To me that N. Korea got a vehicle even past first stage is impressive. Launch vehicles are hard. If nothing else managing a project that size requires a great deal of skill, I doubt the average MBA can do it.
Let me tell you something about MBAs.
This one time at computer camp, we had an MBA on-staff to run the project. We kept her out of our hair with a simple plan. We obtained a 12 x 7 x 17" rectangular brown enclosure from a local merchant. They were just giving them away. We placed the MBA inside with orders to manage an escape utilizing the skills she obtained from her education.
Suffice to say we completed the project on-time, on-budget and with great results. And no, the MBA did not make it out to "assist" us.
If you want to work behind-the-scenes on SAP, you'd better know German.
I can't tell you how much translation work I've done for folks getting into the deeper parts of their engine, who suddenly can't figure out what any of the comments or variable names mean.
Language is language is language, whether computer or human. Learn to use one well, and the others become clearer while you come to a greater appreciation of a quality statement.
You would be better off recognizing that your team and technology all need to be on the same page than saying that everyone should simply accommodate you.
Up to this point, people just wanted something flashy that justified expensive, penis-length-contest-winning hardware. And so Microsoft gave people a more and more integrated experience.
As the public finally realized that they mostly just wanted glorified net appliances, demands changed. Microsoft, being relatively nimble as gigantic international companies go, is shipping what people are demanding.
Whether people would have realized this without alternative OSs pulling them along is debatable, of course. But Microsoft is simply tailoring their product to demand.
Sounds like a class where I can just make up answers out of absolutely nothing
I have a minor in Religion from a Lutheran college, and while I don't see the point in granting a master's in Creationism outside of the liberal arts wing of academia, I will say that religion classes in general don't allow the sort of thing you describe at all.
You have to support any position you take by using the actual texts, understanding the history of the document itself as well as the Sitzt im Leben and supporting traditions. In fact, the professors tend to make you feel pretty small if you just spout off some fundie crap and say, "it's just what I believe".
It's a shame someone modded your obvious troll insightful. Try expanding your horizons before being so superficially critical.
Typically, that sort of thing falls under "workplace harassment" laws in the US.
Although it's generally considered better if you can show a pattern of trying to work within the company before leaving/suing. It's serious enough today that most HR departments take such cases pretty seriously.
Mozilla should release a "Windows EU Compliance Edition".
This thing should absolutely suck. Terribly slow page load times, grossly unstable. But totally standards compliant and able to pass acid3 with flying colors.
Yeah, it'll take some creative coding to do. (if website = acid3.acidtests.org......)
But when the rotten reviews come in, just respond, "Well, if Microsoft ever released those standards documents, and got compliant with what modern OSs do, this would have worked fine, like it does on Linux on this demonstrator".
Then the EU will continue to spend its time trying to bend Microsoft over a table while ignoring copyright law reform, international banking panics, and anything else that could actually use attention.
The CTO of the country doesn't need to be someone with an impressive resume who's never actually done anything or created anything substantial, it needs to be someone who has actual experience innovating and growing innovation.
Why?
That doesn't line up with our choice for President at all.
It seems to me that we should be asking for a Federal CTO with big ideas and virtually no experience. What's Jon Katz up to, these days?
Christians came to these realizations roughly 500 years ago....how long before the new Enviroligion realizes the following?
(Highlights follow, with apologies to Dr. Martin Luther and all the other good Lutherans/Protestants on/.)
27 There is no green authority for preaching that the pollution flies out of the biosphere immediately once the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.
28 It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase; but when the Treehuggers offer intercession, all depends in the will of Gore.
29 Who knows whether all souls who live in pollution wish to be redeemed in view of what is said of St. Severinus and St. Pascal? (Note: Paschal I, pope 817-24. The legend is that he and Severinus were willing to endure the pains of a befouled environment for the benefit of the Treehuggers).
32 All those who believe themselves certain of their own harmony with nature by means of letters of carbon credit, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.
41 Carbon Credits should only be preached with caution, lest people gain a wrong understanding, and think that they are preferable to other good works: those of loving trees.
49 Hippie Treehuggers should be taught that the Gore's indulgences are useful only if one does not rely on them, but most harmful if one loses the fear of Pollution through them.
54 The word of Gore suffers injury if, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is devoted to Carbon Credits than to that word.
67 The Carbon Credits, which the merchants extol as the greatest of favours, are seen to be, in fact, a favourite means for money-getting.
82 They ask, e.g.: Why does not the Gore liberate everyone from pollution for the sake of loving trees (a most Green thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their environment? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable polluters for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build Gore Manor, a very minor purpose.
"People" are not hoarding anything. In Q3 2005, the personal savings rate went negative. Now, 3-4 years later, the ARMs are adjusting and the piper is being paid.
"Banks" are holding money borrowed from the US Treasury against expected losses on badly-made loans. So to say they're hoarding is wrong, because it implies there is money they would lend, but aren't. Instead, the Citibanks and Chases of the world are trying to shore up their reserves to get back to standard, federally-mandated levels.
Even so, other institutions (like the Federal Banks in England, EU, USA, Japan) are pumping in money like crazy, buying troubled assets, and loaning money for peanuts. In any other time, a 0 to 0.25% funds rate would be disgustingly inflationary. Let's hope that gets ratcheted back up as fast as the banks recover - otherwise, say hello to our old friend Stagflation again.
And some banks, such as US Bank, didn't get deep into the mess to begin with and are perfectly happy to loan money to qualified borrowers. So I still say, Bunk. There is no "hoard".
The other part of the problem is, you can't make people want to borrow money. It's as much a demand problem as anything, with consumer confidence at historic lows. Individual consumers aren't any more interested in buying houses when values are slipping than banks are in making low-down-payment loans on them.
Yes, private lending does create money. It was creating money too fast and too easily, when nothing-down, interest-only loans were being made on a stated-income basis. That may as well be the definition of overspending, which of course is what you seem to be arguing against, since it was a main point. In sum, you can't create money via reserve-ratio-based lending if no one wants to borrow.
And, while personal savings rates did spike all the way up (ha) to 2.5% of disposable income in Q2 2008, it's fallen back down to just over 1% in Q3. We don't have Q4 numbers yet. None of those numbers are impressive, and even 2.5% is still very low. http://www.bea.gov/briefrm/saving.htm
Keep in mind, also, that what was once "saved" is now 40% gone with the stock market collapse. It's not "hoarded", it's just gone. So there's that to contend with also.
People listening to talking heads like to echo the phrase, "frozen credit markets", as if it was a way to grab a suit at some bank and shake them for not making loans. But implying that lenders are just altogether refusing to lend from some massive, secret reserve is specious. You do, after all, have to have a reserve from which to loan - even when working reserve ratios.
They're just not willing to dive into Lake Stupid with the stated-income, interest-only mortgages for 105% loan-to-value anymore. Especially not on a depreciating asset like a house. And yes, that is a contraction from a year ago. But "hoarding"? Try "return to common sense" instead.
You actually contradict yourself, and reality, quite a bit.
If you have a corporation, you use that corporation as a tax shelter. The higher the tax on your income, the less you will claim as an official salary from your company...... which means....higher wages
You claim to increase your wages by decreasing your wages. Nice logic.
In truth, a small business owner will probably seek to shift their personal rewards to a more tax-advantageous status, like claiming part of the home as an office, handing over the car payment to the business, and structuring part of their income as a pre-tax benefit, like retirement investments and a medical expense account.
Or, probably more likely, they'll just decide that the tall demands of running a small business aren't worth the reward once Uncle Sam gets finished picking their pocket, and will fire the employees, sell off the assets and go work 9-5 for someone else.
In truth, you're not talking about a large-corporation executive who makes 1 million USD+/year, you're talking about a person who directly owns an S-corp with a dozen employees or fewer, and who's personal income appears, to the tax code, to be $150,000 - 800,000, even though this is actually operating income, which has little to do with his/her own personal wealth or cash flow.
This notion you have of who is wealthy and who is not has a couple of major problems. First off, people who own small businesses represent the bulk of people who the tax code considers to be earning between $200,000 and $800,000. Their real lifestyle, however, is middle-class professional, and is equivalent to a family making significantly less. Taxing these people, therefore, pulls the rug out from under your local landscaper, independent contractor, or dentist. And, what they'll turn around and do is fire people and contract their businesses because they can't afford to continue.
Second, of course, is that in the background, you assume to know what a "fair" level of income is and is not. I don't think you're qualified.
You then go on to claim that business owners who pay more federal income tax get it right back in the form of infrastructure improvements.
When you consider where tax money goes (mostly social security, medicare and defense), you'll see the flaw in your reasoning. It can't possibly be spent $1 for $1 to improve ANYTHING. Due to bureauocracy and centrally-planned objectives, government entities spend money less efficiently than anyone else to begin with!
You continue, claiming that investment in small business caused by high personal tax rates creates more credit for everyone. Huh? If I own a landscaping business, how exactly does my buying a new core aerator create credit for everyone? It doesn't. You're confusing stock purchasing and venture capital with basic capital expenditures. To borrow a phrase, I don't know one competent business person who would do that.
The trouble we have is that no one IS saving. So claiming you have to take money away from people who are hoarding it is silly, because no one IS hoarding money.
Your entire post bases from one grand assumption: Someone, somewhere, is sitting on a pile of cash like Tiamat sits on a pile of gold. The problem is, it's not true in the slightest. This entire ride-up has been driven by negative saving. That's right, we - as individual citizens - have run the economy up by spending faster than we can make money or, recently, even hope to repay it. There must eventually be a reckoning, and that is now. People stopped spending because they finally hit the consequences of living beyond their means. Now, we must live beneath our means for a while....and it's quite a swing.
CNET is owned by CBS, one of the major networks who's prejudiced "coverage" of the news is prompting people to cancel subscriptions and tune out. The obviously, grossly biased news on CBS even cost Dan Rather his job for the simple sake of appearances (even though he's just the talking head that reads what the producer puts on the teleprompter). Despite this, the lesson still isn't learned. So CNET has a strong interest in putting this kind of "analysis" out.
In truth, most old-media outlets get their news from the same source: The Associated Press. Watching almost any local or national newscast, or picking up nearly any newspaper in America, shows a near-perfect reprint of the AP feed. And the AP feed is exactly what people are getting from the syndicated news site of their choice, whether it has a Yahoo, MSN, Google or some other banner at the top of the page. Why watch some overpaid talking-head and suffer through bad advertising if you can just go online, read the source of the copy?
Local and insightful reporting is a dead art, and THAT is what people are turning to the internet for, because it's hard to get from anywhere but a blog in the US.
Each time I physically write out a check, there's a bit of mental bookkeeping that takes place. You can't sit down and write "One thousand one hundred ninety-eight and 32/100" without pausing for a moment to think, holy shit, that's X% of my paycheck.
This is exactly why people should have to pay income tax instead of having it automatically deducted.
If everyone actually had to write that fat check out, they might begin to care about elections and the state of the world.
You'd think amortization of a mortgage would be consistent. Now, throw in new twists like interest-only loans.
-Did the programs assume you might want to pay nothing against principle, or would that throw an error?
-Is there a point where the loan converts to something that pays against the principle after N years? (often yes) What about reverse mortgages? That's a loan you don't make payments on....think that might cause some errors in a standard mortgage module?
Take credit cards. Add reward features - that's new (compared to cards themselves). So you have to build interfaces to companies that manage reward points for you, to airlines, etc.
Suppose your bank issues a card for some other, smaller bank or credit union. You have to build that product into your system.
New regulations come along, like SOX. And Visa/Mastercard change their compliance standards twice a year - you have to keep up.
Hell, a terminal emulator is a terminal emulator. If the company allows for it, it's just like being there. You spend your life coding in a screen 80 characters wide and 26 lines tall.....it's not like this is bandwidth-intensive.:)
Only large organizations use mainframes, so it helps to look at that model.
Large companies generally bin out salaries for most professionals. Developers are no exception.
So you'll get tossed into an income bin with people of similar relative experience. Having a scarce skill will push your income towards the top of that bin. So if the range for "Developer 1" is $52,000 - $75,000, you'll be closer to the upper end. If you're comfortable being a contract consultant under your own name, you'll probably be able to get a decent hourly, whatever your local market goes for.
But if you're expecting this to be the second coming of the HTML millionaires, you're probably going to be disappointed. The most likely outcome is that retired baby boomers will come out of retirement, as part-timers or as occasional consultants, as was done for Y2K.
What coding COBOL CAN do for you is grant you a level of job security you otherwise might not know. Many flavors of the week have come and gone during the COBOL run, and many more will yet. The systems written in COBOL were put on the mainframe because they are fault-intolerant heart and soul of the businesses they support.
I know I do a bit of a poo-poo job on mainframe development below, but I have to say: despite the terminal emulator, mainframe hardware is pretty godly.
5 nines uptime (99.999%)
Hot-swappable CPUs
Fail-predictive hardware throughout - an IBM tech will be at your door with replacement hardware before you even know it's going bad.
And the development environments aren't some freeware/just hacked together things. The tools have been developed by pros over the last 30 frickin' years. It's a very, very solid platform. And things like "dll hell" don't exist there. If you have decent admins (which is not uncommon), actually doing work in a mainframe environment can be pretty nice.
A couple of things people should realize when thinking about getting into mainframe/cobol:
1. COBOL programmers are 99.9% baby boomers. If you want to spend your next decade getting talked down to by a 50-something or 60-something who thinks they're a programming god because of their teaching degree and 30 years writing COBOL, then you're probably into leather and whips, and would be happier staying in your dungeon. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
2. COBOL is not challenging to learn (it's designed that way), and the programming tasks are largely mundane. You'll be working almost exclusively on data processing tasks, because that's what the mainframe does best: massive throughput of number crunching.
3. You shouldn't just learn COBOL, you should spend time with JCL and DB2's version of SQL, and some CICS concepts would serve you very well. But without JCL and DB2, you're practically useless anyway. But they're not hard to learn.
4. zOS also runs Java now, so if we just stay back and let it rot, eventually perhaps they'll just throw it all to Java.
5. It's hard to just "take a class" on COBOL, but forward-thinking companies are starting to train people like disaffected teachers, just like what was done in the 70's. So if you want to work with/clean up after that sort of developer....
But the "dummies" book should serve you very well.
Oh, and once you start working with them, expect lots of, "Why does my PC do this", kind of questions, because most of the COBOL people I've met in shops aren't very technical. (IBM people are bright enough though)
In 1995, the Congress changed the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring bakers to make a certain percentage of their bread to sell to people who couldn't otherwise afford it. We'll call it waybread. Congress said, don't worry about the risk, we'll buy whatever waybread doesn't go, but we have to do it through a shell game, so we'll get our friends Fanny and Freddy to buy it all.
But that's not all. If Bakers wanted to merge, or open a new storefront, or just buy more yeast, they had to meet that percentage, or the Regulators of Baking wouldn't let them.
Now, you could sell this waybread on a market. So if you made more then you needed to meet the percentage the Regulators of Baking demanded, you could sell it.
Some bakers didn't operate in areas where people bought waybread at all. So they bought big lots of this waybread, which drove demand for it up and made it more valuable then it should have been. Even foreign Bakers bought it up, knowing they could resell it for more than they bought it for.
But then, the waybread started going bad. Really bad. So everyone looked for Fanny and Freddy to buy it. But they couldn't afford to, the Congress had demanded too much be made.
The lesson is, when you want your Congress to make an industry behave by Communist central planning, be ready for it to flop like a centrally-planned economy. It's kind of hard to blame the Bakers for doing what they were required to do by Congress. Especially since they've been fighting it all along, and were criticized by the nut-gathering group Acorn, and others, for fighting the standards. The Bakers, you see, understood the risk involved.
It's not the cookies and loaves of bread that are rotting, it's just the waybread. And now we're stuck with a whole lot of rotten waybread.
Do you have an e-mail account you use which is not associated with your job?
All these assumptions about what goes on in private e-mail accounts have not been substantiated. In fact, the cracker responsible said he went through Palin's e-mail, and found absolutely nothing.
Furthermore, since this cracker is the son of a Democrat, he would have known what to look for. Instead, he freely admits it's just stuff like communications with friends, casual conversations with other Republicans, and pictures of her kids.
There's nothing there - as the opposition party fully admits - but it sure doesn't stop the idiot conspiracy theorists from foaming at the mouth.
And one last thing: if you consider this to be a politically-used account, then what _exactly_ is the difference between this and Watergate?
FYI: Senator Kohl, D-WI, does not accept campaign funding from such sources. His campaign tagline has, for years now, been "nobody's senator but yours".
Senator Kohl is independently wealthy, and largely funds his own campaign every 6 years. No one of consequence ever challenges him.
Or put it this way: ever hear of Kohl's Department Stores? Yeah, that's him.
www.svc.com has always been good to me for things like data cables, cooling gear like fans + heatsinks, and other odds and ends. Highly recommend them.
And the nice thing is, they don't charge you $3 for shipping per SATA cable, for example. They actually calculate the weight of your order and charge what it actually costs - saves quite a bit on this sort of thing.
I've also noticed that www.buy.com can have very good prices on monitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me tell you something about MBAs.
This one time at computer camp, we had an MBA on-staff to run the project. We kept her out of our hair with a simple plan.
We obtained a 12 x 7 x 17" rectangular brown enclosure from a local merchant. They were just giving them away. We placed the MBA inside with orders to manage an escape utilizing the skills she obtained from her education.
Suffice to say we completed the project on-time, on-budget and with great results. And no, the MBA did not make it out to "assist" us.
Actually, all the research and money put into developing an ICBM would be better spent feeding the North Korean people.
According to the UN's World Food Program, 8.7 million North Koreans will need food aid this year. That's roughly one third of the population.
What if you're a buttface?
Will Opera just poop out on you?
If you want to work behind-the-scenes on SAP, you'd better know German.
I can't tell you how much translation work I've done for folks getting into the deeper parts of their engine, who suddenly can't figure out what any of the comments or variable names mean.
Language is language is language, whether computer or human. Learn to use one well, and the others become clearer while you come to a greater appreciation of a quality statement.
You would be better off recognizing that your team and technology all need to be on the same page than saying that everyone should simply accommodate you.
Up to this point, people just wanted something flashy that justified expensive, penis-length-contest-winning hardware. And so Microsoft gave people a more and more integrated experience.
As the public finally realized that they mostly just wanted glorified net appliances, demands changed. Microsoft, being relatively nimble as gigantic international companies go, is shipping what people are demanding.
Whether people would have realized this without alternative OSs pulling them along is debatable, of course. But Microsoft is simply tailoring their product to demand.
If it's a Dell, something on the order of $50. YMMV.
http://www.linux.com/articles/59381
I have a minor in Religion from a Lutheran college, and while I don't see the point in granting a master's in Creationism outside of the liberal arts wing of academia, I will say that religion classes in general don't allow the sort of thing you describe at all.
You have to support any position you take by using the actual texts, understanding the history of the document itself as well as the Sitzt im Leben and supporting traditions. In fact, the professors tend to make you feel pretty small if you just spout off some fundie crap and say, "it's just what I believe".
It's a shame someone modded your obvious troll insightful. Try expanding your horizons before being so superficially critical.
Typically, that sort of thing falls under "workplace harassment" laws in the US.
Although it's generally considered better if you can show a pattern of trying to work within the company before leaving/suing. It's serious enough today that most HR departments take such cases pretty seriously.
Mozilla should release a "Windows EU Compliance Edition".
This thing should absolutely suck. Terribly slow page load times, grossly unstable.
But totally standards compliant and able to pass acid3 with flying colors.
Yeah, it'll take some creative coding to do. (if website = acid3.acidtests.org......)
But when the rotten reviews come in, just respond, "Well, if Microsoft ever released those standards documents, and got compliant with what modern OSs do, this would have worked fine, like it does on Linux on this demonstrator".
Then the EU will continue to spend its time trying to bend Microsoft over a table while ignoring copyright law reform, international banking panics, and anything else that could actually use attention.
The CTO of the country doesn't need to be someone with an impressive resume who's never actually done anything or created anything substantial, it needs to be someone who has actual experience innovating and growing innovation.
Why?
That doesn't line up with our choice for President at all.
It seems to me that we should be asking for a Federal CTO with big ideas and virtually no experience. What's Jon Katz up to, these days?
Christians came to these realizations roughly 500 years ago....how long before the new Enviroligion realizes the following?
(Highlights follow, with apologies to Dr. Martin Luther and all the other good Lutherans/Protestants on /.)
27
There is no green authority for preaching that the pollution flies out of the biosphere immediately once the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.
28
It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase; but when the Treehuggers offer intercession, all depends in the will of Gore.
29
Who knows whether all souls who live in pollution wish to be redeemed in view of what is said of St. Severinus and St. Pascal? (Note: Paschal I, pope 817-24. The legend is that he and Severinus were willing to endure the pains of a befouled environment for the benefit of the Treehuggers).
32
All those who believe themselves certain of their own harmony with nature by means of letters of carbon credit, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.
41
Carbon Credits should only be preached with caution, lest people gain a wrong understanding, and think that they are preferable to other good works: those of loving trees.
49
Hippie Treehuggers should be taught that the Gore's indulgences are useful only if one does not rely on them, but most harmful if one loses the fear of Pollution through them.
54
The word of Gore suffers injury if, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is devoted to Carbon Credits than to that word.
67
The Carbon Credits, which the merchants extol as the greatest of favours, are seen to be, in fact, a favourite means for money-getting.
82
They ask, e.g.: Why does not the Gore liberate everyone from pollution for the sake of loving trees (a most Green thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their environment? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable polluters for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build Gore Manor, a very minor purpose.
Egad, you've shifted "people" and "institutions".
"People" are not hoarding anything. In Q3 2005, the personal savings rate went negative. Now, 3-4 years later, the ARMs are adjusting and the piper is being paid.
"Banks" are holding money borrowed from the US Treasury against expected losses on badly-made loans. So to say they're hoarding is wrong, because it implies there is money they would lend, but aren't. Instead, the Citibanks and Chases of the world are trying to shore up their reserves to get back to standard, federally-mandated levels.
Even so, other institutions (like the Federal Banks in England, EU, USA, Japan) are pumping in money like crazy, buying troubled assets, and loaning money for peanuts. In any other time, a 0 to 0.25% funds rate would be disgustingly inflationary. Let's hope that gets ratcheted back up as fast as the banks recover - otherwise, say hello to our old friend Stagflation again.
And some banks, such as US Bank, didn't get deep into the mess to begin with and are perfectly happy to loan money to qualified borrowers. So I still say, Bunk. There is no "hoard".
The other part of the problem is, you can't make people want to borrow money. It's as much a demand problem as anything, with consumer confidence at historic lows. Individual consumers aren't any more interested in buying houses when values are slipping than banks are in making low-down-payment loans on them.
Yes, private lending does create money. It was creating money too fast and too easily, when nothing-down, interest-only loans were being made on a stated-income basis. That may as well be the definition of overspending, which of course is what you seem to be arguing against, since it was a main point. In sum, you can't create money via reserve-ratio-based lending if no one wants to borrow.
And, while personal savings rates did spike all the way up (ha) to 2.5% of disposable income in Q2 2008, it's fallen back down to just over 1% in Q3. We don't have Q4 numbers yet. None of those numbers are impressive, and even 2.5% is still very low.
http://www.bea.gov/briefrm/saving.htm
Keep in mind, also, that what was once "saved" is now 40% gone with the stock market collapse. It's not "hoarded", it's just gone. So there's that to contend with also.
People listening to talking heads like to echo the phrase, "frozen credit markets", as if it was a way to grab a suit at some bank and shake them for not making loans. But implying that lenders are just altogether refusing to lend from some massive, secret reserve is specious. You do, after all, have to have a reserve from which to loan - even when working reserve ratios.
They're just not willing to dive into Lake Stupid with the stated-income, interest-only mortgages for 105% loan-to-value anymore. Especially not on a depreciating asset like a house. And yes, that is a contraction from a year ago. But "hoarding"? Try "return to common sense" instead.
You actually contradict yourself, and reality, quite a bit.
If you have a corporation, you use that corporation as a tax shelter. The higher the tax on your income, the less you will claim as an official salary from your company. .....
which means....higher wages
You claim to increase your wages by decreasing your wages. Nice logic.
In truth, a small business owner will probably seek to shift their personal rewards to a more tax-advantageous status, like claiming part of the home as an office, handing over the car payment to the business, and structuring part of their income as a pre-tax benefit, like retirement investments and a medical expense account.
Or, probably more likely, they'll just decide that the tall demands of running a small business aren't worth the reward once Uncle Sam gets finished picking their pocket, and will fire the employees, sell off the assets and go work 9-5 for someone else.
In truth, you're not talking about a large-corporation executive who makes 1 million USD+/year, you're talking about a person who directly owns an S-corp with a dozen employees or fewer, and who's personal income appears, to the tax code, to be $150,000 - 800,000, even though this is actually operating income, which has little to do with his/her own personal wealth or cash flow.
This notion you have of who is wealthy and who is not has a couple of major problems. First off, people who own small businesses represent the bulk of people who the tax code considers to be earning between $200,000 and $800,000. Their real lifestyle, however, is middle-class professional, and is equivalent to a family making significantly less. Taxing these people, therefore, pulls the rug out from under your local landscaper, independent contractor, or dentist. And, what they'll turn around and do is fire people and contract their businesses because they can't afford to continue.
Second, of course, is that in the background, you assume to know what a "fair" level of income is and is not. I don't think you're qualified.
You then go on to claim that business owners who pay more federal income tax get it right back in the form of infrastructure improvements.
Tell that to the good people of Minnesota, who get only 19 cents of returning investment for every dollar they pay in federal tax. In fact, 31 out of the 50 states get back LESS than they send to Washington.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Publications/What-Came-to-Your-State-in-2005.html
When you consider where tax money goes (mostly social security, medicare and defense), you'll see the flaw in your reasoning. It can't possibly be spent $1 for $1 to improve ANYTHING. Due to bureauocracy and centrally-planned objectives, government entities spend money less efficiently than anyone else to begin with!
You continue, claiming that investment in small business caused by high personal tax rates creates more credit for everyone.
Huh?
If I own a landscaping business, how exactly does my buying a new core aerator create credit for everyone? It doesn't. You're confusing stock purchasing and venture capital with basic capital expenditures. To borrow a phrase, I don't know one competent business person who would do that.
The trouble we have is that no one IS saving. So claiming you have to take money away from people who are hoarding it is silly, because no one IS hoarding money.
Your entire post bases from one grand assumption: Someone, somewhere, is sitting on a pile of cash like Tiamat sits on a pile of gold. The problem is, it's not true in the slightest. This entire ride-up has been driven by negative saving. That's right, we - as individual citizens - have run the economy up by spending faster than we can make money or, recently, even hope to repay it. There must eventually be a reckoning, and that is now. People stopped spending because they finally hit the consequences of living beyond their means. Now, we must live beneath our means for a while....and it's quite a swing.
CNET is owned by CBS, one of the major networks who's prejudiced "coverage" of the news is prompting people to cancel subscriptions and tune out. The obviously, grossly biased news on CBS even cost Dan Rather his job for the simple sake of appearances (even though he's just the talking head that reads what the producer puts on the teleprompter). Despite this, the lesson still isn't learned. So CNET has a strong interest in putting this kind of "analysis" out.
In truth, most old-media outlets get their news from the same source: The Associated Press. Watching almost any local or national newscast, or picking up nearly any newspaper in America, shows a near-perfect reprint of the AP feed. And the AP feed is exactly what people are getting from the syndicated news site of their choice, whether it has a Yahoo, MSN, Google or some other banner at the top of the page. Why watch some overpaid talking-head and suffer through bad advertising if you can just go online, read the source of the copy?
Local and insightful reporting is a dead art, and THAT is what people are turning to the internet for, because it's hard to get from anywhere but a blog in the US.
Each time I physically write out a check, there's a bit of mental bookkeeping that takes place. You can't sit down and write "One thousand one hundred ninety-eight and 32/100" without pausing for a moment to think, holy shit, that's X% of my paycheck.
This is exactly why people should have to pay income tax instead of having it automatically deducted.
If everyone actually had to write that fat check out, they might begin to care about elections and the state of the world.
Bloody Biometrics!
Well, take mortgages.
You'd think amortization of a mortgage would be consistent.
Now, throw in new twists like interest-only loans.
-Did the programs assume you might want to pay nothing against principle, or would that throw an error?
-Is there a point where the loan converts to something that pays against the principle after N years? (often yes)
What about reverse mortgages? That's a loan you don't make payments on....think that might cause some errors in a standard mortgage module?
Take credit cards.
Add reward features - that's new (compared to cards themselves). So you have to build interfaces to companies that manage reward points for you, to airlines, etc.
Suppose your bank issues a card for some other, smaller bank or credit union. You have to build that product into your system.
New regulations come along, like SOX. And Visa/Mastercard change their compliance standards twice a year - you have to keep up.
The one constant in business is change.
Every day?
Not many.
On and off?
Lots.
Hell, a terminal emulator is a terminal emulator. If the company allows for it, it's just like being there. :)
You spend your life coding in a screen 80 characters wide and 26 lines tall.....it's not like this is bandwidth-intensive.
More as opposed to what?
Only large organizations use mainframes, so it helps to look at that model.
Large companies generally bin out salaries for most professionals. Developers are no exception.
So you'll get tossed into an income bin with people of similar relative experience. Having a scarce skill will push your income towards the top of that bin. So if the range for "Developer 1" is $52,000 - $75,000, you'll be closer to the upper end. If you're comfortable being a contract consultant under your own name, you'll probably be able to get a decent hourly, whatever your local market goes for.
But if you're expecting this to be the second coming of the HTML millionaires, you're probably going to be disappointed.
The most likely outcome is that retired baby boomers will come out of retirement, as part-timers or as occasional consultants, as was done for Y2K.
What coding COBOL CAN do for you is grant you a level of job security you otherwise might not know.
Many flavors of the week have come and gone during the COBOL run, and many more will yet. The systems written in COBOL were put on the mainframe because they are fault-intolerant heart and soul of the businesses they support.
And if you support those systems, so are you.
I know I do a bit of a poo-poo job on mainframe development below, but I have to say: despite the terminal emulator, mainframe hardware is pretty godly.
5 nines uptime (99.999%)
Hot-swappable CPUs
Fail-predictive hardware throughout - an IBM tech will be at your door with replacement hardware before you even know it's going bad.
And the development environments aren't some freeware/just hacked together things. The tools have been developed by pros over the last 30 frickin' years. It's a very, very solid platform. And things like "dll hell" don't exist there. If you have decent admins (which is not uncommon), actually doing work in a mainframe environment can be pretty nice.
A couple of things people should realize when thinking about getting into mainframe/cobol:
1. COBOL programmers are 99.9% baby boomers. If you want to spend your next decade getting talked down to by a 50-something or 60-something who thinks they're a programming god because of their teaching degree and 30 years writing COBOL, then you're probably into leather and whips, and would be happier staying in your dungeon. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
2. COBOL is not challenging to learn (it's designed that way), and the programming tasks are largely mundane. You'll be working almost exclusively on data processing tasks, because that's what the mainframe does best: massive throughput of number crunching.
3. You shouldn't just learn COBOL, you should spend time with JCL and DB2's version of SQL, and some CICS concepts would serve you very well. But without JCL and DB2, you're practically useless anyway. But they're not hard to learn.
4. zOS also runs Java now, so if we just stay back and let it rot, eventually perhaps they'll just throw it all to Java.
5. It's hard to just "take a class" on COBOL, but forward-thinking companies are starting to train people like disaffected teachers, just like what was done in the 70's. So if you want to work with/clean up after that sort of developer....
If, after all this, you really want to know more, IBM has most of the useful documentation online.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/zos/library/
But the "dummies" book should serve you very well.
Oh, and once you start working with them, expect lots of, "Why does my PC do this", kind of questions, because most of the COBOL people I've met in shops aren't very technical. (IBM people are bright enough though)
Just one problem.
In 1995, the Congress changed the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring bakers to make a certain percentage of their bread to sell to people who couldn't otherwise afford it. We'll call it waybread. Congress said, don't worry about the risk, we'll buy whatever waybread doesn't go, but we have to do it through a shell game, so we'll get our friends Fanny and Freddy to buy it all.
But that's not all. If Bakers wanted to merge, or open a new storefront, or just buy more yeast, they had to meet that percentage, or the Regulators of Baking wouldn't let them.
Now, you could sell this waybread on a market. So if you made more then you needed to meet the percentage the Regulators of Baking demanded, you could sell it.
Some bakers didn't operate in areas where people bought waybread at all. So they bought big lots of this waybread, which drove demand for it up and made it more valuable then it should have been. Even foreign Bakers bought it up, knowing they could resell it for more than they bought it for.
But then, the waybread started going bad. Really bad. So everyone looked for Fanny and Freddy to buy it. But they couldn't afford to, the Congress had demanded too much be made.
The lesson is, when you want your Congress to make an industry behave by Communist central planning, be ready for it to flop like a centrally-planned economy. It's kind of hard to blame the Bakers for doing what they were required to do by Congress. Especially since they've been fighting it all along, and were criticized by the nut-gathering group Acorn, and others, for fighting the standards. The Bakers, you see, understood the risk involved.
It's not the cookies and loaves of bread that are rotting, it's just the waybread. And now we're stuck with a whole lot of rotten waybread.
Absolute tripe.
Do you have a job?
Do you have an e-mail account you use which is not associated with your job?
All these assumptions about what goes on in private e-mail accounts have not been substantiated. In fact, the cracker responsible said he went through Palin's e-mail, and found absolutely nothing.
Furthermore, since this cracker is the son of a Democrat, he would have known what to look for. Instead, he freely admits it's just stuff like communications with friends, casual conversations with other Republicans, and pictures of her kids.
There's nothing there - as the opposition party fully admits - but it sure doesn't stop the idiot conspiracy theorists from foaming at the mouth.
And one last thing: if you consider this to be a politically-used account, then what _exactly_ is the difference between this and Watergate?
Answer: nothing.
FYI: Senator Kohl, D-WI, does not accept campaign funding from such sources. His campaign tagline has, for years now, been "nobody's senator but yours".
Senator Kohl is independently wealthy, and largely funds his own campaign every 6 years. No one of consequence ever challenges him.
Or put it this way: ever hear of Kohl's Department Stores? Yeah, that's him.
www.svc.com has always been good to me for things like data cables, cooling gear like fans + heatsinks, and other odds and ends. Highly recommend them.
And the nice thing is, they don't charge you $3 for shipping per SATA cable, for example. They actually calculate the weight of your order and charge what it actually costs - saves quite a bit on this sort of thing.
I've also noticed that www.buy.com can have very good prices on monitors.