A market is not a living being. It has no will. It has no responsibility. There's a reason that for negative externalities like pollution, we rely on leaders with human will rather than markets with computational power.
Well then why does everyone in the USA keep trying to shift everything to the cloud? To keep capitalist software in business against the forces of piracy on the one hand, market saturation on another, Free Software on the third hand, and genuine technological issues with desktops on the last.
Your skepticism shows a good scientific mind, but is unfortunately misplaced. The governmental science budget allocated through the NSF, NIH, and DARPA has just been cut over and over and over again.
the number of American-born students in the progams isn't where it should be
That's because the salaries and working conditions coming out of STEM programs really aren't that great. They're better in engineering and technology, especially computing, but they're still just not there compared to law, finance, or medicine.
Hell, let's compare apples to apples rather than BE degrees to MD degrees. We'll compare PhD to MD.
PhD? You do damned well in undergrad, you apply and get into grad school, you make do on ~$20,000/year +/- $4000 for 5 years of your mid-twenties, and then you receive your PhD. Depending on the level of funding for scientists in your field, you will probably have to do 1-3 postdocs earning $30,000-$50,000 before you become qualified for a proper faculty/scientist position at a university or other laboratory setting earning $60,000-$80,000/year. After 6 years at this position, you may either be given a nice raise and a job for life, or fired summarily and made to start that 6-year slog all over again. All this time, you've been working massively long hours, you often had to hunt for your own funding, and don't think you were getting vacations as a post-doc! (NOTE: The "hot" sciences of computing and chemical engineering have it significantly better than this, but they used to be not merely healthy but BOOMING.)
MD? You do really damned well in undergrad, you apply and get into med school (somehow), you take on student-loan debt for med school lasting 3-4 years, then you do a year's internship, then a 2-3 year residency. Notably, your wages as an intern or resident just about match those of the post-doc, with similar hours and job security to the post-doc, while you have student-loan debt from undergrad med school to pay off. If you ultimately get through all of this and succeed, you become a qualified doctor who can earn six figures in a hospital or practice, but it's damned easy to fall off the track at any point.
JD? You do really damned well in undergrad, you apply to law school and get in, you do 2-3 years of law school on student-loan debt, you pass the Bar Exam, and you get a job as a lawyer earning $50,000/year-$70,000/year. You now have exhaustingly hard work and debt to pay off, and these days pretty bad job prospects out of law school, but if you succeed you can earn scads of money in a law firm, do good for people in public service, and someday maybe even break into politics.
Now ultimately, in terms of indebtedness and invested effort, they're all in the same ballpark of each other. However, in terms of rewards if you actually "win", and therefore in terms of expected values, medicine and law are obviously much better. There are fields of science and engineering research that remain fairly well-funded, such as computing and chemistry (especially chemical engineering), but even these aren't what they used to be (I've heard a story about university department chairs lining up by the dozens for a chance to interview the graduating class of PhDs somewhere for tenure-track faculty positions, of which there were 3). Meanwhile, the other "core sciences" of physics and biology are starving for the funding to support both existing research and new researchers.
This is not to say that nobody should try to enter science. I sure as hell want to become a scientist in computing, and from what I've heard, we're pretty decently off. You can graduate with your PhD, and while the chances of winning a faculty position at an R1 research university are microscopic, you can probably find a research job at a non-R1 university or lab, or an industrial job applying your research. Meanwhile, you only spent 5 years living off ramen rather than living off ramen while going into debt.
The core message, however, needs to be shouted from mountaintops. Don't cut the science budget and then wonder why there aren't enough scientists! If we spent on science what we spend on war, every little geek and his jock brother could work in a lab!
I'm actually a self-taught programmer and amateur systems hacker since age 11 myself (which means my resume lists 11 years' experience in some things and I'm not sure anyone believes it). Not everyone self-taught is going to have skills in web-dev, either, especially if they (like me, for example) started at an age when "web development" was not yet the primary form of programming. My actual point was that in a field like programming, where the actively popular technologies can change very quickly, sometimes it's best to just hire a generalist or polymath and have them learn your specific set-up than to require someone who knows everything about your technologies as they walk in the door.
I've ended up feeling like an incredible dinosaur for not being able to whip up an AJAX or PHP web-app, but also incredibly grateful that I don't have to go through the sheer pain of trying to get inconsistent, non-standardized technologies to all work well on mutually rivalrous platforms. Ahaha.
25? I'm from New York and Massachusetts and I simply haven't heard of buying your own house before age 30. Who the hell has money to buy a house at age 20? Even plumbers are still in training then!
Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks?
Because the thing you're really paying so much for is the site, the land, which appreciates with the entire local economy,cultural scene, and productivity.
The real trick is to figure out how to make land prices go down in places where people actually want to live. The best-known method is to increase the equality of desirability between areas.
Why are we still working 40 hour weeks?
Because people are too stupid to give up their notion that contribution to production/society == work == hours. Otherwise, we could easily be at a 20-hour or 30-hour work-week by now with only a moderate decrease in standard of living for the 99%. Our standard of living has increased so little in the past several decades that we could revert 20 or 30 years of "growth" (minus things like scientific/technological advances and accounting for population growth) in order to shorten the work-week or the work-year and the vast majority of us would keep living the same old lives. Who would actually lose out? The 1%, the capitalist class, who have captured all the wealth from our getting more productive while increasing the amount we work.
Hells yes! What I wouldn't give to have a programming job and live where I damn well please, perhaps someplace with amenities known as "friends" or "family".
By the way, was your big metro area Boston, New York, or Raleigh?
I can actually tell you the reason for that, being Boston-area myself: everyone hiring for web-dev type positions seems to want prior experience. Us kids don't walk out of college with web-dev experience, and if we can't get a first job in web-dev because we don't have experience, we're not walking out of our first jobs with that experience either. So you're starved for developers who can honestly consider themselves qualified for your requirements.
I saw some damn good offers in my senior year of college to relocate to the West Coast (Seattle area specifically). I have so far never seen anything like that on the East Coast, which seems ridden with small companies, mostly nontechnical rather than true technology companies, who mostly all seem to want to hire someone experienced rather than even try out a twenty-something like me.
Want to work for a real tech company? West Coast. Want to work for a web startup? San Francisco or, admittedly, Boston-Cambridge. Want to work for smaller companies that mostly don't do any serious technology? Most of the East Coast. Want to work in actual technology on the East Coast? Be 30 and have the experience of a 35 year-old, preferably with a Master's degree.
So could we agree that as capitalism produces enough abundance to slowly abolish scarcity and make many entire professions non-earners in the free marketplace, it also creates unpleasant levels of unemployment? Or, in short, that the increasing inability to earn a living from one of many high-skill professions (software, law, science, general-practice medicine, etc.) is a class contradiction of capitalism?
The answer is actually relatively simple (especially when you hear the end of the story): she was offered a job picking biomedical stocks on Wall Street, and took it. So the answer is: money has been reallocated from research to finance, making it more financially feasible for a trained researcher to pick research stocks than to actually do research.
Capitalism has abstracted its way away from actual productivity and into financial masturbation.
But when they get there, they find themselves forced to room with several people to get by, living in conditions no better than they did at home in order to send a significant chunk of their pay home. It's the tech equivalent of the "Alberta Oilsands Lifestyle" -- long hours, brutal living expenses, and relatively high pay for short periods followed by trips home to survive unemployment while looking for the next contract.
My God, you just described my life in Boston in miniature. Well, I did a little better than that, but my friends who didn't study at hard at school have done exactly like this.
Except that not everyone does it. From the number of OWS and pro-Union Ohioan whiners, I'd say that it's a definite minority who successfully adjust.
Got any evidence that OWS protesters are mostly unemployed, or have mostly failed to qualify themselves for today's good jobs? I seem to remember a news story about a 31-year-old unemployed woman with a biomedical PhD. That ought to qualify her for a job in today's research-driven "knowledge economy", right?
Except that public spending on research has plummeted for the past couple decades exactly as Wall Street has driven corporations to cut their R&D spending. So now we've got out-of-work PhDs.
Coders don't fly the banner of allegiance because management doesn't fly the banner of allegiance. They can't make long-term promises when it's possible they'll get bought up after 2 or 3 years. What can you possibly offer me aside from salary + Bonus? Stock? 401K? Incentive plan? Who even takes those seriously these days? Fact: If you aren't reviewing your employee's and asking them every 6-months to a year what makes them happy, don't expect to keep em'. You can only burn the smart ones once.
Time off work. It's one of the few things that cannot POSSIBLY lose value.
I agree with the epithet "iBust". I completely disagree with the notion that Apple or Google will go under.
Google is now the world's premier advertiser. Apple has more cash-on-hand than any government on the planet, all from product revenues. The rest might crash and burn, but these two have sustainable business models based on selling stuff to people who want it.
I was actually referencing my own graduate work in AI involving PROLOG and a custom language we created to assist in non-routine problem solving within software agents.
That actually sounds pretty cool. Got a publication link?
Sometimes people need work done RIGHT NOW. Like... you know... they are competing against another startup and first one there wins. Or they are about to lose a major customer and they need someone to build what they need right now. You can't walk in the door and do that job just because you have an IT degree. It's just not happening. I can't walk in the door and do certain work. I would have neither the experience in the particular technologies nor the background to understand wtf they want me to do. People that have those... they're scarce. Many many programmers know code and could give a shit about the business they support. For that reason, they're not scarce to their employer. Or to any other employer.
So custom-built commodities are scarce, while mass-produced ones are non-scarce? Amazing, why didn't I see it before?
I completely agree, but I have one objection: a normal job is 9-5, not 8-5. Once you start saying 8-5 you're already normalizing the notion of 9-hour workdays or of taking an extra, unpaid hour for lunch. In most professional jobs outside the tech sector, nobody sees anything wrong with eating lunch away from your desk and, gasp, not working another hour to make up for it.
You seem to have missed my point and gone off on a big crotchety rant. My point was: I'm scarcer than a lot of the hot-shots who think they're scarce, but on a conscious level I'm not scarce. If I'm scarce, I'm artificially scarce: I invested time learning things that other people could learn (or if someone actually trained them at their job), and I did things that other people could do -- all if they had the time from earning this month's rent. People could do the same with your skills and experience, I guarantee it. I'm not scarce. You're not scarce. No mere laborer is so scarce that he can't be replaced if the need is dear enough. If your employers felt they needed to, they would throw you out on the street and train me or some other monkey to take your job.
Welcome to capitalism.
And you can be both scarce and useless (for example, being the only one that knows some language nobody needs).
Oy mate, I'm the only one who knows the language I'm creating. No shit. I don't expect others to know it, or consider it a job skill. Lay off that one.
"Value proposition" is a business term. It means: how do they actually make money? And that's their problem: they create lots of value but capture none of it for themselves in the form of revenue. They're essentially operating as highly-leveraged charities.
Slashdot Mirror
A market is not a living being. It has no will. It has no responsibility. There's a reason that for negative externalities like pollution, we rely on leaders with human will rather than markets with computational power.
Oh fair enough. I'm slowly working on a solution to this problem, but...
Well then why does everyone in the USA keep trying to shift everything to the cloud? To keep capitalist software in business against the forces of piracy on the one hand, market saturation on another, Free Software on the third hand, and genuine technological issues with desktops on the last.
Where do you live that people are well-fed and can find shelter without having a job, permanently?
Your skepticism shows a good scientific mind, but is unfortunately misplaced. The governmental science budget allocated through the NSF, NIH, and DARPA has just been cut over and over and over again.
the number of American-born students in the progams isn't where it should be
That's because the salaries and working conditions coming out of STEM programs really aren't that great. They're better in engineering and technology, especially computing, but they're still just not there compared to law, finance, or medicine.
Hell, let's compare apples to apples rather than BE degrees to MD degrees. We'll compare PhD to MD.
PhD? You do damned well in undergrad, you apply and get into grad school, you make do on ~$20,000/year +/- $4000 for 5 years of your mid-twenties, and then you receive your PhD. Depending on the level of funding for scientists in your field, you will probably have to do 1-3 postdocs earning $30,000-$50,000 before you become qualified for a proper faculty/scientist position at a university or other laboratory setting earning $60,000-$80,000/year. After 6 years at this position, you may either be given a nice raise and a job for life, or fired summarily and made to start that 6-year slog all over again. All this time, you've been working massively long hours, you often had to hunt for your own funding, and don't think you were getting vacations as a post-doc! (NOTE: The "hot" sciences of computing and chemical engineering have it significantly better than this, but they used to be not merely healthy but BOOMING.)
MD? You do really damned well in undergrad, you apply and get into med school (somehow), you take on student-loan debt for med school lasting 3-4 years, then you do a year's internship, then a 2-3 year residency. Notably, your wages as an intern or resident just about match those of the post-doc, with similar hours and job security to the post-doc, while you have student-loan debt from undergrad med school to pay off. If you ultimately get through all of this and succeed, you become a qualified doctor who can earn six figures in a hospital or practice, but it's damned easy to fall off the track at any point.
JD? You do really damned well in undergrad, you apply to law school and get in, you do 2-3 years of law school on student-loan debt, you pass the Bar Exam, and you get a job as a lawyer earning $50,000/year-$70,000/year. You now have exhaustingly hard work and debt to pay off, and these days pretty bad job prospects out of law school, but if you succeed you can earn scads of money in a law firm, do good for people in public service, and someday maybe even break into politics.
Now ultimately, in terms of indebtedness and invested effort, they're all in the same ballpark of each other. However, in terms of rewards if you actually "win", and therefore in terms of expected values, medicine and law are obviously much better. There are fields of science and engineering research that remain fairly well-funded, such as computing and chemistry (especially chemical engineering), but even these aren't what they used to be (I've heard a story about university department chairs lining up by the dozens for a chance to interview the graduating class of PhDs somewhere for tenure-track faculty positions, of which there were 3). Meanwhile, the other "core sciences" of physics and biology are starving for the funding to support both existing research and new researchers.
This is not to say that nobody should try to enter science. I sure as hell want to become a scientist in computing, and from what I've heard, we're pretty decently off. You can graduate with your PhD, and while the chances of winning a faculty position at an R1 research university are microscopic, you can probably find a research job at a non-R1 university or lab, or an industrial job applying your research. Meanwhile, you only spent 5 years living off ramen rather than living off ramen while going into debt.
The core message, however, needs to be shouted from mountaintops. Don't cut the science budget and then wonder why there aren't enough scientists! If we spent on science what we spend on war, every little geek and his jock brother could work in a lab!
I'm actually a self-taught programmer and amateur systems hacker since age 11 myself (which means my resume lists 11 years' experience in some things and I'm not sure anyone believes it). Not everyone self-taught is going to have skills in web-dev, either, especially if they (like me, for example) started at an age when "web development" was not yet the primary form of programming. My actual point was that in a field like programming, where the actively popular technologies can change very quickly, sometimes it's best to just hire a generalist or polymath and have them learn your specific set-up than to require someone who knows everything about your technologies as they walk in the door.
I've ended up feeling like an incredible dinosaur for not being able to whip up an AJAX or PHP web-app, but also incredibly grateful that I don't have to go through the sheer pain of trying to get inconsistent, non-standardized technologies to all work well on mutually rivalrous platforms. Ahaha.
25? I'm from New York and Massachusetts and I simply haven't heard of buying your own house before age 30. Who the hell has money to buy a house at age 20? Even plumbers are still in training then!
Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks?
Because the thing you're really paying so much for is the site, the land, which appreciates with the entire local economy,cultural scene, and productivity.
The real trick is to figure out how to make land prices go down in places where people actually want to live. The best-known method is to increase the equality of desirability between areas.
Why are we still working 40 hour weeks?
Because people are too stupid to give up their notion that contribution to production/society == work == hours. Otherwise, we could easily be at a 20-hour or 30-hour work-week by now with only a moderate decrease in standard of living for the 99%. Our standard of living has increased so little in the past several decades that we could revert 20 or 30 years of "growth" (minus things like scientific/technological advances and accounting for population growth) in order to shorten the work-week or the work-year and the vast majority of us would keep living the same old lives. Who would actually lose out? The 1%, the capitalist class, who have captured all the wealth from our getting more productive while increasing the amount we work.
I wish I had mod points for you.
Where in New England?
Hells yes! What I wouldn't give to have a programming job and live where I damn well please, perhaps someplace with amenities known as "friends" or "family".
By the way, was your big metro area Boston, New York, or Raleigh?
I can actually tell you the reason for that, being Boston-area myself: everyone hiring for web-dev type positions seems to want prior experience. Us kids don't walk out of college with web-dev experience, and if we can't get a first job in web-dev because we don't have experience, we're not walking out of our first jobs with that experience either. So you're starved for developers who can honestly consider themselves qualified for your requirements.
I saw some damn good offers in my senior year of college to relocate to the West Coast (Seattle area specifically). I have so far never seen anything like that on the East Coast, which seems ridden with small companies, mostly nontechnical rather than true technology companies, who mostly all seem to want to hire someone experienced rather than even try out a twenty-something like me.
Want to work for a real tech company? West Coast. Want to work for a web startup? San Francisco or, admittedly, Boston-Cambridge. Want to work for smaller companies that mostly don't do any serious technology? Most of the East Coast. Want to work in actual technology on the East Coast? Be 30 and have the experience of a 35 year-old, preferably with a Master's degree.
Or maybe I'm just being pessimistic. Whatever.
So could we agree that as capitalism produces enough abundance to slowly abolish scarcity and make many entire professions non-earners in the free marketplace, it also creates unpleasant levels of unemployment? Or, in short, that the increasing inability to earn a living from one of many high-skill professions (software, law, science, general-practice medicine, etc.) is a class contradiction of capitalism?
Was that article ever submitted to Slashdot?
Cool straw men and rationalization, bro.
The answer is actually relatively simple (especially when you hear the end of the story): she was offered a job picking biomedical stocks on Wall Street, and took it. So the answer is: money has been reallocated from research to finance, making it more financially feasible for a trained researcher to pick research stocks than to actually do research.
Capitalism has abstracted its way away from actual productivity and into financial masturbation.
But when they get there, they find themselves forced to room with several people to get by, living in conditions no better than they did at home in order to send a significant chunk of their pay home. It's the tech equivalent of the "Alberta Oilsands Lifestyle" -- long hours, brutal living expenses, and relatively high pay for short periods followed by trips home to survive unemployment while looking for the next contract.
My God, you just described my life in Boston in miniature. Well, I did a little better than that, but my friends who didn't study at hard at school have done exactly like this.
Except that not everyone does it. From the number of OWS and pro-Union Ohioan whiners, I'd say that it's a definite minority who successfully adjust.
Got any evidence that OWS protesters are mostly unemployed, or have mostly failed to qualify themselves for today's good jobs? I seem to remember a news story about a 31-year-old unemployed woman with a biomedical PhD. That ought to qualify her for a job in today's research-driven "knowledge economy", right?
Except that public spending on research has plummeted for the past couple decades exactly as Wall Street has driven corporations to cut their R&D spending. So now we've got out-of-work PhDs.
Coders don't fly the banner of allegiance because management doesn't fly the banner of allegiance. They can't make long-term promises when it's possible they'll get bought up after 2 or 3 years. What can you possibly offer me aside from salary + Bonus? Stock? 401K? Incentive plan? Who even takes those seriously these days? Fact: If you aren't reviewing your employee's and asking them every 6-months to a year what makes them happy, don't expect to keep em'. You can only burn the smart ones once.
Time off work. It's one of the few things that cannot POSSIBLY lose value.
I agree with the epithet "iBust". I completely disagree with the notion that Apple or Google will go under.
Google is now the world's premier advertiser. Apple has more cash-on-hand than any government on the planet, all from product revenues. The rest might crash and burn, but these two have sustainable business models based on selling stuff to people who want it.
Does "Eli" sound like a female name? Only to Gentiles...
Person with small kids? Inshallah one of these days I'll have kids.
But in my case: person with a girlfriend, person with friends, person with hobbies.
I was actually referencing my own graduate work in AI involving PROLOG and a custom language we created to assist in non-routine problem solving within software agents.
That actually sounds pretty cool. Got a publication link?
Sometimes people need work done RIGHT NOW. Like... you know... they are competing against another startup and first one there wins. Or they are about to lose a major customer and they need someone to build what they need right now. You can't walk in the door and do that job just because you have an IT degree. It's just not happening. I can't walk in the door and do certain work. I would have neither the experience in the particular technologies nor the background to understand wtf they want me to do. People that have those... they're scarce. Many many programmers know code and could give a shit about the business they support. For that reason, they're not scarce to their employer. Or to any other employer.
So custom-built commodities are scarce, while mass-produced ones are non-scarce? Amazing, why didn't I see it before?
I completely agree, but I have one objection: a normal job is 9-5, not 8-5. Once you start saying 8-5 you're already normalizing the notion of 9-hour workdays or of taking an extra, unpaid hour for lunch. In most professional jobs outside the tech sector, nobody sees anything wrong with eating lunch away from your desk and, gasp, not working another hour to make up for it.
You seem to have missed my point and gone off on a big crotchety rant. My point was: I'm scarcer than a lot of the hot-shots who think they're scarce, but on a conscious level I'm not scarce. If I'm scarce, I'm artificially scarce: I invested time learning things that other people could learn (or if someone actually trained them at their job), and I did things that other people could do -- all if they had the time from earning this month's rent. People could do the same with your skills and experience, I guarantee it. I'm not scarce. You're not scarce. No mere laborer is so scarce that he can't be replaced if the need is dear enough. If your employers felt they needed to, they would throw you out on the street and train me or some other monkey to take your job.
Welcome to capitalism.
And you can be both scarce and useless (for example, being the only one that knows some language nobody needs).
Oy mate, I'm the only one who knows the language I'm creating. No shit. I don't expect others to know it, or consider it a job skill. Lay off that one.
"Value proposition" is a business term. It means: how do they actually make money? And that's their problem: they create lots of value but capture none of it for themselves in the form of revenue. They're essentially operating as highly-leveraged charities.