Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@LeoSammallahti Yes. I agree that the emphasis on college is unsustainable. The majority of the jobs in the USA is in the low paid service sector, and that's also where the biggest shortage lies.

@LeoSammallahti @charlag We can even carry it down to the people who ensure the labs are properly cleaned and maintained.

@LeoSammallahti @charlag Engineered software and hardware is largely responsible for rapid advances in medicine compared to the clerical and trial work that consumed a lot of time in the past. We can talk about a COVID-19 vaccine in terms of months rather than decades.

@LeoSammallahti ...resources, which has made outsourcing more attractive. If you can't measure software, you can't understand which skills best suit your needs, and you can't gauge the productivity of your workers, which is a key economic factor. You also aren't able to gauge your quality very well.

I digress.

@LeoSammallahti ...reducing costs as to cost of labor. In engineering and management, it's mostly salary and benefits cost, so it has been a slower adoption.

Hardware engineering was hit much harder than software engineering, because the costs are fully understood. Software has not adopted a viable measurement definition, so it is still "magic" to management (and unfortunately many practitioners). This same mechanism has made management view software engineers as fungible...

@LeoSammallahti Your argument for union apprenticeship makes the assumption that it's a viable option. I don't know about the UK, but Thatcher and Reagan put both on a similar course. In the USA, union jobs are hard to come by and they don't pay nearly as good as in the past.

The article doesn't mention outsourcing, which is a key factor in the decline of both union and office jobs (now including management). Outsourcing in manufacturing is due as much to looser regulations ...

Greystone Nursing Homes, Whose Executives Gave 00,000 to Trump, Are Epicenters of Covid-19 Deaths https://theintercept.com/2020/09/04/nursing-homes-coronavirus-deaths-greystone/

Police and Affordable Housing Collide in Charleston - The South's most picturesque city reckons with race and gentrification. https://inthesetimes.com/article/charleston-south-carolina-police-affordable-housing-race-gentrification

Decided to grab "Introducing Python" by Bill Lubanovic as a reference. In reading the "sell the language" chapter, I'm amazed at some outright falsehoods. Perpetuation of the terse language means more productivity myth and network wait times obviate the need for processing efficiency myth are two prominent ones.

The "look how much cleaner this looks in my language" thesis always cracks me up as well in comparing 3GLs.

Python appears to be one of those languages I'm going to be forced to learn, even though it really doesn't add anything to my development abilities.

#sigh More #boredcoding