Pity the only thing that's rewarded in this society is wealth. Money might not be everything, but it's the only thing that matters. Money buys you respect, security, and social station; it doesn't matter if you work 80 hours/week for it or inherited it from your parents.
Intelligence and hard work are only rewarded if you use them to earn money. If you use them to help your fellow man, or grow intellectually at the expense of making money, you're a sucker and treated as such, or pitied for your "wasted potential".
I'll take myself as an example. Most people consider academic acheivement to be an indicator of intelligence; if this is accurate, then I'm above average. But I guess I can't be that smart, because I foolishly listened to someone when she told me I should study what interested me, and not worry about how much earning potential a degree in that field would earn me. I'd like to go back in time and poke her in the eye; I earned high honors along with my BS, but what it qualified me for in terms of employment would put me below those on welfare in terms of income. I wound up going into a completely different field so I could pay my bills, and learned the hard way that, indeed, money is the only thing that matters.
Call me materialistic, pessimistic, shallow, a troll, whatever you want. Deep down you know I'm right; think about it next time you grovel to a bank for a loan so you can have a place to live or a car to drive. That's the most common example of those with money exerting control over those that don't; in the final analysis, the banks have near-total control over your life because they have money and you don't. They've got such influence over you that the $200k (for example) that you borrow to buy a house earns them $300k or more in interest, and this is considered acceptable, even proper.
I think you can blame the reliance on Windows. I find the same thing. If it isn't point and click or Windows, you can bet the IT department is going to say not supported.
They're going to say that because more than likely their department is 50% understaffed, 70% undertrained and 95% underpaid. (That is, 95% of the workers in their IT department are underpaid.) I think if you ask the average IT worker, they'd say they'd love to support more things that their end users ask for. The problem is that supporting more technologies requires more work, and they don't have enough people to do the work that they have. So the result is that they have to hide behind their support boundaries to maintain any semblance of sanity in their workload.
When your IT people say "not supported" they're not saying it to be lazy, mean, or apathetic, they're really saying "We can't cover the work we have, we can't take on more by supporting that." Plus, asking for training on additional technologies at most companies will get you laughed out of your manager's office if you're lucky (if you're not, they'll replace you with someone too dumb to train.)
It really all comes back to money. When you don't spend enough on IT salaries, you get one of two things: not enough smart people, or too many dumb people. Big business seems to be unable to comprehend the concept of "you get what you pay for" in terms of IT salaries. They want warm bodies who are willing to take anything to keep from being unemployed (or deported; let's not forget the REAL reason companies hire H1-B workers; they can say "Do this or you'll get deported"), not qualified people who require a living wage.
What company would go for the idea of willfully lowering productivity?
What company would stand for allowing their employees to waste company time and resources on Weatherbug and porn and warez?
Yes, it would negatively impact productivity in the short term, but in the long term, one of two things would happen: Either the "repeat offenders" would change their behavior, or their productivity would be reduced to the point where they became redundant.
Of course, this is in the fantasy world where IT workers are actually allowed to do their jobs (keeping the computers running smoothly and enhancing profitability for the company by improving efficiency), and where anyone in management can see beyond this quarter.
Umm. I don't think that's true. If you work in an at-will state without a contract then you can be let-go at any time.
You can be let go at any time even with a contract.
You can also quit at any time with or without notice.
In theory, yes. However, most employment contracts do include the non-compete language that is the focus of this particular story. They can't keep you from quitting, but they can keep you from earning a living.
But if you have a contract then that becomes enforceable in Civil Court.
If you can afford legal representation, that is. Attorneys don't like to take this kind of case on contingency, and the ones who would probably aren't the cream of the crop, if you know what I mean. (read: personal injury lawyers.)
If that contract promised you employment for a set number of years (or what not) then it damn well would be enforceable -- employment at will or not.
At least in this state "at-will" supercedes any guaranteed time of employment. If one were to file suit in civil court, you'd lose, either because of the "at-will" factor or because your former employer would invent some cause that would be nearly impossible to prove one way or another. Since the burden of proof in a civil case (I'm still NAL) would be on the plaintiff, that would most likely result in a decision for the defendant or an outright dismissal for lack of evidence.
Of course I don't think a Court can force them to let you come back to work. But they could order them to pay you all of your wages that you would have earned in that period.
In theory, yes. In practice, not so much. If a company is determined enough, they can delay payout nearly indefinitely or offer a much smaller settlement once the employee has reached the point of abject poverty.
However, the corporations, when found out, pay a fine and can contniue. They are not barred from operating in their field. They are not closed down.
This is the point that people are missing. Employment contracts by their very nature are biased in favor of the employer.
Think about it. If you work in an "at will" employment state, as so many of us do, any "employment contract" isn't worth the paper it's printed on. There's nothing keeping your employer from escorting you from the building at any given time, no matter what you may have signed. At least in this state, no reason needs to be given for your termination (and in others HR can come up with some bullshit corporate doublespeak to give lip service to the process); however, the kicker is that even though your employer may have technically violated some of the terms of the employment contract, there is usually a clause (and IANAL) that states something to the effect of "invalidation of one clause of this contract shall not invalidate the other clauses," meaning that just because we broke one clause doesn't mean that you're not held to the other clauses.
So effectively, the employee receives no benefit from having an employment contract. Sure, they can sue in civil court, but precedent and Big Expensive Corporate Lawyers (tm) will beat nearly every claim, except in the case of blatant documented discrimination, and even then it's a tough sell.
Disclaimer: I was at one time employed at a state agency. Not as a state worker, but as a contractor.
Because they've been told that, in fact, formats do matter, and having been made aware of it they will start to care?
State workers care about two things: jack and shit. Doubly so when you're talking about computers.
True story: at the agency I worked at, the "lifers" had union protection from being forced to be computer literate, and the state could not list computer literacy in any job postings. Theory was, that if they made computer literacy a condition of employment, they'd have sufficient justification to replace the older, more-highly-paid workers with people they didn't have to pay so much. That, or the lifers would have to actually *gasp* LEARN something. Can't have that.
It's a matter of laziness
NOW you're on track.
Once people start thinking
Again, state workers, thinking doesn't apply.
their boss has told them to
See above. If their boss tells them they have to do/learn something about their computer, the union gets involved.
Americans are a mixed bag also, there are quite a few folks who are good, but if an American sucks, he/she sucks real hard, because Americans are ridiculously difficult to fire for non-performance.
Why do people have this impression? It's just as easy to say "You're fired, get out" to a US citizen as it is to anyone else, as employment law (such as it is) is biased in favor of the employer in nearly every state. In some states, when an employer is asked for the reason for the termination, the ex-employee is told "We don't have to give a reason", a statement which is true and accurate, since the employee is considered to be an employee "at will", and employment contracts are unenforceable.
Why do people think it's harder to fire Americans?
2) There is a reward/difficulty issue that has nothing to do with religion. Most that could (with effort) complete a degree in the physical sciences see that lawyers, accountants, marketing specialists, etc. tend to make *more* money with less personal responsibility and greater choice of employers. Therefore they runwaway from more rigorous physical science options.
This is a symptom of a larger, disturbing trend in American culture. Intelligence and academic acheivement are no longer rewarded in our society (if indeed, they ever were.) Quite the opposite, if you start to demonstrate critical thinking skills in any form of public discourse, you'll immediately be attacked as liberal|un-American|unpatriotic|a whiner. Ignorance, once seen as a negative characteristic, is now not only tolerated, but expected and encouraged. A CEO isn't expected to know how to send an e-mail, they have people that know that for them. The people that know that for them are encouraged not to know what goes on in their boss' business, and curiosity or motivation to acheive a higher status frequently becomes a career-limiting event.
People no longer encourage those around them to share knowledge and information, but rather spend a significant portion of each day trying to keep the other guy from learning something, lest the other guy get a competitive edge of some kind. The energy they spend on throwing the other guy under the bus could be spent learning what the other guy learns, but who wants to learn anything? We'd rather be lazy and just be an obstruction.
3) The problem of offshoring/outsourcing. What person in their right mind is going to go for a minimum of 4 years at a respected computer science major at University when after graduation he will be in direct competition with guys in Bangalore that will work for $5/hour and be wealthy on a local basis?
There's another facet to this phenomenon which isn't limited to CS majors, but runs the gamut; if, by some small miracle, you DO manage to find a job in your field that doesn't require an impossible-to-get amount of experience (meaning everyone wants you to have 3 years experience but is hiring graduates, can you tell I hate HR?) you will most likely be replacing someone (or in a lot of cases, two someones) who made three times as much as you are offered. Those folks go try to make ends meet working at Wal-Mart, and you get to take an insulting salary. But the company saves lots of money, so it's OK. You put in herculean amounts of effort into doing the job, fighting your hideous overworked status with as best an attitude as you can muster, with the naive belief that your hard work will be rewarded. Then comes wage review time, and you get a raise that doesn't even cover inflation. Meanwhile you're eating Ramen and living in a rabbit hutch so you can pay off your student loans. It's gotten so that I don't even encourage the high school students that I meet to go to college, because I know for a fact that it's become a complete waste of time and money. Sure, maybe that B.A. helps you get a slightly better job and salary, but if you add in the $70,000 of debt you garnered to get it, you're not any better off.
I'm reminded of the "E-Learning" system at Best Buy...I think if they switched to Open Office
You're not serious. Best Buy? Using that commie Open Source stuff? What color is the sky on your planet? I'd be very shocked if anyone in the entire BB organization (past a few blueshirts in the stores working there until they get another job) could even say they'd ever even heard of OSS. Just mentioning the concept you suggest to anyone of consequence in their IT would probably be enough to get you fired; after all, if you're talking about not using something from Microsoft when you could be, then you must be anti-Microsoft, and therefore cannot work towards making customers buy Microsoft products.
If a hospital network isn't secured, IMO it is GROSS negligence on the part of the IT staff of the hospital.
This makes a few assumptions:
That there is an IT staff at said hospital,
That said IT staff, if it exists, has collective brainpower greater than that of a pile of wet coffee grounds,
That some impervious-to-logic bean-counter hasn't decided that securing the network is too expensive,
That some overpaid quack M.D. hasn't complained to the administration that the network doesn't "just work",
That said administration gives a damn about negligence.
In my experience, it's a small fucking miracle that the hospital even HAS a wireless network. Maybe it's different in the UK, but here in the States most hospitals go to irrational lengths to avoid spending money on any technology newer than 10 years old. Unless they can (over)bill the HMOs for it, that is, in which case it's laptops for everyone!... except for the people who do actual work, like the nursing staff.
Someone want to tell me whose bright idea it was to have for-profit hospitals? Did they really think that having making money be the primary goal of a health care institution was a good idea? Free clue folks: The profits aren't going to come from patients choosing to use your services because you make a better mousetrap, they're going to come from spending as little as possible on said mousetrap. The vast majority of patients in the US health care system have little or no choice in who provides their health care, especially at the hospital level. They go where the HMO tells them to (if they don't want to go bankrupt paying for it, that is.) As a result, the hospitals make the choice to cut costs by any means necessary. As long as the level of care remains at a level that prevents malpractice suit settlements from eating into the bottom line, that's good enough for the administration. Meanwhile, the people who give a damn about the patients (again, the nursing staff) see their staffing levels drop to dangerous levels and watch as patients get denied care by some lawyer who couldn't diagnose a cold if it walked up and sneezed on them.
Not my intention. You're entitled to your opinion.
1) Purchasing a pirated copy of Windows is in no way similar to purchasing a product from an unauthored dealer. At best, it is similar to purchasing a drill from someone who stole it off a truck.
What if the person buying it has no knowledge that the copy isn't legitimate? For example, Joe Sixpack goes down to his local mom-and-pop computer store and buys a new computer. Unbeknownst to him, the shop installs a pirated copy of Windows XP. Joe has no actual knowledge that the copy isn't legit, and indeed would be hard pressed to determine as such unless he educates himself as to how to tell.
2) They are still offering security updates to anyone, regardless of the origin of the software they have on their box (nullifying your "broken product" complaint). To follow through on your analogy, the recall would still be honored in this case.
Upon re-reading TFA, you are correct. My bad. However, there is another possibility: people with less-than-legit copies of Windows will turn off the automatic updates for fear of being busted. It's possible they might make the same mistake I did, by assuming all downloads are subject to this ban. Either way, the result is the same: unpatched Windows boxes.
3) They are under no obligation to provide new features to people who didn't purchase the product originally. To follow through on your analogy, if DeWalt offered a free drill bit to those who sent in proof of purchase, and your UPC symbol was cut off the box (because the thief who stole it didn't want the goods to be traced back to them), you wouldn't be able to get the free drill bit.
I wouldn't classify security patches as "new features", I would classify them as "we made a broken product, here's the fix". See my "exploding battery" analogy above.
Your DeWalt drill doesn't cause problems for other people if it breaks. Windows installations missing security patches (as people will shut off automatic updates for fear of being caught) become zombies very quickly, adding to the spread of viruses, spam, etc.
Also, the copy of Windows in question isn't likely to be a knock-off, it most likely is the same OS that you can buy off the shelf. A better analogy would be if you bought a genuine DeWalt drill from someone who wasn't an authorized DeWalt dealer, and the (genuine OEM DeWalt) batteries had a habit of exploding and hurting people around the user. More than likely DeWalt would issue a recall on *all* batteries, and more than likely they'd be pretty lenient about making sure the drill was purchased through authorized channels. In essence, the safety of the community would take precedence over the other factors involved. (Also, the effort to check where the drills came from would cause serious headaches, logistically. It would be more expedient to just replace the battery when it's sent in and not worry about the legitimacy.)
Granted, we're talking about risk of physical injury vs. network security, but IMHO the obligation is the same: if you put out a broken product, you have an obligation (IMHO) to put out a fix. Anything less is corporate irresponsibility that could subsequently expose the company to liability, should a loss occur.
Of course, MS doesn't care about that, since they have better lawyers than just about anyone else.
Wal-Mart is only recently breaking into urban, and more wealthy, areas. So while the dollar wage may be less, the buying power ofthat wage is not less in the same percentage.
I don't know how you're figuring that. Wal-Mart is paying the same rates to someone in the city as out in the rural areas; the problem is that the city has a much higher cost of living, so the wages are effectively lower.
Another cause of the difference is that Wal-Mart employees are not unionized, while most supermarket employees are, and some of that wage difference also goes to paying the union.
Perhaps, but certianly not all of it, and being able to bargain collectively with the company IMHO more than compensates for the union dues through improved benefits, progressive discipline, and improved working conditions.
Whether corporate health insurance is cheaper to the economy than emergency room treatment is debatable - but isn't a cause for blaming walmart for not providing healthcare, it's a cause for changing the rather stupid way we provide medical care to the uninsured.
No argument from me there, as far as I can tell the entire health care system in this country is broken. However, as that's unlikely to change anytime soon, it's irrelevant to this discussion. It is what it is, at least for the forseeable future.
Lower prices are almost ALWAYS a good thing, because they mean you're producing a good more effeciently.
Taken purely by itself, independent of any other factors, I would agree. It's how we get to those lower prices where we run into trouble. Getting to those prices on the backs of the workers damages the system.
More efficient production frees up money to be spent on other things
Such as health care for the workers. Or improved wages. Or, more often than not, bonuses for the executives.
we keep the same number of people employed, and we *ALL* get more stuff.
Problem, here. Let's say there's a group of 20 people getting a given wage. They have a certain amount of buying power, based on that wage and the cost of living where they are. If you cut their wages, they're still employed, but their buying power decreases. *They* don't get more stuff. (Wal-Mart providing lower prices doesn't make up for their loss in buying power. And you can't buy *everything* at Wal-Mart, eventually you're going to need a car or a refrigerator.) Multiply that by the literally millions of people that Wal-Mart employs, and you're talking about a serious dent in the public's ability to keep the economy running. Please see the grandparent for why this could spell disaster for the economy.
Of course, your whole point assumes that Wal-Mart pays its employees less than other retailers. This is unlikely to be true.
Quite true. (warning, pdf.)Paraphrasing, the average supermarket worker makes $10.35 an hour, while the average Wal-mart clerk makes $8.23 an hour. This isn't open to debate, it's fact, as verified by multiple independent sources.
And...? If Wal-Mart has figured out how to sell grocereies without needing to pay people to manage inventory, that's a GOOD thing - it allows our economy to be more productive.
Except when people can't afford to buy groceries anymore.
Let's assume Wal-Mart pays its work force minimum wage (which it doesn't), and let's say Wal-Mart were, just because it suddenly decides to be a welfare company, to raise everyone's wage to $6.2. That's a 20% increase.
In order for that 20% increase to ONLY result in a 1% change in expenses, wages would need to make up less than 5% of expenses, which is obviously too low, but we'll assume you meant that it wouldonly make a 1% difference in expenses and that, if you had actually said that, you'd be right.
Wal-Mart made 2.5 billion in net income on 70.6 billion in revenue in Q1CY05, leaving 69.1 billion in expenses. 1% of 69.1 billion is 690 million - or over 25% of profit, not 1%.
Granted, my numbers were off, and it's clear that they weren't meant to be accurate, I was speaking in hyperbole. But you've proven the point I was trying to make: they could do it if they wanted to.
How does that cost me billions of dollars? If we were to assume this were true, which it isn't, wouldn't every other grocery store not paying its workers health insurance also be costing the tax payers billions of dollars?
Yes, actually. The numbers go into the billions for Wal-Mart because they're the world's largest retailer.
Where is this money going to come from? We've already shown that it's well beyond the ability of Wal-Marat to cover this with their profits
Disproven above, using your own numbers. 1.875 billion is still a ton of money for one quarter's business.
so short of the company going out of business, that means prices will have to go up, prices paid by.... oh yeah, the consumers/taxpayers.
You said yourself:
Eitehr we pay for everyone's healthcarein higher prices for goods, or we pay for it in taxes.
So we pay it either way.
Wal-Mart's business practices are cost-neutral in regards to tax payers.
Health insurance gives their insured access to medical care in such a way that efficiencies of scale and the benefits of negotiated rates can be realized. When an uninsured patient gets rolled into an ER after getting hit by a bus, it costs a lot more for the state to pick up their tab than an HMO. So no, it isn't cost-neutral. The amount that prices would have to rise to pay for health insurance for the workers would be exceeded by the amount of money saved by the taxpayers.
Lower prices aren't always a good thing. It's a vicious cycle: Consumers demand lower prices. Retailers (not just Wal-Mart) cut salary/benefits to workers. Workers can no longer afford existing prices. Retailers have to lower prices more, so they cut more salary/benefits. Workers can no longer afford existing prices. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's unsustainable. Improvements in efficiency are finite. Eventually retailers can't lower prices any more without going broke, and the economy implodes. Everyone loses.
Wal-Mart prides itself on keeping many people firmly in the category of "employed at all", as well as in the category of "Providing less expensive goods for the poor." We just had a walmart super center open up here. The groceries at Wal-Mart are cheaper than the groceries at the other grocery stores in town - and not 5% cheaper, often 20% cheaper. That means the working poor just had their food bills go down 20%.
When that's hand-in-hand with 20% lower wages, there's no benefit. That supercenter is cheaper now because it's in the "destroy the competition" phase of its lifetime. When all the other supermarkets in the area go out of business (putting people out of work) you'll see those prices go up. And the people who are out of work will probably have to work at the supercenter at lower wages.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, it's because they never developed any job skills worth more than the minimum wage
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, chances are that it's because all the other jobs they could do with their skill set have disappeared because Wal-Mart has crushed them. Believe it or not, customer service, inventory management, employee management, etc. are all job skills.
That's not Wal-Mart's problem. Wal-Mart shouldn't have to pay more money for employees than the employees are worth (as dictated by supply of labor with the requisite skill set)
This is true on a level playing field. However, a large part of Wal-Mart's business model is elimination of the competition. When there are fewer jobs available to workers in a given talent pool, wages go down. What the worker is worth isn't a consideration, it's how little they can get away with paying them.
and more importantly, I shouldn't have to pay more for groceries because people feel like they're entitled to more of my money 'just because', as it's ultimately me, the consumer, who pays for higher labor costs.
True, living wages would have an effect on consumer pricing, because big business would simply pass the costs on to the consumer instead of taking as much as a 1% hit to their profits. However, by paying as little as they do, Wal-Mart costs the American taxpayer (read: everyone, including you) billions of dollars each year. This might not make sense until you realize that the majority of people working at Wal-Mart, despite working full-time hours, 1) qualify for food stamps/welfare/WIC/$socialProgram, which costs the taxpayer money, and 2) do not have health insurance, which does not eliminate the need for medical care, as much as people would like to think it does. The taxpayer ends up picking up the tab for their health care in the form of Medicaid/uncompensated care programs.
I earned good grades in high school, went to collee, and now have a real job. Some of my classmates screwed around in high school, didn't go to college, and now work at Wal-Mart. We live in a society where you have the freedom of choice. Consequences are the price you pay for choice.
Lots of people earn good grades in high school, went to college (where they learned how to spell college), and wound up at Wal-Mart because it's the only place that would hire them without experience. Living wages benefit everyone. Wal-Mart could easily afford to pay living wages and provide at least rudimentary health insurance for their full-time workers. They choose not to. The consequences of their actions are higher profits for the company, rich people getting richer, and millions of workers making it possible without receiving any of the benefits.
This raises a point regarding objectionable content. IMHO once you've taken it upon yourself to say "We filter some content" you've taken on a responsibility to filter it all; the problem is, you're never going to completely match all of your customers' expectations of your filtering. This concept goes far beyond the realm of telecommunications; the analogy is Wal-Mart refusing to carry music with parental warning labels on it. By taking a stand against "immoral" (or whatever) content, they've created a perception that whatever is bought from their store will not have any objectionable content. ISTR that they were sued recently over a CD bought by a minor that had the F-Bomb on it. While I disagree with Wal-Mart on this topic (as well as most other topics), I cannot argue that they have a right to stock whatever items they want, as a private company. The trouble is now they're dealing with the consequences of their actions. (I found it kind of funny that when I had a contract to replace some parts in their cash registers, I noticed that every store I worked in had no trouble stocking M-rated video games, such as the now-infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Yay for hypocrisy.)
Lots of people thought that lawsuit was frivolous; I think that it served an important purpose. Wal-Mart prides itself on its "family values" (while ironically keeping many families firmly in the category of the "working poor"). The suit reminds them that there are consequences for taking on the role of moral arbiter, and they may get more trouble than they bargained for.
Of course, if anyone can afford to take the hit, it's the biggest retailer in the world.
That can't be right. Surely if you win the court case, you can recoup the lawyer's / solicitor's fees from the loosing party? Otherwise anyone with lots of money, could take anyone with not much money to court, and the poor person would be forced to accept whatever the rich person said just to reduce the bill.
Welcome to the American legal system. This is status quo over here; the only way the defendant would be able to recoup their legal fees is either to 1) countersue the plaintiff, in which case he'd run the risk of being stuck with even more legal fees, or 2) if the judge decided that the case was so completely without merit that the plaintiff should pay the defendant's legal fees. In the USA, you get as much justice as you can afford. This is why the RIAA has settled most of the suits it's brought against individual file sharers; the defendants can't compete with the RIAA's deep pockets, and the RIAA's lawyers will chew their clothes off if they try.
If a show goes straight to DVD, not passing through TV, the people buying it will be those who have heard about the show before and see the DVDs offered have a good quality/price ratio.
These two things should correlate, but in practice, they do not. Chances are the people who have heard about the show and intend to buy it on DVD will buy it regardless of quality.
You are true about the case when there are no other, better, ways of getting the content.
You've come to the point; there is a monopoly at work here, so the localization company can basically do whatever they want so long as the licensing is obeyed.
If the companies would have released the DVDs quickly after they aquire the shows, having quality translations that infer the original nuances and don't charge extra for dubs, then people would buy.
People will buy anyway. The average consumer won't know or care about the difference between a quality production and a steaming pile of digital crap.
This would presume that the company in question wants (or can afford) to care what the consumer actually wants.
The sad reality is that it's usually incredibly cheaper to deliver content the way people prefer it, which lowers your overhead and lowers your workload.
On the contrary, researching the market for consumer input costs money and time, thereby increasing overhead costs. Unfortunately the average buyer of this product will buy it despite its glaring flaws, because they don't know any better (or don't care enough to change their behavior). As long as the distributors continue to buy their product, they don't have to give a flying whatsit about the consumer.
The bottom line is it doesn't increase profits measurably to listen to the consumer, because the consumer is too stupid to know when the product sucks. Wal-Mart has based an entire empire on this premise. See.sig for more info.
Yeah, you just have more faith in the Govt. than I do.
This raises an interesting point. I'm a third-generation New England liberal, and still believe that the government has a responsibility to the have-nots; but I find myself increasingly alienated from a government ruled by rich white people and the corporations they run. On the one hand, I'm thrilled that the people of Lafayette are rebelling against their corporate masters by taking matters into their own (the peoples') hands. On the other, I have limited confidence in a municipal government to run an agency providing internet bandwidth such as we're seeing here. If you thought dealing with Verizon was difficult when there was a technical problem, wait until you have to call the local Department of Public Works because a router is down. Chances are that whoever you speak with (if you can find anyone at all to call) will have gotten his/her job through political connections rather than technical qualifications, and cannot be fired or reprimanded for poor job performance. Worse, (and more likely,) the town could put technical support out for bid, and wind up with lowest bidder quality.
Oh, and congratulations to the parent poster for being an actual conservative, rather than the current leading brand of NeoCon. You're a rarity these days. I never thought I'd see the day when Reagan looked like a better alternative to the current primate occupying the Oval.
Oooh, nice obscure reference there. I wonder how many people will catch it.
Where did I leave that Rebus tape...
In a similar vein, now that the TV industry is fighting our ability to fast-forward through advertising, how long will it be before they start to lobby for the outlawing of off buttons?
Lucky you. You've found a capmpany that actually spends money on technology. You work in some utopia where your CEO sees value in new things.
The place where I work spends money on technology. Niether of our new corporate standard desktop nor laptop comes with a floppy drive. You've never heard such whining.
"If it doesn't have a floppy then how do I send people files?" "Send them to a shared drive that the other person has access to, or use email" "But we've always sent stuff this way! We don't know how to do that shared thingy, and I'm not typing the whole thing into an email!" "... Please contact IT for training." (I'm really glad I can do that.)
I'm all for removing floppy drives from new computers. It's one less way for idiots to screw them up and bring down the enterprise in the process; it eliminates a virus vector. Now if they would just remove the USB floppy drives from our corporate standard purchasing sheet...
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Intelligence and hard work are only rewarded if you use them to earn money. If you use them to help your fellow man, or grow intellectually at the expense of making money, you're a sucker and treated as such, or pitied for your "wasted potential".
I'll take myself as an example. Most people consider academic acheivement to be an indicator of intelligence; if this is accurate, then I'm above average. But I guess I can't be that smart, because I foolishly listened to someone when she told me I should study what interested me, and not worry about how much earning potential a degree in that field would earn me. I'd like to go back in time and poke her in the eye; I earned high honors along with my BS, but what it qualified me for in terms of employment would put me below those on welfare in terms of income. I wound up going into a completely different field so I could pay my bills, and learned the hard way that, indeed, money is the only thing that matters.
Call me materialistic, pessimistic, shallow, a troll, whatever you want. Deep down you know I'm right; think about it next time you grovel to a bank for a loan so you can have a place to live or a car to drive. That's the most common example of those with money exerting control over those that don't; in the final analysis, the banks have near-total control over your life because they have money and you don't. They've got such influence over you that the $200k (for example) that you borrow to buy a house earns them $300k or more in interest, and this is considered acceptable, even proper.
When your IT people say "not supported" they're not saying it to be lazy, mean, or apathetic, they're really saying "We can't cover the work we have, we can't take on more by supporting that." Plus, asking for training on additional technologies at most companies will get you laughed out of your manager's office if you're lucky (if you're not, they'll replace you with someone too dumb to train.)
It really all comes back to money. When you don't spend enough on IT salaries, you get one of two things: not enough smart people, or too many dumb people. Big business seems to be unable to comprehend the concept of "you get what you pay for" in terms of IT salaries. They want warm bodies who are willing to take anything to keep from being unemployed (or deported; let's not forget the REAL reason companies hire H1-B workers; they can say "Do this or you'll get deported"), not qualified people who require a living wage.
Yes, it would negatively impact productivity in the short term, but in the long term, one of two things would happen: Either the "repeat offenders" would change their behavior, or their productivity would be reduced to the point where they became redundant.
Of course, this is in the fantasy world where IT workers are actually allowed to do their jobs (keeping the computers running smoothly and enhancing profitability for the company by improving efficiency), and where anyone in management can see beyond this quarter.
Think about it. If you work in an "at will" employment state, as so many of us do, any "employment contract" isn't worth the paper it's printed on. There's nothing keeping your employer from escorting you from the building at any given time, no matter what you may have signed. At least in this state, no reason needs to be given for your termination (and in others HR can come up with some bullshit corporate doublespeak to give lip service to the process); however, the kicker is that even though your employer may have technically violated some of the terms of the employment contract, there is usually a clause (and IANAL) that states something to the effect of "invalidation of one clause of this contract shall not invalidate the other clauses," meaning that just because we broke one clause doesn't mean that you're not held to the other clauses.
So effectively, the employee receives no benefit from having an employment contract. Sure, they can sue in civil court, but precedent and Big Expensive Corporate Lawyers (tm) will beat nearly every claim, except in the case of blatant documented discrimination, and even then it's a tough sell.
True story: at the agency I worked at, the "lifers" had union protection from being forced to be computer literate, and the state could not list computer literacy in any job postings. Theory was, that if they made computer literacy a condition of employment, they'd have sufficient justification to replace the older, more-highly-paid workers with people they didn't have to pay so much. That, or the lifers would have to actually *gasp* LEARN something. Can't have that.
NOW you're on track.Again, state workers, thinking doesn't apply.See above. If their boss tells them they have to do/learn something about their computer, the union gets involved.And you thought YOU had difficult users.
Why do people think it's harder to fire Americans?
People no longer encourage those around them to share knowledge and information, but rather spend a significant portion of each day trying to keep the other guy from learning something, lest the other guy get a competitive edge of some kind. The energy they spend on throwing the other guy under the bus could be spent learning what the other guy learns, but who wants to learn anything? We'd rather be lazy and just be an obstruction.
There's another facet to this phenomenon which isn't limited to CS majors, but runs the gamut; if, by some small miracle, you DO manage to find a job in your field that doesn't require an impossible-to-get amount of experience (meaning everyone wants you to have 3 years experience but is hiring graduates, can you tell I hate HR?) you will most likely be replacing someone (or in a lot of cases, two someones) who made three times as much as you are offered. Those folks go try to make ends meet working at Wal-Mart, and you get to take an insulting salary. But the company saves lots of money, so it's OK. You put in herculean amounts of effort into doing the job, fighting your hideous overworked status with as best an attitude as you can muster, with the naive belief that your hard work will be rewarded. Then comes wage review time, and you get a raise that doesn't even cover inflation. Meanwhile you're eating Ramen and living in a rabbit hutch so you can pay off your student loans. It's gotten so that I don't even encourage the high school students that I meet to go to college, because I know for a fact that it's become a complete waste of time and money. Sure, maybe that B.A. helps you get a slightly better job and salary, but if you add in the $70,000 of debt you garnered to get it, you're not any better off.
Upon a second reading of your post, I see what you were trying to say. Forgive my venom, please.
One priority: Money is all that matters.
- That there is an IT staff at said hospital,
- That said IT staff, if it exists, has collective brainpower greater than that of a pile of wet coffee grounds,
- That some impervious-to-logic bean-counter hasn't decided that securing the network is too expensive,
- That some overpaid quack M.D. hasn't complained to the administration that the network doesn't "just work",
- That said administration gives a damn about negligence.
In my experience, it's a small fucking miracle that the hospital even HAS a wireless network. Maybe it's different in the UK, but here in the States most hospitals go to irrational lengths to avoid spending money on any technology newer than 10 years old. Unless they can (over)bill the HMOs for it, that is, in which case it's laptops for everyone!... except for the people who do actual work, like the nursing staff.Someone want to tell me whose bright idea it was to have for-profit hospitals? Did they really think that having making money be the primary goal of a health care institution was a good idea? Free clue folks: The profits aren't going to come from patients choosing to use your services because you make a better mousetrap, they're going to come from spending as little as possible on said mousetrap. The vast majority of patients in the US health care system have little or no choice in who provides their health care, especially at the hospital level. They go where the HMO tells them to (if they don't want to go bankrupt paying for it, that is.) As a result, the hospitals make the choice to cut costs by any means necessary. As long as the level of care remains at a level that prevents malpractice suit settlements from eating into the bottom line, that's good enough for the administration. Meanwhile, the people who give a damn about the patients (again, the nursing staff) see their staffing levels drop to dangerous levels and watch as patients get denied care by some lawyer who couldn't diagnose a cold if it walked up and sneezed on them.
I'm really glad I didn't go to med school.
Your DeWalt drill doesn't cause problems for other people if it breaks. Windows installations missing security patches (as people will shut off automatic updates for fear of being caught) become zombies very quickly, adding to the spread of viruses, spam, etc.
Also, the copy of Windows in question isn't likely to be a knock-off, it most likely is the same OS that you can buy off the shelf. A better analogy would be if you bought a genuine DeWalt drill from someone who wasn't an authorized DeWalt dealer, and the (genuine OEM DeWalt) batteries had a habit of exploding and hurting people around the user. More than likely DeWalt would issue a recall on *all* batteries, and more than likely they'd be pretty lenient about making sure the drill was purchased through authorized channels. In essence, the safety of the community would take precedence over the other factors involved. (Also, the effort to check where the drills came from would cause serious headaches, logistically. It would be more expedient to just replace the battery when it's sent in and not worry about the legitimacy.)
Granted, we're talking about risk of physical injury vs. network security, but IMHO the obligation is the same: if you put out a broken product, you have an obligation (IMHO) to put out a fix. Anything less is corporate irresponsibility that could subsequently expose the company to liability, should a loss occur.
Of course, MS doesn't care about that, since they have better lawyers than just about anyone else.
Lower prices aren't always a good thing. It's a vicious cycle: Consumers demand lower prices. Retailers (not just Wal-Mart) cut salary/benefits to workers. Workers can no longer afford existing prices. Retailers have to lower prices more, so they cut more salary/benefits. Workers can no longer afford existing prices. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's unsustainable. Improvements in efficiency are finite. Eventually retailers can't lower prices any more without going broke, and the economy implodes. Everyone loses.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, chances are that it's because all the other jobs they could do with their skill set have disappeared because Wal-Mart has crushed them. Believe it or not, customer service, inventory management, employee management, etc. are all job skills.This is true on a level playing field. However, a large part of Wal-Mart's business model is elimination of the competition. When there are fewer jobs available to workers in a given talent pool, wages go down. What the worker is worth isn't a consideration, it's how little they can get away with paying them.True, living wages would have an effect on consumer pricing, because big business would simply pass the costs on to the consumer instead of taking as much as a 1% hit to their profits. However, by paying as little as they do, Wal-Mart costs the American taxpayer (read: everyone, including you) billions of dollars each year. This might not make sense until you realize that the majority of people working at Wal-Mart, despite working full-time hours, 1) qualify for food stamps/welfare/WIC/$socialProgram, which costs the taxpayer money, and 2) do not have health insurance, which does not eliminate the need for medical care, as much as people would like to think it does. The taxpayer ends up picking up the tab for their health care in the form of Medicaid/uncompensated care programs.Lots of people earn good grades in high school, went to college (where they learned how to spell college), and wound up at Wal-Mart because it's the only place that would hire them without experience.
Living wages benefit everyone. Wal-Mart could easily afford to pay living wages and provide at least rudimentary health insurance for their full-time workers. They choose not to. The consequences of their actions are higher profits for the company, rich people getting richer, and millions of workers making it possible without receiving any of the benefits.
All so you can save 50 cents on a jar of pickles.
This raises a point regarding objectionable content. IMHO once you've taken it upon yourself to say "We filter some content" you've taken on a responsibility to filter it all; the problem is, you're never going to completely match all of your customers' expectations of your filtering. This concept goes far beyond the realm of telecommunications; the analogy is Wal-Mart refusing to carry music with parental warning labels on it. By taking a stand against "immoral" (or whatever) content, they've created a perception that whatever is bought from their store will not have any objectionable content. ISTR that they were sued recently over a CD bought by a minor that had the F-Bomb on it. While I disagree with Wal-Mart on this topic (as well as most other topics), I cannot argue that they have a right to stock whatever items they want, as a private company. The trouble is now they're dealing with the consequences of their actions. (I found it kind of funny that when I had a contract to replace some parts in their cash registers, I noticed that every store I worked in had no trouble stocking M-rated video games, such as the now-infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Yay for hypocrisy.)
Lots of people thought that lawsuit was frivolous; I think that it served an important purpose. Wal-Mart prides itself on its "family values" (while ironically keeping many families firmly in the category of the "working poor"). The suit reminds them that there are consequences for taking on the role of moral arbiter, and they may get more trouble than they bargained for.
Of course, if anyone can afford to take the hit, it's the biggest retailer in the world.
You're only up to two?
In the USA, you get as much justice as you can afford. This is why the RIAA has settled most of the suits it's brought against individual file sharers; the defendants can't compete with the RIAA's deep pockets, and the RIAA's lawyers will chew their clothes off if they try.
You've come to the point; there is a monopoly at work here, so the localization company can basically do whatever they want so long as the licensing is obeyed.People will buy anyway. The average consumer won't know or care about the difference between a quality production and a steaming pile of digital crap.
The bottom line is it doesn't increase profits measurably to listen to the consumer, because the consumer is too stupid to know when the product sucks. Wal-Mart has based an entire empire on this premise. See
Oh, and congratulations to the parent poster for being an actual conservative, rather than the current leading brand of NeoCon. You're a rarity these days. I never thought I'd see the day when Reagan looked like a better alternative to the current primate occupying the Oval.
In a similar vein, now that the TV industry is fighting our ability to fast-forward through advertising, how long will it be before they start to lobby for the outlawing of off buttons?
(This comment brought to you by Zik-Zak)
Lucky you. You've found a capmpany that actually spends money on technology. You work in some utopia where your CEO sees value in new things.
The place where I work spends money on technology. Niether of our new corporate standard desktop nor laptop comes with a floppy drive. You've never heard such whining.
"If it doesn't have a floppy then how do I send people files?" "Send them to a shared drive that the other person has access to, or use email" "But we've always sent stuff this way! We don't know how to do that shared thingy, and I'm not typing the whole thing into an email!" "... Please contact IT for training." (I'm really glad I can do that.)
I'm all for removing floppy drives from new computers. It's one less way for idiots to screw them up and bring down the enterprise in the process; it eliminates a virus vector. Now if they would just remove the USB floppy drives from our corporate standard purchasing sheet...