Living standards are stagnating, vicious wars raging, poverty-stricken migrants pouring across borders and class chasms growing. Amidst this, the crony capitalists and their bureaucratic allies have only grown more arrogant and demanding. But the failures of those who occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights” are obvious to most of the citizens on whose behalf they claim to speak and act.
Ethnic minorities and immigrants have now become core constituents of progressive parties in many countries—the Socialists in France, the British Labour Party and the Democratic Party here in America.
Nationalism gets a bad rap in Europe,
Seems like a rather misguided reaction. The people causing all of this aren't really experts at anything, apart from gaining themselves more power.
...And they're still getting their way even now. They've just managed to damage the educational opportunities of the lower classes so significantly that they now don't realize they're actually doing exactly what those "experts" want them to do.
Nothing benefits the cronies more than the masses believing that learnedness and intelligence is the enemy. Anti-intellectualism shoots itself in the foot yet again.
From my little corner of the economy, there's two things that make my blood boil:
1) Not protecting workers from predatory non-compete "agreements". This blocks the employee from finding a new job.
2) Driving down wages by importing cheap labor.
It's not xenophobic either. I consider someone who is a cream of the crop programmer from India a valued colleague who likely isn't cheap labor. A copy-and-paste programmer that CHEAPLY creates bloated, chaotic code is a saboteur to my craft and I resent such people. Short sighted companies consider the cream of the crop as interchangeable with the copy-and-paste chump.
At the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy and a COMPLETE idiot, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and just jump right in.
Say you apply for a job with a company which requires that you sign a non-compete before they'll hire you. Say this company subs out cut-and-paste programming because they have designed their systems to work with production line flunkies. Well, allow me to be the first to say, "Welcome to the real world."
I feel your pain. I've been there-done that, and it really suxxxx. On the other hand, there are ballsy ways to get around non-competes without cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm old now and I will never have to worry about working again, so this is easy for me. One, design a fail-safe strategy for blowing up non-compete contracts. Two, go to work for a small, solid, successful company and learn everything you can possibly learn about being an OWNER of a small, solid, successful company. Make friends...DO NOT NETWORK, people can smell a phony networker a mile away. Invent something that will make you special and different. Save your money. Live in a cracker box. Walk to work. Eat PB&J sandwiches at your desk. Make a close friend with a local, home town bank. Develop a business plan, not some kind of screwball prospectus, just a business plan. Now, start lining up your very own customer base. If that means doing work at home at night, do it. If you drink, stop. If you smoke dope, stop. If you do anything that can get in the way of you one day being a rock star, stop doing it. I have had Porsches since I was 22 years old. I'm 70 now and they feel a WHOLE lot better now than they did along time ago.
It's you world. If you are as good as you think you are, you will succeed. Every now and then it will be a "white-knuckle" ride but one day it will all be worth it. Mark my word, you can be an honorable man and still win.
At the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy and a COMPLETE idiot, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and just jump right in.
Say you apply for a job with a company which requires that you sign a non-compete before they'll hire you. Say this company subs out cut-and-paste programming because they have designed their systems to work with production line flunkies. Well, allow me to be the first to say, "Welcome to the real world."
I feel your pain. I've been there-done that, and it really suxxxx. On the other hand, there are ballsy ways to get around non-competes without cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm old now and I will never have to worry about working again, so this is easy for me. One, design a fail-safe strategy for blowing up non-compete contracts. Two, go to work for a small, solid, successful company and learn everything you can possibly learn about being an OWNER of a small, solid, successful company. Make friends...DO NOT NETWORK, people can smell a phony networker a mile away. Invent something that will make you special and different. Save your money. Live in a cracker box. Walk to work. Eat PB&J sandwiches at your desk. Make a close friend with a local, home town bank. Develop a business plan, not some kind of screwball prospectus, just a business plan. Now, start lining up your very own customer base. If that means doing work at home at night, do it. If you drink, stop. If you smoke dope, stop. If you do anything that can get in the way of you one day being a rock star, stop doing it. I have had Porsches since I was 22 years old. I'm 70 now and they feel a WHOLE lot better now than they did along time ago.
It's you world. If you are as good as you think you are, you will succeed. Every now and then it will be a "white-knuckle" ride but one day it will all be worth it. Mark my word, you can be an honorable man and still win.
I'm NOT a rock star because I don't smoke dope. I'm more of a classical symphony star. I do make contacts that are more like fellow travelers that appreciate the craft of fine software. I may have "cut off my nose" a couple of times as you suggest. When I'm interviewing and someone puts a predatory non-compete in front of me, I glare and ask "Are you nuts?" It just makes me angry. I produce things with an "open source" mentality, letting anyone who wants to see my work have a copy unless I'm under some legal obligation not to. I'm an open book.
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