They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid
That analysis is actually quite inaccurate, because it misses much bigger effects. Yes, valuation of employees is subjective. But that's true for cars, iPads, loaves of bread, massages, flights, etc. as well. Far more important is that valuation of employees is relative to the needs of an employer. Furthermore, several employers usually bid for a single employee, leading to the Winner's Curse. My guess is that the winner's curse is probably the largest effect in software engineering salaries (it seems to be a big effect in NHL and NBA player salaries).
If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.
If you make $7/h, you get the winner's curse in reverse and probably are undervalued (though probably only by a tiny amount).
In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that this is actually a pretty good system compared to the alternatives. Markets sometimes can be pretty poor at determining value, but they are still better than any alternative.
The reason why we're having this conversation in the first place is because scientifically illiterate people like you or Danielle Brown refuse to accept facts that disagree with your politics. If you don't accept scientific facts and you don't accept credentials, what do you accept?
Degrees don't differentiate psychopaths.
Well, between Danielle Brown, a woman who ascended to a VP position at Google and "the 0.1%" with no discernable skills within a decade after receiving a second rate MBA, and J.D., someone who couldn't manage to build a career out of his Harvard Ph.D. and has no social skills, the smart money would be on Danielle Brown being the psychopath.
Well, the good thing about the doxxing is that we can now compare credentials.
Danielle Brown, Google's diversity officer, has an MBA from a second rate school and then been making her career in the Intel HR department, going directly for a management and executive track.
The author of the memo has a Ph.D. in systems biology from Harvard.
Which of the two do you think is more credible talking about the biological origins of sex differences? Which of the two do you think has an ideological ax to grind?
Creating a truly neutral, inclusive and meritocratic workplace is *HARD*.
And it's also a bad way to run your business. Businesses can't all hire the best of the best because there are too few of those around. It is far easier for businesses to focus their recruiting and hiring efforts on specific groups. It's far easier for people to work together if they share common world views and common beliefs.
And this pointless pursuit of diversity doesn't just hurt the businesses, it also hurts minority groups. If the corporate giants didn't vacuum up all the minorities they can get their hands on in order to get their diversity quotas up, we would actually have more minority owned and minority run businesses and corporations.
I would love to work for a mostly gay tech company. There is none. All you get is a bunch of progressive companies like Google that are nominally tolerant but are otherwise not such a great environment for gays and lesbians.
Slashdot reader Darth Technoid disagrees, calling a lack of security "the Original Sin of the Internet,"
Oh, those silly medieval peasants and all their famines! Why didn't they just eat at KFC?
Seriously, when the Internet was developed, cryptography was in its infancy, connections were physically secured, and the backbone consisted of 16 bit processors with up to 32k of core memory, and I mean core memory. When the web was developed, it was still not really possible to encrypt everything.
Long term, encryption alone isn't the right thing anyway. The next generation shouldn't just have encryption but also peer-to-peer service, decentralized naming, etc. People are trying to build that kind of internet using blockchain technology. You should support it.
Although there is an effect of vegetarian diets on diabetes (beyond BMI), I don't think it is strong enough to suggest that Type 2 diabetes is a zoonotic disease:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Well, the Johnny Depps of the world, plus the wannabes, has-beens, and academics. Another common group of American expats are a subset of the nouveau riche who think they can assimilate culture and status in Europe by osmosis.
I emigrated from Europe and still spend part of the year there. Anybody who thinks that Europe is something for the US to emulate is a bloody fool. Europe is a fun place for American expats to hang out, but that's mostly because as an American expat, you're rich and privileged compared to Europeans.
No, Europe just has communists, fascists, socialists, and Christian conservatives in pretty much every European parliament. European politicians don't even rise up to the level of Trump, having spent their entire careers on nothing else than brown nosing within their respective party hierarchies, utterly unaccomplished at anything else. And it's not like European politicians deliver the goods: if European nations were US states, they would mostly be at or below the poorest US states, but with the liberties and opportunities that Americans enjoy.
But by all means, American progressives, do go to Europe and integrate into those societies; but don't do so keeping your US citizenship as a safety net, because that's cheating.
And now we add in the second thing people routinely confuse with Hyperloop (pneumatic tubes). Let's be clear:
I suppose in every crowd there has to be someone as illiterate and slow as you. I thought someone of average intelligence was capable of figuring out that the idea of "air pressured propulsion in a tube" inspired "magnetic levitation propulsion in a vacuum tube". The latter (not the former) is found in many science fiction stories.
You imagine that people must go to an office and work a job for a corporation in order to produce value for society. I tell you that all of that bullshit is actually inefficiency.
So let's summarize. You made a choice to work "odd jobs" in Lake County and live in a cheap, out of the way place; you believe that this is an efficient and useful way for you to contribute to society. Those are free market choices, choices that don't exist under socialism. In a socialist society, you would be required to work as an IT drone because that's what the state trained you for, and whether you consider your working conditions to be "inefficient" is irrelevant.
Now you may say "but under communism I would have that choice". And in a sense, that's exactly what you got. True communism assumes a post-scarcity society, and as far as basic necessities go, food, housing, transportation, most people in the US effectively live in a post-scarcity society: you can buy your cheap trailer in the middle of nowhere, live cheaply, and work very little.
But there is another, parallel society in the US, that of upscale urban centers, palatial homes, supercomputers in your pocket, massive organizations that rival the pyramid builders, and medical technologies that can make you live for a century; that society is full of scarcity. Contributions to that society need to be more than "odd jobs", they require long term dedication, superior skills, and massive efforts and investments, and they are rewarded accordingly.
It's your choice which society you want to be part of. But whichever choice you make, you need to live with the consequences. And the fact that you have that choice in the first place is a consequence of the fact that the US is based on free markets and individual liberties.
It was forced communism for the lower classes, while the upper classes continued to behave like any capitalist.
You're right: capitalist societies are full of sociopaths and power hungry pricks at the top. What socialists/communists have never managed to explain is how they are going to prevent sociopaths and power hungry pricks from gaining power in those societies. And in a socialist/communist society, you have no way of escaping from those in power: their control over your life is total. You can't drop out, you can't choose not to work, frugality and hard work are no escape.
The US Constitution has the best answer to this problem anybody has every found: limited government limits the power those sociopaths have over you, and capitalism and free markets give you the possibility of succeeding without being a sociopath yourself, simply by trading with other people stuff that's useful.
And meanwhile, socialism is working well in a number of countries today.
Have you lived in any of them? Why aren't you living there now? I have, and let me tell you: no matter what your place is in the American pecking order, no matter how much you may think your life sucks in the US, you'd be worse off in any of those countries. Per capita social welfare expenditures by the US are among the highest in the world, benefits for the poor are among the best in the world, and taxes for lower income earners are much lower than in most other countries.
Furthermore, those supposedly "socialist" countries really are just a bloated social welfare state on top of an otherwise capitalist society, and that bloated social welfare state isn't even sustainable: it's financed by the capitalist economic booms of the past. That's why many such nations have reverted to conservative governments again.
You're the one who wants people to starve and die, and you seem to think that won't affect you in any way. You're the only one in this conversation who is ignorant or evil.
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you don't actually want people to starve and die, but the policies you advocate have that effect. Socialism and communism killed about 100 million people in the 20th Century, many of them from famine.
According to your resume, you haven't worked in 10 years, but you do live in your cheap home in Northern California and buy an Audi 32V V8. What's up with that? Did you just drop out? Are you a pot grower? Are you disabled? Who knows. What I can tell you is what would happen under socialism/communism, because I have experienced it: you'd be assigned a bedroom in some decrepit apartment in some industrial area with unbreathable air and you'd be forced to work in some factory; if you are unable to work, you'll be institutionalized and "treated" until you do. That's real socialism/communism for you.
And maybe you can explain how you justify that other people pay more taxes while you yourself seem to be nothing productive for your fellow men.
Finally, you might also try to reflect on what would happen if lots of other people made the same choices you did. How would your infrastructure get paid for? Who would build it? And who would create the "Oneirochronon" that you named your site after?
Who told you that? They lied to you. You clearly didn't check to see if it was true.
You can check for yourself: the total value of publicly traded US corporations is about $25T, while cash holding by those corporations are $2T. And private investments are even more than that.
In fact, governments worldwide are experiencing problems due to cash hoarding.
"Hoarding eggs" causes prices for eggs to rise; "hoarding cash" causes "prices for cash to rise", which is the same as everything else getting cheaper. How is that a bad thing?
What governments actually mean when they say that is that corporations don't make enough capital investments; as a result, the economy doesn't grow as fast as it should. That's true. But the reason companies don't make capital investments is that they don't expect much return due to the current political climate. If you take their cash and redistribute it, you make that problem worse. And in the process, you'll cause a stock market crash and you cause people to lose their retirement investments.
People's resume is a good place to start figuring out whether to pay attention to them. Gundotra is a "former Google seniorvice president of Social", responsible for Google+. Before that, he was "platform evangelist" at Microsoft. He seems to have no expertise or background in photography or art. His opinion on Andtroid vs. iPhone photography is about as worthless as that of a random cab driver... probably less so, since with a random cab driver, there's a good chance you'll actually be talking to a starving artist instead of a wealthy manager.
One of the first measures to fix the issues would be to make them responsible: if a parent they granted gets overthrown in justice, they should refund all the fees, plus the cost of the prior art research that was obviously botched. That would give them the incentive to do their work.
Why would they care? The bureaucrats who make bad decisions are never going to pay for the cost of their bad decisions. If you impose fines on government departments, it's the tax payer that's going to pay for it in the end.
"I won't hire you because _____" is not a form of violence, it's freedom of association.
No, not "I won't hire you," actual physical violence.
We were talking about anti-discrimination laws in employment. So you agree then that "I won't hire you because ____" is not violence. Good. It is, in fact, freedom of association.
Now, remember how police go around hurting and shooting people? That's what you advocate as a response to "I won't hire you because ____", because the only way to ultimately enforce anti-discrimination laws against private citizens is through sending jack-booted thugs to invade their homes.
Hence, you advocate violence against people, I oppose it. Glad we settled that.
Do you know, I didn't think I was going to enjoy a Trump presidency? But really it's just all pretty funny. I mean, you're a flaming douchebag, but Trump is just pure entertainment at this point.
Actually, I was talking about the massive shift to the right in both the US and Europe at all levels of government. Sorry if you were asleep for the past 20 years.
And I'm glad Trump is entertaining you. While he is doing that, progressives aren't able to pass any laws: a huge political opportunity cost of losing. The fact that corporate media and the Washington establishment embarrass themselves in response to his trolling is an added bonus. Good times. And we're going to get deregulation, a lot of constitutionalist judges, and maybe tax reform out of it. Good times again. Enjoy. It's going to last another 7 1/2 years.
Your lifestyle is an irrelevant consideration to your work environment and if you're going to argue against workplace protections for discrimination, that fight has been over for decades
I'm sorry you are so ignorant of gay issues, but gays and lesbians are not covered by federal non-discrimination laws. The Obama administration's EEOC interpreted the CRA that way, but that's unlikely to hold up in court.
I assume that your reading comprehension failure was my characterization of your argument, but the point continues to be that it's your side perpetrating violence and abuse
"I won't hire you because _____" is not a form of violence, it's freedom of association. "Police (=armed, violent thugs) are going to take away your business because you refuse to hire _____" is a form of violence.
That's the nice thing about being on the right side of history, if you wait long enough you get what you want.
Indeed. And if you're paying attention to politics, you'll see that you're being pushed into the dustbin of history, along with your fellow neo-Marxists, progressives, fascists, and other authoritarians. Good riddance to you.
Slashdot Mirror
If they can do it, why not? Middlemen only make sense if they add value, and if Amazon can go directly to the manufacturer, all the better.
That analysis is actually quite inaccurate, because it misses much bigger effects. Yes, valuation of employees is subjective. But that's true for cars, iPads, loaves of bread, massages, flights, etc. as well. Far more important is that valuation of employees is relative to the needs of an employer. Furthermore, several employers usually bid for a single employee, leading to the Winner's Curse. My guess is that the winner's curse is probably the largest effect in software engineering salaries (it seems to be a big effect in NHL and NBA player salaries).
If you make $7/h, you get the winner's curse in reverse and probably are undervalued (though probably only by a tiny amount).
In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that this is actually a pretty good system compared to the alternatives. Markets sometimes can be pretty poor at determining value, but they are still better than any alternative.
The reason why we're having this conversation in the first place is because scientifically illiterate people like you or Danielle Brown refuse to accept facts that disagree with your politics. If you don't accept scientific facts and you don't accept credentials, what do you accept?
Well, between Danielle Brown, a woman who ascended to a VP position at Google and "the 0.1%" with no discernable skills within a decade after receiving a second rate MBA, and J.D., someone who couldn't manage to build a career out of his Harvard Ph.D. and has no social skills, the smart money would be on Danielle Brown being the psychopath.
Danielle Brown, Google's diversity officer, has an MBA from a second rate school and then been making her career in the Intel HR department, going directly for a management and executive track.
The author of the memo has a Ph.D. in systems biology from Harvard.
Which of the two do you think is more credible talking about the biological origins of sex differences? Which of the two do you think has an ideological ax to grind?
And it's also a bad way to run your business. Businesses can't all hire the best of the best because there are too few of those around. It is far easier for businesses to focus their recruiting and hiring efforts on specific groups. It's far easier for people to work together if they share common world views and common beliefs.
And this pointless pursuit of diversity doesn't just hurt the businesses, it also hurts minority groups. If the corporate giants didn't vacuum up all the minorities they can get their hands on in order to get their diversity quotas up, we would actually have more minority owned and minority run businesses and corporations.
I would love to work for a mostly gay tech company. There is none. All you get is a bunch of progressive companies like Google that are nominally tolerant but are otherwise not such a great environment for gays and lesbians.
Oh, those silly medieval peasants and all their famines! Why didn't they just eat at KFC?
Seriously, when the Internet was developed, cryptography was in its infancy, connections were physically secured, and the backbone consisted of 16 bit processors with up to 32k of core memory, and I mean core memory. When the web was developed, it was still not really possible to encrypt everything.
Long term, encryption alone isn't the right thing anyway. The next generation shouldn't just have encryption but also peer-to-peer service, decentralized naming, etc. People are trying to build that kind of internet using blockchain technology. You should support it.
Although there is an effect of vegetarian diets on diabetes (beyond BMI), I don't think it is strong enough to suggest that Type 2 diabetes is a zoonotic disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Just keep in mind: 30 years from now, today's commercials will look just as ridiculous as that.
Well, the Johnny Depps of the world, plus the wannabes, has-beens, and academics. Another common group of American expats are a subset of the nouveau riche who think they can assimilate culture and status in Europe by osmosis.
"The civilization cannot survive..." "The world will end unless..." "Society is doomed..." "Think of the children!" Politics is always fear mongering.
I emigrated from Europe and still spend part of the year there. Anybody who thinks that Europe is something for the US to emulate is a bloody fool. Europe is a fun place for American expats to hang out, but that's mostly because as an American expat, you're rich and privileged compared to Europeans.
No, Europe just has communists, fascists, socialists, and Christian conservatives in pretty much every European parliament. European politicians don't even rise up to the level of Trump, having spent their entire careers on nothing else than brown nosing within their respective party hierarchies, utterly unaccomplished at anything else. And it's not like European politicians deliver the goods: if European nations were US states, they would mostly be at or below the poorest US states, but with the liberties and opportunities that Americans enjoy.
But by all means, American progressives, do go to Europe and integrate into those societies; but don't do so keeping your US citizenship as a safety net, because that's cheating.
I suppose in every crowd there has to be someone as illiterate and slow as you. I thought someone of average intelligence was capable of figuring out that the idea of "air pressured propulsion in a tube" inspired "magnetic levitation propulsion in a vacuum tube". The latter (not the former) is found in many science fiction stories.
It's also been a staple of Science Fiction since the invention of pneumatic tube transports. I think Arthur C Clarke had it in several of his stories.
Right now, it's not competing with anything.
So let's summarize. You made a choice to work "odd jobs" in Lake County and live in a cheap, out of the way place; you believe that this is an efficient and useful way for you to contribute to society. Those are free market choices, choices that don't exist under socialism. In a socialist society, you would be required to work as an IT drone because that's what the state trained you for, and whether you consider your working conditions to be "inefficient" is irrelevant.
Now you may say "but under communism I would have that choice". And in a sense, that's exactly what you got. True communism assumes a post-scarcity society, and as far as basic necessities go, food, housing, transportation, most people in the US effectively live in a post-scarcity society: you can buy your cheap trailer in the middle of nowhere, live cheaply, and work very little.
But there is another, parallel society in the US, that of upscale urban centers, palatial homes, supercomputers in your pocket, massive organizations that rival the pyramid builders, and medical technologies that can make you live for a century; that society is full of scarcity. Contributions to that society need to be more than "odd jobs", they require long term dedication, superior skills, and massive efforts and investments, and they are rewarded accordingly.
It's your choice which society you want to be part of. But whichever choice you make, you need to live with the consequences. And the fact that you have that choice in the first place is a consequence of the fact that the US is based on free markets and individual liberties.
You're right: capitalist societies are full of sociopaths and power hungry pricks at the top. What socialists/communists have never managed to explain is how they are going to prevent sociopaths and power hungry pricks from gaining power in those societies. And in a socialist/communist society, you have no way of escaping from those in power: their control over your life is total. You can't drop out, you can't choose not to work, frugality and hard work are no escape.
The US Constitution has the best answer to this problem anybody has every found: limited government limits the power those sociopaths have over you, and capitalism and free markets give you the possibility of succeeding without being a sociopath yourself, simply by trading with other people stuff that's useful.
Have you lived in any of them? Why aren't you living there now? I have, and let me tell you: no matter what your place is in the American pecking order, no matter how much you may think your life sucks in the US, you'd be worse off in any of those countries. Per capita social welfare expenditures by the US are among the highest in the world, benefits for the poor are among the best in the world, and taxes for lower income earners are much lower than in most other countries.
Furthermore, those supposedly "socialist" countries really are just a bloated social welfare state on top of an otherwise capitalist society, and that bloated social welfare state isn't even sustainable: it's financed by the capitalist economic booms of the past. That's why many such nations have reverted to conservative governments again.
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you don't actually want people to starve and die, but the policies you advocate have that effect. Socialism and communism killed about 100 million people in the 20th Century, many of them from famine.
According to your resume, you haven't worked in 10 years, but you do live in your cheap home in Northern California and buy an Audi 32V V8. What's up with that? Did you just drop out? Are you a pot grower? Are you disabled? Who knows. What I can tell you is what would happen under socialism/communism, because I have experienced it: you'd be assigned a bedroom in some decrepit apartment in some industrial area with unbreathable air and you'd be forced to work in some factory; if you are unable to work, you'll be institutionalized and "treated" until you do. That's real socialism/communism for you.
And maybe you can explain how you justify that other people pay more taxes while you yourself seem to be nothing productive for your fellow men.
Finally, you might also try to reflect on what would happen if lots of other people made the same choices you did. How would your infrastructure get paid for? Who would build it? And who would create the "Oneirochronon" that you named your site after?
You can check for yourself: the total value of publicly traded US corporations is about $25T, while cash holding by those corporations are $2T. And private investments are even more than that.
"Hoarding eggs" causes prices for eggs to rise; "hoarding cash" causes "prices for cash to rise", which is the same as everything else getting cheaper. How is that a bad thing?
What governments actually mean when they say that is that corporations don't make enough capital investments; as a result, the economy doesn't grow as fast as it should. That's true. But the reason companies don't make capital investments is that they don't expect much return due to the current political climate. If you take their cash and redistribute it, you make that problem worse. And in the process, you'll cause a stock market crash and you cause people to lose their retirement investments.
People's resume is a good place to start figuring out whether to pay attention to them. Gundotra is a "former Google seniorvice president of Social", responsible for Google+. Before that, he was "platform evangelist" at Microsoft. He seems to have no expertise or background in photography or art. His opinion on Andtroid vs. iPhone photography is about as worthless as that of a random cab driver... probably less so, since with a random cab driver, there's a good chance you'll actually be talking to a starving artist instead of a wealthy manager.
Yeah, that about sums up you and your understanding of politics: silly giggling.
Why would they care? The bureaucrats who make bad decisions are never going to pay for the cost of their bad decisions. If you impose fines on government departments, it's the tax payer that's going to pay for it in the end.
Somebody filed a bad patent!
We were talking about anti-discrimination laws in employment. So you agree then that "I won't hire you because ____" is not violence. Good. It is, in fact, freedom of association.
Now, remember how police go around hurting and shooting people? That's what you advocate as a response to "I won't hire you because ____", because the only way to ultimately enforce anti-discrimination laws against private citizens is through sending jack-booted thugs to invade their homes.
Hence, you advocate violence against people, I oppose it. Glad we settled that.
Actually, I was talking about the massive shift to the right in both the US and Europe at all levels of government. Sorry if you were asleep for the past 20 years.
And I'm glad Trump is entertaining you. While he is doing that, progressives aren't able to pass any laws: a huge political opportunity cost of losing. The fact that corporate media and the Washington establishment embarrass themselves in response to his trolling is an added bonus. Good times. And we're going to get deregulation, a lot of constitutionalist judges, and maybe tax reform out of it. Good times again. Enjoy. It's going to last another 7 1/2 years.
I'm sorry you are so ignorant of gay issues, but gays and lesbians are not covered by federal non-discrimination laws. The Obama administration's EEOC interpreted the CRA that way, but that's unlikely to hold up in court.
"I won't hire you because _____" is not a form of violence, it's freedom of association. "Police (=armed, violent thugs) are going to take away your business because you refuse to hire _____" is a form of violence.
Indeed. And if you're paying attention to politics, you'll see that you're being pushed into the dustbin of history, along with your fellow neo-Marxists, progressives, fascists, and other authoritarians. Good riddance to you.