The local college here (Alaska) pays almost $1000 per credit hour, so teaching a 4 credit hour math class would pay about $3800 for four hours of class time per week, plus a couple of hours of ``office hours'', plus prep time, plus grading three or four tests.
If you're teaching the same old class from the same old book, prep time should be less than class time, but if you're teaching from a new book, with a new syllabus, it can be more than the class time. Since you're adjunct faculty, you typically don't get to choose your syllabus or book, so the prep time will generally be 1 hour plus per class. Therefore, you get $3800 for about 15 hours per week times 16 weeks, or about $16 per hour.
I guess that's a little more cash than the janitors get, but you're not getting health benefits, and the janitors are.
Learning to hear, and worst of all remember, the four+ tones is not fun. If you can get past that, you'll do fine. I have a bad accent, because I can't keep the right tone associated with the right word.
Neat. If you can get any brownie points for referring new proofreaders, pass my name along to them (name, email, et cetera on my web site). Or, please let us know how we can get in on it?
... going to be a Chinese Linguist/Interrogator. Training is two years long...
So, do you already know Chinese, or are you starting from scratch? I'd think that two years is awfully fast for ``from scratch''. What's your rank and pay going to be? Strictly academic interest on my part; I'm interested in learning Chinese, but far too old for the military to consider me.
Also, what happens if you somehow don't make the grade in your language school? If the alternative is Middle East shrapnel catcher, I guess you're really motivated.
... you are forced to look for jobs which are both off-hours and feature very flexible schedules.
Many universities cater to people who work a 9-5...
I hope that you see the obvious side job for the white collar worker: teach an evening course at the local community college. Of course, you'll be making less per hour than the janitor, but it is white collar.
Our quality standard certification is an ideal route for Open Source Consultancies who wish to be recognised for taking the first steps to implementing a formal quality management system. The OSC Business Standard makes an ideal first step on the road to ISO 9001 or the Excellence Model.
So, this is for consultancies, not software.
More to the point, isn't ISO 9001 one of those standards where you prove your ``quality'' by committing to following a process, and documenting that you do indeed follow that process? The inevitable result is that you can commit to shooting your customer in the foot, and document that you have done so, and earn the highest ``quality'' rating for it. That sort of ``quality'' isn't very reassuring.
In my case, it means I get paid X dollars per week, whether I work 20 hours or 80.
That's the definition of ``salaried'' to me. When a prospective employer starts talking about salary, I ask: ``What happens if I decide to go home at noon, or come in at noon?'' If the answer is: ``As long as the work gets done, we don't care.'' it's a salaried job. Otherwise, I tell them they'll have to pay me by the hour, with overtime, or pay someone else. You can pay me a salary, or you can keep track of my time, but no both. So far, that policy has worked well, and it's kept me out of what would have been some nasty jobs.
You don't stay for overtime... you'll simply be replaced by someone who will.
You're better off out of there, though it may not seem that way at the time. The company gets a young fool who'll cost them a bundle to bring up to speed, and then be too burned out to be productive. The young fool at least learns a lesson, sooner or later. You get to find a job where you're treated like a human being. There are plenty like that, and not all with small companies, either.
You might not be able to find another job which pays so much, but you can probably find another one which pays about as much per hour worked, and that's really more important than the total amount you get.
Let them fire you; it's good all around. Get out of debt and you can do it safely. Get a life, and put it ahead of your job. You'll be happier, and you'll be a better employee, too.
... many team members were working around 70-80 hours a week.
Walmart pays $7 per hour and up plus overtime, as does McDonalds and Taco Bell. You could quit, get two McJobs, and work the same hours with less stress and nearly the same hourly wage.
If you're happy where you are, don't complain. If not, try a government job. I'm getting $54,000 per year. That may not sound like much, but I'm in a spot which is a lot cheaper than California, especially for housing. I work a 7.5 hour day, fewer than 200 days a year, and I always go home on time, and I never take work home.
It sounds to me as if you could quit, get two Walmart/McDonalds jobs, and have better working conditions and about the same hours and pay per hour. Plus, you'd have the option to quit one and cut your hours in half after you learn to live well on half the money.
In MozMail, when I middle-click a link in an email, it opens the link in a new tab in the browser. In Thunderbird, it tries to open Konquerer. In general, the Mozilla suite works together, and the Firebird/Thunderfox duo don't, quite.
Then, there's the UI differences: the teeny-tiny search bar instead of typing searches into the big URL bar, slightly different handling of middle clicks and searching, and so on. I haven't used anything but Moz for a while, so can't tell you more specifics. These are matters of taste, but Firefox and Thunderbird don't suit my taste.
All my Windows boxes are 5+ year old crap with the cream of the crop being a PIII 600.
I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.
Lets see: dozens or even hundreds of ``4-way Sun boxes'' versus hundreds of thousands of ``PIII 600''. Hmm. Guess I see why they didn't start with the Solaris version.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
Yep.
How does one go about making sure that nobody makes a variant client which phones home with bogus results? Would that be harder to assure if everyone were compiling their own?
In my experience, you can get rid of good customers with a quick glance, but the bad customers you can't drive away with an axe.
Good customers want good service and good merchandise, and good value for their money. They'll leave in a heartbeat, if they think they aren't getting all three.
Bad customers want all of the above, but they are incredibly price sensative, and they'll compromise service, quality, and perhaps value to get the lowest price. The one way to get rid of bad customers is to raise your prices. That won't drive off the good customers if you keep the value for money up where it belongs.
Why doesn't Best Buy try that? Probably because most of their customers are the bad kind.
Surely the point of a mobile phone is that you can use it wherever you are - therefore there is no "local call"
I'm here. There is a sharp dividing line between local and long distance for me. Being able to call anyone in town free is a big deal. When the kids get a little bigger, it'll be a huge factor.
The `` the semantic equivalent of local calls'' just doesn't cut it for me. That's what I was trying to say in the earlier post: that always having the phone with me is a mixed blessing, at best, and it certainly doesn't make up for all the new, improved irritations that the cell phone brings with it. Phone companies will have to give me what I want to buy, not what they want to sell. Otherwise, it's just no sale.
Some of us seem to be hazy on exactly what constitutes
theocracy.
Maybe a couple of the definitions from that link will help:
a form of state political organization in which the government is based on religious offices.
Sounds bad.
A system of government controlled by the dominating religions beliefs inherent in the society.
Sounds good, given that you have a set of ``dominating religions beliefs''. If you think that the U.S. doesn't have that, you must be new here. Supreme Court Justice Black said: ``We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.'' The original government of the U.S., as described in our constitution, would be a theocracy by that definition. It was designed to be controlled by the religious majority.
Letting religious organizations get a little bit of slops from the pork barrel is a long way from either of those definitions of theocracy.
I'm paying about $20 per month for free local calls, 400 minutes long distance anywhere in the U.S. except Alaska, plus dial-up internet and pop3 email. All via landline, all on one bill, all with an absolute minimum of hassle and no commitment. And, I can get my phone from the free box at a garage sale and not worry whether it's compatible.
My circumstances are probably different than yours. I don't need to be as available as you seem to. I'm at my desk while at work and so my family can easily contact me. When I'm not at work, I'm with my family. If I were going to be out of touch, it'd be on the water (no, I'm not on that page yet), and I'd get a couple of marine VHF handhelds to keep in touch.
One of the big reasons that I still don't have a cell phone is that most cell phones aren't a phone, they're a package. They're a contract, with minutes and special terms and cameras and side-talking and I-don't-know-what-all. I want a phone that's nothing but a phone, free local calls, and I want a simple, no-surprises monthly bill that's not too high. Right now, the only way I can get that seems to be via land line.
When the phone companies start offering just plain phone service that I can use with a cheap, basic just-plain-phone wireless phone, I'll think about going wireless. When I can buy a wireless phone at a garage sale, punch in my number or my card and get a wireless dial tone, just like I can do with a landline phone, it'll be a no-brainer. Until then, I just don't need the hassle.
My first degree is in electrical engineering, and I don't think I'm a technophobe, but I want my phone to be a phone, and gadgetry isn't for me.
You would think that the phone companies would eventually realize that they've already gotten all the gearheads and early adopters signed up. If they want to get the rest of us, they'll have to start offering services and phones that the rest of us want, and that starts with simple and no hassle.
Well, the mods think it's funny, but I've been doing exactly that since 1997, and it's worked wonders for me. Linux was ready for my desktop back then, it was ready for the desktop of most clerical employees, and it's gotten nothing but better in the last seven years. For most folks, there's no reason not to use Linux except inertia.
Of course, if you don't mind buying Apple hardware, there's always OSX. If your organization has an exclusive contract with Dell, that's not an option, though.
A sales woman at a little value added retail computer shop I used to work for said (of me): ``Don't let him talk to the customers, he's an engineer, he'll tell them the truth!''
The customer doesn't want to hear the truth, he wants his hand held, and he wants to hear that spending his money is going to make it all better and life will be good. He may know its all lies, but he still needs to hear it or he won't feel good.
I guess it's not surprising that it was true for befuddled consumers and small businessmen buying what were, in 1985, expensive toys. The sad thing is that this seems to be equally true for CIOs of big corporations twenty years later.
In what way is "very significant differences" the same as "almost identical"?
It all depends on what you use as a yardstick. Compared to mainland China or Taiwan, we're almost identical. I did read what you wrote, and I agree with your list of differences, but I don't think those differences are very significant, in comparison to the similarities.
The differences between us that you point out are differences in how we implement our socialism. The U.S. is striving to provide universal healthcare via universal employment with welfare as a backup, while Canada is striving to provide universal healthcare via welfare, with employment as a backup. The identical goal is for the government to ensure, somehow, universal healthcare. A very different society might place the responsibility elsewhere.
Both countries are socialist, and happy that way. Both countries have willingly implemented most of the ten steps to destroy a free society which Marx laid out in his Manifesto (steps 2, 5 and 10 almost completely implemented, 3,4,7 and 8 at least partially). Same language, same legal system (British common law), same cultural heritage.
Remember, too, that they're both big, diverse countries. Compared to the difference between Quebec and Nevada, Minnesota and Manitoba are almost identical (people, not climate). Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Scandinavians, who brought with them the culture that made Scandinavia socialist. They are still significantly different from the rest of the U.S., but it's equally reasonable to say that they are almost identical to the rest, despite being more like the Canadians than the Kentuckians.
Canadians and Americans are more similar than Canadians would like to think, and less similar than Americans would like to think
It's all a question of which side of the binoculars you look through, isn't it?
You don't think it's reasonable to parse it as "cruel punishment and unusual punishment"?
The courts have sometimes interpreted it that way, but they aren't nearly as averse to novelty as they are to cruelty, which would be evidence in favor of my interpretation that it's the combination of novelty and cruelty that's forbidden.
I think that the courts may have been wrong in interpreting it as ``cruel punishment and unusual punishment'', for the simple reason that if Madison had meant to say that, he would have. In that day, clear writing was the norm, and Madison was a master at expressing himself clearly. You can take what he wrote to be what he meant.
The courts' interpretation is probably in error, but it's not an unreasonable error for a victim of the U.S. education system to make. I think that, error or no, the current policy may be good, so I've never bothered to search the Federalist Papers and the other writings of the founding fathers to determine the original intent on this issue. If I did look, I wouldn't be surprised to find that my joking interpretation as ``punishment both novel and cruel'' is at least defensible.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're teaching the same old class from the same old book, prep time should be less than class time, but if you're teaching from a new book, with a new syllabus, it can be more than the class time. Since you're adjunct faculty, you typically don't get to choose your syllabus or book, so the prep time will generally be 1 hour plus per class. Therefore, you get $3800 for about 15 hours per week times 16 weeks, or about $16 per hour.
I guess that's a little more cash than the janitors get, but you're not getting health benefits, and the janitors are.
Learning to hear, and worst of all remember, the four+ tones is not fun. If you can get past that, you'll do fine. I have a bad accent, because I can't keep the right tone associated with the right word.
Good luck.
Neat. If you can get any brownie points for referring new proofreaders, pass my name along to them (name, email, et cetera on my web site). Or, please let us know how we can get in on it?
So, do you already know Chinese, or are you starting from scratch? I'd think that two years is awfully fast for ``from scratch''. What's your rank and pay going to be? Strictly academic interest on my part; I'm interested in learning Chinese, but far too old for the military to consider me.
Also, what happens if you somehow don't make the grade in your language school? If the alternative is Middle East shrapnel catcher, I guess you're really motivated.
Many universities cater to people who work a 9-5 ...
I hope that you see the obvious side job for the white collar worker: teach an evening course at the local community college. Of course, you'll be making less per hour than the janitor, but it is white collar.
More to the point, isn't ISO 9001 one of those standards where you prove your ``quality'' by committing to following a process, and documenting that you do indeed follow that process? The inevitable result is that you can commit to shooting your customer in the foot, and document that you have done so, and earn the highest ``quality'' rating for it. That sort of ``quality'' isn't very reassuring.
That's the definition of ``salaried'' to me. When a prospective employer starts talking about salary, I ask: ``What happens if I decide to go home at noon, or come in at noon?'' If the answer is: ``As long as the work gets done, we don't care.'' it's a salaried job. Otherwise, I tell them they'll have to pay me by the hour, with overtime, or pay someone else. You can pay me a salary, or you can keep track of my time, but no both. So far, that policy has worked well, and it's kept me out of what would have been some nasty jobs.
You're better off out of there, though it may not seem that way at the time. The company gets a young fool who'll cost them a bundle to bring up to speed, and then be too burned out to be productive. The young fool at least learns a lesson, sooner or later. You get to find a job where you're treated like a human being. There are plenty like that, and not all with small companies, either.
You might not be able to find another job which pays so much, but you can probably find another one which pays about as much per hour worked, and that's really more important than the total amount you get.
Let them fire you; it's good all around. Get out of debt and you can do it safely. Get a life, and put it ahead of your job. You'll be happier, and you'll be a better employee, too.
Walmart pays $7 per hour and up plus overtime, as does McDonalds and Taco Bell. You could quit, get two McJobs, and work the same hours with less stress and nearly the same hourly wage.
If you're happy where you are, don't complain. If not, try a government job. I'm getting $54,000 per year. That may not sound like much, but I'm in a spot which is a lot cheaper than California, especially for housing. I work a 7.5 hour day, fewer than 200 days a year, and I always go home on time, and I never take work home.
It sounds to me as if you could quit, get two Walmart/McDonalds jobs, and have better working conditions and about the same hours and pay per hour. Plus, you'd have the option to quit one and cut your hours in half after you learn to live well on half the money.
Then, there's the UI differences: the teeny-tiny search bar instead of typing searches into the big URL bar, slightly different handling of middle clicks and searching, and so on. I haven't used anything but Moz for a while, so can't tell you more specifics. These are matters of taste, but Firefox and Thunderbird don't suit my taste.
Q: How can you tell the Titanic is sinking?
A: They keep rearranging the deck chairs, and reassuring us that the ship is too big to sink.
I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.
Lets see: dozens or even hundreds of ``4-way Sun boxes'' versus hundreds of thousands of ``PIII 600''. Hmm. Guess I see why they didn't start with the Solaris version.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
Yep.
How does one go about making sure that nobody makes a variant client which phones home with bogus results? Would that be harder to assure if everyone were compiling their own?
Smarter or more knowlegeable? If he maintains his fascination in those areas, why would we imagine that he wouldn't gain knowlege?
Smarter would mean something like ``better able to reason with a given set of information.''
Since the article is on CNN, I suppose that we shouldn't expect any sort of detail or sense, and not much fact, either.
Good customers want good service and good merchandise, and good value for their money. They'll leave in a heartbeat, if they think they aren't getting all three.
Bad customers want all of the above, but they are incredibly price sensative, and they'll compromise service, quality, and perhaps value to get the lowest price. The one way to get rid of bad customers is to raise your prices. That won't drive off the good customers if you keep the value for money up where it belongs.
Why doesn't Best Buy try that? Probably because most of their customers are the bad kind.
I'm here . There is a sharp dividing line between local and long distance for me. Being able to call anyone in town free is a big deal. When the kids get a little bigger, it'll be a huge factor.
The `` the semantic equivalent of local calls'' just doesn't cut it for me. That's what I was trying to say in the earlier post: that always having the phone with me is a mixed blessing, at best, and it certainly doesn't make up for all the new, improved irritations that the cell phone brings with it. Phone companies will have to give me what I want to buy, not what they want to sell. Otherwise, it's just no sale.
a form of state political organization in which the government is based on religious offices.
Sounds bad.
A system of government controlled by the dominating religions beliefs inherent in the society.
Sounds good, given that you have a set of ``dominating religions beliefs''. If you think that the U.S. doesn't have that, you must be new here. Supreme Court Justice Black said: ``We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.'' The original government of the U.S., as described in our constitution, would be a theocracy by that definition. It was designed to be controlled by the religious majority.
Letting religious organizations get a little bit of slops from the pork barrel is a long way from either of those definitions of theocracy.
My circumstances are probably different than yours. I don't need to be as available as you seem to. I'm at my desk while at work and so my family can easily contact me. When I'm not at work, I'm with my family. If I were going to be out of touch, it'd be on the water (no, I'm not on that page yet), and I'd get a couple of marine VHF handhelds to keep in touch.
When the phone companies start offering just plain phone service that I can use with a cheap, basic just-plain-phone wireless phone, I'll think about going wireless. When I can buy a wireless phone at a garage sale, punch in my number or my card and get a wireless dial tone, just like I can do with a landline phone, it'll be a no-brainer. Until then, I just don't need the hassle.
My first degree is in electrical engineering, and I don't think I'm a technophobe, but I want my phone to be a phone, and gadgetry isn't for me.
You would think that the phone companies would eventually realize that they've already gotten all the gearheads and early adopters signed up. If they want to get the rest of us, they'll have to start offering services and phones that the rest of us want, and that starts with simple and no hassle.
1) Use Linux
Well, the mods think it's funny, but I've been doing exactly that since 1997, and it's worked wonders for me. Linux was ready for my desktop back then, it was ready for the desktop of most clerical employees, and it's gotten nothing but better in the last seven years. For most folks, there's no reason not to use Linux except inertia.
Of course, if you don't mind buying Apple hardware, there's always OSX. If your organization has an exclusive contract with Dell, that's not an option, though.
But it doesn't have a camera! I thought every audio device had to have a camera? or at least a battery-devouring, expensive color display?
The customer doesn't want to hear the truth, he wants his hand held, and he wants to hear that spending his money is going to make it all better and life will be good. He may know its all lies, but he still needs to hear it or he won't feel good.
I guess it's not surprising that it was true for befuddled consumers and small businessmen buying what were, in 1985, expensive toys. The sad thing is that this seems to be equally true for CIOs of big corporations twenty years later.
It all depends on what you use as a yardstick. Compared to mainland China or Taiwan, we're almost identical. I did read what you wrote, and I agree with your list of differences, but I don't think those differences are very significant, in comparison to the similarities.
The differences between us that you point out are differences in how we implement our socialism. The U.S. is striving to provide universal healthcare via universal employment with welfare as a backup, while Canada is striving to provide universal healthcare via welfare, with employment as a backup. The identical goal is for the government to ensure, somehow, universal healthcare. A very different society might place the responsibility elsewhere.
Both countries are socialist, and happy that way. Both countries have willingly implemented most of the ten steps to destroy a free society which Marx laid out in his Manifesto (steps 2, 5 and 10 almost completely implemented, 3,4,7 and 8 at least partially). Same language, same legal system (British common law), same cultural heritage.
Remember, too, that they're both big, diverse countries. Compared to the difference between Quebec and Nevada, Minnesota and Manitoba are almost identical (people, not climate). Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Scandinavians, who brought with them the culture that made Scandinavia socialist. They are still significantly different from the rest of the U.S., but it's equally reasonable to say that they are almost identical to the rest, despite being more like the Canadians than the Kentuckians.
Canadians and Americans are more similar than Canadians would like to think, and less similar than Americans would like to think
It's all a question of which side of the binoculars you look through, isn't it?
China has dirt-cheap labor (which stinks if you're Chinese).
Since all China's infrastructure is new, it's more modern than our 20 to 30 year-old stuff.
The article was written by a woman (item 10: ``Will you be wearing these with high heels or flats?'').
The courts have sometimes interpreted it that way, but they aren't nearly as averse to novelty as they are to cruelty, which would be evidence in favor of my interpretation that it's the combination of novelty and cruelty that's forbidden.
I think that the courts may have been wrong in interpreting it as ``cruel punishment and unusual punishment'', for the simple reason that if Madison had meant to say that, he would have. In that day, clear writing was the norm, and Madison was a master at expressing himself clearly. You can take what he wrote to be what he meant.
The courts' interpretation is probably in error, but it's not an unreasonable error for a victim of the U.S. education system to make. I think that, error or no, the current policy may be good, so I've never bothered to search the Federalist Papers and the other writings of the founding fathers to determine the original intent on this issue. If I did look, I wouldn't be surprised to find that my joking interpretation as ``punishment both novel and cruel'' is at least defensible.