The reality is, it's insane for any company with a decent reputation to be getting involved with these scams. Even companies that aren't involved with scamming people might eventually be splattered with mud (or is it mud...) from this kind of sharp practice.
I mean the video game industry is already the go to area for every moral panic, and this is a case where they are being legitimately sleazy and evil...
Seriously, this is on the level of a Nigerian 419 scams... and about as ethical. Even if you are a slimeball who believes that the suckers deserve to be fleeced, you need a Lyle Langley type exit strategy at the least... (Yes, I realize the irony of this given Tapped Out.)
Most of the big US corporations don't make sound business decisions. They are good at shenanigans and not much else. Shady accounting, corruption, price fixing, wage theft, etc.
What would it actually take to destroy Facebook, if we all really wanted to do it (I just mean people mad at this, not the vast public)? In theory, I mean.
It's a Social Network, surely if enough people wanted to eliminate it, we could? we're talking about something entirely reliant on voluntary association, and uniquely vulnerable to people just saying "no thanks."
Frankly, I don't understand how the thing legitimately makes money.
"you corp bootlickers really want that? think it thru, please. erosion of our middle class hurts everyone in the long-run."
Think it through, someday some person who would have developed a cure for some disease that affects a member of the upper class will be mired in poverty and never able to get the education he needs to do it, sure.
We decided to destroy our national ideals of liberty on the altar of security after the events of 09/11/2001. We increased the powers of the state, increased the powers of the police, and made airports into little gulags in response to those events.
Every time someone like Adam Lanza decides to go out and murder a bunch of unarmed victims, we find out all over again that all that we've done has been completely futile, and we could have kept our America.
We'll never know if Adam Lanza had some grievance he thought he was settling by this, but any political terrorist who wants to make a point can see how vulnerable we all still are. Politicians have gotten a taste for the police state though, so their reaction after events like this will be to double down.
It's problematic that an adult terrorist, who may or may not have been mentally incompetent, is being treated like some pre-adolescent school shooter. (not that I think even the pre-adolescent school shooters are handled properly, but people have these strange ideas about the innocence of children).
I don't recall them checking into what video games Ted Kazynski or Timothy McVeigh were playing when they did their mad, but politically motivated, acts. This seems to be a new thing, and it is pretty troubling.
The Chinese haven't been using "rare earth hegemony" to flex their muscles. The Chinese have correctly identified rare earths as an important strategic resource, and therefore aren't in a hurry to sell them at bargain basement prices to whoever wants them.
This of course, has put the people who like buying rare earths cheaply into a snit, and caused them to put their spin machine into action to demonize this as some kind of belligerent act.
If you are getting your news from a video source, you've probably already lost.
(As to print sources, you are on your own to figure out which one of those has good information, but at least you are more likely to be looking at news and not entertainment. )
On the other hand, if you are looking for "news as entertainment," and of the big three will fill your needs. Just don't expect good information.
I should point out that Austerity (putting the Budget Deficit above all) doesn't just mean cutting services, it also means increasing taxes and creating new taxes. In Cyprus they recently proposed a tax where they would just go into your bank account and take a percentage. This was done to pay for a deficit.
So, in the short run, there will be a combination of cutting and taxing to pay down the deficit (whether it will work or not depends on whether you think the shrinkage to the economy will increase the deficit more than the revenue generation can pay it down), but after all cutting has been done and only politically hardened targets remain for cutting, deficit reduction will eventually be imposed purely by new taxes and tax increases.
The picture doesn't show a surreptitious recording device, it shows a pretty obvious recording device. I would probably only wear something like this in a situation where I wanted to take video, but I suppose some folks will wear them all the time. In which case, post a sign like they have at your friendly neighborhood Swingers Club and be done with it. (Again, why get hostile about a video camera just because it can be worn on someones face. The time to get upset about ubiquitous video cameras was when they started including them in cell phones, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Or perhaps back when they started selling small video cameras to the general public, but that ship sailed an even longer time ago.)
Han Solo has been on the run for years from Greedo's family, who are furious that he gunned down Greedo in cold blood.
Han weakly claims, "Greedo shot first," in one scene to try to get the relentless Greedo Family off of his trail, but nobody believes his story, as it sounds far-fetched.
The reasons why the Post Office is currently doomed are mainly that a fairly large portion of the government believes in privatisation. Therefore they are using the same kind of tricks (and some new ones) to destroy the Post Office as were used to destroy Streetcar networks throughout the country. (Mainly this boils down to increase the price, while decreasing the service.)
It's not a funding problem. Find a new way to fund the Post Office (and there have already been some more creative ideas than a simple tax such as allowing the Post Office to offer Internet or banking services), and the people trying to eliminate it will simply figure out ways to send that money into the general budget via various tricks. The problem is that currently the goal is not to save the Post Office but to destroy it, and eliminate a low cost competitor for Fed Ex and UPS.
So, in order to keep the Post Office from being destroyed, you need a large, well funded lobby determined to keep it open to counter the large, well funded lobby determined to close it. (I thought a coalition of large and small businesses who are going to be the source of Fed Ex and UPS's windfall profits as soon as the Post Office is gone would be a place to start, but I'm not much of a political person.)
I wish I could say that Holder was our worst Attorney General. He's criminally corrupt and incompetent to boot, the fact that he's still there speaks to the poor judgement and childish stubbornness of the President of the United States. Seriously, he should have been out a long time ago, and the way certain people get flung under buses for nothing (Shirley Sherrod, Sheila Bair) while others get to hang on forever shows you what this administration and this President really believes in, in case anyone was in doubt.
But if you compare him to his predecessors, it's not that he looks better but that he looks like he fits in. Janet Reno literally put people in prison for Witchcraft, and Alberto Gonzales.presided over the dismantling of many constitutional protections.
So, they've been a bad bunch, and it's an office people really need to pay attention too.
I expect Carmen Ortiz will be an Attorney General some day.
Sometimes we don't get enough feedback from our bosses at work, but usually we get reviews a certain number of times a year.
Are your reviews telling you? "Shape up or ship out."
Or are they saying, "Smooth Sailing?"
If you are having poor reviews then this is an employment problem, if your reviews are fine then it is simply a personal problem.
If you've already been getting bad reviews at work, you should probably be getting your resume in order, and doing other stuff to make the transition to another job. It's too late for salvation at this job, but your next job might be better, provided you take your time and look carefully.
On the other hand, if your boss loves you and consistently gives you good reviews then you aren't doing anything wrong. You are probably feeling guilty because your job actually only takes a fraction of your day, and you therefore have a lot of extra free time.
You may feel like it's a horrible waste to spend that extra free time at your desk on pointless nonsense, but if you finished all your work for the day in the first two hours and then spent the rest of the day staring at the wall, not only would that not be a better use of your time but you might start getting bad reviews because you no longer "look busy."
No, you can't leave the office at 10 and spend the rest of the day golfing, and you can't take up origami in your cube, because the biggest part of your job, aside from your actual job, is to "look busy."
Presumably you need the job for rent or a mortgage, and lunch and the like, so you need to do your job, which is "LOOK BUSY!!!"
Also, if you are getting good reviews from your boss, making enough money, and the job isn't too stressful, why would you change jobs?
Now, you might think, "Well, I could look busy and do something more educational or personally productive than watching episodes of Ninja Scroll on YouTube." Sure. That's probably true, but the trouble with that is if you are doing something personally productive, educational and interesting with your "LOOK BUSY!!" time, then you will have a resistance to dropping it to get back to your real job when it intrudes on you. Your job may only actually take 2 hours a day, but it's probably broken up into dribs and drabs 6.35 minutes here, 8.12 minutes there, over the course of the entire 9 hours your butt is in your chair.
For example, the other day, I solved an Internet problem for a lady working for a mining company in Indonesia.
My job has nothing to do with solving problems, the Internet, Indonesia or mining.
However, I got so into the technical challenges of solving this particular problem that if someone had come to me with some actual work, I would have been tempted to tell them, "Buzz Off, I'm busy." And they'd just sheepishly have gone away, and left me to the task... (none would dare question me!!!) fortunately there was very little actual work to do that particular day.
So, you see the problem, if I had been randomly searching for clips of Lemongrab on Youtube, or looking at pictures of Hot Italian Girls on Facebook, and some coworker came to me with some actual work, I would have guiltily dropped whatever it was and focused on the task at hand.
But because I got so into solving this technical problem at an Indonesian mining company, I felt like I was being more productive doing that than I usually do at my well-paying, relatively secure job, where I am loved by my bosses and have virtually no supervision. (And what did I get for solving the problem? Some heartfelt thanks in broken English, and the promise of a free lunch if I ever get over there... which is pretty unlikely.)
You see the problem.
"LOOK BUSY!!!!"
(Incidentally, I have a problem with vacation time. We're not supposed to carry it over from year to year, and I usually have tons of days left at the end of the year. I'm scared to take it, you see, because then I wouldn't be at my desk, "LOOKING BUSY!!!!!")
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, when read stuff like this, I always say, "If you don't like it, then move to the United States..."
Oh-ho-ho-ho....
I've set up my special Christmas line just for you...
The reality is, it's insane for any company with a decent reputation to be getting involved with these scams. Even companies that aren't involved with scamming people might eventually be splattered with mud (or is it mud...) from this kind of sharp practice.
I mean the video game industry is already the go to area for every moral panic, and this is a case where they are being legitimately sleazy and evil...
Seriously, this is on the level of a Nigerian 419 scams... and about as ethical. Even if you are a slimeball who believes that the suckers deserve to be fleeced, you need a Lyle Langley type exit strategy at the least... (Yes, I realize the irony of this given Tapped Out.)
We should stick with nice, safe, harmless gasoline.
Totally harmless...
Most of the big US corporations don't make sound business decisions. They are good at shenanigans and not much else. Shady accounting, corruption, price fixing, wage theft, etc.
Besides, for Zuckerberg, Gates and company, this isn't a business strategy, it's ideology. It's like the use of stack ranking at Microsoft or always online single player games at Electronic Arts.
A group of peasants (workers, consumers, etc) who must be "kept in their place" is designated, the policies designed to keep them in their place are followed. If they can get government enforcement, so much the better, but if not they can use cartel or monopoly behaviour to try to enforce it. The idea that this is based on rational behavior is nonsense. It's not even naked self-interest. it's as dumb as the old Soviet "inheritance of acquired characteristics" nonsense and possibly even more destructive.
Qu'un sang impur, Abreuve nos sillons!
What would it actually take to destroy Facebook, if we all really wanted to do it (I just mean people mad at this, not the vast public)? In theory, I mean.
It's a Social Network, surely if enough people wanted to eliminate it, we could? we're talking about something entirely reliant on voluntary association, and uniquely vulnerable to people just saying "no thanks."
Frankly, I don't understand how the thing legitimately makes money.
Zuckerberg doesn't have to do that, "The Mountain will come to Mohammed" as it were.
He'll eventually get to enjoy that stuff here... as will the rest of us, just without his money.
I found it more blatant than subtle. I mean they made St. Margaret's hagiography before she was even in the ground!
"you corp bootlickers really want that? think it thru, please. erosion of our middle class hurts everyone in the long-run."
Think it through, someday some person who would have developed a cure for some disease that affects a member of the upper class will be mired in poverty and never able to get the education he needs to do it, sure.
However, if you read "The Most Dangerous" game as a young trust fund brat and said, "gee, I wish I was a Russian aristocrat with my own Island where i could hunt humans for sport," well, golly, we get closer and closer to that everyday. Soon the rich will be able to do whatever they want to whatever non-rich person they want, and no one can do a thing about it! A bunch of budding Marquis St. Evrémonde's will be born.
Really, there are some things worth sacrificing a few medical and technological advances for, don't you think?
Any sufficiently large corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
We decided to destroy our national ideals of liberty on the altar of security after the events of 09/11/2001. We increased the powers of the state, increased the powers of the police, and made airports into little gulags in response to those events.
Every time someone like Adam Lanza decides to go out and murder a bunch of unarmed victims, we find out all over again that all that we've done has been completely futile, and we could have kept our America.
We'll never know if Adam Lanza had some grievance he thought he was settling by this, but any political terrorist who wants to make a point can see how vulnerable we all still are. Politicians have gotten a taste for the police state though, so their reaction after events like this will be to double down.
It's problematic that an adult terrorist, who may or may not have been mentally incompetent, is being treated like some pre-adolescent school shooter. (not that I think even the pre-adolescent school shooters are handled properly, but people have these strange ideas about the innocence of children).
I don't recall them checking into what video games Ted Kazynski or Timothy McVeigh were playing when they did their mad, but politically motivated, acts. This seems to be a new thing, and it is pretty troubling.
The Chinese haven't been using "rare earth hegemony" to flex their muscles. The Chinese have correctly identified rare earths as an important strategic resource, and therefore aren't in a hurry to sell them at bargain basement prices to whoever wants them.
This of course, has put the people who like buying rare earths cheaply into a snit, and caused them to put their spin machine into action to demonize this as some kind of belligerent act.
If you are getting your news from a video source, you've probably already lost.
(As to print sources, you are on your own to figure out which one of those has good information, but at least you are more likely to be looking at news and not entertainment. )
On the other hand, if you are looking for "news as entertainment," and of the big three will fill your needs. Just don't expect good information.
I should point out that Austerity (putting the Budget Deficit above all) doesn't just mean cutting services, it also means increasing taxes and creating new taxes. In Cyprus they recently proposed a tax where they would just go into your bank account and take a percentage. This was done to pay for a deficit.
So, in the short run, there will be a combination of cutting and taxing to pay down the deficit (whether it will work or not depends on whether you think the shrinkage to the economy will increase the deficit more than the revenue generation can pay it down), but after all cutting has been done and only politically hardened targets remain for cutting, deficit reduction will eventually be imposed purely by new taxes and tax increases.
That guy is just part of the Soylent Majority.
Next you'll be telling me that the best fried chicken in America isn't KFC and the best hamburgers don't come from McDonald's.
That's treading close to Heresy, that is!
We should not talk about humans as a "herd." That would be like talking about a herd of wolves.
Also this song.
It's a sad story of lost love!
http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY
Brian Roedecker: " It's a little more 'James Bondian' but we are living in a more Blofeldian world."
I haven't decided what I think of Google glasses, but I expect people's reactions to them to resemble a moral panic or neo-ludditism. Surreptitious recording devices are pretty old technology at this point, and they've been available to the general public for years.
Now, look at the Google Glass website:
How to get one
The picture doesn't show a surreptitious recording device, it shows a pretty obvious recording device. I would probably only wear something like this in a situation where I wanted to take video, but I suppose some folks will wear them all the time. In which case, post a sign like they have at your friendly neighborhood Swingers Club and be done with it. (Again, why get hostile about a video camera just because it can be worn on someones face. The time to get upset about ubiquitous video cameras was when they started including them in cell phones, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Or perhaps back when they started selling small video cameras to the general public, but that ship sailed an even longer time ago.)
"sticks and stones will not break my bones"
Um, I'm pretty sure that they will. (That's kind of the point of the nursery rhyme, after all, which you seem to have written wrong.)
Han Solo has been on the run for years from Greedo's family, who are furious that he gunned down Greedo in cold blood.
Han weakly claims, "Greedo shot first," in one scene to try to get the relentless Greedo Family off of his trail, but nobody believes his story, as it sounds far-fetched.
The reasons why the Post Office is currently doomed are mainly that a fairly large portion of the government believes in privatisation. Therefore they are using the same kind of tricks (and some new ones) to destroy the Post Office as were used to destroy Streetcar networks throughout the country. (Mainly this boils down to increase the price, while decreasing the service.)
It's not a funding problem. Find a new way to fund the Post Office (and there have already been some more creative ideas than a simple tax such as allowing the Post Office to offer Internet or banking services), and the people trying to eliminate it will simply figure out ways to send that money into the general budget via various tricks. The problem is that currently the goal is not to save the Post Office but to destroy it, and eliminate a low cost competitor for Fed Ex and UPS.
So, in order to keep the Post Office from being destroyed, you need a large, well funded lobby determined to keep it open to counter the large, well funded lobby determined to close it. (I thought a coalition of large and small businesses who are going to be the source of Fed Ex and UPS's windfall profits as soon as the Post Office is gone would be a place to start, but I'm not much of a political person.)
I wish I could say that Holder was our worst Attorney General. He's criminally corrupt and incompetent to boot, the fact that he's still there speaks to the poor judgement and childish stubbornness of the President of the United States. Seriously, he should have been out a long time ago, and the way certain people get flung under buses for nothing (Shirley Sherrod, Sheila Bair) while others get to hang on forever shows you what this administration and this President really believes in, in case anyone was in doubt.
But if you compare him to his predecessors, it's not that he looks better but that he looks like he fits in. Janet Reno literally put people in prison for Witchcraft, and Alberto Gonzales.presided over the dismantling of many constitutional protections.
So, they've been a bad bunch, and it's an office people really need to pay attention too.
I expect Carmen Ortiz will be an Attorney General some day.
Sometimes we don't get enough feedback from our bosses at work, but usually we get reviews a certain number of times a year.
Are your reviews telling you? "Shape up or ship out."
Or are they saying, "Smooth Sailing?"
If you are having poor reviews then this is an employment problem, if your reviews are fine then it is simply a personal problem.
If you've already been getting bad reviews at work, you should probably be getting your resume in order, and doing other stuff to make the transition to another job. It's too late for salvation at this job, but your next job might be better, provided you take your time and look carefully.
On the other hand, if your boss loves you and consistently gives you good reviews then you aren't doing anything wrong. You are probably feeling guilty because your job actually only takes a fraction of your day, and you therefore have a lot of extra free time.
You may feel like it's a horrible waste to spend that extra free time at your desk on pointless nonsense, but if you finished all your work for the day in the first two hours and then spent the rest of the day staring at the wall, not only would that not be a better use of your time but you might start getting bad reviews because you no longer "look busy."
No, you can't leave the office at 10 and spend the rest of the day golfing, and you can't take up origami in your cube, because the biggest part of your job, aside from your actual job, is to "look busy."
Presumably you need the job for rent or a mortgage, and lunch and the like, so you need to do your job, which is "LOOK BUSY!!!"
Also, if you are getting good reviews from your boss, making enough money, and the job isn't too stressful, why would you change jobs?
Now, you might think, "Well, I could look busy and do something more educational or personally productive than watching episodes of Ninja Scroll on YouTube." Sure. That's probably true, but the trouble with that is if you are doing something personally productive, educational and interesting with your "LOOK BUSY!!" time, then you will have a resistance to dropping it to get back to your real job when it intrudes on you. Your job may only actually take 2 hours a day, but it's probably broken up into dribs and drabs 6.35 minutes here, 8.12 minutes there, over the course of the entire 9 hours your butt is in your chair.
For example, the other day, I solved an Internet problem for a lady working for a mining company in Indonesia.
My job has nothing to do with solving problems, the Internet, Indonesia or mining.
However, I got so into the technical challenges of solving this particular problem that if someone had come to me with some actual work, I would have been tempted to tell them, "Buzz Off, I'm busy." And they'd just sheepishly have gone away, and left me to the task... (none would dare question me!!!) fortunately there was very little actual work to do that particular day.
So, you see the problem, if I had been randomly searching for clips of Lemongrab on Youtube, or looking at pictures of Hot Italian Girls on Facebook, and some coworker came to me with some actual work, I would have guiltily dropped whatever it was and focused on the task at hand.
But because I got so into solving this technical problem at an Indonesian mining company, I felt like I was being more productive doing that than I usually do at my well-paying, relatively secure job, where I am loved by my bosses and have virtually no supervision. (And what did I get for solving the problem? Some heartfelt thanks in broken English, and the promise of a free lunch if I ever get over there... which is pretty unlikely.)
You see the problem.
"LOOK BUSY!!!!"
(Incidentally, I have a problem with vacation time. We're not supposed to carry it over from year to year, and I usually have tons of days left at the end of the year. I'm scared to take it, you see, because then I wouldn't be at my desk, "LOOKING BUSY!!!!!")