As our business is deeply centered around writing skills and communication, as well as business integration, etc, our engineers (except one) are all native english speakers.
As for imports, I think we have two aussies and a kiwi, as well as a few Canadians and at least one Brit, as well as a guy from Eastern europe who studied at an American university and has been a citizen since then.
I imagine we could find Russians or Chinese equally skilled, but the reputation of our company in having engineers who are highly skilled COMMUNICATORS as well as engineers.
It's not specifically structured finance, but the whole system of money-making.
In my company, there are a number of world class engineers who do consulting work.
There are also sales drones... err people... who sell said work.
We bill about $300/hr for consulting and our better engineers make $200k. Not bad. Even the average guy makes $125k or so.
But our top sales guy made almost $1m last year and there are a dozen of them making over $500k. That's more than the CEO.
The sales guys can sell so much because we have world class engineers and a world class management team.
Why did he make 8x what some of these world class engineers make? Is it because sales is more important?
I don't think he's a world class person in any regard. He's a lush. He gets kicked out of strip clubs on friday nights for getting sloshed and being a dick.
At the same time, his engineer is at home working to finish up the project he was working on to pay for that strip club outing.
My main problem with the teaching of evolution is the attempt to actually ban the discussion of any criticism of the theory. Yes, I understand that such criticism could lead to the discussion of religion in the classroom*, but if you are going to ban discussion based on the possibility of that discussion moving to a discussion about religion, then all discussion should banned and anything can have a religion underpinning.
* There is nothing wrong or Unconstitutional about discussing or even teaching religious doctrine in a classroom. I learned about the Greek religions in History class years ago and never had the urge to bow to Zeus.
There IS a problem with addressing a specific theory as if it is truth, or controversy. One may teach Greek creation stories of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders in the "people once believed that.." category.
The category of "perhaps this is an alternative to scientific evolution theories" is entirely different and almost completely unjustifiable, in my opinion.
Almost thirty percent of the world are Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and other traditional Asian religions. Almost 10% fit in a smattering of others (traditional tribal, Sikhism, Jainism, etc).
I'm not sure, but perhaps that dictates the teaching (in the same light) of the Vishnu, Brahma creation story. It might be worth referencing the Buddhist doctrine that pondering the creation of Universe is a bit contrary to Buddhist ideals. Or perhaps the giant Tortoise creation myth that is very common in geographically diverse tribal religions.
To be fair, 20 years ago, I learned about many of these in Social Studies class. I don't think there's any controversy teaching that.
It's the migration of these theories into science class, when there is relatively no scientific merit to them, that is vexing.
We have just as much scientific evidence of Noah's flood or Adam and Eve's garden as we do of Vishnu growing a giant flower from his navel, from which a many-headed deity was hatched.
Well, actually, while the number of seafood restaurants will decline, the remaining ones will be able to charge a MUCH higher price.
After all, there are sustainable farming operations for ALMOST all types of fish, but the quantities are limited. The few that can't be farmed may never be widely available again (whale, crab, and a few others come to mind).
I personally have reduced my use of gasoline by almost 4 times from that of the lifestyle my parents lead by making choices in my own life. I use about 1/8 the electricity of my parents. It's really not hard, if you give a fuck about anyone other than yourself.
I'm planning to spend a year on the ocean, living on a small yacht "off the grid", a life based exclusively on wind and solar power in a few years. What have you done to improve the life of your progeny? (and I'm talking about 10 generations from now, which rules out spewing spittle while pointing at the size of your 401K).
Do you realize the level of the absolute asshattery (or perhaps ignorance) that you have demonstrated with the "YOU GUYS ARE STUPID POOPYHEADS" tone of this comment?
Lay off the Limbaugh crack, it'll make you smarter and generate more salient debates, rather than regurgitated internet flamebait.
I have a co-worker who constantly pulls the "dude, RTFM" on everyone like he knows the answer. But when you pin him to the wall, frankly, he constantly doesn't.
He frequently chortles when someone asks a question "dude, didn't you learn this in 4th grade?" but he then gets the same thing wrong the next time he has to do it because he can't ask the same question (having teased someone for asking it before).
Knowing a lot is very different from being a jackass, which is what is implied in the GP's answer.
Asking credible questions incorporating the previous steps you attempted to answer your own question gains you a lot of support and will make you a wiser person in the long run.
Simply being a turd and thinking you already "know it all" just impresses people who don't know any better. Those who do know just roll their eyes and quietly check you off in their head as a know it all turd.
Yeah, but if "janitor steve" gets a virus, the IT department is liable and responsible to fix it and probably has the means to identify the virus and/or re-image the machine.
When your home machine craters and takes a few dozen other VPN nodes with it, they have to just sigh and say "damn users".
I worked in an office a number of years ago when the Nimda virus was floating around. We managed to keep it completely off the network for 3 days, but someone connected to an old archaic dialup system that was still active (and not firewalled) and infected the whole damn place, and I spent the next 80 hours not sleeping, trying to keep the business from going under because they had over 1000 computers that were totally useless bricks.
Well, the list of things that couldn't be done isn't mine... but let me address a few for fun.
The concept of walking on water, for example, has references far older than the bible. It's a pretty common magic trick, if you're willing to swallow the claim it may be just a parlour trick (and this is all assuming, again, that the original observations are, in fact, true).
There are also a number of references to this trick having been performed on various types of shoals and reefs, where a boat may float at anchor, but a wise seaman could position it in such a way that he could virtually step off the side into only inches of water. You might assume that would be obviously visible to others, but if I recall, many who reported it were not seafaring people and may have rarely been out on open water.
There is an interesting anthropologic reference to the red sea. Anthropologists have traced the historical path of the jews out of Egypt. It's pretty well accepted that this would have happened, and it would have taken them very close tto a large bog type swamp. Locals used to map gaps in the swamp, where a person could walk clean across the entire area, but those who were not familiar with the area would wade into a bog and often drown (especially if wearing armour).
Again, assuming that this story is close to literal and isn't the great imagination of the storyteller, it's entirely plausible that they passed a swampy offshooot of the Red Sea, walked across a known land-bridge and watched the armies behind them perish in the bogs, figuratively "splitting" the red sea.
Of course, our vision of Charleton Heston holding his staff in front of a massive wall of water is spiffy and all, but there isn't much more than that to go on.:-)
As for resurrection, I have no idea, except it's not impossible to fake someone's death, especially given sufficient collaboration with outsiders and sufficient time to plan. It's also quite possible to make up such statements. As it has been said, nobody of any historical significance SAW any resurrected people. If I recall, the eye-witnesses were always "the faithful" and/or "random joe who couldn't possibly dispute the claim" which makes them a dubious claim as far as historical accuracy is concerned.
Of course, we're at an impasse, I'm starting with the assertion that Jesus was the son of God, you're starting with the assertion that the Gospels are a fabrication. All the numbers above make both answers plausible, but you're making just as many assumptions as I am, so don't presume yourself to be more 'logical'. You have just as much of a philosophical/spiritual/whatever axe to grind as I do.
I agree with this statement to a limited point.
It's topically accurate in context of the current discussion.
On a more relevant use of occam's razor, I would like to point out that the belief of the gospels as accurate and divine accounts of the events is the foundation of your faith, but merely an offshoot (and a trivial one, at best) of ours.
The fact that there is an impasse on this topic is a bit irrelevant, because I don't require these documents to have been written on a certain date by a certain person who witnessed a certain event that was inspired in a certain way and was worded in a certain fashion in a certain language which lead to a perfect translation for my own belief system to be self-supporting.
In fact, my own belief has really nothing to do with some ancient manuscripts.
If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all lived to 70-100 years old (as would have been required by the estimated dating of the original documents) AND sent these letters, we're still left with letters from 70-100 year old guys recounting magic tricks from their youth, 50-80 years earlier, all written 1,975 years ago as the sole basis for an entire belief system, which I'm still not convinced is even internally consistent.
I have to admit, when something like Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was written, it was a pretty far fetched concept.
But the fact that something like 7 million individual examples have been found, none of which undermine the fundamental concept... and the fact that disparate studies, such as radioactive dating is brought in and almost exactly matches early guesses of the ages of things. And when theories about geologic formations of rocks are hatched independently but then exactly match with theories about the evolution of animals in such an environment and then later, those exact animals are found in the exact rock strata...
And the sheer volume of contradiction with these findings that a literal (or even semi-literal) reading of holy texts must endure...
I used to buy into the media crap about "we're just not quite sure". But when it comes down to it, a literal reading of the bible as an ancient factual text just deflates so completely that it's almost worthless.
That makes it very difficult to even approach the allegorical value, let alone the value as an exact, word-for-word account of historical events (not even bringing to bear, the religious significance).
Oye, so many holes, it's blinding to even try to approach all of them.
Do you believe the earth was flooded completely enough to wipe out all living things, just 6000 years ago?
Do you think a sufficient genetic pool of every animal on earth could fit on a boat... even a boat constructed with the best modern alloys and composites? For months? And then repopulate the entire earth (even the non-attached continents) in just a few decades?
Did you know that people who start from the basis of believing this book claim that the grand canyon was carved in 1 week and the end of the flood?:-P
Were dinosaur bones put there to fool me and the other unbelievers? Or is the entire old-book just an allegory?
Do you find it at all ironic that after hundreds of years of putting together a pretty good estimate about evolutionary heritage, that modern DNA sequencing and the concept of genetic drift would almost exactly corroborate these theories?
I've seen some pretty interesting discussions regarding the originality of the gospel texts being likely Aramaic and then later translated to Koine Greek, which actually explains away some of the contradictions or apparent logical gaps, but then leaves you with the concept of further translation errors...
I dunno, there's about a 500 year gap from "supposedly happened" to "have a consistent text".
In the era, that's a pretty substantial gap to justify undying faith upon.
But if you have undying faith, I'm sure you'll manage.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Full of ROFL.
I know someone who got some binary tattoos.
His kids names, for example, in ASCII binary around his upper arm.
could do creative things with ASCII binary, making shapes and words and it would be your little secret that nobody else knows. :-)
As our business is deeply centered around writing skills and communication, as well as business integration, etc, our engineers (except one) are all native english speakers.
As for imports, I think we have two aussies and a kiwi, as well as a few Canadians and at least one Brit, as well as a guy from Eastern europe who studied at an American university and has been a citizen since then.
I imagine we could find Russians or Chinese equally skilled, but the reputation of our company in having engineers who are highly skilled COMMUNICATORS as well as engineers.
That's a big part of the sales pitch.
And in this case, consulting is a service. :-)
It's not specifically structured finance, but the whole system of money-making.
In my company, there are a number of world class engineers who do consulting work.
There are also sales drones... err people... who sell said work.
We bill about $300/hr for consulting and our better engineers make $200k. Not bad. Even the average guy makes $125k or so.
But our top sales guy made almost $1m last year and there are a dozen of them making over $500k. That's more than the CEO.
The sales guys can sell so much because we have world class engineers and a world class management team.
Why did he make 8x what some of these world class engineers make? Is it because sales is more important?
I don't think he's a world class person in any regard. He's a lush. He gets kicked out of strip clubs on friday nights for getting sloshed and being a dick.
At the same time, his engineer is at home working to finish up the project he was working on to pay for that strip club outing.
Ahh the justice.
I would contend that the use of the adjective "niggardly" would fall in a very different scope than the noun "black hole".
LOL
cuz, that's where the all childrenz is loitering
duhhh
My main problem with the teaching of evolution is the attempt to actually ban the discussion of any criticism of the theory. Yes, I understand that such criticism could lead to the discussion of religion in the classroom*, but if you are going to ban discussion based on the possibility of that discussion moving to a discussion about religion, then all discussion should banned and anything can have a religion underpinning.
* There is nothing wrong or Unconstitutional about discussing or even teaching religious doctrine in a classroom. I learned about the Greek religions in History class years ago and never had the urge to bow to Zeus.
There IS a problem with addressing a specific theory as if it is truth, or controversy. One may teach Greek creation stories of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders in the "people once believed that.." category.
The category of "perhaps this is an alternative to scientific evolution theories" is entirely different and almost completely unjustifiable, in my opinion.
Almost thirty percent of the world are Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and other traditional Asian religions. Almost 10% fit in a smattering of others (traditional tribal, Sikhism, Jainism, etc).
I'm not sure, but perhaps that dictates the teaching (in the same light) of the Vishnu, Brahma creation story. It might be worth referencing the Buddhist doctrine that pondering the creation of Universe is a bit contrary to Buddhist ideals. Or perhaps the giant Tortoise creation myth that is very common in geographically diverse tribal religions.
To be fair, 20 years ago, I learned about many of these in Social Studies class. I don't think there's any controversy teaching that.
It's the migration of these theories into science class, when there is relatively no scientific merit to them, that is vexing.
We have just as much scientific evidence of Noah's flood or Adam and Eve's garden as we do of Vishnu growing a giant flower from his navel, from which a many-headed deity was hatched.
*shrug*
Glen Beck approves of your Hitler reference. :-)
Well, actually, while the number of seafood restaurants will decline, the remaining ones will be able to charge a MUCH higher price.
After all, there are sustainable farming operations for ALMOST all types of fish, but the quantities are limited. The few that can't be farmed may never be widely available again (whale, crab, and a few others come to mind).
They could STOP the flow if they wanted, they are trying to RECOVER the oil.
Wow, srsly?
I won't say anything other than... CITATION PLEASE.
I personally have reduced my use of gasoline by almost 4 times from that of the lifestyle my parents lead by making choices in my own life. I use about 1/8 the electricity of my parents. It's really not hard, if you give a fuck about anyone other than yourself.
I'm planning to spend a year on the ocean, living on a small yacht "off the grid", a life based exclusively on wind and solar power in a few years. What have you done to improve the life of your progeny? (and I'm talking about 10 generations from now, which rules out spewing spittle while pointing at the size of your 401K).
Do you realize the level of the absolute asshattery (or perhaps ignorance) that you have demonstrated with the "YOU GUYS ARE STUPID POOPYHEADS" tone of this comment?
Lay off the Limbaugh crack, it'll make you smarter and generate more salient debates, rather than regurgitated internet flamebait.
But those are two facts.... simply strung together.
Is it a mantra to repeat two facts? hmmm...
Hah. Because in the 3rd world, American trash gets dumped right in your backyard, rather than down in Texas where nobody gives a shit. :-)
You just made me spit my tea all over my keyboard.
Sheesh, have some restraint :-P
ahhhhh ROFL
Bullshit.
I have a co-worker who constantly pulls the "dude, RTFM" on everyone like he knows the answer. But when you pin him to the wall, frankly, he constantly doesn't.
He frequently chortles when someone asks a question "dude, didn't you learn this in 4th grade?" but he then gets the same thing wrong the next time he has to do it because he can't ask the same question (having teased someone for asking it before).
Knowing a lot is very different from being a jackass, which is what is implied in the GP's answer.
Asking credible questions incorporating the previous steps you attempted to answer your own question gains you a lot of support and will make you a wiser person in the long run.
Simply being a turd and thinking you already "know it all" just impresses people who don't know any better. Those who do know just roll their eyes and quietly check you off in their head as a know it all turd.
Yeah, but if "janitor steve" gets a virus, the IT department is liable and responsible to fix it and probably has the means to identify the virus and/or re-image the machine.
When your home machine craters and takes a few dozen other VPN nodes with it, they have to just sigh and say "damn users".
I worked in an office a number of years ago when the Nimda virus was floating around. We managed to keep it completely off the network for 3 days, but someone connected to an old archaic dialup system that was still active (and not firewalled) and infected the whole damn place, and I spent the next 80 hours not sleeping, trying to keep the business from going under because they had over 1000 computers that were totally useless bricks.
So... I gotta say that i see both sides.
That's an interesting point. The -istan countries were bent over and raped by Mother Russia.
This is a bit akin to saying.
"I have proof God doesn't exist. See, his priests are assholes! That proves it!"
While you might be right about Al Gore, it doesn't make the initial claim any less probable.
ROFL.
Leviticus has like 500 commandments to stone people.
Leviticus 20:27
"'A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them;"
Oye.
I think that's supposed to read
"are supposed to turn the other cheek"
The christianists in the bible belt haven't followed Jeebus for a long ass time.
Well, the list of things that couldn't be done isn't mine... but let me address a few for fun.
The concept of walking on water, for example, has references far older than the bible. It's a pretty common magic trick, if you're willing to swallow the claim it may be just a parlour trick (and this is all assuming, again, that the original observations are, in fact, true).
There are also a number of references to this trick having been performed on various types of shoals and reefs, where a boat may float at anchor, but a wise seaman could position it in such a way that he could virtually step off the side into only inches of water. You might assume that would be obviously visible to others, but if I recall, many who reported it were not seafaring people and may have rarely been out on open water.
There is an interesting anthropologic reference to the red sea. Anthropologists have traced the historical path of the jews out of Egypt. It's pretty well accepted that this would have happened, and it would have taken them very close tto a large bog type swamp. Locals used to map gaps in the swamp, where a person could walk clean across the entire area, but those who were not familiar with the area would wade into a bog and often drown (especially if wearing armour).
Again, assuming that this story is close to literal and isn't the great imagination of the storyteller, it's entirely plausible that they passed a swampy offshooot of the Red Sea, walked across a known land-bridge and watched the armies behind them perish in the bogs, figuratively "splitting" the red sea.
Of course, our vision of Charleton Heston holding his staff in front of a massive wall of water is spiffy and all, but there isn't much more than that to go on. :-)
As for resurrection, I have no idea, except it's not impossible to fake someone's death, especially given sufficient collaboration with outsiders and sufficient time to plan. It's also quite possible to make up such statements. As it has been said, nobody of any historical significance SAW any resurrected people. If I recall, the eye-witnesses were always "the faithful" and/or "random joe who couldn't possibly dispute the claim" which makes them a dubious claim as far as historical accuracy is concerned.
Isn't this fun?
Of course, we're at an impasse, I'm starting with the assertion that Jesus was the son of God, you're starting with the assertion that the Gospels are a fabrication. All the numbers above make both answers plausible, but you're making just as many assumptions as I am, so don't presume yourself to be more 'logical'. You have just as much of a philosophical/spiritual/whatever axe to grind as I do.
I agree with this statement to a limited point.
It's topically accurate in context of the current discussion.
On a more relevant use of occam's razor, I would like to point out that the belief of the gospels as accurate and divine accounts of the events is the foundation of your faith, but merely an offshoot (and a trivial one, at best) of ours.
The fact that there is an impasse on this topic is a bit irrelevant, because I don't require these documents to have been written on a certain date by a certain person who witnessed a certain event that was inspired in a certain way and was worded in a certain fashion in a certain language which lead to a perfect translation for my own belief system to be self-supporting.
In fact, my own belief has really nothing to do with some ancient manuscripts.
If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all lived to 70-100 years old (as would have been required by the estimated dating of the original documents) AND sent these letters, we're still left with letters from 70-100 year old guys recounting magic tricks from their youth, 50-80 years earlier, all written 1,975 years ago as the sole basis for an entire belief system, which I'm still not convinced is even internally consistent.
I have to admit, when something like Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was written, it was a pretty far fetched concept.
But the fact that something like 7 million individual examples have been found, none of which undermine the fundamental concept... and the fact that disparate studies, such as radioactive dating is brought in and almost exactly matches early guesses of the ages of things. And when theories about geologic formations of rocks are hatched independently but then exactly match with theories about the evolution of animals in such an environment and then later, those exact animals are found in the exact rock strata...
And the sheer volume of contradiction with these findings that a literal (or even semi-literal) reading of holy texts must endure...
I used to buy into the media crap about "we're just not quite sure". But when it comes down to it, a literal reading of the bible as an ancient factual text just deflates so completely that it's almost worthless.
That makes it very difficult to even approach the allegorical value, let alone the value as an exact, word-for-word account of historical events (not even bringing to bear, the religious significance).
Oye, so many holes, it's blinding to even try to approach all of them.
Do you believe the earth was flooded completely enough to wipe out all living things, just 6000 years ago?
Do you think a sufficient genetic pool of every animal on earth could fit on a boat... even a boat constructed with the best modern alloys and composites? For months? And then repopulate the entire earth (even the non-attached continents) in just a few decades?
Did you know that people who start from the basis of believing this book claim that the grand canyon was carved in 1 week and the end of the flood? :-P
Were dinosaur bones put there to fool me and the other unbelievers? Or is the entire old-book just an allegory?
Do you find it at all ironic that after hundreds of years of putting together a pretty good estimate about evolutionary heritage, that modern DNA sequencing and the concept of genetic drift would almost exactly corroborate these theories?
Multiple translations = KJV, NIV, etc.
I've seen some pretty interesting discussions regarding the originality of the gospel texts being likely Aramaic and then later translated to Koine Greek, which actually explains away some of the contradictions or apparent logical gaps, but then leaves you with the concept of further translation errors...
I dunno, there's about a 500 year gap from "supposedly happened" to "have a consistent text".
In the era, that's a pretty substantial gap to justify undying faith upon.
But if you have undying faith, I'm sure you'll manage. :-)