I had that discussion recently at work.

The problem with the JavaScript scene, is that there's basically 2 communities.

One community is actually doing javascript, and trying to find the best ways to go at it, improving on what has worked, using the strength of the language and building on top of it, etc. This is where things like Express, Kao, Babel, Lodash, Bluebird, Mocha, Browserify/WebPack/SystemJS, Aurelia, etc come from.

Then there's the other group, who hates JavaScript, and is basically going: "Hey, pattern/framework XYZ has no equivalent in javascript yet!?! OMG! Why didn't anyone ever think of this????" and go and reimplement it. This is where AtScript/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, Ember, Angular 2.0 (specifically), all the bullshit classical OO stuff, and the 6 million libraries/hour come from.

After a while, you get pretty good at automatically discarding the second group, and as long as you pick stuff from the first, things go relatively smoothly (at least as smoothly as they go in other languages...which means it still has some pain points)

Don't forget that a lot of 1%er money never gets spent (and thus raise the price) to buy things you would. Unless you were in the market for a multi-billion dollar yacht, it doesn't really matter what Bill Gates, Buffet and Cook spend their money on.

If everyone ends up with all their money and go to the grocery store with it instead....things won't stay rosy very long.

Yeah, dealing with contractors feel like getting a job. It all ends up with a personal network and connections if you want anything good.

I don't even care how much I pay, if there was any kind of correlation between price and quality of the work. But there isn't. The guy with a razor thin profit margin is often leagues better than the one who charges you twice as much for the same work. Once i find a good one, I just tip them an absurd amount to make sure they want to work for me again (especially for cheaper jobs. Professional painters are paid very little, and its not easy to get it done perfectly... A plumber can be another story, where some trivial jobs cost a fortune).

At this point I just don't bother calling someone without a strong referal. It never works out,

I'd expect them to just do it by zip code...And there's always going to be edge cases.

its an hypothesis and a model attempting to explain some weird stuff we're observing. Its probably wrong, but its a starting point. A bit like the early earth centric models of the solar system originally (that actually ended up giving the correct results, even though they were wrong)

My wife and I have this discussion all the time (she's pretty rational).

The thing is that in a lot of industries, and in tech in particular, salaries are negotiated. Sharks and more aggressive personalities always come up ahead with that.

We saw it pretty straight when at one point, she applied for a job in the same department as me, for the same company (we wouldn't work together, but we shared the same department director).

I have more experience than she does, but she has better credentials...roughly a wash. She interviewed a bit better than me. We got a similar initial offer (she got a HIGHER initial offer, and rightly so).

Here's the catch: I refused mine initially. They came back with counter offers, we negotiated for a few days, and I came up way ahead (20%~ higher or so). Even KNOWING this, when my wife got her offer, she just took it as is, no negotiation whatsoever.

Net result: she made about 10-15% less money than me even though she was more qualified.

At the end of the day, hiring managers have budgets and they will try to pay as low as possible without hurting employee moral/retention, and they do expect some level of negotiation. If you take the first offer, you'll be paid less. And less "pushy" individuals are more likely to not negotiate.

That's not the only reason for gender salary gaps, for sure. But its a FUCKING BIG ONE.

And every time antitrust laws and Apple are mentionned, the regulators will look down at their iphone/ipad, think "No....we can't hurt my PRECIOUS!!" and look the other way.

Yup. Net neutrality is a net loss, because the customer could benefit from having not-so-neutral features (ie: let say ISPs favored streaming instead of throttling it?)

It was just better than the alternative in light of having so little competition. With proper competition, this would have solved itself.

We could just import dehydrated water. I hear the transportation cost of water, once dehydrated, is minimal. Its an obvious solution.

The primary issue with java applets at the same (if you assumed a world where it was preinstalled and where version management didn't matter, bringing it in line with JavaScript), was complexity and startup time.

Doing something simple took too much code, and it took forever for a page with it to start. It would have to go in a very different direction than where it was going to have been different.

If you bought a PC with a legitimate version of Windows and you don't have a product key with it, you more or less got screwed.

Even then, assuming again that its legitimate, you can recover the product key and reinstall with it from a vanilla disk. The OEM product keys have been legit for installing with any other ISO/disk for a long time now.

Yup. And guess what license Uber Black drivers have?

Oh, "But we were talking about UberX!!". That's an issue with these discussions....everyone seems to imply Uber ONLY does UberX. Hard to have a balanced discussion.

Except those are generally requirements if you want to run a taxi service that can be hailed on the street. Services where you have to call have existed since FOREVER, legally, without any issues (ie: In NYC they have been very common). Those laws didn't apply to them because you couldn't just hail one.

Second, taxi services have historically been one of the most corrupt thing ever, both on the companies side and the drivers. So basically all of those rules are broken on a daily basis, and getting them enforced is hard.

So in many cases, Uber was totally legal (as the former), but taxi lobbies just interpreted the rules very creatively to try and get the taxi rules (which should not apply) to Uber, while they themselves do not follow them.

Thats a big problem.

Some problems in IE were from implementing things before the standard was complete. Other browsers did this as well, but the other browsers would usually change their browser to match the standard when it was complete. Microsoft would not change to the standard to keep backwards compatibility with pages made specifically for their non-standard implementation.

More recently it got to the point where whatever Firefox, and then later Chrome did WAS the standard, like IE once did.

That being, if Firefox broke the standard, the standard changed to match Firefox. Or if IE matched the standard but other browsers didn't, IE took flack for "implementing a stupid part of the standard".

Its just silly now. All hails the W3...Webkit/Blink.

Everyone knows that rich people don't deserve anything because of how priviledged they are. DUH.