Those who has the ability to program has a moral obligation to drop everything to help the homeless? Classic slave morality, cliched moral self righteousness.
"Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me.
If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.
I don't know when this was written, but some of the "facts" listed are simply not true.
"Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime."
The minimum wage in California is $8/hr, so $0.1 is equal to only 0.75 minutes of labor.
"Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor."
A burger at McDonalds costs around $1, or only 7.5 minutes of labor.
Why did you choose those particular quotes? Are you saying that their tax exmpet status should be revoked because a few of their students are arrogant? While I agree with you that maybe they don't deserve tax exemption attacking the institution based on the behavior of a few students is just spiteful.
Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.
"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff."
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?
He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?
"Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me.
If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.