Do you understand math? Simple math?
Yes, absolutely, but your math is false in that it begins at the wrong end of the equation.
If there is a position to be filled then there is a position to be filled. How high the wages are for that position is another matter entirely. How many people respond to a Help Wanted ad is irrelevant.
My premise is that there is a "floor" below which wages cease to be of any value other than a token, and under which the vast majority of laborers will refuse to work in any case. The minimum wage is not meant to artificially inflate wages (I assert that it does not), but is meant to prevent the minority of employers from taking advantage of those in unfortunate (and probably temporary) circumstances.
Following this premise it is completely acceptable to argue the amount of the minimum wage because it should not artificially inflate wages. If it does, then it should be lowered, but I am convinced that $7.50/hr, paltry as it is, does no such thing.
Regarding SS being a ponzi scheme I will not argue the point. I lack the time to research and prove you wrong, and I concede that the current state of social security may well fit the definition of a ponzi scheme. I do refute the idea that social security should be a ponzi scheme and the idea that social obligations in general are a drain on the economy (or cost jobs). My position is that some smoothing out of the "bumps" for the labor class adds vital stability to the economy, provided such entitlements are within reason, and safeguards are in place to prevent fraud.
Social Security was not intended to be a retirement plan, but it has lately become one. While I reject the idea that social security should be eliminated, I do think we should be regularly re-evaluating what qualifies one to receive benefits, particularly age. I think it's likely that if life expectancy today were what it was 50 years ago, then social security would not meet any definition of a ponzi scheme.
I hope to make it clear that I am no idealogue. My premises are not based on any misguided sense of compassion or emotion. But I do absolutely believe that psychology is an important component to a successful economy. Income equality is a factor in how innovative a society is and so a stable secure middle class is the single most important thing to consider with regards to economic policy.
Unfortunately, there are ideologues in this country who motivation by a sense of what's "fair" who again and again use a technical issue (social security is running out of money in 30 years) to justify an ideological agenda (there should be no entitlements). Such people spend great sums of money and time planting the idea that social security or entitlements in general are the reasons that real wages are going down every year or that the middle class is shrinking.
The real reason is that Supply Side (under any name) economic policy that has dominated our nation for most of the past 30 years.
You are smart people. You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues. We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.
Andrew Samwick, who was Chief Economist on Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 2003-2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics#Criticism
NO. It's not the 'overvalued' currency that drives manufacturing jobs overseas. It's WEAK currency coupled with government regulations that destroy incentive to save capital and invest it in local economy, it's all the shit that drives prices up - printing and borrowing and rules that create asset bubbles and minimum wage laws (yes, even that), and all the social obligations that destroy jobs.
Minimum wage laws and social obligations do not destroy jobs. Supply Side Economics destroys jobs.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company...
You know that's not true, you understand well the list of obstacles in the way, and you know this is why comcast has an effective monopoly in most places.
You'd prefer, "We the people who get to force each other to do whatever we tell them to do, but not me...
You know that's not what the guy wants, you know that's not what he's saying. So why did you make that statement?
Just say what you mean. You want a centrally managed economy that prevents Eeeevil companies from competing Who actually wants that? Are you saying the op is a genuine communist? I hope you don't actually think so.
The post you responded to may well have been chock full irrational, illogical mistakes. Or not, whatever. But your response is the one millionth example of "winning an argument with teenage tactics" that I have seen (sorry the prize is only my unwanted attention). That enough people feel it's okay for an adult to make adolescent arguments like this is why think tanks and special interest groups are able to foster and maintain an "us vs. them" political climate in the U.S., fucking shit up for the rest of us. For the rest of your life try not to do this again, regardless of the topical significance.
Yes, we all (me too) get emotional or sometimes just plain tired, but bad behavior only breeds bad behavior. Please help make rational discourse the norm rather than the exception.
Well, the cost of 1 case and 1 motherboard. Also, the cost of drives because only the cpu and ram need to be upgraded. Also, since we're going from ddr3 to ddr3 (unlike am2-to-am3), only the cpu needs to be upgraded. So yeah, you save the cost of the motherboard, ram, drives, and case.
Doing otherwise is not only foolish, it's a sign of criminal negligence and incompetence.
Bullshit.
Unnecessary layers of abstraction prevent users and developers from having an accurate mental picture of the system as a whole. The author accuses Microsoft of doing this from the start with the intention of keeping the world dependent on Microsoft. It is this false mental picture that makes it so difficult for people with years of experience using only Windows to become expert Linux Admins. I speak from experience, having introduced a lot of kids to Linux as their first computer. When Linux is the first OS they see they pick it up really fast, and mastering Windows is like falling off a bicycle*.
The major shortcoming of frameworks isn't that "off-menu" (to use language from TFA) ideas can't be implemented, it's that the people using the framework become conditioned to finding solutions using only what is on the menu. In other words, that off-menu solution won't even occur to them.
There is a difference between someone who chooses to use someone else's library as a matter of expediency and someone who makes that same choice because he's never had to write his own library. The author of TFA says seeing.NET on someone's resume is an indicator that the applicant is the latter. I agree. When you limit yourself to frameworks your solutions will likely be limited by the framework.
*In recent years I'm seeing more and more 'Windows' style approaches to development on Linux. So this is becoming less true as time goes by.
Of course, just because they have running water and phones doesn't make it "okay" for this division to exist. In the long run, this inequality breeds crime and corruption, makes innovative businesses and ideas less likely, and is overall bad for the economy.
In other words, wealth inequality with or without context is a fine measure of the quality of a civilization.
This happens to me all the time in KDE4 and I wish I could slap someone for it. I've wondered if someone was trying to condition my behavior to never want a window a the top of my screen.
You better know what went wrong in the first place or it will happen again and you will (appropriately) look like an idiot.
If you work for me you better *want* to know what went wrong, even if I don't give you time and make you re-image, or I will (appropriately) think you're lazy to learn and can't be trusted to provide the best solution in all cases.
If someone comes to you with a problem or an idea, do you give them a menu of canned solutions or do you say "Tell me exactly what you want and how you want it." With your attitude I expect the former -and (to speak to your adolescent economic reasoning) that reputation is why I make more money than you.
The problem is that the new "crop" of developers don't have any real problems to solve. They've all been solved, and solved well. So now we're adding unnecessary abstraction layers that hide what's really going on.
People that spent 3 days figuring out how to burn a CD back in the 90's tend to know how everything works, but the "kids" coming up in recent years only know (and only care to know) the flashy point-and-click abstraction layers, and only program within "frameworks".
Years ago I used to talk to people about the Windows approach vs the Unix approach, but sadly the people currently working at Redhat and Novell are work hard to make a liar out of me.
You're off topic. Deploying a new OS or changes to an OS are of course automated -but then we're not logging in to any system are we? Not to mention, what the hell is the difference? You're editing the same configuration through Puppet.
*I need to log in as root, it's an emergency". "Is it a bizarre emergency?" "No, it's just a regular emergency"
Puppet is not so fantastic, most of the time it's an unnecessary abstraction. Sometimes it seems that since all of the important things have already been done people keep themselves busy with new layers of crap... "Well then you better just use Puppet for this one"
Ok, logging into to a database is *not* being a Unix/Linux Admin, it is managing a database.
Listen. The people who log in to make changes to the database, and update the website(sorry, application server), are *USERS*, even if some of them are in sudoers, they are not the Admin (who put them in sudoers).
I dare you to list 10 *Administrative* tasks that don't require root privileges.
Seriously, if you're not starting or stopping a service, editing configs that only root can edit, or reading logs that only root can read -why are you even logged as anything but a user -placing you squarely outside the context of this conversation?
ACL's and SELinux contexts are not the point, we're not talking about uploading changes to the corporate website. We're talking *specifically* about sudo (root) vs sudo su - (root).
Every log, every config, every chmod, damn near every command needs to done as root -I can't even remember clearly the last time I logged into a server and didn't need to immediately sudo su -.
Not being root implies working within my home directory, and that's why we have workstations -where I might sudo to loop mount an iso or something.
On a server, what could I possible need to do that doesn't require root?
All the browser based applications I've ever used suck compared to something similar written in c or c++ (maybe a reflection of how accessible it is to crappy devs and not of the concept). But really I've not run into many of those, there's just not that much need for actual applications in the browser.
What I do see more and more every week are "web apps" (hear me vocalize the quotes) that really need to be web pages. It's as if people can't put up a paragraph of text with a photo unless there's 4 layers of abstraction and 3 jquery scripts to help them.
I propose that web pages that essentially consist of a blog post and maybe an embedded photo don't need to load 7 scripts from four different domains so I can be dazzled by some idiots skill in using includes, etc. It's annoying as hell when a page seems to have finished loading but then stuff moves around just before I middle click something to a new tab. Images that display only as I scroll down are great for pushing stuff around and pissing me off.
Normal, non-Slashdot, human beings like the "bunch of bullshit."
The hell they do. Websites are shite so that the assholes who make them can say "Look what I did! Ain't it cool?" No one is asking for pages that move shit around and display different things as they scroll down. Just because some people are more tolerant than others doesn't mean that anyone actually prefers that kind of crap.
The thing that grinds on my nerves most of all is the rampant use of scripts from external domains. I mean jquery and the like. There are too many websites that require my browser to download scripts from several sites in order to render at all. Too many sites where I have to spend 5 minutes tweaking noscript to view a page...maybe that's the intent, to get me to stop using noscript. I'm certain that some sites deliberately make it hard to load a page without temporarily disabling noscript.
Angst? There's no angst here, maybe you've been working in politics too long and now you just color what you say out of habit. As in your sideways way of calling people who disagree with you childish. The thing about politicians is they get to make statements like that and then walk away from the podium...bullshit statements like yours (and theirs) don't fly in any face-to-face conversation with any intelligent person.
And what is this "...by it's very nature needs to stand on its own" bs? You saying that if wikileaks accepts help from anyone it invalidates something? What the hell premise is that based on?
I'm not going to argue against the bulk of your post, you do raise some good points. But I do find fault with this tendency to paint "entitlements" as a bad word.
If there's one thing I've learned in the last decade it's that in politics, labels and 'buckets' that you can lump things together in are the tools of the truth twisters. When you stick to the specifics, the details, it's possible for one plan to win out over others, logically. When things start getting painted in broad strokes we descend into dogma, propaganda, and further polarization.
Not everything that can be characterized as an entitlement needs to be abolished. Unemployment Insurance is an entitlement that I think adds vital stability to our economy. Your last sentence: "The People wanted entitlements, they got them." Actually, the Government want to tax the wages of labor in return for entitlements (the New Deal). The People accepted. If 'Entitlements' are abolished then so must *all* taxes on the wages of labor, that was the original deal and I (and others) are not going to allow a renege. Right now labor is paying for the majority of the Federal Budget, without that revenue...
You want to discuss changing or improving Medicare to make it more efficient and less of a burden, then that's another thing entirely. My point here is that most of these topics are complex and need to be treated as complex.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you understand math? Simple math?
Yes, absolutely, but your math is false in that it begins at the wrong end of the equation.
If there is a position to be filled then there is a position to be filled. How high the wages are for that position is another matter entirely. How many people respond to a Help Wanted ad is irrelevant.
My premise is that there is a "floor" below which wages cease to be of any value other than a token, and under which the vast majority of laborers will refuse to work in any case. The minimum wage is not meant to artificially inflate wages (I assert that it does not), but is meant to prevent the minority of employers from taking advantage of those in unfortunate (and probably temporary) circumstances.
Following this premise it is completely acceptable to argue the amount of the minimum wage because it should not artificially inflate wages. If it does, then it should be lowered, but I am convinced that $7.50/hr, paltry as it is, does no such thing.
Regarding SS being a ponzi scheme I will not argue the point. I lack the time to research and prove you wrong, and I concede that the current state of social security may well fit the definition of a ponzi scheme. I do refute the idea that social security should be a ponzi scheme and the idea that social obligations in general are a drain on the economy (or cost jobs). My position is that some smoothing out of the "bumps" for the labor class adds vital stability to the economy, provided such entitlements are within reason, and safeguards are in place to prevent fraud.
Social Security was not intended to be a retirement plan, but it has lately become one. While I reject the idea that social security should be eliminated, I do think we should be regularly re-evaluating what qualifies one to receive benefits, particularly age. I think it's likely that if life expectancy today were what it was 50 years ago, then social security would not meet any definition of a ponzi scheme.
I hope to make it clear that I am no idealogue. My premises are not based on any misguided sense of compassion or emotion. But I do absolutely believe that psychology is an important component to a successful economy. Income equality is a factor in how innovative a society is and so a stable secure middle class is the single most important thing to consider with regards to economic policy.
Unfortunately, there are ideologues in this country who motivation by a sense of what's "fair" who again and again use a technical issue (social security is running out of money in 30 years) to justify an ideological agenda (there should be no entitlements). Such people spend great sums of money and time planting the idea that social security or entitlements in general are the reasons that real wages are going down every year or that the middle class is shrinking.
The real reason is that Supply Side (under any name) economic policy that has dominated our nation for most of the past 30 years.
You are smart people. You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues. We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.
Andrew Samwick, who was Chief Economist on Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 2003-2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics#Criticism
NO. It's not the 'overvalued' currency that drives manufacturing jobs overseas. It's WEAK currency coupled with government regulations that destroy incentive to save capital and invest it in local economy, it's all the shit that drives prices up - printing and borrowing and rules that create asset bubbles and minimum wage laws (yes, even that), and all the social obligations that destroy jobs.
Minimum wage laws and social obligations do not destroy jobs. Supply Side Economics destroys jobs.
Why?
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company...
You know that's not true, you understand well the list of obstacles in the way, and you know this is why comcast has an effective monopoly in most places.
You'd prefer, "We the people who get to force each other to do whatever we tell them to do, but not me...
You know that's not what the guy wants, you know that's not what he's saying. So why did you make that statement?
Just say what you mean. You want a centrally managed economy that prevents Eeeevil companies from competing
Who actually wants that? Are you saying the op is a genuine communist? I hope you don't actually think so.
The post you responded to may well have been chock full irrational, illogical mistakes. Or not, whatever. But your response is the one millionth example of "winning an argument with teenage tactics" that I have seen (sorry the prize is only my unwanted attention). That enough people feel it's okay for an adult to make adolescent arguments like this is why think tanks and special interest groups are able to foster and maintain an "us vs. them" political climate in the U.S., fucking shit up for the rest of us. For the rest of your life try not to do this again, regardless of the topical significance.
Yes, we all (me too) get emotional or sometimes just plain tired, but bad behavior only breeds bad behavior. Please help make rational discourse the norm rather than the exception.
Well, the cost of 1 case and 1 motherboard. Also, the cost of drives because only the cpu and ram need to be upgraded. Also, since we're going from ddr3 to ddr3 (unlike am2-to-am3), only the cpu needs to be upgraded. So yeah, you save the cost of the motherboard, ram, drives, and case.
Doing otherwise is not only foolish, it's a sign of criminal negligence and incompetence.
Bullshit. Unnecessary layers of abstraction prevent users and developers from having an accurate mental picture of the system as a whole. The author accuses Microsoft of doing this from the start with the intention of keeping the world dependent on Microsoft. It is this false mental picture that makes it so difficult for people with years of experience using only Windows to become expert Linux Admins. I speak from experience, having introduced a lot of kids to Linux as their first computer. When Linux is the first OS they see they pick it up really fast, and mastering Windows is like falling off a bicycle*. The major shortcoming of frameworks isn't that "off-menu" (to use language from TFA) ideas can't be implemented, it's that the people using the framework become conditioned to finding solutions using only what is on the menu. In other words, that off-menu solution won't even occur to them.
There is a difference between someone who chooses to use someone else's library as a matter of expediency and someone who makes that same choice because he's never had to write his own library. The author of TFA says seeing .NET on someone's resume is an indicator that the applicant is the latter. I agree. When you limit yourself to frameworks your solutions will likely be limited by the framework.
*In recent years I'm seeing more and more 'Windows' style approaches to development on Linux. So this is becoming less true as time goes by.
WTF. Now whenever anyone signs off with 'anonymous' it means they're part of some mythical group invented by the media.
Thanks, now I know that his blog is not journalistic but is driven by agenda. The word hateful is appropriate.
Of course, just because they have running water and phones doesn't make it "okay" for this division to exist. In the long run, this inequality breeds crime and corruption, makes innovative businesses and ideas less likely, and is overall bad for the economy.
In other words, wealth inequality with or without context is a fine measure of the quality of a civilization.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201102/how-economic-inequality-is-damaging-our-social-structure
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/business/17view.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1287314086-lFlE4a4AP+wkJ4dprPfTaw I keep saying it. The far right is working hard to make life miserable for their own grandchildren. There are only so many chairs at the big table and your name isn't on one of them.
This happens to me all the time in KDE4 and I wish I could slap someone for it. I've wondered if someone was trying to condition my behavior to never want a window a the top of my screen.
You better know what went wrong in the first place or it will happen again and you will (appropriately) look like an idiot.
If you work for me you better *want* to know what went wrong, even if I don't give you time and make you re-image, or I will (appropriately) think you're lazy to learn and can't be trusted to provide the best solution in all cases.
If someone comes to you with a problem or an idea, do you give them a menu of canned solutions or do you say "Tell me exactly what you want and how you want it." With your attitude I expect the former -and (to speak to your adolescent economic reasoning) that reputation is why I make more money than you.
The problem is that the new "crop" of developers don't have any real problems to solve. They've all been solved, and solved well. So now we're adding unnecessary abstraction layers that hide what's really going on.
People that spent 3 days figuring out how to burn a CD back in the 90's tend to know how everything works, but the "kids" coming up in recent years only know (and only care to know) the flashy point-and-click abstraction layers, and only program within "frameworks".
Years ago I used to talk to people about the Windows approach vs the Unix approach, but sadly the people currently working at Redhat and Novell are work hard to make a liar out of me.
Another one.
You're off topic. Deploying a new OS or changes to an OS are of course automated -but then we're not logging in to any system are we?
Not to mention, what the hell is the difference? You're editing the same configuration through Puppet.
*I need to log in as root, it's an emergency".
"Is it a bizarre emergency?"
"No, it's just a regular emergency"
Puppet is not so fantastic, most of the time it's an unnecessary abstraction. Sometimes it seems that since all of the important things have already been done people keep themselves busy with new layers of crap...
"Well then you better just use Puppet for this one"
Ok, logging into to a database is *not* being a Unix/Linux Admin, it is managing a database.
Listen. The people who log in to make changes to the database, and update the website(sorry, application server), are *USERS*, even if some of them are in sudoers, they are not the Admin (who put them in sudoers).
I dare you to list 10 *Administrative* tasks that don't require root privileges.
Seriously, if you're not starting or stopping a service, editing configs that only root can edit, or reading logs that only root can read -why are you even logged as anything but a user -placing you squarely outside the context of this conversation?
ACL's and SELinux contexts are not the point, we're not talking about uploading changes to the corporate website. We're talking *specifically* about sudo (root) vs sudo su - (root).
One out of 20? What are the other 19?
Every log, every config, every chmod, damn near every command needs to done as root -I can't even remember clearly the last time I logged into a server and didn't need to immediately sudo su -.
Not being root implies working within my home directory, and that's why we have workstations -where I might sudo to loop mount an iso or something.
On a server, what could I possible need to do that doesn't require root?
You're wrong, the article is right.
All the browser based applications I've ever used suck compared to something similar written in c or c++ (maybe a reflection of how accessible it is to crappy devs and not of the concept). But really I've not run into many of those, there's just not that much need for actual applications in the browser.
What I do see more and more every week are "web apps" (hear me vocalize the quotes) that really need to be web pages. It's as if people can't put up a paragraph of text with a photo unless there's 4 layers of abstraction and 3 jquery scripts to help them.
Web apps are about to get really fucking awesome.
Almost nothing on the internet needs to be an "app".
I propose that web pages that essentially consist of a blog post and maybe an embedded photo don't need to load 7 scripts from four different domains so I can be dazzled by some idiots skill in using includes, etc. It's annoying as hell when a page seems to have finished loading but then stuff moves around just before I middle click something to a new tab. Images that display only as I scroll down are great for pushing stuff around and pissing me off.
Normal, non-Slashdot, human beings like the "bunch of bullshit."
The hell they do. Websites are shite so that the assholes who make them can say "Look what I did! Ain't it cool?" No one is asking for pages that move shit around and display different things as they scroll down. Just because some people are more tolerant than others doesn't mean that anyone actually prefers that kind of crap.
The thing that grinds on my nerves most of all is the rampant use of scripts from external domains. I mean jquery and the like. There are too many websites that require my browser to download scripts from several sites in order to render at all. Too many sites where I have to spend 5 minutes tweaking noscript to view a page...maybe that's the intent, to get me to stop using noscript. I'm certain that some sites deliberately make it hard to load a page without temporarily disabling noscript.
Also, "self" is an illusion.
Why did you even reply to me? Nothing you said has anything to do with anything I said.
Angst? There's no angst here, maybe you've been working in politics too long and now you just color what you say out of habit. As in your sideways way of calling people who disagree with you childish. The thing about politicians is they get to make statements like that and then walk away from the podium...bullshit statements like yours (and theirs) don't fly in any face-to-face conversation with any intelligent person.
And what is this "...by it's very nature needs to stand on its own" bs? You saying that if wikileaks accepts help from anyone it invalidates something? What the hell premise is that based on?
I'm not going to argue against the bulk of your post, you do raise some good points. But I do find fault with this tendency to paint "entitlements" as a bad word.
If there's one thing I've learned in the last decade it's that in politics, labels and 'buckets' that you can lump things together in are the tools of the truth twisters. When you stick to the specifics, the details, it's possible for one plan to win out over others, logically. When things start getting painted in broad strokes we descend into dogma, propaganda, and further polarization.
Not everything that can be characterized as an entitlement needs to be abolished. Unemployment Insurance is an entitlement that I think adds vital stability to our economy.
Your last sentence: "The People wanted entitlements, they got them."
Actually, the Government want to tax the wages of labor in return for entitlements (the New Deal). The People accepted. If 'Entitlements' are abolished then so must *all* taxes on the wages of labor, that was the original deal and I (and others) are not going to allow a renege. Right now labor is paying for the majority of the Federal Budget, without that revenue...
You want to discuss changing or improving Medicare to make it more efficient and less of a burden, then that's another thing entirely. My point here is that most of these topics are complex and need to be treated as complex.