Microsoft-Backed Think Tank: K-12 CS Education Cure For Sagging US Productivity 131
theodp writes: On May 6, notes think tank Brookings, the Department of Labor released labor productivity data showing that output per worker fell by 1.9 percent during the first quarter of 2015. But fear not — the Metropolitan Policy Program of [Microsoft-backed] Brookings says K-12 computer science education is the cure for what ails U.S. productivity: "So how can the United States reverse this trend? First, states, metropolitan areas, and school districts must recognize that basic digital literacy is no longer sufficient preparation for the 21st century workforce. Familiarity with higher-level skills such as coding will be critical as the role of technology continues to grow. The 60-plus school districts that have partnered with [Microsoft-backed] Code.org have already begun to move in this direction. By introducing students to computer science fundamentals early on, Code.org and its partner districts will help get more people on pathways to well-paying jobs in computer programming and other fields." Creating a national K-12 CS and tech immigration crisis was proposed as Microsoft introduced its 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas at a Brookings event in 2012. While creating a K-12 CS crisis fell to Code.org, fanning the flames of a tech immigration crisis is the purvey of [Microsoft exec-backed] FWD.us, the PAC formed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which recently sent an email blast warning U.S. citizens they're in 'A Gigantic Global Talent War', adding that China and India citizens are "just laughing [at the US], saying it's so easy to pick from you guys... we just take all the talent."
How... (Score:3, Insightful)
... is any level of western education going to make it cost-competitive to those at the distant ends of the ethernet cable? Better to help them improve their lifestyles such that they insource to western neighborhoods...
Re:How... (Score:5, Interesting)
is any level of western education going to make it cost-competitive to those at the distant ends of the ethernet cable? Better to help them improve their lifestyles such that they insource to western neighborhoods...
That's a shockingly insightful question for a /. FP! There's two separate issue here, if most of the good jobs in the future are something to do with automation (as seems likely).
How do we make life better here by ensuring we have our share of people who can code - at least code enough for some other technical specialty once everything it? We definitely need to make CS as much a core subject as math, Few people are professional mathematicians (the recent fad in "data science" notwithstanding), but for decades previous most of the good jobs required at least basic math, for cost-benefit analysis and so on. Now simple coding is the same way: it's becoming important to decision making across new professions every year.
Separately, is this all a race to the bottom? Million-dollar houses in Bangalore say no. The average price of a 3-bedroom house there is over $250k, has been for a while - more than many places in the US. It takes time for developing nations to develop, emerging economies to emerge, but it does happen. And it's terrific for the world that it does - we have no special moral right to a better standard of living than anyplace else where CS grads want a job, and it's not a zero-sum game. Until we reach the Singularity, we're not going to run out of tasks to automate.
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My first software development job paid $18k the first year. In a major US city. I competed. And I was already living like a student, with 2 roommates in a scary neighborhood, so I was just happy for my big break! I make rather more now (and all the electronics I wanted back then cost less now - yay technology).
Rice costs money to ship. Programming can be done anywhere. That's the world we live in, it's up to us to succeed in that world. And we certainly can, for demand continues to exceed supply of ta
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I guarantee you it doesn't cost double the cost of a pound of rice to ship rice, not even close. I can ship a 4000 pound vehicle overseas for $600, which works out to about $0.15 per pound, and is considerably more valuable and fragile and possibly larger than 4000 pounds of rice. So I call BS on that.
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And so what? Regardless of that and every other such factor, we have a really nice standard of living, which naturally isn't cheap. And programming can easily be done anywhere. So that's the world as we find it, and it's one in which we can compete, and we can succeed. The programming culture of Silly Valley and now Seattle is a testament to that: a fairly representative sample of programmers the world over including, yes, Americans, being paid quite well indeed even by American standards.
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by not training any of the average to above average people, they're significantly reducing the pool of those that potentially could become the best in the future.
I've worked with dozens, perhaps hundreds of above average people who have the opportunity to become the best in the future because they were brought here on H1-Bs. There will always be sweatshops - I started in one myself, and it's the only way I was able to break into the industry. But that's separate from the core issue: humanity benefits the most as a whole from tapping the largest talent pool to push technology forward.
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I've worked with dozens, perhaps hundreds of above average people who have the opportunity to become the best in the future because they were brought here on H1-Bs.
And I have worked with hundreds of far below average H1-Bs. In fact, I'd be happy to have stated I worked with a handful of average H1-Bs, but that's not happened. So what? It's anecdotal, until there's an overwhelming set of anecdotes about the lack of above average H1-Bs with almost 0 supporting that case.* I'm sure it happens, but it's an exception rather than the rule. And given that they are average, there's no reason you can't hire an average american to work instead. Until that is handled, there's no
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I rather suspect it depends on the quality of company one works for. I've seen dozens of low-quality devs (who worked from India) when I work for cheap places, but even then, the few they were willing to pay to bring to the US were the cream of that crop.
Did you interview the H1-B guys just like everyone else? Or was this some outsourcing thing? I've found that usually when people are complaining about "H1-Bs" their complains are really about shitty contractors in general.
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Meaningless without knowing which year that was.
Re:How... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you find it... questionable that so much corporate welfare and education reform is solely to create widgets for Microsoft to use? Of all the education reforms I could think of, adding coding to a core curriculum that mismanages so many other things seems questionable, although I applaud Microsoft's benevolence with tax money they aren't paying.
Certainly biotechnology is also an expanding field for the future. Do American workers have a solid basing in science to fulfill those needs? Prostitution also seems to be a growing field. Are American workers ready to accept the challenges?
Maybe it would be nice to consult the general public about education reforms they would like to see, especially since they are the one's primarily paying for it. I'd personally like to see logic introduced into the core curriculum so maybe more voters would be able to call bullshit on initiatives like these.
It also gives people a solid basing to pursue coding if they wish.
Oh, in passing, has their been a study on CEO productivity recently? While it is wonderful that worker productivity is of such great importance to require furrowed brows over a 2% drop, my own think tank suggests that loss can more than be made up for by eliminating much of the corruption in business and government, so we won't have to endure further rounds of "nice economy you've got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it".
Re:How... (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, when I went to school... mumble, mumble years ago, there was a basic computing courses available, as well as a computer lab with instructors overseeing it that taught basic coding and other bits if they saw you putting in the effort to learn.
But there was also music classes, art classes, PE, etc. I'd be had pressed to say a computing course served me better than the art course, but imagine some think tank arguing that art education should be reintroduced so people could better understand relationships, abstract thinking, and non-verbal communication.
Not nearly as sexy without the implied "or else you will be scuttled for a cheaper body in India".
Anyway, now all that has been replaced with the advisor to the advisor to the assistant manger of the vice principal, and everyone being very sage about how to best spend other people's money, and near hysterics about how a 2% increase in taxes will collapse the economy. But only for them. If you have to pay more, well that a just sacrifice for the good of our tax structure in Nevada.
So after gutting the educational system, now it's a Big Problem, and requires immediate money so you can finance being a plebe to them for ever.
Fuck 'em.
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Of course, unless things have changed dramatically since the last time I paid attention, a 3 bedroom house in China is liable to be a much higher status thing than it is in the US, owned primarily by executives and the like. May as well try to judge the economic wellbeing of the workers at a major jewelery store by the average price of Ferrari's in the parking lot.
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In India (where Bangalore is) , software developer is the high-status job. It's higher status and better paying than a doctor or a lawyer. We're talking average house prices for a city of over 8 million here. Successful software developers tend to have staff: beyond a maid and gardener as you might find in the US, a nanny, a driver, perhaps a cook. Sure, those jobs aren't providing a first-world standard of living, but the software jobs are coming close (you have the staff, but there's very little in af
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I think this whole education solves all is a giant hail mary wish.
I'm in Canada and this is all we hear as the solution as well. Economy is going down, jobs leaving... invest in education.
Yet, where are the results? Nortel collapse. BB not doing too well. Skilled foreign workers programs. Can anyone tell me why we waste all this money on Western education if we're just going to import our skilled labor? If they can do the work, maybe all this spending on education is a waste. Seems they can spend much less
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Globally there's probably 6 or 7 billion people. Are we all going to be coders? Seriously...
No one is suggesting that we're all going to be software developers. But increasingly you need some coding, or DB, or other "automation" skills to be better at other professional jobs, much like you need high school math for many professional jobs today.
We certainly need to break from our current educational system that was explicitly designed to create good manufacturing workers (with any knowledge transfer being secondary to that goal). Manufacturing jobs were great jobs 100 years ago, and that system m
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I really don't think it will help. I actually think it is hurting us.
As they say, putting money/effort into one thing takes money/effort from other things.
I think we put enough money into education; especially k-12. Speaking in Canada here, but I suspect the same is true in most parts of the US. The spending is there.
But is the spending there for say infrastructure/transit? Is it there to support an industrial policy? Is it there to support job sharing/reduced hours?...
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That's not a trade-off that's important in the US. The federal government only spends 11% of it's budget on all that sort of thing: education, infrastructure, etc. We don't need to take from one to give more to the other. We spend 65% of the budget mailing checks to people, and that's the part we'd need to political will to cut in order to fund other things.
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Now simple coding is the same way: it's becoming important to decision making across new professions every year.
Unless by "simple coding" you mean "the ability to type a formula in Excel" I just don't see this happening.
The mistake a lot of people on slashdot make is thinking that all professions and businesses are like tech start ups. If you're a management consultant, divorce lawyer or something, you will not be spending any of your valuable (billable) time messing around with software design. Someone else will do that for you.
Software in most businesses is another overhead, like IT infrastructure, or office cl
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No manager would be learning to use a word processor, that's crazy talk - they won't be wasting their valuable time when they already have a secretary for this!
Same thing. Word processors meant that the overhead cost of the secretarial pool was eliminated, and everyone was expected to be able to create their own documents.
You mention "typing formulas into Excel", but you don't seem to realize there's an entire coding culture there already. You can't get very far without VBA scripts (or whatever the curren
Re:How... (Score:4, Insightful)
MS and Zuck don't care. Their agenda is to saturate the market with qualified candidates, thereby commoditizing all computer work, be it programming, admin, or support roles. This drives down the price of employees. They won't be happy until you're working for minimum wage and no vacation, or just outright owning you as a slave.
aw, c'mon, man (Score:4, Funny)
Why limit to just CS education? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is pretty obvious to me that our country's productivity and economy in general will improve if we improve CS based education. But that is simply because increasing education in general will help our economy. There are very few ways a country can actually invest in its economy in the long term. Improving education. increasing funding of both private and public research, and improving infrastructure are the only ways that come to mind.
So while improving CS education is a great idea, I see no reason why it needs to be singled out.
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If only I had mod points...
Re:Why limit to just CS education? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It would be like if an airline backed think tank suggested piloting and aviation repair education as a cure for the sagging economy.
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Because Microsoft and Facebook want and abundant (and therefore cheap & expendable) workforce.
The geek is economically and socially illiterate.
What Microsoft and Facebook needs are customers who feel financially secure, have a generous amount of disposable income, and the more of them, the better.
Microsoft typically pays about 15% above market. The lowliest entry level software engineer at Microsoft earns about $80,000/yr. Average Salary for Microsoft Corp Employees [payscale.com]
The median household income in the US is $52,000.
Re:Why limit to just CS education? (Score:4, Informative)
There are very few ways a country can actually invest in its economy in the long term.
You mean besides dealing with the grotesque wage inequality that we have now?
People always thought that deflation (worse than inflation) would happen when a large quantity of out of work people would be unable to buy things, leading to a collapse in prices. But it can also happen through wage stagnation where people are working, but because their wage and buying power do not increase, they simply do not have the means to be consumers and grow the economy. So you end up with the same surplus of goods and services that people are unable to buy, leading to deflationary price collapses. People also put off marriage when they are poor, and there are less consuming families also. Think of an economic drought, just like California has a water drought.
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Computer education is pointless. Why be trained in any profession if that profession is going to end up extinct in the areas that need employed people to patronize the local businesses, pay the taxes, and so forth?
If they were serious about making a sustainable economy, they'd ditch the whole drone-level skill training program and focus on how to start your own business and thus avoid the layoff treadmill. After all, isn't that what we're told? The only job that's safe is the one you make yourself?
That mea
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No, it is not obvious. Since 1995 we are used to 3% productivity gains, and a general slowdown in innovation means it is harder to squeeze more work out of each person.
Email, word processing, instant messenger, desktop sharing, video conferences, and piles of other stuff that are now commonplace did not exist most places. Sure there were precursors back to the 70's, but I'm talking widespread adoption of all of those and more.
America's productivity is largely due to 50 hour work weeks, and if you measure ou
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You can't always have "productivity gains", just like you can't always have a rising stock market. If people are moving from full-time to part-time jobs because of scaled-back demand, of course how much each worker produces will drop. Also, they're forgetting about the oil glut's impact on the economy - people are spending less on gas so you're going to have a drop in GDP even if productivity stays the same.
Of course, the people pushing "moar koderz" are the ones who will benefit the most, with the downwar
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My jaded mind wonders if productivity won't be limited as more people realize just how badly they're being screwed and no longer want to slave away for some guy just because he is rich.
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The problem is that if you improve education overall, the current political class would not survive that. They are just barely scraping by by keeping the population in fear as it is. The last thing they want is citizens that actually understand how they are ripped off and manipulated.
China and India citizens are "just laughing" (Score:2, Insightful)
China and India are hellholes. If we try to match them, the US will be one as well.
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Exactly. If China and India really were just picking from us, why is it that seemingly every Chinese and Indian citizen wants to leave his home country and head for the U.S. or Europe? Likewise, why isn't there a deluge of people in the U.S. and Europe wanting to move to China or India?
Zuckerberg's argument is so asinine and entirely self-serving that I seriously doubt anyone in the U.S., as ignorant as average Americans are, believes it.
Why bother? (Score:3)
We now know that virtually all productivity gains go to the top 1%, there is no incentive to increase productivity if it all goes to our masters.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
This. Before we try to whip our kids harder, we should probably give them an incentive to work in the first place.
The American Dream used to be "work hard, climb the ladder, be successful, grow rich". That dream's over. Working hard only means that your boss gets rich. You stay poor.
The new American Dream is "buy a lottery ticket and hope to get run over by a rich guy so you can sue them". Because that's sadly the only way left for anyone who doesn't already belong to the self proclaimed elite to get rich.
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buy a lottery ticket and hope to get run over by a rich guy so you can sue them
And the latter part of that dream manages to be an even worse proposal than the former:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/... [dailykos.com]
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So I guess shysters plugged that loophole, eh?
So the lottery it is. Well, at least until someone gets a bright idea how to tax that into oblivion, too.
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Before telling someone about the American Reality, please visit reality first.
Wealth for the lowest 50% has stagnated or dropped. With inflation, that means the bottom ~3/4 are stagnant in buying power or dropping. Growth has only been for the richest few.
And that "wealth gnerational passing" is why: someone who happened to be born to wealthy parents will find it easy to get rich. The opportunities are taken by them. There aren't any left for those who weren't born to rich parents.
And because that wealth is
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In the US at least, productivity & real wages moved steadily up in lockstep from the end of WW2 to 1970. From then on, the former has more than doubled, the latter has been flat. Somebody must be pocketing the difference.
World's worst career (Score:5, Insightful)
To encourage a kid to go into a CS is a mean thing to do. Congress will continue to fall over themselves ever expanding the H1B program. Companies will love them right when they get out of college, but they will not pay above a certain salary - the same way a fast food joint doesn't. Then when they reach 40 years old they will be thrown on the human waste pile for not having "current" skills or not willing to put in 80 hour weeks with Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets. Like all the other recent college graduates are or newly arrived H1Bs. Then they'll be lucky to get a $10/hour job at a call center or target.
If you love a kid, encourage them to become a plumber. if they want to do programming, it can be the hobby that they can do out of love for an open source project.
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Re:World's worst career (Score:4, Insightful)
Not may of those high paying programming jobs exist, while every home/business requires a plumber. Plumbing is a five figure to six figure job.
There is at least one high paying software developer job for every highly skilled software developer. That is why no one knows a highly skilled developer who they would kill to have on their team who is unemployed.
Even in the Midwest you will hit a six digit salary by your early 30's. There is a ceiling of about $150k that very few even qualified developers will ever cross (again based on the Midwest) simply because there aren't enough Director / VP / CTO jobs to go around. But very few professions have max salaries that even reach six digits, so I really don't see what software developers have to complain about.
Developers often compare themselves to lawyers, doctors, or investment bankers, but they don't realize there is an army of public defendants, general practitioners, and unsuccessful traders who make no more than your average software developer. The ones making $300k+ per year are likely not much more numerous than the software entrepreneurs making similar money. And the lawyers, doctors, etc. making that much money are often essentially small business owners, not simple salaried employees.
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>If by 40 and you can't make your way into management or have the talent to become a senior-level programmer leading projects, then you deserve to fail.
Why? Why shouldn't there be a solid career path for "good enough" individuals, as there is in most fields?
Look around your building. How many "normal" employees are there? How many managers and senior staff? 10 to 1 maybe? So, what happens to the other nine programmers after the best one gets the "higher" job? It's not like they can get a job elsewhe
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Plumbers can work fewer hours for the same pay. They also have better job security (unions and obligatory certification).. And they can't be outsourced to India or eastern Europe for 1/4 the pay.
If your job can be off-shored by someone who thinks it will save money, you have no job security. Ask all the people laid off by Microsoft and IBM.
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For now. If you think plumbing is some magical career that won't affected by globalization and advancements in tech, think again.
Unless someone invents a Star Trek transporter, people in the US aren't going to be calling up cheaper plumbers in China to come and fix their burst water pipe.
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If you love a kid, encourage them to become a plumber.
You and Barbara Hudson should speak for yourselves. I've been an SE for over 30 years and I love it.
It's a question of averages, but of course everyone on slashdot is a special genius.
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> Congress will continue to fall over themselves ever expanding the H1B program
Why aren't these traitorous bastards strung up by their balls and used as piñatas?
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Because the ones on one side say "We gotta *get* those evil people who disagree with us! The ends justify the means!" and the ones on the other side say "We gotta *get* those evil people who disagree with us! The ends justify the means!"
And the low-info morons treat ideologies like sports teams instead of educating themselves with some history and making choices based on principles, reason, & logic.
How about coming together on
Different IT Skills (Score:2, Insightful)
I work in IT and am highly sought after. Have been for many years. Same with lots of people that I know. Recruiters are pulling them out of college with incredible offers.
The difference is a specialization in Linux, website management, and database administration (LAMP, Hadoop, Cpanel, PostGre, etc.).
Windows admins are a dime per dozen and they know it. Someone moved their cheese and they are failing to adapt.
Unfortunately, Windows skills are what all of the teachers are pushing. It is time for the hig
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which recently sent an email blast warning U.S. citizens they're in 'A Gigantic Global Talent War'
Who comes up with terms like "email blast" and why are Slashdot submitters repeating them? Can we please eliminate stupid marketing terms like that at Slashdot, of all places?
... because email spam doesn't have quite the cachet :-) And anyone who thinks they can compete with someone who costs 1/4 their pay is an ID-10-T. This whole scam is just to sell more products and services, and put downward pressure one wages.
"Sagging Productivity" (Score:2)
Who is making this shit up? And why is anyone believing it?
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I think it's the same source that keeps telling us that our economy is shrinking and that we have to take another pay cut to keep it afloat.
Oddly that economy problem does not affect management bonuses negatively. Quite the opposite. But we have to pay them well and increase their bonus, you see, because they're the only thing that keeps our failing economy afloat. Let's all pray for them. Or to them.
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You are taking a pay cut and suffering other austerity measures and phony 'debts' to provide more currency to the financial markets that everybody calls *too big to fail*. Apparently the bailout wasn't enough.
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The problem is that the bailouts did nothing to deflate the bubble. Quite contrary, it blew more hot air into the whole thing.
And now we don't have the money anymore to cushion another burst.
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...it blew more hot air into the whole thing.
That's all it was supposed to do, nothing else.
And now we don't have the money anymore to cushion another burst.
You don't need 'money', you only need to believe to carry this on indefinitely. The bailout doesn't even cover a half a percent of the derivatives market. The system is truly faith driven. 'Confidence', a good name for this game.
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It's a real thing, output per employee. I guess you could remain blissfully ignorant and reject new information, or you could learn stuff.
http://www.bls.gov/lpc/ [bls.gov]
It's much more satisfying to be outraged at anything that confirms your ignorant cynicism, ans easier too
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Everything shows pretty steady since the 50s, but each point is only in comparison to the previous quarter, which is the kind of thinking used to bring on these kinds of panics. It's all bullshit, and your reply non-responsive.
Re:"Sagging Productivity" Explained (Score:2)
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Also, since productivity is measured by $$ produced per hour worked, the huge drop in gas prices means that even if the total produced were to stay the same, "productivity" drops.
Sold! (Score:1)
Re:Sold! (Score:5, Interesting)
Brookings analyses have increasingly been up for sale [wikipedia.org]. Not surprisingly it is taking up this pro-Microsoft, pro-Gates agenda after the Bill's foundation became their biggest contributor.
Talent of what exactly? (Score:2)
Yes I know they're good at math and CS scores and more willing to accept longer work hours and less payment, but what else? There is no world-class software company or any organization of the field in China or India, except the Chinese cyber army maybe. And so far they haven't made anything significant yet, commercial or open-sourced.
What kind of talent are they looking for exactly? How many of those H-1Bs could possibly be helpful in key areas such as Microsoft Research, the kind of place which actually ne
Slashdot Religion (Score:1)
I'm starting to feel like Slashdot is a religious website pushing for converts, what with all the posts about needing more women in engineering and CS and also saying that elementary and high schools need to focus more on programming. I guess that would classify this as a universalizing religion.
In my experience, even people who choose engineering and the like as a career path often aren't that intelligent. Schooling doesn't necessarily make you a good programmer or anything else. One might consider that a
Money can buy PR (Score:1)
slashdot is merely reporting what the media is discussing.
The tech companies want to increase the number of h1-bs. So, the big tech companies have been pushing (paying) a media narrative, that the product of American k-12 schooling is inferior, and that America needs to import talent from overseas. Sort of like how Microsoft has been pushing that Google is evil, and anticompetitive, and Saudi Arabia is pushing that the Syrian rebels want a secular democracy (ha ha).
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You make a good point. Most of what I see here now is indistinguishable from a cult, and any contrary opinions are rapidly shouted, er, modded down.
Yeah, it's our CS education (Score:3)
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the endemic problems with the US educational system extend somewhat broader and deeper than "we don't teach kindergartners to code".
Simple explaination: we're tired (Score:3)
...output per worker fell by 1.9 percent during the first quarter of 2015.
Because the current/remaining employees are being ridden hard and put away wet. Employers are squeezing what they have, instead of hiring, to be "competitive" - even though profits are up and shareholders are happy. Or it could be because of things like this: Georgia Businessman Refuses to Hire Until Obama Is Fired [go.com] (there are others):
Bill Looman, owner of U.S. Cranes LLC, said he is fed up with the bad economy and D.C. politicians who do nothing to solve the problem. So until there is a change of leadership, his company trucks will bear the message: “New Company Policy: We Are Not Hiring Until Obama Is Gone.”
Or that that the top priority [nytimes.com] of Mitch McConnell and the GOP was/is to make Obama a one-term president (which didn't go so well) and prevent any successes for the President or the Democrats - instead of actually working to fix the Economy. (Yes, the Dems are a problem too, but mainly because they're inept, not actively evil, hostile and uncaring toward those who are not rich, old, white and male - like the Republicans.)
Talent War? It's Class War (Score:4, Insightful)
Computer Science Programs aren't the cure for much of anything -- so stop trying to make them out to be. By doing so, you are DOING ACTUAL HARM to our already broken education system and to the students who will be subjected to these asinine policies.
You want to know what ails US productivity? Being raised by over-protective parents who are scared to death of being thrown in jail if they so much as let their children walk to school unattended, much less play outside on their own, who are given rewards and told how special they are for just showing up at the soccer match, are told to be busy little worker bees at school, to get good grades if they want to have a career, who then go to college, put themselves deep in debt to pay for that education and find that that MBA that they thought would make them just like Gordon Gekko and wealthy beyond belief has netted them a job as a "Sales Representative" at Comcast.
And after all that, they watch as the costs of rent and groceries keeps going up year after year. And that they are struggling to survive in a society that treats it's unemployed and homeless as pariahs. A society where the Local Governments are creating more and more Municipal Infractions with higher and higher fines to charge them with and even sending people to jail over non-payment of debts and/or subjecting them to predatory "payment programs" via private companies who manage to turn a $100 fine into a $1000 profit. A society where their very employers are charging higher and higher prices for goods and services locally, while they practically give away their products "emerging markets" all in the name of globalization -- while laying off their co-workers and either off-shoring operations or importing H1-B workers who live in a corporate squat house. A society where Martha Stewart is thrown in Camp Cupcake for acting on a stock tip given by a friend over dinner -- but where the DoJ chooses not to prosecute practically the entirety of Congress for Insider Trading for acting on the litany of illegal stock tips given by Lobbyists on a daily basis -- where that same Congress then passes a law legalizing Insider trading for them and them alone
And then it really sets in -- everything really hits home. They finally get a crystal clear understanding of what the term "wage slave" means. And that yes -- they are indeed a slave and it's no laughing matter or petty issue. Because you find you are an actual fucking slave. Tied down by shackles made of debt, credit ratings and the need to get by in a society that does not take care of it's own, were they are not equal under law, where the law is against them while giving a complete pass on the crimes of the wealthy and where it's "I got mine, go get yours you lazy slob" while the Corporations and Government work hand in hand to squeeze every last bit of money from the lower classes until there is nothing left but the ultra-wealthy and "the scum"
And that's where this Think Tank supports -- cracking the whip -- telling scary stories, making it us against them -- all in an effort to get kids to work harder, to give more, do more and to do it all for less.
So can you blame the current work force for languishing? For not giving a shit if the company that employs them is as successful as your Board and Shareholders wants it to be? And if this "Think Tank" gets it's way -- who will they blame when this next generation, not content to merely languish in apathy chooses to rise up and seek the blood of their oppressors? Because that is exactly where things are going. Because that is where society has always gone under similar conditions. Because that's where things always go when the greedy short sighted fucks finally take things too far
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Yes. And basically they are creating a crisis to profit from it.
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The only way to cure that would be a revolution, but that would be totally contrary to America's fundamental values.
Smoke and mirrors (Score:2, Interesting)
There is NO shortage of technology talent in the United States. The lies propagated by prominent technology companies like Microsoft and Facebook are so they can fire more older workers and hire immigrants at bottom basement wages to replace them.
As for productivity declining, maybe that is because the economy is better now so that workers don't feel so compelled to work their asses off just to try to save their jobs. Also, productivity has increased substantially over the past decade or two, whereas wage
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Why do you hate Capitalism? Why do you hate Freedom? Why do you have children. Think of the children!
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ummm why do you *hate* children. I screwed that up.
Yeah, right. (Score:1)
The idea that everyone needs to be able to write code is nonsense. This is just propaganda to support the "need" for more visas.
It's a CRISIS, I tell you! But fortunately we can spend the next 20 years importing labor for the jobs we can't export, while you fix the school system and kids work their way through it.
Or, you could try paying them (Score:2)
These stupid bastards. They think the most productive workforce in the world has suddenly lost productivity because of some educational deficit.
I wonder if it even occurred to them that maybe just paying people a reasonable wage might make a difference instead of putting all your focus on your C-class executives' compensation.
Who doesn't realize that eventually, growing income inequality is going to eventually result in lower productivity? And that deteriorating lifestyles are not good for business even
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There's trouble! Trouble I tell you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Pretty sure this has been tried before. (Score:2)
I was installing security systems at the time, and we serviced all of the local schools. I was there during the purge of Apple from the school system. Rooms just for the storage of out going Apple equipment (computers, printers, other peripherals) lots of rooms. Every school was the same.
Some schools were giving a single Win95 and a modem a try (not a router) to get outside access and having a heck of a go of it. Running a 6 line BBS I could of been of some use, but regulations prevented it. - interesting
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Yep, when I was in elementary/middle school (late '80s / early '90s), there were Apple ][s everywhere. There was a big "computers in schools" push, grant money made it nearly free for a school to get them, so they all had them. I am not sure how effective it was at "improving productivity of the workforce" though.
Sagging productivity? (Score:2)
The US is the most productive economy in the world. I say we don't worry about it yet and instead use some of that productivity for critical utilities, such as health care, and liesure.
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The US is the most productive economy in the world. I say we don't worry about it yet and instead use some of that productivity for critical utilities, such as health care, and liesure.
Lie? Sure.
the guy who brought us windows and office (Score:1)
shouldn't be allowed within a 100 miles of education or healthcare
What we need is a perspective (Score:1)
What do you expect from a techno Thug like Gates? (Score:1)
Sagging Tits (Score:2)
Serendipitous (Score:1)
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God save us from 'Educational Reform'.