Younger folks have more stamina, so they could go 14-16 hours a day:
1. Attending back-to-back excruciatingly boring meetings. 2. Writing memos. 3. Making phone calls. 4. Going to press conferences. 5. Traveling. 6. Catching up on random things on the weekend. 7. Shmoozing clients by taking them to the golf course, dinner, sports outings, etc.. 8. Anything else...
The older guys just won't be able to keep up with the younger set on this, and they "cut their teeth " on "old" methods of human interaction and business practices. After all, it's a different world now from what it was back when those older guys were in their twenties, isn't it?
So, does that mean older CxO's should be fired and those positions given to any old uni grad who took business and happens to show some promise?
Well, that is, pardon my French, just fucking stupid thinking.
If someone went to school for Comp Sci, why on Earth does that translate into being an entrepeneur or manager by the time you are 30? Here's a clue: some folks *love* coding, and will always love coding, and working for a living is not a "free ride" in any case.
games, software, and music. Then everyone who wants to actually OWN any sort of content for even legitimate re-use can be considered a criminal.
Ayn Rand was right: governments have to create criminals. Well, in this case, it's a group of corps, but it's the same notion, and only the government can enforce crappy legislation like DMCA, anyway.
Rest assured that I will NEVER buy this movie media format. Let's just hope this goes the way of Divx and the dodo bird.
If Clinton's "positive" image helped so much, why did the economy start to slide the spring of 2000? Before we even knew who would have the office?
That being said, I think the jobs that dried up during these recession years are not coming back to these shores...I should have taken on a career that had some sort, any sort, of protection. IT is dead end. There is no way I'm going to make it to retirement in this field - and I'm no dummy. I can't even begin to tell you how much experience in all the buzzwords that I have. I've done the whole gamut, too: requirements gathering, design, DB design, all the way through to maintenance. It won't matter much to corps looking to follow the Nike model (cut labor costs by using next to no American labor; continue to sell at exorbitant prices to Americans). Well, it can't last forever. If there are no more middle class folks, there will be NO ONE to buy the products. I'm Libertarian, but I've never been a fan of globalism as it's being carried out here. American policies have to be there to protect AMERICANS - I don't give a rip about others - if we can help them, that's nice, but that comes secondary to Americans' interests. And policies cannot be set up just to protect CEO interests. I say if companies hire more than a certain percentage of their staff offshore, then the CEO/COO/VPs, etc., need to live in that country, too.
I hate to be so negative, but it's rough out there, and it's only going to get rougher. As people have pointed out, it's a race to the bottom. Corps want wage slaves and automatons, not uppity individuals with any sort of opinion. It doesn't matter how much "value" you can try to angle for, you'll still be out the door the minute they can snap up an h1b to do your job for 1/2 your wages, or better yet, send it to some third world country like India for 1/10 your wages.
Actually, if you think about it, taxing real estate is sort of like taxing an 'unrefined, natural resource', and people have done that for a whole lot longer than they've taxed almost anything else.
...and that's why Libertarians call taxes "slavery". Because they are. Once people allow all these taxes, especially pernicious ones like real estate taxes, to creep into their lives, you can kiss true liberty goodbye. And we have, a long, long time ago.
Yes, but the sort of environments where people feel they mustn't be the last to come in in the morning, or the first to leave at the end of the day aren't necessarily fostering productivity...many are just putting in the time for show, not any real "work".
I've set myself a policy that I've stuck by for most of the years I've worked (except the first few wasted years of having no life that made me set that policy in the first place) - I work 8 hours a day, and then go home, and by all means avoid working on the weekend. I get my stuff done on time and under budget. When PMs or marketing or whoever is trying to set a ridiculous schedule so that *I* and others get to work overtime to meet it, I call them on it.
Workers working overtime is a bad reflection on *management*, and I have refused to continue working for folks who figure overtime into their software "schedules".
Of course, the economy blows right now, so I take what I can get - as a contractor. And you know how contractors get paid - if I work 80 hours a week, I'm going to be paid for those 80 hours.
Personally, I think the whole "exempt" thing is ridiculous. If companies want the work, they need to *pay* for that work. For another thing, people compare salaries by K/yr across different careers and jobs, which is utterly fallacious. Teachers might get paid 30K/yr, for example, and *some* developers 80K/yr. But if you work 60-80hr week as a developer 50weeks a year vs. 40-60hr week as a teacher only part of the year, who is earning more per hour? What if the developer works 80-100hr/week? These are not unreasonable numbers, too, especially for spineless developers.
This just sounds like the dire warnings of a Luddite to me.
What about the HUGE benefits you could gain from this? Did you ever eat one of those nutritional bars that taste like sawdust? They are really good for you (if you get the right bar; many are just trash) and can help stave off hunger for a few hours instead of snacking on crap food, but boy, do they taste bad. Something like this applied to bars would be great...and that's just one example...the long-term benefits to mankind could be stunning.
And...some of those evolved traits we have are seriously outmoded by the state of the modern world. Would you argue that fight or flight is always a good trait in the modern world?
Like all technology discovered or created since fire, this could be used for good or bad.
But done right, this could do a lot towards ending famine - not that we don't have the technology now, but we'd (the U.S.) have even more food to export as a result: people could/would switch to growing soybeans instead of raising livestock, since something like tofu could meet both the nutritional and taste requirements for many people if this technology takes off.
People would never eat something that tastes good and doesn't have nutritional value, since at least at first, meals like these would cost more...so they'd want to have something almost perfectly balanced, and yet tasty. Imagine: manufacturers could make MREs that taste GREAT and are perfectly constructed to be a well-balanced meal in proteins, fats, carbs, sugars, etc...
Yes. Thanks mostly to freedom (social and financial freedom)...not Big Government policy wonks. There have been a few things that Big Government has done to help things along (many of them a product of the military machine), but for the most part the government is there to *manage* problems, not *solve* them. You see, if a problem is solved, a department or program or what have you is no longer necessary.
Some would argue that they *are* pissing in the wind.
Beyond some environmental protections, the meddlings of big government in the private sector have brought about what good, exactly? And who do those people rely on for their expert testimony even when they do good things?
They rely on economists (math) and scientists and lawyers.
Man that's a shame that administration officials see that your mission is to help students succeed. What bollocks.
But...MIS is for CS dropouts, is it not? The only ones I met who weren't were ones who said they wanted to be the ones "bossing you computer geeks around".
In my (admittedly limited) experience it breaks down like this:
1. "traditional" engineering -> ball-buster. I had many engineering friends in school, and those guys busted their hump. Big workload, tough classes, many weed-out courses. Those guys get infinite respect from me. 2. Comp Sci...many of the same classes (weed-outs) as engineers for the first two years. Some of the CS-specific courses like Algorithms (proving the big-O of them, for the most part) could be real ball-busters. Bonus: no EIT exams. 3. MIS - I don't know what those guys did, but at my school, the only "programming" requirement was a Cobol course. No algorithms class, no linear algebra, etc. And MIS is where the CS dropouts ended up. 4. Liberal arts - a lot of reading. Yes, some profs let you get by with BS'ing, but sometimes the reading requirement was HUGE. I know, I took some of those courses as general electives. Oddly enough, I was often the top-scoring student in those classes. Kind of pokes a hole in the "engineers/computer nerds can't grok LA topics" theory. It was always a drag to have to write some of those longer papers, though...especially if the topic was getting strained. My (major) comp sci projects usually took much, much longer, but then again, that's my bread and butter, so it only got old when it was the 11th hour and you realized you'd be up until 9am finishing up the work. 5. Accounting/Finance/Business. I know it's anecdotal, but I don't think I ever met someone who opted for these that had much intelligence (whether left-brain, right-brain, "street smarts", etc), and they certainly were never working on schoolwork. And still landing A's. 6. Art majors. It seems the prereqs are smoking clove cigarettes, wearing black, waking at about 5pm, and staying up until dawn after clubbing all night. What great fun! I wish I knew of a way to take art in school and have a sure-fire job when I finished.:)
All this talk of school reminds me of the time I took differential equations as a *general elective* because I didn't get to sign up for the LA class in time. Shudder....
Give the multiculturalists enough time, and they'll get their claws into the science and engineering courses, too, and we will see grade inflation there, too. These folks have confused equal *opportunity* with equal *outcomes*.
For those interested in reading more about grade inflation, check out Illiberal Education, by Dinesh D'Souza. A bit outdated, but still relevant.
By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly December 20, 2002
Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such assholes? Surely it's no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the Lincoln Navigator.
Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, "High and Mighty," the connection between the two isn't a coincidence. Unlike any other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be.
According to market research conducted by the country's leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."
He says, too, that SUV drivers generally don't care about anyone else's kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have control over the people around them. David Bostwick, Chrysler's market research director, tells Bradsher, "If you have a sport utility, you can have the smoked windows, put the children in the back and pretend you're still single."
Armed with such research, automakers have, over the past decade, ramped up their SUV designs to appeal even more to the "reptilian" instincts of the many Americans who are attracted to SUVs not because of their perceived safety, but for their obvious aggressiveness. Automakers have intentionally designed the latest models to resemble ferocious animals. The Dodge Durango, for instance, was built to resemble a savage jungle cat, with vertical bars across the grille to represent teeth and big jaw-like fenders. Bradsher quotes a former Ford market researcher who says the SUV craze is "about not letting anything get in your way, and at the extreme, about intimidating others to get out of your way."
Not surprisingly, most SUV customers over the past decade hail from a group that is the embodiment of American narcissism: baby boomers. Affluent and often socially liberal, baby boomers have embraced the four-wheel-drive SUV as a symbol of their ability to defy the conventions of old age, of their independence and "outdoorsiness," making the off-road vehicle a force to be reckoned with on the American blacktop.
But as Bradsher declares in his title, this baby boomer fetish is considerably more harmful than the mere annoyance of yet another Rolling Stones tour or the endless commercials for Propecia. In their attempt to appear youthful and hip, SUV owners have filled the American highways with vehicles that exact a distinctly human cost, frequently killing innocent drivers who would have survived a collision with a lesser vehicle. Bradsher quotes auto execs who concede that the self-centered lifestyle of SUV buyers is apparent in "their willingness to endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety."
After covering the auto industry for six years, Bradsher is an unabashed critic of sport-utility vehicles and the automakers that continue to churn them out knowing full well the dangers they pose. He doesn't equivocate in his feeling that driving an SUV is a deeply immoral act that places the driver's own ego above the health and safety of those around him, not to mention the health of the environment. Ironically, and though most supposedly safety-conscious owners don't realize it, SUVs even imperil those who drive them.
Road Rodeo
Ask a typical SUV driver why he drives such a formidable vehicle, and he'll invariably insist that it's for safety reasons - the kids, you know - not because he's too vain to get behind the wheel of a sissy Ford Windstar. Automakers themselves know otherwise - their own market research tells them so.
But Bradsher makes painfully clear that the belief in SUV safety is a delusion. For decades, automakers seeking to avoid tougher fuel economy standards have invoked the fiction that the bigger the car, the safer the passenger. As a result, most Americans take it on faith that the only way to be safe on the highway is to be driving a tank (or the next best thing, a Hummer). Bradsher shatters this myth and highlights the strange disconnect between the perception and the reality of SUVs.
The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars - 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of rollover; 62 percent of SUV deaths in 2000 occurred in rollover accidents. SUVs don't handle well, so drivers can't respond quickly when the car hits a stretch of uneven pavement or "trips" by scraping a guardrail. Even a small bump in the road is enough to flip an SUV traveling at high speed. On top of that, SUV roofs are not reinforced to protect the occupants against rollover; nor does the government require them to be.
Because of their vehicles' size and four-wheel drive, SUV drivers tend to overestimate their own security, which prompts many to drive like maniacs, particularly in inclement weather. And SUV drivers - ever image-conscious and overconfident - seem to hate seat belts as much as they love talking on their cell phones while driving. Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those killed in roll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the general driving population now buckles up regularly.
While failing to protect their occupants, SUVs have also made the roads more dangerous for others. The "kill rate," as Bradsher calls it, for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken. Government researchers have found that a behemoth like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe.
Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side - not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening.
But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.
Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his 2-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.
To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)
The tragedy of SUVs is that highway fatalities were actually in decline before SUVs came into vogue, even though Americans were driving farther. This is true largely for one simple reason: the seatbelt. Seatbelt usage rose from 14 percent in 1984 to 73 percent in 2001. But seatbelts aren't much help if you're sideswiped by an Escalade, a prospect that looms yet more ominously as SUVs enter the used-car market. Not surprisingly, last year, for the first time in a decade, the number of highway deaths actually rose.
No Roads Scholars Here
Bradsher blames government for failing to adequately regulate SUVs, but doesn't fully acknowledge the degree to which it has encouraged SUV production by becoming a major consumer of them. Law enforcement and public safety agencies in particular seem enamored of the menacing vehicles, a fact on proud display when officers finally apprehended the alleged snipers in the Washington, D.C., area and transported them to the federal courthouse in a parade of black Ford Explorers and Expeditions.
Judging from the number of official SUVs on the road today, law enforcement officials - those most likely to know firsthand the grisly effects of a rollover - are enthusiastic customers. Like the rest of America, police departments seem to believe that replacing safe, sturdy cars with SUVs is a good idea, though it's hard to imagine a more dangerous vehicle for an officer conducting a high-speed chase.
Government's taste for SUVs isn't limited to cops and firemen. There's hardly a city in America where the mayor's chauffeured Lincoln Town Car hasn't been replaced by an SUV. In Virginia, where state officials recently discovered that SUVs were wrecking their efforts to meet clean-air regulations, a few noted sheepishly that perhaps local governments should sell their own fleets, which had ballooned to 250 in Fairfax County alone. (A Fairfax County official told The Washington Post that public safety officials needed four-wheel drive and large cargo spaces to transport extra people and emergency equipment through snow or heavy rain - proof that even law enforcement officials misunderstand SUV safety records.)
As Bradsher details, because of their weight, shoddy brakes, and off-road tires, SUVs handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble stopping on slick roads. What's more, they're generally so poorly designed as not to be capable of carrying much cargo, despite the space. A contributing factor in the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle was that drivers weren't told that their Explorers shouldn't carry any more weight than a Ford Taurus. The extra weight routinely piled in these big cars stressed the tires in a way that made them fall apart faster and contributed to the spate of rollover deaths.
I have a hunch that government officials' justification for buying SUVs is mostly a ruse for their real motivation, which is the same as any other SUV owner's: image. Officials can safely load up their fleets with leather-seated SUVs, whereas using taxpayer dollars to buy themselves, say, a fleet of BMW coupes would get them crucified (even though Detroit considers SUVs luxury vehicles and designs them accordingly). Police departments may claim that they need an SUV to accommodate SWAT teams or canine units, but there is no reason that Sparky the drug dog wouldn't be just as comfortable in the back of a nice safe Chevy Astrovan.
The same is true for nearly everyone who drives an SUV today. Of course, not every SUV owner is gripped by insecurity and a death wish - plenty of otherwise reasonable people seem to get seduced by power and size (see sidebar).
But if soccer moms and office-park dads really need to ferry a lot of people around, they could simply get a large car or a minivan, which Bradsher hails as a great innovation for its fuel efficiency, safety, and lower pollution. (And minivans don't have a disproportionately high kill rate for motorists or pedestrians when they get into accidents.) According to industry market research, minivan drivers also tend to be very nice people. Minivans are favored by senior citizens and others (male and female, equally) who volunteer for their churches and carpool with other people's kids. But that's the problem. SUV owners buy them precisely because they don't want the "soccer mom" stigma associated with minivans.
While Bradsher does a magnificent job of shattering the myths about SUVs, he has a difficult time proposing a solution. Sport utility vehicles have become like guns: Everyone knows they're dangerous, but you can't exactly force millions of Americans to give them up overnight. And because the SUV is single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the once-depressed American auto industry, the economy is now so dependent on their production that it would be nearly impossible to get them off the road.
Bradsher suggests regulating SUVs like cars rather than as light trucks, so that they would be forced to comply with fuel-efficiency standards and safety regulations. He also proposes that the insurance industry stop shifting the high costs of the SUV dangers onto car owners by raising premium prices for SUVs to reflect the amount of damage they cause. But these ideas, commendable though they are, fall short of a perfect answer.
Clearly, the best solution would be for Americans to realize the danger of SUVs and simply stop buying them. Social pressure can be a powerful determinant on car choices, as seen in Japan, the one country where SUVs have not caught on because of cultural checks that emphasize the good of the community over that of the individual. There are signs that perhaps public sentiment is beginning to shift against SUV drivers here, too, as activists have begun to leave nasty flyers on SUV windshields berating drivers for fouling the environment and other offenses.
But for a true reckoning to take place, image-obsessed Americans will need to fully understand the SUV's true dangers - including to themselves - before they will willingly abandon it to the junkyard. Spreading that message against the nation's biggest advertiser - the auto industry - will be tough work. Drivers can only hope that Bradsher's book will cut through the chatter.
You seek the best talent for the job. And if this guy happens to come from another country, well, so be it.
Nice in theory. It doesn't really work that way in practice, though, does it?
Companies seek the cheapest, longest-working, talented people they can find. An added bonus is having a worker who can't easily jump to another company, as well as a worker they don't have to give benefits to.
*This* is why companies lobby for more H1Bs instead of a speedier path to permanent immigration. If, as everyone says, the H1B is a "gateway visa", then why not do away with the H1B entirely, and put foreigners on a path to permanent immigration if they are qualified to do the work here? One has to assume that the companies think having indentured servants is to their benefit since they do not lobby for this.
The labor market for technical people is still extremely tight.
Wait...are you saying that it's hard to find techies? I don't know where you live, but I haven't been able to find a job for almost six months now, and it's not for lack of looking. Anyway...
...we need to increase the H1B visa program until the salaries of technical people are on par, rather than above average, with other four-year degree professionals.
This sounds like corporate welfare to me. Why not do the same for all professions, then? Maybe *I* think doctors or lawyers or VPs or CxOs get paid too much, let's bring in H1Bs to replace take *their* jobs until salaries are in the range I think they should be. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Well, no less ridiculous than the H1B program. I do agree with that one poster that said we should propose bringing in foreign workers for *all* professions - then we'd at least everyone could benefit from the competition.
Every other country in the world practices some sort of protection for their workers, why should America be any different? It's insane to think that INS and other institutions that my taxes pay for should do otherwise. Americans should look out for Americans. It's not xenophobic. It's common sense.
The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the legacy of failed Republican imperialism of the past.
...well, there goes any credibility you might have had. There isn't *any* "imperialism" in either party's foreign policy.
If there was, Japan would be the 51st state, we would have annexed Germany, and Iraq and Afghanistan would be at least partly ours, to name a few.
Whenever I see "imperialism" used to describe American foreign policy, my BS detector goes off. That's all the further I'm going with this discussion; followups will be ignored...it's clearly a waste of my time talking to someone who actually believes Americans have "imperialist" policies.
We'll see...everyone called Reagan stupid and ignorant and heaped invective on him for his Evil Empire comments - they claimed it provoked the Soviet Union, and they wanted appeasement of the Communists. But Reagan said that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history.
It took a number of years, but Reagan was shown to be right. You have to put what he did in the context of the times - he did this when there was the serious possibility that the Soviets would dominate the world. Since the fall, there were high-ranking Soviet officials who blamed the fall on those comments. Not to mention that once the Soviets knew we were going to go ahead with SDI, it broke their spirit.
This isn't to say that we are meeting the same problem here - but pundits are already judging the "war on terrorism" barely a year into it, and that's hardly an accurate assessment. Just remember what people said about Reagan at the time of his comments. Even the State Department would strike out his comments like "Evil Empire" and "tear down this wall". But he was right, and more than any other single person, he brought about the end of that Evil Empire due to his straight talking and weapons buildup and negotiating style.
Also, about your comments about "alleged" bomb building - do you know that according to one of Saddam's own bomb builders (he wrote a book, and I can't find the name right now. He worked for Saddam for 20yrs.), when we invaded Iraq the first time, they were *months* away from having a nuke?
So let history be the judge. Just about everything liberals (and most conservative elites, too) predicted about Reagan was wrong.
All I can say is that I was very, very, very glad that Gore lost and Bush won when those cowardly Islamic nutballs murdered thousands of Americans. Before that, I was pretty ambivalent...but when it comes to foreign policy, sorry, Dems lose every time, and they have been wrong on every major issue over the past 20-30 years.
That's true, but there is a huge diffrence between national socialism, of facism, and socialism. If you don't know the diffrence, you really shouldn't be talking.
This post has some references that you might be interested in.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Hitler+ties+to++ marxism&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=jo hannp-1905961046210001%40news.aimnet.com&rnum= 2
Maybe it's *you* who should not be doing the talking.
For someone who can barely spell, you sure do have a high opinion of yourself. And again, the ad hominem attack. You are making this too easy.
No, I don't have references handy, but I'm sure you can dig them up yourself. A visit to your local library may help you.
Stalin threw communists into concentration camps; just because the Nazis did proves little.
I could use some humor - why don't you tell me what you think the Nazis stood for? And how they *didn't* have a centrally administered economy? Or how using the Jew as a scapegoat *isn't* class warfare?
I know *exactly* what today's liberal Democrats stand for - I used to be one of them. I was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, so believe me when I say this.
In any case, my original intent was to show that of today's two major parties, Democrats are the ones who are closer to the Nazis. I'm not saying Democrats are two steps away from building concentration camps, but it's certain that Republicans are nowhere near the Nazis.
What about Senator Byrd? What about Al Gore's dad? What about Hillary Clinton?...but are Confederate flag wavers...
The Confederate flag only became an "issue" because some folks in the civil rights industry decided to make it one. This is just ridiculous, but it's the same sort of thinking behind folks saying "the American flag stands for a racist, imperialist, homophobic, sexist country". That is, the thinking is utter nonsense.
You want to know what I saw just a few days after 9/11? I pulled up to a light, and I saw a black gentleman in the car to my right, and he had a bandana on - made out of the Confederate flag. When he pulled away, I saw he a Confederate flag on his car, too. I suppose you'll tell me he's an "Uncle Tom", or worse, a "house nigger" as some of the more sensitive Black Caucus members have been wont to use against opponents.
Well, thanks for the ad hominem attack. I'm not incessently bitching about the left, I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. When a conservative does something idiotic, I jump on them, too, because I'm a Libertarian. HOWEVER, since most of the media is left-leaning, they do a fine job of doing that already, so most of what I'd have to add would be superfluous.
In any case, Byrd may not be majority leader or minority leader, but he is called the "conscience of the Senate" by his fawning supporters.
It doesn't really *matter* what position they are in, someone who is a Democrat with a past will have legions of people covering and spinning for him, including his own party members. What does that say about what the left will sink to?
When a conservative does something stupid like Lott, even conservatives call him out...
Who wants to end LEGAL immigration? Even Pat Buchanan doesn't want this. I don't know who you are talking about.
Decisive action? What decisive action? Shaking his dick at Iraq? Pissing on the constitution? Gore would have the same thing with Afghanistan, almost anyone would have (maybe not Nader...) to say otherwise is idiotic.
Assuming you're not joking, let's see...
Bush formed a coalition of countries (that naysayers said would never happen) and dismantled the Taliban. Bush made his Axis of Evil speech...which was *incredibly* decisive. I know liberals *hate* this sort of thing, but it's necessary. Reagan said the same thing of the Soviet Union, and we all saw the results.
Gore most certainly would NOT have done the same thing. Ask yourself: what did the Clinton/*GORE* administration do about the first WTC bombing, besides treat it as a "crime"? What about the bombing of the USS Cole?
Go back and re-read the last half of my post. There are many many many lightbulbs. There is one Internet. If there was a huge frikkin lightbulb somewhere on earth, and when anyone refered to The Lightbulb they were talking about That One Big Frikkin Lightbulb, would it be inappropriate for a person to say they had a hand in creating it?
You got derailed in your debating points here, and in fact, you made my point that there is not difference in this example between "invent" and "create". Let's compare the Internet to something more apt: the telephone network. There is only one "telephone network" - a network of networks, true, but there is one, just like the Internet. If I say I "created the telephone network", explain to me how that is different than "invented the telephone network". It didn't exist before (well, part of the infrastructure did for both Internet and phone network, but that's moot), so create and invent mean the same thing in this context.
And yes, the Internet as we have it today was the result of the work of many, many people across several decades. What Gore was talking about was what he did AS A CONGRESSMAN, not as a scientest, not as a businessman setting up isp's. AS A CONGRESSMAN.
And I'm asking what concrete legislation did he pen or get passed for him to claim *any* credit whatsoever? I'm not saying that he claimed he wrote the TCP/IP stack, or defined the protocol. I just want to know what he did, even as a politician, to actually further the work and research already being done.
Lastly: while you're nitpicking a comment Gore made in an interview, what do you have to say about Bush TAKING CREDIT FOR SOMETHING HE VETOED. In one of the 2000 debates, Bush said "you know the state of Texas is the first to allow patients to sue their HMO's." Bush VETOED that bill as govenor, and he only let it become law without his signarture when the state legislature had enough votes to override his veto. The fact that so many people have made so much hay over lies that Gore never made, but will let a shitsack like Bush sit there and take credit for something he fought against tooth and nail, does not fill me with hope for the future of humanity.
Again, your debating style really needs work. Attacking Bush when we are talking about *Gore* is using the EDI (Everbody Does It) defense. Try to stay focused. I'm not talking about Bush, nor am I defending him. We are talking about what Gore said, and how to interpret both his statement OUT of context, as well as the deeper question of the meaning behind his statement IN context.
And namecalling like "shitsack" only hinders your case.
I'm waiting for you to evoke Hitler's name or "fascist" next.
If you are comparing Bush to Hitler, give me a break...only someone with a muddled sense of history could think that Republicans have anything in common with Hitler or fascism.
1. Hitler's party was called the National Socialist Party. 2. Germany was a long way down the path of collectivization to begin with, and the Nazis "inherited" that fine tradition...they also got some of their "best" ideas from Stalin. 3. Industries were nationalized. 4. The Nazis passed gun control laws as soon as they got into power. 5. Nazis engaged in class warfare.
If these sound familiar, it's because these are things the Democrats support.
Tell me: which plank of the conservative platform supports any of the Nazi's planks? I'd love to hear it. In what way are Republicans "destroying the country"? Concrete examples, please.
It sounds to me like you get your "news" from The Nation. I wonder if you apologize for Stalin and Chairman Mao, too, even though Stalin's murder alone far outstripped Hitler's?
Lastly, about equal rights: Clinton was heralded for having a diverse administration, but notice the Bush has two very competent black people in very high positions (Rice and Powell) not just some token positions. Anyone who thinks Republicans are racists is seriously deluding themselves.
BTW: I suggest you read _The Road to Serfdom_. It might broaden your mind a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm....let's apply this thinking to CEOs:
Younger folks have more stamina, so they could go 14-16 hours a day:
1. Attending back-to-back excruciatingly boring meetings.
2. Writing memos.
3. Making phone calls.
4. Going to press conferences.
5. Traveling.
6. Catching up on random things on the weekend.
7. Shmoozing clients by taking them to the golf course, dinner, sports outings, etc..
8. Anything else...
The older guys just won't be able to keep up with the younger set on this, and they "cut their teeth " on "old" methods of human interaction and business practices. After all, it's a different world now from what it was back when those older guys were in their twenties, isn't it?
So, does that mean older CxO's should be fired and those positions given to any old uni grad who took business and happens to show some promise?
Well, that is, pardon my French, just fucking stupid thinking.
If someone went to school for Comp Sci, why on Earth does that translate into being an entrepeneur or manager by the time you are 30? Here's a clue: some folks *love* coding, and will always love coding, and working for a living is not a "free ride" in any case.
Sheesh. Talk about daft.
How about giving it some oomph? How about NADzilla? :)
games, software, and music. Then everyone who wants to actually OWN any sort of content for even legitimate re-use can be considered a criminal.
Ayn Rand was right: governments have to create criminals. Well, in this case, it's a group of corps, but it's the same notion, and only the government can enforce crappy legislation like DMCA, anyway.
Rest assured that I will NEVER buy this movie media format. Let's just hope this goes the way of Divx and the dodo bird.
If Clinton's "positive" image helped so much, why did the economy start to slide the spring of 2000? Before we even knew who would have the office?
That being said, I think the jobs that dried up during these recession years are not coming back to these shores...I should have taken on a career that had some sort, any sort, of protection. IT is dead end. There is no way I'm going to make it to retirement in this field - and I'm no dummy. I can't even begin to tell you how much experience in all the buzzwords that I have. I've done the whole gamut, too: requirements gathering, design, DB design, all the way through to maintenance. It won't matter much to corps looking to follow the Nike model (cut labor costs by using next to no American labor; continue to sell at exorbitant prices to Americans). Well, it can't last forever. If there are no more middle class folks, there will be NO ONE to buy the products. I'm Libertarian, but I've never been a fan of globalism as it's being carried out here. American policies have to be there to protect AMERICANS - I don't give a rip about others - if we can help them, that's nice, but that comes secondary to Americans' interests. And policies cannot be set up just to protect CEO interests. I say if companies hire more than a certain percentage of their staff offshore, then the CEO/COO/VPs, etc., need to live in that country, too.
I hate to be so negative, but it's rough out there, and it's only going to get rougher. As people have pointed out, it's a race to the bottom. Corps want wage slaves and automatons, not uppity individuals with any sort of opinion. It doesn't matter how much "value" you can try to angle for, you'll still be out the door the minute they can snap up an h1b to do your job for 1/2 your wages, or better yet, send it to some third world country like India for 1/10 your wages.
Actually, if you think about it, taxing real estate is sort of like taxing an 'unrefined, natural resource', and people have done that for a whole lot longer than they've taxed almost anything else.
...and that's why Libertarians call taxes "slavery". Because they are. Once people allow all these taxes, especially pernicious ones like real estate taxes, to creep into their lives, you can kiss true liberty goodbye. And we have, a long, long time ago.
Yes, but the sort of environments where people feel they mustn't be the last to come in in the morning, or the first to leave at the end of the day aren't necessarily fostering productivity...many are just putting in the time for show, not any real "work".
I've set myself a policy that I've stuck by for most of the years I've worked (except the first few wasted years of having no life that made me set that policy in the first place) - I work 8 hours a day, and then go home, and by all means avoid working on the weekend. I get my stuff done on time and under budget. When PMs or marketing or whoever is trying to set a ridiculous schedule so that *I* and others get to work overtime to meet it, I call them on it.
Workers working overtime is a bad reflection on *management*, and I have refused to continue working for folks who figure overtime into their software "schedules".
Of course, the economy blows right now, so I take what I can get - as a contractor. And you know how contractors get paid - if I work 80 hours a week, I'm going to be paid for those 80 hours.
Personally, I think the whole "exempt" thing is ridiculous. If companies want the work, they need to *pay* for that work. For another thing, people compare salaries by K/yr across different careers and jobs, which is utterly fallacious. Teachers might get paid 30K/yr, for example, and *some* developers 80K/yr. But if you work 60-80hr week as a developer 50weeks a year vs. 40-60hr week as a teacher only part of the year, who is earning more per hour? What if the developer works 80-100hr/week? These are not unreasonable numbers, too, especially for spineless developers.
This just sounds like the dire warnings of a Luddite to me.
What about the HUGE benefits you could gain from this? Did you ever eat one of those nutritional bars that taste like sawdust? They are really good for you (if you get the right bar; many are just trash) and can help stave off hunger for a few hours instead of snacking on crap food, but boy, do they taste bad. Something like this applied to bars would be great...and that's just one example...the long-term benefits to mankind could be stunning.
And...some of those evolved traits we have are seriously outmoded by the state of the modern world. Would you argue that fight or flight is always a good trait in the modern world?
No, no, no.
Like all technology discovered or created since fire, this could be used for good or bad.
But done right, this could do a lot towards ending famine - not that we don't have the technology now, but we'd (the U.S.) have even more food to export as a result: people could/would switch to growing soybeans instead of raising livestock, since something like tofu could meet both the nutritional and taste requirements for many people if this technology takes off.
People would never eat something that tastes good and doesn't have nutritional value, since at least at first, meals like these would cost more...so they'd want to have something almost perfectly balanced, and yet tasty. Imagine: manufacturers could make MREs that taste GREAT and are perfectly constructed to be a well-balanced meal in proteins, fats, carbs, sugars, etc...
Yes. Thanks mostly to freedom (social and financial freedom)...not Big Government policy wonks. There have been a few things that Big Government has done to help things along (many of them a product of the military machine), but for the most part the government is there to *manage* problems, not *solve* them. You see, if a problem is solved, a department or program or what have you is no longer necessary.
Some would argue that they *are* pissing in the wind.
Beyond some environmental protections, the meddlings of big government in the private sector have brought about what good, exactly? And who do those people rely on for their expert testimony even when they do good things?
They rely on economists (math) and scientists and lawyers.
Man that's a shame that administration officials see that your mission is to help students succeed. What bollocks.
:)
But...MIS is for CS dropouts, is it not? The only ones I met who weren't were ones who said they wanted to be the ones "bossing you computer geeks around".
In my (admittedly limited) experience it breaks down like this:
1. "traditional" engineering -> ball-buster. I had many engineering friends in school, and those guys busted their hump. Big workload, tough classes, many weed-out courses. Those guys get infinite respect from me.
2. Comp Sci...many of the same classes (weed-outs) as engineers for the first two years. Some of the CS-specific courses like Algorithms (proving the big-O of them, for the most part) could be real ball-busters. Bonus: no EIT exams.
3. MIS - I don't know what those guys did, but at my school, the only "programming" requirement was a Cobol course. No algorithms class, no linear algebra, etc. And MIS is where the CS dropouts ended up.
4. Liberal arts - a lot of reading. Yes, some profs let you get by with BS'ing, but sometimes the reading requirement was HUGE. I know, I took some of those courses as general electives. Oddly enough, I was often the top-scoring student in those classes. Kind of pokes a hole in the "engineers/computer nerds can't grok LA topics" theory. It was always a drag to have to write some of those longer papers, though...especially if the topic was getting strained. My (major) comp sci projects usually took much, much longer, but then again, that's my bread and butter, so it only got old when it was the 11th hour and you realized you'd be up until 9am finishing up the work.
5. Accounting/Finance/Business. I know it's anecdotal, but I don't think I ever met someone who opted for these that had much intelligence (whether left-brain, right-brain, "street smarts", etc), and they certainly were never working on schoolwork. And still landing A's.
6. Art majors. It seems the prereqs are smoking clove cigarettes, wearing black, waking at about 5pm, and staying up until dawn after clubbing all night. What great fun! I wish I knew of a way to take art in school and have a sure-fire job when I finished.
All this talk of school reminds me of the time I took differential equations as a *general elective* because I didn't get to sign up for the LA class in time. Shudder....
Give the multiculturalists enough time, and they'll get their claws into the science and engineering courses, too, and we will see grade inflation there, too. These folks have confused equal *opportunity* with equal *outcomes*.
For those interested in reading more about grade inflation, check out Illiberal Education, by Dinesh D'Souza. A bit outdated, but still relevant.
From:= 14839
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID
Bumper Mentality
By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly
December 20, 2002
Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such assholes? Surely it's no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the Lincoln Navigator.
Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, "High and Mighty," the connection between the two isn't a coincidence. Unlike any other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be.
According to market research conducted by the country's leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."
He says, too, that SUV drivers generally don't care about anyone else's kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have control over the people around them. David Bostwick, Chrysler's market research director, tells Bradsher, "If you have a sport utility, you can have the smoked windows, put the children in the back and pretend you're still single."
Armed with such research, automakers have, over the past decade, ramped up their SUV designs to appeal even more to the "reptilian" instincts of the many Americans who are attracted to SUVs not because of their perceived safety, but for their obvious aggressiveness. Automakers have intentionally designed the latest models to resemble ferocious animals. The Dodge Durango, for instance, was built to resemble a savage jungle cat, with vertical bars across the grille to represent teeth and big jaw-like fenders. Bradsher quotes a former Ford market researcher who says the SUV craze is "about not letting anything get in your way, and at the extreme, about intimidating others to get out of your way."
Not surprisingly, most SUV customers over the past decade hail from a group that is the embodiment of American narcissism: baby boomers. Affluent and often socially liberal, baby boomers have embraced the four-wheel-drive SUV as a symbol of their ability to defy the conventions of old age, of their independence and "outdoorsiness," making the off-road vehicle a force to be reckoned with on the American blacktop.
But as Bradsher declares in his title, this baby boomer fetish is considerably more harmful than the mere annoyance of yet another Rolling Stones tour or the endless commercials for Propecia. In their attempt to appear youthful and hip, SUV owners have filled the American highways with vehicles that exact a distinctly human cost, frequently killing innocent drivers who would have survived a collision with a lesser vehicle. Bradsher quotes auto execs who concede that the self-centered lifestyle of SUV buyers is apparent in "their willingness to endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety."
After covering the auto industry for six years, Bradsher is an unabashed critic of sport-utility vehicles and the automakers that continue to churn them out knowing full well the dangers they pose. He doesn't equivocate in his feeling that driving an SUV is a deeply immoral act that places the driver's own ego above the health and safety of those around him, not to mention the health of the environment. Ironically, and though most supposedly safety-conscious owners don't realize it, SUVs even imperil those who drive them.
Road Rodeo
Ask a typical SUV driver why he drives such a formidable vehicle, and he'll invariably insist that it's for safety reasons - the kids, you know - not because he's too vain to get behind the wheel of a sissy Ford Windstar. Automakers themselves know otherwise - their own market research tells them so.
But Bradsher makes painfully clear that the belief in SUV safety is a delusion. For decades, automakers seeking to avoid tougher fuel economy standards have invoked the fiction that the bigger the car, the safer the passenger. As a result, most Americans take it on faith that the only way to be safe on the highway is to be driving a tank (or the next best thing, a Hummer). Bradsher shatters this myth and highlights the strange disconnect between the perception and the reality of SUVs.
The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars - 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of rollover; 62 percent of SUV deaths in 2000 occurred in rollover accidents. SUVs don't handle well, so drivers can't respond quickly when the car hits a stretch of uneven pavement or "trips" by scraping a guardrail. Even a small bump in the road is enough to flip an SUV traveling at high speed. On top of that, SUV roofs are not reinforced to protect the occupants against rollover; nor does the government require them to be.
Because of their vehicles' size and four-wheel drive, SUV drivers tend to overestimate their own security, which prompts many to drive like maniacs, particularly in inclement weather. And SUV drivers - ever image-conscious and overconfident - seem to hate seat belts as much as they love talking on their cell phones while driving. Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those killed in roll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the general driving population now buckles up regularly.
While failing to protect their occupants, SUVs have also made the roads more dangerous for others. The "kill rate," as Bradsher calls it, for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken. Government researchers have found that a behemoth like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe.
Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side - not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening.
But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.
Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his 2-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.
To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)
The tragedy of SUVs is that highway fatalities were actually in decline before SUVs came into vogue, even though Americans were driving farther. This is true largely for one simple reason: the seatbelt. Seatbelt usage rose from 14 percent in 1984 to 73 percent in 2001. But seatbelts aren't much help if you're sideswiped by an Escalade, a prospect that looms yet more ominously as SUVs enter the used-car market. Not surprisingly, last year, for the first time in a decade, the number of highway deaths actually rose.
No Roads Scholars Here
Bradsher blames government for failing to adequately regulate SUVs, but doesn't fully acknowledge the degree to which it has encouraged SUV production by becoming a major consumer of them. Law enforcement and public safety agencies in particular seem enamored of the menacing vehicles, a fact on proud display when officers finally apprehended the alleged snipers in the Washington, D.C., area and transported them to the federal courthouse in a parade of black Ford Explorers and Expeditions.
Judging from the number of official SUVs on the road today, law enforcement officials - those most likely to know firsthand the grisly effects of a rollover - are enthusiastic customers. Like the rest of America, police departments seem to believe that replacing safe, sturdy cars with SUVs is a good idea, though it's hard to imagine a more dangerous vehicle for an officer conducting a high-speed chase.
Government's taste for SUVs isn't limited to cops and firemen. There's hardly a city in America where the mayor's chauffeured Lincoln Town Car hasn't been replaced by an SUV. In Virginia, where state officials recently discovered that SUVs were wrecking their efforts to meet clean-air regulations, a few noted sheepishly that perhaps local governments should sell their own fleets, which had ballooned to 250 in Fairfax County alone. (A Fairfax County official told The Washington Post that public safety officials needed four-wheel drive and large cargo spaces to transport extra people and emergency equipment through snow or heavy rain - proof that even law enforcement officials misunderstand SUV safety records.)
As Bradsher details, because of their weight, shoddy brakes, and off-road tires, SUVs handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble stopping on slick roads. What's more, they're generally so poorly designed as not to be capable of carrying much cargo, despite the space. A contributing factor in the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle was that drivers weren't told that their Explorers shouldn't carry any more weight than a Ford Taurus. The extra weight routinely piled in these big cars stressed the tires in a way that made them fall apart faster and contributed to the spate of rollover deaths.
I have a hunch that government officials' justification for buying SUVs is mostly a ruse for their real motivation, which is the same as any other SUV owner's: image. Officials can safely load up their fleets with leather-seated SUVs, whereas using taxpayer dollars to buy themselves, say, a fleet of BMW coupes would get them crucified (even though Detroit considers SUVs luxury vehicles and designs them accordingly). Police departments may claim that they need an SUV to accommodate SWAT teams or canine units, but there is no reason that Sparky the drug dog wouldn't be just as comfortable in the back of a nice safe Chevy Astrovan.
The same is true for nearly everyone who drives an SUV today. Of course, not every SUV owner is gripped by insecurity and a death wish - plenty of otherwise reasonable people seem to get seduced by power and size (see sidebar).
But if soccer moms and office-park dads really need to ferry a lot of people around, they could simply get a large car or a minivan, which Bradsher hails as a great innovation for its fuel efficiency, safety, and lower pollution. (And minivans don't have a disproportionately high kill rate for motorists or pedestrians when they get into accidents.) According to industry market research, minivan drivers also tend to be very nice people. Minivans are favored by senior citizens and others (male and female, equally) who volunteer for their churches and carpool with other people's kids. But that's the problem. SUV owners buy them precisely because they don't want the "soccer mom" stigma associated with minivans.
While Bradsher does a magnificent job of shattering the myths about SUVs, he has a difficult time proposing a solution. Sport utility vehicles have become like guns: Everyone knows they're dangerous, but you can't exactly force millions of Americans to give them up overnight. And because the SUV is single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the once-depressed American auto industry, the economy is now so dependent on their production that it would be nearly impossible to get them off the road.
Bradsher suggests regulating SUVs like cars rather than as light trucks, so that they would be forced to comply with fuel-efficiency standards and safety regulations. He also proposes that the insurance industry stop shifting the high costs of the SUV dangers onto car owners by raising premium prices for SUVs to reflect the amount of damage they cause. But these ideas, commendable though they are, fall short of a perfect answer.
Clearly, the best solution would be for Americans to realize the danger of SUVs and simply stop buying them. Social pressure can be a powerful determinant on car choices, as seen in Japan, the one country where SUVs have not caught on because of cultural checks that emphasize the good of the community over that of the individual. There are signs that perhaps public sentiment is beginning to shift against SUV drivers here, too, as activists have begun to leave nasty flyers on SUV windshields berating drivers for fouling the environment and other offenses.
But for a true reckoning to take place, image-obsessed Americans will need to fully understand the SUV's true dangers - including to themselves - before they will willingly abandon it to the junkyard. Spreading that message against the nation's biggest advertiser - the auto industry - will be tough work. Drivers can only hope that Bradsher's book will cut through the chatter.
You seek the best talent for the job. And if this guy happens to come from another country, well, so be it.
Nice in theory. It doesn't really work that way in practice, though, does it?
Companies seek the cheapest, longest-working, talented people they can find. An added bonus is having a worker who can't easily jump to another company, as well as a worker they don't have to give benefits to.
*This* is why companies lobby for more H1Bs instead of a speedier path to permanent immigration. If, as everyone says, the H1B is a "gateway visa", then why not do away with the H1B entirely, and put foreigners on a path to permanent immigration if they are qualified to do the work here? One has to assume that the companies think having indentured servants is to their benefit since they do not lobby for this.
The labor market for technical people is still extremely tight.
...we need to increase the H1B visa program until the salaries of technical people are on par, rather than above average, with other four-year degree professionals.
Wait...are you saying that it's hard to find techies? I don't know where you live, but I haven't been able to find a job for almost six months now, and it's not for lack of looking. Anyway...
This sounds like corporate welfare to me. Why not do the same for all professions, then? Maybe *I* think doctors or lawyers or VPs or CxOs get paid too much, let's bring in H1Bs to replace take *their* jobs until salaries are in the range I think they should be. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Well, no less ridiculous than the H1B program. I do agree with that one poster that said we should propose bringing in foreign workers for *all* professions - then we'd at least everyone could benefit from the competition.
Every other country in the world practices some sort of protection for their workers, why should America be any different? It's insane to think that INS and other institutions that my taxes pay for should do otherwise. Americans should look out for Americans. It's not xenophobic. It's common sense.
The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the legacy of failed Republican imperialism of the past.
...well, there goes any credibility you might have had. There isn't *any* "imperialism" in either party's foreign policy.
If there was, Japan would be the 51st state, we would have annexed Germany, and Iraq and Afghanistan would be at least partly ours, to name a few.
Whenever I see "imperialism" used to describe American foreign policy, my BS detector goes off. That's all the further I'm going with this discussion; followups will be ignored...it's clearly a waste of my time talking to someone who actually believes Americans have "imperialist" policies.
We'll see...everyone called Reagan stupid and ignorant and heaped invective on him for his Evil Empire comments - they claimed it provoked the Soviet Union, and they wanted appeasement of the Communists. But Reagan said that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history.
It took a number of years, but Reagan was shown to be right. You have to put what he did in the context of the times - he did this when there was the serious possibility that the Soviets would dominate the world. Since the fall, there were high-ranking Soviet officials who blamed the fall on those comments. Not to mention that once the Soviets knew we were going to go ahead with SDI, it broke their spirit.
This isn't to say that we are meeting the same problem here - but pundits are already judging the "war on terrorism" barely a year into it, and that's hardly an accurate assessment. Just remember what people said about Reagan at the time of his comments. Even the State Department would strike out his comments like "Evil Empire" and "tear down this wall". But he was right, and more than any other single person, he brought about the end of that Evil Empire due to his straight talking and weapons buildup and negotiating style.
Also, about your comments about "alleged" bomb building - do you know that according to one of Saddam's own bomb builders (he wrote a book, and I can't find the name right now. He worked for Saddam for 20yrs.), when we invaded Iraq the first time, they were *months* away from having a nuke?
So let history be the judge. Just about everything liberals (and most conservative elites, too) predicted about Reagan was wrong.
All I can say is that I was very, very, very glad that Gore lost and Bush won when those cowardly Islamic nutballs murdered thousands of Americans. Before that, I was pretty ambivalent...but when it comes to foreign policy, sorry, Dems lose every time, and they have been wrong on every major issue over the past 20-30 years.
That's true, but there is a huge diffrence between national socialism, of facism, and socialism. If you don't know the diffrence, you really shouldn't be talking.
+ marxism&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=jo hannp-1905961046210001%40news.aimnet.com&rnum= 2
This post has some references that you might be interested in.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Hitler+ties+to+
Maybe it's *you* who should not be doing the talking.
For someone who can barely spell, you sure do have a high opinion of yourself. And again, the ad hominem attack. You are making this too easy.
No, I don't have references handy, but I'm sure you can dig them up yourself. A visit to your local library may help you.
Stalin threw communists into concentration camps; just because the Nazis did proves little.
I could use some humor - why don't you tell me what you think the Nazis stood for? And how they *didn't* have a centrally administered economy? Or how using the Jew as a scapegoat *isn't* class warfare?
I know *exactly* what today's liberal Democrats stand for - I used to be one of them. I was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, so believe me when I say this.
In any case, my original intent was to show that of today's two major parties, Democrats are the ones who are closer to the Nazis. I'm not saying Democrats are two steps away from building concentration camps, but it's certain that Republicans are nowhere near the Nazis.
P.S.: Have you read The Road to Serfdom?
What about Senator Byrd? What about Al Gore's dad? What about Hillary Clinton? ...but are Confederate flag wavers...
The Confederate flag only became an "issue" because some folks in the civil rights industry decided to make it one. This is just ridiculous, but it's the same sort of thinking behind folks saying "the American flag stands for a racist, imperialist, homophobic, sexist country". That is, the thinking is utter nonsense.
You want to know what I saw just a few days after 9/11? I pulled up to a light, and I saw a black gentleman in the car to my right, and he had a bandana on - made out of the Confederate flag. When he pulled away, I saw he a Confederate flag on his car, too. I suppose you'll tell me he's an "Uncle Tom", or worse, a "house nigger" as some of the more sensitive Black Caucus members have been wont to use against opponents.
Well, thanks for the ad hominem attack. I'm not incessently bitching about the left, I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. When a conservative does something idiotic, I jump on them, too, because I'm a Libertarian. HOWEVER, since most of the media is left-leaning, they do a fine job of doing that already, so most of what I'd have to add would be superfluous.
In any case, Byrd may not be majority leader or minority leader, but he is called the "conscience of the Senate" by his fawning supporters.
It doesn't really *matter* what position they are in, someone who is a Democrat with a past will have legions of people covering and spinning for him, including his own party members. What does that say about what the left will sink to?
When a conservative does something stupid like Lott, even conservatives call him out...
Who wants to end LEGAL immigration? Even Pat Buchanan doesn't want this. I don't know who you are talking about.
Decisive action? What decisive action? Shaking his dick at Iraq? Pissing on the constitution? Gore would have the same thing with Afghanistan, almost anyone would have (maybe not Nader...) to say otherwise is idiotic.
Assuming you're not joking, let's see...
Bush formed a coalition of countries (that naysayers said would never happen) and dismantled the Taliban. Bush made his Axis of Evil speech...which was *incredibly* decisive. I know liberals *hate* this sort of thing, but it's necessary. Reagan said the same thing of the Soviet Union, and we all saw the results.
Gore most certainly would NOT have done the same thing. Ask yourself: what did the Clinton/*GORE* administration do about the first WTC bombing, besides treat it as a "crime"? What about the bombing of the USS Cole?
And where is this "pissing on the Constitution"?
Go back and re-read the last half of my post. There are many many many lightbulbs. There is one Internet. If there was a huge frikkin lightbulb somewhere on earth, and when anyone refered to The Lightbulb they were talking about That One Big Frikkin Lightbulb, would it be inappropriate for a person to say they had a hand in creating it?
You got derailed in your debating points here, and in fact, you made my point that there is not difference in this example between "invent" and "create". Let's compare the Internet to something more apt: the telephone network. There is only one "telephone network" - a network of networks, true, but there is one, just like the Internet. If I say I "created the telephone network", explain to me how that is different than "invented the telephone network". It didn't exist before (well, part of the infrastructure did for both Internet and phone network, but that's moot), so create and invent mean the same thing in this context.
And yes, the Internet as we have it today was the result of the work of many, many people across several decades. What Gore was talking about was what he did AS A CONGRESSMAN, not as a scientest, not as a businessman setting up isp's. AS A CONGRESSMAN.
And I'm asking what concrete legislation did he pen or get passed for him to claim *any* credit whatsoever? I'm not saying that he claimed he wrote the TCP/IP stack, or defined the protocol. I just want to know what he did, even as a politician, to actually further the work and research already being done.
Lastly: while you're nitpicking a comment Gore made in an interview, what do you have to say about Bush TAKING CREDIT FOR SOMETHING HE VETOED. In one of the 2000 debates, Bush said "you know the state of Texas is the first to allow patients to sue their HMO's." Bush VETOED that bill as govenor, and he only let it become law without his signarture when the state legislature had enough votes to override his veto. The fact that so many people have made so much hay over lies that Gore never made, but will let a shitsack like Bush sit there and take credit for something he fought against tooth and nail, does not fill me with hope for the future of humanity.
Again, your debating style really needs work. Attacking Bush when we are talking about *Gore* is using the EDI (Everbody Does It) defense. Try to stay focused. I'm not talking about Bush, nor am I defending him. We are talking about what Gore said, and how to interpret both his statement OUT of context, as well as the deeper question of the meaning behind his statement IN context.
And namecalling like "shitsack" only hinders your case.
I'm waiting for you to evoke Hitler's name or "fascist" next.
If you are comparing Bush to Hitler, give me a break...only someone with a muddled sense of history could think that Republicans have anything in common with Hitler or fascism.
1. Hitler's party was called the National Socialist Party.
2. Germany was a long way down the path of collectivization to begin with, and the Nazis "inherited" that fine tradition...they also got some of their "best" ideas from Stalin.
3. Industries were nationalized.
4. The Nazis passed gun control laws as soon as they got into power.
5. Nazis engaged in class warfare.
If these sound familiar, it's because these are things the Democrats support.
Tell me: which plank of the conservative platform supports any of the Nazi's planks? I'd love to hear it. In what way are Republicans "destroying the country"? Concrete examples, please.
It sounds to me like you get your "news" from The Nation. I wonder if you apologize for Stalin and Chairman Mao, too, even though Stalin's murder alone far outstripped Hitler's?
Lastly, about equal rights: Clinton was heralded for having a diverse administration, but notice the Bush has two very competent black people in very high positions (Rice and Powell) not just some token positions. Anyone who thinks Republicans are racists is seriously deluding themselves.
BTW: I suggest you read _The Road to Serfdom_. It might broaden your mind a bit.