Umm i don't consider 20 young. I was coding professionally by that age. By "young", i'm thinking high school age.
Just because you were working doesn't mean you aren't young. Twenty years old IS young in the working world. The vast majority of working professionals are older than 20 so it's merely a statement of fact. Saying someone is young doesn't mean they are saying they are incompetent though they might be implying that they are inexperienced.
In my experience users are more often than not pretty bad at articulating what they need even when they know. Even more often they simply cannot envision doing things a different way. I'm an industrial engineer by training. If I walk out onto our shop floor and ask even my best people what they need (and I do this all the time), I'll usually get a non answer unless it is something like a supply for something they are already doing. You still have to ask (sometimes they have good input) but almost always it is a waste of time. In fact you would be amazed at how few people can write a simple work instruction for something they do every day. They leave steps and critical details and corner cases out often because it is too second nature to them. They're even worse when it comes to writing specifications for things they haven't tried yet.
However when you do run into that rare person who can actually envision and articulate what they want, it is a joyful thing.
In all likelihood neither of those is your customer. Your customer is the person tasked with actually using the device, most likely a nurse or doctor, and the organization that pays you for it. The FDA is certainly not your customer. The FDA's job is to ensure you aren't selling snake oil. They do not buy or use your equipment. They are a regulator not a customer. Just because you have to please them doesn't make them your customer.
If making it easier for the nurse compromises the safety of the patient, its BAD software.
Of course but making it needlessly difficult for the nurse also compromises the safety of the patient AND it hurts operational efficiency which is both a treatment risk and an economic cost. Safety first obviously but don't try to excuse bad design as a safety measure when it isn't.
Fracking doesn't have major effects on oil prices, and won't until cars run on natgas.
Curious since US oil production has increased dramatically recently largely due to close to a million barrels of oil per day coming out of the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations thanks to fracking. You want to explain to me how an extra million barrels of supply a day has no effect on oil prices?
First off, the collusion in the oil industry is not fully known, so we are just guessing when we talk about 'global supply'
Sorry but no conspiracy theories are needed here. Oil is a fungible commodity sold worldwide. Simple supply and demand analysis (with a bit of speculation thrown in) can explain oil pricing rather well. If you want to invoke collusion outside of known cartels like OPEC you need to provide even a hint of evidence that nothing else can explain oil price movements.
If the US automakers hadn't **killed the electric car** there would have been at least an **equal drop in demand**
I think you are going to have a hard time proving that assertion. Your argument basically is falling into the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. I will happily concede that battery technology has not received adequate investment and that car companies (including GM) really dropped the ball here. However it does not automatically follow that electric cars would have had the effect on the market you seem to believe the would have. There were and are significant technology hurdles for electric vehicles to overcome to significantly impact the car market. We very likely might be further along than we are but that isn't the same thing as proving that electric vehicles would have been adopted at a rate sufficient to offset that much oil use.
This is a perfect example of how oil has created such a horrible political mess over the years. It has been very dangerous for us to be so dependent on the middle east.
The only direct dependence the US has on the middle east is due to oil being priced globally. The US isn't particularly dependant on the middle east and OPEC for oil supply. The problem is that other parts of the world are. Oil has created big political messes like Iran due to countries like the US being unable to resist being a bunch of evil a-holes and doing things like overthrowing governments in the region on behalf of oil companies without regard to future consequences. What's astonishing is that our leaders have the nerve to act surprised when it turns out that people in other countries don't like us meddling in their internal affairs.
Relatively little of the oil used in the US comes from the middle east. About 40% of the oil used in the US is produced domestically and this number has been climbing. Of the 316 million barrels imported by the US in August 2013, only 67 million came from the Persian Gulf region or about 21%. This 21% is about 13% of total US oil demand and about 2/3 of that 13% is from Saudi Arabia. In fact Saudi Arabia is the only middle eastern country to crack the top 5 exporters to the US - the others being Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria.
I wonder how soon people will realise that there is really no need for almost all normal non-packet mail.
Not even remotely true. Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers. Furthermore there is no other organization, public or private (including FedEx and UPS), that has the infrastructure to deliver envelopes to virtually any mailing address in the US like the USPS can and certainly not for the price point the USPS charges.
Most could be sent by email. There are very few documents that have to be sent physically but don't require signed or tracked delivery.
Which helps people who cannot afford computers how exactly? Paper mail has a least common denominator quality to it. Pretty much everyone with an address can and does utilize it. Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.
Despite your glib implication that subsidies are not needed, mail remains a vital service and it is important that it be available to everyone, even if this requires subsidies. There is no one else who realistically can replace the USPS including UPS and FedEx. This remains true despite falling mail volumes. Just because the postal service often seems to be mostly a paper spam delivery service doesn't mean it isn't also a vital service for communications. Remove subsidies right now and the USPS will collapse and yes that IS a Bad Thing (tm). While the USPS will need to adapt to modern times, the role it serves is a critical one and that isn't going to change.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
They also used to deliver multiple times a day. So what? We don't need that now. Times change.
If Bitcoin had no value, people wouldn't be paying for them.
The problem with bitcoin isn't that it has no value. Obviously some people (not many) have a use for it. The problem(s) with bitcoin is that it is HIGHLY illiquid, volatile and risky. Few people even know what bitcoin is, and fewer are willing to accept it as a form of payment. Exchange rates bounce around like a caffeinated border collie on a pogo stick which makes for significant exchange rate risk. Furthermore it depends on encryption and one cannot be certain that said encryption is ultimately secure. And those problems are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
This is all well and good and inevitable but society really needs to think hard and fast about what we are going to do with a future where there are only so many jobs available for people with a shovel or a wrench.
This is a recurring fallacy that you are not remotely the first person to point out. Your argument is predicated on the assumption that someone that works with a wrench or a shovel will be unable to do anything else valuable to society in the future. So far every time this argument has been made it has later been proven false by future events. We are tool builders and over time we have built more and more effective tools. These tools eliminate some jobs and help us create new ones. Furthermore labor costs act as a brake against implementation of automation everywhere. I'm a cost accountant professionally and it is trivial to show examples of how it is economically impossible to automate many tasks. Arguments that the robots are going to take all the jobs are basically unfounded paranoia based on ignorance of economics.
It used to be something like 30% of the nation was involved with food production. Thanks to industrialization that's now 1-2%.
In 1870 the number was more like 70%-80%. You seem to be implying that somehow that is a bad thing. Those people who no longer had to work on a farm were then able to participate in other valuable tasks. The very fact that you are able to type on a computer is probably due in large part to the fact that some very smart people didn't have to spend their brain cells trying to grow food.
Even the last bastions of farm work -- fruit picking -- is being inched into by robotics.
Probably not as fast as you seem to be implying since there are literally millions of migrant farm workers employed and there is no automation that is going to replace most of them in the immediate future. Automation only makes sense in certain economic circumstances. If labor is cheap enough it doesn't make much economic sense to automate certain jobs. Companies that spend unnecessarily on automation will go out of business because cheap labor will undercut them. Happens all the time. The US is highly automated in manufacturing but cheap labor from China and other places has out competed automation for many products.
The farm hands who left the fields and went into the factories are now finding themselves being replaced en masse by sophisticated machines.
Those farm hands did a lot more than just go into manufacturing. While manufacturing (like agriculture) is still a huge business in the US and Europe, the majority of the economy hasn't been in either of those two sectors for some time now. People have ALWAYS obsoleted some jobs with machines and created new ones at the same time. We're tool makers. That's what we do. It's a bizarre argument that somehow we should stop doing what we are best at.
we need unions to stop BS like this and make it so you can't fire demote some one with out real proof.
A union isn't going to solve any of Yahoo's problems nor those of the people who work for Yahoo. I'm guessing from your rather glib comment that you don't have much actual experience with their being a member of a union or having to deal with them as management. Unions are appropriate in some cases, particularly when workers are being treated to truly awful and/or dangerous conditions or genuinely unfair pay. There are places where management can be described as evil for lack of a better word and in those places, that is where we need unions. While Yahoo has some serious problems (poor management not the least of them), I'm pretty sure people at Yahoo aren't paid badly (perhaps overpaid if anything) or being forced to work in hazardous conditions. In fact I'm pretty confident that working at Yahoo is relatively pleasant compared to most places I've worked. Come work in a steel plant or a coal mine or even work a heavy manufacturing assembly line sometime and get a little perspective.
Additionally I think you need to explore what at-will employment really means and why it is standard practice. Sometimes people don't perform well and I've worked directly with far too many unions which fight to protect a lot of deadwood employees. It's not hard to find examples of unions that forgot their real purpose (to provide safe working conditions, reasonable work rules and fair compensation) and instead actively work for goals that ultimately hurt the company and the very workers they were supposed to protect.
start reporting your employees as independent contractors.
Doesn't get you a thing. Businesses are responsible for people working on their behalf whether or not they receive a W2.
the fact is OSHA has been a toothless entity for a decade or so anyhow.
Toothless? Hardly. They might be underfunded but they can easily shut a business down on a whim. They can even lie about "findings" and fine you as a result. If OSHA visits your facility you are almost certain to be fined for something. It's virtually impossible to be perfectly compliant with every rule. In my state they even send out offers to "inspect" your place to make suggestions with the offer that if they find something they'll go easier on you. It's basically a shakedown.
If necessary, outsource any remaining work to 1 or more subcontractors, each of which has 250 employees or less.
That potential loophole is ridiculously easy to seal with some careful phrasing of the rules. You simply have to look at beneficial ownership and make companies have to report injuries from subcontractors. No, the proper way to deal with this is through getting the rules written in a sane manner in the first place. If information like this is made public then it needs to be done so in a manner that explains the context.
The notion of reporting workplace injuries is a good idea (in principle anyway) but there are a LOT of nuances to the issue. Many workplace injuries have nothing to do with the actual performance of work at the job. Sometimes people just trip and hurt themselves in ways they could just as easily have done in their living room and which the company could not possible prevent. Should that be something the company is held responsible for? There are a LOT of people who falsely claim to have received workplace injuries in order to get workers compensation payments. Should the company be penalized by public reporting of these false claims? What about when it is unclear whether the "injury" was real or not?
It's a complicated issue and a simply reporting requirement is both a significant administrative burden and a potential source of misleading information about the safety of a given workplace.
Actually, there are a significant number of people who buy macs, mostly notebooks, and run Windows on them.
They run Windows but none of them buy the device without OS X and virtually all of them either dual boot or run VMware or Parallels. They are buying the software and just adding Windows to it. HUGE difference between that and buying a barebones mac with just Windows loaded on it.
Most companies, particularly large ones, don't just do one thing.
However most of them do make their money in a fairly narrowly defined way. Microsoft makes money selling software. Google makes money selling advertising. GM sells cars. Apple sells consumer electronics. Additionally what constitutes the core abilities of the companies is usually something rather narrow. Honda is fundamentally a company that is built around competence in making engines. Dow Corning has an expertise in silicon and silicone based chemicals.
One of the major consistent parts of Apple's business model is that they regard both hardware and the software it runs as important.
Correct. However the ONLY piece of that puzzle that is meaningfully different from their competitors is the software. A Macbook frankly is little different than a laptop from Dell or HP. The actual computing bits are barely different at all. Same with the iPad and iPhone. The differences in hardware between those devices and competing Android devices is minimal. Apple gets their competitive advantage by the software they produce and the fact the software is bundled with a tightly specified piece of hardware. They just put it on some nice hardware and get some economies by not having twenty zillion devices to support. However the hardware in Apple's products is mostly commodity products. It's nice but it mostly isn't anything not available to their competition. iOS and OS X however are not available to anyone but Apple and that is what at the end of the day sets their products apart. Steve Jobs himself even admitted in a recorded interview that Apple at its core is a software company. Whether you like Jobs or not (not a huge fan myself) he very clearly understood what set Apple apart from everyone else.
Saying Apple is a software company (or a hardware company) is like saying Dow Corning is a breast implant company.
Dow Corning is a chemicals company, specifically silicone and silicon based chemicals. Your analogy is rather badly flawed.
Google's revised proposals have not been made public and were only sent to 125 interested parties who were warned that they were not to be made public.
Apparently they never heard the maxim that the only way to keep a secret is if just two people know and one of them is dead.
If Apple only makes their money selling hardware, how about opening up the OS to allow people to install anything they want?
Because Apple does not actually make their profits selling hardware. People have a hard time wrapping their head around this but Apple is fundamentally a software company. Nobody would pay a premium for a Macintosh that runs Windows. Put Windows on a Mac and you'd have a hard time distinguishing it from a Dell without looking at the label on the front. Nobody would pay extra for an iPhone or iPad running Android. Apple's software is what people actually pay for and what makes their products different. Apple's business model is just a sort of backwards razor and blades model. Instead of selling you a cheap handle and expensive blades they sell you expensive hardware (the handle) and give the software (the blades) away cheap to get lock in. Apple's business model doesn't work if they are not selling a bundled product. If Apple just sold you the hardware without any software they would be out of business faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit".
The difference between Apple and Google is that Google's actual product is YOU. Google makes their money by providing information about you to advertisers. Apple might do this too but that is incidental to their business model which is to sell you a piece of bundled technology. Advertising versus Consumer Electronics. The difference is not always obvious but it is a huge difference.
If she's using an iPad daily, she's obviously not that computer illiterate (at least not anymore).
Yes she is. She is able to use only a tiny fraction of what the iPad can do - so little that the term computer illiterate still easily applies. She knows how to play a few games, look at pictures, answer (but not make) facetime calls, and a few other very basic things. Sending an email or even a text message is beyond her. (her memory isn't very good anymore which she freely admits) Her understanding of what is actually going on is close to nil and yet she can still can do a few useful/entertaining things.
Microsoft imagined tablets back in the 90s. Nobody cared
That's because Microsoft's implementation of those tablets back then SUCKED. I used some of their tablets and they simply weren't a good product. They treated a pen like a mouse and slapped some half-baked afterthought software for using pens on top of their mouse/keyboard oriented products. The result was extra cost for very little benefit to most people. They never really understood that a pen is NOT a replacement for a keyboard. A pen is ONLY useful for drawing. As a result Microsoft's tablets were an answer to a question nobody asked.
Apple imagined them a couple years ago and people wet themselves like an excited dog.
That's because Apple's product actually worked fairly well and filled a need many people didn't even know they had. My 94 year old computer illiterate grandmother uses an iPad daily and there is no way in hell that would have happened with Microsoft's tablet.
Dogfight? What century do you think this is? I'm not really an expert, but my understanding of modern air battles is that they launch missiles at each other from extremely long distances.
That's what they thought would happen around the time of the Vietnam war. They even went so far as to remove the guns from the fighter aircraft. Turned out they were full of shit. Missiles did not eliminate the need for air combat maneuvering (aka a dogfight) and actually put their pilots at a disadvantage at times. These lessons were a big part of the reason why pilot schools like TOPGUN were created. Even the most modern fighters like the F22 carry onboard 20mm cannons to this day.
Relying exclusively on electronic technology introduce a single point of point of failure. Fly by wires, car ecu etc.
Fly/Drive-by-wire only has a single point of failure if you design it that way. Fly-by-Wire systems are regularly designed to be multiply redundant or even have mechanical backups. Because fly-by-wire is typically lighter it is often possible to have more safety systems in place. Mechanical systems despite seeming dependable are often actually less reliable if you actually bother to check the data. It's all in how the product is designed. Sometimes a single point of failure is the only option but more often it is a choice rather than a necessity.
what else is there that provides any real benefit beyond geek appeal.
Use cases that are actually pretty useful:
* Remote confirmation of door status (open/shut) including garage doors or appliance status (stove off) * Revocable key code access and other security controls * Controlling multiple lights or other devices without having to run new wires * Controlling hard to reach windows/fans * Opening/closing multiple windows, shades or fans with a single control * Putting lighting controls in new places without requiring new wiring * Timer controls for lighting * Better adjustments for seasonality (daylight length, etc) * Interaction with power companies regarding price optimization
That's just off the top of my head. I agree that the options presently are relatively poor but the potential is there.
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Umm i don't consider 20 young. I was coding professionally by that age. By "young", i'm thinking high school age.
Just because you were working doesn't mean you aren't young. Twenty years old IS young in the working world. The vast majority of working professionals are older than 20 so it's merely a statement of fact. Saying someone is young doesn't mean they are saying they are incompetent though they might be implying that they are inexperienced.
1) Ask the user what they need
In my experience users are more often than not pretty bad at articulating what they need even when they know. Even more often they simply cannot envision doing things a different way. I'm an industrial engineer by training. If I walk out onto our shop floor and ask even my best people what they need (and I do this all the time), I'll usually get a non answer unless it is something like a supply for something they are already doing. You still have to ask (sometimes they have good input) but almost always it is a waste of time. In fact you would be amazed at how few people can write a simple work instruction for something they do every day. They leave steps and critical details and corner cases out often because it is too second nature to them. They're even worse when it comes to writing specifications for things they haven't tried yet.
However when you do run into that rare person who can actually envision and articulate what they want, it is a joyful thing.
My customer is the patient and the FDA.
In all likelihood neither of those is your customer. Your customer is the person tasked with actually using the device, most likely a nurse or doctor, and the organization that pays you for it. The FDA is certainly not your customer. The FDA's job is to ensure you aren't selling snake oil. They do not buy or use your equipment. They are a regulator not a customer. Just because you have to please them doesn't make them your customer.
If making it easier for the nurse compromises the safety of the patient, its BAD software.
Of course but making it needlessly difficult for the nurse also compromises the safety of the patient AND it hurts operational efficiency which is both a treatment risk and an economic cost. Safety first obviously but don't try to excuse bad design as a safety measure when it isn't.
Fracking doesn't have major effects on oil prices, and won't until cars run on natgas.
Curious since US oil production has increased dramatically recently largely due to close to a million barrels of oil per day coming out of the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations thanks to fracking. You want to explain to me how an extra million barrels of supply a day has no effect on oil prices?
First off, oil producing countries collude with each other to control global demand.
Oil producing countries (notably OPEC) collude to control SUPPLY and by extension price. They have no way to directly influence demand.
First off, the collusion in the oil industry is not fully known, so we are just guessing when we talk about 'global supply'
Sorry but no conspiracy theories are needed here. Oil is a fungible commodity sold worldwide. Simple supply and demand analysis (with a bit of speculation thrown in) can explain oil pricing rather well. If you want to invoke collusion outside of known cartels like OPEC you need to provide even a hint of evidence that nothing else can explain oil price movements.
If the US automakers hadn't **killed the electric car** there would have been at least an **equal drop in demand**
I think you are going to have a hard time proving that assertion. Your argument basically is falling into the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. I will happily concede that battery technology has not received adequate investment and that car companies (including GM) really dropped the ball here. However it does not automatically follow that electric cars would have had the effect on the market you seem to believe the would have. There were and are significant technology hurdles for electric vehicles to overcome to significantly impact the car market. We very likely might be further along than we are but that isn't the same thing as proving that electric vehicles would have been adopted at a rate sufficient to offset that much oil use.
This is a perfect example of how oil has created such a horrible political mess over the years. It has been very dangerous for us to be so dependent on the middle east.
The only direct dependence the US has on the middle east is due to oil being priced globally. The US isn't particularly dependant on the middle east and OPEC for oil supply. The problem is that other parts of the world are. Oil has created big political messes like Iran due to countries like the US being unable to resist being a bunch of evil a-holes and doing things like overthrowing governments in the region on behalf of oil companies without regard to future consequences. What's astonishing is that our leaders have the nerve to act surprised when it turns out that people in other countries don't like us meddling in their internal affairs.
Relatively little of the oil used in the US comes from the middle east. About 40% of the oil used in the US is produced domestically and this number has been climbing. Of the 316 million barrels imported by the US in August 2013, only 67 million came from the Persian Gulf region or about 21%. This 21% is about 13% of total US oil demand and about 2/3 of that 13% is from Saudi Arabia. In fact Saudi Arabia is the only middle eastern country to crack the top 5 exporters to the US - the others being Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria.
I wonder how soon people will realise that there is really no need for almost all normal non-packet mail.
Not even remotely true. Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers. Furthermore there is no other organization, public or private (including FedEx and UPS), that has the infrastructure to deliver envelopes to virtually any mailing address in the US like the USPS can and certainly not for the price point the USPS charges.
Most could be sent by email. There are very few documents that have to be sent physically but don't require signed or tracked delivery.
Which helps people who cannot afford computers how exactly? Paper mail has a least common denominator quality to it. Pretty much everyone with an address can and does utilize it. Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.
Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
You mean remove the Constitution?
Despite your glib implication that subsidies are not needed, mail remains a vital service and it is important that it be available to everyone, even if this requires subsidies. There is no one else who realistically can replace the USPS including UPS and FedEx. This remains true despite falling mail volumes. Just because the postal service often seems to be mostly a paper spam delivery service doesn't mean it isn't also a vital service for communications. Remove subsidies right now and the USPS will collapse and yes that IS a Bad Thing (tm). While the USPS will need to adapt to modern times, the role it serves is a critical one and that isn't going to change.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
They also used to deliver multiple times a day. So what? We don't need that now. Times change.
If Bitcoin had no value, people wouldn't be paying for them.
The problem with bitcoin isn't that it has no value. Obviously some people (not many) have a use for it. The problem(s) with bitcoin is that it is HIGHLY illiquid, volatile and risky. Few people even know what bitcoin is, and fewer are willing to accept it as a form of payment. Exchange rates bounce around like a caffeinated border collie on a pogo stick which makes for significant exchange rate risk. Furthermore it depends on encryption and one cannot be certain that said encryption is ultimately secure. And those problems are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
This is all well and good and inevitable but society really needs to think hard and fast about what we are going to do with a future where there are only so many jobs available for people with a shovel or a wrench.
This is a recurring fallacy that you are not remotely the first person to point out. Your argument is predicated on the assumption that someone that works with a wrench or a shovel will be unable to do anything else valuable to society in the future. So far every time this argument has been made it has later been proven false by future events. We are tool builders and over time we have built more and more effective tools. These tools eliminate some jobs and help us create new ones. Furthermore labor costs act as a brake against implementation of automation everywhere. I'm a cost accountant professionally and it is trivial to show examples of how it is economically impossible to automate many tasks. Arguments that the robots are going to take all the jobs are basically unfounded paranoia based on ignorance of economics.
It used to be something like 30% of the nation was involved with food production. Thanks to industrialization that's now 1-2%.
In 1870 the number was more like 70%-80%. You seem to be implying that somehow that is a bad thing. Those people who no longer had to work on a farm were then able to participate in other valuable tasks. The very fact that you are able to type on a computer is probably due in large part to the fact that some very smart people didn't have to spend their brain cells trying to grow food.
Even the last bastions of farm work -- fruit picking -- is being inched into by robotics.
Probably not as fast as you seem to be implying since there are literally millions of migrant farm workers employed and there is no automation that is going to replace most of them in the immediate future. Automation only makes sense in certain economic circumstances. If labor is cheap enough it doesn't make much economic sense to automate certain jobs. Companies that spend unnecessarily on automation will go out of business because cheap labor will undercut them. Happens all the time. The US is highly automated in manufacturing but cheap labor from China and other places has out competed automation for many products.
The farm hands who left the fields and went into the factories are now finding themselves being replaced en masse by sophisticated machines.
Those farm hands did a lot more than just go into manufacturing. While manufacturing (like agriculture) is still a huge business in the US and Europe, the majority of the economy hasn't been in either of those two sectors for some time now. People have ALWAYS obsoleted some jobs with machines and created new ones at the same time. We're tool makers. That's what we do. It's a bizarre argument that somehow we should stop doing what we are best at.
Thanks for letting me know about these shenanigans, I will not consider joining yahoo anytime soon.
I'm sure they will be terribly disappointing you turned them down. [/sarcasm]
we need unions to stop BS like this and make it so you can't fire demote some one with out real proof.
A union isn't going to solve any of Yahoo's problems nor those of the people who work for Yahoo. I'm guessing from your rather glib comment that you don't have much actual experience with their being a member of a union or having to deal with them as management. Unions are appropriate in some cases, particularly when workers are being treated to truly awful and/or dangerous conditions or genuinely unfair pay. There are places where management can be described as evil for lack of a better word and in those places, that is where we need unions. While Yahoo has some serious problems (poor management not the least of them), I'm pretty sure people at Yahoo aren't paid badly (perhaps overpaid if anything) or being forced to work in hazardous conditions. In fact I'm pretty confident that working at Yahoo is relatively pleasant compared to most places I've worked. Come work in a steel plant or a coal mine or even work a heavy manufacturing assembly line sometime and get a little perspective.
Additionally I think you need to explore what at-will employment really means and why it is standard practice. Sometimes people don't perform well and I've worked directly with far too many unions which fight to protect a lot of deadwood employees. It's not hard to find examples of unions that forgot their real purpose (to provide safe working conditions, reasonable work rules and fair compensation) and instead actively work for goals that ultimately hurt the company and the very workers they were supposed to protect.
start reporting your employees as independent contractors.
Doesn't get you a thing. Businesses are responsible for people working on their behalf whether or not they receive a W2.
the fact is OSHA has been a toothless entity for a decade or so anyhow.
Toothless? Hardly. They might be underfunded but they can easily shut a business down on a whim. They can even lie about "findings" and fine you as a result. If OSHA visits your facility you are almost certain to be fined for something. It's virtually impossible to be perfectly compliant with every rule. In my state they even send out offers to "inspect" your place to make suggestions with the offer that if they find something they'll go easier on you. It's basically a shakedown.
If necessary, outsource any remaining work to 1 or more subcontractors, each of which has 250 employees or less.
That potential loophole is ridiculously easy to seal with some careful phrasing of the rules. You simply have to look at beneficial ownership and make companies have to report injuries from subcontractors. No, the proper way to deal with this is through getting the rules written in a sane manner in the first place. If information like this is made public then it needs to be done so in a manner that explains the context.
The notion of reporting workplace injuries is a good idea (in principle anyway) but there are a LOT of nuances to the issue. Many workplace injuries have nothing to do with the actual performance of work at the job. Sometimes people just trip and hurt themselves in ways they could just as easily have done in their living room and which the company could not possible prevent. Should that be something the company is held responsible for? There are a LOT of people who falsely claim to have received workplace injuries in order to get workers compensation payments. Should the company be penalized by public reporting of these false claims? What about when it is unclear whether the "injury" was real or not?
It's a complicated issue and a simply reporting requirement is both a significant administrative burden and a potential source of misleading information about the safety of a given workplace.
Actually, there are a significant number of people who buy macs, mostly notebooks, and run Windows on them.
They run Windows but none of them buy the device without OS X and virtually all of them either dual boot or run VMware or Parallels. They are buying the software and just adding Windows to it. HUGE difference between that and buying a barebones mac with just Windows loaded on it.
Most companies, particularly large ones, don't just do one thing.
However most of them do make their money in a fairly narrowly defined way. Microsoft makes money selling software. Google makes money selling advertising. GM sells cars. Apple sells consumer electronics. Additionally what constitutes the core abilities of the companies is usually something rather narrow. Honda is fundamentally a company that is built around competence in making engines. Dow Corning has an expertise in silicon and silicone based chemicals.
One of the major consistent parts of Apple's business model is that they regard both hardware and the software it runs as important.
Correct. However the ONLY piece of that puzzle that is meaningfully different from their competitors is the software. A Macbook frankly is little different than a laptop from Dell or HP. The actual computing bits are barely different at all. Same with the iPad and iPhone. The differences in hardware between those devices and competing Android devices is minimal. Apple gets their competitive advantage by the software they produce and the fact the software is bundled with a tightly specified piece of hardware. They just put it on some nice hardware and get some economies by not having twenty zillion devices to support. However the hardware in Apple's products is mostly commodity products. It's nice but it mostly isn't anything not available to their competition. iOS and OS X however are not available to anyone but Apple and that is what at the end of the day sets their products apart. Steve Jobs himself even admitted in a recorded interview that Apple at its core is a software company. Whether you like Jobs or not (not a huge fan myself) he very clearly understood what set Apple apart from everyone else.
Saying Apple is a software company (or a hardware company) is like saying Dow Corning is a breast implant company.
Dow Corning is a chemicals company, specifically silicone and silicon based chemicals. Your analogy is rather badly flawed.
Google's revised proposals have not been made public and were only sent to 125 interested parties who were warned that they were not to be made public.
Apparently they never heard the maxim that the only way to keep a secret is if just two people know and one of them is dead.
If Apple only makes their money selling hardware, how about opening up the OS to allow people to install anything they want?
Because Apple does not actually make their profits selling hardware. People have a hard time wrapping their head around this but Apple is fundamentally a software company. Nobody would pay a premium for a Macintosh that runs Windows. Put Windows on a Mac and you'd have a hard time distinguishing it from a Dell without looking at the label on the front. Nobody would pay extra for an iPhone or iPad running Android. Apple's software is what people actually pay for and what makes their products different. Apple's business model is just a sort of backwards razor and blades model. Instead of selling you a cheap handle and expensive blades they sell you expensive hardware (the handle) and give the software (the blades) away cheap to get lock in. Apple's business model doesn't work if they are not selling a bundled product. If Apple just sold you the hardware without any software they would be out of business faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit".
The difference between Apple and Google is that Google's actual product is YOU. Google makes their money by providing information about you to advertisers. Apple might do this too but that is incidental to their business model which is to sell you a piece of bundled technology. Advertising versus Consumer Electronics. The difference is not always obvious but it is a huge difference.
If she's using an iPad daily, she's obviously not that computer illiterate (at least not anymore).
Yes she is. She is able to use only a tiny fraction of what the iPad can do - so little that the term computer illiterate still easily applies. She knows how to play a few games, look at pictures, answer (but not make) facetime calls, and a few other very basic things. Sending an email or even a text message is beyond her. (her memory isn't very good anymore which she freely admits) Her understanding of what is actually going on is close to nil and yet she can still can do a few useful/entertaining things.
Microsoft imagined tablets back in the 90s. Nobody cared
That's because Microsoft's implementation of those tablets back then SUCKED. I used some of their tablets and they simply weren't a good product. They treated a pen like a mouse and slapped some half-baked afterthought software for using pens on top of their mouse/keyboard oriented products. The result was extra cost for very little benefit to most people. They never really understood that a pen is NOT a replacement for a keyboard. A pen is ONLY useful for drawing. As a result Microsoft's tablets were an answer to a question nobody asked.
Apple imagined them a couple years ago and people wet themselves like an excited dog.
That's because Apple's product actually worked fairly well and filled a need many people didn't even know they had. My 94 year old computer illiterate grandmother uses an iPad daily and there is no way in hell that would have happened with Microsoft's tablet.
Give me a call when those fuel cells are ready for deployment...
Ok, what number should we call to wake you since industrial fuel cells are already available and apparently work fairly well.
Dogfight? What century do you think this is? I'm not really an expert, but my understanding of modern air battles is that they launch missiles at each other from extremely long distances.
That's what they thought would happen around the time of the Vietnam war. They even went so far as to remove the guns from the fighter aircraft. Turned out they were full of shit. Missiles did not eliminate the need for air combat maneuvering (aka a dogfight) and actually put their pilots at a disadvantage at times. These lessons were a big part of the reason why pilot schools like TOPGUN were created. Even the most modern fighters like the F22 carry onboard 20mm cannons to this day.
Relying exclusively on electronic technology introduce a single point of point of failure. Fly by wires, car ecu etc.
Fly/Drive-by-wire only has a single point of failure if you design it that way. Fly-by-Wire systems are regularly designed to be multiply redundant or even have mechanical backups. Because fly-by-wire is typically lighter it is often possible to have more safety systems in place. Mechanical systems despite seeming dependable are often actually less reliable if you actually bother to check the data. It's all in how the product is designed. Sometimes a single point of failure is the only option but more often it is a choice rather than a necessity.
what else is there that provides any real benefit beyond geek appeal.
Use cases that are actually pretty useful:
* Remote confirmation of door status (open/shut) including garage doors or appliance status (stove off)
* Revocable key code access and other security controls
* Controlling multiple lights or other devices without having to run new wires
* Controlling hard to reach windows/fans
* Opening/closing multiple windows, shades or fans with a single control
* Putting lighting controls in new places without requiring new wiring
* Timer controls for lighting
* Better adjustments for seasonality (daylight length, etc)
* Interaction with power companies regarding price optimization
That's just off the top of my head. I agree that the options presently are relatively poor but the potential is there.
As an employee, he gets paid $1/yr. This is not about what he is doing as an employee.
He gets a salary of $1/year. He gets paid considerably more than that. Compensation is not just what is on your W2.