In the video, why does Lath Carlson, Executive Director of the Seattle Living Computers Museum euphemize history by saying Steve Jobs "quit" in 1985?
183 karma · joined July 5, 2010
You might make free software more reliable and secure. The EU won't.
Men and women have clear differences which should be celebrated. This means men and women can never be literally equal.
It so happens that women are significantly over represented in nursing. It is not obvious that fighting this imbalance is worth the effort.
It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market".
Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process).
The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to.
The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR.
The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity.
Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions).
(1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete.
The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.
That's subjective.
In any case, similarity of jobs is orthogonal to the narrow question - who has the stronger mandate?
Take Person A who via an elected representative would like to effect legislative change in their nation. Who has the stronger mandate to take action?
In other words, which representative would be closer to the truth in saying that "they were acting in Person A's name"?
1. For the sake of argument, let's take the UK Prime Minister. He is voted for by a party consisting of members of the public via an open process to represent a specific platform; is elected directly by a constituency numbering in the low tens of thousands of people who happen to live in a geographical area of the nation under representation.
Furthermore, the representative is a widely known public figurehead with a well-known platform meaning that although members of the public in other constituencies cannot affect his election to parliament directly, they can affect the amount of power he wields. The election covers 70 million people.
2. For an EU Commissioner a shortlist of representatives are chosen in secret by a team of people, each of whom is a proxy, elected via a process similar to (1). One of the shortlist is chosen by a vote from members of a directly elected parliament. The election takes into consideration the views of 3/4 billion people.
The EU commissioner shortlist process is secret (and thus open to nefarious influence - go on: tell me this will not happen), the final vote is diluted by the views of an order of magnitude more people, spread over a much greater geographic area (meaning a much wider range of concerns need be taken into consideration), and the commissioner need not have been elected directly by anyone from the population he represents (other than via proxy).
Based on this, it is clear that the representative in scenario (1) has a stronger claim to be said to be acting in the name of Person A than the person elected via process (2).
The EU is hence less democratic than the institutions is is replacing, and is in some sense democratically regressive.
(And this is before any discussion about the differences in the legislative path between Westminster and the EU).
The question at hand is: do the EU commissioners have a stronger or weaker democratic mandate than national MPs?
When considering this question, the vote in the EU parliament is neither here nor there, because the person being voted for by them has not been directly elected by a single member of the public, possibly ever.
If a person is directly elected by the people he represents, then he has a stronger mandate than another who has not been directly elected. Mandate gets weaker the farther you are from direct election by the people.
Furthermore, you could argue that the EU contributed to the triggering of a new Cold War (hot in the Ukraine) by staging a coup of a democratically elected government.
Or at the very least having unelected foreign policy actors (Ashton et al) take ham-fisted actions on behalf of a whole continent.
...or that it has contributed to untold sufferring of an entire generation in the Mediterranean countries due to an ill-conceived currency union.
Given said negative externalities, might it be worth re-visting the premise of the whole endeavour?
The democratic mandate for EU commissioners is less strong than for directly elected officials.
@matt4077 called out that even Cameron is not elected directly as PM, and that is correct. The problems with the existing parliamentary democracy in the UK are well understood.
So having a "somewhat undemocratically elected official" Cameron, nominate a person for the commission who has not been directly elected at all by the populous, is less democratic because it is one step further removed from direct election.
This is how we have all these "unknown faces" wielding immense power in Brussels - like Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council.
The democratically elected European Parliament then vote for the nominees, but at this point the nominees already have less mandate (for reasons given above) than the members of national parliaments (and the EU parliament). And, I might add, more power.
This is one of the main problems with the EU as a political union. It is a move away from grass-roots democracy towards a centralized monolith that disenfranchises millions and millions of people.
Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats was king-maker and part of the coalition (deputy PM) in the last government. With a smaller party in power, this was seen as a crucial opportunity for electoral reform.
Ultimately, Clegg blew it - and I don't think this is an exaggeration.
What we are left with is the SNP needing 26,000 votes per seat in the Commons, and UKIP needing 3.9 million votes per seat. Only 30 million votes were cast in total!
This can be said to be deeply undemocratic, regardless of your political persuasion.
You point out that Cameron (for example) is not directly elected as PM. He does however have to be elected to parliament via a democratic vote. Unlike the European Commission, where commissioners have no democratic mandate to speak of and yet they hold immense power.
34% of those eligible voted in the UK European elections (i.e. for the European Parliament). Your comment re people not caring is overly simplistic. People will not vote for a wide variety of reasons. Only one of which is that they "don't care".
Edit: please explain your downvote, so that I may improve my comment or respond.
The problem with the EU is that is is even less democratic and hence less accountable than the pre-existing system of national governments.
Furthermore, as this article shows, the EU makes it easier for large companies and trading blocks to pull-off greater subversions and abuses of power via lobbying and corruption, since power is concentrated in a much smaller number of people.
The founders and implementors of the EU "project" used the term "ever tighter integration" in their founding documents, where they laid out their vision for a United States of Europe.
They even describe how they intended to implement this via a technique called "gradualism". The idea being that big sweeping reforms would be rejected by the individual polities, but that more gradual, subtle changes spread over time could achieve the same effect without the same resitance. And we have seen this in action over the past forty years.
A bit like the apochryphal boiling of a frog.
The problem is that this is in some sense subversive and in another, presumptious that the EU project is desired and/or sensible. At some point the frog metaphor breaks down and people begin to realize what is happening and what has happened.
And in the UK at least, finally, we are beginning to see a debate being held on the desirability of the EU being a political union (rather than the more prosaic free-trade area).
I might experience one 404 a month. Even if you multiply that by ten to account for selective memory, link rot is a good example of something that sounds like it will be a massive problem, but generally isn't in reality.
If you are running forwards slower than a treadmill is taking you back, are you advancing?
I suppose that would be kind of neat if the Web wasn't already the most shareable medium in the world (you've heard of URLs?).
MS is way behind in standards implementation (yes still, even in IE11). Yes this software is pure vapor, but has their browser project office heard of feature prioritization?
MS has not, cannot and will never change. They are onto a losing strategy long-term (just review your GA logs). And for that I am glad because as a developer for the Web, I hate them with a passion.
"Its marketing and documentation does not correct those who believe it is suitable for web-applications more complex than simple CRUD apps."
As soon as you have an application where you have to reason about the events ocurring in your page, with AngularJS you're lost. Note that CRUD apps are a sizeable proportion if not the majority of applications, so it's brilliant for a massive number of applications.
But for anything more complicated, you're on a knife-edge of performance-problems and ballooning accidental complexity.
Haters gonna hate!