That's fine, it's not a competition. I don't care what other people do, I'm just relating the reason why I think the claim that the incidence of RRoD is "majorly overestimated" is ridiculous. Like I said, it's not just me, it's pretty much every single person I know that's got a 360 has had to replace it at least once (I know one guy on his 5th, which is insane in my opinion), but people are going to believe what they want.
Maybe we should all have our heads examined for buying multiple Xbox 360's in the first place. I certainly know I'm not going to invest as much in the next Microsoft console, not right away, not until I'm confident that it's gonna last more than a couple years...
You know, I'll have to try that, I've been itching to play Star Trek: Armada again but I've tried every damn compatibility setting and it works for shit no matter what. Had the same problem with Descent 3 if I remember correctly.
If I recall correctly, the Civilization box set with Civ I - Civ IV worked on Windows 7, although I've only played Civ II and Civ IV out of the set so far...
I don't actually know anyone that hasn't had to replace their Xbox 360 console at least once due to it either getting the RRoD or that bullshit where it just stops reading the fucking discs. I'm on my third, the first one died 2 years after purchase, sent it in and got it replaced, it died again about a year and half later (just after the 3 year extended warranty, of course), so I had to purchase a new one out of pocket since obviously I'm not about to just say fuck it when I've got like 40 games and a ton of accessories for it. Now that one is even making a grinding sound and taking forever to load discs so I'm sure I'm going to have to replace that one soon, too. At least I can keep using it as a Netflix box, I guess, but considering I've invested already $700+ dollars into it ($500 for the Elite that died, $200 for the replacement Arcade unit), that does little to soften the blow.
My PS3 and Wii are both still going strong 5 years later. My Playstation 2 is still going strong (although I admit I had to readjust the laser height at one point) and I bought that at least 10 years ago, my N64 still works at 15 years old, my SNES, NES, and Gameboy still work, they're all over 20 years old. Hell, my original Xbox even still works (although I hardly ever use it, not since I last played through KOTOR 1 & 2 a year or so ago in preparation for The Old Republic).
My point is, obviously there is something different about the 360 when all these other consoles are still going strong after so many years (and I put more hours than I can count on some of them, I'm big into JRPGs, so my PS2 had many, many 12 hour days, as did my SNES). Meanwhile, it seems like you fucking breathe on a 360 funny and the thing self-destructs.
I admit, I don't know what the quality is like with the newest consoles with the redesigned cases and ventilation and everything, but Microsoft really screwed the pooch with their older models. Either that, or it's all a ploy to get us to buy the same fucking console over and over again, in which case I'd say they succeeded spectacularly. I know one thing, I'll be damned if I buy the next one right away. I'm giving them at least 2 years to get the kinks worked out first because lord knows they're probably going to need it. I'm not even a Microsoft hater, I've put a lot of hours on my 360, but nowhere near what I've put on those older consoles, and certainly not enough to justify it's ridiculous failure rate even just in my own personal experiences, and like I said, I don't know anyone that has had a vastly different experience than I have with the hardware.
It may be an idea for backup in regards to fires, but you can always stash a drive at another location, such as your parent's or friend's house.
My mother is a professional nature photographer and does just that; she's got a safe deposit box where she keeps hard drives of every photo she's ever taken (worth keeping, obviously) in RAW format, as well as the photoshopped digital masters of the prints she sells/publishes. She used to also burn them to DVD-R's for redundancy but her newer cameras are something like 30 MP so that's just not as efficient as it used to be, so now she just keeps redundant hard-drive backups in her house in climate-controlled storage.
She lives in Alaska, so the cloud isn't a viable option for her given the extremely limited internet speeds up there (she pays almost $100 a month for 768k DSL and that's considered a luxury to most people there, who are mostly on dialup or satellite), but I doubt she would feel comfortable storing her raw photos online, anyway. I think it's going to be a long time before people really trust 3rd party cloud storage for anything really important, and the U.S. government sure isn't doing anything to encourage it with their cowboy bullshit on the net...
Maybe it is psychosomatic, I don't know, either way, coming out of a movie theater with a pounding headache and then having to jump in the car and drive home isn't very fun. Standard movies don't give me headaches like that. I suspect it has something to do with the flickering of the light coming in the sides of the lenses (since the movie has to be twice as bright due to the way polarized 3D works), but I don't know for sure, I'm not a doctor.
As for 3D TVs, honestly I think the TV industry is just trying to cash in and get people to replace their perfectly good 2D HDTVs. Since that obviously wasn't the moneymaker they'd hoped it would be, they're pushing the Smart TVs ("oh boy, my TVs firmware is out of date and my model is no longer supported, time to buy a new one!"). The only thing that I'm mildly enthusiastic about is the new 4K sets, but honestly, it's going to be a long time before I consider upgrading my current set. I bought my first HDTV back in 2005 when the technology was relatively new, spent $1700 on a Samsung 32" 720p set, and prices plummeted like a rock (the upgrade I bought just 4 years later cost almost half that, is nearly twice the size, and better in almost every way), so there ain't no way I'm going to be an early adopter anymore.
I feel that way about a lot of electronics these days, honestly. Model cycles are refreshing so ridiculously fast that it's just hard for me to justify buying something today when it's going to be getting marked down on clearance in 3 months when the new model rolls out.
Yeah, I'm not a big social network fan, but I admit that G+'s circles is a really nice way to segregate your feed easily. I fooled around with it when it launched before I remembered that I don't really give much of a shit what most other people do all fucking day and stopped coming back.
The Down population in most of Europe, for instance, is dwindling because screening is widespread and upon detection, the vast majority of women elect for abortion. Since Down are rarely able to reproduce and their life expectancy is about 50, in about half a century they will be gone throughout the EU (apart from some fanatical Catholic states but they're seeing the light as well).
Except for the part where Down Syndrome is not a hereditary condition and rather the result of random genetic mutation. That means that you're not going to "breed it out". The fact that there are less Down Syndrome children in Europe is due to changing social mores regarding terminating unhealthy pregnancies there.
Even if abortion were to suddenly be universally accepted overnight, there would still be Down Syndrome children being born because some parents will choose to give birth to their child even if they are going to be disabled. Short of state mandated eugenics programs, there will always be children born with these conditions, unless we come up with some way to cure Down Syndrome in vitro. IANAD obviously but it seems to me that Down Syndrome would be almost impossible to "cure", due to being the result of an extra chromosome due to random genetic mutation. How would they "erase" that chromosome throughout all of the DNA without killing the fetus?
3D is a gimmick, just like it always has been up to this point. I'll invest in 3D when we're seeing true 3-dimensional holography without the need for special glasses, and it doesn't seem like that's going to be anytime soon...
Plus I always get headaches after a couple hours of watching 3D content, so I avoid it in the theater whenever I can. The only film I even care to see in 3D at this point is The Hobbit, and that's not so much because it's 3D in itself but because I've been watching the behind the scenes footage of their technical setup and am interested to see the difference in quality compared to the typical shit-tastic, fake 3D slapped on top of a 2D movie, Hollywood crap.
Honestly, it's my Western Digital drives that have lasted the longest. My dad is still rocking several single digit GB capacity WD drives actively in his legacy tower, and I've yet to have one die on me. Not to say I haven't replaced them as their capacity becomes outdated, but I've had much better luck with them than Maxtor (the worst brand I've ever used), which is now a part of Seagate, which I've also had a couple fail on me (but nowhere near as bad as Maxtor).
I've never used Hitachi or Samsung or any other brand that I know of, so I can't speak as to their quality, but I'm sticking with Western Digital.
Agreed. I've been gradually rotating larger backup drives in and smaller backup drives out over the last 10 years or so. Right now I have about 2 TB's of unique data in my archive which is kept on the host machine if it is regularly accessed or duplicated on another external hard drive. Everything (I care about) has two copies at all times. As my archive grows, I'm going to have to upgrade my archive device's capacity, but that's a given, no matter what you do, if you want it stored locally, you'll have to add capacity somewhere obviously. DVD-R's and BluRay discs aren't a viable option in my opinion, because I've got a ton of old self-burned discs that I recently had to toss because they were rendered useless from laser rot, even though they were in sealed containers in a cool, dry place.
The cloud is, to me, not a backup solution. I see it as a way to globally access my data and I use it as such. No sensitive data of mine will go to the cloud because the likelihood of needing access to it without warning is completely nil, so in my case, it's limited to media that I want constant access to. Now, the cloud definitely has the potential to serve as a backup solution, don't get me wrong, but there's just too much uncertainty involved in the cloud these days, especially as concerns the government nuking sites from orbit without warning, whether justified or not.
However, I agree with some others that are telling you to do some house-cleaning. I recently went through my backups and found 300 GB's worth of crap that I hadn't accessed or used dating back to the early 2000's that I was saving for some stupid reason. Disc Images for ancient games that don't even run well on modern systems (or require a lot of fucking hassle to get running well), music that I haven't listened to in half a decade, old-ass videos that I'd downloaded from the internet back before there was such a thing as youtube, etc. Not to say that everyone's data is as silly as mine was, but it just added up over the years...
companies think they can dictate things that are absurd and yet, they often get away with it.
There was an employer here in town a few years ago that basically called a company meeting and told everyone that they had to take a 10% pay cut or else he was laying them off and hiring in new people to work for lower wages. When the employees obviously went completely apeshit, the owner said "Don't blame me, blame the economy".
So the employees, they all get together in their own time and they work out ways for them to cut costs, give up their vacations and shit, sacrifice some bonuses, raises, and shift differentials, agree to higher production quotas, and manage to come up with a plan that will enable the boss to cut costs without cutting the employee pay so drastically. The owner's response? "No, my decision to cut your pay is final. The economy is weak right now, and I'm going to capitalize on that by cutting wages back. I don't have to do this, but I am going to anyway to increase my bottom line. Don't like it, there's the door. If you think you're going to organize, be aware that I will fire all of you and move this entire operation to Kentucky."
The employees were obviously furious, but what could they do? A few did quit, but most of them just sucked it up because even a 10% pay cut is better than working for minimum wage in retail or collecting a paltry $300 bucks a week in unemployment that won't even cover a mortgage payment. It turns out it didn't matter anyway, because not long after that, the owner fired everyone and moved to Kentucky just like he threatened, obviously having had plans to do that all along.
If I were those new employees in Kentucky, I wouldn't get too comfortable. I'm sure Mexico or China is going to start looking more and more attractive to him every single day...
get back to us in 10-20 years from now and tell us if YOU are still employed.
obviously you are well employed and proud of it.
but what is now, won't always be. I was once like you are: young, arrogant and thought I owned the world.
THINGS CHANGE.
but people like you, in your current mind-frame, are NOT HELPING.
I can't tell you how many people that I've heard bitching and complaining about "the nanny state" and "handouts" since Obama got elected that, once they themselves have fallen on hard times, had no problem whatsoever being a huge hypocrite and taking those "handouts" from the "nanny state" themselves. One old 'friend' (more of an acquaintance these days) in particular regularly posts shit about kicking people off of Medicaid saying that it's not his responsibility to take care of "freeloaders". Meanwhile his wife has been milking Social Security for a decade due to a car accident which injured her ankle and is "unable to work".
Hypocrisy is being worn almost like a badge of honor these days. I honestly can't tell if it's deliberate or people are seriously so fucking stupid and short-sighted that they can't imagine being in similar situations.
I've got friends and acquaintances in HR and sometimes that, in itself, is damning. The unofficial policy is "Either they have a Facebook account and are hiding it, or they don't have one and have anti-social tendencies and thus would not be a good 'fit' for our company. Either way they are a potential liability." Just because they are outright asking for it now doesn't mean that HR hasn't been using Facebook to check up on applicants before, that's nothing new, it's just off the record, and discrimination based on those Facebook accounts is nothing new, either. Facebook has been a factor for many years.
Now, if I was in an interview and was asked for my social media account password (or even access to it), I would thank the interviewer for their time and take my leave, but I understand not everyone has that luxury these days. Still, how would one even prove something like that? Unless the interview is recorded (by you), or you have corroborative evidence of some other form, it's going to be your word against theirs...and as everyone knows, HR is there to protect the company, not the employees.
If you can find a lawyer willing to take the case, of course. From my own experiences dealing with discrimination as an employee of a major corporation, I couldn't find any lawyers in my area willing to take the case because it would have been ridiculously expensive to bring to trial, not because my case didn't necessarily have merit (although I admit it would have been a difficult case, as much of the discrimination was in the form of verbal comments and bias in terms of scheduling and double-standards, still, there were numerous witnesses and others that were discriminated against to varying degrees).
Not to say that there aren't frivolous discrimination lawsuits, but the mere size and resources of the defendant has a definite chilling effect on those cases being brought.
Is there some law that prevents people from possessing oil?
Joe Wall Street can rent himself some legal storage to keep his oil in while he's trying to sell it just the same as anyone else. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for someone bidding up the price of tens of thousands of barrels of oil knowing full well that he would never actually be able to take possession of it?
If I go down to Home Depot and buy all of the lumber they have in stock, Home Depot isn't going to let me leave it on their shelves while I find other people to sell it to at a profit. They're going to tell me to get my shit out of their fucking store so they can put more unsold lumber out. If I didn't, they'd dump it out back and start charging me storage, as well they should.
I'm not proposing that we limit who can speculate. I'm proposing that we require speculators to take possession of the product they're trading. Why can't they hire someone else to take possession on their behalf? I don't much care what Joe Wall Street does with his oil as long as it is environmentally responsible.
Obviously a digital file cannot be both owned for purposes of liability and licensed for purposes of use, so the courts need to get on top of this ASAP.
...and then, when it all falls apart and they end up on the hook for millions, they declare bankruptcy and socialize the losses while privatizing the profits.
Ok, now implement this in China. If you do it in the US alone it will have exactly zero effect.
China has just as much interest in cheaper gasoline as the U.S. does. I'm sure China would be among the first to cheer if Wall Street wasn't able to pump the cost of a barrel of oil up months before it's even sucked out of the earth.
If you need to buy oil at all it should come with the requirement that you're actually prepared to take possession of it at some point.
I have no problem with speculation if refineries are the ones doing the speculation because they actually have a vested interest in not inflating the cost of a barrel of oil into the stratosphere. The paper pushers that have absolutely no intention whatsoever of taking possession of the oil they're trading back and forth should not be able to resell the oil until it's in their possession in the first place. Joe Wall Street isn't going to bid on tens of thousands of barrels of oil if there's a possibility he's going to be called down to the dock to collect it when the tanker comes to port.
A faithful adaptation of Dune would be amazing, although I admit I've only read the first few Dune novels, so I don't know how well the later novels would translate.
I really wish HBO would adapt either Stephen King's The Stand or The Gunslinger series to an ongoing series. Both could do well in my opinion. I know that The Gunslinger was in the works as a series of films, but that has been in an out of production so many times I have no ckue as to it's current status.
Actually, now that I think about it, Star Trek almost suffered the same fate. They tried to cancel that show after every season, it wasn't the moneymaker that The Powers That Be wanted, and look at the franchise today. Four subsequent TV series, Eleven Feature Films (with a twelfth on the way), countless merchandise...it's a billion dollar franchise today.
I truly believe if they would have stuck with the show it would have been just as successful, but everything's instant gratification these days. If a show doesn't capture enormous ratings and millions of dollars in ad revenue from the start, it's doomed. They gave Firefly, what, 3 whole months? Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season was a flaming pile of shit and that show lasted 7 fucking years and spawned four feature films...I wonder how their early ratings compared to Firefly's?
Maybe, just maybe, Firefly would've done better if it wasn't aired out of order and shuffled between time slots...
Oh, and considering the sales of the DVDs (both Serenity and the series) it's pretty obvious it was financially viable, it was just mismanaged.
Exactly. Firefly, as a franchise, could have competed with Star Trek and Star Wars in my opinion, but we'll never know, because they sabotaged it from the get-go. People that have watched the show in the order it was supposed to be seen, and not the cluster-fuck that they aired, generally have much more positive reactions to the show in my experiences.
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That's fine, it's not a competition. I don't care what other people do, I'm just relating the reason why I think the claim that the incidence of RRoD is "majorly overestimated" is ridiculous. Like I said, it's not just me, it's pretty much every single person I know that's got a 360 has had to replace it at least once (I know one guy on his 5th, which is insane in my opinion), but people are going to believe what they want.
Maybe we should all have our heads examined for buying multiple Xbox 360's in the first place. I certainly know I'm not going to invest as much in the next Microsoft console, not right away, not until I'm confident that it's gonna last more than a couple years...
You know, I'll have to try that, I've been itching to play Star Trek: Armada again but I've tried every damn compatibility setting and it works for shit no matter what. Had the same problem with Descent 3 if I remember correctly.
If I recall correctly, the Civilization box set with Civ I - Civ IV worked on Windows 7, although I've only played Civ II and Civ IV out of the set so far...
Yeah, okay dude.
I don't actually know anyone that hasn't had to replace their Xbox 360 console at least once due to it either getting the RRoD or that bullshit where it just stops reading the fucking discs. I'm on my third, the first one died 2 years after purchase, sent it in and got it replaced, it died again about a year and half later (just after the 3 year extended warranty, of course), so I had to purchase a new one out of pocket since obviously I'm not about to just say fuck it when I've got like 40 games and a ton of accessories for it. Now that one is even making a grinding sound and taking forever to load discs so I'm sure I'm going to have to replace that one soon, too. At least I can keep using it as a Netflix box, I guess, but considering I've invested already $700+ dollars into it ($500 for the Elite that died, $200 for the replacement Arcade unit), that does little to soften the blow.
My PS3 and Wii are both still going strong 5 years later. My Playstation 2 is still going strong (although I admit I had to readjust the laser height at one point) and I bought that at least 10 years ago, my N64 still works at 15 years old, my SNES, NES, and Gameboy still work, they're all over 20 years old. Hell, my original Xbox even still works (although I hardly ever use it, not since I last played through KOTOR 1 & 2 a year or so ago in preparation for The Old Republic).
My point is, obviously there is something different about the 360 when all these other consoles are still going strong after so many years (and I put more hours than I can count on some of them, I'm big into JRPGs, so my PS2 had many, many 12 hour days, as did my SNES). Meanwhile, it seems like you fucking breathe on a 360 funny and the thing self-destructs.
I admit, I don't know what the quality is like with the newest consoles with the redesigned cases and ventilation and everything, but Microsoft really screwed the pooch with their older models. Either that, or it's all a ploy to get us to buy the same fucking console over and over again, in which case I'd say they succeeded spectacularly. I know one thing, I'll be damned if I buy the next one right away. I'm giving them at least 2 years to get the kinks worked out first because lord knows they're probably going to need it. I'm not even a Microsoft hater, I've put a lot of hours on my 360, but nowhere near what I've put on those older consoles, and certainly not enough to justify it's ridiculous failure rate even just in my own personal experiences, and like I said, I don't know anyone that has had a vastly different experience than I have with the hardware.
It may be an idea for backup in regards to fires, but you can always stash a drive at another location, such as your parent's or friend's house.
My mother is a professional nature photographer and does just that; she's got a safe deposit box where she keeps hard drives of every photo she's ever taken (worth keeping, obviously) in RAW format, as well as the photoshopped digital masters of the prints she sells/publishes. She used to also burn them to DVD-R's for redundancy but her newer cameras are something like 30 MP so that's just not as efficient as it used to be, so now she just keeps redundant hard-drive backups in her house in climate-controlled storage.
She lives in Alaska, so the cloud isn't a viable option for her given the extremely limited internet speeds up there (she pays almost $100 a month for 768k DSL and that's considered a luxury to most people there, who are mostly on dialup or satellite), but I doubt she would feel comfortable storing her raw photos online, anyway. I think it's going to be a long time before people really trust 3rd party cloud storage for anything really important, and the U.S. government sure isn't doing anything to encourage it with their cowboy bullshit on the net...
Maybe it is psychosomatic, I don't know, either way, coming out of a movie theater with a pounding headache and then having to jump in the car and drive home isn't very fun. Standard movies don't give me headaches like that. I suspect it has something to do with the flickering of the light coming in the sides of the lenses (since the movie has to be twice as bright due to the way polarized 3D works), but I don't know for sure, I'm not a doctor.
As for 3D TVs, honestly I think the TV industry is just trying to cash in and get people to replace their perfectly good 2D HDTVs. Since that obviously wasn't the moneymaker they'd hoped it would be, they're pushing the Smart TVs ("oh boy, my TVs firmware is out of date and my model is no longer supported, time to buy a new one!"). The only thing that I'm mildly enthusiastic about is the new 4K sets, but honestly, it's going to be a long time before I consider upgrading my current set. I bought my first HDTV back in 2005 when the technology was relatively new, spent $1700 on a Samsung 32" 720p set, and prices plummeted like a rock (the upgrade I bought just 4 years later cost almost half that, is nearly twice the size, and better in almost every way), so there ain't no way I'm going to be an early adopter anymore.
I feel that way about a lot of electronics these days, honestly. Model cycles are refreshing so ridiculously fast that it's just hard for me to justify buying something today when it's going to be getting marked down on clearance in 3 months when the new model rolls out.
Yeah, I'm not a big social network fan, but I admit that G+'s circles is a really nice way to segregate your feed easily. I fooled around with it when it launched before I remembered that I don't really give much of a shit what most other people do all fucking day and stopped coming back.
The Down population in most of Europe, for instance, is dwindling because screening is widespread and upon detection, the vast majority of women elect for abortion. Since Down are rarely able to reproduce and their life expectancy is about 50, in about half a century they will be gone throughout the EU (apart from some fanatical Catholic states but they're seeing the light as well).
Except for the part where Down Syndrome is not a hereditary condition and rather the result of random genetic mutation. That means that you're not going to "breed it out". The fact that there are less Down Syndrome children in Europe is due to changing social mores regarding terminating unhealthy pregnancies there.
Even if abortion were to suddenly be universally accepted overnight, there would still be Down Syndrome children being born because some parents will choose to give birth to their child even if they are going to be disabled. Short of state mandated eugenics programs, there will always be children born with these conditions, unless we come up with some way to cure Down Syndrome in vitro. IANAD obviously but it seems to me that Down Syndrome would be almost impossible to "cure", due to being the result of an extra chromosome due to random genetic mutation. How would they "erase" that chromosome throughout all of the DNA without killing the fetus?
3D is a gimmick, just like it always has been up to this point. I'll invest in 3D when we're seeing true 3-dimensional holography without the need for special glasses, and it doesn't seem like that's going to be anytime soon...
Plus I always get headaches after a couple hours of watching 3D content, so I avoid it in the theater whenever I can. The only film I even care to see in 3D at this point is The Hobbit, and that's not so much because it's 3D in itself but because I've been watching the behind the scenes footage of their technical setup and am interested to see the difference in quality compared to the typical shit-tastic, fake 3D slapped on top of a 2D movie, Hollywood crap.
Honestly, it's my Western Digital drives that have lasted the longest. My dad is still rocking several single digit GB capacity WD drives actively in his legacy tower, and I've yet to have one die on me. Not to say I haven't replaced them as their capacity becomes outdated, but I've had much better luck with them than Maxtor (the worst brand I've ever used), which is now a part of Seagate, which I've also had a couple fail on me (but nowhere near as bad as Maxtor).
I've never used Hitachi or Samsung or any other brand that I know of, so I can't speak as to their quality, but I'm sticking with Western Digital.
Agreed. I've been gradually rotating larger backup drives in and smaller backup drives out over the last 10 years or so. Right now I have about 2 TB's of unique data in my archive which is kept on the host machine if it is regularly accessed or duplicated on another external hard drive. Everything (I care about) has two copies at all times. As my archive grows, I'm going to have to upgrade my archive device's capacity, but that's a given, no matter what you do, if you want it stored locally, you'll have to add capacity somewhere obviously. DVD-R's and BluRay discs aren't a viable option in my opinion, because I've got a ton of old self-burned discs that I recently had to toss because they were rendered useless from laser rot, even though they were in sealed containers in a cool, dry place.
The cloud is, to me, not a backup solution. I see it as a way to globally access my data and I use it as such. No sensitive data of mine will go to the cloud because the likelihood of needing access to it without warning is completely nil, so in my case, it's limited to media that I want constant access to. Now, the cloud definitely has the potential to serve as a backup solution, don't get me wrong, but there's just too much uncertainty involved in the cloud these days, especially as concerns the government nuking sites from orbit without warning, whether justified or not.
However, I agree with some others that are telling you to do some house-cleaning. I recently went through my backups and found 300 GB's worth of crap that I hadn't accessed or used dating back to the early 2000's that I was saving for some stupid reason. Disc Images for ancient games that don't even run well on modern systems (or require a lot of fucking hassle to get running well), music that I haven't listened to in half a decade, old-ass videos that I'd downloaded from the internet back before there was such a thing as youtube, etc. Not to say that everyone's data is as silly as mine was, but it just added up over the years...
companies think they can dictate things that are absurd and yet, they often get away with it.
There was an employer here in town a few years ago that basically called a company meeting and told everyone that they had to take a 10% pay cut or else he was laying them off and hiring in new people to work for lower wages. When the employees obviously went completely apeshit, the owner said "Don't blame me, blame the economy".
So the employees, they all get together in their own time and they work out ways for them to cut costs, give up their vacations and shit, sacrifice some bonuses, raises, and shift differentials, agree to higher production quotas, and manage to come up with a plan that will enable the boss to cut costs without cutting the employee pay so drastically. The owner's response? "No, my decision to cut your pay is final. The economy is weak right now, and I'm going to capitalize on that by cutting wages back. I don't have to do this, but I am going to anyway to increase my bottom line. Don't like it, there's the door. If you think you're going to organize, be aware that I will fire all of you and move this entire operation to Kentucky."
The employees were obviously furious, but what could they do? A few did quit, but most of them just sucked it up because even a 10% pay cut is better than working for minimum wage in retail or collecting a paltry $300 bucks a week in unemployment that won't even cover a mortgage payment. It turns out it didn't matter anyway, because not long after that, the owner fired everyone and moved to Kentucky just like he threatened, obviously having had plans to do that all along.
If I were those new employees in Kentucky, I wouldn't get too comfortable. I'm sure Mexico or China is going to start looking more and more attractive to him every single day...
"they tuk uuur juuubs" idiots
get back to us in 10-20 years from now and tell us if YOU are still employed.
obviously you are well employed and proud of it.
but what is now, won't always be. I was once like you are: young, arrogant and thought I owned the world.
THINGS CHANGE.
but people like you, in your current mind-frame, are NOT HELPING.
I can't tell you how many people that I've heard bitching and complaining about "the nanny state" and "handouts" since Obama got elected that, once they themselves have fallen on hard times, had no problem whatsoever being a huge hypocrite and taking those "handouts" from the "nanny state" themselves. One old 'friend' (more of an acquaintance these days) in particular regularly posts shit about kicking people off of Medicaid saying that it's not his responsibility to take care of "freeloaders". Meanwhile his wife has been milking Social Security for a decade due to a car accident which injured her ankle and is "unable to work".
Hypocrisy is being worn almost like a badge of honor these days. I honestly can't tell if it's deliberate or people are seriously so fucking stupid and short-sighted that they can't imagine being in similar situations.
Or better yet - don't have a Facebook account.
I've got friends and acquaintances in HR and sometimes that, in itself, is damning. The unofficial policy is "Either they have a Facebook account and are hiding it, or they don't have one and have anti-social tendencies and thus would not be a good 'fit' for our company. Either way they are a potential liability." Just because they are outright asking for it now doesn't mean that HR hasn't been using Facebook to check up on applicants before, that's nothing new, it's just off the record, and discrimination based on those Facebook accounts is nothing new, either. Facebook has been a factor for many years.
Now, if I was in an interview and was asked for my social media account password (or even access to it), I would thank the interviewer for their time and take my leave, but I understand not everyone has that luxury these days. Still, how would one even prove something like that? Unless the interview is recorded (by you), or you have corroborative evidence of some other form, it's going to be your word against theirs...and as everyone knows, HR is there to protect the company, not the employees.
Plenty of fertile ground for lawsuits.
If you can find a lawyer willing to take the case, of course. From my own experiences dealing with discrimination as an employee of a major corporation, I couldn't find any lawyers in my area willing to take the case because it would have been ridiculously expensive to bring to trial, not because my case didn't necessarily have merit (although I admit it would have been a difficult case, as much of the discrimination was in the form of verbal comments and bias in terms of scheduling and double-standards, still, there were numerous witnesses and others that were discriminated against to varying degrees).
Not to say that there aren't frivolous discrimination lawsuits, but the mere size and resources of the defendant has a definite chilling effect on those cases being brought.
Is there some law that prevents people from possessing oil?
Joe Wall Street can rent himself some legal storage to keep his oil in while he's trying to sell it just the same as anyone else. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for someone bidding up the price of tens of thousands of barrels of oil knowing full well that he would never actually be able to take possession of it?
If I go down to Home Depot and buy all of the lumber they have in stock, Home Depot isn't going to let me leave it on their shelves while I find other people to sell it to at a profit. They're going to tell me to get my shit out of their fucking store so they can put more unsold lumber out. If I didn't, they'd dump it out back and start charging me storage, as well they should.
I'm not proposing that we limit who can speculate. I'm proposing that we require speculators to take possession of the product they're trading. Why can't they hire someone else to take possession on their behalf? I don't much care what Joe Wall Street does with his oil as long as it is environmentally responsible.
The industry itself doesn't even have a clear-cut idea as to what is property and what isn't as concerns digital media.
Take the RIAA, for instance, who in the course of a week or so, argued that an MP3 was merely being 'licensed' in order to prevent the sale of 'used' MP3's in their suit against Redigi, and then in another case, argued that MP3's were actually being 'sold' to avoid being liable for the much higher percentage of royalties due the artist for licensing their music as opposed to selling it.
Obviously a digital file cannot be both owned for purposes of liability and licensed for purposes of use, so the courts need to get on top of this ASAP.
The Executive branch can Vito the Law from the Legislative.
The last time I was Vito'd I spent a week in the hospital. I knew I should have never borrowed that money...
...and then, when it all falls apart and they end up on the hook for millions, they declare bankruptcy and socialize the losses while privatizing the profits.
America! Fuck Yeah!!
Ok, now implement this in China. If you do it in the US alone it will have exactly zero effect.
China has just as much interest in cheaper gasoline as the U.S. does. I'm sure China would be among the first to cheer if Wall Street wasn't able to pump the cost of a barrel of oil up months before it's even sucked out of the earth.
If you need to buy oil at all it should come with the requirement that you're actually prepared to take possession of it at some point.
I have no problem with speculation if refineries are the ones doing the speculation because they actually have a vested interest in not inflating the cost of a barrel of oil into the stratosphere. The paper pushers that have absolutely no intention whatsoever of taking possession of the oil they're trading back and forth should not be able to resell the oil until it's in their possession in the first place. Joe Wall Street isn't going to bid on tens of thousands of barrels of oil if there's a possibility he's going to be called down to the dock to collect it when the tanker comes to port.
A faithful adaptation of Dune would be amazing, although I admit I've only read the first few Dune novels, so I don't know how well the later novels would translate.
I really wish HBO would adapt either Stephen King's The Stand or The Gunslinger series to an ongoing series. Both could do well in my opinion. I know that The Gunslinger was in the works as a series of films, but that has been in an out of production so many times I have no ckue as to it's current status.
Really? How fucking annoying...
The sound of a dial-up modem making a connection is as much a part of my childhood as hair metal...
Actually, now that I think about it, Star Trek almost suffered the same fate. They tried to cancel that show after every season, it wasn't the moneymaker that The Powers That Be wanted, and look at the franchise today. Four subsequent TV series, Eleven Feature Films (with a twelfth on the way), countless merchandise...it's a billion dollar franchise today.
I truly believe if they would have stuck with the show it would have been just as successful, but everything's instant gratification these days. If a show doesn't capture enormous ratings and millions of dollars in ad revenue from the start, it's doomed. They gave Firefly, what, 3 whole months? Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season was a flaming pile of shit and that show lasted 7 fucking years and spawned four feature films...I wonder how their early ratings compared to Firefly's?
Maybe, just maybe, Firefly would've done better if it wasn't aired out of order and shuffled between time slots...
Oh, and considering the sales of the DVDs (both Serenity and the series) it's pretty obvious it was financially viable, it was just mismanaged.
Exactly. Firefly, as a franchise, could have competed with Star Trek and Star Wars in my opinion, but we'll never know, because they sabotaged it from the get-go. People that have watched the show in the order it was supposed to be seen, and not the cluster-fuck that they aired, generally have much more positive reactions to the show in my experiences.