Via TSS, I found this excellent post. Unfortunately, while I appreciate the sentiment (hell, I'm not so young and commitment-free no more), I'm simply not convinced that these things are actually myths. Sure, age discrimination sucks, I guess, and I'd like them to be myths, but is it really a myth that:
Older software developers are less able to perform the arduous tasks of software development (read: work long, painful hours) because of family commitments and other attachments that younger workers don’t have.
Or that:
Older software developers are more jaded and cynical and therefore, less desirable in the workplace than younger ones. Younger developers are more enthusiastic than older ones.
C'mon, let's give these young snippets their due! Lots of young guys really are smart, hard-working and enthusiastic. And their crazy ideas are much too often shot down by experienced, but clueless, people in more senior roles.
Sure, there's lots of reasons to want some more level-headed folks floating around the project somewhere, but you're going to have to do more than simply assert that these things are myths before I'm going to drop my (totally-based-on-personal-experience-so-take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt) belief that younger folks are, on average, more productive than older folks.
And now let me flip this around a bit: is the incredible salary discrimination (5x, or more) against younger developers really defensible?
Is this your baby? Did you become a father? :-)
I am 24 and not an old developer but my enthusiasm has declined over the last years just because I have been bitten too much because of living on the bleeding edge and because I understand a lot more about general software engineering principles. I expect that development to continue.
I guess when you're older you've seen and felt too much to be as blind and neutral as the young guys.
When you think about it... I just plugged in a Powerbook from the beginning of the 90ies from my father. It booted in less than 20 seconds, it had software to create designs for customers, to manage a customer database and to create invoices. It is almost 20 years ago and how much have we progressed from this feature set? Yes, we now have colour-displays and rounded corners, but the problems we solve are essentially the same. We just throw away our solutions every year or two, because there is a now trend or because some hardware somewhere along the line has gotten more powerful and enables us to do more fancy things.
If you had looked at cet process/progress over all those years, I think you cannot do the same decisions as somebody that comes straight from a university. And thats why there is an age-difference and the myths that are the source of this blog post.
I guess the software industry wouldnt be as insane as it is if more elderly people were in charge of it instead of super-young-consultants that are willing to use their latest hammer for everything they consider to be a nail.
Until the time has passed for them to consider things as something else than a nail, they will have started to understand Lisp and will be seen as old and productive dinosaurs. That is the vicious cycle of our industry. Let us find a new way to create rounded corners on some faster device then!
Yes. She's 6 weeks old :-)
Your question can be answered with questions...
1) Does experience matter in software development? 2) Is a seasoned architect more likely to create a viable architecture? 3) Is an experienced, low-level developer more productive than a less-experienced, low-level developer?
This sentiment may be ok for entry/mid level developers, but based on my 20 years of professional experience it absolutely is not true for 3. Experience matters.
Well, I cant speek for others but I'm nearly 62, about 36 in the software arena and still able to work for 14 hours a day during long periods of time. And come on, you dont have to be old to have family commitments. Another thing is if I am willing to do so. It depends. If a project group is forced to do such long continuous working periods it means some thing is really bad going on with the project.
And older software developers have something youngsters lack: Experience.
In my case, it is completelly true: Im cynical and my superiors don't buy me with a simple .
The last time I had a job in a software development company (most of the time I work as freelance), my project manager did'nt really loved me, but my team mates and people in other teams did because they quickly learned that I could help them out with their problems in a few minutes. And that caused me problems with the . He said I wasted much time in tasks I was not assigned.
I think eldery and of course experienced people are very useful. You must be very stupid if in 10, 20, or 30 years in the software arena tou did not learn a whole bunch of things really useful in a project.
And let me tell you something. With my 62 years of age, I still investigate and study much more than most of the younger fellows.
Congrats! Welcome to the club. And weeks/months of lack of sleep (oh don't worry, it's coming). Enjoy!
What's her name?
Read the spec, Arbi, it's on the page! ;-)
:-) And now GKing will know what it's like to not have time and family commitments and be dreadfully tired, etc. Happy days are here again.
Read the spec!
This is a fascinating topic and was speaking to my mother about it this week. I'm curious as to when others have suspected an age related decline, if at all. I'm 30, and in many ways I feel like I may have been in peak form in my mid-20s. Recognition of this change raises personal concern about achieving some form of success with more than a decade invested and transitioning to some other way of life away from the frontlines of software development. However, I find some hope in others. For example, although I don't know the full composition of the team, the public faces of the ZFS project at Sun looked to be in their 40s.
Marc Andreessen on age and the entrepreneur: http://pmarchive.com/age_and_the_entrepreneur
This is a nice read since it is applicable to artists, musicians, and scientists. In contrast, physicians don't hit a peak until their 50s.
congrats to you and your wife, and welcome to the papa club :)
On topic: I think every project needs a certain mix of experienced/careful and fresh/powerful/inspired people. I experienced this when I lead a big project in the late 90s, where I had a young guy which was full of ideas - but you couldn't let him do 3 similar dialogues, because he was so fond of trying new things every minute that they all worked completely different.
LieGrue, strub
PS: juergens son is now 4 months, would make a nice couple to end the war ;)
One thing I've noticed (now that I'm rounding the corner to 45, having done this professionally now for a quarter of a century) is that older folks who are not able to cut the mustard--who are incapable or unwilling to spend extra hours on their spare time playing with new technologies or reading the latest technical papers--tend to filter themselves out of the marketplace. They tend to realize that they can't keep up, and either shift careers (by getting an MBA and moving into management), or find niches where they can maximize income while minimizing the effort of learning new technologies. It's not senility--it's practicality.
Those of us, however, who are able to (or in my case, loves to) keep up don't suffer some some of mental senility as some of my 20-something co-workers seem to suggest. In the past two years I've learned three new API frameworks and two new programming languages, gaining sufficient proficiency in three of these to get a new job at a startup. So it is possible to slide past 35 without declining into developer decay.
I think a lot of these myths have cropped up to explain the lack of older developers in our field. But I believe the reason for a lack of older developers is not because of persistent myths, but because of this self-selection.
It is actually scary to me how much of our industry is driven by people who are too young to have any corporate knowledge or experience of older algorithms and techniques, who insist upon inventing everything completely from scratch because they don't know it has already been done before. It's quite obnoxious to come up against the bravado of some young guy fresh out of college trying to tell me about some new algorithm or technique--not realizing it's based on something from the 1960's (before his parents were out of diapers), and getting the details wrong to boot.
I think this attitude--that everything was invented maybe three years before whomever you're talking to graduated from college--and the concerns or limitations of those ideas are completely lost because that young programmer learned it imperfectly--has led us to all sorts of insanity over the past few years. Older developers were highly concerned with personal privacy; younger programmers invented Facebook and said "if you don't want it made public maybe you shouldn't be doing it." Older developers know the source materials and have the experience to use secure hashing to store and transmit passwords; younger programmers don't know this is vitally important and create security holes that allow huge botnets and millions of credit card numbers and personal identity theft to run rampant. (Our banking infrastructure has been computerized for decades and have been transmitting wire money transfers for longer than most developers today have been alive--yet why is it identity theft is a relatively new phenomenon?)
In my opinion re this issue it's very simple - you're only as old as you decide to be ;)
half serious and half not...
i have just had 2 daughters and the eldest is now 9 months. Lack of sleep has meant my last nine months have been like being stuck in first gear. I am now getting uninterrupted sleep and feel the energy of an 18 year old again! My brain seems to have gotten a lot smarter in the last 2 weeks....aaaahh the joys of sleep.
congrats Gavin!
Thanks for the comments on my post, Gavin...
I don't think that my post specifically dissed younger developers, only pointing out that there's a widespread belief that certain characteristics of developers are only prevalent amongst younger ones.
Perhaps you are lucky enough to be out of the way of PHB's at JBoss.org, but I definitely haven't been so lucky in all cases and these are observations I've made over the years in interviews, while interviewing, my own personal bias against older developers early on, and conversations with other developers.
Good Lord that's a beautiful picture! Congratulations, Gavin.
Congrats Gavin, didn't even know you were married. Fun times ahead. Remember to keep those batteries for the camera and camcorder charged :)
for some of us, it is the realization that the fruits of our labor serve only the capital class. i realized long ago that working 90 hours per week for my employer (or for myself) only serves to widen the gap between the rich and poor rather than eliminate it.
personally, i have chosen to focus my efforts on activism and purposefully set limits on what energies i devote to our technology-will-save-the-day culture. For this, i have to thank the purveyors of the XP methodology for implanting in my head the dangerous idea that we should only be laboring 40 hours/week in order to have a life outside of work.
many people the world over have given their lives in the fight against the capital class to ensure we have these things called weekends (if you like them, thank your nearest union member!). However, thanks to the naivite of these young developers willing to give away their labor and work however their employer insists (many work this way out of free will), even weekends may go the way of the dodo bird.
interesting thing about the idea of atrophy: if you don't use it, you lose it.
btw, i don't have kids...
Thanks folks :-)
Errr. Riiight. Clearly you've never traveled to any non-capitalist countries to observe the difference between the haves and have-nots in those societies. The truth is that the last 200 years have delivered almost unimaginable improvements to living standards in those countries fortunate enough to have adopted a free-market system. Meanwhile, most societies without some kind of free market system have stagnated. And it is the poor whose lives are most affected by rising living standards.
One of the reasons people get this stuff wrong is that they assume that utility is a linear function of income, which of course it is not, due to diminishing returns and other factors. So the difference in living standard between someone who earns $10k/year and someone who earns $20k/year is greater than the difference between someone who earns $40k/year and someone who earns $150k/year. (Unfortunately it's difficult to quantify these differences, since you can't really compare between individuals.)
So if you look at income inequality measured in dollars, inequality has slightly risen or remained more or less constant over the last 50 years. But if you account for diminishing marginal returns, and for the differences in consumption mix, inequality has actually fallen. There is now much less in the food we eat, the cars we drive, the gadgets we own, the clothes we wear.
This effect (diminishing marginal returns on extra income) partially explains why you prefer to sacrifice additional income to work less hours per week, whereas a young developer on a lower income is not prepared to make that sacrifice.
Probably with that switch of company I also become very cynical, and not willing to do what the manager would want (if he's saying crap you gotta let him/her know that :D). I don't have to spend 2 days of coding for his client to see soem screens and then decide that the previous version was better, I know from experience that will be the outcome.
So yes, the older we get, the more cynical we get, and that is a good thing. Because you can correct an error before it reached to production level, you can give advice or recommandations to younger programmers, and don't take all the crap the bad managers are trying to pour on your head :).
clearly you spend too much time with the 'cloud minders' in these 'non-capitalist' countries and have no clue as to what you are spouting. the free market system has resulted in a race-to-the-bottom, globally-linked economic system that is on the verge of collapse. well, it is collapsing. just look at how all the capitalist countries are scrambling to prop up the banks.
the truth, gavin, is that while a very small percentage of the world's population is expanding it's wealth at an amazing rate, the remaining 99% of us have our wealth drained, stolen, and bilked by that 1%. i encourage you to read some world news, interact with some poor people (its not really that hard if you open your eyes), maybe even travel to some of these other countries, and you will find that there are populists movements in almost every corner of the world. hmmm, why is that?
these movements are converging, most recently spurred on by the work of anti-globalization (pro-localization is a much better word) activists in seattle '99. non-cloud minders everywhere have finally set their sights on corporations and those free-marketeers who have paved the way for corporate rule of this planet.
perhaps you were thinking of 'fair-trade'? they are two different things.
my father is a recently retired auto-worker, and his union was the only reason my family survived the 90's due to clinton and NAFTA/GATT. i have first had experience with the havoc that these policies wreak. at the time NAFTA was the latest incarnation of ideas put forth by milton friedman (father of disaster capitalism). nixon, reagan, bush1, cliton, and bush2 all carried his torch, but it was reagan and thatcher that really sold the idea of free-market global capitalism to GB and US
oh, btw, you should also educate yourself on the history of the corporation. GB recognized that their imperialistic tendencies needed some refinement, so they began extending to corporations the same rights as it's military. the first american colonies were owned by corporations!
gavin, i choose to define equality from a human rights perspective rather than consumer perspective. if all you are talking about is equality of the things people buy, you are absolutely correct. there is a simple explanation for this: there are a handful of multinational corporations that produce everything. this should be no surprise! however, to say that as human beings, we all have equal rights, you are dead wrong!
can you please explain to me how we have more abject poverty in this world than at any other time in human history, while at the same time have this wonderful system in which everyone benefits? clearly there is a disconnect.
the rising tide does not lift all boats, it smashes them!!!
peace, jeff
Oh c'mon, this is hardly history's first bank bailout! One of the most common errors that the human brain can make is to mistake current short-term cycles for long-term trends. The business cycle has been a feature of all postwar economies, and banking crises have existed since the invention of banking!
How is a good source for information on trends in economic development? How about instead looking at objective measures of well-being like global average life expectancy, global average infant mortality, GDP growth, etc. The long term trends in these indicators are overwhelmingly positive.
I now live most of the year in Mexico. A middle-income country, where a good portion of the population is by the standards of the developing world. I'm quite sure I interact with a lot more people on a daily basis than you do, assuming you live in a developed nation, which seems likely.
And yes, I've traveled extensively in South East Asia and Latin America, and a little in North Africa, and my views are somewhat informed by personal experiences. However, it's always better to mistrust subjective experience and rely upon hard numbers.
Yes, and these demagogues have even met recent electoral success in some latam countries, for example, in Venezuela, which I visited a couple of years ago. And isn't that country doing great! Not. Thankfully Mexico dodged a bullet by narrowly not electing Lopez Obrador.
Any free trade is an exchange of goods and services where both parties obtain something that they value more than what they gave up. The only kind of trade, by definition, is trade which is coerced. (Taxes, for example.)
So near where I live in Mexico, in a rather poor city named Silao, with quite high unemployment, there is a GM factory which employs a fair slice of the population. Explain to me precisely why American workers are more deserving of auto-industry jobs than the residents of Silao. I'm interested to see how you can justify this, given your concern for the poor of the world.
The trade barriers that NAFTA phased out hurt poor workers in latin America at the expense of much more prosperous workers in the United States. Is that your idea of ?
It's kinda hard to know what you would consider a , given your views on other issues. But if we're talking about traditional human rights (of the variety), such as life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, property rights, universal suffrage, the right to self defense, the right to vote, and to trial by jury, etc, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who is more concerned about the erosion of these rights than I am. And I certainly agree that there are very many infringements of these rights going on today. Even in the developed world we have stuff like the war on drugs, arbitrary taxation regimes, infringements upon free speech, and people being locked up for shooting intruders in their own homes. The picture in some developing nations is much grimmer. And let's not even mention North Korea, where essentially the entire populace lives as slaves.
But again, let's look at the big picture. The world is surely much freer, as a whole, since the collapse of almost all of the horrid communist regimes in the 1980s. Both China and India, which together account for a huge slice of the worlds population are both becoming gradually freer.
And China and India provide us with a perfect example of why your dichotomy between and is a false dichotomy. Economic growth and prosperity almost invariably goes hand in hand with increasing liberty.
We definitely do not have more poverty than at any other time in human history. In fact, the opposite is true. We have much less poverty than at any other time in human history. This is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Do yourself a favor and watch this. It's awesome.
It's always fun to believe totally counterfactual things, isn't it :-)
Of course, I don't mean to connect those sentences and imply that India was ever a communist system. However, it's clear that India's experiments with socialism held back development by decades and did nothing to help alleviate widespread poverty.
hey gavin,
i fully understand that these are your opinions formed from your experiences while traveling around teaching hibernate. naturally the kinds of places utilizing hibernate are not going to be in the poor parts of town. your experiences then, come from interactions with the more affluent aspects of society.
that's the ironic thing about experts. some seem to forget that expertise is a very narrow in scope and doesn't necessarily spill over into other areas. it's difficult to be a student after you've been a teacher, it's natural.
i also understand your perspective. you make your living off of an invention used by corporations/multinationals the world over. it must be an incredible feeling to know that something that came out of your head is used to make them more productive and do what they do more efficiently! it must be gratifying :)
for these reasons, i do not expect for you to see things from the perspective of the rest of us. you'll continue to believe what you want to believe. i do sincerely hope for the sake of your daughter's generation you'll eventually see. in the meantime, people like me any my wife will continue to work for her.
anyway, you forgot to mention evo morales, the indigenous president from bolivia who won by a landslide. of course, it's no surprise that the capital class has quickly mobilized against him, but he is holding fine. perhaps you have heard of these tiny things called the World Social Forums in durban, brazil, india and kenya? as far as my 'creds', i forgot to mention that i was the green party candidate for agricultural commissioner in my state in 2004. i'm running for county surveyor this year.
oh, i'll be sure to pass along to my auto-working father and my waitress mother that we've been schooled on being poor by a globe trotting techie. we'll get a good giggle out of that at the next family gathering!!!
signing off, jeff
p.s. human rights: there is this thing called the International Declaration of Human Rights -- it's already defined, check it out!!!
You know nothing about where, how, or why I've traveled. And your guesses are way off. Yes, I've done plenty of business travel. I've stayed in some pimp hotels and got my sleep on in business class. I've also stayed in dirty hostels and worse, traveled by train, bus, boat, grand taxi and tuk tuk. I've ridden a motorcycle from San Francisco to Isla de Omotepe in Nicaragua. You're barking up the wrong tree here, mate.
But the point is that my opinions are not formed by my personal experiences. I'm not so arrogant to assume that the things I've seen in my short life are even a tiny sliver of what is in the world.
Instead, my opinions are formed by looking at facts. Facts like the incredible reduction in poverty and infant mortality over the last centuries. You're a fan of the UN, so go check the UN's statistics, if you don't believe me.
Hey, give him time. He has not yet had enough time in office, or achieved enough power to fuck up Bolivia the way Chavez has fucked up Venezuela. But I imagine he'll get there eventually. He's already totally polarized that society and set citizen against citizen. The history of populist governments in latam is a history of failure. If you're looking for a positive left-ish role model for latin america, try Lula, not Evo Morales.
Well, I certainly don't go to the parliament of dictators and thugs that is the UN to decide what my human rights are. (What a great idea: give a vote to a bunch of asswipes who don't let their own citizens vote!) But honestly, the International Declaration of Human Rights is really not too bad. I've got some concerns about
huh?
And Articles 23-26 contains some rights, where the government forces some group of citizens to provide to other citizens, but these sections are sufficiently wishy-washy that I'm not too bothered by them.
Oh and:
is just disgusting. My human rights are not circumscribed by whatever a totally non-democratic international club of dictators ascribes to itself.
But overall it could have been a lot worse.
oh, i get it. but it is ok for you to make assumptions and statements about my experience and qualifications? i've got two words for you, gavin: white privilege
hey, since you are soooo familiar with mexico, perhaps you will find this interesting: Temping Down Labor Rights: The Manpowerization of Mexico
jeff
LOL!!!
sounds like the WTO or the Bankers to me. so we've some full circle and you made my point for me. on top of that you brought me back to why i have limited my energies i give to my employer! well done gavin
jeff
hey gavin,
i almost forgot. instead of waxing philosophical on things outside of your domain, why dont you join us in toronto for the G-20 summit or in mexico city for the climate change conference this year (i plan on being at one of them)
i'll can let you know which one if you want to come and learn something!
jeff
So, so far, I've made a number of points about how life is getting better all over the world, and that the biggest improvements have happened, or are in the process of happening, in those places where economic and political freedom is greater (i.e. capitalist-ish places).
As an aside: we don't really need to quibble about economic freedom vs. political freedom, since they almost always go hand in hand. It's very difficult to maintain restrictions upon economic freedoms in a democracy, and it's more difficult to restrict political freedom in a rich country. Those are not ironclad rules, but they seem to generally hold.
My arguments are based upon fairly conventional economics, and upon statistics which are generally accepted. Pretty middle-of-the-road stuff. Stuff that is accepted by pretty much all professional economists.
Every one of your of the points I have made has been to call me or (!), or tell me that I need to , or claim that I have insufficient personal experience of poverty to be able to have an opinion on the subject.
My arguments do not rest on my (a) personal experience, (b) economic situation, (c) education, or (d) skin color, and therefore these items cannot be used to refute them. This is a style of argument called , and an especially weak example thereof. The arguments I made are valid or they are not valid, independent of who is making them.
I'm sure that if I were a black factory-working single mother with a PhD in economics and another in sociology saying these things, you would still disagree with them. So my skin color and economic situation are just not relevant to why you disagree with me. Try addressing the substance. Bringing up my skin color just makes you sound like an ass.
The fact that you have not responded with any counter-argument of substance tells me that you have not actually thought this stuff through very far. Your beliefs seem to be based more upon emotion than upon reason and knowledge of economics. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
So precisely what is your point? That labor conditions are often lower in developing nations or in nations in the earlier stages of industralisation? Well, duh! Have you read about labor conditions in Europe during the industrial revolution? Horrid. Much worse than Mexico today. And yet the industrial revolution was the incredible spark that began the only extended period of improvement in the human condition that the world has ever known. Before the industrial revolution, virtually everyone, everywhere lived in abject poverty. 200 years later, and a huge slice of the globe has escaped poverty and leads unimaginably freer, longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives, with far greater physical wellbeing.
And yes, I do know some folks who work in factories in central Mexico and the conditions described in that article are not atypical. It seems that conditions are generally better working for a US company like GM, than for a Mexican (or Chinese) company.
Or is your point that people in poor countries get paid low wages? Double duh.
But these are not really the interesting questions. The interesting questions are:
As to the why, it's always difficult to prove one when you look at one country in isolation. Mexico has suffered centuries of bad government. But it seems clear that a history of experiments with socialistic policies and a general lack of economic freedom is a major contributing factor. That's finally changing.
As to the best way to improve prosperity, the answer seems obvious. Mexico should follow the model that has worked in Asia and other parts of the world, and open up to foreign direct investment and encourage local entrepreneurship. It should become more capitalist. Which is the path Mexico is already taking. We know from our own history that this path eventually leads to improved labor conditions and higher wages.
I don't know what with a capital is, but if the WTO started trying to define my , I would take an equally dim view. But of course, it doesn't. So I don't see the relevance.
I have been playing this game for almost over 20 years and I have to agree with both sides a bit on the age issue (leaving the global political debate alone for now). In general, I think senior developers are those who learn constantly regardless of their age. If you like to solve problems and have fun doing so, you'll continue to be productive for many years. With age does tend to come experience, but that turns into an annoyance when it is used to dismiss new ideas from younger developers.
With the explosion of our industry, we have also seen a large influx of young "software engineers" that can't. I would personally say that I have been dissapointed with a general lack of enthusiasm among many of the very newly graduated candidates. They expect to earn high-$$$s and are not commited to the work required. Perhaps that may be the next myth to discuss.
Good topic.
On the global economy discussion: Where there is less war and more entrepreneurial freedom, there are less poor. Even China, which is still theoretically communist, is seeing its biggest economic gains by turning a blind eye towards those evil capitilists in their own nation. Of course we need balance... We work to live and not live to work, but it helps to enjoy your work.
Cheers!
hey gavin,
perhaps you might find this interesting. your hero alan greenspace concedes that free market is broken
the longest journey starts with the first step. i'll prod you along by encouraging you to understand the difference between fact and reality. i'll give you a hint: any statistics 101 student can answer this one...
later! jeff
actually, the inverse is true! anywhere there are more economic freedoms, there are less political freedoms. this is clearly documented. i mentioned to you earlier that this was the propaganda that reagan and thatcher sold to their respective countries. equating economic freedom to political freedom was the brain child of milton freidman, and has been the greatest scam pulled over on citizens everywhere. well, aside from WallStreet and the Bankers.
if this is true, can you explain why in every capitalist country, elections must be rigged so that the capital class remains in power?
again, gavin, we come back to perspective. you are speaking of corporate freedoms (and you are a corporate libertarian, as espoused by your beliefs in this thread). the freedom to pathologically pursue profit is not the kind of freedom that i and 99% of the world dream of.
i suggest you learn about disaster capitalism.
seriously dude, please join me in toronto or mexico city and see for yourself.
hell, even greenspan knows when to cut his losses. if you wont listen to me, listen to him!!!!
good luck, jeff
wrong again! FDI is the first step that a country makes towards giving up its sovereignty.
FDI is another tool in the belt of the economic colonizers. we are currently in a transition phase where we are moving from outright colonization to economic colonization. this parallels the relationship between the military and the corporation when imperialist powers realized they needed a way to operate under-the-radar. likewise, corporations are now assuming the role of nation states. something like 77 of the top 100 economies are corporations. (you really should educate yourself on structural adjustments and the IMF)
corporations are subservient to people, not the other way around!
sorry man, i choose to be a citizen of spaceship earth.
jeff
hey gavin,
your confusion is understandable. the first requirement for a true democracy is freedom of and access to information. you can hardly get the 'facts' when the media is owned by weapons manufacturers. there is this thing called 'conflict of interest' and when you are in the business of war, reality is bad. facts must be engineered to produce the desired outcome.
the hurdle for us is to learn to weed out the corporate news and seek out independent news sources who follow true journalistic practices, rather than producing what their employer wants them to produce.
hmmmm, are you seeing a pattern here?
how sad is it when tabloids are reporting real news, when the so-called 'true' outlets are producung entertainment?
jeff
Please name one country that has given up its sovereignty as a result of foreign direct investment.
Oh, so you don't actually mean in the traditionally understood sense of the word . You're working from your own private definition of the word by which you mean economic isolation, not self-government.
Precisely which corporations have armies and control territory? (Actually, by definition, a corporation that assumed the role of a nation state (controlling territory) would be a nation state.)
You're delusional. Name one media outlets in a western nation that is owned by an arms manufacturer.
I never mentioned Alan Greenspan and I he's not my hero. You're just making stuff up.
Again, you're simply making stuff up. Yes, it's difficult to come up with objective numerical measures of , and the relationship between the two kinds of freedom is not precise. Human societies are messy and unique and defy easy characterization.
But it doesn't take much knowledge of the world to notice that democratic nations generally have freer (and less corrupt) economies than non-democratic nations. By making ridiculous claims like this, you don't persuade anyone of your point of view, rather you discredit yourself by demonstrating your ability to believe in counter-factuals. That makes people less likely to pay attention to the rest of what you have to say.
Do you really, truly, deep down, believe that elections are more rigged in western capitalist nations than in former eastern bloc nations, the middle east, Africa, China, Pakistan, Venezuela, North Korea? Really, truly? Or are you just saying that because you think it sounds good? I'm trying to establish if you're sane and arguing in bad faith, or delusional and arguing in good faith. Because what you're saying definitely isn't objectively believable.
Thanks for reducing me to a label. And it's a new one to me - I've never heard anyone self-describe using the term . A quick google search reveals that it seems to be an epithet applied to libertarians by the far left. Basically, name-calling.
Sorry mate, next time I'm in the DF, it will definitely be for shopping in Polanco, food in La Condesa, and salsa at Mama Rumba. I have much better things to do with my life than protest against modernity with a bunch of Gringos. But if you go, I recommend spending some time outside of the DF. Seriously, there's much more interesting things to do in Mexico, that will enrich your life a whole lot more. Mexico is one of the culturally richest places I've ever been.
Having spent a year motorcycling through Central America (a significant portion with Gavin), let me suggest you travel to a few of these places and meet a few of the people you obviously have no clue about. Leave the tin-foil sombrero at home.
Jeff (S)
I am surprised I actually read this discussion. Jeff, I just don't get the underlying point you have, which seems to be that people that work hard make it more difficult for those that don't. That's a pretty obvious statement. Like it or not we are all in competition, no matter how many rules and regulations society chooses to place on itself.
hey jason,jeff,gavin,
thats awesome! you know you are being effective when gavin has to summon the gang to rush to his aid!
i have given enough information, stop being haters, and read the links i have provided. to help you along, here is a link to the weapons manufacturer that owns media
jeff
hey jason,
first, thank you for taking the time to read this thread.
the underlying point is that corporations must be tamed and free-market global capitalism has brought the planet to it's knees; the three vehicles of the capital class (corporations, wall street and free-market capitalism) are intimately related. for my part, i choose to tame the corporation by limiting what i invest of myself. you can think of it as 'devaluing' the corporation. for wall street, i choose not to invest my money in any securities. as far as free-market capitalism goes, i just don't participate in it's consumerism. i buy things that are hand made, i am vegan so i buy my produce locally (coops), i understand true cost pricing.
it's your challenge to understand just what your labor supports, i can't do that for you or anyone else for that matter. once you begin to understand the basic relationships, you begin to see the revolving doors that exist between governments and corporations. seriously, how in the hell do you think an idiot like GWB was elected; we all know by now that it wasn't done democratically.
it's time to put capitalism and the free-market to bed as the failed experiment they are, and move forward with a more people oriented approach. we don't need global-scale businesses, we need human-scale businesses.
when i speak to other developers, i like to use the specification/implementation analogy. typically, this is directed at americans, so i have to explain how 'America-the api' is awesome, but 'America-the implementation' is all wrong. it was crafted by aristocrats who believed in slavery, and it shows in our history and we live with it's consequences even today. once i then relate that to software and how we would never tolerate such broken software for so long, the lights go on.
i hope this better explains my position, feel free to contact me if it does not!
jeff
OMG, are you serious??? hmmm, white males cruising around a brown country with money made from their corporate adventures: if that is not the picture of white privilege, i'm not sure what is...
wow. hey, you know i dressed up as a samurai for holloween, but that doesn't make me a samurai...
no, actually it is not. the term was introduced by David C. Korten to describe the set of beliefs that you espouse, your ideologocal persuasion.
sorry about that, one of the cats just crawled all over the keyboard.
anyway, no, not name calling. saying someone is a 'corporate libertarian' is no different than saying someone is a 'libertarian', or a 'green' like myself
jeff
OK so your point has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Trolling is not welcome here.
Well, LOL, you got me there! GE - the largest company on earth, does indeed have some defense-related business (primarily aircraft engines, but also some weapons systems). And GE owns NBC - though it seems to be in the process of selling NBC to Comcast. Now, I would never have described GE as a (that's a vanishingly small part of their business, so small that it doesn't even rate a mention in wikipedia), but they do manufacture weapons, so the description is literally true. Haha! :-)
But what makes this example truly funny is that NBC is the home, not of Fox News, or the WSJ, or any other conservatively-inclined media outlets, but of MSNBC, home of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews - the most rabidly leftwing broadcasters on US cable TV!
So, Jeff, I suppose you're correct in saying that we, the sheeple, are being fed capitalist propaganda by arms manufacturer Keith Olbermann. ROFL!
You really are obsessed with race, huh? Dude, that's just not a good look. Really it's not.
Earlier in this discussion you said:
But now that you discover that I have, in fact, done these things, it turns out they weren't such good things after all - indeed, they form a . So help us out here: should we or should we not visit other countries, interact with the inhabitants, etc?
And would it make a difference if I was black? Asian? Latino? Female? Which race/gender combinations are permitted to visit other countries on motorcycles and which are not? Cos I have a couple of Asian and Latino friends with motorbikes and I want to know if I can invite them to come riding with me in Mexico...
Inquiring minds want to know!
And what I love about capitalism is that in this capitalist economy you are free to pursue your own preferences without getting in the way of my desire to own a goodly number of large-displacement, fossil-fuel burning, Italian and German cars and motorcycles and eat delicious animals, especially Bison mmmmmmmmm Bison.
The free market provides us each with products customized to our individual preferences. Isn't there something just magical about capitalism?
Actually the way this works is:
First they fight you, then they ridicule you, then they ignore you, and then... it really doesn't matter, because we've just moved on to the ignore stage.
Jeff (S)
...and if no-one would have said anything you would have of course taken it as proof that you're right. I've seen soooo many cases of your kind around. Throwing around high-flying arguments that might look impressive at a quick glance but you don't really answer any questions or cite any sources. Let's see... your next step should be to start quoting logical fallacies (remember to use the latin names, they're much more impressive). And yes, I know what will follow from this post. And I still couldn't stop myself from writing it. Sigh.
I haven't laughed this much about a blog on in.relation.to since forever :-D
again guys, the info is all there. you have to actually read it!
oh, and i love that fact that someone here has corrected ghandi! rich ....
trolling? really? c'mon ...
Whoa! I came back to see what other posts may have been here and found all that?!
Perhaps age of the developer doesn't really matter. It's really all about the Marxist perfection we're all missing out on.
Now that IS funny! I'll be checking back for more interesting threads.
Cheers!
Speaking of short-term cycles vs. long-term trends, one only needs to observe the larger environmental trends to see the capitalist party is about to come to a tragic end.
Yes, for a few hundred years and over geographically limited areas, capitalism did an uncanny job of fostering technological innovation and improvements to the human condition, and Hibernate is one noteworthy example, but will technology be potent enough to overcome global climate change, the depletion of oil and the mass extinction of species that our planet is now experiencing?
And as for all this talk about our cherished freedoms in the democratic world, why don’t you ask the fishermen in the Gulf, if they feel free and empowered by capitalism. This is a great example of why capitalism is a long-term disaster waiting to happen. BP was free to extract oil from the bottom of the ocean, but that freedom came at the expense of the fishermen and marine life. In a world of limitless resources and technology, the libertarian philosophy makes perfect sense. Everyone is free to produce wealth from their own labor and creativity. But in a world of increasingly constrained and endangered resources, ownership is the act of one group taking control of a resource and denying others access. Every time you turn on an air conditioner, or take a recreational drive to a park, you are depleting a natural resource that belongs to you only because there is a system coercive laws that protect your access.
When the shit hits the fan, the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, will become a mad-max society of raging lunatics “competing” for the last few precious drops of oil. Personally, I’d rather live in civilized Europe where there are socialist aspects of government investing in the collective good.
Anyway, that's the take of one over-the-hill Java developer. :)
Since 26th of february you didn't post anything. Did you change your blog? Cheers
That's what I was just thinking...
He's a new father, that may explain it...
Off topic: Has anybody actually lived with an Amazonian tribe or similar aboriginal tribe say in Australia? Death and taxes, right? Wrong. Just death.
Vancouver rocks, just visited there for vacation. Highly recommended (esp. during jazz festival!). Very cool/friendly ppl there.
I never understood the whole vegan concept, why do we have incisor teeth??
Politics is boring. What an interesting tangent though, I read almost the entire thread.
Are you guys running for president or what? Bet you would beat Palin.
Let's see what the Mayans have in store for us...
On topic: single developers have more free time to code/research, etc. than older married ones with families do (trust me, I have personal experience on this one).
Long time no news of Gavin, he went to do it?
Gavin had left Radhat，and joined Facebook ：）
wai, wait lemme get this straight... Gavin isn't a Black Factory-Working woman with a PhD in Economics?