Bayosphere

I won’t even get started on the morality of this. I will simply suggest that the well documented quality and security problems of the software industry are not unrelated to age discrimination.

There is nothing like age discrimination laws in India. So you can’t blame IBM or any other company following policies in India or any other country that is different from US. You can’t expect all countries to have the same laws as the US.

Sometimes in the US it is reverse age discrimination specially in the jobs controlled by unions. People with less seniority are let go irrespective if they are more capable than a senior person.

Just check out Indian help wanted ads: www.naukri.com, and see how many of them have an upper years of experience limit that rules most of us out. We hear that it’s a global world and we need to compete, but if you are over 35 in this new world, look out! Age discrimination laws are not an arbitrary US cultural idiosyncrasy, they are a recognition that human intelligence, energy, and ability do not have a short shelf life. Unless you are independently wealthy or planning to die young, you’d better hope that Indian labor practices do NOT become the norm in the new global economy.

B Kumar, of course you can. There is no law that says IBM cannot have more stringent policies than the laws of the country in which it is located. IBM is perfectly free to say “We will not discriminate based on age, even though it is legal.” IBM doesn’t need a law to make its managers wear ties; why should it need a law to make them hire qualified people over 30?

mythago

I don’t argue with that except it shouldn’t make IBM or any other company follow US laws in other countries. If this causes IBM to lose out on valuable talent they will change the law as do other companies, both local and foreign, in India or other country.

Betsy Ross

The only problem is sometimes people outprice themselves compared to their skills even in the US without outside competition as they grow older, since lot of the earning power is tied with seniority and yearly increases, promotion etc but the productivity starts going down after you reach 40 in most cases. In that case shouldn’t the salary be revised downward which can’t be currently done in the US because of labor laws. So this forces companies to eliminate positions which they otherwise would like to keep.

Some of the laws that are created to right a wrong cause other problem which are not addressed.

B Kumar: there is no evidence that productivity goes down after 40 except in those jobs that require brute strength or athletic speed, and that’s certainly not IT or any other modern industry (finance, education, research, management, etc.). On the contrary, those are the very jobs where experience should be worth a premium. In the west, the idea of being washed up at 40 is long gone: not only can people not afford to retire, they often don’t even want to. By accusing older people of pricing themselves out of the market, I’m reminded of the Indian argument in favor of offshoring and guestworker visas: “We’re cheaper, so give us your jobs!” Labor-dumping is what India is doing to the western world. There is no universal standard of what constitutes a fair wage, and when India dilutes the labor pool with cheap workers they are simply exporting their own population problem. What to think of a nation whose major economic plan is to deprive the citizens of other nations of their livihoods? And, their press is full of bogus excuses as to why this is ok, and age is one of them. I’ve read endless nonsense about how western people are not reproducing and will need replacements, how we are all getting old (over 40) and can’t work any more, how none of us know any math, science, have any computer skills so we deserve to be replaced – whatever nonsense the Indian press can come up with.

I’ve made a fairly good living, although intellectually deadening, over the past 7 years cleaning up the messes made by “cheap labor” H-1Bs and the “cheap labor conservative” bosses who employ them.

The problem is not the techies, whatever age. There are just too many MBAs in the U.S. who were educated at second-rate schools. They’ve been managing projects with a bottom-line mentality, no focus on quality (or even basic requirements). Get the job done under budget, and they get a raise. Patches and revs and bug fixes come out of somebody else’s budget, so there’s no accountability.

The better schools of management still teach Edward Deming’s 14 points for quality management, the 4th of which can be summarized as “stop awarding low-bid contracts; minimize total cost by working with a single supplier”.

Betsy,

You are making emotional arguments and you seem to have a particular beef about India.

My arguments hold true even if there was no India in the market. I have been in the IT field in the US for the last 15 years and I have seen the younger folk always being better programmers than the over 40 ones. Ever wonder most of the scientific and technological discoveries are made by people under 40 except for rare exceptions, most of the great physics discoveries were made by scientists when they were in the 20’s and early 30’s and who dind’t do anything great after that? Just because we are able to live longer because of medical advances doesn’t mean that our mental faculties for most people begin to diminish after 40. There are always exceptions.

I myself will admit that there are quite a few sharp 25-30 year olds who will beat me in most programming tasks. The only place I have better leverage is where I have certain specilaized business knowledge which I have acquired thru’ years of experience which most younger folks have. If you have that you will be valuable, if not you are toast. So don’t blame others if you are not upto the task.

I guess you are ok if the thir
d world knows its place and just keeps to manufacturing clothes, toys etc at cheap prices so you can have 2500 sq foot homes with a uge walk in closet and fill them up with cheap stuff.

B Kumar: you are the one making emotional arguments. Your allegations about older workers are nothing short of defamation. There is not a shred of evidence that older workers are worth less. All you have to do is be a regular reader of www.economictimes.indiatimes.com to see what India really thinks of the west and western workers. This is the place where we should send our data, our intellectual property, and our jobs? Everyone read and see for yourself.

Betsy:

My arguments stand on its own and I am not defaming older workers, just stating facts. How many people over 40 can get into a top 10 MBA program (the regular MBA, not the weekend/executive MBA)? They may tell you are overqualified, or something else except the real reason because they will get sued.

And if you are getting your news from the Economic times or any of the publications from the IndiaTimes group, I feel sorry for you. Thier flag ship newspaper Times of India is commonly referred to as the Toilet Paper of India, because they sensationalize the news and have a lot of hyberbole except the facts. They are also known to sell the editorial pages and even news for a price. And this story about selling the news was just published in other newspapers including Asiantimes just recently.

Whether a person over 40 can “get into” anything has absolutely no revelance to whether or not they are qualified, whether they could handle the program, and whether or not the program would be wasted on them (it wouldn’t). Other people’s subjective prejudices have nothing to do with the matter. Unless we are talking about athletic prowess we are simply spewing discrimination if we say that we are justified in ruling out older workers simply because of their age.

So a popular, powerful politician avoids doing the right thing because, well, it might make him unpopular.

Gee, where have I heard this before?

What do you expect Hill to say? She’s a known advocate for higher taxes.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8215678.htm?1c

“The Legislature’s nonpartisan (sic) analyst, Elizabeth Hill, said in a January analysis that Schwarzenegger’s $99 billion budget proposal would leave the state with a $6 billion deficit by summer 2006. The analysis encouraged lawmakers to consider raising taxes — something opposed by Schwarzenegger.”

Yes, the governor “missed an opportunity” to *raise taxes*. No, the Democrats won’t support any more spending cuts.

There’s no substance here. Just ranting against a Republican by a tax & spend liberal, by a public official whose brief is to be nonpartisan!

Sure, franken. Tax-and-spend=bad, borrow-and-spend=good. What spending cuts has Arnold proposed? It seems all he’s done is promise a bunch of constituency groups that if they took a cut this year, they’d get more next year. That’s not fiscal responsibility, and it’s NOT the Democrat’s fault. You can’t blame Democrats for a Republican’s budget proposal.

“You can’t blame Democrats for a Republican’s budget proposal.”

Of course you can.

Arnold has proposed what he knows he can get, and aims to use the proposition process to get the rest. (stay tuned).

Any other strategy would ensure that crazed Left Democrats of Sacramento would announce “it’s dead on arrival”.

Just make massive cuts in CA budget. If there is no money don’t spend. If you want to spend, tax the people. It is that simple. Either the state hurts for money or they take from the people’s wallets in either income taxes, or better yet fees, raise gas, education, and other user fees. If you use services pay for them.

Dan-

The voters are the ones to blame here. We have enacted countless laws through the initiative process that limit what the legislature can do. We have mandated spending on all sorts of things, while at the same time we have not allowed an increase in taxes to cover that spending (I’m mainly talking about Prop. 13 here.) We have enacted a three-strikes and mandatory minimum laws that have been greatly increasing our prison population, but we are unwilling to pay for new prisons.

And we have a bigger problem than just a budget deficit, we are using up our capital goods in the state. There isn’t a city in the state that can afford to do major road work, so the roads are slowly deteriorating. Same goes for water and power and any other capital good we expect the government to take care of for us. That is an expense that nobody ever thinks of but will be far more costly in the future than financing the State’s debt. It is cheaper to maintain our capital goods than it will be to rebuild them in the future.

If Californians want something to change with the State’s budget we need to be willing to do it at the ballot box. We need to be willing to pay for the things we want from the government or cut back what we are asking for.

I think Swartznegger should raise taxes on newspapers. They are as responsible as the legislature for the budget mess. They are obvious advocates of raising taxes and write sob stories about any cut that’s proposed. So do it to them.

I happen to believe that solving the budget problem requires a forensic examination into where changes were made to the budget after Davis took office. There was no justification for spending bubble-revenue including whatever tax cuts contributed to the problem. It doesn’t have to be reinstating the car tax but some taxes should be increased to offset its loss, less any increases in fees and taxes enacted in the interim. The rest should be done on the spending side and in making choices among competing interests, the public should know what changes exceeded the growth of revenues from the last Wilson budget to the current one. Show us the money… and where it went.

It sounds like what happened is that during the economic boom, the legislature and governor allocated all the extra tax revenue to permanent programs, instead of saving it or using it for capital improvements. So now these are line-item expenses in the annual budget with their own constituencies, who jump up and yell “You can’t balance the budget on the backs of (name of special interest group)” whenever someone proposes actually trying to balance the budget.

I think what we really need is for people to understand that the a balanced budget means expenditures can’t exceed revenue, so either programs get cut or taxes go up (or both). This should be obvious but a lot of people seem oblivious to it.

“This should be obvious but a lot of people seem oblivious to it.”

Yes, and for a very good reason.

It’s easier to play the “Dem vs. Rep” game than it is to work.

Work is such a drag. Let’s call each other some more names, and hope all these awfully complicated problems will just go away.

Why are online bill-paying services so expensive? It seems as if the going rate is about $1/transaction, about the same as it was five years ago. Why should I pay $1 to save myself 37 cents in postage?

The economics of this is all backwards. Surely it’s much more expensive for a vendor (and their bank) to process a paper check. If anything, they should be providing incentives for me to handle my payments electronically. And individually, they do: I can go to the SBC site and pay my SBC bill electronically for no charge. I can pay my credit card bill electronically by going to their site, etc. But if I want to handle all my transactions in the same place, I have to pay through the nose. Why is this? Why isn’t there an incentive for the vendors to absorb the third-party costs for such transactions, as there is with credit card purchases at point-of-sale?

This is reminisicent of the whole ATM thing. When ATMs were first installed, we were told that we’d all benefit because they would save lots of money which they’d pass on in the form of low fees. But then they started charging, in some cases $3 or more, to use an ATM. Greedy.

It’s clear why certain electronic conveniences (such as cash cards) have been much more successful in Europe and elsewhere than in America. Our companies are too damn greedy. Why should they expect to get $1 just for moving some money from one bank account to another, an electronic event which costs them nothing?

Sunday’s Meet The Press episode told me two things:

The Bush Administration will stop at nothing to lie and manipulate the American people

Colin Powell made a terrible mistake in deciding to serve the Bush Administration. His hard-earned integrity slowly deteriorates as he serves as Secretary of State.

Sunday’s Meet The Press episode told me two things:

The Bush Administration will stop at nothing to lie and manipulate the American people

Colin Powell made a terrible mistake in deciding to serve the Bush Administration. His hard-earned integrity slowly deteriorates as he serves as Secretary of State.

Yawn. It taught me that Tim Russert is so full of angst that his own network isn’t promoting his book that he’ll rail against the Secretary of State when Russert’s own staff let the interview go into overtime, taking the satellite time from other networks, and Powell’s aide stepped in to move on to the next interview.

wahoofive asks: “Why are online bill-paying services so expensive?” Because people are willing to pay that much. I don’t use them because I don’t see why I should pay more in order to save money for everyone else involved.

you should revolt!

i’m in dallas (moved from los angeles in 1993) and get free quicken bill-paying with my bank, and have for years (i recall paying $6/month when i first moved here). if the bank started to charge me, i’d retaliate by either switching back to free paper checks, or move my account elsewhere. i suspect that’s not what they want, so … free checking and free ATMs are standard fare.

last time i paid an ATM fee was during a roadtrip to mississippi (`nuff said).

-g

I’m right with you, NonMoose, but it seems to me that since they’d save money, they have economic motivation to get me to switch. Where’s the invisible hand of Adam Smith? Gene, are banks competing on that feature in Dallas? No bank here in the Bay Area is advertising free bill-paying services, although one advertises no ATM fees.

Mind if I plug some of my recent work about tech/social issues?

“Jew Watch”, Google, and Search Engine Optimization
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/google/jew-watch.php
Abstract: This report examines issues surrounding the high ranking of an anti-semitic website, “JewWatch.com”, for searches on the word” Jew”. The search results present complex issues of unintended consequences and social dilemmas.

And

Nitke v. Ashcroft : Seth Finkelstein expert witness report
http://sethf.com/nitke/ashcroft.php
“A provider of content via the Internet cannot reasonably be expected to know the location of readers, if the context is one in which location would lead to a denial of the ability to read the content.”

Hey Dan: RE your future Prius

Don’t know if you saw this article. Sounds liek some unhappy campers.

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,63413,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

A man walks into a bar and trips over a string laying on the ground, and now the string is all twisted and coming apart at the ends.

The bartender sees the string on the floor and says “Hey! Haven’t I seen you here before and told you not to come in?”

To which the string replies “Oh no! I’m a frayed knot!”

I’m wondering what America would be like had it returned to strict isolationism after World WAR II ended?

I would like to think that America would be a land of unequaled economic wealth, a happy population that long-ago solved racial problems because it would have had the money to fix American poverty.

It would be an America with citizens that could walk down the streets of any nation in the world and be greeted in kindness for staying neutral like much of the world does.

We wouldn’t be torn apart by the activities of the outside world, indeed many places of strife may not exist in the world had America stayed out of other nations problems. If America had not help create problems within the borders of other countries there might be peace in the Middle East.

Yes, I often wonder what such an America would have been like with tens of thousands of Americans that would have lived instead of dying for causes that were none of our business.

Don

I realize that I am a blowhard with not a lot of intelligent things to say. But someone has to represent the right on this libby board.

Media off the mark with Rumsfeld potshots:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul18.html#

Al’s,

Your purpose is to derail any attempt at meaningful posit-and-discuss by asserting partisanship.

Why don’t you start your own blog rather than hijack Dan’s?

I hope this is an OK place for this. This is something I sent to Dan awhile ago, and he thought he might post something about this for discussion.
I haven’t seen any posts about it, so I figured I’d put it here in the open thread.

—–
I am self-employed, and make nearly my entire living from delivering services/products by using Open Source Software.

I think that I am not alone and probably signify the beginnings of a trend in IT.

I think IT people have become accustomed to being employed by large
companies, because that’s where IT technologies started.

But now, it’s rather easy for large companies to move their jobs overseas.
Now that IT technologies are more mature, executives know they can get
some return from moving common development tasks overseas.

In the US though, we excel at many things including entrepreneurship.
And Open Source, greatly lowers the “barrier-to-entry”.

The lowering of the “barrier-to-entry” is not being heralded in any
publications that I read. Publications tend to focus on things like,
“Linux is free. Companies can save $$$”. That’s missing the biggest
impact.

So, if you know IT technologies (and savvy/self-directed enough to figure
things out on your own), then you can create wonderful new ideas that a
large behemouth company may not be pursuing.

And, possibly, we may see a big economic gain in the future from IT people
being unemployed. Some will pick up Open Source tools, and try to make
something out of not having a job.

Personally, my thinking is “Do I want to spend thousands of dollars to get
software for development for a risky idea?” Or do I say, “Hey, I have lots
of time on my hands, I’ll just figure out how to work with this Open
Source stuff!” There’s other reasons too, but I think that’s a big one.

I see some very qualified people getting laid off, and I think there will
be some adjustment to people not relying on large companies to provide a
living.

I would love to see an article that can tease out information out there to
support this trend. I think the article would be a good candidate for
being posted on slashdot too, which I’ve also tried to get this topic
discussed but get lost in the noise.

I wrote this rather quickly, so I hope my points are clear enough.
I’ve corresponded to you in the past when you wrote about open source. I
think my testament to this trend is that I’m still here.

http://www.linuxjava.net/howto/webapp/

I thought this article from http://www.military.com/ deserved a wider audience. This is a site devoted to the Services on a professional level and the writer is a Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Sanders_051704,00.html

Its a look in the mirror piece.

I am curious how the academies that Jerry Brown set up a few years ago in Oakland are doing. Are the test scores and gruduation rates better? Do they still exist?

I tried looking for updated information and only came up with info. announcing they were being started a couple of years ago.

Ray

A social issue that has been hidden is the long term unemployed. What can be done to make it so a company would prefer to hire someone who has been unemployed for a while, or at a lower paying job. Such as a former manager of mine taking a job at target because he is over forty, and can’t find a job in his field. Tax break perhaps? I have seen very qualified people, especially over age 40, who have a very hard time after losing a job finding a new one. Age discrimination is a problem in our youth worshipping society, unfortunately.

Or is the answer just expand the Forty Plus network, such as http://www.fortyoc.org

wahoofive:

The invisible hand of Adam Smith was treated like the visible hand of Luca Brasi in “The Godfather”. And then the rest of Smith was treated like the rest of Brasi. What we today call the “free market” is such a bastardized abomination that Smith himself would be compelled to ask “Weren’t ANY of you paying attention to what I said?”

I suspect Jesus would do the same upon a return to Earth.

Russert is a wuss…a laydown too often and too easy to the fluff and BS of the GOP.

Allthough she is the (expletive appropriate…) gutter_____ of corporate sludge as news and earning every bit of the value they seek for her 15 million a year, the hardest assed interview on tv or elsewhere hands down is ….Katy Couric.

I know …never thought I would say so and do despise the format of banal crap she dominates, that said …disinformation and mfg. consent aside…having hated her as I did …I went with no cable a year stuck on one channel….watch her, it is true. There is no quarter given to squiggle or parse or mince or blow smoke. Laugh if you want but name one better. Someone like this is needed on the sunday gabs…But then Joe Biden sounds like the smartest man on the Hill today so maybe we who still prefer basis and context to frame our newsreading seem just as deluded to them. Best crock of dooty out today…

read the tripe Safire spouits in NYT today?
How can he hold a job with such bleeting.

Nice to have an entirely open thread once in a while. Good idea.

There was an article in the Scotsman recently, here, detailing human rights abuses including torture by Arafat and the PLO that I think deserves wider notice. Apparently an organization, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), has been receiving funding from the Europeans and others as long as it focuses on Israeli abuses. But as soon as it began reporting on Palestinian actions the funding mysteriously dried up. Curious.

There may be many reasons to support candidates for President other than George W. Bush. So why do anti-Bush zealots go illogical?

The ‘Bush lied about WMD’ Tango: http://blogs.rny.com/sbw/stories/storyReader$131

Considering that he published the exploit before notifying the vendor (which he never did) he’s no different that the people creating exploits like Beagle and Sassar.

Good job linking someone advocating and providing instructions on how to hack a commercial software service. Very tech savvy of you…

From the blogrolling.com news blog:

===

This morning at roughly 9:05am EST, Brent Ashley brought a security vulnerability to our attention. The issue was escalated to our on call developer who crafted a hot-patch and fixed the problem by roughly 9:54am EST.

===

The right thing to do in such a situation is to notify us and give us a chance to fix the bug. If you ever find a security flaw in any Tucows product, you can drop me a line at jdevilla@tucows.com. It’s part of my job to handle things like this. I’ll make sure the appropriate alarms are sounded, action is taken and even pull strings to make sure that we send you some kind of gift of gratitude.

The wrong thing to do is to point out the flaw to the world, tell people how to exploit it and even make creative suggestions. That’s just anti-community behaviour.

Joey deVilla
Technical Community Development Coordinator
Tucows, Inc.

You’re running Movable Type here, right, Dan? As it happens, I know a fresh and incredibly severe MT exploit. Would you like it on my blog? Shall I post it on one of the security email lists that you don’t subscribe to, but every single cracker does?

I understand the urge to publish, I feel it myself. Even just to hint. But while I’d enjoy the momentary fame, I don’t think people getting hosed would be that happy about my full exposure.

Do you back up your MT installation? Often?

Dan, if it were a Windows bug, what would you do?

You cry foul when the Pentagon tries to minimize coverage of embrassing events. Yet you agree with those who try to minimize publication of software bugs?

Regardless how fast anyone fixes bugs, it takes time for administrators to upgrade their software. Bugs are bugs. It shouldn’t matter whose fault it is – bugs and security holes are not acceptable.

If lawsuits are the only way to make cars safer, then humiliation may be the only way to force software developers more proactive. It shouldn’t a race to see who can fix bugs faster, it should be about not having any in the first place!

I write software. I also have to use a lot of crap. That is why I take these things very seriously.