Um, what? Unless the link changed since you looked, it links to a google search on "clinton corruption", which really does return thirty one million, nine hundred thousand results. (I just verified, not trusting what might be a flash fake.) I think that was the point, not some single, cherry-picked example.
I registered democrat in 2008 specifically to vote for Hillary, because the 'pubs couldn't field a viable candidate to save their lives, and I felt that HIllary would at least be entertaining, in a tawdry, back-room-deal sorta way. Since then it's been fairly apparent that she doesn't really have a clue about foreign policy, and sees positions of power as a goal for its own sake, with no idea what to do with it when she gets there. A Hillary presidency is something we would be talking about for decades to come, and not in a good way. I especially look forward to a spectacular melt-down at some press conference.
So yeah, go HIllary. If nothing else, her administration would be something to remember, should we survive it.
The point of wanting to go off the power grid is not to solve climate change. The point is to have a workable alternative should the power grid go off you.
If anyone ever figures out how to "document" experience and hands-on skills, I think they'd be the next Bill Gates.
And that's the real issue -- the misconception that IT jobs are just a matter of pushing this button when that light goes on, and doesn't require education, experience, and diagnostic skills.
And then, when that doesn't work, this develops into the misconception that you can have former taxi drivers in your first and second level support, and a few high achievers in your third level support to handle everything that they don't. And this turns into a few third level admins doing the work of twenty while the rest act as a buffer between them and increasingly angry customers.
And then, when that doesn't work out, this develops into the misconception that you can train your former taxi drivers and grow them into junior admins. And so you find out that as soon as they get some training, they go across the street to a rival call center where they can get a higher paying job. (I mean, who wouldn't?)
In the meantime, customers suffer, production plummets, and upper management go on speaking tours bragging about the money they saved.
Dunno about your company, but H-1B employees here have a different color badge, and are not allowed into certain meetings. It's a pretty easy differentiation to make.
When a company I worked for outsourced IT, they required all displaced employees to document their jobs to the extent that offshore operators could do them.
it seems to me that this makes three, shall we say, outrageously optimistic assumptions: (1) that untrained operators can do the job based entirely on looking up solutions, (2) that IT jobs can be entirely quantized into a reasonable number of procedures, and (3) that displaced employees would be sufficiently motivated to document their jobs to the degree necessary that operators could do them.
A side assumption, equally optimistic, is that managers have enough savvy to tell whether displaced employees have done a good job documenting the work they do, or are just having them on.
So, cutover happens -- and the lights go out.
...and the outsourcing company's excuse is invariably that the outgoing employees didn't document their jobs well enough (probably true, see (2) and (3) above) but entirely ignores the hard reality (see (1) above) that you really can't buy competent help for three rupees a day.
I don't have the visibility to say whether this is endemic, but I observer that a manager in my own organization stated openly not long ago that H-1B would get preference in new hires or backfill hires for budgetary purposes. And he has been as good as his word. About half the organization is now made up of foreign contractors, and the percentage is growing.
My thought also. On the other hand, although the labels of "systemic and widespread" might be wild exaggerations, perhaps even for political purposes, this might be a case of doing the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons. The salient point being, it's still the right thing. So I'm going to hold my nose and support.
"Negotiation" is very much part of what I am being paid for. Or what anyone is being paid for, who has to work with other people. Else, why the heck does the company send us to those Karrass seminars?
Moreover, I wonder how far Ellen Pao would have gotten without sharp negotiation skills.
This strikes me as one of those epiphanies that sounds good in your head but starts to fall apart when unintended consequences become apparent.
Don't good negotiation skills increase the value of an employee?
And... isn't this penalizing someone for having more talent? What other characteristics are we no longer going to consider? Typing speed? The ability to write a coherent sentence? Designing maintainable code?
> Once an iris scan is on record, it becomes nearly impossible to evade detection.
Um, not really, just the techniques change. When you have a "foolproof" method of identity, (in this case where you compare some biometric data stored in a database somewhere,) the tendency is to believe the method of identity, without once considering that everything is predicated on the database being correct.
And so, instead of wearing a wig and affecting a different accent and different posture and style of walk and all of those things Sherlock Holmes used to do when he went into disguise, you don't have to change any feature of yourself at all -- you just have to change the database. This is especially easy when your organization *owns* the data, but isn't impossible even if the imposter you're trying to field needs credentials in someone else's database.
First thought: Global warming is making allergies and asthma worse, yeah, because there's... more things growing...
Ok wait, how is that a bad thing, again?
(I have severe allergies and asthma. But I live in a time where medication for these conditions has never been more effective or had fewer side-effects. One pill in the morning, carry medications for emergencies, and I'm good. I'm not in a position to complain that the growing season is longer.)
what's special about 2016? Extended support doesn't end til 2020.
Very good point. So really, I can ignore the next two releases. Golden.
Because after all, Windows is not the app. Windows runs apps and manages resources. And trying to get used to a new gooey paradigm just to be able to say that I'm running the latest OS is an exercise in futility.
...to talk about the successor now, is that if 10 doesn't pan out, I need to know what I'll be migrating to from Win7 in 2016.
If they can get it wrong so many times, maybe you should be thinking of migrating to something that's not Windows.
I'd love to, but I guess I'm what you'd call an edge case. I need apps that are only ported to Windows and Mac. (I migrated from Mac to Windows a few years ago when Apple and Adobe weren't getting along.)
Slashdot Mirror
Um, what? Unless the link changed since you looked, it links to a google search on "clinton corruption", which really does return thirty one million, nine hundred thousand results. (I just verified, not trusting what might be a flash fake.) I think that was the point, not some single, cherry-picked example.
Well, ok, for one example, it was specifically the HIllary 2008 campaign that started the rumor that Obama was not born in the US.
I registered democrat in 2008 specifically to vote for Hillary, because the 'pubs couldn't field a viable candidate to save their lives, and I felt that HIllary would at least be entertaining, in a tawdry, back-room-deal sorta way. Since then it's been fairly apparent that she doesn't really have a clue about foreign policy, and sees positions of power as a goal for its own sake, with no idea what to do with it when she gets there. A Hillary presidency is something we would be talking about for decades to come, and not in a good way. I especially look forward to a spectacular melt-down at some press conference.
So yeah, go HIllary. If nothing else, her administration would be something to remember, should we survive it.
The point of wanting to go off the power grid is not to solve climate change. The point is to have a workable alternative should the power grid go off you.
That's so cool!
If anyone ever figures out how to "document" experience and hands-on skills, I think they'd be the next Bill Gates.
And that's the real issue -- the misconception that IT jobs are just a matter of pushing this button when that light goes on, and doesn't require education, experience, and diagnostic skills.
And then, when that doesn't work, this develops into the misconception that you can have former taxi drivers in your first and second level support, and a few high achievers in your third level support to handle everything that they don't. And this turns into a few third level admins doing the work of twenty while the rest act as a buffer between them and increasingly angry customers.
And then, when that doesn't work out, this develops into the misconception that you can train your former taxi drivers and grow them into junior admins. And so you find out that as soon as they get some training, they go across the street to a rival call center where they can get a higher paying job. (I mean, who wouldn't?)
In the meantime, customers suffer, production plummets, and upper management go on speaking tours bragging about the money they saved.
Dunno about your company, but H-1B employees here have a different color badge, and are not allowed into certain meetings. It's a pretty easy differentiation to make.
When a company I worked for outsourced IT, they required all displaced employees to document their jobs to the extent that offshore operators could do them.
it seems to me that this makes three, shall we say, outrageously optimistic assumptions: (1) that untrained operators can do the job based entirely on looking up solutions, (2) that IT jobs can be entirely quantized into a reasonable number of procedures, and (3) that displaced employees would be sufficiently motivated to document their jobs to the degree necessary that operators could do them.
A side assumption, equally optimistic, is that managers have enough savvy to tell whether displaced employees have done a good job documenting the work they do, or are just having them on.
So, cutover happens -- and the lights go out.
But we saved a lot of money.
I don't have the visibility to say whether this is endemic, but I observer that a manager in my own organization stated openly not long ago that H-1B would get preference in new hires or backfill hires for budgetary purposes. And he has been as good as his word. About half the organization is now made up of foreign contractors, and the percentage is growing.
My thought also. On the other hand, although the labels of "systemic and widespread" might be wild exaggerations, perhaps even for political purposes, this might be a case of doing the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons. The salient point being, it's still the right thing. So I'm going to hold my nose and support.
Salt in the diet... Dietary cholesterol...
I wasn't aware of that. At very least, we should make all executioners women. Think of it as a career.
Or in this case, a left handed women who loves bacon.
"Negotiation" is very much part of what I am being paid for. Or what anyone is being paid for, who has to work with other people. Else, why the heck does the company send us to those Karrass seminars?
Moreover, I wonder how far Ellen Pao would have gotten without sharp negotiation skills.
This strikes me as one of those epiphanies that sounds good in your head but starts to fall apart when unintended consequences become apparent.
Don't good negotiation skills increase the value of an employee?
And... isn't this penalizing someone for having more talent? What other characteristics are we no longer going to consider? Typing speed? The ability to write a coherent sentence? Designing maintainable code?
How's that "best shore" strategy working out for ya?
Won't that make him a martyr?
Ok, so "some day" is apparently not today.
> Once an iris scan is on record, it becomes nearly impossible to evade detection.
Um, not really, just the techniques change. When you have a "foolproof" method of identity, (in this case where you compare some biometric data stored in a database somewhere,) the tendency is to believe the method of identity, without once considering that everything is predicated on the database being correct.
And so, instead of wearing a wig and affecting a different accent and different posture and style of walk and all of those things Sherlock Holmes used to do when he went into disguise, you don't have to change any feature of yourself at all -- you just have to change the database. This is especially easy when your organization *owns* the data, but isn't impossible even if the imposter you're trying to field needs credentials in someone else's database.
C'mon, we're geeks. Several vectors come to mind.
> Strange . . . I could swear that you are describing the Greeks. Are you sure that you are really lived in Hawaii, and not Greece . . . ?
And here *I* thought he was talking about Venice, California.
It's too bad James Hansen's original doomsday scenario -- the earth as an arctic wasteland -- didn't come to pass, then.
I wonder if some day we will look back at "global warming" the same way.
First thought: Global warming is making allergies and asthma worse, yeah, because there's... more things growing...
Ok wait, how is that a bad thing, again?
(I have severe allergies and asthma. But I live in a time where medication for these conditions has never been more effective or had fewer side-effects. One pill in the morning, carry medications for emergencies, and I'm good. I'm not in a position to complain that the growing season is longer.)
Might be time for a remake of Weird Science.
what's special about 2016? Extended support doesn't end til 2020.
Very good point. So really, I can ignore the next two releases. Golden.
Because after all, Windows is not the app. Windows runs apps and manages resources. And trying to get used to a new gooey paradigm just to be able to say that I'm running the latest OS is an exercise in futility.
If they can get it wrong so many times, maybe you should be thinking of migrating to something that's not Windows.
I'd love to, but I guess I'm what you'd call an edge case. I need apps that are only ported to Windows and Mac. (I migrated from Mac to Windows a few years ago when Apple and Adobe weren't getting along.)