If you unionize, your employer has far less rights regarding workmanship and professionalism than if he can simply fire someone who displays neither. He also has fewer options come hiring time.
By all means, lets restrict all IT work to people who have the piece of paper, rather than the actual ability. In my experience the people who want the former, are the people who lack the latter.
Well, gee, lets see. Setting aside the economic issues, the inertia and sloppy work that comes with systems where "seniority" is more important than "ability", lets talk about the Bar thing.
What does the American Bar Association do? Primarily it sets standards for it's members, and enforces them. Almost all professional associations do this, whether it's lawyers, accountants, or plumbers, you can't practice your trade unless they say you can...In Union strong states, you aren't allowed to hire plumbers and electricians who haven't jumped through the hoops, regardless of qualifications...Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field. Not only is he more fit, but you can't even hire the other guy because he can't get licensed without jumping through the union hoops.
Now, how many people get into IT through "non standard" channels? How many self-taught pros are there out there? How many people have a non-IT educational background? How many people from other countries?
Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards.
Jesus. If you want to drive offshoring, that's the way to do it. Make American IT more expensive and less efficient than everywhere else in the world, and the work will flee this country and leave us longing for the days of H1-Bs and mere outsourcing.
EULA's are really more for protecting them from liability than they are for trying to steal our junk.
I mean, vis a vis the Facebook thing, there are vast quantities of precedent regarding copyright and liability which make it a bit unlikely that they could actually follow through on some mass appropriation of content...Just as an example, say I'm a professional photographer and someone else puts one of my images on Facebook...does that mean that they own all the rights to my photo? Seriously unlikely; those laws have wicked teeth, and there are very specific things that have to occur for you to transfer rights to your own copyrights to a third party.
Everyone asks for whatever they think they can get preemptively to reduce their own liability. I mean, imagine Facebook loses all your pictures through some data breach. If they didn't have all the rights to 'em sewn up, this might be a problem.
Likewise the rest. If you have no rights, you can't complain when they get infringed on. The AOL thing is probably more along the lines of pre-justifying the banning of accounts.
Basically, you end up with everyone else raising their tariffs too, so your goods are worth crap overseas, and the things you need to import are vastly more expensive.
Basic stuff like out-of-season fruit becomes impossible to get...We're talking about no more bananas, for starters.
Local manufacture has to make the local goods, that's true, but the prices are obscene because they can charge whatever they want, since you've artificially raised the price.
In the '80's we set a quota on Japanese cars to support our auto industry...They could only sell 20,000(?) a year, or something like that, so naturally, the prices shot up and made it so American cars were more price-competitive. Do you know what happened then? The fucking American car companies raised their rates to make a bigger profit, and ended up still coming second place to Japan in terms of demand, and worse, regular people here couldn't afford to buy goddamn cars!
Basically, the more protected an industry is, the crappier it works. It doesn't have to compete because it can't go out of business. No new services, high prices, few options. Look at the US post office, look how it's changed since the government said "We're not going to protect you from FedEx and UPS anymore." They do priority mail now, and rush delivery for packages...That stuff just didn't happen when they didn't have to compete.
The thing about high import tariffs that works for a while, the thing that Japan did, and China is doing now, is that when you're developing rapidly you don't have much of a middle class...No citizens with disposable income, so you can jack up your tariffs and not really piss off anyone except the rich.
When the middle class arrives however, you've got to take those barriers down or you're going to be stifling the service sectors of your economy, and the service sector is HUGE and profitable. It brings in wholesale wealth from other countries. Like in the 80's and 90's when Japan was so dominant and they were going to buy all of America, and weren't we foolish for letting them...Do you see what we did to those poor bastards? The service sector eats foreign wealth. Now they're in terrible economic shape, and we're still rolling along.
And now, the dollar is tanking. That's terrible, you say. But it's really not. If the dollar devalues without us experiencing insane inflation, that gives our local manufacturing a huge advantage selling overseas, while only impacting the price of imported goods. This economic crapfest is concentrated in the financial sector. The industrial sector is growing at a better rate than it's seen in a long time. Good stuff.
See that widget will languish in a warehouse now, because no one wants to pay 10 times as much as a similar widget from another country. The company that made it won't get any orders for their over priced widget, and they'll go out of business.
That benefits local workers how exactly? You can't just say, "Local production always produces local benefits." It doesn't. In fact, what you're talking about isn't trade at all, it's a type of economic isolationism, which generally results in inflation, overpriced goods, and poverty.
No, what I'm saying is, if something costs a dollar to make here, and ten cents to make somewhere else, it benefits everyone who wants the product to buy the 10 cent version.
Only a Socialist would try to convince people that they're better off paying more for the same thing.
Nice strawman. The Chinese have an immense labor surplus; by and large it's not an educated population. That gives them an advantage in this sort of work. That's common sense, and it has nothing to do with their race, but only economics.
The reason the illegal immigrant workers are such a problem is because people like you are so protectionist of the crappy tree cutting, chicken gutting, fruit picking jobs that those people are willing to work, that we are unable to pass laws that allow them to work legally while protecting them from being abused by unscrupulous businessmen.
The problem with people like you is that you have this demi-religious faith that has nothing to do with the actual reality of the world, and you're determined to demonize anyone who disagrees with you. It's not a black and white issue. I suggest you educate yourself.
Like it or not, we don't have the sort of workforce for a traditional manufacturing economy anymore. You don't put someone through 12 years of school so they can do a job that can be done by someone straight off the farm with little or no education (e.g. our workforce, 50 years ago).
We export those jobs for a reason. We have a highly educated workforce that is capable of doing work that not everyone is capable of doing. To keep those people from having to make shoes, pillow cases, and misc. plastic crap, we export those jobs to countries whose workforces are suited to those types of jobs, theoretically saving our skilled population for more skilled work.
Trying to re-import those jobs flies in the face of all modern economic thought. If they can do it cheaper, then we should use that to our advantage and focus our competition in areas where they are weak. We should not try to beat them at a game where they hold a strong advantage. The only way to make our good cheaper would be to jack up tariffs, and that would only make the same crap cost more, and thus sell poorly.
IIRC in Europe its a pension whether it comes from a private employer or the govt.
Private pensions aren't actually that good an idea. Lot of industries (steel, auto, airline) that gave pensions to employees are currently struggling under massive pension debt because of technological advances that have substantially reduced the workforces in those companies...Pretty much the same thing that's going to happen to the US in a decade or so.
It'd be better to have a government-run pension plan that everyone pays into (than a private system) to help the system itself adapt to the changing workforce.
Fortunately for us, we're still in a position to attract skilled immigrants to make up the labor shortfall...That gives us the benefit of their labor, without having to have paid their costs as they were growing up.
In the US the cost of healthcare outstrips what you can expect from pensions and government programs, so healthcare eats into your retirement income.
Yes, we all know that no one who isn't within 10-15 years of collecting isn't going to. This doesn't mean that people who are collecting today are stupid for doing so. The spiking costs of healthcare make what would have been a livable stipend insufficient.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason I don't look. You inevitably find out stuff you'd have been happier not knowing...Not necessarily vis a vis the whole "company is going to shut down" thing (always nice to know when to look), but I'm in financials, so I'd know that before they would.
As for bonuses and pay scales and crap like that, you don't want to know what people make. There is no faster way to go nuts on the job than to know what all the people whose job is apparently only to annoy you are making.
Well, I am harder core than the average schmo where Perl is concerned, so for me it's a requirement...The vendor version is always inferior. Most forums will tell you the same thing.
But like I said, if you don't really need it, it's fine. I doubt the average user would ever run into this problem.
Who uses vendor Perl? It's like GCJ; if you don't really need it, it's good enough, but if you really need it, you download the real thing. And like java, it's easy to have multiple versions of Perl on your system.
I guess that's snarky, but seriously. These guys were running a fancy production package on the crap perl install that comes with Fedora? They needed performance (and chose perl?) and they didn't look first at compiling perl from source? It doesn't take long at all, and the benefits are substantial, even aside from not having this bug.
Because that's not true? I vote, 80% of the state votes against me, and my vote counts for nothing in the national election. It's pathetic.
Now, I still vote, but I don't have the illusion that my vote means anything in the presidential election. Winner take all politics is sure and certain death for minority candidates, and it can decide the national election as well, as in 2000.
There is a difference between a "bug" and a poor design decision. For a Windows release, Vista isn't all that buggy, it's just user-hostile. You certainly can't blame them for the driver issues that caused most of the bugs early on.
What they're talking about is that it is more productive to present some boring task in game form than it is to just require people to do it.
A spoon full of sugar does indeed make the medicine go down...It's about time corporations clued in to this basic facet of human existence. Work is work, and play is play, and if work can be a little like play, people will work more.
50k is too high. Median household income is lower than that; half the country wouldn't have to pay taxes.
I'm all for simplifying the tax system: it's basically welfare for lawyers and accountants as it stands right now. The average citizen should be able to figure out their own damn taxes without having to hire professional help.
Still, I think a flat tax is only ever going to benefit the top.1%, and just in terms of people to piss off, it's better to piss off.1% than 1% or even 10%.
Frankly, with the boomers all moving to old-people welfare in the next decade, we need an influx of warm bodies to help pay for them. Immigration, extra babies, whatever.
Societies may be made up of individuals, but the individual has little place in society. It's about what's best for the most, not what's best for you in particular. Yea, you may have to support some poor people. Yea, some women have children they can't afford.
Of course the government is strictly opposed to having a sensible family planning program with free contraception; I'm sure you are too because of course you'd have to pay for that, which you'd equate with stealing. Which is pretty classy btw; blame the kid for being born.
It's a hell of a lot easier to deal with the actual problem before it occurs. Put together a sensible immigration policy to draw skilled workers, set up a wide-reaching guest worker program with taxes and benefits to draw unskilled workers. Teach the kids how not to get pregnant, give them contraception. Teach 'em enough to become productive members of society, give 'em job training. Of course, all those social programs are stealing too, right?
The argument is that a wealthy person can afford to pay a greater share, since their basic needs can be met with a much smaller slice of their income than a poor person.
If a person makes 100,000 dollars a year, and is taxed at a rate of 25%, then they still have 75,000 dollars to support their lifestyle, whereas a person making 10,000 dollars would have only 7,500 dollars left if taxed at the same rate.
In short, it's a much bigger deal when you have less money. Every bit is important.
The argument isn't that rich people use more or less services, but that the burden should be shared equally, and a flat tax puts a heavier weight on people who make less.
There is also the argument that it is better to tax the poor less, because that is more efficient than having to provide government programs to support them...It's the same argument that we use for making people who don't have children pay taxes to support public schools. Even though they're getting no direct benefit from supporting the schools, they're reaping indirect benefits from a more educated population.
Because it's not something that most people care about? NASA is big news here, but 90% of the country couldn't give a shit, and the republicans will be quick to trumpet "Tax and Spend."
Yea, because pandering to the geek crowd who loves NASA wins a lot of elections for people...They know we're a fractured block who are more likely to vote based on privacy/copyright issues.
And don't feed me horseshit about Florida; you could win that state in a second by promising to increase medicare payments.
Slashdot Mirror
If you unionize, your employer has far less rights regarding workmanship and professionalism than if he can simply fire someone who displays neither. He also has fewer options come hiring time.
By all means, lets restrict all IT work to people who have the piece of paper, rather than the actual ability. In my experience the people who want the former, are the people who lack the latter.
Well, gee, lets see. Setting aside the economic issues, the inertia and sloppy work that comes with systems where "seniority" is more important than "ability", lets talk about the Bar thing.
What does the American Bar Association do? Primarily it sets standards for it's members, and enforces them. Almost all professional associations do this, whether it's lawyers, accountants, or plumbers, you can't practice your trade unless they say you can...In Union strong states, you aren't allowed to hire plumbers and electricians who haven't jumped through the hoops, regardless of qualifications...Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field. Not only is he more fit, but you can't even hire the other guy because he can't get licensed without jumping through the union hoops.
Now, how many people get into IT through "non standard" channels? How many self-taught pros are there out there? How many people have a non-IT educational background? How many people from other countries?
Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards.
Jesus. If you want to drive offshoring, that's the way to do it. Make American IT more expensive and less efficient than everywhere else in the world, and the work will flee this country and leave us longing for the days of H1-Bs and mere outsourcing.
EULA's are really more for protecting them from liability than they are for trying to steal our junk.
I mean, vis a vis the Facebook thing, there are vast quantities of precedent regarding copyright and liability which make it a bit unlikely that they could actually follow through on some mass appropriation of content...Just as an example, say I'm a professional photographer and someone else puts one of my images on Facebook...does that mean that they own all the rights to my photo? Seriously unlikely; those laws have wicked teeth, and there are very specific things that have to occur for you to transfer rights to your own copyrights to a third party.
Everyone asks for whatever they think they can get preemptively to reduce their own liability. I mean, imagine Facebook loses all your pictures through some data breach. If they didn't have all the rights to 'em sewn up, this might be a problem.
Likewise the rest. If you have no rights, you can't complain when they get infringed on. The AOL thing is probably more along the lines of pre-justifying the banning of accounts.
Jesus.
Basically, you end up with everyone else raising their tariffs too, so your goods are worth crap overseas, and the things you need to import are vastly more expensive.
Basic stuff like out-of-season fruit becomes impossible to get...We're talking about no more bananas, for starters.
Local manufacture has to make the local goods, that's true, but the prices are obscene because they can charge whatever they want, since you've artificially raised the price.
In the '80's we set a quota on Japanese cars to support our auto industry...They could only sell 20,000(?) a year, or something like that, so naturally, the prices shot up and made it so American cars were more price-competitive. Do you know what happened then? The fucking American car companies raised their rates to make a bigger profit, and ended up still coming second place to Japan in terms of demand, and worse, regular people here couldn't afford to buy goddamn cars!
Basically, the more protected an industry is, the crappier it works. It doesn't have to compete because it can't go out of business. No new services, high prices, few options. Look at the US post office, look how it's changed since the government said "We're not going to protect you from FedEx and UPS anymore." They do priority mail now, and rush delivery for packages...That stuff just didn't happen when they didn't have to compete.
The thing about high import tariffs that works for a while, the thing that Japan did, and China is doing now, is that when you're developing rapidly you don't have much of a middle class...No citizens with disposable income, so you can jack up your tariffs and not really piss off anyone except the rich.
When the middle class arrives however, you've got to take those barriers down or you're going to be stifling the service sectors of your economy, and the service sector is HUGE and profitable. It brings in wholesale wealth from other countries. Like in the 80's and 90's when Japan was so dominant and they were going to buy all of America, and weren't we foolish for letting them...Do you see what we did to those poor bastards? The service sector eats foreign wealth. Now they're in terrible economic shape, and we're still rolling along.
And now, the dollar is tanking. That's terrible, you say. But it's really not. If the dollar devalues without us experiencing insane inflation, that gives our local manufacturing a huge advantage selling overseas, while only impacting the price of imported goods. This economic crapfest is concentrated in the financial sector. The industrial sector is growing at a better rate than it's seen in a long time. Good stuff.
Actually no.
See that widget will languish in a warehouse now, because no one wants to pay 10 times as much as a similar widget from another country. The company that made it won't get any orders for their over priced widget, and they'll go out of business.
That benefits local workers how exactly? You can't just say, "Local production always produces local benefits." It doesn't. In fact, what you're talking about isn't trade at all, it's a type of economic isolationism, which generally results in inflation, overpriced goods, and poverty.
This is the most basic economics.
No, what I'm saying is, if something costs a dollar to make here, and ten cents to make somewhere else, it benefits everyone who wants the product to buy the 10 cent version.
Only a Socialist would try to convince people that they're better off paying more for the same thing.
Nice strawman. The Chinese have an immense labor surplus; by and large it's not an educated population. That gives them an advantage in this sort of work. That's common sense, and it has nothing to do with their race, but only economics.
The reason the illegal immigrant workers are such a problem is because people like you are so protectionist of the crappy tree cutting, chicken gutting, fruit picking jobs that those people are willing to work, that we are unable to pass laws that allow them to work legally while protecting them from being abused by unscrupulous businessmen.
The problem with people like you is that you have this demi-religious faith that has nothing to do with the actual reality of the world, and you're determined to demonize anyone who disagrees with you. It's not a black and white issue. I suggest you educate yourself.
Like it or not, we don't have the sort of workforce for a traditional manufacturing economy anymore. You don't put someone through 12 years of school so they can do a job that can be done by someone straight off the farm with little or no education (e.g. our workforce, 50 years ago).
We export those jobs for a reason. We have a highly educated workforce that is capable of doing work that not everyone is capable of doing. To keep those people from having to make shoes, pillow cases, and misc. plastic crap, we export those jobs to countries whose workforces are suited to those types of jobs, theoretically saving our skilled population for more skilled work.
Trying to re-import those jobs flies in the face of all modern economic thought. If they can do it cheaper, then we should use that to our advantage and focus our competition in areas where they are weak. We should not try to beat them at a game where they hold a strong advantage. The only way to make our good cheaper would be to jack up tariffs, and that would only make the same crap cost more, and thus sell poorly.
A ray of sunshine as always. Call me when you learn something about economics.
IIRC in Europe its a pension whether it comes from a private employer or the govt.
Private pensions aren't actually that good an idea. Lot of industries (steel, auto, airline) that gave pensions to employees are currently struggling under massive pension debt because of technological advances that have substantially reduced the workforces in those companies...Pretty much the same thing that's going to happen to the US in a decade or so.
It'd be better to have a government-run pension plan that everyone pays into (than a private system) to help the system itself adapt to the changing workforce.
Fortunately for us, we're still in a position to attract skilled immigrants to make up the labor shortfall...That gives us the benefit of their labor, without having to have paid their costs as they were growing up.
In the US the cost of healthcare outstrips what you can expect from pensions and government programs, so healthcare eats into your retirement income.
Yes, we all know that no one who isn't within 10-15 years of collecting isn't going to. This doesn't mean that people who are collecting today are stupid for doing so. The spiking costs of healthcare make what would have been a livable stipend insufficient.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason I don't look. You inevitably find out stuff you'd have been happier not knowing...Not necessarily vis a vis the whole "company is going to shut down" thing (always nice to know when to look), but I'm in financials, so I'd know that before they would.
As for bonuses and pay scales and crap like that, you don't want to know what people make. There is no faster way to go nuts on the job than to know what all the people whose job is apparently only to annoy you are making.
Well, I am harder core than the average schmo where Perl is concerned, so for me it's a requirement...The vendor version is always inferior. Most forums will tell you the same thing.
But like I said, if you don't really need it, it's fine. I doubt the average user would ever run into this problem.
Who uses vendor Perl? It's like GCJ; if you don't really need it, it's good enough, but if you really need it, you download the real thing. And like java, it's easy to have multiple versions of Perl on your system.
I guess that's snarky, but seriously. These guys were running a fancy production package on the crap perl install that comes with Fedora? They needed performance (and chose perl?) and they didn't look first at compiling perl from source? It doesn't take long at all, and the benefits are substantial, even aside from not having this bug.
Because that's not true? I vote, 80% of the state votes against me, and my vote counts for nothing in the national election. It's pathetic.
Now, I still vote, but I don't have the illusion that my vote means anything in the presidential election. Winner take all politics is sure and certain death for minority candidates, and it can decide the national election as well, as in 2000.
At least they're not teabagging you...yet.
There is a difference between a "bug" and a poor design decision. For a Windows release, Vista isn't all that buggy, it's just user-hostile. You certainly can't blame them for the driver issues that caused most of the bugs early on.
What they're talking about is that it is more productive to present some boring task in game form than it is to just require people to do it.
A spoon full of sugar does indeed make the medicine go down...It's about time corporations clued in to this basic facet of human existence. Work is work, and play is play, and if work can be a little like play, people will work more.
50k is too high. Median household income is lower than that; half the country wouldn't have to pay taxes.
I'm all for simplifying the tax system: it's basically welfare for lawyers and accountants as it stands right now. The average citizen should be able to figure out their own damn taxes without having to hire professional help.
Still, I think a flat tax is only ever going to benefit the top .1%, and just in terms of people to piss off, it's better to piss off .1% than 1% or even 10%.
Frankly, with the boomers all moving to old-people welfare in the next decade, we need an influx of warm bodies to help pay for them. Immigration, extra babies, whatever.
Societies may be made up of individuals, but the individual has little place in society. It's about what's best for the most, not what's best for you in particular. Yea, you may have to support some poor people. Yea, some women have children they can't afford.
Of course the government is strictly opposed to having a sensible family planning program with free contraception; I'm sure you are too because of course you'd have to pay for that, which you'd equate with stealing. Which is pretty classy btw; blame the kid for being born.
It's a hell of a lot easier to deal with the actual problem before it occurs. Put together a sensible immigration policy to draw skilled workers, set up a wide-reaching guest worker program with taxes and benefits to draw unskilled workers. Teach the kids how not to get pregnant, give them contraception. Teach 'em enough to become productive members of society, give 'em job training. Of course, all those social programs are stealing too, right?
The argument is that a wealthy person can afford to pay a greater share, since their basic needs can be met with a much smaller slice of their income than a poor person.
If a person makes 100,000 dollars a year, and is taxed at a rate of 25%, then they still have 75,000 dollars to support their lifestyle, whereas a person making 10,000 dollars would have only 7,500 dollars left if taxed at the same rate.
In short, it's a much bigger deal when you have less money. Every bit is important.
The argument isn't that rich people use more or less services, but that the burden should be shared equally, and a flat tax puts a heavier weight on people who make less.
There is also the argument that it is better to tax the poor less, because that is more efficient than having to provide government programs to support them...It's the same argument that we use for making people who don't have children pay taxes to support public schools. Even though they're getting no direct benefit from supporting the schools, they're reaping indirect benefits from a more educated population.
I love Slashdot...If income tax is applied to us, it's unconstitutional, but if it's NOT applied to someone else, it's pandering.
Because it's not something that most people care about? NASA is big news here, but 90% of the country couldn't give a shit, and the republicans will be quick to trumpet "Tax and Spend."
Yea, because pandering to the geek crowd who loves NASA wins a lot of elections for people...They know we're a fractured block who are more likely to vote based on privacy/copyright issues.
And don't feed me horseshit about Florida; you could win that state in a second by promising to increase medicare payments.