CleanedStar

You couldn't have hit the nail more on the head.

Of course you're right.

There's no debate over this question, like say, physicists getting together to debate quantum mechanics, in a desire to all get to the truth together. This is a fight, a struggle over how the pie gets divided up. Any statement someone makes is basically just a declaration of how there bread is buttered - are they a worker, a programmer, a creator of wealth? Or are they some parasite heir who collects dividends from Intel, or are a limited partner for some VC? Or worse a flunky for one of those types.

There's one question to ask, really. WHO came up with this law? Was it the programmers, DBAs etc. getting together pushing for these laws? Was it even the H1-Bs - who are chained to companies like a slave chained up at a plantation? Of course not. Whose faces do we see on the fwd.us page? Mark Pincus - fresh off of ripping his workers off of their options. Keith Rabois, Khosla partner - he was bounced from Square because he was playing grab-ass with one of his underlings who he was porking - the underling filed a lawsuit. Mr. Lace Curtain political mover and shaker himself Ron Conman - Conman is lace-curtain Irish, meaning he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pisses in it. Blah blah blah, VCs, "super-angels", incubatorers, current/former CEOs (Bill Gates) blah blah.

Really we don't even see whose pulling the strings. They love to shove some 20/30-something techie CEO like Zuckerberg or Drew Houston on there. But really it's all for the people the CEOs got their money from. Which is not even the VCs, because they're front men too. It's the heirs who give money to the VCs, the limited partners we never see. They're the kind of people Nixon said on his tapes that hung out at the Bohemian Grove, the San Francisco heirs whose hands he felt like washing after he shook it. Even Nixon felt disgusted by these heirs.

"the growth of Silicon Valley" - real meaning, "the growth of the profits of the heirs who own the majority of tech company stocks, are the VC limited partner financiers etc."

"There are no unemployed competent programmers". This has two meaningless adjectives - unemployed and competent. People working at McDonalds are "employed". Competent is a completely arbitrary concept as well, some people consider only 1% of programmers comptent. So this sentence is double meaningless.

My experience with HR at companies - if you dropped out of college in your senior year you're SOL - they want someone with a Bachelors. Sometimes even a Masters. They want an unbroken history of jobs going back to leaving college - if you decided to take a summer off and travel, god help you. Before you have even sat down to talk, they want references from your former 3 bosses, so you have to beg them for a favor to give you a recommendation - to a company which you might not even be working for. The interview happens during working hours, so odds are you'll have to take a vacation day just to interview at the place.

Then there is specialization. Knowing how heaps work or other elemental CS and programming concepts does not matter to the interviewer. Knowing Python in and out does not matter to the interviewer. Having a pretty good grasp of the Django web framework does not matter to the interviewer. What does matter is that they, unlike your company, use multiple databases with Django, so they will drill you on that. Oh you don't know how to select different databases in a QuerySet? That's it for you - next. Of course, you can go out of your way to learn this specific part of the framework, but then it will just be another specific part of Django you don't know. Or maybe they run CherryPy.

The real thing is companies used to actually train people. Now they won't wait a week for someone to get up to speed with some sub-specialization. So they leave the position open until they find such a person. This is not a shortage of people, it's a lack of desire to invest by investors.

Grenada was a "major conflict"? Only if the entire US military versus a bunch of infighting leftists on a 344 square kilometer island with a population of less than 100,000 counts as a major conflict.

In the opening issue of the National Review, William F. Buckley said the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop". When their political antithesis ended in the early 1990s, the book that probably best summed up the establishment intellectual view of the time was one which said we were at "The End of History".

I think comments such as these bookending the Cold War speak for themselves. The tendencies of monopoly capitalism have been written about for over a century. Romney's slam of Tesla is part of all that (please don't say Romney was against Tesla due to government breaks - it's more difficult to name a large company not getting government subsidies than one which does get one, including Romney's own Steel Dynamics). The Democratic party is so near this position as well to be almost indistinguishable from the GOP.

FIOS means fiber optic which means the speed of light. Recent breakthroughs allow multiple signals down one fiber cable, which means multiple times the speed of light.

Yes, the fault for slow service in the US, as compared to the rest of the world, is people like this guy - not that the local telco and local cable company have a monopoly over the local loop and are usually one of the biggest, if not the biggest contributors to state (and federal) government campaigns.

Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted.

More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce.

This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum.

If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case.

If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on.

The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.

"build...data centers...millons of dollars of inventory"

All of which are irrelevant in this case, of course. Which just means the case of Tumblr provides more clarity into the reality of these processes. The case holds for the data centers along Kifer Road as well.

And of course, this required capital is only the expropriated wealth from workers that have gone before. The old rip-off money to pay for the new rip-off. Which will go to future ripoffs. What does the marco.org link on the front page say? "I look back on Tumblr's crunch times with mixed feelings...I won't make yacht-and-helicopter money". This is the guy who hit the jackpot of his startup job.

Plus where are these SV offices located? On the old hunting grounds of the Ohlone. Now owned by landlords talking about how they're giving their land as input to this ecosystem.

I'm concerned with the facts of the past, not whatever sappy liberal sentiment might be attached to these facts.

I know you're probably happy with your, Dave and Jeremy's big payout recently, but at the end of the day, whether it's OK with your or not - you were all still on some level ripped off.

The truth is that the VCs have created absolutely none, zero of the wealth in Silicon Valley. All of the wealth was created by the workers who built these companies. If there is anyone other than workers at these companies who create wealth nowadays, it is the users. The users of Facebook are creating the content of Facebook for free. The people working on Facebook are the ones who create the platform allowing them to do this. You can say the same with Google and web content. Google found a way to take the decentralized web, with contentual links thought of by humans, and centralize it in one place. People thinking how to contextually connect millions of web pages do the work, and Google crawls and amalgamates that.

And as is said here, and is true, it costs almost nothing in capital costs to start a startup nowadays, create an app, get a cloud presence etc. Wages are the main cost. The people doing the work create the wealth, either paid (infrastructure) or even unpaid (free content, free contextual links etc.)

jwz is someone who "hit the jackpot" with his options, yet even he saw up close what happens ( http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se... ). I would quote the relevant part of his blog post here, but all nine paragraphs could be quoted, really.

The main point is, the programmers create the wealth making the platform, and perhaps the people working for free uploading content like pictures, or getting their web sites crawled. The money goes to the VCs, and a little bit of it to the CEO and top execs. Even those that hit the jackpot at a Netscape don't really hit the jackpot. And these are the programmers who slept under their desks and made the killer product. What about the guy in the Midwest?

Organized labor allowed an equitable distribution of wealth. VCs are leeching off the US government, the universities of China and India, the high tech workers here etc. How is some heir putting his millions in some fund creating wealth? We create the wealth. The heir is a leech. Like the kids in the "Born Rich" documentary.

New technology can mean less hours for workers, more pay for workers etc. Instead it goes to the aristocracy.

Modes of production change and so does the organization of labor. Workers in Ancient Rome went on strike, and I remember the strike waves in the US in the 1970s. Things change over the millenia, but these notions labor will stop organizing circa now are silly. It hasn't stopped after all these millenia. We are the programmers, system/network/database admins etc. creating this wealth of all the people in the world, and as jwz points out, even when we hit the jackpot we get screwed. Production is changing but there will be a revival of organization, education and then agitation. What happened before in history will happen again. It's to the oligarchs advantage to tell us all these millenia of struggle have finally stopped in the past few years. It hasn't. And we are the ones in the most key positions to do something. I will quote one sentence from that link. "When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers"

In Bill Ayers book "Fugitive Days", he says during the Days of Rage, some of the people marching were a little apprehensive, but then someone broke a window and the riot he desired ensued. Social research has shown this beyond that case - when an angry mob gathers, they often still repress their hostility, but when a window breaks, that is when things go into a free-for-all.

I think it's the same here. People can have opinions, but once says Microsoft is great and open source sucks or something like that, you're already past the point of no return, it's inevitable the thread or sub-thread will devolve into a flame war.

Certain threads are this way starting from the original topic. Like the threads, amidst the recent threads of falling programmer salaries (or perhaps mentions of the historically high unemployment rates) of the desire of the SV barons to raise the H1B cap. This again is guaranteed to degenerate into a flame war.

My unscientific study of HN is that someone can get a lot of karma for saying why they think Obama is good or bad or the like. A post on that guarantees a dozen upvotes. Someone making a cogent comment on how a company should limit the scope of what parts of C++ they use is not going to get as much karma.

I have been on BBSs since the 1980s. The real problem of a forum is this. It has a handful of very sharp, interesting people who like communicating with each other and who write good posts. Then you get some blabbermouths who post and post and post and fill the boards up with junk. Then the good people leave. The good people leaving is the problem.

I don't think flames are the only thing to be concerned with. Blabbermouths who have nothing to say kill boards as well. Have flamewars killed the Linux kernel mailing list? Just as long as things are kept under control. The NetBSD/OpenBSD flamewar got out of control.

Slashdot is a board that was good and had its founders leave and is all corporate and user-view baiting now. What are its topics right now? "Google's Nexus Q Successor Hits the FCC". Who cares? "John McAfee's Belize Home Burns To Ground". I can survive a few weeks without an update on McAfee. "NetBSD 6.1 Has Shipped". Something only the dwindling remainder of NetBSD fanbois care about.

Certain topics and upvoted threads, once existing, are going to turn into a flamewar no matter what. It has to be rooted out early on for anything to be effective.

"The occupy movement rallied against what they perceived to be a rigged game: a financial system that required their participation but did not offer them a seat at the table. Then they went home - maybe because the weather got bad"

Occupy Wall Street was cleared out by police starting at 1 AM on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011. It was done at 1 AM as they only had to deal with people staying at the park at that time. They arrested 200 people in a well-planned operation. One of the reasons given for clearing the park was unsanitary conditions, which I can personally attest was BS - OWS was always sanitary, and when the mayor began using sanitation as a reason to clear things out OWS became fanatical about cleanliness. I watched people sweep the same spot of ground multiple times an hour. Compare that to the parks and recreation cuts where some NYC parks can go more than a week without any cleanup.

The police pushed back attempts to re-occupy the park in the day of November 15th and November 16th. A more organized effort to get back in the park was tried on New Year's Eve, and was met by pepper spray, dozens of arrests etc.

While this is the reality, which can be easily verified, I realize there is this hegemonic false way of thinking. I realize this requires reporting that OWS were a bunch of trustafarians not affected by Wall Street shenanigans, and who went home when it got cold. Because to talk about what really happened, as opposed to the invented ideas of what would happen from someone embracing a propagandistic model of explanation, would require revealing things which are not allowed to be revealed.

While I embrace ideas that came out of OWS, I didn't go for the first week or two even though I knew about it before it happened, because I didn't see how occupying an area would do anything, and I didn't think people were interested. On that latter point I certainly misjudged - people from NYC and surrounding areas who had pent-up frustration about unemployment and the economy came flooding into OWS. Any how, it's funny how Russian governments or Chinese governments and their press organs lied, and much of the population knew its BS, yet the corporate press organs in the U.S. lie and say it got too cold so OWSers went home, and it is accepted as fact by so many. That the press lies is not surprising, that Americans are so credulous is what's surprising. I guess with so much fundamentalist religion among the working class and a different sort of warped thinking among professionals in the US, I shouldn't be continuously surprised by this, but I am.

I realize it sounds hyperbolic to call some of your terminology Orwellian, especially since it is so commonplace in the US media, but it's kind of amusing how corporations took a look at citizen-voted, government-financed public broadcasting, public libraries, public schools, public transportation, public works etc. and decided to try to grab that adjective for themselves.

That the median blue collar worker in the US can buy a token stock of a company means nothing. The last survey by the Federal Reserve of wealth distribution that I'm aware of, the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances, shows that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 42.2% of the stock market, the wealthiest 90%-99% own the exact same same amount - 42.2%, and the other 90% of the country owns only 15.6% of the stock market, and most of that at the top. Almost all studies indicate this disparity has increased, even credible conservative/liberatarian studies don't dispute the disparity. The stock market is a rich man's game, your talk about being public and shareholders is part of that.

Obviously this is something good for the millionaires and billionaires and heirs in the US, and bad for workers. Workers are in an economy which is still at a historically high unemployment rate that has not been seen since the summer of 1992, and before that 1984. In a profession with a mass of data of age discrimination over the age of 40, with plenty of able older programmers looking for work. With interviews where candidates with necessary programming experience and necessary language experience and even necessary API experience are nixed because they're not so familiar with the specific areas of the job required API that people need. Unemployment is at a historic high, and they want tens of thousands of more open jobs on the market to be whisked away. Means more unemployment, lower wages, longer hours.

There is no argument here, there is nothing to argue about. It is not like some scientific enquiry where scientists sit around and argue a matter all honest and searching for the truth. This is a struggle over how the pie is divided up. The heirs who provide the majority of money to VC funds and the public markets are the ones who created and wrote this legislation. It is for their benefit and against your benefit. If one makes "arguments" against this in this struggle over money, in this carving up of the pie, it all basically boils down to the statement "I am, or on the benefiting side of, the billionaires looking to profit off your labor". Those opposed are those doing the work like myself. There's no real arguments, just declarations of which side of the fight you're on.

As for maudlin, mawkish comments about the dreams of immigrants and the like - fine, we will keep the H1-B cap where it is, and make a lottery of all people who seek to immigrate, of any skill level, and let more people in that way. I'm sure immigration will mean more to some poor Guatemalan then some Indian IIT graduate who can live a decent life in India with his CS diploma. These mawkish comments about how the H1-B visa is for foreigners never mentions that these people making maudlin comments are blocking the poor people who could really benefit the most from immigration from immigrating. Some "humanitarian" move.

I'm afraid your analogy is stretched a little too far for me - that your open door leading to someone physically wandering into your personal living space is the same as some corporation with tens of millions of revenue a year that has some script kiddie sitting in his mom's basement seeing some Linode stuff come onto his screen. I guess when I think of some kid snooping around some corporation's computers, I'm supposed to compose a mental image of some thug physically invading my own home. Yes, I can see why corporations want people to think this way, but it's a rather silly metaphor as far as I'm concerned.

Of course I agree, but there's an extra reason why this is the case on Wikipedia. Let's take a look at "History of Iraq" on Wikipedia back in 2002 -

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Iraq...

"Once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq was the site of flourishing ancient civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Parthian cultures. Muslims conquered Iraq in the seventh century A.D. In the eighth century, the Abassid caliphate established its capital at Baghdad, which became a frontier outpost on the Ottoman Empire."

Now let's look at the US State Department profile of Iraq it had from 2001 to 2003 -

http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bgn/iraq/24819.htm

"Once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq was the site of flourishing ancient civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Parthian cultures. Muslims conquered Iraq in the seventh century A.D. In the eighth century, the Abassid caliphate established its capital at Baghdad, which became a frontier outpost on the Ottoman Empire."

Yes, the history of Iraq on Wikipedia was literally written by the US State Department. As have the histories of most of the world's countries.

Well start with Wikipedia's head, Wales. Where does he come from, how does he think? We know he ran an Ayn Rand mailing list before becoming involved with Wikipedia, but how does his personal, political thinking influence Wikipedia? Well he himself has said that conservative Friedrich Hayek's work "is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". While he is not always blatant and draconian in politically influencing Wikipedia, this has cropped up again and again.

For example this Arbitration Committee spoken of - in mid-2005 Wales appoints an editor so biased against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that Wikipedia Review has a whole forum on this editor - JayJG ( http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=46 ). People find him incredibly biased and the vote of all Wikipedia in early 2006 for ArbCom members kicks him out. But Wales is not happy with this and decides to stuff ArbCom, like FDR threatened to stuff the Supreme Court. So Wales creates a new ArbCom seat. Does he appoint the Wikipedia-wide next highest voted neutral editor to ArbCom? No, he reappoints this Arab and Muslim hating editor JayJG.

You can find many examples of this sort of thing. With Wikipedia, the rot starts at the top. One day, a rival wiki encyclopedia will come into play and trounce Wikipedia (or at least be an alternative to it).

"Investors have won"

Congratulations, after ten thousand years of struggle, the ruling class has finally won for good, permanent victory has been declared by - Venkatesh Rao.

Marx says in the Communist Manifesto - "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

Marx had a point here about the long time span. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, written several thousand years ago, rulers are advised to capture new slaves from far-away, rural areas, as these slaves tend to be more passive. These issues have been around for a while - from that time, to the time of Pisistratus, and Spartacus and the Roman Servile wars, and the struggle between the optimates and the populares, to the German Peasants revolt of the 16th century up to this modern day - one may have noticed how large and militant the May Day rallies in Spain and Greece (unemployment is 26% in both countries) were. US drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Boston marathon bombings - these struggles carry on over time.

If one reads a lot of Marx (something John McCarthy said was a sign of a wasted youth), you see the point that just when some system is said to be completely victorious, it has usually peaked and is on a long downhill slide until something new comes along. Louis XIV was called the Sun King and is quoted as saying, L'Etat, c'est moi, but less than eighty years after his death, Louis XVI was guillotined in front of a crowd of revolutionary sans-culottes.

Final victory is here for the investor...well, we will see about that...

There is nothing to argue here really. The two little Wall Street Journal drawn bobble heads of two billionaires borne of the professional class can tell you that. They, the 1%, have their interests, and people such as myself, who work and create wealth, have our interests. Were American workers, or even Indian workers, consulted about how this visa be set up? Of course not. It was created by the myrmidons of the idle class to further their interests.

There is no argument. Do you think these billionaires argue among themselves whether to stuff their pockets or let working people keep the weath they create? This is not like scientists together debating quantum mechanics theories to seek the truth. This is a struggle over how the pie is divided up. People don't state arguments, any statement they make is just one of which faction they're in, a worker creating wealth, or some heir (or proxy of that heir) who owns a lot of Facebook and Google stock. This web site is owned by people proclaiming themselves with the word capitalists, "venture" capitalists. Obviously it will reflect in this way, although there are a lot of programmers who come here and discuss C and Lisp and JavaScript and so forth as well.

Obviously this professionally done graphic has a lot of nonsense in it, and all of this has been debunked over and over, and one can read Norm Matloff and others to see this. I'll just do the first point as more is a waste of my time. The first graphic says "college-educated workers in any occupation, 22-64". Well first off, this is very bogus - college educated workers go into all professions, but H1-Bs go into professions like IT. They don't make the chart showing what the degrees of people in IT and correlated industries are because then more Americans would have Masters. Also it is again in all industries and shows US 41.4 and H1-B 32 for age. I'm sure if you correlated for age, the US age would be younger. And so just as a product of age, more younger Americans would have a college degree as older workers have a less of a chance of having an advanced degree. The chart cheats by comparing H1Bs in IT etc. to all college-edcuated Americans who are in less education focused professions and who are also older then in IT. The rest of the infographic is bogus like this but you can read Norm Matloff and others if you wish.

And what was Drogheda, when the English massacred an entire town? Or shooting up the crowd in Croke Park? Or Bloody Sunday? The English have carried out terrorism against the Irish for centuries. It's an English war of choice. The English stole my family's land, gave it to settlers, and now English troops still march up and down Belfast. If you choose to go to war with a country and try to subjugate their people, expect the consequences. Don't cry that some of the war of your choice blew back to your homeland.

As I said, nothing was done without warning. PIRA gave more then a half hour warning before bombing Harrod's despite three civilians killed. Enniskillen was aimed at a patrol of troops.

As I said, the Volunteers did not set bombs to kill civilians, warnings were given ahead of time. A very benevolent attitude I think against an enemy which invaded their country, flooded the north part with settlers, and whose army was shooting civilians in the street when Enniskillen and Harrod's happened. If England doesn't want to be in a war, the solution is simple - remove English troops from Ireland.

This idea is completely inane. The Volunteers declared war against the England that was on their soil in 1916, that they would shift suddenly to a war against the U.S. is ridiculous. Also, purposefully killing civilians gathered en masse without warning is more along the lines of British Army terrorism (Bloody Sunday, Amritsar), not the Irish volunteers who give warnings and tend to attack military targets, back when they did so.

Also, the ruling came somewhat unexpectedly, a few hours before this happened. That's a short space of time to set up a bombing of a marathon. This bombing was obviously planned for days, if not weeks in advance.

> extremely insane cruel anti-woman Islamist totalitarian regime

Afghanistan was under the secular, socialist leadership of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan until the CIA launched Operation Cyclone and began funding Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda and Taliban predecessors, in order to overthrow that secular, socialist government. Sylvester Stallone made action films like Rambo 3 where he fought alongside Islamic jihadists to overthrow the secular Afghan government. Now some poor guy trying to make a living you pontificate about because he went to a country which was exactly like how the US tried to make it? But they're totalitarian...I guess whisking people off to detention centers with no evidence, no recourse to trial is the democratic way.

I won't even say that they do, as it is obvious on the face of it.

There's really no debate about this issue, like scientists debating some aspect of quantum mechanics seeking to get to the truth. This is a fight over how the pie gets divided up, and the billionaires and their commissars like Yglesias are trying to grab more of the pie. We're still at a historic unemployment high from the 2008 crash, current unemployment was not at its high current level from 1984 to 2008 other than a two month period in 1992.

As I said, this is not a debate like physicists arguing to get to the truth. This is a struggle of people trying to get their pockets filled, and lies and nonsense are par for the course. Every statement in a thread like this boils down to either "I am on the side of the IT workers who create the wealth in the US" or "I am on the side of the heirs and billionaires who extract profit from the labor of those who work".

So glad Yglesias is looking out for us common programmers...Yglesias's bio says he went to Dalton. Do you know how much first grade costs at Dalton? Over $40,000. The heirs, the billionaires and their agents got together to push for more H1-B slaves in the midst of this historic unemployment, and now the propaganda push happens. Arguing with their agents does nothing - get together with other engineers organizing against this type of nonsense and get going. There is no type of honest debate possible as they are just greedy people who will tell any lie to pile some more money on their billions. Your alternatives are join with those organizing against these types of things or do nothing. Yglesias and those who agree with them are liars who will say anything to rip you off, so talking to them is pointless.

"There are human beings..."

Please, what are we the biggest fools on the planet? This sounds like the people who'd get on the news and play some liberal middle class melodrama about why the U.S. needs to free the Iraqis.

This is a naked power grab by billionaires and VCs and such. It is about as bare a naked power grab as can be imagined. Please take your mawkish nonsense somewhere else. "Cruelty and selfishness beyond belief". Yes break out the violins, some IIT graduate not being able to get an H1-B is the cruelest fate imaginable in the world. I'm glad Rabois, fresh from (accusations of) sexually harassing his underlings at Square, and Pincus, fresh from robbing his employees of their options have become such humanitarians.

A bunch of billionaires make a power grab to fill their pockets with money, and you make a desperate, mawkish comment such as this. "Anyone who who dare question these billionaires humanitarian motives...are conspiracy theorists thinking its an 'evil plot'...'I can't over emphasize my absolute disgust'....barf.

From fwd.us: "program must also include an increase in the number of H-1B visas"

There's no debate about this, like some theory of quantum mechanics. These are a bunch of people, many billionaires, who have banded together to push forward their class interests - to enrich their billions even further, at our expense - at a time when the unemployment rate is above what it was, from 1984 to 2009 (aside from two months in 1992). They are very well organized. This message is being typed on a web site of a wealthy person whose face is plastered on fwd.us.

It talks of the "tech community" and shows that little weasel Mark Pincus as a supporter. Pincus who robbed employees of their options once the startup lottery was won. I guess we the people who actually work the long hours, Ron Conman, Pincus, Rabois and all the people featured all all together in one big "community" where we all want more H1-B visas.

It's not a topic of debate, your statements on it just reflect which side your bread is buttered on. There are those of us who code and maintain servers and databases and routers, those of us who create all of the wealth. There are those - the VCs, the incubators, the angels, and especially the old aristocracy of money these middlemen get their money from, who are parasites on those of us who create wealth.

There is no debate like whether BSD or Linux, or vi or emacs is better. People have a class interest, and their feelings about this are just another way to affirm that fact.

Karl Marx said the process of value creation is thus: a carpenter goes into a woodshop and bangs on wood for eight hours a day. The raw materials (wood, nails) plus partially used and worn down materials (saw blade etc.) are transformed into tables, which are worth more than the materials used. $2000 worth of material becomes worth $2160 in eight hours. In eight hours $160 of value is created.

The carpenter keeps all the wealth he creates for the first six hours of work - all $160 worth. The last two hours he keeps none of the wealth he creates - it goes to the woodshop owner who rents the woodshop, owns the mechanical saws etc.

This is how business works. It is obvious. Of course there are caveats, which Marx spends thousands of pages covering - only a fool would reply to this saying my summation of thousands of pages in a short HN comment missed one of those caveats.

It is also obvious how in a system like this, the owners are making money while the workers are stagnant or doing worse. And the method owners have of doing this is obvious - either have the worker work more hours for free per day, or try to somehow increase the amount of wealth that is created every hour. Obviously both methods are used.

The economy is already centrally controlled. A few centuries ago, much of the world, even the outer reaches of Europe, had mostly independent, semi-nomadic people living on it - including the land the USA is on.

Now the vast majority of people are wage slaves for a very tight group of intermarrying heirs - the Waltons, the Koches, the Sauds, the Mars's, the Johnsons, the Newhouses, the Rockefellers etc.

From 1993 to 2008, the US unemployment rate never hit what the current rate is - 7.6% unemployment. Most of those people currently have no control of the economy, or their own lives. The idea that the government's protection of this central racket may lessen is of little concern to most of these unemployed.

You say that the modern economic system as it runs has large oscillations and busts, and you are perturbed that Marxists say "I told you so" when a bust happens. But US mainstream economists through the twentieth century did not say that the economy came with large oscillations and busts. How many US economists even in the late 1990s said that the economy would run into big busts in the future? The people who predict correctly are marginalized by a media controlled by capital, and the Jim Cramers of the world are free to continue their panglossian bromides and predictions, no matter how often they turn up false.

Five hundred years ago, the HN class equivalents would be clergy and lower (and some upper) nobles. The majority of people would be praising feudalism, saying that feudalism was common sense etc. Now we are five centuries later, in a different economic system, and the majority of people here praise the economic system they are in as the best one, saying it makes sense etc. In 1935, the intelligentsia in the USSR praised their economic system, said it was common sense etc. - why shouldn't they have? The western world was in a depression while their economy went full steam ahead. Despite the world having seen four economic systems (hunting-gathering, slavery, feudalism, capitalism), and the sparks of a possible fifth one (socialism), it's not surprising that the majority of people under the current economic system see it as being, unlike its three predecessors, as permanent, lasting forever, as being common sense etc. The majority of people felt the same way about serfdom centuries ago. Many felt this way even one century ago, when most of Europe was run by kings.

I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which produces real commodities.

Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans believe "every word of the Bible is literally accurate", and that "the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East" are "historically accurate". Over 70% believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, expecting people to understand how wealthy people discretely work the economic system is way, way beyond most people.

The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking"

This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air.

I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it.

As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.