Certainly individual rights are a _huge_ part of almost all functioning democracies, but I think it's quite a different thing to say societies exist for the individual. I didn't actually set out to defend authoritarian governments when I questioned the premise of the primacy of the individual, because it doesn't seem to be a dichotomy. I think the preamble to the US constitution states a more comprehensive view:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Individual liberty is indeed a foundational element, but one of many parts of what society -- or, the one I'm guessing we're both a part of, the USA -- exists to protect.
News flash: Individuals do not exist for the sake of society, society exists for the individual.
That's an interesting notion. Could you expand on what you mean by this assertion? It seems to me that an individual binds to a society because it's better for him or her, but that notion seems unidirectional. Society exists for the good of the collective, and it's an individual's choice to associate.
I thought I responded yesterday, but I don't see the posted comment. I apologized for not getting the thrust of your comment, I mistook the "druggies" in the first line to be generalized to everyone involved in the transactions.
In response to your second reply, there are a few scenarios I would probably look the other way, but it almost always be at a risk to myself. Allowing illegal trade to go on in your neighborhood is asking for trouble in many cases, especially for drugs. In the petunias scenario, I doubt anyone's going to get shot over getting wilted flowers, but when you don't have the force of law behind your transactions things get out of hand quickly. I saw and heard about lots of violence and theft when I dabbled in construction, when folks had to try and remedy disagreements themselves or get screwed out of money trading in illegal labor.
In the instances/scenarios I reference, there is nothing immoral about the objects themselves, but there's a reasonable risk that there will be blood when things go sideways and you can't go to the law to set things right.
Snowden didn't give specifics, but he did say this in response to the question:
2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?
All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.
"taking advantage" you say. Someone who is running an illegal business out of a private residence and flagrantly breaking all sorts of laws, you think this person should _not_ report this sort of activity? If the person was illegally selling petunias out of their garage I'd probably report it, if it was bringing all sorts of riffraff to my neighborhood and keeping me awake. I can sympathize with users, but sellers, hell no.
Oddly, I think the physical keys to our homes are a perfect analogy. We get our house-keys from commercial entities, and can reasonably assume they are safe to use. We don't require folks to forge their keys from molten metal to keep the government from printing keys and walking into our houses.
The _video_ cost them next to nothing, the video facilities weren't built explicitly for this damned video. How we end up here arguing over a kitschy video made for peanuts while so many other places in government (defense, social security, health care) or the private sector (how about goldman sachs and metals price manipulation) are costing the public substantially I'll never know.
Thank you for those links. I should have qualified, I'd heard employers whining about difficulty finding employees in the media, but not much for numbers to back it up.
developers can demand salaries that many segments of the market cannot afford.
Corporations have been making record profits. Wages have not increased significantly. Something is out of whack.
some of the most telling statistics (IMO): -For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. -Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels. -The annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders.
You're making a market based-argument on factors that haven't been established. Where is this $200/barrel commensurate developer pay? Where are the long lines of companies waiting at the developer stations? Does simply not wanting to pay more for something mean there is a shortage? Give me a break, companies just want to import cheap labor to keep prices down.
I've done this song and dance from both sides. My time and sanity spent culling the chaff of applicants is all for naught if my candidates aren't willing to work for the salary range I'm offering.
This silent auction of labor talent is hurting your chances of head-hunting worthy candidates from elsewhere who don't realize they are undervalued. Show them the money.
You saying you're getting mediocre or untalented developers. It sounds like you want a "rockstar" coder, so I'm guessing you should probably be paying rockstar prices. I don't know much about the Bay Area, so I'd just be speculating if I said what a fair wage would be.
I'm curious why most places don't post their compensation. Everywhere I look everyone says their wages are "competitive", yet few if any actually post what they're actually paying. Of the top 20 software developer links I clicked in my area:http://austin.craigslist.org/sof/ , only 2 offered a salary, and both of those were part time.
While what you say is a very rational decision from an individual's perspective, "society" is not really making the decisions here. Powerful members of society are cultivating the laws to extract the most for themselves to the detriment of other citizens. Society is only a casual observer.
I'm not clear how a society made up of all chiefs, no indians will function either. Eventually those overseas will realize they haven't much need for overseas chiefs either and we'll have outsourced our entire economy. This is why I think we have to oppose these sorts of decisions at a general level, even if as an individual it's not the best choice.
I agree there is a shortage of qualified developers currently looking for work.
Bullshit, you're seeing a shortage of _cheap_ developers, not qualified developers, which is obvious from your statement "Hiring better people locally & paying them a bit more is a better ROI". As long as the cost of living disparity exists as dramatically as it does now, you'll never see salary parity between overseas labor and local labor. That has nothing to do with shortages of qualified workers.
It seems like a half-ass attempt at best by Oracle, though it's been getting better since Microsoft quit supporting the Oracle drivers themselves. You still have to install the fairly unwieldy Oracle Client on all front end servers to access the database (though I believe they are working on a portable library). The ODP.net client doesn't do automatic cursor mapping, and if you want to use it, Oracle seriously recommends to hand/hard code into your base configuration file xml mappings for cursor return types on stored procedures. And they still refuse to provide a boolean type (except in pl/sql). Quite annoying still, but better than the old days.
DHS (Department of Homeland Security) - inept, invasive, expensive, and superfluous. SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) - inept, impotent, and irrelevant. That or exceedingly corrupt. DEA (Drug enforcement Administration) - ridiculous drug scheduling, over the top enforcement based on this poor scheduling, and representative of some of the most fixable problems we choose to litigate and prosecute rather than try and solve.
It's a pointless comment, makes unproven assertions with no supporting evidence, seems self-evidently wrong ("to the best of our abilities" -- should we really spy the maximum we are capable on our allies?), and calls someone an inflammatory name. It's not worth defending.
That's absurd. The people have decided long ago that there is social value to marriage and so it gets special benefits. Your whining could be likened to a corporation squalling because they don't get the same tax breaks as a non-profit. Get married if you want the same benefits --and non-benefits, so when you split up with your roommates they get half your stuff.
"The union" _is_ the employees, and they do have a seat at the table during decision making, that's what collective bargaining allows. You think this is a bad thing, I think it's the only thing that will keep our society together (division of power, some semblance of equality.)
In Austin, Texas, I pay $40 (intro rate that goes to $52 after 6 months) for earthlink/twc cable internet for 15 Mbps down/1 Mbps up. They are the only provider that will offer unbundled internet that services my area of the city.
Sure, if it comes to that. I'm hopeful the supreme court will live up to it's calling and do their part to balance out the hysteria of those held accountable to public opinion so we don't have to rely on armed rebellion over matters that can and should be resolved civilly.
Luckily, it doesn't matter what the majority wants unless they vote to change the law. The 4th amendment protects this right until we vote to change it.
I'm not sure how we'll be able to hold business liable for discrimination if that information is no longer tracked, at least in cases of systemic discrimination.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly individual rights are a _huge_ part of almost all functioning democracies, but I think it's quite a different thing to say societies exist for the individual. I didn't actually set out to defend authoritarian governments when I questioned the premise of the primacy of the individual, because it doesn't seem to be a dichotomy. I think the preamble to the US constitution states a more comprehensive view:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Individual liberty is indeed a foundational element, but one of many parts of what society -- or, the one I'm guessing we're both a part of, the USA -- exists to protect.
News flash: Individuals do not exist for the sake of society, society exists for the individual.
That's an interesting notion. Could you expand on what you mean by this assertion? It seems to me that an individual binds to a society because it's better for him or her, but that notion seems unidirectional. Society exists for the good of the collective, and it's an individual's choice to associate.
I thought I responded yesterday, but I don't see the posted comment. I apologized for not getting the thrust of your comment, I mistook the "druggies" in the first line to be generalized to everyone involved in the transactions.
In response to your second reply, there are a few scenarios I would probably look the other way, but it almost always be at a risk to myself. Allowing illegal trade to go on in your neighborhood is asking for trouble in many cases, especially for drugs. In the petunias scenario, I doubt anyone's going to get shot over getting wilted flowers, but when you don't have the force of law behind your transactions things get out of hand quickly. I saw and heard about lots of violence and theft when I dabbled in construction, when folks had to try and remedy disagreements themselves or get screwed out of money trading in illegal labor.
In the instances/scenarios I reference, there is nothing immoral about the objects themselves, but there's a reasonable risk that there will be blood when things go sideways and you can't go to the law to set things right.
Snowden didn't give specifics, but he did say this in response to the question:
2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower
"taking advantage" you say. Someone who is running an illegal business out of a private residence and flagrantly breaking all sorts of laws, you think this person should _not_ report this sort of activity? If the person was illegally selling petunias out of their garage I'd probably report it, if it was bringing all sorts of riffraff to my neighborhood and keeping me awake. I can sympathize with users, but sellers, hell no.
Oddly, I think the physical keys to our homes are a perfect analogy. We get our house-keys from commercial entities, and can reasonably assume they are safe to use. We don't require folks to forge their keys from molten metal to keep the government from printing keys and walking into our houses.
The _video_ cost them next to nothing, the video facilities weren't built explicitly for this damned video. How we end up here arguing over a kitschy video made for peanuts while so many other places in government (defense, social security, health care) or the private sector (how about goldman sachs and metals price manipulation) are costing the public substantially I'll never know.
Thank you for those links. I should have qualified, I'd heard employers whining about difficulty finding employees in the media, but not much for numbers to back it up.
developers can demand salaries that many segments of the market cannot afford.
Corporations have been making record profits. Wages have not increased significantly. Something is out of whack.
this link lays out what I would say is a decent rebuttal:
http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis.pdf
some of the most telling statistics (IMO):
-For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.
-Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels.
-The annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders.
You're making a market based-argument on factors that haven't been established. Where is this $200/barrel commensurate developer pay? Where are the long lines of companies waiting at the developer stations? Does simply not wanting to pay more for something mean there is a shortage? Give me a break, companies just want to import cheap labor to keep prices down.
I've done this song and dance from both sides. My time and sanity spent culling the chaff of applicants is all for naught if my candidates aren't willing to work for the salary range I'm offering.
This silent auction of labor talent is hurting your chances of head-hunting worthy candidates from elsewhere who don't realize they are undervalued. Show them the money.
You saying you're getting mediocre or untalented developers. It sounds like you want a "rockstar" coder, so I'm guessing you should probably be paying rockstar prices. I don't know much about the Bay Area, so I'd just be speculating if I said what a fair wage would be.
I'm curious why most places don't post their compensation. Everywhere I look everyone says their wages are "competitive", yet few if any actually post what they're actually paying. Of the top 20 software developer links I clicked in my area:http://austin.craigslist.org/sof/ , only 2 offered a salary, and both of those were part time.
While what you say is a very rational decision from an individual's perspective, "society" is not really making the decisions here. Powerful members of society are cultivating the laws to extract the most for themselves to the detriment of other citizens. Society is only a casual observer.
I'm not clear how a society made up of all chiefs, no indians will function either. Eventually those overseas will realize they haven't much need for overseas chiefs either and we'll have outsourced our entire economy. This is why I think we have to oppose these sorts of decisions at a general level, even if as an individual it's not the best choice.
I agree there is a shortage of qualified developers currently looking for work.
Bullshit, you're seeing a shortage of _cheap_ developers, not qualified developers, which is obvious from your statement "Hiring better people locally & paying them a bit more is a better ROI". As long as the cost of living disparity exists as dramatically as it does now, you'll never see salary parity between overseas labor and local labor. That has nothing to do with shortages of qualified workers.
IEEE has a computing society that seems like what you're looking for:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok
Martin had texts talking about previous fights and desire to make his opponent bleed more, if his cell phone counts as valid evidence.
It seems like a half-ass attempt at best by Oracle, though it's been getting better since Microsoft quit supporting the Oracle drivers themselves. You still have to install the fairly unwieldy Oracle Client on all front end servers to access the database (though I believe they are working on a portable library). The ODP.net client doesn't do automatic cursor mapping, and if you want to use it, Oracle seriously recommends to hand/hard code into your base configuration file xml mappings for cursor return types on stored procedures. And they still refuse to provide a boolean type (except in pl/sql). Quite annoying still, but better than the old days.
DHS (Department of Homeland Security) - inept, invasive, expensive, and superfluous.
SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) - inept, impotent, and irrelevant. That or exceedingly corrupt.
DEA (Drug enforcement Administration) - ridiculous drug scheduling, over the top enforcement based on this poor scheduling, and representative of some of the most fixable problems we choose to litigate and prosecute rather than try and solve.
It's a pointless comment, makes unproven assertions with no supporting evidence, seems self-evidently wrong ("to the best of our abilities" -- should we really spy the maximum we are capable on our allies?), and calls someone an inflammatory name. It's not worth defending.
That's absurd. The people have decided long ago that there is social value to marriage and so it gets special benefits. Your whining could be likened to a corporation squalling because they don't get the same tax breaks as a non-profit. Get married if you want the same benefits --and non-benefits, so when you split up with your roommates they get half your stuff.
"The union" _is_ the employees, and they do have a seat at the table during decision making, that's what collective bargaining allows. You think this is a bad thing, I think it's the only thing that will keep our society together (division of power, some semblance of equality.)
In Austin, Texas, I pay $40 (intro rate that goes to $52 after 6 months) for earthlink/twc cable internet for 15 Mbps down/1 Mbps up. They are the only provider that will offer unbundled internet that services my area of the city.
Sure, if it comes to that. I'm hopeful the supreme court will live up to it's calling and do their part to balance out the hysteria of those held accountable to public opinion so we don't have to rely on armed rebellion over matters that can and should be resolved civilly.
Luckily, it doesn't matter what the majority wants unless they vote to change the law. The 4th amendment protects this right until we vote to change it.
I'm not sure how we'll be able to hold business liable for discrimination if that information is no longer tracked, at least in cases of systemic discrimination.
If the the tables were turned and you were fired for supporting LGBT rights, I doubt you'd feel that's exactly how free speech is supposed to work.