And so if I act like a lunatic, I go to the front of the line? So now everyone who calls will shriek and scream. I'm sure that will be a big improvement.
Why is it that governments can't figure out that people have minds, and will adapt their behavior to govt programs?
From my perspective there's nothing wage depressing about H-1B visas. You're legally required to provide them the prevailing wage, and in my case I can find americans with similar skills for less than the legally required wage.... Compare that to the 45 H-1B applicants who were also not qualified, but given the job description I legally would be required to pay them $72k/yr.
There is a serious lack of talented skilled american programmers. You can't find them until you get in the $100-$150k/yr range.
Did you read what you wrote? You've supplied all the data to refute your claims.
Skilled american programmers cost 100-150k. If you found a qualified H1B, you could hire him at 72k, the "prevailing wage". So the supposed prevailing wage is what, 30%-110% lower than the actual market rate for a talented american programmer.
So already we see that the prevailing wage is bogus and depressing wages, even by your own numbers. But even if you had to hire them at the current prevailing wage for skilled american programmers, 100k-150k, that would still be the prevailing wage in a market with H1B workers in it. If you couldn't hire the H1B workers, the salaries for talented programmers would go up. Supply of skilled workers goes down, price goes up. Or maybe you'd actually start hiring lesser skilled American programmers.
The H1B program is so completely dishonest. Companies like them because they're disposable indentured servants who can be deported on a whim. They depress wages and working conditions. They provide enormous opportunities for corruption through head shops and contract labor. And the best part is the subsidy - employers are able to offer the right to live and work in the US to foreigners as part of their compensation package. What's not to like, from the corporate perspective?
A word to students and hiring managers: colleges are among the best places to learn a lot of skills that people need in the workplace, but the vocational training they are designed for is the academic world.
Technically, the Google Nexus One is a beautiful, high-performing, genius-simple device.
But as a business it was a total flop.
How many android phones are out there now? I think all Google wanted was to spread android phones, and in fact preferred to do it without making phones themselves. Nexus was a prototype loss leader that got the ball rolling. Looks like a winning strategy to me.
japan is a "grey democracy," a gerokelptocracy (made up word): the elderly hoarde the power in corporations and in society's rules such that the young can't get a foothold.
Great word - although you had a typo - should be gerokleptocracy.
Between social security, medicare, property tax abatements, and other goodies for seniors, the government is a machine that transfers wealth from the young, working, relatively poor to the old, retired, relatively wealthy. Oh yeah, let's not forget the tens of trillions of dollars in debt that supposedly the young will be paying in the future.
Probably the most important political movement will be for the young to outright repudiate the debt. They didn't run it up, they aren't going to pay it.
Make it *insurance* and needs test it. It was always an entitlement program, not a pension program. Let's be honest about it, and stop a huge entitlement program which transfers wealth from the relatively poor, working young, to the relatively rich, idle old. Entitlements for the elderly are largely just preserving the inheritance of middle and upper middle class people. Let's means test and go after the estate when a person dies.
'At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,"
Shouldn't we (the US) have been in on th bidding for these parts? It annoys me that we spend billions and billions, and then let our enemies toss around pocket change to defeat us.
Is there any particular reason we haven't bought up the entire Afghanistan poppy harvest every year, besides stupidity? How about we buy up the cocaine harvests from farmers across South America? (If you feel you must keep adults from putting things in their own bodies)
A senior person who knows the business inside out but doesn't keep up technologically deserves to be paid no more than a junior person with technological skill and no business experience, but being paid less is another matter.
If the company is only going to pay for technology skills, the company should expect that no one will want to gain the business knowledge, and those who do are likely to leave the company. When that business knowledge walks out the door, you probably never get it back at any price, and only begin to recover some of it after long apprenticeship.
Employee turnover is costly. Having business knowledge walk out the door is more costly. If your business has an oversupply of people with deep business knowledge, then you've got nothing to worry about, treat the lead like dirt and risk having him walk.
Companies do what they do. From my perspective, it's a dumb policy.
I've got a radical idea. Why not pay the guy to train up on the technology skills, what companies used to do? Now you've got a guy with deep business knowledge who knows your organization and can program in the new tech.
The alternative is to pay for a hiring search, hire some yahoo off the street, pay him to train on the business knowledge, pay for the lost productivity of everyone who interacts with him, pay the lead to train him, and likely watch your lead walk out the door with business knowledge you're never going to replace,
I can see why you want an authority to run your life, because you're clearly unable to read simple sentences.
You seemed to have missed the part where the doctor admitted that most doctors would be fine prescribing it in my case. I had plenty of my experts on my side too.
There is always a doctor somewhere who will go along with the program. And there are always doctors who won't. We shouldn't have to doctor shop to get what we want. Because in the end, it's always our decision, the only question is how much time, money, and effort the government will force us to waste to get what we want.
And I didn't shout at him, I merely countered all his weak excuses. He was merely asserting one of his own intellectual whims. He wasn't asserting expertise anymore than the doctors who would have said yes.
Honest and intelligent doctors know that they generally don't know if a medicine will help or hurt a particular patient, and have enough humility to admit their ignorance. In the face of their ignorance, they'll give their best advice, but let people make their own decisions. The central planners would do well to emulate them.
The average US government job does pay more than the average private sector job. But US government jobs are NOT average jobs. Most require higher levels of education and experience than the average private sector job.
Like teachers degrees from teaching colleges, which unions can use to wall themselves off for competition for their tenured for life jobs?
You mean those degrees are the ones that justify their higher than market salaries?
This was insightful? Nothing in the world will ever work unless a government regulator is there making it work?
Wouldn't freedom be a horrible thing?
I wanted to start taking simvastatin for high cholesterol. To start taking a medication that costs $4 a month, I had to schedule a $200 dollar appointment with a doctor (and that's the insurance companies negotiated price). The doctor feels my cholesterol is 5 points too low to warrant using simvastatin. He acknowledges that most doctors would be perfectly fine prescribing in my case, but he isn't comfortable with it. So I should pay another $200 for an appt with another doc? No thanks. I brow beat the guy into giving me a prescription, because he had no good arguments against it besides his feelings anyway.
You shudder to think about the bad care given if patients were free to trust who they trust. I shudder to think of the millions killed each year by the arbitrary restrictions to health freedom and the associated increased cost of care.
The main problem with health care are distortions caused by government intervention, mainly through regulations and tax policy.
Because of tax policy, the market has been distorted to where people are buying health buffet plans, instead of health insurance. Insurance makes sense for high cost. low probability events, not every medical purchase. We also insure end of life care, which really isn't a low probability event either.
Stop distorting the market. Subsidize care for those who can't afford it, but otherwise make people pay for their own health care.Leave them free to buy a much broader range of prescription medications w/o getting the permission of a government licensed provider. Let people order minimally invasive tests without similar permission. Let companies import medications from the lowest cost suppliers, trusting in the regulators of some finite list of countries for quality control. Let consumers order directly from the same countries.
Deduct costs for all subsidized care out of any estate. Subsidize care, don't subsidize inheritance.
Change liability law so that Google can provide online Google Diagnostics. So that offshore companies can provide medical consultations.
Add this to regulations and liability law, and we could be paying a third as much with better outcomes, satisfaction, and freedom.
Surprisingly, not much lower. You hear a lot about waste/inefficiency, but although you can find any number of egregious examples of misapropriation, they amount to a small fraction of the total.
Misappropriation isn't the main source of waste. The problem is that central planning spends money inefficiently. Worse, laws and regulations limit possibilities and destroy wealth in ways you rarely ever see.
If I went into Walgreens and said, here is my credit card, I'd like to buy my pills, I'd pay $200. With insurance company price negotiation, the price is $80. Mail order from and out of state pharmacy, $25. Mail order on the internet, $10 plus shipping. Walk into a pharmacy in Malaysia, $2.
That's the scale of the cost differentials government regulations impose.
I think it is reasonable to think that global warming could be a problem. Instead of rushing the world into pissing away trillions of dollars on carbon mitigation, I'd rather see us spend a few billion until the climate modelers can reliably beat the weatherman in climate prediction.
In the meantime, lets get serious about funding research into technologies that might have a chance of making a difference. It's scandalous that we've put such puny funds into IEC fusion, for example. How much have we pissed away in subsidies for solar panel installations? Was that really necessary, when the technology is mainly a scaling up entirely predictable from a single chip? Wouldn't it have been more effective to put that money into improving the technology first?
Unlike some, I think we could have a real problem and should spend some money to deal with it. But let's spend that money a bit more wisely, instead of "doing something", not matter how wasteful and inefficient, to show that we care about Mama Earth.
Unless their theories don't make predictions that specific. It's perfectly possible to have a theory which is undisputed but whose predictions are long-range and apply to the big picture.
Then someone should challenge him on the time scale that they can be confident at.
No bet over a 10 year window tells us that not only is no one is confident there will be a problem over the 10 year period, no one is confident there will be a *measurable increase* over 10 years. That's quite an admission to make.
What about 20 years? 30 years?
What happened to all this certainty about global warming? If you're certain, you should be willing to place a bet. You should be eager to place a bet.
That in itself will tell us a lot. If people are only confident that there will be a rise in temper
A global warming gambling market would be a wonderful thing, and show us what people really believe. It would be a way for believers and skeptics to profit, depending on who is right. Put your money where your mouth is.
I'm surprised that more people haven't talked about this. So much of management is braindead when it comes to cheaping out on work environment.
Get everyone as many 24 inch monitors as they want. Max out RAM. Get a site license to a technical library. Give programmers some freedom to order tools. Make sure that people can work remotely without hassle.
Have decent meeting rooms with a dedicated box for remote desktop, and monitors or projectors. It's crazy how much time is wasted tracking down projectors, carrying equipment, plugging it in, and getting it to work.
10 people at a meeting. 5 minutes fiddling with setup. Meeting after meeting. Do the math.
If you require a sprint period where people have to work overtime, end the period with a cheap lunch on friday and tell them everyone has to get out and go home.
Have meeting hours and "Do Not Disturb" hours for programmers. Encourage more team collaboration, pair programming, and mentoring. Encourage HOWTO wikis. Encourage lunch time tech talks. Make secure desktop sharing software available, and encourage it's use.
Food. Food. And more food. We're dogs and monkeys - give us a little biscuit for a buck, and we can be quite pleased. Protein shakes are good, because they're tasty, can replace a meal, and you can eat them while working.
Be flexible on time. Have standard core hours, but otherwise flex time. Make life easy on people. Allow packages to be delivered at the office. Stop the idiot policies against using computers for "personal use". I also use my internet, cel phone, and computers at home for business use. Let's all get over it.
Make work an opportunity to improve your skills and work habits, instead of a time to be chained to an oar as a galley slave. Treat people like they're professionals who want to do a good job, write good code, and get good at what they do. Treat them like they're part of a team and want the project to succeed. Help them to do it.
and even that insight I think is less penetrating than what one can get from studying abstract information theory and encoding in computer science (where it is quantitative and measurable in addition to providing one with essentially the same insights). I've mentioned it before, I'll mention it again:
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess that this confers no protection to you if you are not a "minority group member".
And so if I act like a lunatic, I go to the front of the line? So now everyone who calls will shriek and scream. I'm sure that will be a big improvement.
Why is it that governments can't figure out that people have minds, and will adapt their behavior to govt programs?
Wage depressing strategies?
I'm sorry, but this is BS...
From my perspective there's nothing wage depressing about H-1B visas. You're legally required to provide them the prevailing wage, and in my case I can find americans with similar skills for less than the legally required wage. ...
Compare that to the 45 H-1B applicants who were also not qualified, but given the job description I legally would be required to pay them $72k/yr.
There is a serious lack of talented skilled american programmers. You can't find them until you get in the $100-$150k/yr range.
Did you read what you wrote? You've supplied all the data to refute your claims.
Skilled american programmers cost 100-150k. If you found a qualified H1B, you could hire him at 72k, the "prevailing wage". So the supposed prevailing wage is what, 30%-110% lower than the actual market rate for a talented american programmer.
So already we see that the prevailing wage is bogus and depressing wages, even by your own numbers. But even if you had to hire them at the current prevailing wage for skilled american programmers, 100k-150k, that would still be the prevailing wage in a market with H1B workers in it. If you couldn't hire the H1B workers, the salaries for talented programmers would go up. Supply of skilled workers goes down, price goes up. Or maybe you'd actually start hiring lesser skilled American programmers.
The H1B program is so completely dishonest. Companies like them because they're disposable indentured servants who can be deported on a whim. They depress wages and working conditions. They provide enormous opportunities for corruption through head shops and contract labor. And the best part is the subsidy - employers are able to offer the right to live and work in the US to foreigners as part of their compensation package. What's not to like, from the corporate perspective?
A word to students and hiring managers: colleges are among the best places to learn a lot of skills that people need in the workplace, but the vocational training they are designed for is the academic world.
Technically, the Google Nexus One is a beautiful, high-performing, genius-simple device.
But as a business it was a total flop.
How many android phones are out there now? I think all Google wanted was to spread android phones, and in fact preferred to do it without making phones themselves. Nexus was a prototype loss leader that got the ball rolling. Looks like a winning strategy to me.
It's not that "the community" benefits, it's that the idle relatively rich benefit at the expense of the working relatively poor.
Since kings were overthrown, that has not been the explicit deal, no matter how much it is usually the case.
japan is a "grey democracy," a gerokelptocracy (made up word): the elderly hoarde the power in corporations and in society's rules such that the young can't get a foothold.
Great word - although you had a typo - should be gerokleptocracy.
Between social security, medicare, property tax abatements, and other goodies for seniors, the government is a machine that transfers wealth from the young, working, relatively poor to the old, retired, relatively wealthy. Oh yeah, let's not forget the tens of trillions of dollars in debt that supposedly the young will be paying in the future.
Probably the most important political movement will be for the young to outright repudiate the debt. They didn't run it up, they aren't going to pay it.
Of course the Kingdom of Hawaii isn't a state of the US, it is an occupied territory! I didn't know there were so many progressive people in NC.
I used to live in Hawaii, and always loved these guys squatting on beaches and protesting. Viva la Revolution!
http://www.hawaiiankingdom.org/united-nations.shtml
There was a good talk on religious demographics at fora, and how fundamentalist families have much higher fertility rates within most all cultures.
http://fora.tv/2010/09/05/Eric_Kaufmann_Shall_the_Religious_Inherit_the_Earth
I don't understand the hostile reaction to the idea that propensity to religion has a genetic component. I wonder what the gene is for that.
Precisely. Why aren't they, in the same breath, saying "House walls give people entirely too much privacy!"
Well, they're not saying it yet, but I'm sure they're thinking it.
"Think about how much evidence is denied to law enforcement by envelopes, opaque concrete, and criminals' failure to shout."
Think about how much evidence is lost because we don't ubiquitously record all conversations, everywhere we go.
Make it *insurance* and needs test it. It was always an entitlement program, not a pension program. Let's be honest about it, and stop a huge entitlement program which transfers wealth from the relatively poor, working young, to the relatively rich, idle old. Entitlements for the elderly are largely just preserving the inheritance of middle and upper middle class people. Let's means test and go after the estate when a person dies.
'At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,"
Shouldn't we (the US) have been in on th bidding for these parts? It annoys me that we spend billions and billions, and then let our enemies toss around pocket change to defeat us.
Is there any particular reason we haven't bought up the entire Afghanistan poppy harvest every year, besides stupidity? How about we buy up the cocaine harvests from farmers across South America? (If you feel you must keep adults from putting things in their own bodies)
A senior person who knows the business inside out but doesn't keep up technologically deserves to be paid no more than a junior person with technological skill and no business experience, but being paid less is another matter.
If the company is only going to pay for technology skills, the company should expect that no one will want to gain the business knowledge, and those who do are likely to leave the company. When that business knowledge walks out the door, you probably never get it back at any price, and only begin to recover some of it after long apprenticeship.
Employee turnover is costly. Having business knowledge walk out the door is more costly. If your business has an oversupply of people with deep business knowledge, then you've got nothing to worry about, treat the lead like dirt and risk having him walk.
Companies do what they do. From my perspective, it's a dumb policy.
I've got a radical idea. Why not pay the guy to train up on the technology skills, what companies used to do? Now you've got a guy with deep business knowledge who knows your organization and can program in the new tech.
The alternative is to pay for a hiring search, hire some yahoo off the street, pay him to train on the business knowledge, pay for the lost productivity of everyone who interacts with him, pay the lead to train him, and likely watch your lead walk out the door with business knowledge you're never going to replace,
I can see why you want an authority to run your life, because you're clearly unable to read simple sentences.
You seemed to have missed the part where the doctor admitted that most doctors would be fine prescribing it in my case. I had plenty of my experts on my side too.
There is always a doctor somewhere who will go along with the program. And there are always doctors who won't. We shouldn't have to doctor shop to get what we want. Because in the end, it's always our decision, the only question is how much time, money, and effort the government will force us to waste to get what we want.
And I didn't shout at him, I merely countered all his weak excuses. He was merely asserting one of his own intellectual whims. He wasn't asserting expertise anymore than the doctors who would have said yes.
Honest and intelligent doctors know that they generally don't know if a medicine will help or hurt a particular patient, and have enough humility to admit their ignorance. In the face of their ignorance, they'll give their best advice, but let people make their own decisions. The central planners would do well to emulate them.
Great post.
My pet peeve with tax talk is how people use income tax rates as evidence that "the rich" are paying their fair share.
The average US government job does pay more than the average private sector job. But US government jobs are NOT average jobs. Most require higher levels of education and experience than the average private sector job.
Like teachers degrees from teaching colleges, which unions can use to wall themselves off for competition for their tenured for life jobs?
You mean those degrees are the ones that justify their higher than market salaries?
This was insightful? Nothing in the world will ever work unless a government regulator is there making it work?
Wouldn't freedom be a horrible thing?
I wanted to start taking simvastatin for high cholesterol. To start taking a medication that costs $4 a month, I had to schedule a $200 dollar appointment with a doctor (and that's the insurance companies negotiated price). The doctor feels my cholesterol is 5 points too low to warrant using simvastatin. He acknowledges that most doctors would be perfectly fine prescribing in my case, but he isn't comfortable with it. So I should pay another $200 for an appt with another doc? No thanks. I brow beat the guy into giving me a prescription, because he had no good arguments against it besides his feelings anyway.
You shudder to think about the bad care given if patients were free to trust who they trust. I shudder to think of the millions killed each year by the arbitrary restrictions to health freedom and the associated increased cost of care.
The main problem with health care are distortions caused by government intervention, mainly through regulations and tax policy.
Because of tax policy, the market has been distorted to where people are buying health buffet plans, instead of health insurance. Insurance makes sense for high cost. low probability events, not every medical purchase. We also insure end of life care, which really isn't a low probability event either.
Stop distorting the market. Subsidize care for those who can't afford it, but otherwise make people pay for their own health care.Leave them free to buy a much broader range of prescription medications w/o getting the permission of a government licensed provider. Let people order minimally invasive tests without similar permission. Let companies import medications from the lowest cost suppliers, trusting in the regulators of some finite list of countries for quality control. Let consumers order directly from the same countries.
Deduct costs for all subsidized care out of any estate. Subsidize care, don't subsidize inheritance.
Change liability law so that Google can provide online Google Diagnostics. So that offshore companies can provide medical consultations.
Add this to regulations and liability law, and we could be paying a third as much with better outcomes, satisfaction, and freedom.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mining-the-moon
It looks like the idea is to mine the moon for materials to make fuel for space exploration.
Also, if we ever get fusion going, heavy isotopes of hydrogen and helium become possible targets.
Surprisingly, not much lower. You hear a lot about waste/inefficiency, but although you can find any number of egregious examples of misapropriation, they amount to a small fraction of the total.
Misappropriation isn't the main source of waste. The problem is that central planning spends money inefficiently. Worse, laws and regulations limit possibilities and destroy wealth in ways you rarely ever see.
If I went into Walgreens and said, here is my credit card, I'd like to buy my pills, I'd pay $200. With insurance company price negotiation, the price is $80. Mail order from and out of state pharmacy, $25. Mail order on the internet, $10 plus shipping. Walk into a pharmacy in Malaysia, $2.
That's the scale of the cost differentials government regulations impose.
I think it is reasonable to think that global warming could be a problem. Instead of rushing the world into pissing away trillions of dollars on carbon mitigation, I'd rather see us spend a few billion until the climate modelers can reliably beat the weatherman in climate prediction.
In the meantime, lets get serious about funding research into technologies that might have a chance of making a difference. It's scandalous that we've put such puny funds into IEC fusion, for example. How much have we pissed away in subsidies for solar panel installations? Was that really necessary, when the technology is mainly a scaling up entirely predictable from a single chip? Wouldn't it have been more effective to put that money into improving the technology first?
Unlike some, I think we could have a real problem and should spend some money to deal with it. But let's spend that money a bit more wisely, instead of "doing something", not matter how wasteful and inefficient, to show that we care about Mama Earth.
Unless their theories don't make predictions that specific. It's perfectly possible to have a theory which is undisputed but whose predictions are long-range and apply to the big picture.
Then someone should challenge him on the time scale that they can be confident at.
No bet over a 10 year window tells us that not only is no one is confident there will be a problem over the 10 year period, no one is confident there will be a *measurable increase* over 10 years. That's quite an admission to make.
What about 20 years? 30 years?
What happened to all this certainty about global warming? If you're certain, you should be willing to place a bet. You should be eager to place a bet.
That in itself will tell us a lot. If people are only confident that there will be a rise in temper
A global warming gambling market would be a wonderful thing, and show us what people really believe. It would be a way for believers and skeptics to profit, depending on who is right. Put your money where your mouth is.
I'm surprised that more people haven't talked about this. So much of management is braindead when it comes to cheaping out on work environment.
Get everyone as many 24 inch monitors as they want. Max out RAM. Get a site license to a technical library. Give programmers some freedom to order tools. Make sure that people can work remotely without hassle.
Have decent meeting rooms with a dedicated box for remote desktop, and monitors or projectors. It's crazy how much time is wasted tracking down projectors, carrying equipment, plugging it in, and getting it to work.
10 people at a meeting. 5 minutes fiddling with setup. Meeting after meeting. Do the math.
If you require a sprint period where people have to work overtime, end the period with a cheap lunch on friday and tell them everyone has to get out and go home.
Have meeting hours and "Do Not Disturb" hours for programmers. Encourage more team collaboration, pair programming, and mentoring. Encourage HOWTO wikis. Encourage lunch time tech talks. Make secure desktop sharing software available, and encourage it's use.
Food. Food. And more food. We're dogs and monkeys - give us a little biscuit for a buck, and we can be quite pleased. Protein shakes are good, because they're tasty, can replace a meal, and you can eat them while working.
Be flexible on time. Have standard core hours, but otherwise flex time. Make life easy on people. Allow packages to be delivered at the office. Stop the idiot policies against using computers for "personal use". I also use my internet, cel phone, and computers at home for business use. Let's all get over it.
Make work an opportunity to improve your skills and work habits, instead of a time to be chained to an oar as a galley slave. Treat people like they're professionals who want to do a good job, write good code, and get good at what they do. Treat them like they're part of a team and want the project to succeed. Help them to do it.
and even that insight I think is less penetrating than what one can get from studying abstract information theory and encoding in computer science (where it is quantitative and measurable in addition to providing one with essentially the same insights). I've mentioned it before, I'll mention it again:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
I've got the hardback, but thanks for the link to the online version.