It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.
It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.
And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs, with both positive and negative impact.
All of California's inequality problems go back to that.
Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forces and actors at play. Any analysis that attempts to reduce it to a single causal factor will instantly fail.
> It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.
No particular implementation of zoning law is a "natural construct", and USian zoning laws have an extremely particular focus on preventing the construction of high-density housing (hell, some jurisdictions even criminalise roommates in pre-existing housing). There's nothing natural or inherent about that; and plenty of other countries have more sensical zoning laws that provide for adequate and dense housing supply while still having zoning (and they have lower rents and less problems with homelessness and housing-cost induced poverty, gasp).
Oh, not every ordinance (or planning department directive) is "natural" or reasonable, of course. But zoning generically is a pretty well established and generally understood practice by this point - on par with the idea of "democracy", or for that matter, this business land "ownership" in the first place.
Zoning is not natural, the way the law of gravity, or even the idea of liberty, is natural.
Zoning is invented by people, as you correctly noticed, to balance several trade-offs. Maybe in 1950s it was adequate; since 2000s, the balance of trade-offs has shifted drastically.
Maybe it's time to rebalance things. The problem is that those who profited form it most (the old realty owners), due to that very fact, can also afford to spend most resources (as in time, money, and lobbying efforts) to resist it.
I don't think there's a talent shortage problem, I think there's a recruiter problem.
Though they certainly aren't helping much (and in many ways are quite simply harmful), recruiters are more of a "pain signal" than a problem source as such. The deeper problem is that the whole process (or rather, the lack thereof that many companies practice) itself is so broken, on so many levels. (Or more specifically: the expectations people have from this process, on both sides of the table).
The recruiters? They're just trying to make a living - and doing the best they can with the broken models, and let's not forget, bad data presented to them - again, from both sides.
To the extent that they're to "blame", it's just that through their education (read: life choices made), they just don't know any better than to simply accept the process for what it is - and try to milk it for a buck or two.
>"The recruiters? They're just trying to make a living - and doing the best they can with the broken models, and let's not forget, bad data presented to them - again, from both sides."
They're doing the best they can with the broken models?
Let's step back and consider some behaviors by recruiters that almost nobody in tech will find unusual:
"Ghosting" - the practice of ignoring and stopping all communications with candidates after they have committed their time have undergone interviews.
Failing to exercise any sense of professionalism in their communications - like sending emails with spelling errors or that lack basic punctuation. One sentence emails without so much as a salutation or using "Hey," as a salutation. Details matter when someone is representing your candidacy.
Not using a calendar app to send out invites for interviews.
Reaching out to candidates to gauge their interest in a role and then never following up with them when a candidate takes the time to speak with them and expresses an interest.
The list goes on and on. These have nothing to do with unrealistic expectations or broken models. These are basic business skills, etiquette and decency.
Oh they quite definitely suck - even when "doing the best they can".
The spin I'm trying to put on this is -- they exist solely for one reason: to fill a vacuum. The vacuum created by the fact that both sides (mostly the employer, but also candidates) perceive that there's some value for them. Despite massive (and almost overwhelming) evidence to the contrary.
So my take is... to get to the root of the problem, focus on the vacuum, not on the dregs that rush into fill it.
Not using a calendar app to send out invites for interviews.
Or using them, but being too lazy (or just uneducated) to figure out this pesky time zone stuff.
So you're absolutely right -- the list goes on and on.
Over the past 7 years, Bitcoin has outperformed every security and portfolio that Jack Bogle has recommended.
Same deal (give or take a few name and parameter changes) as with the preconditions for every speculative bubble - and crash - since the beginning of time, basically.
How is bitcoin different than other commodities or property in this regard?
The key distinction is that, mercurial though their price fluctuations may be - traditional commodities such as oil or real estate at least have some intrinsic value, and hence, an intrinsic floor to their valuations. Meanwhile, to the extent that any of these "coins" have such an intrinsic value - if they can even be thought of as "currencies" at all - it is extremely hard to pin down.
Which is Bogle's central point: to the extent that any of these instruments have "value", it's in the belief that ... that value will keep going up, and up, and ever up.
I've used a variant of this when interviewing CS PhD candidates.
If in fact it's for an actual PhD qualifying exam (or something similar), then this question might be OK.
The problem with the current crisis in interviewing is that it's become almost standard practice to ask questions like this (or its siblings: knapsack, outré graph search or sorting questions, etc) for what are basically run-of-the-mill API monkey / grunt finance programming / etc jobs.
As if the message these companies intend to convey is: "Fuck, we have no idea how to assess these candidates, nor do we have the time. So if we just ask a few gee-whiz questions that 75% of them will fail, then that might be an indication that the other 25% just might be a little smarter. Or at least very good at cramming. Because after all, that's how we got through college, too."
Ploy or not, I'm not happy with TC blindly passing along the "$1M donation" meme, clearly meant to suggest a pure cash donation... when, when you read a few lines down, you find out that "a part cash, but part (read: presumably mostly) credits toward unused inventory" donation --
-- as the vast majority of BigCorp "donations" to noble causes reveal themselves to be, when you scratch the surface.
I'm not sure of the split but say it's $X of cash an $1M - $X of non-cash credits. I'll take that over just the $X cash any day of the week. This isn't like out PCs to schools to market to the schools/students down the road, this is a pure charity where they happen to have a good that they can directly offer without long term commitment. It's no different than a sandwich shop sending their excess inventory to a soup kitchen at the end of the day.
It's just a bit disappointing that media outlets (like TC in this case) consistently allow themselves to get pulled into spinning a lot these as pure cash donations (by emitting headlines that say "XCorp donates $Y" with no other qualifiers), as if that's what they actually were. Which, most of the time, they quite plainly aren't.
Unfortunately it's partially valid. Job ads in particular are (presumably for a want of some other way to whittle down the pile of incoming resumes) considerably biased towards frameworks and gizmos that have been around 3 years or less.
Yes there are new languages and frameworks we have to learn, but if we apply any effort ...
You'd think a lot of these places assuming we're all utterly incapable of "learning", they way they phrase some of these requirement lists.
You don't. You simply allow whatever perfectly natural reaction your spinal cord chooses to trigger - to bubble up through your system. Which you should in no way be ashamed of. You're the one coming to them on good faith, expecting to be treated as a professional, after all. And they're the one who, unfortunately, has chosen to revert to silly mind games, and demonstrate a complete and obvious lack of respect for your time.
The only way to "prepare" for situations like these is to go in with a willingness to trust one's own gut - and to simply break off the interview once you start to feel you're not being treated professionally, and that the questions you're being asked are, like the above, completely out of line.†
† Okay, maybe if you were applying for the job of chairing some IEEE committee on numerical standards or something, thiis particular question might be. But I somehow doubt that was the case with this particular role.
It's also -- for the very majority of people -- way too damn short to simply cut one's self off from salary and (don't forget, please), health insurance. Especially when your industry suffers from the illusion that "all the good people have high-paying jobs they love, that you could never possibly woo them away from", and hence "if you don't have a job already, what the fuck is wrong with you? You must really, really suck." Especially when one has family and/or other dependents to support.
It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.
And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs, with both positive and negative impact.
All of California's inequality problems go back to that.
Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forces and actors at play. Any analysis that attempts to reduce it to a single causal factor will instantly fail.