pastProlog

> government is now regulating the internet...government takeover

Who do you think we are, a bunch of Fox News watching yokel fools? I was on the Internet back when the NSFnet AUP banning commercial use was in effect in the early 1990s. So were a lot of us.

The Internet was a creation of the government, and remained a government funded project from the 1960s until the 1990s. Then CIX came along and eventually NSFnet and ARPAnet were decommissioned.

This type of telco/cable astroturfing talk is for uneducated rednecks who get their news from fundamentalist preachers and Glenn Beck. Not for people who maintained machines which switched from using /etc/hosts to translate IP address, to name resolution via sri-nic.arpa (and then nic.ddn.mil, etc.)

> why you want your back to the wall. All the people I know that do this are chronic goof offs.

"Goof offs" sounds like something a McDonalds manager has to micromanage for amongst his summer hire of local teenagers. I didn't spend four years getting a BSCS, studying compiler internals, graph theory, finite state automata, 1st, 2nd and 3rd normal forms, the fetch/execute cycle etc., plus all my subsequent study, so that my manager can monitor me at any moment to see if I'm "goofing off".

Your comment is exactly the reason why I need a desk with my back to the wall. If I walk in on an interview and see I would not have that, I have a suspicion that managers are people with your mentality.

I don't want to work at a company with potential goof offs coding elementary PHP and people who police them to make sure they're spending every second pounding out code. I want to do professional work and have the autonomy to do so.

> currency is not that stable

Do you mean like a currency that was worth $650 against the US dollar a year ago, and today is worth $250 against the US dollar? That kind of stability?

> The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution.

There is a case for skipping over the technological changes that shifted the slave societies of Greece and Rome to the feudal societies of medieval Europe.

You can't really make one for an important shift 40,000 years before the agricultural revolution. We went from a world without cave paintings to one with them. From a world without venus figurines and other carvings to one with one. With sweeping technological changes in hunting and fishing instruments and so forth. It's the second most important technological revolution ever, if not the first. If fishing is wrapped up with the human brain modifying into its modern form, wouldn't it be the most important?

Note that each revolution had a corresponding revolutionary change to political systems, family structures and society. With the agricultural revolution we had the end of primitive communism and hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of surplus, class systems and slave societies. Much of the earliest literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is on how to catch and keep slaves.

With the rise of capitalism we saw the fading of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism and the "Protestant work ethic". We also saw the end of monarchies and the rise of liberal democracies. The bourgeoisie and proletariat of the time united to overthrow these old systems, but soon began facing off against one another, which is pretty much the history of the 20th century, or if we look at the election of old euro-communists in Greece last month, perhaps the 21st.

The famous old definition of economics in our capitalist economy by Robbins is "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Scarcity is the bedrock of modern economic analyses - of utility, of supply and demand, of price.

What scarcity is there when someone films a movie, or writes a book or magazine article, or records an audio track, and with the press of a button can fly off to billions of Android and iPhone devices? Or writes an app and flings it across the world as soon as it hits the App Store or Google Play? Or sends code to Github, which someone in Bulgaria patches, which someone in Brazil patches, which someone in Japan then uses in a product they're putting out, glued together to some other framework on Github?

This is the end of scarcity. The most well-paid modern workers are those who produce commodities which are not scarce. That is if we can call these products commodities - a non-scarce commodity is something of a contradiction.

These revolutionary technological changes in production, at the base, will reverberate through the superstructure of political systems, families and societies. The old superstructure is still trying to keep down or even kill the new one - NSA spying. DMCA letters. David Cameron's great firewall for porn in England. IP and patent lawsuits. The recent New York Times article with investors questioning why Google is building self-driving cars. Aaron Swartz's suicide, when trying to open up taxpayer-funded research which is locked down and privatized by now irrelevant Elsevier. Telcos using their government granted monopolies to try to harm budding businesses.

Revolutions in production lead to revolutions in the relations of production. In the twentieth century, blue collar workers like railroad engineers and factory mechanics had their hands on the engines running the economy. As technology and AI causes more and more unemployment for people who can't find the derivative of 5x, de facto, if not de jure, power of production goes to those who are rack mounting cloud servers, or rolling out new web site builds.

> this reads exactly like some communist screed

Well, if the idea that people who work and create wealth should keep the wealth they create is a "communist" idea, then so be it.

> "I'm only getting paid $100.000 per year and it's so low, boohoo"

And you advocate that more of the wealth that we create by our own labor goes to the only other involved party - those LP heirs who do not work, and parasitically suck millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions each year from those of us who do work. Me saying I should keep more of the wealth I create is "whining" according to you. I guess the parasite heirs who suck off my labor and their toady advocates like you must hold the moral high ground then. You're the one who needs some perspective, parasite.

> if you are complaining about earning $80,000 to sit behind a computer screen and type all day, you are one entitled SOB.

What does that make the LP's, and VC's, and angels, and accelerators, who do no work, and sit on their yachts whining how much money that the workers who do all the work are making?

I do all the work and I create all the wealth. If I am being paid $80k, then on average I am creating $100k, or $120k etc. for the company. It's a joke that the parasites who live on my sweat, and their toadies like yourself would use the word entitled. Yes, I am entitled to the wealth I create, in fact I am entitled to more than that.

If the wealth I create does not go to me who worked to create it, who is it going to? To the lazy heir LP. You advocate more going to these parasites which just reflects how you think - like a parasite.

Sometimes people haven hidden agendas - they want to bring their friend in and want to show they had dozens of interviews and could not find anyone.

I was at a Fortune 1000 company and we interviewed one guy. He answered every technical question flawlessly. He was personable. The lead turned him down. I argued it since he was the best we had seen. He said "I don't think he'd appreciate it if we called him at 3AM to do some work". This was the reason to not hire him, since no other rational reason could be given. The position wound up being filled by his friend, whose skill set was way below the interviewed guy, and who ambled in at 10:30-11:00 AM every day.

> The German government, in collusion with the German business establishment, has wrecked Europe, first through its irresponsible lending...

I do agree that this sanctimonious moralizing of the virtues of the German over the Greek is risible. However, with common assumptions in place, what Germans did makes sense. Businesses had high productivity, lots of capital investment, and nowhere to send the excess of the commodities it could produce, the domestic market was satiated. So they lent money to the Greeks etc. and had a place to send these excess commodities for a few years. They kicked the can down the road so that they could figure out what to do with this overproduction and - today is the result.

I see a worldwide self-reinforcing cycle for slow growth, unemployment, recession and depression. Companies have it over employees so money goes to profit more than wages. This happens eveywhere so money goes to capital, not consumption. But the more impoverished workers have no money to buy commodities. So a temporary solution is found - debt. Things go along again and then one day the game of musical chairs ends and you have a situation like now.

Greek youth is not going to put up with a 65% unemployment rate forever, and the election of Syriza points to that. So does the rising number of votes going to Golden Dawn and the KKE. I see news commentators calling Syriza "far left" - they are not far left, they are just socialists. People are so used to soi disant socialist and labour parties performing neoliberal cuts when elected to government, the idea that a socialist politician wants a floor to living standards is a shock to them.

> It is hard to imagine a more consequential singular leak than one that reveals a carefully-planned human-intelligence counter-proliferation mission against a hostile state. 

It is hard for me to get up in arms about Iran seeking a nuclear power program when:

* In the 1950s Iran had a democratic, secular parliament, which was overthrown and turned into a puppet dictatorship by the US and UK because Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil resources.

* The nuclear power industry in the US used to run magazine ads in the 1970s boasting about how they were "proliferating" nuclear energy to Iran ( http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sh... ), with Henry Kissinger making statements about how we should encourage Iran to have nuclear power etc.

* At the end of the 1970's, despite the Savak secret police torturing and murdering secular left wing opposition to the dictatorship (with CIA help), Iranian nationalists still managed to rise up and overthrow the puppet dictatorship - with the main force being the religious right, partly because the government had killed off and driven into exile a lot of the secular left wing opposition.

* The US takes the Shah in and Iranians believe due to this are planning another coup. The US declares Iran an enemy and seeks a worldwide ban on arms import to Iran. The US sends Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq and begins arming Saddam Hussein to fight Iran and the Kurds. When a Kurdish uprising occurs in the north, the US lifts sanctions against Iraq and sends helicopters to Iraq so Hussein can gas the Kurds. The US continues to arm Hussein after gassing the Kurds. Decades later, the US sanctimoniously uses this as one of the reasons to invade Iraq. Then Reagan begins secretly and illegally arming Iran, so as to fund another illegal and secret war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua.

* One of the major issues in Middle East nuclear proliferation is that Israel is a nuclear power in the region. All calls from Iran and other Middle East countries to address this in a broad peace plan or anti-proliferation plan are rejected by the US. The "only democracy in the Middle East" (which controls the West Bank but "democratically" forbids Palestinians there a vote in the Knesset, although some Russian Jew just off an airplane can move to a West Bank settlement and vote) is de facto a nuclear power and the US declares it can be and Iran and other Middle East countries can't be.

So it is hard for me to shed a tear that the US can't persecute its own press for reporting on its hypocritical, sanctimonious attitude towards Iran.

> he helped kidnap and kill two people

I think you mean:

* he helped capture and execute two soldiers

I'm not sure why one person working in military/intelligence being killed is a "political assassination" while the other one being killed is not.

Well if that's not good enough, here's another Mossad piece of work, a Moroccan waiter with no political involvement at all gunned down by the Mossad in Norway - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair

> this case makes me wonder if political assassinations also occur in Western politics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghQ0ZcRfQs

> To me it's just astrology for people who know calculus.

> [...]

> While I may disagree with methodology, and I may even argue politically about policy implications based on conclusions various sciences reach

Economics is a science like theology is a science. Some of our skepticism just goes beyond yours. Actually, the word "economics" was created to replace "political economy" by some of the most political of the economists like Jevons and Marshall. I can accept the impartiality of astronomers coming to a consensus of how close the star Proxima Centauri is to earth. Insofar as deciding how the pie should be divided up, to call that a science with people working in good faith is absurd.

> This is a flawed, Marxist labor theory of value that can't explain why an artisanally-made handbag that takes 120 man-hours to produce still is valued less than a Coach/Prada/LV handbag that was machine-manufactured with no human labor.

Certainly it can explain it. The bespoke handbag has the labor of manufacturing done in one place, the machine-manufactured handbag has the labor of manufacturing done in two places - the place of manufacture and the place where the machine was manufactured.

The "Marxist" labor theory of value was held by Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith and all of the pre-Marxist political economists I know of. It is also a theory you seem to know little about as you're constructing a false, strawman notion of what LTV is and then knocking it down. Not that you're alone in this, I've read Paul Krugman attribute theories to the LTV which its proponents never had, so as to, like you, knock down the strawman theories. I honestly believe he is doing it out of ignorance as opposed to malice.

Actually, like all economic theories, the LTV does have holes which serious critics have pointed out. You don't seem to know what those are though.

> My home town is literally at the bottom end of Australia. Beautiful place but there are very few development jobs and no paying startups here.

You should work to go to events like Startup Grind Melbourne, or at least such events in Adelaide. Network, approach people and introduce yourself.

> I fear that someone will beat me to market (trying for bare minimum viable product).

This shouldn't be a big worry. Even if it happens, move on to the next thing.

> I also fear burn out (has happened before)

Pull back on your startup work if this happens. A job you don't like, new baby and your own startup you're working on solo and in a rush as someone might beat you to market sounds like a recipe for burnout. Your startup idea can be put on the back burner when the other things take precedence. You fear burn out, so you should spend less time on it. You're not really cutting down time from it any how, your brain is going 24/7. I often have programming breakthroughs after waking up in the morning, or coming home from a dinner. I guess I'm unconsciously working on the problem even when doing something else.

Maturity might be part of these things. As people get older, that they hear BS at work becomes less important.

A proper perspective helps as well. You say "the managers are micromanagers and the developers sit at the bottom of the org chart". This may be true, but you should look at it with equanimity. Just think logically how to further your agenda. If it's unfair or illogical that developers sit at the bottom of the org chart in a software company, getting emotional about it will not serve you. It is something you have no control of, you can only vote with your feet, and for now you've voted to stay.

When going for a CS degree, the usual rule of thumb is one should spend three hours studying for every hour in the classroom.

To get the education you'll get at a college, you'll have to spend those three years studying any how. So college is really like three years of independent study and one year of class time.

Why not just spend that year of time going to classes, learning things from professors (some of whom are quite knowledgeable, and doing cutting edge CS theory research), learning things from classmates and making social and networking connections? Perhaps private schools are expensive, but UC Berkeley, UIUC, UWashington, Georgia Tech are more affordable, especially with Pell grants etc. Especially part-time.

Also - people doing self-study tend to go right for the immediately useful stuff - how to make web pages in PHP and the like. How many people spend eight months studying calculus, then four months studying discrete math, then four months on graph theory, then four months on theory of computation, then four months studying logic gates and processors, then four months studying data structures etc.? What kind of code is someone who has not studied concurrent programming going to write when an application needs threading?

A degree is also a sign someone can stick with something for four years.

Of course a degree is no guarantee they know anything in and of itself.

> This has not been my experience at all

How far back is this experience?

Is this what the job listings (of what there were) said during the 2008-2009 recession? Is this what they said in 2001 after the dot-com crash?

They may not say them now, they may not have said them in 1999, but they certainly are requirements companies can (and do) put up during the years when people need a job most.

Right. From the essay: "But it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives". "Dishonest", "anti-immigration people", if that's how the "principle of charity" starts off, where do we go from there?

> "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."

> - Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985

This is of course an invented quote, but it tells you where the head of the person quoting it is at.

The US State Department, this page has a graph of H1-B visa issuances and links to some of the reports -

http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services web page has numbers as well.

There already is a program to bring in exceptional programmers - the H1-B visa program. The 100,000 people it is bringing in a year is not enough? There are more exceptional programmers out there?

Also throw in all the college debt they require you to pile on before being hired, not to mention the hours spent studying instead of working. And that it is a cyclical feast or famine industry where it ping pongs between 70 hour weeks of deadline crunches and post-dotcom, post-bank bust periods where no one is hiring. And that the career of many ends at 40. Plus as you mentioned, the San Francisco rents for those requiring you work in the city.

> From the essay: But it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives. An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them.

Eric Schmidt not only illegally colluded in a conspiracy to drive down programmer salaries, his e-mails say things like "this may be illegal so delete this e-mail".

I guess I'm one of those "dishonest" wealth-creating worker bees who read these subpoenaed e-mails where I spin the "dishonest" narrative that I actually believe what Eric Schmidt said about his attempts to secretly and illegally drive down his programmer's salaries.

The H1-B visa IS supposed to be for top-notch programmers. That's what it exists for.

> Footnote [2]: it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives

Profit? Who is being dishonest here?

How is being against an H1-B indentured servant coolie visa being one of the "anti-immigrant" people?

I guess the women's groups who protest that Russian, Mexican and Brazilian strippers are being imported into Tenderloin clubs are anti-immigrant as well.

Yes. Over 100,000 H1-B's are coming over every year. This keeps discussing exceptional programmers. You mean we need more than 100,000 exceptional programmers coming over every year? The reality is that the idea that even 10,000 of these people are exceptional programmers is a laugh.

Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.

> Anti-immigration people

Like the author? He wants a tranche of immigration slots to open and for that tranche, indirectly if not directly, to block immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Nigeria, and so forth. These slots are effectively only open to Indians, Chinese, and a trickle from other countries.

So this H1-B proposal is anti-immigrant. It means immigration only from mostly two countries. Of a certain class of person. In order to cut the wages of US programmers and force them to work more non-FLSA hours.

> Exceptional programmers

This is risible. I worked with a Chinese H1-B hire who told me he had never touched a computer until he got to the US. While that may have been anomalous, research on the H1-B immigration program ( http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html ) shows that it is not the best and brightest immigrating. The millionaire and billionaire angels and VC's want to flood the US with indentured servants chained to their H1-B visa. Look at the top H1-B sponsors - they are for Tata's indentured servants, not for people doing bleeding edge compiler/AI/whatever work.

> you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional

Perhaps not, but I've met plenty of people with the capability to be exceptional programmers, but during non-flush times companies want programmers to have a BSCS, and with public colleges become more selective and raising their rates, they never get a chance to do so. The millionaires and billionaires get tax cuts on their capital gains, so the training they require for this work becomes more costly to the worker, and in fact more workers can't afford it, so a shortage develops. So then the parasite millionaires want to suck off of India's free IIT program instead of restoring US education to the level it used to be.

> how many more he'd hire

Yes, times are flush now. How many was he hiring in 2008-2009? How many in 2001-2002? When the economy goes into the toilet again, there will be millions of indentured servants still here on H1-B visas. How many 40 or 50 year old programmers is he willing to hire? Or are we supposed to pay and take out big loans for our college, work 60 hour weeks in our 20s and 30s with the carrot of options while paying San Francisco rents, suffering through the post-dotcom and bank failure recessions, only to be cast aside at 40?

We hear about supply and demand from the oracles of economics all the time, but somehow this NEVER applies to salaries going up. I mean I am open to hiring programmers right now as well - seriously. You'll be paid minimum wage and the output will have to be spectacular. As soon as the economy dips you'll be gone.

We the programmers work. We are the creators of wealth. I have been studying biology recently, including species which have become parasites. As one species becomes more parasitic on another, it changes form completely. It usually gains hooks and suckers to latch on to the working species it is a parasite off of, and the parasite devotes its body to eating and sexual reproduction. In our modern times, the angels, the accelerators, the VC's are the parasites. These "job creators" expropriate the surplus labor time of we the programmers, the network/system/database admins etc. who do all the work and create all the wealth. The LP's of the big VC firms are the type of polo-playing Phillips Andover heirs you can see in the documentary "Born Rich". Something I know the 20-something unkempt dorks who go to Python conferences know nothing about, although they are the ones ultimately being given their marching orders and who are getting profits sucked off their labor. These heirs have set up additional financial hurdles to getting a BSCS at a public college over the years, and the parasites now want to parasitically suck of of India's free IIT universities and turn their graduates into H1-B coolies over here.

> we should train

When the hell was the last time a tech company really trained its employees? Aside from the odd week-long class here or there? What a farce. Companies haven't trained for decades, and the parasites who use companies to parasitically suck off the labor of those of us who actually work have reworked public US colleges to be more financially impossible to get through than they used to - then they whine they can't find more "exceptional" US programmers. What a farce.

Like the glossed over fact that US occupation and military domination of Italy, rather than populist uprising, is what kept Italy with its economic system undisturbed? The US didn't even try to hide what it was doing during the fixed elections of 1948, by the time of Gladio, P2, strategy of tension etc. it had become a little more hidden. The US still occupies Italy with seven military bases which alternately has hot dog pilots killing civilians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_%28... ) when they're not kidnapping Arab nationalists ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_case ).

Hungary established a soviet republic on its own in 1919, so it's obvious there was a populist wellstream of worker's organizations to pull from. It's also obvious the post-1945 Hungarian people's republic was a popular government - if it wasn't, the USSR wouldn't have had to invade Hungary in 1956. Because Imre Nagy would have never become prime minister if the USSR had imposed the government by Russian occupation and military domination.

> European states mobilized their populations with an efficiency that dazzled some Americans (notably Theodore Roosevelt) and appalled others (notably Wilson).

Yes and no. People nowadays really don't even remember the end of World War I. Russian troops began shooting their officers and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Earlier that year were the massive Nivelle mutinies of French enlisted men. There were the German naval mutinies of 1918, followed by a powerful but ultimately failed revolution in Germany by communists (put down by the socialist-run government - echoes of the French communist party ending the 1968 left-communist uprising which caused de Gaulle to flee France). Hungarian workers had an uprising and established a Soviet republic in 1919, which lasted until it was defeated by an invasion by Romania. Italy saw the Biennio Rosso with factory occupations in Turin etc. which were finally ended when Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. As late as 1976 the Italian communist party was getting over 1/3 of the vote in Italy, with the Socialist party (with a hammer and sickle emblem) getting 9% of the vote, and the left-communist Maoists getting over half a million votes (never mind the non-voting anarchists/autonomists).

Europe mobilized its population twice in the twentieth century. The first time Russia became communist, the second time everything east of Steppin to Trieste became communist. With Europe needing the US with NATO, Marshall plan, Gladio etc. to keep post-WWI western Europe (Spain, Italy and France) from becoming communist. Eventually Europe's capitalists learned going to war with one another's countries didn't help them all that much.