Sven7

This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.

The article is not about whether programmers are doing well for themselves. It's about what happens to the rest of society when only one section (tech\finance) do well for themselves at the expense of everyone else?

I fully agree with this piece.

I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated.

Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.

My favorite kind of cranky old geezer. Inspired.

I'd like to believe there is a secret rag tag bunch of 60-70 year old, retired Engineers out there working on some cool tech.

If we have 60-70 year old's running for president, moving the markets on wall st and robbing diamonds there just have to be a few greybeards dying of cancer working on perpetual motion or something. I mean this is the generation that built the first rockets and computers with fucking slide rules. I am sure a few lurk around here. What are you busybodies upto?

Interesting. Could explain why the different wiring produces the same computation.

I am just curious to see what, this generation of 20-40 year old's who get lucky, end up doing with their cash. They do seem a bit more worldly wise than the last gen (who I blame for funding all the BS tech we see today).

Agree and also Investors have a bias towards the student crowd as they are much easier to impress and deal with, than an experienced Academic or Engineer.

I agree with you. Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.

In so many ways. You can find the pattern everywhere once you start looking.

On a recent trip I saw the after effects of a Nokia factory closing. Now one would think given the boom in phones it wouldn't be an issue for the employees to get new jobs. Two years after loosing their jobs the majority were involved in evangelical churches or multilevel marketing schemes.

Disruption does many useful things, but I feel the benefits are accruing to fewer and fewer people at the expense of many.

Since the crowd around here can't exist without an increase in poverty, the real question is how many poor people do we need to produce one Zuckerberg. If we want more Zuckerbergs we need more poor people, just as if we want more whales in the ocean we need more ocean.

Pretty sure Trump can work out a nice formula to export the poor into the developing world, in return for an expansion of H1B visas or something. Given the clamor I still see in China and India for people coming in, shouldn't be too hard to work out. Also they don't use toilet paper there.

And yes I am that cynical of the crowd around here and the effect the tech industry has had on increasing poverty.

"Computers" were actually clerks in the census office that spent their days manually adding up and multiplying things. They got replaced by IBM's tabulators well before the 30's. But you are right IBM's inventory at the time was mostly tabulators.

Also well worth reading about T.J Watson.

IBM was one of the few American companies that had no layoffs during the depression in the 30's.

Inventories built up. No sales. And he was almost fired.

Once the recovery started every company and govt in the world wanted a computer and the rest is history.

Amen.

It's an unfortunate effect of social media and the information overload. People get flooded with info. They spot hypocrisy. They think they are doing gods works by pointing it out. They get encouraged by the likes and retweets. And we get an endless cycle of people who have no idea what to do about hypocrisy upvoting each other.

The architecture needs to change. We have hit peak hypocrisy detection. You can detect hypocrisy in anything by spending a few days looking into things just like the "activist" editors have. The kind of people who do things about hypocrisy...well...where's the algo for that?

Well...the conservative nature is mostly cause they haven't discovered the internet yet. Zuckerberg is working on it with drones over the Serengeti and such.