He's aware of this. He picked 70k because that is the number at which, according to studies he accepts, more money does not have a significant effect on happiness.

I understood the intention was not to replace English, but to create another viable secondary language. Nonetheless, there is no value in doing this. Whatever you create will be just as difficult to learn for a human as English is. You can make something that is easier for a Chinese person to learn, or easier for an English person to learn, but you cannot make something that is easier for ALL humans to learn.

If your goal is to make something which is easier to learn *in general*, you will not succeed, because your language will be just as arbitrary as a natural language.

If your goal is to make something easier to learn for a specific language group like Chinese, or French, or Spanish, then it isn't clear why you don't just pick one of the native languages already in that language group. That language will be as easy to learn for others in that group as your artificial language, and it will be just as hard to pick up for people outside the language group as your artificial language will be.

Nothing is accomplished by creating a new language, except the expenditure of cognitive energy. It is similar to changing the characters for the logical operators in math to something else because you think that will make math easier to learn.

I've been picking up contractors and employees recently. It usually takes me 3 to 4 days to identify someone that I want, a few more days to discuss the position with them, and then two to three weeks to start engaging them (or bringing them on).

We have had absolutely no difficulty finding talented people who solve our problems very quickly. If you can't find people, you are doing one or more of the following:
1) Allowing an external company to handle your recruitment
2) Allowing someone who was never a developer to be involved in your recruitment
3) Offering poor salary, benefits, 401k, or stock options
4) Somehow being an idiot during the interview process, thereby communicating to the candidate they probably don't want to work for you. You could be doing this with asinine questions, not showing interest in the skills they have which are relevant to the job, saying things which indicate the environment is not a meritocracy, implying that they will be treated poorly (working over 40 hours a week regularly), the list goes on.

There are legions of developers in Caliornia. The state has the highest concerntration of skilled software devs on the planet. It is trivially easy to find devs if you understand what they want, and give it to them.

I'm a software developer by trade now, myself. If you would call a CTO that. Humanities doesn't pay well. So I understand the value you see in making expressions elegent, encoding best practices in the language itself, and etc. That being said, I think we can make a stronger assertion than "next to impossible" with regard to replacing English with an artificial language. I am willing to assert that it is literally, mathematically, impossible to replace English with an artificial language. If you succeeded, it would mean that the speakers aren't what we think of as humans. I'm not saying that human cognitive processing can't change alot in a trans-humanist kind of way to make this possible someday. However, the lifeform wouldn't be recognizable to humans today as a human.

Like I said in my first post, the structure and form of the language is arbitrary. Nearly irrelevant. Humans don't necessarily even need speech sounds. They use writing (like we are). Orthographies tend to be based on spoken languages, but this is because it is easier to bootstrap in a learning sense, not because it has to be that way. Sign languages, for example, don't use sound. They use symbols represented with hands instead. My point here is that the language itself doesn't matter. We would be gaining nothing by making an artificial language (especially since it would change instantly into a natural language as soon as people start using it).

Languages become more static when the human environment is static. They become more dynamic when the environment does. Language change is mostly a pragmatic event (though changes due to the accumulation of minor copy inconsistencies do become significant over time, especially in speech sounds). Humans mostly don't simply want to play around with their language for fun, though they do that too. Even if you managed to create a language which an individual human is capable of internalizing that was of such complexity it could express all possible expressions (I believe this not to be possible), some humans would change it for reasons not related to the need to convey raw data. They would change it to show their class. Or they would change it to express group identity. Or they would change it because they are rebellious and want to change anything they see as commonly accepted just for the sake of it. The list goes on.

I have expressed and implied a ton of stuff in these posts. The most important take-aways related to your questions are:
- Making an artificial language serves no purpose. It will not be easier to learn for all humans, it will not be better at conveying meaning, it will not contribute to humanity in any useful way
- Making a language resist change is impossble. But, even if it were possible, it would be pointless. The fact that language changes is not a weakness of language. It is a critical strength. Think of language like an organism. An organism which cannot adapt will become extinct, eventually.

TL;DR: Attempting to artificially create a human language is a complete waste of time. It's almost as wasteful as learning a natural human language you will never actually use practically.

The ops question stems from a deep misunderstanding of what human language is. Humans use language to communicate meaning. The important part here is the meaning, not the language. Language itself is practically arbitrary. Sure, there are similarities across human languages. Like, the English R sound is pretty uncommon and comes late in language acquisition. This doesn't mean that English is "hard". English isn't hard. Neither is Chinese, nor is French, nor vietnemese, nor any other natural human languages.

Different languages do not take different lengths of time to learn. Native language acquisition occurs at approximately the same rate overall across languages. Different people acquire language at different rates, but there are clear statistical trends, and there tend to be only a few commonly used learning strategies for any given problem in language space (like making the English R sound). You might think certain languages are harder to learn because they are harder for YOU to learn, but this isn't the case. Secondary language acquistion occurs as a bootstraping on an existing scaffold (your native language). That means the base language significantly affects the ease at which a secondary language will be acquired.

Language is organic. People creatively use language in order to communicate meaning, as we said above. There isn't actually a thing called "English". There is a group of people who understand each other. They play a language game, but they don't all do it the same way. You've heard of something called "dialects"? It turns out that people who can understand each other don't necessarily always play by the same rules. Rules vary, and that varience tends to corrolate with geographic distance. Now, even though they vary, people tend to still understand one another pretty well across dialects. You get to the point eventually where people no longer understand one another, even though the languages are still recently historically related (Spanish and French). At this point, we say they speak different languages. The point of this "language is organic" line is that language CHANGES. Sometimes it changes slowly, sometimes it changes rapidly. It is an absolutely critical feature of language that it can change.

Humans adapt language to serve their needs. It evolves over time, morphing into mutually unintelligible versions of itself across speakers. Now, language change does work acording to some rules. There are syntax and grammar features which human brains appear reluctant to violate, and there are common strategies which are usually followed (though there are exceptions to pretty much anything). What does language change mean? It means that if you go designing a language(an artificial language), your carefully designed language will change into something else over time (a natural human language), People will change the rules you have prescribed to suit their needs. They will invent new words. They will stop using old words and use different ones, sometimes for reasons as trivial as that they like the way the new ones sound. They will alter syntax creatively in order to express themselves, but insodoing they will make those changes acceptable over time. What, then, is the point of designing an artifical language if it is desitined to quickly change into something essentially identical than what you started out with?

The only artificial languages which persist are computer languages. They persist only because a computer is very unlike a human in that it will not attempt to parse your expression for layers of meaning. Computers demand all expressions have only one possible interpretation. This is vastly different than human language processing. If you would like an example of the utter failure of humans attempting to create artificial languages then go look up Esperanto.

IAAL and IAAPoL (I am a linguist and a philosopher of language)

I wish I could mod you up.

If you had comcast business assuring you, in writing, that they could install to your house and then their error subsequently caused you to suffer financial damages, I'm pretty sure you have standing to sue.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.

It is absurd to expect a corporation of any size to "toss something your way". He should have told apple, when it mattered to them, that they could pay a service fee to have him delay the patch for their benefit. No, this isn't how you want to deal with individual people. Yes, this is how you must deal with a corporation.

Life lesson: mega corps don't even care for the people they employ, and much less people outside the corporation. A corp is an abstract non-human entity. It doesn't deserve your charity.

What are you talking about? Android switches between tasks trivially. Android phones have a button similar to the alt+tab on a windows machine which brings up all the active apps and lets you just touch one to switch. It's even easier than using an iphone for switching apps.

Maybe you're using some hacked bloatware version of android? Go buy a nexus.

Cue Streisand effect.

I would love to start an ISP. I have the resources to lay fiber through certain municipal areas that aren't well covered. It would take 10 years to start seeing profit, but after that, its almost 100% profit. I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.

But guess what? In our great "free" market that the telcos are trying to protect, I can't. You see, the telecos have convinced (see: bribed) many municipalities into signing deals which prevent any competitor from moving in. Google is attempting to deploy fiber nationwide, but they are forced to first spend insane amounts of money in lobbying themselves in order to be able to do it (they are forced to do other things as well, but this is a big problem). There are big truckloads of money that would dump into infrastructure in a heartbeat. The problem is that no one legally can because of how totally f-ed up the market has become with lobby $$$.

It isn't about money.
The market isn't free. It is a duopoly, and it is corrupt.

Clearly the shortage of tech workers has gotten so bad in the USA that the laws of supply and demand no longer hold true. Cats and dogs are living together, and pigs fly through the air with reckless abandon!

Congress must act to raise the H1B cap even further before it's too late.

The pdf (IMO it shouldn't even do pdf, but should create an html page.) should be an automatic result of wherever they update their menu. There should be no extra steps from their point of view. If you mean the extra step of having to create the workflow process which does it, you're doing that anyway by writing crazy ad-hoc webcam software.

It isn't interesting to compare your wealth with someone in Africa, because people in Africa are not a threat to you. They are incapable of competing with you in any meaningful sense. No, H1B does not introduce pitchfork level competition (taking off rich people's heads).

If you have 77k in assets in your 20s then you're doing well, but you are by no measure wealthy in our society (USA). You're solidly middle class. If you are 40 and are at 77k in assets, you are doing very poorly. I'm talking about wealth gathering here. If that isn't your thing, then the phrase "doing poorly" might not apply. A lot of people have rejected the notion of wealth gathering because they have rightly recognized that they are incapable of achieving it in any meaningful sense. Look at the tiny house movement, for example. These people have decided that sacrificing their happiness for 30 years in exchange for a net worth of around 300k (at best) isn't worth it. In my opinion, they are correct.

Humans are bad at abstract logic. Not just bad, but shockingly, horribly bad. It requires many years of teaching to get them to learn how to reason according to logical principles and to avoid logical fallacies. Most people never get there at all.

OOP is a step in the right direction, for some kinds of programming. You don't always need to tell a story about your concept space. Sometimes what you're doing is so simple, and so shortlived, that it doesn't matter. However if you want long term maintainability and something that other people are going to be able to learn as quickly as possible, OOP wins. Consider the following example:

English:
John loves Sally. People like to spend time with others that they love. Does John like spending time with Sally?

If you are human and not deeply mentally impaired, you will quickly answer "yes" to the above question

Symbolic logic:
Derive Q (John likes spending time with Sally)
P (Assertion)
P -> Q (Modus Ponens)

Did you immediately think in your brain the following:
Q (Consequence of premises 1 & 2)

A lot of people who stare at that sequence of symbols will require a few moments to process it. Very few will read it as trivially as they read the English expression, although both expressions communicate the same relationships and information. Why is that? It is because the logical derivation is an abstraction above the English expression (which itself is of course an abstraction of something else). Every level of abstraction adds to how difficult it is for a human to comprehend something. It doesn't mean they can't get it, it means it will take longer (though depending on the person it might mean they can't get it).

Do you want people to be able to read your code in the future? The best chance of them succeeding is to use object oriented programming, and to create a class model that closely resembles what most people intuitively understand as the concept space you are working in.

Humans did not evolve to process information regarding Ps and Qs. They evolved to process information about Johns and Sallys. They are much better at the latter than the former.