If a fellow gets married, *then* his creativity and productivity plummets. His time is no longer his own. When I regard the fellows I work with, the guys over 40 who avoided marriage, or have been divorced for a while, are the "top guns" to put in U.S. terms. They have both creativity *and* a lot of experience, which makes them almost impossible to beat over the course of many months.

I honestly don't see how a non-H1b person, especially if over 30, should be realistically planning on working as a programmer, at least in the Silicon Valley area.

http://www.livescience.com/181... If parents sought out a 6 point IQ boost for their children to be more successful, a side effect could be that conservative ideology will go the way of smallpox and polio.

What I remember in California was that one had approximately 4 categories of developers: 1. Journeyman level, typical employee, good enough 2. Short term hired guns, contractors 3. H1-b visa guest labor from India, very affordable at the time so very popular 4. Truly exceptional guys, the much talked about rockstar talent For the rockstar guys, they were so much more valuable and productive than the other 3 categories that it was well worth it to pay double the prevailing wages. The interesting thing in hindsight is that these rockstars really were all guys. No women. Given how the arithmetic behind averages works, I can't help but think that the pay packages of male rockstar techies in the U.S. skews the figures. If one removed the top and bottom 10% of the pay data for men and women in tech work, I think you'd find the average pay for men vs. women would be much closer.

there is no shortage but a glut in the U.S. of pretty much every type of skilled labor that traditionally would have earned a good living. It is very sad.

Does Dice Holdings take orders directly from Zuckerberg these days?

The U.S. is so messed up :( One thing that would make it a little less messed up would be to have an auction for H1b visas, rather than allocating them like IP address ranges to big companies. It would be interesting to see what happens when Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco start bidding up the price of cheap labor visas.

Commoditizing investment channels, eliminating the middleman, would be a nightmare scenario for Wall Street.

I wonder if Slashdot's minders have been overrun by Cato Institute people? There is logic problem here. If the population is ever increasing, then tweaking food production from finite resources is bound to end in tears as the realities of logarithmic growth curves (for supply) kick in, along with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Corrected version: "The pressure to move to GMO foods, along with the phenomenon of global warming, underscores the need to rein in human population growth"

Coming from a 100% scientist, I still have to give props to Buddhism as a very useful mental framework for our quirky human minds. I especially like the Buddhist insight that ego is at the root of a lot of human ills. See yourself as part of the world, not one man battling for respect and wealth, and life gets a lot easier and nicer. And oddly one seems to get more meaningful stuff done.

The only economics book that that doesn't wave hands and try to change the subject when the really hard questions come up.

Will Dice.com Holdings do anything its paymasters tell it, to keep up the astroturf campaign about a shortage of programmers? So that more cheap H1b visa labor can be had by big companies? Yes.

NSA guys will have to do some soul searching. Hopefully the U.S. will have a long, reasonable discussion about how much 1984 surveillance is really needed and healthy, and give the NSA new (more limited ) orders.

There, fixed it for ya

The Basic Income guarantee is something getting more discussion in German-speaking Europe. Because it makes increasing sense in the 21st century in developed countries.

Consider that most "work" in Germany, the UK and the US is what could be labeled as "bullshit jobs" (see www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/). People want to create and build, but modern economies have evolved in a perverse way such that most corporate jobs are essentially courtiers and actors. The real value is added by machines and 3rd world labor. The typical white collar worker's main task is to *appear* useful, necessary, and above all busy and stressed, while somehow evading metrics that actually hold them accountable for specific units of something. The key of course is not whether such a corporate drone produces anything, but whether his manager thinks he's necessary, in some way. This is the province of MBAs and culture consultants and so on.

But freed of the empty, value-subtracting exercise of faking hard work to aquire money credits, people would tend to gravitate toward whatever they're best at. Widespread ownership, or VAT taxes, of machines/robots will keep the funds flowing and get most of the work done, while humans do what they're best at. People get bored, research has found, and it's actually very hard to be a true "moocher." Even if it's creating beer can hats in Texas, people from all cultures are driven to create and build.

The Swiss are first to come to widespread awareness of this, and will vote soon on a small Basic Income for every citizen. My guess is it will not pass this election, but the insight will spread, rather like the awareness of a round planet or the existence of bacteria. So we'll probably see a Citizen's Income in Northern Europe and Japan first, then the English speaking countries.

It is also part of the "steady state economics" framework which humanity will be forced to adopt by the end of this century, if math prevails.