I was thinking of something more passive than active, like a pair of concentric inner glass liners filled with reactive chemicals so that any physical breach of the walls or excessive physical force applied to the safe would break the liners, mix the chemicals and promote a destructive heat reaction.
It makes me wonder if there's a specialty safe made designed to destroy the internal contents if an attempt is made to breach it. Some high-end safes will have glass relockers in them that will break if some kinds of physical breaching attempts are made.
I can see something similar done but instead of just glass parts that break and keep the bolts from be retracted, some combination of chemicals is released that either starts a brief but intense fire inside the safe, releases an acid or something else that would render the internals unusable or even potentially dangerous. Maybe its something where the document materials are designed to react to the anti-breaching chemicals or heat, etc.
I don't think something like this would be made for mass consumers (product liability, etc), but as long as the purpose wasn't a booby trap to harm the person getting in, I'm not sure it would be illegal, either.
I think in some cases with a high end safe the locks themselves may be good enough that breaching the container with a torch or lance might produce enough internal heat to destroy paper documents.
I'm sure the group of people who thought this was a good idea are:
1) Super rich senior managers at Amazon that have a flood of service people through their houses all the time -- maids, cooks, pool cleaners, whatever. They think it's totally normal.
2) 24/7/365 corporate climbers who live in hotel rooms. To them this is just maid service, and they don't own their hotel room.
3) Millennials sharing an apartment with 3 people who think it's totally normal when you're roommates girlfriend's sister is in and out of the place all the time. They have no expectation or experience with privacy.
I can totally see the groupthink among these people that having Amazon in and out of someone's home is a perfectly fine idea.
I think it sucks, unless Amazon wants to sign a confidentiality agreement and post a $1,000,000.00 surety bond payable upon demand for any suboptimal outcome associated with this service.
$11 million "for the university" -- like somebody walked over a check to the CompSci office and said "Here, give those AI researchers a raise!"
It made sense on paper for big athletic departments and sports programs to become "self-funding" -- they could spend whatever fans and boosters wanted, so long as they raised the money to pay for it without spending University money.
The problem was, if they were actually profitable they began to claim their own profits either outright or by inflating their budgets rapidly to absorb growth in income so there wasn't much surplus left to kick back to the University.
It got worse when all the women's teams got mad about unequal funding, because now the for-profit sports had to shell out for those teams, too. But this turned women's sports in an ally of big college athletics because now all the improved facilities and funding were really byproducts of the big men's sports profits.
At the end of the day it's a big mess. Because so many programs are self-funded, there's little moral authority to contain it all. You can't really say they're taking away funding. But at the same time, they're not really providing a bunch of additional funding to schools.
If the colleges and universities put the same administrative effort into retaining valued researchers as they did building stadiums and recruiting coaches, maybe they wouldn't have an AI problem.
Eh, not really. Raising the price to a level that makes the proposed product economically non-viable protects the supply of nickel, but it actually hurts the battery availability problem.
Even if people decide they want batteries with nickel a lot, you have the side effect of crowding out other uses for nickel. Stainless steel becomes much more expensive, for example.
Obviously, but if it raises the price beyond the economic level at which people will pay for the product (ie, batteries), then it doesn't really matter.
Market forces will keep us from actually "running out" of oil or nickel or whatever, but they may also push the price so high that they are defacto unavailable for the use case we want them for.
Hopefully the side effect will be development of substitutes (batteries or nickel alternatives), which is usually what markets excel at.
Are you discounting the resources involved in refining low-grade nickel into high-grade nickel? I don't know what's involved in nickel production, but I can't help but feel that "the application of chemistry" is factually correct but so lacking in detail that it might mask hard problems.
Like what's the multiple of required mined low-grade ore to get high-grade nickel? Are you having to mine 2x, 4x, 10x tons more ore? Is the ore refined at the mine or does it have to shipped to smelters to get refined and are we counting the same multiple of ore extraction into multiple shipping costs to get to the smelter?
What exactly is involved in the "application of chemistry" required to refine the ore? How many reagents are required in this refinement process? How much extra energy is required both to produce the extra chemistry required and to run more involved refining?
And what of the cost of this nickel given the added energy and resource inputs? Just because the industrial process is phyiscally possible doesn't mean the end result is valuable enough to attract the capital to produce it.
I think it's a fairly poorly kept secret that most recycling is "wish-cycling" -- it winds up getting landfilled because the demand for the materials is too low to make it economically viable. Municipalities require it because politicians gin up the public's environmental sentiments and everyone feels good filling up the bins with cans and bottles, but a large percentage of it just gets landfilled.
And nobody mentions the environmental costs of a completely separate recycling truck to pick up the recyclables or the back-end energy consumption moving the collected recyclables around.
I'd actually like to see an energy/carbon calculation of recycling vs. landfilling all the way through materials reclaiming and virgin material generation. I have to believe that the energy consumption involved in collection, separation and refining of recycled materials into something usable is more than making virgin materials and has a lot to do with why recycling winds up being economically non-viable.
I'd wager aluminum is the one material where it makes the most sense, but it's probably also the one that's economically viable now and why it gets done.
The rendered images look strikingly like actual human photographs, I'll bet they could fool nearly everyone -- you'd have to have a reason to think they were fake.
I'm wondering if their choice of celebrities as the training database somehow skews their results positive versus "ordinary" people. Celebrities almost seem too uniform in terms of facial features and general appearance. It makes me wonder if they tried with ordinary people if the algorithm woudln't produce freaks because it sees odd deviations among normal people.
Microsoft is a huge company in a rapidly evolving sector. I'd worry you'd never be able to demonstrate any kind of substantive "equality" in jobs based on title alone -- there'd always be exceptions trotted out for this or that, greatly minimizing if not nullifying the ability to just run the numbers.
"Her performance was great, except that Office always peaks 6 months after the revision is bumped, so it was a judgement call as to whether her performance really improved product sales or whether they were just following the release cycle. We decided on the latter when we chose not to promote/give a raise."
"His performance was great and even though the product was ultimately a failure, we felt that his consistently high effort in spite of the product's obvious failure trajectory indicated a lot of drive and initiative and was worthy of reward/promotion."
Maybe if they were evaluating lower-level back office staff, like accountants or something it would be easier to make comparisons. But those kinds of jobs usually aren't filled by aggressive climbers constantly comparing their success to everyone else.
Bloomberg quotes respected academics speculating on potentially less bleak outcomes for workers, allowing capital hoarding vultures to feel good about more capital hoarding.
Honestly, a lot of times I think that the financial world really only listens to economists to the extent that economists provide academically based opinions that validate the financial world's capital hoarding.
It's like politicians like to listen to religious figures to the extent that religious figures provide opinions that align with their political goals. They are relegated to a cheerleading and moral justification role.
I would say that it's a fair assumption that anyone who bought a cellular product in the last 15 years should have known it had a shelf life.
I'm curious if 5G will wind up being long-term stable enough that the products that it goes into will become totally obsolete before their cellular modules do.
Even better would be adjustable settings for maximum individual CPU by a tab and maximum CPU allowable to all background tabs total, and some way to whitelist tabs so that sites I want to run full tilt in the background can. Somebody can write a plug in for more granular control if you want to go full Asperger's on the settings.
I hate to say it, but it really is going to take Google just deciding to ration background tab CPU. Once they do that it will force web sites to either suck it up and not get real-time updates about the web page I'm not looking at or un-bloat their code.
I think the biggest risk is lead styphnate primers when used in poorly ventilated places because of the gassing of lead in primer ignition.
Maybe followed second by all-lead bullets (no jacket) used in some revolvers, but I'm less sure of that because all-lead bullets don't really work well with high velocities. So with low-velocity ammo you have low charges and probably aren't able to convert much if any of the metallic lead into as breathable gas.
Jacketed bullets don't have any exposed lead, so I don't think they are a lead poisoning risk.
But any indoor firing range I've been to has really strong ventilation. If you wash your hand well after shooting I doubt you'd be absorbing any lead at all.
It's funny, but I think municipal fiber is more likely to fail because of the left than the right.
The left is inclined to see it as a service that can be subsidized for poor people and a giveaway for organized labor (they will all have to belong to IBEW or one of the telecom unions), which makes seem exorbitantly expensive. And the left will also have trouble not giving into their urge to use it to control "objectionable" speech.
The right mostly objects to it because some business or other already has a monopoly on the service and doesn't want to give up rent-seeking income.
The analogy I always harp on is that municipal fiber really ought not be any different than municipal roadways. Government funds them and "owns" them, but mostly it doesn't provide transportation services or any other economic activity on the roads themselves. About the only major difference is that government does do a lot of road maintenance, but even then major road work beyond potholes is usually done by private paving contractors.
Around here anyway, municipal fiber would be EXACTLY like the local water utility. It's run to be self-funding (ie, water fees pay for the water system) and organizationally it's not a city department. The only difference with a municipal fiber utility as I described is that the water utility management isn't farmed out to a third party to staff and run.
I suppose for a fiber utility, that wouldn't really be necessary but I think it's a reasonable gimme to the capitalists, probably provides some kind access to actual networking expertise for running a network like this and ultimately the fixed profit margin after costs probably enforces some kind of operational discipline.
In my mind it's so fucking obvious I can't believe more cities haven't gone for my proposed structure -- it's minimally crowding of private enterprise (only really squeezing monopolists), self-funding and access to dirt-cheap bandwidth likely has a lot of innovation potential, especially if provider-level access to the network isn't really expensive -- ie, a business with six buildings could become their own private "ISP" and rent low-level fiber access for interconnection or other purposes.
No, but there's a whole universe of people involved with computers who got started on the gaming track and for whom the x86 platform is defined by the parts involved in gaming. Their reference point for PCIe slots is graphic cards because on most desktops in the last 10 years every other interface was integrated into the motherboard. For those people, the only apparent purpose of PCIe slots was graphics cards.
They don't remember the old days of ISA/EISA based boards where there was literally nothing integrated into the motherboard and everything from serial ports to parallel ports to network interfaces and disk drives of all types (in addition to graphics cards) required a card and a slot.
It does seem like Reddit's up/downvote system is broken somehow. I wonder if it could be improved by adding +1 to a parent (and grandparent?) post when a reply was added. In theory, a post which gains a reply seems to have an inherent discussion value even if the reply is a disagreement. Conversations in real life are better with some level of disagreement, it adds engagement and furthers the discussion.
Interesting point with Amsterdam is they wired the city but do not operate an ISP
Which is pretty much how municipal fiber ought to work.
1) City forms wholly owned non-profit 2) City underwrites bonds for fiber optic network 3) City contracts with some network operator to run fiber non-profit at fixed profit margin, everything else is plowed back into maintenance 4) Contracted network operator is barred from offering any services on fiber optic network 5) Third parties sell ISP or other network services on fiber optic network 6) City government does not offer ISP or other competitive services on fiber optic network, but may operate on network as their own ISP for municipal operations data needs
Contract to operate network is re-bid every 5 years. Non-profit owns all network operations knowledge, operations and systems.
My guess is that he's implying that people who got laid off were replaced by non-laid-off people, either transfers or promotions.
I think the top performers left because they saw it for what it (probably) was, a bullshit system that advanced people merely because of terminations and sniped at higher level employees, probably because of compensation.
The more I'm exposed to "management systems" the more I think they're nonsense. They all seem to share common traits:
1) Intimidate employees into working more for less 2) Give management arbitrary tools to eliminate people they don't like 3) Allow the most senior people to rule by fear
I never hear anyone say they got involved with a management system that was designed to help them be more productive or be better at their job.
I think most systems get adopted by people who wind up in business circumstances they can't improve -- people who inherit a business, people who founded a business and have had it grow beyond their skill/experience level, or just weak managers looking for an easy fix.
I always wondered if it achieved anything truly productive. 5% is a big enough number that it would seem to have a pretty negative effect on the company -- termination processing, new hires, training, and the general chaos on teams/departments when there's a bunch of change.
I can even see side effects, where people who do well in a job get management positions, become "low performers" and get canned. Sure, they've cut a low performer but they also lost someone good at their original job because, basically, they fired the original manager. Now they need two employees.
I would also think it created a pretty toxic atmosphere and a lot of just people trying to meet goals versus actual productivity.
Maybe they just want free, government-certified background checks.
I'm also assuming they're looking for people with only the most senior security clearances, the kind that are only really certified by the FBI or some other government intelligence agency.
It might be useful if you're just looking to hire someone with an extremely reliable background who exceeds private sector levels of background certification to work on critical security systems.
I'm kind of wondering if the whole big tech world -- Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, (add or remove Microsoft or a couple others as you see fit), isn't in for some kind of comeuppance. Those few seem to be within about five minutes of such a level of pervasiveness that I think they will face a kind of political revenge.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking of something more passive than active, like a pair of concentric inner glass liners filled with reactive chemicals so that any physical breach of the walls or excessive physical force applied to the safe would break the liners, mix the chemicals and promote a destructive heat reaction.
It makes me wonder if there's a specialty safe made designed to destroy the internal contents if an attempt is made to breach it. Some high-end safes will have glass relockers in them that will break if some kinds of physical breaching attempts are made.
I can see something similar done but instead of just glass parts that break and keep the bolts from be retracted, some combination of chemicals is released that either starts a brief but intense fire inside the safe, releases an acid or something else that would render the internals unusable or even potentially dangerous. Maybe its something where the document materials are designed to react to the anti-breaching chemicals or heat, etc.
I don't think something like this would be made for mass consumers (product liability, etc), but as long as the purpose wasn't a booby trap to harm the person getting in, I'm not sure it would be illegal, either.
I think in some cases with a high end safe the locks themselves may be good enough that breaching the container with a torch or lance might produce enough internal heat to destroy paper documents.
You're two buzzwords short of attracting VC capital.
I'm sure the group of people who thought this was a good idea are:
1) Super rich senior managers at Amazon that have a flood of service people through their houses all the time -- maids, cooks, pool cleaners, whatever. They think it's totally normal.
2) 24/7/365 corporate climbers who live in hotel rooms. To them this is just maid service, and they don't own their hotel room.
3) Millennials sharing an apartment with 3 people who think it's totally normal when you're roommates girlfriend's sister is in and out of the place all the time. They have no expectation or experience with privacy.
I can totally see the groupthink among these people that having Amazon in and out of someone's home is a perfectly fine idea.
I think it sucks, unless Amazon wants to sign a confidentiality agreement and post a $1,000,000.00 surety bond payable upon demand for any suboptimal outcome associated with this service.
$11 million "for the university" -- like somebody walked over a check to the CompSci office and said "Here, give those AI researchers a raise!"
It made sense on paper for big athletic departments and sports programs to become "self-funding" -- they could spend whatever fans and boosters wanted, so long as they raised the money to pay for it without spending University money.
The problem was, if they were actually profitable they began to claim their own profits either outright or by inflating their budgets rapidly to absorb growth in income so there wasn't much surplus left to kick back to the University.
It got worse when all the women's teams got mad about unequal funding, because now the for-profit sports had to shell out for those teams, too. But this turned women's sports in an ally of big college athletics because now all the improved facilities and funding were really byproducts of the big men's sports profits.
At the end of the day it's a big mess. Because so many programs are self-funded, there's little moral authority to contain it all. You can't really say they're taking away funding. But at the same time, they're not really providing a bunch of additional funding to schools.
If the colleges and universities put the same administrative effort into retaining valued researchers as they did building stadiums and recruiting coaches, maybe they wouldn't have an AI problem.
Eh, not really. Raising the price to a level that makes the proposed product economically non-viable protects the supply of nickel, but it actually hurts the battery availability problem.
Even if people decide they want batteries with nickel a lot, you have the side effect of crowding out other uses for nickel. Stainless steel becomes much more expensive, for example.
Obviously, but if it raises the price beyond the economic level at which people will pay for the product (ie, batteries), then it doesn't really matter.
Market forces will keep us from actually "running out" of oil or nickel or whatever, but they may also push the price so high that they are defacto unavailable for the use case we want them for.
Hopefully the side effect will be development of substitutes (batteries or nickel alternatives), which is usually what markets excel at.
Are you discounting the resources involved in refining low-grade nickel into high-grade nickel? I don't know what's involved in nickel production, but I can't help but feel that "the application of chemistry" is factually correct but so lacking in detail that it might mask hard problems.
Like what's the multiple of required mined low-grade ore to get high-grade nickel? Are you having to mine 2x, 4x, 10x tons more ore? Is the ore refined at the mine or does it have to shipped to smelters to get refined and are we counting the same multiple of ore extraction into multiple shipping costs to get to the smelter?
What exactly is involved in the "application of chemistry" required to refine the ore? How many reagents are required in this refinement process? How much extra energy is required both to produce the extra chemistry required and to run more involved refining?
And what of the cost of this nickel given the added energy and resource inputs? Just because the industrial process is phyiscally possible doesn't mean the end result is valuable enough to attract the capital to produce it.
I think it's a fairly poorly kept secret that most recycling is "wish-cycling" -- it winds up getting landfilled because the demand for the materials is too low to make it economically viable. Municipalities require it because politicians gin up the public's environmental sentiments and everyone feels good filling up the bins with cans and bottles, but a large percentage of it just gets landfilled.
And nobody mentions the environmental costs of a completely separate recycling truck to pick up the recyclables or the back-end energy consumption moving the collected recyclables around.
I'd actually like to see an energy/carbon calculation of recycling vs. landfilling all the way through materials reclaiming and virgin material generation. I have to believe that the energy consumption involved in collection, separation and refining of recycled materials into something usable is more than making virgin materials and has a lot to do with why recycling winds up being economically non-viable.
I'd wager aluminum is the one material where it makes the most sense, but it's probably also the one that's economically viable now and why it gets done.
The rendered images look strikingly like actual human photographs, I'll bet they could fool nearly everyone -- you'd have to have a reason to think they were fake.
I'm wondering if their choice of celebrities as the training database somehow skews their results positive versus "ordinary" people. Celebrities almost seem too uniform in terms of facial features and general appearance. It makes me wonder if they tried with ordinary people if the algorithm woudln't produce freaks because it sees odd deviations among normal people.
What's the actual proof standard, though?
Microsoft is a huge company in a rapidly evolving sector. I'd worry you'd never be able to demonstrate any kind of substantive "equality" in jobs based on title alone -- there'd always be exceptions trotted out for this or that, greatly minimizing if not nullifying the ability to just run the numbers.
"Her performance was great, except that Office always peaks 6 months after the revision is bumped, so it was a judgement call as to whether her performance really improved product sales or whether they were just following the release cycle. We decided on the latter when we chose not to promote/give a raise."
"His performance was great and even though the product was ultimately a failure, we felt that his consistently high effort in spite of the product's obvious failure trajectory indicated a lot of drive and initiative and was worthy of reward/promotion."
Maybe if they were evaluating lower-level back office staff, like accountants or something it would be easier to make comparisons. But those kinds of jobs usually aren't filled by aggressive climbers constantly comparing their success to everyone else.
To be honest, it's really only average, but knowing that her husband just bought her a new iPhone makes it better in a schadenfreude kind of way.
Bloomberg quotes respected academics speculating on potentially less bleak outcomes for workers, allowing capital hoarding vultures to feel good about more capital hoarding.
Honestly, a lot of times I think that the financial world really only listens to economists to the extent that economists provide academically based opinions that validate the financial world's capital hoarding.
It's like politicians like to listen to religious figures to the extent that religious figures provide opinions that align with their political goals. They are relegated to a cheerleading and moral justification role.
I would say that it's a fair assumption that anyone who bought a cellular product in the last 15 years should have known it had a shelf life.
I'm curious if 5G will wind up being long-term stable enough that the products that it goes into will become totally obsolete before their cellular modules do.
Even better would be adjustable settings for maximum individual CPU by a tab and maximum CPU allowable to all background tabs total, and some way to whitelist tabs so that sites I want to run full tilt in the background can. Somebody can write a plug in for more granular control if you want to go full Asperger's on the settings.
I hate to say it, but it really is going to take Google just deciding to ration background tab CPU. Once they do that it will force web sites to either suck it up and not get real-time updates about the web page I'm not looking at or un-bloat their code.
I think the biggest risk is lead styphnate primers when used in poorly ventilated places because of the gassing of lead in primer ignition.
Maybe followed second by all-lead bullets (no jacket) used in some revolvers, but I'm less sure of that because all-lead bullets don't really work well with high velocities. So with low-velocity ammo you have low charges and probably aren't able to convert much if any of the metallic lead into as breathable gas.
Jacketed bullets don't have any exposed lead, so I don't think they are a lead poisoning risk.
But any indoor firing range I've been to has really strong ventilation. If you wash your hand well after shooting I doubt you'd be absorbing any lead at all.
It's funny, but I think municipal fiber is more likely to fail because of the left than the right.
The left is inclined to see it as a service that can be subsidized for poor people and a giveaway for organized labor (they will all have to belong to IBEW or one of the telecom unions), which makes seem exorbitantly expensive. And the left will also have trouble not giving into their urge to use it to control "objectionable" speech.
The right mostly objects to it because some business or other already has a monopoly on the service and doesn't want to give up rent-seeking income.
The analogy I always harp on is that municipal fiber really ought not be any different than municipal roadways. Government funds them and "owns" them, but mostly it doesn't provide transportation services or any other economic activity on the roads themselves. About the only major difference is that government does do a lot of road maintenance, but even then major road work beyond potholes is usually done by private paving contractors.
Around here anyway, municipal fiber would be EXACTLY like the local water utility. It's run to be self-funding (ie, water fees pay for the water system) and organizationally it's not a city department. The only difference with a municipal fiber utility as I described is that the water utility management isn't farmed out to a third party to staff and run.
I suppose for a fiber utility, that wouldn't really be necessary but I think it's a reasonable gimme to the capitalists, probably provides some kind access to actual networking expertise for running a network like this and ultimately the fixed profit margin after costs probably enforces some kind of operational discipline.
In my mind it's so fucking obvious I can't believe more cities haven't gone for my proposed structure -- it's minimally crowding of private enterprise (only really squeezing monopolists), self-funding and access to dirt-cheap bandwidth likely has a lot of innovation potential, especially if provider-level access to the network isn't really expensive -- ie, a business with six buildings could become their own private "ISP" and rent low-level fiber access for interconnection or other purposes.
No, but there's a whole universe of people involved with computers who got started on the gaming track and for whom the x86 platform is defined by the parts involved in gaming. Their reference point for PCIe slots is graphic cards because on most desktops in the last 10 years every other interface was integrated into the motherboard. For those people, the only apparent purpose of PCIe slots was graphics cards.
They don't remember the old days of ISA/EISA based boards where there was literally nothing integrated into the motherboard and everything from serial ports to parallel ports to network interfaces and disk drives of all types (in addition to graphics cards) required a card and a slot.
It does seem like Reddit's up/downvote system is broken somehow. I wonder if it could be improved by adding +1 to a parent (and grandparent?) post when a reply was added. In theory, a post which gains a reply seems to have an inherent discussion value even if the reply is a disagreement. Conversations in real life are better with some level of disagreement, it adds engagement and furthers the discussion.
Interesting point with Amsterdam is they wired the city but do not operate an ISP
Which is pretty much how municipal fiber ought to work.
1) City forms wholly owned non-profit
2) City underwrites bonds for fiber optic network
3) City contracts with some network operator to run fiber non-profit at fixed profit margin, everything else is plowed back into maintenance
4) Contracted network operator is barred from offering any services on fiber optic network
5) Third parties sell ISP or other network services on fiber optic network
6) City government does not offer ISP or other competitive services on fiber optic network, but may operate on network as their own ISP for municipal operations data needs
Contract to operate network is re-bid every 5 years. Non-profit owns all network operations knowledge, operations and systems.
I think the point is so that enthusiasts can satisfy their Asperger's instincts on trivial details.
My guess is that he's implying that people who got laid off were replaced by non-laid-off people, either transfers or promotions.
I think the top performers left because they saw it for what it (probably) was, a bullshit system that advanced people merely because of terminations and sniped at higher level employees, probably because of compensation.
The more I'm exposed to "management systems" the more I think they're nonsense. They all seem to share common traits:
1) Intimidate employees into working more for less
2) Give management arbitrary tools to eliminate people they don't like
3) Allow the most senior people to rule by fear
I never hear anyone say they got involved with a management system that was designed to help them be more productive or be better at their job.
I think most systems get adopted by people who wind up in business circumstances they can't improve -- people who inherit a business, people who founded a business and have had it grow beyond their skill/experience level, or just weak managers looking for an easy fix.
Wasn't GE famous (or infamous) for doing this?
I always wondered if it achieved anything truly productive. 5% is a big enough number that it would seem to have a pretty negative effect on the company -- termination processing, new hires, training, and the general chaos on teams/departments when there's a bunch of change.
I can even see side effects, where people who do well in a job get management positions, become "low performers" and get canned. Sure, they've cut a low performer but they also lost someone good at their original job because, basically, they fired the original manager. Now they need two employees.
I would also think it created a pretty toxic atmosphere and a lot of just people trying to meet goals versus actual productivity.
Maybe they just want free, government-certified background checks.
I'm also assuming they're looking for people with only the most senior security clearances, the kind that are only really certified by the FBI or some other government intelligence agency.
It might be useful if you're just looking to hire someone with an extremely reliable background who exceeds private sector levels of background certification to work on critical security systems.
You're right.
I'm kind of wondering if the whole big tech world -- Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, (add or remove Microsoft or a couple others as you see fit), isn't in for some kind of comeuppance. Those few seem to be within about five minutes of such a level of pervasiveness that I think they will face a kind of political revenge.