Why can't companies pay better wages? Because that's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Fundamentally, this is a question of economics. You have an oversupply of labor, particularly in lower skilled positions. Increasing the market price of labor can not and will not ever solve that problem. It is an economic impossibility.
Before we can solve the problem, we must first understand what exactly the problem is. In western countries, we have several issues going on. Wealth is concentrating in the hands of the already wealthy. Productivity gains are outstripping both the demand for labor and the demand for goods, or so we suppose for the sake of argument.
The traditional response to this situation is an increasing demand for socialism or communism, which, frankly, does not work. Subsidizing the poor has the perverse effect of making them poorer by limiting their access to work. Central planning is inefficient and ineffective. Top down communism does not work. However, Austrian economics suggests that bottom up communism should work. What I suggest is a multi-part approach. Scrap the current income tax system and welfare system. Switch to a flat tax with a prebate. This provides a subsidy to the poor, but without the welfare trap. Next, replace Social Security with personal investment accounts. Accounts should have the following characteristics: no set retirement age, principle can not be withdrawn, but dividends are paid out. Account should be funded equally. This decreases the pressure for an individual to work. And, of course, an inheritance tax, with an individual lifetime deduction limit. (i.e., you aren't taxed on the first $500k you inherit, after that, it's a 20% tax)
Now, some people are going to make bad decisions with their investment account, and there's not much you can do about that. However, when reconciled against alternative scenarios, the benefits should be vastly superior.
No, the problem is that IBM would need to build search market share. Microsoft has built a search engine that is nearly identical to Google, but Google beats them in terms of market share by about a 4 to 1 margin mostly due to inertia and the fact that people just plain like Google more than Microsoft (2:1 if you figure that Yahoo is essentially just a Bing front end). Together, Google, Bing, and Yahoo constitute 96% of the internet search market. IBM would have to convince people that they have substantially better results, and I don't think that's possible. TFA's argument that people have no loyalty to Google is completely wrong as well. No matter what search engine I use, I usually find what I'm looking for on the first page. Meanwhile, IBM doesn't have the other parts of the ecosystem that they need: local, shopping, email, news, etc. Ultimately, I just can't see IBM being able to lure customers away.
Furthermore, I don't think Watson would scale very well. If you look at the server overhead and electrical cost, I would bet that it's an order of magnitude higher than the Google search farm. Please note that I have no actual figures on Google or Watson operating costs, just a scientific wild assed guess.
And if you get one of these national security letters or other absurd warrant from the feds, publish it. The right of the press to publish otherwise classified material was affirmed in the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States, although that was a pretty weak ruling. But unless you've agreed to keep something secret, you're theoretically free to do with it as you like. Also, I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't take your legal advice from the internet.
As long as you landed your plants along the equator, some should be able to live. Find some high desert plants or lichens. Land them on Mars and wait 30 years to see what happens. Unfortunately, some boring people oppose putting foreign life forms on the surface of Mars. Boo. This is the most important and interesting study of climate and evolution we could possibly ever make.
Ok, next step, let's find some plants that might be able to grow there. Let's make Mars a green planet. I think that's really the next step, can we take a desolate planet and make it remotely suitable for life. I'd like to do the same thing with Venus, which I'm sure will be much more of a challenge.
It seems they can do all the routine parts of driving. The hard parts will be navigating detours, construction zones and obeying traffic cops, and doing all of that without reliable GPS. Still, it's exciting. I don't know if we'll even have a fully autonomous car by 2030, but I expect great advances in collision avoidance that will really help with all the baby boomers retiring.
Completely disagree. A competitive marketplace is almost always a very good thing. Android has become the new destination for malware. I've been saying from the beginning that if Microsoft wants to play in the tablet/mobile market, they're going to have to effectively give the OS away. Some people might pay a bit more for the Apple experience. Microsoft doesn't have that sort of appeal. For everyone else, they've come to expect cheap hardware. Google and Amazon are making money from tying their tablets to other revenue generators - search, shopping, app stores. Microsoft has become so spoiled with the fat margins they get on Windows and Office, they don't know how to work a market where they don't have a monopoly.
Also, turn off 3rd party cookies. And run an ad blocker. That will substantially cut down on things. Until things eventually get integrated on the back end so that everything appears to be coming from the site that you're visiting. Like spam, it's an arms race. While spam is 99.8% solved, do not track will be much more challenging.
My thoughts as well. I kind of wonder how many people out there are still overclocking. It's so rare that anything I do is CPU bound anymore. Maybe I'm getting old becuase I just want things to work.
And you also better be damn sure you're attacking the right person and not some poor company who has already had their own systems compromised. Most people are really bad detectives and just aren't qualified to determine who to hack back against. And usually your attacker doesn't have much of a footprint to attack. So while I support your right to actively defend yourself, don't be a Zimmerman and shoot some unarmed kid with a bag of candy in his pocket.
That's ok. If it's anything like my wife's phone, any idiot could see the finger smudges and retrace the sequence that unlocks it. She's practically worn a grove into the screen.
Try holding some blind tastings. I have. Among casual wine drinkers, there's no correlation between the price of the bottle and the prefernce for what's inside. At my own tasting parties (where I do blind taste testings), the Trader Joes Coastal Zinfandel continues to crush the competition for $6/bottle. Despite what people claim to like, clean, fruity zinfandels are reliable winners.
I've started growing grapes and making my own wines, so I'm looking forward to see how my own vintage fares at my next wine party.
The obvious solution is to have everyone in the potential class opt in at the start of the lawsuit. If the lawyers needed actual clients before proceeding, these suits would almost never happen (and probably be settled much more quickly).
Kids have a thousand times more options for learning to program these days. And iPads aren't displacing general-purpose home computers. Not even close. Tablets are mostly for watching video, facebook, and games. It's quite handy to have the Wikipedia in your living room. Serious work is still done on a proper computer. My kid doesn't do writing assignments on her Nexus 7. She types them up in Word. In any event, if kids want to program, there's no shortage of options and free compilers. There are free versions of Visual Studio, there's Javascript, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. All free.
There are learning resources available today that I couldn't even imagine when I was 8 (in 1984). I learned by typing in a program listing (Applesoft Basic) and then experimenting to see what changing different statements did. In some cases, I just guessed as to what other statements might even exist. When I was 13, I was able to get enrolled in an actual programming class at my local community college. Up unti that point, I had no books, no instruction, no place to ask questions, but I was programming every day.
Quite the contrary. Employers are able to find good workers for a reasonable price and the government is saying no. So meanwhile some guy's new business is struggling to get going and some other guy who had the misfortune of being born somewhere else can't find work. Free trade, by definition, is mutually beneficial to both parties. Meanwhile, people on H1B visas are getting treated like indentured servants, because that's what they are. If you just let workers come over and work for market wages, you'll quickly get equilibrium and not have to deal with this nonsense.
The whole netbook thing came and went already. The biggest problem with the Chromebook is it's got a tiny 12" screen. At that size, I'd rather just use a tablet. For doing any actual work, a 15" screen is pretty much the minimum. I know, I've been using a netbook for occasional travel and configuring IT equipment at the office for the last 4 years. While not terrible, it's hard to type on the shrunken keyboard and the screen is frequently too small to view the window I'm trying to work in without stuff being cut off at the bottom. And the weak Atom CPU can barely play movies while I'm on the plane. I don't need a desktop replacement, but the 12" screen just isn't getting the job done. Put ChromeOS on a decent laptop and then see how it compares to Windows units.
When I'm hiring, I usually just advertise on Craigslist. 90% of the interview is just being able to complete a freshman level programming assignment. But I usually am hiring entry-level developers. It's depressing to see just how few applicants can pass the test, even guys with 5 years experiance. I was beginning to think my test was unreasonable util I had a prospect pass both tests (FizzBuzz and sort a text file of numbers) in 15 minutes dispite never having used C#,.NET or Visual Studio before. His sense of engineering needs a lot of work and supervision, but he does do good UI work.
Graduates expecting to get a job without training in technology de jour is a disturbing trend. Graduates need to have both abstract and concrete skills. You're setting yourself back $15k/year if your education did not include currently in demand skills. Students need to demand this. And most of it is as simple as just teaching the abstract principles on current technologies. I do not personally know anyone who has ever had a job programming in Scheme or Lisp, but academics still seem to love that shit. That's one of the major resons I dropped out. As a customer (and that's how students should be viewed), I was not satisfied with what I was getting for my tens of thousands of dollars.
The last round of hiring I did, none of the new grads I interviewed had ever even used Visual Studio. This is simply inexcuseable. Only one had apparently ever written a program outside of class. He was also the only one to pass the FizzBuzz test and got the job. And technically, he hasn't graduated yet; he's still taking night classes, but he's only got one left.
Blackberry makes business devices, and as a business device, tablets aren't doing much. Tablets are doing great in the consumer space. My wife and kid have their own tablets and use them all the time - Facebook, email, web surfing, games. It gets them away from their main computers and lets them communicate with the world anywhere in the hosue. Meanwhile, no one in my office uses a tablet for work. I don't really see that changing in the next few years, either. They're fine for viewing things, and while there are exceptions, they don't seem to be very good for actual work tasks.
That's what we do. Corporate credit cards are a real pain in the ass to get if you're a small company. We (small business) use personal cards and have the bill sent to the office. The employee gets to keep the airline miles or whatever bonus is attached to the card. Given that I have about $4k/month in expenses that flow through there, it adds up fast and it's a win/win all around.
What do you think people will be doing on an interstellar voyage? Maybe someday we'll have a breakthrough on interstellar travel, but I think the 1000 year spaceship seems much more probable. And that's 1000 years without anywhere to go on vacation. 1000 years where nothing new ever happens. I can tell ya, whoever gets off that ship and arrives on a new planet is going to be damn good at Tetris.
I had a similar idea for streaming movies. I just don't have the time or the resources to try and do it.
Put together a server room filled with DVD towers and literally stream the discs directly to the customer in real time. I'm actually surprised that no one is doing this right now. Or, for all I know, someone is doing this and I just don't know about it.
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Why can't companies pay better wages? Because that's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Fundamentally, this is a question of economics. You have an oversupply of labor, particularly in lower skilled positions. Increasing the market price of labor can not and will not ever solve that problem. It is an economic impossibility.
Before we can solve the problem, we must first understand what exactly the problem is. In western countries, we have several issues going on. Wealth is concentrating in the hands of the already wealthy. Productivity gains are outstripping both the demand for labor and the demand for goods, or so we suppose for the sake of argument.
The traditional response to this situation is an increasing demand for socialism or communism, which, frankly, does not work. Subsidizing the poor has the perverse effect of making them poorer by limiting their access to work. Central planning is inefficient and ineffective. Top down communism does not work. However, Austrian economics suggests that bottom up communism should work. What I suggest is a multi-part approach. Scrap the current income tax system and welfare system. Switch to a flat tax with a prebate. This provides a subsidy to the poor, but without the welfare trap. Next, replace Social Security with personal investment accounts. Accounts should have the following characteristics: no set retirement age, principle can not be withdrawn, but dividends are paid out. Account should be funded equally. This decreases the pressure for an individual to work. And, of course, an inheritance tax, with an individual lifetime deduction limit. (i.e., you aren't taxed on the first $500k you inherit, after that, it's a 20% tax)
Now, some people are going to make bad decisions with their investment account, and there's not much you can do about that. However, when reconciled against alternative scenarios, the benefits should be vastly superior.
I should write a book on this.
No, the problem is that IBM would need to build search market share. Microsoft has built a search engine that is nearly identical to Google, but Google beats them in terms of market share by about a 4 to 1 margin mostly due to inertia and the fact that people just plain like Google more than Microsoft (2:1 if you figure that Yahoo is essentially just a Bing front end). Together, Google, Bing, and Yahoo constitute 96% of the internet search market. IBM would have to convince people that they have substantially better results, and I don't think that's possible. TFA's argument that people have no loyalty to Google is completely wrong as well. No matter what search engine I use, I usually find what I'm looking for on the first page. Meanwhile, IBM doesn't have the other parts of the ecosystem that they need: local, shopping, email, news, etc. Ultimately, I just can't see IBM being able to lure customers away.
Furthermore, I don't think Watson would scale very well. If you look at the server overhead and electrical cost, I would bet that it's an order of magnitude higher than the Google search farm. Please note that I have no actual figures on Google or Watson operating costs, just a scientific wild assed guess.
And if you get one of these national security letters or other absurd warrant from the feds, publish it. The right of the press to publish otherwise classified material was affirmed in the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States, although that was a pretty weak ruling. But unless you've agreed to keep something secret, you're theoretically free to do with it as you like. Also, I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't take your legal advice from the internet.
As long as you landed your plants along the equator, some should be able to live. Find some high desert plants or lichens. Land them on Mars and wait 30 years to see what happens. Unfortunately, some boring people oppose putting foreign life forms on the surface of Mars. Boo. This is the most important and interesting study of climate and evolution we could possibly ever make.
Ok, next step, let's find some plants that might be able to grow there. Let's make Mars a green planet. I think that's really the next step, can we take a desolate planet and make it remotely suitable for life. I'd like to do the same thing with Venus, which I'm sure will be much more of a challenge.
It seems they can do all the routine parts of driving. The hard parts will be navigating detours, construction zones and obeying traffic cops, and doing all of that without reliable GPS. Still, it's exciting. I don't know if we'll even have a fully autonomous car by 2030, but I expect great advances in collision avoidance that will really help with all the baby boomers retiring.
And knowledge was passed from the notes of the instructor to the notes of the student without passing through the brain of either.
According to my own research (n=1), the best approach is to read the text before the lecture and use the lecture for further understanding.
Completely disagree. A competitive marketplace is almost always a very good thing. Android has become the new destination for malware. I've been saying from the beginning that if Microsoft wants to play in the tablet/mobile market, they're going to have to effectively give the OS away. Some people might pay a bit more for the Apple experience. Microsoft doesn't have that sort of appeal. For everyone else, they've come to expect cheap hardware. Google and Amazon are making money from tying their tablets to other revenue generators - search, shopping, app stores. Microsoft has become so spoiled with the fat margins they get on Windows and Office, they don't know how to work a market where they don't have a monopoly.
Yep. Having issues here as well. Not good, but surprisingly I haven't had any calls from angry customers yet.
Also, turn off 3rd party cookies. And run an ad blocker. That will substantially cut down on things. Until things eventually get integrated on the back end so that everything appears to be coming from the site that you're visiting. Like spam, it's an arms race. While spam is 99.8% solved, do not track will be much more challenging.
Someone wake me up when a mobile device has the following features:
can install any arbitrary OS (does not have a locked bootloader)
The default OS is secure
The default OS is not a walled garden
It took my kid hardly any time at all to get her Nexus 7 tablet filled with malware.
My thoughts as well. I kind of wonder how many people out there are still overclocking. It's so rare that anything I do is CPU bound anymore. Maybe I'm getting old becuase I just want things to work.
And you also better be damn sure you're attacking the right person and not some poor company who has already had their own systems compromised. Most people are really bad detectives and just aren't qualified to determine who to hack back against. And usually your attacker doesn't have much of a footprint to attack. So while I support your right to actively defend yourself, don't be a Zimmerman and shoot some unarmed kid with a bag of candy in his pocket.
That's ok. If it's anything like my wife's phone, any idiot could see the finger smudges and retrace the sequence that unlocks it. She's practically worn a grove into the screen.
Try holding some blind tastings. I have. Among casual wine drinkers, there's no correlation between the price of the bottle and the prefernce for what's inside. At my own tasting parties (where I do blind taste testings), the Trader Joes Coastal Zinfandel continues to crush the competition for $6/bottle. Despite what people claim to like, clean, fruity zinfandels are reliable winners.
I've started growing grapes and making my own wines, so I'm looking forward to see how my own vintage fares at my next wine party.
The obvious solution is to have everyone in the potential class opt in at the start of the lawsuit. If the lawyers needed actual clients before proceeding, these suits would almost never happen (and probably be settled much more quickly).
Kids have a thousand times more options for learning to program these days. And iPads aren't displacing general-purpose home computers. Not even close. Tablets are mostly for watching video, facebook, and games. It's quite handy to have the Wikipedia in your living room. Serious work is still done on a proper computer. My kid doesn't do writing assignments on her Nexus 7. She types them up in Word. In any event, if kids want to program, there's no shortage of options and free compilers. There are free versions of Visual Studio, there's Javascript, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. All free.
There are learning resources available today that I couldn't even imagine when I was 8 (in 1984). I learned by typing in a program listing (Applesoft Basic) and then experimenting to see what changing different statements did. In some cases, I just guessed as to what other statements might even exist. When I was 13, I was able to get enrolled in an actual programming class at my local community college. Up unti that point, I had no books, no instruction, no place to ask questions, but I was programming every day.
Quite the contrary. Employers are able to find good workers for a reasonable price and the government is saying no. So meanwhile some guy's new business is struggling to get going and some other guy who had the misfortune of being born somewhere else can't find work. Free trade, by definition, is mutually beneficial to both parties. Meanwhile, people on H1B visas are getting treated like indentured servants, because that's what they are. If you just let workers come over and work for market wages, you'll quickly get equilibrium and not have to deal with this nonsense.
The whole netbook thing came and went already. The biggest problem with the Chromebook is it's got a tiny 12" screen. At that size, I'd rather just use a tablet. For doing any actual work, a 15" screen is pretty much the minimum. I know, I've been using a netbook for occasional travel and configuring IT equipment at the office for the last 4 years. While not terrible, it's hard to type on the shrunken keyboard and the screen is frequently too small to view the window I'm trying to work in without stuff being cut off at the bottom. And the weak Atom CPU can barely play movies while I'm on the plane. I don't need a desktop replacement, but the 12" screen just isn't getting the job done. Put ChromeOS on a decent laptop and then see how it compares to Windows units.
When I'm hiring, I usually just advertise on Craigslist. 90% of the interview is just being able to complete a freshman level programming assignment. But I usually am hiring entry-level developers. It's depressing to see just how few applicants can pass the test, even guys with 5 years experiance. I was beginning to think my test was unreasonable util I had a prospect pass both tests (FizzBuzz and sort a text file of numbers) in 15 minutes dispite never having used C#, .NET or Visual Studio before. His sense of engineering needs a lot of work and supervision, but he does do good UI work.
Graduates expecting to get a job without training in technology de jour is a disturbing trend. Graduates need to have both abstract and concrete skills. You're setting yourself back $15k/year if your education did not include currently in demand skills. Students need to demand this. And most of it is as simple as just teaching the abstract principles on current technologies. I do not personally know anyone who has ever had a job programming in Scheme or Lisp, but academics still seem to love that shit. That's one of the major resons I dropped out. As a customer (and that's how students should be viewed), I was not satisfied with what I was getting for my tens of thousands of dollars.
The last round of hiring I did, none of the new grads I interviewed had ever even used Visual Studio. This is simply inexcuseable. Only one had apparently ever written a program outside of class. He was also the only one to pass the FizzBuzz test and got the job. And technically, he hasn't graduated yet; he's still taking night classes, but he's only got one left.
Blackberry makes business devices, and as a business device, tablets aren't doing much. Tablets are doing great in the consumer space. My wife and kid have their own tablets and use them all the time - Facebook, email, web surfing, games. It gets them away from their main computers and lets them communicate with the world anywhere in the hosue. Meanwhile, no one in my office uses a tablet for work. I don't really see that changing in the next few years, either. They're fine for viewing things, and while there are exceptions, they don't seem to be very good for actual work tasks.
That's what we do. Corporate credit cards are a real pain in the ass to get if you're a small company. We (small business) use personal cards and have the bill sent to the office. The employee gets to keep the airline miles or whatever bonus is attached to the card. Given that I have about $4k/month in expenses that flow through there, it adds up fast and it's a win/win all around.
What do you think people will be doing on an interstellar voyage? Maybe someday we'll have a breakthrough on interstellar travel, but I think the 1000 year spaceship seems much more probable. And that's 1000 years without anywhere to go on vacation. 1000 years where nothing new ever happens. I can tell ya, whoever gets off that ship and arrives on a new planet is going to be damn good at Tetris.
I had a similar idea for streaming movies. I just don't have the time or the resources to try and do it.
Put together a server room filled with DVD towers and literally stream the discs directly to the customer in real time. I'm actually surprised that no one is doing this right now. Or, for all I know, someone is doing this and I just don't know about it.