This is not true; there is no field more well studied than military psychology, due to its importance to the readiness status of the troops. While the process may appear to be pointless, it is not. And the evidence is "in". It's not speculative.
If you're a contractor working as labor, you are most likely non-exempt. If you're an engineer or IT guy, you're probably exempt. If you're a young engineer or IT guy, you are probably exempt, but might be misqualified. Employers misqualify young engineers as exempt all the time. Unfortunately.
The situation is quite complicated. For example, I am exempt, but until last year I was paid O/T regardless. My last promotion ended all possibility of paid O/T for me, but it is routinely expected that I work O/T. That's special, but the rules aren't predictable in a fashion you might think (except for the labor law violations, but let's disregard those).
Here's the deal. You can almost always work overtime on a DoD contract. The consequences depend greatly on the contract time and the exempt status of the employee. The general scattergram of all this is that yes, an employee CAN work uncompensated O/T for the government, but the various accounting mechanisms will not reward them (or for that matter, the company) for it if they do.
You can also work for the government for free. But the legal circumstances of this would take about a week of talk to describe. The short version is that if you work for free for work you said you were working for pay, it better be out of company profit or better not be paid to the employee at all. This is a complicated discussion and won't get into it.
Now I work in engineering; someone in a different field may have a different experience. But over here where I sit, rolling their eyes and dismissing the probability of working O/T "because there is no point and no pay" is a good indicator that the portion of the otherwise scarce raise budget has some chance of going to someone else.
Which is not to say that I'm at all interested in giving big raises to ineffective people who think plotting a lot of O/T means that I will think they are bright.
Calling an employee "salaried" doesn't make him or her exempt.
It also doesn't make him or her non-exempt, so it is flat out wrong to declare "Working more than 40 is overtime. Even if you're "salaried"." Never mind that indeed most salaried positions *are* exempt. You're attempting to distract me from this untrue statement. It's not going to work. Increasingly shrill messages won't make a wrong statement true.
Please do not try to recover from this. These were the exact words: "Working more than 40 is overtime. Even if you're "salaried"." These words were, in fact, FALSE. Your other words "OP said that his contract specified 40 hours per week" are also not true words. OP said no such thing. WTF.
OP actually knows a lot more about the field (and the FAR) than you do. You can find it in the words "most are fixed at the rates and the number of hours, it does them no good to have you work more than your scheduled rate." OP is aware of something here that you were not. He's aware of mandatory rate reductions associated with working an exempt/salaried employee overtime. So while you, Mr. AC, are pretending to know something about labor law, OP actually knows something.
As to the finer details of whether or not a specific firm has improperly qualified a salary employee as "exempt," and said implications, this is not on subject, I am not interested in discussing this with you.
You, Mr. AC, should not be commenting on this business. It's not true that a salaried employee has to be paid over time. I'm in management at a Defense company, and I am highly acquainted with the Law.
Amazon is in the position of being able to loss-lead their tablet. As the HP tablet experience shows, price it low enough and even a bricklet will sell.
Who's confusing productivity with overtime? Not I. The willingness to work overtime represents work ethic.
Working consistent flat 40's is definitely not normal in any government contracting position. Like I said, I've been in the business 20 years. I should know.
There are only certain personality types who are willing to go to work in the "slow lane". And without question, government positions are the slow lane: lower pay, lower hours, much slower promotions that are based not on merit, but time in service, and little chance of layoff. This attracts a certain personality type.
What I am saying is true. It's in the very nature of the market.
I've been in the business 20 years. You're not going to like this.
Because of the pay general cultural issues associated with government positions, it attracts a certain caliber of employee.
On a whole, directly employed government employees: these are most certainly not your lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.
As a fed contractor, I never put in more than 40 hours a week.
Alas, this is more about you than it is about anything else. Which is, to say, and to wit: you were not and are not one of those apex predators I was referring to above.
Shrug. What the employee is PAID when working for the government isn't interesting. How much they COST to be employed by the government is the interesting figure. I bet it's a lot.
It ranges from 1.5X for company employees who work at the government site, to 2.5X for employees who work at the company site. Each company is different, but that range is pretty accurate. The Sloan page isn't much wrong, either.
The purpose of the quip wasn't what you think it was.
For example, there exist market situations in which a corporation cannot raise the price of a good, for a variety of dynamic reasons. Excessive taxation can price a product out of a market. The example you site for minimum wage is just another example of the problem, from a different direction.
The actual point is that there is no tax that doesn't have the property of somehow getting passed on in various ways. Propose a federal property tax; the consequence will be increased rents, for landlords paying the tax, and increased wage demand, for owners paying the tax. At all points of collection, there is a consequence. To defend one specific one without considering this just exposes partisan thinking.
Of course most people don't actually think that "they" are partisan. It's everyone else who's lost their objectivity.
Understood! Overhead cable trays and good patch panels are so much better all the way around.
Cold should fall from the ceiling in the cold aisle, and it should be partitioned off from the room (cold aisle containment). Heat should be evacuated from the ceiling in the hot room/aisle.
At this point the raised floor serves no purpose, and has some liability. For example, can the tiles of a raised floor safely carry the weight of next generation ultra dense (4U, 60 drive) storage trays? These approach 2,500 pounds per rack!
Alternatively, the standard deduction is 50% of the average annual salary, with a flat tax rate of 35% after that. While this may seem unfair to workers living in Manhattan, we already know that regions will do their own corrections to attract workers to those regions. Consider Manhattan salaries.
There might be some issue transitioning to such a system. For example, homeowners with big mortgages relying on the deduction could be teetered into bankruptcy. You'd have to do something to make that not happen.
Personally I prefer the "Fair Tax". It's the best thought out alternative tax system, and has some major advantages for international trade.
If you read the details of what Buffet said, and the analysis, this situation is worse than it would first appear. There are plenty of short term trades that by fiat of law are permitted the "long term" investment rate. This includes hedge funds, for example.
Surprisingly, investments in real estate rise at a rate very close to the value of inflation once you factor in things like lowering interest rates, interest rate subsidies, and the baseline housing values. This trend goes back to the last time interest rates were higher than 18% (contrasted with current 4% interest rates).
Somewhat true. However, not entirely true. You forget the pressure of a growing population versus desirable land. So some of the appreciation is from the demand-supply equation. The effect is real, particularly in coastal areas, which tend to have a 2% advantage on inflation, or so.
The SSD market is very fledgling. However, you can see it reaching maturity, for example, by evidence of the PAMII cards sold as an add on with all NetApp FAS systems.
Disregarding this, there are systems out there that will auto-migrate data from tier to tier, on a block (subfile) basis. This brings in the possibility of flash. For example, you might write all data to flash, and then migrate down to lower tiers as the data becomes less interesting. Stuff read from the lower tiers recently gets migrated up. The classic example of this is Compellent, who popularized this (with 15K and SATA drives, not flash) on their arrays. Lots of other folks are getting into this business, however. EMC with FAST, comes to mind, and more recently, Datacore, with their Autotiering feature.
NetApp doesn't believe in it. Their PAMII cards are cache-only SSD. All writes go to spinning media first, and only land up on the cache on read. Interesting decision, that. Regardless, they have benchmarks showing that stereotypical enterprise read workloads work as well with SATA and PAMII's as they do with 15K drives. Pretty interesting.
Anyway, this all applies to your comment, as the obvious thing to try to do right now is have your cake and eat it, too.
Unfortunately, costs are really holding things back right now. All the tier 1 storage companies list their SSD's for $9,000 each. Each, mind you. Egads.
I'm currently building a prototype DataCore SAN, BTW. Two FusionIO cards in each of two (redundant) boxes. Autotier (on write and read) straight to the fusion IO, flush from there to spinning media. Benchmark data from the manufacturer suggest I'll get in the 200,000 IOPS range with that. This wuold require 500 15K drives otherwise. That's 2 full racks of em! That's to run virtual machines with. Should be fun.
Hard to say what purpose they put that many drives to, but there are plenty of workloads where the qty of drives is purchased to handle the IOPS. This is called "short stroking". I.e., imagine you needed 60 73GB 15K drives to reach your IOPS. You could very well wish to story only 1TB or less, but regardless you still need the 60 drives to reach 60 * 400 = 24000 IOPS.
This disregards all sorts of IO coelescence and cacheing features of some arrays (and file systems), but put aside that remark for the moment, and you can see a major problem with the way higher end storage systems are provisioned, and just why it is that that whole market will flip practically INSTANTLY, as soon as the cost point gets sane, and the drives can be trusted. Neither is quite true at the moment. But soon, very soon...
They are not coming soon. The power required for such drives goes up astronomically for increased rotational velocity. I doubt very much we'll see even a 20K hard drive. Major data centers dont have power budgets for that shit.
As an aside, no spinning magnetic media is not yet dead, and will live a long while. In the bulk storage sector. For IOPS, while it may not yet be dead, it is certainly one foot in the grave. I wouldn't be surprised to see the 10K drive go bye-bye, too. Give the hybrid market a bit of time to mature, and it's a goner. But that's mere speculation.
The death of the 15K market is not speculation at all. Get roadmaps briefings from the major drive manufacturers and find out the truth yourself.
If you think about it, the outcome of this test is 100% in favor of the SSD.
Think about it:
The tester was willing to test only 3 SSD's versus *60* 15K drives. So the tester thought that 20 times fewer drives was a fair test for the comparison. What is the tester actually saying here? I think I have a feeling I know.:-)
Anyway, 15K drives are not long for the market. Soon, all that will be left are economy class, 10K, and SSD's.
Only a little more maturity, and the enterprise flood gates will open. When that happens, the hapless victim will be the short stroked IOPS environment, where total IOPS was always the requirement, and that requirement was for more IOPS than capacity. I.e., if a 15K drive offers 400 IOPS, and you need 400,000 sustained, but don't have to store very much at all, your only current choices are buying a lot of 15K drives. Or a bazillion less SSD's.
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This is not true; there is no field more well studied than military psychology, due to its importance to the readiness status of the troops. While the process may appear to be pointless, it is not. And the evidence is "in". It's not speculative.
If you're a contractor working as labor, you are most likely non-exempt. If you're an engineer or IT guy, you're probably exempt. If you're a young engineer or IT guy, you are probably exempt, but might be misqualified. Employers misqualify young engineers as exempt all the time. Unfortunately.
The situation is quite complicated. For example, I am exempt, but until last year I was paid O/T regardless. My last promotion ended all possibility of paid O/T for me, but it is routinely expected that I work O/T. That's special, but the rules aren't predictable in a fashion you might think (except for the labor law violations, but let's disregard those).
Here's the deal. You can almost always work overtime on a DoD contract. The consequences depend greatly on the contract time and the exempt status of the employee. The general scattergram of all this is that yes, an employee CAN work uncompensated O/T for the government, but the various accounting mechanisms will not reward them (or for that matter, the company) for it if they do.
You can also work for the government for free. But the legal circumstances of this would take about a week of talk to describe. The short version is that if you work for free for work you said you were working for pay, it better be out of company profit or better not be paid to the employee at all. This is a complicated discussion and won't get into it.
Now I work in engineering; someone in a different field may have a different experience. But over here where I sit, rolling their eyes and dismissing the probability of working O/T "because there is no point and no pay" is a good indicator that the portion of the otherwise scarce raise budget has some chance of going to someone else.
Which is not to say that I'm at all interested in giving big raises to ineffective people who think plotting a lot of O/T means that I will think they are bright.
C//
Calling an employee "salaried" doesn't make him or her exempt.
It also doesn't make him or her non-exempt, so it is flat out wrong to declare "Working more than 40 is overtime. Even if you're "salaried"." Never mind that indeed most salaried positions *are* exempt. You're attempting to distract me from this untrue statement. It's not going to work. Increasingly shrill messages won't make a wrong statement true.
C//
Please do not try to recover from this. These were the exact words: "Working more than 40 is overtime. Even if you're "salaried"." These words were, in fact, FALSE. Your other words "OP said that his contract specified 40 hours per week" are also not true words. OP said no such thing. WTF.
OP actually knows a lot more about the field (and the FAR) than you do. You can find it in the words "most are fixed at the rates and the number of hours, it does them no good to have you work more than your scheduled rate." OP is aware of something here that you were not. He's aware of mandatory rate reductions associated with working an exempt/salaried employee overtime. So while you, Mr. AC, are pretending to know something about labor law, OP actually knows something.
As to the finer details of whether or not a specific firm has improperly qualified a salary employee as "exempt," and said implications, this is not on subject, I am not interested in discussing this with you.
You, Mr. AC, should not be commenting on this business. It's not true that a salaried employee has to be paid over time. I'm in management at a Defense company, and I am highly acquainted with the Law.
Amazon is in the position of being able to loss-lead their tablet. As the HP tablet experience shows, price it low enough and even a bricklet will sell.
Should they be allowed to sue if the coffee was served so hot it caused the victim to get skin grafts on her vagina?
Should the lawsuit be awarded by the jury if it turns out internal memos at the company indeed did indicate that the serving temperature was unsafe?
Who's confusing productivity with overtime? Not I. The willingness to work overtime represents work ethic.
Working consistent flat 40's is definitely not normal in any government contracting position. Like I said, I've been in the business 20 years. I should know.
There are only certain personality types who are willing to go to work in the "slow lane". And without question, government positions are the slow lane: lower pay, lower hours, much slower promotions that are based not on merit, but time in service, and little chance of layoff. This attracts a certain personality type.
What I am saying is true. It's in the very nature of the market.
I've been in the business 20 years. You're not going to like this.
Because of the pay general cultural issues associated with government positions, it attracts a certain caliber of employee.
On a whole, directly employed government employees: these are most certainly not your lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.
As a fed contractor, I never put in more than 40 hours a week.
Alas, this is more about you than it is about anything else. Which is, to say, and to wit: you were not and are not one of those apex predators I was referring to above.
Sorry about that.
C//
I'm wiling to hear your evidence. What is the multiplier rate to calculate the cost to employ of a government employee, typically?
C//
The contractor gets paid twice as much...
Shrug. What the employee is PAID when working for the government isn't interesting. How much they COST to be employed by the government is the interesting figure. I bet it's a lot.
C//
It ranges from 1.5X for company employees who work at the government site, to 2.5X for employees who work at the company site. Each company is different, but that range is pretty accurate. The Sloan page isn't much wrong, either.
Read the article again and you'll see that they compared the BILLING RATE for contractors.
The following things are, ball park, the truth, of many federal defense contractors:
1. A company will often bill out employees at 1.45X their salary when they are ON SITE at the government facility.
2. A company will often bill out employees at 2.5X their salary when they work at the contractor facility.
These numbers are pretty low. Companies like Oracle and what not often have "burdened rates" in the 3-4X range.
C//
The purpose of the quip wasn't what you think it was.
For example, there exist market situations in which a corporation cannot raise the price of a good, for a variety of dynamic reasons. Excessive taxation can price a product out of a market. The example you site for minimum wage is just another example of the problem, from a different direction.
The actual point is that there is no tax that doesn't have the property of somehow getting passed on in various ways. Propose a federal property tax; the consequence will be increased rents, for landlords paying the tax, and increased wage demand, for owners paying the tax. At all points of collection, there is a consequence. To defend one specific one without considering this just exposes partisan thinking.
Of course most people don't actually think that "they" are partisan. It's everyone else who's lost their objectivity.
C//
Understood! Overhead cable trays and good patch panels are so much better all the way around.
Cold should fall from the ceiling in the cold aisle, and it should be partitioned off from the room (cold aisle containment). Heat should be evacuated from the ceiling in the hot room/aisle.
At this point the raised floor serves no purpose, and has some liability. For example, can the tiles of a raised floor safely carry the weight of next generation ultra dense (4U, 60 drive) storage trays? These approach 2,500 pounds per rack!
Raised floors: "just say no".
Oh. I already said that. :-P
Alternatively, the standard deduction is 50% of the average annual salary, with a flat tax rate of 35% after that. While this may seem unfair to workers living in Manhattan, we already know that regions will do their own corrections to attract workers to those regions. Consider Manhattan salaries.
There might be some issue transitioning to such a system. For example, homeowners with big mortgages relying on the deduction could be teetered into bankruptcy. You'd have to do something to make that not happen.
Personally I prefer the "Fair Tax". It's the best thought out alternative tax system, and has some major advantages for international trade.
C//
If you read the details of what Buffet said, and the analysis, this situation is worse than it would first appear. There are plenty of short term trades that by fiat of law are permitted the "long term" investment rate. This includes hedge funds, for example.
C//
The world is a different place, now. Capital flight is so much easier, now.
Surprisingly, investments in real estate rise at a rate very close to the value of inflation once you factor in things like lowering interest rates, interest rate subsidies, and the baseline housing values. This trend goes back to the last time interest rates were higher than 18% (contrasted with current 4% interest rates).
Somewhat true. However, not entirely true. You forget the pressure of a growing population versus desirable land. So some of the appreciation is from the demand-supply equation. The effect is real, particularly in coastal areas, which tend to have a 2% advantage on inflation, or so.
C//
First, companies don't pay taxes. Their customers do. To put it simpler, when you tax a company, they raise prices to pay that tax.
Second, employees don't pay taxes. Their employers do. To put it simpler, when you tax an employee, they raise their required salary to pay that tax.
This is a fun game.
C//
Raised floors are terribad. Just say no.
The SSD market is very fledgling. However, you can see it reaching maturity, for example, by evidence of the PAMII cards sold as an add on with all NetApp FAS systems.
Disregarding this, there are systems out there that will auto-migrate data from tier to tier, on a block (subfile) basis. This brings in the possibility of flash. For example, you might write all data to flash, and then migrate down to lower tiers as the data becomes less interesting. Stuff read from the lower tiers recently gets migrated up. The classic example of this is Compellent, who popularized this (with 15K and SATA drives, not flash) on their arrays. Lots of other folks are getting into this business, however. EMC with FAST, comes to mind, and more recently, Datacore, with their Autotiering feature.
NetApp doesn't believe in it. Their PAMII cards are cache-only SSD. All writes go to spinning media first, and only land up on the cache on read. Interesting decision, that. Regardless, they have benchmarks showing that stereotypical enterprise read workloads work as well with SATA and PAMII's as they do with 15K drives. Pretty interesting.
Anyway, this all applies to your comment, as the obvious thing to try to do right now is have your cake and eat it, too.
Unfortunately, costs are really holding things back right now. All the tier 1 storage companies list their SSD's for $9,000 each. Each, mind you. Egads.
I'm currently building a prototype DataCore SAN, BTW. Two FusionIO cards in each of two (redundant) boxes. Autotier (on write and read) straight to the fusion IO, flush from there to spinning media. Benchmark data from the manufacturer suggest I'll get in the 200,000 IOPS range with that. This wuold require 500 15K drives otherwise. That's 2 full racks of em! That's to run virtual machines with. Should be fun.
C//
Hard to say what purpose they put that many drives to, but there are plenty of workloads where the qty of drives is purchased to handle the IOPS. This is called "short stroking". I.e., imagine you needed 60 73GB 15K drives to reach your IOPS. You could very well wish to story only 1TB or less, but regardless you still need the 60 drives to reach 60 * 400 = 24000 IOPS.
This disregards all sorts of IO coelescence and cacheing features of some arrays (and file systems), but put aside that remark for the moment, and you can see a major problem with the way higher end storage systems are provisioned, and just why it is that that whole market will flip practically INSTANTLY, as soon as the cost point gets sane, and the drives can be trusted. Neither is quite true at the moment. But soon, very soon...
C//
They are not coming soon. The power required for such drives goes up astronomically for increased rotational velocity. I doubt very much we'll see even a 20K hard drive. Major data centers dont have power budgets for that shit.
As an aside, no spinning magnetic media is not yet dead, and will live a long while. In the bulk storage sector. For IOPS, while it may not yet be dead, it is certainly one foot in the grave. I wouldn't be surprised to see the 10K drive go bye-bye, too. Give the hybrid market a bit of time to mature, and it's a goner. But that's mere speculation.
The death of the 15K market is not speculation at all. Get roadmaps briefings from the major drive manufacturers and find out the truth yourself.
C//
If you think about it, the outcome of this test is 100% in favor of the SSD.
Think about it:
The tester was willing to test only 3 SSD's versus *60* 15K drives. So the tester thought that 20 times fewer drives was a fair test for the comparison. What is the tester actually saying here? I think I have a feeling I know. :-)
Anyway, 15K drives are not long for the market. Soon, all that will be left are economy class, 10K, and SSD's.
Only a little more maturity, and the enterprise flood gates will open. When that happens, the hapless victim will be the short stroked IOPS environment, where total IOPS was always the requirement, and that requirement was for more IOPS than capacity. I.e., if a 15K drive offers 400 IOPS, and you need 400,000 sustained, but don't have to store very much at all, your only current choices are buying a lot of 15K drives. Or a bazillion less SSD's.
The switchover point is only a heartbeat away.
Bye 15K drive. I'll miss you.
C//