Indeed it's not just the language - it's exceptionally verbose and you're hardly likely to misunderstand the meaning of "MULTIPLY NumA BY NumB GIVING NumC."
Partly, it's about understanding the way data is encoded (which is likely to be packed decimal or ASCII/EBCDIC numeric characters) but when people say "COBOL" they're often referring to code that's intricately linked (possibly through embedded macros) to legacy transaction-processing systems (like CICS) or legacy CODASYL (network-model - as opposed to relational) database systems. It's the knowledge of the environment in which these programs operate that's truly scarce.
It's not the app that eliminates these "annoying things", it's imposing a set of universal business conditions. Uber is trying to establish onerous universal business conditions on the basis that it makes deals with individual contractors, These aren't "deals" since there's an asymmetry of power and no actual negotiation and they aren't "individual contractors" in any rational labour jurisdiction. Uber's financial model may be hollow, but it's business administration model is also unsustainable if it has to be a worldwide employer.
There are models (such as franchising to established taxi operators) that would deliver the consumer advantages (with the possible exception of the subsidised price). And if Uber were really "just an app", the comparatively low cost of operating the IT infrastructure could be lost in the increased efficiency established firms could get from adopting it. However, Uber is actually a fantasy that a de facto monopoly of personal transport can be established just in time for the drivers to be eliminated in favour of autonomous vehicles. Fortunately, the money will run out way before this could ever happen, but there's nothing so mad as a man on a mission...
That's an argument analogous to "The Bible says...". And that's why the so-called "debate" about gun control is impervious to facts: gun ownership has a quasi-religious status in American culture. No amount of rational argument is going to shake the faith of a fundamentalist gun toter. And as this seems to be a religion practised only in the USA, that also accounts for why it not only sounds "odd to Europeans" but to many others who are not initiated into the brotherhood.
And it's why it's futile (and sometimes dangerous) for the rest of us to challenge.
Automation is only sustainable as long as the return it produces justifies the investment. It isn't necessary to contemplate a "Luddite" prohibition on automation if the laws of economics make it unsustainable owing to the elimination of the potential market.
I'm pretty sure we figured out how to grow Cotton here in the US at some point in our history.
You'd have to compete with countries that are still picking it using labour practices that are little improved on those that caused a little local difficulty in 1861.
Milo's all about freedom of speech. I don't know if he can keep the lights on at 4Chan
Well, as a fan of free speech, you'd think he'd have turned up to the employment tribunal that resulted from his seemingly failing to keep the lights on at a previous venture.
... of all the "constitutionally protected" activities which may be subject to surevillance, many people outside the USA would consider that there might just be an argument for paying some passing attention to the collection of lethal weapons by people so obsessed by them that they go to shows to drool over them and defend their right to own them on the basis that they might need them to overthrow the government at some point.
But you do have a Slashdot account. Is Slashdot social media? Fancy having an argument about whether it is and whether you should have declared it when you arrive at the border? I almost got deported on one visit to the US (and at that time I had a business visa) because I said I was planning to stay a "fortnight", a word the border agent apparently didn't understand and therefore assumed meant "as long as is necessary to overthrow the government". Giving them more scope to excercise their xenophobia seems unlikely to end well.
Nothing will persuade me now to visit the US. I certainly have no intention of paying a fee to Uncle Sam to be fingerprinted and photographed so I can be hunted down as soon as my dangerous foreign ways turn inevitably to criminality.
If I were a US citizen, I would, I hope, be more concerned about the effect of increasingly authoritarian government on myself and my children and reflect that an attempt to stifle the free expression of views by visitors might just be a prelude to a similar policy at home.
And at that point, I do care: C# and Java are too confusingly alike-but-different to make a convenient fast switch. It's not just IT - I have the same problem with Dutch and German.
But maybe that's just because I'm getting old and/or my brain is now full.
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country
This is, in essence, why the rest of the UK voted to leave the EU and take London down with it. The EU counterweight to the free movement of people and capital is regional development which is supposed to have a redistributive effect and even out the gains and losses. I'm afraid the hollowing-out of talent from many regions and countries of the EU is proof precisesly that the EU is not working as intended.
It's a patronizing institution run by business, for business.
It rather depends where you stand. The French take the view that Britain has turned the EU into some sort of liberal economic threat to France's paternal statist view of the world. However, the British (and in particular the British right wing who have driven Brexit) regard it as an obstacle to free-wheeling market forces whose environmental and employment regulations need to be ripped up in the interests of greater profit.
And not all EU institutions have the same goals. The European Parliament is probably the only thing standing between the EU citizen and a disastrous business-friendly trade pact with the US that all of the EU's national governments - and the Commission - have had some interest in pursuing over the last few years.
From a British prospective, the next Prime Minister is going to ensure the British government is run by business, for business, to a greater extent than at any time since the Victorian era: that was the whole purpose of the Brexit project.
Unfortunately, they'll have to put up with more of this.
Mind you, there must be something wrong with your recruitment policy - the world is full of Geordie exiles who've had to move to find work and are desperate to get back hoome...
I don't think I could work for an employer who didn't know the difference between "affect" and "effect" - if he can make elementary errors of that kind, what other kinds of carelessness might he tolerate in the workplace? Only a minor slip, you say? Well, it's exactly the same lexically as being unable to correctly choose between $100 and $500. Would you want a guy like that responsible for your pay packet?
If only we had some kind of calculating device that could reference a table of tax rates updated on a regular basis...
It is, in any case, a considerably easier problem than calculating shipping costs and noone seems to have a problem with that.
And if you look at the amount of money multinational businesses spend to avoid corporate taxes, the cost of handling sales tax is trivial.
You can't have public services without taxation. The internet doesn't change that. In the end, people need schools more than they need the internet and the internet is just going to have to grow up and start contributing rather than constantly expecting pocket money from mummy & daddy citizen.
This is the kind of BS you have to worry about when you have government doing things it shouldn't be doing, like running a national TV network
You're right about "government doing things it shouldn't be doing". The BBC is established under a Royal Charter which is supposed to make it a public institution independent of the government of the day. However, governments of the day have never really been able to keep their hands off - from widespread security vetting of BBC staff, heavy-handed threats relating to programs on defence and security issues through to the latest plundering of the TV licence revenue to fund welfare and broadband iniatives at the cost of programming (including one TV channel lost).
The government is supposed to leave running the BBC's national TV networks (and radio networks) to the BBC, but the BBC has always been supine in the face of government pressure (partly because the government can, in the end, turn off the money and partly because its oversight board is stuffed with government appointees many of whom are looking forward to their next sinecure) with the inevitable consequence that each demand is more onerous than the last.
You do realise that the PAL vs NTSC wasn't simply a technological accident? PAL was patented and the patent used to shield European TV manufacturers from, principally Japanese, competition. So it was just as much consumer-hostile as regional content protection is now. It certainly didn't technically prevent the widespread interchange of programming between PAL and NTSC regions - though this was done on film for the most part until digital standards conversion became feasible.
Or of course you could just abolish toilet gender apartheid. It wasn't that long ago that equivalent arguments were being deployed in favour of the racial segregation of the same facilities.
I don't think I've ever read such a self-referential, vacuous pile of crap.
"image", "startups", "city tax break", "hackathon host and startup incubator", "photos on Facebook of cash", "Valleywag", "Huffington Post", "the flavor of disruption", "crowdfunding", "Burning Man"
I'm afraid that if you insist on living inside your own virtual reality you're eventually going to be confronted by the fact that the rest of the world neither cares about this parallel universe whose inflation is powered almost entirely by self-aggrandisement. Nor do they believe that warehousing your homeless in instagram-friendly workfare "decadomes" is a solution to the housing problem : it's simply a product of a mind that does not understand the lives of people in the real world and believes the answer is to sweep them under an attractive carpet.
I've no idea who this guy is, nor do I particulalry care about his fate, but the unquestioning belief in the article that the narcissism of the internet should naturally just carry over into real life is breathtakingly insane.
it'd be fucking moronic to tax a business on income other than its profit
No it wouldn't. It would be moronic to tax a business on income other than its profit at the rates that currently apply to profit, but there is a lot to be said for a low rate of tax on turnover:
Turnover is less easy to disguise through service and IP payments to parent entities
Turnover cannot be reduced by putting money in an overseas bank and inflating your share price on the basis you might be able to repatriate it one day
Businesses still use the resources of their host nation (transport, security, education...) whether they are making a profit or not
Rent, property taxes, labour costs and raw materials are all payable regardless of profit, so why not tax?
Private citizens are not typically taxed on the money they have left over after paying for necessities, but on their total income, so why not corporations?
Quite agree. I kind of retired in my mid 40s. I didn't have a huge pot of money, but I had paid off the mortgage on a fairly modest flat so my outgoings are fairly low. I don't have expensive tastes and I can always do a few days work here and there to top up the funds again if I have to. When I do, I hate it - visiting cube farms with their petty politics and greasy-pole mentalities is frankly soul-destroying.
As relatives around me grew older and more infirm, and simply by virtue of having the free time, I ended up as a serial carer for one after another. It's not quite what I'd planned, but, actually, having the time to spend with people as they reached the end of their lives was far more rewarding than bashing out yet another device driver or ultimately futile business application.
I was lucky to have the opportunity - I started working at a time when housing was relatively afforable in a country where home ownership was the norm. I certainly couldn't have done it if I had to pay rent every month at present rates. And that, I think is the reason so many people work hard - they simply don't have the choice: no big pay cheque at the end of the month, no house. There aren't the same opporunities for ordinary peope to acquire the capital that gives them both security and choice - we're essentially entering a new period of feudalism in which all significant assets are owned by a privileged class and everyone else is obliged to pay a lifelong tax for their use.
The UK government has recently warned local administrations against boycotts on Israeli firms, on the grounds that if falls foul of anti-discrimination rules in international trade agreements (and, it just so happens, that the UK government is generally supportive of Israeli policy).
I'd imagine that public procument in the US, even if all the suppliers were also US companies, would likely have to be done on a non-discriminatory basis or the procuring body would run afoul either of competition laws or of laws requiring they get best value.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it's not just the language - it's exceptionally verbose and you're hardly likely to misunderstand the meaning of "MULTIPLY NumA BY NumB GIVING NumC."
Partly, it's about understanding the way data is encoded (which is likely to be packed decimal or ASCII/EBCDIC numeric characters) but when people say "COBOL" they're often referring to code that's intricately linked (possibly through embedded macros) to legacy transaction-processing systems (like CICS) or legacy CODASYL (network-model - as opposed to relational) database systems. It's the knowledge of the environment in which these programs operate that's truly scarce.
It's not the app that eliminates these "annoying things", it's imposing a set of universal business conditions. Uber is trying to establish onerous universal business conditions on the basis that it makes deals with individual contractors, These aren't "deals" since there's an asymmetry of power and no actual negotiation and they aren't "individual contractors" in any rational labour jurisdiction. Uber's financial model may be hollow, but it's business administration model is also unsustainable if it has to be a worldwide employer.
There are models (such as franchising to established taxi operators) that would deliver the consumer advantages (with the possible exception of the subsidised price). And if Uber were really "just an app", the comparatively low cost of operating the IT infrastructure could be lost in the increased efficiency established firms could get from adopting it. However, Uber is actually a fantasy that a de facto monopoly of personal transport can be established just in time for the drivers to be eliminated in favour of autonomous vehicles. Fortunately, the money will run out way before this could ever happen, but there's nothing so mad as a man on a mission...
The Founding Fathers...
That's an argument analogous to "The Bible says...". And that's why the so-called "debate" about gun control is impervious to facts: gun ownership has a quasi-religious status in American culture. No amount of rational argument is going to shake the faith of a fundamentalist gun toter. And as this seems to be a religion practised only in the USA, that also accounts for why it not only sounds "odd to Europeans" but to many others who are not initiated into the brotherhood.
And it's why it's futile (and sometimes dangerous) for the rest of us to challenge.
Automation is only sustainable as long as the return it produces justifies the investment. It isn't necessary to contemplate a "Luddite" prohibition on automation if the laws of economics make it unsustainable owing to the elimination of the potential market.
I'm pretty sure we figured out how to grow Cotton here in the US at some point in our history.
You'd have to compete with countries that are still picking it using labour practices that are little improved on those that caused a little local difficulty in 1861.
Time to blow the dust off my whip-manufacturing line.
Milo's all about freedom of speech. I don't know if he can keep the lights on at 4Chan
Well, as a fan of free speech, you'd think he'd have turned up to the employment tribunal that resulted from his seemingly failing to keep the lights on at a previous venture.
... of all the "constitutionally protected" activities which may be subject to surevillance, many people outside the USA would consider that there might just be an argument for paying some passing attention to the collection of lethal weapons by people so obsessed by them that they go to shows to drool over them and defend their right to own them on the basis that they might need them to overthrow the government at some point.
Large complex programs will always be a problem
Like a monolithic kernel?
But you do have a Slashdot account. Is Slashdot social media? Fancy having an argument about whether it is and whether you should have declared it when you arrive at the border? I almost got deported on one visit to the US (and at that time I had a business visa) because I said I was planning to stay a "fortnight", a word the border agent apparently didn't understand and therefore assumed meant "as long as is necessary to overthrow the government". Giving them more scope to excercise their xenophobia seems unlikely to end well.
Nothing will persuade me now to visit the US. I certainly have no intention of paying a fee to Uncle Sam to be fingerprinted and photographed so I can be hunted down as soon as my dangerous foreign ways turn inevitably to criminality.
If I were a US citizen, I would, I hope, be more concerned about the effect of increasingly authoritarian government on myself and my children and reflect that an attempt to stifle the free expression of views by visitors might just be a prelude to a similar policy at home.
BASIC, FORTRAN, PL/1, APL, COBOL, BCPL, C, ALGOL, Pascal, Various assembly languages (6502, S/370, PDP-11, VAX), C++, Java, Perl, PHP, C#...
And at that point, I do care: C# and Java are too confusingly alike-but-different to make a convenient fast switch. It's not just IT - I have the same problem with Dutch and German.
But maybe that's just because I'm getting old and/or my brain is now full.
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country
This is, in essence, why the rest of the UK voted to leave the EU and take London down with it. The EU counterweight to the free movement of people and capital is regional development which is supposed to have a redistributive effect and even out the gains and losses. I'm afraid the hollowing-out of talent from many regions and countries of the EU is proof precisesly that the EU is not working as intended.
It's a patronizing institution run by business, for business.
It rather depends where you stand. The French take the view that Britain has turned the EU into some sort of liberal economic threat to France's paternal statist view of the world. However, the British (and in particular the British right wing who have driven Brexit) regard it as an obstacle to free-wheeling market forces whose environmental and employment regulations need to be ripped up in the interests of greater profit.
And not all EU institutions have the same goals. The European Parliament is probably the only thing standing between the EU citizen and a disastrous business-friendly trade pact with the US that all of the EU's national governments - and the Commission - have had some interest in pursuing over the last few years.
From a British prospective, the next Prime Minister is going to ensure the British government is run by business, for business, to a greater extent than at any time since the Victorian era: that was the whole purpose of the Brexit project.
Unfortunately, they'll have to put up with more of this. Mind you, there must be something wrong with your recruitment policy - the world is full of Geordie exiles who've had to move to find work and are desperate to get back hoome...
I don't think I could work for an employer who didn't know the difference between "affect" and "effect" - if he can make elementary errors of that kind, what other kinds of carelessness might he tolerate in the workplace? Only a minor slip, you say? Well, it's exactly the same lexically as being unable to correctly choose between $100 and $500. Would you want a guy like that responsible for your pay packet?
It is, in any case, a considerably easier problem than calculating shipping costs and noone seems to have a problem with that.
And if you look at the amount of money multinational businesses spend to avoid corporate taxes, the cost of handling sales tax is trivial.
You can't have public services without taxation. The internet doesn't change that. In the end, people need schools more than they need the internet and the internet is just going to have to grow up and start contributing rather than constantly expecting pocket money from mummy & daddy citizen.
This is the kind of BS you have to worry about when you have government doing things it shouldn't be doing, like running a national TV network
You're right about "government doing things it shouldn't be doing". The BBC is established under a Royal Charter which is supposed to make it a public institution independent of the government of the day. However, governments of the day have never really been able to keep their hands off - from widespread security vetting of BBC staff, heavy-handed threats relating to programs on defence and security issues through to the latest plundering of the TV licence revenue to fund welfare and broadband iniatives at the cost of programming (including one TV channel lost).
The government is supposed to leave running the BBC's national TV networks (and radio networks) to the BBC, but the BBC has always been supine in the face of government pressure (partly because the government can, in the end, turn off the money and partly because its oversight board is stuffed with government appointees many of whom are looking forward to their next sinecure) with the inevitable consequence that each demand is more onerous than the last.
It made sense when you had PAL vs NTSC
You do realise that the PAL vs NTSC wasn't simply a technological accident? PAL was patented and the patent used to shield European TV manufacturers from, principally Japanese, competition. So it was just as much consumer-hostile as regional content protection is now. It certainly didn't technically prevent the widespread interchange of programming between PAL and NTSC regions - though this was done on film for the most part until digital standards conversion became feasible.
Or of course you could just abolish toilet gender apartheid. It wasn't that long ago that equivalent arguments were being deployed in favour of the racial segregation of the same facilities.
"image", "startups", "city tax break", "hackathon host and startup incubator", "photos on Facebook of cash", "Valleywag", "Huffington Post", "the flavor of disruption", "crowdfunding", "Burning Man"
I'm afraid that if you insist on living inside your own virtual reality you're eventually going to be confronted by the fact that the rest of the world neither cares about this parallel universe whose inflation is powered almost entirely by self-aggrandisement. Nor do they believe that warehousing your homeless in instagram-friendly workfare "decadomes" is a solution to the housing problem : it's simply a product of a mind that does not understand the lives of people in the real world and believes the answer is to sweep them under an attractive carpet.
I've no idea who this guy is, nor do I particulalry care about his fate, but the unquestioning belief in the article that the narcissism of the internet should naturally just carry over into real life is breathtakingly insane.
it'd be fucking moronic to tax a business on income other than its profit
No it wouldn't. It would be moronic to tax a business on income other than its profit at the rates that currently apply to profit, but there is a lot to be said for a low rate of tax on turnover:
Can you believe in intelligent design and Florida simultaneously?
As relatives around me grew older and more infirm, and simply by virtue of having the free time, I ended up as a serial carer for one after another. It's not quite what I'd planned, but, actually, having the time to spend with people as they reached the end of their lives was far more rewarding than bashing out yet another device driver or ultimately futile business application.
I was lucky to have the opportunity - I started working at a time when housing was relatively afforable in a country where home ownership was the norm. I certainly couldn't have done it if I had to pay rent every month at present rates. And that, I think is the reason so many people work hard - they simply don't have the choice: no big pay cheque at the end of the month, no house. There aren't the same opporunities for ordinary peope to acquire the capital that gives them both security and choice - we're essentially entering a new period of feudalism in which all significant assets are owned by a privileged class and everyone else is obliged to pay a lifelong tax for their use.
I'd imagine that public procument in the US, even if all the suppliers were also US companies, would likely have to be done on a non-discriminatory basis or the procuring body would run afoul either of competition laws or of laws requiring they get best value.
I wouldn't worry about Twitter, I'd be more concerned about having a job description of "thought leader". That's just a pink slip waiting to happen.