Employers are struggling to pull their heads out of their assholes and try to hire the right people. They're hiring the people whose resume says they have the skills and who look pretty and failing to hire the people who can solve problems and who look like whatever they look like (some of whom are pretty) because they're incapable of hiring intelligently.

I lay the problem on lazy and/or uneducated managers relying on the HR department to find their candidates without proper guidance, and on lazy and uneducated HR employees who are just trying to find anyone who fits some absurd criteria they copied from someone else's website.

None of those industries can function without IT any more. Also, as the GP alluded, IT is in a position to directly sell out all of a company's secrets, so you want them to be paid well enough not to do so.

It's a simple question of supply and demand; there's not enough supply at the rate they demand to pay. Consequently IT people have become truck drivers and dry cleaners and shit like that. Things that take two brain cells but not three. They're making about the same kind of money they were making in IT if they were underpaid, but with a lot less responsibility. Some of them are even making more.

Oh yeah, you mean like how all of the known evidence (what wasn't immediately and deliberately destroyed by our own government) suggests that the WTC was destroyed from within? Nobody cares about that, either.

That's not what the argument is about. The argument is about whether it's coercion to mandate a minimum wage, or coercion to have the very concept of private property in a system without one.

You want your government to threaten coercion against people for letting their feet take them where they will. You're just another kind of fascist.

You really think it's the presidents themselves who doing this stuff? Maybe in the case of George Bush Sr. Maybe in the case of Nixon, too. But in the majority of cases? No way. Most of them are just hand puppets.

When Rutan won the X-Prize in 2004, I was seriously excited. It seemed like commercial suborbital joyrides for anyone with money to burn were happening right then. 8 years later, still no commercial flights. What happened? SpaceX went from first launch in 2006 to ISS in 2012. I know, manned flights require more rigorous design, but SpaceX has been designing for human flight all along, and Musk is in serious contention to get crew flights to ISS by 2015 or 2016. At this rate, we may be able to buy orbital joyrides before suborbital ones. I know Burt Rutan and crew have the engineering skill to get this thing done, what's been holding them back?

Just because he was corrupt doesn't mean he wasn't set up on that occasion.

...drugs, cigarettes, liquor, gambling, lottery tickets, flat screens, cell phones, junk food, etc...

Why is Nixon a dirty word today, and G. Gordon Liddy a political pundit?

Because Bruce Perens makes his living by talking about and participating in copyright shakedowns?