Education is abysmal. Some of the highest drop out rates in the nation, some of the lowest graduation and SAT rates in the country. Contrary to popular belief the blue states don't just throw money away. They spend it on education, worker training and things that increase the living conditions. What does that mean? Where I live unemployement is a full two points lower than TX.

Using cloud deployment tech is good. Even if you intend to keep your servers in-house. But moving everything to cloud isn't always the most cost effective. Large game companies find that cloud bell curve. Some game companies use a bit of a bell curve for gaming back-ends. They start out on the cloud. However, they have enough infrastructure in place already that it makes sense to host the games in-house when they are at the peek. Post peek it becomes much cheaper to put them in an on-demand cloud host.

Other things that effect ROI are HIPPA and PCI. You may still be on the cloud, but you may have to go through a third party that is willing to bond and insurance the security of the setup, even if the end servers are still AWS, Rackspace, etc. That costs some serious money.

H1B consultants are now reaching the $100+/hr rate for developers. Supply and demand at work as the result of companies not investing in college hires. The pendulum is shifting that hiring from college is actually economical again.

I make a crap ton of money off shops that got burned with H1B and offshore and need experts to fix the systems.

If you have the programming chops you won't have a problem getting a job. Most of us are making enough money to put ourselves in the top 3% in terms of wages and benefits. The dumbest thing so-called globalization experts did was convince students that going into programming was worth while. Fact is we have such a deficit in programming that the H1-B shops now charge $100/hr for a developer (don't worry, the Indian guy working the gig only gets a pittance) because that's what supply and demand warrants. That's a high enough rate that a college graduate is fairly compelling.

The problem is large companies have largely abandoned their college recruiting programs in the 2000s. I haven't worked in a shop that has had a programming intern in at least 8 years. The pipeline for programming talent has shifted to small and mid sized companies. The biggest issue is they lack the resources and will to invest in college hires.

So to answer the question, getting into computer programming, dev ops, database administration are skills that pay very very well. I actually make most of my money off shops that got burned with offshore and H1B and want experienced developers. When they complain about cost I tell them to start up a college recruiting program.

Under current law the US has many 70s era export controls. Frankly there are a bunch of US only makers for petro products and finished fuels. Occasionally we have times when gas is relatively cheap in the US compared to the rest of the world. Albeit rare, usually only when the US economy slows leading to excess gasoline at refineries. Gasoline that cannot be exported. This isn't entirely uncommon in the world. For instance China is a big fan of acquiring the oil rights bypassing the market and setting the gas prices by gov't committee. Although this practice certainly effects supply and demand in the global market.

I think the OP is taking about skipping tar sands and refining the oil and gas in North Dakota. On the US side of the border there's hundred of BILLIONS of barrels of sweet light crude. Not to mention trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. So far the only pipeline out of there goes to a superior Wisconsin refinery. And that's just for the oil. Natural gas is just burned off. There's no pipelines currently to move the crude to the major refining states. It has to be moved via rail and truck, which is already saturated to capactiy.

North Dakota has saturated rail and road traffic trying to get it's crude out of the state. At the same time Natural gas is simply being burned off because there's no pipeline infrastructure to transport it. Pipelines that were being used to transport natural gas to the midwest from the east coast and gulf states will no longer be able to be used next year because they are being converted for use in transporting chemicals needed for tar sand conversion in Canada.

The reason big oil companies want the pipeline from Canada and not North Dakota is because there's a multibillion dollar tax loophole related to foreign oil processed in US refineries for export. Which is why the pipeline runs to the coast. Keystone Excel will have no effect on US fuel prices because it's not designed to sell fuel on the US market. It's quite likely that Keystone will result in refining capacity being taken out of the US market as it's used for export. All the signs point to this project actually costing the tax payer more at the pump in the end.

Let's also not forget the natural gas problems this creates for the upper midwest. They currently get their natural gas from Canada. Tar sand production need incredible amounts of natural gas. That's expected to increase prices people will be paying to heat their home. At the same time there's no plans now or in the future to bring more natural gas to upper midwest from the east coast. If anything they are losing capacity in order to support the tar sand production.

One of the reasons I love Japanese Quality is because of Ribbons of Shame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Man, if workers in Alabama who "assembled" my Honda had to wear them I wouldn't have so many little quality issues.

What's happening in many States is researchers are moving to private sector. In Minnesota at any given time there are over 400 biomed start-ups in operation. Many started in the University system but moved out for various reasons. Mostly that the academic sector moves at a glacial pace in terms of commercialization. It's not that there isn't as much money in totality, it's that a large component has moved to Venture Capital instead of grants.

Sadly I agree. Nye does a lot of guest spot on pseudo news shows. He's very good at writing and a master at presenting scripted material, but he's not a great off the cuff debater. Nye tends to get side tracks and has trouble packaging the argument into a limited time slot when he doesn't have the time to refine a script. Neil deGrasse Tyson is far better at this sort of thing but I he would never do a debate like this.

Having spent time in that part of the world I can attest the idea behind copyright of virtual things is cultural. They don't see stealing it as being wrong. Some even see it as their nationalistic duty to take things from the west to level the playing field. Generally in the US you can't lease space in a mall and open a store that sells clearly pirated software. But over there? It's not a problem until a representative from a Western company makes a complaint. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Be that as it may, since we're making comparisons, I will remind you that older (but quite capable) models of iPhones have sold in the free and under $99 tiers for some time now. Even in the pre-paid market iPhone has been dropping. The carriers have been taking the hit as a customer acquisition cost for some time. By your logic there should have been at least some amount of equalization in the app sell through rates years ago. I'll tell you as a professional in the field it hasn't happened.

There's no analogy. It is what it is.

I'm an independent software developer. I work in a large community of software developers. Two years ago when we did projects for ourselves or startup ventures it was pretty common to try to release the iOS and Android version of the app as close as possible and with the same feature sets. What we found was the sell through rate on iOS was huge compared to Android. At the same time we found the piracy rate of Android was huge compared to iOS.

If I'm charging by the hour and a client wants an Android version of an app, great. But I'm not spending my time and capital writing a paid app it's going to be iOS because there simply isn't a payday at the end of the Android trail.

Given Android users are loath to actually pay for apps I think it make sense. Despite have a tremendous number of Android smart phones active world wide and over 48 billion apps installed the Apple App store blows away Google Play revenues.

So long as you give people enough desk space and drawers to store stuff I think it works well for agile and paired programming. When it doesn't work is when some bean counter decides "Let's throw all the contractors into a meeting room". Things get cramped and stuffy. It also doesn't work when you have resource that take a lot of phone calls. They just end up disturbing everyone else.

The matrix was one of the few movies to get it right. There's a scene where they are sabotaging a computer. The screen showed the output of a real rootkit.