I don’t disagree with this sentiment, however, American culture explicitly drives what you’re describing here. There’s really no money to be made by battling inequality and people want to become wealthy more than they want to live in an equitable society. Because once you’ve become wealthy, you get to join the ranks of the privileged few that have the ability to make the choice that Dan Price made, but they don’t.
I remember reading once that America is the land of the frustrated wannabe millionaire, and it’s kinda true. We’re all on a warpath to make a ton of money with no real incentive to fight the fight you’re talking about.
That's explicitly against the TOS for most social media platforms, and some (like Facebook) are really cracking down on pseudonym accounts over the last few years.
It's against the ToS for Facebook and LinkedIn, it's perfectly fine on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Tiktok, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. Definitely not most platforms, just the few that place weight on real identity.
The keyboard on the new MBP is an improvement from the new MacBooks, but it still doesn't feel as good as the keyboard from the 2013 MBPs IMO. On the other hand, the larger trackpad is fantastic and makes a big difference when browsing, etc.
The touchbar is a wash for me, not having a real ESC is kinda weird, but it's not a deal-breaker for me (although I don't use terminal-based editors often.)
The biggest frustration for me is the dongles, I have to carry around 4 of them in order to maintain my workflow and device connectivity. I get the argument that Apple is nudging us forward on this, but they sacrificed a lot of usability and convenience in getting rid of the current gen ports, and I notice this daily.
I don't have any data for that point, but I get the sense that this shortage of labor is caused more by aging workforce than obscurity. My dad is an engineering manager for a large credit card processor that uses a very similar mainframe setup, and they're constantly putting enormous pressure on their offshore contracting firms to provide young COBOL programmers because they can barely find them here. It's a job that pays people enough that they can retire well if they're good with money, and they're retiring constantly. At 57, he's one of the youngest on the team.
I was involved in this for a couple of years in the mid-90s working for a COBOL vendor helping people migrate from mainframes and minicomputers to what was known as the “open systems” (mostly Unix, with Windows NT rising) world, saving a somewhat jaw-dropping amount of cash in annual licensing and support costs.
Even back then, one of the major complaints was that companies refused to pay for training, hoping they'd find someone who already knew everything they needed. I heard multiple stories about people who told their employer that they were planning to retire, left on schedule after not finding anyone qualified to train, and returned later as a consultant at a significantly higher rate.
Many younger programmers wouldn't want to get into mainframe Cobol programming because of the almost compulsory requirement to provide after-hours support duties in most of these jobs. Many managers find it easier to let programmers get woken up at night to fix the problems instead of allowing them to prevent the problems from occuring beforehand during the daytime. Years of getting woken up at 3 in the morning to fix those types of production problems tends to make many people look for other lines of work. The people who do stay employed doing after-hours support are often the ones who deliberately put the problems into the code during the daytime, generating those money-making callouts. US businesses with some India-based programmers will utilize them to fix those overnight problems because of the time zone difference.
The phrase "their offshore contracting firms" there should be enough to make any sensible 20 year old run screaming. Sure, spend a bunch of time learning a dead language, to get paid peanuts and be replaced by an offshore worker within a year, no problem!
unfortunately even assuming the outsourcer can find people who really have COBOL experience there's a world of difference between knowing COBOL and being able to maintain the 30+ years of hacks that many large companies will have built up in these systems.
Unfortunately the alternative (re-write the mainframe/COBOL systems in a more modern platform) is a risky and costly process....
> being able to maintain the 30+ years of hacks that many large companies will have built up in these systems.
It's not even the hacks. It's that "how the business works" was automated into COBOL 30 or 40 years ago, everyone in the "business" who knew how and why things happened retired or got laid off, and the COBOL programmers are the only ones who remember the business rules.
In college a few years ago I had to work with a system written in FORTRAN 77 in the early 90s that has been hacked new features and bug fixes on and off for almost 20 years, one single file with more than 20k lines of code, it worked all right, but understanding it was troublesome.
I lost the count of how many times I thought about rewriting the entire beast in C or even a more recent iteration of FORTRAN.
In the end, it wasn't something that I would use for much longer and I just mapped what all functions that i needed did on a spreadsheet and added a couple of hacks for the next unfortunate person to handle.
Maintaining old codebases full of hacks and without good documentation that can fail without big consequences is boring, but code that handles the kind of data that banks have is something straight from hell.
I almost went through one of the bigger bootcamps in Austin a couple of years ago, and I'm so glad I didn't for several reasons.
Everything about the application process felt like a for-profit university: they constantly blasted their impressive placement and salary figures at me, making it sound almost like I was guaranteed a $100k job right out of the program. A 96% placement rate and an average starting salary of 100+k allows them to paint a certain picture in applicants heads, and most people have no idea how hard it is when they sign up.
Funny enough, this bootcamp had all of their current students use the same job title on LinkedIn to show the bootcamp as work experience, which made finding alums VERY easy. I sent several alums who didn't get jobs quick messages asking about their experiences, and the responses were eye-opening. They were coached on how to go to networking events, where they wound competing against all of their classmates for junior gigs. After a few months, they went down in the bootcamp register as "failures", so they didn't count towards the glowing placement figures.
But the icing on the cake came years later, when this same bootcamp contacted a friend about recruiting some of their students. During the conversation, they disclosed that they were a contingency recruiter for their students: these junior candidates were going to cost the company six figures with the recruiting fee, which was crazy.
These students shell out $20+k for these programs and become unattractive candidates because the school wants a recruiting fee for someone that's been coding for 12 weeks, and the students probably don't even know what's going on.
It's also worth noting that more and more American students are moving to Europe for free university and staying for the jobs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this demographic begins to explain the increase in the US exodus, at least partially. Student debt can be a scary thing.
In looking at recent history, it's well worth remembering all of the Americans who emigrated to Canada and Europe to avoid the Vietnam draft. Many stayed.
It's very unlikely that the uptick in expatriation is due to a recent increase in the number of US students enrolled overseas. It takes 6-8 years of residency to get German citizenship, and while I don't know the details for Germany, in Sweden that excludes residency as a student.
> It takes 6-8 years of residency to get German citizenship
That doesn't sound any slower than the US - it'll probably take me around 8 years of post-student residency to become a US citizen (3 on H1-B, then 5 on a green card - and bear in mind it's much faster for me than for someone born in India or China, who face massively backlogged green card quotas).
A lot of people fixate on citizenship, but permanent residency is 99% as good as citizenship. Ask any green card holder, they'll tell you the real challenge is getting the green card. The subsequent 5 year wait for US citizenship is gravy by comparison.
We're talking about expatriation. It's difficult to live as a stateless person. You really want to have citizenship in another country before giving up US citizenship.
While permanent residency might be a possible substitute, the lack of any citizenship will likely make it more difficult to travel to another country, and there may be legal problems should you have a child as a stateless mother.
True, assuming you're not a dual citizen to start off. Some of the Americans moving to Europe might already have a European citizenship by descent (although not necessarily of the country they end up settling in).
Oh, I see! I read "begins to explain the increase in the US exodus" and interpreted it as "exodus from US citizenship"/expatriation not "exodus from US residency"/emigration.
People are so quick to point this out, but the reality is that so many hospitals in the US lack basic standards of cleanliness & care. The CDC recorded 722,000 Hospital-acquired infections (often staph or UTI's) in 2011, one of the highest such rates in the modern world. This is simply unacceptable for a country of our resources.
The WHO's assessment on overall access & quality of care doesn't even put the US in the top 25 in the world while our per capita expenditures remain some of the highest worldwide. We may have a handful of exemplary medical institutions to brag about, but so much of our system is in terrible shape.
This is already being done in places like Finland, where speeding tickets are calculated as a percentage of income. This makes a lot of sense given the simple fact that $300 means very different things to different people. If the goal of a fine is deter law-breaking activity, why not use a system that incentivizes everyone equally?
I applied to a bootcamp in Austin a few years back that was boasting about its insanely high placement rate, so I did a little research. They gave all students a "developer intern" title or something similar and told them to go update their LinkedIn profiles. A quick search on LinkedIn showed that they were including people who failed at getting engineering gigs and went back to their old jobs in their placement figures, which seemed super misleading. I messaged a few grads that didn't have developer titles and got some very sobering responses.
I don't blame bootcamps for not getting everyone hired, but touting these ridiculous figures with hooks like "our avg dev grad makes $75k straight out of our program" seems to incentivize people into thinking there's a short path to solid pay, and not emphasizing how hard the work is. It just felt so much like a miniature for-profit program that I pulled my application and got a job after building some stuff on my own.
I don't understand why the pro-gun community doesn't take a stronger stance against mass surveillance, "swamping" a group of law enforcement requires communication that can't be deciphered, and the general public has little interest in that. History tells us that communication wins wars (think cracking the enigma machine), but we're losing the ability to communicate privately at an alarming rate. How do you plan to "swarm" when the safest method of communication is the carrier pigeon?
What "harder stance" would you suggest we take??? We don't exactly view mass surveillance with approval (note how that first vote in the House didn't break along any obvious lines), and I'll attest that, when not legally required, many companies in the guns and ammo business are dreadfully bad at keeping long term records....
The "swamping" concept I was referring to was something of a thought experiment, e.g. imagine an out of science fiction effective speech broadcast to enough people that it doesn't matter that the police know "the people" are coming right now.
As for your general point, people who think about this sort of thing often focus on the old techniques like cells, one time pads, etc., subverting those listening in, etc. etc. Plus I'd add, just how effective do you really think governments are, especially against "non-crazy" people. That's the real danger I see, that "middle class" or thereabouts people like me get upset enough to take up arms, instead of the usual suspects like the Weather Underground. Note our "revolutionary" Founding Fathers, especially apropos this day after the anniversary of Declaration of Independence.
And there's a relatively new "leaderless resistance" concept where individuals not in close communications nonetheless take effective action. Again, see how "effective" for some value of effective Christoper Dorner, working alone, was. One man, or a small group, can be dreadfully effective nowadays.
Per Wikipedia, this concept only goes back to the early '60s, which matches my general reading on this sort of thing in the '70s as I struggled to understand what had just happened in the Vietnam War (I came of political age just as it was ending): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance#History
The early revolution certainly saw the emergence of guerilla warfare if not earlier instances providing that same starting-point. War was a formal issue for many clashes throughout the ages: generally an amassing of resources, a relative comparison and victory to the amasser of "more" with some casualties paid as an afterthought. But guerilla warfare presuposes that a more numerous and detested occupier cannot win because they are faced with a choice of extinguishing their enemies (the domestic population conquered) or being driven from those same holdings.
I remember reading once that America is the land of the frustrated wannabe millionaire, and it’s kinda true. We’re all on a warpath to make a ton of money with no real incentive to fight the fight you’re talking about.