Except they're not embracing anything. They're opening some of their most popular stuff. Do you think they're going to try and kill Github by...putting stuff on github?
He's not suggesting anti-trust regulation per say. He's saying revert things to the state they would have been if it had been void of regulations all along. That is,the companies didn't get a government sponsored monopoly for several decades. Then after that reversion is done, go all out free market.
Its obviously not possible in practice, but if you wanted a free market, you'd have to have it from the beginning. Trying to break a government-made monopoly via free market is impossible.
Ok, so ISP ABC signs a 20 years exclusivity deal with Small Town XYZ.
ISP raises rate through the roof, blocks streaming services, etc.
It is now profitable to compete with ISP ABC...but...you have to wait 20 years. 20 years is basically 1/4th of my expected lifespan. I could move I guess, but...
Now, the 20 years runs out, I'm a decade away from retiring at that point....a bunch of ISPs just can't wait until they can compete again...but ISP ABC made a truckton of money from the exclusivity deal...and can make a heck of a deal with the city...and get another 20 years exclusivity deal.
Net neutrality isn't necessarily what people want, but its the closest thing to what people want that they can get right now in the US.
Think about it. If we had actual competition, and I could go and pick from one of 10 ISPs...none of them would dare, let say, throttle netflix, as they would basically bankrupt themselves. Prices would go down, services would go up (you may have a package that gives videostreaming priority...which is not net neutral, but if its a CHOICE, and you can go to the competitor that gives gaming traffic priority...it may not be a bad thing for you as a customer. Sucks a bit for providers, but still).
The problem is we don't have that. If you're on Comcast, and they throttle netflix, and you want netflix, well, TOUGH. Yay, Netflix makes a deal, and thats cool..but I want Crunchyroll and Funimation. Well, too bad. Its netflix or eat up the throttling! Net neutrality helps that, but it still doesn't give me choice.
Every time something gets easier when it comes to software development, people just push things further (as they should).
Thats why no matter how many versions of Internet Explorer we stop supporting, web development is still a pain in the ass. The moment people stop doing something hard, they just take all the time they saved, and tackle something else that all of a sudden become worth it (ie: supporting mobile operating systems, optimizing stuff with webgl if its available, whatever, you name it)
Things that went from "No way, we don't have time for this!" become standard, and the cycle continues. Every minute we save because a task is automated or redundant, is a minute someone spends doing something that was once impossible. And if that person works for a competitor, you now have to catch up.
No, its not more common than I'd think. All your examples generally have a lot of people behind them, and only a fraction of those people design the API. You can have a product with 500 developers behind it, and have 1-2 people working on the API design. And thats not counting the countless people who make APIs nilly willy (I don't consider that designing an API in the same way this post isn't a hardcover novel.).
I guess it was a poor choice of wording on my part. You're right, most products involve some form of API. A (very small) subset of that actually has effort put into designing it. And of whats left, only a fraction of the developers involved in the project are actually involved in the API design. A bit how in the movie industry, only a fraction of the people involved are script writers.
Designing public APIs is not a common role. The vast majority of people who do it are not even slightly competent at it. Google? Amazon? Many other big names? All terrible. I can count the amount of good APIs Ive seen on my fingers.
And its not about being a snowflake, on the contrary. Writers, designers, movie directors...they all get rewarded in the same way for taking a random idea and publishing a nice interpretation of that idea. Finding the correct words to put on these ideas, for example, can be seen as a parallel to using appropriate method names (naming things correctly being one of the hardest problems a programmer stumbles on).
So either these things can be copyrighted, or none of them can. I'm personally fine either way, but it has to be consistent.
That will fix high turnover issues. But sooner or later, people will leave. They need change every now and then.
But since an employee that has been around a while is potentially more productive by a factor (because they already have so much domain expertise, which is often several times more important than any technical ability), delaying that by an additional year or two can provide a LOT of value...
ie: on the east coast, numbers I've seen show that the average software engineer will stay somewhere 2 years. Now, numbers out of my ass, but let say if the company's awesome, the same person will stay 4 years. Then if you know that, you can provide proper insensitives after 4 years (maybe a sabbatical, additional vacations, some retention bonus, some RSUs...whatever. Heck, a nice embroidered jacket worked for a lot of people at a company I used to be involved with). Then they stay 5 years instead of 4, and generate potentially millions in additional value.
It still gives you a unique identifier (even if its encrypted, its deterministic enough to be used as an ID even if you can't decrypt it) that lets you uniquely identify a household for a period of time. Combined with other more legit tracking methods, you can do some deliciously evil things with it...
For functional languages, the ideal is a language that supports both procedural and functional construct, so you can use either when it makes sense. Scala, and to a lesser extent C#, fit that bill quite nicely.
Dynamically typed languages are great in cases where you'd be writing all the test cases anyway. UI code is a good example. Its faster to write proper JavaScript unit tests. provided you have the necessary infrastructure, than to manually test click click click. Since you're writing all the tests anyway, then having a dynamic language has very little drawbacks.
Probably for subscription purpose... Depending on how its implemented, its not so much the code itself that can be reused, but the transaction made with it that can be "replayed". By revoking the code, you revoke the ability to replay that transaction.
Subscription services often (usually? I only worked on a few online payment systems, most did it this way but not all) don't store the credit card number itself. They just replay transactions authorization.
When I was looking for a place in Cambridge/Boston, the (few) places with FiOS access (as opposed to being stuck with Comcast) were sure to put it on the fliers or MLS descriptions. So I assume people cared.
Of course, FiOS around here is arguably worse than Comcast, which is saying something, but at least you have options if you live in one of those spots.
Its actually pretty family friendly. Having to do a lot of hours, but picking and choosing on what and when, being able to work from home almost on a whim, with only the occasional production outage (and that's only relevant if you don't have a production team).
I had a discussion about it with my family physician once (they, admittedly get screwed too, but that's the point: everyone thinks everyone else has it better). In the same areas an engineer can ask for 150k+ (can easily go over with bonuses and stuff), the family physician is making 220k~. The later actually ends up working more (much more) hours, at the office, much more on-call, and has very little flexibility, plus they get exposed to all the patients who come for a cold or a flu (flu shot isn't 100%!).
Hour for hour the engineer will have it a lot better. Lawyers on average make a little more (500k is only for the very successful private practices or stars at lawyer firms... engineers with successful startups or superstars can command that much too, bad example and its very uncommon), but again, work a lot more hours doing stuff that a lot more people think is boring (very few people will do lawyer work for free...a lot of software engineers will write open source stuff as a hobby...because its fun).
Companies don't try to "make this strategy work". They have little choice. Any easily solved problem has already been solved, probably with an open source solution out. If you want to provide any kind of value, you need to solve unsolved problems, and that's hard. You can train people to some extent, but if people don't keep up at least somewhat on their own, they'll always be in training, and then won't get anything done. The salaries are already in the top 3%~ range and keep pushing up.
When so many people make so much money, you go back to square 1: Tried buying a house in San Francisco lately? That multi-million dollar cashout from Facebook's IPO doesn't get you as far as you'd like... Go ahead, triple the salary of thousands of engineers. Everything that you want will just triple in price with it.
No, but the ones who make as much or more money than a software engineer work batshit hours, even if they have an army of paralegals with them.
Software engineering, at least in the US, pretty much automatically ranks you in the top 3-4%~ in term of income. If you're good, you can get that without any kind of college education, and on payroll (so you don't need your own practice, and will have all the benefits and won't have to argue too much with the bank when getting a mortgage).
The only reason someone can ask for 150k a year with telecommute benefit, full coverage, bonuses, and a 9 to 5 days (and flexible schedule!), as you can get in an afternoon if you are in one of the major tech hubs and at least mediocre, is because people expect you to SOMETIMES to stuff to keep up to date. Otherwise all of the above would just be too good to be true.
Generally the idea is that a broader diversity of backgrounds allows more ideas to pop up, which can mean better software.
In practice, its tricky, because the argument mixes "Both genders are equal! They can do anything the other can!" while at the same time going "One gender can give a different perspective on things because they think differently and approach problems differently!".
A more practical example could be: part of your customer base is female. Having more women on staff could help you get the appropriate perspective to better target them.
The issue with that is: A) companies that have UX departments already have a lot of women in it. B) if the ideas to better target women come from guts feeling and sentences that start with "I think this is better!" instead of analytics data, you're going to make the wrong decision anyway, because the people in the IT department, regardless of gender, will have a different background and a skewed perception relative to the customers, so it won't really help.
My significant other who works at Amazon (a woman software engineer, woo!) had that issue recently. The UX people design a mockup, based on statistics, history, what competitors do, what has been A/B tested, etc. During implementation on the engineering side, one of the PMs (a woman, working with said significant other) goes "No this sucks! Its not intuitive! In Excel things work like this! Lets change everything!", with no backing arguments beyond "she doesn't like it". Then when people explain all the process that lead to that UI, of course: "I'm a woman, i have a different perspective and you refuse to acknowledge it!!".
Which was hilarious said she said that to another woman...
Good thing i wasn't replying to you then:) It makes a lot more sense in the context of the person I actually replied to. I was addressing their points specifically, not the whole of the discussion.
A lot of people in the US will send their kids to private school just because they want them in a school that's allowed to kick people out. If there's a public school that can, like what you mentioned for NYC, then sure, that's fine. But in this society of entitled lawyer-happy parents, an average american public school is very very bleh. It has nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with legal liability and not being able to properly deal with problem kids of parents who aren't willing to raise them properly. You can handle most problem kids if the parents are on board. If they're not, you're screwed.
There's a handful of "conditional" public schools around, usually the kind for gifted kids. Those also can kick people out. Those work fine.
Hmm? Are you insinuating that giving cheap housing in locations that normally even upper middle class people can't afford, sometimes in houses that the same upper middle class would never dream of affording regardless of where they are located, is a bad idea?
Prettier documents, easier to read, easier to grade, less work for the teacher. Making an accurate complex graph on a computer is a HELL OF A LOT easier than making the same one using a pencil with a $4.99 geometry kit bought at CVS on graph paper? Takes freagin forever. Man i loved getting a lower grade because I spent all night doing my 9th grade physics report instead of doing it in an hour because I didn't have a computer at home and if I stayed at the school's computer lab I had no one to pick me up after the school bus was gone!
I totally agree with you and despise welfare queens. My own parents definitely fit that category to the extreme, so I do know what you mean.
At the same time, you don't want people to be predisposed to fail. Everyone should be, as much as realistically possible, born with equal opportunity (disabilities and stuff throw a wrench in this though, so there's always exceptions). If they fuck it up after that, they should only be given just enough safety net to be able to bounce back. If even that isn't enough, you want them to have just enough that they won't get desperate enough to pull a gun and kill a bank clerk for money.
If someone is born in a situation where they have very little options to get out of that situation, you quickly end up with a lot of social problems. In Canada, very few people are in that situation. In the US, its another story. In either case, I think making sure people have full access to communication channels that makes it as painless as possible to learn and/or get a job should be provided. That doesn't mean 100mb up/down. Just enough to browser job sites, read documentation, and answer emails.
There's a lot of stuff they ARE getting that they probably shouldn't... When I was young, my mother got a 1 time subsidy for home renovation to repaint and change carpets and stuff...even though our apartment looked better and was in better shape than by $1 million USD condo. Thats fucked up. I'm also seeing people on Section 8 housing getting assigned townhouses that I can't possibly afford, in the most desirable portions of the city. That makes my blood boil. Get rid of that, take the money, and pay for internet with it.
The devil's in the details, isn't it? If you go through my posts, I'm for ensuring everyone has access to internet, but against doing a lot of these things as long as the US doesn't have its undocumented (fuck PC... ILLEGAL) immigrant problem under control. Makes for a complicated problem, and that's why I'm not a politician, or even an activist. I'd just fuck it up.
That said, I pay more in property tax than a minimum salary worker makes pre-tax, and my wife and I together pay more income tax than the average household income in the US. The only "tax shelters" we have is our 401ks, and only real deductions are the property tax and mortgage interests (I guess I deduct my transit cards too...how greedy of me).
Some places have free. Quite a few (I think Quebec still does) have subsidized child care. Still not cheap by any mean, but god its expensive in the US. Makes me want not to have kids, not because I can't afford it, but because when THOSE kids have kids themselves, they'll expect me to take care of them >.>
Im a bit dicey about a lot of this stuff (and I'm canadian... some of it is a good idea, ie: health care, school, etc, but there are limits), but internet IMO makes sense, because its the best tool to get your ass out of poverty. It makes looking for a job, learning, school, making connections, finding ways of saving money, etc, a bazillion times easier.
When I was young, I was very, very poor. Computers were not common. As I hit 5th~ grade or so, they started being quite common, and some teachers started giving bonus points or other advantages to people using computers. Then they would give certain research assignments that could be done in minutes with Encarta at the time, but would take forever with books (gathering pictures, snippets, quotes...).
So someone who didn't have a computer would have to -put several times as much effort in the same assignment. That was time they couldn't put in another subject. Let's put aside how retarded/unfair those assignments were at the time, and put it in today's context...where some college work would be downright impossible. Sure, you can use the school's infrastructure, but that prevents you from being at home and multitasking (doing chores, cooking, taking care of siblings) at the same time.
I'm definitely not for free lunch. If there's no difference between rich and poor, there's no reason to get up your ass and help yourself. But in 2014, the internet is the ultimate tool to get out of a shitty situation. Knowledge is just too important, and a basic connection is too cheap to not give it to everyone. You'll spend more money with all the bullshit social programs, or worse, jail, if they stay in poverty a single more day because they were connection-less.
And this won't be possibly like it is in other countries until there's some visibility/control in who gets in and qualify for these things. All you can eat buffets don't work so hot if you leave the door open.
Slashdot Mirror
Except they're not embracing anything. They're opening some of their most popular stuff. Do you think they're going to try and kill Github by...putting stuff on github?
He's not suggesting anti-trust regulation per say. He's saying revert things to the state they would have been if it had been void of regulations all along. That is,the companies didn't get a government sponsored monopoly for several decades. Then after that reversion is done, go all out free market.
Its obviously not possible in practice, but if you wanted a free market, you'd have to have it from the beginning. Trying to break a government-made monopoly via free market is impossible.
Ok, so ISP ABC signs a 20 years exclusivity deal with Small Town XYZ.
ISP raises rate through the roof, blocks streaming services, etc.
It is now profitable to compete with ISP ABC...but...you have to wait 20 years. 20 years is basically 1/4th of my expected lifespan. I could move I guess, but...
Now, the 20 years runs out, I'm a decade away from retiring at that point....a bunch of ISPs just can't wait until they can compete again...but ISP ABC made a truckton of money from the exclusivity deal...and can make a heck of a deal with the city...and get another 20 years exclusivity deal.
Yeah, thats working great.
Net neutrality isn't necessarily what people want, but its the closest thing to what people want that they can get right now in the US.
Think about it. If we had actual competition, and I could go and pick from one of 10 ISPs...none of them would dare, let say, throttle netflix, as they would basically bankrupt themselves. Prices would go down, services would go up (you may have a package that gives videostreaming priority...which is not net neutral, but if its a CHOICE, and you can go to the competitor that gives gaming traffic priority...it may not be a bad thing for you as a customer. Sucks a bit for providers, but still).
The problem is we don't have that. If you're on Comcast, and they throttle netflix, and you want netflix, well, TOUGH. Yay, Netflix makes a deal, and thats cool..but I want Crunchyroll and Funimation. Well, too bad. Its netflix or eat up the throttling! Net neutrality helps that, but it still doesn't give me choice.
Companies barely optimize for Windows at this point (have you seen the minimum requirement for assassin's creed unity?).
Heck, some games have slowdowns on -consoles-.
And you expected them to optimize the Linux version?
Baby steps here cowboy.
Every time something gets easier when it comes to software development, people just push things further (as they should).
Thats why no matter how many versions of Internet Explorer we stop supporting, web development is still a pain in the ass. The moment people stop doing something hard, they just take all the time they saved, and tackle something else that all of a sudden become worth it (ie: supporting mobile operating systems, optimizing stuff with webgl if its available, whatever, you name it)
Things that went from "No way, we don't have time for this!" become standard, and the cycle continues. Every minute we save because a task is automated or redundant, is a minute someone spends doing something that was once impossible. And if that person works for a competitor, you now have to catch up.
No, its not more common than I'd think. All your examples generally have a lot of people behind them, and only a fraction of those people design the API. You can have a product with 500 developers behind it, and have 1-2 people working on the API design. And thats not counting the countless people who make APIs nilly willy (I don't consider that designing an API in the same way this post isn't a hardcover novel.).
I guess it was a poor choice of wording on my part. You're right, most products involve some form of API. A (very small) subset of that actually has effort put into designing it. And of whats left, only a fraction of the developers involved in the project are actually involved in the API design. A bit how in the movie industry, only a fraction of the people involved are script writers.
Designing public APIs is not a common role. The vast majority of people who do it are not even slightly competent at it. Google? Amazon? Many other big names? All terrible. I can count the amount of good APIs Ive seen on my fingers.
And its not about being a snowflake, on the contrary. Writers, designers, movie directors...they all get rewarded in the same way for taking a random idea and publishing a nice interpretation of that idea. Finding the correct words to put on these ideas, for example, can be seen as a parallel to using appropriate method names (naming things correctly being one of the hardest problems a programmer stumbles on).
So either these things can be copyrighted, or none of them can. I'm personally fine either way, but it has to be consistent.
That will fix high turnover issues. But sooner or later, people will leave. They need change every now and then.
But since an employee that has been around a while is potentially more productive by a factor (because they already have so much domain expertise, which is often several times more important than any technical ability), delaying that by an additional year or two can provide a LOT of value...
ie: on the east coast, numbers I've seen show that the average software engineer will stay somewhere 2 years. Now, numbers out of my ass, but let say if the company's awesome, the same person will stay 4 years. Then if you know that, you can provide proper insensitives after 4 years (maybe a sabbatical, additional vacations, some retention bonus, some RSUs...whatever. Heck, a nice embroidered jacket worked for a lot of people at a company I used to be involved with). Then they stay 5 years instead of 4, and generate potentially millions in additional value.
It still gives you a unique identifier (even if its encrypted, its deterministic enough to be used as an ID even if you can't decrypt it) that lets you uniquely identify a household for a period of time. Combined with other more legit tracking methods, you can do some deliciously evil things with it...
For functional languages, the ideal is a language that supports both procedural and functional construct, so you can use either when it makes sense. Scala, and to a lesser extent C#, fit that bill quite nicely.
Dynamically typed languages are great in cases where you'd be writing all the test cases anyway. UI code is a good example. Its faster to write proper JavaScript unit tests. provided you have the necessary infrastructure, than to manually test click click click. Since you're writing all the tests anyway, then having a dynamic language has very little drawbacks.
Probably for subscription purpose... Depending on how its implemented, its not so much the code itself that can be reused, but the transaction made with it that can be "replayed". By revoking the code, you revoke the ability to replay that transaction.
Subscription services often (usually? I only worked on a few online payment systems, most did it this way but not all) don't store the credit card number itself. They just replay transactions authorization.
When I was looking for a place in Cambridge/Boston, the (few) places with FiOS access (as opposed to being stuck with Comcast) were sure to put it on the fliers or MLS descriptions. So I assume people cared.
Of course, FiOS around here is arguably worse than Comcast, which is saying something, but at least you have options if you live in one of those spots.
Its actually pretty family friendly. Having to do a lot of hours, but picking and choosing on what and when, being able to work from home almost on a whim, with only the occasional production outage (and that's only relevant if you don't have a production team).
I had a discussion about it with my family physician once (they, admittedly get screwed too, but that's the point: everyone thinks everyone else has it better). In the same areas an engineer can ask for 150k+ (can easily go over with bonuses and stuff), the family physician is making 220k~. The later actually ends up working more (much more) hours, at the office, much more on-call, and has very little flexibility, plus they get exposed to all the patients who come for a cold or a flu (flu shot isn't 100%!).
Hour for hour the engineer will have it a lot better. Lawyers on average make a little more (500k is only for the very successful private practices or stars at lawyer firms... engineers with successful startups or superstars can command that much too, bad example and its very uncommon), but again, work a lot more hours doing stuff that a lot more people think is boring (very few people will do lawyer work for free...a lot of software engineers will write open source stuff as a hobby...because its fun).
Companies don't try to "make this strategy work". They have little choice. Any easily solved problem has already been solved, probably with an open source solution out. If you want to provide any kind of value, you need to solve unsolved problems, and that's hard. You can train people to some extent, but if people don't keep up at least somewhat on their own, they'll always be in training, and then won't get anything done. The salaries are already in the top 3%~ range and keep pushing up.
When so many people make so much money, you go back to square 1: Tried buying a house in San Francisco lately? That multi-million dollar cashout from Facebook's IPO doesn't get you as far as you'd like... Go ahead, triple the salary of thousands of engineers. Everything that you want will just triple in price with it.
No, but the ones who make as much or more money than a software engineer work batshit hours, even if they have an army of paralegals with them.
Software engineering, at least in the US, pretty much automatically ranks you in the top 3-4%~ in term of income. If you're good, you can get that without any kind of college education, and on payroll (so you don't need your own practice, and will have all the benefits and won't have to argue too much with the bank when getting a mortgage).
The only reason someone can ask for 150k a year with telecommute benefit, full coverage, bonuses, and a 9 to 5 days (and flexible schedule!), as you can get in an afternoon if you are in one of the major tech hubs and at least mediocre, is because people expect you to SOMETIMES to stuff to keep up to date. Otherwise all of the above would just be too good to be true.
Generally the idea is that a broader diversity of backgrounds allows more ideas to pop up, which can mean better software.
In practice, its tricky, because the argument mixes "Both genders are equal! They can do anything the other can!" while at the same time going "One gender can give a different perspective on things because they think differently and approach problems differently!".
A more practical example could be: part of your customer base is female. Having more women on staff could help you get the appropriate perspective to better target them.
The issue with that is: A) companies that have UX departments already have a lot of women in it. B) if the ideas to better target women come from guts feeling and sentences that start with "I think this is better!" instead of analytics data, you're going to make the wrong decision anyway, because the people in the IT department, regardless of gender, will have a different background and a skewed perception relative to the customers, so it won't really help.
My significant other who works at Amazon (a woman software engineer, woo!) had that issue recently. The UX people design a mockup, based on statistics, history, what competitors do, what has been A/B tested, etc. During implementation on the engineering side, one of the PMs (a woman, working with said significant other) goes "No this sucks! Its not intuitive! In Excel things work like this! Lets change everything!", with no backing arguments beyond "she doesn't like it". Then when people explain all the process that lead to that UI, of course: "I'm a woman, i have a different perspective and you refuse to acknowledge it!!".
Which was hilarious said she said that to another woman...
Good thing i wasn't replying to you then :) It makes a lot more sense in the context of the person I actually replied to. I was addressing their points specifically, not the whole of the discussion.
A lot of people in the US will send their kids to private school just because they want them in a school that's allowed to kick people out. If there's a public school that can, like what you mentioned for NYC, then sure, that's fine. But in this society of entitled lawyer-happy parents, an average american public school is very very bleh. It has nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with legal liability and not being able to properly deal with problem kids of parents who aren't willing to raise them properly. You can handle most problem kids if the parents are on board. If they're not, you're screwed.
There's a handful of "conditional" public schools around, usually the kind for gifted kids. Those also can kick people out. Those work fine.
Hmm? Are you insinuating that giving cheap housing in locations that normally even upper middle class people can't afford, sometimes in houses that the same upper middle class would never dream of affording regardless of where they are located, is a bad idea?
How dare you!
Prettier documents, easier to read, easier to grade, less work for the teacher. Making an accurate complex graph on a computer is a HELL OF A LOT easier than making the same one using a pencil with a $4.99 geometry kit bought at CVS on graph paper? Takes freagin forever. Man i loved getting a lower grade because I spent all night doing my 9th grade physics report instead of doing it in an hour because I didn't have a computer at home and if I stayed at the school's computer lab I had no one to pick me up after the school bus was gone!
I totally agree with you and despise welfare queens. My own parents definitely fit that category to the extreme, so I do know what you mean.
At the same time, you don't want people to be predisposed to fail. Everyone should be, as much as realistically possible, born with equal opportunity (disabilities and stuff throw a wrench in this though, so there's always exceptions). If they fuck it up after that, they should only be given just enough safety net to be able to bounce back. If even that isn't enough, you want them to have just enough that they won't get desperate enough to pull a gun and kill a bank clerk for money.
If someone is born in a situation where they have very little options to get out of that situation, you quickly end up with a lot of social problems. In Canada, very few people are in that situation. In the US, its another story. In either case, I think making sure people have full access to communication channels that makes it as painless as possible to learn and/or get a job should be provided. That doesn't mean 100mb up/down. Just enough to browser job sites, read documentation, and answer emails.
There's a lot of stuff they ARE getting that they probably shouldn't... When I was young, my mother got a 1 time subsidy for home renovation to repaint and change carpets and stuff...even though our apartment looked better and was in better shape than by $1 million USD condo. Thats fucked up. I'm also seeing people on Section 8 housing getting assigned townhouses that I can't possibly afford, in the most desirable portions of the city. That makes my blood boil. Get rid of that, take the money, and pay for internet with it.
The devil's in the details, isn't it? If you go through my posts, I'm for ensuring everyone has access to internet, but against doing a lot of these things as long as the US doesn't have its undocumented (fuck PC... ILLEGAL) immigrant problem under control. Makes for a complicated problem, and that's why I'm not a politician, or even an activist. I'd just fuck it up.
That said, I pay more in property tax than a minimum salary worker makes pre-tax, and my wife and I together pay more income tax than the average household income in the US. The only "tax shelters" we have is our 401ks, and only real deductions are the property tax and mortgage interests (I guess I deduct my transit cards too...how greedy of me).
So that probably pays for my share?
Some places have free. Quite a few (I think Quebec still does) have subsidized child care. Still not cheap by any mean, but god its expensive in the US. Makes me want not to have kids, not because I can't afford it, but because when THOSE kids have kids themselves, they'll expect me to take care of them >.>
Im a bit dicey about a lot of this stuff (and I'm canadian... some of it is a good idea, ie: health care, school, etc, but there are limits), but internet IMO makes sense, because its the best tool to get your ass out of poverty. It makes looking for a job, learning, school, making connections, finding ways of saving money, etc, a bazillion times easier.
When I was young, I was very, very poor. Computers were not common. As I hit 5th~ grade or so, they started being quite common, and some teachers started giving bonus points or other advantages to people using computers. Then they would give certain research assignments that could be done in minutes with Encarta at the time, but would take forever with books (gathering pictures, snippets, quotes...).
So someone who didn't have a computer would have to -put several times as much effort in the same assignment. That was time they couldn't put in another subject. Let's put aside how retarded/unfair those assignments were at the time, and put it in today's context...where some college work would be downright impossible. Sure, you can use the school's infrastructure, but that prevents you from being at home and multitasking (doing chores, cooking, taking care of siblings) at the same time.
I'm definitely not for free lunch. If there's no difference between rich and poor, there's no reason to get up your ass and help yourself. But in 2014, the internet is the ultimate tool to get out of a shitty situation. Knowledge is just too important, and a basic connection is too cheap to not give it to everyone. You'll spend more money with all the bullshit social programs, or worse, jail, if they stay in poverty a single more day because they were connection-less.
And this won't be possibly like it is in other countries until there's some visibility/control in who gets in and qualify for these things. All you can eat buffets don't work so hot if you leave the door open.