I think you hit the nail on the head. I simply don't "think in metric". Almost any time I have to deal with metric units, I do a rough conversion to imperial so that I can deal with it.
The one difference is liters. I have been buying soft drinks in two liter bottles for so long I have an instinctive understanding of a liter.
I suspect that another big obstacle in this is that our older people, the ones who vote in the greatest numbers, will not budge on the metric conversion.
There should be more R&D funding into liquid condoms, which are basically a spermicidal lube infused with nonoxynol-9. Problem is that many women complain about nonoxynol-9 being too harsh, causing itching or burning.
There's another problem. That itching and burning means that the spermicide is irritating the epithelial tissue. This is important because it can actually increase the risk of HIV transmission. Though nonoxynol 9 kills the HIV virus, at the same time it increases the risk of male to female transmission. Your "liquid condom" idea serves men fairly well, but it's not such a great deal for the ladies.
My endorsements for men with slightly above-average penises are Kimono and jimmiehatz, which are black and may be weird for you and your partner if having a black dick is a problem.
It may be a problem for you, but it's probably a dream come true for her.
1. Applicant Screening on Skill SetsWhen the industry lobbyists started their first push for expansion of the H-1B program in 1997, they attributed the claimed labor shortage to an insufficient number of students in college computer science curricula.141 Yet when confronted with evidence such as we saw earlier that there is no shortage of programmers and engineers, i.e. no shortage of bodies, the industry changed their story. They have replied that it is not a shortage of such workers in general, but rather a shortage of workers with very specific skill sets. During the debate on ACWIA 98, for instance, the skill de jour was Java, a new programming language, and it was claimed that even though there may be lots of programmers in the U.S., there was a shortage of Java programmers. Other skills often cited by the industry as being in short supply were the SAP database language, the UNIX operating system, and various others.
For example, an employer may find that it cannot hire the workers it needs because it cannot afford to pay the new, higher wages that scarcity has produced. From the perspective of an individual employer, this situation looks like a shortage: It can no longer find workers at the wages they have been paying. It is also a crisis for them. From the perspective of the economist and perhaps even of the industry, there is no shortage, just higher wages.
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.
This is a lie. It's about big employers wanting to drive down wages. The issue has been settled. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is no shortage of skilled IT workers. There is a shortage of cheap IT labor.
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.
Repeating this bullshit doesn't make it the truth. You are not telling me that MIT, CMU, Rutgers, Pitt and any other first rate U.S. College/University doesn't produce graduates of the same or better caliber than the University of Calcutta.
I'm sitting out of this fight. I did the same 10 years ago when DVD was new. I refused to get a DVD player until they were under $100 and movies were in the $15-25 range. I waited. I'm going to do the same thing here. I am happy enough with my standard definition DVD player and my HD TV.
In three years BlueRay will be dirt cheap and THEN I'll think about it.
On one level, I'm glad that BlueRay won out, but I'm also wary. Sony has a history of coming up with a technically superior format that people don't buy because Sony is so tight with it. I just hope they don't ruin BlueRay the way they did the MiniDisc and BetaMax.
In which case, no-one will want to spend $200k being trained to do a $35k job, so the colleges will have to either cut their prices or go out of business. Either way, everyone wins.
Or, more people stop their education when they finish high school and everyone loses.
Many universities have large endowments and they only spend their interest. Not all, but many don't even need tuition to remain in business. They can scale back and keep on going just fine.
Maybe now new grads won't be able to demand six figures for writing 'hello world'.
They don't get to do this now. But it's not unreasonable to expect to be near the half-way point of five figures.
If a field makes more than the others, and anyone can enter, then people will continue to enter and drive down the price until there is no more inherent benefit to that field compared to others.
I don't so much have a problem with people choosing to enter a field because they think that there is a good living to be made there. I have a problem with employers paying the government(via campaign contributions) to allow more cheap labor to be imported with the express purpose of driving down wages. That's what all of this crying about the need for more H1Bs is about.
On one level, that may be true. There are a lot of people who think that College is supposed to be the same as a tech school. They go to college expecting to be trained for a specific career. Some colleges have begun to oblige and are acting like the trade schools that some students (and parents) expect them to be.
If you've only been trained in retreading tires, you don't know how to mount a new tire on the rim and balance it. When the CS requirements of some schools consist of "MS Office" in three different sections, how in the fuck do they expect their grads to know anything?
Now, on the other hand there are plents of schools who are giving real and complete tech educations. These people are constantly getting screwed by employers who give up after interviewing a few of the other kind of student.
Lastly you have the tech executives who want nothing more than to lower costs. They want the cheapest labor, and nothing else. They are pushing to raise the H1B caps. They are pushing for outsourcing. It has nothing to do with the quality of US grads. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they want to pay people less money. If I spend 6 years in college and have a Master's degree, you can kiss my ass with your $35k offer. The guys right off the boat from Bombay will be willing to take that sort of job. They don't have $50-200k in student loans to pay back. It's basic economics. What this glut is doing is providing a greater supply of labor in order to drive down prices.
If you're the only plumber in your town, you can charge pretty much whatever you want. No one else has the skills, knowledge or tools to do that work. What happens if overnight four more plumbers come to town? Instead of being able to charge $75 per hour, you may have to cut back to $50. What happens if ten more plumbers come to town? You'll suddenly find yourself working for minimum wage. That's what certain executive-types are trying to do to technology.
Funny that you mention stormfront. I visit there sometimes too. Basically just to tell them what losers they are and remind them that my big black penis is something they'll never be able to compete with.
The states agree to simply recognize each others' legal documents even if the requirements for said documents are not the same.
They states may agree to recognize each other's driver's licenses but they are not constitutionally mandated to do so. For example, if one state stopped giving driving tests and just started passing out licenses to anyone who applied for one, the other states would no longer recognize their licenses as valid.
They're both just bans on particular pairings. The relationship remains the same.
It's not nearly the same thing. There were laws aimed at preventing miscegenation. It was specifically banned to marry someone of another race. "Same Sex" marriage doesn't exist. There were no laws banning it because you don't need to ban someone that doesn't exist. Do we need a law to tell us that the Easter Bunny isn't real?
The Constitution does not grant the Congress an explicitly enumerated power to regulate marriage.
That statement is correct, but the Defense of Marriage Act doesn't regulate marriage.
The Defense of Marriage Act depends on the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution. Article 4 Section 1 states
"Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof."
The Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional on its face.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I knew that you'd say what you did. I just needed to get you to state it so that you couldn't back out of it later.
These days, the SCOTUS is expected to be ideological. So, political parties, lobbyists, and any other political critter will try his hardest to support a candidate (for justice of SCOTUS) who (1) is willing to make a decision on the basis of ideology and (2) exhibits the ideology that the political critter supports.
Why do you think people go to law school, become lawyers and then accept appointment to the bench? It's not just for the paycheck. It's because they want to have the power to give their ideology the force of law.
Human nature being what it is, we can't really expect the SCOTUS to be free of ideology. Human beings are not built that way. If a Judge's father was passed up for a deserved promotion because of racial quotas or racism, s/he will have a personal stake in the outcome of cases that touch on that issue.
Even the moderators are infected, and think it is normal, and somehow OK, to be religious,
Being that all people are to some degree religious, it is certainly "normal" to be religious.
Even people who think they're athiests are religious. It takes a greater amount of faith to believe that all of the universe is the result of random chance than to believe that some immensely powerful being created it.
Maybe it's cause I'm from Europe, but what does guns have to do with government being answerable to the people?
Yes, apparently it IS because you're in Europe. Citizen ownership of firearms is a "last case scenario" kind of reminder to government officials that we're their boss, not the other way around. It's a particularly American way of approaching civics.
A good example of this would be the "Battle of Athens" a google search will bring up a description of events that I don't particularly feel like rehashing now. It shows how Americans deal with corruption.
Yet we don't go around having wet dreams of a future where the government becomes totalitarian so we can shoot people we don't like in an excuse of a revolution.
Perhaps not, but then again Norweigans aren't known for their warlike nature. Not even to defend their homeland from outside aggressors. Quisling bent over and grabbed his ankles. Maybe that's the Norweigan way of approaching civics...
The component materials have gone up in price as well. Brass for cases, lead and copper for cores and jackets have all become less available and more expensive.
Some people believe it has a lot to do with the wars. Basically, most of the capacity that was used to make ammunition for the civilian market has been making ammunition for the military. This war isn't likely to go on long enough to make it worth while to expand capacity. If they did, when the war is over they'd be stuck with idle factory space. This wasn't a problem for years because we had a Republican administration. Firearms collectors and shooters believe that the current administration will take steps to make gun ownership more difficult or expensive (in the 1990s a Democrat in congress proposed a 10000% tax on ammunition), so those people who distrust the Obama administrations motives are buying guns and ammo as fast as they can afford to. I have bought several firarms and over 1000 rounds of ammunition since the election.
So to put it all together, we have a war using up supply and we have an anticipated lack of supply in the near future. These are the reasons why the supply hasn't expanded.
It takes just as much faith to be anti-religious as it does to be religious.
Religious people believe that some mysterious force or being created the universe and all life in it. Anti-Religious people believe that the universe and all life came about as a matter of random chance.
We have no way to prove or disprove either position. To be an subscribe to either position requires faith.
The problem that I have with your position is that it takes just as much faith to be an athiest as it takes to be religious. I'll give you the short version. Do we (humanity) know all that there is to know about the universe? Of course not. So, since we don't know everything we can't know if there is a supreme being. At best, all we can really be is agnostic. Because we really don't know.
Religious people don't have a monopoly on believing strange crap.
If you're secure enough in your beliefs, you won't be converted just by spending time with someone who has different beliefs.
(Whatever happened to all those proposals for 'ala carte' cable?)
What happened to it? I'll tell you. The people who know how the cable industry actually works think that's a horrible idea. I agree. I used to think that it was just profiteering, but after I worked for Dish Network and found out how many of their customers are real assholes, I started to see things differently.
There would be people who change their lineups several times per day. If even one percent of the subscriber base did this, they'd have to pay for bigger call centers and more operators. That would drive up costs for all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Things are not ideal here, but it's not yet a lost cause either. We could use some more people who still give a damn about freedom.
LK
I think you hit the nail on the head. I simply don't "think in metric". Almost any time I have to deal with metric units, I do a rough conversion to imperial so that I can deal with it.
The one difference is liters. I have been buying soft drinks in two liter bottles for so long I have an instinctive understanding of a liter.
I suspect that another big obstacle in this is that our older people, the ones who vote in the greatest numbers, will not budge on the metric conversion.
LK
Maybe they'll try to redefine cancer cells as hormones.
LK
There should be more R&D funding into liquid condoms, which are basically a spermicidal lube infused with nonoxynol-9. Problem is that many women complain about nonoxynol-9 being too harsh, causing itching or burning.
There's another problem. That itching and burning means that the spermicide is irritating the epithelial tissue. This is important because it can actually increase the risk of HIV transmission. Though nonoxynol 9 kills the HIV virus, at the same time it increases the risk of male to female transmission. Your "liquid condom" idea serves men fairly well, but it's not such a great deal for the ladies.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/who55/en/index.html
My endorsements for men with slightly above-average penises are Kimono and jimmiehatz, which are black and may be weird for you and your partner if having a black dick is a problem.
It may be a problem for you, but it's probably a dream come true for her.
LK
Yes, I read your post. The problem (for you) is that you are not my only source of information on the subject.
It is NOT about pushing down wages.
It IS about hiring from a better candidate pool.
If that were true, they wouldn't have pressed the government to eliminate the "prevailing wage" stipulations. Moreover, it's demonstrably false.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf
longer find workers at the wages they have been paying. It is also a crisis for them. From the perspective of the economist
and perhaps even of the industry, there is no shortage, just higher wages.
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.
This is a lie. It's about big employers wanting to drive down wages. The issue has been settled. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is no shortage of skilled IT workers. There is a shortage of cheap IT labor.
People have been caught tailoring job listings to exclude Americans so that they can hire a cheap Indian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx--jNQYNgA
http://www.programmersguild.org/rir/pittsburghtribune_24june2007.html
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.
Repeating this bullshit doesn't make it the truth. You are not telling me that MIT, CMU, Rutgers, Pitt and any other first rate U.S. College/University doesn't produce graduates of the same or better caliber than the University of Calcutta.
LK
I'm sitting out of this fight. I did the same 10 years ago when DVD was new. I refused to get a DVD player until they were under $100 and movies were in the $15-25 range. I waited. I'm going to do the same thing here. I am happy enough with my standard definition DVD player and my HD TV.
In three years BlueRay will be dirt cheap and THEN I'll think about it.
On one level, I'm glad that BlueRay won out, but I'm also wary. Sony has a history of coming up with a technically superior format that people don't buy because Sony is so tight with it. I just hope they don't ruin BlueRay the way they did the MiniDisc and BetaMax.
LK
In which case, no-one will want to spend $200k being trained to do a $35k job, so the colleges will have to either cut their prices or go out of business. Either way, everyone wins.
Or, more people stop their education when they finish high school and everyone loses.
Many universities have large endowments and they only spend their interest. Not all, but many don't even need tuition to remain in business. They can scale back and keep on going just fine.
Maybe now new grads won't be able to demand six figures for writing 'hello world'.
They don't get to do this now. But it's not unreasonable to expect to be near the half-way point of five figures.
LK
If a field makes more than the others, and anyone can enter, then people will continue to enter and drive down the price until there is no more inherent benefit to that field compared to others.
I don't so much have a problem with people choosing to enter a field because they think that there is a good living to be made there. I have a problem with employers paying the government(via campaign contributions) to allow more cheap labor to be imported with the express purpose of driving down wages. That's what all of this crying about the need for more H1Bs is about.
LK
On one level, that may be true. There are a lot of people who think that College is supposed to be the same as a tech school. They go to college expecting to be trained for a specific career. Some colleges have begun to oblige and are acting like the trade schools that some students (and parents) expect them to be.
If you've only been trained in retreading tires, you don't know how to mount a new tire on the rim and balance it. When the CS requirements of some schools consist of "MS Office" in three different sections, how in the fuck do they expect their grads to know anything?
Now, on the other hand there are plents of schools who are giving real and complete tech educations. These people are constantly getting screwed by employers who give up after interviewing a few of the other kind of student.
Lastly you have the tech executives who want nothing more than to lower costs. They want the cheapest labor, and nothing else. They are pushing to raise the H1B caps. They are pushing for outsourcing. It has nothing to do with the quality of US grads. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they want to pay people less money. If I spend 6 years in college and have a Master's degree, you can kiss my ass with your $35k offer. The guys right off the boat from Bombay will be willing to take that sort of job. They don't have $50-200k in student loans to pay back. It's basic economics. What this glut is doing is providing a greater supply of labor in order to drive down prices.
If you're the only plumber in your town, you can charge pretty much whatever you want. No one else has the skills, knowledge or tools to do that work. What happens if overnight four more plumbers come to town? Instead of being able to charge $75 per hour, you may have to cut back to $50. What happens if ten more plumbers come to town? You'll suddenly find yourself working for minimum wage. That's what certain executive-types are trying to do to technology.
LK
But, Nixon was corrupt. I can understand how the other poster could mistake him for a Liberal.
LK
Funny that you mention stormfront. I visit there sometimes too. Basically just to tell them what losers they are and remind them that my big black penis is something they'll never be able to compete with.
LK
The states agree to simply recognize each others' legal documents even if the requirements for said documents are not the same.
They states may agree to recognize each other's driver's licenses but they are not constitutionally mandated to do so. For example, if one state stopped giving driving tests and just started passing out licenses to anyone who applied for one, the other states would no longer recognize their licenses as valid.
LK
They're both just bans on particular pairings. The relationship remains the same.
It's not nearly the same thing. There were laws aimed at preventing miscegenation. It was specifically banned to marry someone of another race. "Same Sex" marriage doesn't exist. There were no laws banning it because you don't need to ban someone that doesn't exist. Do we need a law to tell us that the Easter Bunny isn't real?
LK
The Constitution does not grant the Congress an explicitly enumerated power to regulate marriage.
That statement is correct, but the Defense of Marriage Act doesn't regulate marriage.
The Defense of Marriage Act depends on the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution. Article 4 Section 1 states
The Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional on its face.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I knew that you'd say what you did. I just needed to get you to state it so that you couldn't back out of it later.
LK
...are clearly unconstitutional, but so too are things like the defense of marriage act..
On what grounds do you make this claim?
LK
These days, the SCOTUS is expected to be ideological. So, political parties, lobbyists, and any other political critter will try his hardest to support a candidate (for justice of SCOTUS) who (1) is willing to make a decision on the basis of ideology and (2) exhibits the ideology that the political critter supports.
Why do you think people go to law school, become lawyers and then accept appointment to the bench? It's not just for the paycheck. It's because they want to have the power to give their ideology the force of law.
Human nature being what it is, we can't really expect the SCOTUS to be free of ideology. Human beings are not built that way. If a Judge's father was passed up for a deserved promotion because of racial quotas or racism, s/he will have a personal stake in the outcome of cases that touch on that issue.
LK
It's a matter of trying to shape reality. If they're "Progressive" they must be in favor of progress. If someone opposed progress, they must be bad.
Not all change is progress.
LK
Apparently not. Look at his posting history. He repeats this nonsense over and over again.
LK
Even the moderators are infected, and think it is normal, and somehow OK, to be religious,
Being that all people are to some degree religious, it is certainly "normal" to be religious.
Even people who think they're athiests are religious. It takes a greater amount of faith to believe that all of the universe is the result of random chance than to believe that some immensely powerful being created it.
LK
Plenty of Ammo here on the west coast.
California?
LK
Maybe it's cause I'm from Europe, but what does guns have to do with government being answerable to the people?
Yes, apparently it IS because you're in Europe. Citizen ownership of firearms is a "last case scenario" kind of reminder to government officials that we're their boss, not the other way around. It's a particularly American way of approaching civics.
A good example of this would be the "Battle of Athens" a google search will bring up a description of events that I don't particularly feel like rehashing now. It shows how Americans deal with corruption.
Yet we don't go around having wet dreams of a future where the government becomes totalitarian so we can shoot people we don't like in an excuse of a revolution.
Perhaps not, but then again Norweigans aren't known for their warlike nature. Not even to defend their homeland from outside aggressors. Quisling bent over and grabbed his ankles. Maybe that's the Norweigan way of approaching civics...
LK
The component materials have gone up in price as well. Brass for cases, lead and copper for cores and jackets have all become less available and more expensive.
Some people believe it has a lot to do with the wars. Basically, most of the capacity that was used to make ammunition for the civilian market has been making ammunition for the military. This war isn't likely to go on long enough to make it worth while to expand capacity. If they did, when the war is over they'd be stuck with idle factory space. This wasn't a problem for years because we had a Republican administration. Firearms collectors and shooters believe that the current administration will take steps to make gun ownership more difficult or expensive (in the 1990s a Democrat in congress proposed a 10000% tax on ammunition), so those people who distrust the Obama administrations motives are buying guns and ammo as fast as they can afford to. I have bought several firarms and over 1000 rounds of ammunition since the election.
So to put it all together, we have a war using up supply and we have an anticipated lack of supply in the near future. These are the reasons why the supply hasn't expanded.
True, but they have raised it to an art form.
It takes just as much faith to be anti-religious as it does to be religious.
Religious people believe that some mysterious force or being created the universe and all life in it.
Anti-Religious people believe that the universe and all life came about as a matter of random chance.
We have no way to prove or disprove either position. To be an subscribe to either position requires faith.
LK
The problem that I have with your position is that it takes just as much faith to be an athiest as it takes to be religious.
I'll give you the short version. Do we (humanity) know all that there is to know about the universe? Of course not. So, since we don't know everything we can't know if there is a supreme being. At best, all we can really be is agnostic. Because we really don't know.
Religious people don't have a monopoly on believing strange crap.
If you're secure enough in your beliefs, you won't be converted just by spending time with someone who has different beliefs.
LK
(Whatever happened to all those proposals for 'ala carte' cable?)
What happened to it? I'll tell you. The people who know how the cable industry actually works think that's a horrible idea. I agree. I used to think that it was just profiteering, but after I worked for Dish Network and found out how many of their customers are real assholes, I started to see things differently.
There would be people who change their lineups several times per day. If even one percent of the subscriber base did this, they'd have to pay for bigger call centers and more operators. That would drive up costs for all of us.
LK