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Submission + - Employees who stay more than 2 years paid 50% less (forbes.com)

fleebait writes: According to Forbes:

The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year. There are millions of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on one that we can control. Staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime by about 50% or more.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the best rapid development language to learn today? 2

An anonymous reader writes: Many years ago, I was a coder—but I went through my computer science major when they were being taught in Lisp and C. These days I work in other areas, but often need to code up quick data processing solutions or interstitial applications. Doing this in C now feels archaic and overly difficult and text-based. Most of the time I now end up doing things in either Unix shell scripting (bash and grep/sed/awk/bc/etc.) or PHP. But these are showing significant age as well.

I'm no longer the young hotshot that I once was—I don't think that I could pick up an entire language in a couple of hours with just a cursory reference work—yet I see lots of languages out there now that are much more popular and claim to offer various and sundry benefits.

I'm not looking to start a new career as a programmer—I already have a career—but I'd like to update my applied coding skills to take advantage of the best that software development now has to offer.

Ideally, I'd like to learn a language that has web relevance, mobile relevance, GUI desktop applications relevance, and also that can be integrated into command-line workflows for data processing—a language that is interpreted rather than compiled, or at least that enables rapid, quick-and-dirty development, since I'm not developing codebases for clients or for the general software marketplace, but rather as one-off tools to solve a wide variety of problems, from processing large CSV dumps from databases in various ways to creating mobile applications to support field workers in one-off projects (i.e. not long-term applications that will be used for operations indefinitely, but quick solutions to a particular one-time field data collection need).

I'm tired of doing these things in bash or as web apps using PHP and responsive CSS, because I know they can be done better using more current best-of-breed technologies. Unfortunately, I'm also severely strapped for time—I'm not officially a coder or anything near it; I just need to code to get my real stuff done and can't afford to spend much time researching/studying multiple alternatives. I need the time that I invest in this learning to count.

Others have recommended Python, Lua, Javascript+Node, and Ruby, but I thought I'd ask the Slashdot crowd: If you had to recommend just one language for rapid tool development (not for the development of software products as such—a language/platform to produce means, not ends) with the best balance of convenience, performance, and platform coverage (Windows, Mac, Unix, Web, Mobile, etc.) what would you recommend, and why?

Comment Re:Firrrst post the noo (Score 1) 286

According to the Financial Times

If [an Independent Scotland's] geographic share of UK oil and gas output is taken into account, Scotland’s GDP per head is bigger than that of France. Even excluding the North Sea’s hydrocarbon bounty, per capita GDP is higher than that of Italy.

So your saying a western European economy of this size would not have been part of the EU when countries like Slovenia, Latvia, Malta are welcome? That's delusional.

Comment Re:Firrrst post the noo (Score 0) 286

As for english opinion on independence, you don't get a say because that is not how it works globally. Read the news and educate yourself chappy.

As for Labour government, you would have voted for it all by yourself
.
I'm Scottish but have lived in London and have done for 10 years so I can't vote either. I think the only way you will see sensible change in England is when an independent Scotland performs much better. Or maybe the McCrone Report is too scary.

Comment Re:Firrrst post the noo (Score 1) 286

Who was it that had to bail out the British banks RBOS and HBOS? That's kind of a silly question, the British government of course. You can't decide something is British in the good times, absorbing corporation tax, national insurance, PAYE and % of bonuses in the good times then deciding it's Scottish in the bad because you feel like it. This isn't Andy Murray we're talking about. As far as bank bailouts go, could an independent Scotland's banks have avoided collapse during the economic crisis? The experts think yes. Then remember that the US Fed bailed out Barclays to the tune of £552Bn, much less that UK contributions to RBOS and HBOS, themselves large chunks of which are actually English banks of which the investment banking arms based in London. In Europe, considering an independent Scotland may have been in the Eurozone at that time, bailouts were across country boundaries so other avenues. Then again, who's to say Scotland wouldn't have had regulation to prevent the kind of excess we saw in London where the distressed investment banking arm of RBOS is based? That's without even considering a long term oil fund.

Before we joke more about Gordon Brown, remember that the English voted for him. Even if Scotland wasn't in the UK, the outcome of the general elections in the rest of the UK would have been the same. In other words, the rest of UK voted wanted Blair (and Brown by extension), Thatcher etc. It's not something the Scottish force on the rest. The same is not true in reverse. The Scots never vote Tory.

Comment Re:Firrrst post the noo (Score 1, Troll) 286

Although probably economically beneficial to Scotland, most people want independence for moral reasons. Successive Tory governments have been absolutely ruthless of stripping Scotland of it's assets while maintaining that it is a burden. Economic and social policy benefits mainly only London and the south east but negative decisions about war and other foreign policy affect us all equally. It's time for a change in Scotland.

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