I love the Free Market crowd. I usually just challenge them to show me a free market, one that isn't tinkered with by a large organization (government or private) anywhere in the world.... I'll wait.
Free Markets are a useful tool to explain some economics concepts, but do not exist in real life.
It's not an either/or thing, but a question of how much impingement there is on the consumers' freedom to choose before you can confidently declare the market free or closed.
For example, grocery stores are a free market almost everywhere - there are different companies competing for your food-buying money, no artificial barriers to entry, and the choices can be freely made or changed without any undue burden on the consumer.
Out here (PDX Metro) we have chains like Kroger (viz. Fred Meyer) Albertson's, Safeway, Thriftway, Wal-Mart, Target, the organic/new-age stores like Whole Foods, New Seasons, Trader Joe's, the little independent operators (including ethnic stores like Uwijamaya (Beaverton), various Latino, Vietnamese, Filipino, Russian and Halal markets, etc), and finally the farmers' markets and vegetable stands. Sure, they have various regulations (see also FDA, USDA, ABC and other various state boards), but a typical middle-class family can pick and choose what and where they shop, can do so in almost a literal heartbeat, and these stores all know it.
As a result, these stores go out of their way to entice you to spend money there, and none of them would dare try to overtly screw you over, lest word get out and the store's sales collapse. They also know full well that anybody can open a new store, wow the customers, and suck up all the money (which is why the local New Seasons store is giving Whole Foods and Trader Joe's a huge run for their money). The barriers to entry are relatively low - most of those barriers being related to food safety regulations.
---
On the other extreme, you have the telecoms, which are pretty much a closed market. In a given area, you have a couple of choices, each with various restrictions or limitations. Minus dial-up, you're usually stuck with one or two at the most (Cable and/or DSL), with perhaps a third if you're lucky (FIOS). In rural areas, you;re stuck with maybe one if you're lucky (usually low-end DSL). They know full well that you have no real choice, and they happily collude on pricing, caps, and limitations. Comcast knows full well that Charter or Time-Warner aren't going to show up and provide competition for cable broadband. CenturyStink knows that they won't see another DSL provider rear its head and start providing competing DSL. And besides, where are you going to go? If you get mad at Comcast, your only other options are to ditch your 50mbps cable line for a 15-20 mbps DSL line in most cases, or if you can still get FIOS, you could go there, but either way, the 'competition' is not all that much different if they also decide to screw you over when it comes to how fast and how much data you give/get. Finally, the barriers to entry are relatively high - only someone the size of Google could intrude on their cozy little setup.
They pay you for 40 hours a week. If you're working over that amount, you're just fucking yourself over.
This is why you negotiate your salary based on a 50 hr work week. Anything less is stupid on your part, because the reason most devs and sysadmins are on salary is precisely due to laws surrounding overtime pay.
If you're working 80 hrs a week for any more than 1-2 weeks a year, you need to find another job.
However managers still want you to do that, mostly because far too many managers are completely stupid. (Something I feel justified in saying because I've seen way too many mind bogglingly stupid decisions from managers.)
That's because most tech managers either have no technical background (mine has an MBA), or their technical skills died sometime back when they first made the swing to management.
Why is this a problem? Well...
This means the manager, no matter how clued-in they may be to their team, do not know when (and more importantly, why) to push back against unreasonable roadmaps and demands, nor do they have a good sense of when to demand more headcount/budget/etc. My own manager relies on myself and folks at my level to tell them when to push back, and how much money/growth to expect when next year's budget is put together. Problem is, we don't have the visibility the boss has, so in the end everybody either guesses, or in my case, I end up having to make a few informal visits to get to the bottom of things and find out for myself.
As for hours? If it takes more than 40 hrs a week to do, I start demanding to know why. Pity that I can't have that lack of planning reflect upwards against the management that makes such decisions when it comes time for their reviews....
yeah, but if you want the intel reference design, it's worth it to pay the intel tax. you're going to pay an intel tax when you buy an intel processor anyway. I have literally never had a complaint with an intel motherboard except when it had onboard ATI graphics — Mach64CT, what a POS, you couldn't even trust it to provide a framebuffer without getting the colors wrong.
Same here - with the one additional exception being when the motherboard was littered with chips labeled "Intel Experimental**", in which case you kind of expected it to go loopy.
(**...what? EVERYBODY scrounged the waterfall piles to put extra gear in the cubicle when you needed it. Policy be damned, that's pretty much what the damned things were for.)
Depends on the woman in question, but once the menses stops and the hormonal roller-coaster that accompanies menopause calms down, women are usually (not always, but usually) far more able to concentrate on work in the business realm.
Us guys on the other hand? Well, I have yet to meet a peer age-wise who isn't also a fully paid-up member of the Dirty Old Man Club, a bonafide priest, or gay (in which case his distractions focus on the male gender...)
While most of us are quite able to keep it in check and behave ourselves in the office, the distraction is still mentally well-noted.
or they're deluded prima donnas with demands that no other employer with a brain would want to even contemplate.
Like wanting an old-fashioned cubicle instead of an open-plan work area, so they can concentrate on their work?
Actually, not that (though I do agree; open-plan sucks ass unless you have a set of headphones and a good hiding place for those times when you need the concentration.)
No, I'm talking about weird hours, the ability to skip meetings even if one is needed in them, Never having to come in or implement changes off-hours, instead forcing everyone else to deal with a daytime outage, being exempt from the grunt-work that all the other team members (no matter seniority) have to share, etc.
At risk of severe misogyny, I figure that once menopause is done, women have a HUGE advantage in this arena... mostly because us dirty old men still find a nice pair of female legs/breasts/glutes/etc to be a constant-but-pleasant distraction.;)
...a career path that doesn't cap out by the time they're 35...
Not everyone in IT is a developer, eh?
At one month shy of 45 years old, I'm drowning in recruiters wanting me to talk to people, testing on my part has shown that employers are hella eager to speak with me, and they all see "20 years of experience" right at the top of my frickin' resume.
Seriously though - where in the hell does everyone get the idea that just because your beard turns gray you're suddenly worthless in IT? Sure I've seen IT folks who are, in all honesty, well past their expiration date - but this is mostly because they've either mentally checked-out, burned-out, or they're deluded prima donnas with demands that no other employer with a brain would want to even contemplate. The prima donnas are usually considered to be rock stars within the little company where they've worked for 15 years or so, but discover to their horror that the sweet little deals they have with their employer is something no other employer would want to buy into. The first two are fucking helpless whenever something new or unusual comes along. None of these, single or combined, make up the majority, and judging by my own experience, most employers know it.
Assertions aside, there's also the hordes of graybeards out there who not only read and write COBOL, FORTRAN, et al, but along the way write their own effing paychecks. Why? Because they know the ancient languages which the trend-chasing.NET and Ruby-on-Rails s'kiddies apparently can't be bothered to learn.;)
$7.26 USD/gallon according to Google's latest exchange-rate thingy, but what is neglected is that New Zealand has at least four advantages that the US does not:
1) geographic size - infrastructure costs have to be orders of magnitude smaller. 2) smaller population, ergo less automobiles to pound on the aforementioned roads 3) the population is mostly concentrated in a couple of cities, and not of a huge relative geographical area. More folks can do mass transit there, and drive less often. 4) an immigration policy that would get us called Nazis if we implemented them here (see also the current immigration woes and their contribution to economic issues here in the US)
The tax-per-gallon is over 2x as much as the oil companies themselves get from it in profit (currently $0.184 for the feds vs. ~$0.08 for the so-called evil oil companies).
So yeah, what the hell - let's nearly double the gas taxes *and* jack up prices for everything else at the same time - after all, these chumps in congress don't have to pay it (their transportation is almost fully provided either gratis or reimbursed, for as long as they're senators...)
Fuckheads. I'd rather see a direct income tax hike - at least that way it's an honest attempt, and it doesn't jack up the price of everything else.
By the way... did someone forget to inform these dummies that the economy hasn't exactly recovered yet?
I worry that the stupid FAT32 patent will still be around (since it deals with how a HDD is formatted), but maybe, just maybe other crap (long filenames, anyone?) can finally just frickin' die.
I think everyone else was paralyzed with the shock of seeing such "blinding common sense" come from a government institution.
I think the rest of us were wondering when in the everliving hell we can start seeing some of this trickle down to the rest of the tech world... the sooner, the better.
If it gets stolen, the thing gets remote-wiped five minutes later and I'm only out $150. less than an hour later I can mosey to the store, get another one, and be back on the network with the same phone number, with everything sync'd back up.
I actually don't mind it when other whip out the new shinies, because I know they're paying through the nose for 'em, and to be honest, there really isn't anything in latest/greatest that blows my dress up. *shrug*
But that's the thing. If the environment isn't also controlled, the weld will not be of uniform quality.
Depends - I recall welding kits a couple decades ago that used preheat torches and submerged the arc under a pile of powdered flux, which made the environment pretty uniform and automated (at least good enough for x-ray inspection - the parts being welded were steel bridge-beams). The welding kit was a 1/4-ton monster that ran along sections of track, which in turn attached to the steel by way of strong-assed magnets. The operator only had to set the machine up for proper amperage, make sure the flux hopper stayed full, that there was always enough wire on the spools, that the preheat torches had enough gas, knock off the semi-hardened flux once it cooled down, and stop the thing before it reached the end of the track. Mind you, the bead was about an inch thick and two inches wide, but it was incredibly uniform, and you could do multiple passes over the same seam without any grinding in the interim.
The only real hard part was setting up the right amperage and prepping/grinding the seam surfaces properly before a run.
What they can't do, necessarily, is count upon the full force of government to help them out if they want to prevent other people from using the same term in connection with their business, if they choose to use a particular category of name, as they are doing..
Though they are technically in Washington DC, one would suspect that the Equal Protection Clause would say otherwise.
1) Joking aside, Al Jazeera America is actually a fairly solid and unbiased source of hard news on subjects outside of the Mideast, and even when the topic is the Mideast, they have been (so far) fairly even-handed. Sometimes it's scary as hell how much less biased they are when you compare them to CNN, MSNBC, Fox, et al. Even covers a lot more topics than the Big Three, which means they carry a wide variety of stories that don't revolve around the latest [Outrage || Scandal]. It's like the BBC, but without the Downton Abbey accents.
2) In reply to GP: Yes, you certainly CAN have a "The Jihad Channel" on cable if you can get a company to carry it. Now your local cable provider may prohibit it, but that's not a 1st Amendment issue, since the 1st Amendment only restricts government, not private entities.
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Political joke = butthurt, apparently.
Tough crowd.
is fucking everything up. The Republicans won't be happy until everything is ruined because of their actions.
So that's where Karl Rove was last weekend - he was up at the North Pole shoving the magnetic field around!
I love the Free Market crowd. I usually just challenge them to show me a free market, one that isn't tinkered with by a large organization (government or private) anywhere in the world.... I'll wait.
Free Markets are a useful tool to explain some economics concepts, but do not exist in real life.
It's not an either/or thing, but a question of how much impingement there is on the consumers' freedom to choose before you can confidently declare the market free or closed.
For example, grocery stores are a free market almost everywhere - there are different companies competing for your food-buying money, no artificial barriers to entry, and the choices can be freely made or changed without any undue burden on the consumer.
Out here (PDX Metro) we have chains like Kroger (viz. Fred Meyer) Albertson's, Safeway, Thriftway, Wal-Mart, Target, the organic/new-age stores like Whole Foods, New Seasons, Trader Joe's, the little independent operators (including ethnic stores like Uwijamaya (Beaverton), various Latino, Vietnamese, Filipino, Russian and Halal markets, etc), and finally the farmers' markets and vegetable stands. Sure, they have various regulations (see also FDA, USDA, ABC and other various state boards), but a typical middle-class family can pick and choose what and where they shop, can do so in almost a literal heartbeat, and these stores all know it.
As a result, these stores go out of their way to entice you to spend money there, and none of them would dare try to overtly screw you over, lest word get out and the store's sales collapse. They also know full well that anybody can open a new store, wow the customers, and suck up all the money (which is why the local New Seasons store is giving Whole Foods and Trader Joe's a huge run for their money). The barriers to entry are relatively low - most of those barriers being related to food safety regulations.
---
On the other extreme, you have the telecoms, which are pretty much a closed market. In a given area, you have a couple of choices, each with various restrictions or limitations. Minus dial-up, you're usually stuck with one or two at the most (Cable and/or DSL), with perhaps a third if you're lucky (FIOS). In rural areas, you;re stuck with maybe one if you're lucky (usually low-end DSL). They know full well that you have no real choice, and they happily collude on pricing, caps, and limitations. Comcast knows full well that Charter or Time-Warner aren't going to show up and provide competition for cable broadband. CenturyStink knows that they won't see another DSL provider rear its head and start providing competing DSL. And besides, where are you going to go? If you get mad at Comcast, your only other options are to ditch your 50mbps cable line for a 15-20 mbps DSL line in most cases, or if you can still get FIOS, you could go there, but either way, the 'competition' is not all that much different if they also decide to screw you over when it comes to how fast and how much data you give/get. Finally, the barriers to entry are relatively high - only someone the size of Google could intrude on their cozy little setup.
What are there, maybe a dozen or so of us left in Amerika that believe in free markets?
If the ISP/telecom market were truly a free market, you might have had a point.
They pay you for 40 hours a week. If you're working over that amount, you're just fucking yourself over.
This is why you negotiate your salary based on a 50 hr work week. Anything less is stupid on your part, because the reason most devs and sysadmins are on salary is precisely due to laws surrounding overtime pay.
If you're working 80 hrs a week for any more than 1-2 weeks a year, you need to find another job.
However managers still want you to do that, mostly because far too many managers are completely stupid. (Something I feel justified in saying because I've seen way too many mind bogglingly stupid decisions from managers.)
That's because most tech managers either have no technical background (mine has an MBA), or their technical skills died sometime back when they first made the swing to management.
Why is this a problem? Well...
This means the manager, no matter how clued-in they may be to their team, do not know when (and more importantly, why) to push back against unreasonable roadmaps and demands, nor do they have a good sense of when to demand more headcount/budget/etc. My own manager relies on myself and folks at my level to tell them when to push back, and how much money/growth to expect when next year's budget is put together. Problem is, we don't have the visibility the boss has, so in the end everybody either guesses, or in my case, I end up having to make a few informal visits to get to the bottom of things and find out for myself.
As for hours? If it takes more than 40 hrs a week to do, I start demanding to know why. Pity that I can't have that lack of planning reflect upwards against the management that makes such decisions when it comes time for their reviews....
yeah, but if you want the intel reference design, it's worth it to pay the intel tax. you're going to pay an intel tax when you buy an intel processor anyway. I have literally never had a complaint with an intel motherboard except when it had onboard ATI graphics — Mach64CT, what a POS, you couldn't even trust it to provide a framebuffer without getting the colors wrong.
Same here - with the one additional exception being when the motherboard was littered with chips labeled "Intel Experimental**", in which case you kind of expected it to go loopy.
(** ...what? EVERYBODY scrounged the waterfall piles to put extra gear in the cubicle when you needed it. Policy be damned, that's pretty much what the damned things were for.)
Depends on the woman in question, but once the menses stops and the hormonal roller-coaster that accompanies menopause calms down, women are usually (not always, but usually) far more able to concentrate on work in the business realm.
Us guys on the other hand? Well, I have yet to meet a peer age-wise who isn't also a fully paid-up member of the Dirty Old Man Club, a bonafide priest, or gay (in which case his distractions focus on the male gender...)
While most of us are quite able to keep it in check and behave ourselves in the office, the distraction is still mentally well-noted.
Wow - you just convert to that layout or something? You're seeing it everywhere now... ;)
or they're deluded prima donnas with demands that no other employer with a brain would want to even contemplate.
Like wanting an old-fashioned cubicle instead of an open-plan work area, so they can concentrate on their work?
Actually, not that (though I do agree; open-plan sucks ass unless you have a set of headphones and a good hiding place for those times when you need the concentration.)
No, I'm talking about weird hours, the ability to skip meetings even if one is needed in them, Never having to come in or implement changes off-hours, instead forcing everyone else to deal with a daytime outage, being exempt from the grunt-work that all the other team members (no matter seniority) have to share, etc.
At risk of severe misogyny, I figure that once menopause is done, women have a HUGE advantage in this arena... mostly because us dirty old men still find a nice pair of female legs/breasts/glutes/etc to be a constant-but-pleasant distraction. ;)
Agreed with all but this one bit:
...a career path that doesn't cap out by the time they're 35...
Not everyone in IT is a developer, eh?
At one month shy of 45 years old, I'm drowning in recruiters wanting me to talk to people, testing on my part has shown that employers are hella eager to speak with me, and they all see "20 years of experience" right at the top of my frickin' resume.
Seriously though - where in the hell does everyone get the idea that just because your beard turns gray you're suddenly worthless in IT? Sure I've seen IT folks who are, in all honesty, well past their expiration date - but this is mostly because they've either mentally checked-out, burned-out, or they're deluded prima donnas with demands that no other employer with a brain would want to even contemplate. The prima donnas are usually considered to be rock stars within the little company where they've worked for 15 years or so, but discover to their horror that the sweet little deals they have with their employer is something no other employer would want to buy into. The first two are fucking helpless whenever something new or unusual comes along. None of these, single or combined, make up the majority, and judging by my own experience, most employers know it.
Assertions aside, there's also the hordes of graybeards out there who not only read and write COBOL, FORTRAN, et al, but along the way write their own effing paychecks. Why? Because they know the ancient languages which the trend-chasing .NET and Ruby-on-Rails s'kiddies apparently can't be bothered to learn. ;)
Not in Portland he didn't
(...I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.)
$7.26 USD/gallon according to Google's latest exchange-rate thingy, but what is neglected is that New Zealand has at least four advantages that the US does not:
1) geographic size - infrastructure costs have to be orders of magnitude smaller.
2) smaller population, ergo less automobiles to pound on the aforementioned roads
3) the population is mostly concentrated in a couple of cities, and not of a huge relative geographical area. More folks can do mass transit there, and drive less often.
4) an immigration policy that would get us called Nazis if we implemented them here (see also the current immigration woes and their contribution to economic issues here in the US)
The tax-per-gallon is over 2x as much as the oil companies themselves get from it in profit (currently $0.184 for the feds vs. ~$0.08 for the so-called evil oil companies).
So yeah, what the hell - let's nearly double the gas taxes *and* jack up prices for everything else at the same time - after all, these chumps in congress don't have to pay it (their transportation is almost fully provided either gratis or reimbursed, for as long as they're senators...)
Fuckheads. I'd rather see a direct income tax hike - at least that way it's an honest attempt, and it doesn't jack up the price of everything else.
By the way... did someone forget to inform these dummies that the economy hasn't exactly recovered yet?
I worry that the stupid FAT32 patent will still be around (since it deals with how a HDD is formatted), but maybe, just maybe other crap (long filenames, anyone?) can finally just frickin' die.
I think everyone else was paralyzed with the shock of seeing such "blinding common sense" come from a government institution.
I think the rest of us were wondering when in the everliving hell we can start seeing some of this trickle down to the rest of the tech world... the sooner, the better.
TFA is why I have a cheap-assed Android phone.
If it gets stolen, the thing gets remote-wiped five minutes later and I'm only out $150. less than an hour later I can mosey to the store, get another one, and be back on the network with the same phone number, with everything sync'd back up.
I actually don't mind it when other whip out the new shinies, because I know they're paying through the nose for 'em, and to be honest, there really isn't anything in latest/greatest that blows my dress up. *shrug*
But that's the thing. If the environment isn't also controlled, the weld will not be of uniform quality.
Depends - I recall welding kits a couple decades ago that used preheat torches and submerged the arc under a pile of powdered flux, which made the environment pretty uniform and automated (at least good enough for x-ray inspection - the parts being welded were steel bridge-beams). The welding kit was a 1/4-ton monster that ran along sections of track, which in turn attached to the steel by way of strong-assed magnets. The operator only had to set the machine up for proper amperage, make sure the flux hopper stayed full, that there was always enough wire on the spools, that the preheat torches had enough gas, knock off the semi-hardened flux once it cooled down, and stop the thing before it reached the end of the track. Mind you, the bead was about an inch thick and two inches wide, but it was incredibly uniform, and you could do multiple passes over the same seam without any grinding in the interim.
The only real hard part was setting up the right amperage and prepping/grinding the seam surfaces properly before a run.
I fail to see how the joke is disparaging to Catholics.
As a Catholic, I fail to see the disparagement myself. ;)
Thx for the explanation though.
I am more offended as a native by the cowboys (americas team) and the yankees than I am the redskins or braves
Trust me, after last year's performance, *everybody* is offended by the Cowboys.
Equal Protection.
Hell, if someone wants to trademark a swastika, they should be perfectly able to. The market will decide the rest.
And no one has a right to trademark a racial slur.
Okay... why not?
What they can't do, necessarily, is count upon the full force of government to help them out if they want to prevent other people from using the same term in connection with their business, if they choose to use a particular category of name, as they are doing. .
Though they are technically in Washington DC, one would suspect that the Equal Protection Clause would say otherwise.
really? al jazera is on time warner ;)
1) Joking aside, Al Jazeera America is actually a fairly solid and unbiased source of hard news on subjects outside of the Mideast, and even when the topic is the Mideast, they have been (so far) fairly even-handed. Sometimes it's scary as hell how much less biased they are when you compare them to CNN, MSNBC, Fox, et al. Even covers a lot more topics than the Big Three, which means they carry a wide variety of stories that don't revolve around the latest [Outrage || Scandal]. It's like the BBC, but without the Downton Abbey accents.
2) In reply to GP: Yes, you certainly CAN have a "The Jihad Channel" on cable if you can get a company to carry it. Now your local cable provider may prohibit it, but that's not a 1st Amendment issue, since the 1st Amendment only restricts government, not private entities.