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1245
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Exactly. In the context it was discussed, it was a white thing.

  • You should see the CNN segment where a white lady argued with the black host that slavery wasn't a white thing. CNN, not Fox.

  • THX-1138

    Gotta watch this film again.

  • I'm dowloading a backup and will be seeding it. 😄

  • What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you'd study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you'd choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you'd continue past high school.

  • Yes my point is that it's a feature of using the market to decide these variables in the economy, that includes the supply-demand dynamics. If we used some form of planning at the macro level that takes data from the industry and educational institutions, project long term direcrion, and propagate targets or at least expectations down the industry and educational institutions, we could save a ton of real resources and parts of people's lives, and reduce the negative social effects of this process. Effects that destabilize the whole system if they grow to any significant proportions.

  • Can you share the firm or the union representing? I'm curious if it's a viable place for me. 😄

  • In software?

  • That's not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I'm not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That's why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I'd have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won't catch me claiming they're professional training factories.

  • The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.

    The numbers aren't too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.

    It's important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there's no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don't have to do it this way but that's how it's been decided for a while now.

    I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn't find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn't have an answer then and people around me couldn't explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.

  • In other words, Marx was right.

  • Google's fucked.

  • Yup, a democratic system should be judged on its outcomes, not its structure. If the decisions taken by a democratic organization do not strongly align with the wishes of the large majority of its members, then it isn't democratic. There are plenty such examples playing out today. Besides, in representative democracy voting at the various elections is not enough to achieve highly aligned outcomes. By the time you get to the ballot box a whole lot of the fundamental decisions have been made without your input. E.g. who the representatives candidates are and what their candidate platforms are. This is how you get to "all the choices suck" and "vote for the least bad option" scenarios. Meanwhile the prebaked decions that lead to these scenarios are going to benefit the interested groups that made them. The effect of voting at the ballot box in such scenarios then becomes providing consent to satisfy those interests.

    E: And of course any leftist can explain why and how those interests arise and how they capture the representative democratic system. And how that produces loss of faith in the system.

  • After the nuclear holocaust, it'll be the cocroaches and they'll run The Universal Operating System whenever they rediscover the computer.

  • The next version of Debian won't be more ambient and pervasive. It would be just the same as it is today.

  • Yeah, op is clearly ignoring some very important differences that have actual, material consequences that are pretty obvious. The argument is that there's no perfect solution therefore they're all the same/similar. Which isn't a great argument.

  • I think they mentioned 20-30 days in their original announcement.