Fortunately, there is now the ACA to address the health insurance issue. Much better than Cobra from a cost standpoint.
Fortunately? No, I don't think so. The cost of insurance under the ACA is at least as high as Cobra used to be. If there is a plus side it is that at least when you lose your job you can now budget for paying the same amount in insurance afterwards. Don't forget to include the 20% per year rate hike! And don't bother checking if you qualify for any assistance just because you lost your job and don't have any income. I have no income and still don't qualify for assistance with my government mandated insurance. Not even tax credits.
The fear of this sort of fiasco makes establishing the company in London instead far more attractive. So the French are ever more stripped of talent. As a Brit I am grateful to the French for sending us so many talented people, but for the folk in France this is BAD NEWS. And this sort of story will discourage risk taking there even more.
London! Ha! Open it in the U.S. Tell all your employees that you are paying them low now and can't pay them overtime but very soon now they will have ownership and bonuses and raises. Oh, and we need you to work every evening and weekend forever. Then, when you finally reach profitability due to the efforts of your employees, get rid of the ones that put the most work in.
That's what my company did to me. They also made me sign a contract not to tell anybody about that in exchange for two months severance. But since they stopped paying me after the two months severance and I am not receiving any remuneration for my side of the contract, I don't see why I should still honor it. Also, the contract said they would pay me a certain amount, but they did not, they gave most of it to the U.S. Government, so the contract is void. Also, the contract said they would reimburse me for any outstanding expenses, and they did not, so the contract is void.
Wow, you Republicans are so stupid. Really? Does you kind not know how to spell their? You are so stupid. You are too stupid to live. Too bad your kind has enslaved us and made the smart people your slaves. I know you hate us and want us to die like the rest of your kind. You are so stupid.
Thank you for including the obligatory grammar error in your grammar flame. Oh, and you misspelled Democrats.
These 'greedy ex-employees' wanted their money & 'be damned with who gets hurt'.
Excuse me? If someone performs services for an employer for an agreed amount, they are selfish for wanting the employer to pay them? Apparently the judge ordered it paid all at once. So they are selfish for wanting the employer to pay them the wages they were due months ago in a manner that the courts said must be done? How about the employer is selfish for not having paid them in the first place. Why blame the victim. The employer is the one that did not fulfill the contract. The employees deserve every penny they worked for. If the company's business model was dependent upon not paying its employees than it is not the employees that should take it on the chin. That is what the C level people get paid for. To take risk. The people working for a pittance shouldn't be the ones taking all the risk.
Running a successful business is certainly a special skill set.
The real question is, what is the company more dependent on?
This question can be answered just fine with a private business. But once the business goes public, then the answer is a straightforward "the shareholders". And this is the real crux of the problem.
From what I can see, the decisions made are not always in the shareholders best interest either. it is usually in the C** and Board Members best interest. Some of the decisions might also be said to be in the shared traders best interest, but definitely not in the shareholders best interest. Firing a couple of people to improve this quarters earnings when you are going to need those people or someone like them in the next quarter is an idiot move. You will have to pay more in the long term than just keeping the people on. But that sort of stuff happens all the time. People are absolutely focused on this quarter's earnings to the detriment of every quarter afterwards. That is no way to run a company. Unless you are a CEO with a great golden parachute that you can live off of until the next doomed company picks you up.
I live about 1 mile from the end of a runway where AWACS are frequently practicing approaches. This means executing an approach, then breaking off, accelerating to full throttle, and executing the missed approach procedure, and going around and doing it again. AWACS are old 707 airframes with noisy engines. I really don't have an issue with the noise. Every once in awhile they will do a radius arc approach which has them about 1,000 feet above my house with full flaps and high engine output. That is noisy, but after a couple of seconds they fly by and everything is peaceful again. I don't really see any reason to get all agitated when the noise level is not really all that bad and the airport has been here for about 75 years. Civilian airports have much quieter aircraft, although they do usually have more operating at a given time. Civilian airports also are frequently subject to noise reduction procedures. I doubt that they see as much noise as those of us living by a military base, and the military base is easily tolerable.
Why would we want to add the expense of this? Only poor people live near the airport, and they don't matter, and we must pave everything flat to maximize profit anyway.
In some countries poor people live near airports. IN the U.S. upper middle class people buy near the airport and then complain about the noise. Or rich people live on the airport itself, and don't complain about the noise at all, especially since they own a plane.
Nice. Still great to find some good 'ol casual racism on Slashdot. I'm sorry that you're afraid of black people using your pristine, blond-haired blue eyed protestant internet.
So you are saying that all poor people are black? Racist.
Seriously Extending universal service, lifeline, and the like to internet access is brain dead obvious. There are many local and state government related functions that are now, or will be in the very near future internet/only/.
In my area this June there will be a subsided housing wait list who's status can/only/ be checked on the internet. The local library is already getting ready to handle the influx of low income residents that need to check their status.
And yes, this probably means smart phones. Self contained, portable, wireless internet access. Mobile internet browsing is already an accepted standard that all modern sites accommodate.
I sure would hate to have to do any kind of applying for jobs or checking status on government programs on a smart phone. Smart phones suck at stuff like that. Not to mention many Government sites (like the Unemployment site in my state) require that you use IE 9. If you don't it puts you in an endless loop. This is a pain when your IE updates automatically or you are using a phone, for which IE 9 is not available.
I am out of work right now and have to pay for my broadband, cable TV and phone. Why should I pay an additional amount so that other people can get broadband, cable TV and phones for free?
There exist a system fÃr detection of hinders in all cars. It's called a driver.
The driver should never use a feature of a car that can make it move in a way that it can hit a human.
Its common sense.
This is true. That is why they shouldn't be installing autonomous parking and driving systems. They will never be a substitute for a human being. If people are going to blame the human when the feature didn't work correctly, then there is no point in having that feature. Manufacturers, please stop putting these outrageously expensive systems into our cars which do not work sufficiently, increase driver liability and drive up the cost of cars.
I've never seen powerpoint used for an in depth technical meeting. I have only seen it used to give the 50,000 foot view so that the higher-ups eyes don't glaze over during the meeting.
Mod parent up. I also can vouch for the 30 second reset button. There is no way the engine could be operating without an engineer unless it was being remotely operated from the rear. I can also confirm that many Amtrak consists have a locomotive in the back and one in the front. They often do this on commuter routes to avoid having to shuffle engines around from one end to the other. Metra in Chicago actually has locomotive controls and a tiny control room in the second floor of some of their double decker passenger cars, but I am not aware of Amtrak having anything similar.
Dunno - it's pretty hard to account for why the dude was doing 100+ mph on a 50mph curve.
Oh, I could probably imagine a few scenarios. Probably the most likely being that dispatch told him to make up some time.
Ultimately, the engineer is responsible for the safety of the passengers, but if he chose to obey the speed limit when he was told to get there faster, the fact that he saved all those people will be of little consolation when he gets fired and can't get hired on anywhere else because 1) there isn't anyone else and 2) he disobeyed a direct order from dispatch.
I have a 12 year old BMW with an integrated navigation system. It works very well indeed. It is simple to use.
What I hate about the newer model BMW's is that the UI has become extremely complicated. It is not any easier to use and I actually find it slower.
I'm not convinced at all that things are improving.
I've got a 2011 BMW and I like the UI pretty well. The only thing I find a little irritating is that it doesn't just let you start entering an address, you have to select a city first, and then a street. When you put in the street they have it broken down by zip code, which I don't always know, so sometimes I have to take a couple of stabs to get the address range that fits the street address I am looking for.
I guess I need to see one of the 2003 models to see what was different about them.
Get of our lawn. Yankee. What we do in our country is our own business. If we limit our taxi business for good reasons (see other posts), then it is not up to you to insult us. You can do in your country, as it pleases you.
No argument here. I think it is good that we limit the number of taxis and ensure that they are licensed and regulated. Established Taxi Services had to pay for a medallion and it absolutely is unfair competition if a competitor is allowed to operate without having to obey the same laws that every other taxi service complies with.
"Unfair competition", against government laws whose purpose is, against the concept of freedom, to restrict competition? Against a government/big business coalition to carve up the rights to sell to people-qua-owned cattle?
How ludicrous.
Well, it seems unfair if all of the previous people that started a taxi business had to be pay for a medallion, but suddenly Uber comes in and doesn't have to. If we are going to get all butthurt that Uber shouldn't have to pay, then go ahead and refund the $100k to all the other drivers as well. I am sure they will appreciate it.
Maybe Microsoft could make a Blackberry crash. I personally had believed that phones crashing was just a joke because my Blackberry literally never crashed or needed rebooting. Then I got an Android and found out that, yes, phones really do crash. Apparently iphones do too, from what I hear from iphone owners, however, iphones crash because it is Job's will.
There are exactly 0 valid reasons why gay couples shouldn't be allowed to get married, that's it, zero reasons, as in absolutely none. Any country or region which bans gay marriage or has to ask if it should be allowed it just a bunch of uncivilized hicks who need to grow up.
Oh, OK, well end of thread then.
Oh wait, what about all of the billions of people in the world who think the exact same thing as you except they use "should" instead of "shouldn't".
Starbucks is a nasty company. Its CEO Howard Schultz is a fanatical Zionist; if you patronize Starbucks, you're supporting Israeli genocide.
Being a publicly traded company, the financial information is available, so go ahead and show on their financials where they are sending money to support Israeli genocide.
yes yes... but it says "exceptionally good reason"... there must be harm... exceptionally serious harm... right?
I know it was a slanted story as soon as I saw "toxic" in the headline. These beads are not toxic. Also, the story says they are 5mm in diameter, which is the size of a large pea. According to Wikipedia, they are far smaller than that, from 1mm to 0.001mm. TFA says that 471 million of them enter SF Bay every day. But taking the average size at 0.1mm and a density of 1gm/cc, that is less than a kg.
Yes, but if we continue at this rate, then in only 1.15 million years, we will have higher than the accepted rate of Total Disolved Solids in San Franciso Bay, assuming none of it leaks out into the rest of the ocean.
I have seen what you are talking about, but there is no reason why java programming should have to go hand in hand with utter dependence on third party libraries. Where I used to work, there were two programming departments. We both did Java, but the other department was dead set on spending days and weeks researching third party solutions for simple problems. Then they would spend trying to learn the interface. Then inevitably, if there was a problem, it always seemed to be in the third part code. Well, of course, if you need to add two plus two, and you download a Cray simulator library to accomplish this, then you have to instantiate the library, and seed it with the two numbers, and start the thread that does the calculation, then receive the even that it is done, then retrieve the data, well you see where this is going.
I am not in favor of reinventing the wheel, but if it is going to take less time for me to write something than to research third party solutions and figure out how to integrate to them, and I can control the code, then I will be reinventing that wheel rather than download the global transportation library so I can use their wheel.
That's not Java. It's the corporate mentality of replacing older experienced programmers with newer cheaper programmers or offshoring. You get service applications that have to fire up a remote desktop session so it can write messages to the screen (What!). You get "uncaught exception". You get programs that will fail one time and work the next on the same input. What the heck, do they have a random number generator in there? I have seen this with Ruby, Python, C++, on and on.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, there is now the ACA to address the health insurance issue. Much better than Cobra from a cost standpoint.
Fortunately? No, I don't think so. The cost of insurance under the ACA is at least as high as Cobra used to be. If there is a plus side it is that at least when you lose your job you can now budget for paying the same amount in insurance afterwards. Don't forget to include the 20% per year rate hike! And don't bother checking if you qualify for any assistance just because you lost your job and don't have any income. I have no income and still don't qualify for assistance with my government mandated insurance. Not even tax credits.
The fear of this sort of fiasco makes establishing the company in London instead far more attractive. So the French are ever more stripped of talent. As a Brit I am grateful to the French for sending us so many talented people, but for the folk in France this is BAD NEWS. And this sort of story will discourage risk taking there even more.
London! Ha! Open it in the U.S. Tell all your employees that you are paying them low now and can't pay them overtime but very soon now they will have ownership and bonuses and raises. Oh, and we need you to work every evening and weekend forever. Then, when you finally reach profitability due to the efforts of your employees, get rid of the ones that put the most work in.
That's what my company did to me. They also made me sign a contract not to tell anybody about that in exchange for two months severance. But since they stopped paying me after the two months severance and I am not receiving any remuneration for my side of the contract, I don't see why I should still honor it. Also, the contract said they would pay me a certain amount, but they did not, they gave most of it to the U.S. Government, so the contract is void. Also, the contract said they would reimburse me for any outstanding expenses, and they did not, so the contract is void.
. This time they closed there doors.
Where doors?
Wow, you Republicans are so stupid. Really? Does you kind not know how to spell their? You are so stupid. You are too stupid to live. Too bad your kind has enslaved us and made the smart people your slaves. I know you hate us and want us to die like the rest of your kind. You are so stupid.
Thank you for including the obligatory grammar error in your grammar flame. Oh, and you misspelled Democrats.
These 'greedy ex-employees' wanted their money & 'be damned with who gets hurt'.
Excuse me? If someone performs services for an employer for an agreed amount, they are selfish for wanting the employer to pay them? Apparently the judge ordered it paid all at once. So they are selfish for wanting the employer to pay them the wages they were due months ago in a manner that the courts said must be done? How about the employer is selfish for not having paid them in the first place. Why blame the victim. The employer is the one that did not fulfill the contract. The employees deserve every penny they worked for. If the company's business model was dependent upon not paying its employees than it is not the employees that should take it on the chin. That is what the C level people get paid for. To take risk. The people working for a pittance shouldn't be the ones taking all the risk.
Running a successful business is certainly a special skill set. The real question is, what is the company more dependent on? This question can be answered just fine with a private business. But once the business goes public, then the answer is a straightforward "the shareholders". And this is the real crux of the problem.
From what I can see, the decisions made are not always in the shareholders best interest either. it is usually in the C** and Board Members best interest. Some of the decisions might also be said to be in the shared traders best interest, but definitely not in the shareholders best interest. Firing a couple of people to improve this quarters earnings when you are going to need those people or someone like them in the next quarter is an idiot move. You will have to pay more in the long term than just keeping the people on. But that sort of stuff happens all the time. People are absolutely focused on this quarter's earnings to the detriment of every quarter afterwards. That is no way to run a company. Unless you are a CEO with a great golden parachute that you can live off of until the next doomed company picks you up.
I live about 1 mile from the end of a runway where AWACS are frequently practicing approaches. This means executing an approach, then breaking off, accelerating to full throttle, and executing the missed approach procedure, and going around and doing it again. AWACS are old 707 airframes with noisy engines. I really don't have an issue with the noise. Every once in awhile they will do a radius arc approach which has them about 1,000 feet above my house with full flaps and high engine output. That is noisy, but after a couple of seconds they fly by and everything is peaceful again. I don't really see any reason to get all agitated when the noise level is not really all that bad and the airport has been here for about 75 years. Civilian airports have much quieter aircraft, although they do usually have more operating at a given time. Civilian airports also are frequently subject to noise reduction procedures. I doubt that they see as much noise as those of us living by a military base, and the military base is easily tolerable.
Why would we want to add the expense of this? Only poor people live near the airport, and they don't matter, and we must pave everything flat to maximize profit anyway.
In some countries poor people live near airports. IN the U.S. upper middle class people buy near the airport and then complain about the noise. Or rich people live on the airport itself, and don't complain about the noise at all, especially since they own a plane.
Well it may not show how well they party, but the SAT has a large essay portion
I don't remember an essay portion on the SAT. Is this a new thing (as in the last 25 years)?
Nice. Still great to find some good 'ol casual racism on Slashdot. I'm sorry that you're afraid of black people using your pristine, blond-haired blue eyed protestant internet.
So you are saying that all poor people are black? Racist.
Seriously Extending universal service, lifeline, and the like to internet access is brain dead obvious. There are many local and state government related functions that are now, or will be in the very near future internet /only/.
In my area this June there will be a subsided housing wait list who's status can /only/ be checked on the internet. The local library is already getting ready to handle the influx of low income residents that need to check their status.
And yes, this probably means smart phones. Self contained, portable, wireless internet access. Mobile internet browsing is already an accepted standard that all modern sites accommodate.
I sure would hate to have to do any kind of applying for jobs or checking status on government programs on a smart phone. Smart phones suck at stuff like that. Not to mention many Government sites (like the Unemployment site in my state) require that you use IE 9. If you don't it puts you in an endless loop. This is a pain when your IE updates automatically or you are using a phone, for which IE 9 is not available.
I am out of work right now and have to pay for my broadband, cable TV and phone. Why should I pay an additional amount so that other people can get broadband, cable TV and phones for free?
Well, what a refreshing change of pace. Instead of the commenters setting up strawmen and beating them down, the article takes care of that for us.
There exist a system fÃr detection of hinders in all cars. It's called a driver.
The driver should never use a feature of a car that can make it move in a way that it can hit a human.
Its common sense.
This is true. That is why they shouldn't be installing autonomous parking and driving systems. They will never be a substitute for a human being. If people are going to blame the human when the feature didn't work correctly, then there is no point in having that feature. Manufacturers, please stop putting these outrageously expensive systems into our cars which do not work sufficiently, increase driver liability and drive up the cost of cars.
I've never seen powerpoint used for an in depth technical meeting. I have only seen it used to give the 50,000 foot view so that the higher-ups eyes don't glaze over during the meeting.
Mod parent up. I also can vouch for the 30 second reset button. There is no way the engine could be operating without an engineer unless it was being remotely operated from the rear. I can also confirm that many Amtrak consists have a locomotive in the back and one in the front. They often do this on commuter routes to avoid having to shuffle engines around from one end to the other. Metra in Chicago actually has locomotive controls and a tiny control room in the second floor of some of their double decker passenger cars, but I am not aware of Amtrak having anything similar.
Dunno - it's pretty hard to account for why the dude was doing 100+ mph on a 50mph curve.
Oh, I could probably imagine a few scenarios. Probably the most likely being that dispatch told him to make up some time.
Ultimately, the engineer is responsible for the safety of the passengers, but if he chose to obey the speed limit when he was told to get there faster, the fact that he saved all those people will be of little consolation when he gets fired and can't get hired on anywhere else because 1) there isn't anyone else and 2) he disobeyed a direct order from dispatch.
I have a 12 year old BMW with an integrated navigation system. It works very well indeed. It is simple to use.
What I hate about the newer model BMW's is that the UI has become extremely complicated. It is not any easier to use and I actually find it slower.
I'm not convinced at all that things are improving.
I've got a 2011 BMW and I like the UI pretty well. The only thing I find a little irritating is that it doesn't just let you start entering an address, you have to select a city first, and then a street. When you put in the street they have it broken down by zip code, which I don't always know, so sometimes I have to take a couple of stabs to get the address range that fits the street address I am looking for.
I guess I need to see one of the 2003 models to see what was different about them.
Get of our lawn. Yankee. What we do in our country is our own business. If we limit our taxi business for good reasons (see other posts), then it is not up to you to insult us. You can do in your country, as it pleases you.
No argument here. I think it is good that we limit the number of taxis and ensure that they are licensed and regulated. Established Taxi Services had to pay for a medallion and it absolutely is unfair competition if a competitor is allowed to operate without having to obey the same laws that every other taxi service complies with.
"Unfair competition", against government laws whose purpose is, against the concept of freedom, to restrict competition? Against a government/big business coalition to carve up the rights to sell to people-qua-owned cattle?
How ludicrous.
Well, it seems unfair if all of the previous people that started a taxi business had to be pay for a medallion, but suddenly Uber comes in and doesn't have to. If we are going to get all butthurt that Uber shouldn't have to pay, then go ahead and refund the $100k to all the other drivers as well. I am sure they will appreciate it.
You've had 80% battery life because all you can do with the device is make phone calls, because the app store sucks.
Well, it is a phone after all. If it can't make and receive phone calls reliably and have decent call time, then what is the point?
I like "Crashberry"
Maybe Microsoft could make a Blackberry crash. I personally had believed that phones crashing was just a joke because my Blackberry literally never crashed or needed rebooting. Then I got an Android and found out that, yes, phones really do crash. Apparently iphones do too, from what I hear from iphone owners, however, iphones crash because it is Job's will.
There are exactly 0 valid reasons why gay couples shouldn't be allowed to get married, that's it, zero reasons, as in absolutely none. Any country or region which bans gay marriage or has to ask if it should be allowed it just a bunch of uncivilized hicks who need to grow up.
Oh, OK, well end of thread then.
Oh wait, what about all of the billions of people in the world who think the exact same thing as you except they use "should" instead of "shouldn't".
Starbucks is a nasty company. Its CEO Howard Schultz is a fanatical Zionist; if you patronize Starbucks, you're supporting Israeli genocide.
Being a publicly traded company, the financial information is available, so go ahead and show on their financials where they are sending money to support Israeli genocide.
yes yes ... but it says "exceptionally good reason" ... there must be harm ... exceptionally serious harm ... right?
I know it was a slanted story as soon as I saw "toxic" in the headline. These beads are not toxic. Also, the story says they are 5mm in diameter, which is the size of a large pea. According to Wikipedia, they are far smaller than that, from 1mm to 0.001mm. TFA says that 471 million of them enter SF Bay every day. But taking the average size at 0.1mm and a density of 1gm/cc, that is less than a kg.
Yes, but if we continue at this rate, then in only 1.15 million years, we will have higher than the accepted rate of Total Disolved Solids in San Franciso Bay, assuming none of it leaks out into the rest of the ocean.
I have seen what you are talking about, but there is no reason why java programming should have to go hand in hand with utter dependence on third party libraries. Where I used to work, there were two programming departments. We both did Java, but the other department was dead set on spending days and weeks researching third party solutions for simple problems. Then they would spend trying to learn the interface. Then inevitably, if there was a problem, it always seemed to be in the third part code. Well, of course, if you need to add two plus two, and you download a Cray simulator library to accomplish this, then you have to instantiate the library, and seed it with the two numbers, and start the thread that does the calculation, then receive the even that it is done, then retrieve the data, well you see where this is going.
I am not in favor of reinventing the wheel, but if it is going to take less time for me to write something than to research third party solutions and figure out how to integrate to them, and I can control the code, then I will be reinventing that wheel rather than download the global transportation library so I can use their wheel.
That's not Java. It's the corporate mentality of replacing older experienced programmers with newer cheaper programmers or offshoring. You get service applications that have to fire up a remote desktop session so it can write messages to the screen (What!). You get "uncaught exception". You get programs that will fail one time and work the next on the same input. What the heck, do they have a random number generator in there? I have seen this with Ruby, Python, C++, on and on.