Then why don't you specify exactly what government functions need to go? Aside from DOD the federal workforce is pretty damn small. A much bigger problem is the way government contracts are awarded. In many cases our government costs so much because we have too few government employees, and have to pay exorbitant prices to private sector contractors to do the work of employees. Note that the people who actually do the work make less money than the average federal worker for the same job, but the middle-man contracting companies make ridiculous profits.
I'm doubting the accuracy of your MSNBC report. MSNBC is just as bad as Fox when it comes to selling bullshit, so I'm going to do more digging. On the first Tuesday of the shutdown it was reported that the FDA would still be inspecting everything that needed inspection because the establishment was already using that as a "we're all doomed" vehicle. I do know that CA had FDA inspectors on site at the company selling bad chicken before any changes were made to the shut down, which backs my initial statement.
I just used your own evidence to show you were wrong, I won't claim that MSNBC presented facts.
It was NBC, not MSNBC. But seriously, now you're saying the shutdown never happened? That *no* FDA employees were furloughed? You're either a very convincing troll or a very troubled individual.
One other quick point: If Obama made sure enough park rangers got paid to harass WW II vets and barricade open air monuments, he could have made sure that the FDA was fully staffed.
One other quick point: If Obama made sure enough park rangers got paid to harass WW II vets and barricade open air monuments, he could have made sure that the FDA was fully staffed.
From your source, not mine. Fox my ass, I don't get news from Fox either.
The Food and Drug Administration has 60 percent of its 1,602 investigators on furlough, according to an administration spokesman – and the effects on the country’s food supply may last well beyond the shutdown’s expiration date, whenever that may be, experts said.
The date is also the 8th, and was changed the following Monday due to issues in CA for which the FDA didn't even matter as the manufacturer in essence said "we don't care what the Government say's, we are not shutting down" which has nothing to do with the FDA but a legal matter.
Perhaps you were just giving partial facts to make your point and didn't mean For instance, the FDA was considered non-essential because the country could still function for a while without food inspection which indicates all of the FDA not at work? Giving partial facts to back your point instead of real facts is still dishonest isn't it?
Yeah, not like your:
Food inspectors were not on furlough. Those people were considered essential.
Which was just factually wrong. The FDA was furloughed. The fact that "only" 60% of the FDA was shut down does not diminish the fact that it was furloughed. The fact that they were called back in because of a crisis also does not affect the fact that they were furloughed in the first place.
Repeat much propaganda? Food inspectors were not on furlough. Those people were considered essential. Most DOD workers were not on furlough. Most contractors were not on furlough either, because contracts are all paid up front in Government work.
Go back and read what I stated, then go do some fact checking. Nothing I said is wrong, everything you claimed is wrong.
I was a federal employee for 3 years, but I left 6 months ago for the private sector because the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job were terrible. I'll say that again, the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job is significantly worse than in the private sector.
Strawman much? First, that is a complete load of bullshit because I worked in DOD for probably longer than you have had a career. I was also Military, so save your fallacy. More importantly, it does not change anything I stated or that you lied about.
You're clearly wrong about most everything, and clearly have some anger management issues. I'll just address the first of your contentions, that FDA was not furloughed. Since you're clearly wrong here, I don't think it's worth debating with you any longer. Go back to your Fox "News", where facts change around ideology instead of the other way around.
Or perhaps had they been smart enough to not spend their hard earned(I use that term loosely with the feds) money on iduds and new cars every few years they would have had enough cash on hand to pay ALL of their bills for at least 3 months rather than go belly up from not working for only 2 weeks.
We ALL always have a choice. The idea that someone only has the choice between getting a paycheck from the federal government and going and getting another loan to pay for the first loan that they can't pay because they were piss poor planners is not only disingenuous, but morally bankrupt. In this country we all have not only the choice, but the opportunity to better ourselves and then some.
Another good question is WHY IN THE FLYING MONKEY POO do we need 800,000 Federal workers? And before anyone goes there, yes, I've lost my job before and was at one time out of work for more than 3 months. In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. Responsibility of both idiot political stooge parties for creating this mess and responsibility of the individual collecting a paycheck to care and provide for their families.
It never occurred to you that you can have more than one emergency at a time? For instance, having to pay for expensive chemo treatment drained your savings 3 months ago, but at least you've got a nice stable federal job! Oh wait... Also, remember these workers also had to deal with a 10% pay cut this year due to sequester furloughs, so their savings were already a bit light.
Lost productivity? Those are non essential people, there was no productivity lost in reality. Are you going to make up something about how they were spinning gold or some such to claim that "no really they are very productive people"? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure every one of those people do the best they can at their jobs, so I don't mean that as a personal insult to them. My claim is that those people are non essential people. They are not required for defending our borders from a massive invasion, they are not required to judge legal matters, they are not required to mitigate our laughable trade imbalance, and they are not required for other members of society to perform their daily activities.
There is of course a red herring where you could claim that a service industry that relies on that many Government workers suffered. It's a false argument of course, because if we took away those non-essential jobs and returned the tax money to those of us that pay, that service industry would make the same amount of money.
Now to the other point you made in "Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work", this is another line of crap from politicians. We don't "have" to pay them! This was a politician's decision to GIVE them money. Many of them are going to get Unemployment in addition to getting PTO. We didn't have to give them anything, but a politician chose to give them YOUR TAX MONEY! Makes you feel good don't it?
I don't think you understand the difference between non-essential and non-productive. For instance, the FDA was considered non-essential because the country could still function for a while without food inspection (or so they thought, a few thousand people who recently got salmonella might disagree if they could get away from the toilet long enough to post). Systems might need to be upgraded -- anyone working on improvements to existing infrastructure would be considered non-essential. As for the "paid time off" argument.. Well, they didn't exactly ask for this time off, did they? If you were working at a private employer and they said "we can't pay you, and you can go home, but we promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future", would you consider that a paid vacation? I wouldn't. I would consider that time to look for a better employer. I was a federal employee for 3 years, but I left 6 months ago for the private sector because the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job were terrible. I'll say that again, the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job is significantly worse than in the private sector.
Complain all you want about government employees, but at the end of the day most of them bust their ass for people like yourself who demand that they all be fired.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers bore the economic brunt of the shutdown
This should read, 100's of thousands of federal workers, got an extra 16 day paid vacation this year.
Hardly what I would call "bearing the economic brunt" of anything.
Or, ya know, "hundreds of thousands of federal workers had to choose between predatory payday loans or defaulting on their mortgages while waiting to get paid and sitting at home every day waiting to find out if they can go back to work". Not quite the same thing as a vacation when you a.) didn't get your last paycheck, and b.) don't know when you have to go back to work.
It cost 24 billion dollars? Based on.. any number of imaginary things they want to show it cost them right? We must keep spending money we don't have, and we must keep increasing the amount of debt we have or we are all going to die right?
I mean to say, we have to spend this for the Children, and the children just lost 24Billion dollars! If you deny their right to spend, you are a "conspiracy theorist" to boot, so shaddup!
How is it difficult to believe this number? Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work, yet we lost 17 days of productivity from each one of them, that comes to $1764 in lost productivity per employee, not counting all kinds of other non-personnel costs. I find that number entirely reasonable, if not a bit low.
The devs are in a pretty interesting situation that you don't see too often.. They're tasked with developing an application that generally can anticipate a low load level, except for one (and only one) extreme peak load. Do you develop for the general case, or the (very important) exception? Remember that the difference between these two options would make a difference in the basic structure of the app. Do you use a traditional RDBMS (perfect for the low load case), or some sort of no-SQL system (possibly necessary for the peak load case)? Remember that you can't leverage any commercial cloud resources either -- these are government records, and there are laws saying they'll have to be housed on government computers.
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
Straw man much? "Nanny state" laws prohibiting you from, for instance, driving while drunk are there because the safety of others outweighs your right to be an asshat. Occasionally laws over-reach, and some are just plain silly, but on the whole we actually allow a great deal more shit than we should.
I suppose they're both sad in different ways.. All I meant was that many of them are not only being obnoxious douchebags, but they're not even getting paid to be obnoxious douchebags.
Perhaps the problem is people like you? Instagram is for the masses, medical industry interop tools are not. It's all about size of the potential customer base to collect valuable data to sell. It has nothing to do with whether the programs have any 'use' but whether the programs can attract users as data points. Ever hear of a venture capitalist looking to make the world a better place instead of making money?
But Instagram's big 'idea' is:
1.) get the user to take a photo
2.) apply gimp filter
There's no monetization strategy. There's no added value. It's all a turd inside a package with a pretty bow.
Very few software developers actually sell software. Most software developers are paid to build custom software used by the same company that they are employed by or by some other company under contract.
But almost all game developers sell their software (or "in-game purchases" for the F2P games), because video games have no other viable business model. A good video game is often involves massive work on its code, art, music, gameplay, and story. Aside from asking for donations, how do you imagine such workers will be compensated for their efforts?
I have never met a competent developer who had trouble finding work.
I HAVE met incompetent out-of-touch, burnt-out, full-of-themselves developers who can't find work. It's this second kind that think they're good but are not and who should be in another field.
As far as finding work goes, you're probably correct. I have, however, met a fairly large number of good developers who are 10x more productive than an average programmer, but have difficulty getting paid what they're worth.
My point is that we've really lowered our standards in terms of what is a "good" wage or not. 40 years ago it was practically unheard of to be unable to support a family with a single income from a blue collar job, and now you're considered to be doing well to be able to buy a starter home after saving for 5 years working as an engineer with a university degree. Everything is relative, I know, but I'd gladly trade in my fancy tablets and internet for affordable housing and decent schools for my kids.
We don't need or want more lawyers or politicians. We want more scientists and engineers. It probably holds my salary down in the short-term, but it keeps the US competitive and makes my relatively high salary more sustainable in the long term. $60k right out of school is a very comfortable wage.
It is until you try to buy a house. Then you're in for a rude awakening.
Time to start giving your friends one time pads on physical media.. a few GB worth should provide plenty of encrypted chat time, though you will have to get the key to them in the first place.
This is achieved not by adherence to political ideology, but rather by analyzing empirical evidence and employing the scientific method to determine the best ways in which to promote these goals.
That's a mighty fine quality of bullshit you're shoveling there. There's another name for this: ethnic homogeneity. Have a bunch of people who are fairly closely related and you end up with a bunch of common interest. So Nordic countries can pull off stuff like the Nordic system as a result.
My bet is it has more to do with social mobility and education than any racial element. A rich white person is much more likely to associate with a rich black person than a poor white person.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC that was a Swedish thing, and quite popular at one time.
Then why don't you specify exactly what government functions need to go? Aside from DOD the federal workforce is pretty damn small. A much bigger problem is the way government contracts are awarded. In many cases our government costs so much because we have too few government employees, and have to pay exorbitant prices to private sector contractors to do the work of employees. Note that the people who actually do the work make less money than the average federal worker for the same job, but the middle-man contracting companies make ridiculous profits.
I'm doubting the accuracy of your MSNBC report. MSNBC is just as bad as Fox when it comes to selling bullshit, so I'm going to do more digging. On the first Tuesday of the shutdown it was reported that the FDA would still be inspecting everything that needed inspection because the establishment was already using that as a "we're all doomed" vehicle. I do know that CA had FDA inspectors on site at the company selling bad chicken before any changes were made to the shut down, which backs my initial statement.
I just used your own evidence to show you were wrong, I won't claim that MSNBC presented facts.
It was NBC, not MSNBC. But seriously, now you're saying the shutdown never happened? That *no* FDA employees were furloughed? You're either a very convincing troll or a very troubled individual.
One other quick point: If Obama made sure enough park rangers got paid to harass WW II vets and barricade open air monuments, he could have made sure that the FDA was fully staffed.
Who's playing the straw man card now?
Sorry, meant to say red herring
One other quick point: If Obama made sure enough park rangers got paid to harass WW II vets and barricade open air monuments, he could have made sure that the FDA was fully staffed.
Who's playing the straw man card now?
From your source, not mine. Fox my ass, I don't get news from Fox either.
The Food and Drug Administration has 60 percent of its 1,602 investigators on furlough, according to an administration spokesman – and the effects on the country’s food supply may last well beyond the shutdown’s expiration date, whenever that may be, experts said.
The date is also the 8th, and was changed the following Monday due to issues in CA for which the FDA didn't even matter as the manufacturer in essence said "we don't care what the Government say's, we are not shutting down" which has nothing to do with the FDA but a legal matter.
Perhaps you were just giving partial facts to make your point and didn't mean For instance, the FDA was considered non-essential because the country could still function for a while without food inspection which indicates all of the FDA not at work? Giving partial facts to back your point instead of real facts is still dishonest isn't it?
Yeah, not like your:
Food inspectors were not on furlough. Those people were considered essential.
Which was just factually wrong. The FDA was furloughed. The fact that "only" 60% of the FDA was shut down does not diminish the fact that it was furloughed. The fact that they were called back in because of a crisis also does not affect the fact that they were furloughed in the first place.
Repeat much propaganda? Food inspectors were not on furlough. Those people were considered essential. Most DOD workers were not on furlough. Most contractors were not on furlough either, because contracts are all paid up front in Government work.
Go back and read what I stated, then go do some fact checking. Nothing I said is wrong, everything you claimed is wrong.
I was a federal employee for 3 years, but I left 6 months ago for the private sector because the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job were terrible. I'll say that again, the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job is significantly worse than in the private sector.
Strawman much? First, that is a complete load of bullshit because I worked in DOD for probably longer than you have had a career. I was also Military, so save your fallacy. More importantly, it does not change anything I stated or that you lied about.
You're clearly wrong about most everything, and clearly have some anger management issues. I'll just address the first of your contentions, that FDA was not furloughed. Since you're clearly wrong here, I don't think it's worth debating with you any longer. Go back to your Fox "News", where facts change around ideology instead of the other way around.
Or perhaps had they been smart enough to not spend their hard earned(I use that term loosely with the feds) money on iduds and new cars every few years they would have had enough cash on hand to pay ALL of their bills for at least 3 months rather than go belly up from not working for only 2 weeks.
We ALL always have a choice. The idea that someone only has the choice between getting a paycheck from the federal government and going and getting another loan to pay for the first loan that they can't pay because they were piss poor planners is not only disingenuous, but morally bankrupt. In this country we all have not only the choice, but the opportunity to better ourselves and then some.
Another good question is WHY IN THE FLYING MONKEY POO do we need 800,000 Federal workers? And before anyone goes there, yes, I've lost my job before and was at one time out of work for more than 3 months. In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. Responsibility of both idiot political stooge parties for creating this mess and responsibility of the individual collecting a paycheck to care and provide for their families.
It never occurred to you that you can have more than one emergency at a time? For instance, having to pay for expensive chemo treatment drained your savings 3 months ago, but at least you've got a nice stable federal job! Oh wait... Also, remember these workers also had to deal with a 10% pay cut this year due to sequester furloughs, so their savings were already a bit light.
Lost productivity? Those are non essential people, there was no productivity lost in reality. Are you going to make up something about how they were spinning gold or some such to claim that "no really they are very productive people"? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure every one of those people do the best they can at their jobs, so I don't mean that as a personal insult to them. My claim is that those people are non essential people. They are not required for defending our borders from a massive invasion, they are not required to judge legal matters, they are not required to mitigate our laughable trade imbalance, and they are not required for other members of society to perform their daily activities.
There is of course a red herring where you could claim that a service industry that relies on that many Government workers suffered. It's a false argument of course, because if we took away those non-essential jobs and returned the tax money to those of us that pay, that service industry would make the same amount of money.
Now to the other point you made in "Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work", this is another line of crap from politicians. We don't "have" to pay them! This was a politician's decision to GIVE them money. Many of them are going to get Unemployment in addition to getting PTO. We didn't have to give them anything, but a politician chose to give them YOUR TAX MONEY! Makes you feel good don't it?
I don't think you understand the difference between non-essential and non-productive. For instance, the FDA was considered non-essential because the country could still function for a while without food inspection (or so they thought, a few thousand people who recently got salmonella might disagree if they could get away from the toilet long enough to post). Systems might need to be upgraded -- anyone working on improvements to existing infrastructure would be considered non-essential. As for the "paid time off" argument.. Well, they didn't exactly ask for this time off, did they? If you were working at a private employer and they said "we can't pay you, and you can go home, but we promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future", would you consider that a paid vacation? I wouldn't. I would consider that time to look for a better employer. I was a federal employee for 3 years, but I left 6 months ago for the private sector because the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job were terrible. I'll say that again, the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job is significantly worse than in the private sector.
Complain all you want about government employees, but at the end of the day most of them bust their ass for people like yourself who demand that they all be fired.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers bore the economic brunt of the shutdown
This should read, 100's of thousands of federal workers, got an extra 16 day paid vacation this year.
Hardly what I would call "bearing the economic brunt" of anything.
Or, ya know, "hundreds of thousands of federal workers had to choose between predatory payday loans or defaulting on their mortgages while waiting to get paid and sitting at home every day waiting to find out if they can go back to work". Not quite the same thing as a vacation when you a.) didn't get your last paycheck, and b.) don't know when you have to go back to work.
It cost 24 billion dollars? Based on.. any number of imaginary things they want to show it cost them right? We must keep spending money we don't have, and we must keep increasing the amount of debt we have or we are all going to die right?
I mean to say, we have to spend this for the Children, and the children just lost 24Billion dollars! If you deny their right to spend, you are a "conspiracy theorist" to boot, so shaddup!
How is it difficult to believe this number? Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work, yet we lost 17 days of productivity from each one of them, that comes to $1764 in lost productivity per employee, not counting all kinds of other non-personnel costs. I find that number entirely reasonable, if not a bit low.
The devs are in a pretty interesting situation that you don't see too often.. They're tasked with developing an application that generally can anticipate a low load level, except for one (and only one) extreme peak load. Do you develop for the general case, or the (very important) exception? Remember that the difference between these two options would make a difference in the basic structure of the app. Do you use a traditional RDBMS (perfect for the low load case), or some sort of no-SQL system (possibly necessary for the peak load case)? Remember that you can't leverage any commercial cloud resources either -- these are government records, and there are laws saying they'll have to be housed on government computers.
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
Straw man much? "Nanny state" laws prohibiting you from, for instance, driving while drunk are there because the safety of others outweighs your right to be an asshat. Occasionally laws over-reach, and some are just plain silly, but on the whole we actually allow a great deal more shit than we should.
I beg to differ, obesity is a much bigger risk than cancer.
I'd be willing to bet that the biggest band for our buck would be eliminating traffic accidents.. It's already in alpha testing.
I suppose they're both sad in different ways.. All I meant was that many of them are not only being obnoxious douchebags, but they're not even getting paid to be obnoxious douchebags.
Perhaps the problem is people like you? Instagram is for the masses, medical industry interop tools are not. It's all about size of the potential customer base to collect valuable data to sell. It has nothing to do with whether the programs have any 'use' but whether the programs can attract users as data points. Ever hear of a venture capitalist looking to make the world a better place instead of making money?
But Instagram's big 'idea' is:
1.) get the user to take a photo
2.) apply gimp filter
There's no monetization strategy. There's no added value. It's all a turd inside a package with a pretty bow.
I'm pretty sure people are employed to loudly name-drop companies in conversation at various Starbucks in Silicon Valley.
I'm betting the vast majority do it for free, sadly...
Very few software developers actually sell software. Most software developers are paid to build custom software used by the same company that they are employed by or by some other company under contract.
But almost all game developers sell their software (or "in-game purchases" for the F2P games), because video games have no other viable business model. A good video game is often involves massive work on its code, art, music, gameplay, and story. Aside from asking for donations, how do you imagine such workers will be compensated for their efforts?
"Hundreds of hours of experience"? Wow, they're not even claiming to look for qualified candidates, are they?
I have never met a competent developer who had trouble finding work.
I HAVE met incompetent out-of-touch, burnt-out, full-of-themselves developers who can't find work. It's this second kind that think they're good but are not and who should be in another field.
As far as finding work goes, you're probably correct. I have, however, met a fairly large number of good developers who are 10x more productive than an average programmer, but have difficulty getting paid what they're worth.
I'm letting him know the build server is offline, and reminding him that I'm still waiting for my VPN access.
My point is that we've really lowered our standards in terms of what is a "good" wage or not. 40 years ago it was practically unheard of to be unable to support a family with a single income from a blue collar job, and now you're considered to be doing well to be able to buy a starter home after saving for 5 years working as an engineer with a university degree. Everything is relative, I know, but I'd gladly trade in my fancy tablets and internet for affordable housing and decent schools for my kids.
We don't need or want more lawyers or politicians. We want more scientists and engineers. It probably holds my salary down in the short-term, but it keeps the US competitive and makes my relatively high salary more sustainable in the long term. $60k right out of school is a very comfortable wage.
It is until you try to buy a house. Then you're in for a rude awakening.
Time to start giving your friends one time pads on physical media.. a few GB worth should provide plenty of encrypted chat time, though you will have to get the key to them in the first place.
This is achieved not by adherence to political ideology, but rather by analyzing empirical evidence and employing the scientific method to determine the best ways in which to promote these goals.
That's a mighty fine quality of bullshit you're shoveling there. There's another name for this: ethnic homogeneity. Have a bunch of people who are fairly closely related and you end up with a bunch of common interest. So Nordic countries can pull off stuff like the Nordic system as a result.
My bet is it has more to do with social mobility and education than any racial element. A rich white person is much more likely to associate with a rich black person than a poor white person.