Re: Letter to US Sen. Byron Dorgan re unpaid overtime

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/20/03 

Date: 19 Dec 2003 17:11:00 -0800

Randy Howard <randy.howard@FOOmegapathdslBAR.net> wrote in message news:<MPG.1a4cfa0a318bd30c9899e1@news.megapathdsl.net>...
> In article <f5dda427.0312190511.2ebeccb4@posting.google.com>, spinoza1111
> @yahoo.com says...
> > I did want to do more
> > training than they wanted because it was clear to me that the
> > developers were hungry for training, not having a single bookstore in
> > all of Suva except one, that stocked only used computer books, books
> > on agronomy, and sacred texts of Christianity and Hinduism.
>
> That explains why a lot of them are well versed in 20-year old DOS
> weirdness and such, witness some of the websites and "programming
> books" floated in c.l.c recently which were filled with out of date
> information. If they intend to become a technical powerhouse, they
> should at least get reference information from the current century.

Since 20-year old DOS weirdness is still chuckling and muttering in
the bowels of Windows 2000, they do very well to have this
understanding. Furthermore, books are out of sight expensive in India
and Fiji although some publishers try to meet the demand by special
editions printed on cheaper materials. Offshore developers do very
well with out of date information, which they know is out of date.

>
> > Because Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford don't in any way speak
> > for ELF (Earth Liberation Front) and other radical groups.
>
> So, they're not terrorists yet. That's not exactly comforting.

Nor are they like to be, having too much to lose.

>
> > Hollywood stars are "liberal" because in fact they live, like the
> > rest of us, from paycheck to paycheck
>
> Are you on crack? Their version of "paycheck to paycheck" is
> not in the same universe with that of most other people. The
> very idea that you can feel somehow caught in the same struggle
> with them is bizarre in the extreme.
>
What a strange question. "Crack" occupies a mental economy as the
representation of all that the middle class desires and fears, and we
are reminded in this connection of the large numbers of middle-class
white crack addicts who go into the city for a fix. No I am not on
crack.

Gee, what's next. "Is Ed Nilges a Negro?"

I've lived with a steady paycheck, and without, surviving in the
latter case on magazine articles and book advances. The Hollywood
"star", or struggling midlevel actor, doesn't get a steady paycheck
because each film is a new venture and if he becomes not "bankable"
for any reason, he can end up in poverty. This happens to "stars" all
the time.

It happened to the stars of the silents who did not make the
transition to talkies. It happened to Peter Fonda.

The actor has only to be associated with a bomb to have her career
terminated: Elizabeth Berkeley, the star of Showgirls, is now peddling
Pilates tapes.

The actor's career can be terminated, permanently as was the case with
OJ Simpson and as will be the case with Michael Jackson if the
allegations are "proved".

Superrich Hollywood stars are different from you and me, of course.
But not in the way you imagine. And they are not all liberal, as the
example of Reagan, Wayne, Dennis Miller and Arnold shows.
 
> > and if their bankability goes down, they suffer like the rest of
> > us;
>
> Yes, it just takes 5 years instead of 5 months to run their savings
> dry. By then, the next opportunity to strip down and rut with
> another moron on screen comes along and they're in coke money
> again.
>
My word, such vivid imagery. You lead an active fantasy life. I'd
guess that acting is mostly hard work.
 
> > at the height of her career, Judy Garland didn't have food money,
>
> That was a while ago. Mike Tyson is a more modern example, and
> he got more than he deserved in compensation, and less than he
> deserved in karmic retribution.
>
> > and Marilyn Monroe was used and discarded by several Mob figures
> > and JFK himself.
>
> History keeps repeating itself with used women and democratic
> presidents, yes.

Republican presidents (with the exception of Richard Nixon) get laid,
too. However, it has been a long-standing media rule not to publicise
Republicans getting lucky since Republicans retaliate. George Bush,
for example, participated in sado-masochistic, bisexual orgies in
earlier times and may do so today: look at Laura's eyes: that woman is
on some powerful drugs and has seen things no decent Texas librarian
should have seen.
>
> > Unlike the real powers in Hollywood, which are corporations, the
> > actors you mention retain some of the liberalism of their parent's
> > generation in part because it's convenient and in part because they
> > work for a living.
>
> Streisand doesn't work for a living any more than the British Royal
> family does. She just opens her mouth 500% more often.
>
> > Besides, far more prevelant are Hollywood stars who buy-in to
> > conservative causes, a long list that just starts with Ronald Reagan,
> > John Wayne, and Arnold Shwarzenegger.
>
> You're actually trying to claim that there are more conservative
> Hollywood stars than liberals? Okay, that's just ridiculous. You
> made it through a substantial amount of verbiage and only got
> derailed by your hysterics a couple times so far, but this is proof
> that you use a PRNG as a logic circuit.
>
Consider my list alone. Most "leading men", from Clint Eastwood to
Bruce Willis, are conservative or centrist, and no "action heroes" are
politically liberal. These males are the dominant players in
Hollywood.

Again, you are like a child at a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade:
dazzled by notions and ideas no more substantial than a giant floating
balloon image.

> > of Dennis Miller, a sour little individual who never got over the fact
> > that his Daddy left and who claims to be, today, vestigially liberal
>
> Wrong. He is essentially now an outcast in Hollywood, because he is
> overtly conservative, was a strong supporter of Bush and the war on
> terror, and is a FOX news guest commentator. You couldn't be more
> off-base.
>
That's bull***. Sean PENN was thrown out of work for his stand
against the war. Miller gets to make his garbage all the time. His
stance of being "alternative" is a complete lie. He instead speaks in
the hate-filled authoritarian way that attracts white men in which his
problems are always caused by someone else, because white men think
that way.

In Dennis Miller's rants, it's always some "***" who is causing
all the problems and it's clear to me that that "***" is his
father. He is a dangerous man and a proto-Fascist.

 
> > Indeed I would have to ask questions about a mental economy formed in
> > the 1960s which is occupied by ersatz action figures who represent
> > real politics.
>
> Elections have always been popularity contests. Nobody worth having
> for office wants the job in the first place. Anyone that does is
> guilty of something before they even get elected. The fact that we
> vote based upon appearance and charm instead of logic and platforms
> is why we get what we deserve with elected representatives.
>
That's bull***, too. Howard Dean's popularity is based on the fact
that he both projects and is a solidity that cannot become a Macy's
balloon. The problem isn't in the electorate which wanted to vote for
RFK in 1968 and would like very much to vote for Dean.

It's in the view of elite wannabes that democracies are of necessity
mobocracies in which elections are decided by appearance and charisma,
a view that the elite uses to in fact manipulate results and bar solid
candidates from a shot, as the DLC is trying to bar Dean.

In fact, these newsgroups form a model of the process in which solid,
stand up guys like me are subject to systematic campaigns based
precisely on the fact that we say what we mean, and do not calculate
for effect.
 
> > Like a child at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, the conservative
> > sees Barbara Streisand, or more precisely a great gas bag
> ...
> > and concludes that all liberals must be rich.
>
> All liberals are not rich. In fact, they exist solely because so damn
> few of them have any money at all. They rely and insist upon keeping
> the majority of the population as poor and dependent on the system as
> possible for their voting base. They use rich "pseudo-liberals" who
> are really living life completely different than what comes out of
> their mouth as mouthpieces (as you said) to try and convince their
> brainwashed masses that they too could rich, if only the conservatives
> weren't "keeping them down". It's really pretty sad, but you can't
> expect sheep to think for themselves. The scary part, is that in the
> US, the sheep allow actors to think for them.
>
> > This is correct and it's a good thing. Those of us who remain,
>
> I'm sorry, I wasn't including you in the list of developers. You
> are a sociologist that is good enough at persiflage that you can
> fool a few manglers into thinking you are a competent programmer.
> The rest of us know better.
>
All you know is in all probability second-hand information based on a
systematic campaign of character assassination that was conducted
commencing last year by Richard Heathfield, and this makes you a
complete fool. You have been had.
 
> > who do what we need to do to stay in the game (such as work in Fiji
> > or write computer books, as fast a way to the poorhouse as you'll
> > ever find) because we like to code.
>
> If it makes you happy, great. If you start developing code for
> automobiles, please let us know so we can adjust our buying selections
> accordingly.
>
It is jejune to get into debates about skill. Such debates are fueled
by a genuine anxiety because (details at 11) corporate and even
scientific employers DO NOT BELIEVE that programming "skill" exists in
any meaningful way.

John von Neumann did not think that a programming "skill" would be
needed to assemble code for the ENIAC or IAS machines. He thought
their programming to be a dull transcription activity, and his view is
shared today by most high-level types.

Having mastered programming I think that the constant stress on a
"skill" here in this ng is primarily part of a macho system.

There is a programming "skill" but it is very, very different from
what the highlevel administrator or ordinary programmer thinks it is.
It is close to but not identical to what the computer science
professor thinks it is. Hint: it has nothing to do with the
knowledge-or-belief that concatenation in a loop is "inefficient".

You've concluded, probably from a combination of my broad culture,
writing skill, second-hand information and the absence of code that I
have no "programming skill". Fine: I can live with that. My concern in
this discussion is not my skill, for I have found the whole issue so
clouded by the macho system that countless developers can be up to
their ass in "certification" and still be deskilled in a heartbeat.
That is because developers are such little s*ts with so little
solidarity and so few relational skills that they have been placed
into a savage competition with each other for diminishing jobs, and
are deeply anxious about their place in the dog-eat-dog struggle,
they've brought on themselves.

I have seen countless developers eased out despite "skill" because the
name of "skill" is under a discourse rule always and everywhere able
to be transformed into its reverse by management, since management
retains the right to define what constitutes "skill".

I'd draw your attention to phrases such as "business sense" and "the
needs of the user". Innocuous in and of themselves, they can,
universally, be used to put "skilled" developers in their place, and
they can replace technical pushback at-will.

In fact, precisely because programmers are regarded as a
lower-life-form by the real elite in our society (which does not, you
may be assured, include Barbara Streisand), a whole body of their
insights is in danger of being lost. I refer to the practices
surrounding structured programming including structured walkthroughs
which were developed in the 1970s and during an era of greater worker
control of production.

I used to think the phenomenon was restricted to bottom-feeders in
Chicago such as the folks I worked for in the 1970s. But then I spent
five years in Silicon Valley and Princeton University and I discovered
that the alienation and the systematic maltreatment of the mere
programmer was systemic. I found serious errors in Numerical Recipes
precisely because the code was written by grad student slaves such as
I assisted at Princeton...people living on Ramen noodles and a hair
from a nervous breakdown, systematically maltreated by overpaid
academic super-stars.

Some of the grad students have wised up and at Harvard they've formed
a union.

But in most areas, the macho system is used to spread fear about a
"skill" which managers don't even want. Again, I think there is a
programming skill and that society (not managers) needs it: but to
admit its necessity would mean that managers aren't needed per se.

Programmers believe they are in the possession of an arcane skill when
they "know" it's "inefficient" to concatenate in a loop...and they
persist in the belief they are skilled labor even when you find out,
as I have as a trainer, that 9 out of 10 US programmers, in all
probability, could not explain the run time semantics of a for loop or
a Boolean operator.

I am quite serious. The fellows on this ng who yawp about obscure
details of their favorite language and who on the job refuse to
maintain code unless it's written in their favorite style are the SAME
fellows who will tell you that it's not efficient to code

for ( i = 0; i < j+L; i++ )

because of the addition of the j and the L. They may also tell you to
make

if (a && b)

a nested if because they may actually believe, with ten years of C
"experience" that C's && operator doesn't short circuit. And oh
yes...they will code C in C++, changing only comment styles.

Of course, Richard blasted bleeding Heathfield knows the run time
semantics of for and Booleans. The trouble is that this is all he
knows.

In Visual Basic COM they will believe that the Form is a magic Thing
and not a real object at all. And if you make so bold in .Net as to
create, from nothing, a Form with gizmos aplenty, by simple code

Dim frmForm As Form = New Form
Dim lblLabel As Label = New Label
frmForm.Controls.Add(lblLabel)

or in C#

System.Windows.Forms.Form frmForm = new System.Windows.Forms.Form;
System.Windows.Forms.Label lblLabel = new System.Windows.Forms.Label;
frmForm.Controls.Add(lblLabel);

thereby avoiding claptrap such as ActiveX, they will say that somehow,
someway you must have committed some crime to make it seem so easy.

And then if you set them straight, by describing the run time
semantics of for or &&, by showing how in .Net alles is ein Objekt
they will get pouty and start talking (with a strange and even bizarre
irrevelance) about something like "the needs of the end user", giving
us the signal that the biztalk is a sort of incantatory language to be
used at-will, preferably with the attention to style of a George Bush.

This phenomenon, of professional moronization, isn't restricted to DP
and as long ago as Dickens (in Bleak House), Dickens has the lawyer
who not only has worked on one case for thirty years, but is actually
proud of doing no law, nor reading, outside of materials for the case.
This moronization is the rule in a macho system because to take risks
is problematic in a macho system...you might be found out.

 
> > > You'll need to find a new axe to grind.
> >
> > No shortage of those.
>
> Yes, you've proven that.

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