Alex63

If we assume that income reflects society's demand for an individual's labor/skills/knowledge, and we arbitrarily increase income with no concomitant increase in demand then we have to assume something else is going to shift. A couple of outcomes seem likely to me:

* employer wages for low-demand workers will drop, as competition for low-demand workers will not increase, and those workers will accept a lower wage reasoning that the UBI 'makes up the difference'

* if employer wages are not allowed to drop below a certain point (the minimum wage), then more disposable income will create increased demand for scarce resources (e.g., housing that is a bit better than currently occupied) thereby causing prices to rise.

I'm no Econ major, so happy to hear how my reasoning may be in error.

I think you'll find it is closed, unless you have an urgent need to cross (e.g., sick parent). If you do cross, you will have to self quarantine for 2 weeks (which kind of defeats the purpose of trying to help your sick relative). Last we heard, it will be June 21 before we can visit our parents in Vancouver.

Someone is going to be busy...

Chariots of the Gods [1] The GMO Deception [2] How to End the Autism Epidemic [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chariots-Gods-Erich-von-Daniken-ebook...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/GMO-Deception-Corporations-Government...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Autism-Epidemic-J-B-Handley/dp/16...

If you are looking for salary growth, then moving into an Operations management role is probably your fastest path. If you want to stay involved in the technical side of service delivery, building on the investment you have already made in your sysadmin skills is probably the safer bet. SysAdmin and developer roles are quite different, so you may find that moving into a developer role is a bigger change than you anticipated. If you are really interested in software development (do you do it as a hobby?), then by all means try landing a junior developer role.

Interesting insight into US wool sourcing.

This probably isn't the type of war story you were expecting, but...

Many years ago I was the leader of an application maintenance team. The application had an n-tier client-server architecture. The database was DB2, running on an MVS system (with CICS).

We had some records that had incorrect information in them about the business process (basically what state they were in in the workflow). The team had to reset the business process info to the correct value. We wrote an UPDATE statement, and tested it in our non-production environment. Everything looked good.

In order to perform the clean up, we needed to create some new JCL to run the UPDATE statement in production. Because we had not yet learned better, the process involved re-keying the SQL into a new JCL file. Unfortunately, when the developer re-keyed the statement into the new JCL, he accidentally inserted a ';' before the WHERE clause.

The morning after the job was supposed to run, I asked the developer whether it had worked. "Yes," he told me. I asked him how many records had been updated in the end. He checked. Then he told me a number that was so big I knew something must have gone wrong. As you have probably already realized, we had updated every record in the table. We had changed the state of every workflow in our system.

We were very fortunate that we had a nightly backup AND I had a more senior manager who realized that we could repair the records using the data in the backup without doing a full restore. The org lost about a day of productivity, and we learned to never re-enter code that had been successfully tested. We parameterized our JCL after that.

The Mythical Man Month, Brooks. Probably more than 200 pages, but you can read the chapters as stand-alone essays. There are other good books about programming as a social activity, but everyone who does development for a living should read this one.

Not as thin, but you might find Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style interesting as a follow-up to S&W.

Hear, hear. The Diamond Age is probably my favourite:

  The Diamond Age +++
  Snow Crash ++
  Quicksilver/The Confusion/The System of the World ++ (I think it makes sense to rate them as a series)
  Anathem +
  Seveneves -
  Cryptonomicon -
  Reamde --

Fall, or Dodge in Hell: hate to admit it but I haven't read it yet. It's sitting right next to The Rise and Fall of DODO, which is also waiting to be read. And I should probably read Zodiac at some point, but it hasn't seemed urgent.

The 'one file' installs the other tools for you. At least mine does. I move between machines regularly, and when I do I just install emacs according to the recommended method for the particular OS and copy my init.el file to the new machine. All the packages I depend on are installed the first time I run emacs. And my init.el would be considered pretty basic by the standards of an advanced user.

It's interesting to me that you say you did software development as a hobbyist before you made it your job. So presumably there was something that interested you enough to pursue it in your spare time. It would be interesting to know more about what does interest you, as opposed to the things that don't. Maybe you could provide more info?

I agree with commentators who say software development can be a terrible job if you aren't really interested in it. I knew a lot of young consultants at Accenture when I worked there in the early 90s who hated the programming roles they were expected to do for the first couple of years. But most of them were not from comp sci backgrounds, and wanted to move into management consulting roles as quickly as possible.

Based on your comments about having trouble learning and generalizing, it sounds like you might be happier in a more process-oriented role. Or maybe you would be happier in a role that was more focused on personal interaction?

No criticism of TACP intended, but I don't think you would find it very helpful in learning "how to program like the pioneers did in the old days." I don't remember too many of my older colleagues in the 1980s having copies of Knuth. It was something you might encounter among computer scientists, but not day-to-day working programmers. We rarely thought about algorithms in that way when we were building business systems. If we did need an algorithm (maybe to sort some customer records that were stored on tape) we would dig out the IBM or DEC binders and look up the system call that we were supposed to use.

I suspect that programmers who have grown up in the era of the PC would be surprised at how much the vendors supplied. The IBM mainframes came with huge libraries of software and documentation. I remember being given a UNIX box for a project at the telco where I worked, and being a little surprised at how little was included compared to the IBM or DEC machines of the day.

There certainly were some good programmers around, but a lot of "development" consisted of taking a copy of some existing COBOL program and tweaking a few things to create a new report. Out of two or three years of working in COBOL, I don't think I ever wrote a program completely from scratch. As a creative outlet, it was much more interesting to work in C and try to figure out how the guys at Bell Labs were doing things. Those are the shoulders that many of us stand on today.

I used COBOL on PDP 11/7X (RSTS/E) and VAXen (VMS) back in the 80s, and on IBM mainframes (I graduated in '85). I can't say that I was a big fan of the language, or the SCREEN SECTION specifically. The SCREEN SECTION is basically a description of labels, input fields, and display areas and where they appear on the screen (line, column). The COBOL program can reference the input fields and display areas as a variable. Typically you would use the 'move' statement to copy a value from a variable or a literal to the display variable.

I don't know that anyone would ever want to do things the same way today. Today we expect interfaces to adjust to the available screen and font size, which to the best of my recollection was not something that the old COBOL screens could do. There are still 'text-based user interface' tools available, although the modern approach is to link them into the program as a library rather than having them built into the language runtime. The curses (or ncurses) and s-lang libraries are what comes to mind.

Yep. I keep checking for availability announcements from Starlink. 5 Mbps ADSL was "acceptable" for casual use, but is not so good for working from home.

I'm slightly surprised (this being HN) that no one has noted that the Jamie Zawinski quoted in the article is the Jamie Zawinski (jwz, known for Xemacs and Xscreensaver) . Or is it just too obvious to mention?

Regardless, his comments seem very much in character.

But what do you do when the government is trying to shut down your access to banking (as in the case of gun sellers)?

Haven't tried SuperPutty, but I find that Putty + ConEmu is good for a tabbed UI.

Hear, hear! DA is my favorite; love the Turing machine castle.

Now that's a zip line!

>> I wish there were an equally clever idiom I could trot out when people criticise professions they probably know noting about.

Isn't that "Pointy-Haired Boss syndrome"?

IMHO, for the same reason many of them are interested in Buddhism. I think many middle-upper class people struggle to understand why they are not happy in spite of their material wealth. Buddhism, Stoicism, and other philosophies offer answers for how one can find happiness/satisfaction in life, irrespective of one's material possessions or status. I also think that Stoicism in particular may currently be popular because, in comparison to eastern philosophies, it is more grounded in traditional Western thought and may be easier for Westerners to understand. At least compared to my efforts to understand Taoism, for example.

My knowledge of Stoicism (in the philosophical sense, not behavioral) is based on recently reading The Practicing Stoic, by Ward Farnsworth (https://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Stoic-Philosophical-Users-...). I recommend the book as a good introduction to incorporating Stoicism into one's life, and I think readers would be hard-pressed to see an endorsement of "toxic ideology" in the thoughts of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and other Stoic thinkers.

It's a tricky trade-off. The last couple of times we visited Disneyland, the crowds were so bad that it didn't feel worth it. However, I'm not sure I'm ready to pay $100+ per person per day for less congestion. I think I topped out at $99.

Canada has free movement between provinces, including Quebec, which has a different language and a different legal system. Not arguing the larger point one way or the other, but wanted to add this data point.

I was taught (as a Canadian from an English family) that the only people who should be addressed as "doctor" in normal conversation are MDs and active/retired college/university professors. What is common etiquette today?

I'm a fan of Standard Ebooks for my Kobo Aura One reader. Their EPUB versions look great.

Hear, hear. And not just taste as evidenced by his possessions, but also the good taste to appreciate her uncle and aunt. I think we should also give some weight to the good impressions that Georgiana and the housekeeper at Pemberly may have made upon her.

Wouldn't such a law (assuming it could pass in the first place) run afoul of the First Ammendment? Maybe you could ban payment for lobbying, but I would have thought that "lobbying" and "political advocacy" were essentially the same thing, and thus protected speech. I like Glenn Reynold's (Instapundit) idea: a high tax on any earnings from lobbying in the first X years after leaving government service.

First, understand that there isn't really a Canadian federal health care system. The Canadian government (federal) transfers funds to the provinces, which operate health plans for provincial residents. The provincial health plans control the number of available specialists. A health care provider can only bill the provincial plan if they have a billing number, and the provincial plans manage billing numbers to limit/encourage specialists and to make sure doctors provide services in less populous areas. I don't know if it's still the case, but historically there was no private alternative available (so doctors couldn't operate a private practice that didn't need a billing number from the provincial plan). If provinces chose to allow private practices, the federal government threatened to withhold funds from the plan.

As with most western democracies, Canadian doctors are well compensated in comparison to the rest of society. But it is generally understood that they can make more money in the US if they qualify for immigration (and many can because of rules allowing people with specialist skills to get immigrant visas). This also contributes to reduced supply of specialists, and longer waiting times.

To get to see one of the available specialists in Canada, you have to have a referral from a primary care provider. Here in the US (in my experience) a referral is as simple as saying to your GP, "I want to see a cardiologist." Then your GP says "Oh, sure, this one's very good. I'll refer you." In Canada, your GP has to follow plan guidelines for referrals, and confirm that it is warranted. Then you get on the waiting list for the specialist. You'll wait for a consultation. At the consultation the specialist will determine whether or not you need treatment, and the urgency. Then you go on the waiting list for treatment.

Of course, Canadians with the financial resources are free to travel to other countries to obtain medical treatment more quickly. The provincial medical plans do not pay for treatments obtained outside of Canada. Medical "tourism" is not that unusual, including travel to the US and other countries.

I'm not sure that I understand your point. I'm not arguing that increasing minimum wage is the only cause of inflation. I was saying that like inflation, increasing minimum wage affects everyone in the economy eventually.

Don't you agree that if you arbitrarily increase wages for a significant segment of the population, that segment will now want more of the goods and services they could not previously afford? Increased demand will drive up prices for those goods and services unless supply increases at the same time. If prices do go up, those with more bargaining power will seek higher returns for their labor. The net effect will be that almost everyone will see their income rise to some extent, but the supply of goods and services they are chasing is going to remain essentially the same. So almost all of us will be paying more for the same stuff. The only way that won't happen is if supply could magically increase at no extra cost – but that can't happen because we've raised the wages of all the people that supply those goods and services.