"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
"Treat us well". Not equally, Working everyone to death equally is like Communism - everyone equally poor.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
Finally, one last bit of advice. Before you go quacking out that Nobody owes anyone a job, remember that nobody owes a company any business either. If you're going to go by third-world market rates and lay off the greedy locals, don't be surprised if the unemployed locals can no longer afford your products and the third-world potential customers don't want to pay first-world prices.
And this is why across the nation, top-level executives are all biting the bullet, tiightening their belts and demanding that their boards pay them less money.
My bank lets me send money to anyone I want... You give me your account and routing number (which are printed on your checks) and I fill out a form on my bank's website to tell them to send you the money.
No it doesn't.
The US Government has a list of "entities" that all employees, transactions, vendors, etc., etc., etc. have to be vetted against. These "entities" are people, corporations, the names of ocean-going vessels and so forth.
If the name of one of these entities comes, up, the Feds have to be notified.
Ironically, "Osama bin Ladin" was never on the list - they spelled it Fox News style ("Usama"). But God Help You if your name is Guadalupe Ortiz. Every so often someone with that name shows up on the news for having been outed by the Government's list after trying to buy a car or something.
And the sad thing about it is that the actual offending "Guadalupe Ortiz" wasn't a person, it was a travel agency that had been laundering money.
Sorry, but having two people in the cockpit is a safety measure, not a security measure. It helps if one pilot has a heart attack, but it does pretty much nothing if one pilot is a suicidal, murderous maniac.
I wouldn't say "nothing". It's hard to concentrate on suicide if you're busy trying to murder someone.
Before we got so efficient, a cockpit would have 3 or 4 personnel. Pilot, co-pilot, engineer, possibly radio officer. If there were always at least 2 people in the cockpit at all times, then it would be much harder for a single berserker to crash.
Unless of course, you arm the pilots and they shoot everyone else first.
It isn't a free market if state laws restrict who can do business with whom. Remove those laws and the free market would push Comcast right out the door.
Sure. The "Free Market" offered me exactly one alternative to Comcast.
I took it, but only because it was that or Comcast.
I would in principle support reigning in on the patriot act, and possibly this bill. However, something tells me "This bill might be a trap", an item with no chance of passing; but either they want to figure out who will support the bill, so they can start investigating these people, or they will bury some Trojan horses in the bill itself in order to kill.
A congressperson votes for the bill, then they will be immediately under investigation as 'an enemy of the state' and attempts by the executive in response to undermine that person's support.
Will folks be shipped off to Guantanamo, for petitioning their representative in support?
We live in paranoid times, it's true. And a lot of things that people didn't want to believe about the US Government have been demonstrated to be fact.
But I don't think we're quite that far gone yet. I'd rather take the risk. Besides, how many people can Cuba hold?
It's not a linear conversion. Even a $5 suit in 1913 was likely to be hand-tailored simply because mass-production wasn't as far advanced back then. Electronics were esoteric high-tech devices, not something run off en-masse by extremely specialized automated machinery. Food, on the other hand, was quite labor-intensive and made up a big chunk of where most people's paychecks went. It still has a lot of labor in it (hence the exemption from minimum-wage laws for farm workers), but we've managed to come up with a lot more farm automa since then, and no few items that use those much cheaper, more compact, and more reliable electronics that people so love to use as a false measuring stick of time-relative purchasing power.
Inflation is destructive when the relative values of income versus expenses rises rapidly or disproportionately. An extreme example was given me by an old German teacher who said that her grandfather sold a solid wood wardrobe in the morning pre-WWII and in the evening was barely able to buy a pound of bacon with the proceeds. In our day, inflation in absolute terms is mostly low and thus it would take longer to make such a radical difference - you'd have had to stash the money in some non-appreciating place for a relatively long period of time to get that kind of hurt. Instead what hurts us is the downsizing of positions such that so many people have to take lower-paying jobs even while the absolute salaries are more or less tracking inflation. Meaning that there's effective high inflation despite little absolute high inflation.
The absolute number written on a dollar bill is almost meaningless. What matters is whether or not buyers and sellers are both receiving enough of them to be satisfied. That's equally true for shiny yellow rocks, but some people can't seem to understand that. They think the rocks have some sort of absolute value.
If you can't trust that the entity with which you're exchanging information has the security of the information as their highest priority, no amount of securing of channels is going to help.
Why sir, I have no doubt that my insurance company/big-bog retailer, etc. is totally dedicated to keeping my information secure and not in simply making the cheapest token security gestures they can get away with.
After all, if you can't trust major corps like Anthem, Home Depot and Target, who can you trust?
Realistically, what we need is a "web of trust". The idea that there are certain incorruptible agencies who can vouch for anyone is pretty preposterous to begin with.
If, instead, anyone could vouch for another and we could build up our own list of trusted authenticators and score unknown parties against their associations, a la degrees of Kevin Bacon, it would probably be a lot more secure than the current binary system with unreliable certifiers in it.
As it is, I'm already dealing with a number of agencies who've allowed their certs to expire but I have to bite the bullet and trust that their site isn't being spoofed. Local/state government agencies are especially bad at this, since they frequently have crap tech resources to begin with. If the city, county, and/or state could be a trust source in its own right and vouch for local agencies it would be a move up.
Consider the case of the Americans and the atomic bomb technology, and how quickly the Russians achieved parity.
Well, considering that they continuously kept getting information from the inside and it still took them four more years, perhaps one could say that it wasn't all that quick.
Then again, the Russians had to work to steal it. IBM's actively pushing it out.
Bought a motherboard or LCD TV lately? Don't even bother to TRY to find one built without Chinese labor in it.
Of course, I don't think any of us would want to be exposed to a working Tricorder -- they worked by bombarding the subject with EM radiation, including a bunch in the "radioactive" spectrum. In real life, the thing was likely to diagnose you as being in the early stages of cancer due to the tricorder itself..
Did they? I missed that episode.
I always thought that the ideal tricorder could accept a broad spectrum of natural radiations in 3 dimensions and use that to construct a bio-chemical-mechanical model of the subject. Thus the name "tricorder" being equally used for both medical purposes (medical tricorder) and general exploration (for example, Spock's tricorder).
Think about it. Every nanosecond we are being constantly bombarded by radio waves from Jupiter, the Sun, and the stars, cosmic rays, neutrinos, natural radioactivity from the ground we stand on and the air we breathe, light at various frequencies, including UV and IR, sound waves of all frequencies and that's not even factoring in man-made stuff like WKRP AM/FM, the local police/fire/rescue/transportation/etc and business channels or cell phones. Some of that stuff goes straight through, some reflects and/or refracts, some is absorbed selectively by various tissues, some is blocked. All you need is sensors, a computer powerful enough to correlate it, and software that can reduce it to usable data.
That's a cop-out. Voting the party line is just pushing the process back a level. SOMEONE has to select who the party candidates ARE.
The reason that political parties were so despised by Founding Fathers is that they take on a life and allegiance of their own. People do things for the Party, not for the Country. Witness what happened to John McCain.
Parties, in turn devote their allegiance to Ideology. Id(iot)ology is basically adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to problems, whether that size helps or hurts.
In short, too much of American politics operates less on careful thought and more on knee-jerk reaction to a litmus test (to mix metaphors). If the voters would responsibly select who their parties represented, the parties would field responsible candidates. Instead it's all duckspeak and litmus tests because the people who actually vote aren't really interested in thinking things through themselves.
That's what makes drafting people in to vote willy-nilly even less appealing. If we do so badly with those who will at least make the effort to show up when they don't have to, then what would we get if they were joined by people who simply blindly checked things just to get out of the polling booth as quickly as possible.
Never mind. At this stage, we'd probably be better off with random chance anyway.
With voter turnout this epically low, we are at the point where all the eligible voters who don't vote could band together and elect a president and VP who aren't even on the ticket. Whether or not mandatory voting would help is unclear, but voter disenfranchisement doesn't help anyone and neither do all the various voter suppression methods that we see in each election cycle. Something should be done to push back.
Problem is, we ALREADY have too many ignorant people voting in elections. Do you really want the apathetic-ignorant ones in there as well?
A harpsichord is quite different than a piano. A piano (pianoforte) operates by the action of key-driven hammers striking the strings. A harpsichord operates by having the keys drive a plucking mechanism instead, like picking a guitar. It makes for a very different tonal quality.
The more important issue here, however is that this is the well-tempered Clavier. Or, more accurately, the even-tempered Clavier. Earlier instruments were tuned more precisely to the key that they would be played in. Bach was showing off a new technology where instead of precise tuning, the tuning was warped just enough that you could play in any key without retuning.
So a modern piano would actually be more faithful to the sound Bach was intending than an authentic Bach-era instrument that wasn't even-tempered.
What do you do when you've created lots of GUI interfaces for novice users based on your web browser and that web browser isn't there anymore?
I don't. People who wrote apps that assumed that I was running IE or Flash have literally lost big-ticket business from me because I don't run IE and wouldn't trust it within 100 miles of my money.
I'd feel sorry for all those people who built IE6 web apps, except, well, no. I don't feel sorry for them. I was there when they did it and I warned them it was a bad idea to lock yourself into a monocultural world even then.
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"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
"Treat us well". Not equally, Working everyone to death equally is like Communism - everyone equally poor.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
Finally, one last bit of advice. Before you go quacking out that Nobody owes anyone a job, remember that nobody owes a company any business either. If you're going to go by third-world market rates and lay off the greedy locals, don't be surprised if the unemployed locals can no longer afford your products and the third-world potential customers don't want to pay first-world prices.
And this is why across the nation, top-level executives are all biting the bullet, tiightening their belts and demanding that their boards pay them less money.
At one time, at least, the OFAC list included the entire democratically-elected government of Palestine. By name.
Not because they were all confirmed terrorists. Because they were all democratically elected heads of a "terrorist state".
My bank lets me send money to anyone I want... You give me your account and routing number (which are printed on your checks) and I fill out a form on my bank's website to tell them to send you the money.
No it doesn't.
The US Government has a list of "entities" that all employees, transactions, vendors, etc., etc., etc. have to be vetted against. These "entities" are people, corporations, the names of ocean-going vessels and so forth.
If the name of one of these entities comes, up, the Feds have to be notified.
Ironically, "Osama bin Ladin" was never on the list - they spelled it Fox News style ("Usama"). But God Help You if your name is Guadalupe Ortiz. Every so often someone with that name shows up on the news for having been outed by the Government's list after trying to buy a car or something.
And the sad thing about it is that the actual offending "Guadalupe Ortiz" wasn't a person, it was a travel agency that had been laundering money.
Well, it's only until they manage to ensure that it isn't plug-replaceable.
Like the systemd logging system.
Yeah, but Gnome 2 was usable. Gnome 3 switched me to Cinnamon.
You mean give Oveur the top position again?
Roger, Roger!
Sorry, but having two people in the cockpit is a safety measure, not a security measure. It helps if one pilot has a heart attack, but it does pretty much nothing if one pilot is a suicidal, murderous maniac.
I wouldn't say "nothing". It's hard to concentrate on suicide if you're busy trying to murder someone.
Before we got so efficient, a cockpit would have 3 or 4 personnel. Pilot, co-pilot, engineer, possibly radio officer. If there were always at least 2 people in the cockpit at all times, then it would be much harder for a single berserker to crash.
Unless of course, you arm the pilots and they shoot everyone else first.
It isn't a free market if state laws restrict who can do business with whom. Remove those laws and the free market would push Comcast right out the door.
Sure. The "Free Market" offered me exactly one alternative to Comcast.
I took it, but only because it was that or Comcast.
I would in principle support reigning in on the patriot act, and possibly this bill.
However, something tells me "This bill might be a trap", an item with no chance of passing; but either they want to figure out who will support the bill, so they can start investigating these people, or they will bury some Trojan horses in the bill itself in order to kill.
A congressperson votes for the bill, then they will be immediately under investigation as 'an enemy of the state' and attempts by the executive in response to undermine that person's support.
Will folks be shipped off to Guantanamo, for petitioning their representative in support?
We live in paranoid times, it's true. And a lot of things that people didn't want to believe about the US Government have been demonstrated to be fact.
But I don't think we're quite that far gone yet. I'd rather take the risk. Besides, how many people can Cuba hold?
It's not a linear conversion. Even a $5 suit in 1913 was likely to be hand-tailored simply because mass-production wasn't as far advanced back then. Electronics were esoteric high-tech devices, not something run off en-masse by extremely specialized automated machinery. Food, on the other hand, was quite labor-intensive and made up a big chunk of where most people's paychecks went. It still has a lot of labor in it (hence the exemption from minimum-wage laws for farm workers), but we've managed to come up with a lot more farm automa since then, and no few items that use those much cheaper, more compact, and more reliable electronics that people so love to use as a false measuring stick of time-relative purchasing power.
Inflation is destructive when the relative values of income versus expenses rises rapidly or disproportionately. An extreme example was given me by an old German teacher who said that her grandfather sold a solid wood wardrobe in the morning pre-WWII and in the evening was barely able to buy a pound of bacon with the proceeds. In our day, inflation in absolute terms is mostly low and thus it would take longer to make such a radical difference - you'd have had to stash the money in some non-appreciating place for a relatively long period of time to get that kind of hurt. Instead what hurts us is the downsizing of positions such that so many people have to take lower-paying jobs even while the absolute salaries are more or less tracking inflation. Meaning that there's effective high inflation despite little absolute high inflation.
The absolute number written on a dollar bill is almost meaningless. What matters is whether or not buyers and sellers are both receiving enough of them to be satisfied. That's equally true for shiny yellow rocks, but some people can't seem to understand that. They think the rocks have some sort of absolute value.
If you can't trust that the entity with which you're exchanging information has the security of the information as their highest priority, no amount of securing of channels is going to help.
Why sir, I have no doubt that my insurance company/big-bog retailer, etc. is totally dedicated to keeping my information secure and not in simply making the cheapest token security gestures they can get away with.
After all, if you can't trust major corps like Anthem, Home Depot and Target, who can you trust?
Realistically, what we need is a "web of trust". The idea that there are certain incorruptible agencies who can vouch for anyone is pretty preposterous to begin with.
If, instead, anyone could vouch for another and we could build up our own list of trusted authenticators and score unknown parties against their associations, a la degrees of Kevin Bacon, it would probably be a lot more secure than the current binary system with unreliable certifiers in it.
As it is, I'm already dealing with a number of agencies who've allowed their certs to expire but I have to bite the bullet and trust that their site isn't being spoofed. Local/state government agencies are especially bad at this, since they frequently have crap tech resources to begin with. If the city, county, and/or state could be a trust source in its own right and vouch for local agencies it would be a move up.
"plaid" is the Scottish word for "blanket", You should have said "tar-tan".
Consider the case of the Americans and the atomic bomb technology, and how quickly the Russians achieved parity.
Well, considering that they continuously kept getting information from the inside and it still took them four more years, perhaps one could say that it wasn't all that quick.
Then again, the Russians had to work to steal it. IBM's actively pushing it out.
Bought a motherboard or LCD TV lately? Don't even bother to TRY to find one built without Chinese labor in it.
Well, All You Have To Do Is...
If you haven't yet sold your IBM stocks in the last few decades, now might be the time to do so.
Got any tips on the Chinese companys to invest in?
I hear Lenovo's got some good stuff.
Music is medicine for the soul.
Of course, I don't think any of us would want to be exposed to a working Tricorder -- they worked by bombarding the subject with EM radiation, including a bunch in the "radioactive" spectrum. In real life, the thing was likely to diagnose you as being in the early stages of cancer due to the tricorder itself..
Did they? I missed that episode.
I always thought that the ideal tricorder could accept a broad spectrum of natural radiations in 3 dimensions and use that to construct a bio-chemical-mechanical model of the subject. Thus the name "tricorder" being equally used for both medical purposes (medical tricorder) and general exploration (for example, Spock's tricorder).
Think about it. Every nanosecond we are being constantly bombarded by radio waves from Jupiter, the Sun, and the stars, cosmic rays, neutrinos, natural radioactivity from the ground we stand on and the air we breathe, light at various frequencies, including UV and IR, sound waves of all frequencies and that's not even factoring in man-made stuff like WKRP AM/FM, the local police/fire/rescue/transportation/etc and business channels or cell phones. Some of that stuff goes straight through, some reflects and/or refracts, some is absorbed selectively by various tissues, some is blocked. All you need is sensors, a computer powerful enough to correlate it, and software that can reduce it to usable data.
Well, if EVERYONE decides they'll mooch off their neightbor, it's Communism!
And if no one actually HAS WiFi to mooch off of, that's Soviet-style Communism.
That's a cop-out. Voting the party line is just pushing the process back a level. SOMEONE has to select who the party candidates ARE.
The reason that political parties were so despised by Founding Fathers is that they take on a life and allegiance of their own. People do things for the Party, not for the Country. Witness what happened to John McCain.
Parties, in turn devote their allegiance to Ideology. Id(iot)ology is basically adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to problems, whether that size helps or hurts.
In short, too much of American politics operates less on careful thought and more on knee-jerk reaction to a litmus test (to mix metaphors). If the voters would responsibly select who their parties represented, the parties would field responsible candidates. Instead it's all duckspeak and litmus tests because the people who actually vote aren't really interested in thinking things through themselves.
That's what makes drafting people in to vote willy-nilly even less appealing. If we do so badly with those who will at least make the effort to show up when they don't have to, then what would we get if they were joined by people who simply blindly checked things just to get out of the polling booth as quickly as possible.
Never mind. At this stage, we'd probably be better off with random chance anyway.
With voter turnout this epically low, we are at the point where all the eligible voters who don't vote could band together and elect a president and VP who aren't even on the ticket. Whether or not mandatory voting would help is unclear, but voter disenfranchisement doesn't help anyone and neither do all the various voter suppression methods that we see in each election cycle. Something should be done to push back.
Problem is, we ALREADY have too many ignorant people voting in elections. Do you really want the apathetic-ignorant ones in there as well?
You can lead a horse to water, but..
A harpsichord is quite different than a piano. A piano (pianoforte) operates by the action of key-driven hammers striking the strings. A harpsichord operates by having the keys drive a plucking mechanism instead, like picking a guitar. It makes for a very different tonal quality.
The more important issue here, however is that this is the well-tempered Clavier. Or, more accurately, the even-tempered Clavier. Earlier instruments were tuned more precisely to the key that they would be played in. Bach was showing off a new technology where instead of precise tuning, the tuning was warped just enough that you could play in any key without retuning.
So a modern piano would actually be more faithful to the sound Bach was intending than an authentic Bach-era instrument that wasn't even-tempered.
What do you do when you've created lots of GUI interfaces for novice users based on your web browser and that web browser isn't there anymore?
I don't. People who wrote apps that assumed that I was running IE or Flash have literally lost big-ticket business from me because I don't run IE and wouldn't trust it within 100 miles of my money.
I'd feel sorry for all those people who built IE6 web apps, except, well, no. I don't feel sorry for them. I was there when they did it and I warned them it was a bad idea to lock yourself into a monocultural world even then.