scottwhudson

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.

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 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.

There's absolutely a need for transparency here.

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.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/why-american-students-are-...

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?

Working in the Austin startup scene, I definitely get a sense that this is an issue amongst younger companies. However, I look at my father who's now with a massive merchant software company and there's not a single person in his division under the age of 40 (a lot of these guys are maintaining legacy mainframes, etc.)

About a year ago, the company realized that they're SOL with a n aging employee base and no one coming in to replace them once they retire. He's always argued that larger companies will come calling once the boomers are out, but I shutter at the thought of having to learn COBOL.