This isn't the current stable version of apache, this is some random one of dozens frameworks built by the apache group. Very different animal. You'd get apache updates just by keeping OS updates current unless they are running windows or something ridiculous like that.
"Shouldn't someone be seeing a report of all unapplied patches and how old they are? Yell at the testing group if they age too much?"
That is probably who he is blaming. If this random one of thousands apache group framework isn't included in the scanner doing the testing or wasn't configured when they told it the list of apps a year ago, a list that has never been updated that isn't going to help. Also, if that app was on the list but generates too much noise for false positives, it will go on the exceptions list where PCI and other standards no longer apply because an exception is documented.
But lets be real here, they added security staff. The only thing that will have done is throw up 200 checks and silos that cause any sort of administration to slow to a crawl... including applying patches.
"If.25Bn has been invested then there's sure as hell no process that could have allowed a single critical patch go unchecked as described. There's teams, or should be teams of people watching these things."
The.25Bn and teams of people sounds like the problem to me. Like in every other large enterprise environment that leads to a whole lot of procedures and massive dysfunctional security theater. The security people want everything silo'd, disconnected, and to tie the hands of ops in every way possible and then want everything fully patched on a schedule that simply isn't feasible at that scale operationally. Generally there is something like a 90 day requirement on critical patches... in a large enterprise environment you probably won't even find out all the applications that are running in 1-5yrs, let alone keep up with every patch for every application that doesn't get bundled with OS patches. And of course half their environment is probably ancient EOL or EOL for everybody who couldn't get the vendor to make a super special exception that isn't actually backed by any resources and therefore on some kind of exception list that makes them compliant.
It is perfectly valid for them say, "Perhaps, this is true." Period. The flawed Jimmy example is nothing but a well chosen strawman that compells us to beat at its irrelevant flaw. To say "Perhaps" is to raise a possibility not to draw a conclusion and since probabilities approach but never reach zero it is never incorrect. It is not the fault of the writer that people gloss over words like "Maybe","Perhaps", "Possibly", "Might", and "Probably"; the fault lies with those ignoring these critical words and those who press for absolutes in a world without any... except, perhaps, that one.
Facts, Theories, Hypothesis, Guesses, Speculation, Fabrications, Things you saw with your own eyes, measurements, consensus, these are all things with a probability somewhere less than 100% and more than 0% and that gap, however small, is REAL. We don't know what we don't know and almost all of our certainty and confidence in what we know comes from having internally consistent models. Having consistent measurements with tools which are also built on those models calculated out to higher levels of precision only proves consistency of the model it doesn't decrease the probability there is a bigger picture at play. According to our models, what we are modeling has exists over a such a large span of time, scale, and complexity that in essentially every aspect what is possible for us to observe and measure at this point can't provide us with statistically significant confidence about anything we've concluded regarding reality and its laws.
There is even a significant chance that the stuff of reality is pure probability and is only being temporally fixed into certain laws and patterns of behavior as we speculate and define them. Just like our neurons aggregate for form a larger consciousness we are all neurons in a persistent mind... if we all snapped out of being tomorrow and a new observer appeared at a later point who knows if there would even be gravity in their temporally fixed reality.
"A platform that other apps and devices can connect into? This starts to sound a lot like an operating system for the home to me."
Seriously, this is just a wifi enabled hub. Everything wants to be a hub for your smart home now from Alex/Google Now to your TV remote.
Take some tips from someone who has a substantial smart home investment.
1. If you need perfect, turn-key, ready-to-go, solutions a smart home isn't for you yet there is nothing out there you can simply drop more money on to completely idiot-proof this tech. Even if you pay someone else to do it for you, if you want it to look anything like what companies claim their products can do then you'll have to learn a bit to USE those advanced capabilities. For starters, if you aren't willing to spend 15minutes on youtube and rewire a light switch be ready for having a far less convenient smart home setup or paying a couple hundred per outlet to have an electrician do it for you.
2. Everything and it's dog wants to be the hub/bridge/controller of your world. You need to think about how these things are going to work together logically and what happens if two of them are telling a device different things. 3. Wifi, Zigbee, Zwave, Zwave Plus, Wink, Nest, Homekit, WHAT?
Okay, this comes down to forgetting the terminology anybody else is using for anything (including the vendor) and coming back to actual network terms. Paying careful attention to the following definitions won't just help with smart home things and if you aren't a computer networking professional I recommend reading it because although you are likely familiar with some of these things, your understanding is likely off in small but important ways.
Bridge, in networking when you combine different physical connection types (wifi/4g/copper/fiber/etc) together to allow communication between them that is called bridging and any device that does that is called a bridge. A device which takes a signal and repeats it is called a repeater, a device which does the same with multiple ports is called a multi-port repeater aka a hub (from the hub and spoke design of a wagon wheel). This has a security implication in that anyone attached to one of the ports can listen to the communication of everyone else and the total reliable speed of communication for all ports combined is the speed of the slowest port. Also, no two devices can talk at the same time. A device which has multiple ports and lets you toggle between them is a switch (think of railways, at any moment the switch allows multiple possible paths but at any moment there is only one isolated path with the others disconnected). A switched path, while isolated, can only be switched one way at a given moment. If you have a six way switch you certainly can send more trains across to more places than if you had a solid line of track or even six fixed lines of track but you also still have the possibility of a collision. Solving that possibility of a collision is where the first logical layer comes in, this is layer 2 in the networking world (Ethernet is the most common and with Ethernet you will have what is called a MAC address for every connected device). Most commonly, bridges create a common layer 2 between different physical mediums. The last piece I'll fill in is layer 3, this is called the network layer and for the internet and your home network and such this will basically be the IP layer, you can just think of it as your IP Address. Assuming IPv4 this is probably something like 192.168.1.15. This really isn't four decimal digits but rather 4 8bit binary values converted to decimal to be easier to read and remember. In reality computers split this up into a network identifier and local address using a bitmask that defines how many bits of the first part are used for the network address. A connected layer 2, subnet, and LAN are often terms used as synonyms, by professionals, even though these are all technically different things. A layer 3 bridge (with ports on at least two different layer 2's) is called a router. Fi
Exactly, the algorithm is working perfectly. Since people aren't blowing up buildings left and right and yet are making bomb making stuff, maybe the people in the UK should work on desensitizing themselves to things that are done a regular basis both for practical reasons and recreation. Here in the US (where Amazon is based) we have a massive rural population and blowing stumps and the like is just daily life for those folks. For most things that is just fine and legal so long as they don't transport and for things where it isn't entirely legal... lets just say if he isn't getting anything too crazy, stockpiling anything, or hurting anyone then whatever levy Farmer John is moving or refrigerator he's blowing up on his back 40 or personal firing range is somewhere near the bottom of the list for federal agents, especially since he has a legitimate reason to buy big bags of fertilizer and large quantities of diesel and it isn't the easiest thing in the world detect if he were using something a big bigger to blow a stump.
"Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, environment, the presence of their parents, etcetera -- albeit in an unreflective, present-oriented manner. And if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don't become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go. "
If THAT is what you are calling consciousness, the self-aware higher order though which makes humans... humans then you've set the bar so low that pretty much all life (and certainly anything with a CNS) and even robots meet it.
In fairness to ShanghaiBill it is a sort of stepping stone on that path of phasing foreign workers in.
Generally the high level of the process goes something like this. 1. Find holes that can be created and identify obstacles. 2. Create holes (RIF/Fire/Expand), 3. Work understaffed to overload remaining staff and gather strategic revenue. 4. Plant agents in the manner most likely to reduce obstacles while minimizing local loyalties and ideally do so at or below the strategic revenue gained in step 3, 5. Repeat steps 1-4 leveraging planted agents. If you combine experience in enterprise size organizations with a little thought into this, you'll realize that in the current climate and business ideologies this cycle will begin and proceed even without anyone deliberately steering it.
It's a very effective system in a way. Approaching the problem of you being valuable and costing money in an almost scientific method-like fashion. At every point the company has great business justifications and assurances for staff. This way they naturally don't fire everyone at once, this is how tech companies have such massive reductions over time but it rarely makes headlines. They can always identify the remaining staff as experienced, highly skilled, and essential and this lets them justify postings for staff that are equally skilled and experienced on their technology set. That sets a very very high bar which is likely much higher than the one which developed those staff members. If they find someone who meets it locally, so be it, in the US remote, great, those workers will bring new ideas that they'll implement to prove their value, they'll force existing staff to figure out how to train new staff members who are not so threatening and when the next crunch time comes they'll help remaining staff find ways to automated and increase efficiency so they can survive the overload. Eventually they won't find someone in a reasonable timeframe (people with 10+yrs experience don't grow on trees) and they use that to justify going remote and then on to the H1B ringer.
There are definitely ways to spot it once you know what to look for. Remote flexibility, especially increasing remote flexibility, you think the flexibility is yours but the company is using a combination of proven in-house assets and proven remote workers to develop processes that remove dependence on local workers. H1B workers being integrated alongside staff. Where there are tiers of knowledge and/or specialization especially keep an eye out for these workers being placed into those tiers where within a year or two they can likely be expected train workers in the lower tiers. RIFs (especially using this term for layoffs) are a dead giveaway. Unless you are on the list, you will likely be assured these things happen periodically and your team/department/position are rarely if ever affected or if it hit really close to home that you are now in some sort of elevated spot and one of the people identified to do the more highly skilled work.
Sadly, the real threat here is to jobs paying $75-250k+ and that SHOULD pay as much or more. Over time with all the tech companies doing this kind of redundency cycling they set higher and higher bars, creating the ability to show that they need ever more highly skilled workers, salaries are out of control, and that there is an extreme shortage while more and more skilled Americans are put out of work. Those who still can stay marketable and ride the wave enjoy the growing salaries... for now, but the way they have to cycle jobs functions much like task switching "multi-tasking" using a much smaller number of highly skilled individuals to create the illusion of more people filling jobs. This helps to cover-up how ridiculous the requirements are as well as the jobs statistics creating the illusion more jobs are being created than lost. The high salaries are only appropriate because of those ridiculous requirements. Those high salaries come with zero stability or safety net, on the contrary you both are a threat to those
Those jobs aren't even posted here. Two of my last three positions have been remote. You just have to be ridiculously overqualified and meet the requirements that were intended to justify an H1-B. If they actually stumble onto what they intending as an impossible unicorn or close enough to it they'll generally hire you.
You aren't giving an accurate view of the average salary in Kansas if you aren't including California jobs that allow remote workers. Sorry Kansas, you need to pay the going rate.
I haven't found this to be true at all. Anywhere the enamel gets drilled or abased gets more decay later. Fillings aren't perfect, bacteria find their way between the edges of the fillings and the teeth and eventually work at them. And you can just forget anywhere you have a crown, bacteria get under the crown eventually.
Actually most of it is at the other end of the scale. Fewer die giving birth, being born, or from illnesses that kill children but not adults (nothing gets more attention and eradicated more quickly than a disease which kills large numbers of babies or children). Turns out eliminating deaths between 1 day old and 16 years old bumps the average WAY up.
It could be, but quite frankly I support them running with it. If only because dental health is part of body health and can in fact kill you in other ways as well and should most definitely be covered by normal health insurance. Dental insurance is a joke.
It is quite possible but mouth wash hasn't been proven by itself. I know people who generally do just that, only brushing from time to time to remove food particles instead of as daily practice, and claim to have fairly comparable results to those who brush.
No but perhaps you should search out the invisible mind altering unicorn which is watching you. There is no evidence to either confirm or deny it's existence and a lack of data does not prove the negative. The rest of us will just wait until there is data to support the idea we should torture our gums.
Now we just have to wait to see if it survives deep pockets who want to shut it down. We've had everything from mouthwashes engineered to temporarily suppress this bacteria to genetically modified bacteria that secret an antibiotic, have an immunity to said antibiotic, and release different byproducts that do not decay teeth and thus have a complete evolutionary advantage to native populations and do not leave a void that would allow another potentially harmful bacteria to invade the deep pockets of the gums. Let's not forget a stemcell treatment that allows for implanting a fresh cell in the socket and growing an entirely new tooth. There is even a simple treatment with liquid suspension of calcium and $5 worth of hardware from radioshack that was developed in the UK and heals cavities with electrolysis.
Why are we not all using these magical treatments to have perfect, healthy, minimal maintenance teeth that even get rebuilt by electrolysis to repair any wear and tear? It is far far more profitable to treat decaying teeth and it remains the widespread belief among dentists that cavities and decay are the result of irresponsible behavior. As long as dentists are not seen as medical doctors (despite treating a part of the body which can kill you if diseased) and therefore can't bill real insurance without a 2k/yr cap and dentists can get away with charging tens of thousands of dollars for a $2 implant (and to add insult to injury, charge it again when 50% of them don't take) and $6 for cubic zirconia dentures. They most definitely do NOT want to get rid of tooth decay and it has nothing to do with the $100 for filling the cavities at early stages.
For at least some of us it is partially genetic. There is a gene most commonly found alongside red hair which I myself carry. Rather than just having those big root nerves I have tiny tendrils of nerve tissue throughout my enamel. Because teeth are actually porous and not solid that not only leads to decay but the decay is far more serious once it begins because the nerves provide a path of tissue for the bacteria to follow. Even a cleaning is extremely painful for me and it has taken a long time to find a dentist office that will accept that cleanings aren't painless and give me sedation..
So either I change my ways and save the mosquitos and evil spouses or a big chunk of the world dies, coastlands reduce, and we all have to disgusting lab grown algae.... how long do I have to think about it?
Rare? Hardly. I suppose there are really lonely people out there who follow this methodology. Me, I tend to buy a stapler because I need to bind paper together. It doesn't matter how friendly the sales guy was, I'm not going to buy more staplers than I need. Office depot has better and more friendly sales people than Amazon's non-existent sales staff but Amazon crushes them because they have better marketing, they are more convenient, and they are cheaper.
Sure, but we look at more statistics with regard to athletes. Look at baseball, we look don't just look at the total number of hits a batter gets or home runs, we look at how likely the batter is to hit a run when at bat to determine their batting average. Getting more opportunities will increase your at bats but won't increase your hits when at bat except in the sense of getting more practice but you can do that outside the game. You don't just get a position on a baseball team, get a few lucky hits and have your play time increased. You go through several layers of lower level teams first and had to be that exceptional person who truly leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, including the "stars" of other teams at all those levels. At the lower level teams you don't get more playtime as the star. And your stats count for the same amount as the people you play against for every achievement.
The comparison breaks down very quickly with sales. Comparing to a batter for instance, in order to correct for assigning clients after a single successful at bat with a pitcher every time that opposing pitcher comes up from then on the pitcher has to be paired with that same batter and signal the batter on what they are going to pitch. Also, the pitcher has to choose the slowest and easiest pitches and either be neutral to or prefer the batter hit the pitch because he needs someone to hit his pitches. Also, we need to assign the pitchers scores based on how many pitches they throw a season (to account for size of client and deal) and build a total, every time a batter hits the ball he gets the pitchers score added to his score.
"They do have a point about not adequately explaining the cause of the great recession, but that is a failure on the part of whoever is teaching the macroeconomics courses at the schools in question, and not necessarily the study of economics as a whole."
The failures to explain are many fold but the biggest is the lack of regulation that allowed the banks to create many layers of imaginary macro-instruments overlay on the underlying mortgages, made those banks the sole or primary clients of the firms who were responsible for rating those instruments allowing them to get and continue to get top grade ratings as sound investments, and to disregard reality as those instruments began to fail because they were making such massive profits.
The psychological principal at the heart of capitalist and free market doctrine is critical to understanding the conflict of interest at the heart of all of this. The core of capitalism is greed. People are in fact innately greedy which is why capitalism is so successful vs other systems. But an unregulated greed based system fails on multiple levels because anyone who stands to profit for lose profit as a consequence of the regulation, even indirectly, has a conflict of interest.
Additionally, there is a belief that value is purely perception and you can create potentially unlimited value by increasing perception in the free market system. This isn't true. You can create price inflation which allows you to dillute value and siphon off the overflow but this is like filling half empty bottles of booze with water at a bar, a real economy sits beneath the products and services. There is a sweet spot sought in capitalism where you've watered down the booze some but people are still willing to purchase it. Perhaps you even sell the undilluted stuff at a premium above the watered down booze. You gain greater profits and people consume your product happily so you've created value. What is ignored is that this is another sort of pyramid scheme. You end up purchasing less alcohol so the actual producer of the underlying good has less pressure to produce and reduces production. The alcohol producer eventually raises prices, you pass that increase to the patrons and your watered down drinks now cost as much as the full strength drinks used to cost. Congrats, you've successfully found a way to get the market to bear the increase. But you've reduced overall production of the actual tangible good the currency is meant to represent, because consumers must purchase more drinks to get the same result you've increased the amount consumers must spend on alcohol vs other goods and services that drive the production of actual tangible underlying value. The consumers get fresh paychecks periodically so you create the illusion this isn't a pyramid by looking at your bar in isolation, but across the board others are dilluting the valuation of underlying goods and services as well and there is only so much in those fresh consumer paychecks. Just like bundling a large number of bad investments pretending they become more stable because of 'diversification' is faulty logic, the aggregate of these value dilluting ventures is not to create value but to create a pyramid and at some point there isn't enough new tangible underlying value being produced to sustain it.
The system does not encourage self-regulating away abuse but working around perceived problems, when awareness of pyramids spread enough they simply made the pyramids more complicated to avoid the perception rather than focus on building real value. Just like pyramids turned into MLM schemes. The success of capitalism is to recognize the link between perception and value and greed as the fundamental and unavoidable motivator and to harness both of these. The flaw is to pretend that perceived value is all that exists, this is a flawed model and on macro scale over time the flaws eventually clash with reality. The other flaw is that due to the first flaw and greed motivation self-regulation does not correct issues but only serves to
"No, it's about metrics. You can't reliably measure how much value most engineers or teachers add to an organization. But good salesmen are like star athletes."
Bogus metrics. Star athletes are rare. Pretty much anyone with social skills and poor ethical radar has the talent to qualify as a sales star. The problem with sales goals and commissions is they credit the salesman with the sale. The top sales people simply didn't fuck up the first few deals, so were given bigger leads and/or had those first few clients dedicated to them, which means law of averages their sales figures were higher, the higher they move up the warmer the leads get like big dedicated accounts buying more of what they need or other big accounts referred by people on those accounts or over lunch with contacts on those accounts. Tada. Rockstar sales guy with great numbers that put the other sales guys to shame... except none of it had anything to do with some special talent unique to that guy.
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This isn't the current stable version of apache, this is some random one of dozens frameworks built by the apache group. Very different animal. You'd get apache updates just by keeping OS updates current unless they are running windows or something ridiculous like that.
"Shouldn't someone be seeing a report of all unapplied patches and how old they are? Yell at the testing group if they age too much?"
That is probably who he is blaming. If this random one of thousands apache group framework isn't included in the scanner doing the testing or wasn't configured when they told it the list of apps a year ago, a list that has never been updated that isn't going to help. Also, if that app was on the list but generates too much noise for false positives, it will go on the exceptions list where PCI and other standards no longer apply because an exception is documented.
But lets be real here, they added security staff. The only thing that will have done is throw up 200 checks and silos that cause any sort of administration to slow to a crawl... including applying patches.
"If .25Bn has been invested then there's sure as hell no process that could have allowed a single critical patch go unchecked as described. There's teams, or should be teams of people watching these things."
.25Bn and teams of people sounds like the problem to me. Like in every other large enterprise environment that leads to a whole lot of procedures and massive dysfunctional security theater. The security people want everything silo'd, disconnected, and to tie the hands of ops in every way possible and then want everything fully patched on a schedule that simply isn't feasible at that scale operationally. Generally there is something like a 90 day requirement on critical patches... in a large enterprise environment you probably won't even find out all the applications that are running in 1-5yrs, let alone keep up with every patch for every application that doesn't get bundled with OS patches. And of course half their environment is probably ancient EOL or EOL for everybody who couldn't get the vendor to make a super special exception that isn't actually backed by any resources and therefore on some kind of exception list that makes them compliant.
The
"Your hypothesis does not directly explain why results differed so dramatically between patients."
No but time would.
It is perfectly valid for them say, "Perhaps, this is true." Period. The flawed Jimmy example is nothing but a well chosen strawman that compells us to beat at its irrelevant flaw. To say "Perhaps" is to raise a possibility not to draw a conclusion and since probabilities approach but never reach zero it is never incorrect. It is not the fault of the writer that people gloss over words like "Maybe","Perhaps", "Possibly", "Might", and "Probably"; the fault lies with those ignoring these critical words and those who press for absolutes in a world without any... except, perhaps, that one.
Facts, Theories, Hypothesis, Guesses, Speculation, Fabrications, Things you saw with your own eyes, measurements, consensus, these are all things with a probability somewhere less than 100% and more than 0% and that gap, however small, is REAL. We don't know what we don't know and almost all of our certainty and confidence in what we know comes from having internally consistent models. Having consistent measurements with tools which are also built on those models calculated out to higher levels of precision only proves consistency of the model it doesn't decrease the probability there is a bigger picture at play. According to our models, what we are modeling has exists over a such a large span of time, scale, and complexity that in essentially every aspect what is possible for us to observe and measure at this point can't provide us with statistically significant confidence about anything we've concluded regarding reality and its laws.
There is even a significant chance that the stuff of reality is pure probability and is only being temporally fixed into certain laws and patterns of behavior as we speculate and define them. Just like our neurons aggregate for form a larger consciousness we are all neurons in a persistent mind... if we all snapped out of being tomorrow and a new observer appeared at a later point who knows if there would even be gravity in their temporally fixed reality.
"A platform that other apps and devices can connect into? This starts to sound a lot like an operating system for the home to me."
Seriously, this is just a wifi enabled hub. Everything wants to be a hub for your smart home now from Alex/Google Now to your TV remote.
Take some tips from someone who has a substantial smart home investment.
1. If you need perfect, turn-key, ready-to-go, solutions a smart home isn't for you yet there is nothing out there you can simply drop more money on to completely idiot-proof this tech. Even if you pay someone else to do it for you, if you want it to look anything like what companies claim their products can do then you'll have to learn a bit to USE those advanced capabilities. For starters, if you aren't willing to spend 15minutes on youtube and rewire a light switch be ready for having a far less convenient smart home setup or paying a couple hundred per outlet to have an electrician do it for you.
2. Everything and it's dog wants to be the hub/bridge/controller of your world. You need to think about how these things are going to work together logically and what happens if two of them are telling a device different things.
3. Wifi, Zigbee, Zwave, Zwave Plus, Wink, Nest, Homekit, WHAT?
Okay, this comes down to forgetting the terminology anybody else is using for anything (including the vendor) and coming back to actual network terms. Paying careful attention to the following definitions won't just help with smart home things and if you aren't a computer networking professional I recommend reading it because although you are likely familiar with some of these things, your understanding is likely off in small but important ways.
Bridge, in networking when you combine different physical connection types (wifi/4g/copper/fiber/etc) together to allow communication between them that is called bridging and any device that does that is called a bridge. A device which takes a signal and repeats it is called a repeater, a device which does the same with multiple ports is called a multi-port repeater aka a hub (from the hub and spoke design of a wagon wheel). This has a security implication in that anyone attached to one of the ports can listen to the communication of everyone else and the total reliable speed of communication for all ports combined is the speed of the slowest port. Also, no two devices can talk at the same time. A device which has multiple ports and lets you toggle between them is a switch (think of railways, at any moment the switch allows multiple possible paths but at any moment there is only one isolated path with the others disconnected). A switched path, while isolated, can only be switched one way at a given moment. If you have a six way switch you certainly can send more trains across to more places than if you had a solid line of track or even six fixed lines of track but you also still have the possibility of a collision. Solving that possibility of a collision is where the first logical layer comes in, this is layer 2 in the networking world (Ethernet is the most common and with Ethernet you will have what is called a MAC address for every connected device). Most commonly, bridges create a common layer 2 between different physical mediums. The last piece I'll fill in is layer 3, this is called the network layer and for the internet and your home network and such this will basically be the IP layer, you can just think of it as your IP Address. Assuming IPv4 this is probably something like 192.168.1.15. This really isn't four decimal digits but rather 4 8bit binary values converted to decimal to be easier to read and remember. In reality computers split this up into a network identifier and local address using a bitmask that defines how many bits of the first part are used for the network address. A connected layer 2, subnet, and LAN are often terms used as synonyms, by professionals, even though these are all technically different things. A layer 3 bridge (with ports on at least two different layer 2's) is called a router. Fi
Exactly, the algorithm is working perfectly. Since people aren't blowing up buildings left and right and yet are making bomb making stuff, maybe the people in the UK should work on desensitizing themselves to things that are done a regular basis both for practical reasons and recreation. Here in the US (where Amazon is based) we have a massive rural population and blowing stumps and the like is just daily life for those folks. For most things that is just fine and legal so long as they don't transport and for things where it isn't entirely legal... lets just say if he isn't getting anything too crazy, stockpiling anything, or hurting anyone then whatever levy Farmer John is moving or refrigerator he's blowing up on his back 40 or personal firing range is somewhere near the bottom of the list for federal agents, especially since he has a legitimate reason to buy big bags of fertilizer and large quantities of diesel and it isn't the easiest thing in the world detect if he were using something a big bigger to blow a stump.
"Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, environment, the presence of their parents, etcetera -- albeit in an unreflective, present-oriented manner. And if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don't become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go. "
If THAT is what you are calling consciousness, the self-aware higher order though which makes humans... humans then you've set the bar so low that pretty much all life (and certainly anything with a CNS) and even robots meet it.
In fairness to ShanghaiBill it is a sort of stepping stone on that path of phasing foreign workers in.
Generally the high level of the process goes something like this. 1. Find holes that can be created and identify obstacles. 2. Create holes (RIF/Fire/Expand), 3. Work understaffed to overload remaining staff and gather strategic revenue. 4. Plant agents in the manner most likely to reduce obstacles while minimizing local loyalties and ideally do so at or below the strategic revenue gained in step 3, 5. Repeat steps 1-4 leveraging planted agents. If you combine experience in enterprise size organizations with a little thought into this, you'll realize that in the current climate and business ideologies this cycle will begin and proceed even without anyone deliberately steering it.
It's a very effective system in a way. Approaching the problem of you being valuable and costing money in an almost scientific method-like fashion. At every point the company has great business justifications and assurances for staff. This way they naturally don't fire everyone at once, this is how tech companies have such massive reductions over time but it rarely makes headlines. They can always identify the remaining staff as experienced, highly skilled, and essential and this lets them justify postings for staff that are equally skilled and experienced on their technology set. That sets a very very high bar which is likely much higher than the one which developed those staff members. If they find someone who meets it locally, so be it, in the US remote, great, those workers will bring new ideas that they'll implement to prove their value, they'll force existing staff to figure out how to train new staff members who are not so threatening and when the next crunch time comes they'll help remaining staff find ways to automated and increase efficiency so they can survive the overload. Eventually they won't find someone in a reasonable timeframe (people with 10+yrs experience don't grow on trees) and they use that to justify going remote and then on to the H1B ringer.
There are definitely ways to spot it once you know what to look for. Remote flexibility, especially increasing remote flexibility, you think the flexibility is yours but the company is using a combination of proven in-house assets and proven remote workers to develop processes that remove dependence on local workers. H1B workers being integrated alongside staff. Where there are tiers of knowledge and/or specialization especially keep an eye out for these workers being placed into those tiers where within a year or two they can likely be expected train workers in the lower tiers. RIFs (especially using this term for layoffs) are a dead giveaway. Unless you are on the list, you will likely be assured these things happen periodically and your team/department/position are rarely if ever affected or if it hit really close to home that you are now in some sort of elevated spot and one of the people identified to do the more highly skilled work.
Sadly, the real threat here is to jobs paying $75-250k+ and that SHOULD pay as much or more. Over time with all the tech companies doing this kind of redundency cycling they set higher and higher bars, creating the ability to show that they need ever more highly skilled workers, salaries are out of control, and that there is an extreme shortage while more and more skilled Americans are put out of work. Those who still can stay marketable and ride the wave enjoy the growing salaries... for now, but the way they have to cycle jobs functions much like task switching "multi-tasking" using a much smaller number of highly skilled individuals to create the illusion of more people filling jobs. This helps to cover-up how ridiculous the requirements are as well as the jobs statistics creating the illusion more jobs are being created than lost. The high salaries are only appropriate because of those ridiculous requirements. Those high salaries come with zero stability or safety net, on the contrary you both are a threat to those
Those jobs aren't even posted here. Two of my last three positions have been remote. You just have to be ridiculously overqualified and meet the requirements that were intended to justify an H1-B. If they actually stumble onto what they intending as an impossible unicorn or close enough to it they'll generally hire you.
You aren't giving an accurate view of the average salary in Kansas if you aren't including California jobs that allow remote workers. Sorry Kansas, you need to pay the going rate.
I haven't found this to be true at all. Anywhere the enamel gets drilled or abased gets more decay later. Fillings aren't perfect, bacteria find their way between the edges of the fillings and the teeth and eventually work at them. And you can just forget anywhere you have a crown, bacteria get under the crown eventually.
Sure but if you made it to 50 you likely died of malnutrition because you couldn't eat properly with those rotted and worn teeth.
Don't forget infection of any and all serious wounds and many minor ones. I'd certainly be dead a hundred times over without antibiotics.
Actually most of it is at the other end of the scale. Fewer die giving birth, being born, or from illnesses that kill children but not adults (nothing gets more attention and eradicated more quickly than a disease which kills large numbers of babies or children). Turns out eliminating deaths between 1 day old and 16 years old bumps the average WAY up.
It could be, but quite frankly I support them running with it. If only because dental health is part of body health and can in fact kill you in other ways as well and should most definitely be covered by normal health insurance. Dental insurance is a joke.
It is quite possible but mouth wash hasn't been proven by itself. I know people who generally do just that, only brushing from time to time to remove food particles instead of as daily practice, and claim to have fairly comparable results to those who brush.
No but perhaps you should search out the invisible mind altering unicorn which is watching you. There is no evidence to either confirm or deny it's existence and a lack of data does not prove the negative. The rest of us will just wait until there is data to support the idea we should torture our gums.
Now we just have to wait to see if it survives deep pockets who want to shut it down. We've had everything from mouthwashes engineered to temporarily suppress this bacteria to genetically modified bacteria that secret an antibiotic, have an immunity to said antibiotic, and release different byproducts that do not decay teeth and thus have a complete evolutionary advantage to native populations and do not leave a void that would allow another potentially harmful bacteria to invade the deep pockets of the gums. Let's not forget a stemcell treatment that allows for implanting a fresh cell in the socket and growing an entirely new tooth. There is even a simple treatment with liquid suspension of calcium and $5 worth of hardware from radioshack that was developed in the UK and heals cavities with electrolysis.
Why are we not all using these magical treatments to have perfect, healthy, minimal maintenance teeth that even get rebuilt by electrolysis to repair any wear and tear? It is far far more profitable to treat decaying teeth and it remains the widespread belief among dentists that cavities and decay are the result of irresponsible behavior. As long as dentists are not seen as medical doctors (despite treating a part of the body which can kill you if diseased) and therefore can't bill real insurance without a 2k/yr cap and dentists can get away with charging tens of thousands of dollars for a $2 implant (and to add insult to injury, charge it again when 50% of them don't take) and $6 for cubic zirconia dentures. They most definitely do NOT want to get rid of tooth decay and it has nothing to do with the $100 for filling the cavities at early stages.
For at least some of us it is partially genetic. There is a gene most commonly found alongside red hair which I myself carry. Rather than just having those big root nerves I have tiny tendrils of nerve tissue throughout my enamel. Because teeth are actually porous and not solid that not only leads to decay but the decay is far more serious once it begins because the nerves provide a path of tissue for the bacteria to follow. Even a cleaning is extremely painful for me and it has taken a long time to find a dentist office that will accept that cleanings aren't painless and give me sedation..
So either I change my ways and save the mosquitos and evil spouses or a big chunk of the world dies, coastlands reduce, and we all have to disgusting lab grown algae.... how long do I have to think about it?
Rare? Hardly. I suppose there are really lonely people out there who follow this methodology. Me, I tend to buy a stapler because I need to bind paper together. It doesn't matter how friendly the sales guy was, I'm not going to buy more staplers than I need. Office depot has better and more friendly sales people than Amazon's non-existent sales staff but Amazon crushes them because they have better marketing, they are more convenient, and they are cheaper.
Sure, but we look at more statistics with regard to athletes. Look at baseball, we look don't just look at the total number of hits a batter gets or home runs, we look at how likely the batter is to hit a run when at bat to determine their batting average. Getting more opportunities will increase your at bats but won't increase your hits when at bat except in the sense of getting more practice but you can do that outside the game. You don't just get a position on a baseball team, get a few lucky hits and have your play time increased. You go through several layers of lower level teams first and had to be that exceptional person who truly leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, including the "stars" of other teams at all those levels. At the lower level teams you don't get more playtime as the star. And your stats count for the same amount as the people you play against for every achievement.
The comparison breaks down very quickly with sales. Comparing to a batter for instance, in order to correct for assigning clients after a single successful at bat with a pitcher every time that opposing pitcher comes up from then on the pitcher has to be paired with that same batter and signal the batter on what they are going to pitch. Also, the pitcher has to choose the slowest and easiest pitches and either be neutral to or prefer the batter hit the pitch because he needs someone to hit his pitches. Also, we need to assign the pitchers scores based on how many pitches they throw a season (to account for size of client and deal) and build a total, every time a batter hits the ball he gets the pitchers score added to his score.
"They do have a point about not adequately explaining the cause of the great recession, but that is a failure on the part of whoever is teaching the macroeconomics courses at the schools in question, and not necessarily the study of economics as a whole."
The failures to explain are many fold but the biggest is the lack of regulation that allowed the banks to create many layers of imaginary macro-instruments overlay on the underlying mortgages, made those banks the sole or primary clients of the firms who were responsible for rating those instruments allowing them to get and continue to get top grade ratings as sound investments, and to disregard reality as those instruments began to fail because they were making such massive profits.
The psychological principal at the heart of capitalist and free market doctrine is critical to understanding the conflict of interest at the heart of all of this. The core of capitalism is greed. People are in fact innately greedy which is why capitalism is so successful vs other systems. But an unregulated greed based system fails on multiple levels because anyone who stands to profit for lose profit as a consequence of the regulation, even indirectly, has a conflict of interest.
Additionally, there is a belief that value is purely perception and you can create potentially unlimited value by increasing perception in the free market system. This isn't true. You can create price inflation which allows you to dillute value and siphon off the overflow but this is like filling half empty bottles of booze with water at a bar, a real economy sits beneath the products and services. There is a sweet spot sought in capitalism where you've watered down the booze some but people are still willing to purchase it. Perhaps you even sell the undilluted stuff at a premium above the watered down booze. You gain greater profits and people consume your product happily so you've created value. What is ignored is that this is another sort of pyramid scheme. You end up purchasing less alcohol so the actual producer of the underlying good has less pressure to produce and reduces production. The alcohol producer eventually raises prices, you pass that increase to the patrons and your watered down drinks now cost as much as the full strength drinks used to cost. Congrats, you've successfully found a way to get the market to bear the increase. But you've reduced overall production of the actual tangible good the currency is meant to represent, because consumers must purchase more drinks to get the same result you've increased the amount consumers must spend on alcohol vs other goods and services that drive the production of actual tangible underlying value. The consumers get fresh paychecks periodically so you create the illusion this isn't a pyramid by looking at your bar in isolation, but across the board others are dilluting the valuation of underlying goods and services as well and there is only so much in those fresh consumer paychecks. Just like bundling a large number of bad investments pretending they become more stable because of 'diversification' is faulty logic, the aggregate of these value dilluting ventures is not to create value but to create a pyramid and at some point there isn't enough new tangible underlying value being produced to sustain it.
The system does not encourage self-regulating away abuse but working around perceived problems, when awareness of pyramids spread enough they simply made the pyramids more complicated to avoid the perception rather than focus on building real value. Just like pyramids turned into MLM schemes. The success of capitalism is to recognize the link between perception and value and greed as the fundamental and unavoidable motivator and to harness both of these. The flaw is to pretend that perceived value is all that exists, this is a flawed model and on macro scale over time the flaws eventually clash with reality. The other flaw is that due to the first flaw and greed motivation self-regulation does not correct issues but only serves to
"No, it's about metrics. You can't reliably measure how much value most engineers or teachers add to an organization. But good salesmen are like star athletes."
Bogus metrics. Star athletes are rare. Pretty much anyone with social skills and poor ethical radar has the talent to qualify as a sales star. The problem with sales goals and commissions is they credit the salesman with the sale. The top sales people simply didn't fuck up the first few deals, so were given bigger leads and/or had those first few clients dedicated to them, which means law of averages their sales figures were higher, the higher they move up the warmer the leads get like big dedicated accounts buying more of what they need or other big accounts referred by people on those accounts or over lunch with contacts on those accounts. Tada. Rockstar sales guy with great numbers that put the other sales guys to shame... except none of it had anything to do with some special talent unique to that guy.