There's different kinds of surprise. Am I surprised a politician, any politician, changed their tune? No. Trump specifically? My sense is that Trump quickly found himself lacking in people who would back him politically and has unfortunately begun to align himself more and more with the huckster caucus of the Republican party, those Republicans interested in enriching themselves and their corporate minions even further.
So Trump's turnaround in this issue is less than surprising in light of that, too, as those kinds of Republicans will all be leveraging that issue and it's just another thing for Trump to sell out on. I don't know that this is "bad Trump" or just another politician seeking political expediency.
I'm more surprised working technology professionals also bought into the con man's words.
You roll the dice and take your chances. What kinds of choices did people have? Hillary was bought and paid for and would have never considered H-1B reform because of her affiliation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Further, Democrats are allergic to any talk surrounding immigration that sounds like limits on immigration. They've drank their own kool-aid on immigration control being racism and also work hard to cultivate to every minority constituency.
So were technology people duped? Maybe, but only by their own misguided hopes that a politician would buck a lot of money influence. I think you can say that the issue got a lot more press because of Trump's statements on it, so maybe in some sense they got out of it all that could reasonably be expected.
At this point I think there's just too much money being made/saved on H1-Bs to get much traction on the issue. The nominal wage savings runs into the billions and the side money made probably some substantial fraction of that, and nearly all of it is short-term-result kinds of money, which seems to have a value multiplier among corporate types.
I don't care if Steve Jobs, William Hewitt, David Packard, Seymour Cray, Bill Joy, Linus Torvarlds, Ken Olsen, Ghandi, and Jesus Christ collaborated on this project it could save $1 trillion. These are fantasy numbers and a project this scale would have $10 trillion in hidden costs and risks.
Trumps association with it only adds 0.00001% extra uncertainty.
I would assume that these guys wound up with only a fraction of the money they could have made. I suspect at the directorial level they have a cut of the gross, or at least before some expenses. Regardless, I'm sure they walked away from a pretty big payday.
Who knows what actually happened, but regardless of the money I'm sure they quit at the point where it would be most painful for the people they work for.
I'm sure there's some backbiting that results from this and some favors will be called in to try to deny them future jobs and/or their boss may have to give up more to hire people in the future.
A guy I know used to make a point of only buying packs that said they caused problems with pregnancy and then when someone criticized him for smoking he'd point out that THESE cigarettes were only hazardous to pregnant women.
Nobody is saying that, but you can't sustain an "anti-immigrant" narrative without claiming that significant plurality is against all immigrants & immigration. And once you get people to believe in that one, then it's pretty easy to convince them that this ephemeral anti-immigrant group is really opposed to immigration because they're racist. Once you've made that association, you're home free -- now anyone who questions immigration on any level can simply be disregarded as a racist.
I love the fact that our police and intelligence agencies provide a never-ending stream of corporate mercenaries for hire.
Wouldn't it make more sense for some of these people (FBI, NSA, etc) just to be barred from working in private intelligence jobs? Anyone above a certain level with 10+ years has a choice to either keep working to full pension age or get a partial pension, but in either case they are barred from working as private intelligence/enforcement mercenaries.
It's one thing for an ex-street cop to work as a security guard or a bouncer, but should we really be spending a bunch of taxpayer money training and educating FBI, NSA or other intelligence-type people just so they can take that knowledge and information and apply it to what amounts to private enforcement and intelligence gathering efforts?
This. The increasing Federalization of regulation over time is one of the great enablers of corporate concentration of power. It shrinks the regulation domain to a single entity which is more susceptible to influence and worse, more susceptible to influence by large entities which can crowd out smaller entities and shape regulation to large entity advantage.
While making it more efficient for large corporations with a national scope, it's an open question whether this efficiency ever provides a consumer benefit. I'd argue that the oligopoly conditions it produces just results in rent extraction from consumers and the efficiencies just end up captured as profit.
The inherent inefficiency of state-by-state regulation should make it harder for large-scale corporations since they have to analyze and respond to many regulation demands. In theory smaller corporations should be more competitive, since they have less regulation overhead and can adapt more easily to regulation.
The school already does this. Phones are banned to the extent that kids who bring them have to leave them in their locker. Phones brought to class are confiscated and turned over to the respective grade's dean of students who calls parents and the phone isn't returned to the end of the school day.
I don't think the issue the guy represented in TFS is worried specifically about classroom disruption, but the general effects of smartphones on kids. IMHO, he is onto something but legislation isn't going to fix it.
You mean suddenly it's the Whole Foods Farmer's Market Amazon Marketplace?
All (or well most) irony and humor aside, I think grocery stores exist period because food production is already industrialized and while "eat local" is a great concept, the entire supply chain of groceries needs a complete restructuring before you're actually able to realistically sell locally grown food products at grocery store scale.
And in doing it, you may have to reset people's expectations as to what they have available to eat, unless they actually live in the Central Valley of California. We have lost the entire concept of seasonality of food thanks to industrialization of production and shipment of food.
.22 Short and other similar variations (.22 CB caps, which I think is a.22LR dimensionally but de-charged for lower or subsonic) aren't hard to find but may not be easy to source at many retail outlets.
Since.22 Shorts are rimfire, they will mostly work as single shots in.22LR chambers because the rim provides the spacing, but the action isn't likely to cycle in autoloaders due to reduced recoil and may cause added fouling and poor accuracy since it's not really head spaced to the barrel throat properly.
They mostly get used because they are quieter than LR rounds, especially subsonic variants. A friend uses them to kill raccoons he traps in his back yard without annoying the neighbors as much.
I think your oversell the power of parenting in social situations. I can't run my son's social life for him in school, and if some large plurality of kids have smartphones and now he's excluded from a lot of social activity because he literally can't participate in it, now I have to deal with the fallout at home.
It's been manageable thusfar, but the writing is on the wall. We already hear complaints about not being able to spend time with other kids because activities are arranged via text or snapchat or whatever. I think up to now, it's largely been a positive because he's not had a chance to be an impulsive 12 year old via electronic communication, but eventually I also don't want my kid to feel like he has no social connections, either.
Parents make a million and one mistakes parenting. If it was easy and if we all had ideal role models (ie, our own parents), then everyone would be perfect. But it's not easy, every kid is different and our role models are as flawed as we are.
The guy's law is entirely non-workable for so many reasons, but I at least see where he's coming from.
When I read the summary, I thought to myself that "white hat" hackers are merely facilitating a security economy by buying hacks, documents, etc. They may not specifically commit criminal hacks and may actually be "defenders" of their clients, but in a lot of ways they kind of look like just middle men.
I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of cons run where "the bad guys" steal something and a person claiming to be a "good guy" approaches the victim and says "I'm a white hat, I have contacts and can get your stuff back" and then they transfer the money to the bad guys in exchange for the goods. Meanwhile, does it matter in this transaction whether they belonged to the bad guys all along or whether they were independent good guys?
From an economics perspective, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. Same transactions take place, with the only difference being that if the "good guy" really is an independent agent, it might actually cost more because the good guy will extract their own fee for handling the transaction (which, if he was a bad guy, may have also been rolled in for appearance sake).
I think a law isn't a workable idea at all, but I suspect part of the reason he wants a law is to mitigate the side effects of telling your kid "no" while many other kids get "yes" and now your kid is on the outside, not sharing in electronic communication.
My son is 12 and we haven't given him a phone, but we know parents who gave their kids phones at 9 or 10 and the number of his peers with phones has grown as he's entered middle school.
We have a group of 4 families that socialize together. One of the families has had what appears to be all-you-can-eat iPad/iPhone policy. If we socialize as a group and the iPhone family isn't with us, the kids don't even ask to use them -- they play games, run around and do normal kid stuff. If the iPhone family is there? The other families have to provide phones or iPads, otherwise there is a lot of conflict among the kids over who gets to "share" one of their iPads. It becomes an obvious tool for manipulation.
At our last gathering at our house, I announced that I was collecting all devices and the kids could have them "later". The iPad parents had a mixture of annoyance and relief on their face. One of their kids bugged me every 5 minutes for the first half hour, but I told him no until they all had kind of forgotten about it and moved on to some other activity.
I get where this anesthesiologist is coming from -- for a lot of kids, these devices become a black hole of interest, sucking them away from everything else. We're close to getting a smartphone (totally locked down) for our son, but it's more about our practicality than serving his electronics interest -- GPS tracking, being able to call or text us with info or requests, etc.
A weird thing is comparing this to my dad when he was 12. When my dad was 12, he lived in a rural community in the Ozarks and he saved money and bought a.22 caliber rifle from a neighbor. And he was allowed to go pretty much wherever he wanted with that rifle, he says he mostly used it to shoot turtles and water moccasins when tending to his trout lines (the turtles wrecked his trout lines, the snakes were dangerous pests and may have had some kind of bounty). To contemporary urban sensibilities it sounds crazier to let your 12 year old kid run around with a rifle and totally sane to give them a smart phone.
My first thought was how can businesses possibly be considered to taking IT security seriously when their first and only impulse is how to do things even cheaper than they do now?
I'm still amazed at the dichotomy between shaving pennies and then the utter panic when there is downtime or a security breech. If its so important that you basically can't do business without properly functioning IT systems then why is it treated as if they don't want to spend money on it? Do they really think it's free?
H1Bs are of course just one example of this mindset.
Probably lots of explanations. The person (or algorithm) scheduling people simply doesn't care and has other priorities, like keeping total hours below benefits or other ancillary compensation thresholds.
There could be a deliberate attempt to disrupt worker relationships to maintain management control of information, prevent cliques or unionization.
Some employees may have preferential status and get the shifts they want and other slots are simply backfilled based on other criteria.
Then there's simple ignorance. I worked a job one summer where I was the primary employee (but lived off-site) and the 4 others who lived on site picked up the rest of the hours. We picked 4 hour shifts round-robin, which of course led to me working 6 days a week with a bunch of split shifts (sometimes both 7-11 am and pm). Until I complained, nobody really noticed.
Uhh, isn't San Diego on the ocean, that big body of water filled with salt? Might the salt air have added to your corrosion problems?
Other than that, I agree that Detroit had a lot of problems in the 1980s. Labor problems, economic problems, probably engineering challenges totally overhauling entire product lines to try to compete with smaller and more fuel efficient foreign models.
What's funny is that I would have thought Ford would have been able to adapt easier because of their extensive experience in Europe. I know at some point in the 1980s they were actually selling some European models in the US.
I have accounts at Wells Fargo, mostly because I'm too lazy to move them to a credit union. I keep high balances so it's free, and the branch is convenient.
I recently sold a boat and had to pay the loan off at another bank as quickly as possible to get the lien release for the buyer. I went into the bank that held the note, and they said they could process the lien release same day if I wired the money to pay off the loan. They gave me their wire transfer info, and I went into Wells to wire the money.
Wells wanted $30 for the transfer of $19,800. I complained, long time customer, etc, and they wouldn't waive it. So I said "OK, why don't you just give me $19,800 in cash. You could, of course, just do the wire transfer for nothing because it would save your employees the labor of counting the cash and the Treasury reporting for cash withdrawals in excess of $10,000."
They still refused, so I took the cash. They tried to give it to me with just a money counter total, but I made the teller count it manually in front of me, too.
You evidently have never shopped Whole Paycheck if you think profit margins are thin.
There are several co-op type stores in my area, I don't usually shop them except when they have something I want specifically (like duck eggs). They are small footprint stores with limited skus and selection.
When Whole Foods opened a new store in a high-end shopping area nearby, I went in to see what all the fuss was about. What a disappointment -- I don't think they had many more skus than the local co-ops (and no duck eggs!). The product package sizes were also tiny, half size of normal store equivalent products.
Anyway, I can see how their margins could still be thin despite the high prices. I think most of those products are low-manufacturing volume and very expensive to begin with, so Whole Foods can't be marking them up that much and still remain remotely competitive with regular grocery stores, many of which now have extensive organics and sub-sections with the type of offerings stocked at Whole Foods.
And yet whatever is passing for "sociopolitical violence" these days seems to pale in comparison to the 1960s/early 1970s when we had a lot more domestic politically oriented violence -- civil rights protests, the many civil rights riots, riots against the war in Viet Nam, and several home grown domestic terror groups planting bombs, robbing banks and so on. Not to mention the huge number of airline hijackings.
When was the last time the US had a serious riot that lasted more than a day and required the services of the National Guard to suppress? The Rodney King riots in the 1990s?
I used SugarSync for a while and it must have been deduping because if I copied a widely available.ISO into my folder it would often immediately upload and begin downloading on other synchronized computers.
I was always kind of curious what their global dedupe ratio was.
This behavior is not something I have seen Dropbox do.
In the West Hollywood bank shootout, they had full auto AKs with drum magazines and the only people who died were the bank robbers.
I think people who aren't trained and somewhat experienced in actual shootouts perform worse than would be expected simply based on rate of fire. And then there's the fact that hitting moving targets at distance is just plain hard to do.
I don't find the NYT comment section to be moderated for political views. Often at least some of the NYT Picks comments are what you'd call politically opposed to the Times' expected liberal bias. I have had some of my comments tagged NYT Picks that were explicitly critical of an article's journalism (lack of source diversity, bias, etc).
I do think that when measured in absolute terms, liberal comments dominate but that's mostly a reflection of their readership, but I think even the self-described liberals will often take the paper to task for dubious journalism judgement.
What I think is most pernicious about the Times is its frequent selectivity about what articles have comments enabled. I think the Times does this on purpose with some topics, and not merely because they attract trolls, but because they don't want people to question their narrative in that story specifically.
And I say this as a longtime subscriber, too. I think the NY Times is about as good as news journalism gets on a daily basis in terms of factual accuracy and intelligent reporting, but I do think they carry a very strong editorial bias. I wish there was a conservative version of the NY Times that wasn't filled with a ton of business reporting. I read FT, Economist and Bloomberg from time to time but find them thin on news that isn't business reporting.
Assuming no oil in the Middle East, you have no capital and you probably have the same level of modernization and outside influence that you have in Mauritania or Mali. What would then be the motivating factor for Islamic modernization? The populations would largely still be living rural, subsistence type existences which would seem to just perpetuate parochialism.
Then there's the question of Israel/Palestine. There's no question that region's proximity to oil plays a role in US involvement, but historically the main players have been Egypt, Syria and Jordan, countries with little to no oil reserves, fighting over a tiny patch of ground, also with no oil. I think there's a lot of room to argue that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been a major catalyst for Islamic radicalism, with both sides reinforced and encouraged as proxy fights between the US and the Soviets.
There's no question that the flood of money into oil-rich regions has enabled money and resources to be pumped into extremist ideologies in ways that it wouldn't have had there been no oil, but at the same time, there are other conflicts and interests in that region that have drawn major power involvement. Even without oil, things like the Suez Canal or other strategic interests in the Eastern Mediterranean would have given reasons for the major powers to pick winners and losers and weaponize various factions.
Apple has a conflict of interest and a moral hazard. They get a cut of the in-app purchase revenue and also have a broader interest in the "app economy".
The mostly legitimate side of this is providing app vendors with additional revenue (raising the effective price of an app above $0.99) and the ability to sell a single app with additional features they can upsell.
Personally, I think this is an awful model for consumers as it leads to misleading app store descriptions -- yes, they will show in-app purchases, but you have to dig a little to find out what they are before you buy the app and sort out if the the app you're looking at actually does what it describes without being a $10 app.
But worse, I think it encourages a scam-oriented system ripe for abuse. We've already seen the children's game category use it this way and Apple only slowly make it more difficult for kids to buy in-app advantages often necessary to succeed in games.
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There's different kinds of surprise. Am I surprised a politician, any politician, changed their tune? No. Trump specifically? My sense is that Trump quickly found himself lacking in people who would back him politically and has unfortunately begun to align himself more and more with the huckster caucus of the Republican party, those Republicans interested in enriching themselves and their corporate minions even further.
So Trump's turnaround in this issue is less than surprising in light of that, too, as those kinds of Republicans will all be leveraging that issue and it's just another thing for Trump to sell out on. I don't know that this is "bad Trump" or just another politician seeking political expediency.
I'm more surprised working technology professionals also bought into the con man's words.
You roll the dice and take your chances. What kinds of choices did people have? Hillary was bought and paid for and would have never considered H-1B reform because of her affiliation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Further, Democrats are allergic to any talk surrounding immigration that sounds like limits on immigration. They've drank their own kool-aid on immigration control being racism and also work hard to cultivate to every minority constituency.
So were technology people duped? Maybe, but only by their own misguided hopes that a politician would buck a lot of money influence. I think you can say that the issue got a lot more press because of Trump's statements on it, so maybe in some sense they got out of it all that could reasonably be expected.
At this point I think there's just too much money being made/saved on H1-Bs to get much traction on the issue. The nominal wage savings runs into the billions and the side money made probably some substantial fraction of that, and nearly all of it is short-term-result kinds of money, which seems to have a value multiplier among corporate types.
I don't care if Steve Jobs, William Hewitt, David Packard, Seymour Cray, Bill Joy, Linus Torvarlds, Ken Olsen, Ghandi, and Jesus Christ collaborated on this project it could save $1 trillion. These are fantasy numbers and a project this scale would have $10 trillion in hidden costs and risks.
Trumps association with it only adds 0.00001% extra uncertainty.
I would assume that these guys wound up with only a fraction of the money they could have made. I suspect at the directorial level they have a cut of the gross, or at least before some expenses. Regardless, I'm sure they walked away from a pretty big payday.
Who knows what actually happened, but regardless of the money I'm sure they quit at the point where it would be most painful for the people they work for.
I'm sure there's some backbiting that results from this and some favors will be called in to try to deny them future jobs and/or their boss may have to give up more to hire people in the future.
A guy I know used to make a point of only buying packs that said they caused problems with pregnancy and then when someone criticized him for smoking he'd point out that THESE cigarettes were only hazardous to pregnant women.
I almost got thrown out of a Shropshire pub for trying to tip the bar maid.
Nobody is saying that, but you can't sustain an "anti-immigrant" narrative without claiming that significant plurality is against all immigrants & immigration. And once you get people to believe in that one, then it's pretty easy to convince them that this ephemeral anti-immigrant group is really opposed to immigration because they're racist. Once you've made that association, you're home free -- now anyone who questions immigration on any level can simply be disregarded as a racist.
I love the fact that our police and intelligence agencies provide a never-ending stream of corporate mercenaries for hire.
Wouldn't it make more sense for some of these people (FBI, NSA, etc) just to be barred from working in private intelligence jobs? Anyone above a certain level with 10+ years has a choice to either keep working to full pension age or get a partial pension, but in either case they are barred from working as private intelligence/enforcement mercenaries.
It's one thing for an ex-street cop to work as a security guard or a bouncer, but should we really be spending a bunch of taxpayer money training and educating FBI, NSA or other intelligence-type people just so they can take that knowledge and information and apply it to what amounts to private enforcement and intelligence gathering efforts?
This. The increasing Federalization of regulation over time is one of the great enablers of corporate concentration of power. It shrinks the regulation domain to a single entity which is more susceptible to influence and worse, more susceptible to influence by large entities which can crowd out smaller entities and shape regulation to large entity advantage.
While making it more efficient for large corporations with a national scope, it's an open question whether this efficiency ever provides a consumer benefit. I'd argue that the oligopoly conditions it produces just results in rent extraction from consumers and the efficiencies just end up captured as profit.
The inherent inefficiency of state-by-state regulation should make it harder for large-scale corporations since they have to analyze and respond to many regulation demands. In theory smaller corporations should be more competitive, since they have less regulation overhead and can adapt more easily to regulation.
The school already does this. Phones are banned to the extent that kids who bring them have to leave them in their locker. Phones brought to class are confiscated and turned over to the respective grade's dean of students who calls parents and the phone isn't returned to the end of the school day.
I don't think the issue the guy represented in TFS is worried specifically about classroom disruption, but the general effects of smartphones on kids. IMHO, he is onto something but legislation isn't going to fix it.
You mean suddenly it's the Whole Foods Farmer's Market Amazon Marketplace?
All (or well most) irony and humor aside, I think grocery stores exist period because food production is already industrialized and while "eat local" is a great concept, the entire supply chain of groceries needs a complete restructuring before you're actually able to realistically sell locally grown food products at grocery store scale.
And in doing it, you may have to reset people's expectations as to what they have available to eat, unless they actually live in the Central Valley of California. We have lost the entire concept of seasonality of food thanks to industrialization of production and shipment of food.
.22 Short and other similar variations (.22 CB caps, which I think is a .22LR dimensionally but de-charged for lower or subsonic) aren't hard to find but may not be easy to source at many retail outlets.
Since .22 Shorts are rimfire, they will mostly work as single shots in .22LR chambers because the rim provides the spacing, but the action isn't likely to cycle in autoloaders due to reduced recoil and may cause added fouling and poor accuracy since it's not really head spaced to the barrel throat properly.
They mostly get used because they are quieter than LR rounds, especially subsonic variants. A friend uses them to kill raccoons he traps in his back yard without annoying the neighbors as much.
I think your oversell the power of parenting in social situations. I can't run my son's social life for him in school, and if some large plurality of kids have smartphones and now he's excluded from a lot of social activity because he literally can't participate in it, now I have to deal with the fallout at home.
It's been manageable thusfar, but the writing is on the wall. We already hear complaints about not being able to spend time with other kids because activities are arranged via text or snapchat or whatever. I think up to now, it's largely been a positive because he's not had a chance to be an impulsive 12 year old via electronic communication, but eventually I also don't want my kid to feel like he has no social connections, either.
Parents make a million and one mistakes parenting. If it was easy and if we all had ideal role models (ie, our own parents), then everyone would be perfect. But it's not easy, every kid is different and our role models are as flawed as we are.
The guy's law is entirely non-workable for so many reasons, but I at least see where he's coming from.
When I read the summary, I thought to myself that "white hat" hackers are merely facilitating a security economy by buying hacks, documents, etc. They may not specifically commit criminal hacks and may actually be "defenders" of their clients, but in a lot of ways they kind of look like just middle men.
I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of cons run where "the bad guys" steal something and a person claiming to be a "good guy" approaches the victim and says "I'm a white hat, I have contacts and can get your stuff back" and then they transfer the money to the bad guys in exchange for the goods. Meanwhile, does it matter in this transaction whether they belonged to the bad guys all along or whether they were independent good guys?
From an economics perspective, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. Same transactions take place, with the only difference being that if the "good guy" really is an independent agent, it might actually cost more because the good guy will extract their own fee for handling the transaction (which, if he was a bad guy, may have also been rolled in for appearance sake).
I think a law isn't a workable idea at all, but I suspect part of the reason he wants a law is to mitigate the side effects of telling your kid "no" while many other kids get "yes" and now your kid is on the outside, not sharing in electronic communication.
My son is 12 and we haven't given him a phone, but we know parents who gave their kids phones at 9 or 10 and the number of his peers with phones has grown as he's entered middle school.
We have a group of 4 families that socialize together. One of the families has had what appears to be all-you-can-eat iPad/iPhone policy. If we socialize as a group and the iPhone family isn't with us, the kids don't even ask to use them -- they play games, run around and do normal kid stuff. If the iPhone family is there? The other families have to provide phones or iPads, otherwise there is a lot of conflict among the kids over who gets to "share" one of their iPads. It becomes an obvious tool for manipulation.
At our last gathering at our house, I announced that I was collecting all devices and the kids could have them "later". The iPad parents had a mixture of annoyance and relief on their face. One of their kids bugged me every 5 minutes for the first half hour, but I told him no until they all had kind of forgotten about it and moved on to some other activity.
I get where this anesthesiologist is coming from -- for a lot of kids, these devices become a black hole of interest, sucking them away from everything else. We're close to getting a smartphone (totally locked down) for our son, but it's more about our practicality than serving his electronics interest -- GPS tracking, being able to call or text us with info or requests, etc.
A weird thing is comparing this to my dad when he was 12. When my dad was 12, he lived in a rural community in the Ozarks and he saved money and bought a .22 caliber rifle from a neighbor. And he was allowed to go pretty much wherever he wanted with that rifle, he says he mostly used it to shoot turtles and water moccasins when tending to his trout lines (the turtles wrecked his trout lines, the snakes were dangerous pests and may have had some kind of bounty). To contemporary urban sensibilities it sounds crazier to let your 12 year old kid run around with a rifle and totally sane to give them a smart phone.
My first thought was how can businesses possibly be considered to taking IT security seriously when their first and only impulse is how to do things even cheaper than they do now?
I'm still amazed at the dichotomy between shaving pennies and then the utter panic when there is downtime or a security breech. If its so important that you basically can't do business without properly functioning IT systems then why is it treated as if they don't want to spend money on it? Do they really think it's free?
H1Bs are of course just one example of this mindset.
Why?
Probably lots of explanations. The person (or algorithm) scheduling people simply doesn't care and has other priorities, like keeping total hours below benefits or other ancillary compensation thresholds.
There could be a deliberate attempt to disrupt worker relationships to maintain management control of information, prevent cliques or unionization.
Some employees may have preferential status and get the shifts they want and other slots are simply backfilled based on other criteria.
Then there's simple ignorance. I worked a job one summer where I was the primary employee (but lived off-site) and the 4 others who lived on site picked up the rest of the hours. We picked 4 hour shifts round-robin, which of course led to me working 6 days a week with a bunch of split shifts (sometimes both 7-11 am and pm). Until I complained, nobody really noticed.
Uhh, isn't San Diego on the ocean, that big body of water filled with salt? Might the salt air have added to your corrosion problems?
Other than that, I agree that Detroit had a lot of problems in the 1980s. Labor problems, economic problems, probably engineering challenges totally overhauling entire product lines to try to compete with smaller and more fuel efficient foreign models.
What's funny is that I would have thought Ford would have been able to adapt easier because of their extensive experience in Europe. I know at some point in the 1980s they were actually selling some European models in the US.
I have accounts at Wells Fargo, mostly because I'm too lazy to move them to a credit union. I keep high balances so it's free, and the branch is convenient.
I recently sold a boat and had to pay the loan off at another bank as quickly as possible to get the lien release for the buyer. I went into the bank that held the note, and they said they could process the lien release same day if I wired the money to pay off the loan. They gave me their wire transfer info, and I went into Wells to wire the money.
Wells wanted $30 for the transfer of $19,800. I complained, long time customer, etc, and they wouldn't waive it. So I said "OK, why don't you just give me $19,800 in cash. You could, of course, just do the wire transfer for nothing because it would save your employees the labor of counting the cash and the Treasury reporting for cash withdrawals in excess of $10,000."
They still refused, so I took the cash. They tried to give it to me with just a money counter total, but I made the teller count it manually in front of me, too.
You evidently have never shopped Whole Paycheck if you think profit margins are thin.
There are several co-op type stores in my area, I don't usually shop them except when they have something I want specifically (like duck eggs). They are small footprint stores with limited skus and selection.
When Whole Foods opened a new store in a high-end shopping area nearby, I went in to see what all the fuss was about. What a disappointment -- I don't think they had many more skus than the local co-ops (and no duck eggs!). The product package sizes were also tiny, half size of normal store equivalent products.
Anyway, I can see how their margins could still be thin despite the high prices. I think most of those products are low-manufacturing volume and very expensive to begin with, so Whole Foods can't be marking them up that much and still remain remotely competitive with regular grocery stores, many of which now have extensive organics and sub-sections with the type of offerings stocked at Whole Foods.
And yet whatever is passing for "sociopolitical violence" these days seems to pale in comparison to the 1960s/early 1970s when we had a lot more domestic politically oriented violence -- civil rights protests, the many civil rights riots, riots against the war in Viet Nam, and several home grown domestic terror groups planting bombs, robbing banks and so on. Not to mention the huge number of airline hijackings.
When was the last time the US had a serious riot that lasted more than a day and required the services of the National Guard to suppress? The Rodney King riots in the 1990s?
I used SugarSync for a while and it must have been deduping because if I copied a widely available .ISO into my folder it would often immediately upload and begin downloading on other synchronized computers.
I was always kind of curious what their global dedupe ratio was.
This behavior is not something I have seen Dropbox do.
In the West Hollywood bank shootout, they had full auto AKs with drum magazines and the only people who died were the bank robbers.
I think people who aren't trained and somewhat experienced in actual shootouts perform worse than would be expected simply based on rate of fire. And then there's the fact that hitting moving targets at distance is just plain hard to do.
I don't find the NYT comment section to be moderated for political views. Often at least some of the NYT Picks comments are what you'd call politically opposed to the Times' expected liberal bias. I have had some of my comments tagged NYT Picks that were explicitly critical of an article's journalism (lack of source diversity, bias, etc).
I do think that when measured in absolute terms, liberal comments dominate but that's mostly a reflection of their readership, but I think even the self-described liberals will often take the paper to task for dubious journalism judgement.
What I think is most pernicious about the Times is its frequent selectivity about what articles have comments enabled. I think the Times does this on purpose with some topics, and not merely because they attract trolls, but because they don't want people to question their narrative in that story specifically.
And I say this as a longtime subscriber, too. I think the NY Times is about as good as news journalism gets on a daily basis in terms of factual accuracy and intelligent reporting, but I do think they carry a very strong editorial bias. I wish there was a conservative version of the NY Times that wasn't filled with a ton of business reporting. I read FT, Economist and Bloomberg from time to time but find them thin on news that isn't business reporting.
Or is it the other way around?
Assuming no oil in the Middle East, you have no capital and you probably have the same level of modernization and outside influence that you have in Mauritania or Mali. What would then be the motivating factor for Islamic modernization? The populations would largely still be living rural, subsistence type existences which would seem to just perpetuate parochialism.
Then there's the question of Israel/Palestine. There's no question that region's proximity to oil plays a role in US involvement, but historically the main players have been Egypt, Syria and Jordan, countries with little to no oil reserves, fighting over a tiny patch of ground, also with no oil. I think there's a lot of room to argue that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been a major catalyst for Islamic radicalism, with both sides reinforced and encouraged as proxy fights between the US and the Soviets.
There's no question that the flood of money into oil-rich regions has enabled money and resources to be pumped into extremist ideologies in ways that it wouldn't have had there been no oil, but at the same time, there are other conflicts and interests in that region that have drawn major power involvement. Even without oil, things like the Suez Canal or other strategic interests in the Eastern Mediterranean would have given reasons for the major powers to pick winners and losers and weaponize various factions.
Apple has a conflict of interest and a moral hazard. They get a cut of the in-app purchase revenue and also have a broader interest in the "app economy".
The mostly legitimate side of this is providing app vendors with additional revenue (raising the effective price of an app above $0.99) and the ability to sell a single app with additional features they can upsell.
Personally, I think this is an awful model for consumers as it leads to misleading app store descriptions -- yes, they will show in-app purchases, but you have to dig a little to find out what they are before you buy the app and sort out if the the app you're looking at actually does what it describes without being a $10 app.
But worse, I think it encourages a scam-oriented system ripe for abuse. We've already seen the children's game category use it this way and Apple only slowly make it more difficult for kids to buy in-app advantages often necessary to succeed in games.