On what planet is it cheaper to hire an H1B than a local worker?
This one.
You don't get to pay them lower salaries
Ohh yes you do. It might be against the rules on paper, but when you can threaten the worker with deportation back to their third world hellhole of a home country, they tend to not complain about you breaking the rules.
You use an H1B when you want the best guy, not when you want some low-cost faceless drone.
You use an H1B when you're too cheap to pay market rates domestically and you just want to tick off a laundry list of skills without any assessment of whether they're actually good at their job or not. Have you seen any code H1Bs turn out? It might run (technically) but it's shit.
No, often it works because if one person outside your organisation discovers something then when you get that issue raised with you it is pretty easy to take that to management and show them why the bug needs fixing. If one person can find it so can someone else who is less honest and hence might use it for fraud.
Seriously?
First of all, you can bring whatever you want to management; the pointy haired bosses who control resource allocation likewise can ignore whatever they want. All they hear is "computer shit I don't understand blah blah blah security problem I don't understand blah blah OH MY GOD IT WILL COST MONEY TO FIX blah blah". I used to think "oh, nobody will do that" was just a joke.. then I worked for a small company that did e-commerce. I could stand on my head giving example after example and potential disaster scenarios all I wanted, they would not change anything. The only things that really got fixed were things I found myself and fixed silently without telling anyone. If I told you what info they had been storing you would be sick to your stomach.
Second of all, this: "Has anyone found $problem yet?" "No, but they could" "OK so it's not a problem right now, go do $stupidshitthatdumbassclientwants instead."
When you're dealing with non-technical management that nevertheless is given authority to make technical decisions with or without considering problems raised by people who actually know what the fuck they're doing, security problems will exist no matter how blatant. You can spend all the time you want teaching pigs to sing, but in the end you're wasting your time and annoying the pigs.. who sign your paychecks.
We don't need people to have higher incomes; we need things to cost less.
Terrific, please tell us how you plan to rein in corporate profits and executive salaries to achieve this. Then tell us how you won't be sued out of existence or harassed until you give up and move to someplace where there are no phones.
The only thing that will reduce prices is removing barriers to entry for things that don't need barriers - not adding more barriers.
Oh, you're one of those 'invisible hand' guys. Nevermind, no point in continuing.
Because the American consumer market exists to service the moneyed interests, of course. Duh. Did you think that it was there to provide consumers with quality, competitive services at a reasonable cost? That's cute.
Well, if you take it to a ridiculous extreme, yeah, all that stuff would be banned. How fortunate it is that it isn't all or nothing. Give your hyperbole a rest, it's been used a lot I think.
I'm not so sure. They are both bad. They are also not comparable.
Sure they are, in the fact that they are both psychoactive substances, like coffee or nicotine. Where they're not comparable is 1) current legal status and 2) to my knowledge, nobody has asserted that ethanol has beneficial effects on the body. I know that there are studies showing red wine seems to lower the risk of fatal heart disease, but IIRC it's the antioxidants in the wine that do the good, not the alcohol.
And you'll also have to define "bad" for me. That could mean anything, it's totally subjective.
People tend to do stupid things with their body, and laws are here to reduce the various means to harm oneself.
You're not going to get anywhere with this argument if you're talking to the typical American. Once they hear something like 'protecting people from themselves' they immediately shut down and insist that anything the government does is bad if it forces them to modify their behavior (even if they would do so voluntarily, were there no law. They'll engage in the regulated behavior that they ordinarily would not do just to be spiteful). The theory is that you've got an inalienable right to be a total idiot. Where that falls down for me is the fact that frequently your choice to be a total idiot affects me negatively; for example, let's take motorcycle helmet laws. If you ride a motorcycle without a helmet the chances of you being severely injured or dying in an accident are increased. Sure, it's your body, go on with your bad self, but when you get hurt you incur medical costs. If you have private insurance (like most Americans) this increases their costs, so in order to protect their profit margins, they hike my premium. Same goes for life insurance; if you threaten their profits, they'll just charge everybody more. And the crazy thing is that most bikers would wear helmets voluntarily, so the requirement doesn't affect them at all. They see it as just one more freedom taken away if it's codified into law, and that is the worst thing that could ever happen, even if they would do it anyway.
It's science, not politics !
Sorry, this is just plain wrong. In the case of marijuana, its prohibition in the USA was not intended to protect public health, but to negatively impact the Mexican population that was crossing the border. That isn't science, it's racism. In addition, the science is starting to disagree with you. There isn't a whole lot of data at this point (at least in the USA, due to pot's Schedule I status) but hopefully (and this goes back to the subject of TFA) this will change as attitudes towards marijuana change (a majority of the population now believes it should be legalized).
But PCI compliance isn't actually all that difficult to do
No, so long as you have the ability/authority to make the changes that PCI requires. If you've got a back-office accounting system that can't handle tokenized credit card information, and 100% will NOT accept anything less than a full credit card number and expiration date to enter an order, it's "compensating control" time. Which is a fancy way of saying "Our business practices suck and we don't want to change them, so security suffers".
No, because they still want customers, and no patches quickly equals no customers.
Bad assumption. The people making purchasing decisions (especially at large organizations) do not base their decisions on unimportant things like "quality" or "technical factors", they very frequently make those decisions based on 1) initial cost and 2) who they play golf with. I've seen this in action, where the people who actually know things are standing on their heads trying to get management to understand why buying $x is a bad idea for valid technical reasons, and some retard MBA makes the wrong decision because a sales rep bought them dinner at a conference once.
If you desperately need a job or simply move office within a company and find yourself in a "culture" that is hostile to you and which requires, as in your example, an unhealthy and discriminatory work-life balance (discriminatory because clearly no single parent or person with an illness/disability that limits their ability to work long hours would ever be able to take it) then the company needs to change it.
Welcome to America, where the beatings will continue until morale improves. What you describe is "being competitive".
Employers have no incentive to treat their people like human beings. The next guy treats his employees just as badly, and if you find yourself someplace where they treat you like a human being, you're getting ripped off in terms of pay/benefits. Seriously, employers are like car salesmen here; they know they can treat you like shit because the next guy is just as bad. Oh, and medical insurance, you have none if you quit.
Undoing moderation to ask a question: It sounds like he brought in 178.2 million GBP of revenue after his commission, and they fired him for it. And it sounds like they may not have even paid him his commission. I can't imagine how that can be legal, especially in a country that isn't the USA. I've heard rumors that employees/contractors actually have some rights and recourse when their employer fucks them over over there.
This implies that those who make those decisions are capable of looking at it from that point of view. Fraud *might* not happen, so let's assume it won't, whereas those new terminals *definitely* will cost money RIGHT NOW, so they can't do it.
Full track data is not allowed to be stored or transmitted.
It might not be allowed, but it happens. All the time. Lazy programmers and/or retarded business systems that require all this data for no good reason other than that's how they've always done it lead to all kinds of shit being stored, including CVV data which is a HUGE no-no. I've seen this with my own eyes.
I don't see any reasons why this can't work in the USA if it works everywhere else.
Because of the expense involved in replacing the current terminals with chip and pin-compatible models. Since nothing happens in this country if nobody can make a buck, and replacing these systems improves security, but decreases the bottom line, nobody will do it.
Private schools are less expensive because they can control who attends. They can turn down students that would be more expensive to teach. (Private/charter schools do better academically for the same reason: they don't have to accept the students that will bring their test scores down.)
It's not a fair comparison, much as some people would like you to think.
I have to disagree. Look at any school district - the buildings are all falling apart, recently renovated, or brand spanking new. It is a rare school that is well maintained. This is because there is a lot of pressure on government to keep taxes low, and so they only get occasional capital budgets when the facilities are so bad that they can't limp along anymore without breaking laws.
You've kind of made my point for me - there are different causes involved with a private company not maintaining and a government entity (like a school district) not maintaining. The former doesn't maintain because it's expensive and they want to keep expenses down (and therefore profits up), and will do so at the expense of safety. The latter doesn't maintain for the reason you gave: low budget due to political pressure to keep taxes low (even when not maintaining the schools costs more in the long run). It's relatively easy to fix the schools, give them a sane budget (and raise taxes if you have to), but in the current "TAXES BAD!!1!!" environment that's not likely to happen. It's much harder to get a for-profit company to lower their profits voluntarily (even if doing so is mandatory due to regulation). Additional regulation is cheerfully ignored when the company can get away with it / get around it. Our water company committed criminal acts; it's doubtful that additional regulation would help in this case, unless it had real teeth (as in we take all your money if you do X, Y, or Z). But that leaves the town without a water supply.
Not always. Government might be bureaucratic and slow (and possibly corrupt) but at least they don't have a profit motive driving them to cut (potentially deadly) corners. Our water company is private, and they are horrible horrible horrible. To the point where our fairly conservative town is considering buying them out. Our water quality is terrible, our rates are ridiculous, and the management is so bad that at any time we have about 4 hours' worth of water if (non-redundant) pumps should fail. They're required by law to have disaster plans in writing in easily accessible binders at their offices and they haven't bothered. We had a boil order for 14 days a few years ago, and they're so bad that one of their managers *went to jail* because he doctored samples sent to a lab to determine levels of bacteria so that they would read lower.
Private companies present a whole other set of problems, and they're not automatically better than government at the same task. At least with government we can vote people out of office; a private company has no such threat to encourage good behavior.
Politics. Guessing that snub fighters weren't in the initial spec, so they weren't accounted for. Once the problem was found, it was glossed over to protect the well-connected people who made the mistake in the first place. Hey, the death toll was only in the thousands, no big deal. Someone probably did a quiet cost/benefit analysis and determined that the expense of fixing the problem would raise too many troubling questions, and when the boss has a habit of Force choking people who rock the boat, that boat doesn't get rocked.
The savings wouldn't come from prescription drug prices, they would come from 1) lower overhead when dealing with one insurer instead of 29348792384 (ever wonder why there are 12 administrative staff working at a modestly-sized medical practice? Insurance forms/claims/fights.), and 2) removing the profit motive from health insurance. 1) presumes a public/socialized option, of course, like the grown-up countries have.
You have to remember, though, Big Pharma doesn't give a shit about anything other than money. Not saving lives or curing disease, but selling you pills. They could take a significant haircut and still lead the world in new developments.
Slashdot Mirror
lol bitter. Enjoy your second-class status.
This one.
Ohh yes you do. It might be against the rules on paper, but when you can threaten the worker with deportation back to their third world hellhole of a home country, they tend to not complain about you breaking the rules.
You use an H1B when you're too cheap to pay market rates domestically and you just want to tick off a laundry list of skills without any assessment of whether they're actually good at their job or not. Have you seen any code H1Bs turn out? It might run (technically) but it's shit.
Which, unfortunately, doesn't get the problem addressed. CYA is not a substitute for good decisions.
Problem: What is a security department?
Seriously?
First of all, you can bring whatever you want to management; the pointy haired bosses who control resource allocation likewise can ignore whatever they want. All they hear is "computer shit I don't understand blah blah blah security problem I don't understand blah blah OH MY GOD IT WILL COST MONEY TO FIX blah blah". I used to think "oh, nobody will do that" was just a joke.. then I worked for a small company that did e-commerce. I could stand on my head giving example after example and potential disaster scenarios all I wanted, they would not change anything. The only things that really got fixed were things I found myself and fixed silently without telling anyone. If I told you what info they had been storing you would be sick to your stomach.
Second of all, this: "Has anyone found $problem yet?" "No, but they could" "OK so it's not a problem right now, go do $stupidshitthatdumbassclientwants instead."
When you're dealing with non-technical management that nevertheless is given authority to make technical decisions with or without considering problems raised by people who actually know what the fuck they're doing, security problems will exist no matter how blatant. You can spend all the time you want teaching pigs to sing, but in the end you're wasting your time and annoying the pigs.. who sign your paychecks.
Terrific, please tell us how you plan to rein in corporate profits and executive salaries to achieve this. Then tell us how you won't be sued out of existence or harassed until you give up and move to someplace where there are no phones.
Oh, you're one of those 'invisible hand' guys. Nevermind, no point in continuing.
Because the American consumer market exists to service the moneyed interests, of course. Duh. Did you think that it was there to provide consumers with quality, competitive services at a reasonable cost? That's cute.
Putting some damn goggles on does not require experience.
Well, if you take it to a ridiculous extreme, yeah, all that stuff would be banned. How fortunate it is that it isn't all or nothing. Give your hyperbole a rest, it's been used a lot I think.
Sure they are, in the fact that they are both psychoactive substances, like coffee or nicotine. Where they're not comparable is 1) current legal status and 2) to my knowledge, nobody has asserted that ethanol has beneficial effects on the body. I know that there are studies showing red wine seems to lower the risk of fatal heart disease, but IIRC it's the antioxidants in the wine that do the good, not the alcohol.
And you'll also have to define "bad" for me. That could mean anything, it's totally subjective.
You're not going to get anywhere with this argument if you're talking to the typical American. Once they hear something like 'protecting people from themselves' they immediately shut down and insist that anything the government does is bad if it forces them to modify their behavior (even if they would do so voluntarily, were there no law. They'll engage in the regulated behavior that they ordinarily would not do just to be spiteful). The theory is that you've got an inalienable right to be a total idiot. Where that falls down for me is the fact that frequently your choice to be a total idiot affects me negatively; for example, let's take motorcycle helmet laws. If you ride a motorcycle without a helmet the chances of you being severely injured or dying in an accident are increased. Sure, it's your body, go on with your bad self, but when you get hurt you incur medical costs. If you have private insurance (like most Americans) this increases their costs, so in order to protect their profit margins, they hike my premium. Same goes for life insurance; if you threaten their profits, they'll just charge everybody more. And the crazy thing is that most bikers would wear helmets voluntarily, so the requirement doesn't affect them at all. They see it as just one more freedom taken away if it's codified into law, and that is the worst thing that could ever happen, even if they would do it anyway.
Sorry, this is just plain wrong. In the case of marijuana, its prohibition in the USA was not intended to protect public health, but to negatively impact the Mexican population that was crossing the border. That isn't science, it's racism. In addition, the science is starting to disagree with you. There isn't a whole lot of data at this point (at least in the USA, due to pot's Schedule I status) but hopefully (and this goes back to the subject of TFA) this will change as attitudes towards marijuana change (a majority of the population now believes it should be legalized).
The dealers don't like it? It can only be a good thing. Fuck those guys.
No, so long as you have the ability/authority to make the changes that PCI requires. If you've got a back-office accounting system that can't handle tokenized credit card information, and 100% will NOT accept anything less than a full credit card number and expiration date to enter an order, it's "compensating control" time. Which is a fancy way of saying "Our business practices suck and we don't want to change them, so security suffers".
Bad assumption. The people making purchasing decisions (especially at large organizations) do not base their decisions on unimportant things like "quality" or "technical factors", they very frequently make those decisions based on 1) initial cost and 2) who they play golf with. I've seen this in action, where the people who actually know things are standing on their heads trying to get management to understand why buying $x is a bad idea for valid technical reasons, and some retard MBA makes the wrong decision because a sales rep bought them dinner at a conference once.
That has what to do with the topic at hand? Oh, right, you wingnuts don't need logic or relevance, everything's fair game to push your agenda.
Welcome to America, where the beatings will continue until morale improves. What you describe is "being competitive".
Employers have no incentive to treat their people like human beings. The next guy treats his employees just as badly, and if you find yourself someplace where they treat you like a human being, you're getting ripped off in terms of pay/benefits. Seriously, employers are like car salesmen here; they know they can treat you like shit because the next guy is just as bad. Oh, and medical insurance, you have none if you quit.
What? On what planet is that a good idea? That guy has paid for himself many times over, why would you punish that?
Undoing moderation to ask a question: It sounds like he brought in 178.2 million GBP of revenue after his commission, and they fired him for it. And it sounds like they may not have even paid him his commission. I can't imagine how that can be legal, especially in a country that isn't the USA. I've heard rumors that employees/contractors actually have some rights and recourse when their employer fucks them over over there.
This implies that those who make those decisions are capable of looking at it from that point of view. Fraud *might* not happen, so let's assume it won't, whereas those new terminals *definitely* will cost money RIGHT NOW, so they can't do it.
It might not be allowed, but it happens. All the time. Lazy programmers and/or retarded business systems that require all this data for no good reason other than that's how they've always done it lead to all kinds of shit being stored, including CVV data which is a HUGE no-no. I've seen this with my own eyes.
Because of the expense involved in replacing the current terminals with chip and pin-compatible models. Since nothing happens in this country if nobody can make a buck, and replacing these systems improves security, but decreases the bottom line, nobody will do it.
Private schools are less expensive because they can control who attends. They can turn down students that would be more expensive to teach. (Private/charter schools do better academically for the same reason: they don't have to accept the students that will bring their test scores down.)
It's not a fair comparison, much as some people would like you to think.
You've kind of made my point for me - there are different causes involved with a private company not maintaining and a government entity (like a school district) not maintaining. The former doesn't maintain because it's expensive and they want to keep expenses down (and therefore profits up), and will do so at the expense of safety. The latter doesn't maintain for the reason you gave: low budget due to political pressure to keep taxes low (even when not maintaining the schools costs more in the long run). It's relatively easy to fix the schools, give them a sane budget (and raise taxes if you have to), but in the current "TAXES BAD!!1!!" environment that's not likely to happen. It's much harder to get a for-profit company to lower their profits voluntarily (even if doing so is mandatory due to regulation). Additional regulation is cheerfully ignored when the company can get away with it / get around it. Our water company committed criminal acts; it's doubtful that additional regulation would help in this case, unless it had real teeth (as in we take all your money if you do X, Y, or Z). But that leaves the town without a water supply.
Not always. Government might be bureaucratic and slow (and possibly corrupt) but at least they don't have a profit motive driving them to cut (potentially deadly) corners. Our water company is private, and they are horrible horrible horrible. To the point where our fairly conservative town is considering buying them out. Our water quality is terrible, our rates are ridiculous, and the management is so bad that at any time we have about 4 hours' worth of water if (non-redundant) pumps should fail. They're required by law to have disaster plans in writing in easily accessible binders at their offices and they haven't bothered. We had a boil order for 14 days a few years ago, and they're so bad that one of their managers *went to jail* because he doctored samples sent to a lab to determine levels of bacteria so that they would read lower.
Private companies present a whole other set of problems, and they're not automatically better than government at the same task. At least with government we can vote people out of office; a private company has no such threat to encourage good behavior.
Politics. Guessing that snub fighters weren't in the initial spec, so they weren't accounted for. Once the problem was found, it was glossed over to protect the well-connected people who made the mistake in the first place. Hey, the death toll was only in the thousands, no big deal. Someone probably did a quiet cost/benefit analysis and determined that the expense of fixing the problem would raise too many troubling questions, and when the boss has a habit of Force choking people who rock the boat, that boat doesn't get rocked.
The savings wouldn't come from prescription drug prices, they would come from 1) lower overhead when dealing with one insurer instead of 29348792384 (ever wonder why there are 12 administrative staff working at a modestly-sized medical practice? Insurance forms/claims/fights.), and 2) removing the profit motive from health insurance. 1) presumes a public/socialized option, of course, like the grown-up countries have.
You have to remember, though, Big Pharma doesn't give a shit about anything other than money. Not saving lives or curing disease, but selling you pills. They could take a significant haircut and still lead the world in new developments.