If I had the power to destroy one fiendishly wrong-headed notion before I die, the following would be on the short list:
The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written.
Sigh. Have you seen the inscriptions over the Court? ""Equal Justice Under Law" coming, "Justice, the Guardian of Liberty" going. Maybe you've seen the statue of the blind-folded chick? Wanna take a guess what her name is?
The ultimate job of the Court is not just "to follow the rules." A third-grade hall monitor would be sufficient for that. The ultimate job of the Court is to find what is Just. It is the job of a god in the hands of flawed, fallible men. This is the reason why we are supposed to find our nine finest legal minds, our nine wisest elders.
In our finest legal traditions, we have found that the beginning of Justice, the bare minimum, is to keep the Strong from preying on the Weak, and that is why Dred Scott is such a famously reprehensible decision. We don't condemn the Sharia judges for stoning women to death because they're misapplying the rules. We condemn them for the evil they do by refusing to look beyond the rulebook. The Dred Scott Court cannot excuse themselves by crying "We were just following the rules" any more than other famously evil men can.
When we put guns in the hands of 18-year-old kids and tell them to go and kill in our name, we give them a warning. If the rules conflict with your conscience, if you do something you know is wrong by following the rules, you will one day be held accountable, and crying "I was just doing what the rules said I should," will not save you.
The job of the Court is to find Justice as best Humanity can in the year 2010. It is their black-letter job to stand in the gap and say "This rule, written by the Strong to steal from the Weak, is wrong and we will not abide it."
The Court is supposed to be the Conscience of our Nation, not nine bureaucrats bludgeoning people with the results of lobbies and politics.
The job of the Dred Scott Court was to keep men free. to be the "Guardians of Liberty" as inscribed, not to safeguard the pocketbooks of their kidnappers and rapists. The Dred Scott judges were not "Bad men, but good judges." They were evil men and bad judges as well.
Companies hire you for a 40-hour work week, and then feel no compunction about working you twice that. I know of more than one company that refuses to allow employees to take vacations -- always "too busy now, try again in a couple of months" -- and then institute "hour caps." effectively screwing workers out of their vacations. I know of others that refuse to allow legitimate comp time to be taken.
Once upon a time, after working three 70-hour weeks back-to-back-to-back, and then being asked to put in a fourth week of the same, I came down with a good solid, three-day case of the "flu." To be honest, I actually did feel like hell.
Workers start faking sick days when companies fail to honor their agreements on reasonable work weeks, vacations and comp time.
Now, companies have started hiring private detectives to shadow workers outside of the job. Welcome back to the bad old days of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
During the labor unrest of the late 19th century, businessmen hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
The private detectives aren't there just to enforce sick days. They're also there to quash the unions you advocate as a solution.
Why, I once allowed a doctor to strip my wife naked and cut her open with a knife to pull a baby out. If I had no problems with a doctor doing it, I shouldn't have any problems with anyone else cutting my wife open either.
Why, just the other day I let a nurse jab a needle into my kid, so clearly it's OK for the TSA to do the same!
You're not going to seriously argue that TSA agents carry the same responsibilities and follow the same codes as doctors, priests and lawyers, are you?
Civilian: 2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
But I get your point in that they aren't military. The problem is that the police have forgotten that in the "War on Drugs/Terror/Liberals."
Head over to the forums on "Officer.com" to hear some truly hair-raising smack talked by people we trust with guns and badges. We've tolerated a police culture that thinks of everyone out of uniform as -- officers' own words, mind you -- "sheeple," "peasants" and "children" for far too long.
As much as I love this idea, it'll never happen for the same reason my other favorite plan won't.
Every time we hear the police complain that "Civilians don't understand what it's like, it's a lonely dangerous job, you could never do it, you could never understand" I offer the following plan. Fine. Take every able-bodied, responsible, solid-citizen who's willing, and train and deputize them.
I'm talking serious people with gravitas. Former military officers and chiefs, ER docs, SAR team leads, Red Cross disaster coordinators, CAP fliers, VFD officers, airline pilots and the like. Put them through the Academy on a night shift. They'll sign whatever waivers you require.
In any major city, we could triple the number of boots and guns on the ground, and give the professional police force the breathing room they require. Any full-time uniform outranks and directs the volunteers just like we do for fire-fighting.
This plan is always immediately rejected, no matter what level of training is offered for the volunteers. I once offered to get a squad of triathalon-running judo-black-belt attorneys who could pass the shooting requirements for SWAT together. No dice.
There is a reason our police are chosen from young, poor people with a legally-tested IQ cap. They don't want our cops to know any other life. They don't want our cops to have any other experience than taking orders. That's why they love hiring ex-marines, young people of limited experience who will follow orders without thinking. The city fathers never want to hear a uniform tell them, "I'm sorry sir, but that's an illegal order and it is my duty to decline."
Making cops take a couple of years off of the force would give them the experience and perspective to grow a backbone. The people who hire them would never tolerate that.
worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.
*begin ill-tempered, sleep-deprived rant*
I can certainly understand why some suited weasels would want to buy their way out of any personal responsibility, but seriously, ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHERE THE RISK BELONGS?! I thought that's why we paid them all that money, because they had the 'l33t business and organizational skills to handle the risk, like professional ball players. They're "superstar talent," remember?
God forbid a CIO actually have the get off their fat ass and, you know, TEST an implementation before it goes into production. Oh no, better to just let me get another 3 am panicked call because some jackass can't read...
"On the topic of valuable materials too where do you think we're even going to get the rare-earth metals for our iPhones, and LCDs, or communication grade lasers given that China has pretty much all the worlds supply"
Pretty much every country that has a rare earth mine (and they're not really that rare) put it back into production after last month's fiasco.
Again I like the ideal but the though is shallow and the consequences are more far reaching than you could imagine.
Oh, kid, I got the grey hair to remember what it was like before we started whoring ourselves out to the Chinese government. I can remember when a blue-collar job could buy a house and put your kids through college. Meat-packers and construction workers used to make comfortable livings. Now airline pilots in charge of hundreds of lives have to apply for food stamps.
The United States, unlike Japan or Britain, is not a tiny little island with few natural resources. We don't HAVE to do business with the outside world. Unlike North Korea, we are capable of feeding ourselves. We can supply all of our own manufacturing inputs for steel, plastic, electronics, etc.
The ONLY people who benefit from trade with the Chinese are the wealthy in this country who get access to slave labor by proxy, who get to shirk their environmental responsibilities because the monsters in Beijing don't care if entire peasant towns die from cancer. You and I don't benefit from it because prices are already set as high as the market will bear. All that trade with the Chinese does is cut the legs out from underneath labor, allowing the wealthy to roll back all the gains that were made when the muckrakers ruled.
Welcome back to the bad old days.
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead. I WANT to see China join the civilized world. I WANT to see a real democracy in China. I would love to think those three thousand college kids did not die in vain.
But what I want more than that is that my own children do not join those Chinese kids in servitude, which is precisely where we're headed.
and I know [they say] that everything is about to get more expensive. But,...
...prices are already set as high as the market will bear, so prices are going nowhere. But here's the good news, here's where we get our integrity back.
We will not do business with men who murder kids. We will not do business with butchers who part their own people out like stolen cars. We will no longer allow the people who poison their own children to make toys for ours.
As of today, all imports from China are canceled. Any company that wants to manufacture anything overseas must do so in a country that meets or exceeds our labor and environmental protections. All trade will henceforth be on a "dollar-out, dollar-in" basis, and our trade policies will at least mirror the ones on the other side of the deal.
For all of you who are unemployed, get your resumes ready. You're about to get offers. For those of you who have jobs, get ready to talk to your boss about a raise.
Take me seriously? Have you seen the polls lately? If we cut off trade with China tomorrow, there would be dancing on both sides of the aisle, from both the unions and the tea partiers, from both the tree-huggers and the VFW. The only people who would suffer are the rich bastards who have been selling us out to monsters since Nixon.
In 1989, we watched in horror as the Chinese government murdered 3,000 students for the crime of asking for a Democratic government.
A lot of us tried to boycott China after that for fear of making those bloody monsters even more rich and powerful
We were shouted down. "We have to trade with China. As China grows wealthier, the wealth will trickle down to their middle class, who will then rise up and demand basic human rights and freedoms. As we trade with China, as we stregnthen their middle classes, China will be dragged into joining the civilized world."
It didn't quite work out that way. China still has no real middle class, though ours has been decimated. The Chinese government started executing prisoners and selling their organs for profit, but that uprising of the newly-empowered middle classes still didn't happen.
So where is this "Enlightenment Through Trade?" China took that money, and used it to build a military that they're now threatening Japan with. They're kidnapping Toyota executives and holding manufacturing hostage with the market corner they've got on rare earth elements.
We've sacrificed our manufacturing base to this idea that a richer China is a friendlier China.
"Last Dec. 25 her husband was sentenced to 11 years behind bars, after being found guilty of trying to incite others to subvert state power.
Liu was the lead author of a document called Charter '08, calling for multi-party elections in China, where the Communist Party keeps a lock grip on power."
Why are we still doing business with these monsters?
I agree with the sentiment in theory, but voting with your feet is not as easy as you make it sound.
The extremely large company where I work just fired, well, had a layoff of one, of a guy whose next prospective employer's HR department called to check references. Last I heard, this guy has been unjustly tagged as a malcontent by the boss, and he has not found a new job. HR is giving a very dour and tight-lipped "name and dates of employment only" response that, while skirting the law, makes it very clear the company considers him a horrible employee. It's a small industry, and looking around carries the risk of getting prematurely helped out the door. It can absolutely be done, but the risk is not zero.
Secondly, health insurance. One of the guys I work with has a chronic health problem with one of his kids. Every time he changes jobs, he gets to start the fight anew to get the kid's medical issues covered. It is not trivial, it frequently gets right up to the lawyers, and each time his kid's medical care is interupted, there's a small but real risk that his child could actually die.
Employment has so much "friction" it might as well be considered a market failure. If McDonald's screws you over, Burger King is across the street. If your employer screw you over -- and unjust poor references seem to be the weapon of choice -- then an uphill legal battle lasting years and costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars might be your only rememdy.
Don't kid yourself. "Voting with your feet" isn't nearly as safe and effective as we would like it to be, or as it should be.
"I work as a code monkey at a university and provide research support.... They have a vague idea what they need."
It's one thing to work with bright people who have gained a level of real expertise at something -- anything -- and are working with you in good faith.
It's an entirely different ballgame trying to cope with the mendacious, illiterate sociopaths that corporate structure seems to favor.
The OP was too kind. He should have included the whole quote:
"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
Think about the implications of that statement, and the employees that manager will end up with. Remember, the article begins with the supposition that the manager knows nothing about the technology involved. What's more likely? That you've found some one-in-a-billion Tesla genius who really can do the same job in 1/40th of the time, or that you've found some lying SOB who just claims to?
Here's something else. Smart people tend to recognize their own worth. They may begin young and naive, but they generally don't stay that way. They're smart, remember? What's more likely, that you've found a mad genius with a catastrophic blind spot -- and they exist, I'll grant you -- or that you've found one of the untold number of bootlicking sycophants who know how to bullshit an idiot?
The academics you're working with are trying to get useful things done. In the corporate world, it's about "managing perceptions," and the people who barge into the meeting bringing cold reality are about as appreciated as bartenders who cut you off after the third bottle of tequila.
It's not a "problem," it's a "challenge." You can always decide to rise to the challenge, and once you have made that decision, the challenge has been met and so it no longer exists. Therefore, problems can be solved merely by deciding they have been.
After the inevitable horrible crash, you simply decide to blame someone else and choose "not to dwell on the past" by "moving on..."
We aren't interested in philosophical debates about if information wants to be free, we are interested in teaching the tools companies want to help students get jobs.
Yeah, Education for the Future!
Actually, real colleges are EXACTLY the place where you want to have philosophical debates about EVERYTHING so you don't become one of those idiots who think the University system exists to service Industry instead of building developed minds capable of critical thinking...
Dallas is precisely as the original poster describes it. Various other major cities are following their lead.
The scam goes like this. The private company goes to the various governments and proposes setting up tolls on existing roads, or extending tolls on roads already paid for, and kicking back a small percentage to the State.
The State sees it as free money, and suddenly Joe Sixpack needs a tolltag/transponder to get to work in the morning...
Testing? What's that? The last time I saw real, exhaustive, "Let's Make This Bullet-Proof," "Gentlemen, You Will Not Fail" testing, Bruce Willis had yet to kill his first terrorist.
Testing costs money and is no longer an option. If it fails, you can charge more to fix it.
What are your customers gonna do? "Vote with their wallet?":-)
"These rank amateur egg-head academics are putting themselves and others in harm's way and causing unnecessary danger for the professionals whose job it is to cope with these storms. They have no business in the field and should stay out of the way."
Fire, Police, EMT first responders, 2000
"These rank amateur thrill-seeking rednecks are putting themselves and others in harm's way and causing unnecessary danger for the professionals whose job it is to cope with these storms. They have no business in the field and should stay out of the way."
Egghead Academics, 2010
"Hey Cletus, hold my beer and watch me dominate..."
"Spend time with corrupt, homicidal political figures, and you'll hear a lot of self-pity. What kind of man throws political enemies in prison, and tortures them to death? Usually it's a guy who feels so sorry for himself, he feels justified doing anything. Killers, by and large, are whiny losers. But that doesn't make them any less dangerous."
(Speed traps || Red Light cameras) are about raising revenue, not enforcing the law. They actually make driving less safe by causing drivers to slam on their brakes at unexpected times. They engender contempt for the law by making law enforcement about revenue generation and bill collection, not serving the public.
But yes, I'm in total agreement that red light cameras are a far more egregious case, though I would argue that radar speed traps paved the way for them, in the same way that red light cameras will pave the way for in-car black-box gps monitoring, where all apparent violations will be billed automatically to your credit card.
Slashdot Mirror
... I will personally hunt them down and beat them to death with a Classics textbook. :-)
If I had the power to destroy one fiendishly wrong-headed notion before I die, the following would be on the short list:
The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written.
Sigh. Have you seen the inscriptions over the Court? ""Equal Justice Under Law" coming, "Justice, the Guardian of Liberty" going. Maybe you've seen the statue of the blind-folded chick? Wanna take a guess what her name is?
The ultimate job of the Court is not just "to follow the rules." A third-grade hall monitor would be sufficient for that. The ultimate job of the Court is to find what is Just. It is the job of a god in the hands of flawed, fallible men. This is the reason why we are supposed to find our nine finest legal minds, our nine wisest elders.
In our finest legal traditions, we have found that the beginning of Justice, the bare minimum, is to keep the Strong from preying on the Weak, and that is why Dred Scott is such a famously reprehensible decision. We don't condemn the Sharia judges for stoning women to death because they're misapplying the rules. We condemn them for the evil they do by refusing to look beyond the rulebook. The Dred Scott Court cannot excuse themselves by crying "We were just following the rules" any more than other famously evil men can.
When we put guns in the hands of 18-year-old kids and tell them to go and kill in our name, we give them a warning. If the rules conflict with your conscience, if you do something you know is wrong by following the rules, you will one day be held accountable, and crying "I was just doing what the rules said I should," will not save you.
The job of the Court is to find Justice as best Humanity can in the year 2010. It is their black-letter job to stand in the gap and say "This rule, written by the Strong to steal from the Weak, is wrong and we will not abide it."
The Court is supposed to be the Conscience of our Nation, not nine bureaucrats bludgeoning people with the results of lobbies and politics.
The job of the Dred Scott Court was to keep men free. to be the "Guardians of Liberty" as inscribed, not to safeguard the pocketbooks of their kidnappers and rapists. The Dred Scott judges were not "Bad men, but good judges." They were evil men and bad judges as well.
Companies hire you for a 40-hour work week, and then feel no compunction about working you twice that. I know of more than one company that refuses to allow employees to take vacations -- always "too busy now, try again in a couple of months" -- and then institute "hour caps." effectively screwing workers out of their vacations. I know of others that refuse to allow legitimate comp time to be taken.
Once upon a time, after working three 70-hour weeks back-to-back-to-back, and then being asked to put in a fourth week of the same, I came down with a good solid, three-day case of the "flu." To be honest, I actually did feel like hell.
Workers start faking sick days when companies fail to honor their agreements on reasonable work weeks, vacations and comp time.
Now, companies have started hiring private detectives to shadow workers outside of the job. Welcome back to the bad old days of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency
During the labor unrest of the late 19th century, businessmen hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
The private detectives aren't there just to enforce sick days. They're also there to quash the unions you advocate as a solution.
I think, therefore I'm still not sure if I am or not?
Why, I once allowed a doctor to strip my wife naked and cut her open with a knife to pull a baby out. If I had no problems with a doctor doing it, I shouldn't have any problems with anyone else cutting my wife open either.
Why, just the other day I let a nurse jab a needle into my kid, so clearly it's OK for the TSA to do the same!
You're not going to seriously argue that TSA agents carry the same responsibilities and follow the same codes as doctors, priests and lawyers, are you?
cops are civilians.
Civilian:
2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
But I get your point in that they aren't military. The problem is that the police have forgotten that in the "War on Drugs/Terror/Liberals."
Head over to the forums on "Officer.com" to hear some truly hair-raising smack talked by people we trust with guns and badges. We've tolerated a police culture that thinks of everyone out of uniform as -- officers' own words, mind you -- "sheeple," "peasants" and "children" for far too long.
As much as I love this idea, it'll never happen for the same reason my other favorite plan won't.
Every time we hear the police complain that "Civilians don't understand what it's like, it's a lonely dangerous job, you could never do it, you could never understand" I offer the following plan. Fine. Take every able-bodied, responsible, solid-citizen who's willing, and train and deputize them.
I'm talking serious people with gravitas. Former military officers and chiefs, ER docs, SAR team leads, Red Cross disaster coordinators, CAP fliers, VFD officers, airline pilots and the like. Put them through the Academy on a night shift. They'll sign whatever waivers you require.
In any major city, we could triple the number of boots and guns on the ground, and give the professional police force the breathing room they require. Any full-time uniform outranks and directs the volunteers just like we do for fire-fighting.
This plan is always immediately rejected, no matter what level of training is offered for the volunteers. I once offered to get a squad of triathalon-running judo-black-belt attorneys who could pass the shooting requirements for SWAT together. No dice.
There is a reason our police are chosen from young, poor people with a legally-tested IQ cap. They don't want our cops to know any other life. They don't want our cops to have any other experience than taking orders. That's why they love hiring ex-marines, young people of limited experience who will follow orders without thinking. The city fathers never want to hear a uniform tell them, "I'm sorry sir, but that's an illegal order and it is my duty to decline."
Making cops take a couple of years off of the force would give them the experience and perspective to grow a backbone. The people who hire them would never tolerate that.
worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.
*begin ill-tempered, sleep-deprived rant*
I can certainly understand why some suited weasels would want to buy their way out of any personal responsibility, but seriously, ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHERE THE RISK BELONGS?! I thought that's why we paid them all that money, because they had the 'l33t business and organizational skills to handle the risk, like professional ball players. They're "superstar talent," remember?
God forbid a CIO actually have the get off their fat ass and, you know, TEST an implementation before it goes into production. Oh no, better to just let me get another 3 am panicked call because some jackass can't read...
*end vent*
Better yet, tell them Plone comes from Oracle... :-)
"On the topic of valuable materials too where do you think we're even going to get the rare-earth metals for our iPhones, and LCDs, or communication grade lasers given that China has pretty much all the worlds supply"
Pretty much every country that has a rare earth mine (and they're not really that rare) put it back into production after last month's fiasco.
Again I like the ideal but the though is shallow and the consequences are more far reaching than you could imagine.
Oh, kid, I got the grey hair to remember what it was like before we started whoring ourselves out to the Chinese government. I can remember when a blue-collar job could buy a house and put your kids through college. Meat-packers and construction workers used to make comfortable livings. Now airline pilots in charge of hundreds of lives have to apply for food stamps.
The United States, unlike Japan or Britain, is not a tiny little island with few natural resources. We don't HAVE to do business with the outside world. Unlike North Korea, we are capable of feeding ourselves. We can supply all of our own manufacturing inputs for steel, plastic, electronics, etc.
The ONLY people who benefit from trade with the Chinese are the wealthy in this country who get access to slave labor by proxy, who get to shirk their environmental responsibilities because the monsters in Beijing don't care if entire peasant towns die from cancer. You and I don't benefit from it because prices are already set as high as the market will bear. All that trade with the Chinese does is cut the legs out from underneath labor, allowing the wealthy to roll back all the gains that were made when the muckrakers ruled.
Welcome back to the bad old days.
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead. I WANT to see China join the civilized world. I WANT to see a real democracy in China. I would love to think those three thousand college kids did not die in vain.
But what I want more than that is that my own children do not join those Chinese kids in servitude, which is precisely where we're headed.
and I know [they say] that everything is about to get more expensive. But, ...
...prices are already set as high as the market will bear, so prices are going nowhere. But here's the good news, here's where we get our integrity back.
We will not do business with men who murder kids. We will not do business with butchers who part their own people out like stolen cars. We will no longer allow the people who poison their own children to make toys for ours.
As of today, all imports from China are canceled. Any company that wants to manufacture anything overseas must do so in a country that meets or exceeds our labor and environmental protections. All trade will henceforth be on a "dollar-out, dollar-in" basis, and our trade policies will at least mirror the ones on the other side of the deal.
For all of you who are unemployed, get your resumes ready. You're about to get offers. For those of you who have jobs, get ready to talk to your boss about a raise.
Take me seriously? Have you seen the polls lately? If we cut off trade with China tomorrow, there would be dancing on both sides of the aisle, from both the unions and the tea partiers, from both the tree-huggers and the VFW. The only people who would suffer are the rich bastards who have been selling us out to monsters since Nixon.
In 1989, we watched in horror as the Chinese government murdered 3,000 students for the crime of asking for a Democratic government.
A lot of us tried to boycott China after that for fear of making those bloody monsters even more rich and powerful
We were shouted down. "We have to trade with China. As China grows wealthier, the wealth will trickle down to their middle class, who will then rise up and demand basic human rights and freedoms. As we trade with China, as we stregnthen their middle classes, China will be dragged into joining the civilized world."
It didn't quite work out that way. China still has no real middle class, though ours has been decimated. The Chinese government started executing prisoners and selling their organs for profit, but that uprising of the newly-empowered middle classes still didn't happen.
So where is this "Enlightenment Through Trade?" China took that money, and used it to build a military that they're now threatening Japan with. They're kidnapping Toyota executives and holding manufacturing hostage with the market corner they've got on rare earth elements.
We've sacrificed our manufacturing base to this idea that a richer China is a friendlier China.
Really? How do you explain this?
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/870490--chinese-dissident-tipped-for-nobel-peace-prize
"Last Dec. 25 her husband was sentenced to 11 years behind bars, after being found guilty of trying to incite others to subvert state power.
Liu was the lead author of a document called Charter '08, calling for multi-party elections in China, where the Communist Party keeps a lock grip on power."
Why are we still doing business with these monsters?
"If the same HR department showered some employees with glowing praise and was neutral for others, then we'd have a problem."
Which is pretty much the standard operating procedure these days.
"Hi, I'm from XYZ Inc, calling to check Bob's references..."
"Bob? *sigh* *grunt* Yeah, Bob. Bob used to work here for the past couple of years. That's all I'm going to tell you."
"Can you tell me if Bob was a good employee?"
"Bob used to work here. Now he doesn't. That's all I'm going to say. Understand?"
"Yes, yes I do."
And this is how Bob gets torpedoed, in a perfectly legal way...
I agree with the sentiment in theory, but voting with your feet is not as easy as you make it sound.
The extremely large company where I work just fired, well, had a layoff of one, of a guy whose next prospective employer's HR department called to check references. Last I heard, this guy has been unjustly tagged as a malcontent by the boss, and he has not found a new job. HR is giving a very dour and tight-lipped "name and dates of employment only" response that, while skirting the law, makes it very clear the company considers him a horrible employee. It's a small industry, and looking around carries the risk of getting prematurely helped out the door. It can absolutely be done, but the risk is not zero.
Secondly, health insurance. One of the guys I work with has a chronic health problem with one of his kids. Every time he changes jobs, he gets to start the fight anew to get the kid's medical issues covered. It is not trivial, it frequently gets right up to the lawyers, and each time his kid's medical care is interupted, there's a small but real risk that his child could actually die.
Employment has so much "friction" it might as well be considered a market failure. If McDonald's screws you over, Burger King is across the street. If your employer screw you over -- and unjust poor references seem to be the weapon of choice -- then an uphill legal battle lasting years and costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars might be your only rememdy.
Don't kid yourself. "Voting with your feet" isn't nearly as safe and effective as we would like it to be, or as it should be.
Just because you have bred, doesn't make you the exclusive holder of all knowledge about parenting.
Of course not. But listening to non-parents offer parenting advice is like listening to virgins lecture on sexual technique. :-)
"I work as a code monkey at a university and provide research support. ... They have a vague idea what they need."
It's one thing to work with bright people who have gained a level of real expertise at something -- anything -- and are working with you in good faith.
It's an entirely different ballgame trying to cope with the mendacious, illiterate sociopaths that corporate structure seems to favor.
The OP was too kind. He should have included the whole quote:
"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
Think about the implications of that statement, and the employees that manager will end up with. Remember, the article begins with the supposition that the manager knows nothing about the technology involved. What's more likely? That you've found some one-in-a-billion Tesla genius who really can do the same job in 1/40th of the time, or that you've found some lying SOB who just claims to?
Here's something else. Smart people tend to recognize their own worth. They may begin young and naive, but they generally don't stay that way. They're smart, remember? What's more likely, that you've found a mad genius with a catastrophic blind spot -- and they exist, I'll grant you -- or that you've found one of the untold number of bootlicking sycophants who know how to bullshit an idiot?
The academics you're working with are trying to get useful things done. In the corporate world, it's about "managing perceptions," and the people who barge into the meeting bringing cold reality are about as appreciated as bartenders who cut you off after the third bottle of tequila.
It's not a "problem," it's a "challenge." You can always decide to rise to the challenge, and once you have made that decision, the challenge has been met and so it no longer exists. Therefore, problems can be solved merely by deciding they have been.
After the inevitable horrible crash, you simply decide to blame someone else and choose "not to dwell on the past" by "moving on..."
We aren't interested in philosophical debates about if information wants to be free, we are interested in teaching the tools companies want to help students get jobs.
Yeah, Education for the Future!
Actually, real colleges are EXACTLY the place where you want to have philosophical debates about EVERYTHING so you don't become one of those idiots who think the University system exists to service Industry instead of building developed minds capable of critical thinking...
Pfft. Western Digital and Maxtor have had this feature for years....
Dallas is precisely as the original poster describes it. Various other major cities are following their lead.
The scam goes like this. The private company goes to the various governments and proposes setting up tolls on existing roads, or extending tolls on roads already paid for, and kicking back a small percentage to the State.
The State sees it as free money, and suddenly Joe Sixpack needs a tolltag/transponder to get to work in the morning...
Ms Atkins had told the paper that schools should not try to get rid of every inadequate teacher.
She added she believed it was the responsibility of each school to weed out bad teachers.
Perhaps Ms. Atkins could have used better teachers, or at the very least, better meds.
1. Are you smart enough to get in?
2. Are you smart enough to quit?
Bonus: Are you smart enough to take one look at the group of self-absorbed wankers and run like Hell?
Testing? What's that? The last time I saw real, exhaustive, "Let's Make This Bullet-Proof," "Gentlemen, You Will Not Fail" testing, Bruce Willis had yet to kill his first terrorist.
Testing costs money and is no longer an option. If it fails, you can charge more to fix it.
What are your customers gonna do? "Vote with their wallet?" :-)
"These rank amateur egg-head academics are putting themselves and others in harm's way and causing unnecessary danger for the professionals whose job it is to cope with these storms. They have no business in the field and should stay out of the way."
Fire, Police, EMT first responders, 2000
"These rank amateur thrill-seeking rednecks are putting themselves and others in harm's way and causing unnecessary danger for the professionals whose job it is to cope with these storms. They have no business in the field and should stay out of the way."
Egghead Academics, 2010
"Hey Cletus, hold my beer and watch me dominate..."
Thrill-seeking rednecks and the Dominator
"Spend time with corrupt, homicidal political figures, and you'll hear a lot of self-pity. What kind of man throws political enemies in prison, and tortures them to death? Usually it's a guy who feels so sorry for himself, he feels justified doing anything. Killers, by and large, are whiny losers. But that doesn't make them any less dangerous."
-- Michael Westen
(Speed traps || Red Light cameras) are about raising revenue, not enforcing the law. They actually make driving less safe by causing drivers to slam on their brakes at unexpected times. They engender contempt for the law by making law enforcement about revenue generation and bill collection, not serving the public.
But yes, I'm in total agreement that red light cameras are a far more egregious case, though I would argue that radar speed traps paved the way for them, in the same way that red light cameras will pave the way for in-car black-box gps monitoring, where all apparent violations will be billed automatically to your credit card.