One might not blame Bush. But one might blame the ideology of his party. Or the 1996 Republican Contract On America, which gutted the SEC, and signalled to all the fraudster's out there. . . LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!
Additionally, the biggest responsibility for the economic decline goes to Hugo Chavez, who got Opec to cut supplies in 1999, causing an energy price spike. For those who believe high taxes causes the economy to slow down - high energy prices also do the same thing. For those who call it Clinton's Recession, recall that Clinton attempted to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate the price spikes, and the Republicans tried to stop it. Then the Largest donator to the Republican party and George W Bush, Enron, used the crisis to fraudulently fix markets in California to bilk consumers out of billions. The dotcom crash was a side-effect.
Then when you look at the Republican tendency to reduce rules, and the Bush record on lax enforcement of white collar crime, and his political appointments (Poindexter?!), and the conflicts of interest evident in each one, and add that to the Bush S&L scandal in 1990, Iran-Contra of the 1980's, a pattern emerges.
the scary thing abou the patriot act, is if we have one more major terrorist attack here in the US, you KNOW the politicians will be on TV the very next day crying that the patriot act isn't strong enough, and those nasty commie terrorist-supporting Saddam-loving homosexual Democrats were responsible.
yes - that was mildly interesting - but on the other hand, it was a bit too "squishy" for my tastes, very reminiscent of the Dark Horse comic (great Mark Nelson art, unpleasant story - they changed the planet's name from LB426 to "Archon", gave the aliens telepathic powers, and a "mind link" with an adult Newt. . . bleh! Who clears this stuff anyway?) The whole crybaby/alien child thing was just annoying. Besides, hasn't the whole cloning thing been kind of trampled and over abused?
I want to make a new rule: Once a Science Fiction Concept is used in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, it's no longer cool.
Don't worry. When Coal runs out, Solar will become cheaper, and we'll be on a Solar economy. Assuming, of course, any sunlight will still make it down to the surface after we've burned all the fossil fuels we can. But hey, profit's important, right?
Surely you wouldn't begrudge us ALIENS as well? 3 and 4/Ressurection sucked ass. But Aliens rocked. It was a different movie from Alien (action/adventure vs. scifi horror) - but it had it's own appeal. And for it's time, Aliens was revolutionary in many ways. Noone had ever made a Clancy-esque portrayal of futuristic military like this before. And though it's been imitated since then, I don't think it's been imitated well.
John Nash's theory about cooperation was a very significant effort here - we'd teach this to our kids in school, but that'd be tantamount to brainwashing them with communist propaganda. So it's better to just let them live in an "every man for himself" world.
Putting a complete stop to CO2 production would end the lives of billions of people a surely as global warming would. With a stop to CO2 production means an end to modern farming techniques, and transport of goods. BILLIONS of people with no access to food, will die. Within 30 days. Period.
And even if you could get all the world leaders to agree to this, and march all the world's armies to enforce this agreement, you'd still get massive noncompliance.
We, as a race, are suicide-bound. Either way. It's already too late to do anything about it.
I would NOT kill someone for $1 million. Back in the 90's, I had $1 million (in the market). It's not really all that much money. Certainly not enough to "retire" on.
Now, $10 million, one could live comfortably on the interest. By comfortably, I'm talking about around $50k-$100k/year.
I'm not even talking about the risk of getting caught. I'm talking about "going there" - being a murderer, the telltale heart, and all that. Not worth a measley million to me.
" I do know a few people who abuse it, but in the long run, it's doing less damage to them than the alcohol they would have used in place of it. The lack of addiction or especially bad long-term effects means that when they "go clean", they recover.
It's really no different from alcohol, except that it's not addictive and doesn't cause brain and liver damage "
I have a neighbor lady, about 60 yrs old, cronic alcie. Her husband just left her last month, was sick of dealing with her problem, after she got kicked out of her 5th or 6th time in rehab (cost $20k). I tried to get her to smoke pot, because it was better for her than drinking, but she just won't do it. She says "it makes me stupid". Well, I don't know about that, but every now and then, she asks me to come over to her house to help her figure out her DVD player. "There's four buttons, this one's the power, on/off, this one's PLAY, this one's STOP, this one's EJECT." I try to be patient. .. But I don't think pot could possibly make her more stupid. And would definintely improve her life, if it got her to quit drinking.
From my dealings with Ford IT in the past, I'd characterize them as more "forward looking" than a lot of other large companies I've dealt with, when it comes to IT. Back when I was helping with their initial deployment of NetWare 4.0, (4.00), they were then evaluating Linux, this was back when we used to download floppy images to create an install-set. (1994, 95-ish?) I'm glad something came of it.
" Without the marketing people the company can't sell whatever it is the engineers make. Plus engineers are only needed to make the product ONCE. After that its all about marketing. So yeah the marketers are more valuable. But this is hard to get across to the aspergers syndrome plagueged geek world."
That's a huge load of bullcrap. Marketers and Sales people SELL for a living. So when it comes time to get their budgets set up for the quarter, OF COURSE those same skills apply to the executive staff. It's basic evolutionary logic applied to the business environment. When departments within a company compete for survival, the one that comes up on top is the one that's designed to compete externally as well. A company is like an organism, and imagine that among the internal organs of this organism, is an organ that has it's own set of teeth and claws, to give the organism as a whole, a means to compete and survive against other organisms. Now imagine this set of teeth and claws begins to divert resources, blood, food, oxygen, from other organs to itself, and the other organs are not equipped to defend themselves. Such an organism becomes little more than just another set of empty claws and teeth.
It all grows out of the flawed reasoning accountants use to measure organizations within a corporation. Because IT does not produce revenue, it's considered a cost center. So in order to measure effectiveness, IT has to "bill" it's services to other organizations within the company. This is such bassackwards thinking - as to be laughable - to a normal rational person, who hasn't been schooled in basic accounting principles. Extend this idea, and you see that, on paper, the ONLY organization which produces revenue is Sales and Marketing. So starve or eliminate all the other parts, because they're a liability. It's an oversimplification of how businesses work. Fail to value what makes a company strong or unique, or desirable in the first place, and you end up with another dumb animal whose only function is to hunt and kill. (ie. SCO, Microsoft, Eolas, etc.)
When I was employed at "VeryLargeSoftware Corp", (who incidentally, has an office in Pune), I saw engineers who were denied new hardware, essential for fulfilling the needs of engineering a product to run on the same equipment our customers were running on. For budgetary reasons.
Our company engineered many products, because we were a result of many mergers and buyouts over the years, with satellite offices all over the country. But the sales team really focussed on our top-selling product. They could not be made or enticed to actively sell the other products. As a result, the other products, regardless of technical merit, whithered and died, and the satellite offices were closed down one by one, putting engineers out of work. The sales guys didn't care, because their offices were at our HQ.
So While the sales guys were, essentially not doing their job - they refused to do their job, and our officers refused to force them, and while our engineers were being constrained by opressive and crippling budgetary restrictions, the sales and marketing groups were rewarded with offsite meetings at posh resorts, junkets (one of which was a company-paid trip to South Africa, including a safari trip, resort stay, and an engraved commemorative gold watch - as a reward for what ultimately turned out to be a year of lackluster sales).
Freinds who had been laid off and got jobs at other software companies, had reported similar situations.
I saw guys getting jobs at $50k, just for knowing how to turn a computer on. It was a tulip-bulb economy.
The only thing that's changed, is that guys named Pradesh are getting paid $10k, for the same job, with the same level of expertise.
The real solution to the problem would have been to make sure that the guy you gave $50k to, knew WTF he was doing. This is not competition or meritocracy on skill. It's solely on money. I'm not saying that all Indians are sub-par. We all know individual Indians who are amazingly competent. We also know some who are not. Competence has NOTHING to do with the Outsourcing movement. It's all about the money. And the problem is - lazy stupid managers not taking the time to ensure they hired quality labor, not knowing how to appropriately measure performance. They fill-out headcount, just for the sake of "showing growth" on the bottom line. They don't bother to actually MANAGE.
Actually, the deal is - as far as calculating the ACTUAL cost of our modern conveniences - the whole reason we're able to profit at all from this, is because the poor sucker who invented the wheel isn't collecting royalties from us THIEVES who have stolen his (or her) idea. 6 billion humans, including the poorest of us, are all profitting grossly on the sweat and ingenuity of that person, who really ought to get a lawyer.
Questioning Bush is Questioning America, Questioning Patriotism, Questioning Freedom. Dissent is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. It's supporting terrorism.
MANY regular-joe Americans believe this, and believe it strongly. Even some fairly smart people. It kind of makes you want to keep a tinfoil had handy. It's eerie as hell.
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One might not blame Bush. But one might blame the ideology of his party. Or the 1996 Republican Contract On America, which gutted the SEC, and signalled to all the fraudster's out there. . . LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!
Additionally, the biggest responsibility for the economic decline goes to Hugo Chavez, who got Opec to cut supplies in 1999, causing an energy price spike. For those who believe high taxes causes the economy to slow down - high energy prices also do the same thing. For those who call it Clinton's Recession, recall that Clinton attempted to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate the price spikes, and the Republicans tried to stop it. Then the Largest donator to the Republican party and George W Bush, Enron, used the crisis to fraudulently fix markets in California to bilk consumers out of billions. The dotcom crash was a side-effect.
Then when you look at the Republican tendency to reduce rules, and the Bush record on lax enforcement of white collar crime, and his political appointments (Poindexter?!), and the conflicts of interest evident in each one, and add that to the Bush S&L scandal in 1990, Iran-Contra of the 1980's, a pattern emerges.
bitter much?
the scary thing abou the patriot act, is if we have one more major terrorist attack here in the US, you KNOW the politicians will be on TV the very next day crying that the patriot act isn't strong enough, and those nasty commie terrorist-supporting Saddam-loving homosexual Democrats were responsible.
Lifting body.
Dare I say it? I think The Sci Fi world is ready for 4-breasted women by now. . .
yes - that was mildly interesting - but on the other hand, it was a bit too "squishy" for my tastes, very reminiscent of the Dark Horse comic (great Mark Nelson art, unpleasant story - they changed the planet's name from LB426 to "Archon", gave the aliens telepathic powers, and a "mind link" with an adult Newt. . . bleh! Who clears this stuff anyway?)
The whole crybaby/alien child thing was just annoying.
Besides, hasn't the whole cloning thing been kind of trampled and over abused?
I want to make a new rule:
Once a Science Fiction Concept is used in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, it's no longer cool.
Don't worry. When Coal runs out, Solar will become cheaper, and we'll be on a Solar economy. Assuming, of course, any sunlight will still make it down to the surface after we've burned all the fossil fuels we can. But hey, profit's important, right?
Surely you wouldn't begrudge us ALIENS as well? 3 and 4/Ressurection sucked ass. But Aliens rocked. It was a different movie from Alien (action/adventure vs. scifi horror) - but it had it's own appeal. And for it's time, Aliens was revolutionary in many ways. Noone had ever made a Clancy-esque portrayal of futuristic military like this before. And though it's been imitated since then, I don't think it's been imitated well.
John Nash's theory about cooperation was a very significant effort here - we'd teach this to our kids in school, but that'd be tantamount to brainwashing them with communist propaganda. So it's better to just let them live in an "every man for himself" world.
Yes.
This was a scam all along.
Y'all were warned. And y'all accused the warn-ers of being purveyors of tinfoil hats.
So suffer.
I disagree with Prevayler's approach to "replacing" RDBMS' for the simple fact that it fails the ACID test.
Could this be the end of advertisements disguised as press releases disguised as informative articles?
". . .and the race of uber intelligent cockroaches will be wondering how these silly bipedal organisms in the fossil record went extinct. ;-)"
And they're going to be wondering what the fuck we did with all the oil too. . .
Putting a complete stop to CO2 production would end the lives of billions of people a surely as global warming would. With a stop to CO2 production means an end to modern farming techniques, and transport of goods. BILLIONS of people with no access to food, will die. Within 30 days. Period.
And even if you could get all the world leaders to agree to this, and march all the world's armies to enforce this agreement, you'd still get massive noncompliance.
We, as a race, are suicide-bound. Either way. It's already too late to do anything about it.
. . . and magnamite is a pokemon. . .
I would NOT kill someone for $1 million. Back in the 90's, I had $1 million (in the market). It's not really all that much money. Certainly not enough to "retire" on.
Now, $10 million, one could live comfortably on the interest. By comfortably, I'm talking about around $50k-$100k/year.
I'm not even talking about the risk of getting caught. I'm talking about "going there" - being a murderer, the telltale heart, and all that. Not worth a measley million to me.
" I do know a few people who abuse it, but in the long run, it's doing less damage to them than the alcohol they would have used in place of it. The lack of addiction or especially bad long-term effects means that when they "go clean", they recover.
.
It's really no different from alcohol, except that it's not addictive and doesn't cause brain and liver damage "
I have a neighbor lady, about 60 yrs old, cronic alcie. Her husband just left her last month, was sick of dealing with her problem, after she got kicked out of her 5th or 6th time in rehab (cost $20k). I tried to get her to smoke pot, because it was better for her than drinking, but she just won't do it. She says "it makes me stupid". Well, I don't know about that, but every now and then, she asks me to come over to her house to help her figure out her DVD player. "There's four buttons, this one's the power, on/off, this one's PLAY, this one's STOP, this one's EJECT." I try to be patient. .
But I don't think pot could possibly make her more stupid. And would definintely improve her life, if it got her to quit drinking.
He lied about WMD. Continues to stonewall on many other issues, including closed-door Energy Policy meetings. That's not restored integrity.
George also threatened to bring Osama to justice, to get Saddam Hussein, to restore integrity to the White House.
I'm not sure I believe much of what that alleged person says.
From my dealings with Ford IT in the past, I'd characterize them as more "forward looking" than a lot of other large companies I've dealt with, when it comes to IT. Back when I was helping with their initial deployment of NetWare 4.0, (4.00), they were then evaluating Linux, this was back when we used to download floppy images to create an install-set. (1994, 95-ish?) I'm glad something came of it.
" Without the marketing people the company can't sell whatever it is the engineers make. Plus engineers are only needed to make the product ONCE. After that its all about marketing. So yeah the marketers are more valuable. But this is hard to get across to the aspergers syndrome plagueged geek world."
That's a huge load of bullcrap. Marketers and Sales people SELL for a living. So when it comes time to get their budgets set up for the quarter, OF COURSE those same skills apply to the executive staff. It's basic evolutionary logic applied to the business environment. When departments within a company compete for survival, the one that comes up on top is the one that's designed to compete externally as well. A company is like an organism, and imagine that among the internal organs of this organism, is an organ that has it's own set of teeth and claws, to give the organism as a whole, a means to compete and survive against other organisms. Now imagine this set of teeth and claws begins to divert resources, blood, food, oxygen, from other organs to itself, and the other organs are not equipped to defend themselves. Such an organism becomes little more than just another set of empty claws and teeth.
It all grows out of the flawed reasoning accountants use to measure organizations within a corporation. Because IT does not produce revenue, it's considered a cost center. So in order to measure effectiveness, IT has to "bill" it's services to other organizations within the company. This is such bassackwards thinking - as to be laughable - to a normal rational person, who hasn't been schooled in basic accounting principles. Extend this idea, and you see that, on paper, the ONLY organization which produces revenue is Sales and Marketing. So starve or eliminate all the other parts, because they're a liability. It's an oversimplification of how businesses work. Fail to value what makes a company strong or unique, or desirable in the first place, and you end up with another dumb animal whose only function is to hunt and kill. (ie. SCO, Microsoft, Eolas, etc.)
This is truly IT, what it's all about.
(mod parent up).
When I was employed at "VeryLargeSoftware Corp", (who incidentally, has an office in Pune), I saw engineers who were denied new hardware, essential for fulfilling the needs of engineering a product to run on the same equipment our customers were running on. For budgetary reasons.
Our company engineered many products, because we were a result of many mergers and buyouts over the years, with satellite offices all over the country. But the sales team really focussed on our top-selling product. They could not be made or enticed to actively sell the other products. As a result, the other products, regardless of technical merit, whithered and died, and the satellite offices were closed down one by one, putting engineers out of work. The sales guys didn't care, because their offices were at our HQ.
So While the sales guys were, essentially not doing their job - they refused to do their job, and our officers refused to force them, and while our engineers were being constrained by opressive and crippling budgetary restrictions, the sales and marketing groups were rewarded with offsite meetings at posh resorts, junkets (one of which was a company-paid trip to South Africa, including a safari trip, resort stay, and an engraved commemorative gold watch - as a reward for what ultimately turned out to be a year of lackluster sales).
Freinds who had been laid off and got jobs at other software companies, had reported similar situations.
I saw guys getting jobs at $50k, just for knowing how to turn a computer on. It was a tulip-bulb economy.
The only thing that's changed, is that guys named Pradesh are getting paid $10k, for the same job, with the same level of expertise.
The real solution to the problem would have been to make sure that the guy you gave $50k to, knew WTF he was doing. This is not competition or meritocracy on skill. It's solely on money. I'm not saying that all Indians are sub-par. We all know individual Indians who are amazingly competent. We also know some who are not. Competence has NOTHING to do with the Outsourcing movement. It's all about the money. And the problem is - lazy stupid managers not taking the time to ensure they hired quality labor, not knowing how to appropriately measure performance. They fill-out headcount, just for the sake of "showing growth" on the bottom line. They don't bother to actually MANAGE.
Actually, the deal is - as far as calculating the ACTUAL cost of our modern conveniences - the whole reason we're able to profit at all from this, is because the poor sucker who invented the wheel isn't collecting royalties from us THIEVES who have stolen his (or her) idea. 6 billion humans, including the poorest of us, are all profitting grossly on the sweat and ingenuity of that person, who really ought to get a lawyer.
We've been well programmed.
Questioning Bush is Questioning America, Questioning Patriotism, Questioning Freedom. Dissent is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. It's supporting terrorism.
MANY regular-joe Americans believe this, and believe it strongly. Even some fairly smart people. It kind of makes you want to keep a tinfoil had handy. It's eerie as hell.