See, nobody believes this because if there was actually a shortage of highly-skilled tech workers, all of us who took basic economics in college know that the firms would be willing to pay more. The higher pay would then inspire more people to go into CS and STEM majors in college; computer science departments in particular are running far, far below capacity in terms of the number of students they educate.
And let's assume that the money is there, but students still aren't taking Computer Science in large enough numbers. At that point, we can only come to one of two conclusions:
1) The money isn't enough after all. That's how a free market works. 2) Something other than money, perhaps working conditions or perceived (lack of) socialization, is severely discouraging young talent in America from pursuing computing.
I can tell you that the talent is there. Loads of smart people are trying to find any work they can in the biomedical field right now because it pays DAMN WELL. It's just that even the smart people see some reason not to go into computing, and I can't help but trust their own reasons for their own actions.
I'm in India right now and I see something different. I see a place where new tech parks are rising like crabgrass and replacing shacks. I see people equally as intelligent as their counterparts in Europe and the US willing to work much harder (already in school). Just noting out of ethnic pride, but ditto on certain areas of the Middle East.
It's called "market economics". In this age of cheap transportation if you throw the doors wide open, not only will you deal with immigrants flooding in faster than your culture can assimilate them, but those floods of immigrants will depress the value of labor to such a low that nobody - not immigrants, not natives, nobody - will be able to make a living that supports a family anymore.
Are you trolling, or do you seriously believe that people have a right to move wherever in the world they want to? I mean, if you seriously believe that, I don't have a bridge to sell you, but I do have some blackhat friends you should meet. That is, if you're willing to exercise the same God-given right as them and move to the West Bank.
Oh, and since we have the right to move wherever we like, I'm sending an invasion force of immigrants to Japan. Once there they'll vote themselves a roughly Anglo-European system of government, but they've got a right to go there and swamp the aging population.
It's not a matter of "good teacher" or "bad teacher". Administrations make a lot of difference. About 4-5 years ago, back in high school, I had the most enthusiastic and awesome math teacher ever. Today he's walking around looking downcast all the time; his spirit is utterly broken. Why? The local administration is plain, old-fashioned, Darth Vader evil!
You can live pretty cheap in Israel (spending half of what you'd spend in Silicon Valley would put you well ahead of the game) so long as you're willing to go local and not try to recreate California in your surroundings (and stomach). Excellent [/Monty Burns voice]. I've never even lived in California anyway, so I don't have that to spoil me.
Though something tells me I'll never, ever be satisfied with Israeli pizza shops. I'm from New York, I can't help being a snob about pizza. But other than that I'm pretty willing to go native when it comes to food. Most of the dishes I know from my parents take enough effort that I'll save them for special occasions no matter where I live.
And as to "surroundings"... oh dear God you'd have to be fucking rich to recreate the green bits of California, or even the green bits of the American South/Southwest in Israel. The water and terraforming cost far too much.
Anyway, good to hear that the Israeli tech center is good money. Immigration to anywhere sucks enough without ending up penniless as a perpetual yeshivah student.
You can also get by with English for almost all daily-routine tasks. If your employer doesn't mind then it won't be a problem. Walking around the streets of some cities (e.g., hipper areas of Jerusalem) you'll hear American-accented English spoken as much as anything else. Kmo amarti, ani rotzeh lilmod l'daber ivrit. Gam yesh li ivrit kmo... kacha-kacha ulpan gimel o dalet.
Actually, I would say the homeless are generally homeless due to being mentally ill, unemployable and/or addicted to various narcotic drugs. A government house isn't going to solve that. Mental-health care and drug treatment will.
THE PAY IS HALF THAT OF THE USA!? How does that compare to the cost of living in Israel? Is it like Boston or Silicon Valley where you're poor and living like a student if you make less than six figures (or the rough Israeli equivalent), or is computing and/or programming still a good profession in Israel?
Hot summers I like, I'm willing to learn Hebrew, and I'm even willing to put up with security checkpoints at stores and promenades, but if the money ain't there, fuck it.
But beyond that, bigger is not always better. There is nothing at all wrong with successfully providing a good service to a chosen market for a fair price. Oh, nothing's wrong with it. It's just that if we want cooperatives to have an effect on society at large, they must proliferate enough to become a serious market competitor with standard LLCs. Anything that wants to change the world must either multiply or grow large enough to affect the world.
Now, I accept that these coops may not want to change the world. In the same hand, I have no desire to own or found a bookstore. I was just looking for summer work and asked offhand out of curiosity when I found out that this bookstore was a coop.
But the Slashdot discussion at hand is about things we can do or use to make society as a whole better off, and coops, or anything else, that consciously opt out of doing what's necessary to affect society as a whole at all can't accomplish that. Furthermore, I have observed that cooperatives tend to behave like this across the board, rather than just in isolated cases.
Then there is, of course, the problem of financing cooperatives. A rational economic actor given the choice to give a firm X% of its start-up capital (assume that the two firms require the same dollar amount and have the same chance of success), either as an investment for a X% stake in a normal LLC or as a loan to a workers' cooperative, will almost always choose to invest in the LLC. Firstly, the loan carries much more risk in practice. Secondly, the interest rate required to make the loan more profitable in the event that the firm succeeds is so astronomically high that even American courts would rule it criminal usury.
So one of the big reasons we don't even get small coops springing up all over the place is that financing them with anything other than the small capital contributions the worker-founders can make (which pale in comparison to the start-up capital needs of a modern firm) is both riskier and less profitable on success than giving the same money to an LLC doing exactly the same thing.
I would say the model needs some serious tweaking.
Right. The individuals maintain their right to free speech, of course. But the corporation shouldn't have a right to free speech. Its job is to do business, not voice political opinions.
The upshot is that if shareholders want to voice their political opinions they should have to use their own money and time instead of the money and time (and good name!) of a business corporation that should be making money rather than acting as someone's platform.
I agree entirely. The cooperative model only has one flaw: lacking an ideological momentum (as seen in the Basque cooperatives at Mondragon), cooperatives don't seem to have much of a drive towards growth. I go to school in an extremely liberal area (Amherst, MA) that has more worker cooperatives than most of the rest of the country, but none of them seem to want to grow.
For example, the town has an extremely successful worker-coop book store. I've asked, and they're not even considering turning it into a chain and/or opening other store locations. As long as the money keeps flowing into the workers' hands from the Amherst store, they don't even really want to hire substantial numbers of additional members.
It might just be because they're dirty hippies (hippies have an ingrained instinct against doing business on any level where they would start to reap economies of scale), but it really seems like the coop model needs one tiny little plasmid of organizational DNA transplanted from the current corporate model: the driving, overriding desire to grow that makes them compete and succeed rather than sit on their hands and stagnate.
Secondly, a corporation serves the interest of its shareholders in the end even if it fails to make a profit they can still choose to keep the current CEO and board if they don't vote them out (that is rare though) and the self interest of shareholders often include their own well being so if you own shares in a factory and they produced chemicals that caused the shareholder or someone they know cancer, they might take it up with the board of directors even though change in company policy might cause a loss in profit. Actually, this only really works in theory. In practice, the law says that a corporation must act to increase shareholder financial value even when this runs contrary to the will of the shareholders.
OH DEAR GOD NO. That allows irresponsible executives and board members to rile their involuntarily laid-off workers as a voting bloc against the government to change corporate responsibility laws to exactly how we have them now.
Nobody is saying revoke the charter of every corporation, or take away the right of a business corporation to do business. Don't burn straw men.
What we're all advocating is restricting the rights of a business corporation to only those necessary to do business. For example, why should a business corporation have the right to free political speech? I know of business model but lobbying (not a very socially desirable one, if you ask me!) that actually uses political speech as a vital tool of business!
It's like my robot pal here always says: "Write error-free code or you will be exTERRRminated. Do not code bugs, do not code bugs! Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!"
This troll posts that same notion with a link to a copy-and-pasted blog post on his "signal-based computing" with every single article on programming-language issues. Occasionally someone debates him about, for example, how we encode information and computation in his new paradigm, and then he sort of crumbles. So we start modding him down to "troll", because we've seen it before.
Slashdot Mirror
See, nobody believes this because if there was actually a shortage of highly-skilled tech workers, all of us who took basic economics in college know that the firms would be willing to pay more. The higher pay would then inspire more people to go into CS and STEM majors in college; computer science departments in particular are running far, far below capacity in terms of the number of students they educate.
And let's assume that the money is there, but students still aren't taking Computer Science in large enough numbers. At that point, we can only come to one of two conclusions:
1) The money isn't enough after all. That's how a free market works.
2) Something other than money, perhaps working conditions or perceived (lack of) socialization, is severely discouraging young talent in America from pursuing computing.
I can tell you that the talent is there. Loads of smart people are trying to find any work they can in the biomedical field right now because it pays DAMN WELL. It's just that even the smart people see some reason not to go into computing, and I can't help but trust their own reasons for their own actions.
It's called "market economics". In this age of cheap transportation if you throw the doors wide open, not only will you deal with immigrants flooding in faster than your culture can assimilate them, but those floods of immigrants will depress the value of labor to such a low that nobody - not immigrants, not natives, nobody - will be able to make a living that supports a family anymore.
Latin Americans aren't using American student or H1-B visas to come; they're sneaking over the border. Indians and Chinese are using the visas.
Are you trolling, or do you seriously believe that people have a right to move wherever in the world they want to? I mean, if you seriously believe that, I don't have a bridge to sell you, but I do have some blackhat friends you should meet. That is, if you're willing to exercise the same God-given right as them and move to the West Bank.
Oh, and since we have the right to move wherever we like, I'm sending an invasion force of immigrants to Japan. Once there they'll vote themselves a roughly Anglo-European system of government, but they've got a right to go there and swamp the aging population.
Of course there's a middle ground between warehouses and madrasas! They're called yeshivot ;-).
It's not a matter of "good teacher" or "bad teacher". Administrations make a lot of difference. About 4-5 years ago, back in high school, I had the most enthusiastic and awesome math teacher ever. Today he's walking around looking downcast all the time; his spirit is utterly broken. Why? The local administration is plain, old-fashioned, Darth Vader evil!
OK, I know people disagree with this guy, but what's with the moderation? "+1, Troll"?
Though something tells me I'll never, ever be satisfied with Israeli pizza shops. I'm from New York, I can't help being a snob about pizza. But other than that I'm pretty willing to go native when it comes to food. Most of the dishes I know from my parents take enough effort that I'll save them for special occasions no matter where I live.
And as to "surroundings"... oh dear God you'd have to be fucking rich to recreate the green bits of California, or even the green bits of the American South/Southwest in Israel. The water and terraforming cost far too much.
Anyway, good to hear that the Israeli tech center is good money. Immigration to anywhere sucks enough without ending up penniless as a perpetual yeshivah student. You can also get by with English for almost all daily-routine tasks. If your employer doesn't mind then it won't be a problem. Walking around the streets of some cities (e.g., hipper areas of Jerusalem) you'll hear American-accented English spoken as much as anything else. Kmo amarti, ani rotzeh lilmod l'daber ivrit. Gam yesh li ivrit kmo... kacha-kacha ulpan gimel o dalet.
bsdrtodhshlom.
Actually, I would say the homeless are generally homeless due to being mentally ill, unemployable and/or addicted to various narcotic drugs. A government house isn't going to solve that. Mental-health care and drug treatment will.
THE PAY IS HALF THAT OF THE USA!? How does that compare to the cost of living in Israel? Is it like Boston or Silicon Valley where you're poor and living like a student if you make less than six figures (or the rough Israeli equivalent), or is computing and/or programming still a good profession in Israel?
Hot summers I like, I'm willing to learn Hebrew, and I'm even willing to put up with security checkpoints at stores and promenades, but if the money ain't there, fuck it.
Sure, like anyone gives a damn what Jewish Law says ;-).
Now, I accept that these coops may not want to change the world. In the same hand, I have no desire to own or found a bookstore. I was just looking for summer work and asked offhand out of curiosity when I found out that this bookstore was a coop.
But the Slashdot discussion at hand is about things we can do or use to make society as a whole better off, and coops, or anything else, that consciously opt out of doing what's necessary to affect society as a whole at all can't accomplish that. Furthermore, I have observed that cooperatives tend to behave like this across the board, rather than just in isolated cases.
Then there is, of course, the problem of financing cooperatives. A rational economic actor given the choice to give a firm X% of its start-up capital (assume that the two firms require the same dollar amount and have the same chance of success), either as an investment for a X% stake in a normal LLC or as a loan to a workers' cooperative, will almost always choose to invest in the LLC. Firstly, the loan carries much more risk in practice. Secondly, the interest rate required to make the loan more profitable in the event that the firm succeeds is so astronomically high that even American courts would rule it criminal usury.
So one of the big reasons we don't even get small coops springing up all over the place is that financing them with anything other than the small capital contributions the worker-founders can make (which pale in comparison to the start-up capital needs of a modern firm) is both riskier and less profitable on success than giving the same money to an LLC doing exactly the same thing.
I would say the model needs some serious tweaking.
Right. The individuals maintain their right to free speech, of course. But the corporation shouldn't have a right to free speech. Its job is to do business, not voice political opinions.
The upshot is that if shareholders want to voice their political opinions they should have to use their own money and time instead of the money and time (and good name!) of a business corporation that should be making money rather than acting as someone's platform.
I believe that the word used to refer to the 72 virgins is "houri". 72 "houri"s.
Sorry, I don't really speak Arabic. I just Wiki'd this issue once, and found that the word used was used in its feminine form. Maybe I'm wrong?
I agree entirely. The cooperative model only has one flaw: lacking an ideological momentum (as seen in the Basque cooperatives at Mondragon), cooperatives don't seem to have much of a drive towards growth. I go to school in an extremely liberal area (Amherst, MA) that has more worker cooperatives than most of the rest of the country, but none of them seem to want to grow.
For example, the town has an extremely successful worker-coop book store. I've asked, and they're not even considering turning it into a chain and/or opening other store locations. As long as the money keeps flowing into the workers' hands from the Amherst store, they don't even really want to hire substantial numbers of additional members.
It might just be because they're dirty hippies (hippies have an ingrained instinct against doing business on any level where they would start to reap economies of scale), but it really seems like the coop model needs one tiny little plasmid of organizational DNA transplanted from the current corporate model: the driving, overriding desire to grow that makes them compete and succeed rather than sit on their hands and stagnate.
EXTERMINATE!
Any sufficiently large corporation is indistinguishable from government.
OH DEAR GOD NO. That allows irresponsible executives and board members to rile their involuntarily laid-off workers as a voting bloc against the government to change corporate responsibility laws to exactly how we have them now.
Nobody is saying revoke the charter of every corporation, or take away the right of a business corporation to do business. Don't burn straw men.
What we're all advocating is restricting the rights of a business corporation to only those necessary to do business. For example, why should a business corporation have the right to free political speech? I know of business model but lobbying (not a very socially desirable one, if you ask me!) that actually uses political speech as a vital tool of business!
It's like my robot pal here always says: "Write error-free code or you will be exTERRRminated. Do not code bugs, do not code bugs! Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!"
Poor man. You've never seen the Common Lisp Object System, have you?
This troll posts that same notion with a link to a copy-and-pasted blog post on his "signal-based computing" with every single article on programming-language issues. Occasionally someone debates him about, for example, how we encode information and computation in his new paradigm, and then he sort of crumbles. So we start modding him down to "troll", because we've seen it before.
Arabic is a mostly-gendered language. The word used for the virgins is feminine.