One guy even wanted to tell us that our relatives wouldn't be allowed to take pictures at our own fucking wedding!
OK, you're speaking from ignorance, so I'll go easy on you. Ignorance is curable.
No one should expect to hire anyone to do a job then force that person to work in conditions that will cause the final product to be sub-standard. This is especially true when that final product will be seen by other potential customers and will directly influence the continuation of business.
A professional photographer produces photos for you that you show your friends. If they're good, you're excited and brag on the photog. The friends are impressed. The photog gets more bookings and makes more money. If the photos are bad, you tell all your friends the photog is no good and no word-of-mouth referrals happen. In fact, just the opposite happens. One pissed-off bride in a medium-size town can literally put a wedding photographer out of business if she works very hard at telling everyone she comes in contact with that the photogs work is crap. The continued livelihood of photographers rests directly on their ability to put out on the street only the very best work they can possibly do.
In that light, understand the photographers position. The photographer sets up lights, sets up poses, talks you into proper facial expressions, and eventually produces that perfect moment to capture. As he's pressing the shutter release, your new father-in-law jumps in front of him and snaps five quick ones with his new whizbang point-n-shoot, then starts ordering people into different poses. The photographer will do what he can to set it back up, but a moment lost is just lost. The quality of the final product will suffer.
Consider, too, the "altar return," that time when the wedding party goes back to the church, between the ceremony and the reception, to take pictures. A good pro, doing his job, can get it over with in 15 minutes. Toss in a bunch of relatives crying "Can I get a shot of that?" or just jumping in and what do you have? An altar return that lasts an hour, pissing off all your guests waiting at the reception and resulting in substandard photos, to boot.
When I was a professional wedding photographer, I learned these lessons fast, fast, fast. It took just two weddings for me to establish my rules. You want good photos? Then you have to allow me to work in an environment that doesn't ensure I fail. Specifically, I provided nicely printed cards for people to enclose with their invitations that tactfully told people they were not allowed to bring cameras to the wedding. I also had a deal with the couple - they got one warning. If someone took a photo, I would find the enforcer (often the father of the bride who was paying for everything and therefore had a vested interest in making sure no one screwed with the photographer) who had been designated beforehand by the happy couple and report the problem. If another photo was taken, I walked out. They lost their deposit. No third strike allowed. By adopting these rules, I was able to get into each little scenario, quickly do my job, and then instantly melt into the background until I was needed again. I was able to turn out primo work quickly and unobtrusively without (I can't emphasize enough the importance of this) creating the impression among all the guests that I was trying to control the proceedings. It was simply the case that no "situations" ever arose that I had to control since I wasn't competing for position and time with a bunch of snapshooters. My clients were all pleased as punch.
(Have you ever attended a wedding where it seemed the photographer thought the definition of "wedding" was "a gathering for the purpose of taking pictures"? I am convinced those guys are so obnoxious because they can't bring themselves to force the B&G to let them work in reasonable conditions. And some, well, are just primadonnas, but that's a whole 'no
Uh, no. The bans on lewd cheerleading and gay foster parents failed to pass. The linked page provides a quick list of some of the things that passed and didn't in the last Texas legislative session. Some of the items are pretty funny. Or pretty sad, depending on your POV.
A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.
That's the grip safety. You give the impression that you think this is a novel thing. I'm not saying you actually think so, just that your writing gives that impression.
Since I'm sure you know that grip safeties are, oh, at least a hundred years old, you might want to watch your phrasing a tad more in the future. Ya might give people the wrong impression, ya know.:-)
Thank you for those excellent reminders. The old SCO wasn't non-evil. IMO it was just "normal corporate evil," which is bad enough, I suppose.
My recollections are tainted because OSR was my first Unix and I was deep into it, unaware of much else, long before I ever became aware of Linux. When Tarentalla came out, I was *really* excited. I played with it for a while on a single box. Back when Windows (NT3.51, WfW3.11) seemed to crash once an hour, that box had Unix somehow deep down there providing a stable foundation. I was running MS apps and they weren't crashing! At that point, I wouldn't have cared if the Santa Cruz Operation served fresh-grilled newborns in the company cafeteria, I was in love.
I'm now older, wiser, and the Windows I have to use at work doesn't crash so much anymore. My BSD box at home works fine, too. Life is good.
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.
Garbage.
It took years for bloggers to latch onto the same teat at which most "artists" have been suckling for millenia: You just have to have balls.
Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated, stick it in your front yard, and your neighbors will call you a twit and call the homeowners association to get that eyesore removed. Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated and HAVE THE BALLS TO CALL IT ART and put it in a gallery with a ridiculous price tag and wankers who have no taste and no heart but fat wallets will try to buy an image of intelligence and sophistication by flinging dollars at you. You may be forgiven for laughing all the way to the bank.
When it comes to blogs, most people, some years back, had a reasonable enough sense of shame to realize that their idiotic ramblings were of no interest to anyone but themselves and, maybe, in return for enough monetary compensation, their therapist. Fast forward nearly a decade and several things have happened. Familiarity has bred contempt. Some scam artists have made some money. And way the hell too many people have gotten the idea that it's actually a legitimate use of their time to immortalize their verbal diarhhea via the intarweb.
And I'm posting this on one big-ass blog. Damn. I should shoot myself now.
Evil SCO and Tarantella (i.e. what was left of the old, non-evil SCO) parted ways some time ago. Tarantella was the one thing I had hoped (at that time I was sysadmin in an all OSR 5.0.4 environment) would bring SCO back into the market in strength. It was a good product back then. After all the nonsense started, I lost track. But I wish those guys all the best.
It was actually an accident I had in a car that convinced me to stop riding. I was in the left lane and two boy racers, flying low at 40-plus mph faster than the traffic stream, managed to clip a car three lanes to my right. She bounced off the truck on her right, spun to the left, and slid instantly across four lanes to smack my passenger-side door. In my Lincoln Town Car, the right-side door panel was now six inches from the transmission hump but I was still able to drive the car to a safe stop. After the accident, the lady that hit me didn't even know she had; she thought she had impacted the left-side guard rail. That's how remote was my position from the initial site of impact, how far out of her zone of awareness.
There was absolutely no way for me to avoid that accident. If I had been on my bike, no matter how attentive I could be, no matter how awesomely my bike could accelerate, steer, or brake, there would have been no way I could have avoided it. The only difference is that if I had been on my bike I would have been dead instead of just stiffened up. In the same situation, the most highly skilled rider having his best day on the best-performing bike in the world would have been just as dead.
I now prefer to be surrounded by a sizable quantity of metal.
Background: I drive a 10-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis. For readers outside the U.S., that's a very large sedan with a big V-8 engine and rear-wheel drive. The overwhelming majority of the 200k miles on that car are steady-state highway driving at 65 mph or so. I'd estimate a third of my time is spent on surface streets where I always accelerate as quickly as possible from a standing start. I use the cruise control as often as possible, even for a two-block run at 40 mph; it's become totally automatic for me to hit those buttons. I drive from a full tank of gas to below a quarter tank before refilling, virtually never putting in less than a fillup. I track my mileage at every fillup.
Results: I have never gotten less than 20 miles per gallon. 22 is normal. My last fillup was just shy of 25 miles per gallon; that's quite rare. I've never gotten 26.
Conclusion: I long ago concluded that an aggressive driving style doesn't hurt mileage and that the space and comfort penalty involved in getting a few more mpgs from a cramped little car just ain't worth it. Somebody show me bigger-than-mid-size sedan that consistently gets more than 50 mpg and I'll consider switching. For me, the Prius is getting close but it's not quite there yet.
Yeah, that's the most common usage. A hack writer, though, can also be someone who doesn't display much talent in the final product. That's not necessarily bad. Strictly "Just the facts, ma'am" writing can be called hack writing and it's not really an insult; it's just doing what the job requires in cases where the job requires nothing beyond a bit of clear exposition. In fiction writing, there are hack writers who throw out everything that doesn't either move the story or explain a character. Their prose isn't special or artsy, but it gets the job done. Y'know what? People that write like that often make a solid living. Most screenplays are proof of that. Turning out hack jobs to pay the bills while you work on your novel isn't a bad thing. It's just how you get by.
How many great actors have, occasionally, pay the bills by "phoning in" a performance? Its the same thing with writers, sometimes.
Re:Gates has shown poorly-camouflaged fear before
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The word "bullet" has multiple definitions, including any object shaped like one. That's the definition in play here. If that weren't so, the "bullet train" would have to be shot out of a giant rifle every time it runs. That's not the case, is it?:-)
"Sweating bullets" doesn't require actual perspiration. It can mean simply fretting over something. So he was clearly sweating bullets in a figurative sense. However, he was also literally perspiring an incredible amount. You say you doubt it, but trust me. I was there. He was producing a large amount of sweat while under stress - another of the definitions of "sweating bullets." So...
He was figuratively sweating bullets, iow fretting over the topic at hand.
He was literally sweating bullets, iow perspiration was present in large droplets.
Thus, he sweated bullets. Literally and figuratively.
Am I missing something?
For reference, see the intransitive verb definition number 6 and the noun definition numbers 1 and 2 found here, as well as the noun definition number 2 found here.
Gah! I can be such a dumbass
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Let me be the first to say it so that 5000 other people don't feel the need. I know it's not Baldwin. I guess I was just equating Steve's horrible acting in that little vid with one of those terrible interchangeable actors.
Gates has shown poorly-camouflaged fear before
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I saw ol' Bill give a little rah-rah speech a number of years ago. I dropped my can of tuna fish in the box at the door, thus feeding the MS PR machine (that was, at the time, making hay about how MS was helping feed the hungry) and gaining free entry to Jones Hall in downtown Houston. Most of the attendees had obviously never been to the symphony so they didn't know the layout of the place. Since there was no reserved seating, I ran around to a box entrance and grabbed a seat within, literally, spitting distance of the stage. I mean, the guy was right there in front of me, close enough for me to hear him breathe off-mike. Close enough for me to feel what he was feeling instead of just listen to his words. We were treated to the Gates/Baldwin parody of that silly SNL-inspired movie, A Night at the Roxbury. I guess that would make this about 5 years ago.
The PR garbage flowed from him, everyone made nice, and then questions were taken from the floor. Someone asked about Linux. That was when things got surreal.
Gates made a point of screwing up the pronunciation of the name, trying to give the impression that this OS was from a foreign planet or something. Then he set about ridiculing the available apps, the ease of use, etc. He threw a handful of ill-considered (to anyone who knew anything about Linux) criticisms against the wall, hoping something would stick. He tried to make fun of the whole thing.
And he sweated bullets. Literally and figuratively.
It dawned on me at that moment that the guy was flat-out scared. He saw this THING bearing down on him and he clearly didn't have a clue how to respond. "Barely-concealed panic" is how I would characterize it. I get the feeling this Gates character really hates to not be in control and this Linux thing was giving him ulcers.
That was the ridiculing stage. The fighting stage came soon after. But that was also the moment that I realized Linux was here to stay.
...here in the States, you aren't allowed to lock checked baggage anymore
Except for the exceptions. I regularly fly with firearms. They must be locked. In practical terms, there are problems involved with making sure your luggage is locked yet accessible to the TSA to paw through. It's nothing that can't (usually) be handled by showing up 4 hours early, though.
Ah, such is the danger of posting something short when a problem is complex. I trust that after you posted you read the rest of this thread and my other posts, where I noted things like the difference in the definition of "employee" depending on the body of law involved. If you have, you ought to get the impression that I pretty much agree with everything you say. Ultimately, though, the only writings on this case that really matter will be issued by a court and those won't exist for quite some time.
Just one minor nit to pick - I'm not "hostile" toward those who correctly surmised anything because no one knows if they're correct or not. The suit has yet to be concluded. I was, however, dismissive of those who would reach a conclusion at this early stage. Perhaps, however, I was excessively dismissive and you perceive that as hostile. If so, I apologize.
I'm not trying to be hostile or piss anyone off. I've just seen enough serious human misery around this subject that I'm pleading with people to reach a deeper understanding before they draw conclusions or enter into an employment situation that might later cause them grief.
Perhaps if I'd said it that nicely to begin with people wouldn't have reacted so strongly. That's my fault. Live and learn.
Look, let's call a truce. You obviously know what you're doing. What I'm trying to do is educate the people (and, based on the posts I saw before I wrote anything, there are a bunch of them) who DON'T know what they're doing. Far too many folks around here think that just because they signed with an agency that placed them in another firm pursuant to a contract, everything is fine. Well, all too often things are anything but fine.
If the agency is run by crooks, the real employer and the grunt in the trenches both get screwed. Yes, I can be pedantic about this stuff. But if you'd seen as many (literally thousands) of people as I have who think they have a retirement plan when they actually don't, people who think they have health insurance when they actually don't, then you'd be more pedantic, too. The failure to understand this stuff, the failure to understand just who your real employer is, can create real tragedy in the lives of ordinary people who don't deserve to be put through that kind of crap.
Now, in the instant case, that's obviously NOT what's going on. TFA deals with one of those middle cases where people say they just got fed up with being screwed around. But the sort of ignorance and/or circumstances that led them to that place in their lives can also lead people to much, much worse places.
If I can play any little part in helping people avoid those tragedies, I'll happily endure your flames.
But "contractor" or "independent contractor," the point of my posts in this thread (and something that some people around here seem to have a real problem wrapping their mind around) is that you don't necessarily work for Agency, no matter who finds you the job, withholds taxes, and offers benefits. If MegaCorp controls what you do, day to day, in some detail; if MegaCorp can fire you; if MegaCorp/insert a bunch of other criteria/, then you might actually be an employee of MegaCorp.
All my employment contracts, payrates, benefits etc are with the contracting company.
Which also seems to be the case with the people in Boise. If they want benefits etc, they should take it up with their contracting company and not HP.
Not necessarily. The point most people seem to be missing is that you may be paid by the contracting company; you may have only signed paperwork with the contracting company; BUT if the entity for which you are doing the work is controlling you, you may, legally, be an employee of that company.
Yeah, I know it sounds weird. The reasons why the law needs to be like this are very murky to people who approach their business dealings with integrity. But if you had ever seen some of the absolutely crazy stuff some people do to game the whole employer vs. independent contractor distinction for illegal profit, you'd understand why the law is the way it is. Check my other posts in this thread for more info, including a good link to help you figure out who you actually, as a matter of law, work for.
Oh, btw, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not speaking for my employer, so anything I post doesn't mean anything. (Y'know, I think this is the first thread I've ever participated in where I absolutely HAD to include disclaimers. Sad, really.)
Y'know, normally I don't feed trolls, but this one is too easy.
Contracts don't mean anything?
No contract means what it says when it says something that contradicts the law. You and your neighbor can sign a contract that he allows you to burn trash on his lawn. That's cool. But if your city says burning trash on the lawn is illegal, the piece of paper you guys signed might make good kindling, but it doesn't mean anything else.
You are free to redefine the business relationship at any time?
Nope. You are not free to redefine your business relationships as per the negotiated whims of you and the people who pay you money. If you are their employee, feel free to get everyone in your city to sign a piece of paper saying you're an independent contractor. That piece of paper absolutely cannot magically transform you from an employee into an independent contractor.
Again, the ignorance around here amazes me. So does the hubris. Do people actually think they can just write up a contract and by doing so somehow magically earn the right to ignore the law?
First, the disclaimers. I may be an IRS employee, but I am not a lawyer, not currently directly involved in tax enforcement, not technically qualified to say any of this stuff, not writing this on government time, and (in all caps, so people don't miss it) I AM NOT SPEAKING FOR MY EMPLOYER! Got it? Good. Now...
You ask several excellent, excellent questions. Thank you so much.
The IRS form simply asks questions by which an IRS employee can make a determination, not the criteria by which such decisions are made.
True. The determination is based on the "20 common law factors" but the form maps to those factors pretty directly. And yes, for the *really* clueful out there, those factors are far from perfect and not controlling in all cases. Where taxes are concerned, they are pretty much the be-all and end-all, but for other things, such as fair labor practices, other agencies have other definitions of "employee" that are similar but just different enough to keep armies of lawyers employed.
The Internal Revenue Code simply references common law and goes on to say that an employee is anyone who "has the status of an employee." Real clear, huh? The actual 20 common law factors are laid out in Revenue Ruling 87-41. For a good discussion of these issues (in a different context, but a good one because it was written in a division of folks who are about as anal-retentive and detail-oriented as any employees at the IRS), start at item 4 on page 11 of this report.
In my case, the IRS receives its employment taxes (also corp income taxes) from my consulting corporation so it does not care. In the case of TFA, Adecco pays these taxes so the IRS does not again care.
In practical terms, quite correct. Things only get sticky when people start disputing who is actually employed by who. That's what's happening here.
IMNAL but its my understanding that the laws are structured to make it illegal to make a contracting agreement so that nobody pays the employment taxes.
Correct, again, in practical terms. But that's a dangerous oversimplification.
In my corp-to-corp structure my company pays these taxes, so why should HP be liable.
Setting up an insulating corporation is a good way to stack evidence on the side of the notion that you are not an HP employee. In fact, you seemed to have approached this thing thoughfully enough that you probably aren't. In practical terms, as long as the taxes get paid, the question probably doesn't come up.
But consider this - Do you have a formal retirement plan? Depending on the type, such a plan may only be legal if it is maintained by the employer. So what if your corp gets audited and everything turns out fine except that under the 20 common law factors it is determined that you are actually an employee of HP? The IRS might not change any tax items, but your entire retirement plan might be disqualified because it is not being maintained by the actual employer! This area is a freakin' minefield in tax law and it really bugs me to see the way people are glossing over the details and misunderstanding so many basic things about it.
If the laws structured such that nobody but direct employees could perform certain tasks,
That's not, afaik, what's being discussed here at all. A legitimate independent contractor can perform almost any work that an employee performs, the only real exception being the officers of a corporation. (You really can't contract out the positions of corporate officers although small corps try to do it all the time.) The difference (and remember, there is no bright line, just a judgement based on a bunch of factors) is more in the way things are done. If I'm an employee, the employer can tell me when to show up, what tools to
How many posters have said "They signed a contract! They're contractors! Screw 'em!"? Those posters are idiots. With the notable exception of just a couple of posters, the ignorance here amazes me.
For those of you who want some idea what's real and what's hot air being blown by a bunch of no-nothing nerds who think their world-view should inform every business relationship in the country, listen up. IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU'VE SIGNED A CONTRACT. IT DOES NOT MATTER (much) WHAT THE CONTRACT SAYS.
You can sign a contract to work for a big corp wherein you swear a thousand times that you're not an employee and you'll never seek employee benefits and you're not entitled to them and you'll never sue. You and your new bosses can sing from the mountaintops for a month that you are not an employee. And none of that matters.
Employees are defined by law, not by some silly piece of paper drawn up by the legal department at MegaCorp. If you meet certain criteria, you are an employee. It doesn't matter if you and your bosses agree differently. It doesn't matter what the contract says. If you meet the criteria, you ARE an employee. Period. And if you ARE an employee and your employer is treating you different from other employees (by, for example, referring to you as a contractor and not giving you benefits), then you've got a reason to sue.
Those criteria are found on this form. Read it and learn something and quit spouting off about stuff when (most of) you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
PS - What really amazes me is how many of you guys are posting "I'm a contractor and..." stories. Reading your posts makes it crystal clear that you often haven't a clue what the definition of "independent contractor" is. And you're making your living as one?!? The mind boggles. It really does.
n. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.
often Fundamentalism An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture.
You may have a point. I try not to be intolerant, though that's not required to be a fundamentalist. I'm definitely not militant, though that is only a requirement for the particular strain of fundamentalism referenced in the definition.
I do, however, maintain the inerrancy of Scripture. To me and, in my experience, to most Christians that's the core definition of fundamentalism. Us fundys think that the Bible doesn't make mistakes. That's the...err...fundamental principle to which we adhere.
The difference between most fundys and the ones you see on the news is that most of us are willing to accept that when science demonstrates a fact and the Bible appears to contradict that fact, we look first to our human (and, thus, often flawed) perceptions of reality as the most likely source of the conflict. We don't dismiss science as wrongheaded because we don't understand something. And where we can't resolve these things, we accept on faith that someday, generally a microsecond after we die, we'll figure things out.
We also don't, as in your Humpty-Dumpty reference, choose to redefine our terms on a whim or whenever it suits our purpose. Where sincere effort leads us to change our views, we don't keep it a secret and/or flip-flop in an attempt to manipulate people. Such behavior would be intellectually dishonest and would tarnish the integrity with which we believe God intends us to conduct our worldly affairs.
So maybe, if you insist that the title must carry with it all the problematic baggage that's ever been unfairly associated with the term, I'm not a fundamentalist. But I don't agree. I think I'm about as fundamentalist as a person can be.
Notwithstanding other reasonable points you make...
It's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to fundamentalists some sort of lock-step mindless adherence to bizarre beliefs.
Yes, it's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to a word the very meaning it is defined by.
Not quite. In the context of fundamentalist Christianity, you're a bit off base. Whether the beliefs are bizarre or not isn't germane. Neither is the notion that every fundamentalist believes exactly the same way in a "lock-step" fashion, a patently absurd notion.
Fundamentalism is the belief that the Bible means what it says. That's all. There's nothing bizarre or sinister about that.
Most Christians are taught that God expects us to use our intelligence to understand the difference between a parable, an illustrative story, and the verifiable fact of how hot our coffee is. Where facts are known to be facts, we accept them as facts. Where stories are understood to be similes for higher concepts or descriptive parables, we accept them as such. And where we don't know, we accept on faith. Thus, to most Christians the Bible is full of great stories that illustrate basic truths (whether the actual events occurred or not) and facts.
Now, where do you draw the line between those two things? Each Christian decides for himself. Frankly, I admire the faith of those who truly believe the Bible can help them ascertain the exact day of the week the world was created. I draw the line in a different place. But the fact remains that we can both still claim to be fundamentalist Chrisitians. Our fundamental belief is that the Bible literally means what it says, even if we both read it to mean something a bit different.
The only problem with this is that I believe that where the Bible says one thing and science says something else, I ascribe that perceived difference to my inability to parse out when the Bible is being literal and when it's being illustrative/representational. I view science as helping me understand God's creation and Word better. I don't try to use the Word to refute provable facts. God gave me intelligence so I could try to grok the difference, not run roughshod over anything new and mysterious to me.
Some Christians, often derisively called "fundies," take a different approach. They, in my judgement, are guilty of the sin of pride. They think their faith is perfect in its current form and should never be informed by new facts. That's sad; Christians are supposed to grow in their faith, not ossify in it. I fear their hubris will be their undoing, eventually, and pray that they may be given better understanding before anybody else gets hurt.
If that makes me, in your eyes, something other than "fundamentalist," then I'm afraid you don't really know what the word means in this context.
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OK, you're speaking from ignorance, so I'll go easy on you. Ignorance is curable.
No one should expect to hire anyone to do a job then force that person to work in conditions that will cause the final product to be sub-standard. This is especially true when that final product will be seen by other potential customers and will directly influence the continuation of business.
A professional photographer produces photos for you that you show your friends. If they're good, you're excited and brag on the photog. The friends are impressed. The photog gets more bookings and makes more money. If the photos are bad, you tell all your friends the photog is no good and no word-of-mouth referrals happen. In fact, just the opposite happens. One pissed-off bride in a medium-size town can literally put a wedding photographer out of business if she works very hard at telling everyone she comes in contact with that the photogs work is crap. The continued livelihood of photographers rests directly on their ability to put out on the street only the very best work they can possibly do.
In that light, understand the photographers position. The photographer sets up lights, sets up poses, talks you into proper facial expressions, and eventually produces that perfect moment to capture. As he's pressing the shutter release, your new father-in-law jumps in front of him and snaps five quick ones with his new whizbang point-n-shoot, then starts ordering people into different poses. The photographer will do what he can to set it back up, but a moment lost is just lost. The quality of the final product will suffer.
Consider, too, the "altar return," that time when the wedding party goes back to the church, between the ceremony and the reception, to take pictures. A good pro, doing his job, can get it over with in 15 minutes. Toss in a bunch of relatives crying "Can I get a shot of that?" or just jumping in and what do you have? An altar return that lasts an hour, pissing off all your guests waiting at the reception and resulting in substandard photos, to boot.
When I was a professional wedding photographer, I learned these lessons fast, fast, fast. It took just two weddings for me to establish my rules. You want good photos? Then you have to allow me to work in an environment that doesn't ensure I fail. Specifically, I provided nicely printed cards for people to enclose with their invitations that tactfully told people they were not allowed to bring cameras to the wedding. I also had a deal with the couple - they got one warning. If someone took a photo, I would find the enforcer (often the father of the bride who was paying for everything and therefore had a vested interest in making sure no one screwed with the photographer) who had been designated beforehand by the happy couple and report the problem. If another photo was taken, I walked out. They lost their deposit. No third strike allowed. By adopting these rules, I was able to get into each little scenario, quickly do my job, and then instantly melt into the background until I was needed again. I was able to turn out primo work quickly and unobtrusively without (I can't emphasize enough the importance of this) creating the impression among all the guests that I was trying to control the proceedings. It was simply the case that no "situations" ever arose that I had to control since I wasn't competing for position and time with a bunch of snapshooters. My clients were all pleased as punch.
(Have you ever attended a wedding where it seemed the photographer thought the definition of "wedding" was "a gathering for the purpose of taking pictures"? I am convinced those guys are so obnoxious because they can't bring themselves to force the B&G to let them work in reasonable conditions. And some, well, are just primadonnas, but that's a whole 'no
Uh, no. The bans on lewd cheerleading and gay foster parents failed to pass. The linked page provides a quick list of some of the things that passed and didn't in the last Texas legislative session. Some of the items are pretty funny. Or pretty sad, depending on your POV.
A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.
Try talking to the office of the Taxpayer Advocate.
That's the grip safety. You give the impression that you think this is a novel thing. I'm not saying you actually think so, just that your writing gives that impression.
:-)
Since I'm sure you know that grip safeties are, oh, at least a hundred years old, you might want to watch your phrasing a tad more in the future. Ya might give people the wrong impression, ya know.
Thank you for those excellent reminders. The old SCO wasn't non-evil. IMO it was just "normal corporate evil," which is bad enough, I suppose.
My recollections are tainted because OSR was my first Unix and I was deep into it, unaware of much else, long before I ever became aware of Linux. When Tarentalla came out, I was *really* excited. I played with it for a while on a single box. Back when Windows (NT3.51, WfW3.11) seemed to crash once an hour, that box had Unix somehow deep down there providing a stable foundation. I was running MS apps and they weren't crashing! At that point, I wouldn't have cared if the Santa Cruz Operation served fresh-grilled newborns in the company cafeteria, I was in love.
I'm now older, wiser, and the Windows I have to use at work doesn't crash so much anymore. My BSD box at home works fine, too. Life is good.
Garbage.
It took years for bloggers to latch onto the same teat at which most "artists" have been suckling for millenia: You just have to have balls.
Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated, stick it in your front yard, and your neighbors will call you a twit and call the homeowners association to get that eyesore removed. Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated and HAVE THE BALLS TO CALL IT ART and put it in a gallery with a ridiculous price tag and wankers who have no taste and no heart but fat wallets will try to buy an image of intelligence and sophistication by flinging dollars at you. You may be forgiven for laughing all the way to the bank.
When it comes to blogs, most people, some years back, had a reasonable enough sense of shame to realize that their idiotic ramblings were of no interest to anyone but themselves and, maybe, in return for enough monetary compensation, their therapist. Fast forward nearly a decade and several things have happened. Familiarity has bred contempt. Some scam artists have made some money. And way the hell too many people have gotten the idea that it's actually a legitimate use of their time to immortalize their verbal diarhhea via the intarweb.
And I'm posting this on one big-ass blog. Damn. I should shoot myself now.
Evil SCO and Tarantella (i.e. what was left of the old, non-evil SCO) parted ways some time ago. Tarantella was the one thing I had hoped (at that time I was sysadmin in an all OSR 5.0.4 environment) would bring SCO back into the market in strength. It was a good product back then. After all the nonsense started, I lost track. But I wish those guys all the best.
Bravo.
It was actually an accident I had in a car that convinced me to stop riding. I was in the left lane and two boy racers, flying low at 40-plus mph faster than the traffic stream, managed to clip a car three lanes to my right. She bounced off the truck on her right, spun to the left, and slid instantly across four lanes to smack my passenger-side door. In my Lincoln Town Car, the right-side door panel was now six inches from the transmission hump but I was still able to drive the car to a safe stop. After the accident, the lady that hit me didn't even know she had; she thought she had impacted the left-side guard rail. That's how remote was my position from the initial site of impact, how far out of her zone of awareness.
There was absolutely no way for me to avoid that accident. If I had been on my bike, no matter how attentive I could be, no matter how awesomely my bike could accelerate, steer, or brake, there would have been no way I could have avoided it. The only difference is that if I had been on my bike I would have been dead instead of just stiffened up. In the same situation, the most highly skilled rider having his best day on the best-performing bike in the world would have been just as dead.
I now prefer to be surrounded by a sizable quantity of metal.
Background: I drive a 10-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis. For readers outside the U.S., that's a very large sedan with a big V-8 engine and rear-wheel drive. The overwhelming majority of the 200k miles on that car are steady-state highway driving at 65 mph or so. I'd estimate a third of my time is spent on surface streets where I always accelerate as quickly as possible from a standing start. I use the cruise control as often as possible, even for a two-block run at 40 mph; it's become totally automatic for me to hit those buttons. I drive from a full tank of gas to below a quarter tank before refilling, virtually never putting in less than a fillup. I track my mileage at every fillup.
Results: I have never gotten less than 20 miles per gallon. 22 is normal. My last fillup was just shy of 25 miles per gallon; that's quite rare. I've never gotten 26.
Conclusion: I long ago concluded that an aggressive driving style doesn't hurt mileage and that the space and comfort penalty involved in getting a few more mpgs from a cramped little car just ain't worth it. Somebody show me bigger-than-mid-size sedan that consistently gets more than 50 mpg and I'll consider switching. For me, the Prius is getting close but it's not quite there yet.
Yeah, that's the most common usage. A hack writer, though, can also be someone who doesn't display much talent in the final product. That's not necessarily bad. Strictly "Just the facts, ma'am" writing can be called hack writing and it's not really an insult; it's just doing what the job requires in cases where the job requires nothing beyond a bit of clear exposition. In fiction writing, there are hack writers who throw out everything that doesn't either move the story or explain a character. Their prose isn't special or artsy, but it gets the job done. Y'know what? People that write like that often make a solid living. Most screenplays are proof of that. Turning out hack jobs to pay the bills while you work on your novel isn't a bad thing. It's just how you get by.
How many great actors have, occasionally, pay the bills by "phoning in" a performance? Its the same thing with writers, sometimes.
The word "bullet" has multiple definitions, including any object shaped like one. That's the definition in play here. If that weren't so, the "bullet train" would have to be shot out of a giant rifle every time it runs. That's not the case, is it? :-)
"Sweating bullets" doesn't require actual perspiration. It can mean simply fretting over something. So he was clearly sweating bullets in a figurative sense. However, he was also literally perspiring an incredible amount. You say you doubt it, but trust me. I was there. He was producing a large amount of sweat while under stress - another of the definitions of "sweating bullets." So...
He was figuratively sweating bullets, iow fretting over the topic at hand.
He was literally sweating bullets, iow perspiration was present in large droplets.
Thus, he sweated bullets. Literally and figuratively.
Am I missing something?
For reference, see the intransitive verb definition number 6 and the noun definition numbers 1 and 2 found here, as well as the noun definition number 2 found here.
Let me be the first to say it so that 5000 other people don't feel the need. I know it's not Baldwin. I guess I was just equating Steve's horrible acting in that little vid with one of those terrible interchangeable actors.
I saw ol' Bill give a little rah-rah speech a number of years ago. I dropped my can of tuna fish in the box at the door, thus feeding the MS PR machine (that was, at the time, making hay about how MS was helping feed the hungry) and gaining free entry to Jones Hall in downtown Houston. Most of the attendees had obviously never been to the symphony so they didn't know the layout of the place. Since there was no reserved seating, I ran around to a box entrance and grabbed a seat within, literally, spitting distance of the stage. I mean, the guy was right there in front of me, close enough for me to hear him breathe off-mike. Close enough for me to feel what he was feeling instead of just listen to his words. We were treated to the Gates/Baldwin parody of that silly SNL-inspired movie, A Night at the Roxbury. I guess that would make this about 5 years ago.
The PR garbage flowed from him, everyone made nice, and then questions were taken from the floor. Someone asked about Linux. That was when things got surreal.
Gates made a point of screwing up the pronunciation of the name, trying to give the impression that this OS was from a foreign planet or something. Then he set about ridiculing the available apps, the ease of use, etc. He threw a handful of ill-considered (to anyone who knew anything about Linux) criticisms against the wall, hoping something would stick. He tried to make fun of the whole thing.
And he sweated bullets. Literally and figuratively.
It dawned on me at that moment that the guy was flat-out scared. He saw this THING bearing down on him and he clearly didn't have a clue how to respond. "Barely-concealed panic" is how I would characterize it. I get the feeling this Gates character really hates to not be in control and this Linux thing was giving him ulcers.
That was the ridiculing stage. The fighting stage came soon after. But that was also the moment that I realized Linux was here to stay.
The Wasp and lots of other really neat, really funky stuff along the same lines can be found at this page.
Except for the exceptions. I regularly fly with firearms. They must be locked. In practical terms, there are problems involved with making sure your luggage is locked yet accessible to the TSA to paw through. It's nothing that can't (usually) be handled by showing up 4 hours early, though.
Sigh. Flying used to be so much easier.
Ah, such is the danger of posting something short when a problem is complex. I trust that after you posted you read the rest of this thread and my other posts, where I noted things like the difference in the definition of "employee" depending on the body of law involved. If you have, you ought to get the impression that I pretty much agree with everything you say. Ultimately, though, the only writings on this case that really matter will be issued by a court and those won't exist for quite some time.
Just one minor nit to pick - I'm not "hostile" toward those who correctly surmised anything because no one knows if they're correct or not. The suit has yet to be concluded. I was, however, dismissive of those who would reach a conclusion at this early stage. Perhaps, however, I was excessively dismissive and you perceive that as hostile. If so, I apologize.
I'm not trying to be hostile or piss anyone off. I've just seen enough serious human misery around this subject that I'm pleading with people to reach a deeper understanding before they draw conclusions or enter into an employment situation that might later cause them grief.
Perhaps if I'd said it that nicely to begin with people wouldn't have reacted so strongly. That's my fault. Live and learn.
Thanks for the promotion! I really appreciate it.
Look, let's call a truce. You obviously know what you're doing. What I'm trying to do is educate the people (and, based on the posts I saw before I wrote anything, there are a bunch of them) who DON'T know what they're doing. Far too many folks around here think that just because they signed with an agency that placed them in another firm pursuant to a contract, everything is fine. Well, all too often things are anything but fine.
If the agency is run by crooks, the real employer and the grunt in the trenches both get screwed. Yes, I can be pedantic about this stuff. But if you'd seen as many (literally thousands) of people as I have who think they have a retirement plan when they actually don't, people who think they have health insurance when they actually don't, then you'd be more pedantic, too. The failure to understand this stuff, the failure to understand just who your real employer is, can create real tragedy in the lives of ordinary people who don't deserve to be put through that kind of crap.
Now, in the instant case, that's obviously NOT what's going on. TFA deals with one of those middle cases where people say they just got fed up with being screwed around. But the sort of ignorance and/or circumstances that led them to that place in their lives can also lead people to much, much worse places.
If I can play any little part in helping people avoid those tragedies, I'll happily endure your flames.
Gotcha. Good point, there.
/insert a bunch of other criteria/, then you might actually be an employee of MegaCorp.
But "contractor" or "independent contractor," the point of my posts in this thread (and something that some people around here seem to have a real problem wrapping their mind around) is that you don't necessarily work for Agency, no matter who finds you the job, withholds taxes, and offers benefits. If MegaCorp controls what you do, day to day, in some detail; if MegaCorp can fire you; if MegaCorp
Not necessarily. The point most people seem to be missing is that you may be paid by the contracting company; you may have only signed paperwork with the contracting company; BUT if the entity for which you are doing the work is controlling you, you may, legally, be an employee of that company.
Yeah, I know it sounds weird. The reasons why the law needs to be like this are very murky to people who approach their business dealings with integrity. But if you had ever seen some of the absolutely crazy stuff some people do to game the whole employer vs. independent contractor distinction for illegal profit, you'd understand why the law is the way it is. Check my other posts in this thread for more info, including a good link to help you figure out who you actually, as a matter of law, work for.
Oh, btw, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not speaking for my employer, so anything I post doesn't mean anything. (Y'know, I think this is the first thread I've ever participated in where I absolutely HAD to include disclaimers. Sad, really.)
Y'know, normally I don't feed trolls, but this one is too easy.
No contract means what it says when it says something that contradicts the law. You and your neighbor can sign a contract that he allows you to burn trash on his lawn. That's cool. But if your city says burning trash on the lawn is illegal, the piece of paper you guys signed might make good kindling, but it doesn't mean anything else.
Nope. You are not free to redefine your business relationships as per the negotiated whims of you and the people who pay you money. If you are their employee, feel free to get everyone in your city to sign a piece of paper saying you're an independent contractor. That piece of paper absolutely cannot magically transform you from an employee into an independent contractor.
Again, the ignorance around here amazes me. So does the hubris. Do people actually think they can just write up a contract and by doing so somehow magically earn the right to ignore the law?
First, the disclaimers. I may be an IRS employee, but I am not a lawyer, not currently directly involved in tax enforcement, not technically qualified to say any of this stuff, not writing this on government time, and (in all caps, so people don't miss it) I AM NOT SPEAKING FOR MY EMPLOYER! Got it? Good. Now...
You ask several excellent, excellent questions. Thank you so much.
True. The determination is based on the "20 common law factors" but the form maps to those factors pretty directly. And yes, for the *really* clueful out there, those factors are far from perfect and not controlling in all cases. Where taxes are concerned, they are pretty much the be-all and end-all, but for other things, such as fair labor practices, other agencies have other definitions of "employee" that are similar but just different enough to keep armies of lawyers employed.
The Internal Revenue Code simply references common law and goes on to say that an employee is anyone who "has the status of an employee." Real clear, huh? The actual 20 common law factors are laid out in Revenue Ruling 87-41. For a good discussion of these issues (in a different context, but a good one because it was written in a division of folks who are about as anal-retentive and detail-oriented as any employees at the IRS), start at item 4 on page 11 of this report.
In practical terms, quite correct. Things only get sticky when people start disputing who is actually employed by who. That's what's happening here.
Correct, again, in practical terms. But that's a dangerous oversimplification.
Setting up an insulating corporation is a good way to stack evidence on the side of the notion that you are not an HP employee. In fact, you seemed to have approached this thing thoughfully enough that you probably aren't. In practical terms, as long as the taxes get paid, the question probably doesn't come up.
But consider this - Do you have a formal retirement plan? Depending on the type, such a plan may only be legal if it is maintained by the employer. So what if your corp gets audited and everything turns out fine except that under the 20 common law factors it is determined that you are actually an employee of HP? The IRS might not change any tax items, but your entire retirement plan might be disqualified because it is not being maintained by the actual employer! This area is a freakin' minefield in tax law and it really bugs me to see the way people are glossing over the details and misunderstanding so many basic things about it.
That's not, afaik, what's being discussed here at all. A legitimate independent contractor can perform almost any work that an employee performs, the only real exception being the officers of a corporation. (You really can't contract out the positions of corporate officers although small corps try to do it all the time.) The difference (and remember, there is no bright line, just a judgement based on a bunch of factors) is more in the way things are done. If I'm an employee, the employer can tell me when to show up, what tools to
How many posters have said "They signed a contract! They're contractors! Screw 'em!"? Those posters are idiots. With the notable exception of just a couple of posters, the ignorance here amazes me.
For those of you who want some idea what's real and what's hot air being blown by a bunch of no-nothing nerds who think their world-view should inform every business relationship in the country, listen up. IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU'VE SIGNED A CONTRACT. IT DOES NOT MATTER (much) WHAT THE CONTRACT SAYS.
You can sign a contract to work for a big corp wherein you swear a thousand times that you're not an employee and you'll never seek employee benefits and you're not entitled to them and you'll never sue. You and your new bosses can sing from the mountaintops for a month that you are not an employee. And none of that matters.
Employees are defined by law, not by some silly piece of paper drawn up by the legal department at MegaCorp. If you meet certain criteria, you are an employee. It doesn't matter if you and your bosses agree differently. It doesn't matter what the contract says. If you meet the criteria, you ARE an employee. Period. And if you ARE an employee and your employer is treating you different from other employees (by, for example, referring to you as a contractor and not giving you benefits), then you've got a reason to sue.
Those criteria are found on this form. Read it and learn something and quit spouting off about stuff when (most of) you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
PS - What really amazes me is how many of you guys are posting "I'm a contractor and..." stories. Reading your posts makes it crystal clear that you often haven't a clue what the definition of "independent contractor" is. And you're making your living as one?!? The mind boggles. It really does.
This form is where the rubber really meets the road.
OK. How about dictionary.com?
You may have a point. I try not to be intolerant, though that's not required to be a fundamentalist. I'm definitely not militant, though that is only a requirement for the particular strain of fundamentalism referenced in the definition.
I do, however, maintain the inerrancy of Scripture. To me and, in my experience, to most Christians that's the core definition of fundamentalism. Us fundys think that the Bible doesn't make mistakes. That's the...err...fundamental principle to which we adhere.
The difference between most fundys and the ones you see on the news is that most of us are willing to accept that when science demonstrates a fact and the Bible appears to contradict that fact, we look first to our human (and, thus, often flawed) perceptions of reality as the most likely source of the conflict. We don't dismiss science as wrongheaded because we don't understand something. And where we can't resolve these things, we accept on faith that someday, generally a microsecond after we die, we'll figure things out.
We also don't, as in your Humpty-Dumpty reference, choose to redefine our terms on a whim or whenever it suits our purpose. Where sincere effort leads us to change our views, we don't keep it a secret and/or flip-flop in an attempt to manipulate people. Such behavior would be intellectually dishonest and would tarnish the integrity with which we believe God intends us to conduct our worldly affairs.
So maybe, if you insist that the title must carry with it all the problematic baggage that's ever been unfairly associated with the term, I'm not a fundamentalist. But I don't agree. I think I'm about as fundamentalist as a person can be.
Notwithstanding other reasonable points you make...
Not quite. In the context of fundamentalist Christianity, you're a bit off base. Whether the beliefs are bizarre or not isn't germane. Neither is the notion that every fundamentalist believes exactly the same way in a "lock-step" fashion, a patently absurd notion.
Fundamentalism is the belief that the Bible means what it says. That's all. There's nothing bizarre or sinister about that.
Most Christians are taught that God expects us to use our intelligence to understand the difference between a parable, an illustrative story, and the verifiable fact of how hot our coffee is. Where facts are known to be facts, we accept them as facts. Where stories are understood to be similes for higher concepts or descriptive parables, we accept them as such. And where we don't know, we accept on faith. Thus, to most Christians the Bible is full of great stories that illustrate basic truths (whether the actual events occurred or not) and facts.
Now, where do you draw the line between those two things? Each Christian decides for himself. Frankly, I admire the faith of those who truly believe the Bible can help them ascertain the exact day of the week the world was created. I draw the line in a different place. But the fact remains that we can both still claim to be fundamentalist Chrisitians. Our fundamental belief is that the Bible literally means what it says, even if we both read it to mean something a bit different.
The only problem with this is that I believe that where the Bible says one thing and science says something else, I ascribe that perceived difference to my inability to parse out when the Bible is being literal and when it's being illustrative/representational. I view science as helping me understand God's creation and Word better. I don't try to use the Word to refute provable facts. God gave me intelligence so I could try to grok the difference, not run roughshod over anything new and mysterious to me.
Some Christians, often derisively called "fundies," take a different approach. They, in my judgement, are guilty of the sin of pride. They think their faith is perfect in its current form and should never be informed by new facts. That's sad; Christians are supposed to grow in their faith, not ossify in it. I fear their hubris will be their undoing, eventually, and pray that they may be given better understanding before anybody else gets hurt.
If that makes me, in your eyes, something other than "fundamentalist," then I'm afraid you don't really know what the word means in this context.