Why, exactly, would the government encourage people to destroy currency? What public policy goal would that serve? (Making people poorer?)
Governments tax their citizens...despite the fact that taxation makes people poorer.
The government does not encourage people to destroy money. They actually have a strong dislike for anyone who dinks with the monetary supply.
In a discussion that involved money getting destroyed in a microwave, I thought I would find a humorous way to bring up the issue that you don't destroy the actual value of a dollar bill if you destroy the dollar bill. If a dollar bill got lost, then it is pretty much the same thing as a dollar in taxes.
You are also right that the mint is pretty much controlled by the federal reserve, and that in an economy where most money changes hands electronically, the Federal Reserve does more to control the money supply through lending to banks than through printing money. The 2003 production figures for the US Mint indicate that the Mint printed a scant $896 Million in change...chump change. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing handle printed currency. I couldn't find a quick list of the number of dollar bills printed, but I am sure it is an equally unimpressive figure. Both the Mint and Bureau or Engraving and Printing seem to encourage collecting.
dropping a dime in a wishing well is pretty much like giving Uncle Sam ten cents (minus production cost).
You are correct in pointing out that in today's economy, more money changes hands electronically than as currency. The Federal Reserve controls the monetary supply through the banking system. However, all the rules that apply to currency are still valid. BTW, I would expect that there's several million people work on their $12.50 collection of quarters. Ten million quarter collections equal $125,000,000 for the government.
You remember Saddam Hussein's stock piling US cash? He could have done some serious damage to the economy if he had released it all at once. As it stands, his stock piling cash simply transferred a large amount of wealth to the US treasury.
The thing you point out quite well is the secret part of the arrangement. A billionaire or rogue government can use economic terrorism. There is a long history of governments trying to devalue the currencies of their enemies.
I am surprised the government doesn't encourage people to do more destroying of money. When you lose or destroy a dollar bill, the government can print and spend a replacement without causing inflation.
You know, all of those State Quarters that people collect with fervor are almost pure profit for the mint. I mean, it's like the mint has a license to print money!!!!
It's a sad commentary on the US legal system when the perception exists that courts will look more at a companies ideology then the evidence presented.
No, the sad commentary was on the way that individuals sabbotage themselves. Let's say I had a fervent belief that copyright was an evil and felt that I had to sacrafice myself as a praxis in the social revolution to repeal the copyright laws themselves...I am likely to sabbotage my case by venting my anger at the law itself.
If, on the otherhand, I was just Joe businessman running a shop and getting an annoyance lawsuit from SCO; I would be more apt to focus on the case and to listen to good legal advice on how to win my case.
A person's beliefs affect the way they act. It affects the way they present their arguments, who they choose to represent them, etc.. This is not prejudice on the part of the court, but the beliefs of an organization can affect the outcome of lawsuits.
While you're at it maybe you could suggest that they sue Canopy Group.
Suing a group that stands to gain by losing the lawsuit would be a shrewd move. It would give SCO greater ability to set the stage for a setting a precedent favorable to SCO.
However, the shrewdest move would be to sue a company holding the "information wants to be free" line religiously. It is often easy to win the court's favor when your opponent is holding an absurd ideal with religiour fervor. The worst thing would be to sue a well respected company with shrewd leadership, as they are likely to punch real legitimate holes in the SCO case.
Since when do we need to place a value on individual expression?
A double edged question--From an individual perspective, we need to strive to find that information that is meaningful to us. That is we all have to filter out the tripe.
From a system's perspective, I think Google has the right approach, the system should just gather and try to index the information in a usable manner and let the individual make their choice.
The main things that google needs to look for are data structures that are clearly misleading like pages typed up by bots.
I think one can distinguish the employee-focused firms from the others by watching for layoffs during a downturn.
There is truth to this statement. However, in a situation where the employee truly is a stakeholder, you would see what employees receiving from the firm going up and down with the market. That means being idled in downturns. Employee owned firm can and should be just as aggressive in cutting back the dead wood and adjusting to market conditions. Employee owned firms that consider job security over all else have a decided disadvantage to companies that can adjust.
BTW, Southwest Airlines just closed two reservation centers. That does not mean they are not employee friendly...just that the internet made the jobs obsolete. Keeping the jobs would simply hurt the company.
One of our problems is that employee situation is really not tied to the fate of the company or to the economy.
I think anything ending with an "ist" or "ism" is a leach on the society. That includes the word "capitalism" (capitalism is not the same as the free market). Capitalism is a system where a small number people gain a disproportionate level of influence through market manipulations. The label "capitalism" was defined by people in the Marxist camp. The US was intended to be a free market.
For the free market to work, people have to have ownership of something. The game of selling your entire life to a company is a single transaction is not leading to optimal results. This game where the majority of people become 100% dependent on a single source of income is a farce. This episode of striking against a bankrupt firm and getting fired by text message can only be described as a comedy.
Unionized workers, who make up nearly 90 percent of the firm's 662 staff, have been on strike since mid-December over a takeover by Korea Exchange Bank (KEB), fearing job cuts.
Just a sec, I need to jot this down in my notebook of things not to do: Item 694: Go on strike to prevent job cuts.
That done, Marjorie Kelly makes a good point in her work The Divine Right of Capital that employees are are the wrong side of the ledger. People are expenses not stake holders. This creates the negative feedback that as productivity increases wages go down...not up.
This strike and instant death messages shows that confrontational method of strikes does not work well in a market that is suffering from over capacity. What needs to happen is we need to figure out how to get more people from the expense side of the ledger into the stake holder side of the ledger.
Headhunters are a weird lot. First of all, they don't care a lick about the job seeker. They are after employers. Quite often a headhunter will get a lead on a job from an employer. When this happens they will then run around and try to find a list of candidates that will fit the job.
In this regard, posting your resume on a job board is not a bad thing. If you have a good clean resume with the right keywords, there is a chance that a headhunter with a legitimate job will find you. Anyway, having realised that headhunters work for employers and not for me, I've learned that they can provide a legitimate service.
Um, how is this different from other large-ticket items, like your car?
It is not unlike other industries, and if you look at other industries you will find a long history of companies trying to find ways to sneak in after market expenses. I think you will find that there is a great deal of law trying to control such activities.
Computers are a little bit unique in that it is extremely easy to include sales related logic into programs. Since people are using their computers to make purchases, I suspect it will be an area that needs to be watched carefully for abuse.
As computers can include actual sales logic and monitor and manipulate user behavior in ways that other products cannot, it is simply a worrisome development that needs to be watched. I suspect that the number of ads delivered in software will increase exponentially during this next decade. We've are seeing the transition from software being the end product to simply being the medium for selling other services. There will need to be thought into what is abusive and what is not abusive.
Personal, I am sad about the whole state of affairs in this industry. Basically, the computer manufacturers are choosing which programs the end user will use for listening to music, which antivirus software they will use. Each new computer that comes off the shelf is bundled with more and more ads and programs that monitor behavior.
The boxes coming out of the shop should stop being called "computers" and should be correctly identified as "ad delivery units."
Re:Not a bad read...
on
Digital Fortress
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I got the feeling in the book that the author had twisted his plot one too many times. I had the feeling that perhaps the author himself had realized the mistake and just hurried through the end.
It is strange, I read the book in January, and was so unimpressed that I can't remember anything other than a book beginning with promise and failing to impress.
False witness depends on the context. You give the example of what is expected in court. Malcontent is talking about everyday life. Ommitting information when you are expected to give that information would be a form of lying. According to this Yahoo Article, a Malcontent style CEO is getting his arse hauled before court for sins of ommission.
I was referring to everyday life. If I knew my coworker was getting fired at the end of the week, I probably would not tell them until the proper time. That is not a sin of ommission. Likewise, not telling someone what commission rate we make on a sale is not a sin of ommission, however, telling someone that the product we get a higher commission rate on is a better product (when it is not) is a lie.
BTW, the ten commandments read "thou shall not bear false witness."
Maybe if you worked in a small or a medium sized business that neve[r] really made a lot of money that's true.
Unfortunately, I have worked with people who routinely lie and are incredibly dishonest. They've often gotten ahead. The worst are those who are self righteous...which leads them into an even deeper level of deception.
However, in most cases these political drones have cost the companies I worked for tens of millions of dollars. I worked with one company that can point to a pile of dead bodies caused by a self righteous business drone who falsified reports. He went to jail. I hope he is still there.
Anyway, most people who produce quality work tend to be honest and hard working. The US used to have a very strong competitive edge because Americans used to have better ethics.
BTW, not disclosing information you know is not a lie, unless it is in a circumstance where you are expected to disclose the information. For example, my not posting the source code for my employer's product is not a lie. Not telling a customer the percent of commission on a sale is not a lie either.
A CEO should know the quarterly sales figure several days before the quarterly report. His refusal to tell people this figure is not only not a lie, the CEO would be in big legal trouble for disclosing the information early.
A good part of good business is developing channels so that the information is released in a sane and informative manner.
This garbage mindset where we try to turn good business practice into a call for machiavellian maneuvering is absurd. Unfortunately, the poor logical education that we get in the US has our president seeing WMD where there are none, and is lowering our defenses against the political wolves who continually run US businesses down.
Last I looked, English was a written language in Shakespeare's days. Shakespeare is extremely interesting because he wrote his works just as English grammar was being solidified. BTW, pronunciation rules changed dramatically between Shakespeare's time and today. The i's were pronounced e, the e's were pronounced as a's
Personally, I have a hard time reading The Canterbury Tales, and other pre-Shakespearean English.
Works written in the 1700s are much like those written today.
The article fails to mention that language death and birth is a natural phenomena. For isolated populations without written language rules to carry the language through the generations, you probably see a new language born every other generation. Kids never learn their parent's language exactly. The life cycle of a natural language is probably only three or four generations before it becomes unrecognizable.
The author of the article is simply lamenting that the underlings in the world aren't on a petri dish for study.
Quite frankly, I see a world where people are free to chose the language that best suits their personal goals as the most interesting world to study and live in.
The article fails to make mention of any new language formed in the next generations...nor does it acknowledge that such new languages formed in an industrial era are likely to include cognitive structures that languages to date lack.
BTW, if French was becoming the world language, the academic community would probably be applauding the disappearance of lesser languages.
Already we are seeing more and more proprietary software including adware components, anticompetitive modules which disable competitor's products, etc..
Our big problem today is that we are running thin on trusted sources for code. In this regard, the open source module is superior in that it easier for trusted sources to monitor open software. As to whether or not trustworthy companies will continue to exist...that is a question outside the open v. closed code question.
One of the really sad developments is that the growing lack of trust in the industry hurts the small companies the hardest. Quite often the small firms are the most trustworthy. Of course, small firms have a high fail rate. People who buy up failed small firms are often the worst wolves in the pack.
Capitalism works by reinvesting what gets earned. So, it is the best system for keeping things up.
The biggest worry for the economy right now is that big companies, big government and big unions will use people's fear to inact anti-market legislation and muck up positive market developments.
Don't you think it is odd that people are calling the outsourcing of jobs to India a "free market failure." Out sourcing is widening the income gap world wide. It is narrowing the income gap. The phenomenally poor in India are seeing a big jump in their standard of living, while the fat American is simply seeing a slow down in their accumulation of wealth.
If you take the world view that includes both the US and India, you would see that the number of jobs world wide is increasing substantially faster because of outsourcing.
Of course, if you looked at the stats in 1999, you would see the tech boom was pulling people out of retirement, it was pulling students out of school. A very large portion of the "lost jobs" stat was people who came from India because of the "labor shortage" in the US. What your 2.2 million stat does is compare peaks to valleys. In 2000, the papers were telling about how the brain drain was hurting countries like India. I am extremely happy that the globe is starting to see some economic balance.
My experience is that the main use of the term "code monkey" is by programmers in situations where the boss is not giving them enough respect. A statement might be: "????? is a bad manager, he treats people like code monkeys." Or, a rebuttal "I am not a code monkey." The truth of the matter is that programmers are often good at breaking institutionalized oppression.
My experience with unionization so far is that unionization itself is institutionalized oppression. The first goal of a union would be to shut down independent shops and lock out consultants. Just as the union has successfully done in thousands of industries. The first goal of the union would be to stop the process of social mobility between workers and management. Historically, unionization has been the final seal in the institutionalization of workers.
One of the biggest worries of outsourcing overseas is that it might create a mechanism that stops social mobility. Before the major outsourcing, it was actually shaping up as an alternative means for skilled workers to move into management. The day there is a Union, the social mobility that IT workers currently enjoy will come to a dead stop as it has with most union activities in the past.
Some companies appreciate your taking the time to negotiate and read through all parts of the employment agreement. It shows that you are actively engaged in the process.
I've actually had companies make major changes to their non-compete and non-disclosure agreements after my review of the forms. It probably depends on the firm and the lifecycle of the firm. I've worked in a few companies where the corporate lawyer was thrilled to sit down with an employee and talk seriously about the contract.
Conversely, if the hr clerk, or whoever you talk to, feel they have no control, they will resent what you are doing.
I agree education is a very big part of the equation...however, I would disagree that it is a matter of governments paying for education. In the last 40 years the US has piled money into schools. Far too much of the money was just flittered away. Whether or not Americans pay for education through loans or through really high taxes, the inefficiencies of US education is a big negative for the US. At least, we have large agencies that worry about self-esteemed, and unemployed Americans excesses of self-esteem.
Having the US government spend more money on schools will not solve the efficiency problems of US schools. All it does is mean that we will have a larger deficit or higher taxes.
the capital involved in IT is the knowledge, therefore, the people.
IT is unique in that we are gradually transferring the knowledge and defined business rules into machines. For that matter, one of the biggest challenges of a company is to free itself from dependencies on anyone worker or any one programmer.
The franchising business is a good case in point. What you do as a franchise is design a set of business rules that can be implemented by other entrepreneurs. Your goal is to design a business that is not dependent on a single player or an expertise. The franchise designs the business as a box, others can then implement it.
The challenge of most IT departments is to create a structure that can transition between different employees. For that matter, when I workd on a project, I try to design it so different people will be able to support and extend the project. To an extent, that means separating the people from the knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments tax their citizens...despite the fact that taxation makes people poorer.
The government does not encourage people to destroy money. They actually have a strong dislike for anyone who dinks with the monetary supply.
In a discussion that involved money getting destroyed in a microwave, I thought I would find a humorous way to bring up the issue that you don't destroy the actual value of a dollar bill if you destroy the dollar bill. If a dollar bill got lost, then it is pretty much the same thing as a dollar in taxes.
You are also right that the mint is pretty much controlled by the federal reserve, and that in an economy where most money changes hands electronically, the Federal Reserve does more to control the money supply through lending to banks than through printing money. The 2003 production figures for the US Mint indicate that the Mint printed a scant $896 Million in change...chump change. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing handle printed currency. I couldn't find a quick list of the number of dollar bills printed, but I am sure it is an equally unimpressive figure. Both the Mint and Bureau or Engraving and Printing seem to encourage collecting.
dropping a dime in a wishing well is pretty much like giving Uncle Sam ten cents (minus production cost).
You are correct in pointing out that in today's economy, more money changes hands electronically than as currency. The Federal Reserve controls the monetary supply through the banking system. However, all the rules that apply to currency are still valid. BTW, I would expect that there's several million people work on their $12.50 collection of quarters. Ten million quarter collections equal $125,000,000 for the government.
You remember Saddam Hussein's stock piling US cash? He could have done some serious damage to the economy if he had released it all at once. As it stands, his stock piling cash simply transferred a large amount of wealth to the US treasury.
The thing you point out quite well is the secret part of the arrangement. A billionaire or rogue government can use economic terrorism. There is a long history of governments trying to devalue the currencies of their enemies.
I am surprised the government doesn't encourage people to do more destroying of money. When you lose or destroy a dollar bill, the government can print and spend a replacement without causing inflation.
You know, all of those State Quarters that people collect with fervor are almost pure profit for the mint. I mean, it's like the mint has a license to print money!!!!
No, the sad commentary was on the way that individuals sabbotage themselves. Let's say I had a fervent belief that copyright was an evil and felt that I had to sacrafice myself as a praxis in the social revolution to repeal the copyright laws themselves...I am likely to sabbotage my case by venting my anger at the law itself.
If, on the otherhand, I was just Joe businessman running a shop and getting an annoyance lawsuit from SCO; I would be more apt to focus on the case and to listen to good legal advice on how to win my case.
A person's beliefs affect the way they act. It affects the way they present their arguments, who they choose to represent them, etc.. This is not prejudice on the part of the court, but the beliefs of an organization can affect the outcome of lawsuits.
Suing a group that stands to gain by losing the lawsuit would be a shrewd move. It would give SCO greater ability to set the stage for a setting a precedent favorable to SCO.
However, the shrewdest move would be to sue a company holding the "information wants to be free" line religiously. It is often easy to win the court's favor when your opponent is holding an absurd ideal with religiour fervor. The worst thing would be to sue a well respected company with shrewd leadership, as they are likely to punch real legitimate holes in the SCO case.
A double edged question--From an individual perspective, we need to strive to find that information that is meaningful to us. That is we all have to filter out the tripe.
From a system's perspective, I think Google has the right approach, the system should just gather and try to index the information in a usable manner and let the individual make their choice.
The main things that google needs to look for are data structures that are clearly misleading like pages typed up by bots.
There is truth to this statement. However, in a situation where the employee truly is a stakeholder, you would see what employees receiving from the firm going up and down with the market. That means being idled in downturns. Employee owned firm can and should be just as aggressive in cutting back the dead wood and adjusting to market conditions. Employee owned firms that consider job security over all else have a decided disadvantage to companies that can adjust.
BTW, Southwest Airlines just closed two reservation centers. That does not mean they are not employee friendly...just that the internet made the jobs obsolete. Keeping the jobs would simply hurt the company.
One of our problems is that employee situation is really not tied to the fate of the company or to the economy.
I think anything ending with an "ist" or "ism" is a leach on the society. That includes the word "capitalism" (capitalism is not the same as the free market). Capitalism is a system where a small number people gain a disproportionate level of influence through market manipulations. The label "capitalism" was defined by people in the Marxist camp. The US was intended to be a free market.
For the free market to work, people have to have ownership of something. The game of selling your entire life to a company is a single transaction is not leading to optimal results. This game where the majority of people become 100% dependent on a single source of income is a farce. This episode of striking against a bankrupt firm and getting fired by text message can only be described as a comedy.
Just a sec, I need to jot this down in my notebook of things not to do: Item 694: Go on strike to prevent job cuts.
That done, Marjorie Kelly makes a good point in her work The Divine Right of Capital that employees are are the wrong side of the ledger. People are expenses not stake holders. This creates the negative feedback that as productivity increases wages go down...not up.
This strike and instant death messages shows that confrontational method of strikes does not work well in a market that is suffering from over capacity. What needs to happen is we need to figure out how to get more people from the expense side of the ledger into the stake holder side of the ledger.
Headhunters are a weird lot. First of all, they don't care a lick about the job seeker. They are after employers. Quite often a headhunter will get a lead on a job from an employer. When this happens they will then run around and try to find a list of candidates that will fit the job.
In this regard, posting your resume on a job board is not a bad thing. If you have a good clean resume with the right keywords, there is a chance that a headhunter with a legitimate job will find you. Anyway, having realised that headhunters work for employers and not for me, I've learned that they can provide a legitimate service.
It is not unlike other industries, and if you look at other industries you will find a long history of companies trying to find ways to sneak in after market expenses. I think you will find that there is a great deal of law trying to control such activities.
Computers are a little bit unique in that it is extremely easy to include sales related logic into programs. Since people are using their computers to make purchases, I suspect it will be an area that needs to be watched carefully for abuse.
As computers can include actual sales logic and monitor and manipulate user behavior in ways that other products cannot, it is simply a worrisome development that needs to be watched. I suspect that the number of ads delivered in software will increase exponentially during this next decade. We've are seeing the transition from software being the end product to simply being the medium for selling other services. There will need to be thought into what is abusive and what is not abusive.
Personal, I am sad about the whole state of affairs in this industry. Basically, the computer manufacturers are choosing which programs the end user will use for listening to music, which antivirus software they will use. Each new computer that comes off the shelf is bundled with more and more ads and programs that monitor behavior.
The boxes coming out of the shop should stop being called "computers" and should be correctly identified as "ad delivery units."
I got the feeling in the book that the author had twisted his plot one too many times. I had the feeling that perhaps the author himself had realized the mistake and just hurried through the end.
It is strange, I read the book in January, and was so unimpressed that I can't remember anything other than a book beginning with promise and failing to impress.
False witness depends on the context. You give the example of what is expected in court. Malcontent is talking about everyday life. Ommitting information when you are expected to give that information would be a form of lying. According to this Yahoo Article, a Malcontent style CEO is getting his arse hauled before court for sins of ommission.
I was referring to everyday life. If I knew my coworker was getting fired at the end of the week, I probably would not tell them until the proper time. That is not a sin of ommission. Likewise, not telling someone what commission rate we make on a sale is not a sin of ommission, however, telling someone that the product we get a higher commission rate on is a better product (when it is not) is a lie.
BTW, the ten commandments read "thou shall not bear false witness."
Unfortunately, I have worked with people who routinely lie and are incredibly dishonest. They've often gotten ahead. The worst are those who are self righteous...which leads them into an even deeper level of deception.
However, in most cases these political drones have cost the companies I worked for tens of millions of dollars. I worked with one company that can point to a pile of dead bodies caused by a self righteous business drone who falsified reports. He went to jail. I hope he is still there.
Anyway, most people who produce quality work tend to be honest and hard working. The US used to have a very strong competitive edge because Americans used to have better ethics.
BTW, not disclosing information you know is not a lie, unless it is in a circumstance where you are expected to disclose the information. For example, my not posting the source code for my employer's product is not a lie. Not telling a customer the percent of commission on a sale is not a lie either.
A CEO should know the quarterly sales figure several days before the quarterly report. His refusal to tell people this figure is not only not a lie, the CEO would be in big legal trouble for disclosing the information early.
A good part of good business is developing channels so that the information is released in a sane and informative manner.
This garbage mindset where we try to turn good business practice into a call for machiavellian maneuvering is absurd. Unfortunately, the poor logical education that we get in the US has our president seeing WMD where there are none, and is lowering our defenses against the political wolves who continually run US businesses down.
Last I looked, English was a written language in Shakespeare's days. Shakespeare is extremely interesting because he wrote his works just as English grammar was being solidified. BTW, pronunciation rules changed dramatically between Shakespeare's time and today. The i's were pronounced e, the e's were pronounced as a's
Personally, I have a hard time reading The Canterbury Tales, and other pre-Shakespearean English.
Works written in the 1700s are much like those written today.
The article fails to mention that language death and birth is a natural phenomena. For isolated populations without written language rules to carry the language through the generations, you probably see a new language born every other generation. Kids never learn their parent's language exactly. The life cycle of a natural language is probably only three or four generations before it becomes unrecognizable.
The author of the article is simply lamenting that the underlings in the world aren't on a petri dish for study.
Quite frankly, I see a world where people are free to chose the language that best suits their personal goals as the most interesting world to study and live in.
The article fails to make mention of any new language formed in the next generations...nor does it acknowledge that such new languages formed in an industrial era are likely to include cognitive structures that languages to date lack.
BTW, if French was becoming the world language, the academic community would probably be applauding the disappearance of lesser languages.
The most important thing we will need to know as humans is how to plea: "Please don't kill me oh masterful one" in c#, java and perl.
Already we are seeing more and more proprietary software including adware components, anticompetitive modules which disable competitor's products, etc..
Our big problem today is that we are running thin on trusted sources for code. In this regard, the open source module is superior in that it easier for trusted sources to monitor open software. As to whether or not trustworthy companies will continue to exist...that is a question outside the open v. closed code question.
One of the really sad developments is that the growing lack of trust in the industry hurts the small companies the hardest. Quite often the small firms are the most trustworthy. Of course, small firms have a high fail rate. People who buy up failed small firms are often the worst wolves in the pack.
Capitalism works by reinvesting what gets earned. So, it is the best system for keeping things up.
The biggest worry for the economy right now is that big companies, big government and big unions will use people's fear to inact anti-market legislation and muck up positive market developments.
Don't you think it is odd that people are calling the outsourcing of jobs to India a "free market failure." Out sourcing is widening the income gap world wide. It is narrowing the income gap. The phenomenally poor in India are seeing a big jump in their standard of living, while the fat American is simply seeing a slow down in their accumulation of wealth.
If you take the world view that includes both the US and India, you would see that the number of jobs world wide is increasing substantially faster because of outsourcing.
Of course, if you looked at the stats in 1999, you would see the tech boom was pulling people out of retirement, it was pulling students out of school. A very large portion of the "lost jobs" stat was people who came from India because of the "labor shortage" in the US. What your 2.2 million stat does is compare peaks to valleys. In 2000, the papers were telling about how the brain drain was hurting countries like India. I am extremely happy that the globe is starting to see some economic balance.
My experience is that the main use of the term "code monkey" is by programmers in situations where the boss is not giving them enough respect. A statement might be: "????? is a bad manager, he treats people like code monkeys." Or, a rebuttal "I am not a code monkey." The truth of the matter is that programmers are often good at breaking institutionalized oppression.
My experience with unionization so far is that unionization itself is institutionalized oppression. The first goal of a union would be to shut down independent shops and lock out consultants. Just as the union has successfully done in thousands of industries. The first goal of the union would be to stop the process of social mobility between workers and management. Historically, unionization has been the final seal in the institutionalization of workers.
One of the biggest worries of outsourcing overseas is that it might create a mechanism that stops social mobility. Before the major outsourcing, it was actually shaping up as an alternative means for skilled workers to move into management. The day there is a Union, the social mobility that IT workers currently enjoy will come to a dead stop as it has with most union activities in the past.
Some companies appreciate your taking the time to negotiate and read through all parts of the employment agreement. It shows that you are actively engaged in the process.
I've actually had companies make major changes to their non-compete and non-disclosure agreements after my review of the forms. It probably depends on the firm and the lifecycle of the firm. I've worked in a few companies where the corporate lawyer was thrilled to sit down with an employee and talk seriously about the contract.
Conversely, if the hr clerk, or whoever you talk to, feel they have no control, they will resent what you are doing.
I agree education is a very big part of the equation...however, I would disagree that it is a matter of governments paying for education. In the last 40 years the US has piled money into schools. Far too much of the money was just flittered away. Whether or not Americans pay for education through loans or through really high taxes, the inefficiencies of US education is a big negative for the US. At least, we have large agencies that worry about self-esteemed, and unemployed Americans excesses of self-esteem.
Having the US government spend more money on schools will not solve the efficiency problems of US schools. All it does is mean that we will have a larger deficit or higher taxes.
IT is unique in that we are gradually transferring the knowledge and defined business rules into machines. For that matter, one of the biggest challenges of a company is to free itself from dependencies on anyone worker or any one programmer.
The franchising business is a good case in point. What you do as a franchise is design a set of business rules that can be implemented by other entrepreneurs. Your goal is to design a business that is not dependent on a single player or an expertise. The franchise designs the business as a box, others can then implement it.
The challenge of most IT departments is to create a structure that can transition between different employees. For that matter, when I workd on a project, I try to design it so different people will be able to support and extend the project. To an extent, that means separating the people from the knowledge.