Marketing experts? Bill Gates in a mall eating a f*cking churro and wiggling his butt walking though the parking lot?
Yes, marketing experts. For a certain market.
Bill Gates sure does look like the type of fellow who blends right in a bland corporate world, doesn't he? That's what Microsoft products have always been out--tools to get the job done, in a style and presentation that is attractive to mass market corporate types.
The author of Dink Smallwood, Seth Robinson IIRC, was the previous author of a very popular BBS game called Legend of the Red Dragon. It was quite RPG like, just text based with primitive (but quite colorful and nice) ANSI graphics.
When you logged in and got the main menu, you would basically "go out into the woods" and attack some randomly spawned monsters, get some money and experience, level up, go back into town and buy weapons and armor. You could go into the Inn and chat up others or write on the wall. You could challenge other players to fight and compete with them in the rankings. Other developers could even write "mods" for the game adding new areas to explore and monsters to fight.
I would have to say this would definitely count as a groundbreaking RPG game of the 80s, considering its extreme popularity. On all the BBSs I ever dialed up, it was generally one of the most popular games.
How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?
All I'm saying is, it's foolish/short-sighted to cheer on Google to destroy PayPal and take their place, when they themselves are evil. I think of many ways it would be a Bad Idea to put Google in charge of the Internet's money transactions. This company has too much power already, and has already shown they will abuse it.
Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks"
No, the evidence is out there for everyone to see. It's not huge things, it's many small things that add up to paint a big picture. Not the kind of stuff where I could really explain my viewpoint to the extent where you and everyone would suddenly be like "oh.....now that you put it that way...I totally see what you mean."
All I'm saying is my gut instinct (which I have honed and learned to trust over the years) is strongly telling me that Google is a company which is right now at the peak of its power, and perhaps might gain some more, but at the same time is showing the warning signs of being a company which cannot be trusted with power, if for no other reason than its own stupidity.
It has been making one brash, stupid, poorly thought out, foolish decision after another. OK, here's a recent one that comes to mind--renaming the Android Market to Google Play. "Play?" What the fuck, Google? Extremely poor choice of what is essentially a brand name. This is on only of many, many similar examples I've seen where Google is just totally fucking themselves through poor marketing, branding, and engineering decisions.
Thankfully we do still have (at least to a large extent) a free market in this country, so if Google is doing as wrong as I claim then other companies will rise up to challenge them. And indeed, we're seeing other Android markets such as Amazon Market which are 10x better than the crap Google came out with.
Google is good at coming up with big ideas and spending money on them, but extremely poor at follow-through and execution in polishing it into a marketable, sellable product, then supporting said product in the field.
"Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?
I dont know anything about their new privacy policy. That's not my beef with them.
When you look at the bigger picture, maybe it's not so bad. Its our brains which let us see this type of catastrophe coming a mile away while the moronic masses are led cheering on to their fiery death in a nuclear holocaust. Take your ass away from the major cities and the military hot spots and find a nice quiet hideout in a small town near natural resources. Not saying today--there's still time to see if things are going to turn around, or if we really are on a course for disaster. I'm not worried. Nobody is going to nuke my town and I've got enough Fallout 3 (and Air Force) experience to survive whatever comes. When all the morons finish nuking themselves into oblivion, that'll leave much more room and oil for MY descendents to spread out and get comfy. Well, at least after the molten slag cools to the touch.
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods.
I believe the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are misled, and many of the ideas emerging from that group have been nuts. I don't however discount the possibility that our government may have been aware of the attack and let it happen anyway. Yes, there are many actors in various agencies cold and cruel and greedy/selfish enough to do that.
I also believe that an Enterprise false flag attack could be a possibility. Based on all I've seen and experienced, especially over the past few years, and what I know about the state of the world and our government, and the depths they are willing to resort to in order to maintain the current system, in the odds of possible worldwide economic collapse, riots, and war?
It does not at all shock me to think such a thing could happen. It would not at all surprise me if it were to happen.
The assholes in our government most certainly would benefit from a "Pearl Harbor" type moment to rile everyone up and anger them against Iran, since nobody is at all eager right now to enter into yet another Middle East war.
For good reason: because when we do, this time we are going to get our asses STOMPED.
How does this viewpoint fit into your black and white picture of the world?
I didn't say anything about patents. I think all patents are evil and should be abolished or severely limited. I said WHY does slashdot have such a hard time understanding what innovation is? It's the exploration into new areas. And no, nobody's ideas are ever original, they've been thought up and maybe even implemented by others multiple times in history. It's still innovation to rediscover these ideas for society and bring them forth. This act doesn't mean one should have the exclusive right to use that idea for free.
The problem is you have to push your way through Metro to access the things that run the same, whether you have any interest in what Metro offers or not.
No, you can remove all the Metro apps from the Start menu. You can pin all classic apps there if you want, and zero metro apps.
Furthermore, Metro aside, I really like the new Windows Explorer and other built-in accessories. The old File Manager in Win 3.1 was much better than the one in Windows 95, and they have sucked ever since. Finally it seems Microsoft is "getting it" in some ways. I wouldn't count them out just yet--I think the Vista incident scared them straight. One big purpose behind releasing this "Consumer Preview" is to gauge people's reactions and figure out early where they're screwing up, so they can make changes before releasing a big flop, like Vista. I think they are headed in the right direction. Only time (and the final release) will tell.
What the hell are you on about? Your premise is all wrong. Businesses do not start with the question "How can we use this new technology?!", they start from "How can we best solve this problem?"
Only if they are creatively bankrupt morons with zero vision, who can expect to be overtaken and surpassed (with executives no doubt left wondering "WOW, what just HAPPENED?") by the first company who DOES look forward to emerging technology to see how it can be applied to improve its business.
Wow! A totally foreign and shocking concept to my Western mind! I am QUITE certain NONE of my ancestors have ever engaged in such a vile, deceitful tactic! You sir, have just blown my mind!
It doesn't have to be innovative whatsoever. It just has to be a design that wasn't there before, quite possibly by putting together a dozen different design decisions that have all been made before, just not in that particular combination.
also known as......INNOVATION
Did the person who invented the electric motor also invent steel plating, wires, bolts, and rotors, and pulleys? Or did he just put them together in a new combination that had not been tried before?
Describing Google as Evil and Microsoft as the better alternative to that seems a little suspect to me. There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on
There doesn't need to be an anti-Google campaign. Google's actions are enough to screw them on their own.
I know exactly what you mean bro. It's yet another example of the same thing I've been seeing with Google lately--just changing shit for the hell of it cause they think it should be a certain way, with no regard to those who are negatively affected by the change. It's the exact same attitude we see with groups like Gnome, Ubuntu, etc, and will be the doom of Google for the same reason.
Get rid of all the ways business can fuck with a worker, and things get better.
By implementing government regulations that in the end will just fuck the employee over even more. Sorry, no thanks. Freedom is less regulations, not more.
A and B are factually incorrect. Productivity in the United States has been on a constant rise for the last 60 years. This would directly contradict A because it indicates more and more output is being produced by the workers.
The productivity increase is due to machinery and process improvements, not workers. No, there's been large scores of workers whose "work day" largely consisted of twiddling their thumbs and shuffling papers. This is waste.
The total tax rate on people is lower now than practically anytime in the last 50 years.
I find that REALLY hard to believe, considering the huge number of hidden taxes there are in our country. For example--speed traps and other traffic tickets. We are a HEAVILY taxed people, regardless of whether they call it a "tax" or not.
And underemployment is worse for the economy than unemployment. Underemployment means that we spent money training you to a level higher than you're employed at (even in the US, universities and colleges receive public funds).
Use logic to think through what you just said, for a moment, rather than believing what you've heard from a "credible" source. What you just said is that it's better to have people sitting at home doing nothing, leeching off the government teat, than to actually be employed somewhere producing and adding value to the economy. Presented this way, do you not see how this line of reasoning is absurd?
This type of thing is usually spouted by the likes of Keynesian economists who also happen to think that debt is good and savings are wrong. It's totally backwards voodoo nonsense that was invented in the Depression Era by a quack, and kept around only because the sudden onset of WW2 (with the accompanying "boost" to the economy (i.e. incredible rates of government expenditure), plus the accompanying wartime boom (after all other countries were blasted to rubble) prevented us from seeing just how fatally flawed it was (you know, the whole boiling frog metaphor) until now, when it's just about to do us in. (i.e. potential partial or total economic collapse of multiple Western nations, U.S. not excepted, within 3-5 years.)
You are right of course in that underemployment is bad in the sense that, it is an indication that "we fucked up" as a society and put the wrong person in the wrong job. When there's too many wrong people in the wrong jobs and things aren't working as they should, (i.e. now as the many problems caused by our failed education system are coming to a head), then that's when folks really start to notice and get pissed off/frustrated, though they may not know exactly why.
We've got people out there flipping burgers to pay for a college education they don't need and won't really benefit from, while other people who are looking for work in Corporate Business really should be in that guy's place flipping burgers. We have subdivisions full of practically new homes standing empty. Etc. It's a gross misallocation of resources.
This situation can all be traced back to government interference in the market. Problems in the market (booms, busts, in the larger context) are caused by lack of communications, or interruptions in communications, or other various failures in information flow among its actors. These result in booms, and the resulting inevitable fallout later down the road is a bust.
Any time the government (or any other unnecessary actors) gets involved in the economy, especially by using incentives or taxes to create or artificially destroy demand, it necessarily interferes with this natural flow of information. A consequence of this is a delay in the information flow. It's just like the Internet--the more "hops" between you at the other guy, the more delay (lag) is introduced. The end result is, the booms are bigger, and of course the busts are much bigger as well.
A boom is what happens when you have a large trend of resources being directed towards and accumulating in a portion of the economy at a rate which is higher than justified by the actual True Reality of the world, which is hidden from us. It reveals itself to us only through the joy and happiness of a well functioning economy, resulting from good choices and sound decisions, or the pain and suffering of trying and failing once again to alter the laws of physics and human behavior. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is maxim of truth, and the actions of government economists are no exception to this rule. Our intentions don't matter, only how close our ideas are to the actual truth.
Government interference, no matter how well intentioned, is fatal to proper market functioning. This has been proven time and time again throughout history. Our Founding Fathers weren't necessarily economists but they damn sure knew that the heavy handed taxes and fines levi
Except they shouldn't have to pay. It's the government interfering with the free hand of the market which is the root cause of their problem. (Just like so many other people's problems.) If the government weren't interfering with education and training programs then these people would naturally gravitate towards fields where they are needed. Instead we get high schoolers being shown charts of careers based on pay and being encouraged to pick a career based on that "metric." So glad I was smart enough even back then to see (or suspect) the foolishness of it all.
I work in a manual labor industry. It's no joke. These guys and gals work hard, and it's not an easy job. The only time you see them is when it's sunny and nice, because that's when you're out walking your dog. How about when it's 31 degrees, freezing rain, and you're knee deep in freezing water? For an 8 hour shift? You're not out there because it's too miserable; you're at home under the blanket watching TV. They're out there working.
Nobody is saying your job isn't hard dude, so don't get butthurt over the guy's comments. All he's saying is there are plenty of people out there who are willing to do the job, even if I myself am not. It has nothing to do with not wanting to work hard or carry tools; it's that I'm scared of heights. You think you're the only blue collar dude who has to work in rough conditions? The main barrier to entry in your job is simply how fucking scary it is to be 300 feet off the ground clinging to a swaying tower in gusting winds. Which is why you get paid commensurately.
The reason we have such a shortage of skilled hands for this work is because we've sent all of them off to school to study liberal arts and corporate communications. Our government created false demand through its subsidies, resulting in a poor allocation of resources. Now all these folks are sitting out there homeless on the streets instead of working. If we just let things be, and let the market handle it, this problem will correct itself. People who are sick and tired of being unemployed will find their way into training programs and into careers which have an actual demand for more employees.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't charged a dime for the "Consumer Preview"......were you?
instead of releasing a version people don't want and "culling valuable feedback", why release what people don't want in the first place?
Who's asking for this stuff?
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses." -- Henry Ford
Marketing experts? Bill Gates in a mall eating a f*cking churro and wiggling his butt walking though the parking lot?
Yes, marketing experts. For a certain market.
Bill Gates sure does look like the type of fellow who blends right in a bland corporate world, doesn't he? That's what Microsoft products have always been out--tools to get the job done, in a style and presentation that is attractive to mass market corporate types.
I have heard people say numerous times that they don't want a Windows phone because they don't want a phone that crashes or is insecure
So instead they run Android.
lol
The author of Dink Smallwood, Seth Robinson IIRC, was the previous author of a very popular BBS game called Legend of the Red Dragon. It was quite RPG like, just text based with primitive (but quite colorful and nice) ANSI graphics.
When you logged in and got the main menu, you would basically "go out into the woods" and attack some randomly spawned monsters, get some money and experience, level up, go back into town and buy weapons and armor. You could go into the Inn and chat up others or write on the wall. You could challenge other players to fight and compete with them in the rankings. Other developers could even write "mods" for the game adding new areas to explore and monsters to fight.
I would have to say this would definitely count as a groundbreaking RPG game of the 80s, considering its extreme popularity. On all the BBSs I ever dialed up, it was generally one of the most popular games.
How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?
All I'm saying is, it's foolish/short-sighted to cheer on Google to destroy PayPal and take their place, when they themselves are evil. I think of many ways it would be a Bad Idea to put Google in charge of the Internet's money transactions. This company has too much power already, and has already shown they will abuse it.
Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks"
No, the evidence is out there for everyone to see. It's not huge things, it's many small things that add up to paint a big picture. Not the kind of stuff where I could really explain my viewpoint to the extent where you and everyone would suddenly be like "oh.....now that you put it that way...I totally see what you mean."
All I'm saying is my gut instinct (which I have honed and learned to trust over the years) is strongly telling me that Google is a company which is right now at the peak of its power, and perhaps might gain some more, but at the same time is showing the warning signs of being a company which cannot be trusted with power, if for no other reason than its own stupidity.
It has been making one brash, stupid, poorly thought out, foolish decision after another. OK, here's a recent one that comes to mind--renaming the Android Market to Google Play. "Play?" What the fuck, Google? Extremely poor choice of what is essentially a brand name. This is on only of many, many similar examples I've seen where Google is just totally fucking themselves through poor marketing, branding, and engineering decisions.
Thankfully we do still have (at least to a large extent) a free market in this country, so if Google is doing as wrong as I claim then other companies will rise up to challenge them. And indeed, we're seeing other Android markets such as Amazon Market which are 10x better than the crap Google came out with.
Google is good at coming up with big ideas and spending money on them, but extremely poor at follow-through and execution in polishing it into a marketable, sellable product, then supporting said product in the field.
"Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?
I dont know anything about their new privacy policy. That's not my beef with them.
When you look at the bigger picture, maybe it's not so bad. Its our brains which let us see this type of catastrophe coming a mile away while the moronic masses are led cheering on to their fiery death in a nuclear holocaust. Take your ass away from the major cities and the military hot spots and find a nice quiet hideout in a small town near natural resources. Not saying today--there's still time to see if things are going to turn around, or if we really are on a course for disaster. I'm not worried. Nobody is going to nuke my town and I've got enough Fallout 3 (and Air Force) experience to survive whatever comes. When all the morons finish nuking themselves into oblivion, that'll leave much more room and oil for MY descendents to spread out and get comfy. Well, at least after the molten slag cools to the touch.
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods.
I believe the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are misled, and many of the ideas emerging from that group have been nuts. I don't however discount the possibility that our government may have been aware of the attack and let it happen anyway. Yes, there are many actors in various agencies cold and cruel and greedy/selfish enough to do that.
I also believe that an Enterprise false flag attack could be a possibility. Based on all I've seen and experienced, especially over the past few years, and what I know about the state of the world and our government, and the depths they are willing to resort to in order to maintain the current system, in the odds of possible worldwide economic collapse, riots, and war?
It does not at all shock me to think such a thing could happen. It would not at all surprise me if it were to happen.
The assholes in our government most certainly would benefit from a "Pearl Harbor" type moment to rile everyone up and anger them against Iran, since nobody is at all eager right now to enter into yet another Middle East war.
For good reason: because when we do, this time we are going to get our asses STOMPED.
How does this viewpoint fit into your black and white picture of the world?
Won't it be ironic if it turns out to be actually true?
I didn't say anything about patents. I think all patents are evil and should be abolished or severely limited. I said WHY does slashdot have such a hard time understanding what innovation is? It's the exploration into new areas. And no, nobody's ideas are ever original, they've been thought up and maybe even implemented by others multiple times in history. It's still innovation to rediscover these ideas for society and bring them forth. This act doesn't mean one should have the exclusive right to use that idea for free.
[complex functionality] .... that cannot be simply boiled down into a single self-contained app.
Oh yes it can :)
Maybe a new Space Quest episode. For Android devices, of course.
The problem is you have to push your way through Metro to access the things that run the same, whether you have any interest in what Metro offers or not.
No, you can remove all the Metro apps from the Start menu. You can pin all classic apps there if you want, and zero metro apps.
Furthermore, Metro aside, I really like the new Windows Explorer and other built-in accessories. The old File Manager in Win 3.1 was much better than the one in Windows 95, and they have sucked ever since. Finally it seems Microsoft is "getting it" in some ways. I wouldn't count them out just yet--I think the Vista incident scared them straight. One big purpose behind releasing this "Consumer Preview" is to gauge people's reactions and figure out early where they're screwing up, so they can make changes before releasing a big flop, like Vista. I think they are headed in the right direction. Only time (and the final release) will tell.
What the hell are you on about? Your premise is all wrong. Businesses do not start with the question "How can we use this new technology?!", they start from "How can we best solve this problem?"
Only if they are creatively bankrupt morons with zero vision, who can expect to be overtaken and surpassed (with executives no doubt left wondering "WOW, what just HAPPENED?") by the first company who DOES look forward to emerging technology to see how it can be applied to improve its business.
Wow! A totally foreign and shocking concept to my Western mind! I am QUITE certain NONE of my ancestors have ever engaged in such a vile, deceitful tactic! You sir, have just blown my mind!
What is with you Apple zealots
he says,
and your incessant need to insult?
The irony is so thick here you could spread it on toast.
It doesn't have to be innovative whatsoever. It just has to be a design that wasn't there before, quite possibly by putting together a dozen different design decisions that have all been made before, just not in that particular combination.
also known as......INNOVATION
Did the person who invented the electric motor also invent steel plating, wires, bolts, and rotors, and pulleys? Or did he just put them together in a new combination that had not been tried before?
Describing Google as Evil and Microsoft as the better alternative to that seems a little suspect to me. There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on
There doesn't need to be an anti-Google campaign. Google's actions are enough to screw them on their own.
I know exactly what you mean bro. It's yet another example of the same thing I've been seeing with Google lately--just changing shit for the hell of it cause they think it should be a certain way, with no regard to those who are negatively affected by the change. It's the exact same attitude we see with groups like Gnome, Ubuntu, etc, and will be the doom of Google for the same reason.
Get rid of all the ways business can fuck with a worker, and things get better.
By implementing government regulations that in the end will just fuck the employee over even more. Sorry, no thanks. Freedom is less regulations, not more.
A and B are factually incorrect. Productivity in the United States has been on a constant rise for the last 60 years. This would directly contradict A because it indicates more and more output is being produced by the workers.
The productivity increase is due to machinery and process improvements, not workers. No, there's been large scores of workers whose "work day" largely consisted of twiddling their thumbs and shuffling papers. This is waste.
The total tax rate on people is lower now than practically anytime in the last 50 years.
I find that REALLY hard to believe, considering the huge number of hidden taxes there are in our country. For example--speed traps and other traffic tickets. We are a HEAVILY taxed people, regardless of whether they call it a "tax" or not.
And underemployment is worse for the economy than unemployment. Underemployment means that we spent money training you to a level higher than you're employed at (even in the US, universities and colleges receive public funds).
Use logic to think through what you just said, for a moment, rather than believing what you've heard from a "credible" source. What you just said is that it's better to have people sitting at home doing nothing, leeching off the government teat, than to actually be employed somewhere producing and adding value to the economy. Presented this way, do you not see how this line of reasoning is absurd?
This type of thing is usually spouted by the likes of Keynesian economists who also happen to think that debt is good and savings are wrong. It's totally backwards voodoo nonsense that was invented in the Depression Era by a quack, and kept around only because the sudden onset of WW2 (with the accompanying "boost" to the economy (i.e. incredible rates of government expenditure), plus the accompanying wartime boom (after all other countries were blasted to rubble) prevented us from seeing just how fatally flawed it was (you know, the whole boiling frog metaphor) until now, when it's just about to do us in. (i.e. potential partial or total economic collapse of multiple Western nations, U.S. not excepted, within 3-5 years.)
You are right of course in that underemployment is bad in the sense that, it is an indication that "we fucked up" as a society and put the wrong person in the wrong job. When there's too many wrong people in the wrong jobs and things aren't working as they should, (i.e. now as the many problems caused by our failed education system are coming to a head), then that's when folks really start to notice and get pissed off/frustrated, though they may not know exactly why.
We've got people out there flipping burgers to pay for a college education they don't need and won't really benefit from, while other people who are looking for work in Corporate Business really should be in that guy's place flipping burgers. We have subdivisions full of practically new homes standing empty. Etc. It's a gross misallocation of resources.
This situation can all be traced back to government interference in the market. Problems in the market (booms, busts, in the larger context) are caused by lack of communications, or interruptions in communications, or other various failures in information flow among its actors. These result in booms, and the resulting inevitable fallout later down the road is a bust.
Any time the government (or any other unnecessary actors) gets involved in the economy, especially by using incentives or taxes to create or artificially destroy demand, it necessarily interferes with this natural flow of information. A consequence of this is a delay in the information flow. It's just like the Internet--the more "hops" between you at the other guy, the more delay (lag) is introduced. The end result is, the booms are bigger, and of course the busts are much bigger as well.
A boom is what happens when you have a large trend of resources being directed towards and accumulating in a portion of the economy at a rate which is higher than justified by the actual True Reality of the world, which is hidden from us. It reveals itself to us only through the joy and happiness of a well functioning economy, resulting from good choices and sound decisions, or the pain and suffering of trying and failing once again to alter the laws of physics and human behavior. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is maxim of truth, and the actions of government economists are no exception to this rule. Our intentions don't matter, only how close our ideas are to the actual truth.
Government interference, no matter how well intentioned, is fatal to proper market functioning. This has been proven time and time again throughout history. Our Founding Fathers weren't necessarily economists but they damn sure knew that the heavy handed taxes and fines levi
Except they shouldn't have to pay. It's the government interfering with the free hand of the market which is the root cause of their problem. (Just like so many other people's problems.) If the government weren't interfering with education and training programs then these people would naturally gravitate towards fields where they are needed. Instead we get high schoolers being shown charts of careers based on pay and being encouraged to pick a career based on that "metric." So glad I was smart enough even back then to see (or suspect) the foolishness of it all.
I see what you tried to do there, but you failed, because your statement is true.
I work in a manual labor industry. It's no joke. These guys and gals work hard, and it's not an easy job. The only time you see them is when it's sunny and nice, because that's when you're out walking your dog. How about when it's 31 degrees, freezing rain, and you're knee deep in freezing water? For an 8 hour shift? You're not out there because it's too miserable; you're at home under the blanket watching TV. They're out there working.
Nobody is saying your job isn't hard dude, so don't get butthurt over the guy's comments. All he's saying is there are plenty of people out there who are willing to do the job, even if I myself am not. It has nothing to do with not wanting to work hard or carry tools; it's that I'm scared of heights. You think you're the only blue collar dude who has to work in rough conditions? The main barrier to entry in your job is simply how fucking scary it is to be 300 feet off the ground clinging to a swaying tower in gusting winds. Which is why you get paid commensurately.
The reason we have such a shortage of skilled hands for this work is because we've sent all of them off to school to study liberal arts and corporate communications. Our government created false demand through its subsidies, resulting in a poor allocation of resources. Now all these folks are sitting out there homeless on the streets instead of working. If we just let things be, and let the market handle it, this problem will correct itself. People who are sick and tired of being unemployed will find their way into training programs and into careers which have an actual demand for more employees.