Times are different now. Before the 20th century, goods were expensive and time was cheap. If you've ever had or heard of old world home-cooked food, you know that a lot of it was very labor-intensive but mostly made of grains or broths, often padded full of vegetables. Basically, the sort of thing that rural people had easy access to. They found it hard to afford lots of meat, but they had plenty of spare time to fill and could afford to have a place to live. Where is our money going now? Most of it is paid in rent or mortgage on our homes. So our increasing production has made a great big difference: more people can't afford a place to live, but at least those homeless people have cheap access to everything else they need

We live in a society where the very ambitious have the motivation to create new service industries, like the whole startup thing going on in Silicon Valley. But people without that ambition - the people who have always lived by contributing to existing power structures like their families or their local communities - are at the mercy of a shrinking job market. I am making the argument that now times are different than in the 1800s. A society can only come up with new service jobs for its people so quickly. We should be looking at reducing the work week for the same pay in order to maintain enough jobs for the less ambitious. Otherwise we are looking at a very costly welfare problem. We've already got bottom-rung employers like Wal-Mart and McDonald's expecting their workers to work full-time and also take government welfare just to survive.

It is my opinion that the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement are motivated by the same factors: rich people, large corporations, and generally wealth itself is controlling this country, and the proletariat is getting tired of it. The Tea Party believes all the things that Fox News has to say about liberals, and they're tired of establishment Republicans making deals with liberals because everything liberal is supposed to be bad. Defeating liberalism may be their goal, but the fact is that establishment types are in their way. The Occupy movement, I feel, got a little closer to the actual problem, rather than treating the actual problem like an impediment to their real goal. But they weren't motivated by ambitious desire to control America and they weren't organized like Republicans are, so nobody got elected out of Occupy like people have from the Tea Party.

That's just my opinion though. What you said is probably more reasonable, cusco: "I haven't been close enough...to really say..."

So how long will we in America have to endure year after year of "this summer sucks; I hate global warming" followed by "this winter sucks; global warming is a lie" before we reach some kind of new normal?

You should apply anyway. That way they know how much their purple unicorn really costs, and even if they aren't willing to pay that much, maybe it will help them adjust their expectations.

Which is exactly why they are pushing to hire more of those "exceptional" foreigners on H-1B visas, right?

The attitudes toward fresh graduates are a larger social issue, and I think that the OP gets right to the heart of it:

This is not just a statement about new CS grads. This is a statement about everybody in every industry. And it's not the employee's fault. There has been a huge cultural shift in the last 100 years. Our grandparents could take well-paying factory jobs and work them for 40 years without ever jumping ship, then rest on a pension. That option simply is not available anymore; the closest we can get is having tenure as a teacher, and our society even has that concept under assault. Where is the social value of loyalty? Neither loyalty towards the employer nor loyalty towards the employee have been fashionable for a long time, and it shows.

There are two sides, of course. Job hunters need to be prepared to spend several years at least in any given position. They also need to be empowered to find a culture that fits them, and they need to be prepared to fit themselves into a corporate culture if that culture is at least constructive. But employers need to invest more in the employees, not just in training but in overall career advancement and in making the work itself feel more rewarding. What makes your workplace exciting? Why should your new hire want to stay? Do you give your new hires raises commensurate with the new experience you've given them, now that a competitor could come along and offer to pay them what they are now worth? And just as importantly, when you hire based on experience, are you hiring somebody whose experience is 6 months being trained by a competitor?

And without supporting any of the supposed evil for which a lot of people seem to think unions are responsible. Unless you think being paid more for your work is evil.

I see what you did there.

Let's have a thought experiment. Say that every year, machines replace 40,000 unskilled hours per week with 4,000 skilled hours per week maintaining the machines. The machines are equivalent to the human workers in economic output, so the revenue stays the same. Where does the money go? Should there be 1/10 as many workers working full time or the same number of workers working 1/10 of the hours? Should the skilled hours be worth 10x as much as the unskilled hours? Or should the skilled workers be paid the same or slightly better wages?

Let's say all 40,000 unskilled hours are the entire economic activity of a company. If the company continues to employ the same workers, trains them to maintain the machines, and pays them 10x the rate for 1/10 the work, everything stays exactly the same (this never happens). If the company trains 1/10 of the workers to maintain the machines, laying off the rest, and pays the maintenance 2x the rate for the same number of hours (optimistic), the company now pays 2/10 as much for the same economic activity, leaving the other 8/10 for other activities. Where will that money go? Where should it go? How much of a raise for the management is appropriate? How much of the money can they use to expand? What is the likely expansion? Does the business plan scale up or would it have to change? Does scaling up displace other businesses with other workers?

What about the laid off workers? In a small local economy, the layoffs could easily destroy an entire town. The remaining workers only need so many new clothes, new cars, new toys, and nights eating out. Even if we assume they will spend all of their money in the local economy, that's still 2/10 of the money now supporting the service industry. Restaurants and outlet stores will close, putting more people out of work in a cascade of unemployment. Can the company expand local jobs with its new profits to make up for this? Will it?

When a business becomes more efficient, what is the ideal mix of lay-offs, pay raises, and work hour reductions? How does the answer change depending on whether you are a worker for the company, the owner of the company, a service worker in the company's town, a worker in the same industry in another town, a political leader interested in the most economic progress for voters, or a political leader interested in the most economic progress for campaign donors? Is the ideal outcome maximum economic output, maximum investment in the local community, or something else?

These are questions we must think of now more than ever before. There have been gains in efficiency before, but nothing like what we will see in the 21st century. We stand at the threshold of machines replacing all unskilled work, from retail to agriculture to manufacturing to restaurants to transportation. Nearly all of our needs and desires can be met with machines, but only if we still have jobs.

There's an important difference between the dot-com boom of the 90s and now. In the 90s you needed lots of capital and the smartest minds available to get online. Now you don't. Anybody with a little bit of programming skill can write an app in weeks and make it available to everyone. Anyone who needs a server can get an AWS instance and expect it to scale up when they need it to. Anyone who needs revenue can get a Google AdSense account. And anyone who actually needs substantial capital can point to Facebook's success. Not that Facebook or any other capital-driven businesses are immune. There may well be a bust. But the industry is more mature, the rewards are easier to define, and nobody wants to see their kids' faces when their investment decisions contribute to Facebook's demise.

They aren't just the same tactics. They are the same people making the arguments. And no, I don't mean the deniers on Slashdot (although with an Anonymous Coward you can never be sure). I don't even mean the talking heads on TV. I mean the people primarily at the Heartland Institute who craft the arguments for the talking heads and all of us sheep who want evidence to back up our beliefs rather than beliefs to back up our evidence.

They don't have to repay their donors. They have to convince those donors to donate again in the next election. It's not a big difference, but it does present more of a solution: campaign finance reform. Can't the Liberals and the Tea Partiers agree on this one thing, or are they all too busy hating each other to do something that would likely help both groups politically (against corporate Democrats and establishment Republicans)? Unfortunately, with the Supreme Court we currently have (and will likely have for the foreseeable future) it will take a constitutional amendment to fix things at this point. Are the more corporate elements of both parties simply too powerful to let that happen?

It's very interesting that 2014 was so hot for most of the world, because 2014 was also the coldest year in Iowa for a long while. Which really is not good for food production; Iowa is some of the most fertile and most valuable cropland in the United States. It just goes to show why we say "climate change" instead of "global warming": sure, global average temperatures are rising, but in anybody's local area what we're actually experiencing is instability. They'd have known that in the 70s if the climate wasn't so hard to accurately model. It sure would be great though if we could know what the climate will be like in any local area after a global rise of 4 C.

What about the small shallow islands and coastal nations (like Bangladesh) already being consumed by rising sea levels and erosion? What about the farmlands across the world that will certainly have to be farmed differently (typically at greater expense) with even the slightest change in their local climate? What about ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy fisheries around the world within the next 100 years, decimating marine economies everywhere?

What we are reading is written for the eyes of a mass audience. The only people that know enough to understand the actual basis of their conclusions are other climate scientists. Climate variations are very hard to measure and describe for an average person to understand in the time it takes to read an article. We are past the tipping point of climate change and the environmentalists are getting more desperate every year to convince the average person to take action. It also just so happens that global warming is melting glaciers and permafrost all over the world. Things that have been frozen for longer than anyone can remember, even in the summer. Glaciers from which climate scientists have taken core samples precisely because they have existed for so many thousands of years that they still contained frozen evidence of what the atmosphere was like every single year when a new layer of snow was compacted into them. The melting is the #1 simplest evidence for an average reader to understand, and you want to criticize the wording for not being statistically meaningful? If you want the statistically meaningful results, study climate science and read what the scientists read.