I don't disagree. Intel can do what they want. It's their product. They don't owe me anything, and I don't owe them any of my money. I find their business practices scummy (though perfectly legal and within their rights), which is exactly why I'm voting with my dollar and going elsewhere.
I openly admit that I'm a fan of AMD. However, I think it's reasonable to ask why Intel CPU's have not seen any large jump in performance or features until they had to, due to AMD competition, again. The R&D time and cost on these new chips is multiple years. That means, that Intel can't just roll out a chip in response to AMD, unless they either have good corporate intellignence and knew one to two years ago that AMD was coming back in a big way, or the much more likely answer that they've been sitting on new features and performance because they wanted to milk the previous generation for all it was worth. I find the later to be reprehensible, which is why I will be building an new AMD system, even if it doesn't give me quite the top performance I might get from an Intel chip, because I appreciate them driving competition again (P.S. my last system was Intel because AMD wasn't really competing when I built it).
There are many things to criticize about Equifax, and their handling of this breach. This is not one of them. People in the security industry (such as myself), talk about "breach mentality" vs "castle mentality". Castle mentality is the old style of thinking where companies think that if they just build a strong enough wall, they will never be breached and they can leave their internal network a mess. Breach mentality is to assume you are already breached or will be breached at sometime in the future. This is the sensible approach to security, and the most realistic/practical approach. The goal is to secure everything as best you can to help withstand and catch a hack. It remains to be seen if Equifax actually took reasonable steps to secure their network from breach, or not. I am betting they did not, given their crappy response times and apparent total compromise.
I was/am a user of Crashplan Home. I have previously tried Backblaze.
Reasons I will never use Backblaze again (unless these things change):
1) They only have a Windows client.
2) Their restore process is horrid. You must select folders and files on their website (thus ensuring that they at least no the names of your files). These are zipped up, which you have to wait potentially multiple hours while your zip is prepared. If you have too much data, you have to manually divide it into multiple zip files because they have limited sizes. You can only create one zip file at a time and download only one at a time (maybe two, it's been awhile). If your download fails, and I had multiple failures, you can't resume the download, you have to start over. They cap both backup uploads and downloads (they say they don't but their speeds suck compared to Crashplan). If your zip is not fully downloaded in 48 hours, it gets deleted and you have to start completely over.
Now to CrashPlan:
I have used it before and after BackBlaze and their interface is amazing. They supported unlimited data, unlimited file sizes, effectively unlimited revisions of files, and did not delete your files when you removed them locally (unlike Backblaze). Their speeds are blazing fast. When I recently lost everything on my NAS due to a PSU frying everything, their restore saturated my 100Mbps connection the entire time until the backup completed (this is adjustable, but the point is that they could). Crashplan is also one of the few services that supports Linux and also doesn't care if you backup network shares. In short, all unlimited backup solutions are not equal. I have spent several hours today looking for alternatives that have similar features per price. I have not found any yet. Crashplan is honoring the rest of any current plans + 2 months free, plus giving current home users their Business edition (which is pretty much identical to the home one, but without pc-to-pc backup and costs $10 a device a month), for $2.50 a month (per device) for the first year after the completion of the user's Crashplan home license. I went with that option. As much as I am unhappy with the ending of their home edition, I feel like they have more than been fair to their existing customers. They've saved my bacon three times on serious system failures.
Going forward:
When my cheap year of CrashPlan Business edition ends, I will be looking around for another, cheaper, solution. Any solution I choose must have many revisions of every file, support Linux and have a similarly priced unlimited data plan, or data storage that is so cheap that it is effectively unlimited. They must also have a hassle free restore process. At present, I have not found something better than CrashPlan so I will likely keep paying the new $10 a device per month rate. To save money I have already reduced my backup needs to a single device. I created a home NAS. Everything of value goes on this NAS (just linux with ZFS RAIDZ2 and SAMBA shares, plus some alerting and maintenance scripts). Crashplan goes on the NAS. I access the NAS via NFS and SAMBA shares. All my other remote systems like laptops and things, sync their data to the NAS via Syncthing.
I've used (use) Crashplan and previously used BackBlaze. BackBlaze has the worst restore process I have ever been unfortunate enough to need. You have to manually select files and folders to zip up, then wait considerable lengths of time for the zip file to be created (and there are size limit that are ridiculous). They limit uploads and downloads. If you zip file download fails (which happened multiple times to me), you can't restart the download. You have to start over. Also when you start over the zip may have expired on you because they are only good for 48 hours before they get deleted and you have to start all over again. It was absolutely terrible.
Sure, government regulation is a huge problem, but I think we should all acknowledge all the other impossible hurdles to a practicle Hyperloop first:
1) During normal temperature variance, the inaugural, proposed route will experience over three football fields worth of expansion and contraction. Your supports have to deal with this. The only real solution is flex couplings, but we don't know how to build flex couplings that can also maintain the kind of vacuum that is required for the Hyperloop to be anything but an insanely expensive monorail.
2) In the event of failure, there's no good way to evacuate people. Decompression of a car, even if controlled will kill the passengers because even compressed pure oxygen can't provide enough oxygen to them to survive in the vacuum conditions.
3) A simply pipe bomb, detonated anywhere along the line, will cause explosive decompression of the entire tube, killing anyone in the tube, and immediately scrapping the entire route.
4) Even with conservative projections, and assuming the above problems magically go away, the cost of building the Hyperloop based on the technologies that we can forecast, the cost is astronomical (see the light rail fiasco in California already).
5) While cool, and faster, the Monorail has limited capacity, limited flexibility (it can't carry much or large cargo), so it is less useful than existing forms of transportation that are already "fast enough" in most cases. This means it is of limited use, which massively effects the viability of such an expensive project.
But, yeah, other than the EVERYTHING else, the Hyperloop is probably doomed by government regulation.
Who are you to decide what is has only "Legal" and "Legitimate" uses? There is likely still a good mens rea case to be made probably against this guy based on what he said while selling Kronos and/or providing tech support for clearly illicit usage, but that remains to be seen. I do red team work on a daily basis. The tools I use are very similar and used for a legitimate and lawful purpose. In fact, I write many of my own tools, if I were to sell them, am I also guilty of a crime?
So every college student without a plan is going to go to their mailbox, pull out the latest "acceptance letter" from the nearest vampire college that takes anyone with a pulse, and submit it to get their diploma. Meanwhile, the idiots that wrote this law can do a press conference and talk about how he's thinking of the children.
CenturyLink charged me for services they never rendered, then didn't cancel them when I called it, and I had to fight them for months to get the service shutdown, then they would only refund the last three months. They also added a phone line after I explicitly told them not to.
Even after you open the Powerpoint and hover over the link, you will still be prompted with a scary prompt to Allow the WSF or JS(E) or VB(E) or..., so you still have to click at least once.
Scalia was pretty good about the 4th Amendment, but he still ended up supporting some pretty shaky anti-4th Amendment positions: https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
In particular, he often sided with police on "fruit from a poisoned tree" arguments.
For all the Trump hate in this thread, Gorsuch has historically been pretty skeptical of 4th Amendment overreach (way more than Scalia ever was). For the first time in a long time, there is actually a pretty good chance that this could swing towards more 4th Amendment protection.
I took all the early classes I could get. First, I'm an early riser. I hated afternoon classes. But above and beyond this, starting classes in the afternoon almost ensure that no student can hold down a real job while going to school. That would have been a non-starter for me.
Dear god, will this bullshit end? It's like no one has ever heard of AppInit_Dlls (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/197571/working-with-the-appinit-dlls-registry-value) or Binary Patching the MS way (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370592(v=vs.85).aspx). This is not a new fucking 0-day or even a vulnerability. It is another, legitimate hooking technique that Microsoft invented. You have to have Local Admin credentials. If I have local Admin credentials, I can already kernel hook, install firmware or do any other privileged thing on the box. It doesn't surprise me that some no-name "security" company is peddle over-hyped shit. What does surprise me, is that some many supposedly intelligent "technical" people are swallowing it.
ZFSonLinux works just fine. I've got a huge Debian based NAS running it. Sure, you can't really boot to it, but who cares? I can reinstall the base OS, the irreplaceable part is my personal files which are on a ZFS RAIDZ2 with an encrypted cloud backup.
Except that editors (I've look at you vim) still fuck it up in terms of lining up the tabs and spaces equally. In addition, my point was on standardization. Alice chooses eight because she's a web dev, Bob chooses 4 because he's a sane programmer, and Allen over in the corner chooses 2 because he thinks that whitespace is an abomination. None of that fixes the problem.
I really don't care which one someone prefers, what I can't stand is not having a standard translation between the two. I wish IDE's, programming languages, and text editors would just pick an arbitrary value like 4 spaces = 1 tab and stick to it. Then, we could let people use whichever they choose.
If this is a systemic problem in the company, then your best option is to get out as soon as possible because you aren't going to fix it.
A lot of people who are responding are assuming a bad work environment is systemic when it may not be. It is surprising how many dillholes manage to build themselves empires inside of bigger corporations without getting caught. I have faced this exact scenario at a prior job (manager was exactly like this, and she also had a weird sexual thing for me. Tried to use the whole gas lighting thing as a power play). Company wasn't bad, just her section. I managed to win an ultimately get her fired. The trick in this situation is to find ways to document their behavior and the fact that you were on the right side of the issue, then "inadvertently" expose them when they try to screw you over. If it looks like you are gunning for them, you look like the bad guy. These guys pride themselves on always sucking up to management and looking like the good guy. Your job, if you think it is worth fighting the battle, is to reveal their skullduggery, but make it look innocent. An example from my experience. This manager told me to make a bunch of bad design choices on a client's product. I knew they were wrong, and I told her as much, but she cut me down in front of my colleagues and the client (by misrepresenting the choices). Later I emailed her and said, I must have misunderstood what she was asking, and would she please clarify (thus appearing to submit and getting her to document her explanation, while subtly documenting why I thought it was wrong and that I had explained it to her). Of course the project turned into a train wreck. Manager summoned me to her office, and frankly propositioned me or threatened to get me fired over it if I didn't go along. I refused. Then, when we were presenting, the now horribly screwed up project to the client, as well as upper management in our company, I made sure to print off those emails and take them with me. Of course the meeting was a disaster, the client was mad, as was our upper management. As soon as they started questioning why we'd made all of these stupid decisions, and ignored some of the their direct requests and needs, my manager immediately started to turn on me and the rest of the team. She tried to make it sound like she was blameless and couldn't understand why we'd gone against her direct orders. After letting her dig herself in deep for a minute or two, I pulled our her emails that I had printed off, and said, "You're right! I don't know why things got so out of hand. When I emailed you for clarification, I thought I was very clear on these client needs. Let's use this meeting to do some constructive, 'lessons-learned'. I figured you probably had a superior picture of the requirements, and so that's why I followed your directions to the best of my ability. It must have been my misunderstanding."
Here I looked like I was just doing my job, and thought I'd made a mistake, but actually I exposed what a lying, piece of shit she was. A few days later, the rest of the team and I were each interviewed by upper management on how things had been going. Again, I didn't frame it as personal, or like I was trying to throw her under the bus, I just explained and showed email after email where I had tried to get clarification, after clearly explaining what she was demanding and why that wasn't a good choice, but each time I showed upper management the email, I pretended to be a bit naive on what could have gone wrong. Since I wasn't being "vindictive" it was pretty obvious where the problem was. The rest of my coworkers were only too happy to throw this lady under the bus because these types of jerks rarely screw with only one person. Next thing I knew, she got a forced "lateral promotion" to a dead-end position with no under-staff and shortly there-after got "laid-off".
Human trafficking is the newest horseshit excuse to enforce nanny state laws. It's the new one-size fits all boogeyman to pass laws against stripping, consensual prostitution, pornography.
We've had a President, who has for eight years disrespected the Constitutional limits of the office. Has deported more illegals than any previous President. Has continued to bomb American citizens abroad. Has increased or at least not abated the spying on American citizens. Has continued to perpetrate the drug war. Has at every opportunity attempted to expand the administrative branch through endruns around Congress. Who installed two Supreme Court Justices, one of which (Kagan) doesn't even pretend to care about the Constitutionality of the situation and only wishes to further move the ball into the liberal side of the field. Who has race baited opponents routinely. Who spearheaded the takeover of student loans and the health insurance industry, against the will of the majority of Americans. Yet in spite of this, we are only now fucked? This is why keeping government power in check matters, even when your guy is in office.
I love how the anti-smoking crowd is so black and white.
If you smoke you're an addict.
If you smoke you'll get cancer and die
If you smoke you'll give cancer to everyone around you
If you vape, you'll also get cancer and die, and give it to everyone around you.
If you smoke you'll be come more addicted than a crack addict.
Second hand smoke has never been thoroughly proven, when given the levels of tobacco smoke a person can reasonably expect to encounter.
I enjoy a pipe or a cigar no more than once a month, but my doctor and insurance company treat it like I'm a two packs a day guy. I've been smoking an occasional cigar for years, never once have I ever run into some sort of addictive quality.
I have vaped in the past. All indication from serious studies on the matter are that nicotine by itself is a relatively harmless stimulant, with some actual positive benefits. It's bad for pregnancy, and some of the glycol solutions and heating elements may be bad for you, but again, we're talking extremely small doses, even if you regularly vape.
I love getting lectured about how I a terrible human being for occasionally enjoying tobacco and nicotine by a bunch hippies telling me about the miracles of pot, that will cure everything that ales you, and has no bad long term effects...
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I don't disagree. Intel can do what they want. It's their product. They don't owe me anything, and I don't owe them any of my money. I find their business practices scummy (though perfectly legal and within their rights), which is exactly why I'm voting with my dollar and going elsewhere.
I openly admit that I'm a fan of AMD. However, I think it's reasonable to ask why Intel CPU's have not seen any large jump in performance or features until they had to, due to AMD competition, again. The R&D time and cost on these new chips is multiple years. That means, that Intel can't just roll out a chip in response to AMD, unless they either have good corporate intellignence and knew one to two years ago that AMD was coming back in a big way, or the much more likely answer that they've been sitting on new features and performance because they wanted to milk the previous generation for all it was worth. I find the later to be reprehensible, which is why I will be building an new AMD system, even if it doesn't give me quite the top performance I might get from an Intel chip, because I appreciate them driving competition again (P.S. my last system was Intel because AMD wasn't really competing when I built it).
In my experience T-Mobile was faster, but you had to find the single cell tower in the country and stand right under it. That's a bit of a downside.
There are many things to criticize about Equifax, and their handling of this breach. This is not one of them. People in the security industry (such as myself), talk about "breach mentality" vs "castle mentality". Castle mentality is the old style of thinking where companies think that if they just build a strong enough wall, they will never be breached and they can leave their internal network a mess. Breach mentality is to assume you are already breached or will be breached at sometime in the future. This is the sensible approach to security, and the most realistic/practical approach. The goal is to secure everything as best you can to help withstand and catch a hack. It remains to be seen if Equifax actually took reasonable steps to secure their network from breach, or not. I am betting they did not, given their crappy response times and apparent total compromise.
The thing was always a scam (or at least a terrible idea). AvE did a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are already a million other options: Hipchat, Mattermost, Rocketchat, Lets-Chat, Discord...
I was/am a user of Crashplan Home. I have previously tried Backblaze.
Reasons I will never use Backblaze again (unless these things change):
1) They only have a Windows client.
2) Their restore process is horrid. You must select folders and files on their website (thus ensuring that they at least no the names of your files). These are zipped up, which you have to wait potentially multiple hours while your zip is prepared. If you have too much data, you have to manually divide it into multiple zip files because they have limited sizes. You can only create one zip file at a time and download only one at a time (maybe two, it's been awhile). If your download fails, and I had multiple failures, you can't resume the download, you have to start over. They cap both backup uploads and downloads (they say they don't but their speeds suck compared to Crashplan). If your zip is not fully downloaded in 48 hours, it gets deleted and you have to start completely over.
Now to CrashPlan:
I have used it before and after BackBlaze and their interface is amazing. They supported unlimited data, unlimited file sizes, effectively unlimited revisions of files, and did not delete your files when you removed them locally (unlike Backblaze). Their speeds are blazing fast. When I recently lost everything on my NAS due to a PSU frying everything, their restore saturated my 100Mbps connection the entire time until the backup completed (this is adjustable, but the point is that they could). Crashplan is also one of the few services that supports Linux and also doesn't care if you backup network shares. In short, all unlimited backup solutions are not equal. I have spent several hours today looking for alternatives that have similar features per price. I have not found any yet. Crashplan is honoring the rest of any current plans + 2 months free, plus giving current home users their Business edition (which is pretty much identical to the home one, but without pc-to-pc backup and costs $10 a device a month), for $2.50 a month (per device) for the first year after the completion of the user's Crashplan home license. I went with that option. As much as I am unhappy with the ending of their home edition, I feel like they have more than been fair to their existing customers. They've saved my bacon three times on serious system failures.
Going forward:
When my cheap year of CrashPlan Business edition ends, I will be looking around for another, cheaper, solution. Any solution I choose must have many revisions of every file, support Linux and have a similarly priced unlimited data plan, or data storage that is so cheap that it is effectively unlimited. They must also have a hassle free restore process. At present, I have not found something better than CrashPlan so I will likely keep paying the new $10 a device per month rate. To save money I have already reduced my backup needs to a single device. I created a home NAS. Everything of value goes on this NAS (just linux with ZFS RAIDZ2 and SAMBA shares, plus some alerting and maintenance scripts). Crashplan goes on the NAS. I access the NAS via NFS and SAMBA shares. All my other remote systems like laptops and things, sync their data to the NAS via Syncthing.
I've used (use) Crashplan and previously used BackBlaze. BackBlaze has the worst restore process I have ever been unfortunate enough to need. You have to manually select files and folders to zip up, then wait considerable lengths of time for the zip file to be created (and there are size limit that are ridiculous). They limit uploads and downloads. If you zip file download fails (which happened multiple times to me), you can't restart the download. You have to start over. Also when you start over the zip may have expired on you because they are only good for 48 hours before they get deleted and you have to start all over again. It was absolutely terrible.
Someone needed to be fired for that horrible slide deck. The Exec was probably just offended by their lack of PowerpointFu.
Sure, government regulation is a huge problem, but I think we should all acknowledge all the other impossible hurdles to a practicle Hyperloop first:
1) During normal temperature variance, the inaugural, proposed route will experience over three football fields worth of expansion and contraction. Your supports have to deal with this. The only real solution is flex couplings, but we don't know how to build flex couplings that can also maintain the kind of vacuum that is required for the Hyperloop to be anything but an insanely expensive monorail.
2) In the event of failure, there's no good way to evacuate people. Decompression of a car, even if controlled will kill the passengers because even compressed pure oxygen can't provide enough oxygen to them to survive in the vacuum conditions.
3) A simply pipe bomb, detonated anywhere along the line, will cause explosive decompression of the entire tube, killing anyone in the tube, and immediately scrapping the entire route.
4) Even with conservative projections, and assuming the above problems magically go away, the cost of building the Hyperloop based on the technologies that we can forecast, the cost is astronomical (see the light rail fiasco in California already).
5) While cool, and faster, the Monorail has limited capacity, limited flexibility (it can't carry much or large cargo), so it is less useful than existing forms of transportation that are already "fast enough" in most cases. This means it is of limited use, which massively effects the viability of such an expensive project.
But, yeah, other than the EVERYTHING else, the Hyperloop is probably doomed by government regulation.
Who are you to decide what is has only "Legal" and "Legitimate" uses? There is likely still a good mens rea case to be made probably against this guy based on what he said while selling Kronos and/or providing tech support for clearly illicit usage, but that remains to be seen. I do red team work on a daily basis. The tools I use are very similar and used for a legitimate and lawful purpose. In fact, I write many of my own tools, if I were to sell them, am I also guilty of a crime?
So every college student without a plan is going to go to their mailbox, pull out the latest "acceptance letter" from the nearest vampire college that takes anyone with a pulse, and submit it to get their diploma. Meanwhile, the idiots that wrote this law can do a press conference and talk about how he's thinking of the children.
CenturyLink charged me for services they never rendered, then didn't cancel them when I called it, and I had to fight them for months to get the service shutdown, then they would only refund the last three months. They also added a phone line after I explicitly told them not to.
Even after you open the Powerpoint and hover over the link, you will still be prompted with a scary prompt to Allow the WSF or JS(E) or VB(E) or ..., so you still have to click at least once.
Scalia was pretty good about the 4th Amendment, but he still ended up supporting some pretty shaky anti-4th Amendment positions: https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
In particular, he often sided with police on "fruit from a poisoned tree" arguments.
For all the Trump hate in this thread, Gorsuch has historically been pretty skeptical of 4th Amendment overreach (way more than Scalia ever was). For the first time in a long time, there is actually a pretty good chance that this could swing towards more 4th Amendment protection.
I took all the early classes I could get. First, I'm an early riser. I hated afternoon classes. But above and beyond this, starting classes in the afternoon almost ensure that no student can hold down a real job while going to school. That would have been a non-starter for me.
Dear god, will this bullshit end? It's like no one has ever heard of AppInit_Dlls (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/197571/working-with-the-appinit-dlls-registry-value) or Binary Patching the MS way (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370592(v=vs.85).aspx). This is not a new fucking 0-day or even a vulnerability. It is another, legitimate hooking technique that Microsoft invented. You have to have Local Admin credentials. If I have local Admin credentials, I can already kernel hook, install firmware or do any other privileged thing on the box. It doesn't surprise me that some no-name "security" company is peddle over-hyped shit. What does surprise me, is that some many supposedly intelligent "technical" people are swallowing it.
ZFSonLinux works just fine. I've got a huge Debian based NAS running it. Sure, you can't really boot to it, but who cares? I can reinstall the base OS, the irreplaceable part is my personal files which are on a ZFS RAIDZ2 with an encrypted cloud backup.
Except that editors (I've look at you vim) still fuck it up in terms of lining up the tabs and spaces equally. In addition, my point was on standardization. Alice chooses eight because she's a web dev, Bob chooses 4 because he's a sane programmer, and Allen over in the corner chooses 2 because he thinks that whitespace is an abomination. None of that fixes the problem.
I really don't care which one someone prefers, what I can't stand is not having a standard translation between the two. I wish IDE's, programming languages, and text editors would just pick an arbitrary value like 4 spaces = 1 tab and stick to it. Then, we could let people use whichever they choose.
If this is a systemic problem in the company, then your best option is to get out as soon as possible because you aren't going to fix it.
A lot of people who are responding are assuming a bad work environment is systemic when it may not be. It is surprising how many dillholes manage to build themselves empires inside of bigger corporations without getting caught. I have faced this exact scenario at a prior job (manager was exactly like this, and she also had a weird sexual thing for me. Tried to use the whole gas lighting thing as a power play). Company wasn't bad, just her section. I managed to win an ultimately get her fired. The trick in this situation is to find ways to document their behavior and the fact that you were on the right side of the issue, then "inadvertently" expose them when they try to screw you over. If it looks like you are gunning for them, you look like the bad guy. These guys pride themselves on always sucking up to management and looking like the good guy. Your job, if you think it is worth fighting the battle, is to reveal their skullduggery, but make it look innocent. An example from my experience. This manager told me to make a bunch of bad design choices on a client's product. I knew they were wrong, and I told her as much, but she cut me down in front of my colleagues and the client (by misrepresenting the choices). Later I emailed her and said, I must have misunderstood what she was asking, and would she please clarify (thus appearing to submit and getting her to document her explanation, while subtly documenting why I thought it was wrong and that I had explained it to her). Of course the project turned into a train wreck. Manager summoned me to her office, and frankly propositioned me or threatened to get me fired over it if I didn't go along. I refused. Then, when we were presenting, the now horribly screwed up project to the client, as well as upper management in our company, I made sure to print off those emails and take them with me. Of course the meeting was a disaster, the client was mad, as was our upper management. As soon as they started questioning why we'd made all of these stupid decisions, and ignored some of the their direct requests and needs, my manager immediately started to turn on me and the rest of the team. She tried to make it sound like she was blameless and couldn't understand why we'd gone against her direct orders. After letting her dig herself in deep for a minute or two, I pulled our her emails that I had printed off, and said, "You're right! I don't know why things got so out of hand. When I emailed you for clarification, I thought I was very clear on these client needs. Let's use this meeting to do some constructive, 'lessons-learned'. I figured you probably had a superior picture of the requirements, and so that's why I followed your directions to the best of my ability. It must have been my misunderstanding."
Here I looked like I was just doing my job, and thought I'd made a mistake, but actually I exposed what a lying, piece of shit she was. A few days later, the rest of the team and I were each interviewed by upper management on how things had been going. Again, I didn't frame it as personal, or like I was trying to throw her under the bus, I just explained and showed email after email where I had tried to get clarification, after clearly explaining what she was demanding and why that wasn't a good choice, but each time I showed upper management the email, I pretended to be a bit naive on what could have gone wrong. Since I wasn't being "vindictive" it was pretty obvious where the problem was. The rest of my coworkers were only too happy to throw this lady under the bus because these types of jerks rarely screw with only one person. Next thing I knew, she got a forced "lateral promotion" to a dead-end position with no under-staff and shortly there-after got "laid-off".
Human trafficking is the newest horseshit excuse to enforce nanny state laws. It's the new one-size fits all boogeyman to pass laws against stripping, consensual prostitution, pornography.
We've had a President, who has for eight years disrespected the Constitutional limits of the office. Has deported more illegals than any previous President. Has continued to bomb American citizens abroad. Has increased or at least not abated the spying on American citizens. Has continued to perpetrate the drug war. Has at every opportunity attempted to expand the administrative branch through endruns around Congress. Who installed two Supreme Court Justices, one of which (Kagan) doesn't even pretend to care about the Constitutionality of the situation and only wishes to further move the ball into the liberal side of the field. Who has race baited opponents routinely. Who spearheaded the takeover of student loans and the health insurance industry, against the will of the majority of Americans. Yet in spite of this, we are only now fucked? This is why keeping government power in check matters, even when your guy is in office.
I love how the anti-smoking crowd is so black and white.
If you smoke you're an addict.
If you smoke you'll get cancer and die
If you smoke you'll give cancer to everyone around you
If you vape, you'll also get cancer and die, and give it to everyone around you.
If you smoke you'll be come more addicted than a crack addict.
Second hand smoke has never been thoroughly proven, when given the levels of tobacco smoke a person can reasonably expect to encounter. I enjoy a pipe or a cigar no more than once a month, but my doctor and insurance company treat it like I'm a two packs a day guy. I've been smoking an occasional cigar for years, never once have I ever run into some sort of addictive quality.
I have vaped in the past. All indication from serious studies on the matter are that nicotine by itself is a relatively harmless stimulant, with some actual positive benefits. It's bad for pregnancy, and some of the glycol solutions and heating elements may be bad for you, but again, we're talking extremely small doses, even if you regularly vape.
I love getting lectured about how I a terrible human being for occasionally enjoying tobacco and nicotine by a bunch hippies telling me about the miracles of pot, that will cure everything that ales you, and has no bad long term effects...