This is one of the factors which leads to skewed results when attempting to analyze diets. People who are successful in dieting usually accompany the fad factor of the diet (no meat, no bread, no sugar, no HFCS, raw food, organic, tree bark, etc) with a concerted effort to eat healthier overall and exercise. Then, they say they're thin because of the fad, and it's not really true.
On the subject of HFCS, there appears to be merit to the argument that it makes people hungrier by screwing with the insulin reaction. Sweet foods definitely have a place in the human diet - they make you feel full and happy. HFCS is a perverts this. It is, however, a bit of a red herring - it's easier to think about removing a magic chemical than changing a culture, and the food culture of America is where the majority of the fault lies:
People eat out too much. They do this because many people in my generation don't know how to cook. When they were kids, instead of teaching them to cook, their parents were rushing around all the time trying to keep up with the Joneses in after-school activities and both working. When people go out, the food is cheap per unit mass, but the servings are gigantic and making them more gigantic decreases the cost per pound at a dizzying rate. Then they have to commute rather than walk or bike to where they need to go, which makes them more inclined to overeat, and work at jobs where they do administrative tasks rather than physical ones. Et cetera.
What crime or criminal action are you referring to?
Re:of course, sue now
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Facebook In Court
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not a lawyer, but the NDA/No-Comp angle is enlightening as to exactly why businesses are so meticulous about having people sign such clauses or contracts. This very fact indicates that actually nailing someone on these grounds is difficult.
1) Business plan/"Idea": Seems to me this would be classified as a trade secret. However, they did not attempt to protect themselves via contract. If you just told this guy, who might as well be your mother-in-law, a reporter or John Doe off the street, it's not a secret anymore.
You might also take a patent angle in these times when everything can be patented, but since these guys are in college, I'm going to guess that they didn't apply for a patent.
2) Design: The rough idea of how things fit together. This, I would say, is precisely what patents were intended for, and again, since they're geeks, not lawyers, and no materials I've read thus far have mentioned patent infringement, I'm going to guess they don't have a patent. Therefore, they don't have a case.
3) Code: I followed the SCO v IBM litigation for a few years, then I got bored. Clearly the law has a bit of catching up to do, still, because while it would seem obvious to search for identical code, it took years to get to the point where SCO would say what actually infringed.
Their case then amounts to "They stole our code!" which has been established as a pretty murky area as far as the law is concerned.
If you're going to get on my case for not knowing something, that's great. More power to you. Clearly you do know more about the subject than me. It's this kind of hellfire that ticks me off:
I'm not accusing him of anything other than being full of crap. You don't need a bone through an arbitrary part of your body (or did you think the nasal septum was the only septum?) to be a racist jerk.
That doesn't make sense.
Let me explain this in as verbose a manner as I can, just to be really, really crystal clear. Stereotypically, Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world and its throng of cultures, and believe that everyone else in the world is stupid or backward. These two factors combined give us yet another stereotype: an American programmer who holds the viewpoint that he is more productive than some people in India because these people are Queequeg, straight out of Moby Dick, rather than literate, educated engineers.
And yes, the image of Queequeg is comical to our modern eyes. I don't think any reasonable person anywhere, as low an opinion as they have of Joe Average American, actually believes Joe is so ignorant as to think that everything, Mexico to Argentina to South Africa to the Gold Coast to Ethiopia to Egypt right up the way to Afghanistan and all of Europe east of Italy to India to Vietnam to Samoa, is functioning on a hunter-gatherer level, practicing body modification, and worshipping a Moon goddess. That's why it's a hyperbole, and that's why it's not meant to be taken as a serious and accurate descriptor of what you believe that person to believe.
they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worth
You are accusing someone of either being ignorant of the rest of the world or filled with hubris about their worth as opposed to an Indian professional, which is exactly what I'm talking about above. That assertion is absurd, and your assumption that anyone who both disagrees with you and presents you with an image you don't understand to be a steath racist, along with the little digs about reading comprehension, Sylvan Learning Center, etc, is irrelevant and fallacious.
When you have some numbers to back up that you're actually worth 20 of them, let us know; until then, it's hollow dishonest bragging. The only people you're impressing are other people like you.
When someone says, "I am as productive as 20 offshore workers," they do not necessarily believe that your average Indian technical professional has a bone stuck through his septum and likes to spend his time shouting at the moon. The chief benefits of having a local worker are that they can easily communicate with the rest of your organization because of physical presence, and having a common culture between the client, the employer and the employee leads to less miscommunication.
If you're going to say, "Well, these guys from halfway across the globe understand exactly what I'm saying," not so fast. Even a workplace has its own idiomatic expressions. You must also consider the disparities in overall dialect and slang that accord to your region, and the fact that diagrams and bizarre hand-gestures often come into play when describing technical concepts. And telecommunication? I don't know how e-hip you are, but I hate telephones with a passion. As soon as a telephone rings at any time of the day, my mind does a core dump. They're an annoyance and are definitely less marginally productive than just having the guy you need 10 feet away.
So, while it is silly to say that one coder can do the same work as twenty if you falsely think of the work as bricklaying (like so many managers do), it is likely that it takes 19 other people to figure out what the hell you meant when you were talking to the one guy and subsequently implement it, given that adding coders to a project has sharply diminishing returns.
After the bubble burst, my girlfriend had ex-DotCommers come into her coffee shop, where she made minimum wage, and ask to be hired at $25 to make lattes.
As a side note, you do not need six figures to get by in the Bay Area, unless by "getting by" you mean living in an exclusive, upscale urban area.
The comparison to ADHD is false. In many cases I have seen, "hyperactivity" is simply the result of having a smart, energetic kid in a classroom where an authoritarian teacher refuses to let them excel.
I believe that my experiences as a person who still struggles for social success, but, perhaps as a consequence of this, does not struggle in other areas gives me some room to comment on this. As I am - that is, I can be sociable but with effort - I would not trade my advantages for greater sociability and less anxiety around people. However, were I more socially handicapped, to degree of a person with autism or Asperger's, my response would probably be different. If someone is going to be so handicapped that they require lifelong supervision, or that they cannot have meaningful relationships with others, it is probably best to intervene.
It is unfortunate that we cannot simply ask the child in question which they would prefer, and we cannot possibly anticipate what is truly at stake - that is, how profound their condition will ultimately be, and how they might be if they were "neurotypical". The issue is further complicated by the fact that autistic-advocacy groups desire to elevate their condition from a disease to a way of life. However, any group of people united by some factor will seek to validate themselves, so I do not think that this opinion is really valid in the same way as an objective analysis of how the child's life might turn out, and though they may have interesting (if odd) capabilities, I do not think I would trade places with an autistic person. Is this a chilling thought? Well, perhaps, but sometimes you have to make hard decisions as a parent.
Perhaps I was not being specific enough. I think I should've said, "Debt, willfully accumulated by persons attempting to live beyond their means, which will never realistically be paid off." For example, people who have long since graduated with advanced degrees and are still paying off pizzas they ate in their freshman year, or who go into a store with a one hundred dollar budget and end up spending five hundred.
Speaking as a layperson, I cannot fathom how such people are having anything but a negative effect on the economy as a whole.
The very people who have the biggest problem with consumption are debtors, who are, by definition, not wealthy. Aside from their own abilities, their net worth is often zero or negative.
The issue with this is that many people are apparently not taught financial prudence, moderation or frugality by anyone, and then, the economy fails to acutely punish their manic spending as harshly as it would have in the past (death, prison, slavery, etc). Instead, we must all bear the burden of the massive consumer debt. Tragedy of the commons, you know. It is this, not directly technology, which allows people to be as gluttonous as they are.
I think you missed part of my point in your eagerness to point out a bleeding-heart. At my most cynical, I would like to hope that in the next 10 years it will become harder to steal someone's identity, or even that a different process would be needed, making her too incompetent to repeat the crime. I don't think that's gonna happen. They'll just keep putting chips in our credit cards, or some equally pointless bullshit.
California has a law in place that limits the amount of revenue which can be gathered via property taxes. Merely having wealthy people with expensive homes on your soil, therefore, only marginally increases the wealth of the municipal government. They must spend their money locally for sales tax to allow money to flow into local coffers, or the district must get their pittance from the fed and the state, or the locals must pass bond measures to voluntarily increase their own property taxes. People rarely volunteer to pay higher taxes.
So, basically, if you're a bedroom community like Contra Costa, you're fucked. Nobody will volunteer to raise their own taxes, and Prop 13 is a political third rail - touch it and ya dead. That's why California is a very wealthy state with very poor services.
Wouldn't solve anything to give them jail time. She's obviously a junkie and a career criminal already. In ten years, she'll come out, and the methods needed to steal an identity will have not changed one bit.
It seems to me like these companies often make combative location choices. For example, Starbucks often puts their coffee shops near a local favorite, which is a slam dunk because everyone 14-20 in the area will be guzzling frappuchinos at a pancreas-shocking rate. Then Peet's moves in because there's a Starbucks, regardless of whether there are enough pretentious hipsters to support a Peet's long-term profitability. And all 3 stores now sell the same products, more or less, so it's not really about choice, it's Rochambeau (South Park style). Similarly, I've seen Good Guys/Circuit City/Best Buy/Compusa/etc locations out in the middle of nowhere, seemingly only because there was already a Compusa/Best Buy/Circuit City/Good Guys there.
I misread that, then, and thank you for clarifying your point. I do wish you would've just said, "You're completely wrong," though, rather than letting it devolve into emotions, because that will increase the amount of time we have before we just start throwing mud at each other. I try have a pretty thick skin when I get into these discussions.
And as a aside, I comprehend the reason there's such a pressure to focus on the Jewish portion of the holocaust - anything else is seen as treading down the slippery slope towards allowing it to happen again, or giving traction to deniers.
By providing incomplete information, you lose the trust of your audience and, in fact, give way to deniers anyway. Some ovine people are going to start saying, "Well, they never talked about group y in detail. I wonder what else they're not talking about?" Also, by focusing exclusively on one group, you elide the fact that they were after everyone who didn't fit their ideal, and anyone who was politically inconvenient as well.
And of course it's not about the body count (If we were to talk about body count, we'd be teaching about the wrongness of the whole war and the evil nature of imperialistic wars for power driven by fervent nationalism. But that's another gripe!). However, you cannot include content in a discussion without excluding all non-included content. And by teaching the holocaust in a way that only includes Jews and Homosexuals because they were the most characteristic example of the dynamic, you are implicitly excluding everybody else who was victimized. And when you exclude something from teaching, a lot of people forget about it entirely.
Even the characterization of Jews and Homosexuals (I'll forgive you for not including the Romani, because as you said you're not a scholar) as the only groups who were targeted because of what they were is dangerous, because many people consider their religion as inseparable and fundamental from their being as sexuality or ethnicity. Furthermore physical or mental disability might be considered a more undeniable, corporeal fact than someone's sexual orientation. People of all orientations flex their boundaries more often than my cousin goes for a jog. You might say that people with different abilities do not have a culture per se, but I'm sure many deaf and autistic people would disagree with that assertion. And if it falls into a gray area, I really think that it should be taught.
I know I'm making a mistake attempting to have a rational discussion of this on the internet, but here goes.
The most prominent primary target of the Nazi's killing spree was indeed the Jewish people, and their story of systematic, legitimized oppression, and how the general German populace went along with it by degrees is the most harrowing. It teaches us that when you start institutionally marginalizing a people or class of persons, even if only slightly at first, you go down a road which may lead to something truly horrific.
That having been said, the current state of holocaust education effectively denies the deaths of the millions of non-Jews by focusing exclusively on the deaths of the Jews. It invalidates their suffering. You yourself implicitly said it was unimportant. And thus, people grow up thinking that genocide is some kind of rare thing which confines itself to one people at a time, and not only is this not correct, but the message is injured. Think I'm wrong? Ask an average American high school kid about Darfur, or the Armenians, or the purges in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia.
I would rather teach kids that if they start letting intolerance into their hearts, not only is it going to be the people of x super-vilified minority who go against the wall, it's going to be your little sister with a bum leg, your evangelical uncle, the sad beggars in downtown, those two boys holding hands, anyone who voices a dissident opinion, and everyone you know who's not white, brown, yellow, or whatever the uber-race is supposed to be.
I sacrificed clarity for brevity when I wrote my that - I apologize. I have nothing against importing workers, especially if they have the intention of someday naturalizing. What I find odious is exporting jobs. That's what I meant when I said, "foreigners" - people who are in another country and will stay there. As soon as you step foot on American soil you begin the process of naturalizing, for better or for worse.
Anyway, there's evidence that your experience is not universal. I know someone who's on a hiring committee in medium-sized database company, and many of the managers there have passed more qualified native candidates over for less-qualified non-citizens. Just because you're playing by the rules doesn't mean other people are. Wondering about that drop in local quality? There's the reason. Despair over not being able to differentiate yourself on your merits simply because you don't work for peanuts while salesmen and executives reap ever-higher bonuses, and a federal government that is systematically attempting to destroy public education.
I overheard an older businessman talking at lunch with a friend of his about the absurdity of these practices. The goal really is just to suppress wages, and it is undertaken in a series of discrete steps:
Testing is only mindless if you're not good at it. It takes a specific kind of person to be a virtuoso tester, but those people will, regularly, write more bugs than five mediocre testers combined. You are testing a system for flaws. If you understand how that type of system is built - that is, if you're a programmer - you have clues as to what might produce bugs.
I will say that I disagree with the idea of game QA as a way to break into game development. That's silly. If you're not a great tester you won't shine and will stay in QA, and if you're not a great developer you will be promoted to your level of incompetence. The real career path for a good game tester is to get a job as a tester in more specialized fields. And don't be fooled by the peanuts they pay to game testers: a distinguished QA engineer can command a very enviable salary.
There is software out there that has approximately 0 bugs, but it takes years and years to get the software into that state, by which time it may look positively antediluvian to someone who has an eye for the cutting-edge. The target audience for these solutions is very small and specialized, so it's often pretty expensive to boot unless it's free software. Most people can cope with a few random and inexplicable bugs.
It's just how the industry works. You have some folks on one side for whom the existence of a bug means, to varying degrees, that you're fucked. Usually they realize that this means they're working with a limited feature palette. Then you have people on the other side who need everything to be bleeding edge because they need the performance, the features, or they're just total technophiles. And then you have all of us in between. And because the early adopters and average people have far more eyes than most QA departments, as well as a more varied set of conditions, we see bugs that would be more difficult to isolate for QA. So, five years after we've started beating on it, it gets to the people who require stability, and it is stable in part because of early adopters.
So really, a lot of software is released before all the bugs are gone not because the executives are evil and unscrupulous plutocrats, but because they want to get it out there and because the people out there want it. Of course, a lot of software is developed under the whip of evil, unscrupulous plutocrats who release (for example) barely playable games which never become perfect, ever, but they shouldn't really be a part of this discussion because they live in their own warped little world.
Really, Bill Gates was correct when he said that people don't buy software for bug fixes. What he meant, I think, was that the average home user or desk jockey has no use for such software, for the costs of a crash are almost nonexistent for them, while the hassle of not being able to run new software is significant.
I know tons of people who love their 50-60 year old stoves which are still going strong with no signs of stopping. I love mine. Same goes for many other categories of appliance: washers, dryers, etc. I don't need features. I need them to perform a fairly basic operation upon the material world - burn natural gas, wash, dry, etc.
Now, I know there is demand for appliances with lots of buttons that break after a year, but given the number of people I know who are into classic cars and appliances, I find it more believable that manufacturers realized there was more profit to be made in selling cheap, flimsy products than durable ones. That whole, "Well, demand drives production, blah blah blah" line is, itself, very old-fashioned. These days, you decide what people want, then use marketing and advertising to convince people it's what they should buy. Or have you never heard of a Happy Meal?
I must admit that this is one of the main reasons I stopped watching the show. Before, we'd have parties on Fridays where I'd go to watch BSG et al with someone who had cable. Now... Sunday at 10? No freakin way. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to watch. It was that, coupled with Season 3's gigantic filler fuckfest.
Labor is merely the organization of survival. Nothing wrong with that. Saying labor is bad is nothing short of nihilism.
Investment and profit - well, okay, let's go back a step. You have a society. The society, as an entity unto itself, has resources which can be allocated in a variety of directions. The allocation of the resources is investment. Reaping the benefits is revenue. Profit is whatever you gain over your initial input.
This is true whether you're a capitalist, a communist, an anarcho-syndicalist or a hunter-gatherer. Even people who are out in the brush just looking to get by need to invest resources in more than providing for their immediate nutritional needs because goods decay, and producing some surplus is a good way to avoid famine. It's the same reason that each woman needs to have 2.1 kids to keep the population from shrinking. Different economic systems are simply different ways to decide who gets to allocate resources.
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This is one of the factors which leads to skewed results when attempting to analyze diets. People who are successful in dieting usually accompany the fad factor of the diet (no meat, no bread, no sugar, no HFCS, raw food, organic, tree bark, etc) with a concerted effort to eat healthier overall and exercise. Then, they say they're thin because of the fad, and it's not really true.
On the subject of HFCS, there appears to be merit to the argument that it makes people hungrier by screwing with the insulin reaction. Sweet foods definitely have a place in the human diet - they make you feel full and happy. HFCS is a perverts this. It is, however, a bit of a red herring - it's easier to think about removing a magic chemical than changing a culture, and the food culture of America is where the majority of the fault lies:
People eat out too much. They do this because many people in my generation don't know how to cook. When they were kids, instead of teaching them to cook, their parents were rushing around all the time trying to keep up with the Joneses in after-school activities and both working. When people go out, the food is cheap per unit mass, but the servings are gigantic and making them more gigantic decreases the cost per pound at a dizzying rate. Then they have to commute rather than walk or bike to where they need to go, which makes them more inclined to overeat, and work at jobs where they do administrative tasks rather than physical ones. Et cetera.
What crime or criminal action are you referring to?
I'm not a lawyer, but the NDA/No-Comp angle is enlightening as to exactly why businesses are so meticulous about having people sign such clauses or contracts. This very fact indicates that actually nailing someone on these grounds is difficult.
1) Business plan/"Idea": Seems to me this would be classified as a trade secret. However, they did not attempt to protect themselves via contract. If you just told this guy, who might as well be your mother-in-law, a reporter or John Doe off the street, it's not a secret anymore.
You might also take a patent angle in these times when everything can be patented, but since these guys are in college, I'm going to guess that they didn't apply for a patent.
2) Design: The rough idea of how things fit together. This, I would say, is precisely what patents were intended for, and again, since they're geeks, not lawyers, and no materials I've read thus far have mentioned patent infringement, I'm going to guess they don't have a patent. Therefore, they don't have a case.
3) Code: I followed the SCO v IBM litigation for a few years, then I got bored. Clearly the law has a bit of catching up to do, still, because while it would seem obvious to search for identical code, it took years to get to the point where SCO would say what actually infringed.
Their case then amounts to "They stole our code!" which has been established as a pretty murky area as far as the law is concerned.
If you're going to get on my case for not knowing something, that's great. More power to you. Clearly you do know more about the subject than me. It's this kind of hellfire that ticks me off:
I'm not accusing him of anything other than being full of crap. You don't need a bone through an arbitrary part of your body (or did you think the nasal septum was the only septum?) to be a racist jerk.That doesn't make sense.
Let me explain this in as verbose a manner as I can, just to be really, really crystal clear. Stereotypically, Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world and its throng of cultures, and believe that everyone else in the world is stupid or backward. These two factors combined give us yet another stereotype: an American programmer who holds the viewpoint that he is more productive than some people in India because these people are Queequeg, straight out of Moby Dick, rather than literate, educated engineers.
And yes, the image of Queequeg is comical to our modern eyes. I don't think any reasonable person anywhere, as low an opinion as they have of Joe Average American, actually believes Joe is so ignorant as to think that everything, Mexico to Argentina to South Africa to the Gold Coast to Ethiopia to Egypt right up the way to Afghanistan and all of Europe east of Italy to India to Vietnam to Samoa, is functioning on a hunter-gatherer level, practicing body modification, and worshipping a Moon goddess. That's why it's a hyperbole, and that's why it's not meant to be taken as a serious and accurate descriptor of what you believe that person to believe.
they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worthYou are accusing someone of either being ignorant of the rest of the world or filled with hubris about their worth as opposed to an Indian professional, which is exactly what I'm talking about above. That assertion is absurd, and your assumption that anyone who both disagrees with you and presents you with an image you don't understand to be a steath racist, along with the little digs about reading comprehension, Sylvan Learning Center, etc, is irrelevant and fallacious.
When someone says, "I am as productive as 20 offshore workers," they do not necessarily believe that your average Indian technical professional has a bone stuck through his septum and likes to spend his time shouting at the moon. The chief benefits of having a local worker are that they can easily communicate with the rest of your organization because of physical presence, and having a common culture between the client, the employer and the employee leads to less miscommunication.
If you're going to say, "Well, these guys from halfway across the globe understand exactly what I'm saying," not so fast. Even a workplace has its own idiomatic expressions. You must also consider the disparities in overall dialect and slang that accord to your region, and the fact that diagrams and bizarre hand-gestures often come into play when describing technical concepts. And telecommunication? I don't know how e-hip you are, but I hate telephones with a passion. As soon as a telephone rings at any time of the day, my mind does a core dump. They're an annoyance and are definitely less marginally productive than just having the guy you need 10 feet away.
So, while it is silly to say that one coder can do the same work as twenty if you falsely think of the work as bricklaying (like so many managers do), it is likely that it takes 19 other people to figure out what the hell you meant when you were talking to the one guy and subsequently implement it, given that adding coders to a project has sharply diminishing returns.
After the bubble burst, my girlfriend had ex-DotCommers come into her coffee shop, where she made minimum wage, and ask to be hired at $25 to make lattes.
As a side note, you do not need six figures to get by in the Bay Area, unless by "getting by" you mean living in an exclusive, upscale urban area.
The comparison to ADHD is false. In many cases I have seen, "hyperactivity" is simply the result of having a smart, energetic kid in a classroom where an authoritarian teacher refuses to let them excel.
I believe that my experiences as a person who still struggles for social success, but, perhaps as a consequence of this, does not struggle in other areas gives me some room to comment on this. As I am - that is, I can be sociable but with effort - I would not trade my advantages for greater sociability and less anxiety around people. However, were I more socially handicapped, to degree of a person with autism or Asperger's, my response would probably be different. If someone is going to be so handicapped that they require lifelong supervision, or that they cannot have meaningful relationships with others, it is probably best to intervene.
It is unfortunate that we cannot simply ask the child in question which they would prefer, and we cannot possibly anticipate what is truly at stake - that is, how profound their condition will ultimately be, and how they might be if they were "neurotypical". The issue is further complicated by the fact that autistic-advocacy groups desire to elevate their condition from a disease to a way of life. However, any group of people united by some factor will seek to validate themselves, so I do not think that this opinion is really valid in the same way as an objective analysis of how the child's life might turn out, and though they may have interesting (if odd) capabilities, I do not think I would trade places with an autistic person. Is this a chilling thought? Well, perhaps, but sometimes you have to make hard decisions as a parent.
Perhaps I was not being specific enough. I think I should've said, "Debt, willfully accumulated by persons attempting to live beyond their means, which will never realistically be paid off." For example, people who have long since graduated with advanced degrees and are still paying off pizzas they ate in their freshman year, or who go into a store with a one hundred dollar budget and end up spending five hundred.
Speaking as a layperson, I cannot fathom how such people are having anything but a negative effect on the economy as a whole.
The very people who have the biggest problem with consumption are debtors, who are, by definition, not wealthy. Aside from their own abilities, their net worth is often zero or negative.
The issue with this is that many people are apparently not taught financial prudence, moderation or frugality by anyone, and then, the economy fails to acutely punish their manic spending as harshly as it would have in the past (death, prison, slavery, etc). Instead, we must all bear the burden of the massive consumer debt. Tragedy of the commons, you know. It is this, not directly technology, which allows people to be as gluttonous as they are.
I think you missed part of my point in your eagerness to point out a bleeding-heart. At my most cynical, I would like to hope that in the next 10 years it will become harder to steal someone's identity, or even that a different process would be needed, making her too incompetent to repeat the crime. I don't think that's gonna happen. They'll just keep putting chips in our credit cards, or some equally pointless bullshit.
California has a law in place that limits the amount of revenue which can be gathered via property taxes. Merely having wealthy people with expensive homes on your soil, therefore, only marginally increases the wealth of the municipal government. They must spend their money locally for sales tax to allow money to flow into local coffers, or the district must get their pittance from the fed and the state, or the locals must pass bond measures to voluntarily increase their own property taxes. People rarely volunteer to pay higher taxes.
So, basically, if you're a bedroom community like Contra Costa, you're fucked. Nobody will volunteer to raise their own taxes, and Prop 13 is a political third rail - touch it and ya dead. That's why California is a very wealthy state with very poor services.
Wouldn't solve anything to give them jail time. She's obviously a junkie and a career criminal already. In ten years, she'll come out, and the methods needed to steal an identity will have not changed one bit.
Polygamy means "many marriages," and is not gender-specific, though most instances of polygamy recorded have been polygynous (many women, one man).
It seems to me like these companies often make combative location choices. For example, Starbucks often puts their coffee shops near a local favorite, which is a slam dunk because everyone 14-20 in the area will be guzzling frappuchinos at a pancreas-shocking rate. Then Peet's moves in because there's a Starbucks, regardless of whether there are enough pretentious hipsters to support a Peet's long-term profitability. And all 3 stores now sell the same products, more or less, so it's not really about choice, it's Rochambeau (South Park style). Similarly, I've seen Good Guys/Circuit City/Best Buy/Compusa/etc locations out in the middle of nowhere, seemingly only because there was already a Compusa/Best Buy/Circuit City/Good Guys there.
Outsourcing? Inefficient? NAAAAAW!
I misread that, then, and thank you for clarifying your point. I do wish you would've just said, "You're completely wrong," though, rather than letting it devolve into emotions, because that will increase the amount of time we have before we just start throwing mud at each other. I try have a pretty thick skin when I get into these discussions.
And as a aside, I comprehend the reason there's such a pressure to focus on the Jewish portion of the holocaust - anything else is seen as treading down the slippery slope towards allowing it to happen again, or giving traction to deniers.
By providing incomplete information, you lose the trust of your audience and, in fact, give way to deniers anyway. Some ovine people are going to start saying, "Well, they never talked about group y in detail. I wonder what else they're not talking about?" Also, by focusing exclusively on one group, you elide the fact that they were after everyone who didn't fit their ideal, and anyone who was politically inconvenient as well.
And of course it's not about the body count (If we were to talk about body count, we'd be teaching about the wrongness of the whole war and the evil nature of imperialistic wars for power driven by fervent nationalism. But that's another gripe!). However, you cannot include content in a discussion without excluding all non-included content. And by teaching the holocaust in a way that only includes Jews and Homosexuals because they were the most characteristic example of the dynamic, you are implicitly excluding everybody else who was victimized. And when you exclude something from teaching, a lot of people forget about it entirely.
Even the characterization of Jews and Homosexuals (I'll forgive you for not including the Romani, because as you said you're not a scholar) as the only groups who were targeted because of what they were is dangerous, because many people consider their religion as inseparable and fundamental from their being as sexuality or ethnicity. Furthermore physical or mental disability might be considered a more undeniable, corporeal fact than someone's sexual orientation. People of all orientations flex their boundaries more often than my cousin goes for a jog. You might say that people with different abilities do not have a culture per se, but I'm sure many deaf and autistic people would disagree with that assertion. And if it falls into a gray area, I really think that it should be taught.
I know I'm making a mistake attempting to have a rational discussion of this on the internet, but here goes.
The most prominent primary target of the Nazi's killing spree was indeed the Jewish people, and their story of systematic, legitimized oppression, and how the general German populace went along with it by degrees is the most harrowing. It teaches us that when you start institutionally marginalizing a people or class of persons, even if only slightly at first, you go down a road which may lead to something truly horrific.
That having been said, the current state of holocaust education effectively denies the deaths of the millions of non-Jews by focusing exclusively on the deaths of the Jews. It invalidates their suffering. You yourself implicitly said it was unimportant. And thus, people grow up thinking that genocide is some kind of rare thing which confines itself to one people at a time, and not only is this not correct, but the message is injured. Think I'm wrong? Ask an average American high school kid about Darfur, or the Armenians, or the purges in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia.
I would rather teach kids that if they start letting intolerance into their hearts, not only is it going to be the people of x super-vilified minority who go against the wall, it's going to be your little sister with a bum leg, your evangelical uncle, the sad beggars in downtown, those two boys holding hands, anyone who voices a dissident opinion, and everyone you know who's not white, brown, yellow, or whatever the uber-race is supposed to be.
I sacrificed clarity for brevity when I wrote my that - I apologize. I have nothing against importing workers, especially if they have the intention of someday naturalizing. What I find odious is exporting jobs. That's what I meant when I said, "foreigners" - people who are in another country and will stay there. As soon as you step foot on American soil you begin the process of naturalizing, for better or for worse.
Anyway, there's evidence that your experience is not universal. I know someone who's on a hiring committee in medium-sized database company, and many of the managers there have passed more qualified native candidates over for less-qualified non-citizens. Just because you're playing by the rules doesn't mean other people are. Wondering about that drop in local quality? There's the reason. Despair over not being able to differentiate yourself on your merits simply because you don't work for peanuts while salesmen and executives reap ever-higher bonuses, and a federal government that is systematically attempting to destroy public education.
I overheard an older businessman talking at lunch with a friend of his about the absurdity of these practices. The goal really is just to suppress wages, and it is undertaken in a series of discrete steps:
Testing is only mindless if you're not good at it. It takes a specific kind of person to be a virtuoso tester, but those people will, regularly, write more bugs than five mediocre testers combined. You are testing a system for flaws. If you understand how that type of system is built - that is, if you're a programmer - you have clues as to what might produce bugs.
I will say that I disagree with the idea of game QA as a way to break into game development. That's silly. If you're not a great tester you won't shine and will stay in QA, and if you're not a great developer you will be promoted to your level of incompetence. The real career path for a good game tester is to get a job as a tester in more specialized fields. And don't be fooled by the peanuts they pay to game testers: a distinguished QA engineer can command a very enviable salary.
There is software out there that has approximately 0 bugs, but it takes years and years to get the software into that state, by which time it may look positively antediluvian to someone who has an eye for the cutting-edge. The target audience for these solutions is very small and specialized, so it's often pretty expensive to boot unless it's free software. Most people can cope with a few random and inexplicable bugs.
It's just how the industry works. You have some folks on one side for whom the existence of a bug means, to varying degrees, that you're fucked. Usually they realize that this means they're working with a limited feature palette. Then you have people on the other side who need everything to be bleeding edge because they need the performance, the features, or they're just total technophiles. And then you have all of us in between. And because the early adopters and average people have far more eyes than most QA departments, as well as a more varied set of conditions, we see bugs that would be more difficult to isolate for QA. So, five years after we've started beating on it, it gets to the people who require stability, and it is stable in part because of early adopters.
So really, a lot of software is released before all the bugs are gone not because the executives are evil and unscrupulous plutocrats, but because they want to get it out there and because the people out there want it. Of course, a lot of software is developed under the whip of evil, unscrupulous plutocrats who release (for example) barely playable games which never become perfect, ever, but they shouldn't really be a part of this discussion because they live in their own warped little world.
Really, Bill Gates was correct when he said that people don't buy software for bug fixes. What he meant, I think, was that the average home user or desk jockey has no use for such software, for the costs of a crash are almost nonexistent for them, while the hassle of not being able to run new software is significant.
I know tons of people who love their 50-60 year old stoves which are still going strong with no signs of stopping. I love mine. Same goes for many other categories of appliance: washers, dryers, etc. I don't need features. I need them to perform a fairly basic operation upon the material world - burn natural gas, wash, dry, etc.
Now, I know there is demand for appliances with lots of buttons that break after a year, but given the number of people I know who are into classic cars and appliances, I find it more believable that manufacturers realized there was more profit to be made in selling cheap, flimsy products than durable ones. That whole, "Well, demand drives production, blah blah blah" line is, itself, very old-fashioned. These days, you decide what people want, then use marketing and advertising to convince people it's what they should buy. Or have you never heard of a Happy Meal?
I must admit that this is one of the main reasons I stopped watching the show. Before, we'd have parties on Fridays where I'd go to watch BSG et al with someone who had cable. Now... Sunday at 10? No freakin way. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to watch. It was that, coupled with Season 3's gigantic filler fuckfest.
Clearly this is the next step for Google.
Labor is merely the organization of survival. Nothing wrong with that. Saying labor is bad is nothing short of nihilism.
Investment and profit - well, okay, let's go back a step. You have a society. The society, as an entity unto itself, has resources which can be allocated in a variety of directions. The allocation of the resources is investment. Reaping the benefits is revenue. Profit is whatever you gain over your initial input.
This is true whether you're a capitalist, a communist, an anarcho-syndicalist or a hunter-gatherer. Even people who are out in the brush just looking to get by need to invest resources in more than providing for their immediate nutritional needs because goods decay, and producing some surplus is a good way to avoid famine. It's the same reason that each woman needs to have 2.1 kids to keep the population from shrinking. Different economic systems are simply different ways to decide who gets to allocate resources.