The politicians like to talk about STEM and how we need more of it, but once again they ignore the basic economics. A STEM profession requires years of rigorous education and training and very often an advanced degree which means several more years at the minimum of post-graduate education. Most students who begin such a program don't complete it. Indeed, the graduation rate for undergraduate degrees in STEM is below 50% of students beginning the program and even then it often takes more than four years to finish. This is not an insubstantial risk for those taking out student loans that must be repaid whether a degree is earned or not. What is the reward for all of this? Maybe a research job, or perhaps an industry position if it's a practical engineering degree, that generally pays much less than 100k per year. There's also the issue of substantial foreign competition and outsourcing which further increases the labor competition and drives down salaries even more, especially in the long run. If you're a smart young undergraduate who cares about financial success, you'd have to be crazy to major in STEM unless your degree is somehow directly transferable into finance as an analytical geek or 'quant' and even then you will still struggle to find respect amongst the traders and other Wall Street types who look down their noses at techies who only make 150k per year and don't get the real bonuses.
scream that they're not all social workers focused on bullying, eating disorders and special needs.
In theory, the same amount of money that's spent bringing special needs students up to standard is also supposed to be spent advancing the gifted students so that they achieve their fullest potential. However in practice what happens is that the special needs kids use up all of the money, and then some, leaving nothing for the advancement of the gifted students. It's then up to the parents to spend their own money, after already paying their taxes which were supposed to cover appropriate schooling for their child, on private tutors to provide the necessary and proper enrichment. Unfortunately, not every gifted child is born to wealthy parents and those parents with the temerity to demand the promised resources for their gifted child are viciously attacked by the teachers and special needs advocates who argue that your kid will meet the standard without additional help and that they cannot waste resources advancing them while other students are still falling behind. It should be noted that No Child Left Behind has reinforced this line of thinking amongst many educators who are rewarded for class averages that meet or exceed the standards and punished when they don't. I suppose that's understandable, but it's still regrettable.
how Facebook dodged a bullet and avoided hiring a wuss.
Have you heard the idealistic crap that spews out of that place? I'd say it's a bit too late for them to avoid hiring wusses. If people weren't so damned ignorant about what Facebook is doing or had at least some inkling of what a company like Facebook could do with the results of continuous surveillance of their lives, they'd quit using it. Indeed, I sometimes wish that someone would hurry up and dox those people at Facebook who continue to insist that privacy as a concept, theirs excepted of course, is outdated or dead.
Exactly. It's often argued by some, especially those predisposed to emotional arguments designed to short circuit logic and reason, that a new law or rule ought to be enacted merely because it offers some forlorn hope of additional safety or security. But in their haste to do "something" these same people rarely stop to consider the unintended consequences of their actions and in so doing they fail to recognize that their new law or rule is a far greater and more pernicious evil than that which they hope to eradicate. Indeed, it's the natural tendency of society to take for granted the good things in life while regarding every misfortune that befalls them as unnecessary and preventible if only we had the right rules. Of course, before these people are finished making their new rules, the security that they'd hoped to receive as the price for their surrendered freedoms has long since failed to materialize while they've made slaves to the state of us all.
Crappy, hard to maintain code helps you stay employed
How would you feel if the people that made your car shared that sentiment? It's attitudes like that that give the profession a bad name. Take some pride in your work and don't be the guy that's cursed by everyone who comes after you.
YES! The Indian outsource shops especially are notorious for producing poor quality code that fails to meet required minimum standards for what's acceptable in most American and European companies. To any managers out there reading this, beware of outsourced development. IBM and other big tech companies get away with it because they run their own operations in India and hire the better people. This leaves only the bottom of the barrel for your next outsourced project. That bid was cheap for a reason so don't be fooled. Hire an American instead or you'll be wishing that you had when the consultants hand you their bill for what it will cost to "fix" the outsourced project.
It's Terrible Because Nobody Wants to Pay
on
Real World Code Sucks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The simple truth of the matter is that most commercial code is written by overworked developers on tight schedules and with miniscule budgets. The managers crack the whip and rush things along because the people who sign the checks don't care about quality code if it means that they won't have a "first mover" advantage in the marketplace. This is particularly true in the consumer space and the phone app world. Much of that code is just pure shit. Ironically, some of the best and worst code that I've seen in the wild comes from the open source community. Is there any good commercial code out there? I'm sure that it does happen from time to time in mature products. The engine control unit in your car or perhaps the drill bit controllers on oil field equipment or maybe the hard disk controller, but in my experience crappy code is the rule and quality is the exception. Users rarely perceive quality as long as they system works, so few are willing to pay more for it in either time or money.
The Chinese and Indians have been competing with us for jobs, natural resources and economic growth for years now and often at the expense of environmental quality. If they want to go on poisoning themselves, why should we be concerned? Indeed, a few less Chinese and Indians competing for jobs and resources benefits us Americans and Europeans and unlike some other emissions, smog and soot are mainly localized problems which tend to punish most those who produced them in the first place. So excuse me while I enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude over the environmental problems of our Chinese and Indian competitors; it couldn't have happened to nicer people after all.
The statements of belief are matters of opinion to be decided by the German courts. As for the German taxpayers, I doubt that many of them would consider this a waste of money. The Europeans in general and the Germans in particular have very well developed and sophisticated legal concepts of privacy and ownership of personal information. This is due in no small part to successive generations of European taxpayers who, recognizing the value in such things, directed their governments to secure them rather than allowing them to routinely violate them as we've done here in the United States.
VISA and MasterCard aren't normal businesses, they're banks. If you don't understand why banks are special and need to be regulated, I suggest you pick up an economics textbook, I recommend Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw, and read the chapter(s) covering the monetary system, banking and the growth of money and inflation. As for "relevant international organizations" there basically are none, apart from powerful nation states, because the power to regulate commerce has always rested implicitly, and when necessary explicitly, upon the economic and military might of those nations that can enforce their wills upon other potential or competing authorities. It's no accident after all that the value of any currency throughout history has always been closely associated with the economic and military might of the entity issuing it and their ability to standardize and enforce its use.
it would be incumbent on the financial institutions to NOT use it as their primary means of ID for purposes of granting credit.
The laws must be changed to say that a Social Security number, by itself, proves nothing. It should not prove that a debt exists or that any other legally binding agreement was entered into by anyone. As long as businesses can get away with using the SSN as both an identifier and an authentication, which is how this whole "identity theft" nonsense got started in the first place, they will continue to do so. Therefore, the only viable solution is to render the Social Security Number legally worthless as proof of anything. They ought to be just numbers, nothing more.
It should be noted that China, along with India, is on the tier just below the Americans and the Russians in this regard. While it's true that China has invested in SLBMs, they have yet to demonstrate a well developed strategic capability in this area. An effective SLBM force must be capable of having at least some of its boats on permanent rotating patrols so as to guarantee that an effective counter-strike is always available to respond to a launch order at any time. The Chinese aren't there yet. They have neither the number of boats required to maintain these patrols nor the operational experience necessary to conduct them. In time they may achieve those milestones, but for now they remain decidedly second tier, behind the United States and Russia.
Incorrect. Without the capability to protect an ICBM during the boost phase of the flight, it's vulnerable to attack by an enemy who can establish air superiority over the launch areas. As far as we know, North Korea lacks both SLBMs and long range strategic bombers which means they cannot establish the nuclear triad. In fact, the existence of North Korean nuclear weapons, with neither first nor second strike capability, increases the likelihood that they will be attacked preemptively in the future. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is not enough. A nation must also posses the capability to launch a surprise attack and to guarantee retaliation in the event of a surprise attack. Thus, the only nations with a complete and credible deterrent at this time are the United States and Russia.
Everyone in the US is a criminal. If they want you there is a law somewhere they can use to burn you.
Yes. However, those who challenge the authorities should not be surprised by the response. It's one thing to be targeted, but it's quite another to paint the target on your own back.
When they want to get someone they'll fish for something illegal until they find something.
Hence the need for powerful friends who can be called upon for favors. If you cannot afford such friends then it's best to remain hidden and out of site amongst the great unwashed masses. Remember, it's the tall grass that gets cut first by the scythe.
It was legalized theft, with the rich legally robbing the poor.
Ignorance sure is expensive, isn't it? Maybe people shouldn't sign financial papers that they don't understand? Nah, that would be asking too much, right? If you're making a large purchase, like a home, isn't it worth a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars more to get the opinion of an attorney or a CPA that you pay directly and can trust to look over the paperwork on your behalf?
You obviously don't know how to leverage SharePoint.
I've worked with it in the past and I know what it is. I've also used other tools that do the same or similar jobs. I wouldn't chose to "leverage" SharePoint, as you put it, because in my experience any number of other tools, including open source tools, are better and cheaper. If you like Microsoft and ASP.NET, for example, then you might consider using DotNetNuke instead. Can SharePoint be made to work? Yes it can, but the costs are prohibitively high for what you get, especially if you have to "customize" the out-of-box product (which is almost always the case). SharePoint makes a few selected tasks, that weren't very hard to begin with, easy at the cost of making everything else extremely difficult. It always feels like you're fighting with SharePoint to get it to do what you want. This can be especially frustrating when you know that what you just spent three days getting to work in SharePoint could have been done in an hour or less with Drupal or DotNetNuke or hell even Ruby on Rails.
To make a long story short, developers aren't interested in SharePoint because there are many other better platforms for development and even if they do want to use Microsoft tools they'll just use ASP.NET directly instead or maybe DotNetNuke. The IT department isn't interested because SharePoint gets installed behind their backs, even when another tool might have been more appropriate, and then they get dragged into supporting the mess. The users may like it, but even that isn't guaranteed and unless geographically distributed use of Microsoft Office or Exchange integration is absolutely essential to your users, consider using something else instead. Finally, if you do chose SharePoint, be aware of the time, money and expertise that will be required to do it properly and know what your getting into because you don't have to look very far on Google to find many examples of SharePoint horror stories. Be skeptical and know what you're buying before you hand the consultants your credit card because SharePoint is frequently over promised and under delivered in the real world.
So what's the libertarian way of settling disputes, then?
Most Libertarians would favor the use of contracts and the laws governing them to resolve disputes. In the event of differences that cannot be resolved in any other way, the use of the courts is acceptable, as provided by law. However, in such cases it's not unreasonable to expect that those using the government run courts be asked to pay for most or even all what it costs to provide them, especially in civil matters.
A practice which nearly every Libertarian with whom I've spoken would abhor. Think about it. How can one advocate minimal government and sparing use of government powers while at the same time engaging in rent seeking? Please do us all a favor and educate yourself about the positions of others before saying things that expose your ignorance for all to see. Those who call themselves "Libertarian" are not merely Conservatives who don't mind what you do in your bedroom. We support voluntary cooperation among individuals, with only minimal necessary involvement of government, as opposed to using those authoritative and coercive powers of government to impose unwanted choices or unwarranted restrictions upon the lives of others. The use of government power destroys freedom and liberty and it must therefore be used sparingly and only when necessary to preserve the negative rights of everyone. In economic terms this means that you have the right to an opportunity or a chance, which the government is bound to protect or at least not to unduly interfere with, but nothing more.
Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
I suspect that most of us free market Libertarians would be right there with you on that one. You have a perfect right to view, or not view, content on your own computing hardware in whatever manner you wish. They may choose not to serve you, if they can detect you, but it's an unacceptable encroachment of government upon the rights of the individual to censor or require consumption of anything, healthcare now not withstanding although that's an entirely separate discussion, via the force of law.
Start with billions of dollars, establish a private spaceflight company offering rides to bored rich people and shut it all down before you're bankrupt.
Raise the price on it and even some of the most MS-centric IT shops will go "Fine, we'll just set up an internal Apache server and Confluence instead."
You might think so, but remember that SharePoint is usually not purchased by the IT department. It's purchased either outside of the IT department for use by non-technical people, good luck with that btw, or it's forced upon everyone by clueless management at the urging of consultants who have a vested interest in plugging SharePoint as the "solution" to whatever "problems" management thinks exist. Microsoft should just change the marketing pitch to, "SharePoint is right for anyone with a credit card" because that's basically how they sell it. Anyway, it's only after the purchase has been made and the consultants are gone that people realize just how much SharePoint sucks. Of course by then it's generally to late too do anything about it because the expense of the project has blown the IT budget for the next three years. In fact, I've yet to hear of a SharePoint project that either delivered on its promises or didn't go way over budget, so raising the price can only makes matters even worse. For those of you out there who haven't experienced any of this, do yourselves a favor and push back against "PainPoint" or you'll regret it later guaranteed.
leaf-node employees who trusted unions to negotiate benefits for them
That was their first mistake. Nobody cares more about your retirement more than you do. If you cant be bothered to mind your own investments then why should anyone else care? Let this be a lesson to younger workers: take some time to learn the basics of saving and investing, your financial future depends on it.
Government teachers love to talk about checks and balances, but somehow miss out on their retirement depending on an edifice with neither.
Welcome to the real world that everyone outside of public employment la-la land has been living in for decades now. You'll get very little sympathy from those who've toughed it out in the private sector, I assure you.
Myself, I am quite sympathetic to the idea of workers organizing for greater leverage with their employers
Milton Friedman commented on this way back in 1975 on episode 494 of the The Open Mind: Living Within Our Means. Of course, it's now over thirty years later and were still talking about the same problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly when talking about STEM
The politicians like to talk about STEM and how we need more of it, but once again they ignore the basic economics. A STEM profession requires years of rigorous education and training and very often an advanced degree which means several more years at the minimum of post-graduate education. Most students who begin such a program don't complete it. Indeed, the graduation rate for undergraduate degrees in STEM is below 50% of students beginning the program and even then it often takes more than four years to finish. This is not an insubstantial risk for those taking out student loans that must be repaid whether a degree is earned or not. What is the reward for all of this? Maybe a research job, or perhaps an industry position if it's a practical engineering degree, that generally pays much less than 100k per year. There's also the issue of substantial foreign competition and outsourcing which further increases the labor competition and drives down salaries even more, especially in the long run. If you're a smart young undergraduate who cares about financial success, you'd have to be crazy to major in STEM unless your degree is somehow directly transferable into finance as an analytical geek or 'quant' and even then you will still struggle to find respect amongst the traders and other Wall Street types who look down their noses at techies who only make 150k per year and don't get the real bonuses.
scream that they're not all social workers focused on bullying, eating disorders and special needs.
In theory, the same amount of money that's spent bringing special needs students up to standard is also supposed to be spent advancing the gifted students so that they achieve their fullest potential. However in practice what happens is that the special needs kids use up all of the money, and then some, leaving nothing for the advancement of the gifted students. It's then up to the parents to spend their own money, after already paying their taxes which were supposed to cover appropriate schooling for their child, on private tutors to provide the necessary and proper enrichment. Unfortunately, not every gifted child is born to wealthy parents and those parents with the temerity to demand the promised resources for their gifted child are viciously attacked by the teachers and special needs advocates who argue that your kid will meet the standard without additional help and that they cannot waste resources advancing them while other students are still falling behind. It should be noted that No Child Left Behind has reinforced this line of thinking amongst many educators who are rewarded for class averages that meet or exceed the standards and punished when they don't. I suppose that's understandable, but it's still regrettable.
bang on and on about how their solution is the one true solution without ever understanding all the competing needs.
President Obama and his fellow travelers do this all the time, it's just how they roll.
how Facebook dodged a bullet and avoided hiring a wuss.
Have you heard the idealistic crap that spews out of that place? I'd say it's a bit too late for them to avoid hiring wusses. If people weren't so damned ignorant about what Facebook is doing or had at least some inkling of what a company like Facebook could do with the results of continuous surveillance of their lives, they'd quit using it. Indeed, I sometimes wish that someone would hurry up and dox those people at Facebook who continue to insist that privacy as a concept, theirs excepted of course, is outdated or dead.
Exactly. It's often argued by some, especially those predisposed to emotional arguments designed to short circuit logic and reason, that a new law or rule ought to be enacted merely because it offers some forlorn hope of additional safety or security. But in their haste to do "something" these same people rarely stop to consider the unintended consequences of their actions and in so doing they fail to recognize that their new law or rule is a far greater and more pernicious evil than that which they hope to eradicate. Indeed, it's the natural tendency of society to take for granted the good things in life while regarding every misfortune that befalls them as unnecessary and preventible if only we had the right rules. Of course, before these people are finished making their new rules, the security that they'd hoped to receive as the price for their surrendered freedoms has long since failed to materialize while they've made slaves to the state of us all.
Crappy, hard to maintain code helps you stay employed
How would you feel if the people that made your car shared that sentiment? It's attitudes like that that give the profession a bad name. Take some pride in your work and don't be the guy that's cursed by everyone who comes after you.
YES! The Indian outsource shops especially are notorious for producing poor quality code that fails to meet required minimum standards for what's acceptable in most American and European companies. To any managers out there reading this, beware of outsourced development. IBM and other big tech companies get away with it because they run their own operations in India and hire the better people. This leaves only the bottom of the barrel for your next outsourced project. That bid was cheap for a reason so don't be fooled. Hire an American instead or you'll be wishing that you had when the consultants hand you their bill for what it will cost to "fix" the outsourced project.
The simple truth of the matter is that most commercial code is written by overworked developers on tight schedules and with miniscule budgets. The managers crack the whip and rush things along because the people who sign the checks don't care about quality code if it means that they won't have a "first mover" advantage in the marketplace. This is particularly true in the consumer space and the phone app world. Much of that code is just pure shit. Ironically, some of the best and worst code that I've seen in the wild comes from the open source community. Is there any good commercial code out there? I'm sure that it does happen from time to time in mature products. The engine control unit in your car or perhaps the drill bit controllers on oil field equipment or maybe the hard disk controller, but in my experience crappy code is the rule and quality is the exception. Users rarely perceive quality as long as they system works, so few are willing to pay more for it in either time or money.
The Chinese and Indians have been competing with us for jobs, natural resources and economic growth for years now and often at the expense of environmental quality. If they want to go on poisoning themselves, why should we be concerned? Indeed, a few less Chinese and Indians competing for jobs and resources benefits us Americans and Europeans and unlike some other emissions, smog and soot are mainly localized problems which tend to punish most those who produced them in the first place. So excuse me while I enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude over the environmental problems of our Chinese and Indian competitors; it couldn't have happened to nicer people after all.
The statements of belief are matters of opinion to be decided by the German courts. As for the German taxpayers, I doubt that many of them would consider this a waste of money. The Europeans in general and the Germans in particular have very well developed and sophisticated legal concepts of privacy and ownership of personal information. This is due in no small part to successive generations of European taxpayers who, recognizing the value in such things, directed their governments to secure them rather than allowing them to routinely violate them as we've done here in the United States.
VISA and MasterCard aren't normal businesses, they're banks. If you don't understand why banks are special and need to be regulated, I suggest you pick up an economics textbook, I recommend Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw, and read the chapter(s) covering the monetary system, banking and the growth of money and inflation. As for "relevant international organizations" there basically are none, apart from powerful nation states, because the power to regulate commerce has always rested implicitly, and when necessary explicitly, upon the economic and military might of those nations that can enforce their wills upon other potential or competing authorities. It's no accident after all that the value of any currency throughout history has always been closely associated with the economic and military might of the entity issuing it and their ability to standardize and enforce its use.
it would be incumbent on the financial institutions to NOT use it as their primary means of ID for purposes of granting credit.
The laws must be changed to say that a Social Security number, by itself, proves nothing. It should not prove that a debt exists or that any other legally binding agreement was entered into by anyone. As long as businesses can get away with using the SSN as both an identifier and an authentication, which is how this whole "identity theft" nonsense got started in the first place, they will continue to do so. Therefore, the only viable solution is to render the Social Security Number legally worthless as proof of anything. They ought to be just numbers, nothing more.
It should be noted that China, along with India, is on the tier just below the Americans and the Russians in this regard. While it's true that China has invested in SLBMs, they have yet to demonstrate a well developed strategic capability in this area. An effective SLBM force must be capable of having at least some of its boats on permanent rotating patrols so as to guarantee that an effective counter-strike is always available to respond to a launch order at any time. The Chinese aren't there yet. They have neither the number of boats required to maintain these patrols nor the operational experience necessary to conduct them. In time they may achieve those milestones, but for now they remain decidedly second tier, behind the United States and Russia.
Incorrect. Without the capability to protect an ICBM during the boost phase of the flight, it's vulnerable to attack by an enemy who can establish air superiority over the launch areas. As far as we know, North Korea lacks both SLBMs and long range strategic bombers which means they cannot establish the nuclear triad. In fact, the existence of North Korean nuclear weapons, with neither first nor second strike capability, increases the likelihood that they will be attacked preemptively in the future. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is not enough. A nation must also posses the capability to launch a surprise attack and to guarantee retaliation in the event of a surprise attack. Thus, the only nations with a complete and credible deterrent at this time are the United States and Russia.
Everyone in the US is a criminal. If they want you there is a law somewhere they can use to burn you.
Yes. However, those who challenge the authorities should not be surprised by the response. It's one thing to be targeted, but it's quite another to paint the target on your own back.
When they want to get someone they'll fish for something illegal until they find something.
Hence the need for powerful friends who can be called upon for favors. If you cannot afford such friends then it's best to remain hidden and out of site amongst the great unwashed masses. Remember, it's the tall grass that gets cut first by the scythe.
It was legalized theft, with the rich legally robbing the poor.
Ignorance sure is expensive, isn't it? Maybe people shouldn't sign financial papers that they don't understand? Nah, that would be asking too much, right? If you're making a large purchase, like a home, isn't it worth a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars more to get the opinion of an attorney or a CPA that you pay directly and can trust to look over the paperwork on your behalf?
You obviously don't know how to leverage SharePoint.
I've worked with it in the past and I know what it is. I've also used other tools that do the same or similar jobs. I wouldn't chose to "leverage" SharePoint, as you put it, because in my experience any number of other tools, including open source tools, are better and cheaper. If you like Microsoft and ASP.NET, for example, then you might consider using DotNetNuke instead. Can SharePoint be made to work? Yes it can, but the costs are prohibitively high for what you get, especially if you have to "customize" the out-of-box product (which is almost always the case). SharePoint makes a few selected tasks, that weren't very hard to begin with, easy at the cost of making everything else extremely difficult. It always feels like you're fighting with SharePoint to get it to do what you want. This can be especially frustrating when you know that what you just spent three days getting to work in SharePoint could have been done in an hour or less with Drupal or DotNetNuke or hell even Ruby on Rails.
To make a long story short, developers aren't interested in SharePoint because there are many other better platforms for development and even if they do want to use Microsoft tools they'll just use ASP.NET directly instead or maybe DotNetNuke. The IT department isn't interested because SharePoint gets installed behind their backs, even when another tool might have been more appropriate, and then they get dragged into supporting the mess. The users may like it, but even that isn't guaranteed and unless geographically distributed use of Microsoft Office or Exchange integration is absolutely essential to your users, consider using something else instead. Finally, if you do chose SharePoint, be aware of the time, money and expertise that will be required to do it properly and know what your getting into because you don't have to look very far on Google to find many examples of SharePoint horror stories. Be skeptical and know what you're buying before you hand the consultants your credit card because SharePoint is frequently over promised and under delivered in the real world.
So what's the libertarian way of settling disputes, then?
Most Libertarians would favor the use of contracts and the laws governing them to resolve disputes. In the event of differences that cannot be resolved in any other way, the use of the courts is acceptable, as provided by law. However, in such cases it's not unreasonable to expect that those using the government run courts be asked to pay for most or even all what it costs to provide them, especially in civil matters.
A practice which nearly every Libertarian with whom I've spoken would abhor. Think about it. How can one advocate minimal government and sparing use of government powers while at the same time engaging in rent seeking? Please do us all a favor and educate yourself about the positions of others before saying things that expose your ignorance for all to see. Those who call themselves "Libertarian" are not merely Conservatives who don't mind what you do in your bedroom. We support voluntary cooperation among individuals, with only minimal necessary involvement of government, as opposed to using those authoritative and coercive powers of government to impose unwanted choices or unwarranted restrictions upon the lives of others. The use of government power destroys freedom and liberty and it must therefore be used sparingly and only when necessary to preserve the negative rights of everyone. In economic terms this means that you have the right to an opportunity or a chance, which the government is bound to protect or at least not to unduly interfere with, but nothing more.
Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
I suspect that most of us free market Libertarians would be right there with you on that one. You have a perfect right to view, or not view, content on your own computing hardware in whatever manner you wish. They may choose not to serve you, if they can detect you, but it's an unacceptable encroachment of government upon the rights of the individual to censor or require consumption of anything, healthcare now not withstanding although that's an entirely separate discussion, via the force of law.
Start with billions of dollars, establish a private spaceflight company offering rides to bored rich people and shut it all down before you're bankrupt.
Raise the price on it and even some of the most MS-centric IT shops will go "Fine, we'll just set up an internal Apache server and Confluence instead."
You might think so, but remember that SharePoint is usually not purchased by the IT department. It's purchased either outside of the IT department for use by non-technical people, good luck with that btw, or it's forced upon everyone by clueless management at the urging of consultants who have a vested interest in plugging SharePoint as the "solution" to whatever "problems" management thinks exist. Microsoft should just change the marketing pitch to, "SharePoint is right for anyone with a credit card" because that's basically how they sell it. Anyway, it's only after the purchase has been made and the consultants are gone that people realize just how much SharePoint sucks. Of course by then it's generally to late too do anything about it because the expense of the project has blown the IT budget for the next three years. In fact, I've yet to hear of a SharePoint project that either delivered on its promises or didn't go way over budget, so raising the price can only makes matters even worse. For those of you out there who haven't experienced any of this, do yourselves a favor and push back against "PainPoint" or you'll regret it later guaranteed.
leaf-node employees who trusted unions to negotiate benefits for them
That was their first mistake. Nobody cares more about your retirement more than you do. If you cant be bothered to mind your own investments then why should anyone else care? Let this be a lesson to younger workers: take some time to learn the basics of saving and investing, your financial future depends on it .
Government teachers love to talk about checks and balances, but somehow miss out on their retirement depending on an edifice with neither.
Welcome to the real world that everyone outside of public employment la-la land has been living in for decades now. You'll get very little sympathy from those who've toughed it out in the private sector, I assure you.
It's so bad!
Myself, I am quite sympathetic to the idea of workers organizing for greater leverage with their employers
Milton Friedman commented on this way back in 1975 on episode 494 of the The Open Mind: Living Within Our Means. Of course, it's now over thirty years later and were still talking about the same problems.