The bigger problem is that many people buy their cars with a laundry list of "what ifs". I know a few guys at work that bought huge trucks because they might have to haul a lot of things (they rarely if ever do). Here in the US, people have had that luxury because of our artificially low gas prices. Another dollar or two tacked onto a gallon of gas will eventually break people of that habit.
I never understood this behavior because of how wasteful it is. A lot of people like myself though will have different cars for different utilitarian reasons. One small sized sedan is good for my commute and roundabout car, even though I take the bus most days. I also have an old beat up truck for weekend projects, and for AWD travel in the snow or offroading. This is a much more fuel efficient way to have your cake and eat it too, as long as you have the room for multiple vehicles. If not then just rent a truck when you need to haul something.
I predict lots of... transmission issues for the zooty new million-speed automatics and CVT's
Continuously variable transmissions have been around decades now, with simple designs existing reliably in many tractors and not so simple designs that have broke down and not panned out in the past.
Nissan's unique design in the Toroidal/Roller-based CVT has been around for 20 years now and has consistently proved reliable in a number of models. You don't often hear of Nissan transmissions failing before 150k.
If you don't mind my asking, what the hell kind of software is this company writing that it takes them 3+ years to deliver on? You coding the software for the LHC? The AI behind Watson? I can't even see Windows taking 3+ years to develop.
It's not your job to nearly lie, no matter how many other people do it or how little backfire you've received from it so far because that sort of thinking, while it sadly might get you ahead and give you steady employment for life, is also the very essence of why so few people actually trust sales people and honestly is the cause of the economic downturn in the first place.
Agreed. All of the other sales people have already lied to your potential customer so what do you have to do? Bad mouth the competition? Thats not professional. Tell them that you do things differently? It is not like they haven't heard that before. Give them testimonials from other clients who were happy with you? That is a great idea, if you have testimonials, but the customer doesn't care if you have good reputation and a high price, during the economic downturn these decisions almost exclusively come down to who has the lowest price. So sadly you have nothing left to do but say, "Yes we can do that at that price under that timeframe."
To fight a disease by spewing your own version of it just makes the situation worse in the long-term for everyone.
I am all for it, but when it comes to business you just can't think in terms of what is in the best long term interest for everyone. When you are struggling to get off the ground and keep the lights on you can't even think in terms of long term interest for yourself and your company, let alone the entire industry.
I agree something must be done but this is why the market is a horrible tool to affect positive changes to social and community policy. The problem isn't poor sales practices, it is the symptom of too many competitors in the market and clients with smaller and smaller budgets to play with. Some think that this can only be a good thing for Purchasers in the market but in reality it hurts them too because the quality is so wildly different, and impossible to predict, it is just too volatile.
There are so many wildly different players in the market because software development is not a regulated engineering discipline with the accepted authority of other engineering fields. If engineers had to become licensed it helps weed out the incompetent companies and talent, as well as raise the barrier to entry of a market that has too many players as it is. This is the prime reason why even though I can start up a building architectural firm with some office space and some drawing tools, that the market for building architecture is stable because quality is more consistent, and the requirements to be an architect make for a higher barrier of entry. In software development, I can start a software company in my garage using only open source tools and a shoestring budget and offer a low price for a contract that I can't deliver on while a larger more experienced operation would lose that revenue. Volatility. Uncertainty in quality.
If a VIP demands a project be inserted with a higher priority, make sure that that goes up on the board so that the other VIPs know why theirs was bumped back. Let them fight it out with each other.
Trust me that is not the answer that management wants. I find it cute that so many scheduler worker bees will pontificate over problems like this and just assume that these kinds of problems will simply go away once Manager X sees the logic of Y.
It is a logical fallacy to assume that Manager X must be rational, rational people make logical choices, thus Manager X makes logical choices. Logical choices are not being made therefore Manager X must be ill informed.
Here is a more logical evaluation and more likely. Manager X is actually pretty damn smart and quite logical to have gotten to his position. Managers tend to have an ego or bonuses on the line that affect rational judgement as it pertains to the best choice for the company. Manager X has more tenure than the worker bee and is probably already aware of the problem and some potential solutions. Managers with lots of tenure tend to value the status quo as a self preservation instinct. All of the solutions to the problems described cause change or affect the status quo of Management in some way, thus all known solutions are not viable.
Bottom line is that project management at that company is this way for a very clear and very real reason. It is not a giant mystery to assume that if it has been this way for years before you started and that it wasn't addressed, that is not because nobody as smart as you hasn't figured out that there was a problem yet. It is that this problem is unsolvable at this company under the current management structure, thus only an upper manager or executive can likely affect the change necessary within the organization to improve it.
It is far more likely for change to be affected from above then it is to be affected from below, especially in a tiered command structure. In all my years and experiences and failed attempts to save companies from their own putrid vile mistakes I have eventually figured this out to be the case, and this is something that only comes with the destruction of the idealism of youth and the seniority of repeated failures.
Theme these days is, get projects at any cost, we will figure it out once the project starts moving.
Survival in the global economy demands this kind of business strategy though. It sucks I know but when you are a small company with a tight budget and you got ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market then you have some tough choices to make.
I used to think this way until I saw the books and I participated in sales meetings. When the choice is to sell fiction and hope for the best, or just hope another opportunity comes around in 3 months before you run out of money for payroll... well then maybe you wouldn't be so quick to point fingers at sales.
Yeah some of the worst mis-management stories I have heard came out of Texas. It is like business people over there aren't in the club unless they are abusing and overworking foreigners.
You got people who don't know how to manage, distributing far too much work to offshore resources who don't know how to develop software, for mission and business critical applications. If that is their idea of what offshoring brings to the table then they were doomed for failure even if they were appropriately staffed.
Software Development Lesson 1: NEVER assign mission critical or project critical tasks to offshore resources. NEVER. You want the ability to handle this and the knowledge for this in-house. Offshore the menial shit that doesn't matter or the bells and whistles, but NEVER offshore your bread and butter.
This is a great piece of advice if you are talking about software development. In this case however the question is about IT Projects. This could be hardware design, or networking a building, or installing and configuring a new ERP system.
Agile really only makes sense in software development and even then Agile buys you nothing if you have poor management or company culture that isn't willing to be flexible in a way that Agile demands.
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
This.
You will be amazed how much more can get done on projects when you have dedicated Firefighers and Babysitters. Another helpful suggestion is to make sure that the Babysitters have teeth. Upper management is not going to care what IT processes are in place to keep the whole infrastructure from devolving into anarchy. They want what they want and they want it fast.
Make sure your babysitters are the best of the best, and make sure that they can affect immediate change in IT without having to go through the proper channels. If they need to open a port on the firewall then they should have the passwords and access to do so. If they need to have an account created make sure that they can log into the LDAP server and create one, etc...
So many IT people get angry about this claiming that they shouldn't get special treatment. Bullshit. They should get special treatment because they are the Upper Management, they are pretty damn special. You don't want them waiting and you don't want their IT requests to slow down the project guys at all.
Right wing shillery RELIES on two things: the echo chamber and the chilling effect. Ever noticed how a Fox News viewer screams about the "liberal media" nonstop? It's because if they ever listened to both sides, they'd realize their side's argument is more full of holes than a loaf of aged swiss cheese.
You deserve +5000 mod points for this alone. I grew up in an disgustingly conservative family where Fox News was playing nonstop. I was an extremely conservative Fox News parrot until I moved out on my own and actually started noticing other viewpoints. After realizing how duped I was, I became almost militantly leftist out of the anger and realization that I had been lied to my entire life, but then that anger and vigor passed and am now compassionate towards my right-wing brothers who are so led astray.
It is my hope and wish that they can work past the brainwashing and put aside the emotional arguments, read a few select books, mostly on topics such as History and Game Theory, discuss the facts, then think long and critically on it. If they can do this and understand how events in history relate to today, and understand the logical and illogical reasons that people make important decisions then they have a good chance of seeing the light. Fundamental acceptance that people are fundamentally the same as they were tens of thousands of years ago, the nature of societies, and the reasoning behind important decisions by important people throughout history.
It is the nature of the game and you gotta be hungry. Put your conscience aside and forget everything you learned and loved about coding. Even if you don't understand what the hell is going on you make sure that you fake it.
I first started getting panic attacks because I hated being a manager and I needed xanax for a while but eventually that all went away and I feel comfortably numb now. If you ever want them to stop disrespecting you, shitting on you, cutting your pay, cutting your benefits and making you work overtime then make damn sure that you ream ass like a porn star and stay the fuck away from the guys who are happy where they are at. Don't be seen with them anymore, they are no longer your friends.
You gotta be the biggest damn phony you can be because it is the only way to make 6 figures in IT if you were born after 1980. Fuck those old COBOL white beard COBOL programmers making more than you, they are relics and they will retire soon. That won't exist anymore. Just you, your fake manager buddies and all of your outsourced Indian programmers. That is the only way that you can have an endgame and actually have a hope of retiring comfortably.
It was however, perfectly legitimate for him to walk out with the knowledge of how stuff worked in his head and sell his expertise
You sure about that? Ever heard of a Non-Disclosure Agreement or a Non-Compete Clause? As a software developer I have had to sign at least one of these at every single job I have ever had.
But as was already said, this is speculative trading and NOT an investment. If you are a small time investor and are trying to engage in speculative trading then you are just asking to be bilked of your money. You don't overhear the chatter on the trading floor. You don't see breaking news happening before it goes public. The day traders and hedge funds will eat your lunch. You might as well be playing blackjack at the casino.
If you are a small time investor you are much better off studying earnings reports and making long term investment choices in blue chip stocks that pay dividends than trying to play the big boy games.
It wouldn't be the biggest stretch in the world for a lawyer to equate willfully disposing of currency in the garbage where it will be buried hundreds of feet below ground for tens of thousands of years as equivalent to willful destruction or mutilation.
Hell, if they can get OJ off for murder then this isn't so far fetched.
Or how about everytime our corrupt crony capitalists screw up the world economy, our placating fascist government just stop printing endless amounts of cash to cover everybodies debts.
The problem is we have too much money and not enough wealth. A penny could buy a piece of candy, our smallest division of our currency could buy what amounts to the most menial of items. Over the years inflation continues to get so bad that pennies pretty much only have value on an accountants books.
Sure the economy will tank, but in the end things will adjust to where they are supposed to be because it was all a false economy anyway. Money doesn't create wealth, innovation and labor create wealth.
Question 1.
Bob brutally rapes and beats Carol to an inch of he life, but she manages to pull through. His punishment is:
a) imprisonment
b) death by stoning
c) he must marry Carol
and the correct answer is: c.
What, that isn't how you met your wife? ^_^ V But in all seriousness, marriage back then for a man was sort of disconnected when it came to sex. It really meant that he was financially responsible for her and her children's physical well being. If you were a poor man then marriage would be a devastating punishment for you. On top of that you are forgetting that the rapist had to pay a fine to the village elders as well. If they couldn't pay that basically meant slavery. Still sucks for the woman but still...
Question 3:
The widow Sasha has sex with the unmarried Grog. They need to
a) marry or be executed for adultery
b) it is OK as long as Sasha doesn't get pregnant
c) it is OK as long as Grog doesn't have sex with any other women.
The correct answer is b, though there is some ambiguity (it is more like 'b' as long as Grog doesn't get caught and Sasha doesn't turn him in and Sasha doesn't take any money for the service).
Again, not really the whole story. If you were a woman your lot in life pretty much fell into three categories. You were a daughter and you must obey your father until you are married and sex will bind you in marriage to the man. You were a wife and you must obey your husband and not commit adultery. You were a widow and simply to survive you MUST remarry, become a concubine or become a prostitute, which basically means you are independent. Prostitution itself was not a sin worthy of stoning back then because it literally was the only way for a widow to survive. Interestingly it was ok for men to be with prostitutes because it was viewed as charity. Most modern interpretations of the bible phrased it in such a way to seem as if men were being charitable to widows when in fact they were really just paying them for sex.
the Hebrews became a hard-working agrarian society with the added mobility, lifespan, and morality to hold civilization together
Wrong.
The Sumerian peoples were a hard working agrarian society that formed the first cities around limited water sources making them the first to begin farming on a grand scale (BTW Abraham was a Sumerian). The Hebrews were a nomadic people that were briefly enslaved by the later Egyptians but eventually became conquerors themselves. They were notable for doing little fighting themselves but paying conquered peoples in silver to assist in further conquest and pillage of desert cities. They were probably the first society to use finance as a means of subjugation and control.
Humanity hates that which is different. Humanity dislikes a positive outcome that breaks from the normal. Humanity fears change.
One aspect of Humanity we can all count on is that we have a natural tendency to pick a familiar Hell over an unfamiliar Heaven. Just look at every web programmer who suffers trying to build scalable enterprise web applications in PHP when they could be using a language intended for this sort of thing like C# or Java;-)
The Bible claims that woman was created from Man's Rib. Or at least that is the popular interpretation we know today from English, however if you were to look back to the original Aramaic or Greek translation it really stated something closer to:
Woman was created from Man's Bone
This is a significantly different interpretation because what bone could really be talked about? The word Bone, even thousands of years ago could have appropriately been used to refer to a man's penis. If one were to take this translation that Woman was created from Man's Penis then that means Adam shot off some Knuckle Children and Eve popped up or it means that God created Eve FROM his penis, meaning that he started there like one would a plaster mold from the penis or something that fits it like a Vagina, then he just created everything else on the Woman starting with her Vagina which his Penis would fit perfectly into.
This seems to suggest that a sexual partner was the primary purpose for Woman even existing, even more so than actual reproduction.
You assuming that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was in fact a literal tree. Think in terms of an innocent 10 year old child who does not know the difference between good and bad. He is given the internet by his benevolent overlord and seer, who is a wise guy and strongly believes against censorship and the like, but he is told to never go to a site called 4chan.
Of course though, being the disobedient little brat that he is, he goes straight to the 4chan/b/ board and his innocence is brutally taken from him. He has seen evil and is corrupted.
This basically points out just how sinful we truly are, we are programmed to be so.
Don't think of Elephants...
... What did you just do? I bet you thought of Elephants didn't you? Admit it you sad fuck, you thought of elephants merely because I implanted the suggestion in your mind. That in and of itself is why we are sinners to our very core. This is why the Christian Bible, in merely the first few pages already lays the foundation for how useless and defective you are without God.
This is why I have trouble accepting that even if God exists, that he would be infallible, when he fucked up so royally on people. Did he outsource the programming to Galactic India? Did his project managers follow Waterfall methodology? Did he do a poor job of communicating requirements?
There is still theological debate though if animals truly were not sentient in the GoE. One would think Eve would have been surprised at the prospect of a talking snake, but she didn't even begin to question the validity of this. When Adam found out about the snakes advice he didn't even question the validity of the story.
It is because of this that it is thought animals were significantly different before the fall, possibly more akin to Angels than how we know them today.
It does give a specific upper limit, which some people passed, and having the upper limit different from some, but not others makes no sense from a design perspective.
It was a feature, not a bug. I am sure this will correct itself in Humanity 2.0, but if you are not patient enough for the end of times later this year you can always fix the problem yourself in the open source version, OpenHumanity.
Their budget blows out significantly and their methods are seen by the pollies as more and more asinine. Going into an election, the more noise and bad press that can be generated, the less politicians will want to touch it.
A great idea but it won't work in the United States because all outlets of media are tightly controlled by a few enormous conglomerates.
What will happen in the US:
Everybody will bitch about the body scanners
A small percentage will do something about it (probably only young people who can afford the inconvenience) causing chaos and missed flights at the airport.
Republicans will thwart any attempt to increase TSA budget to handle it because they are too focused on deficit reduction.
Fox news will somehow find a way to tie it to a covert leftist conspiracy to ruin the airlines for normal hard working tax paying Americans all as part of the overall global liberal agenda of one world government.
The 30% of the population who is brainwashed will troll Internet forums and other media, and form counter protest movements against the idea
The other media outlets instead of doing real journalism will pretend to be neutral by acknowledging both sides even though one side does not have a legitimate factual point.
The rest of the population will stop paying attention because it is now too politicized to be worth talking about and because they are working two or three jobs just to feed their kids.
There are perfectly legitimate medical reasons for why one would not want to be scanned as well.
My wife had reconstructive knee surgery when she was in high school and because of this she has titanium bolts holding her knee together. Have you ever seen what happens to titanium when you subject it to large amounts of x-rays? It heats up rapidly and tremendously, which she can't really feel at the time but the expansion and subsequent contraction of the bolts when it cools down causes her hours of aching pain later.
Because of this she refuses the scanner and always opts to have her naughty bits being fondled by a complete stranger.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger problem is that many people buy their cars with a laundry list of "what ifs". I know a few guys at work that bought huge trucks because they might have to haul a lot of things (they rarely if ever do). Here in the US, people have had that luxury because of our artificially low gas prices. Another dollar or two tacked onto a gallon of gas will eventually break people of that habit.
I never understood this behavior because of how wasteful it is. A lot of people like myself though will have different cars for different utilitarian reasons. One small sized sedan is good for my commute and roundabout car, even though I take the bus most days. I also have an old beat up truck for weekend projects, and for AWD travel in the snow or offroading. This is a much more fuel efficient way to have your cake and eat it too, as long as you have the room for multiple vehicles. If not then just rent a truck when you need to haul something.
I predict lots of ... transmission issues for the zooty new million-speed automatics and CVT's
Continuously variable transmissions have been around decades now, with simple designs existing reliably in many tractors and not so simple designs that have broke down and not panned out in the past.
Nissan's unique design in the Toroidal/Roller-based CVT has been around for 20 years now and has consistently proved reliable in a number of models. You don't often hear of Nissan transmissions failing before 150k.
If you don't mind my asking, what the hell kind of software is this company writing that it takes them 3+ years to deliver on? You coding the software for the LHC? The AI behind Watson? I can't even see Windows taking 3+ years to develop.
It's not your job to nearly lie, no matter how many other people do it or how little backfire you've received from it so far because that sort of thinking, while it sadly might get you ahead and give you steady employment for life, is also the very essence of why so few people actually trust sales people and honestly is the cause of the economic downturn in the first place.
Agreed. All of the other sales people have already lied to your potential customer so what do you have to do? Bad mouth the competition? Thats not professional. Tell them that you do things differently? It is not like they haven't heard that before. Give them testimonials from other clients who were happy with you? That is a great idea, if you have testimonials, but the customer doesn't care if you have good reputation and a high price, during the economic downturn these decisions almost exclusively come down to who has the lowest price. So sadly you have nothing left to do but say, "Yes we can do that at that price under that timeframe."
To fight a disease by spewing your own version of it just makes the situation worse in the long-term for everyone.
I am all for it, but when it comes to business you just can't think in terms of what is in the best long term interest for everyone. When you are struggling to get off the ground and keep the lights on you can't even think in terms of long term interest for yourself and your company, let alone the entire industry.
I agree something must be done but this is why the market is a horrible tool to affect positive changes to social and community policy. The problem isn't poor sales practices, it is the symptom of too many competitors in the market and clients with smaller and smaller budgets to play with. Some think that this can only be a good thing for Purchasers in the market but in reality it hurts them too because the quality is so wildly different, and impossible to predict, it is just too volatile.
There are so many wildly different players in the market because software development is not a regulated engineering discipline with the accepted authority of other engineering fields. If engineers had to become licensed it helps weed out the incompetent companies and talent, as well as raise the barrier to entry of a market that has too many players as it is. This is the prime reason why even though I can start up a building architectural firm with some office space and some drawing tools, that the market for building architecture is stable because quality is more consistent, and the requirements to be an architect make for a higher barrier of entry. In software development, I can start a software company in my garage using only open source tools and a shoestring budget and offer a low price for a contract that I can't deliver on while a larger more experienced operation would lose that revenue. Volatility. Uncertainty in quality.
If a VIP demands a project be inserted with a higher priority, make sure that that goes up on the board so that the other VIPs know why theirs was bumped back. Let them fight it out with each other.
Trust me that is not the answer that management wants. I find it cute that so many scheduler worker bees will pontificate over problems like this and just assume that these kinds of problems will simply go away once Manager X sees the logic of Y.
It is a logical fallacy to assume that Manager X must be rational, rational people make logical choices, thus Manager X makes logical choices. Logical choices are not being made therefore Manager X must be ill informed.
Here is a more logical evaluation and more likely. Manager X is actually pretty damn smart and quite logical to have gotten to his position. Managers tend to have an ego or bonuses on the line that affect rational judgement as it pertains to the best choice for the company. Manager X has more tenure than the worker bee and is probably already aware of the problem and some potential solutions. Managers with lots of tenure tend to value the status quo as a self preservation instinct. All of the solutions to the problems described cause change or affect the status quo of Management in some way, thus all known solutions are not viable.
Bottom line is that project management at that company is this way for a very clear and very real reason. It is not a giant mystery to assume that if it has been this way for years before you started and that it wasn't addressed, that is not because nobody as smart as you hasn't figured out that there was a problem yet. It is that this problem is unsolvable at this company under the current management structure, thus only an upper manager or executive can likely affect the change necessary within the organization to improve it.
It is far more likely for change to be affected from above then it is to be affected from below, especially in a tiered command structure. In all my years and experiences and failed attempts to save companies from their own putrid vile mistakes I have eventually figured this out to be the case, and this is something that only comes with the destruction of the idealism of youth and the seniority of repeated failures.
Theme these days is, get projects at any cost, we will figure it out once the project starts moving.
Survival in the global economy demands this kind of business strategy though. It sucks I know but when you are a small company with a tight budget and you got ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market then you have some tough choices to make.
I used to think this way until I saw the books and I participated in sales meetings. When the choice is to sell fiction and hope for the best, or just hope another opportunity comes around in 3 months before you run out of money for payroll... well then maybe you wouldn't be so quick to point fingers at sales.
Yeah some of the worst mis-management stories I have heard came out of Texas. It is like business people over there aren't in the club unless they are abusing and overworking foreigners.
You got people who don't know how to manage, distributing far too much work to offshore resources who don't know how to develop software, for mission and business critical applications. If that is their idea of what offshoring brings to the table then they were doomed for failure even if they were appropriately staffed.
Software Development Lesson 1: NEVER assign mission critical or project critical tasks to offshore resources. NEVER. You want the ability to handle this and the knowledge for this in-house. Offshore the menial shit that doesn't matter or the bells and whistles, but NEVER offshore your bread and butter.
This is a great piece of advice if you are talking about software development. In this case however the question is about IT Projects. This could be hardware design, or networking a building, or installing and configuring a new ERP system.
Agile really only makes sense in software development and even then Agile buys you nothing if you have poor management or company culture that isn't willing to be flexible in a way that Agile demands.
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
This.
You will be amazed how much more can get done on projects when you have dedicated Firefighers and Babysitters. Another helpful suggestion is to make sure that the Babysitters have teeth. Upper management is not going to care what IT processes are in place to keep the whole infrastructure from devolving into anarchy. They want what they want and they want it fast.
Make sure your babysitters are the best of the best, and make sure that they can affect immediate change in IT without having to go through the proper channels. If they need to open a port on the firewall then they should have the passwords and access to do so. If they need to have an account created make sure that they can log into the LDAP server and create one, etc...
So many IT people get angry about this claiming that they shouldn't get special treatment. Bullshit. They should get special treatment because they are the Upper Management, they are pretty damn special. You don't want them waiting and you don't want their IT requests to slow down the project guys at all.
Right wing shillery RELIES on two things: the echo chamber and the chilling effect. Ever noticed how a Fox News viewer screams about the "liberal media" nonstop? It's because if they ever listened to both sides, they'd realize their side's argument is more full of holes than a loaf of aged swiss cheese.
You deserve +5000 mod points for this alone. I grew up in an disgustingly conservative family where Fox News was playing nonstop. I was an extremely conservative Fox News parrot until I moved out on my own and actually started noticing other viewpoints. After realizing how duped I was, I became almost militantly leftist out of the anger and realization that I had been lied to my entire life, but then that anger and vigor passed and am now compassionate towards my right-wing brothers who are so led astray.
It is my hope and wish that they can work past the brainwashing and put aside the emotional arguments, read a few select books, mostly on topics such as History and Game Theory, discuss the facts, then think long and critically on it. If they can do this and understand how events in history relate to today, and understand the logical and illogical reasons that people make important decisions then they have a good chance of seeing the light. Fundamental acceptance that people are fundamentally the same as they were tens of thousands of years ago, the nature of societies, and the reasoning behind important decisions by important people throughout history.
This.
It is the nature of the game and you gotta be hungry. Put your conscience aside and forget everything you learned and loved about coding. Even if you don't understand what the hell is going on you make sure that you fake it.
I first started getting panic attacks because I hated being a manager and I needed xanax for a while but eventually that all went away and I feel comfortably numb now. If you ever want them to stop disrespecting you, shitting on you, cutting your pay, cutting your benefits and making you work overtime then make damn sure that you ream ass like a porn star and stay the fuck away from the guys who are happy where they are at. Don't be seen with them anymore, they are no longer your friends.
You gotta be the biggest damn phony you can be because it is the only way to make 6 figures in IT if you were born after 1980. Fuck those old COBOL white beard COBOL programmers making more than you, they are relics and they will retire soon. That won't exist anymore. Just you, your fake manager buddies and all of your outsourced Indian programmers. That is the only way that you can have an endgame and actually have a hope of retiring comfortably.
It was however, perfectly legitimate for him to walk out with the knowledge of how stuff worked in his head and sell his expertise
You sure about that? Ever heard of a Non-Disclosure Agreement or a Non-Compete Clause? As a software developer I have had to sign at least one of these at every single job I have ever had.
But as was already said, this is speculative trading and NOT an investment. If you are a small time investor and are trying to engage in speculative trading then you are just asking to be bilked of your money. You don't overhear the chatter on the trading floor. You don't see breaking news happening before it goes public. The day traders and hedge funds will eat your lunch. You might as well be playing blackjack at the casino.
If you are a small time investor you are much better off studying earnings reports and making long term investment choices in blue chip stocks that pay dividends than trying to play the big boy games.
It wouldn't be the biggest stretch in the world for a lawyer to equate willfully disposing of currency in the garbage where it will be buried hundreds of feet below ground for tens of thousands of years as equivalent to willful destruction or mutilation.
Hell, if they can get OJ off for murder then this isn't so far fetched.
You realize that it is a felony offense to do this? http://www.usmint.gov/consumer/18USC331.cfm
Or how about everytime our corrupt crony capitalists screw up the world economy, our placating fascist government just stop printing endless amounts of cash to cover everybodies debts.
The problem is we have too much money and not enough wealth. A penny could buy a piece of candy, our smallest division of our currency could buy what amounts to the most menial of items. Over the years inflation continues to get so bad that pennies pretty much only have value on an accountants books.
Sure the economy will tank, but in the end things will adjust to where they are supposed to be because it was all a false economy anyway. Money doesn't create wealth, innovation and labor create wealth.
Question 1. Bob brutally rapes and beats Carol to an inch of he life, but she manages to pull through. His punishment is: a) imprisonment b) death by stoning c) he must marry Carol and the correct answer is: c.
What, that isn't how you met your wife? ^_^ V But in all seriousness, marriage back then for a man was sort of disconnected when it came to sex. It really meant that he was financially responsible for her and her children's physical well being. If you were a poor man then marriage would be a devastating punishment for you. On top of that you are forgetting that the rapist had to pay a fine to the village elders as well. If they couldn't pay that basically meant slavery. Still sucks for the woman but still...
Question 3: The widow Sasha has sex with the unmarried Grog. They need to a) marry or be executed for adultery b) it is OK as long as Sasha doesn't get pregnant c) it is OK as long as Grog doesn't have sex with any other women. The correct answer is b, though there is some ambiguity (it is more like 'b' as long as Grog doesn't get caught and Sasha doesn't turn him in and Sasha doesn't take any money for the service).
Again, not really the whole story. If you were a woman your lot in life pretty much fell into three categories. You were a daughter and you must obey your father until you are married and sex will bind you in marriage to the man. You were a wife and you must obey your husband and not commit adultery. You were a widow and simply to survive you MUST remarry, become a concubine or become a prostitute, which basically means you are independent. Prostitution itself was not a sin worthy of stoning back then because it literally was the only way for a widow to survive. Interestingly it was ok for men to be with prostitutes because it was viewed as charity. Most modern interpretations of the bible phrased it in such a way to seem as if men were being charitable to widows when in fact they were really just paying them for sex.
the Hebrews became a hard-working agrarian society with the added mobility, lifespan, and morality to hold civilization together
Wrong.
The Sumerian peoples were a hard working agrarian society that formed the first cities around limited water sources making them the first to begin farming on a grand scale (BTW Abraham was a Sumerian). The Hebrews were a nomadic people that were briefly enslaved by the later Egyptians but eventually became conquerors themselves. They were notable for doing little fighting themselves but paying conquered peoples in silver to assist in further conquest and pillage of desert cities. They were probably the first society to use finance as a means of subjugation and control.
This has nothing to do with an aversion to free will and everything to do with an aversion to change.
Humanity likes conformity. Humanity likes comfortability. Humanity likes consensus.
Humanity hates that which is different. Humanity dislikes a positive outcome that breaks from the normal. Humanity fears change.
One aspect of Humanity we can all count on is that we have a natural tendency to pick a familiar Hell over an unfamiliar Heaven. Just look at every web programmer who suffers trying to build scalable enterprise web applications in PHP when they could be using a language intended for this sort of thing like C# or Java ;-)
The Bible claims that woman was created from Man's Rib. Or at least that is the popular interpretation we know today from English, however if you were to look back to the original Aramaic or Greek translation it really stated something closer to:
Woman was created from Man's Bone
This is a significantly different interpretation because what bone could really be talked about? The word Bone, even thousands of years ago could have appropriately been used to refer to a man's penis. If one were to take this translation that Woman was created from Man's Penis then that means Adam shot off some Knuckle Children and Eve popped up or it means that God created Eve FROM his penis, meaning that he started there like one would a plaster mold from the penis or something that fits it like a Vagina, then he just created everything else on the Woman starting with her Vagina which his Penis would fit perfectly into.
This seems to suggest that a sexual partner was the primary purpose for Woman even existing, even more so than actual reproduction.
You assuming that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was in fact a literal tree. Think in terms of an innocent 10 year old child who does not know the difference between good and bad. He is given the internet by his benevolent overlord and seer, who is a wise guy and strongly believes against censorship and the like, but he is told to never go to a site called 4chan.
Of course though, being the disobedient little brat that he is, he goes straight to the 4chan /b/ board and his innocence is brutally taken from him. He has seen evil and is corrupted.
This basically points out just how sinful we truly are, we are programmed to be so.
Don't think of Elephants ...
This is why I have trouble accepting that even if God exists, that he would be infallible, when he fucked up so royally on people. Did he outsource the programming to Galactic India? Did his project managers follow Waterfall methodology? Did he do a poor job of communicating requirements?
There is still theological debate though if animals truly were not sentient in the GoE. One would think Eve would have been surprised at the prospect of a talking snake, but she didn't even begin to question the validity of this. When Adam found out about the snakes advice he didn't even question the validity of the story.
It is because of this that it is thought animals were significantly different before the fall, possibly more akin to Angels than how we know them today.
It does give a specific upper limit, which some people passed, and having the upper limit different from some, but not others makes no sense from a design perspective.
It was a feature, not a bug. I am sure this will correct itself in Humanity 2.0, but if you are not patient enough for the end of times later this year you can always fix the problem yourself in the open source version, OpenHumanity.
Their budget blows out significantly and their methods are seen by the pollies as more and more asinine. Going into an election, the more noise and bad press that can be generated, the less politicians will want to touch it.
A great idea but it won't work in the United States because all outlets of media are tightly controlled by a few enormous conglomerates.
What will happen in the US:
There are perfectly legitimate medical reasons for why one would not want to be scanned as well.
My wife had reconstructive knee surgery when she was in high school and because of this she has titanium bolts holding her knee together. Have you ever seen what happens to titanium when you subject it to large amounts of x-rays? It heats up rapidly and tremendously, which she can't really feel at the time but the expansion and subsequent contraction of the bolts when it cools down causes her hours of aching pain later.
Because of this she refuses the scanner and always opts to have her naughty bits being fondled by a complete stranger.