thrmsforbfast

Furthermore, the attitude that "either you're a coastal elite or you believe in the future of well-paid manufacturing jobs" is extraordinarily presumptive.

Has it occurred to you that some of us want "middle America to let go of the dream of well-paid manufacturing jobs" precisely because we are from/currently live in middle America, desperately want what's best for it, and believe manufacturing isn't going to provide that?

By the way, why on earth do you believe the Midwest needs manufacturing for a robust economy? That assertion -- that the Midwest can't build a thriving information/services-based economy -- seems far more like "turning your nose up" at the Midwest than your parent's post!

Frankly, whenever I encounter this mentality, I read it as: "oh yes, those [small-town] midwesterners, what could they ever do for society if they don't have assembly lines to work on."

I measure governments in terms of "politician generations", so 5-10 years is still "the present" in the sense that anything less than 10 years can very easily encapsulate just a single set of people in leadership.

1. the percentages changed because the total numbers dropped. I.e., it's not like there's going to be a ton of white collar jobs. It's more like there aren't going to be a ton of jobs, period.

2. And even then, this is a Foxconn representative who has every incentive to mis-characterize. They're basically just saying whatever they think is best to say at the moment. Not even 3 months ago they were pushing hard on an ad campaign about manufacturing jobs. Then the projected manu salaries dropped and now they're saying that the avg salary will be higher because we'll hire so many tech people. All while hoping (1) gets lost in the exchange.

Everything mentioned in your post is relatively recent. If you go back even a decade or two, a lot in WI government was working well.

I'm not painting with a broad stroke here. I'm referring to specific people I have had specific conversations with.

Of course, Milwaukee, Madison, and also many of the smaller cities in Wisconsin have great engineering cultures with extremely smart people who understand this distinction. And also many Wisconsites with non-Engineering backgrounds obviously understand the distinction.

All I'm saying is that, based on my first-hand experience, there were many in Wisconsin who did not/do not understand this distinction. Which is good news, because that means that explaining simple and easily demonstrable facts can change people's minds.

Perhaps sustained canvassing on this issue would be a good way to change things in WI. I've been able to win a few people over by explaining over a year ago where this whole thing was going to go and then reminding them any time there's a development.

Also, Racine really is driving distance from Milwaukee. The southern suburbs literally border Racine.

The factory is a dumb idea, but this is not the reason why.

Also worth noting that the average salaries required to get those subsidies have dropped substantially since the beginning of this process; we've gone from "lots of skilled jobs" to "mostly $15/hr factory labor". Totally predictable to those of us who know the difference between "iPhone factory" and "Apple HQ", but this was a huge source of confusion among my non-tech blue collar Wisconsin friends. They [1] really did think there would be six figure tech jobs available to anyone with a CC degree.

[1] edit: here "they" refers to 10-15 specific people, and isn't intended to generalize to "all Wisconsites", although I do believe there's a demographic that's being intentionally deceived and who would change their opinions on Foxconn if someone sat them down and explained that "working in an LCD factory" is not a "tech job" in the sense of six figure salary with good benefits, and that if those "tech jobs" do come to Wisconsin via Foxconn it's going to be a relatively small number of them and most certainly won't go to people who are straight out of high school after 6 months in a fast-tracked community college program.

But in any case, parent's comment that "OOP has no special claim" to hidden state/data (or abstraction) is sound; after all, ADTs already do that.

That said, the post is a windy road with some dead-ends. Lots of statements that are highly contestable (see other top-level comments for examples).

So here is, IMO, the important take-away from the post on what's novel/unique/significant about the combination of abstraction/program design/programming techniques we call oop:

> In most software systems when one function calls another, the runtime dependency and the source code dependency point in the same direction. The calling module depends on the called module. However, when polymorphism is injected between the two there is an inversion of the source code dependency. The calling module still depends on the called module at run time. However, the source code of the calling module does not depend upon the source code of the called module. Rather both modules depend upon a polymorphic interface. This inversion allows the called module to act like a plugin.

This is a particular programming style. The author calls it "polymorphism", but that's far too large a label. The paragraph above is specific way of using polymorphism. This sort of programming style can be done in functional languages, but I think it's fair to say that 1) OOP did it first, and 2) OOP provides the most natural setting for thinking about what's going on in these sort of "plugin architectures".

Again, research labs are not hiring people to build products. They are not even hiring people to do advanced development in most cases (and when they do, those supporting engineer roles typically don't require phds). They are hiring people to do heavy-R research.

> We're talking about the value of Phd's to high tech companies, so it's relevant.

No, we are talking about whether these companies should hire phds into their already existing research labs. Not even generally, but specifically (e.g., Intel Labs and Amazon).

The decision that these labs should do heavy-R research was already made for us by VPs or C-level folks. These labs already exist, their mandate is already spelled out, and now the question is "why won't they hire me to execute on that mandate?"

If parent disagrees with that mandate, why would he be interested in getting a job in one of these labs?

The question of whether these places should have heavy-R research labs in the first place is entirely orthogonal to this thread. Why? Because parent already stated he wants to work within these existing research organizations.

It sounds like you think typical industrial research labs are bad investments. That's fine. I disagree. More importantly, presumably, the parent commenter disagrees. After all, if he did agree with you, why the hell would he want to work in an R&D lab?

If parent agreed with you, why the hell would he be pining for a job in one of these labs? He wouldn't. He would just apply to YC.

So, again, litigating whether or not these heavy-R research labs should exist in the first place is an important topic but is not relevant to this thread, which is about the question: "why don't research orgs that have a corporate mandate to do heavy-R research hire non-phds?".

Extremely off-topic, as I've stated multiple times now, but maybe it will help: YC has HARC and (indirectly) OpenAI. Those are much more analogous to corporate research labs than YC investments. Are they wastes of money? Good question; but one thing is certain: if you think so, then you probably don't want a job at one :-)

Major R&D research labs exist to do the "R" in R&D. Many of them are explicitly not doing research that is intended to become a new business/product.

There are many models here, but the important point is that if you want to start a new business (unit), an industrial research lab is probably not a good fit. They mostly exist for other reasons.

If parent wants to start a new company or business unit, he should do that. But in that case, why is he applying to industrial R&D labs? He should be applying to y combinator instead...

Your post is a bit like saying that it's reasonable for a personal trainer to get a job as a doctor at a hospital because exercise is more important than surgery to most people's health. I.e., you're saying true things but kind of completely misses the point of the sorts of organizations we are talking about (research labs in large companies).

(I'll leave aside the ridiculous irony that you included Google in that list... in any case, each of those companies has benefited significantly from their internal R&D orgs.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...

b) you could apply to phd programs and get a phd.

But yes, it's impossible to get into R&D labs if you've never done research. You can self-teach and publish in top conferences on your own (this is probably much harder than you think it is but is not impossible!), or you can defer income to get an education from one of the many structured educational programs designed to teach you how to do research.

I'm not sure why you expect industry R&D labs (as a researcher, that is) to hire people who do not already know how to do the job. They are companies, not guilds or universities. Software Engineering positions certainly require people to already know how to program, after all. How is this any different?

I.e., they are actually doing the exact job that they are now being hired to do.

> Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? Or is it the fact that they have knowledge in that particular field?

When you apply to R&D labs, you are competing against people who spent at least five years:

* building research infrastructure (which includes, but is not limited to, knowledge about "methods, process, analysis, discipline"),

* a concrete track record of producing publishable research,

* a professional network and some amount of respect for you previous research output, and

* experience designing a multi-year research project (from writing/helping write a convincing proposal all the way through publishing, evangelizing, and managing relationships with people who want to build on your work).

Do you have 5+ first author publications in good conferences? Have you contributed to R&D software? Do you have multiple influential collaborators who have a high opinion of you and are likely to help popularize/contribute to/build upon your research goals? Have you written and followed through on grant proposals?

If "yes" to all those things, you should apply for these research positions! Even without a phd, you are a good candidate.

If all you have is a six month MOOC, or some R&D software development but no experience with the full research process, then sorry, but there are people with who have already demonstrated they can successfully design and execute on research agendas. You might still be a good candidate, but preferring strictly more experienced and better qualified candidates who have demonstrated, empirically, that they can perform the full job, is not an "arbitrary blockade".

> Every time I speak to someone with a PhD at work (I work in top 10 tech companies in US), in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis.

"people I have worked with" is a huge selection bias.

IME, in CS this is almost always either a) not true, or b) a conscious choice on the part of the phd holder (and is more of a pivot than a "totally unrelated thing"; you just might not see that there's a deep connection between the thing that the person was doing before and what they're doing now).

SICP is not an introduction to programming as much as it is an introduction to computer science.

I mean, one of the key lectures is about differential calculus. Do you realize that at most universities, CS 101 students are not assumed to have taken calculus. Hell, a large fraction of CS 101 students will NEVER take calculus (non-majors who will instead opt for college algebra).

But that example itself is actually more of a red herring. The point is that the mathematical maturity does provide a lot of extremely useful background thinking/problem-solving skills that most CS 101 students haven't yet developed and will be developing for the first time in CS 101.

As an American who believes in the separation of church and state, I definitely understand and sympathize with the instinct that, although religious laws often provide good moral guidance for secular codes of conduct, the two serve distinct purposes. You don't have to reject the ten commandments to recognize why we need more graularity and detail in actual laws regarding murder.

As a developer, I recognize that there are concrete and specific ways in which documents like The Rule fail to meet the pragmatic needs of a code of conduct, including:

1. clearly delineating acceptable from unacceptable behavior

2. establishing a reporting mechanism

3. codifying specific consequences for doing things that were clearly delineated as unacceptable.

A perhaps important thing to realize about monkish orders is that they were intrinsically self-selecting; you didn't need to worry about the "spirit" vs. the "letter" of the law. Monks did not need to worry about people misunderstanding ambiguously stated laws (e.g. "love thy neighbor"). The process of joining a monk-hood or a a religion includes an indoctrination/inculcation/instruction into the "spirit" of the law. Sending a pull or posting on a message list is not even remotely similar.

I.e., if you want to extend the development community beyond a small a close-knit group who understands each other, then you need something closer to laws than to religious commandments.

Second, in most districts, alternative schools really are a strictly inferior experience for students who do not have special intellectual, behavioral, or emotional needs.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but this is definitely the rule. E.g., how many alternative schools offer Calc BC?

Alternative schools are great, but in the case parent described, they're probably the strictly inferior option.

Responsible school administrators do not waste money/time on free speech lawsuits unless (a) they are dead-to-rights certain that they will win, or (b) there is some other incredibly important issue (e.g., an innocent teacher's professional reputation as in Sagehorn v. Rogers, where the lawsuit -- even if lost -- sends an important signal).

Lawsuits are EXTREMELY expensive, not just in dollar terms (which may or may not matter regardless of the outcome; larger school districts have insurance, retainers, often even in-house legal staff) but also -- perhaps more importantly -- in staff time/energy and public relations terms.

Furthermore, there is a lot of grey area in current court precedent re: student free speech on the internet. SCOTUS hasn't made a single peep about this issue. This, combined with the above fact about lawsuits, works in your favor. Lawsuits on contentious and undecided questions tend to get national attention and can therefore take on a life of their own in school board elections, upsetting an otherwise friendly board. Top administrators know this risk. If the issue is really as minor as you're making it out to be, and serves as a good test case for student free speech on the internet, no superintendent in his right mind would risk a friendly board over some dumb internet video.

Furthermore, the circuit courts that have spoken on this issue made many free-speech-friendly decisions; in particular, the second circuit proposes a test that your brother's school will almost certainly have a very hard time passing [1, page Page 16 of 18, top paragraph].

So, I would advise your brother's legal guardian to take the following steps:

1. Write an email to the superintendent expressing their belief that this is a highly inappropriate and very possibly unconstitutional attack on their child's free speech rights. Request a meeting in person. Emphasize that if this issue is not resolved soon and in your child's favor, your next step will be to consult with lawyers.

2. If no dice, contact your school board representatives and explain that you think the administration is over-reaching. Contact them individually and, if possible, in person. A single sympathetic board member can create enough political head-aches for administration to back off.

3. In parallel, contact the regional ACLU. If you don't have luck, try the bar association. If you don't have luck, find a lawyer who provides free consultations and get a sense for how grey your case is.

IANAL, but have some personal experience in this: I had a somewhat similar issue in high school, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream. There was literally zero legal precedent on public school first amendment internet speech issues. Literally not a single case. Is this Tinker land? Is the speech happening at school, outside of school, or both? After all, you can access websites at school. Does whether or not people actually accessed the website at school determine if Hazelwood applies? Etc.

Oh, and this was also before Morse v. Frederick, so administrative reach beyond the schoolhouse doors regardless of internet wasn't even well-understood. (BTW, Morse v. Frederick probably actually works in your brother's favor, unless his video was about Hitler doing drugs.)

Lots of opportunities for the school to lose.

Fortunately, my parents were supportive and the district decided they had better things to spend money/effort/PR on than a test case on the extent of student free speech in the emerging internet age. Good thing for them, because there was an almost identical case less than 2(?) years later with a six-figure settlement against the district. Emailing that decision to the power-hungry admin who tried to suspend me was probably the most passive aggressive email I've ever sent.

[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-nynd-3_12-cv-01888/pd...

BTW: my children will NEVER use school-issued laptops unless/until SCOTUS rules that Hazelwood doesn't grant censorship rights just because the speech is typed out on a government-owned keyboard.

Buy older computers (1980s/early 1990s) that don't provide access to those games or the internet.

No one worries about allowing 24/7 access to a microscope, because although "microscope addiction" is I suppose possible, it's so bloody unlikely that we don't worry about it.

I think certain computers are similar to the microscope in this respect (e.g., an apple ][ with nothing by apple basic).

Obviously, excessive screen time is always bad. The point is that if you can limit what's on the screen (e.g., an apple basic interpreter), people (even/especially children) will self-moderate their screen time, so you don't have to worry about moderating access to the screen (similar to the microscope).

Obviously, if my child starts spending 10 hours a day looking through a microscope, I'm going to intervene. Ditto for BASIC programming. But I don't feel the need to, a priori, restrict access. The odds of either of those things happening (esp. in a way that's not healthy/constructive/short-lived) is so low that I don't worry about it.

> The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising.

A lot of parents lack sophistication when it comes to "screen time".

I have multiple in-laws who seem to not understand that it's what is on the screen that matters. As you predicted, those same people are also prone to magical thinking about other things: vaccination, fluoride, radio waves, GMOs, etc.

This has multiple effects. First, they tend to over-limit access to useful aspects of computers. Second, they tend to allow toxic uses of the screen-time (allowing an hour of pocket slot machine time each day, which is IMO super excessive).

A stretched analogy: it's similar to a parent who doesn't understand the difference between alcohol and water, and therefore limits their children's access to liquid to a few times a day. However, during those few hours, the kids get to drink whatever they want out of the liquor cabinet. Obviously, the cabinet should be off-limits 24/7 but the water faucet should be freely available.

Similarly, kids should not be allowed to play pocket slot machines or watch youtube with zero restriction/oversight. But there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time for other uses, because it's not the screen itself that's the problem.

Concretely, my kids will have unrestricted access to an Apple ][ with an Apple BASIC interpreter and manual. I doubt that will cause any problems that aren't also caused by unlimited access to microscopes or pH strips.

Of course, their access to iPad games and Netflix will be moderated in the same way their access to TV will be moderated.

But a lot of parents -- especially non-tech-literate parents -- lump it all in as "screentime", which causes them to both under-moderate what's going on when the screen is on and over-moderate access to the screen for healthy uses.

That's interesting data.

However, one income supporting one person is very different from one income supporting 4+ people. Is there any reason why we shouldn't just use division (# earners/household size) here?

In that paper, the authors conclude:

> The overall mortality rate for unintentional drug poisonings in the United States grew exponentially from 1979 through 2016. This exponentially increasing mortality rate has tracked along a remarkably smooth trajectory (log linear R2 = 0.99) for at least 38 years. By contrast, the trajectories of mortality rates from individual drugs have not tracked along exponential trajectories.

The authors also suggest that we should attempt to "understand the forces that are holding multiple subepidemics together onto a smooth exponential trajectory", and suggest a double-whammy of increased supply (due to improved communication, transportation, and manufacture) and increase demand (despair, loss of purpose, and dissolution of communities) that cuts across both demographics and geographic regions.

--

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaau1184

IF KC and Pittsburgh aren't "middle america", then the term ceases to have much of a meaning and we might as well stick with "rural".

However, somewhat ironically, the actual paper that's cited [1] seems to disagree with the author's characterization:

> In sum, while technological progress is no doubt a large part of the story behind employment deindustrialization in the advanced countries, in the developing countries trade and globalization likely played a comparatively bigger role.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w20935

Do you think that an influx of underpaid skilled labor is going to ease the tensions that created Brexit and Trump?

Your assertion here appears to be that Trump voters were pissed off that more immigrants weren't making it to their hometowns. I find that assertion... highly implausible.

> Policy that lets the economic advantage of urban areas snowball more is something that should be given more thought than "it wouldn't matter anyways, those places suck."... Those places do suck, but we should treat that as a problem to be addressed rather than avoided.

Oy.

1. IMO they don't suck. They have many advantages. But they aren't particularly good locations for doing highly skilled labor.

2. There are a lot of policy levers that can be used to help rural areas. Trying to turn them into immigration-fueled discount tech/med hubs is doomed to fail and is therefore definitely not the right lever.

3. It's also worth noting that even rural economic development tends to be geographically concentrated. Just as wealth concentrates in cities with 10M people compared to cities with 100,000 people, wealth also concentrates in cities with 100,000 people compared to cities with 1,000 people. And BTW, those 100,000 person towns where skilled labor would invariably concentrate are in many cases already doing quite well.

Even rural development -- and ESPECIALLY rural development based on skilled labor immigration -- isn't going to help the rural places that have been hardest hit in the past two decades, which tend to be in the 1,000 to 10,000 range.

The argument isn't that policy should benefit urban America. The argument is that trying to bootstrap tiny local economies with skilled labor immigration is doomed to fail.

Yes, that's the point. Skilled labor immigration is for skilled labor.

It should not by a subsidy to companies that cannot afford to pay prevailing wages and/or are unwilling to invest in their workforce.

> This will deprive rural and middle America of the skilled labor that they need to survive.

Middle America will be fine; Chicago, KC, Pittsburgh, etc. can and do compete with the coasts for skilled labor!

That said, I could get behind a rule that adjusts for cost of living so that e.g. 100k in Pittsburgh or KC == 200k in SF. That seems fair.

As for rural America, there's a reason these areas can't attract companies or talent.