Flavoring the jury...and it works! A century ago, we'd have heard about how the bumps on a person's head determined their personality / criminal disposition...and here it is again, in a new form! What wonders humanity dreams up! One side always working to erase labels and tear down walls, the other side working to build them up again and invent new labels! Who's on the right side, who's on the wrong side...it changes daily, and I never know who's going to be pushed out of the group next!
Oh Humanity, you are the Silastic Armor Fiends! Keep you on a planet long enough, and you will go to war with yourself!
I believe you are assuming, falsely, that increased surveillance and tracking does not increase occurrences as well. Who, at this current time, would like to argue that our police departments are the model of social justice and restraint when dealing with the formerly criminal element? That these 'supermen,' who fail so often and tragically to meet whatever passes for the standards of normal in any local, will not instigate, or attempt bribery, extortion, etc. of these types? "Pay me $300 by Tuesday, or I'm sending you back to prison" -> much like the disappearing money / cocaine from the evidence locker, I would not take this bet.
Make a choice -> create a permanent slave-caste, the felon, to be spat upon for all time, and treated as a second class individual, or rehab them / banish them, and be done with it. It should be a boon to the taxpayer if we were to move to banishment, as the cost savings from closing several prisons would be enough to fuel any number of local schools, etc. But then, you'd lose the stick that keeps the rest of society in line...they won't have anyone to hear stories from, to look down upon...the evening news would be duller.
Or you could, I don't know, banish them from the society to which they are ill-suited? The Ancient Greeks did that, I believe.
What purpose can be found in holding someone to standards they cannot meet, except to exact revenge upon them for being born in the wrong place, and not having the resources to emancipate themselves?
Actually, the current criteria, in some sectors, for a criminal or potential criminal is anyone who insists that they have 'rights.'
See, a perfectly sane individual knows that life is about rule of law. The police show up at your house, guns drawn, and demand to rape your wife...they're probably going to have her. An insane individual will, in the light of weaponry, and obvious harm to themselves, continue to assert that a piece of paper over two hundred years old that has been increasingly reinterpreted to mean whatever-the-fuck the people with guns want it to mean is somehow some protection against Sir-Thug-U-Lox. That's what the shrink calls a 'thought disorder' and 'magical thinking.'
Hehe. Got it one. A little manual 'calibration' of the machine, or perhaps some careful slips of the results...and voila, your average political protester is now a career criminal, with no chance for an appeal!
One of the simpler tricks, of course, will be to simply take a brain scan from a known mass murderer before 'taking a scan' of the person of political interest...old tricks are the best tricks, right?
But on a serious note, which contractor is this? Knowing which sector it's a part of might give us a clue...knowing the name of the contractor can tell us whether they had a falling out with a congressman on the 'flying submarine' project or perhaps the 'cure for the common cold' project. I kid. But again, give us names, info, or we know nothing. People get fired every day, in public / private, for many reasons.
Indeed. Looking at the college loan bubble...as well as the new real estate / mortgage bubble...I am without words. We just went through this not even a decade ago, so...why are we doing this again?
As for the 'tech' bubble...these are purely fluff acquisitions...good money paid for crap...that makes the original DOTCOM bubble look rock solid in comparison. I don't have the figures in front of me, but I've read some of this stuff recently...we're looking at paying premiums for companies in excess of their earnings for the next 50 years...many of them aren't even paying a dividend, so the only money that can be made is by selling it off to someone else who thinks it will go higher...or possibly someone who needs to claim a fictitious loss through some mystic means. Like Instagram, a number of these companies don't even seem to have anything resembling new technology.
From what I've seen, the heart wood of the tech sector has given out, and it appears to be shrinking. We're seeing a compacting of the tech sector, not new energy.
An easier way to chart things is to ask the tech sector "have your wages risen greatly, on average, in the past three years, allowing for inflation?" Find out which sector is seeing a rise in wages, either regional or global, and you'll know which one is currently enjoying a boom. Last I checked, which was a while ago, the Australian mining companies were doing pretty well here.
Hmm, taking a quick survey of the people who have shot up schools / movie theaters / etc., it appears NOT to have been a sudden decision. It's not like it was a Friday night, and they went "Oh shit, I need to shoot someone up, and I need to do it by Monday!" These people made their decisions MONTHS in advance. Many of them had multiple weapons on them, up to and including homemade bombs. So...limiting magazine size / firearm access may, unfortunately, have the perverse effect of increasing the number and yield of the bombs used. And of course, once those bomb-making skills become in vogue, that spike in bomb-making may never drop down again...
Yeah, because then they'd switch to demolitions instead of firearms. That'll cut down on the casualties.
Amazes me that a century ago a 14 year old boy could own a rifle, bring it to school, and no one would bat an eye. Nowadays, they bring in a SWAT team if a kid uses a cellphone that is the wrong shape.
Actually, I think it's intentional. See, they use the massacres from 'Gun Free Zones,' to push the idea of how bad such things are.
See, if only two people are shot, before the shooter is taken down...that's not much of a headline, and not much for creating outrage. But if a gymnasium filled with elementary school students are shot up like cows in a slaughter house, well, it instantly becomes a national headline, and also that much easier to generate outrage. "How can our children ever be safe if the killers knew how to disable the lock down system / locked themselves inside the auditorium during a school assembly?" -> no thinking on the part of these people.
I think you are missing a finer detail here: it's the cockpit windows that the terrorists used here to identify the buildings that they flew into. We should really be banning windows.
Bah, there's always one like you in every crowd. Where do you think the money comes from that pays for the services you use? Like roads and healthcare? It has to come from some place. And those data centers, well, they're using a lot of the local infrastructure, like the electrical grid and parking lots and air. Why shouldn't they be taxed? That's the cost of doing business in Massachusetts: if these clouds want to benefit from the economic policies in place that obviously made it agreeable for them to locate there in the first place, then they need to give something back to the community.
Then those women's voice should be heard! I do not think I am alone in favoring anyone who enjoys some degree of jocularity, especially when it is not at the expense of others.
Perhaps not in its original form, but these days it is. It used to be about tearing down the inequalities between men and women, and teaching women to feel empowered.
Now it's about women exacting revenge upon men for how women were treated for the last thousand years or so ("This is for our mothers and grandmothers!" -> Yeah, but none of those men were alive when those gender crimes occurred, so why are you punishing their descendents? Madness.), and about leaving men scared to be in the same room as women. It's essentially a religious crusade, in which the enemy is the enemy simply because they were born with a penis and a pair of testicles; their sole goal in life is seems to be to find and convince a man that he is wrong for existing.
Even a woman who went around picking up other women (who went on to write a book about it) pointed out how blind the female gender is to its own power / actions. At no point have they stopped to think that perhaps men have as many grudges against women as women do against men, but are simply more forgiving of them. But I digress, the die is cast, revenge is sought, history has been occluded, mistakes will no doubt be repeated.
Allow me: "We've been noticing that a lot of money has been showing up in this BitCoin thing over the past few months. We want it, and here's a developer who is going to help us find a way to get it."
Exactly. See, the sad part is, having reviewed what happened during WWII, with regards to Pearl Harbor, we know that our leadership is not above lying to us to achieve their own ends. Having recently read what Nixon pulled off with regards to the Vietnamese, we know it was not a one-time thing. It is, in all likelihood, a recurring problem with regards to leadership, both in this country, and possibly others. As such, there is no logical option, but to view all attacks on the US, as reported by various compromised organs, as possibly tainted, or incomplete, with regards to the information supplied. We hear that China is attacking us via the internet...suspicion says that we perhaps are doing the same to them. From this point on, it becomes a question of which nation, if any, is 'right'; which is usually resolved in the time honored fashion of 'who started it' and 'who is continuing it.'
Another problem then presents itself, which is of the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' -> despite the lunacy of this situation, there may well be a time when there is a real enemy out there, destroying things, yet no one believes the information regarding it purely because they've been lied to so much. Two lessons could be learned from that fable, three of you're Ferengi ("Never tell the same lie twice"): 1.) Continuously lying will result in a lack of help when it is most needed, and 2.) There really was a wolf, in the end. It shows up only after all chance of help has been permanently removed.
Amazing that in all this time, they haven't employed proper security. I mean, you should hear what is said about some of these systems: no anti-viral protection, engineers carrying critical files around on thumb-drives (infected with viruses), etc. It's not like any half-decent network admin doesn't know how to secure these things to the ridiculous degree...it's just that things are never put into play, because, I assume, it requires training, and training is money. So people bumble along, from one catastrophe to the next, only fixing things when they become bad enough to warrant attention. No different from the Mr. Burns approach to running the Springfield nuclear power-plant.
You want to lock down a network? Force registration of the MAC address of every device to an existing account. Encrypt traffic inside. Use fiber instead of copper (harder to tap, I'm told). Etc., etc.
There is better chance to positively identify a spy on your own soil, than on the internet. Again, misdirection, proxy methods, pawns, compromised individuals, etc. are all applicable here. If the Russians want some information on the latest DoD submarine, are they going to go in directly and get it, or have a female agent compromise a contractor on the project? And yet the contractor is, unknowingly, a pawn in all of this nonsense.
Precisely. The 'Just War' approach inevitably degrades into the "I do as I please" approach, as there is no metric for telling you that you are going to far, save that of the guillotine or sudden appearance of a MIRV over your capital city.
Tread carefully here. Misdirection on the internet was a fine art during the '90s...who knows what level it's at now. We're talking the kind of 'bouncing the signal off enemy satellites' kind of approach that the CIA wishes they could pull off.
And now a bunch of morons, with tiny brains, and big clubs, who want to bring 'T3h L@w to the iNternets' are getting involved? If I were a betting man, I'd be betting a few thousand dollars that the US gets tricked into a war by someone more clever than itself. Remember, the one of the greater feats of cleverness, at the end of the day, is to get your enemies to fight each other, while you watch from afar, on a comfy couch, eating popcorn and drinking pop.
Give up your baseless dreams of playing the White Knight to people who do not need your help; your ego prevents you from realizing what you need, which is some quiet contemplation over whether the direction you're headed in is really in sync with your ideal.
The keywords were "sizable project." So what you're really saying is that it's going to take him 9 months to just to understand the data structures / schema of this project, before he can began changing anything beyond string level. Typical example of excellent business level thinking: programmers are fungible trade workers, unskilled, and can easily be replaced. I'm guessing it's going to take 1.5 years before they can begin to move forward again, with the help of a few extra developers...
So...I'm guessing that they will begin to panic in several months, double up with a few extras to try and cover up their mistake, then either try and scrap the project, or do something equally stupid. Now, I could be wrong...they might be hiring a MENSA candidate right out of college, complete with the passion or salary that is required to keep someone like him around...but I'm thinking not; I've known a few people like that...but then, they went on to earn six-figures as their starting salaries right out of college...and you're saying this company is cutting back because of the economy...so probably not. This will be a good lesson for them. Can you name some of their competitors? I have a mild interest in investing in them, and shorting your company's stock, seeing as the new project will probably be a crash and burn in a year's time...randomly guessing the probability to be something like 70% likelihood here...
I say that as long as they are willing to pay you to train him, do so. It's not like he's getting a copy of your trade secrets, or your thinking processes, or even the books you've read...he hasn't attended the same college, doesn't think the same way, etc. Chances are, he will get a broad overview of what you've done, with some stringy reasons (because the company doesn't want to pay you to train him a minute longer than it has to) why you did what you did, which he may or may not write down, and which will be complete gibberish in 3 months time, save for a few obvious things, like "I did this because this didn't work." It's true, you want businesses where executives know how to perform cost analysis situations...but studies have also shown that businesses run purely by the accounting department tend to do poorly, especially where IT / Technology / programming is concerned. Because you're fighting with Archimedes over a pitcher of water...and whether he can cost justify it to twelve decimal places...
I mean, come on, anyone who has studied business / economics in general knows that the business community is sick in general as of late. Heavyweights that have survived cataclysmic downfalls, and gotten back up, are being taken out like chumps through homicidal mismanagement. So, if you're a business guy, and you know (because you took business classes, which 'make sense' to you) how to run things, because you were taught how to do this, or it's what you believe, or how you feel things should be done...and that's also how your friends are doing things....but they're dying off like they've contracted the Black Plague...are you going to keep doing what you've been doing? Stick your fingers in your ears, say that your friends just got unlucky, it happens...or are you going to ask yourself if someone slipped you the wrong info? That the reason you're struggling isn't because you don't have what it takes (a separate discussion), but because someone told you that it was a good idea to cut your sales staff right before your sales biggest day of the year, or that you'd make more money by taking out a big loan that through interest and savings, was supposed to make you more money, instead of giant losses?
Or it could have been the other way around: a handful of skilled Neanderthals could have taken out a village of less capable humans, and afterwards made off with their women (why not, right guys?).
Or they could have easily interacted with each other, lived among each other, and simply interbred.
Slashdot Mirror
Flavoring the jury...and it works! A century ago, we'd have heard about how the bumps on a person's head determined their personality / criminal disposition...and here it is again, in a new form! What wonders humanity dreams up! One side always working to erase labels and tear down walls, the other side working to build them up again and invent new labels! Who's on the right side, who's on the wrong side...it changes daily, and I never know who's going to be pushed out of the group next!
Oh Humanity, you are the Silastic Armor Fiends! Keep you on a planet long enough, and you will go to war with yourself!
I believe you are assuming, falsely, that increased surveillance and tracking does not increase occurrences as well. Who, at this current time, would like to argue that our police departments are the model of social justice and restraint when dealing with the formerly criminal element? That these 'supermen,' who fail so often and tragically to meet whatever passes for the standards of normal in any local, will not instigate, or attempt bribery, extortion, etc. of these types? "Pay me $300 by Tuesday, or I'm sending you back to prison" -> much like the disappearing money / cocaine from the evidence locker, I would not take this bet.
Make a choice -> create a permanent slave-caste, the felon, to be spat upon for all time, and treated as a second class individual, or rehab them / banish them, and be done with it. It should be a boon to the taxpayer if we were to move to banishment, as the cost savings from closing several prisons would be enough to fuel any number of local schools, etc. But then, you'd lose the stick that keeps the rest of society in line...they won't have anyone to hear stories from, to look down upon...the evening news would be duller.
Or you could, I don't know, banish them from the society to which they are ill-suited? The Ancient Greeks did that, I believe.
What purpose can be found in holding someone to standards they cannot meet, except to exact revenge upon them for being born in the wrong place, and not having the resources to emancipate themselves?
Actually, the current criteria, in some sectors, for a criminal or potential criminal is anyone who insists that they have 'rights.'
See, a perfectly sane individual knows that life is about rule of law. The police show up at your house, guns drawn, and demand to rape your wife...they're probably going to have her. An insane individual will, in the light of weaponry, and obvious harm to themselves, continue to assert that a piece of paper over two hundred years old that has been increasingly reinterpreted to mean whatever-the-fuck the people with guns want it to mean is somehow some protection against Sir-Thug-U-Lox. That's what the shrink calls a 'thought disorder' and 'magical thinking.'
Hehe. Got it one. A little manual 'calibration' of the machine, or perhaps some careful slips of the results...and voila, your average political protester is now a career criminal, with no chance for an appeal!
One of the simpler tricks, of course, will be to simply take a brain scan from a known mass murderer before 'taking a scan' of the person of political interest...old tricks are the best tricks, right?
Yeah...that might break the machine. Good try though.
AK Marc, he has you there.
But on a serious note, which contractor is this? Knowing which sector it's a part of might give us a clue...knowing the name of the contractor can tell us whether they had a falling out with a congressman on the 'flying submarine' project or perhaps the 'cure for the common cold' project. I kid. But again, give us names, info, or we know nothing. People get fired every day, in public / private, for many reasons.
Indeed. Looking at the college loan bubble...as well as the new real estate / mortgage bubble...I am without words. We just went through this not even a decade ago, so...why are we doing this again?
As for the 'tech' bubble...these are purely fluff acquisitions...good money paid for crap...that makes the original DOTCOM bubble look rock solid in comparison. I don't have the figures in front of me, but I've read some of this stuff recently...we're looking at paying premiums for companies in excess of their earnings for the next 50 years...many of them aren't even paying a dividend, so the only money that can be made is by selling it off to someone else who thinks it will go higher...or possibly someone who needs to claim a fictitious loss through some mystic means. Like Instagram, a number of these companies don't even seem to have anything resembling new technology.
From what I've seen, the heart wood of the tech sector has given out, and it appears to be shrinking. We're seeing a compacting of the tech sector, not new energy.
An easier way to chart things is to ask the tech sector "have your wages risen greatly, on average, in the past three years, allowing for inflation?" Find out which sector is seeing a rise in wages, either regional or global, and you'll know which one is currently enjoying a boom. Last I checked, which was a while ago, the Australian mining companies were doing pretty well here.
The food. HFCS made them do it.
Hmm, taking a quick survey of the people who have shot up schools / movie theaters / etc., it appears NOT to have been a sudden decision. It's not like it was a Friday night, and they went "Oh shit, I need to shoot someone up, and I need to do it by Monday!" These people made their decisions MONTHS in advance. Many of them had multiple weapons on them, up to and including homemade bombs. So...limiting magazine size / firearm access may, unfortunately, have the perverse effect of increasing the number and yield of the bombs used. And of course, once those bomb-making skills become in vogue, that spike in bomb-making may never drop down again...
Yeah, because then they'd switch to demolitions instead of firearms. That'll cut down on the casualties.
Amazes me that a century ago a 14 year old boy could own a rifle, bring it to school, and no one would bat an eye. Nowadays, they bring in a SWAT team if a kid uses a cellphone that is the wrong shape.
Actually, I think it's intentional. See, they use the massacres from 'Gun Free Zones,' to push the idea of how bad such things are.
See, if only two people are shot, before the shooter is taken down...that's not much of a headline, and not much for creating outrage. But if a gymnasium filled with elementary school students are shot up like cows in a slaughter house, well, it instantly becomes a national headline, and also that much easier to generate outrage. "How can our children ever be safe if the killers knew how to disable the lock down system / locked themselves inside the auditorium during a school assembly?" -> no thinking on the part of these people.
I think you are missing a finer detail here: it's the cockpit windows that the terrorists used here to identify the buildings that they flew into. We should really be banning windows.
You're right: we should ban planes. Or at least ban planes ladened with jet fuel.
Bah, there's always one like you in every crowd. Where do you think the money comes from that pays for the services you use? Like roads and healthcare? It has to come from some place. And those data centers, well, they're using a lot of the local infrastructure, like the electrical grid and parking lots and air. Why shouldn't they be taxed? That's the cost of doing business in Massachusetts: if these clouds want to benefit from the economic policies in place that obviously made it agreeable for them to locate there in the first place, then they need to give something back to the community.
Then those women's voice should be heard! I do not think I am alone in favoring anyone who enjoys some degree of jocularity, especially when it is not at the expense of others.
Perhaps not in its original form, but these days it is. It used to be about tearing down the inequalities between men and women, and teaching women to feel empowered.
Now it's about women exacting revenge upon men for how women were treated for the last thousand years or so ("This is for our mothers and grandmothers!" -> Yeah, but none of those men were alive when those gender crimes occurred, so why are you punishing their descendents? Madness.), and about leaving men scared to be in the same room as women. It's essentially a religious crusade, in which the enemy is the enemy simply because they were born with a penis and a pair of testicles; their sole goal in life is seems to be to find and convince a man that he is wrong for existing.
Even a woman who went around picking up other women (who went on to write a book about it) pointed out how blind the female gender is to its own power / actions. At no point have they stopped to think that perhaps men have as many grudges against women as women do against men, but are simply more forgiving of them. But I digress, the die is cast, revenge is sought, history has been occluded, mistakes will no doubt be repeated.
Allow me: "We've been noticing that a lot of money has been showing up in this BitCoin thing over the past few months. We want it, and here's a developer who is going to help us find a way to get it."
Exactly. See, the sad part is, having reviewed what happened during WWII, with regards to Pearl Harbor, we know that our leadership is not above lying to us to achieve their own ends. Having recently read what Nixon pulled off with regards to the Vietnamese, we know it was not a one-time thing. It is, in all likelihood, a recurring problem with regards to leadership, both in this country, and possibly others. As such, there is no logical option, but to view all attacks on the US, as reported by various compromised organs, as possibly tainted, or incomplete, with regards to the information supplied. We hear that China is attacking us via the internet...suspicion says that we perhaps are doing the same to them. From this point on, it becomes a question of which nation, if any, is 'right'; which is usually resolved in the time honored fashion of 'who started it' and 'who is continuing it.'
Another problem then presents itself, which is of the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' -> despite the lunacy of this situation, there may well be a time when there is a real enemy out there, destroying things, yet no one believes the information regarding it purely because they've been lied to so much. Two lessons could be learned from that fable, three of you're Ferengi ("Never tell the same lie twice"): 1.) Continuously lying will result in a lack of help when it is most needed, and 2.) There really was a wolf, in the end. It shows up only after all chance of help has been permanently removed.
Amazing that in all this time, they haven't employed proper security. I mean, you should hear what is said about some of these systems: no anti-viral protection, engineers carrying critical files around on thumb-drives (infected with viruses), etc. It's not like any half-decent network admin doesn't know how to secure these things to the ridiculous degree...it's just that things are never put into play, because, I assume, it requires training, and training is money. So people bumble along, from one catastrophe to the next, only fixing things when they become bad enough to warrant attention. No different from the Mr. Burns approach to running the Springfield nuclear power-plant.
You want to lock down a network? Force registration of the MAC address of every device to an existing account. Encrypt traffic inside. Use fiber instead of copper (harder to tap, I'm told). Etc., etc.
There is better chance to positively identify a spy on your own soil, than on the internet. Again, misdirection, proxy methods, pawns, compromised individuals, etc. are all applicable here. If the Russians want some information on the latest DoD submarine, are they going to go in directly and get it, or have a female agent compromise a contractor on the project? And yet the contractor is, unknowingly, a pawn in all of this nonsense.
Precisely. The 'Just War' approach inevitably degrades into the "I do as I please" approach, as there is no metric for telling you that you are going to far, save that of the guillotine or sudden appearance of a MIRV over your capital city.
Tread carefully here. Misdirection on the internet was a fine art during the '90s...who knows what level it's at now. We're talking the kind of 'bouncing the signal off enemy satellites' kind of approach that the CIA wishes they could pull off.
And now a bunch of morons, with tiny brains, and big clubs, who want to bring 'T3h L@w to the iNternets' are getting involved? If I were a betting man, I'd be betting a few thousand dollars that the US gets tricked into a war by someone more clever than itself. Remember, the one of the greater feats of cleverness, at the end of the day, is to get your enemies to fight each other, while you watch from afar, on a comfy couch, eating popcorn and drinking pop.
Give up your baseless dreams of playing the White Knight to people who do not need your help; your ego prevents you from realizing what you need, which is some quiet contemplation over whether the direction you're headed in is really in sync with your ideal.
The keywords were "sizable project." So what you're really saying is that it's going to take him 9 months to just to understand the data structures / schema of this project, before he can began changing anything beyond string level. Typical example of excellent business level thinking: programmers are fungible trade workers, unskilled, and can easily be replaced. I'm guessing it's going to take 1.5 years before they can begin to move forward again, with the help of a few extra developers...
So...I'm guessing that they will begin to panic in several months, double up with a few extras to try and cover up their mistake, then either try and scrap the project, or do something equally stupid. Now, I could be wrong...they might be hiring a MENSA candidate right out of college, complete with the passion or salary that is required to keep someone like him around...but I'm thinking not; I've known a few people like that...but then, they went on to earn six-figures as their starting salaries right out of college...and you're saying this company is cutting back because of the economy...so probably not. This will be a good lesson for them. Can you name some of their competitors? I have a mild interest in investing in them, and shorting your company's stock, seeing as the new project will probably be a crash and burn in a year's time...randomly guessing the probability to be something like 70% likelihood here...
I say that as long as they are willing to pay you to train him, do so. It's not like he's getting a copy of your trade secrets, or your thinking processes, or even the books you've read...he hasn't attended the same college, doesn't think the same way, etc. Chances are, he will get a broad overview of what you've done, with some stringy reasons (because the company doesn't want to pay you to train him a minute longer than it has to) why you did what you did, which he may or may not write down, and which will be complete gibberish in 3 months time, save for a few obvious things, like "I did this because this didn't work." It's true, you want businesses where executives know how to perform cost analysis situations...but studies have also shown that businesses run purely by the accounting department tend to do poorly, especially where IT / Technology / programming is concerned. Because you're fighting with Archimedes over a pitcher of water...and whether he can cost justify it to twelve decimal places...
I mean, come on, anyone who has studied business / economics in general knows that the business community is sick in general as of late. Heavyweights that have survived cataclysmic downfalls, and gotten back up, are being taken out like chumps through homicidal mismanagement. So, if you're a business guy, and you know (because you took business classes, which 'make sense' to you) how to run things, because you were taught how to do this, or it's what you believe, or how you feel things should be done...and that's also how your friends are doing things....but they're dying off like they've contracted the Black Plague...are you going to keep doing what you've been doing? Stick your fingers in your ears, say that your friends just got unlucky, it happens...or are you going to ask yourself if someone slipped you the wrong info? That the reason you're struggling isn't because you don't have what it takes (a separate discussion), but because someone told you that it was a good idea to cut your sales staff right before your sales biggest day of the year, or that you'd make more money by taking out a big loan that through interest and savings, was supposed to make you more money, instead of giant losses?
Or it could have been the other way around: a handful of skilled Neanderthals could have taken out a village of less capable humans, and afterwards made off with their women (why not, right guys?).
Or they could have easily interacted with each other, lived among each other, and simply interbred.