Exactly right. As a Bernie voter myself, I completely blame Hillary and the DNC for Trump getting elected, and I will blame them for everything bad that happens during his term(s).
This is definitely a case where your so-called "friends" are much worse than your enemies.
You'll fuck over the poor, you'll fuck over the future. You poor deluded fuck.
Wow, you're really the deluded one here. In case you haven't noticed, Trump and the GOP are working very hard to fuck over the poor, such as by repealing the Medicaid expansion and by repealing Obamacare without replacing it with anything that actually works for lower-income people. Then they want to lower taxes for ultra-rich people. You talk about "fucking over the poor", while simultaneously defending the people who have that as their explicit party platform. Sad.
I disagree entirely. Walking away is *always* the best course of action, unless you're in a position of power (and even that's questionable, because if you're the NSA director and refuse to "do your job" you'll probably be sacked).
Decisions and policy always come from the top. If you're a low-level peon (as any engineer is; face it, this is not a prestigious profession with any real power), then you either do what your superiors tell you, or you resign, or you get fired. There is no "stay and try to fix the problem"; you do not have that power.
Everyone has a different bar; obviously, Snowden's and your standards are different from this unnamed guy's. It's not black and white.
What's remarkable about this article is how apparently bad the morale is at the NSA now. So obviously, a lot of NSA insiders were at least somewhat OK with things post-Snowden (or with the things Snowden revealed), but now they're *not* OK with how things are going now with Trump in office.
It's kinda like the Mafia: even they have their limits. They'll happily do "protection" rackets, prostitution, etc., but do something that victimizes young children and suddenly they're morally opposed. (A lot of hardened criminals are like this, which is why child predators have to be kept separate from them in prison.) This isn't to say NSA employees are like the Mafia or other hardened criminals, I'm just pointing out the parallel: everyone has different standards, and at some point can be pushed too far, or asked to do something that's beyond their morals, and that appears to be what we're seeing here.
It's generally middle management's decision whether to hire people who will work remotely
Marissa Meyer's edict at Yahoo contradicts this claim.
Not only that, but in any job involving working with computers, the IT department has to be set up to allow remote work. If they're not, remote employees have no way of getting work done. Middle managers have zero control over IT.
There isn't any work in many of those cities for people in certain professions (i.e. tech). So you're looking at going back to school and starting all over in a new career field.
Honestly, I frequently wish I had gone into the medical field somewhere instead of engineering/programming. The pay might not be as good (I'm not talking about being a surgeon), but the job stability is much better, and you can work almost anywhere (depends on your exact specialty of course but if it isn't something obscure it'll be needed everywhere).
You need to take some of his requirements with a grain of salt, and assume he's exaggerating. The battery-life requirement is one of those. I think it's entirely possible to get a significantly longer lifetime than current phones, with normal usage (not CPU bouncing off the thermal limiter...); all they need to do is double the battery size. Considering how everyone and his brother has some kind of case on his phone, a little extra thickness shouldn't be a big problem.
We don't need 20 pound cellphones, and it's true that such a thing would not sell very well. But there is room to expand the battery some and add many of these features back in, which used to be common: user-replaceable batteries, headphone jack, SDcard slot, etc., while not ending up with an overly-large phone.
It's increasingly hard for middle management to justify to senior management why they're not doing that.
What are you talking about? It's not middle management's decision about where to base their company and operations; that comes straight from senior management.
That said, the bay area situation is great for consultants living in places with a sane cost of living. When I was doing that, my contracting rate was lower than a salaried employee in the bay area, yet I was able to cover my cost of living and pay off my mortgage quickly if I worked two days a month.
How so? If you're an on-site consultant, you have to pay the living costs in that area, unless you're living in your car or something. If you're talking about being a remote consultant, then sure that works out great but how many people are able to get a gig like that? This whole thread is about management not wanting remote workers.
Yeah, they're getting all that, and they don't care, or they refuse to believe it's because of their shitty policies. It doesn't really affect them personally anyway; they get to walk away with giant golden parachutes, while blaming the failure of their company on "market conditions". Just look at shitty executives like Carly Fiorina, Bob Nardelli, Jack Welch, and countless others: they're not hurting. Carly ran HP straight into the ground (and helped destroy Lucent before that), and she's quite wealthy and even made a (somewhat lame) run for the Presidency. So obviously, having to pay higher salaries and having poor retention isn't hurting these executives any; it's probably hurting the shareholders and investors, but that's not the executives' problem.
Yeah, but then you're still driving a GM. Remember, this is the company that decided to sell you a car with an ignition switch that's horribly easy to turn off so they could save a few pennies, and led to many fatal accidents.
So then the lone tech worker is stuck in an apartment forever effectively, without pairing up with someone else's income, and how do you fit kids into that picture, if both have to work, etc.
You don't fit kids into that picture. Kids are infeasible in today's society unless you're on welfare or extremely wealthy. Just leave raising the next generation to them.
I'm sure plenty of software engineers realize this, and have realized this for a very long time now.
The problem is that it's not up to them. It's up to managers and executives, who don't like remote workers. From what I've seen, telecommuting is becoming more and more rare; it was more common 10 years ago. Now the managers all want everyone on-site, and they want them working in noisy open-plan offices, sitting at open tables with no partitions whatsoever.
Maybe he fully understands the physics problem with trying to heat a condo with 20-foot ceilings, but his wife insists on cranking up the heat to 75-80, and getting a divorce means not being able to afford living there any more after paying her alimony.
No, you don't need to go to that extreme. If you're a non-American, it's simple: there's dozens of civilized, developed nations that you can travel to without worrying about Nazi-like interrogations at the airport. Just go to any of those for your vacation.
Get a Mazda; there's nothing there spying on you as far as I can tell. The infotainment systems in the latest models do not have cellular modems, so they have no way to communicate with the outside world unless you pair it to your phone, which is entirely optional. These systems are also easily hacked into, and enthusiasts have done this and made all kinds of changes; if there were spying going on, someone would have noticed by now.
There is a downside, however: the biggest complaint people have about Mazda's system is that it does not support CarPlay or Android Auto. (There is an unofficial mod to add AA to the system, but it's very buggy and of course not at all supported by the mfgr; if it bricks your system they won't fix it under warranty.)
So while the likes of GM probably are spying on you and selling that data somewhere, not every car company is. But Mazda doesn't even bother advertising this, probably because, as you pointed out, very few people give half a shit about it.
Google owns both Google Maps and Waze. They're getting data from other users of these services. On Waze, it'll even show little icons on the map to indicate other Waze users, so of course they're getting traffic data from other users.
Obviously, this is much more useful in denser locales.
The discussion in this thread is about users protecting themselves. Work computers are irrelevant: if your work computer is taken over by hackers, so what? If you were putting your personal info on there, that's your own dumb fault. It's not your computer, it's your employer's. The only thing that should happen when your employer's computer gets hacked is your employer suffers data loss and other problems, not you. You only need to notify the IT department that your computer isn't working right and let them fix it for you.
Why would you hate your LED flashlight? As you said, it's very bright. It's also extremely energy-efficient, something very important in a flashlight. It sounds like you don't like the color spectrum that some LEDs have, but while that is an understandable complaint with LED room lighting, who cares about the color spectrum of a flashlight? All that's important is that it's bright and lasts a long time on a battery.
There's good LED bulbs out there for lamps and other room lighting; you probably picked cheap, crappy ones.
Oh please. The scenario you described could be easily prevented by writing these Right to Repair laws so that requiring consumers to ship devices out of the country (or maybe even the state) is illegal, and consumers are entitled to a full refund from the retailer if a manufacturers tries this.
If it "drives you crazy" when you're discouraged by society and government from oppressing people who aren't part of your religious nuttery, then maybe you need psychological help.
No, you seem to not get it. The "real" women are American, and hence are overwhelmingly obese. The trannies aren't.
If you guys find obesity attractive, then more power to you, but obesity is extremely unhealthy so from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, it's perfectly normal for a man to not be attracted to obese women.
When I was using Tinder (up until a few months ago), I did notice a LOT of trans-girls (men dressing and acting like women). There used to be hookers, but those seem to have disappeared; perhaps Tinder got a lot better at dealing with that problem. But for the 25+ ages, and esp. the 30+ people, it's all real people AFAICT. But there are a lot of trannies, at least in my metro area, though they all seem to be between 25 and 30. The sad thing, however, is that the trannies are, on average, a lot prettier than the real women. American women these days really look awful.
With the "hook-up" generation, there certainly is no shortage of sex happening, so unplanned families are going to happen regardless of want or need.
That's factually untrue. Maybe you're unaware, but birth control has been around for at least a half-century now, and abortion is cheap and easily available now (meaning chemical abortions), not to mention "day after pills". Obviously, access might be a problem for poor people, but in general, unplanned families should not be a big problem any more, especially for anyone who can afford birth control.
So we can leave having families to rich people and the very poor.
Establishing a retirement plan to fund life after employment or carrying insurance to help pay for the inevitable should never be viewed as a "luxury".
It shouldn't, in your worldview and opinion, but that's not reality. The reality is that this is how it will be, like it or not. (Note, I never said I thought this was a great way to run a society. But no one asked me on how to run this one.)
If that is the attitude of tomorrow, then we shouldn't be surprised when slavery becomes legal again in the name of unending Greed that races to establish the worlds first trillionaires.
I agree completely. I think we shouldn't be surprised when slavery is legalized, and I think it's not unrealistic to envision this.
I just don't see the point in having rosy, unrealistic and idealistic visions of what the future will be. I think we should be realistic and prepared for what it will really be like. And that's trillionaires and slavery. But don't worry, the problem will correct itself eventually, thanks to an extremely low birthrate.
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Exactly right. As a Bernie voter myself, I completely blame Hillary and the DNC for Trump getting elected, and I will blame them for everything bad that happens during his term(s).
This is definitely a case where your so-called "friends" are much worse than your enemies.
You'll fuck over the poor, you'll fuck over the future. You poor deluded fuck.
Wow, you're really the deluded one here. In case you haven't noticed, Trump and the GOP are working very hard to fuck over the poor, such as by repealing the Medicaid expansion and by repealing Obamacare without replacing it with anything that actually works for lower-income people. Then they want to lower taxes for ultra-rich people. You talk about "fucking over the poor", while simultaneously defending the people who have that as their explicit party platform. Sad.
I disagree entirely. Walking away is *always* the best course of action, unless you're in a position of power (and even that's questionable, because if you're the NSA director and refuse to "do your job" you'll probably be sacked).
Decisions and policy always come from the top. If you're a low-level peon (as any engineer is; face it, this is not a prestigious profession with any real power), then you either do what your superiors tell you, or you resign, or you get fired. There is no "stay and try to fix the problem"; you do not have that power.
Everyone has a different bar; obviously, Snowden's and your standards are different from this unnamed guy's. It's not black and white.
What's remarkable about this article is how apparently bad the morale is at the NSA now. So obviously, a lot of NSA insiders were at least somewhat OK with things post-Snowden (or with the things Snowden revealed), but now they're *not* OK with how things are going now with Trump in office.
It's kinda like the Mafia: even they have their limits. They'll happily do "protection" rackets, prostitution, etc., but do something that victimizes young children and suddenly they're morally opposed. (A lot of hardened criminals are like this, which is why child predators have to be kept separate from them in prison.) This isn't to say NSA employees are like the Mafia or other hardened criminals, I'm just pointing out the parallel: everyone has different standards, and at some point can be pushed too far, or asked to do something that's beyond their morals, and that appears to be what we're seeing here.
It's generally middle management's decision whether to hire people who will work remotely
Marissa Meyer's edict at Yahoo contradicts this claim.
Not only that, but in any job involving working with computers, the IT department has to be set up to allow remote work. If they're not, remote employees have no way of getting work done. Middle managers have zero control over IT.
There isn't any work in many of those cities for people in certain professions (i.e. tech). So you're looking at going back to school and starting all over in a new career field.
Honestly, I frequently wish I had gone into the medical field somewhere instead of engineering/programming. The pay might not be as good (I'm not talking about being a surgeon), but the job stability is much better, and you can work almost anywhere (depends on your exact specialty of course but if it isn't something obscure it'll be needed everywhere).
You need to take some of his requirements with a grain of salt, and assume he's exaggerating. The battery-life requirement is one of those. I think it's entirely possible to get a significantly longer lifetime than current phones, with normal usage (not CPU bouncing off the thermal limiter...); all they need to do is double the battery size. Considering how everyone and his brother has some kind of case on his phone, a little extra thickness shouldn't be a big problem.
We don't need 20 pound cellphones, and it's true that such a thing would not sell very well. But there is room to expand the battery some and add many of these features back in, which used to be common: user-replaceable batteries, headphone jack, SDcard slot, etc., while not ending up with an overly-large phone.
It's increasingly hard for middle management to justify to senior management why they're not doing that.
What are you talking about? It's not middle management's decision about where to base their company and operations; that comes straight from senior management.
That said, the bay area situation is great for consultants living in places with a sane cost of living. When I was doing that, my contracting rate was lower than a salaried employee in the bay area, yet I was able to cover my cost of living and pay off my mortgage quickly if I worked two days a month.
How so? If you're an on-site consultant, you have to pay the living costs in that area, unless you're living in your car or something. If you're talking about being a remote consultant, then sure that works out great but how many people are able to get a gig like that? This whole thread is about management not wanting remote workers.
Yeah, they're getting all that, and they don't care, or they refuse to believe it's because of their shitty policies. It doesn't really affect them personally anyway; they get to walk away with giant golden parachutes, while blaming the failure of their company on "market conditions". Just look at shitty executives like Carly Fiorina, Bob Nardelli, Jack Welch, and countless others: they're not hurting. Carly ran HP straight into the ground (and helped destroy Lucent before that), and she's quite wealthy and even made a (somewhat lame) run for the Presidency. So obviously, having to pay higher salaries and having poor retention isn't hurting these executives any; it's probably hurting the shareholders and investors, but that's not the executives' problem.
Yeah, but then you're still driving a GM. Remember, this is the company that decided to sell you a car with an ignition switch that's horribly easy to turn off so they could save a few pennies, and led to many fatal accidents.
So then the lone tech worker is stuck in an apartment forever effectively, without pairing up with someone else's income, and how do you fit kids into that picture, if both have to work, etc.
You don't fit kids into that picture. Kids are infeasible in today's society unless you're on welfare or extremely wealthy. Just leave raising the next generation to them.
Wrong.
I'm sure plenty of software engineers realize this, and have realized this for a very long time now.
The problem is that it's not up to them. It's up to managers and executives, who don't like remote workers. From what I've seen, telecommuting is becoming more and more rare; it was more common 10 years ago. Now the managers all want everyone on-site, and they want them working in noisy open-plan offices, sitting at open tables with no partitions whatsoever.
Maybe he fully understands the physics problem with trying to heat a condo with 20-foot ceilings, but his wife insists on cranking up the heat to 75-80, and getting a divorce means not being able to afford living there any more after paying her alimony.
oh, fuck it. just stay home. it's better. really.
No, you don't need to go to that extreme. If you're a non-American, it's simple: there's dozens of civilized, developed nations that you can travel to without worrying about Nazi-like interrogations at the airport. Just go to any of those for your vacation.
Get a Mazda; there's nothing there spying on you as far as I can tell. The infotainment systems in the latest models do not have cellular modems, so they have no way to communicate with the outside world unless you pair it to your phone, which is entirely optional. These systems are also easily hacked into, and enthusiasts have done this and made all kinds of changes; if there were spying going on, someone would have noticed by now.
There is a downside, however: the biggest complaint people have about Mazda's system is that it does not support CarPlay or Android Auto. (There is an unofficial mod to add AA to the system, but it's very buggy and of course not at all supported by the mfgr; if it bricks your system they won't fix it under warranty.)
So while the likes of GM probably are spying on you and selling that data somewhere, not every car company is. But Mazda doesn't even bother advertising this, probably because, as you pointed out, very few people give half a shit about it.
Google owns both Google Maps and Waze. They're getting data from other users of these services. On Waze, it'll even show little icons on the map to indicate other Waze users, so of course they're getting traffic data from other users.
Obviously, this is much more useful in denser locales.
The discussion in this thread is about users protecting themselves. Work computers are irrelevant: if your work computer is taken over by hackers, so what? If you were putting your personal info on there, that's your own dumb fault. It's not your computer, it's your employer's. The only thing that should happen when your employer's computer gets hacked is your employer suffers data loss and other problems, not you. You only need to notify the IT department that your computer isn't working right and let them fix it for you.
Why would you hate your LED flashlight? As you said, it's very bright. It's also extremely energy-efficient, something very important in a flashlight. It sounds like you don't like the color spectrum that some LEDs have, but while that is an understandable complaint with LED room lighting, who cares about the color spectrum of a flashlight? All that's important is that it's bright and lasts a long time on a battery.
There's good LED bulbs out there for lamps and other room lighting; you probably picked cheap, crappy ones.
Oh please. The scenario you described could be easily prevented by writing these Right to Repair laws so that requiring consumers to ship devices out of the country (or maybe even the state) is illegal, and consumers are entitled to a full refund from the retailer if a manufacturers tries this.
Of course it isn't, but the people who were "driven crazy" were surely motivated by that kind of thing, not substantive policy issues.
If it "drives you crazy" when you're discouraged by society and government from oppressing people who aren't part of your religious nuttery, then maybe you need psychological help.
The Millennials aren't having kids.
No, you seem to not get it. The "real" women are American, and hence are overwhelmingly obese. The trannies aren't.
If you guys find obesity attractive, then more power to you, but obesity is extremely unhealthy so from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, it's perfectly normal for a man to not be attracted to obese women.
When I was using Tinder (up until a few months ago), I did notice a LOT of trans-girls (men dressing and acting like women). There used to be hookers, but those seem to have disappeared; perhaps Tinder got a lot better at dealing with that problem. But for the 25+ ages, and esp. the 30+ people, it's all real people AFAICT. But there are a lot of trannies, at least in my metro area, though they all seem to be between 25 and 30. The sad thing, however, is that the trannies are, on average, a lot prettier than the real women. American women these days really look awful.
With the "hook-up" generation, there certainly is no shortage of sex happening, so unplanned families are going to happen regardless of want or need.
That's factually untrue. Maybe you're unaware, but birth control has been around for at least a half-century now, and abortion is cheap and easily available now (meaning chemical abortions), not to mention "day after pills". Obviously, access might be a problem for poor people, but in general, unplanned families should not be a big problem any more, especially for anyone who can afford birth control.
So we can leave having families to rich people and the very poor.
Establishing a retirement plan to fund life after employment or carrying insurance to help pay for the inevitable should never be viewed as a "luxury".
It shouldn't, in your worldview and opinion, but that's not reality. The reality is that this is how it will be, like it or not. (Note, I never said I thought this was a great way to run a society. But no one asked me on how to run this one.)
If that is the attitude of tomorrow, then we shouldn't be surprised when slavery becomes legal again in the name of unending Greed that races to establish the worlds first trillionaires.
I agree completely. I think we shouldn't be surprised when slavery is legalized, and I think it's not unrealistic to envision this.
I just don't see the point in having rosy, unrealistic and idealistic visions of what the future will be. I think we should be realistic and prepared for what it will really be like. And that's trillionaires and slavery. But don't worry, the problem will correct itself eventually, thanks to an extremely low birthrate.