Good programmers work to replace themselves with small shell scripts.

The people in the comments on this shit article are the other type of programmers.

"Were"? You idiot.

There are jobs where face time is important - there is a lot of knowledge sharing that happens informally just by being in the same office. For those type of jobs, you tell the remote workers either start coming in to the office or find another job.

There are jobs were face time isn't important. For those type of jobs, you fire the US remote workers and hire someone in India, if being able to sort of speak English is important, or some other even more hellish Asian country if it isn't.

"There should be a business document that says what the application does at a high level and you design/write code based on that."

Hahaha.

I don't see how any of your argument applies to the Swartz case. Swartz makes the worst poster boy for criminal justice reform ever.

He was not a disadvantaged minority. He was not poor, was not a "poor looking defendant". He was a rich white college educated adult. He was a faculty member at Harvard University. It was not a case of manufactured or suppressed evidence. There was solid evidence that he committed the crimes of which he was accused. He was not forced to use a public defender.

And most importantly, this was not a good example of the abuse of plea bargaining. The cases where the plea bargain system are most troublesome are the cases where the defendant has to make the choice between a guilty plea and a trial - while sitting in a jail cell unable to make bail. The choice Swartz faced was a fair one. The choice someone makes when faced with a guilty plea to a felony and a 6 month sentence, or who knows how long in jail during the trial and sentencing is much less fair.

As Orin Kerr wrote:

These sorts of tactics have been going on for years, without many people paying attention. If we don’t want a world in which prosecutors have these powers, we shouldn’t just object when the defendant in the crosshairs is a genius who went to Stanford, hangs out with Larry Lessig, and is represented by the extremely expensive lawyers at Keker & Van Nest. We should object just as much — or even more — when the defendant is poor, unknown, and unconnected to the powerful. To do otherwise sends an extremely troubling message to prosecutors that they need to be extra sensitive when considering charges against defendants with connections. We have too much of a two-tiered justice system already, I think.

So much of the response to the case - not yours specifically - seems to be simply tribal. It doesn't seem that people in general care that prosecutors use these powers every day against poor or disadvantaged people. It seems to bother people here that the prosecutors dare use these tactics against one of us.

I think we have the motto to put on the trillion dollar platinum coin:

"The United States of America - Likely No Worse Than Scotland".

"There's only an IOU there with no economic value"

IOUs written by the US government have economic value. They have so much value that over the last few years, investors have occasionally paid the US government for the privilege of being allowed to hold those IOUs, as in a negative interest rate.

If John has the right to print currency, then yes the trust fund can be relied on and no he is not broke.

Yes, those fascist universities are much more authoritarian than prisons or the military.

There's a joke that "Christ, what an asshole." can be fittingly substituted for the caption of any New Yorker cartoon. It works on Wall Street Journal articles just as well.

You drive your car on roads that our taxes paid for.

During Katrina FEMA was slow and let people die. The director of FEMA didn't know, three days after the storm hit, that there were refugees in the convention center. Anybody who had been watching television during those three days knew.

The head of FEMA during Katrina was appointed because he was Bush's campaign manager's college buddy. His previous job was as an inspector of Arabian horse judges.

The current head of FEMA's previous job was 8 years as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Seriously. You are going to try to compare the two situations? You're doing a heck of a job.

Let us know how that inland harbor thing works out for you.

Here are the average salaries from the 2010-2011 Dice survey, by programming language:

ABAP $105,887
Korn Shell $96,886
Perl $94,210
Java/J2EE $91,060
C $90,346
Python $90,208
Ruby On Rails $89,973
PL/SQL $89,742
Shell $88,918
C++ $86,648
COBOL $85,847
C# $85,501
Javascript $81,576
VB.net $79,646

Doesn't look to me like Java engineers are particularly cheap.

You argue, in effect, that a US software developer and an Indian software developer are close substitutes. Close substitutes should have similar prices, or people would choose the cheaper option over the expensive one.

US software developer: $80-130K.
Indian software developer: $10-25K

These are not close substitutes. IT jobs that can be sent offshore have been sent offshore. The jobs remaining in the US are the jobs where a local resource is, for whatever reason, an order of magnitude more productive than an offshore one.

What would happen if H1-B visas were eliminated and salaries rose would not, for the most part, be a move by executives to offshore more jobs. There may be a few situations in which executives would say, "Well when we could get 10 Indian developers for the price of one US developer, it made sense to keep the job here, but now that we can get 10 and a half, let's send the work offshore", but only a few. What would happen would be that some marginal projects wouldn't get done - the rising wages would simply make it too costly. Some people in the US who would have gone into other areas would go into tech instead. And some of the profits being made by companies would go to tech workers instead.