So we here in the Midwest would be justified in raising the price on a bushel of wheat to $50/bushel. You're ok with paying $10 for a loaf of bread? Raise the price of gas, up goes the price of beef and dairy products. How would you a $50 cheese burger? Want bacon? Add $10. Fries? We'll cut you a break: $9.95. Enjoy.
It goes both ways. If you raise our costs then the we have to raise our prices. A free market can not be completely free. A free market is subject to abuse, skittishness, knee-jerk reactions, etc. It's a balancing act.
Apparently you've never lived in a rural environment. You know, rural, like 99.99% of the United States. I can't close my eyes, and throw a rock in any direction and hit a McD's or a Starbucks. I can't walk to work and carry my groceries home at night for that one meal. I now live in a town of about 350k people. I work in a town of about 2100 people. You probably have more people living in your city than in my entire state. My home town had 231 people in it in the 2000 census. My 6th grade class had 5 kids in it, all boys. My high school graduating class had 32 people in it. My high school was made up of about 15 small rural communities. I live here in the heartland, smack dab in the dead center of this country. You know, the "World's Bread Basket." We feed you! How about we turn off your food supply. If you want my food, move to a place where I offer it, or buy someone else's food. Simple as that. Jackass.
There are certain necessities in life, staples if you will, that are the building blocks of society and everyday life. Without regulation many utility companies would ignore the majority of the US and focus solely on the areas with the highest concentration of people, primarily the seaboards. Without regulation costs of delivery services to these areas would be levied solely on the shoulders of those in rural America. Why should my fuel cost me $10/gallon when your's only costs you $2/gallon? Regulations spread the load out evenly across all members of our society. Without regulation the country couldn't maintain a balance between producers and consumers. Without balance you consumers die. It's a simple as that.
Before anyone goes off on a rant about me being a Republican or a Bush ass-kisser let me kick that in the nuts right now and say I am a Liberal.
Most natural gas and lp explosions are caused not by the living space of a home being filled with the gas but with the non-living spaces such as a basement or crawl space being filled with gas. Lp, being heavier than air, is the most common of the 2 gases for explosions around here. Natural gas is slightly lighter than air but can easily be contained in an enclosed area such as a crawl space. Long before I was born the downtown area of Latham, KS was obliterated by a propane leak and subsequent explosion. It leaked over the course of a weekend into the crawl space of one of the buildings. When it blew it took the the whole downtown with it. The artificial smells added to either gas isn't enough to most people to think twice about a gas leak. Most will simply assume they forgot to take out the trash. I've been around gas all my life and recognize the smell for what it is (my grandfather was a plumber). My nose has been known to pick up on the tiniest of gas leaks. All those years of being my grandfather's gas detector paid off I guess.
These types of explosions are actually rather common I'm sorry to say. I can think of 3 in as many months in this reality small area I live in. In fact about 20 minutes from here a gas explosion obliterated the home of a 7 person family while they were away on vacation. Extreme Makeover Home Edition helped them build a new home a few months later. About an hour from here a natural gas well exploded in the middle of a town. It made international headlines.
And is required by code in some areas. I'm referring to the methane gas detectors. It would be nice if the CO detectors were also required and could thus be wired into the home's smoke detector system. Ideally they'd all be wired together so that a CO alarm in the kitchen would alert everyone in the whole house.
Might I remind you of something of critical importance? Conjure up in your mind a quick mental image of Ms. Lewinski. Let me helpyou. That is why, my dear tc, President Clinton was impeached. After that unconscionable lack of judgement and/or eyesight we had to revoke his man card. He was already on probation for marrying Hillary. Lewinski was just too much. For shame Billy Boy. You could have at least tapped a nice ass.
The GP isn't exactly correct which also creates some errors in your post. No gas heater is ventless. All gas heaters are vented, even the near 100% efficient ones. They have to be to vent the burner chamber. Heat is wicked off of the burner chamber through a heat exchanges with a blower (usually) but there is always some form of venting. Even gas hot water heaters and gas furnaces are vented.
That said, no home is completely air tight. Without enough oxygen to fully burn fuels CO is produced (that's carbon monoxide). Here is a good article. A 100% air-tight home is not feaible and dangerous.
There are plenty of technical tips in this thread. I'll throw another type of tip at you. You really need to make sure that you have insurance on your home. I wouldn't mention that the house is no longer occupied. That would jack your rate up. I would make certain that your home was fully covered though and that it include damage from bursting water pipes, winter weather damage, vandals, etc. That way if something does happen you can at least be covered.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work?
on
Understanding Burnout
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This whole thread has been very enlightening to me. I've been thinking about all of this for a few months now and it's been increasing growing on me.
I'm considering a job change. I need to acquire better certs for my field. I'm trying to decide if I should wait until I have those to see if it improves my relationship with my current employer, or if I should take my new certs and run, or if I should just get out now to work on my certs while looking for a new job. Money is a problem for me. My current employer pays me so little that I'm having trouble staying afloat. I'm trying to pay down credit cards but the process is slow. I have an investment account that I could tap but I'm afraid to because that's my only source of fairly liquid cash. I have a couple retirement accounts that I can tap of I absolutely have to but that will cost me about 40% off the top (taxes and a 10% penalty). How hard was it for you to pull up stakes and relocate? I know that a lot of people do it in this industry and do it often. I don't really want to do that but I can see where that's required to get ahead in this business. Any other thoughts or comments you might have would be helpful. I'm thinking about looking for a career counselor or someone along those lines.
I'd like to be able to do this. Unfortunately I think it's too late for me and this particular job. My company has an extremely high turnover rate. We lost 75% of our senior network engineers in a month's time this year. We were very close to 100%.
When I come home at night (late as always) I usually fall asleep in my chair. I didn't always used to be this way. I've come to wonder lately if this is technically depression. You know how the commercials on TV talk about how depression can manifest itself literally. I constantly feel tired and lethargic. I wonder if I'm clinically depressed. That's a scary thought. I know my work has been hard on me these past couple of years but to think that I might actually be depressed, well, depresses me. I'm going to have to put some more thought into that.
This is only something I've come to realize in that past few weeks. I am rapidly becoming burnt out. There. I said it. I feel like I would expect to feel making a confession at an AA meeting.
I have a large workload right now. I'm part of 3 major projects right now, all of which have the eyes or personal involvement of the owners of my family-owned company. One of the project I have basically been in the lead position on for months now. It was sold to the owners by my last supervisor but the plan was always for me to implement it. This involves a significant amount of planning, late night windows, etc. My second project hinges on the first but is backed by the division of the company that I actually work for. I'm contracted out to another division which is the owner of the first project. Confused yet? The third project is one that I've had so little time to work on that I feel significantly inferior in knowledge to the lesser technical and non-technical people associated with the project. I'm asked a question and I honestly can't answer it because I've had little involvement in the project. It's a major projects that's worth millions to my company in the not too distant future.
I have so much work on my plate that I don't know where to even begin. On top of all that I have the daily break/fix duties of the division that I've been contracted to. There is a bad personality at the division I'm contracted too that I have to deal with. He makes horrible business and technical decisions that I have to somehow work around.
I also have a wealth of crap dumped on me from my division in the form of internal documentation, procedures, processes, and politics. I have been placed smack in the middle of the political fighting between the divisions of my company. What's more the division I'm contracted to never tells my division about the many positive things I do. They only speak up when they perceive something as being negative. Of course my division thinks that this is a major problem and that it's my fault. I must be doing something wrong if they don't hear anything good from my customer. Well for starters I have a technical relationship with my customer. There is not sales person relationship with this customer. That's where the personal comments are made. Secondly my customers switches multiple times per week about how they want to be treated (as a customer or as a member of the family).
I feel that 99% of my heartburn is caused by my own employer and not by my customer. My wage is 20-25% below market, even for this area. My employer has accused me of falsifying time entries and mileage reports. My employer asked me to do a significant amount of work on a 7 day period but didn't want to pay me for it. They actually said that it wasn't possible to work 96 hours in a week. It's bad enough having to work that much time in a week but it's even worse if your employer accuses you of trying to defraud the company. The same went for my mileage report. This same person refused to reimburse me for my mileage to a client in another town (actually 2 towns away) even though my last 2 supervisors told me to include it. He also wouldn't pay for the travel time. I don't even bother turning in mileage anymore. I end up eating a couple hundred a month but it's simply less heartache in the end. I didn't expense a training trip from a few months back because I heard that my employer paid up to a certain meal per dium if I had receipts. My coworkers and myself took turns buying the meals and I didn't keep receipts. I figured rather than putting up with the hassle of trying to get them to pay for it I would simply eat the 4 days of per dium. The last time I asked them to buy a book for me I went round and round with them over which customer to bill the book to. WTF?! My employer is all about making money, customer be damned. My review had a handful of negative marks on it. All of them came back to me not taking advantage of opportunities for me to bring another billable
You might want to brush up on your Pippin knowledge. The Pippin was a very interesting product. I wrote a research paper on it back in the day.
The Pippin was both ahead of its time and a late entry into the console market. Consoles were not a multi-purpose multimedia station back in the mid-nineties like they are (or can be) today. The Pippin was too much too soon and not enough of a console too late. By the time the Pippin-based products were on the market the market was already dominated the Big 3. They did what they were designed to do better too. The market wasn't willing to wait for the Pippin to mature given multiple mature alternatives. The Pippin should have remained an Apple R&D project and never should have been sent to market. Like so many of Apple's great ideas they were timed poorly. Had Apple brought back the Pippin 3-4 years ago as a multi-functional entertainment system (TV, DV, DVR, home audio, Web, some gaming perhaps) they would have had a stellar product on their hands.
I've not once had trouble. I can see where some people would but I never do. I use my pocket knife to open all my plastic packages. I do not carry a small pocket knife. My knife is about folding knife that's 4 inches long when folded, 8" when open and locks. It's always sharp. Larger knives are significantly safer than small pocket knives.
Besides my knife I've also been known to grab other things that are handy such as a large pair of Klein side cutters.
AA/AAA batteries can't take care of everything you have. I bet you wife has a tool or two that requires at least C batteries... If C batteries were an option I bet it would go something like this:
bzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzt...silence... "Honey, can you hand me another rechargeable battery? Thanks, sweetie." Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz
i realize differnt devices have dfferent amperage requirements but why, oh why, must cell phone manufacturers make so many different interfaces and amperage settings for what is essentially the same device! can they possibly be making that much money ripping people off for chargers?
That's about right. By changing the specs just enough to require new accessories they've created an additional market that they can control. They could make a slight modification to their power interface, patent it, and then license the use of it to the after-market manufacturers. This creates them a recurring revenue stream. Creating cheap accessories that break, wear-out, or have a limited-life non-replaceable battery (Bluetooth headset) also create another recurring revenue stream for these companies. Personally I'd rather buy from a company that showed a little ethics but that's just me.
I agree on the USB thing. Nothing but USB for me. The guy that created USB didn't charge Intel enough for it when he sold it back in the early 90s.
Yeah, but where's the beef? Their websites didn't offer any products, any accessories to add to you existing devices to enable them to use SplashPower, or anything of any substance. Are there other companies with a product already on the market?
I'm in a similar situation. My company recently re-evaluated their classification system for employees. Now everyone, unless you are a lowly field tech, is in a salary position. They do pay out bonuses but conveniently enough they forgot to mention that it wasn't going to be considered "pay" but instead would be considered a "bonus" which means that they won't pay any of the taxes on it. You, the employee are left paying about 45% of it out to taxes yourself. Likewise since it's a bonus and not part of your pay they don't include it in their end-of-the-year calculation for profit sharing and instead only calculate your profit-sharing off of your base pay. They didn't give me a choice when I had my review. It was either sign the paper and switch to salary or else. In their words the salaried position "was the only position available" to me.
This is a very small IT community. There aren't a lot of IT-related jobs that don't have something to do with my company. At some point even if I did leave this job for another in the area I will likely work for or with one of the people that I believe is causing these problems at my company. I don't particularly want to move to a new market. I'm hopeful that the people causing the problems at this company will leave. However, having been in a similar situation before I know that the chances of that are slim to none. In the mean time my medical and financial health suffer.
Since we're talking about OT, maybe someone here can explain to me what our position is (by "our" I mean all of us in IT) thanks to Bush's changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 2003. My understanding of his pro-employer changes to the FLSA mean that I can now be classified in such a way to prevent me from being eligible for OT. If that's so then how are these 2 lawsuits proceeding? The Sieblel article says 2000 to 2005 but my understanding is that 2004 and 2005 and the last 5 months of 2003 are times when OT wouldn't have applied. I'm assuming that's why my company decided to re-evaluate their position on job classifications. Comments?
Really. I didn't know that. I've been looking for the Mozilla browser. I haven't actually been able to find the link to it (their site sucks IMHO). I'll look it up. The memory leaks are really quite painful. FF is literally consuming 248MB right now. I rebooted my laptop last night.
I will say one positive thing about FF v2.0. It hasn't crashed on me once. FF v1.5x would crash at least once a week. Mozilla would do the same thing to me as well. I overuse my browser. I always have a couple dozen windows open and at least a dozen tabs in each. Ever since I started using Virtual Dimension I have even more open. Anyhow, thanks for the info about Seamonkey.
I've been too busy to tackle the hassle of downgrading and I'm still holding out hope that I'll discover a good reason why I should be using it v2.0. FF is using 141MB of RAM right now, and I rebooted last night. All I keep finding are reasons not to use it.:-(
That's a pretty damn good reason not to use it. Before my HD crash I used Mozilla as my primary work browser. I used FF 1.5 as my personal web browser. I had it set up to use a proxy that was localhost:8080 which happened to be the local end of an SSH tunnel. The SSH tunnel terminated on one of my personal servers and was tied to port 3128. I ran a basic Squid proxy on that server. With this setup I could force all my personal web surfing out over the encrypted tunnel without fear about what might be lurky in these webpages (unless if was a java applet or js that somehow or for some reason didn't honor the proxy setting. I haven't taken the time to try and recreate that. One thing that I do want to do is move my web browsing into a virtual machine. I though about that long and hard and I think it will greatly help my local security.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: Email is not a File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, Public Folders is not a File Server.
I'm surrounded by idiots. Didn't any of you people ever take Macro Economics? This isn't rocket science. It's basic Economics.
It goes both ways. If you raise our costs then the we have to raise our prices. A free market can not be completely free. A free market is subject to abuse, skittishness, knee-jerk reactions, etc. It's a balancing act.
There are certain necessities in life, staples if you will, that are the building blocks of society and everyday life. Without regulation many utility companies would ignore the majority of the US and focus solely on the areas with the highest concentration of people, primarily the seaboards. Without regulation costs of delivery services to these areas would be levied solely on the shoulders of those in rural America. Why should my fuel cost me $10/gallon when your's only costs you $2/gallon? Regulations spread the load out evenly across all members of our society. Without regulation the country couldn't maintain a balance between producers and consumers. Without balance you consumers die. It's a simple as that.
Before anyone goes off on a rant about me being a Republican or a Bush ass-kisser let me kick that in the nuts right now and say I am a Liberal.
These types of explosions are actually rather common I'm sorry to say. I can think of 3 in as many months in this reality small area I live in. In fact about 20 minutes from here a gas explosion obliterated the home of a 7 person family while they were away on vacation. Extreme Makeover Home Edition helped them build a new home a few months later. About an hour from here a natural gas well exploded in the middle of a town. It made international headlines.
And is required by code in some areas. I'm referring to the methane gas detectors. It would be nice if the CO detectors were also required and could thus be wired into the home's smoke detector system. Ideally they'd all be wired together so that a CO alarm in the kitchen would alert everyone in the whole house.
Might I remind you of something of critical importance? Conjure up in your mind a quick mental image of Ms. Lewinski. Let me help you. That is why, my dear tc, President Clinton was impeached. After that unconscionable lack of judgement and/or eyesight we had to revoke his man card. He was already on probation for marrying Hillary. Lewinski was just too much. For shame Billy Boy. You could have at least tapped a nice ass.
No, but it has Disciples with frickin' laser beams on their heads...
That said, no home is completely air tight. Without enough oxygen to fully burn fuels CO is produced (that's carbon monoxide). Here is a good article. A 100% air-tight home is not feaible and dangerous.
There are plenty of technical tips in this thread. I'll throw another type of tip at you. You really need to make sure that you have insurance on your home. I wouldn't mention that the house is no longer occupied. That would jack your rate up. I would make certain that your home was fully covered though and that it include damage from bursting water pipes, winter weather damage, vandals, etc. That way if something does happen you can at least be covered.
I'm considering a job change. I need to acquire better certs for my field. I'm trying to decide if I should wait until I have those to see if it improves my relationship with my current employer, or if I should take my new certs and run, or if I should just get out now to work on my certs while looking for a new job. Money is a problem for me. My current employer pays me so little that I'm having trouble staying afloat. I'm trying to pay down credit cards but the process is slow. I have an investment account that I could tap but I'm afraid to because that's my only source of fairly liquid cash. I have a couple retirement accounts that I can tap of I absolutely have to but that will cost me about 40% off the top (taxes and a 10% penalty). How hard was it for you to pull up stakes and relocate? I know that a lot of people do it in this industry and do it often. I don't really want to do that but I can see where that's required to get ahead in this business. Any other thoughts or comments you might have would be helpful. I'm thinking about looking for a career counselor or someone along those lines.
When I come home at night (late as always) I usually fall asleep in my chair. I didn't always used to be this way. I've come to wonder lately if this is technically depression. You know how the commercials on TV talk about how depression can manifest itself literally. I constantly feel tired and lethargic. I wonder if I'm clinically depressed. That's a scary thought. I know my work has been hard on me these past couple of years but to think that I might actually be depressed, well, depresses me. I'm going to have to put some more thought into that.
I have a large workload right now. I'm part of 3 major projects right now, all of which have the eyes or personal involvement of the owners of my family-owned company. One of the project I have basically been in the lead position on for months now. It was sold to the owners by my last supervisor but the plan was always for me to implement it. This involves a significant amount of planning, late night windows, etc. My second project hinges on the first but is backed by the division of the company that I actually work for. I'm contracted out to another division which is the owner of the first project. Confused yet? The third project is one that I've had so little time to work on that I feel significantly inferior in knowledge to the lesser technical and non-technical people associated with the project. I'm asked a question and I honestly can't answer it because I've had little involvement in the project. It's a major projects that's worth millions to my company in the not too distant future.
I have so much work on my plate that I don't know where to even begin. On top of all that I have the daily break/fix duties of the division that I've been contracted to. There is a bad personality at the division I'm contracted too that I have to deal with. He makes horrible business and technical decisions that I have to somehow work around.
I also have a wealth of crap dumped on me from my division in the form of internal documentation, procedures, processes, and politics. I have been placed smack in the middle of the political fighting between the divisions of my company. What's more the division I'm contracted to never tells my division about the many positive things I do. They only speak up when they perceive something as being negative. Of course my division thinks that this is a major problem and that it's my fault. I must be doing something wrong if they don't hear anything good from my customer. Well for starters I have a technical relationship with my customer. There is not sales person relationship with this customer. That's where the personal comments are made. Secondly my customers switches multiple times per week about how they want to be treated (as a customer or as a member of the family).
I feel that 99% of my heartburn is caused by my own employer and not by my customer. My wage is 20-25% below market, even for this area. My employer has accused me of falsifying time entries and mileage reports. My employer asked me to do a significant amount of work on a 7 day period but didn't want to pay me for it. They actually said that it wasn't possible to work 96 hours in a week. It's bad enough having to work that much time in a week but it's even worse if your employer accuses you of trying to defraud the company. The same went for my mileage report. This same person refused to reimburse me for my mileage to a client in another town (actually 2 towns away) even though my last 2 supervisors told me to include it. He also wouldn't pay for the travel time. I don't even bother turning in mileage anymore. I end up eating a couple hundred a month but it's simply less heartache in the end. I didn't expense a training trip from a few months back because I heard that my employer paid up to a certain meal per dium if I had receipts. My coworkers and myself took turns buying the meals and I didn't keep receipts. I figured rather than putting up with the hassle of trying to get them to pay for it I would simply eat the 4 days of per dium. The last time I asked them to buy a book for me I went round and round with them over which customer to bill the book to. WTF?! My employer is all about making money, customer be damned. My review had a handful of negative marks on it. All of them came back to me not taking advantage of opportunities for me to bring another billable
The Pippin was both ahead of its time and a late entry into the console market. Consoles were not a multi-purpose multimedia station back in the mid-nineties like they are (or can be) today. The Pippin was too much too soon and not enough of a console too late. By the time the Pippin-based products were on the market the market was already dominated the Big 3. They did what they were designed to do better too. The market wasn't willing to wait for the Pippin to mature given multiple mature alternatives. The Pippin should have remained an Apple R&D project and never should have been sent to market. Like so many of Apple's great ideas they were timed poorly. Had Apple brought back the Pippin 3-4 years ago as a multi-functional entertainment system (TV, DV, DVR, home audio, Web, some gaming perhaps) they would have had a stellar product on their hands.
It's those damn bugs I tell you. "I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"
Besides my knife I've also been known to grab other things that are handy such as a large pair of Klein side cutters.
That's about right. By changing the specs just enough to require new accessories they've created an additional market that they can control. They could make a slight modification to their power interface, patent it, and then license the use of it to the after-market manufacturers. This creates them a recurring revenue stream. Creating cheap accessories that break, wear-out, or have a limited-life non-replaceable battery (Bluetooth headset) also create another recurring revenue stream for these companies. Personally I'd rather buy from a company that showed a little ethics but that's just me.
I agree on the USB thing. Nothing but USB for me. The guy that created USB didn't charge Intel enough for it when he sold it back in the early 90s.
Yeah, but where's the beef? Their websites didn't offer any products, any accessories to add to you existing devices to enable them to use SplashPower, or anything of any substance. Are there other companies with a product already on the market?
Don't forget about all the primary education text books that will have to be changed to reflect the completely different styles of currency.
This is a very small IT community. There aren't a lot of IT-related jobs that don't have something to do with my company. At some point even if I did leave this job for another in the area I will likely work for or with one of the people that I believe is causing these problems at my company. I don't particularly want to move to a new market. I'm hopeful that the people causing the problems at this company will leave. However, having been in a similar situation before I know that the chances of that are slim to none. In the mean time my medical and financial health suffer.
Since we're talking about OT, maybe someone here can explain to me what our position is (by "our" I mean all of us in IT) thanks to Bush's changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 2003. My understanding of his pro-employer changes to the FLSA mean that I can now be classified in such a way to prevent me from being eligible for OT. If that's so then how are these 2 lawsuits proceeding? The Sieblel article says 2000 to 2005 but my understanding is that 2004 and 2005 and the last 5 months of 2003 are times when OT wouldn't have applied. I'm assuming that's why my company decided to re-evaluate their position on job classifications. Comments?
I will say one positive thing about FF v2.0. It hasn't crashed on me once. FF v1.5x would crash at least once a week. Mozilla would do the same thing to me as well. I overuse my browser. I always have a couple dozen windows open and at least a dozen tabs in each. Ever since I started using Virtual Dimension I have even more open. Anyhow, thanks for the info about Seamonkey.
Agreed! She is a hottie and is certainly smart.
I've been too busy to tackle the hassle of downgrading and I'm still holding out hope that I'll discover a good reason why I should be using it v2.0. FF is using 141MB of RAM right now, and I rebooted last night. All I keep finding are reasons not to use it. :-(
That's a pretty damn good reason not to use it. Before my HD crash I used Mozilla as my primary work browser. I used FF 1.5 as my personal web browser. I had it set up to use a proxy that was localhost:8080 which happened to be the local end of an SSH tunnel. The SSH tunnel terminated on one of my personal servers and was tied to port 3128. I ran a basic Squid proxy on that server. With this setup I could force all my personal web surfing out over the encrypted tunnel without fear about what might be lurky in these webpages (unless if was a java applet or js that somehow or for some reason didn't honor the proxy setting. I haven't taken the time to try and recreate that. One thing that I do want to do is move my web browsing into a virtual machine. I though about that long and hard and I think it will greatly help my local security.