Funny, I mentioned something similar to my boss last night. Anyway, I totally agree, and that was a bad example to use for making my point. I work late in fairly rare instances, when there is either an emergency or about twice per year when there is a *real* deadline, such as a government imposed legal deadline that's non-negotiable. I work in order to take care of my family; neglecting my family in order to work late would be putting the means before the ends.
Anyway, you make a good point. *My* point, which a slightly missed, was that I make sure my boss knows that when I "work" from home, I actually *work*, from home, and things get done.
> But, also, I would argue that you need to have established the trust with that particular employer. (Try doing it with your next one.)
I'm going to try.:) Actually I'm probably going to be bold and mention it at the interview. Because I'm now working from home most days, and the head of the office sees me working past midnight sometimes, I will have a strong reference telling the hiring manager I do well with it. Other references will say the same. We'll see what happens. I suspect I'll find which employers are comfortable the idea of doing that in the future, after I'm in the office for a while. And some companies, like my current one, have a standard policy of one day per week or whatever. (My boss currently ignores the written policy in my case.)
> In my world "rockstar" = "reliable and doesn't take the piss".
"Doesn't take the piss" - that's a phrase I'm not familiar with. I found a vague reference that sounds like it might fit. Do you mean "doesn't take advantage", "doesn't screw the employer over"? If so, where are you from? I wondered if it's British or Australian English. For British I found:
take the piss out of (someone/something) - to make fun of. pissed - drunk, roughly equivalent to hammered in AmE. on the piss - out drinking, similar to on the town, on the tiles. piss (someone) off - to offend, irritate, anger someone. (Hence: pissed off = angry, closely equivalent to AmE pissed.) Piss off! - Go away! (Milder analogue of Fuck off!) piss about (or around) - to mess around, do things that aren't really worthwhile.
PS the company decided that they will not build a system with resolution better than enough to follow a car, which will be about six pixels or so.They won't build something that can see a face. Of course another company might.
Along with crime/security for something like the Super Bowl, they can assist with wide-area real time views of natural disasters, they've done traffic flow analysis to watch traffic jams form in real time, etc.
It's 1 frame per second with enough resolution to watch a 25 square mile area and follow a car as it drives away from a crime scene, as well as rewind to see where the car came from. When a crime occurs, you can rewind to see the bad guy drive up, then watch to see where they go. I want one!:)
Everywhere I've worked doing software development, a reliable employee could transition to a lot of working from home, no need to be a "rockstar". Work from home one day while waiting for the AC repair guy, or when your and SHOW that you get your job done from home. Skipping the commute (working half of the commute time) makes that easy for anyone who has the skills from working from home or working for themselves. (For example, you learn to work in a room with no TV or family members distracting you.)
My current employer has offices in many places, in the UK, Colombia, several US states, etc. Therefore meetings are ALREADY teleconferenced and people already use IM as the routine method of communication. Basically, our normal ways of doing things assume that co-workers may be in a different physical location. That makes working from 25 miles away easy.
I've been approached about out of state positions similar to one I had before, where I'd be responsible for systems running in some datacenter away from the corporate office. If I worked in the corporate office, I'd sit in the corporate office and ssh to the systems in the datacenter. Working from home, I ssh to the systems in the datacenter. There's absolutely no difference in the work. I just don't have to drive in to the office, possibly move to their city, and the company doesn't pay for an office. Ideally are positions where the person has primary responsibilty for maintaining and developing some software system which interacts with other systems only in well-defined ways. The job doesn't call for a ton of communication with different people.
Particularly the last point about introducing work-from-home gradually. That's been my experience both as an employee and as a manager. As an employee, first I established a good reputation as a solid worker in the office. Then I worked from home one day because I waiting for the AC repairman or whatever. That day, I made it a point to start working at the time I would otherwise be starting my commute, stop when I would have finished my commute home, and communicate fully with co-workers while I was working in my home office. Btw, my home office doesn't have TV or other "home" stuff in it either, it's set up for work. As my boss SAW that it was effective to have me work from home, she became comfortable with it. The same process repeated at my next job. Now I work from home most days. I appreciate saving the commute time, so once in a while I do the same thing the office chief does and finish up a project just before bed - he notices that I'm online just he is. (Occassionally, I even email or message a manager late when appropriate, knowing they'll see the timestamp.)
When I ran my own company, it was similar. Early on, I preferred people to be in the office so we could more easily get to know them and they could easily ask someone a quick question. As they became familiar with our systems and processes, most would try working from home occasionally. For many people, that worked well. Other people had trouble. Being at home, they forgot to get to their desk at the scheduled time and were easily distracted by "home" stuff. One guy eventually moved to another state and kept on working remote.
Yeah I missed the humor that is now plain in hindsight.
You're absolutely right, there is/was some attractive things about California which caused people to be willing to pay so much to live there. The climate is nice, for any definition of nice if you choose the part of CA that has the weather you like. Unless of course you like weather, four very distinct seasons. High-paying jobs WERE big draw, those jobs have been moving away over the last twenty years.
I do understand some reasons people like California. And I get annoyed when they decide they need to GTFO of Ca because they can't get a job there or pay the sky-high rent, so they come here and insist that we start doing exactly the same things that caused high unemployment and high prices in Ca - advocating for exactly the things they fled from.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps you could clarify. You mentioned "tax payers can float the bill", so I'll give you a bit of information about that.
With the TEEX model, about 10% of the TEEX budget comes from the state of Texas - from Texas taxpayers, but actually about zero percent because TEEX sends money back to the state at the end of the year. A large percentage of funding comes from training first responders from other countries; Mexico and Canada spend a lot at TEEX having their first responders trained, as do many of the oil producing countries because TEEX has mockups of oil rigs, pipelines, etc that are rigged to catch fire, collapse, etc. Other states such as California send their people to TEEX for training. Other get a good deal, but provides some revenue. The best deal for taxpayers is private companies who get the training or use rent the facilities - Chevron etc have their own firefighters and other emergency workers on staff who train at TEEX, plus there's product testing.
Texas taxpayers get Texas Task Force 1 and other benefits of having the training center more or less for free. Btw you can also get free TEEX training online. Their cybersecurity courses are pretty decent.
Aside from the ATF agents officially working the show, at least 35% of the attendees will be law enforcement of some type. Cops carry a gun (and often another backup gun) 24/7 and are required to have regular training, so they tend to be interested in the topic.
I used go own a gun forum for a certain brand of firearm. I'd say about 35%-40% of members were LEO. Wherever gun people gather at the range, the gun shop, the forum, a gun show, a training class - many of the people there are cops.
I'm really glad you like California so much, if you live there! I hope you can stay there forever, if you love it there.
If in the future you do as so many Californians do and come to Texas for thr available jobs and the much lower cost of living, please keep in mind there are *reasons* we have more work here and lower cost of living. Please don't go on incessantly about "you should do it this way, like we did it in California." If we did it the way California does it, we'd get the same results as California, and people would be fleeing from here. We prefer our way. Thanks, enjoy CA and thanks for the Guirradelli chocolate - that stuff is delicious.
> -- there's so many police forces and so many of them are small, use of force training has no chance of being uniform across all departments nor does the quantity and quality of training have a chance of being the same.
The use-of-force training can be exactly the same, taught by the same instructor, with cops from different departments in the same class if you prefer. Each department doesn't have to run their own training school, and shouldn't, for most things.
In Texas there's a place called TEEX - you may have seen part of it, Disaster City, on TV. TEEX trains firefighters and some police from not only all over Texas, but from all over the world. Unlike a department-run academy that runs once per year, TEEX staff is mostly full time, year-round instructors, with topic-specific experts brought in for special classes. Because their facilities are in use year-round, with multiple facilities being used by different classes simultaneously, they can afford better facilities than any one department.
There's another advantage as well. Because TEEX has some of the best facilities and staff in the world, private companies want use it from time to time, for testing fire safety or new equipment for fire fighters, police, and paramedics, and car companies use the driving facilities to test car safety, etc. They pay well. So you end up with the extra money Fire Trucks, Inc helping to offset the cost of training for Podunk County PD.
Lastly, it gives Texas a full-time team of expert first responders ready to go for any emergency. The Search and Rescue team from TEEX is well known nationally, in S&R circles. In many states, the S&R team is regular cops and firefighters who train in S&R a couple of weeks per year. Texas Task Force One train S&R all day, every day. They responded to World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and I watched them roll out toward Katrina the day before it made landfall.
So there is that option. You *can* have everyone get the same, very high-quality training from a dedicated training organization, then supplement with classroom or on-the-job training specific to a particular department. The urban and suburban departments can add their own along with the consistent training. Also, the training center (TEEX etc) offers more than one class. A rural department can choose a TEEX class that covers dealing with wild animals or grass fires, while an urban department chooses an extra class on de-escalating situations, crowd control, or high-rise fires. Both would probably get the same use-of-force classes.
My first attempt to write this got submitted before I was finished writing it.
I haven't made a ton of money, and I'm now 40, with a two-year-old daughter. That worries me - how am I going to be able to pay for everything I need when I'm old and possibly sick? I may not be able to keep working forever, and from ages 65-90 is 25 years of expenses I'll need to cover. The voters have decided to let social security go bankrupt rather than making some small changes while there's still time, so I can't rely on social security. Who knows what my daughter my need - just braces if I'm lucky, something MUCH more expensive if I'm not. So I'm living very frugally and saving as much as I can. I go home and make spaghetti while my friends go out to eat.
Since I do have a slight clue, I don't put the money I'm saving under my mattress, I put it in a mutual fund, where it will grow. That means I own a tiny bit of many large companies - Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, BOA, etc. When P&G makes money selling cereal or AT&T makes money providing phone service, my savings makes a little bit of money. I pray that I can save enough, and earn enough from those savings, to be able to pay my electric bill when I'm 80.
For some reason, which you may or may not understand, about 25% of Slashdot commenters think it's perfectly okay to steal from those of us who save. Stealing from AT&T, or P&G, or BOA is fine, they say, those are big companies. Those greedy capitalist stockholders who save for retirement don't need their money! It's fine for me to take it, Ray won't actually need his money that he's been saving. If you can understand that thinking, I bet the Indian scammers think much the same way. Personally, I can't understand it at all, but then again maybe that's because I'm simply not a crook.
Another 30% of Slashdot think taking our savings is a great idea, we should pass a law saying anyone who saved has to give their money to people who chose to buy a new smartphone instead of saving. I'm not sure how that reasoning works either. You blow $650 on a new iPhone, to replace the perfectly good iPhone you already have. I keep my cheap Walmart phone and save my money for when my daughter needs something. Therefore you, with the help of federal agents brandishing guns, should take my money that I saved so you can blow it on some more stupid crap? I don't understand that at all, other than I understand that selfishness and self-centeredness exists, and it seems many of these people are horribly, horribly spoiled. They're in the top 3% wealthiest people in the world, and whine that sometimes they don't have quite enough bandwidth to run their both of their two 4K TVs at full resolution, unless they pay the $10 upgrade (meaning they'd have to actually work for a few minutes).
> Low taxes are not a solution to unemployment. They might encourage companies to move, but the jobs are low paid. If they were not low paid, the taxes wouldn't be a big factor and there wouldn't be much incentive to move them.
I sure WISH we could get free money by taking a billion from this person, a billion from that company, and it had no effect. Free money! That's simply not the case, though - look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California. Those are the facts. California tried to get that "free" money, just tax the hell out of everybody, nothing bad will happen, right? Now they're a tad fucked, mush worse off than Texas, where the opposite approach was used.
It would also be nice to think that only melon-packing jobs are leaving, but that's not the case. The software company I work for had two offices in the US, employing many systems architects, programmers, etc. The median salary is likely six figures. Now they've opened offices in Cali, Colombia, and that's where they are hiring the programmers and project managers. These are six figure jobs. You CAN still get a melon-packing job in California, though http://joeproduce.com/.
Our health care system does need some work. It needs several changes. A month ago I went in for an annual physical. I've become absolutely convinced that the first, most important, and simplest thing we need to do is have upfront pricing. Doctors sent my wife and I for MRIs. We called the place we were referred to and asked how much they charge. It was a little difficult to get that information - nobody seemed to know. $2,200. I Googled "Dallas MRI" and called the first place that came up - $1,200 9AM-5PM, $1,000 after 5PM, and a $150 additional discount if I fill out the insurance paperwork instead of having them do it. A 5 minute phone call dropped the price in HALF, but virtually nobody does that. A month ago, I went for an annual physical and my doctor said he wanted to do some blood tests, so we did that. I got a thick envelope in the mail with some really good information, and a bill for $3,000. If the doctor had said "I'd like to do $3,000 worth of blood tests" I would have said "no way!" We probably would have done a few important tests, with a reasonable price. So upfront pricing would be very good, I think. Further, insurance companies already calculate the *average* price for each procedure in each geographical area. I'd love to see that disclosed ahead of time, "we'd like to do an MRI and charge you $2,200; the average price of an MRI in Dallas in $1,400." Who wants to bet many providers would realize they'd better say "the average price is $1,400, we're going to charge $1,250"?
Another thing we need to do is figure out the difference between INSURANCE and HEALTH CARE. Insurance, whether it be auto insurance, home insurance, renters insurance, or medical insurance, is designed to cover unexpected, high costs that you can't budget for. Home insurance is for when your house burns down, not replacing a $10 air filter in your AC or maintenance such as mowing the grass. Car insurance covers you when your total your car, not when you need an oil change or brake pads. I notice that when I go to my doctor for a flu shot, there are two doctors in the office and three people handling claims paperwork, because they deal with a bunch of paperwork and bureaucracy for every $20 flu shot, making it cost $40-$50 in the end. Again, a simple way to cut the cost in half is to use insurance as *insurance*, and use a $20 bill for a flu shot.
The US government is designed to be, is supposed to be, very different from the government of North Korea and similar prices. It's supposed to be FAIR, it's supposed to be TRANSPARENT, it's designed to be ACCOUNTABLE. We have a series of public hearings before each decision is m
Nah actually many of the problems in Windows are caused by overly *complex* design internally.
Windows tries to make the exposed surface seem simple by having a lot of complexity underneath. Unix is the opposite - the simple upper layer is formed atop another simple layer underneath, which sits atop another simple layer. (Which is one reason that systemd is hated by those who value the Unix approach.)
It wouldn't say it's IMPOSSIBLE for Google to know the SHA1 hash (torrent URL) of infected files.
If you're just trying to make the same tired argument about unlawful pirate sites that courts have struck down again and again, you might enjoy this page: http://famguardian.org/publica...
Same here. I learned a few things. With that head start, I learned about other types of accounts, so now I have a 401k, an IRA, a Roth, an HSA...
Then again, I started typing up invoices and sending them out when I was 12. I remember the first invoice I mailed was to the elementary school I attended the year before, for services I performed at their school carnival.
> That's an interesting point, and a clear example, thanks. > The next problem though
I sure appreciate such a gracious comment from someone who seems to perhaps disagree with me a bit. Civility of discourse is quite pleasant. I wish you were logged in, so I had a name to associate with your pleasant conversation.
Pirate Bay has categories "Applications" and "Games" (aka executables). It seems most of these are supposedly hacked to get around the licensing check.
Chrome may be indicating that some of these hacked executables are... wait for it... HACKED!
It's almost unbelievable, hackers who illegally mess with software sometimes illegally add malware. I'm shocked!
You seem to have an unspoken premise that "social responsibility" requires that all businesses must operate completely within the home town (county? state? country?) of the person who founded the business.
That is of course at odds with what most people would call "social responsibility" - if I grow rice for consumers in Phoenix, most people would say the responsible thing to do would be to grow it in a wet place (Louisiana), package it somewhere, then sell it in Arizona. Insisting that rice sold in Arizona must be produced by wasting huge amounts of water creating swamps in Arizona seems rather silly, and quite IRRESPONSIBLE.
If I grew up in Montana and I want to have a business developing software used by ranchers and farmers, why must I have the business in Montana? Why not have the business where the programmers are, Denver, Austin, Dallas, or the Bay area? It seems quite silly to ask developers to move to Montana.
Let's put that aside and pretend for a moment that "social responsibility" DID require that anyone who wants to run a business must do so in their home town. In this thread we're talking about how T&C costs (taxes and compliance) influence where companies put their various operations. Are you under the impression that California's very high T&C are CAPITALISM? Really? Huge government fees are capitalism? Might want to refer back to fourth grade social studies.
That's correct. A BBB, as the name suggests, works to improve business in their area. They are not law enforcement. Criminals are not their area, better businesses areb
> American law doesn't require that Trump outsource his work overseas
In many industries, that is in fact the effect of US law. US labor and tax laws are such that the total cost to employ workers in the US is roughly 2.3Ã-- their take-home pay. So employees taking home $10/hour cost roughly $23/hour once you pay various federal, state and local taxes, unemployment, workers comp, etc etc. So of you have a widget that requires $10 of material and one hour labor @ $10/hour, production cost is about $33. $10 materials, $10 to employee, $13 taxes and compliance). Since it costs $33 to make under US law, obviously you can't wholesale it for any less than $33 production cost.
100 miles south, your competitor producing a nearly identical product has production in Mexico, where the cost is $10 material, $10 to the worker, and $5 taxes and compliance. Total production cost $25. This competitor can wholesale at $30 and have a 20% margin.
The person buying wholesale can pay $30 for the product made in northern Mexico, or at least $33 for the US-made one (which still leaves the US manufacturer zero profit). Which do you think the retailer will choose to buy? The less expensive one, obviously. The company with much higher tax and compliance costs goes out of business.
In most countries, business taxes and similar costs are based on the motivation to have business in their country. In the US, we have a significant interert group influencing policy based primarily on emotions, including envy, with no understanding of, or concern for, the economics or the results of the policies they support. "Fuck those companies" is this groups attitude, and the companies respond with "okay, we're not wanted here; we'll go where we're wanted".
You can see the same effect between US states. Many billions of dollars of businesses have moved from California to Texas due to the tax and regulation in California. Unemployment has gotten bad in California, while there are plenty of jobs in Texas.
> For organizations like the FTC and BBB, what exactly is the damn threshold for these kinds of regulatory agencies
For the FTC, which is a government agency, apparently the threshold is about 4,000.
The BBB is not a regulatory agency, it's private-sector group whose members are businesses. For the BBB, the threshold is one - they'll take action from the first complaint. The BBB does three things with complaints. 1) ask the company to resolve the complaint, 2) post the result on their web site, and 3) compile complaint and other information into a rough score which is published on their site. Because the results will be published, companies normally resolve complaints. If tou look on your local BBB web site, you'll probably see that most companies have resolved all complaints to the satisfaction of the customer. Of course, total scam companies probably won't, and you can see the difference pretty clearly.
The FTC is government, so they can take legal action, but it takes years and thousands of complaints. The BBB, a private club, acts immediately, and normally effectively, but you have to actually look at their web site to see that a company is a complete scam.
Btw, I *am* the moron in kernel dev. My name is in the kernel changelog exactly once, which means I helped find and fix a problem when I had never done so before - I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Kernel development is very complex, with it's own set of rules quite different from userspace and I was in there trying to work on it, sending emails to the maintainer of the md subsystem (raid etc.) For anyone reading my emails or code, I was, compared to them, a moron. My flailing about might have been frustrating for them.
On the other hand, after almost 20 years I understand Linux pretty well from the userspace perspective, particularly the storage and security side of things. So when I'm in a meeting at work and the project manager wants to put certain files "on the C drive", when he wants to defrag and log in as Administrator, he becomes the moron and I'm the one getting frustrated.
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Funny, I mentioned something similar to my boss last night. Anyway, I totally agree, and that was a bad example to use for making my point. I work late in fairly rare instances, when there is either an emergency or about twice per year when there is a *real* deadline, such as a government imposed legal deadline that's non-negotiable. I work in order to take care of my family; neglecting my family in order to work late would be putting the means before the ends.
Anyway, you make a good point. *My* point, which a slightly missed, was that I make sure my boss knows that when I "work" from home, I actually *work*, from home, and things get done.
> But, also, I would argue that you need to have established the trust with that particular employer. (Try doing it with your next one.)
I'm going to try. :) Actually I'm probably going to be bold and mention it at the interview. Because I'm now working from home most days, and the head of the office sees me working past midnight sometimes, I will have a strong reference telling the hiring manager I do well with it. Other references will say the same. We'll see what happens. I suspect I'll find which employers are comfortable the idea of doing that in the future, after I'm in the office for a while. And some companies, like my current one, have a standard policy of one day per week or whatever. (My boss currently ignores the written policy in my case.)
> In my world "rockstar" = "reliable and doesn't take the piss".
"Doesn't take the piss" - that's a phrase I'm not familiar with. I found a vague reference that sounds like it might fit. Do you mean "doesn't take advantage", "doesn't screw the employer over"? If so, where are you from? I wondered if it's British or Australian English. For British I found:
take the piss out of (someone/something) - to make fun of.
pissed - drunk, roughly equivalent to hammered in AmE.
on the piss - out drinking, similar to on the town, on the tiles.
piss (someone) off - to offend, irritate, anger someone. (Hence: pissed off = angry, closely equivalent to AmE pissed.)
Piss off! - Go away! (Milder analogue of Fuck off!)
piss about (or around) - to mess around, do things that aren't really worthwhile.
Might be Singlish?
> Distractions to disasters, they do not excuse any lack of success.
If you heroically resolve some disaster and your boss doesn't find out about it, one of two things is true:
a) You /caused/ the disaster and solved your own fuck up without it being noticed. Good job.
or
b) You fail at boss management.
PS the company decided that they will not build a system with resolution better than enough to follow a car, which will be about six pixels or so.They won't build something that can see a face. Of course another company might.
Along with crime/security for something like the Super Bowl, they can assist with wide-area real time views of natural disasters, they've done traffic flow analysis to watch traffic jams form in real time, etc.
It's 1 frame per second with enough resolution to watch a 25 square mile area and follow a car as it drives away from a crime scene, as well as rewind to see where the car came from. When a crime occurs, you can rewind to see the bad guy drive up, then watch to see where they go. I want one! :)
> Who "hires" telecommuters?
Everywhere I've worked doing software development, a reliable employee could transition to a lot of working from home, no need to be a "rockstar". Work from home one day while waiting for the AC repair guy, or when your and SHOW that you get your job done from home. Skipping the commute (working half of the commute time) makes that easy for anyone who has the skills from working from home or working for themselves. (For example, you learn to work in a room with no TV or family members distracting you.)
My current employer has offices in many places, in the UK, Colombia, several US states, etc. Therefore meetings are ALREADY teleconferenced and people already use IM as the routine method of communication. Basically, our normal ways of doing things assume that co-workers may be in a different physical location. That makes working from 25 miles away easy.
I've been approached about out of state positions similar to one I had before, where I'd be responsible for systems running in some datacenter away from the corporate office. If I worked in the corporate office, I'd sit in the corporate office and ssh to the systems in the datacenter. Working from home, I ssh to the systems in the datacenter. There's absolutely no difference in the work. I just don't have to drive in to the office, possibly move to their city, and the company doesn't pay for an office. Ideally are positions where the person has primary responsibilty for maintaining and developing some software system which interacts with other systems only in well-defined ways. The job doesn't call for a ton of communication with different people.
The article does indeed make some good points.
Particularly the last point about introducing work-from-home gradually. That's been my experience both as an employee and as a manager. As an employee, first I established a good reputation as a solid worker in the office. Then I worked from home one day because I waiting for the AC repairman or whatever. That day, I made it a point to start working at the time I would otherwise be starting my commute, stop when I would have finished my commute home, and communicate fully with co-workers while I was working in my home office. Btw, my home office doesn't have TV or other "home" stuff in it either, it's set up for work. As my boss SAW that it was effective to have me work from home, she became comfortable with it. The same process repeated at my next job. Now I work from home most days. I appreciate saving the commute time, so once in a while I do the same thing the office chief does and finish up a project just before bed - he notices that I'm online just he is. (Occassionally, I even email or message a manager late when appropriate, knowing they'll see the timestamp.)
When I ran my own company, it was similar. Early on, I preferred people to be in the office so we could more easily get to know them and they could easily ask someone a quick question. As they became familiar with our systems and processes, most would try working from home occasionally. For many people, that worked well. Other people had trouble. Being at home, they forgot to get to their desk at the scheduled time and were easily distracted by "home" stuff. One guy eventually moved to another state and kept on working remote.
Yeah I missed the humor that is now plain in hindsight.
You're absolutely right, there is/was some attractive things about California which caused people to be willing to pay so much to live there. The climate is nice, for any definition of nice if you choose the part of CA that has the weather you like. Unless of course you like weather, four very distinct seasons. High-paying jobs WERE big draw, those jobs have been moving away over the last twenty years.
I do understand some reasons people like California. And I get annoyed when they decide they need to GTFO of Ca because they can't get a job there or pay the sky-high rent, so they come here and insist that we start doing exactly the same things that caused high unemployment and high prices in Ca - advocating for exactly the things they fled from.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps you could clarify. You mentioned "tax payers can float the bill", so I'll give you a bit of information about that.
With the TEEX model, about 10% of the TEEX budget comes from the state of Texas - from Texas taxpayers, but actually about zero percent because TEEX sends money back to the state at the end of the year. A large percentage of funding comes from training first responders from other countries; Mexico and Canada spend a lot at TEEX having their first responders trained, as do many of the oil producing countries because TEEX has mockups of oil rigs, pipelines, etc that are rigged to catch fire, collapse, etc. Other states such as California send their people to TEEX for training. Other get a good deal, but provides some revenue. The best deal for taxpayers is private companies who get the training or use rent the facilities - Chevron etc have their own firefighters and other emergency workers on staff who train at TEEX, plus there's product testing.
Texas taxpayers get Texas Task Force 1 and other benefits of having the training center more or less for free. Btw you can also get free TEEX training online. Their cybersecurity courses are pretty decent.
Aside from the ATF agents officially working the show, at least 35% of the attendees will be law enforcement of some type. Cops carry a gun (and often another backup gun) 24/7 and are required to have regular training, so they tend to be interested in the topic.
I used go own a gun forum for a certain brand of firearm. I'd say about 35%-40% of members were LEO. Wherever gun people gather at the range, the gun shop, the forum, a gun show, a training class - many of the people there are cops.
I'm really glad you like California so much, if you live there! I hope you can stay there forever, if you love it there.
If in the future you do as so many Californians do and come to Texas for thr available jobs and the much lower cost of living, please keep in mind there are *reasons* we have more work here and lower cost of living. Please don't go on incessantly about "you should do it this way, like we did it in California." If we did it the way California does it, we'd get the same results as California, and people would be fleeing from here. We prefer our way. Thanks, enjoy CA and thanks for the Guirradelli chocolate - that stuff is delicious.
> -- there's so many police forces and so many of them are small, use of force training has no chance of being uniform across all departments nor does the quantity and quality of training have a chance of being the same.
The use-of-force training can be exactly the same, taught by the same instructor, with cops from different departments in the same class if you prefer. Each department doesn't have to run their own training school, and shouldn't, for most things.
In Texas there's a place called TEEX - you may have seen part of it, Disaster City, on TV. TEEX trains firefighters and some police from not only all over Texas, but from all over the world. Unlike a department-run academy that runs once per year, TEEX staff is mostly full time, year-round instructors, with topic-specific experts brought in for special classes. Because their facilities are in use year-round, with multiple facilities being used by different classes simultaneously, they can afford better facilities than any one department.
There's another advantage as well. Because TEEX has some of the best facilities and staff in the world, private companies want use it from time to time, for testing fire safety or new equipment for fire fighters, police, and paramedics, and car companies use the driving facilities to test car safety, etc. They pay well. So you end up with the extra money Fire Trucks, Inc helping to offset the cost of training for Podunk County PD.
Lastly, it gives Texas a full-time team of expert first responders ready to go for any emergency. The Search and Rescue team from TEEX is well known nationally, in S&R circles. In many states, the S&R team is regular cops and firefighters who train in S&R a couple of weeks per year. Texas Task Force One train S&R all day, every day. They responded to World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and I watched them roll out toward Katrina the day before it made landfall.
So there is that option. You *can* have everyone get the same, very high-quality training from a dedicated training organization, then supplement with classroom or on-the-job training specific to a particular department. The urban and suburban departments can add their own along with the consistent training. Also, the training center (TEEX etc) offers more than one class. A rural department can choose a TEEX class that covers dealing with wild animals or grass fires, while an urban department chooses an extra class on de-escalating situations, crowd control, or high-rise fires. Both would probably get the same use-of-force classes.
My first attempt to write this got submitted before I was finished writing it.
I haven't made a ton of money, and I'm now 40, with a two-year-old daughter. That worries me - how am I going to be able to pay for everything I need when I'm old and possibly sick? I may not be able to keep working forever, and from ages 65-90 is 25 years of expenses I'll need to cover. The voters have decided to let social security go bankrupt rather than making some small changes while there's still time, so I can't rely on social security. Who knows what my daughter my need - just braces if I'm lucky, something MUCH more expensive if I'm not. So I'm living very frugally and saving as much as I can. I go home and make spaghetti while my friends go out to eat.
Since I do have a slight clue, I don't put the money I'm saving under my mattress, I put it in a mutual fund, where it will grow. That means I own a tiny bit of many large companies - Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, BOA, etc. When P&G makes money selling cereal or AT&T makes money providing phone service, my savings makes a little bit of money. I pray that I can save enough, and earn enough from those savings, to be able to pay my electric bill when I'm 80.
For some reason, which you may or may not understand, about 25% of Slashdot commenters think it's perfectly okay to steal from those of us who save. Stealing from AT&T, or P&G, or BOA is fine, they say, those are big companies. Those greedy capitalist stockholders who save for retirement don't need their money! It's fine for me to take it, Ray won't actually need his money that he's been saving. If you can understand that thinking, I bet the Indian scammers think much the same way. Personally, I can't understand it at all, but then again maybe that's because I'm simply not a crook.
Another 30% of Slashdot think taking our savings is a great idea, we should pass a law saying anyone who saved has to give their money to people who chose to buy a new smartphone instead of saving. I'm not sure how that reasoning works either. You blow $650 on a new iPhone, to replace the perfectly good iPhone you already have. I keep my cheap Walmart phone and save my money for when my daughter needs something. Therefore you, with the help of federal agents brandishing guns, should take my money that I saved so you can blow it on some more stupid crap? I don't understand that at all, other than I understand that selfishness and self-centeredness exists, and it seems many of these people are horribly, horribly spoiled. They're in the top 3% wealthiest people in the world, and whine that sometimes they don't have quite enough bandwidth to run their both of their two 4K TVs at full resolution, unless they pay the $10 upgrade (meaning they'd have to actually work for a few minutes).
> Low taxes are not a solution to unemployment. They might encourage companies to move, but the jobs are low paid. If they were not low paid, the taxes wouldn't be a big factor and there wouldn't be much incentive to move them.
I sure WISH we could get free money by taking a billion from this person, a billion from that company, and it had no effect. Free money! That's simply not the case, though - look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California. Those are the facts. California tried to get that "free" money, just tax the hell out of everybody, nothing bad will happen, right? Now they're a tad fucked, mush worse off than Texas, where the opposite approach was used.
It would also be nice to think that only melon-packing jobs are leaving, but that's not the case. The software company I work for had two offices in the US, employing many systems architects, programmers, etc. The median salary is likely six figures. Now they've opened offices in Cali, Colombia, and that's where they are hiring the programmers and project managers. These are six figure jobs. You CAN still get a melon-packing job in California, though http://joeproduce.com/ .
Our health care system does need some work. It needs several changes. A month ago I went in for an annual physical. I've become absolutely convinced that the first, most important, and simplest thing we need to do is have upfront pricing. Doctors sent my wife and I for MRIs. We called the place we were referred to and asked how much they charge. It was a little difficult to get that information - nobody seemed to know. $2,200. I Googled "Dallas MRI" and called the first place that came up - $1,200 9AM-5PM, $1,000 after 5PM, and a $150 additional discount if I fill out the insurance paperwork instead of having them do it. A 5 minute phone call dropped the price in HALF, but virtually nobody does that. A month ago, I went for an annual physical and my doctor said he wanted to do some blood tests, so we did that. I got a thick envelope in the mail with some really good information, and a bill for $3,000. If the doctor had said "I'd like to do $3,000 worth of blood tests" I would have said "no way!" We probably would have done a few important tests, with a reasonable price. So upfront pricing would be very good, I think. Further, insurance companies already calculate the *average* price for each procedure in each geographical area. I'd love to see that disclosed ahead of time, "we'd like to do an MRI and charge you $2,200; the average price of an MRI in Dallas in $1,400." Who wants to bet many providers would realize they'd better say "the average price is $1,400, we're going to charge $1,250"?
Another thing we need to do is figure out the difference between INSURANCE and HEALTH CARE. Insurance, whether it be auto insurance, home insurance, renters insurance, or medical insurance, is designed to cover unexpected, high costs that you can't budget for. Home insurance is for when your house burns down, not replacing a $10 air filter in your AC or maintenance such as mowing the grass. Car insurance covers you when your total your car, not when you need an oil change or brake pads. I notice that when I go to my doctor for a flu shot, there are two doctors in the office and three people handling claims paperwork, because they deal with a bunch of paperwork and bureaucracy for every $20 flu shot, making it cost $40-$50 in the end. Again, a simple way to cut the cost in half is to use insurance as *insurance*, and use a $20 bill for a flu shot.
The US government is designed to be, is supposed to be, very different from the government of North Korea and similar prices. It's supposed to be FAIR, it's supposed to be TRANSPARENT, it's designed to be ACCOUNTABLE. We have a series of public hearings before each decision is m
> Why do Indians think it's allowable to steal from White people?
I'm 40 and I haven't made a ton of money for most
But they can write Windows; and they did.
Nah actually many of the problems in Windows are caused by overly *complex* design internally.
Windows tries to make the exposed surface seem simple by having a lot of complexity underneath. Unix is the opposite - the simple upper layer is formed atop another simple layer underneath, which sits atop another simple layer. (Which is one reason that systemd is hated by those who value the Unix approach.)
It wouldn't say it's IMPOSSIBLE for Google to know the SHA1 hash (torrent URL) of infected files.
If you're just trying to make the same tired argument about unlawful pirate sites that courts have struck down again and again, you might enjoy this page:
http://famguardian.org/publica...
But keep in mind, believing such utter BS *will* end up with you in prison. See:
https://www.irs.gov/tax-profes...
Same here. I learned a few things. With that head start, I learned about other types of accounts, so now I have a 401k, an IRA, a Roth, an HSA ...
Then again, I started typing up invoices and sending them out when I was 12. I remember the first invoice I mailed was to the elementary school I attended the year before, for services I performed at their school carnival.
> That's an interesting point, and a clear example, thanks.
> The next problem though
I sure appreciate such a gracious comment from someone who seems to perhaps disagree with me a bit. Civility of discourse is quite pleasant. I wish you were logged in, so I had a name to associate with your pleasant conversation.
Pirate Bay has categories "Applications" and "Games" (aka executables). It seems most of these are supposedly hacked to get around the licensing check.
Chrome may be indicating that some of these hacked executables are ... wait for it ... HACKED!
It's almost unbelievable, hackers who illegally mess with software sometimes illegally add malware. I'm shocked!
You seem to have an unspoken premise that "social responsibility" requires that all businesses must operate completely within the home town (county? state? country?) of the person who founded the business.
That is of course at odds with what most people would call "social responsibility" - if I grow rice for consumers in Phoenix, most people would say the responsible thing to do would be to grow it in a wet place (Louisiana), package it somewhere, then sell it in Arizona. Insisting that rice sold in Arizona must be produced by wasting huge amounts of water creating swamps in Arizona seems rather silly, and quite IRRESPONSIBLE.
If I grew up in Montana and I want to have a business developing software used by ranchers and farmers, why must I have the business in Montana? Why not have the business where the programmers are, Denver, Austin, Dallas, or the Bay area? It seems quite silly to ask developers to move to Montana.
Let's put that aside and pretend for a moment that "social responsibility" DID require that anyone who wants to run a business must do so in their home town. In this thread we're talking about how T&C costs (taxes and compliance) influence where companies put their various operations. Are you under the impression that California's very high T&C are CAPITALISM? Really? Huge government fees are capitalism? Might want to refer back to fourth grade social studies.
That's correct. A BBB, as the name suggests, works to improve business in their area. They are not law enforcement. Criminals are not their area, better businesses areb
> American law doesn't require that Trump outsource his work overseas
In many industries, that is in fact the effect of US law. US labor and tax laws are such that the total cost to employ workers in the US is roughly 2.3Ã-- their take-home pay. So employees taking home $10/hour cost roughly $23/hour once you pay various federal, state and local taxes, unemployment, workers comp, etc etc. So of you have a widget that requires $10 of material and one hour labor @ $10/hour, production cost is about $33. $10 materials, $10 to employee, $13 taxes and compliance). Since it costs $33 to make under US law, obviously you can't wholesale it for any less than $33 production cost.
100 miles south, your competitor producing a nearly identical product has production in Mexico, where the cost is $10 material, $10 to the worker, and $5 taxes and compliance. Total production cost $25. This competitor can wholesale at $30 and have a 20% margin.
The person buying wholesale can pay $30 for the product made in northern Mexico, or at least $33 for the US-made one (which still leaves the US manufacturer zero profit). Which do you think the retailer will choose to buy? The less expensive one, obviously. The company with much higher tax and compliance costs goes out of business.
In most countries, business taxes and similar costs are based on the motivation to have business in their country. In the US, we have a significant interert group influencing policy based primarily on emotions, including envy, with no understanding of, or concern for, the economics or the results of the policies they support. "Fuck those companies" is this groups attitude, and the companies respond with "okay, we're not wanted here; we'll go where we're wanted".
You can see the same effect between US states. Many billions of dollars of businesses have moved from California to Texas due to the tax and regulation in California. Unemployment has gotten bad in California, while there are plenty of jobs in Texas.
> For organizations like the FTC and BBB, what exactly is the damn threshold for these kinds of regulatory agencies
For the FTC, which is a government agency, apparently the threshold is about 4,000.
The BBB is not a regulatory agency, it's private-sector group whose members are businesses. For the BBB, the threshold is one - they'll take action from the first complaint. The BBB does three things with complaints. 1) ask the company to resolve the complaint, 2) post the result on their web site, and 3) compile complaint and other information into a rough score which is published on their site. Because the results will be published, companies normally resolve complaints. If tou look on your local BBB web site, you'll probably see that most companies have resolved all complaints to the satisfaction of the customer. Of course, total scam companies probably won't, and you can see the difference pretty clearly.
The FTC is government, so they can take legal action, but it takes years and thousands of complaints. The BBB, a private club, acts immediately, and normally effectively, but you have to actually look at their web site to see that a company is a complete scam.
Btw, I *am* the moron in kernel dev. My name is in the kernel changelog exactly once, which means I helped find and fix a problem when I had never done so before - I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Kernel development is very complex, with it's own set of rules quite different from userspace and I was in there trying to work on it, sending emails to the maintainer of the md subsystem (raid etc.) For anyone reading my emails or code, I was, compared to them, a moron. My flailing about might have been frustrating for them.
On the other hand, after almost 20 years I understand Linux pretty well from the userspace perspective, particularly the storage and security side of things. So when I'm in a meeting at work and the project manager wants to put certain files "on the C drive", when he wants to defrag and log in as Administrator, he becomes the moron and I'm the one getting frustrated.