They have all the wealth and power - I don't think they're the ones with the problem.

Wealth generates value. Money doesn't - it doesn't even hold its value. Keeping dollars around for short-term needs is using the tool for its job. Accumulating a pile of dollars is a naive mistake.

Well, I'll say to you what I say to everyone who complains of overpopulation: you first. Everyone has the right to pursue their own path to happiness. There's plenty of food and land to go around - the rest is politics.

Bill's Plan is to give away most of his money before he dies. I believe it's much less than 1 Billion he will give to his heirs. The Gates Foundation has done significant and meaningful charity work that's had a real effect: certainly malaria deaths have fallen, by somewhere around 100k a year. That's a Hell of a thing.

I give money to some of the same charities, because they're trying to solve the longer-term problem, to help people need less charity in the future. I'm just a drop in the bucket, but at least I'm not a fucking hypocrite when I suggest that people should give to good causes.

That hasn't been an issue since before the industrial revolution. That was rather the point of the revolution. The 1% may have twice as much stuff as the rest of us -- twice as many houses and cars and furniture -- OK, fine that 1% of all stuff "wasted", so what? If you've been to Walmart ever, you know it's not the rich eating twice their share of food. If you're rich and spend your money on expensive frivolities, you eventually stop being rich.

It's not really any man's place to demand that another give away what's he has earned. As far as suggest, sure, but the Dalai Lama makes better arguments than you do, and far more powerful people take him seriously than read Slashdot.

Anyway, first: don't be a hypocrite. Lead the life you believe others should lead. Be an example of the righteous life. Otherwise, you're just one more asshole.

I work with an extremely diverse crowd, and always have - or did you mean a "diverse" set of white Americans? Relative to the cost of living in NYC, I think West Coast mid-career programming jobs pay OK compared to run-of-the-mill investment banker jobs (especially considering the EA-style workweeks those guys have), or for that matter corporate lawyer jobs.

Where I work, the number of senior tech-track jobs and senior engineering managers is roughly the same - many companies are lagging in that regard, but then again there aren't many of us with 20+ years of experience (eventually it should be nearly half).

But then, if you want to get paid more, you have to do more than sit in a corner and bang out code by yourself. There's only so much one person can do: technical leadership is different from management, but it's still work few people will ever be good at. Still, if you're at all successful in this field you'll make six figures if you go where the jobs are - very few professions can say that.

What the US sells as "chocolate" in cheap stores is a chocolate-flavored snack - engineered to be affordable to the masses back when chocolate was something only the rich could have. You can certainly get real chocolate too, but it's not the mass-market product here.
 

Money is only relevant as the temporary medium of exchange: a real step up from the inefficiency of barter. It's not wealth, and shouldn't be confused with wealth. You can buy wealth with money, or you can buy chocolate, or a stupid status symbol: whatever makes you happiest (I recommend wealth). But holding onto very many dollars is silly.

Giving money to help others makes the world a better place, and is praiseworthy. Complaining about others doing so isn't helping.

And coal miner pay really sucks in areas with no coal mines. Deep sea fishing jobs pay really well, but you're not going to find one in Kansas. Want a career as a physicist? Which 5 years are you spending at the LHC? If you want to be paid, you must first find someone to value the service you're offering.

Have you looked at what most layers actually make (those that can ever find work), and at what age they actually pull ahead of developers in lifetime earnings less schooling costs? Ditto doctors that don't have a much-in-demand specialty. Bankers? Only investment bankers make the big money you're thinking of, and try finding that job outside of a couple of cities. And managers? Most large companies have a technical track these days, as the industry matures.

But in any case, the pay of coders from the companies owned by the billionaires making these donations is quite high.

No, no it really, really doesn't. Every terrible blight upon the landscape of programming languages have come from this same, horrible mistake. The difficult part of programming is organizing your thoughts, not learning the language.

Teach using a simple language that makes it clear what the computer is doing, preferably a language without a lot of confusing cruft in it, though it seems all the common high-level languages have crazy historical baggage these days. Plus the point of this is to make people employable so for goodness sake use a popular language in industry.

 

The purpose of a keyboard it to make it easy to type quickly, not to make it easy to learn to type, obviously. Qwerty was that for mechanical typewriters. Dvorak may make more sense today, but again: employability. Stick with what employers will want.

And did you give $60? Thought not.

People needing assistance are helped no less if the donor is well off.

"Compassion is not about sacrifice" - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th (and likely final) Dalai Lama.

Where the heck do you work? Find a better job! (Or realize the all first jobs suck.)

Look at some of the donors: Facebook, Google, and MS all pay quite well. There's very few careers that pay better without going into business for yourself. I'm quite OK with heart surgeons making more than me, really.

That pretty well covers it. I also don't like the screen off to the side like that. I want to be able to overlay an augmented-reality HUD over what I'm looking at. That would actually be potentially useful. Having to take my eyes off what I'm looking at and glance at a screen, not so much. Hell I'd be OK with a single color pixels, if the entire lens was the screen.

But we could forbid the laws preventing cities from running their own. My city ran fiber back in the '90's but before they were able to act on it, the state passed a law that cities couldn't be internet providers. The law specified that individual cities could opt out of the law by passing a ballot referendum in which residents of the city vote to opt out of the law. We did that a couple years ago by a solid margin (Something like 80% I forget exactly.) The work crews were just going through marking power lines and stuff last week in preparation to start laying fiber to houses. Already Comcast and Centurylink seem to be scrambling to try to keep customers here. Other cities in the area are also scurrying to jump on that bandwagon as they're concerned they're going to use businesses and residents to mine. The benefits in the few cities around the USA that have done this are clear enough that it's obvious the anti-competitive laws are holding the market back.