Merry Christmas!
Well, you *knew* I wouldn't let this "warmest Christmas Eve in recorded history" go by without a comment, right? Every place I've been over the last ten years is in the part of this map that's been described as "the molten inside of a Hot Pocket", which represents temperatures 18°F to 36°F above normal for the day.
Some people claim that Global Warming will kill a billion people, or 14% of the planet's human population. That's almost big a reduction as the 17% that the planet got from the Black Death. And, you know, after the Black Death the relative power of Labour vs Capital was improved considerably! So if you think that people have no power and corporations own everything, just wait until you're negotiating your next raise while all your co-workers' bodies are rotting in the streets! (Disclaimer: this refers specifically to Europe, where half the people died of plague; fatalities from Global Warming are expected to vary widely across the planet, affecting outsourced programmers in Bangladesh much more than those in Ukraine).
Recently I heard that jobs for computer programmers in the USA are expected to drop by 8% over the next decade, while jobs for software developers (previously called "Programmer/Analysts") will grow by 17%. Of course, these estimates assume that current off-shoring trends will continue unchanged, but the one thing you can be certain of about trends is that they eventually change.
Happy ChristmaHanuKwanzaakah! We celebrated our tradition with a Christmas Eve visit to a Chinese restaurant, like all the other Jews.
Did you know that "kwanza" is the unit of currency in Angola?