No SSH may be all you need, but when the corporate IT decrees that you're not getting past the firewall except via $officalsolution you need $officalsolution. It's great how many of you guys work in some perfect little paradise where you chose all the IT solutions to be most useful for your personal preferences; but most of us work for companies, and outside of our box have little or no influence on how it's all setup. I guestimate that 85-90% of the people on this site are at least somewhat beholden to some sort of outside policy maker, whether it be their immediate supervisor or (as in my case) some guy 1000 miles away who isn't even in our chain of command (I work for engineering, not IT. The IT people aren't even in my food chain until you get to the CTO level one step below the President/CEO).
Now as it happens this isn't a problem for my company, we have VPN solutions for both iOS and Android available; but if the powers that be changed VPN solutions tomorrow, I'd be finding a client that worked or not getting past the firewall on my phone.
There are several problems with the article, but this ain't one. You're looking at two different statistics. The first is based on web use, the second on market share. So if iPhones represent 20% of the market, but people who use them spend 75% more time on the web, then the discrepancy is explained. What this really means is that people who own iPhones spend more time on the Internet using their phones. I'm still confused about the numbers though. I can see why feature phones are so high; not many people use them much on the Internet, but there are a huge number of them.
It seems strange that Android usage is so far below iOS usage though. Market shares are close (depending on who's numbers you believe), and I can't imagine that iOS owners use the Internet three times as much as Android owners.
To be fair, no one not a British Citizen can get a "real" knighthood. It's not like they slighted Bill giving him inferior honors, all Americans who've been knighted have "honorary knighthoods". It wouldn't due to let Americans vote in your House of Lords as just one example of why.
That... depends a lot. Do they have 40-50% share of a much larger market? Are they am making more, less, or the same amount per unit? I don't think Apple's board, or anyone else, ever expects to dominate any one niche forever. They don't need to. Apple's profits are rising. They make more per phone (and tablet) than any Android manufacturer and sell more units than any Android manufacturer. Their goal is make money, not dominate markets. They *still* make more profits on their computer division than any other single computer manufacturer, despite only being around 6 or 7 percent of the market share. When compared to "Windows PCs", Macs are a small minority of computers. When compared to "Dell PCs", Macs beat all the other manufacturers in sales and make more per unit. Dominating markets is nice, but it's not likely to last. Being a huge player in a much larger market makes just as much money and can last a good long while.
Look at phones. For a while iPhone dominated the smartphone category. Then Android joined the fray. People started buying Android phones too. Eventually more people bought Android phones than iPhones, but here's the thing... More people were buying iPhones than ever before. Every ad for an iPhone is, in a way, and ad for an Android phone. Every ad for an Android phone is, in a way, an ad for an iPhone. Ads for both make people want smartphones, and that's good for everybody. Would you rather have the whole 12 inch diameter pie, or a quarter of a pie the size of a dining room table?
I probably don't need unlimited data, but I don't pay that much for it because I'm grandfathered into one of the original iPhone plans.I think to save any money I'd have to go down to a 1GB a month plan. While I don't really need the unlimited, 1GB seems a little short.
That's fine, though I'd definitely nit pick on what you say you pay. I pay $115 a month for unlimited text and data, plus generous voice minutes on two phone lines. So if you were being frugal about minutes, text, and data you use you could doubtless pay more like $40-45 a month (maybe even as little as $35 if you shop around) for your plan. That said, in response to you and the original poster, the answer is clearly "no, I don't need a smartphone." I also don't need a dumb phone. Or cable. Or a TV. Or a computer. I could clearly exist and probably even be happy without any of these things. All of them are nice to have however, and in my opinion worth what I spend on them.
I get a *lot* of use out of my smartphone. Of major purchases, I'd rate it below only my workstation computer and my car on the "things I use a lot" list. I play with it, keep in touch with people on it, use it to get around a my new home city, keep notes on it... I don't *need* it, but if you told me I could only keep one electronic device... I'd probably pick the phone. It *can* do everything my computer can (though often not as nicely), does lots of extra stuff like GPS, and is very portable. I wouldn't be thrilled to do away with my desktop or my TV, but I'd probably get rid of them before my phone.
There is a certain assumption that when you give a child an age appropriate *toy* you can let the child play with the toy without direct supervision. If a parent's job is to literally watch every single thing their child does from playing with their toys to watching their Dora the Explorer videos, when precisely can said parent be expect to cook, eat, poop, or drive? I'm all for parental responsibility, and yes there are many times when a parent should be supervising a child; but really there have to be some activities that at least require a more passive form of supervision or nothing will ever get done. Surely playing with the child's own toys should be one of those times?
I can't answer for GP on the family thing (it's a choice he's making, I went to Iraq because I got deployed, I doubt I'd have made the choice to do so), but he can definitely pay off all his debts on a years salary, especially if he doesn't have a mortgage (possibly even then). Think about it. Let's say you're an IT guy in Middle America (obviously not on one of the coasts, our costs of living run higher, as do salaries). You make... 60K a year, more like 50K after taxes. A reasonable salary outside of Cali, New England, or the Mid-Atlantic states. You take a job for a year in Afghanistan for 185K (not unreasonable for a contractor in a combat zone).
The first 93K of your income -per year I believe- is tax free. If you split things just right (starting and ending in June) you might manage to pay no taxes at all on 185K, but even if you work January to December that's a huge thing. Remember, not only are you not paying taxes on the original 93K, it's like it doesn't exist at all for tax purposes. Your income tax bracket is the same as if you made 92K a year. You're paying, worst case scenario, 20K in taxes on 185K, so that takes it down to 165K. That's roughly 115K more than you make in your "real job".
Now houses in Middle America sell for a lot less than they do on the coasts. It's possible that your whole mortgage is 100K, it's certainly possible that if you've been in a place for 5 or 10 years, that you're payed down to 100K or even less. It's also possible that GP rents or inherited a house and doesn't even have a mortgage he needs to pay off. 115K is a pretty fair amount of money. If I'm guessing close to right about GPs annual salary, he's basically getting three years pay in one year. That will pay off almost anyone's debts completely less mortgage, and make a huge dent even for someone with a significant mortgage
I was actually a deployed soldier. I was an officer in the National Guard and my unit got deployed for a year. I've done contract work since I got out, but all of it has been on US soil. I know enough to answer your questions reasonably accurately, but you may want to double check some of it. You typically work for an American company under America laws if you're doing anything that involves direct contact with any kind of sensitive information. There are what we called "TCNs" (Third Country Nationals) who do contract work either for American companies or even some foreign subcontractors, but they do mostly menial work. Cooks in the Dining Facility, workers in the PX and PX restaurants (usually a Burger King or Pizza Hut, we had a Cinnabon at one PX), barbers, laundry workers were all mostly TCNs. I talked to several of them, and from what I understand their conditions were not as nice as the skilled US contractors, and they made less; but still outrageous amounts of money compared to what they could get in their home countries.
If you're a citizen of a NATO country, you might be able to find something with your own government's contractors. Like The US, all the NATO countries require that you be a citizen of the country in question to get the security clearances you'll need to do ay kind of sensitive work. That's the main blocker to non-citizens getting these kinds of jobs: doing almost anything that involves contact with US government systems in the war zone requires a clearance, and you have to be a citizen to get one.
I'm not convinced of the effectiveness of their "sorted, categorized, and fine-tuned quite nicely for whomever is willing to pay for it" information to be honest. Among other things, Facebook seems convinced that I'm gay. The only thing in my entire profile that I can find which indicates that this might be the case is that I've "liked" the Human Right Campaign. I'm married, my spouse is a woman (noted in my profile, and cross noted in hers), I have one gay "friend", but he's not all that active... yet I still get constant ads for gay cruises, and slightly disturbing looking videos. Meanwhile, every other one of my posts is a new run time from my phone, I've often mentioned and/or liked the races I run in, and I still never see any ads for running gear. Same with beer, any human glancing at my history/profile would immediately assume I'm a beer guy, yet nothing ever comes up in ads for beer.
I dunno if Facebook is trying to tell me something or what.
You'd be surprised. I'm no expert on the matter, but as a former Army officer who had to serve in Iraq I've been through more than my share of suicide prevention training. It's an annual requirement normally, and I think we did it two or three extra times on deployment. While it's by no means universal, apparently most people who attempt suicide give warning ahead of time, often fairly explicit warning. Mostly they aren't taken seriously.
Also I'm pretty sure that there are laws preventing Facebook from selling information about suicide counseling. It's the sort of thing the Department of Health and Human Services takes kind of seriously. I don't think there's an ulterior motive here, Facebook has had a couple of high profile suicides linked to them and this is a cheap and fairly effective way to show that they're "doing something."
Spoken like a person who has never been to warzone. There's a great number of things wrong with your post, so I'll enumerate them:
1) Contractors are rarely killed in warzones. There've been a few high profile incidents, but it's a very uncommon event. Moreover, of the contractors that *are* killed, the vast majority are either trucking contractors or security contractors. People that spend a lot of time "outside the wire" (basically not on our bases). I'd be shocked to hear that the number of IT contractors killed in Iraq/Afghanistan goes above the single digits. You're probably as safe as you would be driving a half hour to work on the highway every day.
2) Lots of people ride motorbikes to work without helmets in places that it's legal to so. People perform various other risky activities too. they have unprotected sex in non-monogamous relationships, they climb mountains, they go cave diving... There are an endless variety of things that people do, some of them explicitly because they are, or seem, dangerous.
3) The pay in the military sucks by comparison to what contractors make. You also spend years in training, can't always guarantee that you'll be doing the job you signed up for (several of my "IT" soldiers spent their tour in Iraq on guard duty assigned to one of our line companies), and you can't quit if you decide you don't like it. On top of that, while it's true that soldiers are better trained than contractors, they are also often doing far more dangerous jobs. The number of contractors killed in action pales compared to the number of troops killed in action.
4) IT contractors aren't breaking down doors and rushing into combat. They're doing IT. Usually on a base. The chance that they'll ever see an enemy combatant, let alone have a chance to be "a risk to themselves and others" is small. If they do see action it will be on a road traveling between bases, and likely the driver will be a soldier and know what to do. Contractor's job is: get low, stay low, don't freak out any more than you have too.
There are thousands of contractors working on every base in every conflict zone. It's a perfectly normal and accepted part of the gig. Nobody thinks they're nuts, soldiers are mostly jealous that they make so much more than we do.
I will caution the original poster on a few things though. Contracting work in a hot zone is not fun and games. The pay is good, but there are lots of downsides. You often work 12 hour days, 6-7 days a week. What leisure time you do have is constrained: you usually can't leave base, there are no movie theaters, no restaurants beyond a Burger King or Pizza Hut (and then only on larger bases), Internet connectivity is extremely chancy, and TV is limited to AFN (Armed Force Network, pretty good mix of programs but only a couple channels). While what i said earlier about it being fairly safe is true, it's not completely safe by any means, and even when they aren't aimed at you hearing explosions in the distance all the time can get... disconcerting. On the bright side, on any decent sized base you have cell service so your family is easy to stay in touch with, unlike in earlier wars.
You're against both ads and sub-services? How exactly should people make money on the site? I mean, even sites that aren't trying to turn a profit should at least be able to pay for themselves surely? I've never entirely understood the attitude: "Keep making things that I like, but don't expect me to make any sacrifices at all to help you."
Ok, I'm feeling your angst, but your arguments make little sense. First, SOPA isn't law. It hasn't gotten through committee, let alone gotten to the full House, let alone been passed by both houses and signed into law. There's lots of objections to this law, many from some heavy hitters with lots of lobbyists. Its passage is far from assured. You've setup a large series of events in your prediction, but the first stone hasn't even been cast.
Your assertions that the US is least "free" pace you've ever been indicates a serious lack of travel (I've been to far worse places). Much also depends on how you define "free". For instance: I love Germany. I've been there twice, enjoyed the Hell out it, think the health care system is great, find their attitude on things like sex, food, drink, and body image refreshing. It's also very clearly a "free" country by most reasonable definitions of the word. On the other hand, they have some severe restrictions on certain areas of speech. You practically can't mentions Nazis (I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much). Weapons laws are much more restrictive than in the US (Not a big deal for me, but I have friends who would find this onerous). I also recall a recent article about the German Government installing spyware on people's computers as they cross the border.
Is Germany "more free" than the US? In some ways yes, in some ways no. The thing is, as Americans, we see the problems in our system much more prominently. To an extent, due to the influence of the US on world politics, even non-Americans see those problems more prominently. I'm not saying that the US is the best place to live on Earth; I haven't been everywhere for one thing, and I can't deny that I wouldn't mind living in Europe or Canada for a time at least. On the other hand the US is hardly an awful place to live. There are far far less free places out there, and far far worse situations to be in. Of course, we should fight things like this wherever we can to maintain (or even improve) that situation.
It's really kind of worse than that in this case. Intel *is* growing, it's profits *are* increasing, and by every single reasonable measure they're a secure company with good potential for future profits. They're being punished for failing to meet their own quarterly estimates. Estimates that they *clearly* missed for no other reason than a completely unpredictable natural disaster that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon. Next quarter Intel will be back to making more money than they can spend... hell, this quarter they made more money than they can spend, just slightly less than they expected to.
This is like me going to my wife and saying: "Well all our bills are paid, and we have a healthy savings account, but obviously Johnny's broken arm cost us a couple grand last quarter so the saving account isn't quite what we planned", and her leaving me because I can't manage money.
Sadly most of the college bookstores these days are either owned by Barnes and Noble or Follett. There are very few "local college bookstores" left. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I was in the Harvard bookstore a couple of weeks ago (playing tourist, I've always wanted to see the place) and I think it's a Barnes and Noble. Even if it's not, it's one of the very few truly local college bookstores left.
I think it'll work out cheaper, but probably not quite "pay for the iPad" cheaper. If I recall my college experience, it went like this. Beginning of every semester I'd buy books. Usually six or seven books for my five claseses (sometimes more, I was a History major so I bought a lot of old novels and translations of ancient or medieval source material. There tended to be a lot of these, but they were also much cheaper than real "text books"). I'd be able to get half or less of them used. Used books were sold for 75% of cover, new books for 100% of cover. Also, if it was a core class, I'd buy new so I could mark it up and keep the book. So I usually paid ~90% of cover on average.
End of the semester, I'd sell the books that weren't core. For a book that wasn't going into a new edition the next semester that meant 50% of cover coming back. If a book was going into a new edition, it was next to nothing if the book store would take it back at all. Plus, of course, I kept books from core courses (which I'd bought new). On a good semester I got 30% of cover back from selling books. So, I paid 90% of cover for the books, and got 30% back. I'm paying, roughly, 60% of cover total. Probably a bit more, occasionally a bit less. If the e-book is 40% of cover, I'm definitely saving bucks. As a bonus I'm keeping all of my books (not just core books), and they aren't taking up a ton of physical space (I still have probably two or three decent sized shelves of books from my undergraduate degree in History, and my graduate degree in Comp Sci).
In graduate school (where I thankfully had a real job) I bought every book new, and sold none of them back. I'd have saved the cost of an iPad in a few semesters there at 40% of cost. Also consider that while it's not exactly a total cost savings per se, it's generally easier to ask for an iPad for Christmas than a textbook. If you can source the iPad (or any tablet, really) as a gift then the cost savings to your personal budget accrue a lot faster. Plus you can use the tablet for other things.
The real loser here is the book store. They make 25% of cover on used books, but usually much less on new books. That's why the used book market exists in the first place. The student and the publisher are basically splitting the book store's cut, and the e-books are being sold directly which cuts out the book store entirely on these sales.
How so? Part of the reason they charge so much for textbooks (not all of the reason by any means, but definitely part of it) is that they know there's a thriving market in used books. Especially for books used in non-core classes, a textbook company can expect that at best one in three students who are taking a class that uses their book will actually buy the book. A textbook is current for usually four to six semesters, but you have to figure that at least some students will buy new on principle, even in non-core classes. It's probably more like one in four, but we'll go with three. Let's also assume that production of the physical book is 15% of the cost of the book (it might be less, but text books are legitimately more expensive to print because of the higher paper quality and often having lots of color pictures).
So you have an e-book version that (thanks to DRM) you can guarantee will get sold to every single student who takes a class using it, plus you save the 15% on production costs. You can probably sell it for 1/3 of the amount you sell the dead tree version for, undercut used book prices, and still make more than you used to. On top of that, if you can get most students to use the e-book instead of the physical book, you can slow down your release cycle (since you no longer have to worry as much about students cutting into your profits by buying used) and save still more money.
I didn't say they never make mistakes, just that they do due diligence. Given the sheer number of dangerous and never before attempted things they've tried on that show over the course of its run, their safety record isn't half bad. In a ten year career with the National Guard I've probably witnessed more incidents during one weekend a month training operations than they've had in their whole run, and everything we did was according to an establish procedure we were well versed in. They do entirely different, often dangerous, things every week.
Except that they always, *always*, have officials of the local emergency services and experts on hand when they do stuff like this. Pretty much once your experiment has been cleared by fire/safety, the police, and a known explosives expert you can wash your hands of criminal liability. They're still financially responsible for the damage of course, but unless this is some sort complete departure from their normal modus operandi they did more than enough due diligence to avoid criminal prosecution for gross negligence.
It's not a matter of whether he can keep up with it, it's a matter of backup. Did you ever take a vacation? Not a "going on a trip this weekend" thing, a real week long vacation? How many times did you log in remotely? What if you got really sick? What if something broke while you were really sick? I'm not talking about, "gosh, I don't feel too good today I'm staying home and can log in remotely if there's a problem" sick, I'm talking bedridden or hospitalized sick. How important was it that your servers stay up 99.9% of the time? This sounds like a "Our servers are down, we're hemorrhaging money" kind of situation. I'm not saying they need a team of 15 people, but one extra guy who can fix the business critical systems because you have jury duty today is always nice.
Not to mention that he's also the programmer. So while he's ripping out, documenting and fixing all the IT his predecessor left him, he's also supposed to be building and maintaining the site and the backend code. Oh, and fixing the bosses lap top. Cause hey, he's the IT guy.
My guess is he's not... I'm immediately concerned by: "position of programmer and sole IT personnel" and: "thriving e-commerce company" together in the same sentence. The fact that this does not appear to be a small mom and pop with two or three servers making up the "e-presence" adds fuel to the fire. I'm getting the image of a fairly large company that relies heavily on it's web and e-commerce presence. And has one guy to take care of that. What happens when he's on vacation or sick and a server dies? What happens when the website has an issue and then *anything* else goes wrong?
There's no bullpen here, if anything, anything at all, breaks there's only one guy to fix it. Day or night. If two things break you're already triaging. Surely a "thriving" company can afford a backup to what is pretty clearly a business critical unit?
The problem is that $14 and hour, once management overhead and other costs come out, isn't even a reasonable living in India. Figure that after all the overhead and costs come out, coders are probably making less than $4 an hour. Last I checked ( I was vaguely curious about living there for a year or two at one point) average salary for a technology professional in an Indian city is around $25-30K a year. A lot less than even pretty depressed areas of the US or Europe, but still a Hell of a lot more than $4 an hour.
This tells me that most likely when you're paying $14 an hour for coders in India (I'm specifically using India here, because I have at least some idea what "reasonable" pay is there) you're not getting good coders by Indian standards, let alone any arbitrary external standard. If you want an average talent you have to pay average rates. So in India, if you want an average talent programmer, you're probably looking at paying the *programmer* (not the contracting company) $14 an hour. Now add overhead and costs to *that* (also factor that he managers and such are likely correspondingly better, and therefore more expensive) number and I bet contracting India isn't a lot cheaper than doing it in house.
Slashdot Mirror
Updated second edition. The one in the GP is out of print and rather expensive. May have to grab this.
No SSH may be all you need, but when the corporate IT decrees that you're not getting past the firewall except via $officalsolution you need $officalsolution. It's great how many of you guys work in some perfect little paradise where you chose all the IT solutions to be most useful for your personal preferences; but most of us work for companies, and outside of our box have little or no influence on how it's all setup. I guestimate that 85-90% of the people on this site are at least somewhat beholden to some sort of outside policy maker, whether it be their immediate supervisor or (as in my case) some guy 1000 miles away who isn't even in our chain of command (I work for engineering, not IT. The IT people aren't even in my food chain until you get to the CTO level one step below the President/CEO).
Now as it happens this isn't a problem for my company, we have VPN solutions for both iOS and Android available; but if the powers that be changed VPN solutions tomorrow, I'd be finding a client that worked or not getting past the firewall on my phone.
There are several problems with the article, but this ain't one. You're looking at two different statistics. The first is based on web use, the second on market share. So if iPhones represent 20% of the market, but people who use them spend 75% more time on the web, then the discrepancy is explained. What this really means is that people who own iPhones spend more time on the Internet using their phones. I'm still confused about the numbers though. I can see why feature phones are so high; not many people use them much on the Internet, but there are a huge number of them.
It seems strange that Android usage is so far below iOS usage though. Market shares are close (depending on who's numbers you believe), and I can't imagine that iOS owners use the Internet three times as much as Android owners.
To be fair, no one not a British Citizen can get a "real" knighthood. It's not like they slighted Bill giving him inferior honors, all Americans who've been knighted have "honorary knighthoods". It wouldn't due to let Americans vote in your House of Lords as just one example of why.
That... depends a lot. Do they have 40-50% share of a much larger market? Are they am making more, less, or the same amount per unit? I don't think Apple's board, or anyone else, ever expects to dominate any one niche forever. They don't need to. Apple's profits are rising. They make more per phone (and tablet) than any Android manufacturer and sell more units than any Android manufacturer. Their goal is make money, not dominate markets. They *still* make more profits on their computer division than any other single computer manufacturer, despite only being around 6 or 7 percent of the market share. When compared to "Windows PCs", Macs are a small minority of computers. When compared to "Dell PCs", Macs beat all the other manufacturers in sales and make more per unit. Dominating markets is nice, but it's not likely to last. Being a huge player in a much larger market makes just as much money and can last a good long while.
Look at phones. For a while iPhone dominated the smartphone category. Then Android joined the fray. People started buying Android phones too. Eventually more people bought Android phones than iPhones, but here's the thing... More people were buying iPhones than ever before. Every ad for an iPhone is, in a way, and ad for an Android phone. Every ad for an Android phone is, in a way, an ad for an iPhone. Ads for both make people want smartphones, and that's good for everybody. Would you rather have the whole 12 inch diameter pie, or a quarter of a pie the size of a dining room table?
I probably don't need unlimited data, but I don't pay that much for it because I'm grandfathered into one of the original iPhone plans.I think to save any money I'd have to go down to a 1GB a month plan. While I don't really need the unlimited, 1GB seems a little short.
That's fine, though I'd definitely nit pick on what you say you pay. I pay $115 a month for unlimited text and data, plus generous voice minutes on two phone lines. So if you were being frugal about minutes, text, and data you use you could doubtless pay more like $40-45 a month (maybe even as little as $35 if you shop around) for your plan. That said, in response to you and the original poster, the answer is clearly "no, I don't need a smartphone." I also don't need a dumb phone. Or cable. Or a TV. Or a computer. I could clearly exist and probably even be happy without any of these things. All of them are nice to have however, and in my opinion worth what I spend on them.
I get a *lot* of use out of my smartphone. Of major purchases, I'd rate it below only my workstation computer and my car on the "things I use a lot" list. I play with it, keep in touch with people on it, use it to get around a my new home city, keep notes on it... I don't *need* it, but if you told me I could only keep one electronic device... I'd probably pick the phone. It *can* do everything my computer can (though often not as nicely), does lots of extra stuff like GPS, and is very portable. I wouldn't be thrilled to do away with my desktop or my TV, but I'd probably get rid of them before my phone.
There is a certain assumption that when you give a child an age appropriate *toy* you can let the child play with the toy without direct supervision. If a parent's job is to literally watch every single thing their child does from playing with their toys to watching their Dora the Explorer videos, when precisely can said parent be expect to cook, eat, poop, or drive? I'm all for parental responsibility, and yes there are many times when a parent should be supervising a child; but really there have to be some activities that at least require a more passive form of supervision or nothing will ever get done. Surely playing with the child's own toys should be one of those times?
I can't answer for GP on the family thing (it's a choice he's making, I went to Iraq because I got deployed, I doubt I'd have made the choice to do so), but he can definitely pay off all his debts on a years salary, especially if he doesn't have a mortgage (possibly even then). Think about it. Let's say you're an IT guy in Middle America (obviously not on one of the coasts, our costs of living run higher, as do salaries). You make... 60K a year, more like 50K after taxes. A reasonable salary outside of Cali, New England, or the Mid-Atlantic states. You take a job for a year in Afghanistan for 185K (not unreasonable for a contractor in a combat zone).
The first 93K of your income -per year I believe- is tax free. If you split things just right (starting and ending in June) you might manage to pay no taxes at all on 185K, but even if you work January to December that's a huge thing. Remember, not only are you not paying taxes on the original 93K, it's like it doesn't exist at all for tax purposes. Your income tax bracket is the same as if you made 92K a year. You're paying, worst case scenario, 20K in taxes on 185K, so that takes it down to 165K. That's roughly 115K more than you make in your "real job".
Now houses in Middle America sell for a lot less than they do on the coasts. It's possible that your whole mortgage is 100K, it's certainly possible that if you've been in a place for 5 or 10 years, that you're payed down to 100K or even less. It's also possible that GP rents or inherited a house and doesn't even have a mortgage he needs to pay off. 115K is a pretty fair amount of money. If I'm guessing close to right about GPs annual salary, he's basically getting three years pay in one year. That will pay off almost anyone's debts completely less mortgage, and make a huge dent even for someone with a significant mortgage
I was actually a deployed soldier. I was an officer in the National Guard and my unit got deployed for a year. I've done contract work since I got out, but all of it has been on US soil. I know enough to answer your questions reasonably accurately, but you may want to double check some of it. You typically work for an American company under America laws if you're doing anything that involves direct contact with any kind of sensitive information. There are what we called "TCNs" (Third Country Nationals) who do contract work either for American companies or even some foreign subcontractors, but they do mostly menial work. Cooks in the Dining Facility, workers in the PX and PX restaurants (usually a Burger King or Pizza Hut, we had a Cinnabon at one PX), barbers, laundry workers were all mostly TCNs. I talked to several of them, and from what I understand their conditions were not as nice as the skilled US contractors, and they made less; but still outrageous amounts of money compared to what they could get in their home countries.
If you're a citizen of a NATO country, you might be able to find something with your own government's contractors. Like The US, all the NATO countries require that you be a citizen of the country in question to get the security clearances you'll need to do ay kind of sensitive work. That's the main blocker to non-citizens getting these kinds of jobs: doing almost anything that involves contact with US government systems in the war zone requires a clearance, and you have to be a citizen to get one.
I'm not convinced of the effectiveness of their "sorted, categorized, and fine-tuned quite nicely for whomever is willing to pay for it" information to be honest. Among other things, Facebook seems convinced that I'm gay. The only thing in my entire profile that I can find which indicates that this might be the case is that I've "liked" the Human Right Campaign. I'm married, my spouse is a woman (noted in my profile, and cross noted in hers), I have one gay "friend", but he's not all that active... yet I still get constant ads for gay cruises, and slightly disturbing looking videos. Meanwhile, every other one of my posts is a new run time from my phone, I've often mentioned and/or liked the races I run in, and I still never see any ads for running gear. Same with beer, any human glancing at my history/profile would immediately assume I'm a beer guy, yet nothing ever comes up in ads for beer.
I dunno if Facebook is trying to tell me something or what.
You'd be surprised. I'm no expert on the matter, but as a former Army officer who had to serve in Iraq I've been through more than my share of suicide prevention training. It's an annual requirement normally, and I think we did it two or three extra times on deployment. While it's by no means universal, apparently most people who attempt suicide give warning ahead of time, often fairly explicit warning. Mostly they aren't taken seriously.
Also I'm pretty sure that there are laws preventing Facebook from selling information about suicide counseling. It's the sort of thing the Department of Health and Human Services takes kind of seriously. I don't think there's an ulterior motive here, Facebook has had a couple of high profile suicides linked to them and this is a cheap and fairly effective way to show that they're "doing something."
Spoken like a person who has never been to warzone. There's a great number of things wrong with your post, so I'll enumerate them:
1) Contractors are rarely killed in warzones. There've been a few high profile incidents, but it's a very uncommon event. Moreover, of the contractors that *are* killed, the vast majority are either trucking contractors or security contractors. People that spend a lot of time "outside the wire" (basically not on our bases). I'd be shocked to hear that the number of IT contractors killed in Iraq/Afghanistan goes above the single digits. You're probably as safe as you would be driving a half hour to work on the highway every day.
2) Lots of people ride motorbikes to work without helmets in places that it's legal to so. People perform various other risky activities too. they have unprotected sex in non-monogamous relationships, they climb mountains, they go cave diving... There are an endless variety of things that people do, some of them explicitly because they are, or seem, dangerous.
3) The pay in the military sucks by comparison to what contractors make. You also spend years in training, can't always guarantee that you'll be doing the job you signed up for (several of my "IT" soldiers spent their tour in Iraq on guard duty assigned to one of our line companies), and you can't quit if you decide you don't like it. On top of that, while it's true that soldiers are better trained than contractors, they are also often doing far more dangerous jobs. The number of contractors killed in action pales compared to the number of troops killed in action.
4) IT contractors aren't breaking down doors and rushing into combat. They're doing IT. Usually on a base. The chance that they'll ever see an enemy combatant, let alone have a chance to be "a risk to themselves and others" is small. If they do see action it will be on a road traveling between bases, and likely the driver will be a soldier and know what to do. Contractor's job is: get low, stay low, don't freak out any more than you have too.
There are thousands of contractors working on every base in every conflict zone. It's a perfectly normal and accepted part of the gig. Nobody thinks they're nuts, soldiers are mostly jealous that they make so much more than we do.
I will caution the original poster on a few things though. Contracting work in a hot zone is not fun and games. The pay is good, but there are lots of downsides. You often work 12 hour days, 6-7 days a week. What leisure time you do have is constrained: you usually can't leave base, there are no movie theaters, no restaurants beyond a Burger King or Pizza Hut (and then only on larger bases), Internet connectivity is extremely chancy, and TV is limited to AFN (Armed Force Network, pretty good mix of programs but only a couple channels). While what i said earlier about it being fairly safe is true, it's not completely safe by any means, and even when they aren't aimed at you hearing explosions in the distance all the time can get... disconcerting. On the bright side, on any decent sized base you have cell service so your family is easy to stay in touch with, unlike in earlier wars.
You're against both ads and sub-services? How exactly should people make money on the site? I mean, even sites that aren't trying to turn a profit should at least be able to pay for themselves surely? I've never entirely understood the attitude: "Keep making things that I like, but don't expect me to make any sacrifices at all to help you."
Ok, I'm feeling your angst, but your arguments make little sense. First, SOPA isn't law. It hasn't gotten through committee, let alone gotten to the full House, let alone been passed by both houses and signed into law. There's lots of objections to this law, many from some heavy hitters with lots of lobbyists. Its passage is far from assured. You've setup a large series of events in your prediction, but the first stone hasn't even been cast.
Your assertions that the US is least "free" pace you've ever been indicates a serious lack of travel (I've been to far worse places). Much also depends on how you define "free". For instance: I love Germany. I've been there twice, enjoyed the Hell out it, think the health care system is great, find their attitude on things like sex, food, drink, and body image refreshing. It's also very clearly a "free" country by most reasonable definitions of the word. On the other hand, they have some severe restrictions on certain areas of speech. You practically can't mentions Nazis (I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much). Weapons laws are much more restrictive than in the US (Not a big deal for me, but I have friends who would find this onerous). I also recall a recent article about the German Government installing spyware on people's computers as they cross the border.
Is Germany "more free" than the US? In some ways yes, in some ways no. The thing is, as Americans, we see the problems in our system much more prominently. To an extent, due to the influence of the US on world politics, even non-Americans see those problems more prominently. I'm not saying that the US is the best place to live on Earth; I haven't been everywhere for one thing, and I can't deny that I wouldn't mind living in Europe or Canada for a time at least. On the other hand the US is hardly an awful place to live. There are far far less free places out there, and far far worse situations to be in. Of course, we should fight things like this wherever we can to maintain (or even improve) that situation.
It's really kind of worse than that in this case. Intel *is* growing, it's profits *are* increasing, and by every single reasonable measure they're a secure company with good potential for future profits. They're being punished for failing to meet their own quarterly estimates. Estimates that they *clearly* missed for no other reason than a completely unpredictable natural disaster that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon. Next quarter Intel will be back to making more money than they can spend... hell, this quarter they made more money than they can spend, just slightly less than they expected to.
This is like me going to my wife and saying: "Well all our bills are paid, and we have a healthy savings account, but obviously Johnny's broken arm cost us a couple grand last quarter so the saving account isn't quite what we planned", and her leaving me because I can't manage money.
Hmm, the Harvard Bookstore web site swears they're family owned, so maybe it was just me being suspicious.
Sadly most of the college bookstores these days are either owned by Barnes and Noble or Follett. There are very few "local college bookstores" left. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I was in the Harvard bookstore a couple of weeks ago (playing tourist, I've always wanted to see the place) and I think it's a Barnes and Noble. Even if it's not, it's one of the very few truly local college bookstores left.
I think it'll work out cheaper, but probably not quite "pay for the iPad" cheaper. If I recall my college experience, it went like this. Beginning of every semester I'd buy books. Usually six or seven books for my five claseses (sometimes more, I was a History major so I bought a lot of old novels and translations of ancient or medieval source material. There tended to be a lot of these, but they were also much cheaper than real "text books"). I'd be able to get half or less of them used. Used books were sold for 75% of cover, new books for 100% of cover. Also, if it was a core class, I'd buy new so I could mark it up and keep the book. So I usually paid ~90% of cover on average.
End of the semester, I'd sell the books that weren't core. For a book that wasn't going into a new edition the next semester that meant 50% of cover coming back. If a book was going into a new edition, it was next to nothing if the book store would take it back at all. Plus, of course, I kept books from core courses (which I'd bought new). On a good semester I got 30% of cover back from selling books. So, I paid 90% of cover for the books, and got 30% back. I'm paying, roughly, 60% of cover total. Probably a bit more, occasionally a bit less. If the e-book is 40% of cover, I'm definitely saving bucks. As a bonus I'm keeping all of my books (not just core books), and they aren't taking up a ton of physical space (I still have probably two or three decent sized shelves of books from my undergraduate degree in History, and my graduate degree in Comp Sci).
In graduate school (where I thankfully had a real job) I bought every book new, and sold none of them back. I'd have saved the cost of an iPad in a few semesters there at 40% of cost. Also consider that while it's not exactly a total cost savings per se, it's generally easier to ask for an iPad for Christmas than a textbook. If you can source the iPad (or any tablet, really) as a gift then the cost savings to your personal budget accrue a lot faster. Plus you can use the tablet for other things.
The real loser here is the book store. They make 25% of cover on used books, but usually much less on new books. That's why the used book market exists in the first place. The student and the publisher are basically splitting the book store's cut, and the e-books are being sold directly which cuts out the book store entirely on these sales.
How so? Part of the reason they charge so much for textbooks (not all of the reason by any means, but definitely part of it) is that they know there's a thriving market in used books. Especially for books used in non-core classes, a textbook company can expect that at best one in three students who are taking a class that uses their book will actually buy the book. A textbook is current for usually four to six semesters, but you have to figure that at least some students will buy new on principle, even in non-core classes. It's probably more like one in four, but we'll go with three. Let's also assume that production of the physical book is 15% of the cost of the book (it might be less, but text books are legitimately more expensive to print because of the higher paper quality and often having lots of color pictures).
So you have an e-book version that (thanks to DRM) you can guarantee will get sold to every single student who takes a class using it, plus you save the 15% on production costs. You can probably sell it for 1/3 of the amount you sell the dead tree version for, undercut used book prices, and still make more than you used to. On top of that, if you can get most students to use the e-book instead of the physical book, you can slow down your release cycle (since you no longer have to worry as much about students cutting into your profits by buying used) and save still more money.
I didn't say they never make mistakes, just that they do due diligence. Given the sheer number of dangerous and never before attempted things they've tried on that show over the course of its run, their safety record isn't half bad. In a ten year career with the National Guard I've probably witnessed more incidents during one weekend a month training operations than they've had in their whole run, and everything we did was according to an establish procedure we were well versed in. They do entirely different, often dangerous, things every week.
Except that they always, *always*, have officials of the local emergency services and experts on hand when they do stuff like this. Pretty much once your experiment has been cleared by fire/safety, the police, and a known explosives expert you can wash your hands of criminal liability. They're still financially responsible for the damage of course, but unless this is some sort complete departure from their normal modus operandi they did more than enough due diligence to avoid criminal prosecution for gross negligence.
It's not a matter of whether he can keep up with it, it's a matter of backup. Did you ever take a vacation? Not a "going on a trip this weekend" thing, a real week long vacation? How many times did you log in remotely? What if you got really sick? What if something broke while you were really sick? I'm not talking about, "gosh, I don't feel too good today I'm staying home and can log in remotely if there's a problem" sick, I'm talking bedridden or hospitalized sick. How important was it that your servers stay up 99.9% of the time? This sounds like a "Our servers are down, we're hemorrhaging money" kind of situation. I'm not saying they need a team of 15 people, but one extra guy who can fix the business critical systems because you have jury duty today is always nice.
Not to mention that he's also the programmer. So while he's ripping out, documenting and fixing all the IT his predecessor left him, he's also supposed to be building and maintaining the site and the backend code. Oh, and fixing the bosses lap top. Cause hey, he's the IT guy.
My guess is he's not... I'm immediately concerned by: "position of programmer and sole IT personnel" and: "thriving e-commerce company" together in the same sentence. The fact that this does not appear to be a small mom and pop with two or three servers making up the "e-presence" adds fuel to the fire. I'm getting the image of a fairly large company that relies heavily on it's web and e-commerce presence. And has one guy to take care of that. What happens when he's on vacation or sick and a server dies? What happens when the website has an issue and then *anything* else goes wrong?
There's no bullpen here, if anything, anything at all, breaks there's only one guy to fix it. Day or night. If two things break you're already triaging. Surely a "thriving" company can afford a backup to what is pretty clearly a business critical unit?
The problem is that $14 and hour, once management overhead and other costs come out, isn't even a reasonable living in India. Figure that after all the overhead and costs come out, coders are probably making less than $4 an hour. Last I checked ( I was vaguely curious about living there for a year or two at one point) average salary for a technology professional in an Indian city is around $25-30K a year. A lot less than even pretty depressed areas of the US or Europe, but still a Hell of a lot more than $4 an hour.
This tells me that most likely when you're paying $14 an hour for coders in India (I'm specifically using India here, because I have at least some idea what "reasonable" pay is there) you're not getting good coders by Indian standards, let alone any arbitrary external standard. If you want an average talent you have to pay average rates. So in India, if you want an average talent programmer, you're probably looking at paying the *programmer* (not the contracting company) $14 an hour. Now add overhead and costs to *that* (also factor that he managers and such are likely correspondingly better, and therefore more expensive) number and I bet contracting India isn't a lot cheaper than doing it in house.