It isn't that simple, much as the right would like you to think. In this case, competition would be good for the consumer. This is in contrast to the right, who define "competitiveness" as "give us tax breaks and cheap labor that will wreck the economy and bankrupt the states (see Kansas for what lower taxes really do) or we'll pitch a fit, call you anti-business, and close factories just to spite you".

The current car dealership model is bad for the consumer. It's great for the rich that own the dealer chains, but at the consumer level, it's a model of sleazy sales tactics and outright lies. Liberals, contrary to what the echo chamber would like you to think, are not out to destroy businesses and pass regulations just for their own sakes. These laws are bad laws. Removing them gives new business models a level playing field, instead of one that's drastically slanted in favor of the status quo.

I think the story here is "man bites dog". Texas, home of the "fuck the people, give businesses ALL the money, regulation-is-literally-Hitler" attitude is resisting innovation with unnecessary regulation. So much for the free(er) market.

This is why car dealers can treat their (sales) customers like total dogshit and get away with it; the dealer chain owners are able to afford buying legislators outright, and protectionist laws give the dealerships unreasonable leverage in the manufacturer trying to get bad (well, worse than the rest, which is beyond horrible) dealerships to change their practices. Revoking a dealership's franchise is only slightly less hard than getting a Buick through the eye of a needle.

Your analogy can extend to the fact that a car's engine can be put in the front, amidships, or the rear of the car, or can be transversely placed, or can have anywhere from 2 to 12 cylinders, or can have carburetors or fuel injectors, or can be air- or liquid-cooled... and so on. They don't know where to put the engine! They don't know how many cylinders to use! They don't know how to get gas into the engine! They don't know how to cool the engine! What a joke! Not ready for prime time!

Why did we move from carburetors to fuel injectors? Why did we mount engines in different places? Why are cars liquid-cooled now, instead of air-cooled (unless you have an old Microbus or a motorcycle)? Because someone thought of something that could improve the technology. The fact that someone realized there could be a better way to do something does not mean that solar isn't ready for prime time. It means that new thinking led to an improvement in the application. It happens all the time with all kinds of mature technology. It's called "progress".

If you were to look back at how cars progressed, there would be lots of instances in which one technology was replaced with another that was far superior. With the advantage of hindsight, you could look at people who used the old tech and say "Boy, were they stupid", but you'd be wrong. They were using what was available at the moment, until someone figured out a better way to do it. So, you could look at south-facing placement as stupid, if you wanted to grind that particular axe. Sure, when you look at new ways to configure the arrays, you can say "They don't know what they're doing", but what they're doing has been common wisdom in solar applications for decades. Someone looked at that in the context of residential energy usage patterns and utility rate schedules, and figured out a better way to do it. Huzzah! Seems obvious in hindsight, of course, as do many things when a new technique or technology reaches the common consciousness.

If we were to compare solar to automobile technology, it's probably at the "Model T" mass-production consumer-consumption stage at the moment. Compared to modern cars, the Model T is hopelessly outdated, because new thinking led to improvements. Ford had his detractors too, and history made fools of them. I think history has its sights trained on you and those who think as you do. When was the last time you developed a solution to a problem instead of bitching about those who are trying to do the same? Maybe if you did that, you'd find the billion dollar idea that cuts our conventionally-generated electricity usage in half at a price point that made it viable. Or maybe not. In any event, condemning people who are developing solar tech as stupid is by far not the most useful thing you could do.

Or are you one of those neanderthals that "rolls coal" and tries to run bicyclists off the road?

Yeah, because every technology emerged fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. I guess that since Henry Ford didn't put fuel injection or power steering in his cars, he should have just given up. Clearly there was no future in those newfangled horseless carriage thingys.

It's not that they don't know "which way to point the damned things", "At the sun" is pretty hard to fuck up. The current status quo of home solar installs is to mount the panels fixed and pointing south; this article points out that there might be a better way to do it. Oh, shit, we don't have it perfect yet! Better shitcan the whole thing! Clearly we're not going to learn any more and won't be able to advance the technology, like everything else that enables our modern standard of living.

No, it's not perfect yet. No, it doesn't provide 100% of our energy needs. Those are not reasons to abandon the technology completely; incremental improvement is still improvement. If there were a tech that provided 100% of our energy needs without any of the drawbacks of our current energy tech, we would all be using it and there would be no need to push the newer tech further. The fact that we don't have that (yet) doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air, tell the renewable energy hippies to get a job and a haircut, slash the tires on their Priuses (Prii?) and resign ourselves to the fact that we are slowly making our planet uninhabitable.

I don't understand the downmods. This is a legitimate thing; I personally would much rather be a coder for the balance of my career than get pushed into a lead/management role where I'd be miserable and ineffective. Sure, I could probably learn enough to fake it, but it's not what I want to do. It's career-limiting, sure, but does it have to be that way? Doesn't actually doing useful work mean anything anymore? Is engineering turning into marketing? Do we want technical decisions to really be made based on who plays golf with whom?

I thought I left cliques and the "popular kids" bullshit back in high school. Why drag it into the workplace unless you don't have the actual skills to prove your usefulness even if you don't do the glad-handing presentation-to-pinhead-managers-who-wont-understand-it schmoozing-to-get-stuff-approved-instead-of-on-the-ideas-merits thing?

"People skills" are for MBAs and useless non-technical managers. They have their place, but that's not in the trenches where actual work gets done. Coders should be polite, reasonably groomed, with a useful attitude in meetings etc. but asking them to do the "people skills" thing is counter-productive and a waste of time and talent. Any time a coder spends cultivating his "people skills" is time they could be doing something more directly related to their job, like actual work.

That assumes that they care about losing "the best". They would rather have a bunch of mediocre workers that get the job done and accept poor treatment than have good workers who want crazy shit like market wages and to be treated like human beings. At a certain point "good" is no longer profitable, you reach the point of diminishing returns. Cheap > good again. The Walmart effect in action.

Bottom line: They're cheap. They can hire 4 of them for the cost of one FTE here. That's all they care about. Dollars are easy to quantify; quality of work is more difficult, especially when you're a walking haircut in an empty suit with an MBA and remarkable myopia. Trying to get an MBA to understand the difference between "cheap" and "good" is like talking to a wall most of the time. In their mind, they are the same. They don't understand what their reports do, and refuse to listen to them when they raise a problem that might require 1) actual work on their part, or 2) (shock horror) SPENDING MONEY.

You might want to get your sarcasm detector checked :)

Because, frequently, they are better off financially on unemployment. Finding a minimum wage job that provides health coverage is pretty much impossible; if you're on assistance, you probably qualify for Medicaid. So, minimum wage + buy your own health insurance (although the ACA makes this much more feasible), or (probably) better than minimum wage and Medicaid coverage. Is it any shock what some people choose? If the minimum wage wasn't such a fucking joke, and we had a single-payer health system like all the grownup countries have, this would cease to be so big a problem.

I don't know why they bother; if those are exempt employees (which they are, if the employer has any brains). It's perfectly legal to require your exempt employees to work many many more hours than the 40 they're getting paid for on paper, and not compensate them for anything over 40. At least for now, if someone complains about long hours, as far as the employer is concerned, they can either 1) shut the fuck up and get back to work, or 2) be threatened with replacement by a cheaper worker. It's harder to do that in technical roles, but not impossible. The effort is probably worth it if you make an example out of someone; the others will be less likely to complain if they see someone frogmarched to the door for speaking up.

So, it's ok to treat them like slaves, because they have a lower COL? Sounds a bit like socialism, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

$40k a YEAR, you mean.

Just rare enough to be worth a premium, and to have the audacity to demand things like good benefits and a work-life balance.

Why do they hate America?

/thread

You ever want to really confuse them? Tell them your keyboard doesn't have a Windows key, like my old IBM model M. They'll spend all kinds of time walking you through trying to find it..

"Please to be looking at the left side of your keyboard, do you see the button C T R L?"
"Yes, I see it."
"The Windows key is being right next to that one"
"No, there's no key right next to it, there is one that says A L T a little further over"
"No, there has to be a key between that has the Windows logo"
"I'm telling you, there isn't. Why don't you tell me what you're trying to do and I'll find a different way"
"You are lying! You have a Windows key there, you have to"
"Nope, old keyboard. What are you trying to do?"
Then you listen to them flip through the script and again insist you must have a Windows key if it's a Windows computer.

It's great fun. I've wasted 90 minutes of their time this way. Another thing I like to do is, when they say there's a problem with my Windows computer, I ask them "Which one? I have several", which is true. I ask them for the machine name, the IP, everything they should know if they're getting a trouble report, right?

The goal is to get them to hang up on YOU.