I was already aware that CESO, a confederation of engineering labor unions, has been pushing against high H1-B caps and other bad legislation that hurts IT workers.
In my view, any type of organization of IT workers to fight against this stuff is good. And the AFL-CIO technical unions have been fighting for it from the beginning, and have actually been doing the type of stuff that gets results, including lobbying in Washington DC and so forth. I know people who want IT workers to organize to work on issues like this or certification but are anti-union, and not much have come out of their efforts thus far. At least they're better than people who don't want to organize at all and be "independent". The employers are of course much smarter than those people, Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. have been well-organized and well-financed for a long time, funding organizations like the ITAA to do away with overtime for IT workers (the FLSA revokation), bringing in tons of H1-B workers which even government reports admit depress wages - which is why IT wages fell for the first time in a decade recently, changing section 1706 tax laws so that IT workers have mroe difficulty contracting independently. The people running the show are more organized than anybody, funding the ITAA to the tune of millions a year, which then goes and lobbies in Washington, puts out bogus reports that even get reported on Slashdot as verity, and blitzing the rest of the press that there is a shortage of IT workers, and nowadays forever releasing papers saying there is going to be an upturn in IT right around the corner so no laws changing the H1-B visa need to be done. These socially retarded programming "geniuses" are seeing industry wages depressed in the midst of employer organization, but they are way too brilliant to become organized themselves, and thus industry wages have fallen as a result. Be smart - hook up with one of the technical unions. And if you don't want to organzie in a union, at least join a professional association funded by members (not by the employers like the IEEE is funded - which shows in how they do things).
You say "where an hour of work per week is productive enough that it can support you" is a good thing. Yes, this is a good thing, productivity is good, you are absolutely correct. But you also say that wages going down is good. This is definitely incorrect (for people who work, eg not heirs), and goes back to my thinking of how it's unfortunate that IT people know little about economics, have economic misconceptions that Economics 101 would dispel etc.
There is a pool of money that goes either to wages or profits. Productivity increases that pool each year - this is a good thing. We are all agreeing so far. OK, now depending on how you divided that up, wages can decrease, stagnate or increase. In fact, since it is growing, both profits AND wages can both increase every year. Thus, wages decreasing is bad. Wages should increase with productivity (and in my view should take a larger bite out of the profit rate).
"This is the USA. Start your own business if you don't like your current position. It's called grabbing your sack and doing something for yourself rather than having someone hand it to you."
This sounds word-for-word like the kind of spiel Amway gives at Baptist churches. Maybe you should post "Work at home, be your own boss!" flyers on lampposts.
"Otherwise, move to a Socialist country."
Well actually, the US has been unable to train engineers, which is why people educated in countries with socialist education systems (China, India) have been moving here en masse to do US IT work.
"I, for one, like it when the worker actually has to be better than everyone else, has to sell himself a little more, try harder. It's called 'getting ahead'. I don't seem to have any problem doing it and I came from nothing (no money, no inheritance, just hard work)"
You like when a worker has to be better than every other worker? So every worker has to be better than every other worker? This sounds paradoxical, maybe you see the world like a Escher sketch where everyone sits in the so-called high seat. As far as trying harder, productivity skyrocketed in the US over the past three decades, all of the extra wealth went not to the workers creating the wealth, but to the owners.
I am speaking of the profession as a whole, and you seem only focused on yourself. Well fine, but most people don't want to hear you speak about yourself, since they don't care.
Not really. They are pretty academic, and are not really focused on the overall IT worker profession. They actually do lobbying, but the main thing they seem to be concerned about is increasing government funding of scientific research. Well OK, for the segment of IT workers they are, that makes sense, but they do not reflect the overall needs of IT workers. I think IEEE-USA, USENIX/SAGE and the ACM have positive aspects, but they also have negative aspects as well. For one thing, many of them are funded by the same companies that are funding legislation that screws over IT workers in Washington. These corporate sponsors muscled the ITAA-USA into toning down legislation efforts a little bit back. These organizations have good aspects, but they are not the be-all, end-all.
Yes, their good forune is "ill gained" because the person doing the work shouldn't get the wealth I guess (according to you), it should be some heir who has never worked who deserves that money.
Over the past thirty years productivity has sky-rocketed, due to among other things, the training which you speak of - yet inflation-adjusted hourly wages have dropped. Despite being better-trained, wages are down because the owners have decided to take more, and the workers are less organized and powerful in terms of being able to say no. So it doesn't sounf like your solution works. Plus these new more eductaed workers now have less money to take home than in 1972, thus they're less able to save and become owners, throwing another monkey wrench into your grand plan.
Without the "lazy piece of shit can't-survive-in-a-free-market-because-I-suck union worker", the lazy parasite owner would starve to death. You need workers to run a factory, you don't need some heir living in another part of the country who inherited shares in the corporation and whom profits have to be sent to every month. His usefulness is akin to that of the absentee French landlord aristocrat, circa 1789. People are beholden to them as long as they want to be beholden to them. If the day comes they desire to pull that leech off their body, they will still have their jobs, and will be minus the lazy lifeblood sucker to boot.
American productivity skyrocketed in the past thirty years. What happened to US real wages? Less than they were thirty years ago. Why should people work harder if there is no financial incentive to do so - when every penny of every dollar of wealth created by extra hard work goes into someone elses pocket? There is no reason, and anyone who works for free is a sucker.
Maybe when one of the lazy parasite heirs, who is taking profit from the workers while doing nothing,
whom has demanded increased productivity which has happened to 0% benefit of anyone but themselves,
gets up and works a day in their life will I listen to their complaints about not working fast enough. Until that day, they can go fuck themselves, or their little toadie sycophants who defend them due to their natural submissive lackey nature.
This is not a new thing, things have been going slowly downhill (unless you're rich) in the US for over three decades. The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the USA is below what it was thirty years ago.
You can see nice graphs about the declining hourly wage, or get the data raw from the horses mouth -
Punch in:
1 average hourly earnings, 1982 dollars
2 005000 Total private
3 seasonally adjusted (or not, it doesn't matter)
and then on the next page put the date range as
1972-2002.
I keep hearing the same economic fallacies said over and over that I have to point this out.
I think the majority of you have a perception of wages and unemployment which is not in tune with how the economy is and how economists see things - how yous say it works is not how it works, and almost all of the economist specialists who know how these things work will agree
First off regarding not being employed - in a free capitalist market, not being employed is ALWAYS the choice of the employed person. 100% of IT workers right now can be employed if we want to. The thing is, many do not want to work for any wage. The economic reality is, if everyone not working right now wanted an IT job for minimum wage, they could get one almost instantly. Of course, it would be almost impossible to live on a part-time minimum wage, but every unemployed IT person can have a job. I keep hearing that unemployed IT people who according to the posters have poor/medium skills get fired and they can't get employed now. Well, they can get employed, they just choose not to, often for rational reasons (eg. can't live on part-time minumum wage).
This is economics 101...everyone can get a job, it just might literally be not enough to live on, like minium wage...so once we have that settles we have employed people and people desiring not to work the offered wage. These people actually help keep the offered wage high, supply and demand shows if they all decided to work industry wages would fall. So the problem is not with employment, unemployment and so forth it is all about wages. Even someone virtually broke would pay people a penny a week to do their chores for them. The problem is not employment it is wages
That said, industry wages went down for the first time in a decade recently. A lot of people here nod in approval like this "should" happen, but they ignore the contributing factors like the ITAA's pushing of H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA, section 1706 etc. I wonder how low they think wages "should" fall before they start deciding to do something about it, by which point it will probably be too late, since the ITAA was well-organized already on this years ago.
Stop talking this economic crap like you know what you're talking about! Pick up an economics book and read. People are unemployed because they choose not to except the wages offered. This is economics 101. You people have misperceptions about how economics works and are making poor economic decisions because of it and are spreading your incorrect economic ideas to others. If we had more people joining the fledgling IT organizations which put out correct economic analysis, this wouldn't be happening.
You say unions raise the prices of products. Well let's see, the price that goes into products goes to three things - raw needed materials (servers if you're a sysadmin, pieces of wood if you're a carpenter), wages and profits. Well, you can't do much about needing servers, so the remaining money will go to either wages or profit. So according to tommck, who is to blame for this extra expense over raw materials? Well, not the lazy heir who does no work, sitting on his ass in Greenwich, Connecticut, extracting billions of dollars a year in profit from some corporations products. No, it's the people who do all the work - it's THEIR fault products are so high. Especially if they're unionized which means the tug-of-war over created value between the workers and owners is going in the workers favor.
Sycophants like tommck will never say "the lazy parasite owners profit increases the price of a product", he will always blame the people who actually do the work for everything.
Yes unions are the cause of inefficiency! In any company, profits from the wealth created is sent off to heirs who often don't even know the company they own part of is in a mutual fund they own - is this efficent? Is having to import over one million H1-Bs to the USA because India and China can train engineers but the US can't efficient?
Unions are plenty efficient for the people who work for a living - union workers on average make more than non-union workers in their industries. The only inefficiency is in the eyes of the owners. If they want efficiency, those heirs should get off their lazy asses and work for one day in their life.
"Don't forget what happens to union-heavy industries in a downturn."
The same thing that happens to non-union industries in a downturn? The difference in a union industry is the union must be consulted, severance pay negotiated and so forth. Also, the people who just joined the company are the ones most likely to be the ones laid off.
"Forget job security, defined skill sets and straight career paths. This uncertainty is here to stay."
Well, in the US, over the past thirty years hours worked have gone up (over 100 extra hours per year), inflation-adjusted per hour wages have actually fallen if you can believe that (bls.gov will show you), debt has skyrocketed etc. So you might as well add in "forget workload not getting larger every year, forget overtime pay, forget wages going down forever etc." Forget pensions, forget social security, forget having a life...and so on and so on.
Well sorry, but I don't want to "forget" all of these things. And I'm sorry but I don't buy into the idea that I have to sit passively and stoically accept that I am going to get fucked in the ass. I guess there are a lot of passive-agressive socially retarted Farscape marathon-watching dorks in the industry who will, but not I. The message you are giving is that of the owners, transmitted through the bosses to you. I guess some people latch on to the "be a docile sheep - we've decided things will just get worse, and worse and worse for you each year, so sit back and take it" idea that they are promulgating, but I don't. Plenty of people are organizing to push against this, and this resistance has been, does, and will have an effect. So while a lot of you will be "forgetting" that there was a time that people didn't have to ask how high when told to jump, some of us will be organizing and hopefully successfully countering this.
Not that I advocate a union, but when someone does the skeptics reply no because we are a "profession". Are we? Every profession I know has a professional association. Lawyers have the ABA, doctors have the AMA and so forth. Where is our professional association? (You could reply the IEEE, but only if you were answering the question comically). If we do not have a serious professional association, of one sort or another, we are not a profession. Doctors and lawyers have associations, even janitors have the SEIU, what do we have?
The attitude towards recent changes in employment and wages have been massively passive-aggressiveness. The things done during the 1990's to help sow the seeds of derailing the profession, like the ITAA's legislative (and PR) lobbying, were not met with and now that things are bad many people simply want to walk into some other profession, where, for less pay and possibly much self-financed education, they will be walked all over by the plutocrats in that profession as well.
Some IT people still say "My wages are the same, I have a job, everything is fine except $100k HTML coders are laid off, they're cutting the chaff from the wheat, I'm *happy* this is happening". Well, these people have a very poor view of economics usually. For one thing, in a market economy, unemployment is ALWAYS the decision of the unemployed person (although the minimum wage creates an exception when it cancels a few potential less-than-minimum-wage jobs). This makes rational sense many times though, it is often better to collect unemployment and look for a decent paying job than to get paid part-time minimum wage, leaving you unable to pay for rent, food etc. Another thing about the ridiculousness of this idea by some IT workers is that surveys show wages recently dropped industry-wide - even if you feel you will always be employed, which anyone who will take any wage WILL be (unless it goes under minimum wage), can you explain why wages going down is a good thing? People talk about it like it's the weather "well, it was inevitable wages would go down". Like some alien on another planet pulls the levers of the economy and regulates the IT profession. People truly interested in economics and how they pertain to the IT labor market, and who read and study this will not see these things as alien, like barbarians who saw thunder and said it must be gods who made it since they had no understanding of it.
Anyhow, what's the solution? The solution is organization, be it an association, a union, a guild, an advocacy group, whatever. What is needed is about 2% of the profession to be actively involved in organizing, educating, fighting against bad legislation (like H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA exemptions only for IT workers, section 1706 of the IRS tax code pertaining to IT consultants etc.) which is pushed through Congress by the ITAA, which is paid to do so by IBM, Intel, Microsoft etc. You need 2% of IT workers working on this stuff, and majority support of IT workers for this stuff. I say 2% and majority because that's what a survey of sociological studies says is the percentages necessary to have something successful get done.
Do these organizations have to be created out of thin air? No - these organizations already exist, the forums for education and coordination already exist and so on, they just need more critical mass, more people coming on board. People already have compiled all the information you want to know about, say, the H1-B visa issue, you just have to look for it. Campaigns are already working on the issue, you just have to join them. And with more support they will have more successes. Or you can turn tail and run when kicked to another profession, where you will be treated exactly the same way.
I am developing a Gnutella client currently, and have been following this on the GDF, although not that closely
First of all, if this is "open" (free) versus "closed" (commercial), WHERE is the Gnutella 2 specification? "It's coming". I mean that's one of the oldest notions in the free software community, it is NOT open source (or protocol) until the source (or protocol) is actually open! When (if) the specs come out, I'll believe it.
Currently the Gnutella "1" (aka v0.6) specs are published, and functioning in many clients, and the Gnutella 2 protocol is not to be found anywhere. It's true that Shareaza does not (yet) have ads and Limewire and Bearshare do, but Shareaza's source is closed, unlike Limewire's. Calling Shareaza open and free and Limewire closed and commercial is kind of silly, especially since Shareaza source is closed and Shareaza G2 protocol is (currently) closed.
Second of all, Gnutella is a coalition of the most popular Gnutella developers - Limewire, Bearshare, Gnucleus, Xolox, GTK-Gnutella, Morpheus (sort of) and so forth. Currently, they call the Gnutella version they have version 0.6. Along comes a new client Shareaza, and they try to hijack the Gnutella name and call it "Gnutella 2".
I hope Mike comes to his senses. Shareaza is a decent p2p client, and has been a positive thing for Gnutella, and he can do what he wants, but I am uninterested in any new protocol until protocol specifications are published, and trying to seize the Gnutella name is kind of silly as well, especially since the protocol he wrote (and has yet to share specifications of) is so radically different than Gnutella. He can switch to his new protocol if he wants, but he should stop calling it an open protocol until he publishes the specifications, and he should consider a name aside from "Gnutella 2".
I should say as a caveat that Wolff ran one of the original dot bombs, Wolff New Media, which managed to run itself into the ground BEFORE 2000. I've heard from several people he was an asshole boss, and when he ran out of money, he asked his workers to work for free (which some morons did) and then he took what money was left and took a vacation in Tuscany. I would take anything he says with a grain of salt. Suck.com did a good exposé on him in 1998.
I'll address his lists point by point. Probably the one most obviously fallacious to Slashdot readers is "Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations". So raising the H1-B cap to 195,000 is keeping supposedly educated people out how? I guess he's mad that the H1-B cap isn't 300,000 or 400,000, and that IT wages have only fallen a little, and that there still are a few job openings that pop up once in a while. Stein is nothing other than a commissar for the powers that he serves, of whom they are is obvious from the publication he is writing in (Forbes). Then he bashes Mexican immigration but neglects to mention that Steve Forbes is a big booster of Mexican immigration for a variety of reasons - I guess Stein is smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds him, and try to make people think the Teamsters union was all for NAFTA and all that or something...
1) It's true American schools are bad, although not for the reasons he gives. The US has imported hundreds of thousands of skilled workers from countries who have socialist education systems (mainly India and China) because according to tech business leaders, American schools are not putting out the type of students needed. The fact that hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs immigrated to the US shows that their education system is superior, but their pay system is inferior (e.g. it can't pay the workers what they can get here).
2) He only picks on trial lawyers, I guess corporate lawyers get a pass. Lots of horrible things have been created in court, like the modern corporation with the rights of a person, I doubt he would have a problem with that type of court back door use though
3) Slashdot often posst article where some big corporation sues some individual over some minor infraction. In Stein's world, the corporations are the victims, at the mercy of small individuals suing them. Imagine calling tobacco companies (who are more or less drug dealing mass murderers) victims of the law, tobacco companies are the most lawsuit-happy entity in existence, they prevented Sixty Minutes from airing a piece on tobacco for a long time by strange legal threats. Goodbye open society and free press, stopped by the drug dealers like Phillip Morris and co. It's disgusting how the right rushes to defend tobacco drug dealers and portrays them as victims but then turns around and sends guys selling marijuana on the corner to prison for years on end.
4) Where does real success come from? Look at who has the most important job, the president. He got bad grades, bad SAT scores, got into an Ivy League school anyway, got C's there, got into Harvard anyway and so forth. If you look at the Forbes 400 richest Americans list, the majority got there by inheriting the money. It's true that all wealth comes from as the classical economists said, workers working, and creating wealth, but that is covered up by his buddies more than anything.
5) The rich, who are the controlling shareholders/owners of corporations seem to be unable to control their top executives. The reason for this is pretty obvious, they all want immediate, unreasonable returns from their executives and as time goes by things become more unmanagable. This is a byproduct of the economic cycle as it goes along but people like Stein don't see it that way.
6) Yaa laws like it's OK to drink liquor and sell tobacco but not marijuana. And you're not allowed to get a BJ from your girlfriend in certain states. Plus about one million intellectual property laws. The law is bullshit, it's purpose is to protect Stein and his ilk, if he wants people to respect the law they should stop passing stupid laws.
7) In England television is controlled by the government with BBC, in America it was handed over to corporations, with the help of conservatives like Mr. Stein, so instead of seeing "quality television" you have MYV selling things using sex, violence or whatever. He made the bed, now he has to lie in it.
8) I always hear people talking about how the family is belittled and mocked and how they are all for the family...this is pretty stupid it's like saying you're for mom, God and apple pie and other people aren't...rhetorical masturbation. Even Marilyn Manson got married.
9) Right, the H1-B cap is raised to 200,000 a year but he's not happy. And as I said, the workers must be imported from countries with a socialist eductaion system (China/India) since ours is going down the tubes. Steve Forbes said Mexican immigration to the US was a "good safety valve to quell domestic discontent down there" and factory owners love them and only get a slap on the wrist when caught hiring them. So who is encouraging this illegal immigration. I guess Stein wants the H1-B cap at 300,000 or 400,000, because tech salaries haven't gotten low enough and there still might be one or two job openings till popping up here and again.
10) Stein's president has been telling people to go out and consume, which I presume means spend the money don't save it. So who is doing this pushing to spend instead of save? If Stein is high on saving over spending there's a lot of Republicans he better go talk to.
11) A socialist medical system? What country is he writing from? The US has the least socialized medical system in the industrial world.
12) As far as promoting fundamentalism, Stein should once again look around the Republican party, which through out "E Plurubus Unum" as the national motto and replaced it with "In God We Trust", and which wants to stick the Ten commandments and other crap in every public facility in the country.
I have been watching P2P for a while, and I think it is one of the most exciting technologies out there. I have been writing a
Gnutella app, which will hopefully be in releasable format some day.
I think one of the most exciting things about P2P is that the costs are borne by the consumer, not the publisher. This holds true with Freenet, and holds true with Gnutella and Kazaa as well. If I have a popular, non-commercial web page, I the publisher have to pay to keep my pages up, and the more popular the pages are, the more I pay. With P2P however, the consumers act as distributors as well, so whether it's an audio file, video, web page or whatnot flowing over Freenet/Kazaa/Gnutella, the cost for me to publish is not there. I like this because it means popular, non-commercial media can spread by virtue of popularity, and the Internet can't be monopolized by people who can control the flow of information simply because they own the printing presses and distribution networks. I also think this is what makes P2P something disdained by the powers that be. The RIAA/MPAA's activities are just the short-term, tactical activities of the people who fund them, I care very little for their rationale and look for what the long-term effects would be if they were fully successful, and it doesn't look good - I don't really care about the supposed morality of their authority or whatnot, I'm only interested in the effects of their actions. Thousands of years ago, the concept of property in this economy of scarcity was created. Recently this concept has been extended to the spectrum, to bits of information flowing between me and a friend's computer with it's economy of non-scarcity, and even to species themselves. If we do not build a technological foundation that helps put power in the hands of the people (like Gutenberg, Wozniak, and Justin Frankel), accompanied by social movements that protect people from the powers-that-be using law and authority to dominate them, I think we are headed into a dire future.
You say "down times are just what the tech industry needs". After this you say that this is "excess capacity of HTML jockeys and MCSEs". I suppose if we are some super-skilled genius like you presumably think of yourself as, we are immune to unemployment. Fine, can you please explain to me why this is good then? IT wages have gone down for the first time in a decade, factoring in inflation that is really bad. Are you such a super-skilled genius that you float out of earth's economic system and are immune to the economic laws of supply and demand as well? How does getting paid less equal a good thing for me, will you please explain?
Anyhow folks, dumbasses like this guy who are socially retarted aside from their once-a-week get-together with their dork friends to watch Farscape, who derive all of their self-worth from the idea that they are some programming genius above everyone else...just forget these people, they're hopeless. As for the rest of us who are unhappy with Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. ramming laws through Congress with the ITAA like the raised H1-B cap, section 1706 in IRS tax code, FLSA changes etc. and so forth, and who are interested in organizing into whatever - professional associations, unions, guilds or whatever - sitting back and waiting for an organization to come along that you can sign up is not going to happen. An organization of IT workers is built by IT workers, which means people like you can't sit around and wait, you have to get up and help build it yourself. There are already nascent organizations like the Programmers Guild or Washtech/CWA (which is in CESO), there's already a nascent base to organize with, to communicate with and educate one another. Like-minded people like you are out there, and are in organizations, are meeting, are posting on Usenet and so forth, we have to organize those who agree with us, who are predisposed to this - if you want to get somewhere, forget arguing with self-deluded "geniuses", it's not worth the time, from my experience, concentrating on getting like-minded people for a better worker organization is the thing to concentrate on. IBM, Intel, Microsoft and so forth are well organized, and well-funded (with the ITAA). They like having a well-funded, well-organized group - maybe they know something we don't (e.g. organization is good, being unorganized is bad)?
Also, making a proclamation for everyone in the industry is arrogant as well. Why does everyone speak like the whole industry has to be one way or the other? Right now many aerospace, government and telecommunications IT jobs are unionized. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing body shops added to that list, and if unionization "destroys" body shops? Good! We're better off without them, although unionization would only destroy bad body shops, and turn the ones that are not totally crummy into consulting firms. Who are you to tell workers in a company whether they should be in a union or not? Talk about megalomania. May your beeper go off at 3 AM.
The teachers union wants more money? Teachers are paid garbage in most of the US, and now a lot of teaching jobs are asking for a Masters in Education, for nothing pay. If I was to find someone to complain about, I'd complain about the 43.35% of the Forbes 400 who inherited their way directly onto that list, who've never lifted their finger a day in their life and live off the profits they take from people who actually work for a living.
As far as the UAL mechanics - during the 1990's, UAL was rolling in dough and played hardball with the mechanics, the management/owners did not want to spread the wealth, and did not evern want to talk to the mechanics. Now they come in crying poor and saying the Republican government is refusing to give them loan guarantees unless the mechanics take a cut. How come we don't have guarantees about how much profit the shareholders will get, or guarantees about how much management is paid? If management had been a bit more conciliatory during the 1990's, they would not have built up the years of antipathy they have with the mechanics now. It's kind of like a company that screws workers left and right, then falls on hard times and asks the workers to "be loyal" and "tighten their belt". In fact it's not kind of like it, it's exactly like it. Screw that. The mechanics will be better off dealing with whoever buys UAL rather than a company which has mismanaged itself to the point of bankruptcy anyway.
Marx elaborated quite a deal on his theory of labor value, and parts of it may be incorrect, just as virtually every economist has had parts of their general thory as incorrect though. You say "This reeks of Marx's labor theory of value, and is not a valid economic analysis. Entrepeneur's start companies in order to attempt to gain profits. For these purposes they hire workers to fulfill duties for reimbursements (wages/salary)." This does not invalidate the labor theory of value, this is part of the labor theory of value, nothing you said contradicts the labor theory of value. The roots of Marx's ideas were in the ideas of Adam Smith and Ricardo, and in their studies they said that all wealth is created by workers, which is the foundation of Marx's theory of labor value. Marx then builds on this with a series of conclusions (A is true, thus B is true, thus C is true...), the later ones predictive, and probably the most open to attack. Some of the tangents and speculations about the theory of labor value might be incorrect, the foundation is however, in my opinion, unassailable, and I've never heard anything arguing against the foundational ideas, although plenty of people with axes to grind have tried. Most of them are like yours - you say the theory is nonsense, then you say some things that are foundations of the theory and you act like they're refutations of it, and people who know nothing of it believe that you refuted it, when what you said is actually part of it. Maybe it's time for you to brush off Capital Volumes I, II and III and see what he really said. Some of Marx's economic ideas have been discarded, but not the part of the labor theory of value you are talking about, where what Marx thought was rooted in and the same as the economic studies of Adam Smith and Ricardo before him.
I should also add that all left-wing and right-wing economic ideas since the 19th century are very biased. Adam Smith and Ricardo were probably the last economists who simply studied the economy - since the 19th century everyone has had an axe to grind, and you should take everything said by everybody with a grain of salt. When someone tells you Marx, or Keynes, or whoever's ideas are all discredited, look at Japan which has had a virtually 0% interest rate for a decade, and ask why that doesn't disprove the monetarists (whose ideas are currently en vogue) ideas.
"The system works remarkably well, and is the basis of all the successful economies in the world. Class War rhetoric is the hallmark of the world's economic basket cases."
According to the BLS, the average American inflation-adjusted wage is (slightly) below what it was thirty years ago. Americans work more hours per year than any industrialized workers, including Japan - as the years have gone by the hours worked keep going up. They make less per hour than they did thirty years ago. In the US, the wealth difference between the very, very wealthy and everyone else has been increasing every year. Forget class war "rhetoric", a class war has been waged over the past thirty years, with the workers losing while the heirs who sit on their ass collecting profits from them have been winning.
As far as programmers, programmers wages went down for the first time in a decade last year, with inflation factored in, that is not good. Programmer unemployment and underemployment is high, but of course, people can dismiss this with whatever, they're not skilled enough, it's a lot harder to explain why if everything is so rosy according to you why industry wages have fallen. Wages not going up with inflation is bad, wages going down is very bad.
Footnoting everything I said here with a link would take forever, the references are all over the place for anyone who takes a short amount of time. The most important one I think is the falling wages, and it takes a few clicks pass a simple link so here it is:
1) Go to the US government's
BLS economic data page.
2) set the values so that it says:
- average hourly earnings, 1982 dollars
- 005000 Total private
- seasonally adjusted (or not, it doesn't matter)
3) Click the "Get data" button
4) Change the years to 1972 through 2002 and click "go"
You will see that, inflation-adjusted, US wages are slightly below what they were thirty years ago. And you claim this is a system that works "remarkably well", is a "successful economy" and people who say otherwise are advocating class war that leads to a basket case. Well to me, wages going down over thirty years combined with huge, long recessions every decade or so is not something to toot my horn over. It is true that the system works remarkably well, the question is, for whom?
Microsoft, Intel, IBM and other companies are part of the ITAA. The ITAA is a lobbying group - they give money to politicians to benefit the companies (often at the expense of workers), and launch blitzes in the press to convince people that there is a shortage of technical talent and so forth. Then they have congress pass laws like: raising the H1-B cap, sticking section 1706 in the IRS tax code, doing away with FLSA for computer workers etc.
Anyhow, they are very well organized, the solution is for us to get organized in some fashion. How it happens doesn't really matter, it can be a professional association like doctors and lawyers have like the AMA and ABA (and the IEEE-USA is *not* such an organization, a list of which for reasons I will not go into at length here) or a collectively bargaining union like actors and electricians have (SAG and IBEW). We should get organized the way we want to be organized, but should get organized. They're well-organized and sending millions to Washington to screw us, our salaries and wages have dropped for the first time in a decade. People just sit around and say "it's the economy" as if the economy is some alien force and we're farmers who are in a drought or something. First of all, the H1-Bs, FLSA and 1706 laws passed recently by the ITAA may not have been the main cause behind the slump, but they were certainly contributing factors to things as they are - if things were going to be bad, they have made them worse. Secondly, the economy is not some alien force that no one can control, it doesn't just "go down" and up by itself, it goes up and down because the people at the Federal Reserve makes certain decisions, because management at corporations make decisions over capital, because labor and owners make decisions.
If you really want to do something, first of all, forget trying to talk to people who say "I have no life, my social life is watching Farscape with my handful fo dork friends, I get all of my self-worth from thinking I am the best programmer in the world so I don't have to worry about all of this since I think I'm hot shit". The industry wage has just dropped for the first time in a decade - factoring in inflation that's really bad, yet these self-deluded socially retarted morons thinkt he laws of supply and demand don't affect them. So ignore these people - there will always be socially retarted people who can't deal with people, and lazy people who have other people do all the work for them, who if they do anything just criticize the people actually doing something. That's just the way it is, tune these people out.
Now, what's left is people who want to do something. Maybe they want a guild, maybe a professional association, a union, whatever. They don't like the raised H1-B cap, the FLSA changes, section 1706 and whatnot. One does not have to start from scratch to find these people - there are places like the Programmers Guild, or for unions Washtech/CWA (which is in the CESO confederation) and so forth. You might meet people in the IEEE that are interested, but the IEEE would need such massive reform, including cancelling all corporate donations to it, that it's probably not worth it. Get into contact with these people, get on their mailing lists, go to the meetings, read about it on web sites, talk about it on Usenet (like alt.computer.consultants) and so forth. These organizations already exist, get involved with them, if something's missing, start another one. Then go around to places where techies hang out (like here!) and talk about them, forget about the socially retarted who think they're "programming geniuses" who will argue about this, and just tell those interested that this nascent movement, of IT workers helping IT workers, is growing and invoite them in. This is how things get better. Organizations like CESO, the Programmers Guild and so forth have already done good, we just need more people to come in, and bring more people in so it reaches critical mass.
In some ways it's kind of paradoxical, because I hear many people saying "I want to do something like this but there's nothing out there". That's false, there's a lot out there and some nascent organizations, but they need more people like you to come in. It's kind of like wanting to go into a startup and have your phone and computer there and set up on the first day. That just doesn't happen in a startup, it needs people like you there to grow it so it gets to that point. So people interested but less committed are more likely to join, because someone else set up the meetings, the web sites, the moderated and unmoderated newsgroups and so forth.
I have a web site talking about some of
this. Don't sit around waiting for something to hop onto with this, work with us to build it up. Educate yourself, educate others, get involved, join the organizations and organize people. At least there's some been some success on the education front - years ago maybe 20% of IT workers knew what an H1-B visa was, now it's over 50% probably (probably because nowadays over half of IT workers are probably H1-Bs!). But they don't now about the ITAA's involvement in section 1706, the FLSA, and lots of other things. So don't sit around and sulk, help us get this nascent, growing movement going. The movement being IT workers working together to help themselves.
I have two PC's - both have Windows. To install another OS, I would do it over the network (via my POTS line). FreeBSD has always been great about this sort of thing, none of the major Linux distributions has an installer that does this as automagically as FreeBSD though. I want Linux not FreeBSD however so the second machine is still Windows. Someone told me there is a convoluted way to do this with Debian, but I have not had the time to do that yet. If I was going to do FreeBSD though, it would just be putting in the dialup phone #, PAP username and password and that would be it, it would start installing.
If you're a believer in the idea that workers do better in good economies, this contrasts with that. Higher productivity means more money is being made per hour by the company - which means workers would be making more per hour, right? Except real wages are not increasing - most places have a wage freeze as well as a hiring freeze and government data reflects this.
In the article, this process is called a speed-up by the AFL-CIO, because it is more physically grueling for blue collar workers. For white collar workers, it is more mentally straining, as the people from this article say.
As the article said, for the companies things are good right now and getting better. But basically they are shafting workers who if things were in equilibrium would have those people back doing the workloads they had to pickup, or would be getting paid more. Neither is happening.
A lot of the posts here show a lot of economic ignorance. This works against all IT workers. IT wages dropped for the first time in a decade a few months ago, yet many people talk about how they're happy this is happening. This would only make sense if they're not doing IT but are an owner, or perhaps in upper management.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and so forth give millions a year to the ITAA to spin IT economic news in their manner as well as lobbying Congress. In terms of associations for IT people who figure out what's in our interest, most of the organizations are nascent - the Programmers Guild, CESO, Washtech etc. (not IEEE-USA which is a disaster). Our wages are being hurt due to not enough people discussing how financial matters affect our profession with each other, and so forth. This can be done in the aforementioned organizations, on mailing lists and on usenet. I have a web site that discusses some of this.
This is a nonsensical argument, it sounds like something the deluded mathematician in "A Beautiful Mind" frantically scouring Time and Newsweek for cryptic, subversive messages would propose. Two of Bin Laden's statements after 9/11, where he talked about Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel and Palestine and so forth were published all over the world. All one has to do is go to the
BBC web site, or go to a magazine store and pick up a newspaper or magazine published in Europe, or look on Usenet, or get Al-Jazeera on satellite TV, or 100 other ways that are slightly more difficult than reading it in the Washington Post or seeing it on NBC, but which some theoretical "agent" awaiting "instructions" would certainly go and get. It's instructive that the BBC prints Bin Laden's statement, but the BBC had a ban on Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams voice from being broadcast on the BBC, and it was only the English press that censored Sinn Fein statements (Sinn Fein being a political party with MP's regularly elected to parliament, and which has a good chunk of the Catholic Northern Irish vote). Adams was speaking out against the English army's presence in Northern Ireland, the paramilitaries shooting of civilians on an anti-internment march in 1972 and other such things, the BBC simply did not want it's viewers and listeners to hear his voice.
This ridiculous "coded message" argument is a great way to ban anyone hearing any other side to what's going on than what the government is saying. Which is of course it's true purpose, it's obvious that even with the squelching of people who represent a section of people, with minor effort people looking for "instructions" supposedly hidden within them would get them with no effort. Thus, the real purpose is to keep the public misinformed about what's going on. You'd think with the massive deception about Vietnam, which even Robert McNamara in his book "In Retrospect" admits to, the American public would wonder what's going on in Saudi Arabia, Colombia and so forth. But what happens is, with the FCC-appointing White House telling the news media what it should not report (remember that Nixon punished the unfriendly press via the FCC) with regards to Saudi Arabia, and with the Patriot Act threatening those who give an alternative point of view to the billions in arms the US sends to Colombia every year, not only do the powers-that-be achieve their military (and of couyrse, financial) goals in these countries, they successfully squelch any alternative points of view from being expressed at home. They have to, because the Middle East quagmire and Latin American money pit would be less popular if more widely discussed and reported on.
Slashdot Mirror
In my view, any type of organization of IT workers to fight against this stuff is good. And the AFL-CIO technical unions have been fighting for it from the beginning, and have actually been doing the type of stuff that gets results, including lobbying in Washington DC and so forth. I know people who want IT workers to organize to work on issues like this or certification but are anti-union, and not much have come out of their efforts thus far. At least they're better than people who don't want to organize at all and be "independent". The employers are of course much smarter than those people, Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. have been well-organized and well-financed for a long time, funding organizations like the ITAA to do away with overtime for IT workers (the FLSA revokation), bringing in tons of H1-B workers which even government reports admit depress wages - which is why IT wages fell for the first time in a decade recently, changing section 1706 tax laws so that IT workers have mroe difficulty contracting independently. The people running the show are more organized than anybody, funding the ITAA to the tune of millions a year, which then goes and lobbies in Washington, puts out bogus reports that even get reported on Slashdot as verity, and blitzing the rest of the press that there is a shortage of IT workers, and nowadays forever releasing papers saying there is going to be an upturn in IT right around the corner so no laws changing the H1-B visa need to be done. These socially retarded programming "geniuses" are seeing industry wages depressed in the midst of employer organization, but they are way too brilliant to become organized themselves, and thus industry wages have fallen as a result. Be smart - hook up with one of the technical unions. And if you don't want to organzie in a union, at least join a professional association funded by members (not by the employers like the IEEE is funded - which shows in how they do things).
You say "where an hour of work per week is productive enough that it can support you" is a good thing. Yes, this is a good thing, productivity is good, you are absolutely correct. But you also say that wages going down is good. This is definitely incorrect (for people who work, eg not heirs), and goes back to my thinking of how it's unfortunate that IT people know little about economics, have economic misconceptions that Economics 101 would dispel etc.
There is a pool of money that goes either to wages or profits. Productivity increases that pool each year - this is a good thing. We are all agreeing so far. OK, now depending on how you divided that up, wages can decrease, stagnate or increase. In fact, since it is growing, both profits AND wages can both increase every year. Thus, wages decreasing is bad. Wages should increase with productivity (and in my view should take a larger bite out of the profit rate).
"This is the USA. Start your own business if you don't like your current position. It's called grabbing your sack and doing something for yourself rather than having someone hand it to you." This sounds word-for-word like the kind of spiel Amway gives at Baptist churches. Maybe you should post "Work at home, be your own boss!" flyers on lampposts. "Otherwise, move to a Socialist country." Well actually, the US has been unable to train engineers, which is why people educated in countries with socialist education systems (China, India) have been moving here en masse to do US IT work. "I, for one, like it when the worker actually has to be better than everyone else, has to sell himself a little more, try harder. It's called 'getting ahead'. I don't seem to have any problem doing it and I came from nothing (no money, no inheritance, just hard work)" You like when a worker has to be better than every other worker? So every worker has to be better than every other worker? This sounds paradoxical, maybe you see the world like a Escher sketch where everyone sits in the so-called high seat. As far as trying harder, productivity skyrocketed in the US over the past three decades, all of the extra wealth went not to the workers creating the wealth, but to the owners. I am speaking of the profession as a whole, and you seem only focused on yourself. Well fine, but most people don't want to hear you speak about yourself, since they don't care.
Not really. They are pretty academic, and are not really focused on the overall IT worker profession. They actually do lobbying, but the main thing they seem to be concerned about is increasing government funding of scientific research. Well OK, for the segment of IT workers they are, that makes sense, but they do not reflect the overall needs of IT workers. I think IEEE-USA, USENIX/SAGE and the ACM have positive aspects, but they also have negative aspects as well. For one thing, many of them are funded by the same companies that are funding legislation that screws over IT workers in Washington. These corporate sponsors muscled the ITAA-USA into toning down legislation efforts a little bit back. These organizations have good aspects, but they are not the be-all, end-all.
Over the past thirty years productivity has sky-rocketed, due to among other things, the training which you speak of - yet inflation-adjusted hourly wages have dropped. Despite being better-trained, wages are down because the owners have decided to take more, and the workers are less organized and powerful in terms of being able to say no. So it doesn't sounf like your solution works. Plus these new more eductaed workers now have less money to take home than in 1972, thus they're less able to save and become owners, throwing another monkey wrench into your grand plan.
American productivity skyrocketed in the past thirty years. What happened to US real wages? Less than they were thirty years ago. Why should people work harder if there is no financial incentive to do so - when every penny of every dollar of wealth created by extra hard work goes into someone elses pocket? There is no reason, and anyone who works for free is a sucker.
Maybe when one of the lazy parasite heirs, who is taking profit from the workers while doing nothing, whom has demanded increased productivity which has happened to 0% benefit of anyone but themselves, gets up and works a day in their life will I listen to their complaints about not working fast enough. Until that day, they can go fuck themselves, or their little toadie sycophants who defend them due to their natural submissive lackey nature.
You can see nice graphs about the declining hourly wage, or get the data raw from the horses mouth -
BLS.gov
Punch in:
1 average hourly earnings, 1982 dollars
2 005000 Total private
3 seasonally adjusted (or not, it doesn't matter)
and then on the next page put the date range as 1972-2002.
I think the majority of you have a perception of wages and unemployment which is not in tune with how the economy is and how economists see things - how yous say it works is not how it works, and almost all of the economist specialists who know how these things work will agree
First off regarding not being employed - in a free capitalist market, not being employed is ALWAYS the choice of the employed person. 100% of IT workers right now can be employed if we want to. The thing is, many do not want to work for any wage. The economic reality is, if everyone not working right now wanted an IT job for minimum wage, they could get one almost instantly. Of course, it would be almost impossible to live on a part-time minimum wage, but every unemployed IT person can have a job. I keep hearing that unemployed IT people who according to the posters have poor/medium skills get fired and they can't get employed now. Well, they can get employed, they just choose not to, often for rational reasons (eg. can't live on part-time minumum wage).
This is economics 101...everyone can get a job, it just might literally be not enough to live on, like minium wage...so once we have that settles we have employed people and people desiring not to work the offered wage. These people actually help keep the offered wage high, supply and demand shows if they all decided to work industry wages would fall. So the problem is not with employment, unemployment and so forth it is all about wages. Even someone virtually broke would pay people a penny a week to do their chores for them. The problem is not employment it is wages
That said, industry wages went down for the first time in a decade recently. A lot of people here nod in approval like this "should" happen, but they ignore the contributing factors like the ITAA's pushing of H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA, section 1706 etc. I wonder how low they think wages "should" fall before they start deciding to do something about it, by which point it will probably be too late, since the ITAA was well-organized already on this years ago.
Stop talking this economic crap like you know what you're talking about! Pick up an economics book and read. People are unemployed because they choose not to except the wages offered. This is economics 101. You people have misperceptions about how economics works and are making poor economic decisions because of it and are spreading your incorrect economic ideas to others. If we had more people joining the fledgling IT organizations which put out correct economic analysis, this wouldn't be happening.
Sycophants like tommck will never say "the lazy parasite owners profit increases the price of a product", he will always blame the people who actually do the work for everything.
Unions are plenty efficient for the people who work for a living - union workers on average make more than non-union workers in their industries. The only inefficiency is in the eyes of the owners. If they want efficiency, those heirs should get off their lazy asses and work for one day in their life.
"Don't forget what happens to union-heavy industries in a downturn." The same thing that happens to non-union industries in a downturn? The difference in a union industry is the union must be consulted, severance pay negotiated and so forth. Also, the people who just joined the company are the ones most likely to be the ones laid off.
"Forget job security, defined skill sets and straight career paths. This uncertainty is here to stay."
Well, in the US, over the past thirty years hours worked have gone up (over 100 extra hours per year), inflation-adjusted per hour wages have actually fallen if you can believe that (bls.gov will show you), debt has skyrocketed etc. So you might as well add in "forget workload not getting larger every year, forget overtime pay, forget wages going down forever etc." Forget pensions, forget social security, forget having a life...and so on and so on.
Well sorry, but I don't want to "forget" all of these things. And I'm sorry but I don't buy into the idea that I have to sit passively and stoically accept that I am going to get fucked in the ass. I guess there are a lot of passive-agressive socially retarted Farscape marathon-watching dorks in the industry who will, but not I. The message you are giving is that of the owners, transmitted through the bosses to you. I guess some people latch on to the "be a docile sheep - we've decided things will just get worse, and worse and worse for you each year, so sit back and take it" idea that they are promulgating, but I don't. Plenty of people are organizing to push against this, and this resistance has been, does, and will have an effect. So while a lot of you will be "forgetting" that there was a time that people didn't have to ask how high when told to jump, some of us will be organizing and hopefully successfully countering this.
The attitude towards recent changes in employment and wages have been massively passive-aggressiveness. The things done during the 1990's to help sow the seeds of derailing the profession, like the ITAA's legislative (and PR) lobbying, were not met with and now that things are bad many people simply want to walk into some other profession, where, for less pay and possibly much self-financed education, they will be walked all over by the plutocrats in that profession as well.
Some IT people still say "My wages are the same, I have a job, everything is fine except $100k HTML coders are laid off, they're cutting the chaff from the wheat, I'm *happy* this is happening". Well, these people have a very poor view of economics usually. For one thing, in a market economy, unemployment is ALWAYS the decision of the unemployed person (although the minimum wage creates an exception when it cancels a few potential less-than-minimum-wage jobs). This makes rational sense many times though, it is often better to collect unemployment and look for a decent paying job than to get paid part-time minimum wage, leaving you unable to pay for rent, food etc. Another thing about the ridiculousness of this idea by some IT workers is that surveys show wages recently dropped industry-wide - even if you feel you will always be employed, which anyone who will take any wage WILL be (unless it goes under minimum wage), can you explain why wages going down is a good thing? People talk about it like it's the weather "well, it was inevitable wages would go down". Like some alien on another planet pulls the levers of the economy and regulates the IT profession. People truly interested in economics and how they pertain to the IT labor market, and who read and study this will not see these things as alien, like barbarians who saw thunder and said it must be gods who made it since they had no understanding of it.
Anyhow, what's the solution? The solution is organization, be it an association, a union, a guild, an advocacy group, whatever. What is needed is about 2% of the profession to be actively involved in organizing, educating, fighting against bad legislation (like H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA exemptions only for IT workers, section 1706 of the IRS tax code pertaining to IT consultants etc.) which is pushed through Congress by the ITAA, which is paid to do so by IBM, Intel, Microsoft etc. You need 2% of IT workers working on this stuff, and majority support of IT workers for this stuff. I say 2% and majority because that's what a survey of sociological studies says is the percentages necessary to have something successful get done.
Do these organizations have to be created out of thin air? No - these organizations already exist, the forums for education and coordination already exist and so on, they just need more critical mass, more people coming on board. People already have compiled all the information you want to know about, say, the H1-B visa issue, you just have to look for it. Campaigns are already working on the issue, you just have to join them. And with more support they will have more successes. Or you can turn tail and run when kicked to another profession, where you will be treated exactly the same way.
First of all, if this is "open" (free) versus "closed" (commercial), WHERE is the Gnutella 2 specification? "It's coming". I mean that's one of the oldest notions in the free software community, it is NOT open source (or protocol) until the source (or protocol) is actually open! When (if) the specs come out, I'll believe it.
Currently the Gnutella "1" (aka v0.6) specs are published, and functioning in many clients, and the Gnutella 2 protocol is not to be found anywhere. It's true that Shareaza does not (yet) have ads and Limewire and Bearshare do, but Shareaza's source is closed, unlike Limewire's. Calling Shareaza open and free and Limewire closed and commercial is kind of silly, especially since Shareaza source is closed and Shareaza G2 protocol is (currently) closed.
Second of all, Gnutella is a coalition of the most popular Gnutella developers - Limewire, Bearshare, Gnucleus, Xolox, GTK-Gnutella, Morpheus (sort of) and so forth. Currently, they call the Gnutella version they have version 0.6. Along comes a new client Shareaza, and they try to hijack the Gnutella name and call it "Gnutella 2".
I hope Mike comes to his senses. Shareaza is a decent p2p client, and has been a positive thing for Gnutella, and he can do what he wants, but I am uninterested in any new protocol until protocol specifications are published, and trying to seize the Gnutella name is kind of silly as well, especially since the protocol he wrote (and has yet to share specifications of) is so radically different than Gnutella. He can switch to his new protocol if he wants, but he should stop calling it an open protocol until he publishes the specifications, and he should consider a name aside from "Gnutella 2".
I should say as a caveat that Wolff ran one of the original dot bombs, Wolff New Media, which managed to run itself into the ground BEFORE 2000. I've heard from several people he was an asshole boss, and when he ran out of money, he asked his workers to work for free (which some morons did) and then he took what money was left and took a vacation in Tuscany. I would take anything he says with a grain of salt.
Suck.com did a good exposé on him in 1998.
I'll address his lists point by point. Probably the one most obviously fallacious to Slashdot readers is "Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations". So raising the H1-B cap to 195,000 is keeping supposedly educated people out how? I guess he's mad that the H1-B cap isn't 300,000 or 400,000, and that IT wages have only fallen a little, and that there still are a few job openings that pop up once in a while. Stein is nothing other than a commissar for the powers that he serves, of whom they are is obvious from the publication he is writing in (Forbes). Then he bashes Mexican immigration but neglects to mention that Steve Forbes is a big booster of Mexican immigration for a variety of reasons - I guess Stein is smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds him, and try to make people think the Teamsters union was all for NAFTA and all that or something...
1) It's true American schools are bad, although not for the reasons he gives. The US has imported hundreds of thousands of skilled workers from countries who have socialist education systems (mainly India and China) because according to tech business leaders, American schools are not putting out the type of students needed. The fact that hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs immigrated to the US shows that their education system is superior, but their pay system is inferior (e.g. it can't pay the workers what they can get here).
2) He only picks on trial lawyers, I guess corporate lawyers get a pass. Lots of horrible things have been created in court, like the modern corporation with the rights of a person, I doubt he would have a problem with that type of court back door use though
3) Slashdot often posst article where some big corporation sues some individual over some minor infraction. In Stein's world, the corporations are the victims, at the mercy of small individuals suing them. Imagine calling tobacco companies (who are more or less drug dealing mass murderers) victims of the law, tobacco companies are the most lawsuit-happy entity in existence, they prevented Sixty Minutes from airing a piece on tobacco for a long time by strange legal threats. Goodbye open society and free press, stopped by the drug dealers like Phillip Morris and co. It's disgusting how the right rushes to defend tobacco drug dealers and portrays them as victims but then turns around and sends guys selling marijuana on the corner to prison for years on end.
4) Where does real success come from? Look at who has the most important job, the president. He got bad grades, bad SAT scores, got into an Ivy League school anyway, got C's there, got into Harvard anyway and so forth. If you look at the Forbes 400 richest Americans list, the majority got there by inheriting the money. It's true that all wealth comes from as the classical economists said, workers working, and creating wealth, but that is covered up by his buddies more than anything.
5) The rich, who are the controlling shareholders/owners of corporations seem to be unable to control their top executives. The reason for this is pretty obvious, they all want immediate, unreasonable returns from their executives and as time goes by things become more unmanagable. This is a byproduct of the economic cycle as it goes along but people like Stein don't see it that way.
6) Yaa laws like it's OK to drink liquor and sell tobacco but not marijuana. And you're not allowed to get a BJ from your girlfriend in certain states. Plus about one million intellectual property laws. The law is bullshit, it's purpose is to protect Stein and his ilk, if he wants people to respect the law they should stop passing stupid laws.
7) In England television is controlled by the government with BBC, in America it was handed over to corporations, with the help of conservatives like Mr. Stein, so instead of seeing "quality television" you have MYV selling things using sex, violence or whatever. He made the bed, now he has to lie in it.
8) I always hear people talking about how the family is belittled and mocked and how they are all for the family...this is pretty stupid it's like saying you're for mom, God and apple pie and other people aren't...rhetorical masturbation. Even Marilyn Manson got married.
9) Right, the H1-B cap is raised to 200,000 a year but he's not happy. And as I said, the workers must be imported from countries with a socialist eductaion system (China/India) since ours is going down the tubes. Steve Forbes said Mexican immigration to the US was a "good safety valve to quell domestic discontent down there" and factory owners love them and only get a slap on the wrist when caught hiring them. So who is encouraging this illegal immigration. I guess Stein wants the H1-B cap at 300,000 or 400,000, because tech salaries haven't gotten low enough and there still might be one or two job openings till popping up here and again.
10) Stein's president has been telling people to go out and consume, which I presume means spend the money don't save it. So who is doing this pushing to spend instead of save? If Stein is high on saving over spending there's a lot of Republicans he better go talk to.
11) A socialist medical system? What country is he writing from? The US has the least socialized medical system in the industrial world.
12) As far as promoting fundamentalism, Stein should once again look around the Republican party, which through out "E Plurubus Unum" as the national motto and replaced it with "In God We Trust", and which wants to stick the Ten commandments and other crap in every public facility in the country.
I think one of the most exciting things about P2P is that the costs are borne by the consumer, not the publisher. This holds true with Freenet, and holds true with Gnutella and Kazaa as well. If I have a popular, non-commercial web page, I the publisher have to pay to keep my pages up, and the more popular the pages are, the more I pay. With P2P however, the consumers act as distributors as well, so whether it's an audio file, video, web page or whatnot flowing over Freenet/Kazaa/Gnutella, the cost for me to publish is not there. I like this because it means popular, non-commercial media can spread by virtue of popularity, and the Internet can't be monopolized by people who can control the flow of information simply because they own the printing presses and distribution networks. I also think this is what makes P2P something disdained by the powers that be. The RIAA/MPAA's activities are just the short-term, tactical activities of the people who fund them, I care very little for their rationale and look for what the long-term effects would be if they were fully successful, and it doesn't look good - I don't really care about the supposed morality of their authority or whatnot, I'm only interested in the effects of their actions. Thousands of years ago, the concept of property in this economy of scarcity was created. Recently this concept has been extended to the spectrum, to bits of information flowing between me and a friend's computer with it's economy of non-scarcity, and even to species themselves. If we do not build a technological foundation that helps put power in the hands of the people (like Gutenberg, Wozniak, and Justin Frankel), accompanied by social movements that protect people from the powers-that-be using law and authority to dominate them, I think we are headed into a dire future.
Anyhow folks, dumbasses like this guy who are socially retarted aside from their once-a-week get-together with their dork friends to watch Farscape, who derive all of their self-worth from the idea that they are some programming genius above everyone else...just forget these people, they're hopeless. As for the rest of us who are unhappy with Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. ramming laws through Congress with the ITAA like the raised H1-B cap, section 1706 in IRS tax code, FLSA changes etc. and so forth, and who are interested in organizing into whatever - professional associations, unions, guilds or whatever - sitting back and waiting for an organization to come along that you can sign up is not going to happen. An organization of IT workers is built by IT workers, which means people like you can't sit around and wait, you have to get up and help build it yourself. There are already nascent organizations like the Programmers Guild or Washtech/CWA (which is in CESO), there's already a nascent base to organize with, to communicate with and educate one another. Like-minded people like you are out there, and are in organizations, are meeting, are posting on Usenet and so forth, we have to organize those who agree with us, who are predisposed to this - if you want to get somewhere, forget arguing with self-deluded "geniuses", it's not worth the time, from my experience, concentrating on getting like-minded people for a better worker organization is the thing to concentrate on. IBM, Intel, Microsoft and so forth are well organized, and well-funded (with the ITAA). They like having a well-funded, well-organized group - maybe they know something we don't (e.g. organization is good, being unorganized is bad)?
Also, making a proclamation for everyone in the industry is arrogant as well. Why does everyone speak like the whole industry has to be one way or the other? Right now many aerospace, government and telecommunications IT jobs are unionized. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing body shops added to that list, and if unionization "destroys" body shops? Good! We're better off without them, although unionization would only destroy bad body shops, and turn the ones that are not totally crummy into consulting firms. Who are you to tell workers in a company whether they should be in a union or not? Talk about megalomania. May your beeper go off at 3 AM.
As far as the UAL mechanics - during the 1990's, UAL was rolling in dough and played hardball with the mechanics, the management/owners did not want to spread the wealth, and did not evern want to talk to the mechanics. Now they come in crying poor and saying the Republican government is refusing to give them loan guarantees unless the mechanics take a cut. How come we don't have guarantees about how much profit the shareholders will get, or guarantees about how much management is paid? If management had been a bit more conciliatory during the 1990's, they would not have built up the years of antipathy they have with the mechanics now. It's kind of like a company that screws workers left and right, then falls on hard times and asks the workers to "be loyal" and "tighten their belt". In fact it's not kind of like it, it's exactly like it. Screw that. The mechanics will be better off dealing with whoever buys UAL rather than a company which has mismanaged itself to the point of bankruptcy anyway.
I should also add that all left-wing and right-wing economic ideas since the 19th century are very biased. Adam Smith and Ricardo were probably the last economists who simply studied the economy - since the 19th century everyone has had an axe to grind, and you should take everything said by everybody with a grain of salt. When someone tells you Marx, or Keynes, or whoever's ideas are all discredited, look at Japan which has had a virtually 0% interest rate for a decade, and ask why that doesn't disprove the monetarists (whose ideas are currently en vogue) ideas.
According to the BLS, the average American inflation-adjusted wage is (slightly) below what it was thirty years ago. Americans work more hours per year than any industrialized workers, including Japan - as the years have gone by the hours worked keep going up. They make less per hour than they did thirty years ago. In the US, the wealth difference between the very, very wealthy and everyone else has been increasing every year. Forget class war "rhetoric", a class war has been waged over the past thirty years, with the workers losing while the heirs who sit on their ass collecting profits from them have been winning.
As far as programmers, programmers wages went down for the first time in a decade last year, with inflation factored in, that is not good. Programmer unemployment and underemployment is high, but of course, people can dismiss this with whatever, they're not skilled enough, it's a lot harder to explain why if everything is so rosy according to you why industry wages have fallen. Wages not going up with inflation is bad, wages going down is very bad.
Footnoting everything I said here with a link would take forever, the references are all over the place for anyone who takes a short amount of time. The most important one I think is the falling wages, and it takes a few clicks pass a simple link so here it is:
1) Go to the US government's BLS economic data page.
2) set the values so that it says:
- average hourly earnings, 1982 dollars
- 005000 Total private
- seasonally adjusted (or not, it doesn't matter)
3) Click the "Get data" button
4) Change the years to 1972 through 2002 and click "go"
You will see that, inflation-adjusted, US wages are slightly below what they were thirty years ago. And you claim this is a system that works "remarkably well", is a "successful economy" and people who say otherwise are advocating class war that leads to a basket case. Well to me, wages going down over thirty years combined with huge, long recessions every decade or so is not something to toot my horn over. It is true that the system works remarkably well, the question is, for whom?
Anyhow, they are very well organized, the solution is for us to get organized in some fashion. How it happens doesn't really matter, it can be a professional association like doctors and lawyers have like the AMA and ABA (and the IEEE-USA is *not* such an organization, a list of which for reasons I will not go into at length here) or a collectively bargaining union like actors and electricians have (SAG and IBEW). We should get organized the way we want to be organized, but should get organized. They're well-organized and sending millions to Washington to screw us, our salaries and wages have dropped for the first time in a decade. People just sit around and say "it's the economy" as if the economy is some alien force and we're farmers who are in a drought or something. First of all, the H1-Bs, FLSA and 1706 laws passed recently by the ITAA may not have been the main cause behind the slump, but they were certainly contributing factors to things as they are - if things were going to be bad, they have made them worse. Secondly, the economy is not some alien force that no one can control, it doesn't just "go down" and up by itself, it goes up and down because the people at the Federal Reserve makes certain decisions, because management at corporations make decisions over capital, because labor and owners make decisions.
If you really want to do something, first of all, forget trying to talk to people who say "I have no life, my social life is watching Farscape with my handful fo dork friends, I get all of my self-worth from thinking I am the best programmer in the world so I don't have to worry about all of this since I think I'm hot shit". The industry wage has just dropped for the first time in a decade - factoring in inflation that's really bad, yet these self-deluded socially retarted morons thinkt he laws of supply and demand don't affect them. So ignore these people - there will always be socially retarted people who can't deal with people, and lazy people who have other people do all the work for them, who if they do anything just criticize the people actually doing something. That's just the way it is, tune these people out.
Now, what's left is people who want to do something. Maybe they want a guild, maybe a professional association, a union, whatever. They don't like the raised H1-B cap, the FLSA changes, section 1706 and whatnot. One does not have to start from scratch to find these people - there are places like the Programmers Guild, or for unions Washtech/CWA (which is in the CESO confederation) and so forth. You might meet people in the IEEE that are interested, but the IEEE would need such massive reform, including cancelling all corporate donations to it, that it's probably not worth it. Get into contact with these people, get on their mailing lists, go to the meetings, read about it on web sites, talk about it on Usenet (like alt.computer.consultants) and so forth. These organizations already exist, get involved with them, if something's missing, start another one. Then go around to places where techies hang out (like here!) and talk about them, forget about the socially retarted who think they're "programming geniuses" who will argue about this, and just tell those interested that this nascent movement, of IT workers helping IT workers, is growing and invoite them in. This is how things get better. Organizations like CESO, the Programmers Guild and so forth have already done good, we just need more people to come in, and bring more people in so it reaches critical mass.
In some ways it's kind of paradoxical, because I hear many people saying "I want to do something like this but there's nothing out there". That's false, there's a lot out there and some nascent organizations, but they need more people like you to come in. It's kind of like wanting to go into a startup and have your phone and computer there and set up on the first day. That just doesn't happen in a startup, it needs people like you there to grow it so it gets to that point. So people interested but less committed are more likely to join, because someone else set up the meetings, the web sites, the moderated and unmoderated newsgroups and so forth.
I have a web site talking about some of this. Don't sit around waiting for something to hop onto with this, work with us to build it up. Educate yourself, educate others, get involved, join the organizations and organize people. At least there's some been some success on the education front - years ago maybe 20% of IT workers knew what an H1-B visa was, now it's over 50% probably (probably because nowadays over half of IT workers are probably H1-Bs!). But they don't now about the ITAA's involvement in section 1706, the FLSA, and lots of other things. So don't sit around and sulk, help us get this nascent, growing movement going. The movement being IT workers working together to help themselves.
I have two PC's - both have Windows. To install another OS, I would do it over the network (via my POTS line). FreeBSD has always been great about this sort of thing, none of the major Linux distributions has an installer that does this as automagically as FreeBSD though. I want Linux not FreeBSD however so the second machine is still Windows. Someone told me there is a convoluted way to do this with Debian, but I have not had the time to do that yet. If I was going to do FreeBSD though, it would just be putting in the dialup phone #, PAP username and password and that would be it, it would start installing.
In the article, this process is called a speed-up by the AFL-CIO, because it is more physically grueling for blue collar workers. For white collar workers, it is more mentally straining, as the people from this article say.
As the article said, for the companies things are good right now and getting better. But basically they are shafting workers who if things were in equilibrium would have those people back doing the workloads they had to pickup, or would be getting paid more. Neither is happening.
A lot of the posts here show a lot of economic ignorance. This works against all IT workers. IT wages dropped for the first time in a decade a few months ago, yet many people talk about how they're happy this is happening. This would only make sense if they're not doing IT but are an owner, or perhaps in upper management.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and so forth give millions a year to the ITAA to spin IT economic news in their manner as well as lobbying Congress. In terms of associations for IT people who figure out what's in our interest, most of the organizations are nascent - the Programmers Guild, CESO, Washtech etc. (not IEEE-USA which is a disaster). Our wages are being hurt due to not enough people discussing how financial matters affect our profession with each other, and so forth. This can be done in the aforementioned organizations, on mailing lists and on usenet. I have a web site that discusses some of this.
This ridiculous "coded message" argument is a great way to ban anyone hearing any other side to what's going on than what the government is saying. Which is of course it's true purpose, it's obvious that even with the squelching of people who represent a section of people, with minor effort people looking for "instructions" supposedly hidden within them would get them with no effort. Thus, the real purpose is to keep the public misinformed about what's going on. You'd think with the massive deception about Vietnam, which even Robert McNamara in his book "In Retrospect" admits to, the American public would wonder what's going on in Saudi Arabia, Colombia and so forth. But what happens is, with the FCC-appointing White House telling the news media what it should not report (remember that Nixon punished the unfriendly press via the FCC) with regards to Saudi Arabia, and with the Patriot Act threatening those who give an alternative point of view to the billions in arms the US sends to Colombia every year, not only do the powers-that-be achieve their military (and of couyrse, financial) goals in these countries, they successfully squelch any alternative points of view from being expressed at home. They have to, because the Middle East quagmire and Latin American money pit would be less popular if more widely discussed and reported on.