"Even before AI, going to a boot camp might have gotten you a $30k salaried position at a shitty software mill somewhere in Bumblefuck, South Dakota. And only if you were lucky."

Nah, a bootcamp/cert would easily get you an entry level enterprise position paying $65-70k and many places trained those new hires anyway... assuming you left Bumblefuck, South Dakota. In fact, they almost certainly wouldn't hire someone without a degree in bumblefuck because they only need 3 guys whereas the enterprise can afford to hire 20 for a year and only end up keeping 5-10.

This did get more and more difficult as the market flooded with H1Bs and churn culture.

"Demonstrable experience beats paper, full stop."

This. And that is exactly what demonstrable means. The little tech quizes everyone does really don't tell you much. Everyone I've known who is really gifted in tech is on the spectrum/adhd and/or has social anxiety... not only will they be answering a different question than you meant to ask but whatever their performance certainly won't reflect the hyperfocus they'll have on a real work task with an open book. If they have varied experience in blue chip land or small shops [which always mean varied experience] you'd be crazy not to hire them regardless of interview. If they've had a big role but only one... make that a six month contract; if the old dog wakes up he'll be fantastic and handily crush agism.

More than 20years wearing various tech hats with a heavy emphasis on security, code, and *nix. I've had the same experience and not only does it go the wrong direction but it will helpfully "summarize" code and loop and give up on paths just to circle back around and repeat "fixes" which have already failed.

"The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty"

The uncertainty is a big effort to spin the inertia of rampant inflation and recession we were in as the consequence of policy just a few months old; it's purely political in hopes of recovering the midterms. Hate the current politics for other reasons or say it's yet more inertia and credit the last guy, but the trendlines are pretty solid in the US.

Still, if they don't do any reform of tech labor/immigration it'll probably stay rough going forward. Obviously we never really had a shortage of bodies and domestic has better SNR on talent. Laying off a 100k workers and importing 100k new ones each year for the last couple decades has definitely helped stagnate wages and made it harder to find that signal [because the layoffs always follow business logic instead of tech talent]. Stanford degrees... that used to guarantee jobs but only due to ignorance. That's almost as bad as the current obsession with skills in place of talent. Talent can acquire skills almost as quickly as new hires can adjust to a new workplace. Sorry, you'll hire 10 to find one talented worker and there is no getting around needing an experienced and proven talented worker to get work out of them all while finding the one.

No worries, most of the seniors have already been axed and either outsourced or replaced with H1Bs.

I'm not confused at all. 3 out of the top 5 states for homocides are the most gun restricted in the nation. Relaxing gun laws correlates directly with reductions in violent crime. As for the other two states they have very strong stand your ground laws and there are 1.5-3 million self-defense instances using firearms per year and those homocides are one of the best arguments for the right to bear arms

And raise the delivery fee to cover the higher wages you want drivers paid - if you want the driver to make $18/hr, then add in car costs, then add overhead/profit for the delivery service, and divide that by the estimated number of deliveries a driver can make in an hour - you could be looking at $10-12/delivery, with added fees if you are far from your restaurant...

The wages paid to the driver are YOUR responsibility, their pay is a function of the fees you pay.

My grandfather (a wealthy man that owned a large chain of successful regional restaurants) had the habit of tipping before being served, so the server knew to give good service. He was a good tipper and servers loved to see him come to their restaurant/bar.

Cherry-picked facts are always fun, I wonder how many of those workers were senior citizens supplementing their inadequate retirement savings with federal assistance?

If Walmart, McDonalds, etc all paid wages and offered each worker adequate hours such that they no longer qualified for SNAP, free school lunches, subsidized internet/cell service, Medicaid, etc then they would never be able to find sufficient workers.

I just saw an article where an employer said he'd no longer hire entry-level workers, they're just too expensive.

That's the issue in a nutshell.

Employers pay workers what they are worth, not what workers 'need', ideally. The incompetent (entry-level) worker has the same needs (rent, food, car, etc) as the expert worker, so should they both make the same wage? Of course not.

If it becomes illegal to pay a worker less than $18/hr, then jobs that aren't worth $18/hr will go away, and where will high school graduates with no discernible skills (yet, entry-level workers) learn those skills if they cost the employer just as much as a competent (experienced) worker?

Requiring a fast-food restaurant to pay a clerk $25/hr to stand at the counter to punch orders into a POS terminal will have the effect of eliminating that job, to be replaced by a kiosk. You may or may not prefer kiosks, but that counter worker was learning skills and good work habits, now where do they go?

It's not uncommon for waitstaff to be among the highest paid workers in a restaurant "depending on voluntary tips" isn't the purgatory you imagine for all wait staff...

Delivery services don't set food prices, this law only affects delivery services.

If we are going to start down the path of having to pay food delivery workers a 'living wage' and health insurance, then the days of online food delivery services are over since costs will sky-rocket.

I don't care myself, never used a food delivery service, wouldn't miss them if they were gone, but there are segments of the community whose lives were improved by having prepared meals delivered to apartments, dorms, offices, etc. so I see a reason to keep them around/viable.

Uh, there is a large, large population of people on this planet that are not directly or indirectly invested in the stock market - for starters, many Americans entire retirement "plan" relies on nothing more than social security. How many Indians are invested in the stock market? How Many Chinese citizens? Russians? See, there are literally billions and billions of people not invested in any stock market...

What kind of logic is that? We will artificially slow-down trading volume/speed to match what was possible 100 years ago because nobody thought they could make trades that fast? Do we have to hobble investors to the speed of manual traders on a trading floor because that was what the founders had in mind?

No. Let's not...

From the sub heading of the linked-to article:

and from TFS:

Seems like there are still quite a few solar projects going forward (not withdrawing their applications)

Perhaps he doesn't see a reason to provide special subsidies to solar projects, and he doesn't agree with the tax-exempt status solar projects enjoyed versus other sources of electricity? If solar is so great and cheap, why does it require so much taxpayer money to "make sense"?

So 51 solar projects withdrew their applications to connect to the power grid - that quote implies there are still about 150 more projects that still are applying to connect to the power grid - perhaps those 51 projects were marginal, only viable with free money from the state of Utah? And who know what the other (estimated) 150 power projects are? Are they coal-fired? Nuclear? Natural Gas-fired? Wind? Hydro? Solar? We Just Don't Know - but why let that get in the way of a good rant?

For those that didn't click thru to the article:

So he supports other "green" energy sources like Geothermal and Nuclear, interesting...