While they could theoretically do that, doing it to random joe patriot is far more likely to get you into trouble. For example, if you tried to do that to me, I'd report it. Am I going to get questioned? Certainly. Is it going to be pleasant questioning? Probably not. Will I get to keep the money? Most likely not. Might they try to make me a double agent(the old spy you know)? Possibly.
Better yet, make a lump-sum payment on their mortgage for them, when they're swimming in debt over their heads.
Little bit of ignorance here: This is specifically one of the things I look for. I knew somebody once who got to spend a year cleaning the dorms because he lost his clearance over debt(expensive truck on an E3 pay doesn't work).
Want to make someone look like a pedophile? Dump pics on their computer at work. (boot off usb, copy pics to drive, mission accomplished. Worst-case scenario, you'll have to connect the drive's cable to another machine as a slave for a few minutes).
You'll have to get to that machine, and if they can do that, blackmailing the guy is unnecessary. Forget the usb boot - all you need is a key logger. You now have the passwords, and can own the machine.
USB boot is going to be disabled for critical systems anyways.
There are ALWAYS ways to blackmail someone.
It might mostly psychological, but blackmailing somebody who's innocent is far riskier than somebody who's guilty. The innocent is much more likely to blare out the situation to the world.
One of the worst cases of espionage involved a sailor who, because of his gambling debts, actually walked into the USSR embassy and offered to sell secrets. He handed out cryptographic material like candy, stuff that would have been worth millions, for mere thousands of dollars.
While security investigations are not a sure thing, they're far better than nothing. A person in serious debt is more likely to sell out secrets than one who isn't. A person with a hidden secret(like being gay), may do something stupid to try to keep it under wraps.
I have to agree with the grandparent, this looks very promising. I bet this clinical trial just got extended to a lot of other conditions. If they can generalize this to help hearts come back from a variety of heart problems at different ages we're talking about Nobel prize quality research.
Actually, this sort of thing has happened multiple times, especially in younger patients, and has happened even when they got transplants.
The theory I heard is that by disconnecting the heart, but not removing it or the blood vessels providing oxygen and nutrients, you allow healing that simply wouldn't be possible while the heart is functioning.
I won't claim to be an expert on the subject, just that this is not the first time I've heard of this happening. There was a boy a few years back who started rejecting his implanted heart - they were forced to remove it, in the process finding his heart healthy enough to resume it's duties.
True, but calculating the probability of the risk occuring is complicated, though perhaps understated given how often it's been happening.
IE they can now consider the probablility of a data leak occuring to be 100% if preventative measures are not taken. Now how much systems decrease this risk is still up in the air.
It's pretty small-minded to think that every locale in the US has a shortage of workers,
I think that it's pretty small minded to not consider moving when you're unemployed and looking for a new job. Yes it sucks, but such is life. You shouldn't be sitting on welfare when there's a job shortage elsewhere.
There's always shortages in some job market; either location or skillwise. There's lots of programs to help get you skills in most of those careers, and moving doesn't have to be that expensive.
With either, the only choice is to work in the service industry while returning to college/vocational school/opening your own shop.
Good point, at least you generalized it. So many people pick on Walmart it isn't funny. At least there you wouldn't generally go home smelling of greasy food, which happened at the previous employer that got picked on a lot... McDonald's.
I don't think that many people are shopping for cars so often that the car companies couldn't raise prices without much of a stink.
Heck, they could simply wait until the new model year comes out.
That's without going into the fact that car pricing is something of voodoo science; it's one of the last remaining goods purchased by most people through price negotiation(though ebay has reversed this trend a bit). They can manipulate the price of a car by thousands of dollars through the offering of rebates and discounts and such.
Part of the unemployment rate is job shuffle. Let's say that people, on average, change jobs once every 5 years, and are out of work for a month in between. That's 1 month unemployed out of 60, or 1.7% simply for that shuffle.
The economy is better off with some unemployment because otherwise you simply have no flexibility. IE I can't just set up shop somewhere and start hiring, I have to hire workers away from existing jobs. It could be years before I get staffing.
Now - from the point of the worker, that's where the full employment would tend to increase wages, which was my point.
Even at 3%, wages will normally be increasing, at least in many fields, because there'll still be shortages of workers.
A lot of these box stacking jobs could be done the same by 12 people working 10 hours each, 3 people working 40 hours each, or 2 people working 60 hours each.
The thing is, in today's inflated living standards; not everybody is worth the hourly rate it'd take to sustain them.
Thus, the option become one of being either partially employed - and on partial governmental assistance, or being unemployed - and completely on government assistance.
Then there's the question of family - the costs to keep a family at an 'acceptable' standard is much higher than it takes to keep one person up there. Especially when you figure 'family' could range from two people to over a dozen.
A wage that'll allow a family of four with a stay at home parent would keep me living high on the hog.
Minimum wage would be plenty if we moved living standards back a century or so, of course(or even just 50 years).
I'm a non-smoker and I see the point: Let people choose.
If I open up Dan's Smoker friendly steakhouse, it might be a clue for you to not visit my place, while I steal the business of the 30% or so of people who still smoke.
If anything, I'd handle the issue by using the EPA/FDA to monitor air quality in restaurants/bars. Too much tobacco smoke and you have to post a sign.
There are cases where Walmart has shown workers how to use the local welfare system. This appears to be abusive.
Before people go too far off on walmart, I'll just point out that there's another major employer who has done the same thing...
The US Military. Yes, the US Military has advisers who tell young troops how to best get social assistance, because even with base housing, BAS, and incredibly subsidized health care the payments for a E1-E4 are so low that a married Soldier/Sailer/Marine/Airman with children qualifies for all sorts of aid.
As a non-smoking libertarian, I happen to think that such bans should be the choice of the owners/operators of the restaurant, not the government. And this is from a non-smoker who, as a child, tended to hide my grandmother's cigarettes.
Non-smokers are in the majority today, yet there are enough smokers to justify at least some establishments catering to them. Besides, it's neat science but you can design ventilation/filtering systems that make sure the cigarette smoke goes straight up into the filter.
I object to smelling cigarette smoke. Whether the restaurant deals with it by banning smoking inside or fancy ventilation, I don't care. I'll simply not frequent the place if there's too much smoke.
Before they banned smoking in restaurants here, there were a number that had voluntarily gone non-smoking to help pull in the crowds. Some had the systems installed. Is it really fair to them to say 'you can't have smoking inside' even after they spent thousands of dollars to make sure it isn't a problem?
That being said, my wife, a naturalized citizen of the USA comes from rural Colombia where the average person earns about $2000 US per year. When I have gone to Colombia to visit her family, they told me that they wish someone like a Walmart supplier would come and give them jobs at unfair wages. They mistakenly think that a job at unfair wages, which allows them to buy food, clothing, and shelter is better than no job.
Bingo.
Honestly - What's the best way to raise wages, real income for workers? Hire them. Hire all of them. Create competition. If the coffee plantations had to compete to get enough workers to get their beans picked, you'd see the picker's wages increase across the board - and not solely from 'fair trade' feel good beans.
In the USA we have a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of the world. If you're willing to move up north where I live, McDonald's will pay $8+/hour for starting employees. Higher if you have experience or a history as a good worker. Why do they pay this? Because otherwise they wouldn't be able to get enough workers to stay in business.
If walmart wasn't paying a competitive wage, it wouldn't be able to get workers. It's as simple as that.
And it's perfectly in my rights to ignore the boycott and patronize walmart anyways...
Just as it should be my right to go to work in the place of the union workers who're refusing to work without interference from said ex-workers.
Look, I don't mind collective bargaining to an extent. But when it starts eliminating incentives to excel, or even to just do a good job(try to fire somebody who's screwing up in some labor shops...), it's missing the point. When the labor costs are such that the company is getting slaughtered by foreign competition, it's missing the point. When a company would rather outsource and build a plant outside of the unionized area, the union is missing the point. When it's cheaper to close down a plant than to keep it open, the union is missing the point.
The point of the union is to serve the workers. You can't kill the golden goose and do that.
There are employers who are far worse than walmart in most respects. Walmart is simply a larger target.
BTW didn't I read where Nike and Kmart and Apple (forgive me, I know its/.) all were accused of using slave labor in foreign lands?
Slave labor, sweatshop manufacturing plants aside, this hits on what I think is the real reason for wage stagnation in the USA. We're transitioning to a world economy, and resource exploitation naturally tends to shift to where it's the cheapest. Which is currently in Asia. Our high wages are helping to push theirs up*, but at the same time it's trying to drag ours down. Productivity gains all around have helped, but until China and India have substantially caught up, it will continue. While Africa is still a substantial reservoir of essentially untapped labor, it's not stable enough at this time to be of much use to business.
*Disagree with the sweatshops all you want, generally the people who work in them are making more money than they would at their alternatives, such as the subsidence farm.
Sooner or later, one of the companies, native or foreign would take the opportunity to drop prices a bit and steal business from the other companies.
Let's ask this question: If they'd take the opportunity to keep their prices the same if costs drop, why don't they raise prices? After all, what's to stop them from making more profit?
Heck - look at gasoline prices. Sure, it takes a little time, but when the refineries are operational and oil costs are down, gasoline at the pump does drop.
I'd ask: What are grown adults doing getting a part time job at walmart for anything but christmas cash?
You can whine about this all you like, but walmart provides competitive wages and benefits for it's workers for their skill levels and hours.
Yes, it sucks to be at the bottom of the labor pool. I'd suggest education and getting a better job, especially if you have family to support.
Of course, I think that having companies provide health insurance and retirement benefits to be a bad thing on the whole; I'd rather take the money and provide my own health care* and retirement investments. That way I could plan for my retirement, and get the best insurance for me, not the company.
*In an ideal world where individual payers don't get screwed.
Police departments can log their number of arrests, keep track of the crime rate, etc... Still, it's been shown that if you put too much emphasis on these metrics police departments will start doing silly things like arresting for silly things like minor traffic violations and jaywalking to simply get their stats up.
Meanwhile, a truly good department might have high bang for the buck programs that prevent crimes, actually reducing their arrest rate. So you could track by crime rate(not arrest rate), but so many things affect that that it can't be a sole indicator of police effectiveness.
Changing demographics(poor uneducated young men cause the most violent crime) can make a huge difference, easily swamping the efforts of the police. An ineffective judicial/penal system can hamstring police.
Same thing with fire departments. They're actually easier; aside from fire prevention education efforts and code enforcement(in some areas), you can look at the level of their responses to fires. How fast they got there; how fast did they resolve the incidents; did the fires spread to other buildings; etc...
Though that does give me an idea: Judgement by their peers. You can have a group of experienced fire chiefs and fire fighters travel around and 'judge' the various departments. Is their equipment sufficient and well maintained? Do their procedures make sense? Do the supervisors know their stuff; can they tell when to pull their men out of a building for safety?
Same thing for network admins. Do they check their backups? Do they have redundancy, do they keep up with patches and security fixes?
To approach it from an entirely different angle, much of an system administrator's job(whether Unix or not) is to avoid things, much like a security guard.
Just for one example: How do you measure avoided data leaks that would of cost millions?
It also covers people who act to the best of their(limited, non-professional) knowledge.
IE I've had first aid and CPR and such. Because I'm not a professional, and the extent of my training is once every couple years, I'm still covered if I help, but unintentionally cause some harm.
IE I move somebody with back injuries out of a burning car - I *know* he has back injuries, but there's an immediate danger to his life.
In any court they'd have to practically prove that I was being malicious. My training is to save life first, then worry about limbs(back would count there), followed up distantly by comfort and such. I don't have an ambulance worth of medical supplies and tools. I'm not a professional. I have a slightly better than average first aid kit in my car, and annual training provided by my work that takes about an hour and that's it.
I'll try to keep your heart beating, lungs breathing, and stop any bleeding. I'll wrap any severed parts in cloth or paper and stick it on ice if possible.
I'm not a professional, I'll do my best, but I don't have practiced techniques and probably won't do the perfect 20/20 hindsight best practice found by consulting a team of seven doctors over the course of two weeks. I'd be lucky to have two minutes.
Let's say I wanted to ask someone a question, a simple question with no real need for an immediate reply. I send an e-mail. If I were to use regular phone, I have to deal with polite conversation which I may or may not have time for. Not that I don't mind idle conversation, it's just something I don't always want to deal with.
I love email for this very reason. Somebody asks me a question over the phone, if I don't have an immediate answer ready I have to get their contact information. That can be a pain in the butt, especially if we have a bad phone connection(It happens).
With email, if I have the info I dump it into the email and send it off to them. I even tend to keep a 'faq' listing for that very purpose(no, I don't make it public, because I'm supposed to be providing the 'personal touch', and customize the answers a bit for the customer's exact situation). If I need to collect it, no big deal, I have their contact information right there. It's in my queue, so to speak.
Unfortunately, most of my answers require research at this point because I just shifted positions and am still learning my new job.
I've heard some rumblings like this; where high-level characters can manipulate the surroundings and create quests and such.
It's just that making it hard to game the system for advantages is almost impossible.
Also, your actions in a online game are drastically reduced even as a player. For example, do I fight, try diplomacy(more than 3 or 4 dialog options), get creative and try to burn the building down, sneak in through an upper window, disintegrate a wall, polymorph myself as a rat and come in through the sewer, etc...
A good DM/GM can handle this. The closest to this I've seen in games is the old hero's quest type games, and that's because they generally made three or four options to solve each quest. The fighter way, one each for thief and mage, and occasionally the 'smart way' where you didn't have to 'brute force' it at all by using class skills.
Yes, I know they could produce a car with even better mileage.
Heck, I could probably build a car that gets 100mpg without too much trouble.
The problem? It wouldn't meet todays safety and emission requirements, not to mention convenience systems such as power steering, windows, video systems in the vehicle upping power draw to the point you need a larger alternator. Each of which adds substantial weight to the car, requiring a larger engine to maintain performance within specifications, increasing weight even more and reducing gas mileage.
Slashdot Mirror
For a Top Secret, you have to undergo a "lifestyle polygram".
Not true. It remains an option though.
While they could theoretically do that, doing it to random joe patriot is far more likely to get you into trouble. For example, if you tried to do that to me, I'd report it. Am I going to get questioned? Certainly. Is it going to be pleasant questioning? Probably not. Will I get to keep the money? Most likely not. Might they try to make me a double agent(the old spy you know)? Possibly.
Better yet, make a lump-sum payment on their mortgage for them, when they're swimming in debt over their heads.
Little bit of ignorance here: This is specifically one of the things I look for. I knew somebody once who got to spend a year cleaning the dorms because he lost his clearance over debt(expensive truck on an E3 pay doesn't work).
Want to make someone look like a pedophile? Dump pics on their computer at work. (boot off usb, copy pics to drive, mission accomplished. Worst-case scenario, you'll have to connect the drive's cable to another machine as a slave for a few minutes).
You'll have to get to that machine, and if they can do that, blackmailing the guy is unnecessary. Forget the usb boot - all you need is a key logger. You now have the passwords, and can own the machine.
USB boot is going to be disabled for critical systems anyways.
There are ALWAYS ways to blackmail someone.
It might mostly psychological, but blackmailing somebody who's innocent is far riskier than somebody who's guilty. The innocent is much more likely to blare out the situation to the world.
One of the worst cases of espionage involved a sailor who, because of his gambling debts, actually walked into the USSR embassy and offered to sell secrets. He handed out cryptographic material like candy, stuff that would have been worth millions, for mere thousands of dollars.
While security investigations are not a sure thing, they're far better than nothing. A person in serious debt is more likely to sell out secrets than one who isn't. A person with a hidden secret(like being gay), may do something stupid to try to keep it under wraps.
I have to agree with the grandparent, this looks very promising. I bet this clinical trial just got extended to a lot of other conditions. If they can generalize this to help hearts come back from a variety of heart problems at different ages we're talking about Nobel prize quality research.
Actually, this sort of thing has happened multiple times, especially in younger patients, and has happened even when they got transplants.
The theory I heard is that by disconnecting the heart, but not removing it or the blood vessels providing oxygen and nutrients, you allow healing that simply wouldn't be possible while the heart is functioning.
I won't claim to be an expert on the subject, just that this is not the first time I've heard of this happening. There was a boy a few years back who started rejecting his implanted heart - they were forced to remove it, in the process finding his heart healthy enough to resume it's duties.
True, but calculating the probability of the risk occuring is complicated, though perhaps understated given how often it's been happening.
IE they can now consider the probablility of a data leak occuring to be 100% if preventative measures are not taken. Now how much systems decrease this risk is still up in the air.
My family picked up and moved, even with two kids, multiple times.
It's not easy, but it's not especially difficult either.
It's pretty small-minded to think that every locale in the US has a shortage of workers,
I think that it's pretty small minded to not consider moving when you're unemployed and looking for a new job. Yes it sucks, but such is life. You shouldn't be sitting on welfare when there's a job shortage elsewhere.
There's always shortages in some job market; either location or skillwise. There's lots of programs to help get you skills in most of those careers, and moving doesn't have to be that expensive.
With either, the only choice is to work in the service industry while returning to college/vocational school/opening your own shop.
Good point, at least you generalized it. So many people pick on Walmart it isn't funny. At least there you wouldn't generally go home smelling of greasy food, which happened at the previous employer that got picked on a lot... McDonald's.
I don't think that many people are shopping for cars so often that the car companies couldn't raise prices without much of a stink.
Heck, they could simply wait until the new model year comes out.
That's without going into the fact that car pricing is something of voodoo science; it's one of the last remaining goods purchased by most people through price negotiation(though ebay has reversed this trend a bit). They can manipulate the price of a car by thousands of dollars through the offering of rebates and discounts and such.
Want more moeny? Don't offer as much of a rebate.
Part of the unemployment rate is job shuffle. Let's say that people, on average, change jobs once every 5 years, and are out of work for a month in between. That's 1 month unemployed out of 60, or 1.7% simply for that shuffle.
The economy is better off with some unemployment because otherwise you simply have no flexibility. IE I can't just set up shop somewhere and start hiring, I have to hire workers away from existing jobs. It could be years before I get staffing.
Now - from the point of the worker, that's where the full employment would tend to increase wages, which was my point.
Even at 3%, wages will normally be increasing, at least in many fields, because there'll still be shortages of workers.
A lot of these box stacking jobs could be done the same by 12 people working 10 hours each, 3 people working 40 hours each, or 2 people working 60 hours each.
The thing is, in today's inflated living standards; not everybody is worth the hourly rate it'd take to sustain them.
Thus, the option become one of being either partially employed - and on partial governmental assistance, or being unemployed - and completely on government assistance.
Then there's the question of family - the costs to keep a family at an 'acceptable' standard is much higher than it takes to keep one person up there. Especially when you figure 'family' could range from two people to over a dozen.
A wage that'll allow a family of four with a stay at home parent would keep me living high on the hog.
Minimum wage would be plenty if we moved living standards back a century or so, of course(or even just 50 years).
I could argue and state that I was talking about a bottom-level farm(IE no tools) that's barely scrapping by, but you're right.
Then don't visit smoking shops. Sheesh...
I'm a non-smoker and I see the point: Let people choose.
If I open up Dan's Smoker friendly steakhouse, it might be a clue for you to not visit my place, while I steal the business of the 30% or so of people who still smoke.
If anything, I'd handle the issue by using the EPA/FDA to monitor air quality in restaurants/bars. Too much tobacco smoke and you have to post a sign.
There are cases where Walmart has shown workers how to use the local welfare system. This appears to be abusive.
Before people go too far off on walmart, I'll just point out that there's another major employer who has done the same thing...
The US Military. Yes, the US Military has advisers who tell young troops how to best get social assistance, because even with base housing, BAS, and incredibly subsidized health care the payments for a E1-E4 are so low that a married Soldier/Sailer/Marine/Airman with children qualifies for all sorts of aid.
But you hardly hear about that...
As a non-smoking libertarian, I happen to think that such bans should be the choice of the owners/operators of the restaurant, not the government. And this is from a non-smoker who, as a child, tended to hide my grandmother's cigarettes.
Non-smokers are in the majority today, yet there are enough smokers to justify at least some establishments catering to them. Besides, it's neat science but you can design ventilation/filtering systems that make sure the cigarette smoke goes straight up into the filter.
I object to smelling cigarette smoke. Whether the restaurant deals with it by banning smoking inside or fancy ventilation, I don't care. I'll simply not frequent the place if there's too much smoke.
Before they banned smoking in restaurants here, there were a number that had voluntarily gone non-smoking to help pull in the crowds. Some had the systems installed. Is it really fair to them to say 'you can't have smoking inside' even after they spent thousands of dollars to make sure it isn't a problem?
That being said, my wife, a naturalized citizen of the USA comes from rural Colombia where the average person earns about $2000 US per year. When I have gone to Colombia to visit her family, they told me that they wish someone like a Walmart supplier would come and give them jobs at unfair wages. They mistakenly think that a job at unfair wages, which allows them to buy food, clothing, and shelter is better than no job.
Bingo.
Honestly - What's the best way to raise wages, real income for workers? Hire them. Hire all of them. Create competition. If the coffee plantations had to compete to get enough workers to get their beans picked, you'd see the picker's wages increase across the board - and not solely from 'fair trade' feel good beans.
In the USA we have a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of the world. If you're willing to move up north where I live, McDonald's will pay $8+/hour for starting employees. Higher if you have experience or a history as a good worker. Why do they pay this? Because otherwise they wouldn't be able to get enough workers to stay in business.
If walmart wasn't paying a competitive wage, it wouldn't be able to get workers. It's as simple as that.
And it's perfectly in my rights to ignore the boycott and patronize walmart anyways...
Just as it should be my right to go to work in the place of the union workers who're refusing to work without interference from said ex-workers.
Look, I don't mind collective bargaining to an extent. But when it starts eliminating incentives to excel, or even to just do a good job(try to fire somebody who's screwing up in some labor shops...), it's missing the point. When the labor costs are such that the company is getting slaughtered by foreign competition, it's missing the point. When a company would rather outsource and build a plant outside of the unionized area, the union is missing the point. When it's cheaper to close down a plant than to keep it open, the union is missing the point.
The point of the union is to serve the workers. You can't kill the golden goose and do that.
There are employers who are far worse than walmart in most respects. Walmart is simply a larger target.
BTW didn't I read where Nike and Kmart and Apple (forgive me, I know its /.) all were accused of using slave labor in foreign lands?
Slave labor, sweatshop manufacturing plants aside, this hits on what I think is the real reason for wage stagnation in the USA. We're transitioning to a world economy, and resource exploitation naturally tends to shift to where it's the cheapest. Which is currently in Asia. Our high wages are helping to push theirs up*, but at the same time it's trying to drag ours down. Productivity gains all around have helped, but until China and India have substantially caught up, it will continue. While Africa is still a substantial reservoir of essentially untapped labor, it's not stable enough at this time to be of much use to business.
*Disagree with the sweatshops all you want, generally the people who work in them are making more money than they would at their alternatives, such as the subsidence farm.
Basically what Bendodge said.
Sooner or later, one of the companies, native or foreign would take the opportunity to drop prices a bit and steal business from the other companies.
Let's ask this question: If they'd take the opportunity to keep their prices the same if costs drop, why don't they raise prices? After all, what's to stop them from making more profit?
Heck - look at gasoline prices. Sure, it takes a little time, but when the refineries are operational and oil costs are down, gasoline at the pump does drop.
I'd ask: What are grown adults doing getting a part time job at walmart for anything but christmas cash?
You can whine about this all you like, but walmart provides competitive wages and benefits for it's workers for their skill levels and hours.
Yes, it sucks to be at the bottom of the labor pool. I'd suggest education and getting a better job, especially if you have family to support.
Of course, I think that having companies provide health insurance and retirement benefits to be a bad thing on the whole; I'd rather take the money and provide my own health care* and retirement investments. That way I could plan for my retirement, and get the best insurance for me, not the company.
*In an ideal world where individual payers don't get screwed.
Police departments can log their number of arrests, keep track of the crime rate, etc... Still, it's been shown that if you put too much emphasis on these metrics police departments will start doing silly things like arresting for silly things like minor traffic violations and jaywalking to simply get their stats up.
Meanwhile, a truly good department might have high bang for the buck programs that prevent crimes, actually reducing their arrest rate. So you could track by crime rate(not arrest rate), but so many things affect that that it can't be a sole indicator of police effectiveness.
Changing demographics(poor uneducated young men cause the most violent crime) can make a huge difference, easily swamping the efforts of the police. An ineffective judicial/penal system can hamstring police.
Same thing with fire departments. They're actually easier; aside from fire prevention education efforts and code enforcement(in some areas), you can look at the level of their responses to fires. How fast they got there; how fast did they resolve the incidents; did the fires spread to other buildings; etc...
Though that does give me an idea: Judgement by their peers. You can have a group of experienced fire chiefs and fire fighters travel around and 'judge' the various departments. Is their equipment sufficient and well maintained? Do their procedures make sense? Do the supervisors know their stuff; can they tell when to pull their men out of a building for safety?
Same thing for network admins. Do they check their backups? Do they have redundancy, do they keep up with patches and security fixes?
To approach it from an entirely different angle, much of an system administrator's job(whether Unix or not) is to avoid things, much like a security guard.
Just for one example: How do you measure avoided data leaks that would of cost millions?
It also covers people who act to the best of their(limited, non-professional) knowledge.
IE I've had first aid and CPR and such. Because I'm not a professional, and the extent of my training is once every couple years, I'm still covered if I help, but unintentionally cause some harm.
IE I move somebody with back injuries out of a burning car - I *know* he has back injuries, but there's an immediate danger to his life.
In any court they'd have to practically prove that I was being malicious. My training is to save life first, then worry about limbs(back would count there), followed up distantly by comfort and such. I don't have an ambulance worth of medical supplies and tools. I'm not a professional. I have a slightly better than average first aid kit in my car, and annual training provided by my work that takes about an hour and that's it.
I'll try to keep your heart beating, lungs breathing, and stop any bleeding. I'll wrap any severed parts in cloth or paper and stick it on ice if possible.
I'm not a professional, I'll do my best, but I don't have practiced techniques and probably won't do the perfect 20/20 hindsight best practice found by consulting a team of seven doctors over the course of two weeks. I'd be lucky to have two minutes.
Let's say I wanted to ask someone a question, a simple question with no real need for an immediate reply. I send an e-mail. If I were to use regular phone, I have to deal with polite conversation which I may or may not have time for. Not that I don't mind idle conversation, it's just something I don't always want to deal with.
I love email for this very reason. Somebody asks me a question over the phone, if I don't have an immediate answer ready I have to get their contact information. That can be a pain in the butt, especially if we have a bad phone connection(It happens).
With email, if I have the info I dump it into the email and send it off to them. I even tend to keep a 'faq' listing for that very purpose(no, I don't make it public, because I'm supposed to be providing the 'personal touch', and customize the answers a bit for the customer's exact situation). If I need to collect it, no big deal, I have their contact information right there. It's in my queue, so to speak.
Unfortunately, most of my answers require research at this point because I just shifted positions and am still learning my new job.
I've heard some rumblings like this; where high-level characters can manipulate the surroundings and create quests and such.
It's just that making it hard to game the system for advantages is almost impossible.
Also, your actions in a online game are drastically reduced even as a player. For example, do I fight, try diplomacy(more than 3 or 4 dialog options), get creative and try to burn the building down, sneak in through an upper window, disintegrate a wall, polymorph myself as a rat and come in through the sewer, etc...
A good DM/GM can handle this. The closest to this I've seen in games is the old hero's quest type games, and that's because they generally made three or four options to solve each quest. The fighter way, one each for thief and mage, and occasionally the 'smart way' where you didn't have to 'brute force' it at all by using class skills.
Yes, I know they could produce a car with even better mileage.
Heck, I could probably build a car that gets 100mpg without too much trouble.
The problem? It wouldn't meet todays safety and emission requirements, not to mention convenience systems such as power steering, windows, video systems in the vehicle upping power draw to the point you need a larger alternator. Each of which adds substantial weight to the car, requiring a larger engine to maintain performance within specifications, increasing weight even more and reducing gas mileage.