Not the sales reps fault. Anyway, what kind of moron buys a piece of equipment that doesn't have at least a 6 month manufacturers warranty? That's the first thing I check; if the manufacturer doesn't offer a warranty, then their product is probably crap.
Retail shops try to screw you with that stuff. I've had them try and sell me warranties on RAM that comes with a lifetime manufacturers warranty, and hard drives that come with a 3 year manufacturers warranty, but they pitch a less comprehensive warranty for a decent fee.
Well, and Best Buy is well known for pushing hardware and peripherals over actual support...No matter what you ask them, you always need a new one.
I went in there once trying to get a "real" modem (not a winmodem) and I got told first, that there was no difference between a real modem and a winmodem (lie), and second, that I should just get a new computer because modems were old tech.
Never actually asked any meaningful questions, obviously, because a new computer wasn't going to get my fax server running any faster, but a new modem replace the dead one would have been peachy.
Ask for a KVM switch, they'll try and sell you a monitor, and never, ever, buy a usb cable from them.
It's nothing to do with Google. If a bunch of idiots don't want to check their facts before they pull the plug on their portfolios, more power to 'em.
It's just a sign of the economy. News of a bank or an airline tanking is plausible enough to set off a panic, and people do stupid things when they panic.
Only if they're morons. Frankly, if all your savings are in an airline this year, you deserve to lose it all, because that's a damn stupid thing to do.
People lost their money because they panicked. If they hadn't set their stupid stop-loss alarms, they wouldn't have had a problem.
Stuff just blows my mind. I have alerts that tell me when something has happened, but I'd never just throw away a pile of cash by letting the machine make the decision for me. Like in the reverse case, if you have a "sell when the stock tops X" alert, and the company comes out with some huge news that doubles the stock value, and you automatically bailed when it was only up 10%, you'd feel like a moron.
The same exact thing applies to losses. Aside from bankruptcies, which are a hazard of the game, but which very seldom get reported accurately in advance because of serious serious insider trading concerns, most decent stocks will bounce back. You do not want to drop a stock that drops 5 bucks by noon, and climbs 8 bucks before the end of the day, and that stuff does happen.
If you're in it on a "timely" basis, you're doing it wrong.
The playing the margins crap only works if that's your job. Otherwise you need to diversify, pick decent stocks, and stick to time windows of at least a week.
And I'll tell you this for free. People who are wealthy aren't playing the stocks minute by minute. They're wealthy because they play the long game. Right now they're picking up bargains whenever the market drops, and they're holding on to them for when the market evens back out. It's the scrubs who are panicking and losing their shorts selling stocks based on rumor.
Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
They all depend on the voter being careless, and the poll workers being poorly trained. That's a pretty good bet...I wouldn't say it's not feasible, though I agree, it would be caught with a competent staff, and the paper trail was still accurate, assuming 3 & 4 didn't pass unnoticed.
It doesn't per se. It relies partly on the voter not checking the paper ballot. If they don't void it, it slips through normally. If they do check it, it fixes the ballot, and acts normal.
Otherwise it tries to convince the voter they're done without actually returning the smart card. When they walk away, it voids the ballot, and pops up the "fled voter" screen. The poll worker comes up, uses the admin "submit" toggle to submit the changed vote, and takes back the card. Most places I've been, the poll workers depend on you returning the card, so that wouldn't work.
To me the most compelling piece was how easily the system was compromised. Even if it only screws with a percentage of the votes, that could be huge.
This exploit depends on the use of USB keys in the setup process, so it's more a matter of screwing with those keys. Judging by my experience, that would be pretty trivial. The running exploit could be recognized by a competent poll worker, but again, that's not all that likely.
The whole electronic voting thing is hugely flawed. They're building the machines on an extremely hackable (windows) base, rather than a custom firmware. The design does not take into account real security concerns.
While anyone can fake a paper ballot, it would be extremely difficult to fake enough ballots to make a difference. This is not the case with electronic voting. Paper is a much more secure system.
Just look at it this way, the next time a prospective employer is judging you based on what's on your facebook page, you can whip out a photocopy of his naked hairy hippie ass and say, "What, sorry, didn't hear you?"
You have to understand what they're going for...When was the last time you saw a Mac commercial that was really about something technical? They just don't do that, they sell this fun "image", this personified "I'm your buddy" thing which has little or nothing to do with your computer.
That's what MS is trying to counter. They're trying to humanize their image, build up some emotional investment in their brand.
I saw it cold actually, on TV, but I'd heard about it and I was geared up to scream "BULLSHIT!!!!" when the stupid claims started, which kinda threw me when they never did, I must admit.
Despite that knee jerk, and despite all my MS related baggage, I was semi-amused at various points. It was clever. Surreal, yes, but amusing.
And they're getting mad play, jesus, everyone looking at the ad online. I think it may play somewhat for them in the long run, but it's too early to tell.
I likes it as well...All work and no play makes for a dull day. I wish all the goddamn whiners would learn to use the goddamn preferences if they don't want to see it.
HERE is the LINK you whiny bastards...Scroll down to "idle" and put the little dot in the little radio box under the universal circle/slash that means DO NOT WANT.
There is this thing called a "printing press" and it was invented in 1439, and has been commonly used to print news and other sorts of pamplets.
The first newspaper in this country was started in 1704. The one I work for isn't quite 200, but I assure you, it's been dealing with irate advertisers for all 180 years of its existence. When the first medical research came out that corsets caused health problems, you bet your ass the corset makers screamed bloody murder when the news made it into the papers.
If someone gives you money, they think they have a right to tell you what to print. This is not the case in the better publications.
It's totally allowed, unfortunately. Media companies have been dealing with this crap for centuries. Its why there is usually a degree of separation between the content producers, and the advertising people, something I guess Discovery doesn't have.
All the "efficiency" concerns you're talking about come from free market stuff as well...Frankly, I've never seen it from Union work, because usually when it's Union work they demand the solution that will employ the most people, not the "best" solution.
As for the robotics, sure, fine, but if your protective tariffs were lower, those goods could be made elsewhere at a fraction of the cost, and that would benefit the consumers in Sweden and it would benefit the workers in other parts of the world. Hell, if the unions weren't so strong you could probably replace those robots with actual people and maybe reduce that 17% unemployment rate you guys like to pretend you don't have.
Face it, robots aren't as cheap as people, and I can't remember the last time I saw something with "Made in Sweden" stamped on it, so clearly they're not churning out a massive surplus.
You don't have a right to your job...I know that may offend your sense of entitlement, but it's the truth. If they don't need you, or just think they don't need you, it's their right to fire you.
And nothing pisses me off more than people who whine about cutbacks. The industry is in the shitter, yea, but lets all of us refuse to work if management tries to fire one of us. It's like 100 people trying to climb into a lifeboat made for 50; you're going to bring the whole thing down trying to save your own worthless hide.
Re:Unions by definition are crap
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Too many of those skills are things that people are growing up knowing how to do these days...You can't expect the same compensation for work that the guy next door will send his 11 year old daughter over to fix.
I dealt with plenty of this crap myself a few years back. Moved into a small town, and when I couldn't get a full time gig, I started my own company doing whatever I could.
I started deploying PostNuke websites as a sideline (that was the big thing then) for pretty reasonable rates, and it made all the local HTML jockeys lose their fucking minds...They'd gotten by for years with photoshop and dreamweaver doing static pages for big money, and I was undercutting the fuck out of them with big dynamic sites.
I probably put a few people out of business, but it wasn't my job to make them look good, and I wasn't going to bill a thousand dollars an hour to equal their ridiculous prices.
If they were a craft union, on the other hand, I wouldn't have even been allowed to sell my superior product for my lower rate. They would have kept their sweet sinecure, and I would have starved.
Yea, textile unions, steelworkers unions...How'd that work out for them.
This ain't the world of grandpa and grandma...In the old days you had to suck it up because you had a bigass factory, and you couldn't just pick it up and move it to somewhere where the labor was non-union.
This is not the case with IT. They will ship your job to India in a second, and you and all your union buddies can cry about it, and it'll do you no good at all.
Shrug. Usually if you have the ability, you can get the paper. But what if you don't already have the paper?
I used to work for a guy, wholly self-educated, who was one of the best IT guys I've ever seen. He lived and breathed it, spent all his free time doing more IT work, just because he loved it that much. When some of the big Universities started putting classes out in podcast form, he'd walk around listening to university lectures on his iPod, just totally stoked about it.
I have more than 7 years of formal education, and I'm not even half as good as this guy who got his GED at 16, and went straight to work. Means nothing today, because if we were competing for the same job he'd crush me for any position where they actually talked to him.
But if it depended only on the paper? He'd never have a chance.
Ignorant you may be, but you hit the nail on the head.
Unions don't make any industry more efficient, and that loss of efficiency can mean the difference between a successful company and an unsuccessful company. If the work can be done more efficiently by non-union employees, it will be, and IT work is very portable...You can't do the old Union trick of changing the laws in a geographic area when someone across the world could be doing your job remotely.
It comes down to market issues. If you're top notch at what you do, and there is demand for that skill, you'll have work. If your skills are dated, if you're not qualified, you could have problems. Lot of people jumped into the industry in the 90's with extremely limited skillsets. If you can't roll with the changes, you're going to get pushed out.
The industry is really volatile right now, and that makes people crave the sort of stability that Unions seem to provide, but there is a difference between stability and stagnation.
Maybe, maybe not. The point should be whether or not the wiring passes code, not who does it.
The thing that bothers me most is the exclusivity, especially with craft unions. There is no way in except through seniority, so if you come from a non-union state (or country) with tons of experience and ability, you're automatically a second class citizen in your chosen trade, and the only way out of that is having to jump through union hoops for literally years, maybe even under the supervision of someone with less skill and experience than yourself.
As far as I'm concerned, the work is what's important. It all has to be inspected, so if it passes code, then what does it matter who did it in the first place?
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Not the sales reps fault. Anyway, what kind of moron buys a piece of equipment that doesn't have at least a 6 month manufacturers warranty? That's the first thing I check; if the manufacturer doesn't offer a warranty, then their product is probably crap.
Retail shops try to screw you with that stuff. I've had them try and sell me warranties on RAM that comes with a lifetime manufacturers warranty, and hard drives that come with a 3 year manufacturers warranty, but they pitch a less comprehensive warranty for a decent fee.
41,000 a year for a job with a low entry skill is "not bad"? Are you serious? It's 5k above the national average wage.
Well, and Best Buy is well known for pushing hardware and peripherals over actual support...No matter what you ask them, you always need a new one.
I went in there once trying to get a "real" modem (not a winmodem) and I got told first, that there was no difference between a real modem and a winmodem (lie), and second, that I should just get a new computer because modems were old tech.
Never actually asked any meaningful questions, obviously, because a new computer wasn't going to get my fax server running any faster, but a new modem replace the dead one would have been peachy.
Ask for a KVM switch, they'll try and sell you a monitor, and never, ever, buy a usb cable from them.
Commodities are more staid, though I've been delighting in the long slow slide of crude oil.
The shrill whining of all those who really really believe that commodities aren't cyclical is sweet. They always go back down.
It's nothing to do with Google. If a bunch of idiots don't want to check their facts before they pull the plug on their portfolios, more power to 'em.
It's just a sign of the economy. News of a bank or an airline tanking is plausible enough to set off a panic, and people do stupid things when they panic.
Only if they're morons. Frankly, if all your savings are in an airline this year, you deserve to lose it all, because that's a damn stupid thing to do.
People lost their money because they panicked. If they hadn't set their stupid stop-loss alarms, they wouldn't have had a problem.
Stuff just blows my mind. I have alerts that tell me when something has happened, but I'd never just throw away a pile of cash by letting the machine make the decision for me. Like in the reverse case, if you have a "sell when the stock tops X" alert, and the company comes out with some huge news that doubles the stock value, and you automatically bailed when it was only up 10%, you'd feel like a moron.
The same exact thing applies to losses. Aside from bankruptcies, which are a hazard of the game, but which very seldom get reported accurately in advance because of serious serious insider trading concerns, most decent stocks will bounce back. You do not want to drop a stock that drops 5 bucks by noon, and climbs 8 bucks before the end of the day, and that stuff does happen.
If you're in it on a "timely" basis, you're doing it wrong.
The playing the margins crap only works if that's your job. Otherwise you need to diversify, pick decent stocks, and stick to time windows of at least a week.
And I'll tell you this for free. People who are wealthy aren't playing the stocks minute by minute. They're wealthy because they play the long game. Right now they're picking up bargains whenever the market drops, and they're holding on to them for when the market evens back out. It's the scrubs who are panicking and losing their shorts selling stocks based on rumor.
Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
They all depend on the voter being careless, and the poll workers being poorly trained. That's a pretty good bet...I wouldn't say it's not feasible, though I agree, it would be caught with a competent staff, and the paper trail was still accurate, assuming 3 & 4 didn't pass unnoticed.
It doesn't per se. It relies partly on the voter not checking the paper ballot. If they don't void it, it slips through normally. If they do check it, it fixes the ballot, and acts normal.
Otherwise it tries to convince the voter they're done without actually returning the smart card. When they walk away, it voids the ballot, and pops up the "fled voter" screen. The poll worker comes up, uses the admin "submit" toggle to submit the changed vote, and takes back the card. Most places I've been, the poll workers depend on you returning the card, so that wouldn't work.
To me the most compelling piece was how easily the system was compromised. Even if it only screws with a percentage of the votes, that could be huge.
This exploit depends on the use of USB keys in the setup process, so it's more a matter of screwing with those keys. Judging by my experience, that would be pretty trivial. The running exploit could be recognized by a competent poll worker, but again, that's not all that likely.
The whole electronic voting thing is hugely flawed. They're building the machines on an extremely hackable (windows) base, rather than a custom firmware. The design does not take into account real security concerns.
While anyone can fake a paper ballot, it would be extremely difficult to fake enough ballots to make a difference. This is not the case with electronic voting. Paper is a much more secure system.
Bah, I've got a good 10 years on 'em.
Just look at it this way, the next time a prospective employer is judging you based on what's on your facebook page, you can whip out a photocopy of his naked hairy hippie ass and say, "What, sorry, didn't hear you?"
Trademark violation.
I thought it was quite clever actually.
You have to understand what they're going for...When was the last time you saw a Mac commercial that was really about something technical? They just don't do that, they sell this fun "image", this personified "I'm your buddy" thing which has little or nothing to do with your computer.
That's what MS is trying to counter. They're trying to humanize their image, build up some emotional investment in their brand.
I saw it cold actually, on TV, but I'd heard about it and I was geared up to scream "BULLSHIT!!!!" when the stupid claims started, which kinda threw me when they never did, I must admit.
Despite that knee jerk, and despite all my MS related baggage, I was semi-amused at various points. It was clever. Surreal, yes, but amusing.
And they're getting mad play, jesus, everyone looking at the ad online. I think it may play somewhat for them in the long run, but it's too early to tell.
I likes it as well...All work and no play makes for a dull day. I wish all the goddamn whiners would learn to use the goddamn preferences if they don't want to see it.
HERE is the LINK you whiny bastards...Scroll down to "idle" and put the little dot in the little radio box under the universal circle/slash that means DO NOT WANT.
There is this thing called a "printing press" and it was invented in 1439, and has been commonly used to print news and other sorts of pamplets.
The first newspaper in this country was started in 1704. The one I work for isn't quite 200, but I assure you, it's been dealing with irate advertisers for all 180 years of its existence. When the first medical research came out that corsets caused health problems, you bet your ass the corset makers screamed bloody murder when the news made it into the papers.
If someone gives you money, they think they have a right to tell you what to print. This is not the case in the better publications.
It's totally allowed, unfortunately. Media companies have been dealing with this crap for centuries. Its why there is usually a degree of separation between the content producers, and the advertising people, something I guess Discovery doesn't have.
All the "efficiency" concerns you're talking about come from free market stuff as well...Frankly, I've never seen it from Union work, because usually when it's Union work they demand the solution that will employ the most people, not the "best" solution.
As for the robotics, sure, fine, but if your protective tariffs were lower, those goods could be made elsewhere at a fraction of the cost, and that would benefit the consumers in Sweden and it would benefit the workers in other parts of the world. Hell, if the unions weren't so strong you could probably replace those robots with actual people and maybe reduce that 17% unemployment rate you guys like to pretend you don't have.
Face it, robots aren't as cheap as people, and I can't remember the last time I saw something with "Made in Sweden" stamped on it, so clearly they're not churning out a massive surplus.
You don't have a right to your job...I know that may offend your sense of entitlement, but it's the truth. If they don't need you, or just think they don't need you, it's their right to fire you.
And nothing pisses me off more than people who whine about cutbacks. The industry is in the shitter, yea, but lets all of us refuse to work if management tries to fire one of us. It's like 100 people trying to climb into a lifeboat made for 50; you're going to bring the whole thing down trying to save your own worthless hide.
Too many of those skills are things that people are growing up knowing how to do these days...You can't expect the same compensation for work that the guy next door will send his 11 year old daughter over to fix.
I dealt with plenty of this crap myself a few years back. Moved into a small town, and when I couldn't get a full time gig, I started my own company doing whatever I could.
I started deploying PostNuke websites as a sideline (that was the big thing then) for pretty reasonable rates, and it made all the local HTML jockeys lose their fucking minds...They'd gotten by for years with photoshop and dreamweaver doing static pages for big money, and I was undercutting the fuck out of them with big dynamic sites.
I probably put a few people out of business, but it wasn't my job to make them look good, and I wasn't going to bill a thousand dollars an hour to equal their ridiculous prices.
If they were a craft union, on the other hand, I wouldn't have even been allowed to sell my superior product for my lower rate. They would have kept their sweet sinecure, and I would have starved.
Yea, textile unions, steelworkers unions...How'd that work out for them.
This ain't the world of grandpa and grandma...In the old days you had to suck it up because you had a bigass factory, and you couldn't just pick it up and move it to somewhere where the labor was non-union.
This is not the case with IT. They will ship your job to India in a second, and you and all your union buddies can cry about it, and it'll do you no good at all.
Shrug. Usually if you have the ability, you can get the paper. But what if you don't already have the paper?
I used to work for a guy, wholly self-educated, who was one of the best IT guys I've ever seen. He lived and breathed it, spent all his free time doing more IT work, just because he loved it that much. When some of the big Universities started putting classes out in podcast form, he'd walk around listening to university lectures on his iPod, just totally stoked about it.
I have more than 7 years of formal education, and I'm not even half as good as this guy who got his GED at 16, and went straight to work. Means nothing today, because if we were competing for the same job he'd crush me for any position where they actually talked to him.
But if it depended only on the paper? He'd never have a chance.
Ignorant you may be, but you hit the nail on the head.
Unions don't make any industry more efficient, and that loss of efficiency can mean the difference between a successful company and an unsuccessful company. If the work can be done more efficiently by non-union employees, it will be, and IT work is very portable...You can't do the old Union trick of changing the laws in a geographic area when someone across the world could be doing your job remotely.
It comes down to market issues. If you're top notch at what you do, and there is demand for that skill, you'll have work. If your skills are dated, if you're not qualified, you could have problems. Lot of people jumped into the industry in the 90's with extremely limited skillsets. If you can't roll with the changes, you're going to get pushed out.
The industry is really volatile right now, and that makes people crave the sort of stability that Unions seem to provide, but there is a difference between stability and stagnation.
Maybe, maybe not. The point should be whether or not the wiring passes code, not who does it.
The thing that bothers me most is the exclusivity, especially with craft unions. There is no way in except through seniority, so if you come from a non-union state (or country) with tons of experience and ability, you're automatically a second class citizen in your chosen trade, and the only way out of that is having to jump through union hoops for literally years, maybe even under the supervision of someone with less skill and experience than yourself.
As far as I'm concerned, the work is what's important. It all has to be inspected, so if it passes code, then what does it matter who did it in the first place?