Considering XP comes on 1 cd and a cd can only contain 700mb and reasoning they did not need to patch the "windows tunes or skins or wallpapers" it can reasonably be argued that SP2 replaces 1/3 of the software. That ain't a patch that is a rebuild.
You forgot to mention SP1a, which at 125MB makes SP2 the 2nd rebuild.
At any rate, what does it matter? People are eating up SP2 like good little sheep. Heck, they are counting their blessings that Microsoft has deigned to issue them some fixes. Microsoft has thoroughly house-trained its customer base to be their software test department. I just figure that, if we're going to be users AND testers, we may as well run Open Source.
I wish I could agree with you, but to obtain an officer rating in the general business world -- i.e. part of the budgeting process and able to sign for $10K+ acquisitions -- the MBA is still an informal but very real requirement. You either have to have one, or be working towards one, or you will run into a glass ceiling immediately.
Finally, commericals are fed towards the TV-watching class, which encompasses subsets of the middle and lower classes. I don't consider MBA-bashing on the TV to indicate anything beyond wishful thinking on the part of the target demographic.
One thing that leads to upward price pressure for degrees is that they cost significant money to obtain. Hence, degreed people demand higher salary simply on the basis of the education debt they are loaded with. Since the degree ostensibly pertains to the job in the first place, it's difficult to disqualify their demand.
Given what you've said, I'd bet anything that somewhere in your upper management there's an MBA looking to replace you all with another generation of developers making half the salary. The first step is to imply you're no longer qualified to do the job you've always done, and then to leverage that disqualifer to provoke 1 or more of you into leaving... to be replaced soon enough by 1 or more college grads pulling down $40K.
One pervasive problem in the tech and finance companies I've worked for, is that wearing more hats always bumps up against other realms of responsibility.
You sound like the kind of wise fellow that realizes that rights and responsibilities are linked. When people attempt to unlink them, aberrations and strife result.
The wearing of more hats probably works in smaller companies, as your examples imply. But if my experience is any yardstick, taking on more responsibilities without authorization in larger companies is a good way to end up "labelled" as a troublemaker... leading to punishment, isolation and eventually firing.
It's not just a matter of management wanting people to take more responsibility... they are always for that, and love to dish that out with no corresponding rights. It's just that management wants to have Total Control. They'd rather waste labor than lose control of it. The taking of responsibility in the large corporations is a thorny matter.
... which is a great argument for getting rid of them, frankly.
At current per-song pricing from "them", with discounting since it's such a large purchase, that slDVD will cost you $320, and the dlDVD will cost you $960. "They" will even throw in an extra backup disc in case you scratch the original, and "they" will even guarantee your purchase for 20 years (if there are any bad recordings, or you destroy the original AND the backup).
Now, will you buy it? {snort} Of course you won't. OR, yes you would... you and the 346 other customers the business gets across America in the next year, bringing "them" a well-earned average revenue of about $220K that year. Boy, why oh why don't we see "them" jumping at this chance to service this customer base?!?!
I shall henceforth encourage all others who mention the Olympics to join me in not watching it
I've ignored the Olympics for decades. The 'Games are just more of the happyjuice soaking the public mind into oblivion while Rome burns.* I've always been here in this state of contempt, so in a sense, you should be joining me.
An electrician we often use has advised me -- after hearing my tale of outsourcing woe -- to ditch the computer crap and become... an electrician. A 3rd-yr apprentice makes at least $40K around here, and -- despite the damned lies of salary.com for my area -- that beats computer work. Everybody needs an electrician; few people want to do that kind of work, hence you have little competition; it pays quite well; and computer work is being bid down to manual-labor wages.
Your instinct in avoiding HelpDesk work is correct. However, Computer Repair is going the same way: it receives no respect; its pay is dropping; it's outsourced upon the drop of a hat; and, it often has a low glass ceiling over it. Computer Repair is yet another entry-level dead-end for being a "company man".
Admittedly, the last time I opened a monitor cover was about 12 months ago to obtain info for driving it with Linux. However, I still open our Dell GX100 power supplies to re-grease the fan, which seems to dry up waaaay too early. The p/s only has 4 screws to open it... sheesh, as long as you figure out you shouldn't open it with power on, I can't imagine anyone rationally complaining.
Real computer techs with a range of experience still get into computer guts. Let's not dumb down that ability.
Since companies treat college degrees as simple job qualifications anyway, then why not just give them specific job-related certifications? It's not like a company hires you to maintain their network and also expects you to have strong reading comprehension of Shakespeare... they expect you to have strong reading comprehension of technical manuals.
You know, I don't often say "I'm sorry", but in this instance, I'm sorry that you've had so much accidental death visit your life.
Still, given the examples you cite, there's more than enough present law enforcement to handle the perpetrators. Black boxes have no bearing on a person who was drinking, since the 'box has no alcohol sensor. The 'box has no bearing on losing control, since the position of the car is more than enough indicator of fault. A rear-end collision ("always" the fault of the person coming behind) is indicated by bent metal and shattered plastic.
So... just what, exactly, do you want out of black box data to handle the accidents you cited (and I shudder to think of the "many more" you have not recounted)?
As a ending note, people (commonly?) flying down your street at 20mph+ over the speed limit is something any police department will want to hear about. There's nothing that stops you from calling your local station and making a suggestion about enforcement. Traffic cops really do want to be there when such outstanding violations occur... so give them the chance. Get involved. Write down license plates. Chances are, people speeding down your street so outrageously are also speeding down other streets similarly, and you may have heard that police are known to conduct directed patrols.
Talk about irrational! The "State" doesn't hold property as a person does. It holds property for us (the citizenry) to use. This may certainly involve regulation, but it also may not. The ever-blessed "State" is only holding the property (in this case, the roadways) only insofar that no private holder suffices for unqualified public access. And that's it, the very nub of my gist.
You should get out of this irrational "State ownership" crap. Try leaning towards the reality embodied in the term "the State holds the roads in trust for all people".
Given how that for (too) many automobile insurance markets, coverage is mandatory by law, hence I find it difficult to imagine insurance execs voluntarily lowering rates. However, such discounting does remain possible in those mandatory markets where there is heavy competition between insurance providers... you the good driver must have insurance by law, but you can choose which one to give your money to... and if they decide they are hotter for your money than others, then there's no particular barrier to them offering incentives.
In fact, in mandatory markets, where insurance providers are to some degree forced to carry clients of higher risk than they would otherwise want, discounting for "good drivers" is one way to tip the risks of a client base more into the provider's favor. It's a financial risk to take a "guaranteed" minimum income stream and offer discounts on that, however if you can chip away the most egregious claimants by attracting good drivers (allegedly, a low risk population), then you the provider can arrange a better fiscal year for yourself.
Amazingly enough, you're still trying to justify predatory Capitalism. This should be entertaining.
Firstly, I have to define Capitalism, as opposed to this thing called "capitalism" that yoo-hoos like yourself seem to practice. A la Elbert Hubbard, Capitalism is the unavoidable resulting condition of people who have freely attained savings and homes. Everything that happens after that is "Capitalism". Given the zero-to-negative savings rate in America, and the utter bilge idea of people "buying" $300K homes that they will never be able to pay off, then I'd have to say Hubbard's Capitalism is now dead.
What we have left is predatory capitalism... Hypercapitalism, and that's not Capitalism at all. It has no social temper.
Oh? What [Hypercapitalist] misconceptions would those be?
That for the labor class, the 21st Century won't be a re-run of the 19th using 20th Century capital gains. Pensions, health care, home ownership... all these are going away for America. Reason? : They cost the capitalists too much money... they always did, but now the capitalists can do something about it, and entirely outside of legal bounds since corporations essentially control American politics. This is obviously the reason why, for example, your company can declare itself a Bermuda entity just by filing some papers and paying a relative pittance in fees, thus avoiding taxes and things like product liability, but God help you if you try the same for yourself (even assuming you could afford the fees), since that would make you an illegal alien, hence subject to deportation.
That's your first misconception. If you have a contract, you're owed whatever was promised in the contract, provided that you've also met your own obligations under that contract.
No, it's your wildly irresponsible error in assuming there's no social contract that forms the substance under any such contract, like the paper is the substance upon which words are written. Workers are not to be thrown aside like used tissues. Capitalists used to do things like that; the broken bodies of workers were given similar treatment. Then we wised up and passed (and enforced) laws that protected workers against such things.
The current situation is that workers simply aren't protected from the highly predatory capitalism. And this is threat to our status as a First World nation. It is also a threat to the middle class, which a valuable sector of the population.
Increasing shareholder's equity, and doing so within the law, is their *entire* fiduciary responsibility. Any duties you care to make up beyond those, are nothing but wishful thinking on your part.
That's the prevailing fallacy that your class of person seeks to support. I'm sure it was at the forefront of the Rigas's minds when they came with handcuffs for them. Ken Lay found about that, too.
You are so provably wrong, it's pathetic. Riddle me this, Batman: If your only fiduciary responsibility is to your corporate owners, then how should you choose to process (for example) a truckload of PCB-contaminated soil from one of your factories? :
Process it. Oops, that damned cleanup company actually wants MONEY to process that waste. Sweating bullets, you drive the truck to the processor with a check, hoping those shareholders never notice you spent their money on such an unnecessary item. Cost to shareholders: $1000.
Dump it. You drive the truck to a secluded area and dump the soil. Cost to shareholders: $0.
But that's one of many examples. For other examples, you should really consider going back to that college that so ineptly handed you your degree, and demand more. Corporations have many obligations, not just "the fiduciary obligation to shareholders" like many of you 1990s pukes exclaim as your Holy Grail. An
It sounds like the best tool for this is actually marketing. Identify a good subset of your customers and incent them to become guinea pigs for a significantly revised system. With sufficient incentives, it may be possible to use your customer base as a test bed, while making the sensible changes you wanted to make all along. Once all that pain has passed, you can promote the new system as a rollout on the rest of the customer base.
Liberalism and Conservatism were good ideas. Then both became contaminated with bottomless greed and immoral viciousness, leaving us with "Neo-" versions of both being the prevailing philosophies. It's kind of like the foxes having taken over the henhouse; both subspecies of fox have different ideas on how to eat the hens, the eggs, and finally burn down the 'house. At any rate, hopefully your "long time" self-rating means you recall the basics of Liberal thought, and those basics don't involve squashing people like bugs against a windshield of an economy.
At any rate, what you said is essentially the doubt in my mind about what I've concluded. Perhaps something like pervasive prosperity will visit us worldwide eventually. I'm immediately concerned about things like "eventually" and how we'll pay our bills and educate our kids in that interim.
your style makes you look like a Troll
People don't like the way I dress, either. That's their problem. People who reject emotional truth are justly due all the yes-men and slick bastards that they can stand surrounding them. Of course, behavior and expression are often entangled in an online forum.
You DO know what work is, right? That's what gets done by workers. I feel no shame at being a worker. YOU, however, apparently have some problem with them.
I work, and that's doing my duty. I defy to you disprove this fact.
You are under the usual Hypercapitalist misconceptions.
Firstly, if you believe in merit, then yes, having been offered the job and having performed the job, I am owed the job. This outsourcing shit is just a way to stop treating employees like employees... you know, things like pay, benefits, access, trust and overall status. Ever heard of Microsoft? They got successfully sued for treating employees like independent contractors, under that wacky thing called "the law". If you want actual contractors, then you should expect to pay them like contractors.
Secondly, the capitalist class is NOT only under the duty to "increase their shareholder's equity". You are still languishing under the immense selfish stupidity of the 1990s dotcom bust. If things like corporations only have that duty, then they must be perfectly free to not pay workers, to dump toxins in rivers, to ignore government regulations, to not pay taxes, to not pay suppliers, and so on...
... you fucking stooge. Ever heard of ethics? You should get some. Ever heard of a society? You should get out of the house and see it.
Unless, of course, doing the "perp walk" is your thing. Criminal and anti-social behavior used to be frowned upon. Whatever happened to that? Oh, yeah, that's right: a bunch of you noobs saw piles o' cash and vowed to do anything to get it, like any burglar. We just don't have drilling equipment capable of reaching the depths of your moral low ground.
Oooh, yeah, right, like I wasn't just outsourced from my bank employer into one of those scumbag "IT Solutions" companies who are out to nickel-and-dime their clients to death.
My knowledge of bank operations in performing the IT work was worth precisely diddly-squat.
Soooo... go take your Republican propaganda somewhere else. Outsourcing and offshoring are all about cutting costs to absurd levels, to unsustainably support inflated stock prices. I did my duty; the capitalist class is remarkably failing to do theirs.
Believe me, I have, and I come down firmly on Nugent's sentiment: I don't trust vote counts in the hands of partisans. It's better to fulfill vote-recount requirements with machine kickouts than with people with punchcards in their hands and axes to grind.
Add to this the knowledge that many local election areas are highly partisan (strongly Republican or Democrat, and have been that way for a while... effectively local "political machines"), then we should run screaming away from the idea of hand recounts.
Now we must educate the masses into understanding that e-vote machines are a whole other class of risk for vote fraud. Sometimes I despair.
You should have obtained this opinion with some careful study of the formation of that Florida felon voter list in the months before the Nov 2000 election... as well as the failure to "fix" it in time for the 2002 elections.
The methods of making of that list could only have involved criminal intent, since they clearly generated (many) false positives. That was the design. Yet, to this day, then-Sec'y of State Harris and Gov. Jeb Bush remain uncharged and unconvicted of the crime.
On average, each American is perfectly happy with vote fraud... as long as their party benefits thereby. After all, who really listened to Ted Nugent when he paraphrasingly said he'd rather have his vote counted by machines instead of partisans?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering XP comes on 1 cd and a cd can only contain 700mb and reasoning they did not need to patch the "windows tunes or skins or wallpapers" it can reasonably be argued that SP2 replaces 1/3 of the software. That ain't a patch that is a rebuild.
You forgot to mention SP1a, which at 125MB makes SP2 the 2nd rebuild.
At any rate, what does it matter? People are eating up SP2 like good little sheep. Heck, they are counting their blessings that Microsoft has deigned to issue them some fixes. Microsoft has thoroughly house-trained its customer base to be their software test department. I just figure that, if we're going to be users AND testers, we may as well run Open Source.
I wish I could agree with you, but to obtain an officer rating in the general business world -- i.e. part of the budgeting process and able to sign for $10K+ acquisitions -- the MBA is still an informal but very real requirement. You either have to have one, or be working towards one, or you will run into a glass ceiling immediately.
Finally, commericals are fed towards the TV-watching class, which encompasses subsets of the middle and lower classes. I don't consider MBA-bashing on the TV to indicate anything beyond wishful thinking on the part of the target demographic.
One thing that leads to upward price pressure for degrees is that they cost significant money to obtain. Hence, degreed people demand higher salary simply on the basis of the education debt they are loaded with. Since the degree ostensibly pertains to the job in the first place, it's difficult to disqualify their demand.
Given what you've said, I'd bet anything that somewhere in your upper management there's an MBA looking to replace you all with another generation of developers making half the salary. The first step is to imply you're no longer qualified to do the job you've always done, and then to leverage that disqualifer to provoke 1 or more of you into leaving ... to be replaced soon enough by 1 or more college grads pulling down $40K.
You forgot to add your company name, so we can hack in there and crack it open like a nut under a log splitter. Pwn3d!
Dear Microsoft:
Check my Internet Explorer math:
2 little + 2 late = 2 bad = 4 u
Cordially,
Another Lost Customer
One pervasive problem in the tech and finance companies I've worked for, is that wearing more hats always bumps up against other realms of responsibility.
... leading to punishment, isolation and eventually firing.
... they are always for that, and love to dish that out with no corresponding rights. It's just that management wants to have Total Control. They'd rather waste labor than lose control of it. The taking of responsibility in the large corporations is a thorny matter.
... which is a great argument for getting rid of them, frankly.
You sound like the kind of wise fellow that realizes that rights and responsibilities are linked. When people attempt to unlink them, aberrations and strife result.
The wearing of more hats probably works in smaller companies, as your examples imply. But if my experience is any yardstick, taking on more responsibilities without authorization in larger companies is a good way to end up "labelled" as a troublemaker
It's not just a matter of management wanting people to take more responsibility
There I was before, expecting pawn folk to be scumbags. Here I am now, seeing that it's a lot more complicated behind the scenes in the pawn business.
/. ... exposure to all the folks across intellectual life, or "mindful living".
This is why I frequent K5 and
At current per-song pricing from "them", with discounting since it's such a large purchase, that slDVD will cost you $320, and the dlDVD will cost you $960. "They" will even throw in an extra backup disc in case you scratch the original, and "they" will even guarantee your purchase for 20 years (if there are any bad recordings, or you destroy the original AND the backup).
... you and the 346 other customers the business gets across America in the next year, bringing "them" a well-earned average revenue of about $220K that year. Boy, why oh why don't we see "them" jumping at this chance to service this customer base?!?!
Now, will you buy it? {snort} Of course you won't. OR, yes you would
I shall henceforth encourage all others who mention the Olympics to join me in not watching it
I've ignored the Olympics for decades. The 'Games are just more of the happyjuice soaking the public mind into oblivion while Rome burns.* I've always been here in this state of contempt, so in a sense, you should be joining me.
* Nominated: Most Mixed Mataphor of 2004.
Assuming my knowledge is still current, the N.O. police force is being directly run by Federal overseers due to all the past corruption.
An electrician we often use has advised me -- after hearing my tale of outsourcing woe -- to ditch the computer crap and become ... an electrician. A 3rd-yr apprentice makes at least $40K around here, and -- despite the damned lies of salary.com for my area -- that beats computer work. Everybody needs an electrician; few people want to do that kind of work, hence you have little competition; it pays quite well; and computer work is being bid down to manual-labor wages.
Your instinct in avoiding HelpDesk work is correct. However, Computer Repair is going the same way: it receives no respect; its pay is dropping; it's outsourced upon the drop of a hat; and, it often has a low glass ceiling over it. Computer Repair is yet another entry-level dead-end for being a "company man".
Admittedly, the last time I opened a monitor cover was about 12 months ago to obtain info for driving it with Linux. However, I still open our Dell GX100 power supplies to re-grease the fan, which seems to dry up waaaay too early. The p/s only has 4 screws to open it ... sheesh, as long as you figure out you shouldn't open it with power on, I can't imagine anyone rationally complaining.
Real computer techs with a range of experience still get into computer guts. Let's not dumb down that ability.
Since companies treat college degrees as simple job qualifications anyway, then why not just give them specific job-related certifications? It's not like a company hires you to maintain their network and also expects you to have strong reading comprehension of Shakespeare ... they expect you to have strong reading comprehension of technical manuals.
You know, I don't often say "I'm sorry", but in this instance, I'm sorry that you've had so much accidental death visit your life.
... just what, exactly, do you want out of black box data to handle the accidents you cited (and I shudder to think of the "many more" you have not recounted)?
... so give them the chance. Get involved. Write down license plates. Chances are, people speeding down your street so outrageously are also speeding down other streets similarly, and you may have heard that police are known to conduct directed patrols.
Still, given the examples you cite, there's more than enough present law enforcement to handle the perpetrators. Black boxes have no bearing on a person who was drinking, since the 'box has no alcohol sensor. The 'box has no bearing on losing control, since the position of the car is more than enough indicator of fault. A rear-end collision ("always" the fault of the person coming behind) is indicated by bent metal and shattered plastic.
So
As a ending note, people (commonly?) flying down your street at 20mph+ over the speed limit is something any police department will want to hear about. There's nothing that stops you from calling your local station and making a suggestion about enforcement. Traffic cops really do want to be there when such outstanding violations occur
Talk about irrational! The "State" doesn't hold property as a person does. It holds property for us (the citizenry) to use. This may certainly involve regulation, but it also may not. The ever-blessed "State" is only holding the property (in this case, the roadways) only insofar that no private holder suffices for unqualified public access. And that's it, the very nub of my gist.
You should get out of this irrational "State ownership" crap. Try leaning towards the reality embodied in the term "the State holds the roads in trust for all people".
Given how that for (too) many automobile insurance markets, coverage is mandatory by law, hence I find it difficult to imagine insurance execs voluntarily lowering rates. However, such discounting does remain possible in those mandatory markets where there is heavy competition between insurance providers ... you the good driver must have insurance by law, but you can choose which one to give your money to ... and if they decide they are hotter for your money than others, then there's no particular barrier to them offering incentives.
In fact, in mandatory markets, where insurance providers are to some degree forced to carry clients of higher risk than they would otherwise want, discounting for "good drivers" is one way to tip the risks of a client base more into the provider's favor. It's a financial risk to take a "guaranteed" minimum income stream and offer discounts on that, however if you can chip away the most egregious claimants by attracting good drivers (allegedly, a low risk population), then you the provider can arrange a better fiscal year for yourself.
Real business is a game of risks, after all.
Firstly, I have to define Capitalism, as opposed to this thing called "capitalism" that yoo-hoos like yourself seem to practice. A la Elbert Hubbard, Capitalism is the unavoidable resulting condition of people who have freely attained savings and homes . Everything that happens after that is "Capitalism". Given the zero-to-negative savings rate in America, and the utter bilge idea of people "buying" $300K homes that they will never be able to pay off, then I'd have to say Hubbard's Capitalism is now dead.
What we have left is predatory capitalism
Oh? What [Hypercapitalist] misconceptions would those be?
That for the labor class, the 21st Century won't be a re-run of the 19th using 20th Century capital gains. Pensions, health care, home ownership
That's your first misconception. If you have a contract, you're owed whatever was promised in the contract, provided that you've also met your own obligations under that contract.
No, it's your wildly irresponsible error in assuming there's no social contract that forms the substance under any such contract, like the paper is the substance upon which words are written. Workers are not to be thrown aside like used tissues. Capitalists used to do things like that; the broken bodies of workers were given similar treatment. Then we wised up and passed (and enforced) laws that protected workers against such things.
The current situation is that workers simply aren't protected from the highly predatory capitalism. And this is threat to our status as a First World nation. It is also a threat to the middle class, which a valuable sector of the population.
Increasing shareholder's equity, and doing so within the law, is their *entire* fiduciary responsibility. Any duties you care to make up beyond those, are nothing but wishful thinking on your part.
That's the prevailing fallacy that your class of person seeks to support. I'm sure it was at the forefront of the Rigas's minds when they came with handcuffs for them. Ken Lay found about that, too.
You are so provably wrong, it's pathetic. Riddle me this, Batman: If your only fiduciary responsibility is to your corporate owners, then how should you choose to process (for example) a truckload of PCB-contaminated soil from one of your factories? :
But that's one of many examples. For other examples, you should really consider going back to that college that so ineptly handed you your degree, and demand more. Corporations have many obligations, not just "the fiduciary obligation to shareholders" like many of you 1990s pukes exclaim as your Holy Grail. An
It sounds like the best tool for this is actually marketing. Identify a good subset of your customers and incent them to become guinea pigs for a significantly revised system. With sufficient incentives, it may be possible to use your customer base as a test bed, while making the sensible changes you wanted to make all along. Once all that pain has passed, you can promote the new system as a rollout on the rest of the customer base.
Well, it's just a thought. Good luck.
I'm a long time liberal.
Liberalism and Conservatism were good ideas. Then both became contaminated with bottomless greed and immoral viciousness, leaving us with "Neo-" versions of both being the prevailing philosophies. It's kind of like the foxes having taken over the henhouse; both subspecies of fox have different ideas on how to eat the hens, the eggs, and finally burn down the 'house. At any rate, hopefully your "long time" self-rating means you recall the basics of Liberal thought, and those basics don't involve squashing people like bugs against a windshield of an economy.
At any rate, what you said is essentially the doubt in my mind about what I've concluded. Perhaps something like pervasive prosperity will visit us worldwide eventually. I'm immediately concerned about things like "eventually" and how we'll pay our bills and educate our kids in that interim.
your style makes you look like a Troll
People don't like the way I dress, either. That's their problem. People who reject emotional truth are justly due all the yes-men and slick bastards that they can stand surrounding them. Of course, behavior and expression are often entangled in an online forum.
Start my own company? Who then would do my work?
You DO know what work is, right? That's what gets done by workers. I feel no shame at being a worker. YOU, however, apparently have some problem with them.
I work, and that's doing my duty. I defy to you disprove this fact.
You are under the usual Hypercapitalist misconceptions.
... you know, things like pay, benefits, access, trust and overall status. Ever heard of Microsoft? They got successfully sued for treating employees like independent contractors, under that wacky thing called "the law". If you want actual contractors, then you should expect to pay them like contractors.
...
... you fucking stooge. Ever heard of ethics? You should get some. Ever heard of a society? You should get out of the house and see it.
Firstly, if you believe in merit, then yes, having been offered the job and having performed the job, I am owed the job. This outsourcing shit is just a way to stop treating employees like employees
Secondly, the capitalist class is NOT only under the duty to "increase their shareholder's equity". You are still languishing under the immense selfish stupidity of the 1990s dotcom bust. If things like corporations only have that duty, then they must be perfectly free to not pay workers, to dump toxins in rivers, to ignore government regulations, to not pay taxes, to not pay suppliers, and so on
Unless, of course, doing the "perp walk" is your thing. Criminal and anti-social behavior used to be frowned upon. Whatever happened to that? Oh, yeah, that's right: a bunch of you noobs saw piles o' cash and vowed to do anything to get it, like any burglar. We just don't have drilling equipment capable of reaching the depths of your moral low ground.
Oooh, yeah, right, like I wasn't just outsourced from my bank employer into one of those scumbag "IT Solutions" companies who are out to nickel-and-dime their clients to death.
... go take your Republican propaganda somewhere else. Outsourcing and offshoring are all about cutting costs to absurd levels, to unsustainably support inflated stock prices. I did my duty; the capitalist class is remarkably failing to do theirs.
My knowledge of bank operations in performing the IT work was worth precisely diddly-squat.
Soooo
ask yourself this question ...
... effectively local "political machines"), then we should run screaming away from the idea of hand recounts.
Believe me, I have, and I come down firmly on Nugent's sentiment: I don't trust vote counts in the hands of partisans. It's better to fulfill vote-recount requirements with machine kickouts than with people with punchcards in their hands and axes to grind.
Add to this the knowledge that many local election areas are highly partisan (strongly Republican or Democrat, and have been that way for a while
Now we must educate the masses into understanding that e-vote machines are a whole other class of risk for vote fraud. Sometimes I despair.
You should have obtained this opinion with some careful study of the formation of that Florida felon voter list in the months before the Nov 2000 election ... as well as the failure to "fix" it in time for the 2002 elections.
... as long as their party benefits thereby. After all, who really listened to Ted Nugent when he paraphrasingly said he'd rather have his vote counted by machines instead of partisans?
The methods of making of that list could only have involved criminal intent, since they clearly generated (many) false positives. That was the design. Yet, to this day, then-Sec'y of State Harris and Gov. Jeb Bush remain uncharged and unconvicted of the crime.
On average, each American is perfectly happy with vote fraud