D&D was always a wonderful exercise of mentality -- specifically, visual imagination, numerical computing, and social foresight.
Science Fiction and D&D are wonderful jump-starts to young intellects. The downside to them is that they are elitist and promote insular behavior.
Now collected around age 40, the people I knew who played D&D often still do, and on average the game didn't help or harm them... it was just another hobby in life. All those dire predictions during the 1980s about D&D's harm had come to naught... and in fact, all those worried parents instead did far more damage than D&D ever did by working all the time instead of keeping a presence at home with their children.
Bush's health care policy is much the same: "Don't get sick."
Not that I trust Kerry to do anything positive (although he may avoid the most egregious negatives like attacking other countries wantonly). He's as much an elitist pig as Bush is, hence offshoring will probably proceed apace during Kerry's administration.
I do like your wife's sentiment, though. Her abilities appear to be soundly based and she defends them as such. Continued qualification attempts upon her abilities only seem to fall under the "superqualification" trend that is currently damaging the American workforce. It's what I do with my own IT career. She should continue to defend her qualifications and continue to hold out for the right position.
In my experience with working for corporations, firing back questions is generally a setup for a confrontation. After all, asking such "clarification" questions means one or another of:
You're "too stupid" to comprehend the project as given.
Management "made an error" in not clarifying certain aspects of the spec.
Since the general job crash of 1999 -- it hit a lot earlier in the Midwest than on the coasts -- crossing corporate management has become even more suicidal to a career.
Don't get me wrong; after I was outsourced in July, I submitted a list of questions to my new management that would've knocked your socks off (which was promptly ignored), so I'm not saying "just shut up and program as you're told". But like my degrading job situation, you have to accept that your inquisitiveness and involvement are only going to place your employment into jeopardy. "They" can always find someone who will (1) ask less questions and (2) work for less money. Issues about quality have long been subdued while the execs wring their hands and sweat about the performance of the company's public stock.
All IT professionals should be ditching the expensive, yuppie lifestyle and concentrate on saving money. The cushion that that money will buy will allow us to maintain quality during a time of (1) great turnover and (2) high forces towards mediocrity.
It is irrelevant what you think about someone else's private information. You should want it safeguarded as if you wanted your own safeguarded (even if you don't WANT to safeguard your own). Liberty and social stability are built upon tolerance, hence you should learn to tolerate the desires of others, as you would want to have other people tolerate some of the things you do.
For the luva Christ, stop talking this nonsense before some rep at Ford or Chrysler hears you!! We'd have to put up with them producing the DUV (Disabled Utility Vehicle), selling them to millions of elderly, who will run us young'uns over on the sidewalk on a daily basis. Of course, the DUVs will be exempted from all sidewalk-vehicle regulation.
The case for the inheritance tax is being undermined by the middle class being fooled into thinking they'll be stockholding millionaires by the time they retire. Surveys are very revealing on this point: people in general are of the opinion that the tax MUST apply to them (false) or WILL apply to them (ha haa, right, there's no way the middle class will blossom into millionaires).
The 1999 $650K exemption is EXACTLY as big as it sounds. It allows over 98% of individuals (and that's just this year's projections; it's commonly 99%) to escape it. The average working man will never be affected by it.
But keep up the anti-Socialist ranting yourself. You'll have nothing to stand on when the vast swarms of fools suddenly realize that they will NOT die rich from all their bombed-out stocks, that their houses are at least 70% overpriced, and that the "death tax" is just another scam pulled by the rich to duck yet another of their diminishing obligations to a dying American society.
The inheritance tax is a tax on wealth, and since it hits 1-2% of the population, that makes it entirely fair. There's nothing wrong with taxing wealth, if we tax nearly everything else (and we do). Somebody's gonna get caught in gears of any tax! Yes, some people have to sell the family business to afford to pay the tax, but America had a long period of stability with the rich being taxed like that, and it commanded the world's finest education system, road system etc. during that period.
Well, you read it, so summarize the case. That should be child's play for a smart guy like you.
I've already pointed out by implication that launch costs alone make migration impossible. It looks like step "3. ???" for Mars is a viable space elevator for Earth, which must then be made at Mars also.
Gravity wells are terrible barriers. So, let's hear it, friend, how you intend to get around 'em.
After Oprah had taken her precious time to explain to you how your home was insecure, did you then install a lock or guard mechanism on your own sliding doors, which defeated the exploit? Why else did Oprah reveal it? As I'm sure you know, when you buy a door at Home Depot, it doesn't come with a placard that outlines how people can easily defeat the lock.
If someone impersonates me, he's not taking away my identity, he's committing fraud.
But the mass media is very, very vested in this New Economy thing -- literally, technocrats of the first order -- and really, really want to get people to transform their lives into the most Teflon-coated fiscal state possible (the velocity of money always being of interest to the banking and merchant classes). The phrase "identity theft" does not hinge on the word "theft"... it hinges on "identity", and that's what people want to focus your attention on. If they can get you to agree it's IDENTITY theft, and not identity THEFT, then they have obtained your cooperation in continuing the conversion of a citizen into a consumer.
Remember the "inheritance tax"? The mass media has managed to transform that into the "death tax". The word change fools people into thinking the mean, big, bad ol' government is a tax and fee confiscator of the highest order (*), and literally taxes people simply for dying. The inheritance tax doesn't work that way since it has a huge exclusion ($650K by 1999) that makes it apply to a small fraction of newly dead Americans (at most 2% this year) that themselves haven't taken full advantage of things like family trusts. Yet this tiny minority tax was demonized and the public wording of it changed to reflect it.
Getting back to identity theft... if we would decrease the concept of money velocity with respect to business transactions, then identity theft, fraud or whatever would decrease remarkably. I in fact don't actually believe in identify theft or fraud. The twits who will actually trust a voice over a phone speaking a 12-digit number, are the ones I firmly blame. If businesses want to indulge in higher velocity of transactions, then they are entirely to blame for the expansive fraud possibilities that result. A business who uses a fraud-prone transaction system should eat the losses incurred thereby.
* As a matter of fact, with a middle class person being hit for at least 40% of his income due to income tax, gas tax, sales tax, property tax, and other such fees, I'd have to say that it IS a confiscator of the highest order.
If you have the boosters, and the PEs don't, then there's not going to be a Greenpeace-ian rubber raft waiting for you when you land on Mars. At best, the PEs can blow up rockets on the pad, or better yet, blow up funding in the Congress... but they're not going to stop a determined private launcher. We'll see, won't we?
Anybody can get a driver's licence (in the case of truckers, a CDL). On top of that, a significant percentage of the driving population at any single moment is unlicensed. And the traffic rolllls on, doesn't it?
Obtaining "permission to launch" is going to be orders of magnitude harsher to fulfill. But that's not particularly what bothers me. What bothers me is that a private launcher is going to probably be handed far more shit per square inch than, say, NASA or any desired military launch.
The regulations should be equal. And if private industry discovers that NASA's regulations are of such a nature that only a government agency can afford the money and political clout to actually conduct launches, then those regulations should be changed. Putting anything into the sky is a risk, and regulations can't make that fundamental fact go away. Like I said before, NASA has burned 2 shuttles, and is still allowed to launch. Airliners continue to crash, and are still allowed to run. And in fact, you yourself can have some accidents, and you will STILL be allowed to drive.
Would you care when one of those morons built a rocket that came apart, killing everyone on board and raining down debris?
Hmmm... February, 2003: Sound familiar? The point we should be making here is that if NASA can blow up a shuttle and survive, then so should a private launcher. We could go even further by saying if NASA can ignore warnings from engineers about processes that ultimately destroy a spacecraft, kill the occupants, and rain debris over umpteen states, then so can a private launcher.
I can easily see them mandating equipment to prevent boosters from falling on people's houses even though they're shooting from the Mojave desert and there's no chance of it happening.
Skylab's 15ft-long tank debris? Challenger's debris? The airliner that went down in a residential neighborhood after 911? Yeah, that "no chance" thing is something I have every confidence in. After all, didn't the government shut down the airlines, the last time an airliner went down in a residential neighborhood?
I have no faith that the US government will impose sensible regulations. The examples set with model rocketry, alone demonstrate how "too much regulation is never enough" is the guiding philosophy of regulation upon civilian activities that carry even the slightest taint of military use (explosives, ballistics, surveillance, etc.).
Now, if LockheedMartinBoeing Megacorp wanted to loft some hardware... well, that's a different story. Those folks are involved in the military-industrial complex and have all the home phone numbers of the important officials in the regulatory apparatus. Even if restrictive regulations are imposed on them, waivers will pop out of the woodwork.
It is my considered opinion that many people think of something "in pieces" as something that's "no longer functional", hence "broken". No matter how carefully you took something apart, it may well be that your parents promptly considered it broken. I see this kind of thing all the time with the yuppie (or otherwise consumer) class: if the item is not just like the next one on a store shelf, it's trash.
The next time you encounter one of these fucking morons -- who give us real techies a reeeeally bad name -- please DO fall off your chair... and onto their legs or something, hopefully breaking them and forcing them into rehab for a couple of weeks so you can get done the thing that they had sworn up and down could not be done.
It should be cheaper to buy a one-way, half-fuel ticket. I guess that makes it a quarter-way ticket?
Re:What planet are you from?-Apple Juice.
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 1
The NEW CEO has maxed out the companies "credit cards" and living paycheck-to-paycheck just to keep up the minimum payments... if such behaviour is stupid for individuals, why would it be wise for vast corporations[?]
But it isn't "stupid" if most people are doing it. Spending down savings to get hooked on payment programs is now the very pinnacle of fiscal acumen. Rememeber all that brouhaha over car leasing in the 1990s? People were blatantly saying that you should lease a car since it was a good way to get an automobile you couldn't otherwise afford.
This is the sunset of American civilization. Deceit is universal, and people are still trying to "live it up" like there's no tomorrow... because there isn't a tomorrow.
In my career in IT, I have always noticed that IT Outsourcing is always the last grasp for profitability taken by a management infrastructure that cannot figure out how to make the core business profitable.
That statement was so good, I had to repeat in in BOLDFACE.
Re:Not outsourcing - from a business point of view
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 1
Over the long run, the market will do the right thing if you let it be.
No, Capitalism must be regulated with Socialism (popular controls exerted through the power of government), unless you think things like toxic dumping are good ideas (hey, it saves the company money, and they can pass the savings onto you (for medical bills, probably)).
Re:Not outsourcing - from a business point of view
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 1
Shall I tell my creditors to wait until after the long run has come and gone before I pay them[?]
YES... yes, you should. It's called filing for bankruptcy. And -- oh yeah -- generally, they won't get fucking paid anyway.
This is war. Class war. It's time the working man fired back after all the body and head shots he's taken in the last generation.
When your companies flee and leave you under the weight of car and house payments... file for bankruptcy. In certain states, you can even keep one or another of those.
You have every right to demand that the Capitalists owe you the opportunity to work for your living. Or you'll stick 'em with the bills.
One half of this "fuckness equation" is the consumer. We should stop or significantly lessen our shopping at Wal-Mart and megacenters just like it. Over the last 12 years, noting the progressive disappearance of small businesses, I've undertaken to shop conscientiously at small businesses for many things. I know that when I go to the Anderson's here in Toledo to buy cat food and hardware items, that the company is local and my money is likely to stay in the area, as well as compensating at least Americans for their labors. (The damned thing about individual products is finding something that's NOT made in China. But I do find tools made in America. Eight bucks for a good American hammer is actually a better buy for me than $2.50 for a Chinese version.)
I understand that a "crunch time" can happen. But you are making it sound like crunches are expected and frequent. And that makes your management look like fools. Workers have lives, if they are to be First World workers and not re-Industrial-Revolutionized workers. Real workers go home at night and see their kids.
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D&D was always a wonderful exercise of mentality -- specifically, visual imagination, numerical computing, and social foresight.
... it was just another hobby in life. All those dire predictions during the 1980s about D&D's harm had come to naught ... and in fact, all those worried parents instead did far more damage than D&D ever did by working all the time instead of keeping a presence at home with their children.
Science Fiction and D&D are wonderful jump-starts to young intellects. The downside to them is that they are elitist and promote insular behavior.
Now collected around age 40, the people I knew who played D&D often still do, and on average the game didn't help or harm them
Bush's health care policy is much the same: "Don't get sick."
Not that I trust Kerry to do anything positive (although he may avoid the most egregious negatives like attacking other countries wantonly). He's as much an elitist pig as Bush is, hence offshoring will probably proceed apace during Kerry's administration.
I do like your wife's sentiment, though. Her abilities appear to be soundly based and she defends them as such. Continued qualification attempts upon her abilities only seem to fall under the "superqualification" trend that is currently damaging the American workforce. It's what I do with my own IT career. She should continue to defend her qualifications and continue to hold out for the right position.
- You're "too stupid" to comprehend the project as given.
- Management "made an error" in not clarifying certain aspects of the spec.
Since the general job crash of 1999 -- it hit a lot earlier in the Midwest than on the coasts -- crossing corporate management has become even more suicidal to a career.Don't get me wrong; after I was outsourced in July, I submitted a list of questions to my new management that would've knocked your socks off (which was promptly ignored), so I'm not saying "just shut up and program as you're told". But like my degrading job situation, you have to accept that your inquisitiveness and involvement are only going to place your employment into jeopardy. "They" can always find someone who will (1) ask less questions and (2) work for less money. Issues about quality have long been subdued while the execs wring their hands and sweat about the performance of the company's public stock.
All IT professionals should be ditching the expensive, yuppie lifestyle and concentrate on saving money. The cushion that that money will buy will allow us to maintain quality during a time of (1) great turnover and (2) high forces towards mediocrity.
It is irrelevant what you think about someone else's private information. You should want it safeguarded as if you wanted your own safeguarded (even if you don't WANT to safeguard your own). Liberty and social stability are built upon tolerance, hence you should learn to tolerate the desires of others, as you would want to have other people tolerate some of the things you do.
gimps gear has to be heavy and shiny
For the luva Christ, stop talking this nonsense before some rep at Ford or Chrysler hears you!! We'd have to put up with them producing the DUV (Disabled Utility Vehicle), selling them to millions of elderly, who will run us young'uns over on the sidewalk on a daily basis. Of course, the DUVs will be exempted from all sidewalk-vehicle regulation.
Unfortunately, the only killer app for the Segway has been marketing hype.
The case for the inheritance tax is being undermined by the middle class being fooled into thinking they'll be stockholding millionaires by the time they retire. Surveys are very revealing on this point: people in general are of the opinion that the tax MUST apply to them (false) or WILL apply to them (ha haa, right, there's no way the middle class will blossom into millionaires).
The 1999 $650K exemption is EXACTLY as big as it sounds. It allows over 98% of individuals (and that's just this year's projections; it's commonly 99%) to escape it. The average working man will never be affected by it.
But keep up the anti-Socialist ranting yourself. You'll have nothing to stand on when the vast swarms of fools suddenly realize that they will NOT die rich from all their bombed-out stocks, that their houses are at least 70% overpriced, and that the "death tax" is just another scam pulled by the rich to duck yet another of their diminishing obligations to a dying American society.
The inheritance tax is a tax on wealth, and since it hits 1-2% of the population, that makes it entirely fair. There's nothing wrong with taxing wealth, if we tax nearly everything else (and we do). Somebody's gonna get caught in gears of any tax! Yes, some people have to sell the family business to afford to pay the tax, but America had a long period of stability with the rich being taxed like that, and it commanded the world's finest education system, road system etc. during that period.
Well, you read it, so summarize the case. That should be child's play for a smart guy like you.
I've already pointed out by implication that launch costs alone make migration impossible. It looks like step "3. ???" for Mars is a viable space elevator for Earth, which must then be made at Mars also.
Gravity wells are terrible barriers. So, let's hear it, friend, how you intend to get around 'em.
After Oprah had taken her precious time to explain to you how your home was insecure, did you then install a lock or guard mechanism on your own sliding doors, which defeated the exploit? Why else did Oprah reveal it? As I'm sure you know, when you buy a door at Home Depot, it doesn't come with a placard that outlines how people can easily defeat the lock.
If someone impersonates me, he's not taking away my identity, he's committing fraud.
... it hinges on "identity", and that's what people want to focus your attention on. If they can get you to agree it's IDENTITY theft, and not identity THEFT, then they have obtained your cooperation in continuing the conversion of a citizen into a consumer.
... if we would decrease the concept of money velocity with respect to business transactions, then identity theft, fraud or whatever would decrease remarkably. I in fact don't actually believe in identify theft or fraud. The twits who will actually trust a voice over a phone speaking a 12-digit number, are the ones I firmly blame. If businesses want to indulge in higher velocity of transactions, then they are entirely to blame for the expansive fraud possibilities that result. A business who uses a fraud-prone transaction system should eat the losses incurred thereby.
But the mass media is very, very vested in this New Economy thing -- literally, technocrats of the first order -- and really, really want to get people to transform their lives into the most Teflon-coated fiscal state possible (the velocity of money always being of interest to the banking and merchant classes). The phrase "identity theft" does not hinge on the word "theft"
Remember the "inheritance tax"? The mass media has managed to transform that into the "death tax". The word change fools people into thinking the mean, big, bad ol' government is a tax and fee confiscator of the highest order (*), and literally taxes people simply for dying. The inheritance tax doesn't work that way since it has a huge exclusion ($650K by 1999) that makes it apply to a small fraction of newly dead Americans (at most 2% this year) that themselves haven't taken full advantage of things like family trusts. Yet this tiny minority tax was demonized and the public wording of it changed to reflect it.
Getting back to identity theft
* As a matter of fact, with a middle class person being hit for at least 40% of his income due to income tax, gas tax, sales tax, property tax, and other such fees, I'd have to say that it IS a confiscator of the highest order.
If you have the boosters, and the PEs don't, then there's not going to be a Greenpeace-ian rubber raft waiting for you when you land on Mars. At best, the PEs can blow up rockets on the pad, or better yet, blow up funding in the Congress ... but they're not going to stop a determined private launcher. We'll see, won't we?
Settle Mars?
Why spend all that money getting out of Earth's gravity pit, just to fall down another one, in which you still can't breathe or raise crops?
You have to make a case for Martian settlement, over the benefits of simply creating O'Neills and underground lunar setlements.
Anybody can get a driver's licence (in the case of truckers, a CDL). On top of that, a significant percentage of the driving population at any single moment is unlicensed. And the traffic rolllls on, doesn't it?
Obtaining "permission to launch" is going to be orders of magnitude harsher to fulfill. But that's not particularly what bothers me. What bothers me is that a private launcher is going to probably be handed far more shit per square inch than, say, NASA or any desired military launch.
The regulations should be equal. And if private industry discovers that NASA's regulations are of such a nature that only a government agency can afford the money and political clout to actually conduct launches, then those regulations should be changed. Putting anything into the sky is a risk, and regulations can't make that fundamental fact go away. Like I said before, NASA has burned 2 shuttles, and is still allowed to launch. Airliners continue to crash, and are still allowed to run. And in fact, you yourself can have some accidents, and you will STILL be allowed to drive.
Would you care when one of those morons built a rocket that came apart, killing everyone on board and raining down debris?
... February, 2003: Sound familiar? The point we should be making here is that if NASA can blow up a shuttle and survive, then so should a private launcher. We could go even further by saying if NASA can ignore warnings from engineers about processes that ultimately destroy a spacecraft, kill the occupants, and rain debris over umpteen states, then so can a private launcher .
Hmmm
I can easily see them mandating equipment to prevent boosters from falling on people's houses even though they're shooting from the Mojave desert and there's no chance of it happening.
... well, that's a different story. Those folks are involved in the military-industrial complex and have all the home phone numbers of the important officials in the regulatory apparatus. Even if restrictive regulations are imposed on them, waivers will pop out of the woodwork.
Skylab's 15ft-long tank debris? Challenger's debris? The airliner that went down in a residential neighborhood after 911? Yeah, that "no chance" thing is something I have every confidence in. After all, didn't the government shut down the airlines, the last time an airliner went down in a residential neighborhood?
I have no faith that the US government will impose sensible regulations. The examples set with model rocketry, alone demonstrate how "too much regulation is never enough" is the guiding philosophy of regulation upon civilian activities that carry even the slightest taint of military use (explosives, ballistics, surveillance, etc.).
Now, if LockheedMartinBoeing Megacorp wanted to loft some hardware
It is my considered opinion that many people think of something "in pieces" as something that's "no longer functional", hence "broken". No matter how carefully you took something apart, it may well be that your parents promptly considered it broken. I see this kind of thing all the time with the yuppie (or otherwise consumer) class: if the item is not just like the next one on a store shelf, it's trash.
I nearly fell off my chair.
... and onto their legs or something, hopefully breaking them and forcing them into rehab for a couple of weeks so you can get done the thing that they had sworn up and down could not be done.
The next time you encounter one of these fucking morons -- who give us real techies a reeeeally bad name -- please DO fall off your chair
No, I tongue-in-cheekly meant "half fuel" to mean "half way", which means about 30 miles up ... and so have a nice trip, Mr McBride, see ya next fall.
It should be cheaper to buy a one-way, half-fuel ticket. I guess that makes it a quarter-way ticket?
The NEW CEO has maxed out the companies "credit cards" and living paycheck-to-paycheck just to keep up the minimum payments... if such behaviour is stupid for individuals, why would it be wise for vast corporations[?]
... because there isn't a tomorrow.
But it isn't "stupid" if most people are doing it. Spending down savings to get hooked on payment programs is now the very pinnacle of fiscal acumen. Rememeber all that brouhaha over car leasing in the 1990s? People were blatantly saying that you should lease a car since it was a good way to get an automobile you couldn't otherwise afford.
This is the sunset of American civilization. Deceit is universal, and people are still trying to "live it up" like there's no tomorrow
In my career in IT, I have always noticed that IT Outsourcing is always the last grasp for profitability taken by a management infrastructure that cannot figure out how to make the core business profitable.
That statement was so good, I had to repeat in in BOLDFACE.
Over the long run, the market will do the right thing if you let it be.
No, Capitalism must be regulated with Socialism (popular controls exerted through the power of government), unless you think things like toxic dumping are good ideas (hey, it saves the company money, and they can pass the savings onto you (for medical bills, probably)).
Shall I tell my creditors to wait until after the long run has come and gone before I pay them[?]
... yes, you should. It's called filing for bankruptcy. And -- oh yeah -- generally, they won't get fucking paid anyway.
... file for bankruptcy. In certain states, you can even keep one or another of those.
YES
This is war. Class war. It's time the working man fired back after all the body and head shots he's taken in the last generation.
When your companies flee and leave you under the weight of car and house payments
You have every right to demand that the Capitalists owe you the opportunity to work for your living. Or you'll stick 'em with the bills.
One half of this "fuckness equation" is the consumer. We should stop or significantly lessen our shopping at Wal-Mart and megacenters just like it. Over the last 12 years, noting the progressive disappearance of small businesses, I've undertaken to shop conscientiously at small businesses for many things. I know that when I go to the Anderson's here in Toledo to buy cat food and hardware items, that the company is local and my money is likely to stay in the area, as well as compensating at least Americans for their labors. (The damned thing about individual products is finding something that's NOT made in China. But I do find tools made in America. Eight bucks for a good American hammer is actually a better buy for me than $2.50 for a Chinese version.)
I understand that a "crunch time" can happen. But you are making it sound like crunches are expected and frequent. And that makes your management look like fools. Workers have lives, if they are to be First World workers and not re-Industrial-Revolutionized workers. Real workers go home at night and see their kids.