In my career, I did manage to get into the top few percent in my field, but many times came close to falling into the situation you describe. Its not uncommon. We need to move the entire responsibility for job creation out of the hands of corporations where CEO prove they are incapable of doing a credible job. Like generals they are always fighting the last war, the kinds of jobs society needs now are not those that will make a lot of money for a few, but that will begin to address the social, political and environmental challenges that are overtaking humanities inability to address them, because everyone is too slavishly serving away at sending the fruits of their labors up the corporate ladder for others to spend lavishly on themselves.
Wall Street does generate wealth, but it largely does so through defrauding investors, 1) either by hyping and selling short the stocks that are being recommended, or more often by insiders paying themselves in stock options and then paying only a small fraction of their salaries in tax and using corporations to hide insiders using them as piggy banks for personal gain. Make both practices illegal and much of the abuse ends.
"Market fundamentalism has its roots in liberalism, and was reactionary against the totalitarian socialism of Austria [wikipedia.org]. Neo-liberalism is not without merit. But by taking the market as the source of morals, we have neglected what really drives value in society. "
BS. Austria was only for a brief period of time the center of the world. Most of "these problems" can be traced to biological processes that appeared well before the advent of humans.
While I agree that climate change will shape the future of politics, the notion that there will be any place to "stand on the sidelines" is a gross overindulgence in wishful thinking.
There are also consequences to letting those at the top acquiring far too many perks for the workers to sustain. If the workers are overworked the colony dies.
Sadly, all of the GOP and way too much of the Democratic Party are tools of the traditional energy companies (oil/gas/coal). What is happening is that real economies of scale are already being led by other countries and except for the dubious value of "ethanol fuels", they are quickly dominating these markets. It looks as if this opportunity is rapidly closing for an America that seems to want to "shrink" rather than grow.
Its not so much a corporate god as it is good old fashioned corporate greed. Too many think exist as useful societal institutions only to make money. If they only just make money, then they are worse than useless.
You are right though, this is very much at the heart of our problems. Its the general "trickle up theory of economics" promoted by those at the top, whose PR teams are busy selling the virtues of "trick down theory of economics". Things will only change when those who are being peed on, become so pissed off that they will demand laws that force other kinds of valuations on corporate entities. If one only values things in terms of dollars, the lowest common denominator of collective values, then one will greatly undervalue the most important and valuable things that can never be purchased with money.
The problem is that we are all in the Darwinian predicament. We all tend to perceive value as it relates only to our personal bottom line, rather than thinking creatively and wisely enough to assure that everyone's bottom line is raised. The sad reality is that a science based economy is probably something that won't be gasped in time. As a consequence of the sheer magnitude of billions and billions of humans impacting the ecosystems that sustain humanity will overwhelm it, well before such a realization and conceptual awakening can come in time to save us. My guess is that humanity probably has less than a few hundred years. Then we turn things back over to the cockroaches and bacteria, which have long demonstrated superior survival skills.
Without good science, how are we going to determine whether it makes any sense putting all these "system architecs, computer architects, and entrepreneurs" to work doing anything: 1) worth doing, or 2) that won't destroy the planet in the process?
Yes, the money is running out to find ways to continue to give the ultra-wealthy more perks and tax breaks, so now we are at a point where we are making every effort as a society to target the expense of having teachers and scientists. One would think people might have pause to consider the consequences, but hey I guess the CEO's and already wealthy shareholders and their court of lobbyists, lawyers, PR men, middle level managers, etc. would be so traumatized that we must continue on instead with shrinking America on their behalf.
This is total BS. Most of these foreign students are paying full freight on their tuition, unlike most US students. They typically get in now because they are better motivated and often better prepared. Sure there are exceptions, but it is a mistake to generalize.
Cut the guy some slack. His native language is not English and it was an otherwise useful and important post.
The problem is NOT the "craziness" of people wanting to go into science. It is that we as a society seem to value 7 an 8 figure salaries for CEO's more than the steady but in the long run far more important and longer lasting POSITIVE contributions of thousands of scientists, who won't make much personally but give back to society far more than any CEO I have ever heard of.
I too am a scientist and I simply don't buy your argument at all. The question of "worth too much" is rather irrelevant unless it is coupled with a clear indication of to whom and when and for what reasons. Certainly, these are judgement calls and there is a lot of latitude for informed opinion, but without a sufficient diversity of scientists, progress often grinds to a halt simply because unexpected things happen and society can not put all its eggs in one basket. There is no economic, social, or biological law that says we can't once again find ourselves living in the second "Dark Ages".
I work in the area of taxonomy and systematics. Fields that have been in serious decline for years and in which pay is almost non-existent (I fully support my own research now). However, when society reaches the point of recognizing the consequences of the fact that we are living in a historical period that can be only characterized as the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Permian, it may well be too late to do anything about it. This will be true because training people to identify organisms and developing a biological understanding of why and how they originate in the first place and thus sufficiently informed to keep the ecosystems we all take for granted healthy, will take too long to produce a material effect on the human predicament. Most of the public is oblivious as to how hollow many ecosystems have now become nor do they appreciate or comprehend what the consequences will be, almost all not particularly favorable for humanity's own future.
When all is said and done, it comes down to what is it that is worth doing with one's life. We presently presume that the system we have now, where one does something and someone else pays them for it, will be stable enough to sustain "business as usual". This is rapidly becoming no longer the case. The dying of the Gulf of Mexico is a prime example. In the past 50 years we have greatly depleted its bounty until industries that it used employ hundreds of thousands, now have shrank until only a few tens of thousands of jobs are involved. There are a lot of things humans "make" but very few of them do not rely upon some ecosystem services for their ultimate support. If people are even unable to properly identify the species that make up of what little is left of those ecosystems, there is very little reason to expect they will be able to "manage" them.
Again, it all comes down to value, but value can only be assessed in terms of to whom, when and for how much (relative to some other investment of time and energy).
As for government funding, if governments don't step up to the plate to act on societies behalf, then in the longer term society won't have much of a chance, since the changes in biodiversity and human ecology are changing too fast to expect that a few independent "private" efforts here and there in a very few firms able to hire "scientists" would amount to a tincker's darnn in the long run. The adverse accumulative effects of billions and billions of humans will simply outstrip the ability of politicians who want to provide such firms tax beaks or the best efforts of those few "commercial" scientists will be swamped. What is more likely to happen in the near-term is what we are seeing in the US, where its scientific infrastructure and educational systems are being torn up as fuel for more tax breaks for the already wealthy. Consequently, more and more science moves to those countries where governments have a more competitive and viable long term plan. It is not hard to find evidence of this in three of the most economically important areas of science: 1) development of alternative, "clean" forms of energy, 2) biotechnolgoy, and 3) high energy and particle physics.
The argument that government funded science makes it worse is simply preposterous. Virtually all major breakthroughs in science have come as a result of government investment of some kind, which includes a huge amount of R&D funding that went into for example,
The real problem with your notion is its inability to explain why CEO salaries are increasing and our society is putting more and more and more and more and more resources into the already wealthy, with so little to show for it.
Lot of talk about "inferior" foreign scientists, but almost never any talk of inferior CEO's and managers. Why is that?
then you can be plugged into the Apple Store no matter where you go 24/7. If you spend time at place X and time Y, then they know where and when to direct their energies not to mention inform any third parties who might be willing to pay Apple for that information. This capability wasn't built in to simply to permit a handshake between your iPhone and cell towers, it was built in for a long term marketing and business plan. The only way you can avoid it is to stay away from Apple products, which evidently, like cocaine, some people just are unable to do without.
One hardly needs conspiracy theories to explain this behavior. If the corporations can track your every move, you become a captive audience, no place to go, nowhere to hide as they take bigger and bigger bites out of your wallet until your financial vitality has been sucked dry and they can move on to the next victim.
Its simply all about making greater and greater profits, no matter the social consequences. Besides, with corporations already in control, who can tell the difference between the government and corporations anyway these days? The entire fiction of "the quest for smaller government" is that it is based on the notion that the people will still somehow "be in charge".
In reality it means that just an every shrinking number of corporate lobbyists will be telling everybody what to do at the behest of a tiny handful of corporate "owners". That is the true meaning of what the smaller government mantra is all about and yet the suckers continue to fall for it, hook line and sinker.
"we've shifted from having a great industrial base to having a service-based economy,"
We still have an industrial base that remains the envy of most countries, its just that we continue to invest the bulk of our industrial tax credits to oil/gas/coal and transportation and energy production that subsidize these industries. Ultimately this means importing oil and hence running up huge trade imbalances and transportation costs, not to mention all the environmental and health costs that don't get added into the spreadsheets, when calculating the costs of these industries. Just ask the poor fishermen living on the Gulf coast where they fit in the spreadsheet.
This problem is made much larger by making stock-options legal, since it has created a two tiered tax system, where those who make the most money are permitted to be taxed at a rate roughly 25-30% less than those who make almost no money by comparison. If corporations were forced to pay their executives big salaries that presumably they are "worth" in dollars, then they could be taxed at the same rates as rest of us, there would be no federal deficit, not to mention the endless need to cut education and spending on social services, infrastructure, health care, aid for the poor, science and technology, etc. Ironically, the republican party has instead chosen to give up on Christianity rather than eliminating stock options. Also, ironically, the wealthy recipients of stock options have then turned around to use stock options to buy politicians to fool the public into further cutting regulations on their ability to further game the system and to subsidize political parties and media empires that are used to fool many into believing that "government is the problem". It is not an accident that the concept of "trickle-down economics" and stock options evolved at the same moment in time, nor is it an accident that "free-market government is the problem"-enthusiasts" always use perverted arguments such as "the government will piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining" to deflect an examination of the full costs to society of making stock-options legal.
Slashdot Mirror
In my career, I did manage to get into the top few percent in my field, but many times came close to falling into the situation you describe. Its not uncommon. We need to move the entire responsibility for job creation out of the hands of corporations where CEO prove they are incapable of doing a credible job. Like generals they are always fighting the last war, the kinds of jobs society needs now are not those that will make a lot of money for a few, but that will begin to address the social, political and environmental challenges that are overtaking humanities inability to address them, because everyone is too slavishly serving away at sending the fruits of their labors up the corporate ladder for others to spend lavishly on themselves.
Gee I became a professor and I maxed out at 42K for 100 hr plus weeks. Clearly, I was in the wrong field.
"Life is hard, and the world is cruel"
Therefore don't let the ultra-wealthy suffer, they simply wouldn't be used to it.
Wall Street does generate wealth, but it largely does so through defrauding investors, 1) either by hyping and selling short the stocks that are being recommended, or more often by insiders paying themselves in stock options and then paying only a small fraction of their salaries in tax and using corporations to hide insiders using them as piggy banks for personal gain. Make both practices illegal and much of the abuse ends.
Don't destroy it. Nationalize it by taxing the proceeds to buy it.
"Market fundamentalism has its roots in liberalism, and was reactionary against the totalitarian socialism of Austria [wikipedia.org]. Neo-liberalism is not without merit. But by taking the market as the source of morals, we have neglected what really drives value in society. "
BS. Austria was only for a brief period of time the center of the world. Most of "these problems" can be traced to biological processes that appeared well before the advent of humans.
While I agree that climate change will shape the future of politics, the notion that there will be any place to "stand on the sidelines" is a gross overindulgence in wishful thinking.
There are also consequences to letting those at the top acquiring far too many perks for the workers to sustain. If the workers are overworked the colony dies.
Yes, but then you will run smack into the "prestige" industry lobby.
After all how could anyone possibly survive without Gucci shoes, a BMW, and an iPhone?
Sadly, all of the GOP and way too much of the Democratic Party are tools of the traditional energy companies (oil/gas/coal). What is happening is that real economies of scale are already being led by other countries and except for the dubious value of "ethanol fuels", they are quickly dominating these markets. It looks as if this opportunity is rapidly closing for an America that seems to want to "shrink" rather than grow.
Its not so much a corporate god as it is good old fashioned corporate greed. Too many think exist as useful societal institutions only to make money. If they only just make money, then they are worse than useless.
You are right though, this is very much at the heart of our problems. Its the general "trickle up theory of economics" promoted by those at the top, whose PR teams are busy selling the virtues of "trick down theory of economics". Things will only change when those who are being peed on, become so pissed off that they will demand laws that force other kinds of valuations on corporate entities. If one only values things in terms of dollars, the lowest common denominator of collective values, then one will greatly undervalue the most important and valuable things that can never be purchased with money.
The problem is that we are all in the Darwinian predicament. We all tend to perceive value as it relates only to our personal bottom line, rather than thinking creatively and wisely enough to assure that everyone's bottom line is raised. The sad reality is that a science based economy is probably something that won't be gasped in time. As a consequence of the sheer magnitude of billions and billions of humans impacting the ecosystems that sustain humanity will overwhelm it, well before such a realization and conceptual awakening can come in time to save us. My guess is that humanity probably has less than a few hundred years. Then we turn things back over to the cockroaches and bacteria, which have long demonstrated superior survival skills.
If cynicism could solve the world's problems, there wouldn't be any.
You seem to express a death wish for humanity.
Without good science, how are we going to determine whether it makes any sense putting all these "system architecs, computer architects, and entrepreneurs" to work doing anything: 1) worth doing, or 2) that won't destroy the planet in the process?
Yes, the money is running out to find ways to continue to give the ultra-wealthy more perks and tax breaks, so now we are at a point where we are making every effort as a society to target the expense of having teachers and scientists. One would think people might have pause to consider the consequences, but hey I guess the CEO's and already wealthy shareholders and their court of lobbyists, lawyers, PR men, middle level managers, etc. would be so traumatized that we must continue on instead with shrinking America on their behalf.
Good for you. You value your mind more than others who so easily sell themselves for money.
Lots of self-proclaimed "super programmers out there". Indeed they are a dime a dozen, but I have yet to hear of a single one this good.
This is total BS. Most of these foreign students are paying full freight on their tuition, unlike most US students. They typically get in now because they are better motivated and often better prepared. Sure there are exceptions, but it is a mistake to generalize.
Cut the guy some slack. His native language is not English and it was an otherwise useful and important post.
The problem is NOT the "craziness" of people wanting to go into science. It is that we as a society seem to value 7 an 8 figure salaries for CEO's more than the steady but in the long run far more important and longer lasting POSITIVE contributions of thousands of scientists, who won't make much personally but give back to society far more than any CEO I have ever heard of.
Thats because the guy has 50 slashdot accounts and uses them to mod himself up.
I too am a scientist and I simply don't buy your argument at all. The question of "worth too much" is rather irrelevant unless it is coupled with a clear indication of to whom and when and for what reasons. Certainly, these are judgement calls and there is a lot of latitude for informed opinion, but without a sufficient diversity of scientists, progress often grinds to a halt simply because unexpected things happen and society can not put all its eggs in one basket. There is no economic, social, or biological law that says we can't once again find ourselves living in the second "Dark Ages".
I work in the area of taxonomy and systematics. Fields that have been in serious decline for years and in which pay is almost non-existent (I fully support my own research now). However, when society reaches the point of recognizing the consequences of the fact that we are living in a historical period that can be only characterized as the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Permian, it may well be too late to do anything about it. This will be true because training people to identify organisms and developing a biological understanding of why and how they originate in the first place and thus sufficiently informed to keep the ecosystems we all take for granted healthy, will take too long to produce a material effect on the human predicament. Most of the public is oblivious as to how hollow many ecosystems have now become nor do they appreciate or comprehend what the consequences will be, almost all not particularly favorable for humanity's own future.
When all is said and done, it comes down to what is it that is worth doing with one's life. We presently presume that the system we have now, where one does something and someone else pays them for it, will be stable enough to sustain "business as usual". This is rapidly becoming no longer the case. The dying of the Gulf of Mexico is a prime example. In the past 50 years we have greatly depleted its bounty until industries that it used employ hundreds of thousands, now have shrank until only a few tens of thousands of jobs are involved. There are a lot of things humans "make" but very few of them do not rely upon some ecosystem services for their ultimate support. If people are even unable to properly identify the species that make up of what little is left of those ecosystems, there is very little reason to expect they will be able to "manage" them.
Again, it all comes down to value, but value can only be assessed in terms of to whom, when and for how much (relative to some other investment of time and energy).
As for government funding, if governments don't step up to the plate to act on societies behalf, then in the longer term society won't have much of a chance, since the changes in biodiversity and human ecology are changing too fast to expect that a few independent "private" efforts here and there in a very few firms able to hire "scientists" would amount to a tincker's darnn in the long run. The adverse accumulative effects of billions and billions of humans will simply outstrip the ability of politicians who want to provide such firms tax beaks or the best efforts of those few "commercial" scientists will be swamped. What is more likely to happen in the near-term is what we are seeing in the US, where its scientific infrastructure and educational systems are being torn up as fuel for more tax breaks for the already wealthy. Consequently, more and more science moves to those countries where governments have a more competitive and viable long term plan. It is not hard to find evidence of this in three of the most economically important areas of science: 1) development of alternative, "clean" forms of energy, 2) biotechnolgoy, and 3) high energy and particle physics.
The argument that government funded science makes it worse is simply preposterous. Virtually all major breakthroughs in science have come as a result of government investment of some kind, which includes a huge amount of R&D funding that went into for example,
You have hit the nail on the head! The only real question now is what can we do about it before its too late?
The real problem with your notion is its inability to explain why CEO salaries are increasing and our society is putting more and more and more and more and more resources into the already wealthy, with so little to show for it.
Lot of talk about "inferior" foreign scientists, but almost never any talk of inferior CEO's and managers. Why is that?
then you can be plugged into the Apple Store no matter where you go 24/7. If you spend time at place X and time Y, then they know where and when to direct their energies not to mention inform any third parties who might be willing to pay Apple for that information. This capability wasn't built in to simply to permit a handshake between your iPhone and cell towers, it was built in for a long term marketing and business plan. The only way you can avoid it is to stay away from Apple products, which evidently, like cocaine, some people just are unable to do without.
One hardly needs conspiracy theories to explain this behavior. If the corporations can track your every move, you become a captive audience, no place to go, nowhere to hide as they take bigger and bigger bites out of your wallet until your financial vitality has been sucked dry and they can move on to the next victim.
Its simply all about making greater and greater profits, no matter the social consequences. Besides, with corporations already in control, who can tell the difference between the government and corporations anyway these days? The entire fiction of "the quest for smaller government" is that it is based on the notion that the people will still somehow "be in charge".
In reality it means that just an every shrinking number of corporate lobbyists will be telling everybody what to do at the behest of a tiny handful of corporate "owners". That is the true meaning of what the smaller government mantra is all about and yet the suckers continue to fall for it, hook line and sinker.
Yes, but you can be sure she keeps her astrologer and ouija board handy to do the conversions.
"we've shifted from having a great industrial base to having a service-based economy,"
We still have an industrial base that remains the envy of most countries, its just that we continue to invest the bulk of our industrial tax credits to oil/gas/coal and transportation and energy production that subsidize these industries. Ultimately this means importing oil and hence running up huge trade imbalances and transportation costs, not to mention all the environmental and health costs that don't get added into the spreadsheets, when calculating the costs of these industries. Just ask the poor fishermen living on the Gulf coast where they fit in the spreadsheet.
This problem is made much larger by making stock-options legal, since it has created a two tiered tax system, where those who make the most money are permitted to be taxed at a rate roughly 25-30% less than those who make almost no money by comparison. If corporations were forced to pay their executives big salaries that presumably they are "worth" in dollars, then they could be taxed at the same rates as rest of us, there would be no federal deficit, not to mention the endless need to cut education and spending on social services, infrastructure, health care, aid for the poor, science and technology, etc. Ironically, the republican party has instead chosen to give up on Christianity rather than eliminating stock options. Also, ironically, the wealthy recipients of stock options have then turned around to use stock options to buy politicians to fool the public into further cutting regulations on their ability to further game the system and to subsidize political parties and media empires that are used to fool many into believing that "government is the problem". It is not an accident that the concept of "trickle-down economics" and stock options evolved at the same moment in time, nor is it an accident that "free-market government is the problem"-enthusiasts" always use perverted arguments such as "the government will piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining" to deflect an examination of the full costs to society of making stock-options legal.