r_smart

The Pareto Principle is a bitch. There's no way to remove inequality without trampling on the rights of the few lucky people.

|If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things

The vast majority of people with a lot of money are doing things. They are not idle, and it is not through idleness they wound up in their position. At least in the US.

This is doubly true for their money. It's not in a big swimming pool for them to paddle around in Scrooge McDuck style. Well, at least, most of it isn't.

Somebody should have tested that in Firefox. I don't know what's wrong with it, but it's an unreadable mess.

How dare you leave out electrical engineering!

Yes, so long as they aren't breaking the incitement to violence clause.

I work at a company that provides industrial laser measurement systems using robots. This is a niche where robots are far superior to humans because they're much much more repeatable. Our clients are specifying their manufactured parts with .001" tolerances, and a human with a hard gauge is going to introduce a lot of noise in the QC process.

Agreed! I was young at the time. Also, my poor coworker was the one that had to find and fix it since I was in class that day. Who knows what font he was using.

My GF demonstrated an aptitude for STEM at an early age. She received an enormous amount of pressure to continue down that track despite not being interested in it as a career.

Your claim may have been true at one time, but I don't think it has been for awhile now.

*Edit: In response to your paper: It looks like it's a research paper, not a study, written almost 20 years ago, referencing material that was ~10 years old at the time of its publication. It well may have been true, but the time the original research was collected (in the 90s) is about the time I'd argue a major cultural shift happened.

Precisely.

One of my favorite bugs I ever introduced was typing 0 instead of O in a variable name. Review your mental model all you want, a debugger is going to be a lot more useful in sussing that kind of thing out. Even just being able to see you have two variables on the stack RockOn and Rock0n will pretty much save you.

Just a heads up: Firefox gave me a bad cert notice when I visited your site. You might be losing some business.

Maybe, but you sought it out on your own. The porn was a convenient pit stop on the way to living things out, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't have ever gone down that road. All you would've needed was to screw up the courage to make a pass at a receptive lady you saw smoking.

And the net result of that is what? Why would any business want to have regulations passed dictating what they can do? You can support a free, open internet and still not want regulations dictating your behavior. They aren't mutually exclusive.

I doubt it. It may mutate, but regulation has never stopped that sort of thing. If anything, it gains legitimacy by finding a loophole (technical compliance), and it's unlikely anyone will build the political capital to amend the law. And even if they did, it will just mutate yet again.

I mean, if they fix the problem, why would you be upset the government wasn't involved? If the problem persists, we can always have the conversation again. Barring anything else, government solutions tend to be inflexible (which is a feature, but should be much more selectively used).

|subsidizing education lowers the cost, making it more attractive than it otherwise would be compared to the alternatives

The saddest thing, is that it clearly hasn't. Tuition costs have sky-rocketed, as has interest rates on education loans. It's become absurdly expensive.

So what you're saying is, the people currently using the software don't have control over the purse strings?

I mean, the article mentions right away that it's in the Philippines, and the whale's stomach was full of rice bags as sold in local grocery stores. It also says the Philippines is one of the worst plastic polluters in the world. Flagellate yourself as much as you want, but you can't take much blame for this one.

I wonder if this is because the people in companies currently using open source aren't people with control over the purse-strings. They're the people focused on getting a product out the door.

The marketing department on the other hand, expects to have to pay to put the company name on things. So naturally, they'd be happy being listed as a partner, sponsor, patron, etc.

Possibly. I'd say there are a lot of people who are lacking in the principles / integrity department, but I also think Musk tends to stand out among his peers. He's not normal, even for that group of people.

|Capitalism has killed many more

Please support that claim.

|will continue to kill millions and millions as the effects of climate change worsen

Communist countries, past and present, hardly have a sterling reputation when it comes to environmental considerations.

Edit: Oh, and you ignored that the Foxconn thing was manufactured. Unless that's what you're calling clap-trap, but I assume not.

That's the point though, it's inaccurate to do so. Money is a finite resource, but its value constantly fluctuates. It's just a unit of exchange that exists for convenience. The total supply of money does not correlate to the amount of 'wealth' in the world, such as it is.

I know this makes it a pain in the ass for you to make / explain your point, because there's no unit of measurement for wealth (hence why you used money at any given point in time). It just doesn't work that way though.

|Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.

Didn't that turn out to be bullshit? Like, years ago. Pretty sure that guy made the story up. Also, those people weren't employees of Apple.

And I'll take crony capitalism and wealth inequality over gulags and the tens of millions of people who have been killed by their communist overlords (who were also hoarding all the wealth).

|Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.

I'm sorry, but this is bog-standard communist clap-trap. Even if you don't like the current arrangement, the use of the word steal is absurd. Individual wealth, regardless of which income quintile you're in, has risen exponentially since the industrial revolution. There's lots of room for criticism of the world as it stands (crony capitalism and printing a sea of money being favorites of mine), but words like exploit and steal are crazy. And to say that an employer had little hand in the value of the products created is just silly. Even if we ignore everything else, you can't just disregard the massive capital expenses that go into building the infrastructure to make an iPhone. Somebody had to come up with that money to even make the company possible, long before the profits started rolling in.

I've had the dubious pleasure of working for companies that were posting little or no profit vs others that were making lots of money. Personally, I'd be happy to be 'exploited' by the wages Apple pays.

Just because one went up when the other went doesn't mean that there's a causal relationship.

If we assume it is causal and the trend continues, you can expect belts to start tightening. I don't know if you've ever worked at a company that wasn't turning a profit (and isn't living on the borrowed time of VC money), but I have, and it sucks. Hiring freezes, wage freezes, wage reductions, staffing reductions. All kinds of fun.

You have no proof that any of that is the cause. So at the very least, celebration is probably premature.

Wealth isn't a zero sum game.

Further, that money is being transferred voluntarily. People buy things like iPhones because they think it enriches their life more than having the $600 it costs. Hundreds of millions of people believe this, so Apple has a ton of money. There were no victims in the transactions.

Why would I want to celebrate someone else making less money?

You can end up being the one punished in all kinds of scenarios where you're the wronged party initially.

If you are too vigorous in defending your property, you can be charged with assault, which I'm guessing is what happened.

|If you r_smart you should have noticed the jest in this statement

It's my name. I make no claims about my intellect :)

It didn't read like a joke to me, and rereading it as a joke, it seems like, at best, a quip. I stand by my previous sanctimonious tone.

edit: Oh, and lastly, a small curtailment on free speech is the first step to a large one. Why wait until it's illegal to complain?

Let's not conflate fundamental rights with programming languages.

|And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.

Wait, you think this was acceptable? The fine for speaking is outrageous, and it will only get worse if it turns out it's not enough of a deterrent.

So her speech isn't free as in liberty or as in beer, eh?