What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
My definition would focus not on a specific number: I'd consider somebody rich if: (1) They pay for a full-time household staff-person, such as a housekeeper or nanny, (2) They can buy everything they want to comfortably stock at least 2 homes without the slightest bit of difficulty, or (3) They could choose to not work at all and have enough from their investments to live comfortably and end up with more than they started with.
Give me one bad thing about capitalism without going into some political rant. Pick a point, lets discuss.
Consider a really smart kid who was born into a dirt poor family, call her Jane. Under pure capitalism as witnessed in US cities around the year 1900, and many poor countries today: * Jane would have received no pre-natal care whatsoever and probably doesn't get all that much health care after she's born, so there's a significant chance she dies before she reaches age 5. * She might be taught to read at some point in her early childhood, but mostly would be taught whatever her mother knew about home skills like laundry. * When she turned about 13, she would likely be sent to work in a factory of some kind, where her bright mind hurts her because she's perceived as a potential threat by management. * By the time she's 18, if she's lucky she might have the chance to marry some guy who's not going to abuse her, where she then proceeds to have kids of her own and lives an adult life that's not significantly different from her mothers'.
That situation is not only bad for Jane, it is bad for the world as a whole, because we've just wasted a bright mind that might have been able to, say, cure a disease, and instead used her to make coats for J.C. Penny.
Romney described his energy policy as a "No Regrets" policy. I'm sorry, that's a policy of how you're going to deal with waking up next to somebody you don't remember meeting, not a policy for deciding what to do about the biggest technological challenge of the 21st century (and what has been a losing battle for quite some time now).
Also, that last sentence is a lie. Obama has been quite clear about the goals of his energy policy, namely slowly reducing the use of oil in favor of alternatives as they become economically viable. He wants the new energy sources to be manufactured in the United States if at all possible. He's picked an Energy Secretary who's a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and basically given him the assignment of directing research and subsidies and the like towards those goals, which so far has yielded:
- Simple advice like painting roofs white (yes, this actually helps, a lot, even though most media who covered it laughed at the idea)
- new fuel-efficiency standards with the goal of dropping carbon emissions once the new cars are dominating the roads.
- Some increased development of solar cells.
- Some complete duds like Solyndra. What the Romney campaign is actually trying to do is convince people that $4/gallon gasoline has anything to do with Obama's energy policies, when there's absolutely no evidence to back up that claim.
What do educators want? A paycheck and a submissive student body.
My dad is a teacher, his mother was a teacher, and my other grandmother is a well-regarded academic in the field of education (she's currently advising the Australian government on how to educate aborigines so they can both succeed in the modern world and maintain their own cultural identity). And a good friend of mine also teaches in one of the most challenging schools in the country, where they've put all the kids that were kicked out of the other schools in the city. And of course I have my own experience to draw on from a public school system that was decent but not great.
You're vastly misrepresenting why teachers go into teaching. If they were in it for the money, they wouldn't be in teaching, they'd be in finance or business management or engineering, all fields which pay much better than teaching and require the same level of education. There's nothing that delights them more than students who really care about and learn the material they're teaching. There's nothing that makes them happier than to hear from a former student that they've succeeded in life because of what they learned from their work. Just like software developers take pride in their successful work, teachers take pride in their successful students.
You're not entirely wrong though: They do like getting paid something close to what they're education says they're worth, and also dislike having to defend themselves against violent students.
The NBA does take players who didn't play in college, the best-known being LeBron James. Both the NBA and MLB also take players from foreign countries that may or may not have been through that country's educational system.
Specifically, less than half of American children went to school at all in the 19th century, and most of those that did dropped out at age 12. Poor children, girls, and of course slaves regularly grew up without the benefits of education. So they might have been able to read, but they wouldn't have been able to do complex financial math or discuss great works of literature.
Americans are, on average, better educated today than they ever have been before.
I disagree: I think that's doing a great job of preparing you for the real world. Not the real world you'd like, but the real world that major corporations would like.
No time off from mindless busywork
... preparing you to blithely accept your boss demanding that you use the new cover sheets for your TPS reports.
No time off from senselessly time-consuming homework
... preparing you nicely to do senselessly time-consuming overtime.
No time off from cruel and sadistic bullies
... preparing you for dealing with your bosses and colleagues, some of whom will be cruel, sadistic, and redundant.
No time off from incompetent and disinterested teachers
... preparing you for incompetent and disinterested management.
No time off from the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of the school administration
... preparing you for the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of a major corporation, particularly "Human Resources" departments.
No time off from waking up before dawn to trundle out to the school bus, alone and half-awake.
... preparing you for the ritual of the morning commute: white-collar version - people dressed in their work uniform (suit, shirt and slacks, etc) bumbling around in cars, buying coffee, and blearily getting into work. Blue-collar version - sit and wait for a city bus and ride to work, just like you rode to school.
Part of the story you're alluding to but didn't actually say: A few decades ago, lots of high schools had significant vocational training programs. For instance, my hometown had a separate facility where students could elect to study cooking, auto repair, welding, electrical work, child care, and several other trade skills. Since roughly 70% of students do not go to college, and most of them know they aren't going to college, this kind of program is in fact vital to training them for the working world.
Public policy is, unfortunately, the fallacy of composition writ large: College graduates make more on average than high school graduates. Ergo, (goes the flawed logic) if all high school graduates got college degrees, everyone in America would make more money. Of course, what actually happened is that we now have approximately 50% of college graduates under age 35 have either no job at all or a job that they could have gotten without that degree. As any economist should have told them, the effect of everybody getting PhDs is that you'd end up with PhDs mopping floors because not everybody can work in the lab. Instead, they talked to Larry Summers, who was convinced for no obvious reason that the US had an educational advantage over the rest of the world, so they could take all the good jobs and make foreigners do all the dirty work - the US done that up to a point with the really nasty stuff going on in China, but it turns out there aren't enough good jobs to go around.
That's a problem of the California voters' own making: They don't allow the state government to raise taxes without approval via referendum. There are enough people that oppose all tax increases for any reason that Prop 30 and all those like it probably will not pass. However, they also like to vote for referendums creating new projects and programs to solve problems they're having (or think they're having), without specifying how to pay for them. End result: The California government has to do more stuff with less money, and it's hardly surprising that it has to either run a deficit or cut services back.
Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed." Of course, the best counter to this is Rene Descartes' argument: Something exists that could reasonably be called "Rene Descartes", because otherwise there would be nothing thinking that they were writing a book.
Thanks for the correction - I've just read a bit about this stuff (mostly J.P. Mallory, which is really hard slog), not actually studied it for decades like an actual scholar.
It doesn't take much assumption to relate the facts I just laid out to the myth of Noah: 1. There's archaeological evidence of a real flood at about that time. 2. There's clay tablets in Ur and other Sumerian sites with the same basic story that seems more closely matching plausible fact. 3. There's loads of evidence that Genesis was written during the Babylonian captivity, which means the Hebrew writers were around people who were thoroughly familiar with the story. Combine that with the common human traits of making up supernatural explanations, and just plain telling fish stories (the flood probably lasted 1-2 days, was written down by Sumerians as lasting 7 days, and only became 40 days a couple millenia later), and you end up with the Noah flood.
A similar pattern happened to the Trojan War: There really was a war that happened about 1250 BCE, where the Myceneans attacked Troy and burned it to the ground (according to evidence from both Troy and written down back in Mycenae). The most likely reason for this was that Mycenae had some trade going on in the Black Sea and were upset about the Trojans extracting a fee when the goods went by their city. There might have even been people named Agamemnon and Priam, but in any event by the time the oral tradition got to Homer centuries later there were several divine interventions and guys fighting over beautiful women rather than fighting over cash.
It's really not that complicated, and doesn't require space aliens: There was a culture speaking Finno-Ugric languages that started in the Volga River valley and got as far as Finland to the north, Turkey to the south, and much of Russia in between. However, they were dominated in many places by Indo-European speakers, which is why the Indo-European Slavic and Baltic languages split the Finno-Ugric speaking area into smaller pieces. However, one of the reasons Russian and Ukrainian sound different from, say, German, is that they would have picked up some words and concepts from the Finno-Ugric speakers who were in the area (official term for this is "language substrate").
And yes, they're structured completely differently from Indo-European languages, which is why they're part of a different language family. Expecting any similarity at all makes about as much sense as expecting similarities between English and Chinese (other than words specifically borrowed from the other language).
The Noah flood story probably has basis in a real event, but was first written down not in a Semitic language at all, but Sumerian:
There was a flash flood on the Euphrates in about 3000 BCE that overflowed the levees the residents of Shuruppak had built to deal with that problem, and it completely wrecked much of the city (which was a fairly major trading hub). The local leader had the quick wits to put his family and anything else useful he could find onto some trading barges that happened to be there that day, and managed to ride out the storm, but in the process got swept clear down the river through the Persian Gulf to land somewhere near present-day Dubai.
Now, add the usual human tendency for exaggeration, and it's not surprising that this story could easily turn into "The whole world was drowned!". Among other things, for this guy, his whole world had in fact drowned, and everything he really knew was lost. But the version written in Hebrew came quite a bit after the original happenings.
And you have the rights to the limited fruits of your limited labour. IOW, no-one should be able to tell you that they own what you make.
Up to a point. You need to put a certain portion of those fruits into a common kitty that pays for stuff that benefits everybody, like having a road to drive on or an army to protect you from other countries. And yes, pays for protection and allocation of natural resources so that nobody takes too much.
Well, here's what I think they're after: City centers (assuming there is a city center, not all cities have them), tend to be areas filled with the things that make the city unique: tourist attractions, public artwork, nifty historical architecture, headquarters skyscrapers of well-known businesses, etc. Suburban office parks tend to be identical no matter where you go: big glass boxes, concrete and glass boxes, brick and glass boxes, sometimes some marble veneers on the glass boxes, mixed with a variety of chain restaurants to feed the lunch crowd.
Another way of looking at it: If you work in a suburban office park, describe how it's different in any significant way from the one portrayed in Office Space.
Compare and contrast a ridiculously successful project and a ridiculously unsuccessful project, with many of the same developers on both projects.
The successful project started with a good idea for a product, and moved fairly quickly to the project manager talking to developers and getting the best estimates they could and basing their timelines on that plus some slack time. The marketing team had clear requirements and vision, and were happy to manage change requests to prevent scope creep. 2 weeks before the launch date, we had something we could have launched with, decided to spend 2 days adding a couple of extra "nice-to-have" features, spent remainder of that week testing it thoroughly internally, and then launched it a week early. End result: something like a $1 million profit off of a 4 month project.
The unsuccessful project started with a mediocre idea, and moved fairly quickly to different managers engaging in an auction to determine who claimed to get it done the fastest. No estimates were made, no requirements really gathered, the devs were told to just start. The marketing team changed its mind constantly with no pushback from project management (e.g. they made a drawing of the home page, the devs produced exactly that home page, the marketing team rejected it and successfully blamed the devs for the delay). 9 weeks after the supposed launch date, after constant overtime among the developers, a half-assed version was launched. End result: an entire brand ruined and sold off for parts at an 8-figure loss.
Not a new development: Socrates was always quite clear that his real wisdom was knowing that he didn't know very much. He actually describes, in the Apology, going around to different people who were supposed to be knowledgeable, and he found an inverse relationship between how much they thought they knew and how much they actually knew (for instance, learned teachers knew basically nothing, while craftsmen at least understood their craft).
Another key piece of why programming tests are useful: If you give out some relatively easy problems, you learn a lot by finding out not just whether the candidate can solve them, but what it took for them to solve it.
For instance, I recently gave a relatively simple problem to 1 developer who seemed competent from the resume and our phone conversation: She took a quick look over the problem, typed for about 3 minutes and showed me her completely correct solution. I gave the same problem to another developer who seemed competent: He hunted and pecked for 15 minutes, poked through some documentation, and wasn't completely on the wrong track when I cut him off.
When you get clear results like that, the decision of which candidate to hire becomes really really easy.
Oh, and never ask stock interview questions, that's just a waste of time. Much better to ask them to apply their purported knowledge and experience to situations that might arise in the job, and use their answers to extract out thought patterns and problem-solving approaches. The fakers get really obvious in these kinds of interviews, and also really clear is whether they take any pride in their work or have a personality problem which would make them an ineffective employee.
Lay Off 50% of the IT Staff (say 10 People at an average of $70k a year), and Expand Factory workers by 20 average $30k a year. To save $100k, for the company. But the Union ends up getting more money out of dues.
The company also couldn't get away with that if the IT staff were unionized, because to do that would probably cause the remaining 50% to walk off the job too.
Also because the Unions are structured there is a deep dislike towards Outside Consultants and Contractors for temporary work.
Of course there is: Temporary workers are competitors to unionized workers. Using your example of a unionized factory workforce of people getting ~$30k / year, which is a decent living but certainly not an extravagant one: it's about half of the median US household income, about 50% above the poverty line, probably no more than 40% of what you make as an IT consultant, and about the going rate for, say, welders and machinists. Now, if management brings in temps at $7.50 an hour, that's half the cost of your union wage, which means that if management can do so it will fire its entire unionized workforce and replace them with the temps. Sure, the formerly unionized workers could possibly go to the temp agency and get their old jobs back with a 50% pay cut, but could you understand why they might see temps as a fairly direct threat to their own livelihoods? A strong parallel here would be the hostility most US-based IT folks have to H1B holders from India and China.
Union shops tend tries to make sure no one does anyone elses job.
Again, this is a case of union members protecting their own jobs, trying to ensure that management doesn't fire the unionized workforce and just do without. You'd do the same if you were in their shoes.
I once got in trouble from the union because I was consultant commissioned to create a Web Application for them. The commission came from the Application Development group, I did the work to the best of my abilities... Apparently it pissed off the Web Group because my application looked better then what they could do, and they demanded more tools so they can make their apps look better then mine...
And how did that hurt you, exactly? I mean, some folks in a company you didn't work for were pissed off at you - big deal.
When I use to work as a consultant, I was told to avoid these people because they are big in the union, and if I did anything to make them look bad there will be a lot of trouble.
How different is that from the basic rule that embarassing the wrong executive is at best a career-limiting move?
Surely the recent past has shown you what 'ratings' are worth.
The markets continue to place trust in ratings agencies. Ergo, they're worth something (although unclear exactly what, since Moody's and S&P and the like don't provide any kind of public price listing). I agree that they may be nonsense, but they apparantly have value to somebody.
In the USA today, pointing to a black man... and saying "he did bad things" will invariably produce an outcry of "RACIST!!!".
[citation needed]
Specifically, I'm going to need a statistically significant number of incorrect accusations of racism for truthful accusations against black men. A couple of high-profile examples won't do the job, because there's numerous high-profile examples of black men completely falsely accused of heinous acts primarily because they were black.
To demonstrate that your "invariably" is an exaggeration is easy: Nobody has accused the ACLU of being racists when they condemned Barack Obama for ordering a drone strike against an American citizen without bothering to indict him for a crime first.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
My definition would focus not on a specific number: I'd consider somebody rich if: (1) They pay for a full-time household staff-person, such as a housekeeper or nanny, (2) They can buy everything they want to comfortably stock at least 2 homes without the slightest bit of difficulty, or (3) They could choose to not work at all and have enough from their investments to live comfortably and end up with more than they started with.
Give me one bad thing about capitalism without going into some political rant. Pick a point, lets discuss.
Consider a really smart kid who was born into a dirt poor family, call her Jane. Under pure capitalism as witnessed in US cities around the year 1900, and many poor countries today:
* Jane would have received no pre-natal care whatsoever and probably doesn't get all that much health care after she's born, so there's a significant chance she dies before she reaches age 5.
* She might be taught to read at some point in her early childhood, but mostly would be taught whatever her mother knew about home skills like laundry.
* When she turned about 13, she would likely be sent to work in a factory of some kind, where her bright mind hurts her because she's perceived as a potential threat by management.
* By the time she's 18, if she's lucky she might have the chance to marry some guy who's not going to abuse her, where she then proceeds to have kids of her own and lives an adult life that's not significantly different from her mothers'.
That situation is not only bad for Jane, it is bad for the world as a whole, because we've just wasted a bright mind that might have been able to, say, cure a disease, and instead used her to make coats for J.C. Penny.
Romney described his energy policy as a "No Regrets" policy. I'm sorry, that's a policy of how you're going to deal with waking up next to somebody you don't remember meeting, not a policy for deciding what to do about the biggest technological challenge of the 21st century (and what has been a losing battle for quite some time now).
Also, that last sentence is a lie. Obama has been quite clear about the goals of his energy policy, namely slowly reducing the use of oil in favor of alternatives as they become economically viable. He wants the new energy sources to be manufactured in the United States if at all possible. He's picked an Energy Secretary who's a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and basically given him the assignment of directing research and subsidies and the like towards those goals, which so far has yielded:
- Simple advice like painting roofs white (yes, this actually helps, a lot, even though most media who covered it laughed at the idea)
- new fuel-efficiency standards with the goal of dropping carbon emissions once the new cars are dominating the roads.
- Some increased development of solar cells.
- Some complete duds like Solyndra.
What the Romney campaign is actually trying to do is convince people that $4/gallon gasoline has anything to do with Obama's energy policies, when there's absolutely no evidence to back up that claim.
What do educators want? A paycheck and a submissive student body.
My dad is a teacher, his mother was a teacher, and my other grandmother is a well-regarded academic in the field of education (she's currently advising the Australian government on how to educate aborigines so they can both succeed in the modern world and maintain their own cultural identity). And a good friend of mine also teaches in one of the most challenging schools in the country, where they've put all the kids that were kicked out of the other schools in the city. And of course I have my own experience to draw on from a public school system that was decent but not great.
You're vastly misrepresenting why teachers go into teaching. If they were in it for the money, they wouldn't be in teaching, they'd be in finance or business management or engineering, all fields which pay much better than teaching and require the same level of education. There's nothing that delights them more than students who really care about and learn the material they're teaching. There's nothing that makes them happier than to hear from a former student that they've succeeded in life because of what they learned from their work. Just like software developers take pride in their successful work, teachers take pride in their successful students.
You're not entirely wrong though: They do like getting paid something close to what they're education says they're worth, and also dislike having to defend themselves against violent students.
The NBA does take players who didn't play in college, the best-known being LeBron James. Both the NBA and MLB also take players from foreign countries that may or may not have been through that country's educational system.
Specifically, less than half of American children went to school at all in the 19th century, and most of those that did dropped out at age 12. Poor children, girls, and of course slaves regularly grew up without the benefits of education. So they might have been able to read, but they wouldn't have been able to do complex financial math or discuss great works of literature.
Americans are, on average, better educated today than they ever have been before.
I disagree: I think that's doing a great job of preparing you for the real world. Not the real world you'd like, but the real world that major corporations would like.
No time off from mindless busywork
... preparing you to blithely accept your boss demanding that you use the new cover sheets for your TPS reports.
No time off from senselessly time-consuming homework
... preparing you nicely to do senselessly time-consuming overtime.
No time off from cruel and sadistic bullies
... preparing you for dealing with your bosses and colleagues, some of whom will be cruel, sadistic, and redundant.
No time off from incompetent and disinterested teachers
... preparing you for incompetent and disinterested management.
No time off from the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of the school administration
... preparing you for the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of a major corporation, particularly "Human Resources" departments.
No time off from waking up before dawn to trundle out to the school bus, alone and half-awake.
... preparing you for the ritual of the morning commute: white-collar version - people dressed in their work uniform (suit, shirt and slacks, etc) bumbling around in cars, buying coffee, and blearily getting into work. Blue-collar version - sit and wait for a city bus and ride to work, just like you rode to school.
Part of the story you're alluding to but didn't actually say: A few decades ago, lots of high schools had significant vocational training programs. For instance, my hometown had a separate facility where students could elect to study cooking, auto repair, welding, electrical work, child care, and several other trade skills. Since roughly 70% of students do not go to college, and most of them know they aren't going to college, this kind of program is in fact vital to training them for the working world.
Public policy is, unfortunately, the fallacy of composition writ large: College graduates make more on average than high school graduates. Ergo, (goes the flawed logic) if all high school graduates got college degrees, everyone in America would make more money. Of course, what actually happened is that we now have approximately 50% of college graduates under age 35 have either no job at all or a job that they could have gotten without that degree. As any economist should have told them, the effect of everybody getting PhDs is that you'd end up with PhDs mopping floors because not everybody can work in the lab. Instead, they talked to Larry Summers, who was convinced for no obvious reason that the US had an educational advantage over the rest of the world, so they could take all the good jobs and make foreigners do all the dirty work - the US done that up to a point with the really nasty stuff going on in China, but it turns out there aren't enough good jobs to go around.
That's a problem of the California voters' own making: They don't allow the state government to raise taxes without approval via referendum. There are enough people that oppose all tax increases for any reason that Prop 30 and all those like it probably will not pass. However, they also like to vote for referendums creating new projects and programs to solve problems they're having (or think they're having), without specifying how to pay for them. End result: The California government has to do more stuff with less money, and it's hardly surprising that it has to either run a deficit or cut services back.
Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed." Of course, the best counter to this is Rene Descartes' argument: Something exists that could reasonably be called "Rene Descartes", because otherwise there would be nothing thinking that they were writing a book.
Thanks for the correction - I've just read a bit about this stuff (mostly J.P. Mallory, which is really hard slog), not actually studied it for decades like an actual scholar.
Why assume that a myth has a basis in fact?
It doesn't take much assumption to relate the facts I just laid out to the myth of Noah:
1. There's archaeological evidence of a real flood at about that time.
2. There's clay tablets in Ur and other Sumerian sites with the same basic story that seems more closely matching plausible fact.
3. There's loads of evidence that Genesis was written during the Babylonian captivity, which means the Hebrew writers were around people who were thoroughly familiar with the story.
Combine that with the common human traits of making up supernatural explanations, and just plain telling fish stories (the flood probably lasted 1-2 days, was written down by Sumerians as lasting 7 days, and only became 40 days a couple millenia later), and you end up with the Noah flood.
A similar pattern happened to the Trojan War: There really was a war that happened about 1250 BCE, where the Myceneans attacked Troy and burned it to the ground (according to evidence from both Troy and written down back in Mycenae). The most likely reason for this was that Mycenae had some trade going on in the Black Sea and were upset about the Trojans extracting a fee when the goods went by their city. There might have even been people named Agamemnon and Priam, but in any event by the time the oral tradition got to Homer centuries later there were several divine interventions and guys fighting over beautiful women rather than fighting over cash.
It's really not that complicated, and doesn't require space aliens: There was a culture speaking Finno-Ugric languages that started in the Volga River valley and got as far as Finland to the north, Turkey to the south, and much of Russia in between. However, they were dominated in many places by Indo-European speakers, which is why the Indo-European Slavic and Baltic languages split the Finno-Ugric speaking area into smaller pieces. However, one of the reasons Russian and Ukrainian sound different from, say, German, is that they would have picked up some words and concepts from the Finno-Ugric speakers who were in the area (official term for this is "language substrate").
And yes, they're structured completely differently from Indo-European languages, which is why they're part of a different language family. Expecting any similarity at all makes about as much sense as expecting similarities between English and Chinese (other than words specifically borrowed from the other language).
The Noah flood story probably has basis in a real event, but was first written down not in a Semitic language at all, but Sumerian:
There was a flash flood on the Euphrates in about 3000 BCE that overflowed the levees the residents of Shuruppak had built to deal with that problem, and it completely wrecked much of the city (which was a fairly major trading hub). The local leader had the quick wits to put his family and anything else useful he could find onto some trading barges that happened to be there that day, and managed to ride out the storm, but in the process got swept clear down the river through the Persian Gulf to land somewhere near present-day Dubai.
Now, add the usual human tendency for exaggeration, and it's not surprising that this story could easily turn into "The whole world was drowned!". Among other things, for this guy, his whole world had in fact drowned, and everything he really knew was lost. But the version written in Hebrew came quite a bit after the original happenings.
And you have the rights to the limited fruits of your limited labour. IOW, no-one should be able to tell you that they own what you make.
Up to a point. You need to put a certain portion of those fruits into a common kitty that pays for stuff that benefits everybody, like having a road to drive on or an army to protect you from other countries. And yes, pays for protection and allocation of natural resources so that nobody takes too much.
Well, here's what I think they're after: City centers (assuming there is a city center, not all cities have them), tend to be areas filled with the things that make the city unique: tourist attractions, public artwork, nifty historical architecture, headquarters skyscrapers of well-known businesses, etc. Suburban office parks tend to be identical no matter where you go: big glass boxes, concrete and glass boxes, brick and glass boxes, sometimes some marble veneers on the glass boxes, mixed with a variety of chain restaurants to feed the lunch crowd.
Another way of looking at it: If you work in a suburban office park, describe how it's different in any significant way from the one portrayed in Office Space.
Wait, I'm confused: I already thought the US military had trained rats. They called them all "general" for some reason.
Nailed it.
Compare and contrast a ridiculously successful project and a ridiculously unsuccessful project, with many of the same developers on both projects.
The successful project started with a good idea for a product, and moved fairly quickly to the project manager talking to developers and getting the best estimates they could and basing their timelines on that plus some slack time. The marketing team had clear requirements and vision, and were happy to manage change requests to prevent scope creep. 2 weeks before the launch date, we had something we could have launched with, decided to spend 2 days adding a couple of extra "nice-to-have" features, spent remainder of that week testing it thoroughly internally, and then launched it a week early. End result: something like a $1 million profit off of a 4 month project.
The unsuccessful project started with a mediocre idea, and moved fairly quickly to different managers engaging in an auction to determine who claimed to get it done the fastest. No estimates were made, no requirements really gathered, the devs were told to just start. The marketing team changed its mind constantly with no pushback from project management (e.g. they made a drawing of the home page, the devs produced exactly that home page, the marketing team rejected it and successfully blamed the devs for the delay). 9 weeks after the supposed launch date, after constant overtime among the developers, a half-assed version was launched. End result: an entire brand ruined and sold off for parts at an 8-figure loss.
Not a new development: Socrates was always quite clear that his real wisdom was knowing that he didn't know very much. He actually describes, in the Apology, going around to different people who were supposed to be knowledgeable, and he found an inverse relationship between how much they thought they knew and how much they actually knew (for instance, learned teachers knew basically nothing, while craftsmen at least understood their craft).
Another key piece of why programming tests are useful: If you give out some relatively easy problems, you learn a lot by finding out not just whether the candidate can solve them, but what it took for them to solve it.
For instance, I recently gave a relatively simple problem to 1 developer who seemed competent from the resume and our phone conversation: She took a quick look over the problem, typed for about 3 minutes and showed me her completely correct solution. I gave the same problem to another developer who seemed competent: He hunted and pecked for 15 minutes, poked through some documentation, and wasn't completely on the wrong track when I cut him off.
When you get clear results like that, the decision of which candidate to hire becomes really really easy.
Oh, and never ask stock interview questions, that's just a waste of time. Much better to ask them to apply their purported knowledge and experience to situations that might arise in the job, and use their answers to extract out thought patterns and problem-solving approaches. The fakers get really obvious in these kinds of interviews, and also really clear is whether they take any pride in their work or have a personality problem which would make them an ineffective employee.
Lay Off 50% of the IT Staff (say 10 People at an average of $70k a year), and Expand Factory workers by 20 average $30k a year. To save $100k, for the company. But the Union ends up getting more money out of dues.
The company also couldn't get away with that if the IT staff were unionized, because to do that would probably cause the remaining 50% to walk off the job too.
Also because the Unions are structured there is a deep dislike towards Outside Consultants and Contractors for temporary work.
Of course there is: Temporary workers are competitors to unionized workers. Using your example of a unionized factory workforce of people getting ~$30k / year, which is a decent living but certainly not an extravagant one: it's about half of the median US household income, about 50% above the poverty line, probably no more than 40% of what you make as an IT consultant, and about the going rate for, say, welders and machinists. Now, if management brings in temps at $7.50 an hour, that's half the cost of your union wage, which means that if management can do so it will fire its entire unionized workforce and replace them with the temps. Sure, the formerly unionized workers could possibly go to the temp agency and get their old jobs back with a 50% pay cut, but could you understand why they might see temps as a fairly direct threat to their own livelihoods? A strong parallel here would be the hostility most US-based IT folks have to H1B holders from India and China.
Union shops tend tries to make sure no one does anyone elses job.
Again, this is a case of union members protecting their own jobs, trying to ensure that management doesn't fire the unionized workforce and just do without. You'd do the same if you were in their shoes.
I once got in trouble from the union because I was consultant commissioned to create a Web Application for them. The commission came from the Application Development group, I did the work to the best of my abilities... Apparently it pissed off the Web Group because my application looked better then what they could do, and they demanded more tools so they can make their apps look better then mine...
And how did that hurt you, exactly? I mean, some folks in a company you didn't work for were pissed off at you - big deal.
When I use to work as a consultant, I was told to avoid these people because they are big in the union, and if I did anything to make them look bad there will be a lot of trouble.
How different is that from the basic rule that embarassing the wrong executive is at best a career-limiting move?
Surely the recent past has shown you what 'ratings' are worth.
The markets continue to place trust in ratings agencies. Ergo, they're worth something (although unclear exactly what, since Moody's and S&P and the like don't provide any kind of public price listing). I agree that they may be nonsense, but they apparantly have value to somebody.
And don't call me Shirley.
Unfortunately, The Police could not be reached for comment.
But something tells me getting from 4.20 to 4.21 will take a really long time, man.
You're also about 40 times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver. Terrorism is basically a non-existent threat.
In the USA today, pointing to a black man ... and saying "he did bad things" will invariably produce an outcry of "RACIST!!!".
[citation needed]
Specifically, I'm going to need a statistically significant number of incorrect accusations of racism for truthful accusations against black men. A couple of high-profile examples won't do the job, because there's numerous high-profile examples of black men completely falsely accused of heinous acts primarily because they were black.
To demonstrate that your "invariably" is an exaggeration is easy: Nobody has accused the ACLU of being racists when they condemned Barack Obama for ordering a drone strike against an American citizen without bothering to indict him for a crime first.