I've been a programmer for about eighteen years (Economics, B.S. from UTA). In that time, I've worked with dozens of programmers. Maybe, tops, a third of them actually had CS degrees. Probably more like a fourth. The reality is that, outside of kernel development, and some deep blue compiler stuff, programming is much more of a craft than a science.

While such do degrees exist, you wouldn't walk into a wood shop and expect that everyone had degrees in woodworking science, or whatever you would call it. It's just not how things are expected to work - you expect that at some point in the past, the person picked up the craft because they were interested in it, and developed their skills bit by bit. What one knows is nearly irrelevant - it's what one has done, and this is doubly true in IT and IS.

BTW - for I.T., per se, e.g., support and network operations, I've NEVER known anyone with a CS degree.

That's the key. People often have a weird authority relationship with their doctors. The reality of that relationship, at the end of the day, is that he/she is a consultant - just like the consultant you might hire to fix your sink or cut your grass - just better educated and better paid.

I don't begrudge doctors anything they earn honestly - they went to school for ten years, for Pete's sake. But remember that they're human beings and they're made from the same crooked timber of humanity as all of us.

Let's hope they don't confuse it with kilograms, or else it will burn up in the Martian atmosphere.

Starship Troopers?

Really it is this idea that a firm should be forever, and all the effort to make it happen, that creates inefficiencies in the free market.

Here, here. Of course, if there's a lot of government interference to this end, it's not really a free market.

When a company goes out of business, as others have noted, it's not like they shoot the employees and dynamite the equipment - all of that capability goes to competitors who are doing things differently (absent bailouts) and can be used more effectively. I am sad to see such a scion of my childhood near death, business-wise, but change like this is part of life, and when we block change, we get the stagnation we're in right now. Both sides of the political aisle fight this kind of change.

Just for fun, here's a Wikipedia list of the world's oldest companies. Zildjan (the drum folks) are really old.

You didn't make this awful enough. Replace Angelina Jolie and Zach Gali#$)(*#)(*# and I'm in the seat at the theater. Who am I kidding? I'm in the seat either way, I'm a Whovian.

Wrong - though you're in perfectly respectable company to see things this way.

We don't want jobs, we we don't want products (per se) - we want wealth. A lot of confusion results from not understanding what WEALTH is - it's not money, it's not luxury, it's not even security. The grand-unified (and very values-neutral) definition of wealth is:

A quantity of solved problems.

The problem can be as simple and straightforward as an empty stomach to a sandwich, or as complex as a production line to produce an IPad. What we want is to maximize the quantity of solved problems - this is, almost by definition, how a society solves its problems.

If someone decides that a canal (I've also heard "bridge" and "dam" in the story) is a good and desirable thing, then it is a good and desirable thing because it solves a problem. The goodness and desirability comes from the problem it solves, not by the means that it is achieved. What productivity allows us to do is to solve problems A and B at the same time when before we could only solve problem A with the same resources. It should be clear from this definition that this makes us wealthier: we now have the sandwich AND the IPad production line at the same time.

This definition illucidates a lot of why certain societies developed before others did. "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond is all about this - societies on latitudinally oriented continents were able to take advantage of crops that had developed east and west, making them wealthier. Crops, domesticated animals, cultural practices, even intellectual systems like musical notation - these all represent quantities of solved problems. They therefore constitute wealth.

In short, the jobs are only a means to the end - if we could have food in our stomachs, and canals and IPad production lines WITHOUT jobs, we'd be perfectly happy.

1. Graphene can throw a perfect game with one pitch.
2. Graphene once played Russian Roulette with a muzzleloader and won.
3. Graphene simply walks into Mordor.
4. Graphene once beat a wall at tennis.

Sounds like a CafePress opportunity...

That was definitely kicking around in there somewhere...