Should a company hire a hacker? To me, this is akin to the question, should a company hire radical union activists? A corporation is an entity whose purpose is profit - which the people who run them will be the first to admit. The profit goes to the shareholders, which if one looks at the data, are very largely very wealthy, and whom the most common means of acquiring wealth being inheritance. These people hire people to act out their commands (the white collar management), as well as hire people to create wealth (the workers), who have part of their wealth creation time being owned by the owners, so that the workers can have the privilege of creating wealth with the capital that the owners claim, and which the so-called right to which the owner enforces with the use of threatened violence or actual violence, be it private (security guards), or be it of the corporation's nation-state (police, national guard, army).
A radical union activist is someone who would eventually like to see the means of production, that is, all capital, collectively owned by the people who work with it (not by the people who don't work and take wealth from the people who work with capital). A hacker is similar - they are people who seize the means of production for their own uses, without the permission of the owners of capital. So would a manager hire a hacker if aware of that fact? Usually not, it would be against their function to. Nonetheless, I am well aware of many hackers or ex-hackers, and radical union activists being employed by corporations. They just keep their activities which clash with the desires of the owners close to their chest, as during this period of history, it is the idle classes who have the power in this society.
In 1984, Orwell showed how the powerful twist language around to suit their interests. For example, I often here people on TV begin sentences with "More Americans own their homes now then..." (...ever before,...people in other countries). The phrase "home ownership" is odd in the US because it often means people who do not own their home, who may just own 20% of their home, with a bank owning 80% of it, and with the bank able to take possession of the house if one mortgage (mortgage being a French word meaning literally "death bargain") payment is missed. Which is hardly "ownership" of something in the way that I own my shirt. Of course we all understand this, but it does contribute to a psychological change of sorts, where people who own 20% of a home and who will pay 3-4 times the original price of the home in interest, if it's not taken away in the mean time due to missed payments, think of themselves, and call themselves "homeowners". I would even say this has political purposes, as a public which considers itself homeowning is more stable than a public which thinks it has little to lose. In the same manner as many Americans who say that the USSR was "communist", even though USSR stood for "Union of Soviet *Socialist* Republics". Communism by definition means no government, but in American-speak, communism, e.g. no government, is the same thing as the massive socialist "dictatorship of the proletariat" contained in the USSR. It's significant because Cold War propaganda was the most significant and durable campaign over the past several decades in the US, from after WWII to Reagan's "evil empire", and within legitimate criticisms of Eastern Bloc rule, such as the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Prague in 1968 and so forth, there were pieces of false propaganda such as this one.
The meaning of words have always been used by the powerful to try to make their opponents look bad...vandals, barbarians, these words today are nouns to describe anti-social behavior, but originally they were used to describe actual European countries or tribes, with the old literal meanings actually being "foreigners" or "wandering [tribe]". In the same manner, the Luddites are said to be crazy anti-technology peasants from England in the early 19th century. But they weren't. They were workers in Dickensian England, a place where children were chained to workbenches for 14 hours a day, and beaten when they fell asleep. You can read the old English parliament records where their is a debate between conservatives and liberals over whether children are able to work 14+ hours a day (conservative) or are only capable of 12 hour days (liberals). The Luddites were in this period, at a time where after centuries, enclosure of the commons had finally been successful for it's advocates, forcing people into wage-labor, yet once that came about suddenly machines sprung up which did away with the crafts guilds and began driving down wages and driving people out of work. Of course it would behoove the people profitting from this system then to not say "these people are upset because we have, after centuries of effort, enclosed the commons, forcing them to be wage laborers in the city, and now we have begun to drive down their wages as we lay them off left and right, and since the commons are now enclosed they have no farms to go back to". They say instead "they do not like new technology, they are backwards". It says a lot about our society that we remember the Luddites not as people who suffered under an encroaching empire and gentry, but as dump, backwards, ignorant peasants supposedly scared of what was termed progress. Especially when people are being told that anyone who is nervous about the "code red" totalitarian-type government some people seem to want to build, which they say is necessary to fight terrorists, a label which already seems to be continually applied to more and more people in an ever-expanding manner, to the point where it will eventually mean anybody who doesn't think the world should be run by the
I agree. This is a protocol that is going to die a quick death. Instead of creating a great new protocol, he just created yet another p2p protocol (there are hundreds of other ones), but he figured out that if he stuck the Gnutella name on it, he could get lots of free publicity from sites like Slashdot. This way it wouldn't have to be judged on it's merits. Hell, I just developed Gnutella 3 which outdates Gnutella 2, come look at my site. No one minds he wrote his own protocol, but he quite uncreatively comes out of nowhere and calls his new protocol Gnutella 2. Problem is, virtually every Gnutella developer, myself included, doesn't buy into it. And who the hell else is going to develop for it - this is dead in the water. You can barely get enough developers developing on good protocols like Gnutella and Freenet. Also, this guy thre a temper tantrum and said that he was keeping the protocols of Gnutella 2 "secret", but I guess he changed his mind. Hey everybody, come visit my website, Slashdot 2.
I can go on a Solaris box and find out all kinds of information out of the box. prtconf, sysdef...I can check on the temperatures of boards out of the box...this stuff can be done on Linux but it is just easier and out of the box on all Solarises.
I am very suspicious of people who claim to have discovered "scientific" facts about human behavior, especially when their "scientific" discovery is that human behavior is scientically pre-determined. There has always been a hard line between science and social science (the study of human behavior using some scientific methods), and I believe that line is drawn for a reason, I'd say there are very, very few "laws" of human behavior and thinking that we know of, if any. And even fundamental scientific laws like Newton's have been shown to have holes in them, so with social science laws of human behavior, one must be doubly wary.
Trying to prove their ideas "scientifically" is an idea that has been taken up by the far left and the far right in the past, and many of the scientific conclusions of both left and right have over time been shown to be ridiculous. On the left you have the Marxist tradition of "scientific socialism" that "scientifically proves" that there is a dialectically material force of history that will lead to the unstoppable triumph of communism. On the right you have eugenics, the Bell Curve, and "science" proving socially darwinistic ideas, and that human behavior is genetically determined. These ideas, both the scientific socialist and eugenic science ideas were very popular in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but time has shown massive gaps in both of these body of ideas, and they both also lead to some extent to the massive exterminations carried out under Hitler and Stalin. But aside from the toll of ideas, is the simple fact that I think time has shown that many of these so-called scientific ideas have a lot of holes in them.
When a scientist points his telescope at the sky, it doesn't really have much of a social effect on earth nowadays (although centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy for touting the Copernican system, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his works on Copernican astronomy). When the lens is pointed at humans however, especially human behavior, you are sure that there will be plenty of people grabbing "scientific" research and using it to push their social agendas. So much so, that I have an enormous amount of skepticism about virtually any "scientific" model of human behavior, including psychiatry and psychology. That someone has "scientific" proof of some aspect of human behavior, in this case, that it's predetermined by genetics, really has to be taken with a grain of salt. As do anthropological and sociological studies that show humans are generally better off cooperating and working for the greater good (social anarchism) as opposed to competing (capitalism). These kind of ideas usually break down into left wing and right wing people either supporting or disputing the theories, breaking down among political lines, and so on and so forth, I can't think of anything more unscientific than that. That it's been scientifically proven that "our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes" is the epitomy of what sounds like political propaganda - the nurture versus nature debate is an ancient philosophical debate, and from my discussions with scientists who know more about the genome project than I do, they are barely able to use the information they have cataloged to solve medical problems (despite the hype - which is needed for funding), never mind have scientifically set in stone the answer to a fundamental philosophical question about human nature. I take this news with a huge grain of salt.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with chess or computer chess, I'll explain how this works...
A chess game can be broken into three parts, the opening, the middle game, and the endgame.
Computers play the endgame *perfectly*. They do not make mistakes, they play perfectly. And they keep getting better. Originally, they played perfectly when 3 pieces were left on the board. Then 4. Then 5. Then 6. Their pefect playing keeps heading more and more towards the middle of the game.
Then we get to what they play second-best - openings. Computers play the opening as well as any opening ever played. They have every opening ever played by a top player in a "book", and with the generally agreed opinions of the top players what the best opening moves are. One advantage of the computer is it has all of this "memorized" in it's book within massive databases, whereas for a human it's difficult to retain this all, especially in an up-to-date manner. The one advantage a human player has here is he can discover a NEW opening variation, while the computer can't, or at least it won't under these circumstances. But finding new good variations is very difficult, and once one is played, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. So it's a very time-consuming thing to search for which can only be used once to great effect because it's a surprise.
The middle game is where the human player, if he or she is very good, has the most advantage over a computer. Tactically, the computer can wipe the floor with any human player. But human's can strategize better than computers. It's to the human's advantage to play in certain ways against the computer - such as to keep the game "closed up", to advance pawns towards the queening square and so forth. In this case, the computer often can't see the forest for the trees, what would be obvious to even a lower-rated human the computer can not comprehend.
So middle game strategy (and to a lesser extent, new opening variations) is where humans still have the advantage. Kasparov has always used this to the hilt. There are some grandmasters like Yasser Seirawan who make a specialty out of beating computers as well (one mark against Seirawan is thar his books on chess are printed by Microsoft Press...yech). There is material out there on the net on how to beat computers as well. But you have to be a really good player to even get near that level - it takes a lot of study before you could even begin approaching that.
Well, I'll describe how this works on Gnutella, since that's the one I know - let's say you download a file from 4 sources which are checksummed, so the faker is 25% of that download time. And chances are, since tigertree hashes can be done, and overlapping verifications, and so forth, that it probably won't have to go through that whole 25% to get that 1/4 of the file from that one person. But even if it does - all you've done is added 25% more to the download time of someone who will get the file. Not that big of a deal. That's all possible now on Gnutella - well, tigertree isn't all there yet, but the overlap checking and full hashing is, and tigertree will be prolific soon enough. And the next generation can have forms of trust and free association that's even better.
>> And the average Cuban has one of the highest >> standards of living in Latin America. > GDP per capita in Colombia: $6300 > GDP per capita in Cuba: $2300
These two things have little to do with each other. Why would you take the GDP and divide on a per capita basis? This almost implies that all of the wealth created in (or taken out of) the country is equally distributed. Since this is not the case, by a long shot, I wonder why you would divide GDP by population, since doing that has no connection to anything in existence. The billions of dollars in oil that Occidental pumps out of Colombia every year is applied to GDP, but how much of that do Colombian peasants see of that? Very little, if anything, a lot of it goes to buy the guns and pay for the troops that stomp through their villages, which hardly increases their "standard of living", it decreases it in my opinion. It seems to me the wages paid to people would have more of a connection to their living condition.
According to the World Bank, which is hardly biased against Colombia for Cuba, the average Cuban female lives 5 years longer than the average Colombian female, and the average Cuban male outlives the average Colombian male by 7 years. 93% of Cubans have access to safe water compared to 63% of Colombians, the adult illiteracy rate is higher in Colombia than Cuba, the average Cuban gets to use more electricty, a higher percentage of Cubans have better sanitation, by virtually every scale Cubans are better off than Colombians. As I said several times, I never said Cuba was not authoritarian or that it didn't have substantive problems, I just wonder why it is the Latin American country whose foibles are always pointed out. And if you really want to see poverty, look at Guatemala, whose democratically elected government the CIA helped overthrow in 1954, and whose people were kept down, with the support of the US elite over the past decades - as late as 1998 the Catholic bishop who had been a voice for human rights there was killed.
Also as far as Colombia's government - the government declared a "state of emergency" a few months ago to allow for rule by decree and the restriction of civil liberties. The government can "restrict personal movement, detain people for suspicion with no evidence, conduct warrantless searches and wiretaps, and limit press freedom." This is also a country where in 1958, left wing political parties were banned in the government you seem to love so much - yes, great democracy, although you can only vote for the right wing. This lasted until 1974 when some cracks began to open up, M-19 becoming a legal party in 1989, but political activity is still restricted and candidates often wind up dead.
"[Chavez?] You mean the guy who extended the length of presidential terms after he got himself elected president? Yeah, real bastion of morality and democracy there..."
You conveniently neglect to mention that the new constitution was electorally approved by large margins and that Chavez was re-elected under the new constitution.
It's logical that if I spend what comes in, or even save a little, and then my wages decrease, and I continue to spend as if my wages didn't, that I would begin going into debt. This is reality. You say it is because expectations are growing faster than wages. But wages aren't growing, they're falling. In a way what you are saying is true, people's expectations are above the reality, people are acting like it's the golden era of American life, thirty years ago, when the reality is things are economically worse for workers and that their expectations have remained constant while the underlying reality, eg. their actual wages, has fallen.
As far as your list of technological improvements - well, cheap long distance telephone calls it seems to be more to do with de-monopolization by Bell/AT&T, but take television sets. It is true you can get a 20" set for the price of what say a 15" set was thirty years ago. But if one looks at the necessities of the 62-90% (depending on the surveyers point of view) of Americans who are blue collar workers, there are staples like rent, food, transportation and so forth, and then all those electronic goodies are icing on the cake. Well over the past thirty years rents have skyrocketed in relation to the rest of inflation, so the cost of living is a much larger expense in blue collar workers budget than thirty years ago. With declining wages and higher rents, the majority of Americans have less to spend on the newly invented electronic goodies than they did a generation ago.
I'm not sure how the decline in the nummber of workers getting a pension fits into the "massive expansion of benefits over the last 30 years". More importantly, if one looks at the productivity increases over the past 30 years, and then compares them to real wages, which are lower than they were thirty years ago, I think the data, and the natural reaction of people to the idea that their wages have gone down in the US because people have more benefits such as bigger pensions to more people sounds and is false. The reality is that the percentage of money going to the worker who creates wealth has decreased enormously, which the percentage of money going to the owner who expropriates the wealth that worker creates has increased enormously.
I'm an American, please don't lump me in with whatever you believe and talk about the "USA" since I am a part of the "USA" as well. American foreign policy is dictated by the rich in the US who own foreign assets, please don't act like every American is behind their imperialism. The US army has been occupying the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia for over a decade which is the reason that the Muslim extremeists (sic) stated that they attacked US military targets like the Pentagon, as well as the people who give them marching orders, e.g. Wall Street. Their "extremeist" position is they don't want American soldiers marching around their country, just as Americans presumably wouldn't want Saudi Arabian military bases dotting the United States
As far as your concern about Muslim extremeists (sic) getting Ricin and Anthrax and presumably Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", you can read in USA Today where Hussein got those weapons - straight from the American government.
"Americans are rich, spoiled and insulated.[...]Of course, your 'oppression' is worse than any generation come before, but alas, no one understands."
Well, I won't dispute that other countries perceive the US as insulated compared to themselves, which probably has some truth to it. As far as being oppressed worse than previous generations, well - thirty years constitutes a generation. How does the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US compare to what it was thirty years ago? It's lower, people make less per hour than they did a generation ago. To maintain the living standards of a generation ago with lower pay, household debt has increased, from 65% of post-tax income to over 100%. Hours worked has also increased, surpassing Japan, with over 100 more hours per year than thirty years ago. So your desire to see this generation of American workers poorer, more debt-burdened, paid less and working more has already come true.
Like when, like in the 1950's when the leaders of the Communist Party in the US was thrown in jail because he committed the crime, according to the judge, of preaching what Karl Marx said? Along with a bunch of other communists at that time? Not to mention the ones who were denied work for their beliefs, a list of whom were kept in lists like "Red Channels" by ex-FBI men with close ties to the government?
The US has a a very good record on freedom of speech though, relative to other countries. Speech is not the only freedom though and the US has totalitarian aspects undreamable in other industrialized countries. Case in point: Bush ordered dockworkers on the West Coast back to work by virtue of Taft-Hartley act. The Taft-Hartley act was called the "slave labor" act back in the 1950's because it FORCES people to work against their will. Employers can lay people off as they want, but workers are not allowed to stop working. Labor laws in the United States are frightening, and frankly they are pretty close to a totalitarian country.
I find the choices of countries that are "authoritarian" odd. Every country in the world is authoritarian to some extent, so at that point countries become authoritarian relative to one another. Cuba is called authoritarian, although Colombia is not. Unsurprisingly, Cuba is a small country that has embarrassed the leaders of the United States a great deal, from the New Years revolution of 1959 to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Mariel boatlift to it's offer in 2000 to mediate the US elections. And there's no doubt that it has a high degree of authoritarianism - but relative to the rest of Latin America I would ask if it is so much more so than virtually every other Latin American country. In Colombia, hundreds of union activists are killed every year by death squads - in Brazil, death squads roam city streets at night killing homeless children. And the average Cuban has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Of course, US corporate media constantly puts Cuba under a microscope, and finds some real problems, but it seems odd to me that the only Latin American country found fault with is one US rulers have problems with, despite the fact that there are many countries in Latin America which are much worse.
And again in terms of small countries which have embarrassed the US - Vietnam is another example. It's almost beyond belief that a US-funded study would call Vietnam's government authoritarian. What would they call the puppet government they tried to prop up from the 1950's on, where memoes and even Eisenhower's memoirs say the US leaders didn't want an election in Vietnam because they knew the anti-colonialist/imperialist candidates would win? And before that the Western leaders (US, France, England etc.) were trying to keep it a French colony.
I'm tired of having the faults of only the countries who US leadership feels is not to their liking at the moment pointed out. I am an American, but I often think leaders who are criticized in the corporate press (Chavez, Lula) are better people than the ones glossed over. I find more common cause with the working class people like me in these countries than I do with the owners of the press and elite of my own country frankly. As the Bible says, check out the log in your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's.
"I would like to think that I can leave the fruits of my labor to my children. I earned it and I should be able to do with as I wish."
This is not reality however. First of all, the very rich own most of the capital, at least according to the Federal Reserve (the link of which is posted above), so it pertains to them mostly. Where does an heir currently get his money? Well, I go to work and create wealth, say I bang $5 pieces of wood together in a factory and make $30 tables out of them. My work creates $25 of wealth. I get $15 of that in wages, and $10 of that wealth I created goes to some heir who owns a mutual fund that has stock in the company that owns the factory which the heir is probably unaware of it's existence. The patriarch you refer to is six feet under and being fed on worms to use the other fellows phraseology, the current reality is that the wealth is not coming from the work of some ancestor, but is being taken from the work of someone currently working and creating wealth. I'm less concerned of this being "wrong" or "right" than I am of stating what the situation is, what the economic data is, and so forth. The dead ancestor is not in the picture any more, what remains is one person who works and creates wealth, and another who parasitically takes wealth off the other, while doing no work of his own.
Then you say "You seem to be missing a big thing here. You can change all of these things you are complaining about. It's a fairly simple process. Become a CEO. Become a shareholder. Become one of the people you seem to villify with class warfare at every turn. I have a feeling you'll think differently when you get there". Again, you are looking at this at an individual level while I am describing the big picture, which is apples and oranges. What I am saying is that the big economic picture is bad, especially for workers, one being that while the employers are well-organized in the ITAA and whatnot, the workers are barely organized at all. When I speak of the macro-economic picture you begin questioning whether I, individually, want higher wages or not. Well, this is the oldest debating trick in the world. My motivations and whatnot have very little to do with the macroeconomic picture, much of it I learned from other people who researched it, perhaps you should ask them about "becoming a CEO" or whatever since I'm simply relaying what I have learned from them. What you are saying sounds a lot like the pep talks and Horatio Algers where CEO's blow smoke up their workers asses once in a while. I can assure you that the lawyyers and managers at the IT companies that fund the ITAA do not sit around and talk about working hard and all this bullshit, they are working on changing the laws to benefit them financially. When IT workers organize to counter this they here a lot of BS from people who have watched one too many Anthony Robbins seminars. This is a wallet and pocketbook issue, not an opportunity for you to boast hubris and that you're your bosses pet.
"You see, I don't make alot of money." Perhaps if you learned English better and realized "a lot" is two words you might.
As far as entitlement, having to work for it, earning it, not resting etc., there is a huge class of people like this in the USA. They are the company owners. If you look at the Forbes 400 richest Americans, as UFE did a few years back 43.35% of them inherited their way directly onto the list (with the other 56.65% inheriting up to $300 million). The workers in a company create all the wealth, the owners and shareholders do not do any work, they simply take the wealth created by the workers as an entitlement, not working for it, earning it, and resting while doing it. According to the federal reserve, 42.2% of all stock is owned by the richest 1% of Americans, with the poorest 90% of Americans owning only 15.6% of it.
Perhaps the difference in approach is you are only looking at your only situation and I am looking at a bigger picture. Over the past thirty years according to the US government Bureaur of Labor Standards, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage fell. Workers make less today in the US than they did thirty years ago. Go to the BLS site and look it up. American workers work over 100 more hours per year now than thirty years ago. During this time there has been enormous productivity gains, which means workers are more skilled and creating more wealth per hour. How much of this did workers get? Nothing. Nada. Zip. All of the self-improvement they did had absolutely 0 benefit to them, in fact, since wages dropped, they were actually punished for this.
The reality is that if over the past thirty years productivity boomed, which it did, but inflation-adjusted wages fell, which they did, then all of that improvement has not benefited American workers at all. They're actually worse off - not because they're more skilled but because they weren't as well-organized as the owners and thus were not able to share in any of those benefits. Instead they are running scared, repeating the bosses mantra that they should be running scared, increasing productivity even MORE. They have to compete with each other to work faster and faster and do more. Of course, this is borne out of a tech industry with no competition - where ENIAC and Crays and ARPAnet (the Internet) were funded by government to defense contractors. The owners don't have to compete, only workers have to compete, with each other, to make their boss more money, with no benefit to themselves except that they won't lose their seat when the music stops in this round of musical chairs. I'm sorry, I just don't buy into this submissive, running scared mentality.
First of all we're not all programmers (I'm not). The jobs of sysadmins and network admins is going nowhere soon. Network connections to India and China are pathetic, never mind the great firewall of China that would have to be contended with. And the network connections are necessary not just for the Internet but for Fortune 500 companies as well - will Wall Street trading be done in India? No.
Norm Matloff gives a very detailed analysis of why the fear of jobs leaving is bogus.
Low GDP growth? Europe's GDP growth has been WAY over the US's GDP growth for the last few decades. You are really talking out of your ass. This is a fact that is easily proved as nonesense, everything else you say is nonsense as well. Unions have virtually no power in the United States, which is why workers in Europe have been living the high life for decades while dorks sit in their cubicles until 10PM, having their wages undercut by H1-Bs and then they go home and get beeped at 1AM and go running back to fix something that went wrong. Very sad.
Industry wages have fallen for the first time in a decade recently. I would call that my livelihood being dragged down.
I feel sorry for the socially retarded Farscape marathon watching dorks whose only shred of self-respect is that they are in their minds a "high-achieving" genius programmer. This profession is awash in unkempt dorks who think they're a better programmer than most of the other unkempt dorks they work with. Most salesmen or whatnot just take the higher salary for their skills and be done with it, but since this is the only piece of self-respect for these losers with no social lives, they need to maintain their self-delusion that they are special, even if it means their so-called profession's wages get cremated.
A union means a majority of workers somewhere agreeing to bargain collectively. It is not a seperate entity from the workers, it IS the workers at a company. They can join a national union if they want to, or not, or can affiliate with some unaffiliated locals, or whatever they want to do. You're speaking as if a union was alien to workers. A union is the workers, and the decisions they democratically make. As far as members fees, they are determined by the membership. If you are unaffiliated, it is determined solely by you and the people you work with.
In the United States, "business unions" were encouraged throughout history when labor unrest grew. Business unions are what you are talking about - a bureaucracy that doesn't care about much aside from members fees. These unions were the ones that were praised by business during periods of labor unrest because management would rather have workers at those crappy unions then at militant rank-and-file unions. The militant unions run by the rank and file would be called radicals, communists, anarchists, whatever. Anyone who has read labor history knows what a joke what you are saying is, management does everything in it's power to try and favor corrupt lazy unions over militant rank-and-file unions, and then if a union that only cares about dues comes along, they complain about that which they have spent years trying to get. What a joke.
I agree, the H1-B law is being ever-changed, but there are and have been stipulations in the law that allow employers to abuse workers by being a threat to green card applications and so on. I am in favor of these things being changed. I also don't understand why H1-Bs like the current cap - they're already here, what do they care if the cap is lowered? It means less H1-Bs competing for a green card with them.
If this is xenophobia, then how come the borders aren't opened up so anyone can come in, how come it is only people who can come in to destroy the American IT profession? The law was lobbied with millions of dollars by Microsoft, IBM and Intel, was it because they are tolerant, benevolent, magnanimous do-gooders? Give me a God-damn break, *American* IT workers are concerned about this because it affects their wallet. Every other profession in the world is organized to some degree (lawyers - ABA, actors - SAG, doctors - AMA). You are not a profession unless you're organized, which is why this so-called profession is going to be like the blue-collar unionized auto-workers that anti-union bozos so despise soon.
I love how when someone mentions H1-Bs, someone says being against the high caps is "bigotry" or "racism".
The H1-B cap was pushed up to 195,000 due to lobbying in the press and Congress by the ITAA. The ITAA is financed by Microsoft, IBM and Intel. Why did they pass this law, how do they justify the millions in expenses to their shareholders? Are they doing it for benevolent reasons, out of the goodness of their corporate structures heart? Or is it for financial reasons? Yet when someone thinks the recent law they changed pushed the number up to high, they're not concerned that the number is so high it is driving up IT unemployment and driving down wages, they're just racist bigots. How about we change the H1-B visa so it's not just people hurting the IT profession allowed in but anybody. Then it's no more bigotry, right? What a lot of BS.
Well it's great that "[you] wouldn't entertain, even for a second, the idea of paying them less than Americans" since this is the law that you are supposed to follow anyway, but that one or two people like you pays the prevailing wage, while for the rest of the industry the law is not followed, which even the government reports (INS, Department of Labor) plus academic studies and even the business press (Forbes and Wall Street Journal) admit.
The law says they have to be paid the prevailing wage, but the law has no teeth, so they aren't, and they in simple supply and demand, plus witht he green card applications and other things that make them vulnerable, put their wages down and have helped drag our wage down, which is why IT wages have fallen for the first time in a decade recently.
What kind of workers? System administrators? Network administrators working with Ciscos? Anyone in these fields long enough knows how silly the idea that these jobs will get farmed out soon is. Hell, in some cities PNAP's have trouble getting outside of one BUILDING, never mind T-3's and whatnot going to India or through the great firewall of China. How much you have to worry about this depends on your job - as a sysadmin, I have very little to worry about this, and very much to worry about H1-Bs.
Of course people can listen to your idea and cringe like babies at the thought of jobs moving elsewhere and bending over and taking whatever is given them. Having known many IT workers who were probably dorks who were beaten up through high school, it doesn't surprise me they carry this wimpy attitude into adulthood.
Norm Matloff responds to your question in a very detailed manner, as well as other H1-B questions for anyone interested.
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A radical union activist is someone who would eventually like to see the means of production, that is, all capital, collectively owned by the people who work with it (not by the people who don't work and take wealth from the people who work with capital). A hacker is similar - they are people who seize the means of production for their own uses, without the permission of the owners of capital. So would a manager hire a hacker if aware of that fact? Usually not, it would be against their function to. Nonetheless, I am well aware of many hackers or ex-hackers, and radical union activists being employed by corporations. They just keep their activities which clash with the desires of the owners close to their chest, as during this period of history, it is the idle classes who have the power in this society.
The meaning of words have always been used by the powerful to try to make their opponents look bad...vandals, barbarians, these words today are nouns to describe anti-social behavior, but originally they were used to describe actual European countries or tribes, with the old literal meanings actually being "foreigners" or "wandering [tribe]". In the same manner, the Luddites are said to be crazy anti-technology peasants from England in the early 19th century. But they weren't. They were workers in Dickensian England, a place where children were chained to workbenches for 14 hours a day, and beaten when they fell asleep. You can read the old English parliament records where their is a debate between conservatives and liberals over whether children are able to work 14+ hours a day (conservative) or are only capable of 12 hour days (liberals). The Luddites were in this period, at a time where after centuries, enclosure of the commons had finally been successful for it's advocates, forcing people into wage-labor, yet once that came about suddenly machines sprung up which did away with the crafts guilds and began driving down wages and driving people out of work. Of course it would behoove the people profitting from this system then to not say "these people are upset because we have, after centuries of effort, enclosed the commons, forcing them to be wage laborers in the city, and now we have begun to drive down their wages as we lay them off left and right, and since the commons are now enclosed they have no farms to go back to". They say instead "they do not like new technology, they are backwards". It says a lot about our society that we remember the Luddites not as people who suffered under an encroaching empire and gentry, but as dump, backwards, ignorant peasants supposedly scared of what was termed progress. Especially when people are being told that anyone who is nervous about the "code red" totalitarian-type government some people seem to want to build, which they say is necessary to fight terrorists, a label which already seems to be continually applied to more and more people in an ever-expanding manner, to the point where it will eventually mean anybody who doesn't think the world should be run by the
I agree. This is a protocol that is going to die a quick death. Instead of creating a great new protocol, he just created yet another p2p protocol (there are hundreds of other ones), but he figured out that if he stuck the Gnutella name on it, he could get lots of free publicity from sites like Slashdot. This way it wouldn't have to be judged on it's merits. Hell, I just developed Gnutella 3 which outdates Gnutella 2, come look at my site. No one minds he wrote his own protocol, but he quite uncreatively comes out of nowhere and calls his new protocol Gnutella 2. Problem is, virtually every Gnutella developer, myself included, doesn't buy into it. And who the hell else is going to develop for it - this is dead in the water. You can barely get enough developers developing on good protocols like Gnutella and Freenet. Also, this guy thre a temper tantrum and said that he was keeping the protocols of Gnutella 2 "secret", but I guess he changed his mind. Hey everybody, come visit my website, Slashdot 2.
I can go on a Solaris box and find out all kinds of information out of the box. prtconf, sysdef...I can check on the temperatures of boards out of the box...this stuff can be done on Linux but it is just easier and out of the box on all Solarises.
Trying to prove their ideas "scientifically" is an idea that has been taken up by the far left and the far right in the past, and many of the scientific conclusions of both left and right have over time been shown to be ridiculous. On the left you have the Marxist tradition of "scientific socialism" that "scientifically proves" that there is a dialectically material force of history that will lead to the unstoppable triumph of communism. On the right you have eugenics, the Bell Curve, and "science" proving socially darwinistic ideas, and that human behavior is genetically determined. These ideas, both the scientific socialist and eugenic science ideas were very popular in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but time has shown massive gaps in both of these body of ideas, and they both also lead to some extent to the massive exterminations carried out under Hitler and Stalin. But aside from the toll of ideas, is the simple fact that I think time has shown that many of these so-called scientific ideas have a lot of holes in them.
When a scientist points his telescope at the sky, it doesn't really have much of a social effect on earth nowadays (although centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy for touting the Copernican system, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his works on Copernican astronomy). When the lens is pointed at humans however, especially human behavior, you are sure that there will be plenty of people grabbing "scientific" research and using it to push their social agendas. So much so, that I have an enormous amount of skepticism about virtually any "scientific" model of human behavior, including psychiatry and psychology. That someone has "scientific" proof of some aspect of human behavior, in this case, that it's predetermined by genetics, really has to be taken with a grain of salt. As do anthropological and sociological studies that show humans are generally better off cooperating and working for the greater good (social anarchism) as opposed to competing (capitalism). These kind of ideas usually break down into left wing and right wing people either supporting or disputing the theories, breaking down among political lines, and so on and so forth, I can't think of anything more unscientific than that. That it's been scientifically proven that "our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes" is the epitomy of what sounds like political propaganda - the nurture versus nature debate is an ancient philosophical debate, and from my discussions with scientists who know more about the genome project than I do, they are barely able to use the information they have cataloged to solve medical problems (despite the hype - which is needed for funding), never mind have scientifically set in stone the answer to a fundamental philosophical question about human nature. I take this news with a huge grain of salt.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with chess or computer chess, I'll explain how this works...
A chess game can be broken into three parts, the opening, the middle game, and the endgame.
Computers play the endgame *perfectly*. They do not make mistakes, they play perfectly. And they keep getting better. Originally, they played perfectly when 3 pieces were left on the board. Then 4. Then 5. Then 6. Their pefect playing keeps heading more and more towards the middle of the game.
Then we get to what they play second-best - openings. Computers play the opening as well as any opening ever played. They have every opening ever played by a top player in a "book", and with the generally agreed opinions of the top players what the best opening moves are. One advantage of the computer is it has all of this "memorized" in it's book within massive databases, whereas for a human it's difficult to retain this all, especially in an up-to-date manner. The one advantage a human player has here is he can discover a NEW opening variation, while the computer can't, or at least it won't under these circumstances. But finding new good variations is very difficult, and once one is played, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. So it's a very time-consuming thing to search for which can only be used once to great effect because it's a surprise.
The middle game is where the human player, if he or she is very good, has the most advantage over a computer. Tactically, the computer can wipe the floor with any human player. But human's can strategize better than computers. It's to the human's advantage to play in certain ways against the computer - such as to keep the game "closed up", to advance pawns towards the queening square and so forth. In this case, the computer often can't see the forest for the trees, what would be obvious to even a lower-rated human the computer can not comprehend.
So middle game strategy (and to a lesser extent, new opening variations) is where humans still have the advantage. Kasparov has always used this to the hilt. There are some grandmasters like Yasser Seirawan who make a specialty out of beating computers as well (one mark against Seirawan is thar his books on chess are printed by Microsoft Press...yech). There is material out there on the net on how to beat computers as well. But you have to be a really good player to even get near that level - it takes a lot of study before you could even begin approaching that.
Well, I'll describe how this works on Gnutella, since that's the one I know - let's say you download a file from 4 sources which are checksummed, so the faker is 25% of that download time. And chances are, since tigertree hashes can be done, and overlapping verifications, and so forth, that it probably won't have to go through that whole 25% to get that 1/4 of the file from that one person. But even if it does - all you've done is added 25% more to the download time of someone who will get the file. Not that big of a deal. That's all possible now on Gnutella - well, tigertree isn't all there yet, but the overlap checking and full hashing is, and tigertree will be prolific soon enough. And the next generation can have forms of trust and free association that's even better.
>> standards of living in Latin America.
> GDP per capita in Colombia: $6300
> GDP per capita in Cuba: $2300
These two things have little to do with each other. Why would you take the GDP and divide on a per capita basis? This almost implies that all of the wealth created in (or taken out of) the country is equally distributed. Since this is not the case, by a long shot, I wonder why you would divide GDP by population, since doing that has no connection to anything in existence. The billions of dollars in oil that Occidental pumps out of Colombia every year is applied to GDP, but how much of that do Colombian peasants see of that? Very little, if anything, a lot of it goes to buy the guns and pay for the troops that stomp through their villages, which hardly increases their "standard of living", it decreases it in my opinion. It seems to me the wages paid to people would have more of a connection to their living condition.
According to the World Bank, which is hardly biased against Colombia for Cuba, the average Cuban female lives 5 years longer than the average Colombian female, and the average Cuban male outlives the average Colombian male by 7 years. 93% of Cubans have access to safe water compared to 63% of Colombians, the adult illiteracy rate is higher in Colombia than Cuba, the average Cuban gets to use more electricty, a higher percentage of Cubans have better sanitation, by virtually every scale Cubans are better off than Colombians. As I said several times, I never said Cuba was not authoritarian or that it didn't have substantive problems, I just wonder why it is the Latin American country whose foibles are always pointed out. And if you really want to see poverty, look at Guatemala, whose democratically elected government the CIA helped overthrow in 1954, and whose people were kept down, with the support of the US elite over the past decades - as late as 1998 the Catholic bishop who had been a voice for human rights there was killed.
Also as far as Colombia's government - the government declared a "state of emergency" a few months ago to allow for rule by decree and the restriction of civil liberties. The government can "restrict personal movement, detain people for suspicion with no evidence, conduct warrantless searches and wiretaps, and limit press freedom." This is also a country where in 1958, left wing political parties were banned in the government you seem to love so much - yes, great democracy, although you can only vote for the right wing. This lasted until 1974 when some cracks began to open up, M-19 becoming a legal party in 1989, but political activity is still restricted and candidates often wind up dead.
"[Chavez?] You mean the guy who extended the length of presidential terms after he got himself elected president? Yeah, real bastion of morality and democracy there..."
You conveniently neglect to mention that the new constitution was electorally approved by large margins and that Chavez was re-elected under the new constitution.
As far as your list of technological improvements - well, cheap long distance telephone calls it seems to be more to do with de-monopolization by Bell/AT&T, but take television sets. It is true you can get a 20" set for the price of what say a 15" set was thirty years ago. But if one looks at the necessities of the 62-90% (depending on the surveyers point of view) of Americans who are blue collar workers, there are staples like rent, food, transportation and so forth, and then all those electronic goodies are icing on the cake. Well over the past thirty years rents have skyrocketed in relation to the rest of inflation, so the cost of living is a much larger expense in blue collar workers budget than thirty years ago. With declining wages and higher rents, the majority of Americans have less to spend on the newly invented electronic goodies than they did a generation ago.
I'm not sure how the decline in the nummber of workers getting a pension fits into the "massive expansion of benefits over the last 30 years". More importantly, if one looks at the productivity increases over the past 30 years, and then compares them to real wages, which are lower than they were thirty years ago, I think the data, and the natural reaction of people to the idea that their wages have gone down in the US because people have more benefits such as bigger pensions to more people sounds and is false. The reality is that the percentage of money going to the worker who creates wealth has decreased enormously, which the percentage of money going to the owner who expropriates the wealth that worker creates has increased enormously.
As far as your concern about Muslim extremeists (sic) getting Ricin and Anthrax and presumably Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", you can read in USA Today where Hussein got those weapons - straight from the American government.
Well, I won't dispute that other countries perceive the US as insulated compared to themselves, which probably has some truth to it. As far as being oppressed worse than previous generations, well - thirty years constitutes a generation. How does the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US compare to what it was thirty years ago? It's lower, people make less per hour than they did a generation ago. To maintain the living standards of a generation ago with lower pay, household debt has increased, from 65% of post-tax income to over 100%. Hours worked has also increased, surpassing Japan, with over 100 more hours per year than thirty years ago. So your desire to see this generation of American workers poorer, more debt-burdened, paid less and working more has already come true.
The US has a a very good record on freedom of speech though, relative to other countries. Speech is not the only freedom though and the US has totalitarian aspects undreamable in other industrialized countries. Case in point: Bush ordered dockworkers on the West Coast back to work by virtue of Taft-Hartley act. The Taft-Hartley act was called the "slave labor" act back in the 1950's because it FORCES people to work against their will. Employers can lay people off as they want, but workers are not allowed to stop working. Labor laws in the United States are frightening, and frankly they are pretty close to a totalitarian country.
And again in terms of small countries which have embarrassed the US - Vietnam is another example. It's almost beyond belief that a US-funded study would call Vietnam's government authoritarian. What would they call the puppet government they tried to prop up from the 1950's on, where memoes and even Eisenhower's memoirs say the US leaders didn't want an election in Vietnam because they knew the anti-colonialist/imperialist candidates would win? And before that the Western leaders (US, France, England etc.) were trying to keep it a French colony.
I'm tired of having the faults of only the countries who US leadership feels is not to their liking at the moment pointed out. I am an American, but I often think leaders who are criticized in the corporate press (Chavez, Lula) are better people than the ones glossed over. I find more common cause with the working class people like me in these countries than I do with the owners of the press and elite of my own country frankly. As the Bible says, check out the log in your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's.
This is not reality however. First of all, the very rich own most of the capital, at least according to the Federal Reserve (the link of which is posted above), so it pertains to them mostly. Where does an heir currently get his money? Well, I go to work and create wealth, say I bang $5 pieces of wood together in a factory and make $30 tables out of them. My work creates $25 of wealth. I get $15 of that in wages, and $10 of that wealth I created goes to some heir who owns a mutual fund that has stock in the company that owns the factory which the heir is probably unaware of it's existence. The patriarch you refer to is six feet under and being fed on worms to use the other fellows phraseology, the current reality is that the wealth is not coming from the work of some ancestor, but is being taken from the work of someone currently working and creating wealth. I'm less concerned of this being "wrong" or "right" than I am of stating what the situation is, what the economic data is, and so forth. The dead ancestor is not in the picture any more, what remains is one person who works and creates wealth, and another who parasitically takes wealth off the other, while doing no work of his own.
Then you say "You seem to be missing a big thing here. You can change all of these things you are complaining about. It's a fairly simple process. Become a CEO. Become a shareholder. Become one of the people you seem to villify with class warfare at every turn. I have a feeling you'll think differently when you get there". Again, you are looking at this at an individual level while I am describing the big picture, which is apples and oranges. What I am saying is that the big economic picture is bad, especially for workers, one being that while the employers are well-organized in the ITAA and whatnot, the workers are barely organized at all. When I speak of the macro-economic picture you begin questioning whether I, individually, want higher wages or not. Well, this is the oldest debating trick in the world. My motivations and whatnot have very little to do with the macroeconomic picture, much of it I learned from other people who researched it, perhaps you should ask them about "becoming a CEO" or whatever since I'm simply relaying what I have learned from them. What you are saying sounds a lot like the pep talks and Horatio Algers where CEO's blow smoke up their workers asses once in a while. I can assure you that the lawyyers and managers at the IT companies that fund the ITAA do not sit around and talk about working hard and all this bullshit, they are working on changing the laws to benefit them financially. When IT workers organize to counter this they here a lot of BS from people who have watched one too many Anthony Robbins seminars. This is a wallet and pocketbook issue, not an opportunity for you to boast hubris and that you're your bosses pet.
As far as entitlement, having to work for it, earning it, not resting etc., there is a huge class of people like this in the USA. They are the company owners. If you look at the Forbes 400 richest Americans, as UFE did a few years back 43.35% of them inherited their way directly onto the list (with the other 56.65% inheriting up to $300 million). The workers in a company create all the wealth, the owners and shareholders do not do any work, they simply take the wealth created by the workers as an entitlement, not working for it, earning it, and resting while doing it. According to the federal reserve, 42.2% of all stock is owned by the richest 1% of Americans, with the poorest 90% of Americans owning only 15.6% of it.
Perhaps the difference in approach is you are only looking at your only situation and I am looking at a bigger picture. Over the past thirty years according to the US government Bureaur of Labor Standards, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage fell. Workers make less today in the US than they did thirty years ago. Go to the BLS site and look it up. American workers work over 100 more hours per year now than thirty years ago. During this time there has been enormous productivity gains, which means workers are more skilled and creating more wealth per hour. How much of this did workers get? Nothing. Nada. Zip. All of the self-improvement they did had absolutely 0 benefit to them, in fact, since wages dropped, they were actually punished for this.
The reality is that if over the past thirty years productivity boomed, which it did, but inflation-adjusted wages fell, which they did, then all of that improvement has not benefited American workers at all. They're actually worse off - not because they're more skilled but because they weren't as well-organized as the owners and thus were not able to share in any of those benefits. Instead they are running scared, repeating the bosses mantra that they should be running scared, increasing productivity even MORE. They have to compete with each other to work faster and faster and do more. Of course, this is borne out of a tech industry with no competition - where ENIAC and Crays and ARPAnet (the Internet) were funded by government to defense contractors. The owners don't have to compete, only workers have to compete, with each other, to make their boss more money, with no benefit to themselves except that they won't lose their seat when the music stops in this round of musical chairs. I'm sorry, I just don't buy into this submissive, running scared mentality.
Norm Matloff gives a very detailed analysis of why the fear of jobs leaving is bogus.
Low GDP growth? Europe's GDP growth has been WAY over the US's GDP growth for the last few decades. You are really talking out of your ass. This is a fact that is easily proved as nonesense, everything else you say is nonsense as well. Unions have virtually no power in the United States, which is why workers in Europe have been living the high life for decades while dorks sit in their cubicles until 10PM, having their wages undercut by H1-Bs and then they go home and get beeped at 1AM and go running back to fix something that went wrong. Very sad.
I feel sorry for the socially retarded Farscape marathon watching dorks whose only shred of self-respect is that they are in their minds a "high-achieving" genius programmer. This profession is awash in unkempt dorks who think they're a better programmer than most of the other unkempt dorks they work with. Most salesmen or whatnot just take the higher salary for their skills and be done with it, but since this is the only piece of self-respect for these losers with no social lives, they need to maintain their self-delusion that they are special, even if it means their so-called profession's wages get cremated.
In the United States, "business unions" were encouraged throughout history when labor unrest grew. Business unions are what you are talking about - a bureaucracy that doesn't care about much aside from members fees. These unions were the ones that were praised by business during periods of labor unrest because management would rather have workers at those crappy unions then at militant rank-and-file unions. The militant unions run by the rank and file would be called radicals, communists, anarchists, whatever. Anyone who has read labor history knows what a joke what you are saying is, management does everything in it's power to try and favor corrupt lazy unions over militant rank-and-file unions, and then if a union that only cares about dues comes along, they complain about that which they have spent years trying to get. What a joke.
I agree, the H1-B law is being ever-changed, but there are and have been stipulations in the law that allow employers to abuse workers by being a threat to green card applications and so on. I am in favor of these things being changed. I also don't understand why H1-Bs like the current cap - they're already here, what do they care if the cap is lowered? It means less H1-Bs competing for a green card with them.
If this is xenophobia, then how come the borders aren't opened up so anyone can come in, how come it is only people who can come in to destroy the American IT profession? The law was lobbied with millions of dollars by Microsoft, IBM and Intel, was it because they are tolerant, benevolent, magnanimous do-gooders? Give me a God-damn break, *American* IT workers are concerned about this because it affects their wallet. Every other profession in the world is organized to some degree (lawyers - ABA, actors - SAG, doctors - AMA). You are not a profession unless you're organized, which is why this so-called profession is going to be like the blue-collar unionized auto-workers that anti-union bozos so despise soon.
The H1-B cap was pushed up to 195,000 due to lobbying in the press and Congress by the ITAA. The ITAA is financed by Microsoft, IBM and Intel. Why did they pass this law, how do they justify the millions in expenses to their shareholders? Are they doing it for benevolent reasons, out of the goodness of their corporate structures heart? Or is it for financial reasons? Yet when someone thinks the recent law they changed pushed the number up to high, they're not concerned that the number is so high it is driving up IT unemployment and driving down wages, they're just racist bigots. How about we change the H1-B visa so it's not just people hurting the IT profession allowed in but anybody. Then it's no more bigotry, right? What a lot of BS.
The law says they have to be paid the prevailing wage, but the law has no teeth, so they aren't, and they in simple supply and demand, plus witht he green card applications and other things that make them vulnerable, put their wages down and have helped drag our wage down, which is why IT wages have fallen for the first time in a decade recently.
Of course people can listen to your idea and cringe like babies at the thought of jobs moving elsewhere and bending over and taking whatever is given them. Having known many IT workers who were probably dorks who were beaten up through high school, it doesn't surprise me they carry this wimpy attitude into adulthood. Norm Matloff responds to your question in a very detailed manner, as well as other H1-B questions for anyone interested.