The whole reason it’s cheap is the vast majority of the cost is shouldered by the west. If you were able to execute this arbitrage (and you should be able to but can’t legally) you would quickly find prices would lower slightly in the west and rise dramatically elsewhere.
It’s all profiteering. By preventing price discovery they make a boatload of profit even after writing down the losses on “foreign aid”.
What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things? Maybe I'm old now, but this trope has been parroted here and elsewhere as a panacea. Need a job? Contribute to open source for the CV experience. Need something to do? Contribute to open source.
I could see this as maybe something for a small software engineering course to do. maybe. I think in those cases it might even be better to split the class into teams and have them develop a product idea, elect people to various roles, and execute the plan as a semester long project. Midterms, quizzes, etc become sprint reviews and plannings. It would be great if you could get some of the b-school kids to roll over for a combined class where they takeover PMing.
Admittedly I am cynical. But the way I got into programming was many, many years before I started my CS degree. I just built cool things I needed. I got into reverse engineering because being a lazy high schooler I wanted to build trainers for video games so I could get a high level without actually working on it. Call it pathetic - sure. But playing video games is so boring. It's much more fun to get them to play for you :).
What ever happened to just being interested? I hesitate to suggest this but could it because a lot of people are getting into computer science strictly for the job? So that they reach the terminal points in the program and are completely without direction?
I dunno, just rambling I guess. This just strikes me as so odd.
> but I've come to accept that the only way to not be bullied or harassed online is to not expose yourself too much online
I've been on the internet for almost 30 years. This is something that we've lost in the last decade of people dying to tie their real identity to everything. The wild west internet was actively hostile and you had to be smart about not only what you said, but who you were associating with.
This form of "internet bullying" has existed since the dawn of the internet. That doesn't make it any more correct and it's only gotten more vicious with age. Especially because finding exploitable weaknesses is extremely easy when people leave themselves exposed on social media, twitter, discord, etc. We haven't solved it because I don't believe there is an actual solution. You get rid of KF and 4chan, another 10 communities pop up and the most popular one survives. You hit the registars, and they find another. Eventually they'll end up on one of the many registrars located outside the US that could not care any less what is hosted there.
The best thing you can do is compartmentalize. The problem is people, for better or worse, tie their entire identity to whatever they do on the internet. This is fraught with danger because it makes you easy to attack. But being easy to attack isn't enough, you have to also have to have shown some weakness they can use as leverage. Near is an unfortunate example of this. KF bullied them mercilessly because they possessed enough exploitable traits to make it profitable. This isn't victim blaming, but unfortunately something we must learn from. Privacy, compartmentalization, and good operational security are the only things that can protect you.
Maybe we can return to the internet of psuedonyms and lies that I remember. It was safer then, because no one trusted anyone implicitly and no one was willing to expose weaknesses that could be exploited.
You're missing the point of the pension and social security. There are, and has always, been a large portion of society making "just enough". Maxing out your 401k requires 19,500 dollars of pre-tax income you can dump into an account you can't touch. A little less with a match.
So do the math:
Median income in 2019: $65,712.
$19,500 is almost 30% of your pre-tax income. Not a whole lot left to save for a house, buy a (old, used) car, or any number of other things. I say pre-tax because the situation is even more bleak if you look at roth post-tax.
After contributing to your 401k as above your remaining take home after taxes (assuming you do not pay state taxes) is $23635.
So you max out your IRA at $6,000.
Now you have $17,635 to live on. Almost nothing. Maybe in the 90s this would've worked but even in my low CoL town renting an apartment will still run you $1,100 for a single room 600 square foot shack. You could do it, but you would be living on ramen and beans towards the end of the year assuming there weren't any medical emergencies, car problems, or any number of other things that could effect you (rising food costs, gas prices, electrical costs in summer, etc).
The purpose of a pension is that it provides a simple, easy, and guaranteed retirement plan for people in this situation. They can't afford to utilize their 401k for maximum benefit, and they can't afford to utilize an IRA to it's maximum benefit. 401ks were one of the greatest magic tricks ever pulled on Americans. While I agree they're great if you have the extra income, they do a lot of damage to the retirements of people who cannot afford them.
Regardless of your feelings you're missing the point. The middle class is the bellwether of the economy. Though, I don't think you're truly interested in the economy at large.
When middle class wages go up, small businesses open, they employ more people, creating more middle class people, and the cycle continues ad infinitum. The middle class pays the bulk of the taxes since they lack the finances to avoid them, and additionally is responsible for creating the bulk of the jobs in small business. The middle class also leads consumption. See the previous point for why this is important.
If the middle class fails everything below them fails. The only people that win in all scenarios are the ultra wealthy. If the middle class cannot retire, effectively no one can retire. Since their suffering is magnified in the lower economic strata.
Men have consistently surpassed women in both suicide attempts and suicides (see upthread for statistics) but no one seems to care. This "why won't someone think of the women" politicking is all too common these days when in fact focusing on the highest risk group (teenage boys) would probably save more lives on an absolute scale. The same goes for COVID which has an outsized effect on men when compared to women.
We are several decades away at this rate from getting our boys better help in school, mental health support, and other things that society seems to think they don't need.
A better question might be what are the ethical limits of gene editing. How long until we stumble over eugenics but with extra steps? It seems to me at least to be the natural conclusion of advanced gene editing. Law of unintended consequences and all that.
I am not a fan of Tether. I'm an open critic of it in my circles and I get a lot of flak for it.
But this...
> A discussion paper outlining the Fed’s thinking on digital payments, including the risks and benefits of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), will come out this summer, Powell said last month in the same speech where he referred briefly to stablecoins without mentioning any by name.
This sounds more to me like the fed is prepping the onslaught of hit pieces by mass media on crypto, and then solves this by introducing their own stablecoin. They've been vying control of the crypto markets for a long time because decentralized currency is the bane of every central bank. A stable FedCoin would give them the necessary foot in the door to control crypto at large. I don't think they are as concerned about USDT as they say, and rather they are jealous of it's control over the crypto market. They want that control.
> Workers are seen as interchangable at many places. just look at Amazon, one of the most profitable and productive companies in history, that takes pride in how it wears down its employees using corporate language that I'm sure you're painfully familiar with.
My absolute favorite from nearly every company I’ve worked at is referring to employees as “resources”. It seems to be a way to dehumanize people and make it easier to hire and fire. If they’re just cogs without feelings who cares, right? We will just go get a couple more resources for this project. Of course, there’s probably a metaphor for strip mining in here too.
The role reversal comment you made is absolutely true. Recognizing this I think is a sign of maturity. A company can bleet on about how it’s “resources” are family, or how much the CEO cares about each one of them, or how much it hurts to do layoffs. It’s not true. Just another carrot on the proverbial stick. They will can you without thinking once you become a liability, so it’s only natural you reach the same conclusion about them. Expounding on this slightly this is also why you should never give or offer an exit interview. Prey doesn’t help predators adapt and neither should you. Be the predator not the prey.
I ended up taking the pandemic off from my graduate classes. I am funding out of pocket (a local university so about $6,000 per year on a dev salary). I was given the option to get a GA-ship but at 11k a year I figured as long as the night classes don't go away I'd rather work.
I did this because they were upcharging for cleaning, upcharging for "tele-classes", and importantly STILL charging me for property on campus I was barred from using (University, Gym, etc). Worse yet the remaining courses at the beginning of the pandemic were terrible. Once the "cleaning policies" came into effect students were elected from each class, each day to clean the room before and after the class. So effectively we were paying them for the privilege of cleaning desks/boards/markers/etc for free. Something that takes up to 20m in the auditoriums.
Absolutely disgraceful of universities to do these things.
The lack of SLA/SLO/data sovereignty is an absolute non-starter. It's a decent idea but it lacks the necessary guarantees to get people to move off of their current provider (my $company included).
I looked over the article and never saw a single justification for $15/hr. outside of "people need it". The Jacobin study included productivity which I don't know if you can even properly quantify into dollars. Certainly, minimum wage is not addressing the needs of the lowest earners in the country. But there must be a metric to go by:
If we use base minimum wage adjusted for inflation the numbers look even worse than they are today. $0.25 in 1938 is $4.74 in today's money. So that's not good. It would appear using these numbers minimum wage has beat average inflation using the BLS' own CPI calculator.
If we loosen the requirements to the last "stopping point", 2009, $7.25 becomes $7.49 according to the same calculator. Not keeping up with inflation, but I don't think even the poorest people are going to write home about coming up 24 cents short.
But this ignoring local minimum wages. Using the following data:
We arrive at an average minimum wage of $9.78 and a median of $9.45. So, neither of these really indicate a lacking in inflationary tracking even at the state level. So what's the cause?
Well, I'm not an economist but I think the issue is local and not federal. The federal government can set the minimum wage to $15, but that doesn't change the fact the wage curve is heavily skewed by ultra low CoL states and ultra high CoL states. Not being an economist I am willing to ascribe to this something I'm going to call "state-local inflation" where places like California and New York probably demand a minimum wage closer to $25/hr. whereas somewhere like Georgia might do just fine sitting at $10.
As a result I think this medium article is more of a tirade than anything and does not elucidate anything related to the problem other than the tautology that it is a problem (which I do agree with). The solution however, seems far more complicated than the "just raise the wage" protests would make it out to be.
From what I gathered the problem is in the memory module and not memory itself. It would be like your RAM failing. No amount of rust or memory safety can help with that. Moreover you don’t exactly re-upload the entire Hubble system from earth. You may be interested in looking into NASA’s actual software integrity requirements as they are quite stringent and one of the reasons they use some antiquated languages. Rust is far too new, young, and buggy to even consider.
Appreciate the seemingly ever present optimism of rustaceans to golden hammer the language though.
I wrote about this a few posts ago but it's so common to be aged out of tech for any number of reasons that I have no plans to work in it after I turn 40. If I can, great. In all likelihood if I don't make a cushy management job by then it's curtains for me after my stack dries up. I don't have the same motivations I had in my 20s and I don't want to spend my life grinding leetcode to justify my extensive industry CV. It's exhausting and I have a family, life, and interests outside my day job. If it was just simple "retraining" every 5-10 years it wouldn't be such a big deal but every time you leave a company you start from the bottom and have to prove your way back to your position.
Academia used to be an out for "overexperienced" people. But it's so competitive even at the community college level in all likelihood you'll be completely aged out. I will probably be punching numbers into TPS reports.
If you want to be even more disgusted look into how nursing home works. A family member got moved into one (against our recommendation) and they've borderline taken everything from her. Social security checks are signed over and she has no autonomy.
There is no glory in getting old. The elderly are robbed blind at every turn.
> If woman were able to travel to another country (say, USA) and do short-term entertainment work for a few months on her own terms, you will reduce human trafficking.
I don't think this would be the case. Organized crime isn't black/white. They'd simply create a system of room rentals in love hotels or something and take the vig while corrupting prostitute unions (thereby allowing trafficking) or something similar. The mafia is quite famous for the tactic and I wouldn't be surprised if other more modern organized crime families have an even more lucrative business.
I don't know about any other countries but this is extremely common in the US. Dating is a line item in most men's budgets. In my experience, and I'm sure others, it's never pick a bar or something where it can be affordable. With modern dating and apps you are simply a number. I'm sure someone will chime in that they met their lover/soul-mate/girlfriend/whatever on dating apps but the data has time and time again shown this to be the exception and not the rule.
I generally will end a date if the bill isn't split at least for the first few dates. As a result, I had nothing but trouble to the point of swearing off dating until a chance encounter in the real world introduced me to my current girlfriend.
Having at one point worked in the marketing side of ecommerce Google is an absolute bane to work with if you're not clearing several hundred million per year. The entire system is rigged as far as I am concerned and I have been hoping for almost a decade now that their ad dominance would be questioned. It is borderline RICO-worthy.
As a small fry (< 10MM ad spend) it took acts of god to get ads re-listed, it was very hard to contact our rep, there was rampant ad manipulation and outright attacks (spam clicking, etc). An absolute misery but it was always "if you want to advertise there is no other choice".