. I have worked with many great business owners who do their job very well but just don't understand computers and their usefulness. My consulting company works with a lot of them. These companies, and their customers, would not run as well if they had to spend a considerable amount more on IT solutions (because they would often stick with paper-based solutions).
Most progressives understand that supply and demand does not always work to better our country. That is why we have trust busting laws and other regulations. A successful VISA program is something that any successful country needs to have. It needs to let in enough people that our country's companies get the work that they need to compete with a global economy, but not let in so many that our economy is crushed by the weight of a truly free market.
For most [competent] companies, the ROI of an IT system is much greater than the marginal difference in IT worker wages, or else they wouldn't be implementing them in the first place.
Well if our country took your viewpoint, at least in 100 years the United States will be able to look back on a century of decline and find comfort knowing that the only reason we failed was because our companies weren't competent enough to make the correct decisions. [Sarcasm] That moral high ground is much more important than actually creating government policies that account for the human frailty and greed that actually go into many important corporate decisions. [/Sarcasm]
If an industry colludes to either suppress wages or change laws to increase the labor pool (lowering certification and licensing standards or H-1Bs) wages won't reflect supply and demand trends
I completely agree with that. In fact, it was pretty much the entire point of my post. But the rest of my post was dealing with whether or not this is still a good thing for the country. If US companies had to deal with the supply and demand of only US IT workers, but the rest of the world was able to use the entire global supply and demand of IT workers, I think it would do great harm to our country.
I understand that this is just my opinion, but I think it is a pretty reasonable one.
IT is not the same as CS. If you need an IT worker, you hire people with Vo-Tech degrees and outside certifications, you're not looking for someone with a college degree.
What does your simplistic definition of IT have to do with my post? The IT industry commonly includes jobs ranging from CIO to software developer to network administrator.
... to realize that if the wages for STEMs have remained stagnant this past decade, there can't be a shortage. It's soooo blindingly obvious ...
While I am not a fan of our H1B program, stagnant wages do not mean there is no a shortage. If there is a shortage of Doctors then the wages will go up because everyone wants to live forever. If there is a shortage of Lawyers then wages will go up because no one wants to be a pro se defendent. But if there is a shortage of IT workers then most companies just hold off on upgrading their old systems because they would have to pay too much.
If we stopped the H1B program, wages for IT would certainly go up. But innovation and improvements in IT would go down because companies would have to be much more careful about where they spend their money. Foreign companies wouldn't have to worry about this, because they would still have access to cheap labor, and US companies would start falling behind (or at least lose some of their edge).
So there is a shortage of IT workers. There is a shortage of IT workers that companies would be willing to pay. And that is a problem not only for these companies, as it would become a problem for the whole country if we turned off the spigot and lost our lead in tech to the rest of the world.
I don't know what the real answer for this is, because as I said before I think our current system isn't a very good solution. But the solution, and even correct diagnosis of the problem, are not as "blindingly obvious" as you make it seem.
That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% interest. Fuck that bank.
Anyone can get $57,500 in student loans from Stafford loans. Since it cannot be discharged, you can get it even if you declared bankruptcy yesterday. The subsidized portion is 3.4% interest and the unsubsidized portion is 6.8% (not 13%). In this case you only have to make $10k per year; $8k if you spend your first two years in community college. Even if you do have to take out the full amount, your after college income only has to be about $6k/yr more to account for your $300k monthly college loan payment.
Of course it is cheaper to find the cheapest carrier and buy your phone outright, but then you are forced to suffer with worse service. I use Verizon as my carrier not because of the phones they offer, but because I have tried US Cellular, Sprint, and AT&T (well, my fiance has AT&T) and Verizon simply offers the best service. US Cellular had the best voice network (in my area at least) but Verizon's data access is simply unparalleled. No other network has as good of 4G coverage in the chicagoland area, and that is basically all I use my phone for.
I have never tried the cheaper carriers, but if Sprint and AT&T can't keep up with Verizon then I doubt the smaller carriers like Cricket Wireless can. So comparing the No Contract Cell Plans with the larger carrier's plans is like comparing a Lexus with a Ford Focus. Obviously the Focus is cheaper, and it is even a great car IMHO, but if you desire a Lexus level of quality then it is no substitution.
Fraud has nothing to do with whether or not someone used clever wording to not technically lie. If your intent was to deceive, that is enough to qualify as being fraudulent.
And your friend was obviously committing fraud. He was successful because of poor policies at Sears, but the existance of those poor policies does not mean he has no fault. It is like saying that you aren't committing theft if you steal from a house that didn't have locked doors.
Also, even if it isn't prosecutable, it is still fraud. If someone gets away with murder because of a lack of evidence, he still committed murder. He just wouldn't be guilty in a court of law.
It may take 20 years, or it may take 200, but eventually everything a human witnesses will be recorded in a fashion that can be backed up and disseminated. Even people who don't want to will be forced to. Who would want to hire one of the only guys who doesn't have photographic memory and is not a walking encyclopedia?
The real issue is why aren't people admitting that living in a world where everything is recorded is going to be the new reality, and that society has to figure out how to adapt the that instead of buying tin foil hats and trying to deny the change.
If it is trivial why do they put so much effort into squishing it?
They aren't really trying to hurt the used gaming industry, they are trying to combat piracy. And from what I can tell the only successful way to do that is to create some kind of always online requirement to games. This has a side effect of also erradicaing the second hand gaming market, but that isn't the intent.
My guess is that game companies have seen the effect that always on DRM has had on the sales of Steam games, and have realized that your assumptions are not accurate at all. As Zenin also said, I don't think many gamers sell their games. The only people I know who sell games are kids and 20-30 year olds who still work in retail.
The new car market is 14.5 billion, vs a 40.5 billion used car market. That is a healthy used market.
The new games market is about 22 billion vs a 2.5 billion used game market. While Gamestop may make most of its money on used games, but the used game market is pretty trivial. Very, very, very few people make their game purchases based on how much they will be able to sell them for.
Unless .. this is a hedge against the imminent online sales tax. When - not if - when is happens, their business model is almost toast. They still don't have the overhead of retails stores and they'll be able to offer 30% discounts. BUt ...
Amazon is so much cheaper and more convenient than in-store alternatives that an extra 6.25% (IL tax rate) is not going to stop people from saving 25-40% on their purchases online. It will certainly cut into their sales, just like anything that would raise their prices for most people by a small percentage. But their business model is certainly not toast.
Its usually not that the developer thinks he is a better sysadmin than the actual sysadmin, it is that the developer is frustrated that the sysadmin won't help because it is a distraction from day to day operations. It is much easier to support the needs of standard users than it is to properly support the needs of developers (and testers). We often need to create our own private networks, create and destroy computer instances constantly, have virtual machines with dozens of OS/software configurations for testing, have servers with externally routable IPs, etc. A sysadmin would probably do a better job than a developer at doing these tasks, but usually they just don't want to deal with it. So the developer does it (often poorly) and then the sysadmin and developer fight over the results.
That is the only cause of developer / IT conflict that I have ever seen.
By the time someone knows the lay of the land
Here's an idea: if one of your employees can't tell the difference between lay and lie and how to deploy them correctly, sack them.
Here's another idea: if one of your employees is constantly correcting people inaccurately, sack them.
Lay of the land : American English
Lie of the land : British English
Perhaps your friends both qualified for Chapter 7
Yes they were both Chapter 7, the most common form of bankruptcy. 70% of bankruptcies are chapter 7, and 97% of these are non-business so business related bankruptcies are not skewing the numbers.
No offense but you're entire post was anecdotal. I've dealt with dozens of people looking to do the same thing and its never worked out for them.
My experience was anecdotal, but there is plenty of statistics that back up that most bankruptcies are quite easy and almost everything is dischargeable.
According to uscorts.gov the average bankruptcy has $115k in assets and $211k in liabilities. $202,361 of that debt is discharged on average, or almost 96%. That means in your average bankruptcy, someone who owes $211k will still owe $9000 by the end of the bankruptcy. That $9k is usually student loans, domestic support obligations, and taxes.
People still lose any assets that they have significant amount of equity in, such as a house or car. But you can always keep a house or car if you don't have too much equity (less than $30k in your home equity for a couple in IL, $100k in CA).