korch

At Microsoft or Amazon, at least a few years ago when I saw the HR numbers, at any given time, ~20% of the total pool of workers can be temp contractors, so that is a sizable numbers of workers coming and going each December, at least on paper, even if those workers stay on as contractors for many years. (As an aside, I've always wondered why this doesn't generate the same amount of bad PR as the entire video game industry, especially the "EA slave-ship").

I don't have nearly as much direct experience outside of the software industry, but I imagine other industries are doing likewise and on a far broader scale.

Extending this employment pattern to the whole economy, it might explain a big percentage of these mysterious to pin-down "seasonal workers." Or perhaps the labor statistics are just being fudged across the board(thanks US BLS!), from the top down, to try to keep a lid on the worsening unemployment and underemployment situation. I suspect it's a lot of both.

Since the 70's America has been hemorrhaging "real jobs"—i.e. non-service-sector jobs that actually pay an inflation adjusted living wage. Those of us fortunate enough to win the career lottery by going into tech have been quite shielded from the backdrop of the economic decline, and the mass exporting of (manufacturing mostly?) jobs to overseas.

IMHO Ellison's lack of distinction between "take" & "use" is precisely the harm. The danger is how easily that becomes the Embrace & Extinguish strategy. He obviously sees no such distinction himself and imagines that he's big and powerful enough to just take whatever he wants. He sounds like a modern day warlord, and not in the good way. In my book, any individual who assumes that much power, without giving back in proportion, deserves to be shut down on general principle. How is it possible to respect one of the most eminent business leaders on Earth when he shoots his dumb mouth off in public like that? At best he reveals his inability to strategize & maintain coalitions, and at worst he reveals his sociopathic hubris. Being so mighty he would do well to learn the value of at least trying to listen to the advice of his PR viziers, and wear a false-face of humility in public, so as to not trigger indefensible public outrage. Which would lead to eventual Federal investigations—anyone as big as Oracle has a graveyard of skeletons buried in the basement.

I can forgive accidents, stupidity, and even short-term, limited corporate greed(implicit in The Game); but never when it's backed by the treacherous potential to cause long-term harm to much weaker open source allies. Linux, Java, Apache and other open source software projects are not mere pawns to be moved around the chess board upon which Oracle, Apple, Google and IBM engage in battle.

I hope the hippie idealism of open source populism hasn't been drowned in the ocean of money, but is instead still alive & kicking—Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfucke...

—Alexis de Tocqueville

I agree with everything in this post 100%—it's spot on and well worth meditating on over the course of several years, combined with some serious reading in the ancient philosophers.

Ultimately, ain't it a bitch that the law of diminishing marginal utility causes the demand curve to have a negative slope!?

IMHO, that happens to be the best proof that a gift culture is a higher ideal to aim for than an efficiently allocated capitalist society premised on the FUD illusion of artifical scarcity. It is better to give than to receive(or accumulate) after all. (I recommend the writings of Buckminster Fuller more than nearly anything).

Everything that everyone thinks matters, doesn't. I can't wait for the day when American "culture" gains the escape velocity to free itself from its own materialism. On the bright side, the American Empire is well on the way to smashing into the rocks, and shattering into an impoverished 3rd world nation. At least our collective happiness, sanity and basic decency will be restored.

Bollocks!

Invert the question: for every dollar of "profit" diverted to Ellison, imagine the lost opportunity cost to the rest of us—what else could those billions of dollars have been spent on other than a shitty, obscenely overpriced database that belongs back in 1983 and that is entrenched into the biggest Gordian-knot of enterprise vendor-lock-in? A helluva a lot more good could have been done in the world if Ellison was a pauper. He might have even been a good man before he had all that money, though I doubt it.

My only question is: how best can the open-source community align itself to cut off Oracle's air supply?

Now that Google is unabashedly marching under the evil flag of Mordor, can't they just open up Big Table or something for enterprise customers, and snatch the pebble from Ellison's hand? Since day one, Google's dominant strategy has always been to take an expensive, over-engineered technology that other megacorps sell, scale it off the charts of those selling it, and then give it away, recouping the difference by becoming the quasi-impartial steward of the Internet.

I don't think NoSQL yet has the traction to put two bullets in the back of Oracle's skull and call it suicide, though as we saw with the success(and then failure) of MySQL, the situation can change in as little as a few years.

For the longest time I've worn the smallest, lightest Pumas I can find, because of the closer to barefoot feel, so I may just pick up a pair of these to try.

<nelson> Ha-Ha! </nelson>

I am not saying to maliciously lie about being underpaid, nor about non-salary compensation to your new potential employer. What I am saying is that during the initial negotiating process, when they ask "how much did you make at your last job?", if you suspect they might try to low ball you or negotiate you down, then you can maintain the advantage by lying and telling some arbitrary higher amount. Although if this is happening to you, you probably might want to look else where for a job. Unfortunately the economic reality means that is not always possible—who hasn't accepted at least one job from an employer they would not ideally choose to work for?

This thread and my reply is about the well-known claim that in any salary negotiating process, who ever first lets slip a specific dollar amount loses the advantage in the entire process. My reply was simply to point out that the entire logic is premised on a flaw, namely that you, the job candidate, are the one telling the employer how much you used to make, and then naming that amount becomes equivalent to losing the advantage of "don't make the first move." Since in most cases your new employer has no way to even verify what your previous salary & compensation was, they are utterly reliant upon trusting that you are telling them the truth. I have no idea what later commentors were saying about telling your new employer what your previous taxes were. I have never heard of any employee being forced to share their tax info with future employers. (No doubt there are some professions and jobs where this happens, such as those elected to public office or serving the public interest.)

My point was this: in any negotiation process involving money it is a mistake to implicitly assume either party wants to be perfectly honest to their own disadvantage. If you look at any economic process like salary negotiation through the mathematical lens of Game Theory, you would never expect any "game player" to give away such an easy advantage.

Now I know this is going to offend many because it stabs the heart of the economics driving what we (falsely) believe is a strictly "ethical" matter, but please hear me out. I say we are all "small thieves" in our own context-dependent ways, because there really is no such thing as an objective "price." Rather, all prices are simply an arbitrary amount somebody is "willing & able" to pay. Any time you buy or sell, you first have to determine how much you can get from the other party. We are all skimming off the top of somebody else's profit margin, no matter how small.

No salary negotiation I've ever heard of followed this logic:

Recruiter: "how much did you make at your last job so we can trick you into making the first move and losing the advantage in this Game Theory-based negotiation?"

Candidate: "how much are you willing to pay?"

Even though in reality that is precisely what both sides are already trying to do. Size each other up and determine if both parties can agree to mutually benefit within their financial constraints. It's economics 101. But neither party will be honest and tell themselves nor the "opponent" that is what they are doing. And that's equivalent to lying—like Mark Twain said: "the worst lies are told in silence." And that is why I say we might as well throw out any ethical preconceptions and just look at it as a strictly game theoretic, economic process.

Since I don't even view this through the lens of ethics, I can playfully throw around the term "thieves" as a way of winking at the rules of the game itself. Who hasn't played cops & robbers and had fun pretending to be the robber?

To further see my point, think about the exact same situation, but inverted: if you, the candidate, were to ask anyone under the new potential employer: "how much did you make last year?", could you expect anyone to tell you? Or ask the CEO: "I might want to work for you, but how big was your bonus last year?" The conversation would come to a screeching halt right there.

In our era of Too Big to Fail, where the average CEOs makes hundreds of times the average salary of their lowest paid employee, why do so many of us "worker-bee" types have such a problem with turning the tables and fighting fire with fire? How do you think the CEO and the big guys got so big? How do you think the global Labor movement achieved so many gains on behalf of workers back in the 1920's? Why shouldn't employees be able to do the same today on a smaller scale? Fair is fair afterall.

That is all I'm saying. Stop voting down my insights just because I explained myself poorly and it sounded like something morally offensive to your biases. Where's the fun in having biases if we can't debate them on the Internet. :)

Lie.

Bang! they just lost the negotiating game.

There is no honor amongst theives, and I might be an idealist, but as long as money exists in the world, we're all thieves in our own small ways.

It was kind of nice actually. I made a mental note of this trick, so that the next time I want some breathing room to get the boss off my back, the easiest way is to drop a hint that I want a big raise. :)

I did eventually get the raise, and oddly for the exact amount I requested, but it was quite a painful first lesson to learn. Why will a modestly wealthy person who owns a successful company have no issue whatsoever with completely ripping of a just out of college kid who is slaving away for the owner's profit margins, and yet exhibit the most irrational behavior when it comes time to play fair and pay up? I don't know.

But it is absolutely true that in the software industry the easiest way to get a raise is to switch jobs. That's just how the game is played. Any human enterprise premised on profits is forced to be hugely wasteful, especially when you consider how much talent is thrown away to another company in order to avoid being honest about money, all so some jerk at the top can keep a larger piece of the pie for himself. This kind of direct experience is why I laughed at that stupid blog article from a few months back that said to never hire "job hoppers." IMHO job hopping developers, acting like all out software mercenaries, guns blazing on behalf of whoever is signing the checks, are automatically amongst the smartest of the pool, since they see the fundamental economic pattern underneath the entire software industry.

This silly money pattern also leads to the unusual circumstance that requires when you switch jobs, always, every time, no matter what, ask for a higher salary than what you received at your last job. Even if it's only a little bit. Never, ever move backwards, at least unless there are other external constraints preventing it. This is the only way to keep yourself from sliding down into the economic sinkhole. Sadly, it is money and not geeky ideology about OS, programming languages, etc that is the true driving force to align yourself with. Money is magnetic north in all things.(Unless you have enough Fuck-You Money, but that's a different story.)

Anyone who doesn't follow this negotiation pattern, and who isn't in some highly custom circumstances is a complete fool who probably deserves to get fleeced and left as a beggar by those shark-mouthed, pointy-haired MBAs we all love. But we can absolutely beat them at their own game. :)

Best of luck!

Seriously, what the hell is Steve thinking with so many hundreds of thousands of apps? When you want vanilla apps that are simple and popular enough that you know ahead of time which app you want, then the AppStore is great. When you trek even slightly off the beaten path, maybe exploring what's out there, or looking for something very specific and rare, and for which you would be willing to pay a lot more than $0.99, well, that ends up being a lost cause. All iPhone devs know that users simply won't spend any time sifting through apps, and this is why spamming your way to the top of any category lists is just as important as being on Google SERP #1.

Case in point: tonight I went to order a pizza, and thought to myself that it might be neat to try one of the pizza ordering apps. Seconds later I'm scrolling through more than 50 different pizza apps. Half of them I can't even tell whether they are for ordering pizza, nor whether they are local, nationwide, integrated with chains or just mom & pops. If I can't figure it out, and I'm a programmer, how well will a completely non-technical person fare? Do I have 30 minutes to tap and dig down multiple menu levels on several of them, read each one's spamtastic description, then read the user reviews which are worse than YouTube comments, then install it and try it out? Then do that again 50 more times? Does Steve think I'm a moron? If you can't even create software that can semantically represent "order a pizza local to me", how the fuck can we expect them to do something more complex? I ended up going to dominos.com in Safari.

It's almost as if Apple doesn't give a shit about promoting exceptional software for the long haul over the next few years, no, they only care about churning a fast buck right now, with a horizon of just a few business quarters ahead. What Apple will end up doing is driving all of their users to the web, and then html5 is going to mop the floor with Apple's entire Objective-C walled garden. Sorry, as much as the web is flawed, it is always going to be infinitely more simple to use than apps.

However, I do wonder if it would be easy to spam Twitter and thereby ruin its usefulness for real-time data mining. If Twitter can be used to accurately track trends, as soon as everyone knows trends are being created based on Twitter, then they can manipulate it, similar to pump-and-dump spam schemes we've seen on various financial news boards, like Yahoo, Motley Fool etc.

So now Apple is just like any other evil, scheming mega-corp. It's pretty sad actually. Like the day the music died, Apple software has died.

Rev your engines Wall St., here it comes!

Can this please become the foundation of the Internet Bubble 2.0? Just so I can hope to found a startup that is ridiculous, overhyped, and doomed to have no realistic business model, and then flip it for a nice multiple to some evil mega-corp playing shell games in lowering their taxes. Since so many computer geeks got rich doing this in the Dotcom era over a decade ago, it's only fair that a new crop of geeks get the same opportunities for advancement.

In reality, this is a terrible idea. It's also indicative of just how out of ideas our leaders are in fixing The Great Recession. Based on history, the interfering legislative fixes to the last recession always end up becoming the engine of the next financial bubble. Lather, rinse, repeat. I am more afraid of the unintended consequences arising from the executive decisions of a small number of idiot ideologues than I am of leaving things be and letting the economy restore it's own natural equilibrium. You might say "well just look at where so-called free markets got us back in 2008", and I would reply saying that entire crash was the result of political tampering in the economy, not the opposite.

Also, Baucus is a political buffoon—just go examine his track record of many, many years. He is exactly the caricature of the permanent, pandering politician we want out of Washington. He's the type of guy who only makes situations worse when he's involved, so something as big as this, I say whatever it is, if Baucus is involved, cancel it.

    --Henri Frederic Amiel

What absolutely kills me is that we have all of these super smart people dedicating their careers to this, and billions of tax payer dollars spent, and the education system that will eventually become the consensus is going to resemble the earliest modern education system in 19th century Germany/Prussia. (It's a fascinating history itself—the US public school system was originally designed as clone of the German system.)

Oh and after incentiving and selecting teachers for teaching talent based on performance becomes the norm, here is the next question that the education system will confront:

Are great teachers who get to spend one academic year with their students much less effective than even greater teachers who instead stick with the same group of students, and teach the kids for several years of k-12?

After a million studies, experimental schools, and policy debates by people who don't even know what they're talking about, the new consensus will be yes, the greatest teachers are the most effective when they can become semi-permanent tutors for kids over longer periods of time. And then we will have arrived back at the original German system of grad-level teachers who are state-funded, private full-time tutors for small groups of kids.

If Google Docs can take an arbitrary page, figure out what the data is and slurp it into a spreadsheet, then there are some very interesting kinds of data mashups to make!

> LET'S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR? Y/N

It's funny you mention Facebook. I would say Facebook's chief motive right now is to stop Google from encroaching upon their territory, so Facebook wants to put up as many speed-bumps as possible around Google. Basically that means keeping Google sandboxed—it's okay to let Google index anything they want and throw that up on an ordered SERP, but no way can we let them grow elaborate ivy APIs and web-based UIs around our walled-garden of user generated content. (i.e. Buzz.)

Given Microsoft's ownership and early partnering with Facebook, Microsoft and Facebook have aligned interests in keeping Google in the sandbox.

I don't know how much Javascript the GoogleBot currently parses and/or executes, but I imagine it would be enormously complex to embed v8 into the crawler, and then execute all Javascript on every page and determine what to index on a "page." If we ever get to the point where you can't screen scrape a web app without also executing its Javascript, then PageRank-like methods become less effective, and we'll need more semantic approaches to search. It's a great thing such semantic approaches don't yet exist!

  — Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Fiction aside, I predict this law will get repealed pretty quickly and quietly before it goes into effect. The amount of added annual tax revenue from this is projected to only be $20 billion, and as soon as various interest and trade groups realize how much more the extra paperwork is going to cost them, then they'll be screaming at the Congress-critters. They already went through this process with SOX.

It's the Government's duty to maximize tax revenues, so if the cost of doing business in general causes a decrease in many company's profits, then there is less overall income to tax. If that amount of lost tax revenue is more than the projected increase of $20 billion, and I bet it is, then it makes sense to repeal that particular law.

Here's my wild prediction: 10 years from now, with the benefit of hindsight, we will trace the moment where Google's Page Rank empire started to crumble to the introduction of this html5 feature.

However, discovering this makes me wonder what other incredibly useful but as yet unknown html5 features are out there in the wild?

Just as hardware and marketing is not in Google's DNA, so to the race to the bottom commodity pricing is not in Apple's DNA. Apple simply cannot compete on price.

We geeks get caught up in the tech side of things and don't even blink at paying upwards $2,500 for the total cost of a contract-locked smart phone for two years. But give the average non-tech person a choice between a $2500 iPhone, or a $200 unlocked Android that they can use on any carrier. It's obvious which choice the majority of consumers will make.

The New World-Old World divergence also applies to French speakers in Quebec. If you take their perfect French from Montreal to Paris, to the Parisians much of it sounds like an antiquated form of French. I suppose it's equivalent to the way King James or Shakespearean English sounds antiquated to us now.

Remember the WL leaked secret DoD document containing the Pentagon's own plan to counter WL? Their plan was to cause a big enough PR incident to scare any future whistle-blowers into silence by creating the public perception that no matter who you are, if you leak extra-ordinary, critical national security information, then it's 100% guaranteed that you will be publically outed as a whistle-blower.

Isn't it remarkably convenient that the Pentagon's plan is exactly what is now occurring with Lamo's bizarrely out of place participation in this whole fiasco? There sure are a lot of false and scary headlines attacking the credibility of WL! I realize the other logical possibility is that the Pentagon plan to attack WL is itself a fake, and Lamo is doing all of this on purpose to stage an "attack on WL", so that WL can turn around and say "see! the Pentagon is attacking us!" You can't get better PR than that if it really blew up.

But when your lead source is also your lead witness, you have a serious credibility issue and have to assume the entire story is fiction. We may never know the truth.

And much like when you owe Don Corleone a "favor", after you get arrested for the kinds of crimes they did, and then the Feds hook you up with a sweetheart deal with the prosecution, it's pretty obvious who is the master and who is the puppet. Also consider the history of Lamo and Poulsen, and especially go back to Poulsen's self-promoting NYTimes hit pieces on Mitnick in the 90's. Then ask "who is the most probable liar, these guys or WL?"

It's only a bonus that they can also create a media smokescreen around themselves to muddle an already subjective matter. From reading their writings and interviews over the past few years, they both come off as self-promoting fame whore types focused on selling an image of "hackers." Like drunken Hollywood starlets stumbling around a crowd of TMZ paps, their inserting of themselves into whatever issue they are "reporting" makes it impossible to take them seriously as journalists. (Only Hunter S. Thompson can be allowed to get away with that.)

I bet this makes them even more valuable as Federal snitches, since everyone will assume the reason Lamo and Poulsen even have anything to do with this incident is because they're promoting themselves. It's a fantastic cover that prevents the spot light from casting shadows off the puppet strings.