Likely the case, but you'd still need to emulate the absorption spectra of oxygenated hemoglobin (to whatever resolution it is actually measured at - which isn't likely to be terribly accurate in a cheap and compact device). Again, probably just a piece of plastic with the right characteristics somewhere in the light path.
Self censorship is a huge problem throughout organisations with people not being sure enough of themselves to say what they mean or think instead they couch replies in vague terms so as not to offend and hope for some sort of consensus.
Agree with this, but having one of the biggest leaders in the FOSS movement bite heads off when they don't like your idea isn't exactly a good way to foster expression.
I like that he says what he thinks. I'm not sure I like how he says it. I agree with his arguments in that thread, but the language could be toned down. That isn't self-censorship - it is just being civil.
Linux isn't an operating system, though Android is an operating system built on Linux.
Asking how to change the network settings on "Linux" is like asking how to change the network settings on Mach. The overloading of the word "Linux" is the real problem here.
The British of 1776 didn't need any of that stuff - they didn't really lose any major battles other than Yorktown, and they only had that because of the intervention of the French navy. If it weren't for the French that battle would not have been decisive, but the overall outcome of the war would probably not have changed much (though it might have been more drawn out, or diplomatic in resolution - which could have made the US look more like one of the Commonwealth nations).
The American Revolution is a classic example of how you can win almost every battle and yet lose a war. 30% of the population being armed means that anything an opposition army does results in LOTS of people dying on all sides. Sure, you can bomb cities into ruins, but you can't just march in and take over with any kind of continuity. Few really want to stomach that kind of mess, so there are limits on what any government can accomplish. The British might have won Lexington/Concord, but 300 casualties in a single day wasn't really anything the citizens back home really wanted to hear about, and it just set the tone for the entire war.
Just look at Iraq. It isn't exactly smooth sailing for the US over there despite a huge advantage in military power.
As long as you don't have a Gummy bear that has the right IR absorbtion profile, yes it will defeat it.
However, I can't imagine that if you're going to the trouble to reproduce fingerprints or activate latent ones that you couldn't do it using a material that has the right IR spectrum. Most likely they're just transmitting light and measuring relative absorbance at a few wavelengths, and it should be easy to make a plastic film that passes for blood in this test.
If you can work from home too much, why not just ship your job off to a contractor? If you're just doing maintenance then you're not VALUABLE.
It depends on whether the contractor can actually do the work for less.
The contractor model works best for larger projects - ones that take several or better still dozens of people many months to deliver (if not years).
For smaller projects or when you want more flexibility the contractor model breaks down. If 90% of the work is figuring out what to build then you can't exactly just write up an RFP and put it out for bid. Employees should be valued for their flexibility and knowledge of the business, not so much for their ability to do transactional work. These things do not necessarily tie them to a physical location though.
the difference between a private sector job and a public sector job is that a public sector job is a net loss for the government and a private sector job is a net gain.
Not sure I entirely agree with this. For starters, the government should be operating zero-sum regardless - if it spends less it taxes less, if it spends more it taxes more (setting aside borrowing, which complicates this but doesn't really change the underlying principles).
Government is really just another form of a market, just one that isn't free - you get less choice over whether you participate, what you pay, and what you get. Taxpayers trade taxes for services.
The real question isn't whether the government spends more money or less, but whether the services received by taxpayers are worth the cost to them.
This of course is further complicated by socialism, which underlies much of modern governments. A trade of taxes for services might make sense when you look at it from a standpoint of average services delivered for average taxes paid, but that doesn't mean that it works out that way for any individual. A person who never gets sick or a person who pays income tax at a 90% marginal rate might have a different view of socialized medicine as somebody who is always sick and pays at a 10% marginal rate.
"Sue can work from home and I have the same job, same responsibilities, and same glowing employee evaluations as her, so why can't I work from home?"
Correct answer: "No problem. We already have an established set of evaluation criteria for your work which is focused on your work output (quality, quantity, etc), and we both frequently review this together. Your performance will continue to be measured by the same standards. Are you're sure you'll be able to manage this working remotely?"
If there is a problem it should be evident within a few weeks and you can have the appropriate conversation about improving performance. "I'm working as hard as I can" shouldn't cut it whether the employee works remotely or not.
If you aren't able to tell that there is a problem within a few weeks, then you're already not properly managing your employees. When evaluating an employee the important considerations are what is the value of the work produced relative to the cost of having the employee and the cost of those services on the open market (whether outsourcing, the job market, etc).
If I hire a plumber and he says he needs to go back to his shop in the middle of the day to pre-fab some pipes, I don't tell him to bring the tools and do the work sitting on the bathroom floor. I look at his estimate compared to the estimates of others who could do the work and the value I place on not having to do it myself and hold him to it. The less I have to look at him while being sure the work is done right the better...
>Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff.
That actually makes more sense as the reason behind the move, although it is a jerk thing to do.
It is also a dumb move. You get rid of people, but instead of selecting for talent you're annoying everybody and selecting for willingness to put up with it. In fact, the most marketable people are often the first to leave when you do something like this. Those who couldn't get a job anywhere else will put up with the commute.
If I were running a business I'd be keen to keep costs down, but just randomly getting rid of people would not be the way I did it. If I didn't think my employees were helping to make money I wouldn't have hired them in the first place. If I were budget-constrained I'd get rid of the least-profitable (considering both the short and long term) employees, not just those who happen to live furthest from the office or who figure they can get a better deal elsewhere.
Stuff like this is rarely about making companies profitable, but rather it is about making managers comfortable under the guise of making the company profitable.
What about those who goof off and play video games during worker hours where you can't hold them accountable.
You're not holding them accountable already if that is your concern. Make them accountable for results, not effort. If they aren't getting anything done do you really care if it is because they're playing video games vs just being incompetent? If you aren't capable of determining how much they should be able to get done then you're out of touch with your team.
Conversely, if if you're paying somebody $50/task to do something, and to get the same work done by anybody else you'd have to spend much more than that, then do you really care if they're playing video games on the side?
I'm not sure it is about remote time or not, but contact with the next level of management.
Where I work if I were in the office I wouldn't see my boss any more often since my current one lives 150 miles away. Ditto for most of the other managers. The last time I had a manager a few doors down from me I saw him about once a week - he was elsewhere in meetings almost all the time.
You just have to find ways to get that contact however you can if you want to get promoted. I don't think working remotely would really be a barrier to promotion for somebody who is likely to be promoted in the first place.
You do have to wonder how you could 'loose track' of your employees in this day and age...
I could almost see it happening at work. At various points in time they've tried to flatten org structures to the point where managers had tons of people who technically reported to them but took direction elsewhere.
However, it tends to happen more with contractors, and they're easier to lose since they don't have HR review cycles and all that (but they do have things like time-bound contracts). For actual employees I can't imagine that the fact that nobody bothered to give them an annual review would get missed - it is one of those HR-tracked sorts of things. So, not getting ANYTHING done wouldn't really fly.
Now, wasting time during the day is an entirely different matter. I could just pick a different building at work each day and just hang out there all day goofing off and nobody would even notice a pattern - I'd probably only be in any particular building once a quarter, and yet my badge would read present all day. I see my boss face to face only a few times a year. It was only recently that I really was able to work remotely with any regularity, even though my work was effectively managed that way for years.
Why on earth do I need to make say 100K? or let's say 150K?
That's an oddity of big corporations. They generally operate on a one-size-fits-all system. Sure, each manager gets paid more than the one below them, but they're all in a general bucket of career-minded people making quite a bit of money while working full-time-plus.
At my workplace in one area they had some jobs that really consisted of managing storage of stuff. The work tended to get neglected as you could never be promoted for that kind of work even though it was 90% of the job description. Instead the minimum was done on that stuff and everybody was trying to lead initiatives or whatever to get out of the job. If they had just hired somebody with a high school diploma and paid them $15-20/hr they'd have the best employees they could find as the work would actually be meaningful to them and the pay would be WAY higher than other jobs they could land, and at the same time the company would save a fortune as they would otherwise be paying 2x as much at least.
The cookie cutter mentality is pervasive - when you estimate effort on projects you do not in any way take into account the actual skills of the team. Likewise when deciding what to work on. That is kind of like an NFL team saying "we're professionals - we run the best play by the books and we expect the same out of everybody." Any team that played like that would be at the bottom of the league - if you have the a bunch of high-end wide receivers you don't decide to equally balance your strategy with running plays.
It definitely depends on your job. I know somebody who was working in aerospace on something that required a clearance and most of the team spent all day in a room dedicated to classified work. They couldn't even bring a cell phone into the area - guard posted at the door and all that. He had a regular desk for more corporate-oriented work (HR, accounting, etc), but he spent little time there. That would have been the only aspect of his work that he could have done remotely. The classified stuff even had its own email system from what I gather. To actually take anything of any kind out of there required a bunch of procedures.
I suspect those situations happen more with contractors than government employees. They are likely dedicated to a single project, and it is either classified or it isn't.
Yup. My office is on an industrial complex that it takes a good 20 minutes to walk across. Walking across the building isn't that big a deal, but more often than not you're walking across the site, or driving to the next state over.
In fact, the site I work at is large enough that if traffic is light I could probably get to the other side of the site by driving from home and parking there almost as quickly as I could walk there anyway. And no, driving around the site isn't convenient either as it takes me a good 5-10min to get to my car across the gigantic parking lots.
Yup, I've been working from home and I find myself just not caring about all the office politics as much. Who cares who rates an office vs a cube when you work from home 95% of the time? If I need to go into the office half the time I don't even go to my actual office - I'm spending my time with customers and such. I've learned to ditch all the paper and travel light - that makes me a lot more flexible. I work at a big facility and I used to spend a lot of time just walking around, to say nothing about the commute - I get a lot more done without all that. I don't care that the company cafeteria has lousy food and costs an arm and a leg, etc.
I would agree with you if not for the growing trend of collaborative spaces in the IT industry.
That works as long as everybody is actually at the same location. In my company at least it seems like every project I'm on consists of people scattered across numerous geographical locations. They just all sit in their offices and talk on the phone all day in meetings. When it is suggested that one should pick up the phone instead of calling a meeting the problem is that everybody is busy in meetings and won't pick up. When it is suggested that one should get up and talk to people, the problem is that nobody actually sits near them.
This is often the result of acquisitions, re-orgs, etc. Unless you just want to fire people and hire new ones in a central location (which means giving up a LOT of established talent), working remotely is really the only option.
Most IT companies that have one big central location just started out that way and slowly grew, and often the central location is in a place they can sort-of get away with it like Silicon Valley. Even so, how much talent do companies like Google/Apple end up losing out on because they won't hire anybody who wants to live elsewhere?
without at least rooting the device and perhaps voiding warranty
Everyone talks about "voiding the warranty."
But has anyone ever actually had a warranty claim denied just because the phone is/was rooted and/or running different software?
Well, a more useful question is whether anybody has had a court of law deny them warranty coverage on the hardware for a phone simply because they had changed the firmware.
Anybody can deny a warranty for any reason. I can sell you a bike and give you a contract signed in blood that says I'll fix it for any reason for a year, and then you could bring it back to me, and I could say no. Now, if you took me to court the court would likely tell me to fix it, because I'm violating the law.
The problem is that getting relief from a court over a phone that has depreciated to $200 and needs a $50 repair is incredibly cost-ineffective. So, carriers/vendors/etc can basically do whatever they want.
However, I do maintain that warranties are not voided by software changes unless the software itself caused the problem. That's basic warranty law - if you change the battery on your car it doesn't void the warranty on the leather seat, but it might void the warranty on the radio if it was damaged by a power surge of some kind and the battery could be shown to have caused it. But, you're really at the mercy of the companies good faith.
CM is certainly the best option there is for HTC products, but few devices get CM releases after a year. Of course the vendors should be supporting the devices in the first place, but even the CM community doesn't really keep things going for that long. Nobody is paying them, and there are a LOT of phones out there, and most of the better developers seem to buy new phones frequently and move on.
I think the Dream was the only HTC device that was long-supported on Cyanogenmod. I had a G2 and they stopped porting new OSes to it after Gingerbread - that was only a year newer than the device.
Sure, CM supports the devices longer than the vendors do (with the exception of Nexus phones), but their efforts have been diluted considerably and you don't see stable CM releases for most phones after a year. A year really isn't long enough to stop security updates for a computing device that is used heavily for web browsing.
You're certainly welcome to your opinion.;-) But I imagine you don't work in professional services - a 9 hour day is quite short for us. And a 40-45 hour week is actually standard in Switzerland.
And you wonder why we don't have enough doctors... There are a lot of people who probably wouldn't mind being doctors if it weren't for the traditional lifestyle you just brought up. There is no reason you can't treat people while only working 40 hours a week - you just treat fewer people and have more people doing the work. I'm perfectly willing to accept that you might not be able to get that down to an 8x5 schedule, but just because a surgery takes 14 hours to perform doesn't mean that you have to do 5 of them a week.
The irony is that we have laws limiting how many hours pilots can work in a week, but not how many hours surgeons can work. They're fairly analogous jobs - both require careful attention to detail and procedures or people can die, and they often require long shifts due to the nature of the job itself.
Do you think that schoolteachers, fire fighters, and police officers are moochers?
they are economic overheads in that their jobs don't contribute much to the productive economy, so yes they are moochers.
How do you define "productive economy?" A plumber fixes pipes that have gunk in them, a firefighter fixes rooms that have flames in them. Unless you limit the productive economy to manufacture of physical goods and not services of any kind you can't really call the jobs you cited unproductive.
Police officers are a little less analogous to a private enterprise job, but they clearly perform a vital service which even the staunchest of libertarians would probably fund, or they'd just end up privately contracting with security guards to do the exact same thing.
Now, the 47 layers of bureaucracy it takes to process all the paperwork is a different matter, but every company is full of that stuff. The solution there is legal streamlining. There is lots of waste to pick on in government but police and firefighters really aren't what you should be citing as examples. Teachers fulfill an important role as well, though that is one that is a little more readily privatized and I'd be the first to agree that after the first 5-10 years they generally tend to be not incentivized to work much. The solution to that is reform - not eliminating education.
The problem is that the very people who keep touting the power of the market have created a market where most work will never be done. It is their job to find ways to create a profit from work, and they're not doing it.
The problem is opportunity cost. The profit in fixing a bridge or whatever is pretty low, and there isn't much political advantage to spending the government funds to do it. The profit in selling Ponzi schemes to retirement funds is much higher, and there is plenty of campaign donations to go around to fund votes to support all the subsequent bailouts.
The US has become a country where doing tangible work has become unappealing to investors, to the point where a third of our economy consists of nothing more than shuffling money around while somehow tacking a few percent onto each transaction. Building things takes time measured in months, requires effort to manage, and has modest rewards. Financial schemes can be executed in microseconds for much higher returns.
only that those downsides are better than the status quo.
No, it could be really bad, and most likely would plunge us into a recession immediately after going into effect.
I could see huge disruption if you went from zero tariffs to 10000% overnight. However, all you need to do is pass the law, have it go into effect in a year, and slowly ramp up over 5-10 years. That is slow enough to allow supply chains to adapt.
The tariff could be tied to environmental protections, worker safety, social safety net, and minimum wage. So, it might remain near-free trade between the US/EU/Jap/Aus/etc, and as you get into the third world tariffs would become considerable. However, any country could implement first world standards and benefit from free trade. The tariffs would not be set at a level to be discriminatory based on nationality alone. They'd just be enough to eliminate any incentive to do the race for the bottom.
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Oh, gotcha. That would obviously work.
Likely the case, but you'd still need to emulate the absorption spectra of oxygenated hemoglobin (to whatever resolution it is actually measured at - which isn't likely to be terribly accurate in a cheap and compact device). Again, probably just a piece of plastic with the right characteristics somewhere in the light path.
Self censorship is a huge problem throughout organisations with people not being sure enough of themselves to say what they mean or think instead they couch replies in vague terms so as not to offend and hope for some sort of consensus.
Agree with this, but having one of the biggest leaders in the FOSS movement bite heads off when they don't like your idea isn't exactly a good way to foster expression.
I like that he says what he thinks. I'm not sure I like how he says it. I agree with his arguments in that thread, but the language could be toned down. That isn't self-censorship - it is just being civil.
Linux isn't an operating system, though Android is an operating system built on Linux.
Asking how to change the network settings on "Linux" is like asking how to change the network settings on Mach. The overloading of the word "Linux" is the real problem here.
The British of 1776 didn't need any of that stuff - they didn't really lose any major battles other than Yorktown, and they only had that because of the intervention of the French navy. If it weren't for the French that battle would not have been decisive, but the overall outcome of the war would probably not have changed much (though it might have been more drawn out, or diplomatic in resolution - which could have made the US look more like one of the Commonwealth nations).
The American Revolution is a classic example of how you can win almost every battle and yet lose a war. 30% of the population being armed means that anything an opposition army does results in LOTS of people dying on all sides. Sure, you can bomb cities into ruins, but you can't just march in and take over with any kind of continuity. Few really want to stomach that kind of mess, so there are limits on what any government can accomplish. The British might have won Lexington/Concord, but 300 casualties in a single day wasn't really anything the citizens back home really wanted to hear about, and it just set the tone for the entire war.
Just look at Iraq. It isn't exactly smooth sailing for the US over there despite a huge advantage in military power.
As long as you don't have a Gummy bear that has the right IR absorbtion profile, yes it will defeat it.
However, I can't imagine that if you're going to the trouble to reproduce fingerprints or activate latent ones that you couldn't do it using a material that has the right IR spectrum. Most likely they're just transmitting light and measuring relative absorbance at a few wavelengths, and it should be easy to make a plastic film that passes for blood in this test.
If you can work from home too much, why not just ship your job off to a contractor? If you're just doing maintenance then you're not VALUABLE.
It depends on whether the contractor can actually do the work for less.
The contractor model works best for larger projects - ones that take several or better still dozens of people many months to deliver (if not years).
For smaller projects or when you want more flexibility the contractor model breaks down. If 90% of the work is figuring out what to build then you can't exactly just write up an RFP and put it out for bid. Employees should be valued for their flexibility and knowledge of the business, not so much for their ability to do transactional work. These things do not necessarily tie them to a physical location though.
the difference between a private sector job and a public sector job is that a public sector job is a net loss for the government and a private sector job is a net gain.
Not sure I entirely agree with this. For starters, the government should be operating zero-sum regardless - if it spends less it taxes less, if it spends more it taxes more (setting aside borrowing, which complicates this but doesn't really change the underlying principles).
Government is really just another form of a market, just one that isn't free - you get less choice over whether you participate, what you pay, and what you get. Taxpayers trade taxes for services.
The real question isn't whether the government spends more money or less, but whether the services received by taxpayers are worth the cost to them.
This of course is further complicated by socialism, which underlies much of modern governments. A trade of taxes for services might make sense when you look at it from a standpoint of average services delivered for average taxes paid, but that doesn't mean that it works out that way for any individual. A person who never gets sick or a person who pays income tax at a 90% marginal rate might have a different view of socialized medicine as somebody who is always sick and pays at a 10% marginal rate.
"Sue can work from home and I have the same job, same responsibilities, and same glowing employee evaluations as her, so why can't I work from home?"
Correct answer: "No problem. We already have an established set of evaluation criteria for your work which is focused on your work output (quality, quantity, etc), and we both frequently review this together. Your performance will continue to be measured by the same standards. Are you're sure you'll be able to manage this working remotely?"
If there is a problem it should be evident within a few weeks and you can have the appropriate conversation about improving performance. "I'm working as hard as I can" shouldn't cut it whether the employee works remotely or not.
If you aren't able to tell that there is a problem within a few weeks, then you're already not properly managing your employees. When evaluating an employee the important considerations are what is the value of the work produced relative to the cost of having the employee and the cost of those services on the open market (whether outsourcing, the job market, etc).
If I hire a plumber and he says he needs to go back to his shop in the middle of the day to pre-fab some pipes, I don't tell him to bring the tools and do the work sitting on the bathroom floor. I look at his estimate compared to the estimates of others who could do the work and the value I place on not having to do it myself and hold him to it. The less I have to look at him while being sure the work is done right the better...
>Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff.
That actually makes more sense as the reason behind the move, although it is a jerk thing to do.
It is also a dumb move. You get rid of people, but instead of selecting for talent you're annoying everybody and selecting for willingness to put up with it. In fact, the most marketable people are often the first to leave when you do something like this. Those who couldn't get a job anywhere else will put up with the commute.
If I were running a business I'd be keen to keep costs down, but just randomly getting rid of people would not be the way I did it. If I didn't think my employees were helping to make money I wouldn't have hired them in the first place. If I were budget-constrained I'd get rid of the least-profitable (considering both the short and long term) employees, not just those who happen to live furthest from the office or who figure they can get a better deal elsewhere.
Stuff like this is rarely about making companies profitable, but rather it is about making managers comfortable under the guise of making the company profitable.
What about those who goof off and play video games during worker hours where you can't hold them accountable.
You're not holding them accountable already if that is your concern. Make them accountable for results, not effort. If they aren't getting anything done do you really care if it is because they're playing video games vs just being incompetent? If you aren't capable of determining how much they should be able to get done then you're out of touch with your team.
Conversely, if if you're paying somebody $50/task to do something, and to get the same work done by anybody else you'd have to spend much more than that, then do you really care if they're playing video games on the side?
I'm not sure it is about remote time or not, but contact with the next level of management.
Where I work if I were in the office I wouldn't see my boss any more often since my current one lives 150 miles away. Ditto for most of the other managers. The last time I had a manager a few doors down from me I saw him about once a week - he was elsewhere in meetings almost all the time.
You just have to find ways to get that contact however you can if you want to get promoted. I don't think working remotely would really be a barrier to promotion for somebody who is likely to be promoted in the first place.
And yes, cultures/practices vary considerably.
You do have to wonder how you could 'loose track' of your employees in this day and age...
I could almost see it happening at work. At various points in time they've tried to flatten org structures to the point where managers had tons of people who technically reported to them but took direction elsewhere.
However, it tends to happen more with contractors, and they're easier to lose since they don't have HR review cycles and all that (but they do have things like time-bound contracts). For actual employees I can't imagine that the fact that nobody bothered to give them an annual review would get missed - it is one of those HR-tracked sorts of things. So, not getting ANYTHING done wouldn't really fly.
Now, wasting time during the day is an entirely different matter. I could just pick a different building at work each day and just hang out there all day goofing off and nobody would even notice a pattern - I'd probably only be in any particular building once a quarter, and yet my badge would read present all day. I see my boss face to face only a few times a year. It was only recently that I really was able to work remotely with any regularity, even though my work was effectively managed that way for years.
Why on earth do I need to make say 100K? or let's say 150K?
That's an oddity of big corporations. They generally operate on a one-size-fits-all system. Sure, each manager gets paid more than the one below them, but they're all in a general bucket of career-minded people making quite a bit of money while working full-time-plus.
At my workplace in one area they had some jobs that really consisted of managing storage of stuff. The work tended to get neglected as you could never be promoted for that kind of work even though it was 90% of the job description. Instead the minimum was done on that stuff and everybody was trying to lead initiatives or whatever to get out of the job. If they had just hired somebody with a high school diploma and paid them $15-20/hr they'd have the best employees they could find as the work would actually be meaningful to them and the pay would be WAY higher than other jobs they could land, and at the same time the company would save a fortune as they would otherwise be paying 2x as much at least.
The cookie cutter mentality is pervasive - when you estimate effort on projects you do not in any way take into account the actual skills of the team. Likewise when deciding what to work on. That is kind of like an NFL team saying "we're professionals - we run the best play by the books and we expect the same out of everybody." Any team that played like that would be at the bottom of the league - if you have the a bunch of high-end wide receivers you don't decide to equally balance your strategy with running plays.
It definitely depends on your job. I know somebody who was working in aerospace on something that required a clearance and most of the team spent all day in a room dedicated to classified work. They couldn't even bring a cell phone into the area - guard posted at the door and all that. He had a regular desk for more corporate-oriented work (HR, accounting, etc), but he spent little time there. That would have been the only aspect of his work that he could have done remotely. The classified stuff even had its own email system from what I gather. To actually take anything of any kind out of there required a bunch of procedures.
I suspect those situations happen more with contractors than government employees. They are likely dedicated to a single project, and it is either classified or it isn't.
Yup. My office is on an industrial complex that it takes a good 20 minutes to walk across. Walking across the building isn't that big a deal, but more often than not you're walking across the site, or driving to the next state over.
In fact, the site I work at is large enough that if traffic is light I could probably get to the other side of the site by driving from home and parking there almost as quickly as I could walk there anyway. And no, driving around the site isn't convenient either as it takes me a good 5-10min to get to my car across the gigantic parking lots.
Yup, I've been working from home and I find myself just not caring about all the office politics as much. Who cares who rates an office vs a cube when you work from home 95% of the time? If I need to go into the office half the time I don't even go to my actual office - I'm spending my time with customers and such. I've learned to ditch all the paper and travel light - that makes me a lot more flexible. I work at a big facility and I used to spend a lot of time just walking around, to say nothing about the commute - I get a lot more done without all that. I don't care that the company cafeteria has lousy food and costs an arm and a leg, etc.
I would agree with you if not for the growing trend of collaborative spaces in the IT industry.
That works as long as everybody is actually at the same location. In my company at least it seems like every project I'm on consists of people scattered across numerous geographical locations. They just all sit in their offices and talk on the phone all day in meetings. When it is suggested that one should pick up the phone instead of calling a meeting the problem is that everybody is busy in meetings and won't pick up. When it is suggested that one should get up and talk to people, the problem is that nobody actually sits near them.
This is often the result of acquisitions, re-orgs, etc. Unless you just want to fire people and hire new ones in a central location (which means giving up a LOT of established talent), working remotely is really the only option.
Most IT companies that have one big central location just started out that way and slowly grew, and often the central location is in a place they can sort-of get away with it like Silicon Valley. Even so, how much talent do companies like Google/Apple end up losing out on because they won't hire anybody who wants to live elsewhere?
Everyone talks about "voiding the warranty."
But has anyone ever actually had a warranty claim denied just because the phone is/was rooted and/or running different software?
Well, a more useful question is whether anybody has had a court of law deny them warranty coverage on the hardware for a phone simply because they had changed the firmware.
Anybody can deny a warranty for any reason. I can sell you a bike and give you a contract signed in blood that says I'll fix it for any reason for a year, and then you could bring it back to me, and I could say no. Now, if you took me to court the court would likely tell me to fix it, because I'm violating the law.
The problem is that getting relief from a court over a phone that has depreciated to $200 and needs a $50 repair is incredibly cost-ineffective. So, carriers/vendors/etc can basically do whatever they want.
However, I do maintain that warranties are not voided by software changes unless the software itself caused the problem. That's basic warranty law - if you change the battery on your car it doesn't void the warranty on the leather seat, but it might void the warranty on the radio if it was damaged by a power surge of some kind and the battery could be shown to have caused it. But, you're really at the mercy of the companies good faith.
CM is certainly the best option there is for HTC products, but few devices get CM releases after a year. Of course the vendors should be supporting the devices in the first place, but even the CM community doesn't really keep things going for that long. Nobody is paying them, and there are a LOT of phones out there, and most of the better developers seem to buy new phones frequently and move on.
I think the Dream was the only HTC device that was long-supported on Cyanogenmod. I had a G2 and they stopped porting new OSes to it after Gingerbread - that was only a year newer than the device.
Sure, CM supports the devices longer than the vendors do (with the exception of Nexus phones), but their efforts have been diluted considerably and you don't see stable CM releases for most phones after a year. A year really isn't long enough to stop security updates for a computing device that is used heavily for web browsing.
You're certainly welcome to your opinion. ;-) But I imagine you don't work in professional services - a 9 hour day is quite short for us. And a 40-45 hour week is actually standard in Switzerland.
And you wonder why we don't have enough doctors... There are a lot of people who probably wouldn't mind being doctors if it weren't for the traditional lifestyle you just brought up. There is no reason you can't treat people while only working 40 hours a week - you just treat fewer people and have more people doing the work. I'm perfectly willing to accept that you might not be able to get that down to an 8x5 schedule, but just because a surgery takes 14 hours to perform doesn't mean that you have to do 5 of them a week.
The irony is that we have laws limiting how many hours pilots can work in a week, but not how many hours surgeons can work. They're fairly analogous jobs - both require careful attention to detail and procedures or people can die, and they often require long shifts due to the nature of the job itself.
Do you think that schoolteachers, fire fighters, and police officers are moochers?
they are economic overheads in that their jobs don't contribute much to the productive economy, so yes they are moochers.
How do you define "productive economy?" A plumber fixes pipes that have gunk in them, a firefighter fixes rooms that have flames in them. Unless you limit the productive economy to manufacture of physical goods and not services of any kind you can't really call the jobs you cited unproductive.
Police officers are a little less analogous to a private enterprise job, but they clearly perform a vital service which even the staunchest of libertarians would probably fund, or they'd just end up privately contracting with security guards to do the exact same thing.
Now, the 47 layers of bureaucracy it takes to process all the paperwork is a different matter, but every company is full of that stuff. The solution there is legal streamlining. There is lots of waste to pick on in government but police and firefighters really aren't what you should be citing as examples. Teachers fulfill an important role as well, though that is one that is a little more readily privatized and I'd be the first to agree that after the first 5-10 years they generally tend to be not incentivized to work much. The solution to that is reform - not eliminating education.
The problem is that the very people who keep touting the power of the market have created a market where most work will never be done. It is their job to find ways to create a profit from work, and they're not doing it.
The problem is opportunity cost. The profit in fixing a bridge or whatever is pretty low, and there isn't much political advantage to spending the government funds to do it. The profit in selling Ponzi schemes to retirement funds is much higher, and there is plenty of campaign donations to go around to fund votes to support all the subsequent bailouts.
The US has become a country where doing tangible work has become unappealing to investors, to the point where a third of our economy consists of nothing more than shuffling money around while somehow tacking a few percent onto each transaction. Building things takes time measured in months, requires effort to manage, and has modest rewards. Financial schemes can be executed in microseconds for much higher returns.
only that those downsides are better than the status quo.
No, it could be really bad, and most likely would plunge us into a recession immediately after going into effect.
I could see huge disruption if you went from zero tariffs to 10000% overnight. However, all you need to do is pass the law, have it go into effect in a year, and slowly ramp up over 5-10 years. That is slow enough to allow supply chains to adapt.
The tariff could be tied to environmental protections, worker safety, social safety net, and minimum wage. So, it might remain near-free trade between the US/EU/Jap/Aus/etc, and as you get into the third world tariffs would become considerable. However, any country could implement first world standards and benefit from free trade. The tariffs would not be set at a level to be discriminatory based on nationality alone. They'd just be enough to eliminate any incentive to do the race for the bottom.