If most of the employers in a town suck, you can do quite well by being the one place that doesn't. Grab the 20-percenters from every other IT outfit in town.
I did a bunch of interviews to pick out a developer for a customer of mine in Denver once. We weren't offering a whole lot of money, but just the fact that we were doing something moderately interesting attracted an amazing level of quality among the applicants I saw.
"Sure, you can go with the other company but they arent half as serious as we are. We put bloody implants into our employess! That's serious!"
Well, YYMV, but I'd far rather go with a vendor whose employees don't have a reason to hate them. Angry data center personnel in charge of data that I might have a fiduciary duty to keep private doesn't seem like a very clever plan IMNSHO.
You know, people who know what they're doing employ real live security guards and introduce everyone who works in the facility to the guards, so that any random person with a badge can't just waltz right in. I've worked in places where they couldn't afford a guard on every door, so we had to both present a mag-stripe badge through a reader, and know a six-digit code that matched our badge to get in.
And of course, it only takes one case of an employee being assaulted to steal the chip, before the company would be slapped with a judgement that would put them out of business.
I can imagine some pretentious little git trying this, but any company large enough to actually employ a general counsel would quickly dismiss any manager crazy enough to suggest this.
To operate the company in a way that actively recognizes the central role that business plays in society by initiating innovative ways to improve the quality of life locally, nationally and internationally, in all communities we serve.
Central to the mission of CityWatcher.com is the belief that all three parts must thrive equally in a manner that commands deep respect for individuals in and outside the company and supports the community.
Sorry, but chipping your employees the same way you do to a pet or your livestock just doesn't gybe with "respect for individuals".
This is either a hoax, or this company's general counsel got his law degree from a mail-order vendor.
For the record, the appropriate response to a requirement of this kind is to walk out, make a picket sign, and call every reporter in your town. For good measure, see how many of the "mark of the beast" believers you can get to show up.
If that doesn't shame them into giving up this asinine idea, sue for emotional distress.
MS should have no trouble scaling Windows up to four - eight cores in the next iteration.
Yeah, but that's what, another eight years off?
Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, the BSDs, and even the remnants of BeOS will be doing a better job on 8-way machines before MS can patch Vista to even recognize them all.
The real point is that instead of making hay over the executive's increasingly intrusive surveillance of ordinary Americans, the right wing is trying to change the subject to Google's relatively neutral move to enter China on the Communists' terms
It's not just the right-wing that's arguing this issue, and I in fact see many of the same people (libertarians) objecting both to Google's caving in to the commies, and to the current administration's moves to eliminated the fourth amendment. (Not to mention the previous administration's similar attempts.)
It's why people in booming economies are paid more than people in depressed economies.
all we really need are more saints like Ford and Rockefeller!
Ford and Rockefeller each made their fortunes by selling something the public wanted to buy, and doing so at lower prices than their competition. Rockefeller's kerosene was a great deal cheaper than whale oil, so people no longer had to go to bed right when the sun went down because they couldn't afford light.
Ford sold cars for far less than anyone before him, which created such a demand for his product that labor was in short supply. Upshot: he paid more than other employers, who had to raise their wages, too. Ford was actually somewhat preemptive about it; he raised his employees wages a good bit more than he absolutely needed to, because he saw the benefit of morale on their productivity.
I was going to ask you to help clarify why, to take just one recent example, GM moved 50,000 jobs to Mexico
They did so because they want to stay in business. Take a look at their SEC reports for the last decade or so: they simply can't afford to sustain the financial burden of employing a US workforce. You can thank the unions for that, BTW.
our pure and just corporations and their exalted leaders always Do the Right Thing
Try a little more stuffing in your straw man, sport. I never said they always do the right thing. They do the right thing most of the time, and if they do the wrong thing, their customers quit giving them money.
I'm finished stating facts that are obvious to any thinking person.
The most obvious fact of all is that socialism results in poverty.
Compare east and west Germany, north and south Korea, India before and after they gave up on the Soviet model of central planning, and China before and after the red dynasty decided to quit confiscating the wealth generated by anyone who showed any initiative. Look at the Baltics: industrialized countries equal to any others in Europe before WW2, bombed to rubble by two major socialist powers, recovery severely retarded under the Soviets, and now coming very nicely back to their historical levels of prosperity.
The truth has pwned you utterly without any of my help at all.
Yes, it's quite clear that you've never helped the truth in any way.
I forgot, you addressed that too: investment in machinery and automation made labor more efficient, and then all our Noble Corporations voluntarily abandoned their practices of paying people $1 a day for 16 hour days in favor of minimum wage and overtime! Silly me! It had nothing to do with collective bargaining power imposing regulation upon industry.
Forgot to address this..
What raised the wages of laborers was competition for labor (free market works both ways, you know). Henry Ford did more for factory workers' wages than all the "labor leaders" who ever lived.
Sorry, but you're wrong again. Nobody's putting a gun to their heads to make them leave their farms, no matter how much of a snit you work yourself into. (Well, except in China again, but I digress.)
People stream into the cities for factory jobs today for all of the same reasons that they always did. There's more money to be made working in a factory than on a farm. Of course we consider their working conditions deplorable, because you and I have a point of view that's made possible by the very high productivity of labor in our country, which again, was made possible by... Wait for it... Capital investment!
Compare the living conditions of a typical laborer in any relatively free-market country to any of the tragic socialist experiments that plagued the 20th century. QED.
Sweatshops are only a bad thing if you literally chain the kids to their work tables!
If you truly care about improving the lives of factory workers in the third world, then try promoting capital investment in their countries instead of just railing against the very thing that offers the only hope they have of a better life. Socialism promises, capitalism delivers.
Christ, you do such a good job of making my 'brainwashed' case for me, I don't know why I bother.
Here's a summary of your argument: "It's better to have a terrible job than no job at all; therefore, these people are lucky; and just look at them - they are proud to work for our great, rich companies."
That's not his argument, that's your straw man. Nevertheless, the reason why people move from subsistence farming to factory jobs, is because the jobs are in fact better than what they leave behind. It's the same reason why my grandparents left their farms to work in factories, and why the first wave of industrial workers in Great Britain did so in the 1800's. If people were being forced to work in the factories, you'd have a point, but that practice is mostly confined to the Socialist Workers' Paradises of China and North Korea.
Collective bargaining power - what we call unions - are what got rid of child labor and sweatshops in western countries.
Nope.
Capital investment, raising the marginal productivity of labor, is what made it possible to abandon child labor in the industrialized cities. Meanwhile, kids on the farms were still putting in a full day's work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm from Flint, dumbass.
So what? Do you want a medal?
Do you imagine that GM owes you something, just because they left town?
-jcr
If most of the employers in a town suck, you can do quite well by being the one place that doesn't. Grab the 20-percenters from every other IT outfit in town.
I did a bunch of interviews to pick out a developer for a customer of mine in Denver once. We weren't offering a whole lot of money, but just the fact that we were doing something moderately interesting attracted an amazing level of quality among the applicants I saw.
-jcr
anyone could show up at any time and steal the doors
Just removing all the doors and putting them in neat stack in the operations manager's office is a good way to make a point.
-jcr
"Sure, you can go with the other company but they arent half as serious as we are. We put bloody implants into our employess! That's serious!"
Well, YYMV, but I'd far rather go with a vendor whose employees don't have a reason to hate them. Angry data center personnel in charge of data that I might have a fiduciary duty to keep private doesn't seem like a very clever plan IMNSHO.
-jcr
Oh, didn't you get the memo? The rapture already happened. Hardly anyone noticed, since there were only a couple of dozen actual Christians.
-jcr
You know, people who know what they're doing employ real live security guards and introduce everyone who works in the facility to the guards, so that any random person with a badge can't just waltz right in. I've worked in places where they couldn't afford a guard on every door, so we had to both present a mag-stripe badge through a reader, and know a six-digit code that matched our badge to get in.
-jcr
And of course, it only takes one case of an employee being assaulted to steal the chip, before the company would be slapped with a judgement that would put them out of business.
I can imagine some pretentious little git trying this, but any company large enough to actually employ a general counsel would quickly dismiss any manager crazy enough to suggest this.
-jcr
Their website says:
Social Mission
To operate the company in a way that actively recognizes the central role that business plays in society by initiating innovative ways to improve the quality of life locally, nationally and internationally, in all communities we serve.
Central to the mission of CityWatcher.com is the belief that all three parts must thrive equally in a manner that commands deep respect for individuals in and outside the company and supports the community.
Sorry, but chipping your employees the same way you do to a pet or your livestock just doesn't gybe with "respect for individuals".
-jcr
This is either a hoax, or this company's general counsel got his law degree from a mail-order vendor.
For the record, the appropriate response to a requirement of this kind is to walk out, make a picket sign, and call every reporter in your town. For good measure, see how many of the "mark of the beast" believers you can get to show up.
If that doesn't shame them into giving up this asinine idea, sue for emotional distress.
-jcr
So, your girlfriend dismisses the thousands of people in an entire profession, because one of them talked about having a wank on a radio show?
That's a bit of broad brush there, isn't it?
-jcr
MS should have no trouble scaling Windows up to four - eight cores in the next iteration.
Yeah, but that's what, another eight years off?
Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, the BSDs, and even the remnants of BeOS will be doing a better job on 8-way machines before MS can patch Vista to even recognize them all.
-jcr
The real point is that instead of making hay over the executive's increasingly intrusive surveillance of ordinary Americans, the right wing is trying to change the subject to Google's relatively neutral move to enter China on the Communists' terms
It's not just the right-wing that's arguing this issue, and I in fact see many of the same people (libertarians) objecting both to Google's caving in to the commies, and to the current administration's moves to eliminated the fourth amendment. (Not to mention the previous administration's similar attempts.)
-jcr
Ah, so that's why GM destroyed Flint
I've got a little news flash for you: Michael Moore isn't a historian.
-jcr
Competition for labor is what raised prices, eh?
Yes.
It's why people in booming economies are paid more than people in depressed economies.
all we really need are more saints like Ford and Rockefeller!
Ford and Rockefeller each made their fortunes by selling something the public wanted to buy, and doing so at lower prices than their competition. Rockefeller's kerosene was a great deal cheaper than whale oil, so people no longer had to go to bed right when the sun went down because they couldn't afford light.
Ford sold cars for far less than anyone before him, which created such a demand for his product that labor was in short supply. Upshot: he paid more than other employers, who had to raise their wages, too. Ford was actually somewhat preemptive about it; he raised his employees wages a good bit more than he absolutely needed to, because he saw the benefit of morale on their productivity.
I was going to ask you to help clarify why, to take just one recent example, GM moved 50,000 jobs to Mexico
They did so because they want to stay in business. Take a look at their SEC reports for the last decade or so: they simply can't afford to sustain the financial burden of employing a US workforce. You can thank the unions for that, BTW.
our pure and just corporations and their exalted leaders always Do the Right Thing
Try a little more stuffing in your straw man, sport. I never said they always do the right thing. They do the right thing most of the time, and if they do the wrong thing, their customers quit giving them money.
I'm finished stating facts that are obvious to any thinking person.
The most obvious fact of all is that socialism results in poverty.
Compare east and west Germany, north and south Korea, India before and after they gave up on the Soviet model of central planning, and China before and after the red dynasty decided to quit confiscating the wealth generated by anyone who showed any initiative. Look at the Baltics: industrialized countries equal to any others in Europe before WW2, bombed to rubble by two major socialist powers, recovery severely retarded under the Soviets, and now coming very nicely back to their historical levels of prosperity.
The truth has pwned you utterly without any of my help at all.
Yes, it's quite clear that you've never helped the truth in any way.
-jcr
I forgot, you addressed that too: investment in machinery and automation made labor more efficient, and then all our Noble Corporations voluntarily abandoned their practices of paying people $1 a day for 16 hour days in favor of minimum wage and overtime! Silly me! It had nothing to do with collective bargaining power imposing regulation upon industry.
Forgot to address this..
What raised the wages of laborers was competition for labor (free market works both ways, you know). Henry Ford did more for factory workers' wages than all the "labor leaders" who ever lived.
-jcr
Sorry, but you're wrong again. Nobody's putting a gun to their heads to make them leave their farms, no matter how much of a snit you work yourself into. (Well, except in China again, but I digress.)
People stream into the cities for factory jobs today for all of the same reasons that they always did. There's more money to be made working in a factory than on a farm. Of course we consider their working conditions deplorable, because you and I have a point of view that's made possible by the very high productivity of labor in our country, which again, was made possible by... Wait for it... Capital investment!
Compare the living conditions of a typical laborer in any relatively free-market country to any of the tragic socialist experiments that plagued the 20th century. QED.
Sweatshops are only a bad thing if you literally chain the kids to their work tables!
If you truly care about improving the lives of factory workers in the third world, then try promoting capital investment in their countries instead of just railing against the very thing that offers the only hope they have of a better life. Socialism promises, capitalism delivers.
Christ, you do such a good job of making my 'brainwashed' case for me, I don't know why I bother.
Fuck you too, sunshine.
-jcr
He works for Apple.
You're a little out of date there. I left Apple in June '05.
-jcr
So who needs OS X?
Hey, I wasn't the one who claimed it could do the same thing as a Mac.
-jcr
In New York, no less. Where they pay union janitors in the school system over $80K, and can't even fire them if the don't show up for weeks on end.
-jcr
What are they doing now?
Going out of business. QED.
-jcr
Because I can get a machine for half the price that does the same thing
You can get a machine for half the price that runs OS X?
-jcr
Does the phrase "So religious persecution is okay as long as it's not physical?" ring a bell?
That's not discussion, that's playing the victim. So, get stuffed.
-jcr
Since nobody was expecting anything, nobody can complain about unfairness.
;-)
I think you underestimate the ingenuity of people looking for something to gripe about.
-jcr
Here's a summary of your argument: "It's better to have a terrible job than no job at all; therefore, these people are lucky; and just look at them - they are proud to work for our great, rich companies."
That's not his argument, that's your straw man. Nevertheless, the reason why people move from subsistence farming to factory jobs, is because the jobs are in fact better than what they leave behind. It's the same reason why my grandparents left their farms to work in factories, and why the first wave of industrial workers in Great Britain did so in the 1800's. If people were being forced to work in the factories, you'd have a point, but that practice is mostly confined to the Socialist Workers' Paradises of China and North Korea.
Collective bargaining power - what we call unions - are what got rid of child labor and sweatshops in western countries.
Nope.
Capital investment, raising the marginal productivity of labor, is what made it possible to abandon child labor in the industrialized cities. Meanwhile, kids on the farms were still putting in a full day's work.
You've been brainwashed.
Project much, professor?
-jcr
Schwartz ain't all that stupid
Who said he was stupid?
He's done an amazing job of securing compensation for himself that's not tied to performance.
-jcr