Working long hours isn't a guarantee of success. My father used to go to work at 5am every morning. He'd come home at around 5pm with a stack of work. After dinner, he'd log into his office and do more work until he went to bed. On the weekends, he brought home an even larger pile and worked on it on Saturday and Sunday.
He didn't get any extra money for all of this work. When I once asked him why he did it, he answered "My boss expects this level of work from me." (Well, of course he does. You are giving him that without insisting on overtime.)
So what did all of that work get my father? He was fired when he was in his 60s. Nobody would hire him in a managerial position because they feared he'd just retire soon. Better to hire someone younger who might be with the company longer. So he retired not because he wanted to stop working, but because he couldn't find work. He's now 70, suffering from health effects, in part, from sitting at a desk all day every day for years.
When I got my current job, I insisted that my work ends when I leave the office. If a system is down during an off-hour, I'm happy to help get it up and running again, but I'm not going to be bringing projects home to work on after hours. Could I work 10 hours a day and bust my rear to do more for the company I work for? Sure, but it wouldn't get me anything and would cost me my health and time that I could spend with my family or working on projects that I want to work on (versus my day job which pays the bills).
In fact, at a certain point, you actually get negative productivity out of a worker. Sure, they might be producing, but their work will likely be so riddled with errors that you'll need a second or even a third person to check their work. At that point, you might as well just give the first person some time off. They'll come back rested and more productive that before. Yes, it's a short-term productivity dip, but you get long-term productivity gains. (Versus a "death march" scenario where you get gains in the very short term but longer term losses in productivity.)
"Don't test in Production" still applies, though. You can't just say "well, we can't afford to have a test environment so we'll do it in Production and work out the bugs there." ALWAYS have a test environment. Work out as many bugs as you can there.
This guy's test environment was simple: A second copy of the book, a second bullet, and a melon.(Melon credit to michelcolman.) Position the melon behind the book and fire on it. If the book stops the bullet, move to production. If, much more likely, the melon suffers a gunshot "wound", then cancel any production plans because your meatbag skin won't fare better.
From my physics classes (from way back when I was a physics major - before I hit Quantum Mechanics): Nothing prevents an object from travelling faster than the speed of light. It just can't start below light speed and accelerate beyond light speed. However, the equations do work - sort of - with speeds greater than the speed of light. "Sort of" being that it introduces an imaginary number (square root of negative one). This might mean it's impossible or it might mean something else entirely. We're not quite sure yet.
(That is, of course, leaving aside entirely what the new model does to the environment, which is godawful, but not relevant to its place as a community employer.
Except, perhaps, to point out that a "moving all the time" mining operation has no incentive to think about how their local environment changes affect the people living there. The old mining company model would have at least needed to think about how their actions affected the local environment. They might not have, but there was at least, in theory, SOME incentive of "our workers' families are getting sick because of stuff we're doing... let's change." With a moving mining operation, why would they care if they completely destroy the local environment? They'll be someone where entirely soon enough and won't need to see the effects.
It borrows greatly from one thing that The Daily Show did often with Jon Stewart that I loved. Show Politician A giving a speech saying he supports/opposes X. Next, show a clip of Politician A from not that long ago expressing a completely contrary position. They might not have been news media and they were far from unbiased, but they were great at shining a light on those hypocritical moments.
Jon Stewart always said that people using the Daily Show for their news was a sign that the news media was failing, not that the Daily Show was that informative. I'll admit that I did use it for a portion of my news consumption at the time. Many in the news media at that point, seemed unwilling to ask hard questions or point out hypocrisy (such as saying one thing and then supporting something completely opposite a year later for no good reason) lest they anger the people they were covering. Some media are ditching this, but too often you'll get a politician in front of the camera and they're given all softball questions because the interviewer doesn't want to risk the politician leaving and the news organization being banned from future interviews. IMO, the news needs to be hard hitting and hold politicians' feet to the fire. This is true of both sides of the aisle, mind you. I don't want them soft on Democrats and hard on Republicans or vice versa. It's one of the jobs of the media to shine a light on politicians if they step out of line.
It's not so much "leave me alone" as it is "stop contradicting me, news media!" For example, there was a big mine accident of his. Even before the reports came in, with miners still trapped underground, Bob Murray proclaimed that this wasn't due to bad mining practices by his company but by an earthquake. Later, the official analysis found no evidence of an earthquake and cited bad practices by his company. Yet, he still insists it was an earthquake and is ready to sue anyone who says otherwise because, apparently, disagreeing with him (and agreeing with the official analysis of the incident) is "defamation of character."
You can't constantly go around spouting complete falsehoods and then complain when people use facts to prove you wrong. At least, you can't do this in front of a judge (yet).
Luckily, so far, it doesn't seem like the courts are willing to accept that as evidence - though they will use it to indicate a person's intent which I find to be perfectly reasonable. If you are regularly tweeting out X, it's going to be hard in court to prove that you didn't really mean X - especially if you're a popular public figure (i.e. celebrity, politician, etc).
So I'm sure Oliver's team was expecting, even looking forward to Murray's inevitable lawsuit. Indeed, Oliver pretty much openly challenged him to, and you can be sure that there will be followup segments until Murray's case is dismissed, as apparently they all have been.
Followed by a post-case-dismissed segment where they get Mr. Nutterbutter to come back out to dance with John Oliver celebrating the dismissal of the case.
Yup. He mentioned the cease and desist letter. (Sent to Last Week Tonight before they even aired the segment!) He mentioned the other people (news media, etc) sued by Murray for mentioning him in a less-than-completely-flattering-way (despite what any facts are). Then, he said, "Let's take this cease and desist letter and do neither of those."
Of course, Murray doesn't really want this to go to court. Courts require evidence, which doesn't seem to be in his favor. He wants this lawsuit to make John Oliver and HBO quake in their boots so that they'll prostrate themselves before the Coal King. The problem with this is that it's not going to happen. HBO might not make as much as the entire coal industry (around $4.6 billion annually versus about $46 billion), but they're large enough that they're not going to get scared by someone trying a SLAPP tactic. Once Murray sees this, he'll probably attempt to settle this out of court with undisclosed terms. The only question is: Will HBO allow this? Or will they "make an example" of Murray by pushing the case forward?
I agree. While there are days when I miss being able to call up my landlord to say "X is broken, fix it", I don't miss my landlord increasing our rent every time our contract ran out because of all of the things he needed to fix. (Like it's my fault the AC unit broke and needed to be fixed. If you're advertising an apartment as having central AC, it should be WORKING central AC!)
It's a matter of are you going to pay $X one time to fix it on a house you own/pay mortgage on? Or will you pay a smaller $Y extra every month because your landlord paid to fix it and is working the cost (plus a little extra) into your rent?
We use our toaster often, but unplug it when we're not using it. If our toaster was Internet-connected, would we need to wait for it to boot up before we could make some toast? Because if that's the case, I'll do what you do and buy a non-Internet-connected toaster or not connect it to my home network. (If the toaster requires Internet connectivity to make toast, it will be returned ASAP and I'd post a warning online to keep others from buying that model.)
Back to the books, I really really really wish the DRM would go away there.
When I was publishing my book on Amazon, they gave me the option of enabling or disabling DRM. I thought it over and I'll admit to considering enabling DRM to "prevent people from pirating my book." Then, I realized that 1) my book is likely going to have a tiny audience (it's not like I'm a big name author or something) and my "lost sales" (much as I hate that term) from piracy would be minimal to nonexistent and 2) I generally don't like DRM to begin with so why would I use it when offering a product.
So I published my book without DRM. Yes, it's in Kindle format and you need to pay Amazon for it (who then pays me), but there shouldn't be any additional DRM added.
(All this wasn't intended as a sales pitch for my book, but if anyone wanted to support an author who chose the non-DRM route, I wouldn't be opposed to them buying my book.;-) )
Plus, you get a ton of "free" music. Yes, you don't "own" it (if you ever stop paying for Prime, you lose the music), but you can listen to the music (even downloading it locally) without paying anything extra.
There are a lot of other perks, but we use the free shipping and music ones the most.
"Focusing on"? How? By holding on to more and more useless channels? By raising prices continuously? By offering only deceptive "introductory" pricing models? By constantly fighting and making life difficult for TiVo and other third-party box owners? If this is their "focus", they are doing to be in dire straits before they know it.
Don't forget "focusing on TV" by setting caps on their Internet service (to discourage too much streaming). Or by pricing their Internet+TV bundles at a lower price than Internet alone to force people to keep TV service (even if you don't use it, you'll still be counted as a TV subscriber). And all the other ways that they use/abuse their monopoly (or, in some cases, duopoly) ISP position to keep their TV service ahead of competitors.
Years ago, I had a website on a shared hosting environment at a company. One day, their servers all went down and their support lines weren't responding. Eventually, they came back enough to explain that they had gotten hit with a worm that was going around and that their servers should be back up in a week or so. This raised major red flags with me because I knew that the fix for this work was 1) take the servers offline, 2) apply the patch, 3) reboot the server, 4) done. Even a large data center doing this manually should be able to do this quickly - especially if they were pulling people from the support lines to assist.
I had all my files backed up but hadn't backed up my database recently. I was able to connect to the database server and quickly made a backup. Days turned into weeks and they still weren't online again. Every so often, they would pop back to announce that they were definitely coming back. Meanwhile, a forum of affected users (not on the company's servers) began to assemble with a lot of people lamenting that they lost all of the data for tons of clients.
In the end, the company vanished, only to re-appear under another name with the same management staff. (I'm not sure if anyone sued them or if the management repeated this scam.) A lot of people lost a lot of data, but I was spared. Since then, I've learned to always have a backup copy just in case. (I also wouldn't wait weeks for my host to restore my site anymore and don't use shared hosting. This was a long time ago.)
Unfortunately, that's a fantasy story. Corporations have always tried to abuse workers to benefit the company/management/executives. That's why unions were born. You might disagree with them today, but their origins were in abused employees who had no leverage against the companies running their lives in and out of work and government that always sided with the companies.
I'd agree with everything you said but would add: Garnish all future wages of his until his payments to the employees are fully paid back with interest. He can keep minimum wage to live off of, but anything more than that goes to a fund that pays back the employees.
They also have another show "Penn & Teller: Fool Us" where they bring magicians onstage to perform tricks. Then Penn and Teller try to guess how the trick was done. (Often using code words that the magicians will recognize but that audience members not versed in magic won't know.) If the magician fools the pair, they get to perform in Vegas and get a "Fooled Us" statue (with the initials in VERY big letters). Penn and Teller will also perform a trick of their own every episode. There are some amazing magic tricks on that show.
I second this one. I'm not a big fan of the zombie genre, but this one is great. Quirky and fun. A brief run-down: A medical student with her whole life planned out goes to a party which turns into a zombie feeding session. She survives, but is scratched. She can maintain her normal "human" existence (despite pale skin, white hair, and a dulled sense of taste) so long as she regularly eats brains. She goes to work as a medical examiner so she can sneak brains out of dead bodies.
The twist: She inherits the personality traits and flashes of memories from the dead people whose brains she eats. So she begins working with a detective (pretending to be a "psychic") to help solve murders. Basic plot: Person is murdered. Liv eats person's brains. Liv becomes a mixture of Liv and the murdered person while working on the case and while having flashbacks that help solve the crime. There's an overarching plot also about a possible upcoming zombie apocalypse and questions about where the "zombie virus" came from also.
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Working long hours isn't a guarantee of success. My father used to go to work at 5am every morning. He'd come home at around 5pm with a stack of work. After dinner, he'd log into his office and do more work until he went to bed. On the weekends, he brought home an even larger pile and worked on it on Saturday and Sunday.
He didn't get any extra money for all of this work. When I once asked him why he did it, he answered "My boss expects this level of work from me." (Well, of course he does. You are giving him that without insisting on overtime.)
So what did all of that work get my father? He was fired when he was in his 60s. Nobody would hire him in a managerial position because they feared he'd just retire soon. Better to hire someone younger who might be with the company longer. So he retired not because he wanted to stop working, but because he couldn't find work. He's now 70, suffering from health effects, in part, from sitting at a desk all day every day for years.
When I got my current job, I insisted that my work ends when I leave the office. If a system is down during an off-hour, I'm happy to help get it up and running again, but I'm not going to be bringing projects home to work on after hours. Could I work 10 hours a day and bust my rear to do more for the company I work for? Sure, but it wouldn't get me anything and would cost me my health and time that I could spend with my family or working on projects that I want to work on (versus my day job which pays the bills).
In fact, at a certain point, you actually get negative productivity out of a worker. Sure, they might be producing, but their work will likely be so riddled with errors that you'll need a second or even a third person to check their work. At that point, you might as well just give the first person some time off. They'll come back rested and more productive that before. Yes, it's a short-term productivity dip, but you get long-term productivity gains. (Versus a "death march" scenario where you get gains in the very short term but longer term losses in productivity.)
The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
She could also have been planning this and made the "his idea" post to bolster her story later.
"Don't test in Production" still applies, though. You can't just say "well, we can't afford to have a test environment so we'll do it in Production and work out the bugs there." ALWAYS have a test environment. Work out as many bugs as you can there.
This guy's test environment was simple: A second copy of the book, a second bullet, and a melon.(Melon credit to michelcolman.) Position the melon behind the book and fire on it. If the book stops the bullet, move to production. If, much more likely, the melon suffers a gunshot "wound", then cancel any production plans because your meatbag skin won't fare better.
Or Mythbusters.
From my physics classes (from way back when I was a physics major - before I hit Quantum Mechanics): Nothing prevents an object from travelling faster than the speed of light. It just can't start below light speed and accelerate beyond light speed. However, the equations do work - sort of - with speeds greater than the speed of light. "Sort of" being that it introduces an imaginary number (square root of negative one). This might mean it's impossible or it might mean something else entirely. We're not quite sure yet.
Except, perhaps, to point out that a "moving all the time" mining operation has no incentive to think about how their local environment changes affect the people living there. The old mining company model would have at least needed to think about how their actions affected the local environment. They might not have, but there was at least, in theory, SOME incentive of "our workers' families are getting sick because of stuff we're doing... let's change." With a moving mining operation, why would they care if they completely destroy the local environment? They'll be someone where entirely soon enough and won't need to see the effects.
It borrows greatly from one thing that The Daily Show did often with Jon Stewart that I loved. Show Politician A giving a speech saying he supports/opposes X. Next, show a clip of Politician A from not that long ago expressing a completely contrary position. They might not have been news media and they were far from unbiased, but they were great at shining a light on those hypocritical moments.
Jon Stewart always said that people using the Daily Show for their news was a sign that the news media was failing, not that the Daily Show was that informative. I'll admit that I did use it for a portion of my news consumption at the time. Many in the news media at that point, seemed unwilling to ask hard questions or point out hypocrisy (such as saying one thing and then supporting something completely opposite a year later for no good reason) lest they anger the people they were covering. Some media are ditching this, but too often you'll get a politician in front of the camera and they're given all softball questions because the interviewer doesn't want to risk the politician leaving and the news organization being banned from future interviews. IMO, the news needs to be hard hitting and hold politicians' feet to the fire. This is true of both sides of the aisle, mind you. I don't want them soft on Democrats and hard on Republicans or vice versa. It's one of the jobs of the media to shine a light on politicians if they step out of line.
It's not so much "leave me alone" as it is "stop contradicting me, news media!" For example, there was a big mine accident of his. Even before the reports came in, with miners still trapped underground, Bob Murray proclaimed that this wasn't due to bad mining practices by his company but by an earthquake. Later, the official analysis found no evidence of an earthquake and cited bad practices by his company. Yet, he still insists it was an earthquake and is ready to sue anyone who says otherwise because, apparently, disagreeing with him (and agreeing with the official analysis of the incident) is "defamation of character."
You can't constantly go around spouting complete falsehoods and then complain when people use facts to prove you wrong. At least, you can't do this in front of a judge (yet).
Luckily, so far, it doesn't seem like the courts are willing to accept that as evidence - though they will use it to indicate a person's intent which I find to be perfectly reasonable. If you are regularly tweeting out X, it's going to be hard in court to prove that you didn't really mean X - especially if you're a popular public figure (i.e. celebrity, politician, etc).
Followed by a post-case-dismissed segment where they get Mr. Nutterbutter to come back out to dance with John Oliver celebrating the dismissal of the case.
Yup. He mentioned the cease and desist letter. (Sent to Last Week Tonight before they even aired the segment!) He mentioned the other people (news media, etc) sued by Murray for mentioning him in a less-than-completely-flattering-way (despite what any facts are). Then, he said, "Let's take this cease and desist letter and do neither of those."
Of course, Murray doesn't really want this to go to court. Courts require evidence, which doesn't seem to be in his favor. He wants this lawsuit to make John Oliver and HBO quake in their boots so that they'll prostrate themselves before the Coal King. The problem with this is that it's not going to happen. HBO might not make as much as the entire coal industry (around $4.6 billion annually versus about $46 billion), but they're large enough that they're not going to get scared by someone trying a SLAPP tactic. Once Murray sees this, he'll probably attempt to settle this out of court with undisclosed terms. The only question is: Will HBO allow this? Or will they "make an example" of Murray by pushing the case forward?
I agree. While there are days when I miss being able to call up my landlord to say "X is broken, fix it", I don't miss my landlord increasing our rent every time our contract ran out because of all of the things he needed to fix. (Like it's my fault the AC unit broke and needed to be fixed. If you're advertising an apartment as having central AC, it should be WORKING central AC!)
It's a matter of are you going to pay $X one time to fix it on a house you own/pay mortgage on? Or will you pay a smaller $Y extra every month because your landlord paid to fix it and is working the cost (plus a little extra) into your rent?
We use our toaster often, but unplug it when we're not using it. If our toaster was Internet-connected, would we need to wait for it to boot up before we could make some toast? Because if that's the case, I'll do what you do and buy a non-Internet-connected toaster or not connect it to my home network. (If the toaster requires Internet connectivity to make toast, it will be returned ASAP and I'd post a warning online to keep others from buying that model.)
When I was publishing my book on Amazon, they gave me the option of enabling or disabling DRM. I thought it over and I'll admit to considering enabling DRM to "prevent people from pirating my book." Then, I realized that 1) my book is likely going to have a tiny audience (it's not like I'm a big name author or something) and my "lost sales" (much as I hate that term) from piracy would be minimal to nonexistent and 2) I generally don't like DRM to begin with so why would I use it when offering a product.
So I published my book without DRM. Yes, it's in Kindle format and you need to pay Amazon for it (who then pays me), but there shouldn't be any additional DRM added.
(All this wasn't intended as a sales pitch for my book, but if anyone wanted to support an author who chose the non-DRM route, I wouldn't be opposed to them buying my book. ;-) )
Plus, you get a ton of "free" music. Yes, you don't "own" it (if you ever stop paying for Prime, you lose the music), but you can listen to the music (even downloading it locally) without paying anything extra.
There are a lot of other perks, but we use the free shipping and music ones the most.
Don't forget "focusing on TV" by setting caps on their Internet service (to discourage too much streaming). Or by pricing their Internet+TV bundles at a lower price than Internet alone to force people to keep TV service (even if you don't use it, you'll still be counted as a TV subscriber). And all the other ways that they use/abuse their monopoly (or, in some cases, duopoly) ISP position to keep their TV service ahead of competitors.
Years ago, I had a website on a shared hosting environment at a company. One day, their servers all went down and their support lines weren't responding. Eventually, they came back enough to explain that they had gotten hit with a worm that was going around and that their servers should be back up in a week or so. This raised major red flags with me because I knew that the fix for this work was 1) take the servers offline, 2) apply the patch, 3) reboot the server, 4) done. Even a large data center doing this manually should be able to do this quickly - especially if they were pulling people from the support lines to assist.
I had all my files backed up but hadn't backed up my database recently. I was able to connect to the database server and quickly made a backup. Days turned into weeks and they still weren't online again. Every so often, they would pop back to announce that they were definitely coming back. Meanwhile, a forum of affected users (not on the company's servers) began to assemble with a lot of people lamenting that they lost all of the data for tons of clients.
In the end, the company vanished, only to re-appear under another name with the same management staff. (I'm not sure if anyone sued them or if the management repeated this scam.) A lot of people lost a lot of data, but I was spared. Since then, I've learned to always have a backup copy just in case. (I also wouldn't wait weeks for my host to restore my site anymore and don't use shared hosting. This was a long time ago.)
Unfortunately, that's a fantasy story. Corporations have always tried to abuse workers to benefit the company/management/executives. That's why unions were born. You might disagree with them today, but their origins were in abused employees who had no leverage against the companies running their lives in and out of work and government that always sided with the companies.
I'd agree with everything you said but would add: Garnish all future wages of his until his payments to the employees are fully paid back with interest. He can keep minimum wage to live off of, but anything more than that goes to a fund that pays back the employees.
This is less fun than previously indicated!
They also have another show "Penn & Teller: Fool Us" where they bring magicians onstage to perform tricks. Then Penn and Teller try to guess how the trick was done. (Often using code words that the magicians will recognize but that audience members not versed in magic won't know.) If the magician fools the pair, they get to perform in Vegas and get a "Fooled Us" statue (with the initials in VERY big letters). Penn and Teller will also perform a trick of their own every episode. There are some amazing magic tricks on that show.
I second this one. I'm not a big fan of the zombie genre, but this one is great. Quirky and fun. A brief run-down: A medical student with her whole life planned out goes to a party which turns into a zombie feeding session. She survives, but is scratched. She can maintain her normal "human" existence (despite pale skin, white hair, and a dulled sense of taste) so long as she regularly eats brains. She goes to work as a medical examiner so she can sneak brains out of dead bodies.
The twist: She inherits the personality traits and flashes of memories from the dead people whose brains she eats. So she begins working with a detective (pretending to be a "psychic") to help solve murders. Basic plot: Person is murdered. Liv eats person's brains. Liv becomes a mixture of Liv and the murdered person while working on the case and while having flashbacks that help solve the crime. There's an overarching plot also about a possible upcoming zombie apocalypse and questions about where the "zombie virus" came from also.