And how would you tell? Recently I'm getting phone calls with spoofed called ids, when you call them back, a real person answers that is confused about what's going on. The phone companies bare a large responsibility for allowing this, since they claimed this would never happen since the inception of caller Id.
They are when you need employees. Driver wages have sky rocketed due to the drive shortage, at least in my area. LTL prices exploded because of it. The lack of people is having a huge impact on productivity in a lot places. Doesn't matter if you automated either, as operators and maintenance people for those types of equipment are in huge demand right now, but there are still companies trying to pretend supply and demand doesn't exist and think hiring a high school dropout that doesn't know how to read is sufficient.
This has been actually quite challenging for me to deal with as an employer. Skilled workforce is becoming thinner and thinner. I do provide training and I don't care if they jump ship.
More companies need to offer training and educational support for their employees or it's going to get worse, for all of us. I've also resorted to hiring retired people to train others or be kind of a second pair of eyes for others so they can tell them "We've tried that before, it won't work".
All I hear from other companies now is millennial this, millennial that, but none of them offer any solution to it, any educational programs or any sort of guidance. They want a PHD to be a maintenance guy for slightly above minimum wage. Instant gratification. They expect miracle workers now. I don't see many companies building much of an infrastructure to grow on. They just ride on the backs of specific employees, lose them and the company dies.
This isn't unusual. It's stupid but not unusual. I've had 'Professional' software developers tell me this is how it's supposed to be. You'll find a lot enterprise software in a lot of industrial settings functioning this way. Giving root access to people that don't understand anything about the system to deal with faults or errors, etc.
This is now standard industry practice. Stupidity is now standard industry practice.
No sympathy here. Some of these flightsim developers have some of the most absurd anti-piracy practices and forum rule requirements which would make privacy advocates head spin *cough* PMDG *cough*. Complain and they ban you. It's almost as bad as some of these HAM software tool developers who ban you from ever using their software again for saying anything bad about them.
"That "licence" tells the factory owner, the insurance company and all other workers the work done is to a nations standards and was correct and safe."
But it does no such thing. The license just gives the illusion that all of the above is done. But I can tell you with my experience with the contractors and engineers I've hired, all licensed by the way, have a total lack of understanding of standards and common sense. I've hired engineers who have designed my electrical system to be completely ungrounded, no disconnects in line of sight, no coordination studies, etc, then argued with me because they didn't want to pay up for their fuck up. Contractors who try to cheat me with change orders and using aluminum wire when copper is called out. I've also hired structural engineers who have done the crappiest seismic studies I have ever seen, two of them professors at UCLA and USC mind you (You'd think they'd know their stuff). If I wasn't an engineer myself, I wouldn't have called them out on it. Responsibility? Hah!
The whole licensing system has turned into one big joke where contractors hire engineers who never step foot onto the project, pay them some x amount, have them stamp the contractors drawings, and hope the project goes ok. It has become a whole system of cutting corners. If it doesn't go ok, they just close shop, get a new license, start over doing the same crap. There are now so many of these companies, that they've literally flooded the market with it like spam email. Finding genuine contractors or engineers now has become a serious chore.
City inspectors are no better as they've allowed this crap to slide on through. Now cities can't even do plan checking anymore, it has to go through a third party. So your plan check is now being done by a 19 year old highschool drop out (Yeah, they're gonna catch all this stuff!). Insurance companies have also become complicit and completely useless as our last line of defense from this stuff (Can my insurance company stop asking me to do IR Thermal scans on powered down equipment? Bunch of idiots).
Quite frankly, the license nowadays guarantees absolutely nothing with our corrupt system.
Lease price and building prices sky rocketing is what encouraged me to just build my own building. It was far far more cheaper. However, try to do that now, it's not the case anymore. They've put their tentacles in a lot of construction businessses and anyone selling empty land now. If I stayed on my last lease, seeing the rates now, I would never have been in business. And believe me, I had a lot of agencies trying to discourage me from building because they wouldnâ(TM)t be getting their luxurious commissions. It's probably the reason why Amazon and Walmart builds their own facilities as well.
But it's definitely stifling a lot of businesses, not just small businesses anymore, but affecting a lot of medium size businesses now who can no longer afford to have their own office building. All you have to do is just drive down any commercial or industrial area and see the available signs all over the place. You'd think they would be cheap being empty for so long with the whole block being vacant and full of drug dealers. But nope.
So I whole heartedly agree, real estate is actually the big killer of any business right now than Walmart or Amazon. I don't have any statistics on me, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of small businesses can no longer afford the rent anymore or afford the ridiculous prices for them.
Utility power tier levels would be my next gripe killing everything.
Because this is the culture and society we have created. A careless society. We could start executing people like in other countries, but then that will stifle innovation and encourage more incompetence. This is something no laws will fix. People need to change. I'm all for shaming these people in public like we used to do, but people just do not care.
Amazon made it possible to ship items from Europe to the US now with their foreign sites. I found it a lot easier and I can actually get stuff I want compared to calling the shop at midnight my time and asking if they will ship, with the obvious big fat no, because blah blah blah, VAT, blah blah, blah, paperwork, blah, blah, blah.
This is typical for any business, at least in the US.
Management will always try to keep their salaries high instead of sacrificing to keep talent on hand and try to find, fix, or create something new to allieviate the problem. I rarely find companies try to steer a different path because change requires actual work, teamwork, and people that actually care about the company, instead of just themselves and circle of friends working in said company.
Too many places I've seen cut off key employees instead of themselves, which ends up being a disaster as they struggle to get the same results with less.
Meanwhile, their network is still wide open. I know because I have been to many and have worked on machine installs. That is the big joke. Ban Kaspersky, but everything is still unsecure. Hell, Kaspersky was probably making things more secure considering what it is now.
Our security has dropped to Chinese levels in many industries. I used to laugh when I was younger how I could access Chinese machines and mess with them, now Iâ(TM)m saddened at how many machines I can access in across the US.
That's because we have a culture and society that doesn't value privacy or security. Take for example European countries who have a higher value in privacy that security companies actually flourish there, because more people on average care about security and testing for flaws.
Meanwhile, the only security companies that flourish in the US are security camera installers who install completely open to the internet security cameras for everyone (Because it's easier to just leave the firewall open to the internet for the client, who cares? Job is done, got payed! Client is happy to be able to watch their place on their phone and forgets about all that secured network nonsense.). There's definitely zero risk assessment being done at many companies.
Basically youtube is just becoming broadcast TV: Completely useless
Youtube blocking content and removing ads to content they don't approve is just shooting themselves in the foot. Maybe the ad companies don't care if they're on those channels? Either way, I don't foresee youtube being at the forefront of video content creation anymore if this continues.
Many content creators have just resorted to patreon and other forms of donations to get money now than from ads. This is just lost revenue for youtube. Now they're not getting their % cut from these content creators anymore. The funding is now coming from a third party that's completely unrelated to google/youtube. I'm sure youtube will go to the next level and ban anyone attempting to ask for money from third party systems.
You can already see the mess this has created by just visiting youtube.com's front page. All I get is pointless spam videos, live streams of pirated videos and junk in the "recommended" list. A lot of times, I don't even see uploaded videos anymore from subscribed channels, because youtube has deemed these people evil, so no more seeing if they've been updated. What the hell is the point of that?
"From a business perspective, #3 is the best choice."
It does look nice if you don't know what's involved. It's not so great when you actually try to implement robots and automation. It requires a lot of good involved key technical people and lots of patience. There are quite a lot of pitfalls, lots of headaches, things not working, lots of planning, lots of engineering involved and a lot of innovation involved. If you can't keep these people around, your robots might as well be expensive paper weights.
I run into a lot of plant owners around me who think automation allows them to get rid of all their expensive employees, but it's actually the inverse. You end up getting rid of your cheap labor for highly paid skilled positions. To me it's a great thing, it's actually overall cheaper for me with better paid employees who care and knowing things get done without me having to worry or be stressed out. But there are a lot of managers and owners who don't see that at all and expect automation to replace their expensive maintenance people and engineers. They buy these expensive automated machines and expect Juan on minimum wage to be able to figure out how to run it, fix it, troubleshoot it, and also at the same time expect Juan to be QC. Then they cry and wonder how it turned into a disaster.
Unfortunately, there are so many unsecured devices out there that the router is the only thing keeping things secure. From your stupid $15 IoT WiFi nanny camera to multi-million dollar machines. Fortunately, routers and switches with greater security and greater features are out there for reasonable prices now to deal with it. But you're right, if the router is compromised, all those devices are vulnerable.
This is quite true today. I try to minimize computer use for management. Emails and text messaging is the absolute worse. Many people send out messages that requires a lot of deciphering of the persons meaning and customers that email you that want progress reports every damn 5 minutes. If you want your supervisors and managers to be more productive, keep them away from the vast emails and text messaging. I have found people will abuse email and text messaging to hell.
Iâ(TM)ve been using LibreOffice for my work for a while and moved my employees computers to it. Itâ(TM)s not bad, it does what it needs to do, but itâ(TM)s also not great either. It bothers me that hardware acceleration still doesnâ(TM)t work. And it bothers me their main focus is to have better support for competitors formats. It feels like their whole development is focused on supporting every file format possible. Why? Fix the rest of the features please, that have been broken since 4x.
Meanwhile, there have been great office suites releases for Android and IOS. They work great, they look great, they function great.
But that would mean they would have to be paid a decent wage to actually keep them there. No, Jorge can take care of everything, he's very good considering the wage we pay him, don't worry.
"I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training."
It sure is getting worse. Every employee I get has serious lack of training in everything. A lot of companies have thrown training out the door because of "costs", but not realizing that it's making our labor pool worse overall and increasing costs overall upon everyone. I train my employees, but I'm just a tiny tiny fraction. Everyone needs to get on board or we're in serious trouble. Quality Assurance and control is suffering, management, process, etc, is all falling apart. And the ridiculousness of some companies pushing training expenses on to their employees where we've created ridiculous and meaningless new fields in engineering or whatever to get your 4 year degree from (Can't wait for the 4 year degree to use a spreadsheet), when a lot of companies used to offer these training courses in the first place.
"What is a SMA connector, was the response. After explaining it a couple of days went by and they called me up and explained that the guy who knows how to do that quit the company so it would be better if we changed the design for them to make it work."
That's because a lot of companies basically ride on the back of one person that they abuse to hell. Usually, it's the only person there that can keep said company alive. From the owners to all the management depending on this one person. I know, because I see it everyday with vendors and clients. What actually surprises me, or rather bothers me, is how come these employees don't value themselves higher and demand more from their employers?
Slashdot Mirror
And how would you tell? Recently I'm getting phone calls with spoofed called ids, when you call them back, a real person answers that is confused about what's going on. The phone companies bare a large responsibility for allowing this, since they claimed this would never happen since the inception of caller Id.
They are when you need employees. Driver wages have sky rocketed due to the drive shortage, at least in my area. LTL prices exploded because of it. The lack of people is having a huge impact on productivity in a lot places. Doesn't matter if you automated either, as operators and maintenance people for those types of equipment are in huge demand right now, but there are still companies trying to pretend supply and demand doesn't exist and think hiring a high school dropout that doesn't know how to read is sufficient.
This has been actually quite challenging for me to deal with as an employer. Skilled workforce is becoming thinner and thinner. I do provide training and I don't care if they jump ship.
More companies need to offer training and educational support for their employees or it's going to get worse, for all of us. I've also resorted to hiring retired people to train others or be kind of a second pair of eyes for others so they can tell them "We've tried that before, it won't work".
All I hear from other companies now is millennial this, millennial that, but none of them offer any solution to it, any educational programs or any sort of guidance. They want a PHD to be a maintenance guy for slightly above minimum wage. Instant gratification. They expect miracle workers now. I don't see many companies building much of an infrastructure to grow on. They just ride on the backs of specific employees, lose them and the company dies.
How stable is btrfs? I've been using zfs for a while now, but I do get annoyed with updating zfs with the kernel due to licensing restrictions.
This isn't unusual. It's stupid but not unusual. I've had 'Professional' software developers tell me this is how it's supposed to be. You'll find a lot enterprise software in a lot of industrial settings functioning this way. Giving root access to people that don't understand anything about the system to deal with faults or errors, etc.
This is now standard industry practice. Stupidity is now standard industry practice.
These developers have it coming. Flight sim labs isn't the only one.
No sympathy here. Some of these flightsim developers have some of the most absurd anti-piracy practices and forum rule requirements which would make privacy advocates head spin *cough* PMDG *cough*. Complain and they ban you. It's almost as bad as some of these HAM software tool developers who ban you from ever using their software again for saying anything bad about them.
"That "licence" tells the factory owner, the insurance company and all other workers the work done is to a nations standards and was correct and safe."
But it does no such thing. The license just gives the illusion that all of the above is done. But I can tell you with my experience with the contractors and engineers I've hired, all licensed by the way, have a total lack of understanding of standards and common sense. I've hired engineers who have designed my electrical system to be completely ungrounded, no disconnects in line of sight, no coordination studies, etc, then argued with me because they didn't want to pay up for their fuck up. Contractors who try to cheat me with change orders and using aluminum wire when copper is called out. I've also hired structural engineers who have done the crappiest seismic studies I have ever seen, two of them professors at UCLA and USC mind you (You'd think they'd know their stuff). If I wasn't an engineer myself, I wouldn't have called them out on it. Responsibility? Hah!
The whole licensing system has turned into one big joke where contractors hire engineers who never step foot onto the project, pay them some x amount, have them stamp the contractors drawings, and hope the project goes ok. It has become a whole system of cutting corners. If it doesn't go ok, they just close shop, get a new license, start over doing the same crap. There are now so many of these companies, that they've literally flooded the market with it like spam email. Finding genuine contractors or engineers now has become a serious chore.
City inspectors are no better as they've allowed this crap to slide on through. Now cities can't even do plan checking anymore, it has to go through a third party. So your plan check is now being done by a 19 year old highschool drop out (Yeah, they're gonna catch all this stuff!). Insurance companies have also become complicit and completely useless as our last line of defense from this stuff (Can my insurance company stop asking me to do IR Thermal scans on powered down equipment? Bunch of idiots).
Quite frankly, the license nowadays guarantees absolutely nothing with our corrupt system.
Lease price and building prices sky rocketing is what encouraged me to just build my own building. It was far far more cheaper. However, try to do that now, it's not the case anymore. They've put their tentacles in a lot of construction businessses and anyone selling empty land now. If I stayed on my last lease, seeing the rates now, I would never have been in business. And believe me, I had a lot of agencies trying to discourage me from building because they wouldnâ(TM)t be getting their luxurious commissions. It's probably the reason why Amazon and Walmart builds their own facilities as well.
But it's definitely stifling a lot of businesses, not just small businesses anymore, but affecting a lot of medium size businesses now who can no longer afford to have their own office building. All you have to do is just drive down any commercial or industrial area and see the available signs all over the place. You'd think they would be cheap being empty for so long with the whole block being vacant and full of drug dealers. But nope.
So I whole heartedly agree, real estate is actually the big killer of any business right now than Walmart or Amazon. I don't have any statistics on me, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of small businesses can no longer afford the rent anymore or afford the ridiculous prices for them.
Utility power tier levels would be my next gripe killing everything.
Because this is the culture and society we have created. A careless society. We could start executing people like in other countries, but then that will stifle innovation and encourage more incompetence. This is something no laws will fix. People need to change. I'm all for shaming these people in public like we used to do, but people just do not care.
Amazon made it possible to ship items from Europe to the US now with their foreign sites. I found it a lot easier and I can actually get stuff I want compared to calling the shop at midnight my time and asking if they will ship, with the obvious big fat no, because blah blah blah, VAT, blah blah, blah, paperwork, blah, blah, blah.
This is typical for any business, at least in the US.
Management will always try to keep their salaries high instead of sacrificing to keep talent on hand and try to find, fix, or create something new to allieviate the problem. I rarely find companies try to steer a different path because change requires actual work, teamwork, and people that actually care about the company, instead of just themselves and circle of friends working in said company.
Too many places I've seen cut off key employees instead of themselves, which ends up being a disaster as they struggle to get the same results with less.
As with any data in any industry, accurate data is valuable.
Meanwhile, their network is still wide open. I know because I have been to many and have worked on machine installs. That is the big joke. Ban Kaspersky, but everything is still unsecure. Hell, Kaspersky was probably making things more secure considering what it is now.
Our security has dropped to Chinese levels in many industries. I used to laugh when I was younger how I could access Chinese machines and mess with them, now Iâ(TM)m saddened at how many machines I can access in across the US.
That's because we have a culture and society that doesn't value privacy or security. Take for example European countries who have a higher value in privacy that security companies actually flourish there, because more people on average care about security and testing for flaws.
Meanwhile, the only security companies that flourish in the US are security camera installers who install completely open to the internet security cameras for everyone (Because it's easier to just leave the firewall open to the internet for the client, who cares? Job is done, got payed! Client is happy to be able to watch their place on their phone and forgets about all that secured network nonsense.). There's definitely zero risk assessment being done at many companies.
Basically youtube is just becoming broadcast TV: Completely useless
Youtube blocking content and removing ads to content they don't approve is just shooting themselves in the foot. Maybe the ad companies don't care if they're on those channels? Either way, I don't foresee youtube being at the forefront of video content creation anymore if this continues.
Many content creators have just resorted to patreon and other forms of donations to get money now than from ads. This is just lost revenue for youtube. Now they're not getting their % cut from these content creators anymore. The funding is now coming from a third party that's completely unrelated to google/youtube. I'm sure youtube will go to the next level and ban anyone attempting to ask for money from third party systems.
You can already see the mess this has created by just visiting youtube.com's front page. All I get is pointless spam videos, live streams of pirated videos and junk in the "recommended" list. A lot of times, I don't even see uploaded videos anymore from subscribed channels, because youtube has deemed these people evil, so no more seeing if they've been updated. What the hell is the point of that?
All theyâ(TM)re doing is making people return to piracy.
"From a business perspective, #3 is the best choice."
It does look nice if you don't know what's involved. It's not so great when you actually try to implement robots and automation. It requires a lot of good involved key technical people and lots of patience. There are quite a lot of pitfalls, lots of headaches, things not working, lots of planning, lots of engineering involved and a lot of innovation involved. If you can't keep these people around, your robots might as well be expensive paper weights.
I run into a lot of plant owners around me who think automation allows them to get rid of all their expensive employees, but it's actually the inverse. You end up getting rid of your cheap labor for highly paid skilled positions. To me it's a great thing, it's actually overall cheaper for me with better paid employees who care and knowing things get done without me having to worry or be stressed out. But there are a lot of managers and owners who don't see that at all and expect automation to replace their expensive maintenance people and engineers. They buy these expensive automated machines and expect Juan on minimum wage to be able to figure out how to run it, fix it, troubleshoot it, and also at the same time expect Juan to be QC. Then they cry and wonder how it turned into a disaster.
Unfortunately, there are so many unsecured devices out there that the router is the only thing keeping things secure. From your stupid $15 IoT WiFi nanny camera to multi-million dollar machines. Fortunately, routers and switches with greater security and greater features are out there for reasonable prices now to deal with it. But you're right, if the router is compromised, all those devices are vulnerable.
This is quite true today. I try to minimize computer use for management. Emails and text messaging is the absolute worse. Many people send out messages that requires a lot of deciphering of the persons meaning and customers that email you that want progress reports every damn 5 minutes. If you want your supervisors and managers to be more productive, keep them away from the vast emails and text messaging. I have found people will abuse email and text messaging to hell.
Iâ(TM)ve been using LibreOffice for my work for a while and moved my employees computers to it. Itâ(TM)s not bad, it does what it needs to do, but itâ(TM)s also not great either. It bothers me that hardware acceleration still doesnâ(TM)t work. And it bothers me their main focus is to have better support for competitors formats. It feels like their whole development is focused on supporting every file format possible. Why? Fix the rest of the features please, that have been broken since 4x.
Meanwhile, there have been great office suites releases for Android and IOS. They work great, they look great, they function great.
But that would mean they would have to be paid a decent wage to actually keep them there. No, Jorge can take care of everything, he's very good considering the wage we pay him, don't worry.
It's sad that I have similar stories.
"I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training."
It sure is getting worse. Every employee I get has serious lack of training in everything. A lot of companies have thrown training out the door because of "costs", but not realizing that it's making our labor pool worse overall and increasing costs overall upon everyone. I train my employees, but I'm just a tiny tiny fraction. Everyone needs to get on board or we're in serious trouble. Quality Assurance and control is suffering, management, process, etc, is all falling apart. And the ridiculousness of some companies pushing training expenses on to their employees where we've created ridiculous and meaningless new fields in engineering or whatever to get your 4 year degree from (Can't wait for the 4 year degree to use a spreadsheet), when a lot of companies used to offer these training courses in the first place.
"What is a SMA connector, was the response. After explaining it a couple of days went by and they called me up and explained that the guy who knows how to do that quit the company so it would be better if we changed the design for them to make it work."
That's because a lot of companies basically ride on the back of one person that they abuse to hell. Usually, it's the only person there that can keep said company alive. From the owners to all the management depending on this one person. I know, because I see it everyday with vendors and clients. What actually surprises me, or rather bothers me, is how come these employees don't value themselves higher and demand more from their employers?