firstOrder

I see, "defense" is an "investment in the future", but Social Security and Medicare are "morally bankrupt".

I guess the US military bases ringing the world are an investment in some kind of future. US arms shot up El Salvador in the 1980s, and now MS-13 gangs float throughout US cities, so these things are investments of a sort.

I gain nothing by having the boot of US imperialism on the necks of people over the world. I will get Social Security and Medicare though. It's the one thing I'm paying into that I'll benefit from.

People would have to help out their retired parents any how. This just happens collectively.

As far as investments - have you been reading about how corporations balance sheets are flush with cash? Or about factory overcapacity rates? There is no lack of capital, the country is more awash with capital then it has ever been. There is just a lack of places to invest it. Because people aren't buying commodities, there is underconsumption - at least according to Jack Welch and many others.

But putting money in the hands of retirees helps consumption. It keeps the economy moving.

Also, the metric is GDP growth divided by the number of retirees. The US was able to pay Social Security in 1940, when GDP was $100 billion, but now it can't, with a $15 trillion GDP? That makes no sense.

The US has military bases in Cuba (which Cuba has asked to be removed for decades), Djibouti, and many other godforsaken places - the US is spending a fortune to get back into the Phillipines. Never mind bailing out the banks which had lobbied to be deregulated.

Yet the one program I've paid into my whole life and which I will benefit from they want cut. I don't think so.

China's GDP has grown 7% or more every year since 1991. It had an impressive economic record before that as well. You can read gloomy articles like this going back to 1949. In that time, China has become the second largest economy in the world. I was reading articles like this a decade ago, I was reading articles like this two decades ago. People have been saying the sky is falling since 1949. Despite all of that, China's GDP will probably grow 7% this year, as well as 7% next year.

> it would be nice if...you could sponsor homeless people with enough money to find accomodation and medical/psychological assistance

You're presuming that our society and economy isn't designed to purposefully try to get a certain percentage of people into this situation. If someone theoretically entertains the possibility that this is the case ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), then that would be like building sand castles on the shore during low tide.

Actually you don't have to go back to the 19th century to read about this. Read what mainstream economists openly say about NAIRU, or what Business Week and the Wall Street Journal were openly saying when the unemployment rate went below 4% in early 2000. They were pretty much calling for higher unemployment rates - as much as you can get away with in this society any way.

> The VC has collected extra cash

How was that cash collected? What is the VC collecting now?

He collected cash from the last batch of "entrepreneurs" and their teams who did all the work and wealth creation. He's doing it with the current guy, which will fund him doing it to the next guy. He's not collecting cash like picking apples from a tree. He's parasitically leeching off the working wealth creators, as are his heir LPs.

The pie is divided up in a certain way. Of course the VC side has it in their interest to tell some story of how deserving they are. Of anything I can think of, I can't think of anything that would motivate people to tell a BS story more than why their pie slice should be a certain size. Anyone who says that there is some omniscient, objective obviousness to some positive quality of VCs is obviously engaging in the most standard argument of all of partisans. We're not doing some repeatable experiment on some hypothesis that everyone has an interest in accepting. It's a zero-sum division of a pie, and if the VC can get over on people that he's so deserving, he wins the game. If we're talking about dividing the pie, everyone piping in with a comment has an agenda, whether hidden or not.

> We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit. We racked our brains trying to understand this new allegation...I am so very sorry if anyone felt that I was pressuring him or her for advice, labor, or to sign up. I truly never had that intention...my idealistic belief in the status-free community of GitHub, I failed to recognize that power structures cannot ever be obscured entirely.

> employees view them as disconnected and only trying to build empires of gold. Tom saw himself not as CEO, but as the architect of a unique business structure...He wanted to invest heavily in employees and to create a space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things. In our home every night, he spoke passionately about how to build a company that gave employees freedom.

Other than being a Github user and customer, I know nothing of the details of this case other than what I've read. She admits she was obtuse about "power structures" in the company, but this also is not a unique thing in Silicon Valley - she's not blind to these things in a unique way.

That said - it's like someone believing their own press releases. "A space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things". To me that sounds like saying Platt from "Twelve Years a Slave" got an excellent bag to pick cotton from, and build up the glorious plantation he was working on. Preston-Warner can snap his fingers, and someone who was getting a check to put food on the table and a roof over their head is suddenly not going to have the rent check by the end of the month. Especially when the next employer is asking for references, why you left the last job, are there any gaps in employment etc. People on an H1-B visa are dependent upon the company so they can't be thrown out of the country, so their green card application can not be restarted etc.

This is in the default structure of a corporation, and the laws, and all the default papers that super-angels and VC's put forward. Ownership and control of a corporation is 80-90% in the hands of the angels, VC's and founders. Of the scraps left over, executives and top-level experienced techs get the lion's share. This is the reality, and everyone knows it. People believing their own press releases about people building great things are delusional. It's like the Tuskeegee or Dr. Mengele subjects happy about how they are helping contribute to science. No one is fooled by this other than naive, new to the workplace, socially maladjusted programmers in their early 20's. This is why there is such a feeding frenzy over this small pool of naive young men.

You need surplus to establish a hierarchy. A migratory hunter-gatherer band has no surplus - people collect enough food to feed themselves, their children, and perhaps some older people, and that's it.

Once there is a hierarchy with taxes and such you no longer have a migratory hunter-gatherer band. So you're talking about what happened during the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. I am talking about what happened before that.

What resources does a highly migratory hunter-gatherer band actually have to take? The whole point is there is no surplus production. Also, how exactly would one band of hunter gatherers continually oppress another band of hunter gatherers over a period of time? It's not really possible, for a variety of reasons.

How is communism like how people lived 10,000+ years ago? Communism is how all people lived 10,000+ years ago.

It's interesting how throughout the 1930s we see almost no mention of this in the New York Times. Which is what your link is pointing to.

Now that armed right-wing bands have staged a coup in the Ukraine, we suddenly are hearing a lot of discussion about this right here, whereas when it was supposedly happening in the early 1930s, we see almost no mention of it in the press.

Maybe that's why Churchill stopped being a supporter of him.

What happened to Fred Hampton when he disagreed with how blacks were being treated like second-class citizens in Chicago? The Kent State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? The Jackson State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? And so on...

Wow, I guess that means they are biased. Luckily, academics in universities across the US, funded by grants by the Koch brothers ( http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/11/144280/koch-uni... ), are writing objective articles about history, economics, policy and other topics.

Tell me where in the world people did not live communistically prior to 10,000 years ago.

So according to you, the entire world lived under a system that required the oppression of others prior to 10,000 years ago, when everyone lived in migrating hunter-gatherer bands where all wealth was shared. This was a system that forced people to starve, according to you.

This interview took part when the economy in the UK and USA had hit the skids, while the USSR's economy was chugging along like gangbusters. In fact, a significant number of English and west European workers moved to the USSR to work since there was a labor shortage. American firms went there as well.

Whatever the economists were talking about, the US had just started to change to an incredibly centralized, semi-planned economy based on military spending as well as things like the NSF. The US is still like this, the military budget is over half a trillion a year, and the brass has been publicly begging Congress for decades now to not make so useless tanks and such. It is a job and research program, it in/directly financed the transistor and IC and microprocessor, it created the Internet and so forth.

Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great. Khrushchev made a lot of changes, and problems began cropping up (bread shortages, less capital spending etc.)

You can't make a comparison with the US as an unplanned economy, since this was the beginning to changing it to a semi-planned economy with a (conservatively) $600 billion a year "military" budget. You can't say Stalin's economic policies failed, as they were successful under himself, and Khrushchev majorly changed them in the same way FDR changed the US policies.

Also the price argument is tautological and not falsifiable. Something is valuable because something is valuable. Let us say that Bitcoin is a giant Ponzi scheme (which it is), a $6 billion bogus market cap of worthless hashes. In fact it was a $14 billion market cap four months ago, now $6 billion. Is all the equipment buys, and wasted electricity and so forth a rational allocation of capital? Couldn't it be better used to make something useful? Well it's a rational allocation because of the price which makes it rational which points to the price. It's a circular, tautological, unfalsifiable argument. When Bitcoin's market cap crashes below $1 billion, and then lower, the price argument you mention won't have its defenders admit they're wrong because it is tautological.

A janitor who works and lives in San Francisco would have to have enough money to buy food, pay rent and so forth. Perhaps the reproduction of labor might be included (able to afford to have and raise two kids).

This would be the elementary requirements. So is that the case, can a janitor who has been living and working in San Francisco for the past decade afford to buy food, pay rent, or (depending if reproduction of labor is included) have two kids? These people certainly exist. I suppose the people in the news stories who were just getting by in the Bay Area and are now living in their cars or whatever would be another example. And so forth. You could find other types of cases in Bangladesh, Honduras etc., which might be different in some ways.

> Government had nothing to do with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg

Gates and Jobs built their companies on the microprocessor, the development of which was completely dependent upon government contacts to Fairchild.

Zuckerberg's debt is even more so - the Internet was a government funded R&D project from 1969 until the 1991 entry of ANS/CIX. He built his business on top of a 20+ year government project, just like Google and other businesses did. To say that the government had nothing to do with it is absurd, and just highlighting Gordon's own ignorance of how technology, and for that matter the economy, works.

Just looking at the official government forms, tens of billions in military contracts have come into the Peninsula over the past decade ( http://www.governmentcontractswon.com/department/defense/cal... ). That doesn't even cover all military spending, and it does not cover non-militray government spending.

> parts of the progressive community do not believe in supply and demand

Wow, those left wing progressives must really be crazy. It's not like tech CEO's would ever say there is a shortage of good technicians. They obviously believe in supply and demand, and that if demand, salary, working conditions and long-term career viability were good enough, the supply would arise.

> Marx is saying...bosses are evil, capitalism is evil

Actually Marx said capitalism was a positive historic development.

> So X - Y, is what? Pure profit in bosses pocket? Not really...It's the cost of everything needed for the company and for the worker to do their job

When I said...

>> What happens with that $1000 in sales? $800 of it goes to buying wood, nails, hammers etc.

...that is what I was covering.

> cartels, oligopolies, monopolies are so damaging

Marx goes into cartels, oligopolies, and monopolies a little bit, but they didn't really hit their stride until after he died. Lenin is who covers this in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. They both go into great detail of why it is economically and politically impossible to stop cartels, oligopolies, and monopolies from forming. Lenin mentions Standard Oil in his paper, which the government tried to break up in 1911. As Lenin knew then, it is impossible to stop monopolies, which is why the old broken up parts of Standard Oil reformed in the 1999 ExxonMobil merger to become the most profitable company in the world, as well as the company with the third largest revenue in the world. And I can go on and on about how government can't break up monopolies (the Bell breakup only lasted a few years, now AT&T and Verizon control most of the US wired last mile and wireless).

Marx's argument for the inevitability of extreme wealth disparity and at some point a breakdown in the capitalist system is too long to put here, but I can summarize it somewhat. A worker is creating wealth - why else would a company employ him? Let us say he works as a carpenter for a furniture store. He takes $800 worth of wood, nails etc. every day and through his labor makes it into $1000 worth of desks, cabinets etc. What happens with that $1000 in sales? $800 of it goes to buying wood, nails, hammers etc. for the next day. $200 is left over. Some goes to wages to the worker who created the wealth, some goes to profit to the company owners. Let's say it is split down the middle, $100 each way. If the worker works 10 hours a day, he is creating $20 in worth an hour, but only keeping $10 of that. Or you could say he spends the first five hours a day working for himself, and the next five hours he receives none of his own wealth creation, it is expropriated by the capitalists.

What do the capitalists do with their profit? They invest! They buy more capital. They buy capital equipment so that twice as many cabinets and desks can be manufactured in an hour then before. Now, minus the capital cost, with $2000 worth of desks being made a day, with $1600 of daily costs on materials, and keeping the worker at a wage of $100, the capitalist is making $300 a day once his profits pay off the cost of the capital equipment. So the capital spending means a flood of new commodities.

The question becomes - who buys these new commodities? The worker is not going to be buying more desks - he is not making any more than he did before. So then you have "over-production" - too much over-competition, which is not good for capitalists. Marx believed this, but it is not a notion exclusive to Marx - GE CEO Jack Welch has talked about this, as has Peter Thiel, and others. So you get a situation where it is perceived there is a demand for cloud services - so EC2, Linode, Rackspace etc. fund massive capital funding and get into a price war with each other, and people can buy more and more for less and less. There is a ton of capital out there, and demand is not outrageous, so this happens. The bottom line though is the process of profit to capital to more commodities to more profit to more capital to more commodities can't be endless, especially with the consumers wages stagnating. You can get him to get into credit card debt and home mortgage debt and then pass laws saying he can't get out of certain debt and so forth, but this only kicks the can down the road, and makes the inevitable crash worse.

This in a nutshell is one of Marx's major arguments. It is in a nutshell - he wrote more than three large books on this which are difficult to summarize. Replying to thread to argue with one of Marx's ideas is fine, replying to this post because you found some hole in my incredibly condensed argument would be silly - I'm leaving out dozens of caveats which leaves massive holes in my condensed explanation. I have to leave out those caveats or else I'd have to write tens of thousands of more words.

These are interesting articles, especially the 2008 Marxist interpretation of the financial crisis -

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/class-war-and-labors-dec...

http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...

Even if you disagree with the analysis, the data they point to is, I think, interesting. Liberals and moderates talk about wealth inequality, debt, how finance is dominating the real economy etc. They don't talk about the slowdown in real GDP growth, the decline of industrial capacity utilization etc.

> Does turning away highly skilled and educated people due to an artificial cap on visas sound silly?

This is a false way of framing things on many levels. First, as Norm Matloff has extensively documented, they are not all "highly skilled and educated people". Secondly, they can be given green cards and other such things, why is this specific visa necessary?

Also, if there's a shortage of talent, then the Silicon Valley CEO's can put an end to things like their conspiracy to drive down tech wages that is playing out in the courts, which is something that would obviously depress the number of engineers applying for jobs. Instead of the federal government cutting loans and grants to college students, they could expand them if they want more engineers.

And if there is some humanitarian concern for immigrants, there are waiting applicants from Africa who have far more of a humanitarian need to get into the USA then an Indian IIT graduate.

Exactly. I read the book "Nickled and Dimed" when it came out. In the book, she describes a job application test which asks if employers and employees interests are aligned. She noted to herself this seemed a pretty political question.

I applied for a job at a retail store and was asked the same question prior to getting the job. I thought of the first words of the constitution of that American union which was founded in 1905, the IWW - "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common".

So nowadays, not only managers, but employees who think workers are entitled to keep the wealth they create, are verboten. Of course thinking profits can get kicked up to the lazy idle class loafer heirs as dividend checks is all well enough.

Some anti-homosexual screwball is finally pushed out, and finally everyone gets up in arms about how unfair it is that people are pushed out of their jobs. What a laugh.

Whatever God Eich worships who tells him to scorn men who love men, the idle class heir VC limited partner is the God of HN. Doing anything (traction!) to gain his favor and a piece of his surplus value stolen capital is HN's religion.

What are you talking about? Romania has secret prisons where people are held without trial and tortured.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/world/europe/08iht-prisons...

> Robotic car manufacturing hurt some auto workers, but all of society gets cheaper cars

This is false. Over the past forty years, the rise in price for the median car sold in the US has far exceeded inflation. The idea that "society gets cheaper cars" is false, cars have gotten more expensive, even taking inflation into account. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps careful track of such things.

Obviously automating something will benefit someone. You have your facts mixed up however, thus your conclusion that it benefits "society as a whole" can be disregarded.

Is Firefox a local project? It is a project used by the industrialized world, and by some of the non industrialized world. More than 47% of voters in California voted against this bill. Deep pocketed people like Eich were able to get that thin majority, by getting every hayseed in the central valley, north coast and Orange county out to the polls.

A thin majority of one state in fifty of one country isn't much of a norm to deviate from.

> If I read it correctly then they are not holding wages down as such, but are trying to avoid employee poaching.

Well then you are not reading it correctly. What does it say?

>> Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board

Schmidt says as plain as day, in e-mails that escaped his admitted attempts to remove a paper trail, that this is about holding down wages. He says it as plain as you can say it. I can read this, and the other HN readers can read this in black and white. That people like you feel the need to deny this happened when they have been caught red-handed says more about you then it does about what happened.

> Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board. Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later

So Silicon Valley execs were illegally conspiring to drive down wages, and who knows how much more was done outside of the paper trail mentioned.

Then we have an article discussion yesterday and blog posts etc. in the past few weeks about how companies can't find great engineers, and how we need immigration law changes that blocks Mexicans etc. but brings in more engineers to drive down engineer wages etc.

Maybe if CEO's weren't illegally conspiring to drive wages below their market value, there wouldn't be a so-called "engineer shortage"?

I mean it's risible. They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated.

ExxonMobil brought in $469 billion in revenue last year, on which they made $44 billion in profit. It's not a big gamble for them at all if some programmer who gets $100k, $150k or whatever does not work out.

Of course, some bootstrapped company, or some company which had minimal angel funding or the like is taking more of a gamble, but everything is a gamble when you have no product/market fit and only 18 months or less worth of cash in the bank.

You hit the nail on the head. He talks about the 5x programmer. Well if the 1x programmer is making $100k-$150k a year, the 5x programmers should be making $500k-$750k a year. When was the last time you went on Craigslist and saw a programmer job offering over $500k or more a year? I'm not saying it never happens, but...

I agree about making an effort looking for people. I know nothing about the company being discussed here. But for other companies, I know some that contact a (crappy) headhunter or two, or who post an ad on Craigslist, and then expect top tier candidates to roll in. For some CRUD job working in class C office space for relatively not much money etc. They're shocked when they don't have their pick from dozens of top tier candidates.

If your methods don't work - try going to a local programmer meetup. Chat up some of the programmers. Encourage them to apply. I go to programmer meetups as a programmer, and all the time I meet other programmers who are out of work, or who are unhappy at their job and looking to work elsewhere. Most are employed, but there's always a few who are looking.

What is happening is this - in 2008/2009 the economy was tighter, and employers could get by with a CL posting, or talking to a headhunter or two. Now that unemployment rate is less than 10%, you don't have dozens of good programmers checking CL for jobs every day. You have to do a little more work to find people. Just like THEY had to do a little more work when unemployment was double digit.

I don't know how many jobs I've seen out there where they have an incredibly high bar to hire someone, and then it is 99% CRUD work.

Some of the AI jobs at Google, yes, they need good people. Amazon needs some good engineers at the top guiding the creation of EC2 architecture. But most jobs ask for a much higher caliber of people than they actually need.

The objective basis that you are offering engineers too little pay is that they are not taking your offers. Unless you don't believe in one of the first things they teach in modern economics - that at a certain value (price), supply will always meet demand.