I'm not convinced it is that simple. Like it or not, the information economy is going global, and programmers in India are often just as good as programmers in the US, cost far, and it doesn't matter whether or not they live in the same hemisphere with the company they work for or not. So it isn't just H1B's. It is the fact that finding competent people who can support small US business computing and IT needs at a reasonable (for small business) cost is not trivial. Competence is rare, even with a global workforce to draw on, and that makes it expensive anywhere, but expensive in India is cheap in the US and will remain so until the cost of living and quality of life in the two countries are comparable.

Even the computation of "300,000 jobs lost" is a bit glib. Are there 300,000 out of work software engineers in the US who are competent, employable, reliable, etc? Maybe. But I doubt it. That's 0.1% of the US population and would constitute a rather large percentage of all unemployment. It also doesn't reflect the fact that many companies that get a start using offshore computation labor end up making money and stimulating MORE jobs, not fewer, with MORE money going into pockets to spend in the US. And sure, they help out the Indian or Chinese or Korean or Irish economies too! Which isn't a totally bad thing. It's not a zero sum game.

rgb

Really? Don't say that so loud, you'll hurt its feelings. Besides, I thought it was a rare star type called a "black dwarf", sort of the theoretical limit of a brown dwarf with its teensy but measurable gravitational heating...

Well, maybe not so rare...;-)

rgb

(And I'm just kidding, yeah, black dwarfs are dark white dwarfs and brown dwarfs may or may not have had to undergo fusion at some point yadda yadda, but the point is that Jupiter is on the spectrum that includes brown dwarfs emitting only from gravitational collapse and so in some sense is an extremely boring star too small to have ever ignited or just large enough to have barely and briefly ignited -- like all of the other visible or invisible brown dwarfs out there in the Universe. And Pluto is not a planet and shares its name with a Disney dog, and it's feeling bad about that, too.)

Well, one could also understandably confuse "programmer" with building a content page with html. Writing in a markup language -- even in a raw markup language as opposed to using a GUI to build one as many/most "web developers" are prone to do nowadays -- isn't exactly programming. Programming sort of starts when one includes at least some kind of conditionals, with something other than a graphical chooser, and goes up from there.

That is, writing in raw php, java, or maybe even javascript probably counts. But is building a website with Joomla using a mouse plus filling in a bit of content programming? Even if you have to drop in a shopping cart? Not so much.

Of course, being an Old Guy (tm) I tend to think of "real programming" as involving compilers somewhere along the way, and view interpreted scripting languages and interactive languages, especially ones run primarily inside IDEs (e.g. matlab or octave, maybe R) as wussy programming-lite. I know, I know. Fighting words for many young folks these days.

(Besides, I'm kidding. I actually think one can write real, highly functional programs in these languages/environments, as long as you don't mind paying the performance penalty. In cases where the tradeoff between development time and run time favors it, it is even the right thing to do even for the best programmer in the world.)

High paying coding jobs are also tough to get when India is metaphorically just outside of your internet door. In India the job really IS high paying. In the US, rates that can compete with Indian coders are starvation wages.

Even entrepreneurial coding is ever more likely to be shipped overseas, as it isn't even worth it to invest personal serious coder skills as sweat equity in a new company compared to just having a team in India build out ideas to spec (and maybe then tweaking them). Of the last three companies building software to support all or part of the business plan I've been involved with, one had core code worked out by a local real coder (me) that was eventually abandoned in favor of a mix of commercial and open source stuff that could also span the work to be done, one hired an India team for 2/3 of the programming (most of the external interface) and only used me and one other person for a nubbin of mostly database and algorithmic stuff, and the third farmed all of the programming out as the principles didn't even know how to code (and I didn't get involved enough to do something deep in the core of the product before it went away, bought out).

It would be lovely if it were TRUE, and one could make a living doing things like interface work or intermediate algorithmic stuff with a community college education in coding, as a code "plumber" as opposed to a code "architect", but the sad fact is that most people would starve at US code plumber wages, with a few exceptions in mid-sized established businesses where e.g. they maintain their own website and have a team of maybe 5-6 people, only two of whom know what they are doing. But those two aren't going to be CC grads, and the do as you are told code-plumbers won't even make as much as real plumbers make.

Still, it isn't a completely crazy idea. Code plumber wages still beat working as a shelf-stuffing wage-slave employee at Barnes and Noble, or as a line chef in a small restaurant, or as a barista, or as a checkout person in a grocery, or... And the jobs are likely to come with full benefits. And who knows? With enough coders trained at the plumber level, maybe they will self-organize into shops that can compete with India and still pay a living with benefits. A lot of the ability to do so is a matter of scale and backing by enough real programmers who (as noted above) learned to code by coding, coding some more, and then sitting down to really get to work coding (usually with mentoring and some purpose in mind).

rgb

Brilliant!

The only way you'd ever know is if there is a glitch in The Matrix...

rgb

:-)

BTW, nice recursively demonstrative 1337 handle...;-)

rgb

Everybody would at least be trying to be a net positive part of the solution instead of neutral to net negative. As I said elsewhere in the thread, the ideal is probably neither Charles Manson or Mother Teresa, it is probably more like the Boy Scouts -- do a good turn daily and try to be no worse than neutral otherwise. And don't be a butt. Very important that.

rgb

Amen. Line by line, actually. Especially your summary sentence. Although I'd take issue with "become" -- it has always been that way. It is arguably "un-becoming" fucked up, but a glacial pace compared to our capabilities and opposed by the MIC sociopaths and organized crime, who are not necessarily disparate groups.

rgb

Oh, don't worry. This is /. I'm a nerd/geek. I've spent far, far too many hours over the last two weeks playing the Android Icewind Dale remix. And I did my time with the e-cocaine known as minecraft, only quitting when I had built towers from the bottom of the world to its top and realized suddenly that I was bored to tears. Even now I can't get myself motivated to revisit it.

That's how I know that it is doing nothing but skipping sleep.

As for the vanity of the world and the pit of existential despair, hey, minecraft is a better way to cope with it than some I can think of. But I think not the best way.

rgb

And the Sudoku puzzle is good for your brain, and hence isn't all that bad for society to the extent that people with healthy logical brains are better than the alternative. Probably true of minecraft as well -- I certainly enjoyed it for a month or three, just as I enjoyed second life more briefly, World of Warcraft in its day, and am currently enjoying the rebirth of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on my tablet. But at some point all of these things -- even Sudoku -- become a form of e-crack, a means of withdrawal from the world, a kind of meditation that replaces the struggle with a dirty scary largely unknowable world with something clean and relaxing.

In the end, it's a matter of ethical balance. If you are working long and hard enough to support yourself, far be it from me to criticize what you do with your elective time outside of that (and vice versa) as long as it isn't things like torturing puppies or crafting kiddy porn. Also, as many have pointed out, one individual probably can't fix all of the ills of the world, and so in a sense it is wasteful of your life to devote all of your elective energy in trying at the expense of all joy and diversion. Still, I think that in between spending all of one's life in a drug or mindcraft-induced haze of complete avoidance of the real world and becoming Mother Teresa there is an ethical optimum, probably quite broad, of doing no particular harm, being as responsible for supporting your own personal life and its self-assumed obligations (like children and pets) as circumstance and ability permits, and yeah, out of sheer self-interest if nothing else spending some of your elective energy on making the world a better place for everyone because that makes it a better, safer place for you yourself. It needn't even be false or religious altruism, in other words, even if your personal ethos is a single life to live, no god, no afterlife, most of us would prefer to live in a world that minimized the personal risk of being burned alive by religious zealots, being beaten or killed by thugs and bullies, starving to death because some accident robbed us of the ability to work for and feed ourselves -- and so in a very deep sense fulfilling a "social obligation" to help others is part of an optimized selfish ethic, a way of buying "insurance" through one's actions insuring others.

So how much Sudoku, or Minecraft, or WoW/BG/IWD or Diablo II Expansion is too much, compared to doing something more constructive with some part of that time? That's the choice of each individual, but I think that it is arguable that if you get to where you are building word processors out of Minecraft you m-i-i-g-h-t be a hair over the line...;-)

      rgb

Thank you for so effectively demonstrating the existential ennui that paralyzes our entire civilization. Of course if you look carefully at your replies and actually think for a moment, the answers to each and every one are obvious and there are a rather large number of talented individuals who demonstrate this every day by their actions.

The tragedy is the many competent persons who would rather build giant virtual word processors or make armor to sell in WoW than to take up arms against the world's sea of trouble and, by opposing, end them. All that it takes for evil to prevail is for good persons to do nothing, and honestly, building Minecraft engines is as close to doing nothing as it is possible to do and still breathe.

rgb

ROTFL. Ah, shades of mongo.

rgb

The really important question is whether or not at the Planck scale one finds that we are all one really, really big version of Minecraft, being played by beings that look strangely like turtles. All the way down.

Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement. Not that I am entirely without sin in this regard myself, but it is a sad commentary on the state of the world (virtual or not) that we appear to live in when solving vast and pointless artificial problems in a virtual reality is more appealing than tackling the real and serious problems that surround us.

rgb

So you're/they're saying mass-energy in any form doesn't have a "weight"? Einstein was even wronger? Rearrangements at constant mass-energy can have different weight? At the Planck scale you can say pretty much anything you like and not have much chance of your words being falsified, and while I'm not a falsificationist and agree that a consistent hypothesis can have meaning even if it can't be verified or falsified, this falls into the same scientific category that magnetic monopoles do, only tens of orders of magnitude worse. At least in the case of monopoles, I can understand all sorts of observationally true sequellae -- like charge quantization -- and they should be easy enough to observe subject only to their Bayesian prevalence and looking in the right places with the right tools. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if magnetic monopoles are eventually observed, adding a really, really important building block to our incomplete TOE. But in the meantime, I accord them only a weak degree of belief because I cannot rule out from a near infinity of hypotheses human have not thought of -- yet -- alternative explanations of the same sequellae that don't involve monopoles and because it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why we haven't observed at least one monopole yet unless there is some truly enormous energy barrier or symmetry breaking that we do not understand.

So I think that there is a very reasonable chance that monopoles exist and that physics completes in that general direction and that we'll eventually be able to take that "chance" (far too weak to call a "true fact") and turn it into a probably true fact through observation. I think that there is almost no chance that the hypothesis that entanglement alters weight at what amounts to the Planck scale ever gets any experimental validation either way. In its own way, it is like hypothesizing that dynamics at that scale is all due to neurotic invisible fairies. Which is, of course, very nearly a perfect metaphor for quantum field theory anyway.

rgb

Hmm, is that true? Granted that many of the water molecules in my body have been inside many, many living animals and passed through one way or another, surely there are (a LOT of) water molecules being made and unmade every day through ionic dissociation. It might be more accurate to say that every atom of H and O in your body has been through a creature, but not necessarily bonded into water. Then there is "new water" produced when primordial hydrogen or methane are oxidized. Finally, I haven't done the statistical mechanics of it, but the ocean (or total volume of existing water) is pretty big, turnover is pretty slow, diffusion is even slower -- I could believe that a significant fraction of "old" water molecules (or the old constituents of younger molecules) in the world haven't been through an animal yet, and of those a few are making their first pass through me. But that's difficult for me to visualize well enough even to do a Fermi estimate of the probabilities, certainly not before my coffee.

The real problem is dissociation of water into H+ and OH-, followed by the formation of H_3O+ and OH-, followed (quite rapidly) by recombination into H_2O with (probably) different H, though. When that happens (and it happens all the time and rapidly in ordinary water) it is almost certain that the H+ that leaves a water molecule in one second is not the one that rebonds to it a moment later, so water molecules have a comparatively short half-life as a unitary identity, two specific H's and one specific O have been one specific water molecule for less than a day (models indicate order of 10 hours). So in that sense, almost none of the water in my body has been in the body of any other animal, as little of the water I drink was in another animal within ten hours of when I drink it, and even it it was, if it persists in my own body for a single day very little of it is still the same water at the molecular level that it was when I drank it.

In the end it is as useful as noting that we are all stardust, that is to say, the excreta of a dying star. That too is more poetically true than literally true, but it sounds way cooler than saying that we are all made of shit (starshit or otherwise:-).

And yes, we suffer from the same dissociation problem. I am not the same me (in terms of physical constituents) instant to instant as I'm a large, complex, organism and the worldlines of all of the matter that is arguably "me" for at least some brief time if "I" am defined either in terms of chemistry or some physical envelope are a whirling blur around my macroscopic worldline, constantly being spun into my envelope and then spinning out again, with every thread tied to the threads of many, many other living beings by the will of the Norns. Quite a romantic picture, even though sure, the bulk of the ins pass through my nostrils and mouth and the outs pass through many channels including anus and urethra.

So I think I'll stick with stardust woven by the Norns, not a pile of recycled shit.

rgb