> Still, even oilie Dubya had to pay Bill Gates
>his respects when he was unelected, by getting him
promptly >off the DoJ's hook.
Me: I don't think that this was due to the 'power of NASDAQ'; it was just standard GOP policy. If the defendant were a steel company, it'd be the same thing.
Scott:
>It still seems to me that there is a new class here,
whose >interests neither coincide with the working
class nor the >capitalist class. Certainly (and
>much to my displeasure as a fourth generation
socialist and
>great-grandchild of a disenchanted Bolshevik) I found
myself >increasingly pleased by the low
>cost of services whose costs are most closely linked
to >wages (like fast food),
I see this as standard middle-class - it's nice to be able to hire cheap lower-class labor, whether to clean your house, cook your food and do your laundry, and shovel coal (decades ago), or to work in a house-cleaning service, wait/cook in a restaurant, work in a dry-cleaners, and work as a janitor (today).
Scott:
>....
>and equally displeased by the political and financial
power
>of the super-wealthy who owned the companies I worked
>for but understood little about what I was doing
(like Larry >Ellison). At least while I lived in
Silicon Valley. Here in >Belgium, I'm trying to adapt
to a social democratic
>state, such as it is.
...
>The idea that intelligence and education ought to get
you >somewhere, rather than wealth, does run deep
among the >rank and file in the tech
>industry. It runs, perhaps, as deep as the Lockean
notion of >liberty did in the bourgeoisie in the 18th
or 19th centuries.
Me: Again, standard middle-class belief. I would comment on one thing which stands out among programmers (and which is also a standard conceit of all professionals, IMHO, and far from new):
Larry Ellison does know what he's doing. He's taken Oracle to a large, dominant position in the database market, and made a huge pile of money doing it. It's not necessary that he understand the actual work of coding, as long as he understands the businees of software.
Larry Ellison was credited with the saying, 'mediocre technology and good marketing will beat the opposite every time'. That's called 'business'.
Barry
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