I don't think so. "Overbuget" can reasonabily mean one of either two things: Budgeted A, really costed when produced A+delta, or Budgeted as A, when it really costs A-delta.
The third way, especially when you work in government, is that it gets the proposed Budget A, you do the work and it really costs A-Delta, but the Tax Activists in the meantime came in and cut your revenue, which means your real budget is B, and B In neither case will the project be judged to be "under budget". And in neither case will the budget be successfull. It has simply been my bad luck to run into this phenomenon every place I've worked in a 15 year career, because money is a really stupid way to judge the success or failure of technology projects.
They have been- most of these drives are now USB 2.0, and due to the way USB spec is written, there's nothing to prevent compatible improved speed to come out as fast as the chips can handle it.
It's a joke based on an old measure of bandwidth- from back in the day when modems were so slow that the fastest way to transfer a megabyte from LA to San Francisco was to load a station wagon with tapes and drive there.
Given a rough guess of 30,000 thumb drives, at 4GB per, on an 8 hour drive, you get 4GB/sec, give or take a GB, as the bandwith of a Beetle full of thumb drives.
Then you're fucked right out of the gate. Sounds to me like it's pretty silly to stick around in that environment and constantly be involved with projects that do nothing but fail, unless you have no other options.
That's the point I'm at, no other options- I'd rather succeed at raising a kid with CP to be a useful human being than worry about whether projects succeed or fail. I got bitter after 2001- when I realized what was happening in the software industry was the shortsightedness that your company seems to have actually succeeded in fighting (my last private industry manager, in my exit interview, claimed that my project had failed because nobody had money to buy it after 9-11-2001....as if the recession was MY fault).
It was at that point I gave up on capitalism- and learned to just survive.
Not sure what context you're talking about, but I'm talking about things from MY context, as the owner of software development and services companies. Sure, I won't be doing any $170 million dollar contracts any time soon, but I have been involved in many $100 million dollar ones.
Note the word OWNER- governments don't have owners, and nor do publically traded companies. I'm talking about the fact that bureaucracies, unlike dictatorships, have limitations. Limitations that guarantee that large complex projects will come in over budget, late, outside of original spec, or some combination thereof.
Also, I'm not responding directly to the specific case of the story, just the parent's generalized statement regarding software projects.
Yes- and I'm talking LARGE software projects. As in ones that are far more complex than a simple e-commerce website or small database. Ones that have business rules that you'd simply cancel the customer for insisting upon.
I think you're just taking a short/small/unrealistic view at what "cost" is.
The basic I've heard is that if you're paying industry average in government, you're paying too much. Likewise in private industry, if you have a project you can't make money from in under 4 months, the shareholders will force you to cut it.
Sure, my PM might be out of the normal scale for PM's, but I can easily show business cases that justify his "extra" cost (usually less than 2% of the total project, on projects $.5 - $5 million) vs. being late, over budget, and not having something that works. And, I've never had to sell to the "bean counters". I've sold to the client's management, or champions of the project. Sure, bean counters will go over the estimates and projections and costs, and bitch about a whole bunch of stuff, but then we explain and justify those items, and it's all good. I have YET to deal with any client that didn't get it. Let's face it, if I can't sell a higher-than-normal PM to the project, then I'm not doing my job properly. I haven't had a problem doing so in the contracts we've done. And those contracts are with US/CDN Governments and banks. And we deal in very large, complex systems, predominately in globally distributed Oracle installations.
I work in State Government- and we can't even fill the positions we have because the beancounters won't let us pay industry standard wages. When I worked in private industry, the story was the same- except it was the shareholders. Selling higher costs just would get the project cut entirely. I lost more jobs that way than I can count- which is why I'm now in State government where I at least have some protection.
Don't kid yourself, governments and public companies FOR SURE have a say in who they work with. When you get right down to it, there is usually ONE GUY/GIRL that is responsible for the project, and has a huge amount to say in who gets the contract. And they generally have the skills (political) to get their way with any kind of oversight that may be in place. To think otherwise would be very naieve, IMO. I have seen sooo many examples of RFP's/contracts/requirements being worded in such a specific manner that only one particular supplier would meet the requirements, just so that the customer could be guaranteed that that supplier would be picked. (I've been on the receiving end of a few of them). I've also seen a large project broken down into many, many smaller ones so that each piece is within the "arbitrary assignment" limit, allowing the manager to authorize the contract himself, without having to go to tender or oversight.
In Oregon, that's a great way to get fired as a manager, and investigated/thrown in jail for misuse of taxpayer funds.
I'm just saying that I've made some tough, hard-learned decisions in my companies that have resulted in very successful software development projects, where the guys work 40 hours a week, and it gets delivered when we say it will, and it costs what we s
That's because I've hired one of the best, most technical project managers I've ever worked with. I pay him more than double what he made in his last job, and easily a third more than what he could get elsewhere. He is a hard-core programmer who gets project management and interacts well with clients.
Wouldn't that automatically make him overbudget in any publicly traded company or government, where cost is a concern?
We also take a lot of time to educate the client. That, to me, is the biggest problem... "stupid" clients. They don't understand software development, and don't properly equip themselves to ensure that their project will be successful. We refuse to work with any clients that are not prepared, as I've seen the nightmarish outcomes that can occur.
In government and publically traded companies, you don't get to pick your clients. You work with who they tell you to work with. So I guess you've found the way around it: Pick your consituents/customers carefully enough, and you won't have any significantly complex projects to worry about.
Sure, it seems like common sense, but common sense just ain't so common any more.
And also, did it occur to you that NEITHER of your methods are applicable to any large bureaucracy, public or private sector? There's no way you could get away with paying your high-priced project manager like that if you had any beancounter non-technical oversight at all; and same with turning down customers. The ONLY thing that allows you to do this is that you are small potatoes in comparison to $170 million projects with public or stockholder money; and some would say your way is actualy LESS efficient (though not me- I'd say instead you've learned the lesson of The Mythical Man Month and figured out the correct way to handle it, thus you have successful projects that would NEVER be used in a bureaucracy anywhere in the world).
I don't know of a single software project ANYWHERE, public or private industry, that matches those three requirements. In fact, it's widely regarded in modern software project managment that those three items you listed are mutually exclusive, as in:
On Time
Under Budget
Works as Designed
CHOOSE ANY TWO!
There's at least $170 million of development in Windows. Does it work any better? I think the problem is the perception that it is POSSIBLE to write software this complex that is bug free.
As far as there being "no point" to rebuilding a major US port city, that's just silly. The reason that city has remained there for hundreds of years, despite its vulnerability is because it's in such a commercially advantageous spot. Maybe instead of letting it sink into the sea, we should concentrate on rebuilding the wetlands around it that served as natural barriers to hurricanes in the past.
Or maybe we should just recognize that nature is stronger than anything we've got, and just build the whole city to float.
Then I hope you won't mind when the rest of the country tells you to go to hell in the next hurricane, since you're too stupid to actually do something to prevent disaster- such as having building and safety codes that recognize anything below 30' might get flooded out.
I just hope this time they put the generators in the hospital on the top floor (and other such improvements that reflect the fact that anything in the first 30' might get flooded and thus should be used for parking structures only, not residences or stores).
Eventually you get down to just one employee who is basically a security guard, janitor, and front-line customer support ("oh, sorry your sandwich is screwed up sir, here's a refund/new sandwich)", and is armed with a phone number to call when anything unexpectedly goes wrong.
You forgot the most important part of his job- opening 50# boxes of frozen burger patties, stacking them, and putting them in the correct input tray. Sure, it only has to be done once every 48 hours or so, but it's just as important as those other jobs.
How do you think he "earned" that much money? It's only by taking bribes to do what the powers that be want him to that any one man can earn money like that.
Wow. This, sir, is truly a most unusual juxtaposition of viewpoints. I'll go so far as to say it's perhaps the most unusual one I've ever seen.
It's a very common one among those who have studied what happened in the Pacific Northwest between 1830-1833.
But let me say this. My dad is an award-winning economist (Jonathan Hughes Prize, actually) and he's a good man, and I've taken an introductory class myself, though it's been a while. Still, I know a few things. Economics is a science. It has laws. True, they are not as solid as the Laws Of Physics, but they're just as true.
Then why have they been failing for 40 years? Why did they fail the Kalapayu 170 years ago?
And the truth is that free markets, by and large, make peoples' lives better, not worse.
Tell that to the Kalapayu, if you can find any. Oh yeah- most of them died off because their economic competitors brought Malaria to Oregon.
Your rhetoric about how "markets never did any good for anybody" is extremism of the most ridiculous and absurd variety. What did help people then? Sustanance farming?
It's at least more honest than the con game of making money off of charging people usury.
People don't trade in a market , whether they're trading corn or computers or labor or lemons, unless both parties gain something.
Then why has the US trade balance been negative for the past 30 years? Yes, some people gain something- a small minority.
You may groan about your soul-sucking job, but the fact is that you'd be far worse off without it.
My people had the Salmon, the Hazelnut, the Wild Sunflower, Wapato and Camas, long before your "free market" ever existed. We should have protected it better. Now, we just have slavery.
My father has argued that free trade is a fundamental human right:
Then your father is a traitor to his nation and his family.
If someone in Cuba has something to sell me, and I want to buy it, what business has anyone stopping us?
And when that throws your neighbor out of work and he kills you for food, are you going to accept that consequence as well?
Anything else is simply coercing us
Traitors deserve to be coerced. If you don't like it you should move to Cuba.
You argue "protectionism!" to build a strong local economy. Why must it be local?
Because any economy where you can't kill the person who cheats you is evil.
Are the people overseas less deserving of jobs, and the progress of the modern world?
Let them invent their own technology, create their own progress, just as we did.
Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?"
Well, let's see- work 32 hours hunting and gathering vs 40-60 hours in a factory- which is more free?
and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand. Ah, you will say, but the companies, the evil companies of course, they are going to pass all the savings along to the CEOs, those rich evil bastards. In a truly free market, though, another company will gladly spring up doing the exact same thing, but NOT pay the CEOs a bunch of money, until the other company goes out of business (or changes).
Money means nothing if you're homeless and can't eat. And you're wrong- because once money starts accumulating, money will use the power of government to take away more freedom.
Markets are not there to make your life better.
That's the first thing I agree with- and because they're not, I have little to no use for them.
They are there to make everybody's lives better
But they're not, are they? As long as there is one loser who gets cheated, not everybody's life is getting better.
Because I believe in the New Deal that Roosevelt started- and also believe Ceaser Chaverez when he said increasing the supply of labor is only to reduce the cost of labor.
There are jobs Americans won't/can't do and the H1b visa program partly addresses this issue,at least in the tech world.America needs immigrant labor despite your nativist fears.
There are no jobs an American won't do for the right price. Too bad it costs too much.
Why is it always people of color coming here and working that upsets your types so? Mexicans Asians Africans....Do they threaten your "White Privlege"?
No, I've got enough nonwhite blood in me for that. No-it's what happened to 1/8th of my family in the 1830s when a different wave of immigrants came to Oregon that I'm reminded of- they brought with them Malaria- and within 3 years, 95% of my Kalapayu cousins died. The Mexicans and Asians are just the latest wave of destructive immigration in this nation- and we get further away from that Wealthy People.
I'd like to think of a reasonable reply to this one, but it's an emotionally charged lie. They pay for it, just not what you feel they should pay.
If they want to be a citizen of the United States and sell to US citizens, they should pay for what it takes to train an American for the job. If they don't want to be a citizen and don't want to sell in the United States, it's fine with me. They can leave. Permanently. With no assets and no hope of return without being shot.
Since the US isn't a centrally planned economy, your way doesn't work.
Who cares about centrally planned or not? I'm talking about defending the soverignity of our country against traitors.
You're only responding to one word in my statement, and you've taken the sentence out of context. You posted about artificially restricting the supply of programmers by closing off the borders to restrict the source, then you called it supply and demand. There's no way for me to reply reasonably to such a logical misstep.
We're in economic warfare. This is no time for logic- this is time for action.
Rather than reply directly, I'll simply note you object to capitalism, since you apparently would like to place all competition on a level playing field of ignorance and force companies to grow all the skills they need. That's not how a free market economy works at all.
Then I have no use for a free market economy, since it has no use for me.
I don't consider it 'extra' money, and I don't consider wages a right.
Then you're pro-slavery.
We have a deep philosophical difference on this point. I am committed to the concept of the free market.
Oh, so you're a brainwashed fool of a slave.
Occasionally, this leads to someone in a position of power taking advantage of the situation.
No, it always does. That's what you get for no regulation- feudalism.
Such is human nature. This doesn't lead me to tar my brush and paint the whole canvas the same color, because that's not the reality of the situation. CEOs, by and large, do an incredibly difficult job, and they are rewarded for it.
Yeah, it's incredibly hard going to five-martini "business lunches" and playing golf.
There are plenty left, they just aren't being paid outrageous wages for jobs any monkey can do well.
If $.33/hr is outrageous to you, just move your factory to Africa, right?
Programming isn't assembly line work. It won't be for some time, but when it is, it won't command the wages it does now. Such is the price of a dynamic economy.
In that case, I have no use for a "dynamic economy" either.
You and I have taken different tacks on this point - you choose to huddle into a shell and complain, and I choose to adapt. Time will show who wins this one.
Actually, no, I choose to return to real anything-goes capitalism- where we can kill those who offend us.
That's another emotionally charged statement, but this time it's only a half-truth instead of an outright lie. It ignores all the business realities that go into such decisions. In a free market, it's not a company's responsibility to fade into obselescence while it protects a uselessly redundant or outmoded workforce.
It once was- back when we truly had a free market instead of a free for all- but now, I say such companies deserve death. They no longer serve their society, so why should they be allowed to survive?
Pity is worth nothing. Economics is the new warfare- and at the rate Bush's free trade policies are giving away our land to the Chinese, I think IndoChina will become a new empire- after which they will simply kill the people and recolonize.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, some people seem to be better at surviving than I am then.....
There's a third way:
I don't think so. "Overbuget" can reasonabily mean one of either two things: Budgeted A, really costed when produced A+delta, or Budgeted as A, when it really costs A-delta.
The third way, especially when you work in government, is that it gets the proposed Budget A, you do the work and it really costs A-Delta, but the Tax Activists in the meantime came in and cut your revenue, which means your real budget is B, and B
In neither case will the project be judged to be "under budget". And in neither case will the budget be successfull. It has simply been my bad luck to run into this phenomenon every place I've worked in a 15 year career, because money is a really stupid way to judge the success or failure of technology projects.
They have been- most of these drives are now USB 2.0, and due to the way USB spec is written, there's nothing to prevent compatible improved speed to come out as fast as the chips can handle it.
It's a joke based on an old measure of bandwidth- from back in the day when modems were so slow that the fastest way to transfer a megabyte from LA to San Francisco was to load a station wagon with tapes and drive there.
Given a rough guess of 30,000 thumb drives, at 4GB per, on an 8 hour drive, you get 4GB/sec, give or take a GB, as the bandwith of a Beetle full of thumb drives.
Then you're fucked right out of the gate. Sounds to me like it's pretty silly to stick around in that environment and constantly be involved with projects that do nothing but fail, unless you have no other options.
That's the point I'm at, no other options- I'd rather succeed at raising a kid with CP to be a useful human being than worry about whether projects succeed or fail. I got bitter after 2001- when I realized what was happening in the software industry was the shortsightedness that your company seems to have actually succeeded in fighting (my last private industry manager, in my exit interview, claimed that my project had failed because nobody had money to buy it after 9-11-2001....as if the recession was MY fault).
It was at that point I gave up on capitalism- and learned to just survive.
Not sure what context you're talking about, but I'm talking about things from MY context, as the owner of software development and services companies. Sure, I won't be doing any $170 million dollar contracts any time soon, but I have been involved in many $100 million dollar ones.
Note the word OWNER- governments don't have owners, and nor do publically traded companies. I'm talking about the fact that bureaucracies, unlike dictatorships, have limitations. Limitations that guarantee that large complex projects will come in over budget, late, outside of original spec, or some combination thereof.
Also, I'm not responding directly to the specific case of the story, just the parent's generalized statement regarding software projects.
Yes- and I'm talking LARGE software projects. As in ones that are far more complex than a simple e-commerce website or small database. Ones that have business rules that you'd simply cancel the customer for insisting upon.
I think you're just taking a short/small/unrealistic view at what "cost" is.
The basic I've heard is that if you're paying industry average in government, you're paying too much. Likewise in private industry, if you have a project you can't make money from in under 4 months, the shareholders will force you to cut it.
Sure, my PM might be out of the normal scale for PM's, but I can easily show business cases that justify his "extra" cost (usually less than 2% of the total project, on projects $.5 - $5 million) vs. being late, over budget, and not having something that works. And, I've never had to sell to the "bean counters". I've sold to the client's management, or champions of the project. Sure, bean counters will go over the estimates and projections and costs, and bitch about a whole bunch of stuff, but then we explain and justify those items, and it's all good. I have YET to deal with any client that didn't get it. Let's face it, if I can't sell a higher-than-normal PM to the project, then I'm not doing my job properly. I haven't had a problem doing so in the contracts we've done. And those contracts are with US/CDN Governments and banks. And we deal in very large, complex systems, predominately in globally distributed Oracle installations.
I work in State Government- and we can't even fill the positions we have because the beancounters won't let us pay industry standard wages. When I worked in private industry, the story was the same- except it was the shareholders. Selling higher costs just would get the project cut entirely. I lost more jobs that way than I can count- which is why I'm now in State government where I at least have some protection.
Don't kid yourself, governments and public companies FOR SURE have a say in who they work with. When you get right down to it, there is usually ONE GUY/GIRL that is responsible for the project, and has a huge amount to say in who gets the contract. And they generally have the skills (political) to get their way with any kind of oversight that may be in place. To think otherwise would be very naieve, IMO. I have seen sooo many examples of RFP's/contracts/requirements being worded in such a specific manner that only one particular supplier would meet the requirements, just so that the customer could be guaranteed that that supplier would be picked. (I've been on the receiving end of a few of them). I've also seen a large project broken down into many, many smaller ones so that each piece is within the "arbitrary assignment" limit, allowing the manager to authorize the contract himself, without having to go to tender or oversight.
In Oregon, that's a great way to get fired as a manager, and investigated/thrown in jail for misuse of taxpayer funds.
I'm just saying that I've made some tough, hard-learned decisions in my companies that have resulted in very successful software development projects, where the guys work 40 hours a week, and it gets delivered when we say it will, and it costs what we s
That's because I've hired one of the best, most technical project managers I've ever worked with. I pay him more than double what he made in his last job, and easily a third more than what he could get elsewhere. He is a hard-core programmer who gets project management and interacts well with clients.
Wouldn't that automatically make him overbudget in any publicly traded company or government, where cost is a concern?
We also take a lot of time to educate the client. That, to me, is the biggest problem... "stupid" clients. They don't understand software development, and don't properly equip themselves to ensure that their project will be successful. We refuse to work with any clients that are not prepared, as I've seen the nightmarish outcomes that can occur.
In government and publically traded companies, you don't get to pick your clients. You work with who they tell you to work with. So I guess you've found the way around it: Pick your consituents/customers carefully enough, and you won't have any significantly complex projects to worry about.
Sure, it seems like common sense, but common sense just ain't so common any more.
And also, did it occur to you that NEITHER of your methods are applicable to any large bureaucracy, public or private sector? There's no way you could get away with paying your high-priced project manager like that if you had any beancounter non-technical oversight at all; and same with turning down customers. The ONLY thing that allows you to do this is that you are small potatoes in comparison to $170 million projects with public or stockholder money; and some would say your way is actualy LESS efficient (though not me- I'd say instead you've learned the lesson of The Mythical Man Month and figured out the correct way to handle it, thus you have successful projects that would NEVER be used in a bureaucracy anywhere in the world).
True enough- but my point is that it's not just the government that has this problem, but the software industry in general.
There isn't a significantly complex project I know of ANYWHERE that fits this mold.
But likely not "working as designed", or as I put it "working as the daft lusers thought that it could by reading their minds".
I don't know of a single software project ANYWHERE , public or private industry, that matches those three requirements. In fact, it's widely regarded in modern software project managment that those three items you listed are mutually exclusive, as in:
On Time
Under Budget
Works as Designed
CHOOSE ANY TWO!
There's at least $170 million of development in Windows. Does it work any better? I think the problem is the perception that it is POSSIBLE to write software this complex that is bug free.
As far as there being "no point" to rebuilding a major US port city, that's just silly. The reason that city has remained there for hundreds of years, despite its vulnerability is because it's in such a commercially advantageous spot. Maybe instead of letting it sink into the sea, we should concentrate on rebuilding the wetlands around it that served as natural barriers to hurricanes in the past.
Or maybe we should just recognize that nature is stronger than anything we've got, and just build the whole city to float.
Then I hope you won't mind when the rest of the country tells you to go to hell in the next hurricane, since you're too stupid to actually do something to prevent disaster- such as having building and safety codes that recognize anything below 30' might get flooded out.
I just hope this time they put the generators in the hospital on the top floor (and other such improvements that reflect the fact that anything in the first 30' might get flooded and thus should be used for parking structures only, not residences or stores).
Eventually you get down to just one employee who is basically a security guard, janitor, and front-line customer support ("oh, sorry your sandwich is screwed up sir, here's a refund/new sandwich)", and is armed with a phone number to call when anything unexpectedly goes wrong.
You forgot the most important part of his job- opening 50# boxes of frozen burger patties, stacking them, and putting them in the correct input tray. Sure, it only has to be done once every 48 hours or so, but it's just as important as those other jobs.
Mine will cook and serve the breakfast- but only knows how to do a single egg over easy, with bacon and toast. No other menu choices available.
Does he sound like a Marxist?
Actually, I'm a tribal distributist.
American Progressives SUPPORT Immigrant labor.....legal or not.
Ceaser Chaverez didn't. When you find out why, let me know. (hint, it has somthing to do with supporting UNIONS, which immigrant labor is against).
How do you think he "earned" that much money? It's only by taking bribes to do what the powers that be want him to that any one man can earn money like that.
Do you really know programmers that are homeless? That seems pretty hard for me to believe. I don't know where you are (I'm in Portland, Oregon)
Were- most of them ended up out in Newberg farming instead of programming. Had to move out of the expensive city.
Wow. This, sir, is truly a most unusual juxtaposition of viewpoints. I'll go so far as to say it's perhaps the most unusual one I've ever seen.
It's a very common one among those who have studied what happened in the Pacific Northwest between 1830-1833.
But let me say this. My dad is an award-winning economist (Jonathan Hughes Prize, actually) and he's a good man, and I've taken an introductory class myself, though it's been a while. Still, I know a few things. Economics is a science. It has laws. True, they are not as solid as the Laws Of Physics, but they're just as true.
Then why have they been failing for 40 years? Why did they fail the Kalapayu 170 years ago?
And the truth is that free markets, by and large, make peoples' lives better, not worse.
Tell that to the Kalapayu, if you can find any. Oh yeah- most of them died off because their economic competitors brought Malaria to Oregon.
Your rhetoric about how "markets never did any good for anybody" is extremism of the most ridiculous and absurd variety. What did help people then? Sustanance farming?
It's at least more honest than the con game of making money off of charging people usury.
People don't trade in a market , whether they're trading corn or computers or labor or lemons, unless both parties gain something.
Then why has the US trade balance been negative for the past 30 years? Yes, some people gain something- a small minority.
You may groan about your soul-sucking job, but the fact is that you'd be far worse off without it.
My people had the Salmon, the Hazelnut, the Wild Sunflower, Wapato and Camas, long before your "free market" ever existed. We should have protected it better. Now, we just have slavery.
My father has argued that free trade is a fundamental human right:
Then your father is a traitor to his nation and his family.
If someone in Cuba has something to sell me, and I want to buy it, what business has anyone stopping us?
And when that throws your neighbor out of work and he kills you for food, are you going to accept that consequence as well?
Anything else is simply coercing us
Traitors deserve to be coerced. If you don't like it you should move to Cuba.
You argue "protectionism!" to build a strong local economy. Why must it be local?
Because any economy where you can't kill the person who cheats you is evil.
Are the people overseas less deserving of jobs, and the progress of the modern world?
Let them invent their own technology, create their own progress, just as we did.
Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?"
Well, let's see- work 32 hours hunting and gathering vs 40-60 hours in a factory- which is more free?
and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand. Ah, you will say, but the companies, the evil companies of course, they are going to pass all the savings along to the CEOs, those rich evil bastards. In a truly free market, though, another company will gladly spring up doing the exact same thing, but NOT pay the CEOs a bunch of money, until the other company goes out of business (or changes).
Money means nothing if you're homeless and can't eat. And you're wrong- because once money starts accumulating, money will use the power of government to take away more freedom.
Markets are not there to make your life better.
That's the first thing I agree with- and because they're not, I have little to no use for them.
They are there to make everybody's lives better
But they're not, are they? As long as there is one loser who gets cheated, not everybody's life is getting better.
Why do you fear immigrant labor?
Because I believe in the New Deal that Roosevelt started- and also believe Ceaser Chaverez when he said increasing the supply of labor is only to reduce the cost of labor.
There are jobs Americans won't/can't do and the H1b visa program partly addresses this issue,at least in the tech world.America needs immigrant labor despite your nativist fears.
There are no jobs an American won't do for the right price. Too bad it costs too much.
Why is it always people of color coming here and working that upsets your types so? Mexicans Asians Africans....Do they threaten your "White Privlege"?
No, I've got enough nonwhite blood in me for that. No-it's what happened to 1/8th of my family in the 1830s when a different wave of immigrants came to Oregon that I'm reminded of- they brought with them Malaria- and within 3 years, 95% of my Kalapayu cousins died. The Mexicans and Asians are just the latest wave of destructive immigration in this nation- and we get further away from that Wealthy People.
I'd like to think of a reasonable reply to this one, but it's an emotionally charged lie. They pay for it, just not what you feel they should pay.
If they want to be a citizen of the United States and sell to US citizens, they should pay for what it takes to train an American for the job. If they don't want to be a citizen and don't want to sell in the United States, it's fine with me. They can leave. Permanently. With no assets and no hope of return without being shot.
Since the US isn't a centrally planned economy, your way doesn't work.
Who cares about centrally planned or not? I'm talking about defending the soverignity of our country against traitors.
You're only responding to one word in my statement, and you've taken the sentence out of context. You posted about artificially restricting the supply of programmers by closing off the borders to restrict the source, then you called it supply and demand. There's no way for me to reply reasonably to such a logical misstep.
We're in economic warfare. This is no time for logic- this is time for action.
Rather than reply directly, I'll simply note you object to capitalism, since you apparently would like to place all competition on a level playing field of ignorance and force companies to grow all the skills they need. That's not how a free market economy works at all.
Then I have no use for a free market economy, since it has no use for me.
I don't consider it 'extra' money, and I don't consider wages a right.
Then you're pro-slavery.
We have a deep philosophical difference on this point. I am committed to the concept of the free market.
Oh, so you're a brainwashed fool of a slave.
Occasionally, this leads to someone in a position of power taking advantage of the situation.
No, it always does. That's what you get for no regulation- feudalism.
Such is human nature. This doesn't lead me to tar my brush and paint the whole canvas the same color, because that's not the reality of the situation. CEOs, by and large, do an incredibly difficult job, and they are rewarded for it.
Yeah, it's incredibly hard going to five-martini "business lunches" and playing golf.
There are plenty left, they just aren't being paid outrageous wages for jobs any monkey can do well.
If $.33/hr is outrageous to you, just move your factory to Africa, right?
Programming isn't assembly line work. It won't be for some time, but when it is, it won't command the wages it does now. Such is the price of a dynamic economy.
In that case, I have no use for a "dynamic economy" either.
You and I have taken different tacks on this point - you choose to huddle into a shell and complain, and I choose to adapt. Time will show who wins this one.
Actually, no, I choose to return to real anything-goes capitalism- where we can kill those who offend us.
That's another emotionally charged statement, but this time it's only a half-truth instead of an outright lie. It ignores all the business realities that go into such decisions. In a free market, it's not a company's responsibility to fade into obselescence while it protects a uselessly redundant or outmoded workforce.
It once was- back when we truly had a free market instead of a free for all- but now, I say such companies deserve death. They no longer serve their society, so why should they be allowed to survive?
Actually, most of them make a good deal more than that- when you include the bribes and stock options. Want one example? Warren Buffet.
Pity is worth nothing. Economics is the new warfare- and at the rate Bush's free trade policies are giving away our land to the Chinese, I think IndoChina will become a new empire- after which they will simply kill the people and recolonize.
If it's a choice between that and becomeing homeless (like so many programmers I know over the last 5 years) then I'll take forced by law.