Repression, resource competition and conflicts are inevitable. It's simplistic to say that the United States "started it" and ultimately such concerns are irrelevant anyway. We act in our own best interest and others do the same. Sometimes those actions have consequences that cannot be helped. You make your peace with that and move on or else you go through life angry and disillusioned. Could the US have played a better hand at times? Certainly. Does it bother me that our nation must sometimes kill to achieve national objectives? Apparently not as much as it bothers you.
The gold standard of deterrence has always been the nuclear triad of land based ICBMs, submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and inter continental strategic bombers combined with a satellite network for early warning and launch detection. The only two nations which currently meet this standard are the United States and Russia. The Chinese currently lack a credible SLBM threat and their satellite capabilities are still limited at best when compared to either the US or Russia. The Chinese will get there eventually, but they still have a ways to go before they can be ranked with the US and Russia in the top tier.
I never said that wars would be eliminated by the existence of great powers, that would be impossible. My argument was that the presence of a clearly dominant superpower tends to limit the number, scale and scope of the conflicts and minimizes to the extent possible the negative consequences of those conflicts. The fact that wars still occur in no way invalidates my other assertion; namely that higher US military spending permits correspondingly lower spending by allied nations without loss of protective value. I was trying to illustrate that just because some nations get by with lower military spending, due to promised or implied backup of the US military, doesn't mean that lower military spending across the board will yield the same results as the present situation where higher US military spending effectively subsidizes the defense of those other nations. It would be a mistake to think that Europe, South Korea and Japan would not have to increase their domestic military spending if the US were to withdraw its protection.
He could have proved it was neither micro nor soft by banging a female attendee volunteer right then and there on stage. People would be talking about Microsoft and Azure after that, although probably not in quite the way that Microsoft had intended.
I haven't seen something like that since the time my company accidentally hired strippers for our Vegas-themed Christmas party.
That's tame compared to the party that Munich Re threw for it's top "performers" back in 2007. They had pre-paid prostitutes who kept track of the number of "uses" with stamps with everything happening in a large communal steam bath. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but even Vegas couldn't throw a party like that. If Vegas want's to compete with other gambling destinations, they will need to dial up the debauchery or risk losing their "sin city" reputation to other more worthy contenders.
There is no reason the US cannot provide the same level of benefits except for political bickering and the close to 2 billion *per day* the US spends on its military.
Has it ever occurred to you that many nations, notably Japan and South Korea, but also the European nations and North and South America are able to make do with far less military spending than would otherwise be necessary because the United States maintains a large and powerful military? What do you suppose would be the result of many roughly equal military powers scattered across the globe with every incentive to attack their neighbors for material gain, but with none of them strong enough, either individually or even collectively, to quash regional conflicts before they got out of hand? There would be many more regional wars and much less scientific process and other positive developments as individual nations or small groups of nations constantly fought wars or prepared to fight them with their neighbors. It would be tremendously wasteful and inefficient; much more wasteful and inefficient than even current US military spending. Look at any period of world history before WWI and WWII. There were lots of wars, lots of famines and limited scientific, cultural and technological progress with frequent presses of the reset button as empires were conquered, people scattered or put to the sword, and much progress lost with each iteration. You may not like the present state of world affairs, but it could be far worse without a stabilizing force like the United States.
developers have told in no uncertain terms that they would prefer to continue developing for a traditional windows interface.
Or perhaps for a competing platform should Microsoft persist with this idiocy. No doubt Oracle and IBM would be very pleased to see Microsoft make an "own goal" with a forced Metro-only approach.
What about the "store as showroom" problem? There are many people going into Best Buy and other bricks and mortar stores with their smartphones, scanning the bar codes and then finding the same item online (and maybe even ordering it on the spot) for less. This doesn't hurt other retailers, such as WalMart or Costco, as much as it hurts Best Buy because those other retailers draw from a larger and more varied selection of items. The days when stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA where viable businesses have long since passed. Indeed, the later two are already long gong. There's still some business to be done in large regional warehouse stores, like Fry's Electronics, which specialize in all things computer and electronics related for the serious and discriminating customer and who can partner with large online retailers like Amazon, but the days of retail computer and electronics sales to non-geeks in a large non-warehouse format are definitely numbered. Best Buy is boxed in on all sides by superior and established competitors. To say that turning Best Buy around will be difficult is an understatement. I anticipate that their business will continue to decline over the next couple years until they've shrunk to a size where some private equity firm can snap them up and make a final profit striping the carcass (as they did with both Circuit City and CompUSA).
In hindsite, perhaps the developers should have triggered suicide (at least of all non-critical components) whenever contact with the control servers could not be maintained.
Well, there's always version 2.0 after all. Maybe we'll see that feature, among many others I'm sure, in the next version. Somehow I doubt that we've seen the last of Flame or the people who created it.
*statists will recommend overcoming the problem you note, not by eliminating the "special protections", but by the government offering incentives to employers to hire members of the "protected" groups.
Indeed they will, but these incentives will also fail to achieve their desired result which is greater employment of the "protected" groups. Consider a recent example of such incentives here in the United States, tax incentives for businesses which hire workers unemployed for six months or more. What has been the result of this policy over the past year? The unemployment rate has remain largely unchanged and even ticked slightly higher in more recent months. The favored groups, the long term unemployed in this case, have benefited only very modestly or more probably not much at all from these incentives. So what now? Shall we double down on the failed policies of the past or do we look instead to new leadership in 2012? It's a choice I leave to you, dear reader.
So employers try to scare employees away from gathering that kind of info.
So acquire that information in secret. The specific methods of how this might be done are left as an exercise for the reader, but suffice it to say that most offices aren't exactly high security locations. This information can be obtained, provided that one is willing to be creative.
Even during normal economic times, laws designed to "protect" minorities very often hurt most the people whom they were designed to protect. For example, why hire a younger woman, who is likely to become pregnant and require substantial leave time or cost many times more in severance, or a minority who will file the EEO complaint? As an employer, why take that risk? The short answer is that many employers don't, unless the candidate is exceptional enough to overcome these potential negatives. The best way to help ensure that women and minorities receive equal treatment would be to repeal the laws which create special protections for them and penalties for employers who don't give special treatment to these "protected" groups. They're protected alright, from ever getting a job in the first place.
Wasn't Space Command a registered trademark of the Zenith corporation at one time? I wonder if their successors in interest might have a claim or could it be argued that the trademark has now lapsed? Those of a certain generation might recall that this style of television remote gave rise to the term "clicker" in reference to the distinctive "clicking" sound made when a button was pressed. This clicking sound was a combination of the spring loaded release of the miniature hammer inside the device and it's subsequent impact with the internal aluminum cylinders which were tuned to produce the ultrasonic tones necessary to control the basic television functions. Even today this primitive form of remote control still has one advantage over the modern ones, it requires no batteries.
If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries.
That has already been tried and people game those systems too. There's no substitute for a company specific knowledge, training or apprenticeship program because no third party cares more about finding and training qualified employees than the company doing the hiring.
yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.
The problem with that, at least in here in the United States, is that companies are very reluctant to spend any resources on training. They want to hire someone with all of the required knowledge who can "hit the ground running" and be instantly productive, work them like crazy for short term output and then get rid of them through layoffs as soon as they've outlived their usefulness. Of course, if every company does this then there will be a shortage of skilled and trained workers; especially in technical or knowledge intensive fields. In fact, that's exactly what we have today here in the United States today, if the companies are to be believed; a shortage of skilled workers and a severe shortage at the prices that most companies want to pay (read peanuts).
I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.
When I was at university, I specifically chose a foreign language where I was unlikely to encounter native speakers for precisely that reason. For example, it was unwise to study Spanish because there were too many native speakers who set the curve very high and engineering curriculum was difficult enough that I couldn't afford to waste study time in non-major courses. I really didn't care much about foreign languages anyway, so the logical choices at my school where German, French or Italian. Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars. I chose German because it's closer to English than either French or Italian and there were hardly any native speakers at my school. Finally, the German language has some pedigree in the engineering fields, as compared to either French or Italian, so there was at least some engineering value in a rudimentary understanding of the German language. It was easy enough to get a solid B in German without diverting too much time from my engineering studies, so that's what I did.
Yes, I do get that. But it has nothing to do with Social Security, and everything to do with our monetary system.
I have read and thought much about that very problem, what to do about it and how to fix our monetary system. The basic problem, as I see it, is that in theory a centralized fiat currency system, combined with fractional reserve banking, can be the most efficient one provided that it's properly managed and run. However, as we both know humans are very bad at running these systems and there are many chances for corruption, politics and fraud to reduce the efficiency of the system and inject unfairness. Indeed, power over the money seems to lead even the most virtuous men astray; it's extremely corrupting. The next best alternatives are commodity based monies, gold and silver for example, but these tend to be less efficient and there's no longer sufficient commodity in the form of either gold or silver bullion to provide any significant transactional backing compared to the size and scale of our global economy. It's a tough problem to be sure and many men and women, much smarter than I, have thus far been unable to square the circle on this one. Like all theoretically perfect systems, we humans tend to fall short of noble ideals in practice.
The only way for the debt to go is up.
It doesn't have to be that way. At any given time there's a limited amount of credit in the form of free capital available for investment in the real economy, so any debt beyond that simply adds to inflation and waste. For example, look at all of the foreclosed and half-finished homes around the United States these days. They're proof positive that debt and credit in dollar terms can easily outrun the underlying capital available to complete all of those projects (hence the boarded up and half finished homes). I tend to view this problem as a design flaw in our monetary system.
No more debt, no more money.
Yes, I'm well aware of that "feature" in our present monetary system.
That's a separate issue from whether we can afford to take care of our elderly.
I would say that they're related, because poor monetary policies on the part of central banks combined with spending problems in governments, made possible by the abuse of those monetary systems, have real negative effects in the real economy. They make taking care of our elderly harder than it otherwise would be. So the problems are interrelated as I see it. We young workers are already hard pressed to raise families and take care of aging parents. Payroll taxes are already as high as they realistically can be, to ask for more would be counter productive. Social Security is being broken by demographics. It's a demographics problem so how can tweaking a few parameters in the present program solve that while still meeting people's expectations for the program? Of course, it doesn't help that the government has been coy and promoted false perceptions and lies surrounding the program; inflating people's expectations for a program that was originally designed only as bulwark against absolute poverty and starvation in old age, not as a pension or retirement system.
LOL, I almost fell out my chair while reading this. To the managers out there: Are you paying attention? This is essentially what your HR staff is doing right now. So, is it any wonder then that you cannot find anyone who fits this bill?
The 2 year contract can be a good gig, even without the bennies, but it has to pay well. If they're serious about the contract then the hourly rate will be at least $150 with 40 hours per week minimum and any day with at least one hour of work being paid at the full per diem (8-hours), whether there was work ready to do or not (i.e. don't waste my time) AND time + 1/2 for overtime (anything more than 8 hours per day) paid in hourly increments, even for fractions of hours. Finally the contract should guarantee the full 2 year term with penalties for early withdrawal. Otherwise, as you say, they can find themselves some other fool.
And even experienced people who don't trust the situation can be hired if you're willing to pay enough up front.
These people are usually of the hired gun type, working contracts of their own choosing at relatively high rates and absolutely refusing, under any circumstances, to become regular employees. On the plus side, these people can be very good at what they do; the downside, at least from the perspective of the employer, is that they definitely aren't cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Repression, resource competition and conflicts are inevitable. It's simplistic to say that the United States "started it" and ultimately such concerns are irrelevant anyway. We act in our own best interest and others do the same. Sometimes those actions have consequences that cannot be helped. You make your peace with that and move on or else you go through life angry and disillusioned. Could the US have played a better hand at times? Certainly. Does it bother me that our nation must sometimes kill to achieve national objectives? Apparently not as much as it bothers you.
The gold standard of deterrence has always been the nuclear triad of land based ICBMs, submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and inter continental strategic bombers combined with a satellite network for early warning and launch detection. The only two nations which currently meet this standard are the United States and Russia. The Chinese currently lack a credible SLBM threat and their satellite capabilities are still limited at best when compared to either the US or Russia. The Chinese will get there eventually, but they still have a ways to go before they can be ranked with the US and Russia in the top tier.
I never said that wars would be eliminated by the existence of great powers, that would be impossible. My argument was that the presence of a clearly dominant superpower tends to limit the number, scale and scope of the conflicts and minimizes to the extent possible the negative consequences of those conflicts. The fact that wars still occur in no way invalidates my other assertion; namely that higher US military spending permits correspondingly lower spending by allied nations without loss of protective value. I was trying to illustrate that just because some nations get by with lower military spending, due to promised or implied backup of the US military, doesn't mean that lower military spending across the board will yield the same results as the present situation where higher US military spending effectively subsidizes the defense of those other nations. It would be a mistake to think that Europe, South Korea and Japan would not have to increase their domestic military spending if the US were to withdraw its protection.
He could have proved it was neither micro nor soft by banging a female attendee volunteer right then and there on stage. People would be talking about Microsoft and Azure after that, although probably not in quite the way that Microsoft had intended.
I haven't seen something like that since the time my company accidentally hired strippers for our Vegas-themed Christmas party.
That's tame compared to the party that Munich Re threw for it's top "performers" back in 2007. They had pre-paid prostitutes who kept track of the number of "uses" with stamps with everything happening in a large communal steam bath. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but even Vegas couldn't throw a party like that. If Vegas want's to compete with other gambling destinations, they will need to dial up the debauchery or risk losing their "sin city" reputation to other more worthy contenders.
Also, that's not Techno.
Maybe running it through Songsmith would make it better?
There is no reason the US cannot provide the same level of benefits except for political bickering and the close to 2 billion *per day* the US spends on its military.
Has it ever occurred to you that many nations, notably Japan and South Korea, but also the European nations and North and South America are able to make do with far less military spending than would otherwise be necessary because the United States maintains a large and powerful military? What do you suppose would be the result of many roughly equal military powers scattered across the globe with every incentive to attack their neighbors for material gain, but with none of them strong enough, either individually or even collectively, to quash regional conflicts before they got out of hand? There would be many more regional wars and much less scientific process and other positive developments as individual nations or small groups of nations constantly fought wars or prepared to fight them with their neighbors. It would be tremendously wasteful and inefficient; much more wasteful and inefficient than even current US military spending. Look at any period of world history before WWI and WWII. There were lots of wars, lots of famines and limited scientific, cultural and technological progress with frequent presses of the reset button as empires were conquered, people scattered or put to the sword, and much progress lost with each iteration. You may not like the present state of world affairs, but it could be far worse without a stabilizing force like the United States.
developers have told in no uncertain terms that they would prefer to continue developing for a traditional windows interface.
Or perhaps for a competing platform should Microsoft persist with this idiocy. No doubt Oracle and IBM would be very pleased to see Microsoft make an "own goal" with a forced Metro-only approach.
I'm amazed they thought that making the free compiler for windows metro-only was a good idea in the first place.
Sounds like the sort of half-baked shitty idea that some marketing executive, who couldn't find his own ass with both hands, would come up with.
What about the "store as showroom" problem? There are many people going into Best Buy and other bricks and mortar stores with their smartphones, scanning the bar codes and then finding the same item online (and maybe even ordering it on the spot) for less. This doesn't hurt other retailers, such as WalMart or Costco, as much as it hurts Best Buy because those other retailers draw from a larger and more varied selection of items. The days when stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA where viable businesses have long since passed. Indeed, the later two are already long gong. There's still some business to be done in large regional warehouse stores, like Fry's Electronics, which specialize in all things computer and electronics related for the serious and discriminating customer and who can partner with large online retailers like Amazon, but the days of retail computer and electronics sales to non-geeks in a large non-warehouse format are definitely numbered. Best Buy is boxed in on all sides by superior and established competitors. To say that turning Best Buy around will be difficult is an understatement. I anticipate that their business will continue to decline over the next couple years until they've shrunk to a size where some private equity firm can snap them up and make a final profit striping the carcass (as they did with both Circuit City and CompUSA).
In hindsite, perhaps the developers should have triggered suicide (at least of all non-critical components) whenever contact with the control servers could not be maintained.
Well, there's always version 2.0 after all. Maybe we'll see that feature, among many others I'm sure, in the next version. Somehow I doubt that we've seen the last of Flame or the people who created it.
*statists will recommend overcoming the problem you note, not by eliminating the "special protections", but by the government offering incentives to employers to hire members of the "protected" groups.
Indeed they will, but these incentives will also fail to achieve their desired result which is greater employment of the "protected" groups. Consider a recent example of such incentives here in the United States, tax incentives for businesses which hire workers unemployed for six months or more. What has been the result of this policy over the past year? The unemployment rate has remain largely unchanged and even ticked slightly higher in more recent months. The favored groups, the long term unemployed in this case, have benefited only very modestly or more probably not much at all from these incentives. So what now? Shall we double down on the failed policies of the past or do we look instead to new leadership in 2012? It's a choice I leave to you, dear reader.
They will ask the questions in such a way as to trip you up if you're not telling the truth.
Or haven't rehearsed your story ahead of time. This type of questioning will rarely if every trip up a trained foreign case officer.
So employers try to scare employees away from gathering that kind of info.
So acquire that information in secret. The specific methods of how this might be done are left as an exercise for the reader, but suffice it to say that most offices aren't exactly high security locations. This information can be obtained, provided that one is willing to be creative.
Even during normal economic times, laws designed to "protect" minorities very often hurt most the people whom they were designed to protect. For example, why hire a younger woman, who is likely to become pregnant and require substantial leave time or cost many times more in severance, or a minority who will file the EEO complaint? As an employer, why take that risk? The short answer is that many employers don't, unless the candidate is exceptional enough to overcome these potential negatives. The best way to help ensure that women and minorities receive equal treatment would be to repeal the laws which create special protections for them and penalties for employers who don't give special treatment to these "protected" groups. They're protected alright, from ever getting a job in the first place.
Wasn't Space Command a registered trademark of the Zenith corporation at one time? I wonder if their successors in interest might have a claim or could it be argued that the trademark has now lapsed? Those of a certain generation might recall that this style of television remote gave rise to the term "clicker" in reference to the distinctive "clicking" sound made when a button was pressed. This clicking sound was a combination of the spring loaded release of the miniature hammer inside the device and it's subsequent impact with the internal aluminum cylinders which were tuned to produce the ultrasonic tones necessary to control the basic television functions. Even today this primitive form of remote control still has one advantage over the modern ones, it requires no batteries.
If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries.
That has already been tried and people game those systems too. There's no substitute for a company specific knowledge, training or apprenticeship program because no third party cares more about finding and training qualified employees than the company doing the hiring.
yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.
The problem with that, at least in here in the United States, is that companies are very reluctant to spend any resources on training. They want to hire someone with all of the required knowledge who can "hit the ground running" and be instantly productive, work them like crazy for short term output and then get rid of them through layoffs as soon as they've outlived their usefulness. Of course, if every company does this then there will be a shortage of skilled and trained workers; especially in technical or knowledge intensive fields. In fact, that's exactly what we have today here in the United States today, if the companies are to be believed; a shortage of skilled workers and a severe shortage at the prices that most companies want to pay (read peanuts).
I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.
When I was at university, I specifically chose a foreign language where I was unlikely to encounter native speakers for precisely that reason. For example, it was unwise to study Spanish because there were too many native speakers who set the curve very high and engineering curriculum was difficult enough that I couldn't afford to waste study time in non-major courses. I really didn't care much about foreign languages anyway, so the logical choices at my school where German, French or Italian. Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars. I chose German because it's closer to English than either French or Italian and there were hardly any native speakers at my school. Finally, the German language has some pedigree in the engineering fields, as compared to either French or Italian, so there was at least some engineering value in a rudimentary understanding of the German language. It was easy enough to get a solid B in German without diverting too much time from my engineering studies, so that's what I did.
Yes, I do get that. But it has nothing to do with Social Security, and everything to do with our monetary system.
I have read and thought much about that very problem, what to do about it and how to fix our monetary system. The basic problem, as I see it, is that in theory a centralized fiat currency system, combined with fractional reserve banking, can be the most efficient one provided that it's properly managed and run. However, as we both know humans are very bad at running these systems and there are many chances for corruption, politics and fraud to reduce the efficiency of the system and inject unfairness. Indeed, power over the money seems to lead even the most virtuous men astray; it's extremely corrupting. The next best alternatives are commodity based monies, gold and silver for example, but these tend to be less efficient and there's no longer sufficient commodity in the form of either gold or silver bullion to provide any significant transactional backing compared to the size and scale of our global economy. It's a tough problem to be sure and many men and women, much smarter than I, have thus far been unable to square the circle on this one. Like all theoretically perfect systems, we humans tend to fall short of noble ideals in practice.
The only way for the debt to go is up.
It doesn't have to be that way. At any given time there's a limited amount of credit in the form of free capital available for investment in the real economy, so any debt beyond that simply adds to inflation and waste. For example, look at all of the foreclosed and half-finished homes around the United States these days. They're proof positive that debt and credit in dollar terms can easily outrun the underlying capital available to complete all of those projects (hence the boarded up and half finished homes). I tend to view this problem as a design flaw in our monetary system.
No more debt, no more money.
Yes, I'm well aware of that "feature" in our present monetary system.
That's a separate issue from whether we can afford to take care of our elderly.
I would say that they're related, because poor monetary policies on the part of central banks combined with spending problems in governments, made possible by the abuse of those monetary systems, have real negative effects in the real economy. They make taking care of our elderly harder than it otherwise would be. So the problems are interrelated as I see it. We young workers are already hard pressed to raise families and take care of aging parents. Payroll taxes are already as high as they realistically can be, to ask for more would be counter productive. Social Security is being broken by demographics. It's a demographics problem so how can tweaking a few parameters in the present program solve that while still meeting people's expectations for the program? Of course, it doesn't help that the government has been coy and promoted false perceptions and lies surrounding the program; inflating people's expectations for a program that was originally designed only as bulwark against absolute poverty and starvation in old age, not as a pension or retirement system.
You know the Barter System is still a good way to do some business and non taxable :)
In the United States, barter "income" is taxable, see Bartering Income
But the old lady will bitch and it won't happen.
So get rid of grandma, problem solved.
LOL, I almost fell out my chair while reading this. To the managers out there: Are you paying attention? This is essentially what your HR staff is doing right now. So, is it any wonder then that you cannot find anyone who fits this bill?
The 2 year contract can be a good gig, even without the bennies, but it has to pay well. If they're serious about the contract then the hourly rate will be at least $150 with 40 hours per week minimum and any day with at least one hour of work being paid at the full per diem (8-hours), whether there was work ready to do or not (i.e. don't waste my time) AND time + 1/2 for overtime (anything more than 8 hours per day) paid in hourly increments, even for fractions of hours. Finally the contract should guarantee the full 2 year term with penalties for early withdrawal. Otherwise, as you say, they can find themselves some other fool.
And even experienced people who don't trust the situation can be hired if you're willing to pay enough up front.
These people are usually of the hired gun type, working contracts of their own choosing at relatively high rates and absolutely refusing, under any circumstances, to become regular employees. On the plus side, these people can be very good at what they do; the downside, at least from the perspective of the employer, is that they definitely aren't cheap.