- government doesn't have anything "to provide", it can only take away from somebody in order to subsidise somebody else, it doesn't produce anything and has nothing to give to anybody for free. If you are talking about government stealing even more resources from those, who are already being stolen from in order to provide bread and circuses to those, who are already on welfare anyway, then all you will achieve will be more corruption, even less production, as those producing, will be moving their productive capacity out of the country even faster.

...the other red herring argument was age discrimination...

The reality is that USA (and many others, like the Canadian or European) workers are much more expensive than workers from countries that do not have the insane socialist labour laws that raise the cost of doing business just enough for companies not to hire in those places any longer. This is not about an hourly wage, even if the hourly wage was exactly the same in USA and in India it still would not make sense to hire Americans. This is about the insane labour laws, the insane government agenda of running welfare / socialist / fascist states, where the individual is subservient to the government. It is too expensive to deal with big government where you cannot even pay a simple cash bribe for the government to go away and not come back.

For 9 years I was a contractor, doing what needed to be done for many different clients. 1 year? My longest contract (with all the extensions) lasted for 5 years, and I left that one to start my own business. My shortest contract was about 2 weeks, I came to do what the client needed, did it and went on.

Waltons and Kochs do much more for the current society than Musk is, they are bringing cheapest goods possible to the most people that the possibly can. Musk's creativity is actually very narrow in its target market, but he can become Ford of today if he manages to find efficiencies and actually mass produce cheaper and cheaper vehicles even in the modern age of enormous government created inflation.

- yes, putting the religion of socialism before the Constitution is what has destroyed America.

Constitutionally US Congress has no authority to dictate anything to business or individuals unless it is expressly stated in Article 1 Section 8. The actual problem is that SCOTUS has not struck down almost all laws that ever came out of Congress as it should have as unconstitutional, but instead it allowed wider and wider oppression via usurpation of powers by the government and destruction of the individual freedoms.

The reality is that the religious argument shouldn't matter, because the only true argument here is the argument of freedom. Individuals must not be coerced by governments, they must not be forced by governments to accept compensation for their work from their employer in a way that government sees fit (any form of insurance or maternity leave or paid vacation for example) in lieu of what the individual and the business agree to on their own accord. Individual may want to be paid in gold for example and nothing else and may sign a contract with the employer to that effect and government doesn't (Constitutionally) have the authority to overwrite this contract.

- hello, Dr. Lecter.

- so you are not a potential Uber customer, where is the problem? Don't like the service, don't participate in it, but instead you want to steal this choice from people who do like the service and are willing to exchange their own money for the services provided.

You should be arrested for crime against humanity, namely: denying freedoms to individuals to pursue happiness, to make a living in their own manner by using the tools of government oppression - the collective with its guns and prisons in order to create a government controlled monopoly on the entire market.

Your type of thinking has no place in the free human society.

In oppressive regime we impose rules upon people to destroy their freedom. FTFY.

I have a group of people working for me that had no experience before this job, this is how I selected them, found people that were only starting up. I train them, I architect the system and decide who does what based on their abilities (quality, speed, understanding, interests). Works ok as long as I can keep track of everything myself and each one what to do. I have set up very strict rules on how they code, what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed, we use in house produced code generators as well, this way there is some standard and uniformity. We are still using plenty of older frameworks and tech, but some is very new (where it makes it cheaper for us to work).

So we are on JDK 7, Tomcat 7, Struts 1.2 (with some modifications I built into it myself to provide some missing features), Eclipse, ant, but also we are on the latest PostgreSQL, mercurial, OpenBSD 5.5, OpenSMPTD, nginx 1.4.7, jquery, kineticjs, flot, HTML5, a custom flash component. Nothing happens here because "it is cool", only because it works and it's proven by now. We sanitise inputs and validate them for context, encrypt data that needs to be encrypted, check against a large list of 'bad passwords', prevent mixed content (all HTTPS, all from one domain), etc.

Is this going to be enough? Who knows, but at least we are not allowing anything to be overlooked knowingly.

I find that a group of novices is just fine to work with as long as there is somebody with enough experience to guide them (in this case that somebody being myself) who takes stuff seriously.

You are almost there, it's not about age, it is not even about salaries as many here suggest, it is about government's hands in the market - labour laws. There are entire industries based around suing employers, do you ever hear radio shows where some lawyers is giving advice on severance pay, suing the employer, etc.? That is what it is all about. It is about the fact that you cannot have a contract without government intervening into the business and forcing you with all its guns to attempt and avoid hiring people that can sue you because they are part of some protected class.

Hiring young white males seems to be the most optimal solution obviously, since they are the least government protected class of all.

As to myself, I hire plenty of students or new grads myself, not discriminating on age, but discriminating on their newness to the process and their desire to give it a try. I do not particularly care about your age, I do however pay lower wages than large companies and so I can only get people with very little (if any) experience. When a person comes in for the interview, I explain what we do, ask them what their goals are and then make a simple enough offer: here is the salary I can start you with (something similar to 13USD/hour), however if you cannot be productive right away, I am not paying you until I can put you on a project. I teach the new hires, it's about a 3 week crash course on the technologies we use, our frameworks, languages, db, our code generators, etc. They are given a task at a time, they go through the tasks and as they do, they are classified into different categories, this puts them on different projects.

As they become productive (they are on projects) they start getting paid and if they are good they get an equivalent of $1/hour raise every few months (not a guarantee though, nothing is).

So that's my approach to it and it is good for the beginners REGARDLESS of their age, but I WILL NOT hire somebody who is too close to the 'retirement', I do not need government regulations on my ass, any of this nonsense that says that the older the person the more difficult it is for them to find a new job and thus they must be given various entitlements by the employer are playing AGAINST the older people. You think government regulations prevent age (or any other) discrimination? They are the CAUSE of the discrimination.

- precisely why patents and copyrights as monopoly powers protected by governments must be abolished!

Who the hell knows what 'your' product is?

Tell me the difference between these:

I will repeat this over and
over and over and over and over again:
abolish all copyrights and patents.

Of-course I get this type of nonsense as replies, "extremism", "attitude", etc. nonsense.

The problem is that the government must not be able to dictate anything in the free market except basic protections against government abuse of individuals, nothing else.

As long as governments are usurping power away from people to dictate to people property and business rules and regulations and taxes we will keep hitting these types of walls: monopolies created by the force of government, monopolies created with the 'rule' of the gun to our heads.

- IF you truly believe that people would work for 45c/hour, then WHERE IS THE PROBLEM?

If you believe that people would take 45c an hour jobs, where is the problem? If somebody takes a job at 45cents an hour, it means that the job is worth it for them!

I have an employee right now, I hired 7 more people in 2 months, 4 of them are still students, these are summer jobs, so out of 4 students 3 are doing very well, they are learning well (I taught them on the job, first 2-3 weeks I pay NOTHING and that was the deal, that's until they are ready to be put on an actual project). They knew absolutely NOTHING of any use to me whatsoever.

1 of the 4 is much slower than the rest. When I say slower, I mean he spent 2 days for example doing something that takes me about 10-20 minutes and that would take any other one of the students 2-3 hours tops. So in fact what happened is this kid he came to me the other day nearly crying, asking if he could stay and work for FREE, NO MONEY, NOT A PENNY, that's what HE wanted to do

I said no, I'll pay you an equivalent of $4 an hour and you will report to me the hours that you deem you were productive.

Now, if he continues on a progression that I think he has shown over the last month, I will be able to pay him over equivalent of 10 bucks an hour in about 2 months I would say. That's because by that time he should become productive enough for me to afford his services.

You see, I am not interested in paying people anything that is not covered by their productivity, plus makes me at least 20 margin (that's margin, not markup for the uninitiated).

YOU are proposing that IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL FOR THE KID TO WORK FOR ME

Where would he find another job like this one? Where is he going to learn the skills necessary to find a better job down the line?

Minimum wages do not hurt businesses as much as they hurt the potential employees (who end up being unemployed) and the customers of the businesses, for who the prices go up.

I am an anarchist/libertarian/objectivist, call it what you like, I HAVE EMPLOYEES, I HIRE PEOPLE. How many people do YOU hire exactly?

As per usual, governments cannot give anything to anybody, but they can force people, under the barrel of a gun, to stop doing business.

The only thing that such regulations achieve is that fewer small businesses will be online, that's all. As the cost of doing business (selling something online) go up, fewer people can sell things online, thus fewer choices, and those who can sell will have higher prices because there will be less competition.

There is nothing free in this world, all this does it makes it illegal for people to offer products and services online on terms that both parties agree upon (the seller makes an offer, but this offer is not forced upon anybody, by paying money the buyer accepts that offer).

The free market is further distorted, the majority of the masses are led down the line of bigger government intervention and fewer freedoms and the economy is made that much poorer.

The same thing happens in everything that governments do, for example minimum wage is not a protection for the workers, it is an attack on workers, on those who are not qualified to get an above whatever passes for minimum wage job and for who it is made illegal to offer their labour at a competing rate to the buyers - the employers. It is illegal for the employers to advertise jobs at below minimum wage and it is illegal for people who want to get that job to work.

It is made illegal for people to work by the minimum wage laws, it is made illegal by the law described in TFS to offer products on their own terms for exchanges/returns.