I think the PM is right but for all the wrong reasons. "CS" has become a bit of a buzzword lately. What people need is technology literacy, not knowing how to program. It's like teaching someone how to change their oil (practical) versus teaching someone how to build a car (not very practical unless you work for an auto maker). Even ignoring that, it's silly to try to teach people programming before basics. I bet you could go around and as people basic questions like "what's a home directory?", "what does it mean to append to a file?", and so on, and they probably wouldn't be able to answer most of them.

It's only going to get worse and worse as computers hide more and more of their internal workings from the user, especially in the realm of phones and tablets.

Yes, use one accident cause mostly by inexperience with nuclear power than by any inherent danger in it as reasoning for why nuclear power is bad. Of course, you have to ignore all the damage cause not just by fossil fuel accidents like oil spills and coal mining accidents, but also the general damage caused by their emissions and extractions.

object.x = 5 isn't overridable in Java, but it is in other languages like Python.

Refactoring is much easier when the language is actually conducive to refactoring. Java isn't conducive to refactoring at all, so as a result you have to always plan for the worst case scenario (e.g. use getters and setters for everything). Contrast to Python, which makes refactoring objects quite easy due to the amount of control you have over every aspect of your object.

I've never actually seen issues with that. Establish an indentation style for your project, whether it's tabs or X spaces (4 being the typical Python style), and enforce it. If someone can't commit code with the right indentation style, they shouldn't be writing code in the first place.

There's a sweet spot for conciseness versus verbosity. If something gets overly concise, then what you say is true. However, there's a such thing as too verbose as well, where it's so indirect that it becomes difficult to read.

Not to mention, Java has a lot of things that are absent from other languages due to being relatively pointless or having better alternatives like public vs private things. On top of that, the fact that Java best practices dictate using getters and setters whenever possible mean lots of additional code. What's easier to read, "object.x = 5" or "object.setX(5)" plus the boilerplate function that actually does the setting? Yes, I'm aware that IDEs can take care of this, but when a language has so much copy-and-paste boilerplate code that an IDE can eliminate a huge chunk of it, that doesn't exactly reflect well on the language.

There's two ways it can play out in terms of competition:
1. Other competitors are also in LA. Prices go up, nobody is at a major competitive advantage or disadvantage.
2. Other competitors are not in LA. LA company is at a competitive disadvantage. Companies who will be hiring low-wage employees are thus discouraged from doing business in LA, hurting the LA economy. If the advantage is enough to put a company out of business or at least trigger layoffs, now instead of minimum wage workers you have unemployed people.

640k was enough after all.

So either:
1. Their competitors are local, and also suffer from increased costs and thus increased prices. So costs do increase.
2. Their competitors are not local, and thus do not suffer from the minimum wage increase. So now you're at an inherent competitive disadvantage, which discourages people from doing business in that area. Worst case, the business goes under, in which case all those workers who had a low pay before now have no pay at all because they're unemployed. So now your area is a less attractive place for business, and has higher unemployment. But it's fine, because the people who are still employed now get paid a little more, right?

To cite your company A and company B example:
Company A isn't just randomly increasing its prices. It's increasing them because it now has to pay its workers more money. If company B is in the same jurisdiction, then company B would have to do the same. Now, if company B isn't in that jurisdiction and therefore not subject to the min wage increase, then they get a competitive advantage over company A. Not only does that discourage companies from doing business in that area (or at least hiring workers there) due to it putting them at an automatic disadvantage if other factors are held constant, but if company A can't compete and goes out of business, now you went from having poorly paid workers to unemployed workers. So it's not a very good solution to the problem at hand.

For part 2, see above. Companies do tend to have some elasticity in the size of their workforce, but it's not just above individual employers. If an employer goes under, that decreases the demand for labor, which means lower wages and/or unemployment. If the wages are propped up by a minimum wage, then it's going to be unemployment. So again, not a particularly good solution.

The workers have a right to demand better pay by choosing to not work there. If it's not sustainable to live in an expensive city as a burger flipper, they can leave the city and live somewhere where such a living is viable. This decreases the supply of burger flippers, meaning the market pushes the wage of burger flippers up on its own, with no intervention necessary.

Now, if the minimum wage was deemed to be too low in a place that is cheap to live in, then you would have a point, and the minimum wage probably should be increased. But if you're having trouble getting by in LA/NYC, and you refuse to move somewhere cheaper, while it sounds harsh you only have yourself to blame. The entire reason those places are expensive to live in to begin with is supply and demand. If you aren't willing (or able) to pay the price of living there, don't. It's economically inefficient to have someone who can't afford it to live in an expensive place. You may think that having more burger flippers and thus cheaper burgers in LA would be good because it would decrease the cost of eating, but it gets outweighed by the fact that the increased demand for housing increases your rent, and thus your cost of living.

Now, even if the scenario were to play out exactly as you say (less burger restaurants), then there's less places to employ burger flippers, and thus some of them will become unemployed. Thus, the actual positive effect on the minimum wage workers is lower than expected, e.g. a 25% increase in minimum wage might cause 10% of them to become unemployed. Their overall wage will go up somewhat (less than the actual wage increase), but it will be concentrated among a lower number of people. That's not a very effective solution to this problem.

It's ironic that you bring up Walmart, because as much as people like to vilify Walmart, it's one of the places that lets people get by cheaply. Without cheap places like Walmart, the cost of living would go up, so there would be even more people whose wage isn't enough to live on.

Yes, Linux has USB/IP support. There's a kernel module to handle it on the Linux host, and there's a client driver available for Windows (although I'm not sure how well it works as I've never used it myself).

This is just yet another reason on the already long list of why I never use consumer routers. Between the awful specs, terrible proprietary firmwares, and swiss cheese security, I've decided to just use only repurposed hardware for routers. Almost anything past the P4 era can route at gigabit speeds without the need for "NAT accel" hardware (aka "our hardware is so slow that it needs NAT acceleration to do what a thrown-out PC can do"). That, or look for used professional gear.

Pretty much the only thing that proprietary consumer stuff does better is wifi APs.

There's one potential problem: Does the software actually allow you to choose an IP, or is it hardcoded to connect to the pump's standard IP?

And what sets the market price? Supply and demand. If a business's costs go up (especially in this case where all the business's costs go up at the same time to varying degrees), then its prices will go up, because the business is now able to supply less quantity for the same price (or higher price for the same quantity).

The problem becomes actually determining what constitutes a "living wage", and how it varies by location. One major ethical question raised is if, in areas where the cost of living is high, "live somewhere else" is an acceptable answer. If "living wage" for a city is determined to be $25/hr, is it fair to just say "go live somewhere cheaper", rather than demanding that burger flippers get paid $25/hr?