uncountable infinitely-generated chess of octonion-modules over hyperreal numbers

Actually, given The Donald's affinity for dezinformatsiya, I think you're going to want to go with the surreal numbers in the event that you'd like to attempt formalizing this chess match with an algebraic object.

Donald Trump's hands are too big to play chess. ****ing cucks.

US colleges have observed a 39% drop in foreign student enrollment since Trump was elected, over fears of, well, um, basically having to go to the US.

My conservative estimate is that foreign students generate about $610 billion of economic activity per year. (They directly injected $30.5 billion into the US economy in 2014-2015, the most recent school year for which I had statistics, with the standard US spending multiplier because y'all profligate AF).

I guess someone forgot to tell Trump that post-secondary education is was one of America's most valuable exports.

fake

I have another softball for Jon`C.

NPR has written a story on age discrimination, and the silicon valley crowd is doing some navel-gazing*. (I liked this comment, this one, and especially this one.)

One point of consensus in that thread seems to be that younger workers, who are prone to falling into traps which more older programmers have learned to avoid, are nevertheless sought out by companies because it makes sense to exploit their inability to recognize bad management, toss their rights as workers out the window in order to prove themselves and do things like sleep under their desk because their manager was lame and told them to do something that could never work, and expect less pay.

Thoughts?

* Actually, HN does this all the time. This same exact kind of thread comes up multiple times a week and always gets hundreds of comments. Only natural, I suppose, since it plays to legit fears.

Broadening the scope beyond programming to the gist of the NPR article, with more and more jobs being automated, are we going to see even middle-aged people losing their jobs to young people just to save cost? Especially if the expertise that those middle-aged people are being incorporated into non-human stores of information (example: rather than hire a system administrator, why not use Amazon cloud, and go find a Jr. DevOps kid to read a bunch of tutorials on how to set it up?). What are the social and fiscal consequences of this increasingly financially troubled population which hasn't reached retirement age?

American management is terrible, yes.

Is it really the managers? Maybe it's something broader, like culture.

For example, why are programmers constantly re-inventing the wheel? Should things like Node.js, operating systems being written in Javascript, etc. exist?

Management is legally obligated to act according to shareholder interests. Which means often shortsighted, unethical business practice and/or cut corners.

Bill Gates' personal wealth grew 70% after his retirement from Microsoft. That 30 billion is cut from wages in the form of dividends and taxpayer's checks in the form of bailouts. Workers are treated like **** to make sure people like him can have more billions. The American economy is perverse.

Bill Gates is a fine person, btw, he should just be substantially poorer than he is. Like give him 0.1% of the wealth he has and he's still obscenely wealthy for life. 0.01% and he's fat. 0.001% and he's a middle class American's dream retirement.

Well, if we are to believe the curmudgeons in the HN thread who are complaining about the SV youth, who are just as likely as anything to gravitate toward "ramen profitable" privately held startups, I don't see what shareholders have to do with it. Or VC backed startups, which aren't publicly traded either.

I'll readily admit that the economic conditions created by corporate America affect all workers, but I don't think you can blame them for a culture of inter-generational forgetfulness among programmers, unless you are saying that it is the managers of publicly traded companies which have created the environment where experience that comes with age isn't valuable enough to justify the higher cost of older workers.

Or maybe you are saying that greed in general is squeezing companies into being cheap. But that's just the same as exacerbating scarcity in general. The truth is that older workers cost more--the question is why managers in companies big and small don't recognize their value, and if there in fact is value (obviously bluntly overgeneralizing here).

While we're on the topic of what HN says about labor markets in software, in another thread about H2-B visa fraud, the exploitation of foreign workers this comment purports is sort of appalling, but sounds totally like something that would happen.

I hate this subject because it's like talking about slavery and the Civil War. Yes, there is ageism. But no, it's not really ageism, it's a combination of a lot of social and economic factors which just happen to generate ageism. So yeah there's ageism.

Some of this might sound ****ty, so I want to give you the following facts first. Mature companies hire older software engineers just fine. Older workers with exceptional work experience and well-developed technical skills are crown jewels; every non-Thielian-hellhole tech company makes special positions available to those people on demand, usually something like Distinguished Engineer or Technical Fellow. Mature companies also snap up senior-level talent regardless of age, because it's ****ing impossible to find a functional senior no matter how old they are, and you really don't need to throw in ageism to make that **** harder to pull together. So yeah, while I think there is pandemic ageism in tech, it really is largely incidental, and it's not hurting everybody to the same degree.

Anyway, here's problem one, along with some background:

In professions, we have this concept of junior positions and senior positions. The difference between junior and senior positions is a matter of expectations. We expect that juniors will require more investment, but we expect that they will eventually grow into a senior position. We expect that seniors will accept personal responsibility for their work, and can be effective with limited supervision. If you are a junior, and you fail to mature into an intermediate or senior on a reasonable schedule, you will eventually get fired. If you are a senior, and you lose the trust of management, you will eventually get fired. In my understanding, this division is an essential property of professional jobs.

Very close to zero junior software engineers ever mature into senior software engineers.

For starters, most programming jobs just aren't that hard. New CS grad, walk in, three months of ramp-up and then you're killing it? You do that kind of job for 30 years, you aren't going to come out the either end as a well developed senior engineer. You're going to be a junior engineer with a short resume. And this isn't just a problem for older people, it's just hitting them first, and for now it's hitting them hardest. But the same exact thing is going to happen to younger developers over the next few years. All of that webby ****, learning a different dialect of the same technology every year, remaking the same To Do List app every year. You aren't becoming a better engineer by doing that. You're becoming the same engineer in a different language.

Second, professional growth isn't even possible at most companies. This isn't on purpose, it's due to incompetence. It's half-way marketing, half-way a culture of mistrust. Management doesn't understand how to evaluate technical leadership, so they promote opinionated bullies who make (bad) technical decisions for everybody. Management doesn't trust engineers with product, so they centralize product decisions with themselves/marketing. Management sets release dates before requirements gathering is finished, so there's never any point learning how to properly estimate, or satisfying your commitments on time. That means, all of those essential skills - learning to independently make decisions and support them, learning how to gather requirements and design the correct solution, developing a sense for how quickly you can complete certain kinds of tasks, learning to value your time and taking responsibility for your mistakes - all of these essential, self-management skills that define a senior role, are effectively unlearnable at most organizations.

So you take someone, for example, who has done an easy job for 30 years, never learned anything, will need as much (or more) time investment as a new grad, and they're asking for more money just because they're older? Y'all can **** right off, now.

Here's problem two: 22% growth in computer science and software engineering departments over the past 25 years, or thereabouts. With occasional downward blips. Nobody knows how to distinguish a good engineer from a bad one, pretty much everybody asks some stupid ****ing puzzle question and flips a coin to decide whether they like the candidate despite not figuring it out. On average, you're going to end up hiring a lot more young people than older people, just because there are a lot (lot, lot, looooooot) more younger people in the job market.

Here's problem three: Most tech companies were founded by 25 year old morons. They don't know how to hire, full stop. I don't even mean identifying whether a candidate has good engineering skill, because that's a lot cause. I mean they don't know how to hire. People. Period. So you get utter ****shows like Uber, which is apparently 90% rapists or something, because the bro-founder and Chief Technical Bro is simultaneously too asocial to identify a complete knob and too much of a ****ing child to run a background check on his own leadership team. And when you ask a completely clueless piece of **** who to hire, they're gonna follow their basic human bias toward narcissism and pick the guy who looks like them and went to the same undergrad, and they're going to ride that bias all the way to hell.

And then there's problem four: Genuinely good and experienced people don't put up with management bull****. They don't have to. They quit and get a job somewhere else. **** managers quickly learn not to hire people who look "too experienced", because they're "quitters". (c.f. every post Alco ever made about hiring people with undergraduate degrees.)

And finally, there's problem five: Software development isn't science and it's not engineering, it's something different. It's creative. Past a certain point there is zero correlation between development experience and quality/productivity; some people are just better programmers, in the same way that some people are better composers, and some people are better authors. That's just the way it "is", and while deserving of further scrutiny, there's not much else you can do about it right now. One of the major crises behind ageism is the idiot manchild manager's expectation that older engineers are automatically senior, and that senior means they are more technically capable, rather than just more responsible. And THAT is because they don't value responsibility, they only value technical capability.

TL;DR: Destroy the bourgeoisie.

Some jobs still take skill, dude.

yes

Yes, it's really the managers. It's also the culture, but managers produce culture like a cow produces methane (using the exact same parts of their body, in fact). So yes, it really is the managers.

Because most programming jobs are easy and booooooring.

Bill Gates isn't rich because he abused workers/the system, he's rich because he had the most famous IPO right after 401ks started. If you want a less rich Bill Gates, the right people to ***** out are the accelerationist douchebags in US congress.

Eff it. Let them impeach him and make Pence president. Win/win for everyone.

Or Ryan becomes president? Seems likely to me that if Trump is taken down for collusion, Pence benefited as well. He'd be out too.

Or what if the Republicans choose someone else to be the Speaker?

OooO!! It's like Game of THRONES !!!!OOOOOOoOooOo!!!ooo

Putin becomes president

I am president

It doesn't matter if he benefited from anything Trump might have done. If Trump can be found guilty on impeachment, that doesn't mean Pence necessarily can and I doubt Pence did anything wrong anyway. Let's just end this farce. I wonder who Pence will select to be Vice President. Hopefully he doesn't follow Nixon's method.

From media accounts (even liberal ones), Pence seemed pretty pissed off about being lied to about the whole Russia/treason thing.

Edit: But then there's the whole Pence/Manafort connection, so who knows? :iiam:

Microsoft treats its employees well. I have a hard time imagining that Gates' stock portfolio doesn't hold a good quantity of companies that do abuse workers, i.e. Walmart. Which was more my point, anyone who owns shares in a mutual fund is basically partaking in exploiting workers. Which means Gates isn't actively abusing workers, yes, but the 30-35 billion he's made since 2008 had to come from somewhere.

This would only be true if stocks paid normal dividends and traded on the fundamentals. They don't. This complaint is like saying you are supporting US foreign policy by holding USD.

That was actually a very informative effortrant on labor markets and management. Thanks.

Alright, I was wrong.

if you don't transact all of your life in bitcoin you are literally a stormtrooper for uncle sams empire

(Former Trump aide) Mike Flynn offers to testify in exchange for immunity

We're well past "no smoke without fire", aren't we? It seems more like we can see the White House ablaze at this point.

Does he think that after what he did, that we're going to trust him? And he avoids prosecution in the process? This just looks like another set up.

Oh yeah, there's that.

fake news, Mike Flynn is a crisis actor hired by the liberal globalist shadow masters so they can pass unconstitutional treason control laws.

Hey, anybody else remember that time Sarn said that Obama did Sandy Hook just so he could pass gun control laws? And that all of the grieving parents on TV were just actors, paid by the government, and that their kids didn't really die, and their misery was made up?

I bet he voted for Trump.

A few weeks ago I watched some conspiracy theorist videos, including one by Sandy Hook truthers. I learned some scene lingo, such as the portmanteau "vicsim" for "simulated victim".

Just yesterday I learned that I should be afraid of Muslims, because 45% of them believe that "Sharia-style" corporal punishment is "occasionally, often, or usually justified".

It's wrong to believe that corporal punishment is effective, says a voter bloc that has historically supported the death penalty, SYG laws, and, y'know, used to lynch black people.

Pew says that 28% of Muslims favor corporal punishments for theft and robbery.

This is, of course, third world barbarism. The only acceptable punishment for any crime is a 20 year mandatory minimum sentence, spent in solitary confinement because it's more cost effective for the law enforcement corporation.

Who's for intervening in Syria?

I'm against it, because Syria is not in the axis of evil (which of course consists of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). On the other hand, Syria is included in the Bush administration's extension of the axis of evil, known as beyond the axis of evil, along with Cuba and Libya. So while not an original axis of evil country, I suppose I may condone intervening in Syria after all.

How about that Senate?

My feeling is that the Republicans do things like this when they feel cornered. I remember reading a few weeks back in an opinion piece that Trump was most crazed and delusional during episodes in which he had been forced to reconcile his own beliefs with outside facts or forces, and it was only they that he dug his heels in and solidified the craziness of but one of many crazy beliefs. The idea in the article was that the less Trump was confronted like this, the more likely that institutions that depended on reality would survive relatively unscathed, just like you're more likely to preserve your sandcastle on the beach if you don't tell your nasty bully of a brother that you built it. (Collapsing the Trump-craze function can only lead us to more ruinous possible worlds.)

Similarly with the Senate. Whether or not the Republicans were smart to end the filibusterer, I feel that they had no choice, since they were cornered and are running scared in situations like this, and their logic doesn't seem to allow to distinguish between concession and negotiation. In some ways this works well for them, I think. First, it makes Democrats fearful of confronting them, for fear that their very opposition will just cause the Republicans to dig in further. Second, since the Republicans can't distinguish between weakness / concession and fairness / tradition, they have no shame when they act opportunistically, and there is no danger that they won't hesitate to assume that their narrative of the story is without a doubt the moral and correct one.

tl;dr: life is simple when I am always right, and if I can't have it my way then nobody can

So I guess slc and helper here in utah are going to lose amtrak service because of trumps bull****. im officially irate now and unless this opens up more possibilities for me to have my own train easily i almost might get a twitter account so that i can participate in the resistance

Yes, and a renovation project of rickety old CalTrain in the Bay Area (last I checked) is in jeopardy, because Trump's government is threatening to withhold federal funding, which, if memory serves, is partially because the money would also go to the high speed rail project and that funding is part of a larger political chess game.