Yeop.

We see a lot of these articles. It is not about ageism or anything of the like. In every industry there are always people willing to work for less, work harder, working with less standards, take shortcuts...

Most other industries, put in some barriers. Those that don't... well... let's just say they're not for most people looking for good work.

Doctors, lawyers, teachers, trades people, nurses, dentists, accountants... all have some kind of union or professional association to enforce working conditions and standards.

Then again, there are two kind of engineers and software developers.

Those that view it as a career. They want to do an honest days work for an honest days pay.

Those that view as greatness or changing the world.

That ultimately determines how you view it.
For me at least, I'm in the honest days work for honest days pay.

This is why I'm a big believer in simple taxation.
Sales Tax (to capture consumption)
Income Tax (to capture income)
Property Tax (to handle local infrastructure)
Wealth/Inheritance Tax (if you have to.... to prevent a concentration of wealth)

If something needs to paid for, we pay for it by raising the taxes for everyone.
Playing around with all these specific taxes and proxy taxes and sin taxes... just creates massive complexities

We'd all take transit if our work was right beside a subway station and there was a subway station next to our home.

All sin-taxes or fines should NEVER go to revenue.
Speeding tickets, smoking taxes, alcohol taxes... rather they should go to 'victims' of said activity. Speeding ticket revenue goes into a pool for accident victims. Smoking taxes goes to help those who got lung cancer from smoking...

As best as possible it should go to the victim. I know it can complicated and I don't pretend it would be perfect, but it would definitely be more honest and transparent and have less corruption.

And yes, there are ways to do things without taxes. Non-profits, pay per use, subscriptions... are all ways to do things without taxes. For example, let us suppose a community wanted to build it's own ISP. But they can't convince the whole populace. Rather than taxing the whole populace, they could people a stake in a non-profit entity to build it out. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. But no taxation money flows into it.

Money influences politics isn't really an explanation. It gives the impression people just buy off politics.

Almost every such policy is partly money, partly ideology, partly special interest, partly regional politics...

My brother used to be an engineer, and is now in patent law. He genuinely believes that patent law is essential to protecting IP so Western businesses can thrive and long term intellectual property is protected.

I heard a similar story on TVO (Canada's version of PBS). A bunch of lawyers and such talking about free trade and competition. They genuinely believe they are fighting the good fight on behalf of Western industry.

Now of course, it just so happens they benefit very much from this patent business.

So there is a real ideology behind this patent system. People really do believe. Think about politicians who speak about free trade. What idea do they push? They push the idea that the Western world can still thrive via education and IP. So how do we protect this IP? Yep patents. without patents everything is made cheap and their whole intellectual basis for the 'new economy' goes out the window.

I don't agree with their ideology. I'm just stating that people believe in that ideology and so they base their assumptions and what not on it.

Then yes, there is money form lawyers, big companies... do try and influence politics.

This is not unlike say teacher unions. Many genuinely believe education is the future and education will solve any number of problems. It just so happens of course that they benefit from the union and tenure system.

So there is this ideology that education solves all problems. It is what will allow us to compete globally and keep our standard of living. again, I don't agree with this ideology. I'm just stating what they say.

Then they ally themselves as allys of politicians and ideology and money...

It's all a very complex intertwined system.
Thinking all of politics is just people in briefcases buying off votes is just silly.

The real devil is and will always be ideology, institutions, special interests...

On the contrary. We just need to use existing languages. And make use of good libraries and good patterns.

Most new languages offer very little. Most of the good changes are in the libraries.

Offline web-applications?
They need a good caching mechanism of web requests / responses. Easily done as a library.
They might need a background updater/fetcher. Easily done as a library again.

Now there a lot of details to work out. And perhaps you can have a common library for the caching mechanism to coordinate between client and server.
I've worked on something like this and it can be very tricky. I don't want to discount the complexity. But it is nothing that needs a new language. Just some good libraries and patterns.

In the end though, it's all just a library.

I'll put a little twist on it as often even when we speak of 'science' we can use 'facts' that are not truly 'facts'.

I think science is a process that uses logic, experimentation, mathematics, hypothesize... to arrive at conclusions.

Religion uses belief to arrive at conclusions.

For example, the idea of God has no other basis... except the belief in God. You can't experiment on it, use mathematics, hypothesize and test...

You will never get a religious person to say "if this is done... then this should happen religiously... and if it does not happen, then my faith is wrong"

Now, let's take a whacky scientific theory that many would say is 'belief'. Let's say string theory. It is an interesting theory. There is math involved. It has to fit in with the rest of what we know about physics, quantum physics. There's a variety of tests that have been proposed to detect if it is accurate or not. It is possible given enough and energy to perform such tests and get a result which would determine if string theory is true or not.

Real support costs money. Most people aren't willing to pay the proper cost for it.

The next best example of something we all own and often need troubleshooting is a car.

Routine car things are costly enough (oil change...). But that's the equivalent of running a virus scan or defrag.

If you ever have a real problem where something isn't working, it is costly. Diagnostic work? Even costlier and no guarantee it will work.

And the PC is ever more complex as you mod it will all kinds of stuff. Custom hardware. Custom software installed on it. Custom configuration.

Now, how much do you think it will cost you to fix a problem with your car that had it's engine replaced with a more powerful model, software modded... and all the other fancy things car modders do? Yeop... it's going to cost you a hell of a lot more.

And with cars, the normal answer is to just replace parts as a whole.

If you have a problem with some application crashing. Would you consider it valid support if they just said, let's try replacing your ram or upgrading your video card. Cost $500. And no guarantee of working.

And yes, car manufacturers do offer warranties. But they're typically void if you do anything to mod the car.

You'd no doubt not find that acceptable. You want them to fix the software.

Computers are just that complex. And for the rest of the industry, it is heavily cost driven.

The real issue is regulation.
As you point out conflict of interest.

I hope we all learned about conflict of interest from the great recession of 2008 with respect to the financial sector.
They came out with new products/services that the regulatory bodies hadn't dealt with and in many cases, reduces regulation.

That is to say, anytime you grant some powerful organization a new power or tool, it needs to be examined for conflict of interest and other pitfalls.
Seems reasonable.

What hasn't happened is regulation on government.
Well that is not true. Historically, we have regulation on government dating all the way back to English common law.

The government was granted the right to enforce the law. Many centuries have passed and we have pretty reasonable laws to regulate government in how it enforces law (warrants, search and seizure, trial, juries...) It's not perfect and the regulation varies, but it is actually pretty reasonable in most of the western world.

What has not happened is the regulation on government in all the new areas it has gained power.

Everything from pensions (special for public sector workers), to administrating common fines, regulating daily lives of people, debt, taxation...

You can tell we don't have regulation in these areas as there is really nothing stopping the government from doing anything, except that is doesn't do it. We can have 99% taxation. Nothing illegal about it. We can have the government grant arbitrary benefits to any segment of the population...

In this case, we have a conflict of interest between revenue, fines, pay...

So we could have rules and regulations like the following:
1. All fine revenue from regulatory activities can only be used for victims of the act. It cannot be used for revenue or paying salaries...

This would keep fining honest and removes the conflict of interest.

Now that is just a sample regulation, but that is the general idea.

It's not just about cost.
It's also about their priorities.

Older people generally want some time for their lives. Things like family and other interests.

They might also be less driven to just plow through the work as they've been through it a million times. So the younger candidate is more beneficial as he is naive per se.

There's also not much professionalism is software, so things like experience and mentorship and long term platforms are not really there for most companies.

Just a little caveat as it is a big caveat.

It is not the young people the young people that support the old people.

It is young people with 'good' jobs that support the old people.

If we look throughout the world right now, young people aren't exactly basking in good high paying jobs that would be net payers into a tax system.

So yes, an aging Japanese population is a problem.
It might actually be a worse problem to have a large population of elderly people AND a large amount of unemployed or underemployed young people.

I'm Canadian and I just thought I'd point this out as I'm sure it is the same in most countries. The 'economists' have been saying for years we need to have more kids to provide a tax base for our aging baby boomers. Yet, we can't even find good jobs for our current youth.

Seems to me, many of the youth will not be net payers into the tax system. They might get government work, funded by tax dollars or whatever.

True,

I guess as long as they publish those rates for specific traffic or maintain some kind of neutrality on providers, they can manage it on their end.

I personally have nothing against a 'fast-lane'. As in your VOIP example, as a consumer, I should be able to tell my ISP to reserve such traffic and pay for that enhanced service.

But what is really important is who pays.

In my view, your connection to the 'internet' should be paid for by you. You want more speed. You pay for it. You want reserved traffic for VOIP, you pay for it.

You could use that reserved lane for VOIP, torrenting, gaming, or just your own personal FTP.

By letting the deals be made by content providers and ISPs, you lose a lot of the transparency.

It's a bit of both and it's the same with software.

There was this theory at one time that we outsource low-level work and can keep the high-level work.

The problem is simply how do you build high-level talent without having anyone coming in at the lower level.

You generally can't and you just exhaust your old high-level talent.

And yes there is of course the cost equation from overseas as well. They of course forget the payscale difference and the hours worked and the working conditions.

It's all a scam anyways.

I don't know how we got here, but education is touted as the solution and the cause of all of life's problems.

Lack of jobs? People need more education.
Crime? People just need more education.

Most of these problems are huge and have more to do with other factors like industrial policy, culture... than education which tends to mean the school system.

There was an article recently about Japan making sure people can make things by hand to keep the knowledge so we can automate it better. That is part industrial policy, part culture, part education, part corporate policy...

Or for that matter, during the big recession, Germany paid the wages of its industrial workers, to keep them employed at companies producing goods. Again, industrial policy.

Similarly, this guy has a problem with people not being able to think critically. Here's a magic thought. There isn't a profession on Earth where most people 'think critically' to the level people want of IT workers. Even doctors and lawyer who make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most just end up learning some very key skills and repeat it. There are a few brilliant lawyers and doctors, but most are just pretty skilled at doing the same tasks over and over. I don't mean to belittle it and I hope no one else does either.

And he wants critical thinking from IT workers who make a decent, but not top wage.

Here's the problem with 'IT'.
You shouldn't need lots of people with critical thinking skills. Most of 'IT" work can and should be run like infrastructure. Well trained people, probably unionized/accredited/guild (like construction),

Right now, people only think IT needs a lot of critical thinking because it is so poorly run. Things constantly changing with no benefit, a skilled and trained workforce is not maintained, architecture and planning not done. Standard tools not there...

Note, that I speak of IT here. There is definite design work that does need critical thinking and innovation. But the number of these jobs is small and these people are definitely out there. Whether they stick around or are in the right role is a different story.

Only the super super mega wealthy rich don't really work hard... and even that is purely based on my imagination of how they live.

Every other person from executives down to managers down to the middle class workers works damn hard. It's one of the reasons I've often turned down the management path. I saw my old managers and I thought, that is not my life.

It's one of the reasons it is very hard to say raise taxes. People are working so damn hard. 50+ hour week, deadlines, no security... and people want to take more of their money to give it to people who often work less. Then they're often pushed to even work harder to keep up their living or generate more profits...

We could certainly become more leftist, but that has to start with the middle class/rich workers. More vacation time. More job security. Less overtime... This makes people more amenable to then providing other programs and higher taxes and what not.

But the way things stand right now. It's pretty crazy.
Automation, computing... should be having us working less, job sharing...
We should not be having a smaller and smaller group of highly educated folks working harder and harder to support the welfare state. It's almost mathematically impossible at this point.

You're absolutely right about the cost of labor.

However., I think there is a general trend line out there where medical products are significantly overpriced relative to the actual cost of production or use. A lot of the industry is based on keeping the medical professionals and companies filled with decent money.

Things like 3d printers, scanners, generic parts will reduce the cost significantly. It is definitely an area where automation and computing could reduce costs significantly. And yes, perhaps for a while, there will still be some optimization that could be provided for by the super skilled labor. However, there is always a trade off between cost and quality.

If you could get 95% of the quality for 1/20th the cost, it's probably a good idea for most of the population.

Not everyone needs a professional camera person. Sometimes most people can do quite well with a simply point and click of their own. And yes, healthcare is no different in that respect.