SoylentNews

Recently a big-name placement agency reached out to me because I had worked with them nearly a decade ago, looking to fill a role I had done some time ago. In the middle of that process, another guy from the same agency reaches out. As soon as I mention working with the first guy, he kindly drops me. I was later told the second guy wouldn't make as much money on placing me because I "belong" to the first guy and he'll get a cut. What a load of crap. And companies pay scummy recruiters like these, to hide qualified candidates?

A different agency called me about two decent jobs, but when I got the company names I had to tell him I already applied directly to both. While that's frustrating, I think it's worse that the HR departments at these places aren't even humanly reviewing the submissions they have already gotten before turning to an external recruiter. A recommendation from one of your own employees isn't enough to skip the filter process? Is the 10-15% commission paid to these external guys worth it when they add nothing in most cases?

I can't say that all external recruiters are bad, as there are a few exceptional ones. Sadly, the industry isn't self-policing, so short of using Yelp and Glassdoor you have little idea how they will be to deal with. This entire process is frustrating as playing an FPS with a gamepad.

So in the near future we'll be taking the kids to Scarborough Renaissance Festival in the metroplex. The thought always gets the song "Scarborough Faire" running through my head. So I'm sitting here coding and suddenly my mind sang: "Are you parsing a sage data file?" Maybe I'll sing that to the kids for fun when they get a bit older and are working on programming assignments. :)

France prostitution: MPs outlaw paying for sex

French MPs have passed a law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of up to €3,750 (£3,027, $4,274) for those buying sexual acts. Those convicted would also have to attend classes to learn about the conditions faced by prostitutes.

It has taken more than two years to pass the controversial legislation because of differences between the two houses of parliament over the issue.

Some sex workers protested against the law during the final debate. The demonstrators outside parliament in Paris, numbering about 60, carried banners and placards one of which read: "Don't liberate me, I'll take care of myself", the AFP news agency reports.

Several state initiatives going around to lower the drinking age. In California there will be a ballot initiative to lower the drinking age to 18.

Myself, I'd just like to be able to buy wine for communion on Sunday morning in Texas at Wal-Mart. Even us religious fundamentalists are stymied by the fascist religious fundamentalists.

The below is from an article I stumbled across while reading about the Wikileaks release of IMF transcripts.

The author, Paul Mason does offer some suggestions as to resolving the below situation, but I don't feel they deal with the issues described either, so have not included that part of the article.

Primarily this is because of the assumed benevolence and efficiency of an expanding government in creating a less complex financial system. Solutions to those kind of issues take us back far beyond the last 25-30 years of 'neoliberalism' as used as the frame of reference for Mason's article. Those topics are the sort of things that lead back to the era of the central banking's rise to power as unaccountable institutions and their shareholders that have control of the money supply, distribution and creation.

I do feel however that it is a decent introduction into the systemic problems that have massive implications for global, national, local economies and markets.

Neoliberalism is broken because four things that enabled a “heroic period” of growth, stability, global development and technological innovation have turned against the dynamism of the system as a whole.

The first is FIAT MONEY. If you detach money from both metals and real economic activity, and incentivise money creation as the driver of growth, then growth will happen; and financial complexity will increase; and asset wealth will begin to take over from wealth derived from productivity. And if you — as we did in the last 15 years — create a derivatives market several times the size of the economy, you create a finance system that must — by logic — at some point become too big for the physical economy that’s supporting it.

The second problem is FINANCIALISATION. Neoliberalism is the first mode of capitalism in which the capitalists decided they could not tolerate organised labour. The resulting collapse in wage bargaining power, aided by the doubling of the number of salaried workers in the world in 25 years, means wages have stagnated in the developed world. If you then replace wages as the driver of consumption with mass access to credit you create a mechanism whereby the collapse of an investment bank in Manhattan can empty a pub in Lambeth the next day.

The third problem is the GLOBAL IMBALANCES. By neoliberalism I mean the whole global system: the system whereby the USA borrows, China lends; the USA consumes; China produces. During the pre-2008 boom everybody suddenly got very worried about the imbalances, because the gross financial imbalance in the world economy was clearly the source of excess money that allowed cheap money plus financialisation. The 2008 collapse, in this sense, was a partial correction — but it still leaves the entire world economy trapped within the more fundamental imbalance — which has grown: the large cross-border holdings of unpayable debt, increasingly yielding negative returns, and destined to be wiped out in a spectacular cathartic moment.

The fourth problem is FALLING PRODUCTIVITY. This is a multicausal secondary effect of the other problems:
- stagnant wages make it easier to open a coffee shop than invent a new process or machine
- the boom-bust cycles seriously mis-allocate capital, funneling it towards speculation rather than innovation
- consumption driven by cheap lending requires the creation of millions of bullshit jobs so that people can remain on the edge of the credit system, not excluded from it

Stagnant wages combined with cheap money policies in the face of every cyclical downturn creates, in the space of 20 years, three spectacular boom-bust cycles. In the first it was equities that were overvalued; in the second it was securitised financial instruments based on housing; in the third it is government debts. So that when you come later in your careers to write the history of these 20 years I predict you will remember the dotcom crash for Enron; the 2008 crash for Lehman Brothers; the next crash for China.

Each of these crashes wipes some more value and dynamism out of the economy. The dotcom crash destroyed the company pensions system; the 2008 crisis put the banking system on permanent life support, plunged an entire generation into lifetime debt, and took a chunk out of the welfare state; the next crash will involve debt write downs paid for out of the savings of ordinary people.

The outcomes? One, that the system holds together and the world’s households, workers and consumers are forced to pay, over a lifetime of indebtedness and low wages, for the dysfunctionality of the system. But you’ve seen this weekend the limits of that, with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith. The entire 6-years fiscal framework of the British government has been founded on an arbitrary cap on welfare spending that one of the toughest conservatives of his generation found impossible to implement.

Duncan Smith faces the same problem Xi Jin Ping faces, and the hapless mandarins of the Republican and Democratic centre ground face. People are mad as hell and won’t take it much longer.

Carney, Draghi, the Banks of China and Japan are all engaged in one last round of monetary easing, but they are flashing up the warning cards: unless some kind of structural reform or debt write-off happens, monetary policy is running out of steam.

In 1990 Paul Romer formulated the basic challenge of information technology. Digital information has a near zero reproduction cost and under conditions of a free market and competition its price will fall close to zero. The non-rivalry inherent in information goods means that, once produced, they are abundant.

You can only maintain price, and therefore the price mechanism, by accepting something neoclassical economics says should be impossible: the permanent existence of market distortions: monopolies, patents, copyrights, the capture of positive externalities by corporations.

So when iTunes has 95% market share of online music the price of a track is 99p irrespective of supply, demand or quality. The price is set by Apple’s monopoly pricing power and both the producer and consumer must take the downside of an essentially rent-seeking monopolistic distribution platform.

The only problem is, competition and innovation will happen, so now we have Spotify: £9.99 a month for all the music you can listen to. If you want to make the minimum wage as a solo artist you need 1,500 plays on iTunes, but you need 1.1 million plays on Spotify.

Once you can reproduce someting via “command C, command V” you are in a post-marginalist world. Because the tenet of marginalism is that everything economic is scarce, and that anything abundant is beyond the frame of economic thinking.

Put simply: information corrodes the price mechanism and the defensive walls — monopolies, IP, encryption etc etc — are always corroded. If you don’t believe me look up the market share of a company called Blackberry.

That’s problem number one. The second challenge is: information corrodes the link between hours of work and wages. It makes high-value work modular, driven by targets; and it makes low-value work difficult to place a market value. Millions of people’s wages in the developed world are determined not by the market but by an artificial floor placed under them for the purposes of a) social cohesion b) inclusion in the financialised consumption system.

Challenge number three is we already have a growing, dynamic post-market sector. Wikipedia — a £3bn minus sign on the global advertising economy, powered by 27,000 regular writers, produced for free, consumed for free; Linux, which runs the top 500 supercomputers in the world; Apache which runs half of all web servers. And numerous quietly spectacular good enough tools and solutions produced and maintained for free.

Source: "From Adam Smith to Duncan Smith" by Paul Mason of Mosquito Ridge

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to get around
Things kids say sound awful c-c-cold
'cause I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-fade away
I can't dig what kids all s-s-say
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all fu-fu-fu go away
Forgot what I was going to say
I'm not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to g-g-get around
Things they say sound awful c-c-cold
I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

If you were lucky, you started out in this business writing code because you thought it was fun. You sat down with your first computer ecstatic with all of the possibilities, all of the cool things you could do by programming a computer. It was something to learn and something to master, and you thought, "Wow, this is fun. I can make a great career if I get very good a this."

-- Michael C. Feathers, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, Prentice Hall, 2013.

I suppose they call it a career because you career from disaster to disaster...

In the old days, we had floppy disks. They were slow and unreliable, and we had to make multiple backups to avoid losing our bits. How did we do this? Easy, put in a new disk, FORMAT it with the /S switch, and then copy all the files over.

Then we got hard disk drives. They were better than floppies, although they still had a limited life span and were being superceded by faster, larger ones all the time. So when the time came to replace a hard disk, what did we do? FORMAT a new one and copy all the files over? It sounds like a good plan, but for unknown reasons it was actually a million times more difficult than this.

For a hard disk to be bootable it required several things. It needed a proper partition table with a partition set as "active." It needed code in the MBR to load the code in the bootsector to load the OS. If we were running MS-DOS, we could partition a new hard disk, format it (which includes installing a boot sector with proper BIOS Parameter Block and boot code), and by using FDISK's mysterious /mbr command we could even install the MBR boot code, and then we could copy all the files over. However, we could not set the partition active. FDISK imposes an arbitrary limitation on which partitions it can set to active. It will let us set the partition on our old hard disk, which we just booted from, which is already active, as active. It won't let us set the one on the new hard disk, which we have connected as slave or secondary, and are trying to make bootable so it can replace our old hard disk, as active. Why? Who knows. Microsoft dropped the ball.

This is where we have to take matters into our own hands and use a sector editor to go in and set one bit in the partition table to make it active. Only then could we take out the old hard disk and be able to boot from the new one and move on with life. That is, if we were running DOS. If we were running Windows 9x, then we had more problems. We couldn't copy all the files over from within DOS, because all of the new-fangled long names would not transfer over. We couldn't copy the files over from within Windows because we'd get a "sharing violation" or some horseshit. Why? Microsoft dropped the ball again.

Without using some third-party utility or using a second PC, the way to get around this roadblock was to install a second copy of Windows (in a different directory). From within the second Windows, we could copy all the files associated with the first Windows without getting stupid errors.

We may have thought we were pretty slick at this time. Upgrading hard disks left and right, without losing our data or having to waste time monkeying with floppies or CDs. But then we had to face Windows NT/2K/XP. Windows NT had different, incompatible boot sector code. And it had no SYS command to install that boot sector on our new disk (a third-party utility called BOOTPART could do it, but not from within Windows). Furthermore, if it was on NTFS instead of FAT, we couldn't even manage to copy all of the files over without being sabotaged by permissions or directory trees that link back on themselves or whatever. Microsoft had dropped the ball again.

There was only one thing we could think of. We would use the sector editor to copy the entire disk. MBR, boot sector, incomprehensible directory structures, all of it. And our new disk would boot. The only problem is that the partitions would still be sized according to our old disk. So we would create a new one to use the extra space, or if we already had two we might delete the second one and recreate it with a larger size.

It wasn't exactly utopia, but at least we could setup the NTLDR boot menu to list multiple operating systems, and by this time we had USB-to-IDE adaptors so we could connect multiple hard disks even to a laptop when necessary. Then suddenly, Windows Vista/7 appeared. Not only did it ditch NTLDR and the easily editable BOOT.INI, but it had an incompatible boot sector again, and even incompatible MBR boot code. It also couldn't be installed on FAT. It included a utility called BOOTSECT which looked like it was supposed to do something useful, but everytime we ran it an error was displayed.

It was rumored that Windows Vista/7 could resize partitions. However, we never got around to attempting it. Then Windows 8 happened, and things like UEFI and GPT showed up and we stopped caring about any of it.

This post is dedicated to all the time I just wasted replacing the hard disk in a computer with dual boot with a disk that I had just taken out of a computer with triple boot where I put a 320GB SATA in place of an old IDE. And to all the time wasted on such pursuits in years past.

PS, did you know the EnableBigLba registry key has to be added to let Windows 2000 recognize internal (but not USB-attached, apparently) disks larger than 128GB? And that a utility, FAT32FORMAT, can create gigantic FAT32 partitions?

All this flickering stuff turned on somewhere the last 2 hours just makes the reading the site much harder. Please fix this!
And the colors doesn't make it easier either.