I was once the hiring manager for a spell for a department of a *very* large Fortune 500 company. And I mean large, every random bloke on the street you could randomly ask knows them instantly by their two letter initials. It was nearly impossible there to actually hire someone based on preferential merits due to the insanely obsessive CYA filtering process used to select for quotas of race, gender, and age. Worse, because racial and gender preferential selection is itself discriminatory, the company written policies forbid actually documenting any of those selection criteria during the interviews and hiring. So any rejected applicant had to have us retroactively hunt for excuses in their resume or interview performance for rejection items. We had many a "too individual-focused, interview lacked team-player focus" ad-hoc rejections of perfectly ideal candidates that didn't meet quota requirements.
So a typical selection round would be:
1. Hiring team selects their ideal candidate 2. HR V.P. responds that candidate be "held for additional review" and gently reminds us that "Company X is committed to a globally diverse environment" 3. We select our next candidate on the list 4. Rinse and repeat until desired unspecified "diversity" metric gets met.
The laughable part of this is that HR set their metric demographics at low level manager point. So I, as a manager of 6 people, was expected to maintain a 6-person team that met company (50,000+ people) demographic ratios. At no time was my team to ever be all-white and/or all-male. We had our single black female employee leave once for a better gig, and it took us 6 months to hire someone into that entry level position, getting over a dozen highly qualified people rejected by HR (who rejected 3 of our black-male choices, and 3 white-female choices). Interestingly, at this company Asians were most disadvantaged because they were essentially non-categorized and not counted in statistical group demographics by HR.
I hated the dishonesty and hypocrisy being a hiring manager, and never wish to do so again.
I had the luck of growing up in a pilot state-funded gifted program in the 70s, starting in 3rd grade and running through 8th grade, at which point the funding got cut.
I spent those wonderful years in extra classes and workshops, learning programming (hooray for the Apple II+), hardware tinkering, electronics, physics. In 6th grade we were actually programming in assembly. I still credit much of that experience and knowledge with me being the successful design engineer I am today.
When funding got cut in 9th grade, however, I was shoved back into the grinder with all of the other mainstream kids, paced with the lowest common denominator. Boredom and aimlessness led to my grades tumbling out of sheer frustration and lack of any challenge or stimulation. I barely graduated without dropping out, with grades that couldn't get me in to a good college, and poor study habits. It was a long arduous fight to scrape my way up through cheap community college, into university, and eventually catch up to where I should have been naturally.
Had that gifted program not been cut, I likely could have been a shining star MIT PhD, doing truly important work. Now, I'm just a humble BSEE, working fine in industry, but with a lot of missed opportunity that I regret not having available.
Take a look at the homogenized textbooks and curriculums of your kids' public schools. Take a look at No Child Left Behind policies stripping out the gifted science and art program budgets away. That is the reason science in the USA is suffering.
Having done my B.S. in Physics (with an EE 'minor' focus), I say a confident 'perhaps'. I graduated in '94, and had zero success finding a job outside of folding boxes in warehouses for several years. I had scores of interviews, and my degree was always met with "Wow! Physics! That's impressive! So...what is that exactly?"
The average person/manager/HR had always heard of physics, knew it was hard by reputation and thus avoided it during thier own schooling, and so never had enough knowledge of what the degree entailed to make a hiring decision based on it. If it comes down to equal experience between two candidates, the more obscure education will always lose, especially a 'generalist hard science' like physics. I actually had one company hire me to fix broken PCs once, not because I could, but so they could say that they had a "Computer Physicist" on staff:-D.
I got a foot-in-the-door job eventually as a tech in a large company, and worked my way up from the inside to become a full-fledged design engineer. I successfully petitioned the company to retroactively treat my non-ABET accredited Physics degree as equivalent to a full ABET engineering degree as far as pay-scale and responsibility.
I loved the physics education, and honestly feel that it was effectively a more valuable engineering education than most straight engineering degrees would have been. But it has been a mighty hard road struggling through a lot of shitty jobs to reach the point where I can now rely on my experience in my career, and no longer have the "degree monkey" on my back.
Do what you love, and if you love the pure sciences then I recommend doing so. In my experience, though, physics (along with chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology) are near impossible to get jobs with based purely on the degree. You'd better damn well have some internships or other experience under your belt upon graduating!
Yep, the Doom TC Aliens for me also. There were several levels where you walk deeper into the complex, deeper, deeper, but don't see or shoot a thing, just Apone whispering in your ear. Then, you notice the encrustations on the walls. Then, screeee! Headcrabs! Aliens! You empty clip after clip, your counter running low, lights flickering, aiaiaiaiaaaaggghhhh!!!!
I went to WA small claims court to ask for payment from a property agency that had promised repayment. The apartment I was moving into needed repainting, and I painted it on my dime after an agreement with the agency that they would repay me. The property agency not only never paid me back, but claimed that I had never even painted it at all and billed me for additional repainting after I moved out! All told, it was about $3000.00 dollars (my expense, plus the extra that I got billed).
In court, the agency rep claimed there was never any correspondence, and she said that she would be fired by the agency and made to pay it out of her own paycheck if the judgement was lost. A very silly play for sympathy.
I won the full judgement since I had a certified receipt for the summons, still had the Home Depot receipts for materials, as well as an email from a guy at the agency saying they'd pay me back. The judge very severely berated the agency rep for lying, recorded it in the court transcript, and awarded us not only the money that I had spent for painting, but an additional award for the amount that I had been billed by the agency, and bid us a nice day. I came out of there with a tidy $2000 profit.
I sat through three other cases before mine, all landlord/tenant disputes, and the tenants won every judgement. Judges hate slumlords:-)
Anyway, I highly recommend the small claims experience. In Washington small claims, your defendant can't counter-sue (they have to file a separate claim), so you have nothing to lose except a few bucks for the claim and summons fees and a day from work.
As a child of a divorced computer dad...
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
I'll give the perspective from the flip side. My dad was a computer professional back in the punch card and reel-to-reel days. He and my mother divorced in 1979, and had shared custody of my brother and I until 1989, when I turned 18 and my brother sued for emancipation.
Growing up in a tug-of-war shared custody environment is something that I would never wish on anyone. I fully believe that I would have been better off growing up being 100% with one parent or the other after their divorce. Picture a band-aid slowly being peeled off over ten years. My brother and I eventually made the adult choice to side with my mother (realizing our dad really did have fundamental problems) and have cut off relations with our father, having not spoken with him for almost 10 years.
My point being, do what's best for your kid. If you or your kid's mom are unable to leave your emotional baggage behind, and not fight over your kid's time or make your kid feel like he's a commodity in an emotional tug-of-war, then just man up and leave his life now (or convince his mom to leave) while he's young enough to not hate you for it.
On the upside, I have fond memories of playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on a terminal in a vast cavern of humming mainframes during "Take your kid to work day", and learned to program little things in Assembly while still learning my multiplication tables. So I guess that relates to Slashdot.
On the "life factor" note...don't compare just the cost of living, without also factoring in your commute time. Seattle and Redmond area housing cost is highly location dependent, but drops off quickly with distance from the core. It is quite possible to get a decent affordable house (when compared to SF) and still keep your commute under an hour.
Example, my wife does Shoreline (north Seattle area) to Redmond every day. It varies from 35 mins to 2 hours depending on traffic. Not great, but we have an affordable house in a nice neighborhood.
Her carpool buddy just moved from SF, where his commute was often over 3 hours, for a shorter distance driven, from an overpriced condo. He thinks he's in heaven now in Seattle by comparison.
Agreed. I'm an engineer, but any job or university that pigeonholed the training into a single application platform in a niche field is doing a disservice to the engineer they are supposed to be building.
The parent laments that new engineers being poorly trained for the workforce is somehow a recent phenomenon. University has *never* been about workforce training. That's what tech schools and apprecticeships are for, but not for ABET degrees.
You (the manager) are getting a product from university (the engineer) with a broad-based well-rounded qualitative education and a demonstrated ability to *learn*. It is up to you (the manager) to shape the product into a "real world" working engineer. If you aren't willing to put in a year at least of development and OJT into your new university hire, then quit whining and go hire an old experienced industry guy who can do the job faster (there are plenty of them looking for work).
Honey, I couldn't believe that the GPS took me down that sharp ravine filled with low branches and sharp rocks. Lucky for me there was a tire and body paint shop at the end of the road with a special sale going on!
Additionally for Guild Wars, you don't have to worry about progressing together at the same rate. A level 10 character can quest with a level 15 or 20 and still have fun and rewarding gameplay.
Ahh, what a lovely misuse of statistics to support an agenda, that the american poor somehow have it all rosy:
"* In 1995, 41 percent of all "poor" households owned their own homes."
So you are using a minority percentage to somehow make a case against the general case of being "poor". Also, owning a home typically means debt. If 41% of poor had positive net equity, then this might mean something.
"* The average home owned by a person classified as "poor" has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio."
Irrelevant, and speaks nothing to the home value, and again nothing to the indebtedness of the the family. The typical inner-city decay crack-house would still meet your categorization. And "average" is the most misleading and useless statistical category one can spout, it says nothing about the distribution of the data.
"* Over three-quarters of a million "poor" persons own homes worth over $150,000; and nearly 200,000 "poor" persons own homes worth over $300,000"
First, 3/4 million is a seemingly huge "oh wow" number to throw out with no context. Must be a lot huh? How would we know? When there are hundreds of millions in your population then you are actually speaking about a mere sliver. Let's look at that sliver of population then. 150k won't even allow you a 1 br studio in most cities. In Seattle, 300k will barely get you a livable home (aside from realtor "fixer uppers") anywhere near the city.
I'm curious of your underlying reasons for trying to make the claim, with a very biased selection of statistics, that there is no poserty problem in America.
As a perspective from one who has done the hiring...I was the hiring manager at a _large_ US firm, excess of 100k employees large.
Even for small positions that we wanted to fill the same day (and were willing to do so for the first semi-qualified person that walked through the door), company HR policy required us to interview _every_ qualified applicant. Those that we did not wish to interview required us to _individually document_ the reasons each non-interviewed candidate was excluded from the interview process. HR would also not me write my own position posting or qualifications, but instead posted their _compliant_ posting that was sanitized into illegibility and didn't at all reflect the actual job requirements.
Real life example, we had an entry-level administrative position that was perfect for any recent graduate looking for experience. One position, over three hundred qualified resumes. So on facing either 300 interviews, or 300 "book reports" for the candidates we wouldn't interview, we said screw it and just went to a temp agency in frustration.
In my experience, HR is often the greatest hurdle to a hiring manager.
Guild Wars is a great example...There are hard boxes/CDs on the racks in the stores, but GW also has available a tiny (61k I think) client installer for download, and all subscription, activation, and content download can then be done online.
This was a pure impulse buy on a cold, bored, rainy day in my study, that I never would have done if I had to drive out to a store and purchase a box.
The sheer convenience of doing this means that I have been spending more on games recently through Valve, and other direct sites.
People are worried about the permanence of their media, but realistically most of my old CD games are unplayable now due to obsolete OSs, device drivers, and I treat the purchase of ANY software these days as "caveat emptor" with no surprises that I won't be able to use it in 5 years.
I started on computer when I was about 10 years old (Commodore Vic-20) and have been a heavy keyboard user ever since. If you think keyboards today are poor, you haven't spent enough time on a Sinclair, Osbourne, or Tandy. My wrists have a *lot* of miles on crappy keyboards.
I can still type and code heavily for hours at a stretch, and have no trouble with carpal tunnel *right now*. Interestingly though, while in my early 20's I started noticing early signs of the syndrome (numbness, wrist and arm pain, twinges). My mother (a lifetime Cust Service phone rep) was suffering heavily from CT at the time, recovering from a CT operation and possibly unable to work on keyboards again, and I thought that I might be doomed to the same fate.
My CT symptoms were halted, and went away however. Interestingly, I had just started martial arts training at about the same time that I was getting hit with the CT symptoms. Now, fifteen years later, I am still doing martial arts, still coding and keying, and 100% CT free.
I firmly believe that the heavy wrist stretching and training involved with my kung fu training was the key to staying CT free and conditioning myself. As a result, my wrists have always been in a vast variety of motions and positions, and not stuck in stiff repetitive positions.
He has the right attitude and expectations IMHO. Advising and schedule management is what the students pay the colleges to provide. Self-discipline is fine, but very few students (especially as young students who haven't had to sink or swim in the 'real' world) have those skills, nor should they be expected to possess them.
I could realistically study most (if not all) of a degree program by visiting libraries and taking MIT open courseware. However, I currently pay a *lot* of money so that I can have a managed program, disciplined schedule, advising and consulting, teaching assistance, and evaluation. I could pursue this on my own, but I'm realistic to know that I wouldn't be able to discipline myself to do so successfully as I would in a university setting.
The 6-year-bachelor syndrome is very much (but not entirely of course) the fault of inadequate advising and support from the university administration, and the attempt to satisfy ridiculous special-interest degree requirements.
I speak as one whose degree was delayed in large part to false promises and non-existant support from schedule advisors, never knowing that I needed a cultural anthropology course that was only offered one term per year at a weird hour to graduate for a BS in Physics.
I disagree. As other posters have mentioned, faculty will be fleeing a sinking ship and any valuable personal contacts that may have been formed with faculty will be worthless 5 years down the road when he is trying to get recommendations and letters from a vanished department/faculty, or from adjuncts that rotate out every year.
Switching schools is easy, I've done it a couple of times, and with still a couple of years left in your education, it is the contacts and bonds you make during your final quarters that will be most important for connections later. No one is going to give a rats ass about recommendations from your freshman calculus teacher when compared to a senior class faculty.
Yep and yep. I work for a huge company, 200,000+ employees. The company is in the process of disabling local CD/DVD drives except by special approval for this very reason. Our existing Unix and XPC boxes are also having their CD drives unmounted.
Ironically, we are undergoing a massive PC upgrade---LCD monitors, shiny new dual-processor boxes with DVD drives, to "better enable us with state of the art tools". At the same time, USB ports, DVD drives, and any other external interfaces possible are being restricted.
Good post. I was a threshold kid, I tested well but not well enough to qualify for the gifted program path. I was still *way* too bright for mainstream and was bored and miserable with regular classes. Thankfully, my parents were able to push the school administration to give me a shot at the gifted program, and once there I thrived.
The program eventually petered out in high school for budgetary reasons, and we gifted kids were dropped back into the mainstream classes. We still had our choice at the honors classes however, which most did. Even the honors classes, though, were far below the stimulation level of what we were used to, consisting mostly of just more busy work and longer projects and papers.
I decided early in high school that the honors class busy-work grind was making me even more miserable and frustrated than simply being bored was, (a difference of being intellectually bored with zero free time, or bored with plenty of free time) and withdrew from the honors classes completely and coasted through the standard classes with the bulk average kids.
I eventually did college and career successfully, but I often wonder how much more I could have fulfilled my inner Ender Wiggin if the gifted path had been available through my whole education.
As much as I love Straight Dope, and as much as they are often correct, this is very bad advice for anyone that travels outside of the US.
The "See photo ID" seems to be a very US-centric custom, and while vendors and cashiers in the states respect it, there are many countries where you are almost guaranteed to have your card refuse if you try the above tactic. Especially in non-English speaking countries.
I have had the "show photo ID" method refused in England, Ireland (although a couple places reluctantly accepted it), Italy, and China. Many countries are ultra-paranoid about credit card theft or fraud, especially if their customer is a foreigner. These places demanded a signature-signed card most of the time. I was extremely lucky to have a backup card that was signed or I would have been stuck without money overseas.
On a funny note, at a mall in China the vendor would refuse to accept my card until I literally signed the receipt "See Picture ID" in handwriting similar to what I had written on the back of the card.
Slashdot Mirror
I was once the hiring manager for a spell for a department of a *very* large Fortune 500 company. And I mean large, every random bloke on the street you could randomly ask knows them instantly by their two letter initials. It was nearly impossible there to actually hire someone based on preferential merits due to the insanely obsessive CYA filtering process used to select for quotas of race, gender, and age. Worse, because racial and gender preferential selection is itself discriminatory, the company written policies forbid actually documenting any of those selection criteria during the interviews and hiring. So any rejected applicant had to have us retroactively hunt for excuses in their resume or interview performance for rejection items.
We had many a "too individual-focused, interview lacked team-player focus" ad-hoc rejections of perfectly ideal candidates that didn't meet quota requirements.
So a typical selection round would be:
1. Hiring team selects their ideal candidate
2. HR V.P. responds that candidate be "held for additional review" and gently reminds us that "Company X is committed to a globally diverse environment"
3. We select our next candidate on the list
4. Rinse and repeat until desired unspecified "diversity" metric gets met.
The laughable part of this is that HR set their metric demographics at low level manager point. So I, as a manager of 6 people, was expected to maintain a 6-person team that met company (50,000+ people) demographic ratios. At no time was my team to ever be all-white and/or all-male. We had our single black female employee leave once for a better gig, and it took us 6 months to hire someone into that entry level position, getting over a dozen highly qualified people rejected by HR (who rejected 3 of our black-male choices, and 3 white-female choices). Interestingly, at this company Asians were most disadvantaged because they were essentially non-categorized and not counted in statistical group demographics by HR.
I hated the dishonesty and hypocrisy being a hiring manager, and never wish to do so again.
I had the luck of growing up in a pilot state-funded gifted program in the 70s, starting in 3rd grade and running through 8th grade, at which point the funding got cut.
I spent those wonderful years in extra classes and workshops, learning programming (hooray for the Apple II+), hardware tinkering, electronics, physics. In 6th grade we were actually programming in assembly. I still credit much of that experience and knowledge with me being the successful design engineer I am today.
When funding got cut in 9th grade, however, I was shoved back into the grinder with all of the other mainstream kids, paced with the lowest common denominator. Boredom and aimlessness led to my grades tumbling out of sheer frustration and lack of any challenge or stimulation. I barely graduated without dropping out, with grades that couldn't get me in to a good college, and poor study habits. It was a long arduous fight to scrape my way up through cheap community college, into university, and eventually catch up to where I should have been naturally.
Had that gifted program not been cut, I likely could have been a shining star MIT PhD, doing truly important work. Now, I'm just a humble BSEE, working fine in industry, but with a lot of missed opportunity that I regret not having available.
Take a look at the homogenized textbooks and curriculums of your kids' public schools. Take a look at No Child Left Behind policies stripping out the gifted science and art program budgets away. That is the reason science in the USA is suffering.
It starts and ends with the kids.
Ah yes, the "Who Moved My Cheese" management rationalization. All of a worker's woes are really just opportunity in disguise!
Having done my B.S. in Physics (with an EE 'minor' focus), I say a confident 'perhaps'. I graduated in '94, and had zero success finding a job outside of folding boxes in warehouses for several years. I had scores of interviews, and my degree was always met with "Wow! Physics! That's impressive! So...what is that exactly?"
:-D.
The average person/manager/HR had always heard of physics, knew it was hard by reputation and thus avoided it during thier own schooling, and so never had enough knowledge of what the degree entailed to make a hiring decision based on it. If it comes down to equal experience between two candidates, the more obscure education will always lose, especially a 'generalist hard science' like physics. I actually had one company hire me to fix broken PCs once, not because I could, but so they could say that they had a "Computer Physicist" on staff
I got a foot-in-the-door job eventually as a tech in a large company, and worked my way up from the inside to become a full-fledged design engineer. I successfully petitioned the company to retroactively treat my non-ABET accredited Physics degree as equivalent to a full ABET engineering degree as far as pay-scale and responsibility.
I loved the physics education, and honestly feel that it was effectively a more valuable engineering education than most straight engineering degrees would have been. But it has been a mighty hard road struggling through a lot of shitty jobs to reach the point where I can now rely on my experience in my career, and no longer have the "degree monkey" on my back.
Do what you love, and if you love the pure sciences then I recommend doing so. In my experience, though, physics (along with chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology) are near impossible to get jobs with based purely on the degree. You'd better damn well have some internships or other experience under your belt upon graduating!
Yep, the Doom TC Aliens for me also. There were several levels where you walk deeper into the complex, deeper, deeper, but don't see or shoot a thing, just Apone whispering in your ear. Then, you notice the encrustations on the walls. Then, screeee! Headcrabs! Aliens! You empty clip after clip, your counter running low, lights flickering, aiaiaiaiaaaaggghhhh!!!!
I went to WA small claims court to ask for payment from a property agency that had promised repayment. The apartment I was moving into needed repainting, and I painted it on my dime after an agreement with the agency that they would repay me. The property agency not only never paid me back, but claimed that I had never even painted it at all and billed me for additional repainting after I moved out! All told, it was about $3000.00 dollars (my expense, plus the extra that I got billed).
:-)
In court, the agency rep claimed there was never any correspondence, and she said that she would be fired by the agency and made to pay it out of her own paycheck if the judgement was lost. A very silly play for sympathy.
I won the full judgement since I had a certified receipt for the summons, still had the Home Depot receipts for materials, as well as an email from a guy at the agency saying they'd pay me back. The judge very severely berated the agency rep for lying, recorded it in the court transcript, and awarded us not only the money that I had spent for painting, but an additional award for the amount that I had been billed by the agency, and bid us a nice day. I came out of there with a tidy $2000 profit.
I sat through three other cases before mine, all landlord/tenant disputes, and the tenants won every judgement. Judges hate slumlords
Anyway, I highly recommend the small claims experience. In Washington small claims, your defendant can't counter-sue (they have to file a separate claim), so you have nothing to lose except a few bucks for the claim and summons fees and a day from work.
I'll give the perspective from the flip side. My dad was a computer professional back in the punch card and reel-to-reel days. He and my mother divorced in 1979, and had shared custody of my brother and I until 1989, when I turned 18 and my brother sued for emancipation.
Growing up in a tug-of-war shared custody environment is something that I would never wish on anyone. I fully believe that I would have been better off growing up being 100% with one parent or the other after their divorce. Picture a band-aid slowly being peeled off over ten years. My brother and I eventually made the adult choice to side with my mother (realizing our dad really did have fundamental problems) and have cut off relations with our father, having not spoken with him for almost 10 years.
My point being, do what's best for your kid. If you or your kid's mom are unable to leave your emotional baggage behind, and not fight over your kid's time or make your kid feel like he's a commodity in an emotional tug-of-war, then just man up and leave his life now (or convince his mom to leave) while he's young enough to not hate you for it.
On the upside, I have fond memories of playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on a terminal in a vast cavern of humming mainframes during "Take your kid to work day", and learned to program little things in Assembly while still learning my multiplication tables. So I guess that relates to Slashdot.
On the "life factor" note...don't compare just the cost of living, without also factoring in your commute time. Seattle and Redmond area housing cost is highly location dependent, but drops off quickly with distance from the core. It is quite possible to get a decent affordable house (when compared to SF) and still keep your commute under an hour.
Example, my wife does Shoreline (north Seattle area) to Redmond every day. It varies from 35 mins to 2 hours depending on traffic. Not great, but we have an affordable house in a nice neighborhood.
Her carpool buddy just moved from SF, where his commute was often over 3 hours, for a shorter distance driven, from an overpriced condo. He thinks he's in heaven now in Seattle by comparison.
Agreed. I'm an engineer, but any job or university that pigeonholed the training into a single application platform in a niche field is doing a disservice to the engineer they are supposed to be building. The parent laments that new engineers being poorly trained for the workforce is somehow a recent phenomenon. University has *never* been about workforce training. That's what tech schools and apprecticeships are for, but not for ABET degrees. You (the manager) are getting a product from university (the engineer) with a broad-based well-rounded qualitative education and a demonstrated ability to *learn*. It is up to you (the manager) to shape the product into a "real world" working engineer. If you aren't willing to put in a year at least of development and OJT into your new university hire, then quit whining and go hire an old experienced industry guy who can do the job faster (there are plenty of them looking for work).
Perfectly parodied! It only needed a completely arbitrary cliffhanger to end ever paragraph, and it would be perfect.
I'd love to see what you could do with Robert Jordan!
Honey, I couldn't believe that the GPS took me down that sharp ravine filled with low branches and sharp rocks. Lucky for me there was a tire and body paint shop at the end of the road with a special sale going on!
And in case you'd like evidence to back you up, here is the actual scientific paper describing the "too stupid to know it" phenomenon. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pd f/
Additionally for Guild Wars, you don't have to worry about progressing together at the same rate. A level 10 character can quest with a level 15 or 20 and still have fun and rewarding gameplay.
Ahh, what a lovely misuse of statistics to support an agenda, that the american poor somehow have it all rosy:
"* In 1995, 41 percent of all "poor" households owned their own homes."
So you are using a minority percentage to somehow make a case against the general case of being "poor". Also, owning a home typically means debt. If 41% of poor had positive net equity, then this might mean something.
"* The average home owned by a person classified as "poor" has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio."
Irrelevant, and speaks nothing to the home value, and again nothing to the indebtedness of the the family. The typical inner-city decay crack-house would still meet your categorization. And "average" is the most misleading and useless statistical category one can spout, it says nothing about the distribution of the data.
"* Over three-quarters of a million "poor" persons own homes worth over $150,000; and nearly 200,000 "poor" persons own homes worth over $300,000"
First, 3/4 million is a seemingly huge "oh wow" number to throw out with no context. Must be a lot huh? How would we know? When there are hundreds of millions in your population then you are actually speaking about a mere sliver. Let's look at that sliver of population then. 150k won't even allow you a 1 br studio in most cities. In Seattle, 300k will barely get you a livable home (aside from realtor "fixer uppers") anywhere near the city.
I'm curious of your underlying reasons for trying to make the claim, with a very biased selection of statistics, that there is no poserty problem in America.
It will also get you a free man when playing Contra. Those Toyota engineers think of everything!
Ahh...a new emoticon! When you wrote "I 3 Osama"...I read that as "I teabag Osama". It's all in the eye of the beholder I guess...
As a perspective from one who has done the hiring...I was the hiring manager at a _large_ US firm, excess of 100k employees large.
Even for small positions that we wanted to fill the same day (and were willing to do so for the first semi-qualified person that walked through the door), company HR policy required us to interview _every_ qualified applicant. Those that we did not wish to interview required us to _individually document_ the reasons each non-interviewed candidate was excluded from the interview process. HR would also not me write my own position posting or qualifications, but instead posted their _compliant_ posting that was sanitized into illegibility and didn't at all reflect the actual job requirements.
Real life example, we had an entry-level administrative position that was perfect for any recent graduate looking for experience. One position, over three hundred qualified resumes. So on facing either 300 interviews, or 300 "book reports" for the candidates we wouldn't interview, we said screw it and just went to a temp agency in frustration.
In my experience, HR is often the greatest hurdle to a hiring manager.
Guild Wars is a great example...There are hard boxes/CDs on the racks in the stores, but GW also has available a tiny (61k I think) client installer for download, and all subscription, activation, and content download can then be done online. This was a pure impulse buy on a cold, bored, rainy day in my study, that I never would have done if I had to drive out to a store and purchase a box. The sheer convenience of doing this means that I have been spending more on games recently through Valve, and other direct sites. People are worried about the permanence of their media, but realistically most of my old CD games are unplayable now due to obsolete OSs, device drivers, and I treat the purchase of ANY software these days as "caveat emptor" with no surprises that I won't be able to use it in 5 years.
I started on computer when I was about 10 years old (Commodore Vic-20) and have been a heavy keyboard user ever since. If you think keyboards today are poor, you haven't spent enough time on a Sinclair, Osbourne, or Tandy. My wrists have a *lot* of miles on crappy keyboards.
:-)
I can still type and code heavily for hours at a stretch, and have no trouble with carpal tunnel *right now*. Interestingly though, while in my early 20's I started noticing early signs of the syndrome (numbness, wrist and arm pain, twinges). My mother (a lifetime Cust Service phone rep) was suffering heavily from CT at the time, recovering from a CT operation and possibly unable to work on keyboards again, and I thought that I might be doomed to the same fate.
My CT symptoms were halted, and went away however. Interestingly, I had just started martial arts training at about the same time that I was getting hit with the CT symptoms. Now, fifteen years later, I am still doing martial arts, still coding and keying, and 100% CT free.
I firmly believe that the heavy wrist stretching and training involved with my kung fu training was the key to staying CT free and conditioning myself. As a result, my wrists have always been in a vast variety of motions and positions, and not stuck in stiff repetitive positions.
Kung Fu cures CT
He has the right attitude and expectations IMHO. Advising and schedule management is what the students pay the colleges to provide. Self-discipline is fine, but very few students (especially as young students who haven't had to sink or swim in the 'real' world) have those skills, nor should they be expected to possess them.
I could realistically study most (if not all) of a degree program by visiting libraries and taking MIT open courseware. However, I currently pay a *lot* of money so that I can have a managed program, disciplined schedule, advising and consulting, teaching assistance, and evaluation. I could pursue this on my own, but I'm realistic to know that I wouldn't be able to discipline myself to do so successfully as I would in a university setting.
The 6-year-bachelor syndrome is very much (but not entirely of course) the fault of inadequate advising and support from the university administration, and the attempt to satisfy ridiculous special-interest degree requirements.
I speak as one whose degree was delayed in large part to false promises and non-existant support from schedule advisors, never knowing that I needed a cultural anthropology course that was only offered one term per year at a weird hour to graduate for a BS in Physics.
I disagree. As other posters have mentioned, faculty will be fleeing a sinking ship and any valuable personal contacts that may have been formed with faculty will be worthless 5 years down the road when he is trying to get recommendations and letters from a vanished department/faculty, or from adjuncts that rotate out every year.
Switching schools is easy, I've done it a couple of times, and with still a couple of years left in your education, it is the contacts and bonds you make during your final quarters that will be most important for connections later. No one is going to give a rats ass about recommendations from your freshman calculus teacher when compared to a senior class faculty.
Get out while you can!
Yep and yep. I work for a huge company, 200,000+ employees. The company is in the process of disabling local CD/DVD drives except by special approval for this very reason. Our existing Unix and XPC boxes are also having their CD drives unmounted.
Ironically, we are undergoing a massive PC upgrade---LCD monitors, shiny new dual-processor boxes with DVD drives, to "better enable us with state of the art tools". At the same time, USB ports, DVD drives, and any other external interfaces possible are being restricted.
One step forward, two steps back.
Good post. I was a threshold kid, I tested well but not well enough to qualify for the gifted program path. I was still *way* too bright for mainstream and was bored and miserable with regular classes. Thankfully, my parents were able to push the school administration to give me a shot at the gifted program, and once there I thrived.
The program eventually petered out in high school for budgetary reasons, and we gifted kids were dropped back into the mainstream classes. We still had our choice at the honors classes however, which most did. Even the honors classes, though, were far below the stimulation level of what we were used to, consisting mostly of just more busy work and longer projects and papers.
I decided early in high school that the honors class busy-work grind was making me even more miserable and frustrated than simply being bored was, (a difference of being intellectually bored with zero free time, or bored with plenty of free time) and withdrew from the honors classes completely and coasted through the standard classes with the bulk average kids.
I eventually did college and career successfully, but I often wonder how much more I could have fulfilled my inner Ender Wiggin if the gifted path had been available through my whole education.
"which will have implication on a lot of other fields beside toys. Security for example."
What, you mean like on The Prisoner? Giant colored bouncing bubbles gaurding our nation's borders?
As much as I love Straight Dope, and as much as they are often correct, this is very bad advice for anyone that travels outside of the US. The "See photo ID" seems to be a very US-centric custom, and while vendors and cashiers in the states respect it, there are many countries where you are almost guaranteed to have your card refuse if you try the above tactic. Especially in non-English speaking countries. I have had the "show photo ID" method refused in England, Ireland (although a couple places reluctantly accepted it), Italy, and China. Many countries are ultra-paranoid about credit card theft or fraud, especially if their customer is a foreigner. These places demanded a signature-signed card most of the time. I was extremely lucky to have a backup card that was signed or I would have been stuck without money overseas. On a funny note, at a mall in China the vendor would refuse to accept my card until I literally signed the receipt "See Picture ID" in handwriting similar to what I had written on the back of the card.