Did you read the article? They prefer giving small amounts of merit aid to many rich students than large amounts of merit aid to fewer poor students. The result is that, for the same level of merit, the rich get a subsidy and the poor are denied.
Agreed. My point is just that each person tends to favor one or the other.
In truth, it's a false dichotomy for everyone except the super-rich. People could have both low taxes and good social services if they would be willing to tax the super-rich to the same extent that we did so back in, say, 1950.
His comment was perfectly clear, enjoyable, valuable, relevant, and came with a link to a great article.
The fact that you're insulting him for his valuable and interesting contribution is an outrage. Why don't you go pick on someone else, someone who doesn't contribute, who doesn't post great links, who doesn't have an entertaining style.
Not everyone has to be a robotic autistic technical writer on this casual internet forum.
Posts should be judged by their content and style. Your nerdy hatred toward the colloquial /s tag comes off as dry, dweebish, vindictive pedantry.
I'm aware that you represent the HN Zeitgeist to some extent but that pretty much just exemplifies the problem here. You're engaging in the "automatic middle brow dismissal" that pg has identified as majorly obnoxious.
You think sarcasm tags are "too urban" for HN. How fucking classy of you. /s
I really appreciate the critique from someone who's had an account for two days. The personal attacks were an added plus. And, I like how you didn't actually read any of the thread you're replying to.
Nice work. A+, would read again!
(See how I wrote a sarcastic post without needing a "/s" tag? The written word is pretty cool!)
The parent's point was that AA has a bad track record for honoring their deals. The linked article was fascinating and shows how, if the contract/promotion/product they owe you is used too much despite not violating any of the terms, they will still go after you.
AA advertised a lifetime of free flight. They made people pay a lot of money for it. The users weren't abusing it. They were operating according to the terms they signed up for and indeed paid top dollar for. Despite not breaking any rules, AA still revoked their access to the service the customers paid for.
The parent's comment totally applies. The subjects in the article were not abusing the system. AA was abusing the system.
>I never learned to skateboard. I can’t dance. I can’t play a musical instrument. I struggle learning foreign languages. I know people who can do those things well.
The reason people need to become programmers is because, while people love to skateboard and dance, that shit don't pay.
Programming gets money. It's the only white collar job that doesn't artificially limit the number of people entering the field--in fact programmers seem to actively support importing foreign workers to compete with them for jobs. That's a new development in history. A group of professionals eager to give a helping hand to low-wage competition.
The economics of programming are complicated and still unexplored. We're the leading front of the clash between labor finitism vs. labor progressivism.
There's infinite demand for problem solving: making existing processes better. The limiting factor there is trust. How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?
Where there is finite (and plummeting) demand is over subordinate labor: pre-defined work that someone has already decided to pay a fixed amount for. All of that stuff is getting off-loaded to machines or off-shored to low-wage countries.
Labor finitism is the idea that there's a finite amount of paid subordinate work to go around and that we're doomed to compete for a waning quantity of it. Labor progressivism is the idea that, when one block of grunt work is automated, it frees up energy to move to something more interesting (and less subordinate, but more profitable).
Fifty years ago, it didn't matter whether labor finitism or progressivism was a better model of the "true" underlying behavior of society, because we were at full employment and technology didn't change as fast as it does now.
Now, it's a genuine and unresolved question: are we doing the right thing when we, in earnest, do the best job we can at making existing processes more effective? Are we building the skills and credibility that will help us graduate to better work, or are we programming ourselves out of jobs and shutting down the middle class? Right now, it's not clear which. I'd say that labor progressivism is winning, but just barely. For labor progressivism to be true, people need credibility and trust and risk allowance (savings) and those were traditionally won by taking subordinate jobs for ~10 years, but those are disappearing because labor finitism is correct over subordinate labor. The result of this is that the terms of subordinate labor are going to hell, and the people most likely to win in the new economy are those who can find a way to leapfrog that increasingly unprofitable slog.
How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?
While management at most companies is dysfunctional, this problem is 90% our fault.
Try asking a hacker how many dollars they contributed to the bottom line at their last job, and they'll give you a blank stare.
Try asking 10 hackers what their top 1-3 most valuable contributions were at their previous company. Most of them will immediately dive into the details of what they did rather than how it affected the business.
Ask them to quantify those achievements in terms of dollars, or user growth, or any metrics that the business cares about, and maybe 2 will be able to answer.
I'm not talking about asking for immediate answers either. Most hackers can take days and still have a hard time quantifying their contributions.
This gives the impression that the most programmers-even great ones-either are completely unaware of how they affect the business, or don't care.
And if you don't know how something impacts the business, no one will trust your ability to prioritize.
We as a community need to learn to speak the language of dollars, growth, and business objectives if we want to be taken seriously. Otherwise we're just tossing out ideas without articulating how valuable they are.
"How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?"
This is arguably the single biggest issue I've faced in over 20 years as first a programmer and since 2001, an architect.
The result? Trust is easy to get. I'd argue that credibility precedes it, and that's also easy to establish. The caveat is that it requires social skills, and must be done at the outset.
Building relationships that establish trust and credibility requires not focusing on building relationships.
When a new project starts I focus on three things - understanding the current situation, establishing a business objective, and bounding the scope. I do that by getting off my arse, meeting people, finding out what they need to succeed, and listening.
And by not talking, but mostly prompting or re-stating someone's problem in my own words, I build the trust I need from them.
Those are government entities, and the government's parent company is the corporatocracy that owns all the politicians and media.
Science is a business in the service of global capitalism. Truth hurts.
I will give you the MacArthur foundation and certain other non-profits. But most non-profits are also operated by the corporatocratic elite, like everything else on this planet.
You're right - if you define 'funded by corporations' sufficiently loosely (to include everything from governmental bodies to universities to charitable foundations) that the statement 'science is entirely funded by corporations' becomes a tautology, it becomes clear that science is entirely funded by corporations! I for one am shocked and appalled.
You're just being pedantic. The thrust of his comment was clear while not perfectly correct. "Fund" is well understood as a euphemism for "control"
It would be ideal if science were "funded" (read: controlled) by the public in the interest of the public good, but in reality it is controlled by the corporatocracy.
Is Goldman Sachs "funded" by the government or is the government "funded" by Goldman Sachs? The best understanding is that the government is a corporate subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, a profit-centre that Goldman Sachs invests in and controls by means of investment, and those investments reap profits.
Technically you could say that GS is funded by taxpayers, but funding implies both investment and control. So it's more accurate to say that GS funds the government, because this makes it clear where the locus of control is. Citizens are indentured servants that pay tribute to GS via taxes. Academics are indentured servants that receive money and position in exchange for their services to the subsidiary of GS called NSF.
Having said that, I think many foundations are genuinely independent of GS control, but they still can't be said to be funded by the public for the public. They are just altruistic private parties as opposed to the megalithic non-altruistic faction that is the corporatocracy.
