But the government definitely has business setting minimum wages, instituting union frameworks so that workers can deal with employers on more equal footing, and generally doing their best to make sure the powerful don't fuck with the powerless.

Absolutely.

I was offered my first job as a web developer when I was 17. I'd been studying English Literature at Otago University (New Zealand) until then, but had been doing casual front-end web development on the side.

Now I'm still on this first job, although I've been there well over a year. I'm earning above the average (New Zealand) salary, I've plenty of future prospects, I'm involved in some fairly interesting projects and I'm having a good time.

I don't see my lack of degree as being any problem in the future. Once you've got experience and can show previous work you've done you shouldn't have any problems. As other comments have said; getting your foot in the door is the hardest part.

(Oh. And shameless plug. My latest project was www.digitalnz.org

I think we have a contradiction in terms, here.

YES, it certainly isn't the fault of anyone else.

So it's their fault that they were invaded by Ethiopia? Their fault that their traditional government was destroyed by the British and Italians in the late 1800s?

Somalia is as it is because of greater forces, and their role in the generation of those greater forces is minimal. The blame is collective, and no individual has ever had the power to change the country.

Why is not our responsibility? Is it acceptable for use to take our stolen wealth and deny reparations to those we stole it from?

You're wrong about 'people like me'. I've never advocated direct intervention in internal politics. It inevitably makes the situation worse. I advocate fair and equitable economic policy; the protection of emerging economies and regulation preventing economic arm-twisting. Yes - the Somali have to help themselves. We can make it a whole lot easier for them with minimal effort.

War is caused by poverty, in one form or another. The only way to prevent it is to prevent poverty.

Someone breaking into my house is a false analogy and not relevant to this conversation.

No. They'll still become pirates, because they need to eat. They'll just become better-armed, more violent pirates with chips on their shoulders.

Do you really think that their inability is their fault? Do you think there's some kind of taint in the air in Somalia that makes people incapable of rational decision-making?

The Somali people are subject to greater economic and social pressures, just like everyone else. Their political instability is a product of these forces, not of some kind of 'moral' failure on their part.

Don't blame the victim. Don't blame people who are acting as best they can within the social framework that has been imposed on them.

What needs to happen? In general terms, the Western world provides free education to Somalia, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund provide low-interest loans *without* the usual strings attached.

In detail? I don't know. Somalia is a ridiculously complicated situation, and there are no easy answers.

If we want to stop Somalian piracy, however, shooting the pirates we can catch will achieve nothing. There will always be more. Unless we can change the economic pressures within Somalia that drive these people to piracy in the first place, nothing can be done.

Individual action is a bit pointless. What is needed is an end to foreign economic intervention, so the Somali government can stabilise.

The problem, fundamentally, is that the Western world sees the application of free-market/neo-liberal principles to the world economy as a legitimate activity, which inevitably leads to resource-rape and economic exclusion.

And we're starving them through economic means. They're guilty. So are we. They're killing a few of us, and we're killing a lot of them.

Who is more evil?

Why? What right do we have to kill people who are trying to survive by taking a tiny segment of our vast wealth?

Terrorism is not actually any more of a problem than it has always been, except insofar as it has been recently used as an excuse for all sorts of bad internal and foreign policy on the part of the US, UK and Australian governments.

There's a fair argument to make that the poor Somali are simply trying to make ends meet. We're rich. They're not. This dichotomy is at least partly our fault. Is it surprising that they're resentful and willing to *take* what they don't have.

You could ... contribute to an interesting OSS project...

It'd freeze.

In New Zealand, where I'm from, that would be completely illegal. Time you spend at a job doing something related to the job is paid. No exceptions. Hell, there's an allocated amount of time you spend at the job *not* doing anything related to the job we get paid for as well. It's called 'lunch' (and there are mandatory paid tea breaks). I've lived in the US before, though, and the balance of employee/employer power is much more in favour of the employer than it is here. NZ is quite socialist, so there are much more extensive union and labour-protection laws. So yes. My answer is that, if I'm at work waiting for my computer to boot, I'm *not* elsewhere doing other things, and I'll be paid for my time.