Yeah I've had the same experience. Former AT&T customer here who was basically driven to leave them and right into the waiting arms of T-Mobile. Customer service has been excellent so far and the signal is just as good as AT&T if not better. And it's far cheaper. AT&T can go pound sand. I've never going back to those clowns.
I think it's the Richard Branson model - find some industry with crappy service and make it better. He started out in the record industry and moved to the airline industry. He made a killing in both simply by providing superior customer service.
I'm not sure if this is going to work for T-Mobile in the TV business but if they come out with something I'll give it a try, based solely on the great service I have been getting from them so far.
As near as I can tell the bar in this industry is set so low...well, let's just say that T-Mobile should easily exceed whatever laughably passes for customer service in the Cable industry. Cable providers are routinely ranked at the very bottom - right down there with airlines and government. Yeah, it's that bad.
All they really have to do is:
1) NOT treat their customers like shit 2) Be price competitive with other streaming services 3) And....don't treat your customers like shit
The cables companies don't seem to be able to do any of these things...especially #1 & #3. For T-Mobile this should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
First off, start with having them fill out a skills inventory. Just put together a spreadsheet with every IT skill you can think of with a 1-5 rating and have them fill it out. And ask them to give an honest assessment. That is the first test - to see if they are honest. If they lie and tell you they are an expert at this or that it won't take long to find out. If they fail this first basic test then you give them the shittiest most mundane job you can think of and give up and wait until they retire.
If they pass the test then on we go...
Ask them to take the same skills survey again but this time instead of skill substitute area of interest. The objective is to found out what they are good at and what they like. It doesn't matter if they rate themselves a 1 out of 5. As long as they have an interest in it you have something to work with. Aptitude is something you can deal with later on.
It sounds like these two have had shitty management along the way. Your job is to convince them that you are not just another shitty manager and that you actually care about their careers. This will not be easy given how long they have been around but you've got to try. If you don't get their buy in the whole exercise will be pointless.
Next, get a training plan put together. Your bosses seem committed so they should not balk at spending money to get them trained. Work with the two employees as you put the plan together so that they have some skin in the game. Set goals and measure progress along the way. If they are in a bonus plan they tie at least part of the bonus to the goals you set collectively. Money talks.
From your standpoint you have nothing to lose. If all goes to plan you will have two newly productive, motivated employees. If it does not at least you can tell your bosses that you tried. There is only so much you can do. Your job is to provide the tools. Their job is to learn how to use them.
No kidding? Well I guess we're about to see if he can play. Maybe he will surprise everyone and go all Kurt Warner on us and end up back in the NFL via the arena league. That's about as likely as ME getting an NFL contract but you never know.
He's probably so rusty now that his first throw goes into row 10 in the stands but hey, at least he gets to play. Considering that arena gets about zero TV coverage I doubt that soapbox will suffice. But the networks that support his cause will probably show a few clips to keep his name in the news. Fun times.
1) Nobody knows what a catch is anymore. It seems like every single catch or non-catch is analyzed to death. Catching the football is a fundamental part of the game. Someone needs to figure out what constitutes a catch and be done with it.
2) Nobody seems to know what a fair tackle is. In the Steelers-Bengals game on Monday George Iloka gets a one game suspension for flattening Antonio Brown in the end zone. It was a hard hit but he was trying to prevent a touchdown. Rob Gronkowski goes all WWE on a guy with a flying elbow drop to the back of the head when the play was already over and the player was on the ground. Both of them get a one game suspension. In one case it's a football play, in the other case it's a bonehead intent to injure play. It seems to me that Gronk should have got a 2 game suspension and Iloka maybe a fine, it anything. Again, tackling is a fundamental part of the game. Somebody needs to figure out what is fair and what is not.
3) Will someone just go ahead and sign Colin Kapernick? You might not agree with his politics or the whole kneeling thing but he's probably as good as at least half the starting quarterbacks playing right now. The longer this blackballing of Kapernick drags out the worse it looks for the NFL. Sign him. If he can't play then cut him but enough of the blackballing.
Haha...easy bro...I was being glib. Back in the day I used Yahoo Groups and found them to be quite useful. But I recall moving on from it some time ago. Evidently some people stuck around and find it useful for them still. Good for them and thanks for the info ** thumbs up **.
I agree with your comment about Google Groups. At one time I followed rec.Martial-arts on Usenet. I was actively practicing martial arts at the time and found it a fountain of knowledge for all different styles - some of which I had never even heard of before. But then it migrated over to Google Groups and just went to shit. Last time I looked it was full of spam and off topic nonsense. Such a shame.
I have a degree and I have worked in IT for many years, both as a developer and someone that hires developers. As near as I can tell, a degree doesn't make one bit of difference. I have worked with smart people that had degrees and smart people that didn't. I have worked with people with advanced degrees that were as dumb as the day is long.
I think it is a mistake to assume that people that did not attend college or finish college are less intelligent than people who did. One of the big problems is identifying talent. The gatekeepers - HR - are largely unskilled in my experience and often unable to identify talent. Simply excluding people without degrees dumbs it down. It makes their job easier. Relying on software that scans resumes for key words just compounds the problem. This leads to people gaming the system and tailoring resumes to trick the software into thinking they are the better candidate. People that can't or won't play the game are left on the sidelines.
Higher education, particularly in some of the more prestigious schools, is little more than a giant country club. Some people are able to milk these sorts of relationships for their entire career. As the old saying goes, it's not what you know it's who you know. This holds true mainly in executive positions and less so in individual contributor positions. But there is a discrimination of sorts and a stigma attached to those without degrees.
"For far less than a house these days, one can guy 3 acres for $60,000 and the mobile home for $30,000." - That's pretty cheap. Where I live 3 acres of land would cost a lot more than that. What about water supply? Drilling a well can get mighty expensive. Depending on how far you are from electric power lines, hooking that up can cost thousands.
No garage and no covered porch are other downsides.
I have seen so called "luxury" modular homes and they all looked pretty low rent to me. Lots of laminate, lots of carpet, low end fixtures and lighting, low end appliances, etc. I'm not putting down people that live in them it's just that for what you get they seem overpriced to me. And the resale on those things is horrible.
absolutely nobody. Correction...anyone that has been paying attention to Facebook and their wanton disregard for the data security of their users. Several years ago I recall reading several articles about how FB has changed their application to set certain items enabled where they should be disabled. Data security items. And they make it intentionally difficult for the average user to find those settings and to change them easily. So predictably, the settings go unchanged for many people.
They also make it really difficult to disable an account. Every picture you post has to be selected individually and deleted. The delete takes about 3 clicks if I recall. Why is there no "select all" button? You know, like every other application on earth has. Obviously they want to make it a royal pain to get out of. The modern day roach motel. I would be willing to bet that there are tons of zombie accounts just sitting out there that have never been properly closed. Meaning all of those photos and check-ins and friend links and other metadata are still there for FB to mine or sell or do whatever they want with it.
A few weeks ago I read an interview with Sean Parker (one of the early founders at FB) basically confirming that, yes, FB is evil. They have managed to create the internet equivalent of the crack pipe. By playing upon the basest of human emotions (envy, jealousy, greed) they have spawned an entire generation of kids completely addicted to the hamster wheel of Likes, Notifications and Check-ins. It's really a sad state of affairs.
I'm sure that somehow, somewhere, I have been linked to in a FB photo or post but any info they have on me did not come a result of me signing up. The more I read things like this the happier I am with that decision.
Big Pharma is very good at scaring people into thinking they are sick. And the magical cure always seems to be some sort of pill. What big pharma is even better at is coming up with so called "maintenance drugs" that never actually cure anything. Lipitor is a prime example of this. You can take it for 10 years and it will help keep your cholesterol down but the moment you go off it your counts go right back where they were when you started. In other words, you are stuck taking this drug for life. Blood pressure medications work the same way.
Some people might read this article and come to the conclusion that people are less healthy. In fact, all that has happened is that the medical industry (with some nudging I'm sure from big pharma) has lowered the bar. All of a sudden they have a new pool of patients to pitch their blood medication drugs to.
The cold hard reality is that for many people these drugs are completely unnecessary. Blood pressure and cholesterol can be controlled by diet and exercise. But it seems that for many doctors the first course of action is to prescribe pills instead. The medical industry, just like nearly every other industry, has been corrupted by money.
If being "rude" to someone is considered bullying then where does the passive-aggressive BS fall? Because I have worked with loads of people that might seem as nice as can be but that PA behavior is absolutely toxic. It is sneaky, underhanded, disingenuous and clearly designed to hurt and embarrass people. Yet it is tolerated, and sometimes even encouraged and rewarded, because on the surface it seems polite.
Sometimes I long for the days when you could just tell someone to fuck off. None of this "ohhh thank you Ed for your valuable contribution. We will certainly take that under advisement and devote to it all the attention it deserves.". In plain english, that's a stupid idea and I'm not going to spend another moment thinking about it. Now the first response might seem "nicer" but in fact it is phony and dishonest.
But you can't tell people to fuck off anymore or some snowflake is going to burst into tears and go running to HR. And then take two weeks off for "emotional distress". And then I get sent to "counseling" for an attitude adjustment. And everyone has to treat snowflake with kid gloves or we might just have a relapse. And all the other snowflakes in the office with circle the wagons and comfort the wounded snowflake with group hugs and empty words of encouragement.
First of all, it isn't "Arizona's" west valley. It is the west valley of Phoenix, a city in the state of Arizona.
Secondly, in Tonopah there are massive aquifers (underground rivers essentially) and the water is very close to the surface. Makes it easier and cheaper to drill wells.
"Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question" - I think he meant habitable. In any case, lots of people are moving there. Minnesota in January - that's inhabitable.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines." - That may be true now but Arizona is perfectly set up for solar and wind. The kind of city that Gates envisions is achievable.
Phoenix is expanding in basically two directions. Due west, towards Los Angeles. And north west towards Las Vegas. The east valley (Scottsdale, Chandler, Tempe) are basically built out. There is very little land left and what is left is very expensive. To the south, South Mountain effectively cuts off everything south of it from Phoenix making travel into Phoenix difficult. To the north you have the densely packed suburb of Anthem. Beyond that the only freeway (the I-17) goes down to two lanes. And there are Indian reservations hemming in the east valley. In fact, many of the big office towers in Scottsdale are built on land leased from Indian tribes. And they are never selling that land.
People in Scottsdale have traditionally looked down their noses at the west valley of Phoenix. But those are the only large parcels of land left. Jerry Colangelo, who used to own the Phoenix Suns basketball team, made a shit-load of money developing land in the west valley. As did a guy named John F. Long, whose family donated the land that the Arizona Cardinals stadium sits on today. They were buying up land at $5-10 dollars an acre. Today an acre of raw land - no house, no utilities, no water - will set you back about $100,000.
Instead of handing over the encryption keys to the government why not just employ some simple investigation instead? If they need to know what calls were made from the phone find out which carrier was used and get that info from them. If they want to see what emails were sent that can be found out too.
The FBI and the cops don't want to do this because it means having to get one of those pesky warrants. And that requires just cause, etc. No, they would rather just invade our privacy and trample on our 4th amendment rights along the way.
"People want to secure their houses, but they still need to get in and out. Same issue here." - No it's not. I want to secure my house so that I can get in but others can't. Others in this case being the government. There are countless cases where abuses of power have taken place by corrupt law enforcement or overly ambitious attorneys. Add to that the fact that the government has basically unlimited funds to go after someone they want to make an example of.
The dog ate my homework. Let's just blame everything on "the Russians". Well, that narrows it down to a few hundred million people. Let's not bother to actually try and find out which "Russian" may have perpetrated this act. No let's just leave it at that and call it a day. Great way to deflect attention from the fact that this massive breech occurred ON YOUR WATCH.
Well, at least you managed to get all those people working from home back into the office. Because if they are working from home they can't possibly keep an eye on those pesky "Russians". Except that..oh...it happened anyway. So I guess that one kinda backfired. At least you can point to your tremendous success in every portfolio you touched during your tenure as CEO...crickets....
She did "sincerely apologize" so I guess that counts for something. Except she did it after making away with hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and stock so it rings exceedingly hollow to me. And laying off thousands of workers. And driving a stake through the heart of a once proud internet pioneer. But hey, Marissa took care of Marissa and that's all that really matters. Right?
Cunt. Karma is going to have a field day when it catches up to you.
"We don't hire smokers" - Now there's a slippery slope. That same logic could easily lead to let's not hire drinkers because alcohol causes so many health issues. And it does. In fact, alcohol causes far more negative effects on society than tobacco.
For the record, I'm not a smoker. I can't stand the smell of it. But I'm equally offended by bad breath and body odor. Should we stop hiring those people too? Why stop there? Let's get rid of those overweight people too. And what about all those people with kids...taking all kinds of time off work...yeah, let's not hire them either.
Smoking is not a habit it is an addiction. Instead of marginalizing smokers maybe we should try to help them break that addiction.
That is the key word in this entire story. And how do they plan on doing this exactly? Short of the city forming its own non profit telco it means they have to deal with the monopolistic ISPs. A monopoly that was wholly created by government in the first place by the way.
Naturally the ISPs are going to demand, and get, massive kickbacks in the form of tax breaks that are made up by you and I. So the government will hand over all kinds of money to the ISPs with the promise to run fiber to every house. Except that won't happen because the idiots that write up the agreement (the government idiots) will neglect to mention exactly how the money may be spent. Seeing that massive gaping hole in the agreement the ISPs will proceed to hand out huge bonuses to their executives instead of investing it in the way it was intended. The fiber network will be partially done but never completed.
Sound familiar? It should because that is exactly what happened with the TARP funds. Only that time it was banks instead of ISPs.
Call me skeptical but I'll believe it when I see it. I have no confidence in government being able to handle any large scale projects without massive cost overruns, rampant corruption and nepotism.
Parents - some parents don't give a damn about their kids. They see school as some sort of subsidized daycare. They don't help their kids with their homework or otherwise participate in the wellbeing of the child. There is no discipline in the home so the kid is undisciplined at school.
Teachers - some are good some are bad. Just like any profession. Getting rid of the bad ones is nearly impossible.
Unions - they have managed to negotiate some very generous benefits for teachers over the years. Teachers have been served well by unions. Everyone else - not so much. Making any sort of meaningful change to the public education system is going to require cooperation from the unions and, traditionally, they have been inflexible.
Students - if a kid shows up to class unwilling to learn even the best teacher in the world is going to have limited success.
Tax Based Funding - unlike many other countries in the world, the amount of money a given school gets in the US is based largely on property valuations in that neighborhood. Schools in wealthy neighborhoods get a lot more money than schools in poor neighborhoods. Up and coming families strive to live in those wealthier neighborhoods so that their kids can attend the better funded schools. Other families in the same situation send their kids to charter schools. Less fortunate families get left behind in the inner city schools with the shrinking tax base. Ironically these are the schools that most need an advantage. The rich kid is gonna be just fine. The poor kid is left with trying to get an athletic scholarship or selling dope on the corner. If you are a good teacher which school would you rather teach at? Yeah.
Initially I looked at DSL but their bandwidth was laughably slow - 3mb/s. Then I considered HughesNet. But they have data caps and I was concerned about network latency. I eventually ended up going with a place that offers Microwave Wireless technology. My neighbor runs a home based business and he vouched for it.
Essentially the way it works is they have a series of Data Centers that connect to the internet at large. They put up a series of towers and facilitate a connection using radio frequencies. They put up what looks like a satellite dish on your roof and that connects to the tower. The connection is fully encrypted end to end.
They promised me a 40mb/s connection but I am routinely getting 60mb/s. Unlike cable and DSL, it's not a shared pipe. So when every house in the neighborhood is streaming Netflix my connection does not slow down. So far I'm very happy with it. According the the guy that owns the company the technology has the capability of providing up to 1gb/s with the proper equipment in place. I'm not holding my breath for that but at least I have decent speeds and if you're in a rural area that's about all you can hope for.
"Is Terrestrial HD so much different in the US?" - Well in my experience, yeah it is. The images on the OTA antenna were much better than what I was seeing with my cable provider. Same channel, same content. Now I don't have any technical benchmarks to back it up but I know what I saw and it certainly looked a lot better to my eyes on the antenna. Your experience may be different and I can't speak to that.
My point was that this cheap antenna brought in a lot more channels than I thought possible and many of them looked a lot better than my expensive cable service was giving me. Bye bye cable.
Get an antenna. I just bought a new house out in the boonies and it made me take a long hard look at cable. At the old house I was paying $220 a month for tv and internet. I never really paid attention to the bill and was a bit shocked to see how much it was. At most I was watching 10 channels. More and more I was watching Amazon.
I did a little research and ended up buying a Mohu Leaf antenna. $18 at WalMart. Damned if that thing isn't picking up about 40 channels. Now granted, some of them are shopping channels, some are religious, some are spanish but I'm getting all the local channels and the picture is fantastic. What my research also led me to understand is the the satellite and cable companies compress the signal so they can fit more data in their pipe. So 1080 doesn't really mean 1080. If you want to really see what 1080 resolution looks like get one of those antennas and you will immediately see how much sharper the picture is.
Then i have Amazon video, which I consider a freebee since I got Prime mainly for the shipping savings. That has plenty of stuff worth watching. I stumbled across something called Pluto tv. It's an app on Roku with free tv and movies. It has commercials but so does cable - and I'm not paying anything for Pluto.
I'm debating on getting Netflix again but probably won't. I have enough stuff to watch. And I'm saving about $150/month in the process. Life is good. The cable companies can go get stuffed.
maybe she is using Instagram. Facebook owns both apps and I'm sure they are sharing data freely between them. That could be how the link was established.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I've had the same experience. Former AT&T customer here who was basically driven to leave them and right into the waiting arms of T-Mobile. Customer service has been excellent so far and the signal is just as good as AT&T if not better. And it's far cheaper. AT&T can go pound sand. I've never going back to those clowns.
I think it's the Richard Branson model - find some industry with crappy service and make it better. He started out in the record industry and moved to the airline industry. He made a killing in both simply by providing superior customer service.
I'm not sure if this is going to work for T-Mobile in the TV business but if they come out with something I'll give it a try, based solely on the great service I have been getting from them so far.
As near as I can tell the bar in this industry is set so low...well, let's just say that T-Mobile should easily exceed whatever laughably passes for customer service in the Cable industry. Cable providers are routinely ranked at the very bottom - right down there with airlines and government. Yeah, it's that bad.
All they really have to do is:
1) NOT treat their customers like shit
2) Be price competitive with other streaming services
3) And....don't treat your customers like shit
The cables companies don't seem to be able to do any of these things...especially #1 & #3. For T-Mobile this should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
First off, start with having them fill out a skills inventory. Just put together a spreadsheet with every IT skill you can think of with a 1-5 rating and have them fill it out. And ask them to give an honest assessment. That is the first test - to see if they are honest. If they lie and tell you they are an expert at this or that it won't take long to find out. If they fail this first basic test then you give them the shittiest most mundane job you can think of and give up and wait until they retire.
If they pass the test then on we go...
Ask them to take the same skills survey again but this time instead of skill substitute area of interest. The objective is to found out what they are good at and what they like. It doesn't matter if they rate themselves a 1 out of 5. As long as they have an interest in it you have something to work with. Aptitude is something you can deal with later on.
It sounds like these two have had shitty management along the way. Your job is to convince them that you are not just another shitty manager and that you actually care about their careers. This will not be easy given how long they have been around but you've got to try. If you don't get their buy in the whole exercise will be pointless.
Next, get a training plan put together. Your bosses seem committed so they should not balk at spending money to get them trained. Work with the two employees as you put the plan together so that they have some skin in the game. Set goals and measure progress along the way. If they are in a bonus plan they tie at least part of the bonus to the goals you set collectively. Money talks.
From your standpoint you have nothing to lose. If all goes to plan you will have two newly productive, motivated employees. If it does not at least you can tell your bosses that you tried. There is only so much you can do. Your job is to provide the tools. Their job is to learn how to use them.
No kidding? Well I guess we're about to see if he can play. Maybe he will surprise everyone and go all Kurt Warner on us and end up back in the NFL via the arena league. That's about as likely as ME getting an NFL contract but you never know.
He's probably so rusty now that his first throw goes into row 10 in the stands but hey, at least he gets to play. Considering that arena gets about zero TV coverage I doubt that soapbox will suffice. But the networks that support his cause will probably show a few clips to keep his name in the news. Fun times.
Maybe it's because:
1) Nobody knows what a catch is anymore. It seems like every single catch or non-catch is analyzed to death. Catching the football is a fundamental part of the game. Someone needs to figure out what constitutes a catch and be done with it.
2) Nobody seems to know what a fair tackle is. In the Steelers-Bengals game on Monday George Iloka gets a one game suspension for flattening Antonio Brown in the end zone. It was a hard hit but he was trying to prevent a touchdown. Rob Gronkowski goes all WWE on a guy with a flying elbow drop to the back of the head when the play was already over and the player was on the ground. Both of them get a one game suspension. In one case it's a football play, in the other case it's a bonehead intent to injure play. It seems to me that Gronk should have got a 2 game suspension and Iloka maybe a fine, it anything. Again, tackling is a fundamental part of the game. Somebody needs to figure out what is fair and what is not.
3) Will someone just go ahead and sign Colin Kapernick? You might not agree with his politics or the whole kneeling thing but he's probably as good as at least half the starting quarterbacks playing right now. The longer this blackballing of Kapernick drags out the worse it looks for the NFL. Sign him. If he can't play then cut him but enough of the blackballing.
Haha...easy bro...I was being glib. Back in the day I used Yahoo Groups and found them to be quite useful. But I recall moving on from it some time ago. Evidently some people stuck around and find it useful for them still. Good for them and thanks for the info ** thumbs up **.
I agree with your comment about Google Groups. At one time I followed rec.Martial-arts on Usenet. I was actively practicing martial arts at the time and found it a fountain of knowledge for all different styles - some of which I had never even heard of before. But then it migrated over to Google Groups and just went to shit. Last time I looked it was full of spam and off topic nonsense. Such a shame.
carrier pigeons have been downed by high winds. Yahoo groups? Who the heck is still using that?
I have a degree and I have worked in IT for many years, both as a developer and someone that hires developers. As near as I can tell, a degree doesn't make one bit of difference. I have worked with smart people that had degrees and smart people that didn't. I have worked with people with advanced degrees that were as dumb as the day is long.
I think it is a mistake to assume that people that did not attend college or finish college are less intelligent than people who did. One of the big problems is identifying talent. The gatekeepers - HR - are largely unskilled in my experience and often unable to identify talent. Simply excluding people without degrees dumbs it down. It makes their job easier. Relying on software that scans resumes for key words just compounds the problem. This leads to people gaming the system and tailoring resumes to trick the software into thinking they are the better candidate. People that can't or won't play the game are left on the sidelines.
Higher education, particularly in some of the more prestigious schools, is little more than a giant country club. Some people are able to milk these sorts of relationships for their entire career. As the old saying goes, it's not what you know it's who you know. This holds true mainly in executive positions and less so in individual contributor positions. But there is a discrimination of sorts and a stigma attached to those without degrees.
"For far less than a house these days, one can guy 3 acres for $60,000 and the mobile home for $30,000." - That's pretty cheap. Where I live 3 acres of land would cost a lot more than that. What about water supply? Drilling a well can get mighty expensive. Depending on how far you are from electric power lines, hooking that up can cost thousands.
No garage and no covered porch are other downsides.
I have seen so called "luxury" modular homes and they all looked pretty low rent to me. Lots of laminate, lots of carpet, low end fixtures and lighting, low end appliances, etc. I'm not putting down people that live in them it's just that for what you get they seem overpriced to me. And the resale on those things is horrible.
absolutely nobody. Correction...anyone that has been paying attention to Facebook and their wanton disregard for the data security of their users. Several years ago I recall reading several articles about how FB has changed their application to set certain items enabled where they should be disabled. Data security items. And they make it intentionally difficult for the average user to find those settings and to change them easily. So predictably, the settings go unchanged for many people.
They also make it really difficult to disable an account. Every picture you post has to be selected individually and deleted. The delete takes about 3 clicks if I recall. Why is there no "select all" button? You know, like every other application on earth has. Obviously they want to make it a royal pain to get out of. The modern day roach motel. I would be willing to bet that there are tons of zombie accounts just sitting out there that have never been properly closed. Meaning all of those photos and check-ins and friend links and other metadata are still there for FB to mine or sell or do whatever they want with it.
A few weeks ago I read an interview with Sean Parker (one of the early founders at FB) basically confirming that, yes, FB is evil. They have managed to create the internet equivalent of the crack pipe. By playing upon the basest of human emotions (envy, jealousy, greed) they have spawned an entire generation of kids completely addicted to the hamster wheel of Likes, Notifications and Check-ins. It's really a sad state of affairs.
I'm sure that somehow, somewhere, I have been linked to in a FB photo or post but any info they have on me did not come a result of me signing up. The more I read things like this the happier I am with that decision.
Big Pharma is very good at scaring people into thinking they are sick. And the magical cure always seems to be some sort of pill. What big pharma is even better at is coming up with so called "maintenance drugs" that never actually cure anything. Lipitor is a prime example of this. You can take it for 10 years and it will help keep your cholesterol down but the moment you go off it your counts go right back where they were when you started. In other words, you are stuck taking this drug for life. Blood pressure medications work the same way.
Some people might read this article and come to the conclusion that people are less healthy. In fact, all that has happened is that the medical industry (with some nudging I'm sure from big pharma) has lowered the bar. All of a sudden they have a new pool of patients to pitch their blood medication drugs to.
The cold hard reality is that for many people these drugs are completely unnecessary. Blood pressure and cholesterol can be controlled by diet and exercise. But it seems that for many doctors the first course of action is to prescribe pills instead. The medical industry, just like nearly every other industry, has been corrupted by money.
If being "rude" to someone is considered bullying then where does the passive-aggressive BS fall? Because I have worked with loads of people that might seem as nice as can be but that PA behavior is absolutely toxic. It is sneaky, underhanded, disingenuous and clearly designed to hurt and embarrass people. Yet it is tolerated, and sometimes even encouraged and rewarded, because on the surface it seems polite.
Sometimes I long for the days when you could just tell someone to fuck off. None of this "ohhh thank you Ed for your valuable contribution. We will certainly take that under advisement and devote to it all the attention it deserves.". In plain english, that's a stupid idea and I'm not going to spend another moment thinking about it. Now the first response might seem "nicer" but in fact it is phony and dishonest.
But you can't tell people to fuck off anymore or some snowflake is going to burst into tears and go running to HR. And then take two weeks off for "emotional distress". And then I get sent to "counseling" for an attitude adjustment. And everyone has to treat snowflake with kid gloves or we might just have a relapse. And all the other snowflakes in the office with circle the wagons and comfort the wounded snowflake with group hugs and empty words of encouragement.
Yeah - fuck off.
anonymous comments can no longer be considered truly anonymous. Got it.
First of all, it isn't "Arizona's" west valley. It is the west valley of Phoenix, a city in the state of Arizona.
Secondly, in Tonopah there are massive aquifers (underground rivers essentially) and the water is very close to the surface. Makes it easier and cheaper to drill wells.
"Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question" - I think he meant habitable. In any case, lots of people are moving there. Minnesota in January - that's inhabitable.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines." - That may be true now but Arizona is perfectly set up for solar and wind. The kind of city that Gates envisions is achievable.
Phoenix is expanding in basically two directions. Due west, towards Los Angeles. And north west towards Las Vegas. The east valley (Scottsdale, Chandler, Tempe) are basically built out. There is very little land left and what is left is very expensive. To the south, South Mountain effectively cuts off everything south of it from Phoenix making travel into Phoenix difficult. To the north you have the densely packed suburb of Anthem. Beyond that the only freeway (the I-17) goes down to two lanes. And there are Indian reservations hemming in the east valley. In fact, many of the big office towers in Scottsdale are built on land leased from Indian tribes. And they are never selling that land.
People in Scottsdale have traditionally looked down their noses at the west valley of Phoenix. But those are the only large parcels of land left. Jerry Colangelo, who used to own the Phoenix Suns basketball team, made a shit-load of money developing land in the west valley. As did a guy named John F. Long, whose family donated the land that the Arizona Cardinals stadium sits on today. They were buying up land at $5-10 dollars an acre. Today an acre of raw land - no house, no utilities, no water - will set you back about $100,000.
Gates knows exactly what he is doing.
Instead of handing over the encryption keys to the government why not just employ some simple investigation instead? If they need to know what calls were made from the phone find out which carrier was used and get that info from them. If they want to see what emails were sent that can be found out too.
The FBI and the cops don't want to do this because it means having to get one of those pesky warrants. And that requires just cause, etc. No, they would rather just invade our privacy and trample on our 4th amendment rights along the way.
"People want to secure their houses, but they still need to get in and out. Same issue here." - No it's not. I want to secure my house so that I can get in but others can't. Others in this case being the government. There are countless cases where abuses of power have taken place by corrupt law enforcement or overly ambitious attorneys. Add to that the fact that the government has basically unlimited funds to go after someone they want to make an example of.
Sorry I just don't trust these pricks.
The dog ate my homework. Let's just blame everything on "the Russians". Well, that narrows it down to a few hundred million people. Let's not bother to actually try and find out which "Russian" may have perpetrated this act. No let's just leave it at that and call it a day. Great way to deflect attention from the fact that this massive breech occurred ON YOUR WATCH.
Well, at least you managed to get all those people working from home back into the office. Because if they are working from home they can't possibly keep an eye on those pesky "Russians". Except that..oh...it happened anyway. So I guess that one kinda backfired. At least you can point to your tremendous success in every portfolio you touched during your tenure as CEO...crickets....
She did "sincerely apologize" so I guess that counts for something. Except she did it after making away with hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and stock so it rings exceedingly hollow to me. And laying off thousands of workers. And driving a stake through the heart of a once proud internet pioneer. But hey, Marissa took care of Marissa and that's all that really matters. Right?
Cunt. Karma is going to have a field day when it catches up to you.
"We don't hire smokers" - Now there's a slippery slope. That same logic could easily lead to let's not hire drinkers because alcohol causes so many health issues. And it does. In fact, alcohol causes far more negative effects on society than tobacco.
For the record, I'm not a smoker. I can't stand the smell of it. But I'm equally offended by bad breath and body odor. Should we stop hiring those people too? Why stop there? Let's get rid of those overweight people too. And what about all those people with kids...taking all kinds of time off work...yeah, let's not hire them either.
Smoking is not a habit it is an addiction. Instead of marginalizing smokers maybe we should try to help them break that addiction.
That is the key word in this entire story. And how do they plan on doing this exactly? Short of the city forming its own non profit telco it means they have to deal with the monopolistic ISPs. A monopoly that was wholly created by government in the first place by the way.
Naturally the ISPs are going to demand, and get, massive kickbacks in the form of tax breaks that are made up by you and I. So the government will hand over all kinds of money to the ISPs with the promise to run fiber to every house. Except that won't happen because the idiots that write up the agreement (the government idiots) will neglect to mention exactly how the money may be spent. Seeing that massive gaping hole in the agreement the ISPs will proceed to hand out huge bonuses to their executives instead of investing it in the way it was intended. The fiber network will be partially done but never completed.
Sound familiar? It should because that is exactly what happened with the TARP funds. Only that time it was banks instead of ISPs.
Call me skeptical but I'll believe it when I see it. I have no confidence in government being able to handle any large scale projects without massive cost overruns, rampant corruption and nepotism.
Parents - some parents don't give a damn about their kids. They see school as some sort of subsidized daycare. They don't help their kids with their homework or otherwise participate in the wellbeing of the child. There is no discipline in the home so the kid is undisciplined at school.
Teachers - some are good some are bad. Just like any profession. Getting rid of the bad ones is nearly impossible.
Unions - they have managed to negotiate some very generous benefits for teachers over the years. Teachers have been served well by unions. Everyone else - not so much. Making any sort of meaningful change to the public education system is going to require cooperation from the unions and, traditionally, they have been inflexible.
Students - if a kid shows up to class unwilling to learn even the best teacher in the world is going to have limited success.
Tax Based Funding - unlike many other countries in the world, the amount of money a given school gets in the US is based largely on property valuations in that neighborhood. Schools in wealthy neighborhoods get a lot more money than schools in poor neighborhoods. Up and coming families strive to live in those wealthier neighborhoods so that their kids can attend the better funded schools. Other families in the same situation send their kids to charter schools. Less fortunate families get left behind in the inner city schools with the shrinking tax base. Ironically these are the schools that most need an advantage. The rich kid is gonna be just fine. The poor kid is left with trying to get an athletic scholarship or selling dope on the corner. If you are a good teacher which school would you rather teach at? Yeah.
Initially I looked at DSL but their bandwidth was laughably slow - 3mb/s. Then I considered HughesNet. But they have data caps and I was concerned about network latency. I eventually ended up going with a place that offers Microwave Wireless technology. My neighbor runs a home based business and he vouched for it.
Essentially the way it works is they have a series of Data Centers that connect to the internet at large. They put up a series of towers and facilitate a connection using radio frequencies. They put up what looks like a satellite dish on your roof and that connects to the tower. The connection is fully encrypted end to end.
They promised me a 40mb/s connection but I am routinely getting 60mb/s. Unlike cable and DSL, it's not a shared pipe. So when every house in the neighborhood is streaming Netflix my connection does not slow down. So far I'm very happy with it. According the the guy that owns the company the technology has the capability of providing up to 1gb/s with the proper equipment in place. I'm not holding my breath for that but at least I have decent speeds and if you're in a rural area that's about all you can hope for.
"Is Terrestrial HD so much different in the US?" - Well in my experience, yeah it is. The images on the OTA antenna were much better than what I was seeing with my cable provider. Same channel, same content. Now I don't have any technical benchmarks to back it up but I know what I saw and it certainly looked a lot better to my eyes on the antenna. Your experience may be different and I can't speak to that.
My point was that this cheap antenna brought in a lot more channels than I thought possible and many of them looked a lot better than my expensive cable service was giving me. Bye bye cable.
Get an antenna. I just bought a new house out in the boonies and it made me take a long hard look at cable. At the old house I was paying $220 a month for tv and internet. I never really paid attention to the bill and was a bit shocked to see how much it was. At most I was watching 10 channels. More and more I was watching Amazon.
I did a little research and ended up buying a Mohu Leaf antenna. $18 at WalMart. Damned if that thing isn't picking up about 40 channels. Now granted, some of them are shopping channels, some are religious, some are spanish but I'm getting all the local channels and the picture is fantastic. What my research also led me to understand is the the satellite and cable companies compress the signal so they can fit more data in their pipe. So 1080 doesn't really mean 1080. If you want to really see what 1080 resolution looks like get one of those antennas and you will immediately see how much sharper the picture is.
Then i have Amazon video, which I consider a freebee since I got Prime mainly for the shipping savings. That has plenty of stuff worth watching. I stumbled across something called Pluto tv. It's an app on Roku with free tv and movies. It has commercials but so does cable - and I'm not paying anything for Pluto.
I'm debating on getting Netflix again but probably won't. I have enough stuff to watch. And I'm saving about $150/month in the process. Life is good. The cable companies can go get stuffed.
maybe she is using Instagram. Facebook owns both apps and I'm sure they are sharing data freely between them. That could be how the link was established.
How do we know that the brother or nephew wasn't the one that drafted the text? I mean, they do have something to gain from this.