I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).
If they pass the interview then we obviously gladly hire them. But competition is hard.
We do have quite competitive wages. But we need more people than the American-only portion of the market has to offer. Competent foreigners make up a sizeable part of the applicants, and those who don't already have visa or green card we just can't hire. It's as simple as that.
My company struggles to find the right people. Many that we find we can't hire because the risk is too high that they won't make the lottery, so positions keep unfilled. This is a serious problem limiting our growth.
> I think the market will always demand one audience.
What? Ever heard anybody say "follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Youtube"? There are plenty more, all have a niche. Snapchat, Twitch, Tiktok, you name it. It's already a pluralistic world, and one more participant in the "open and free" niche is likely to have its place and fans.
The risk that this happens until we have technical means of avoiding the ecological disaster that current proposals entail is orders of magnitues closer to zero than the next pandemic wiping 50% of humans off the earth within your lifetime. Have you proposed the next lock-down yet?
That's not how this works. Plate tectonics won't stop if you cool down things a little bit. The amount of cooling you'd need to do amount to have that stuff stop is comparable to creating forests and oceans on mars. Not gonna happen, we'll kill off humankind before that.
Without "engineering society" we'd still live in tribes killing each other at first sight. We have reduced that substantially. Some societies are a bit behind (like allowing lethal military-grade weapons at home), some are further advanced. Overall, it seems a good idea to use our intellect to advance societies and we've come a long way from the dark ages.
Our earth engineering has come so far that with the exception of a few national parks and reserves, we've used every little corner to cut off and kill everything that existed on it and turned it into less-and-less usable farmland. A few areas are cities or golf courses or transportation highways, the rest are terrible monocultures or their next stage: deserts. We've extinguished more species than we know and of those that we have not, we have brought lots to close to it. 95% of all fish are dead. Sea levels are rising rapidly. Large areas have water shortages. We need less "earth engineering", not more of it.
> > You would be surprised but there are so many debates in the hiking community. This debate is to bring hiking poles or not.
> I definitely recommend using hiking poles.
This "hiking community" is just the people getting into those debates online. The vast majority of the actual hiking community just enjoys their trips in silence without getting into online arguments.
Source: In my circles of about 40-50 hiking enthusiasts, only about 2-3 engage in online debates. Everybody else enjoys their trips and learns from own experiences and the occasional chat with friends. Debating for weeks whether hiking poles are a must (I never use any, but it's a matter of preference) or whether to break off your toothbrush to save extra weight (IMO ridiculous) are mostly a waste of time.
I'm personally on board with rentals for the occasional long trip or using and building out public transit. But most people are not. Especially not in NA.
I understand the drivetrain argument. What about a simple generator to recharge the battery on the go? Like the original BMW i3 had. That one didn't take off, but likely in part because it was ugly, too small to be practical, and the gas prices still being very low.
I'm not disputing any of that. It's just that in an EV you currently drive around over half a ton of battery with you on your 20 miles a day commutes. That's highly inefficient as well. You need energy to drive it around, you need a bigger car to house it, better safety systems to prevent that solid fuel bomb from going off, you need to source its raw materials, manufacture it, recycle it.
Imagine saving all of that for a much smaller battery (say, 100 miles range) which is enough for 45+ weeks of the year, and then for the rare case of driving further than that you bring gasoline with you, with its vastly superior energy density and thus range. Only for those few trips. It can well be super expensive, but who cares, it's only for that rare trip to the grandparents or the skiing resort. And then you don't need to care much about the bad end-to-end efficiency. After all, you don't care about that when taking a plane to Hawaii either, do you?
Currently, plug-in hybrids tend to just be used as gasoline cars because people are lazy and don't charge every night. There are gas stations everywhere, fuel is cheap, and you are used to filling up gas anyway. But once gasoline prices spike to 3x-5x because it's synthetic fuels, the dynamic will change, fewer gas stations around, the reduced economies of scale lead to further price hikes and boom, everybody will use their plug-ins mainly as EVs. Which is what I'm describing above. Which could outperform pure EVs because you don't need a 500 miles EV range anymore, you can make do with 100 miles.
Most people still have that simplified view that you just have an oil well and just pump it up. In the US, a significant portion is extracted with fracking, an environmentally pretty terrible method for extraction.
Every ounce of oil coming out of the groud and getting burned ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. Banning that has nothing to do with ICEs.
You can run an ICE on synthetic fuels. It's not as energy-efficient but only half the efficiency from a renewable source is still better than "full" efficiency from a fossil source. If you _really_ must use an ICE, there will be a way. It won't be cheap, but it's your choice. There is no human right for cheap ICE fuel.
I lately had trouble convincing some non-tech acquaintances that IoT "cloud-enabled" cameras all over their house (including bedroom) as anti-break-in measure are a bad idea as those devices or the storage in some chinese cloud could be hacked. They ridiculed this as "far fetched".
I'll never be able to bring up this risk with USB to those guys.
There is a lot of other stuff happening right now that may or may not have a massive impact. Dominating the front page like this is just tilting the attention economy too much for everybody who hasn't bought into the hype bubble.
I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).