I worked as an IT auditor for a very big public accounting firm. Reviewing IT controls was a key part of the financial audit (and more so now with Sarbannes Oxley).
If I found developers had access to production, it was automatically a "no reliance" finding.
This means the financial applications are inherently untrustworthy that the financial auditors would have to review original source documents for validation.
"No reliance" meant the audit became much more expensive as a result.
Also - if the auditors can't rely on the financial reports, should management?
"Your average person didn't open their TV to see what tube burned out."
Oh yes they did. I'm old enough to remember when the local drugstore had tube testers - if your TV was out, you took the tubes to a store, plugged them in, and checked if they were OK. If the tube failed, the drugstore would of course sell you a replacement.
God, what horrendously weak "logic" you used there.
So the same millstone around GM's neck was a non-issue for the better managed Ford, and you call this "horrendously weak logic"?
Sounds like it supports my point, and that the overhang of pensions and retiree medical benefits simply "leveraged" the poor management decisions of GM.
Since Ford did not have the loss of market share (due to more intelligent management decisions), the same "millstone" did not bring them down.
Good for Ford's management.
Re:Horrifyingly poor management
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Their union contracts have strangled their ability to compete in a fair market.
You mean the same United Auto Workers union that the very successful Ford has worked with for decades? Amazing how that union has brought down GM, but somehow the same union represents workers at the successful Ford.
Unfortunately, earplugs affect the mix of frequencies that one may hear, with the result that music I would otherwise enjoy is reduced to a throbbing bass with earplugs
I would think a company would be hard pressed to not hire someone based on an anonymous posting board. That's a dangerous practice that could result in a major lawsuit if anyone found out about the practice. It essentially amounts to hiring discrimination.
You are very funny. Have you ever been on the employer's side of the hiring process? Hiring is an incredibly risk-averse process - many candidates have the ability to do the job, so the discriminator is any real or perceived fault.
First, discrimination applies only to protected classes. These are legally defined and generally amount to age, race, gender - period. There is no law that prevents employers from refusing to hire based on other criteria, even if that criteria is completely unrelated to job performance.
Second, most hiring managers are smart enough to discriminate without leaving an incriminating trail. For example, I was verbally instructed at one job to only consider candidates under a certain age, in order to fit a corporate "image". I'm sure none of this was in writing, and the manager advising me to do this would deny it under oath. When you apply for a job, you have no idea the real reason you didn't get interviewed. When you are interviewed, you only get a vague sense of why you weren't hired ("didn't fit the corporate culture" is a common one). If you were denied a job based on anonymous libel, how would you know?
Last, I *have* served on a jury dealing with these issues. It is amazing how many potential jurors stated right out they did not believe companies should be sued for employment discrimination under any conditions (didn't you know that all these law suits are crippling the US economy?). It was also amazing how many people with this mindset actually made it on the jury.
It is very difficult and very expensive for an individual to sue under these conditions, and jurors look at *any* ( flaws in the litigant's professional behavior to rule in favor of the defense. Even if you think you have a good case, there is a good chance that a bad impression in front of a jury would dash you hopes of compensation.
Employers know how hard it is to prove discrimination, and how hard it is for individuals to win these cases against corporate litigators and HR professionals. Policies against discrimination are largely window-dressing, designed to provide plausible deniability
How will illegal non-citizens support the government program when they are (1) not paying income or social security/medicare taxes
WRONG!!
Very few illegal immigrants are paid cash under the table. Most are paid in the same fashion as legal employees, and have taxes and social security withheld.
In fact, illegal immigrants are a net contributor to the social security fund, as many use fake social security numbers for which they will never be able to collect benefits:
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articl Illegal immigrants pay taxes, too
He calculates that illegal immigrants contributed $428 billion dollars to the nation's $13.6 trillion gross domestic product in 2006. That number assumes illegal immigrants are 30 percent less productive than other workers.
The Social Security Administration estimates that about three-quarters of illegal workers pay taxes that contribute to the overall solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
"Overall, any type of immigration is a net positive to Social Security. The more people working and paying into the system, the better," Hinkle said. "It does help the system remain solvent."
I would train at the JKA Dojo in Santa Monica maybe 20 years ago. Leonard was one of the students. I recall when he was promoted from brown belt to black belt. Shotokan Karate is a very intense discipline.
Nothing like having the crap beat out of me by one of the founders of the Internet...
Contracts are a fundamental part of capitalism and any free economic system, in that they allow private parties to set the terms and conditions of their interaction with each other.
There is no reason a contract between and employer and an employees' association setting wages and working conditions should be treated as any worse than any similar contract.
Unless, that is, you are philosophically opposed to contracts that grant employees more power than they would have as individuals, not associated in a union
I find it contradictory that libertarians who supposedly value the foundations of a free economy are so eager to allow collective bargaining contracts to be arbitrarily voided by the employer
Many bloggers are starting to notice some new referrals from a company called “NetVocates” (mine showed up as coming from arrca.netvocates.com to be specific).
I recently invited a guest blogger (who writes under the pseudonym D. Sirmize) to share his political opinions on my blog. I began to get hits (55 to date) from NetVocates a couple days after his first political post. It would seem that whatever they’re currently looking at is based on opinions of a political nature.
More from http://wordsnotfists.blogspot.com/2006/06/another-inconvenient-truth-netvocates.html and of course you can look up Netvocates' own Web site, where they are strikingly open about their PR efforts
Moot? So the people who have been sitting in their cell for 5 years without being charged with a crime, without access to an attorney, and not even having the right to challenge their detention in a court of law ("Habeus Corpus") are vindicated now, and justice has been restored?
You want the sacred and holy writ of Jarvis Gann to forever guide this state? You want your property taxes fixed at a low level forever? You want to make it politically impossible for cities to raise these taxes? Then prepare to pay fees for services.
I remember what it was like before the voters in this state thought they could create a free lunch. You definitely would *not* have been charged for that ride pre-1978
For the sake of non-californians, your assessed value is fixed at purchase price (for long term owners a fraction of current value), can go up by no more than 2% a year, and takes a 2/3 vote to change any of this.
and after 9/11 when these restrictions were put into place, we were forbidden by company policy from taking any classified documents or other classified material with us on board commercial flights for just this reason.
We have to send it in advance via secure courier now.
Which leads me to believe the TSA doesn't care if you stuff is labeled "classified", they will go ahead and search it anyway
Truth is, this is likely to encourage companies to a: use a securId on their computers or b: not to put corporate data on the computer and make it only accessible via a corporate VPN.
They've already got that one covered:
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
I think it is reasonable to assume most commercially available VPN-based encryption (as well as TLS/SSL) can be broken by the NSA. Even if this is not the case, traffic analysis based on unencrypted headers can reveal a lot about what is being communicated to whom.
If I were just a bit more paranoid, I'd say the point of laptop confiscation is to force commercial entities to use easily broken commercial crypto over communications lines that are already heavily wiretapped.
One could argue that traveling to the United States while being Muslim/Arabic does count as self-inflicted harm. I'm reminded of the movie Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood* where the protagonists are arrested for being black on a Wednesday.
This is not too far from being the truth in the recent pastn(until the late 1960's):
A sundown town is a community in the United States where non-whites -- especially African Americans -- were systematically excluded from living in or passing through after the sun went down. This allowed maids and workmen to provide unskilled labor during the day....
n some cases, signs were placed at the town's borders with statements similar to the one posted in Hawthorne, California which read "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne" in the 1930s
Slashdot Mirror
This re-assures me that the military really isn't that different from corporate America.
Here I was worried that all these former military folks might have to deal with the culture shock of private corporate culture.
Instead it looks like they will fit right in.
I worked as an IT auditor for a very big public accounting firm. Reviewing IT controls was a key part of the financial audit (and more so now with Sarbannes Oxley).
If I found developers had access to production, it was automatically a "no reliance" finding.
This means the financial applications are inherently untrustworthy that the financial auditors would have to review original source documents for validation.
"No reliance" meant the audit became much more expensive as a result.
Also - if the auditors can't rely on the financial reports, should management?
"We used to get drunk and use it to play music on our stereo in the barracks room. "
sort of like this?
Kraftwerke - pocket calculator / dentaku
"Your average person didn't open their TV to see what tube burned out."
Oh yes they did. I'm old enough to remember when the local drugstore had tube testers - if your TV was out, you took the tubes to a store, plugged them in, and checked if they were OK. If the tube failed, the drugstore would of course sell you a replacement.
"Nevertheless, what American would tolerate a car that hit 60 in nearly 14 seconds? "
At one point, a very large number of Americans. This was a very popular car for quite a long time.
their experience in the early 1950's has been well documented on film
Children should not be allowed to read Ayn Rand until they clearly understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction
So the same millstone around GM's neck was a non-issue for the better managed Ford, and you call this "horrendously weak logic"?
Sounds like it supports my point, and that the overhang of pensions and retiree medical benefits simply "leveraged" the poor management decisions of GM.
Since Ford did not have the loss of market share (due to more intelligent management decisions), the same "millstone" did not bring them down.
Good for Ford's management.
You mean the same United Auto Workers union that the very successful Ford has worked with for decades? Amazing how that union has brought down GM, but somehow the same union represents workers at the successful Ford.
Scott Adams made fun of the tendency of management to blame the least powerful individuals for management failing.. The UAW is a convenient scapegoat for right-wing talking heads, but the decision to manufacture poorly-made cars that do not meet a market need is purely management's.
They take brands past their prime and run them into the ground
(damn, a computer analogy for a car story. A first for Slashdot?)
There is the option of earplugs
Unfortunately, earplugs affect the mix of frequencies that one may hear, with the result that music I would otherwise enjoy is reduced to a throbbing bass with earplugs
the sound of the original post's intent going right over your head.
Did you hear it?
Or are you deaf from indignant outrage?
You are very funny. Have you ever been on the employer's side of the hiring process? Hiring is an incredibly risk-averse process - many candidates have the ability to do the job, so the discriminator is any real or perceived fault.
First, discrimination applies only to protected classes. These are legally defined and generally amount to age, race, gender - period. There is no law that prevents employers from refusing to hire based on other criteria, even if that criteria is completely unrelated to job performance.
Second, most hiring managers are smart enough to discriminate without leaving an incriminating trail. For example, I was verbally instructed at one job to only consider candidates under a certain age, in order to fit a corporate "image". I'm sure none of this was in writing, and the manager advising me to do this would deny it under oath. When you apply for a job, you have no idea the real reason you didn't get interviewed. When you are interviewed, you only get a vague sense of why you weren't hired ("didn't fit the corporate culture" is a common one). If you were denied a job based on anonymous libel, how would you know?
Last, I *have* served on a jury dealing with these issues. It is amazing how many potential jurors stated right out they did not believe companies should be sued for employment discrimination under any conditions (didn't you know that all these law suits are crippling the US economy?). It was also amazing how many people with this mindset actually made it on the jury.
It is very difficult and very expensive for an individual to sue under these conditions, and jurors look at *any* ( flaws in the litigant's professional behavior to rule in favor of the defense. Even if you think you have a good case, there is a good chance that a bad impression in front of a jury would dash you hopes of compensation.
Employers know how hard it is to prove discrimination, and how hard it is for individuals to win these cases against corporate litigators and HR professionals. Policies against discrimination are largely window-dressing, designed to provide plausible deniability
You don't become a billionaire by sharing anything with anyone
WRONG!!
Very few illegal immigrants are paid cash under the table. Most are paid in the same fashion as legal employees, and have taxes and social security withheld.
In fact, illegal immigrants are a net contributor to the social security fund, as many use fake social security numbers for which they will never be able to collect benefits:
I would train at the JKA Dojo in Santa Monica maybe 20 years ago. Leonard was one of the students. I recall when he was promoted from brown belt to black belt. Shotokan Karate is a very intense discipline.
Nothing like having the crap beat out of me by one of the founders of the Internet...
Contracts are a fundamental part of capitalism and any free economic system, in that they allow private parties to set the terms and conditions of their interaction with each other.
There is no reason a contract between and employer and an employees' association setting wages and working conditions should be treated as any worse than any similar contract.
Unless, that is, you are philosophically opposed to contracts that grant employees more power than they would have as individuals, not associated in a union
I find it contradictory that libertarians who supposedly value the foundations of a free economy are so eager to allow collective bargaining contracts to be arbitrarily voided by the employer
This is already going on.
Some companies make big money via Astroturfing:
Has Netvocates visited your blog recently
More from http://wordsnotfists.blogspot.com/2006/06/another-inconvenient-truth-netvocates.html and of course you can look up Netvocates' own Web site, where they are strikingly open about their PR efforts
Moot? So the people who have been sitting in their cell for 5 years without being charged with a crime, without access to an attorney, and not even having the right to challenge their detention in a court of law ("Habeus Corpus") are vindicated now, and justice has been restored?
Fixed that for you
Firearms allow you to challenge jack-booted thugs that are smashing down your front door to take you away to a concentration camp.
This is how the second amendment keeps you free.
The correlary of this is that as long as no jack booted thugs show up at your doorstep, you have nothing to worry about.
If you can't defend against it with a firearm, then it can't really be a threat, right?
You want the sacred and holy writ of Jarvis Gann to forever guide this state? You want your property taxes fixed at a low level forever? You want to make it politically impossible for cities to raise these taxes? Then prepare to pay fees for services.
I remember what it was like before the voters in this state thought they could create a free lunch. You definitely would *not* have been charged for that ride pre-1978
For the sake of non-californians, your assessed value is fixed at purchase price (for long term owners a fraction of current value), can go up by no more than 2% a year, and takes a 2/3 vote to change any of this.
So now we have to rely on personal firearms ownership to guarantee our freedom to see Web sites about Cuba?
So where should we point all the guns that are supposed to defend our freedom?
And where are all the gun-owners rallying to the cause of freedom?
and after 9/11 when these restrictions were put into place, we were forbidden by company policy from taking any classified documents or other classified material with us on board commercial flights for just this reason.
We have to send it in advance via secure courier now.
Which leads me to believe the TSA doesn't care if you stuff is labeled "classified", they will go ahead and search it anyway
They've already got that one covered:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908
I think it is reasonable to assume most commercially available VPN-based encryption (as well as TLS/SSL) can be broken by the NSA. Even if this is not the case, traffic analysis based on unencrypted headers can reveal a lot about what is being communicated to whom.
If I were just a bit more paranoid, I'd say the point of laptop confiscation is to force commercial entities to use easily broken commercial crypto over communications lines that are already heavily wiretapped.
This is not too far from being the truth in the recent pastn(until the late 1960's):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town