I would venture that the global "budget" for terrorism is only in the low tens of millions of dollars [...]
Considering that the First World's militaries -- dominated by the US -- perform most of the terrorism of the world, and have done so for the last 50 years, I'd have to say your estimate is off by a factor of x10000 AT LEAST.
That's pretty damned inaccurate, Roscoe. You should at least know that $2 billion per month is being spent to terrorize Iraq. That alone is $50B/yr... which is still 5000 times your estimate. You're WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY off.
[I]n Germany, the Driving School (Fahrschule?) is mandatory to get a license and IIRC, costs about $2000.
That's because Germany is CIVILIZED, and has an actual SOCIETY. America in contrast is a wilderness of civility and almost wholly devoid of a society, and people there are still generally encouraged by American culture to prey upon their fellow man in a huge range of ways. Hence, it is still largely the case that a person can survive the pissant tests of their DMV, climb into a 3000LB killing machine, and then hurtle down the road drunk as a skunk and yellin' "yaaaaaahooo!". CRUNCH!
Just try to advocate a mandate to have all drivers in your state undergo a mandatory training program. Go ahead! Just try it. Rush Limbaugh will soon be on the radio screaming "Liberals! Liberals! Liberals!" about your proposal, and will then go on about the "nanny state", excessive costs of government, etc. America loves individualism as a secondary religion, since it supports the primary religion of MAKING MONEY.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
That doesn't work for doctors and lawyers, why would it work for programmers?
Sure it works, for a highly-restricted definition of "works". Programmers will find themselves still making severe mistakes, getting sued, then submitting themselves to an onerous programming malpractice insurance system. Those damaged by bad programming will still be damaged, but some will (a la the "lottery model" as is used now in medical malpractice suits) be able to collect money, even large settlements.
The medical consumer is perfectly OK with this model. Why wouldn't it "work" with programmers?
Wake up, bitch. Governments "consider" prosecuting, whereas in the case of an individual it's a certainty. And the case you mentioned is civil. How much jail time for the responsible executives does THAT entail?
Corporate apologist shitbag. Go the fuck away with your debunked-in-2-seconds propaganda. It's clear corporations break the law with impunity for things the individual would be jailed (even killed) for. We need a Corporate Imprisonment Penalty and a Corporate Death Penalty. Until then, morons like you will keep spouting apologia while corporations run rampant over the populace and the law itself.
There's nothing really off about your response, but who said anything about Republicans? As for "Red States", note that I used the term "Rusty States", not as a political color, but as the indicator of post-industrial-ness with (special emphasis) NOTHING to replace their prosperity with.
If you want to bring up the demon of partisanship, the Republican backers have been voting for the class of elites who have been closing down their factories for years. They have done this even when Democrats were in power (albeit abridged by 1994). But so have Democrat constituencies. Urban yuppies were voting for Clinton, Gore and Kerry in droves, while these assholes did their political work of extensively greasing the wheels of globalism -- which is just socialism for the wealthy, and the free market for the working class.
I well know that over a dozen states that in 2004 voted the heaviest for Bush were also the largest beneficiaries of Federal funds. Anyone can look up those stats, and not only did I also, but I ran the numbers for 2000 and 1996. There's a bunch of egg over the faces of the so-called Conservative voters in those states.
But none of this does away with the cultural swing towards yuppies in our society. The media loves them since the media now almost solely IS them, and media also follows corporate overlord-ery, which means money, which means that same class again: yuppies.
This is why we even HAVE a term like "the flyover". It's fueled by disdain for the rural folk and manual laborers. And THAT is a significant reason why Bush fielded so many votes in 2000 (despite being a demented asshole). The disenfranchised conservative folk in the flyover finally rallied behind an icon... after watching the big-L Liberal elite try to outlaw freedom of speech and the keeping and bearing of arms, for starters.
We're all to blame. We all have to fix this. Disdain of any kind is not serving the solution. We can point fingers for a bit, but eventually we have to work together... urban and rural, liberal and conservative, yuppie and redneck, technician and salesman, labor and management.
It is likely because we do not hear a lot of things happening [in flyover country], and things do happen on the coasts.
This is because the coasts treat news of Midwest factory closings and the like as unimportant. The economy is crashing in the Rusty States, and the coasters not only couldn't care less, but probably find it encouraging, since such a thing only translates to short-term gains in their stock portfolios.
It's all about class war, Ace. The Midwesterners are merely on the losing side, and losers never get fair treatment from the media. Overwhelmingly, Midwesterners are now waking up to empty businesses and shuttered factories... after a generation of having woken up to new owners who were almost invariably from NY or LA.
Despite my contempt for attitudes like yours, it still isn't rational to sympathize with the Midwesterners who are turning into America's fastest growing wage-slave class. Millions of unionized workers in the Midwest could see throughout the 1990s that their gravy train was ending. Yet instead of preparing for a future of markedly lower wages, they went as a class on a gargantuan spending spree in some sort of demented race with the much-better-paid coasters. We can certainly blame the banks for urging on this orgy of spending and speculation, but ultimately (per the doctrine of personal responsibility) it falls upon each worker for shouldering luxuries while pretending they were necessities.
That's because municipality and even state cops like to detain or arrest people nationwide when they see people anywhere with holstered guns. This unconstitutional and violent behavior is what's "chilling" the right to keep and bear arms, as you've observed.
There are 3 major metro areas in the US now that have dared to (as said above) unconstitutionally ban guns altogether... Washington DC, Chicago and now San Franciso. Many smaller metro areas have invoked bans to some degree. In my city (Toledo OH) anyone who has a holstered weapon is arrested on sight by any law enforcement. Allegedly there's a municipal ban on carrying. All this is of course horseshit, but unless we actually shoot the cops and politicians who enact these gestapo tactics, nothing will really improve.
Somebody has to make the point that "home rule" doesn't mean that the law of the land (i.e. the US Constitution) can be over-ruled. Too bad we have so many judges legislating from their benches. Perhaps we should shoot them first?
Correction: Executives are only good at destroying companies. Al Qaeda doesn't have any corporations that can be blown up.
Regardless, attaching fins to these executives and then dropping them from 45K feet is still a good idea. Think of it as... "wiping up" after a particuluarly prolonged crapper.
It makes sense. The floor is at positive pressure, so cold air flows out of it through openings. Each opening under a cabinet tries to fill said cabinet to some level with cold air. Now, the hot components in the cabinet will make the air surrounding them hot, hence rising. The end production (assuming you aren't underpowered with airflow) is that cold air rises within the cabinets, heats up, carries away the heat from the components, and then flows out of the tops... to eventually be collected and cooled from the AC units in the room (if not actually vented, perhaps in some room designs).
Obviously you realize that as the equipment contents of datacenters change, it doesn't make sense to change the room sturcture all that much? Hence many older datacenters have retained their raised floors. Of course, their air conditioners were also designed for raised floors.
I don't know where you've worked, but every datacenter I've seen has had a raised floor, and all of them still had at least one mainframe structure still in use... hence, they still routed cables under the floor for them, by design.
(Many miles of telephone and power line were torn down in Africa because the natives, who weren't using those services themselves, wanted the metal for other things...)
Well, let that be a lesson for all of us. An "infrastructure" devoted to the elite will simply be destroyed by the majority who are being starved by said elite.
They're not expenses. They're frivolous wastes of company wealth, and it is the demand of we stockholders that they be REPLACED with robots that never require such compensation!
In "my world"? WTF? If you OWN stock in the company, you OWN the company ITSELF. YOU are responsible for the things you OWN, and doubly so for things that ACT on your behalf. So it's not just in "my world", Bub.
You want to OWN profits? That's what stockholders have always wanted. Well, you also have to accept responsibility for LOSSES.
I've already explained that investors ARE investors since they want to grow their wealth. Since they MUST invest, they really have to accept the idea that they are responsible for their investments invoking debts and other liabilities in THEIR name. After all, all that "shareholder value" screeching is a double-edged sword for the reasons I've already explained perfectly well. You have to take responsibility for losses as well as profits. This is the joy and sorrow of the Ownership Society, Bub.
Again, if you disagree, then you're an elitist scumbag who doesn't believe that any rules whatsoever apply to you. People like you are shot and dumped into ditches eventually, so keep it up.
It's deuced odd, innit, that we do lots of things we're responsible for, even things we are responsible for through the actions of others... and yet society MARCHES ONWARD.
Owners want to expand their wealth. They can ONLY do this by investing. Hence they MUST invest.
So it doesn't matter about sentiments like "ooooh, I don't like being held responsible!". (Of course, it DOES matter if you're an elite scumbag and think that laws and morality just don't fucking apply to you.)
Humans have invested since time immemorial. The "zero liability" retardation is a modern invention designed to create a new aristocracy inside Republics to assist transforming them into Empires. So pardon me if I just fail to sympathize.
You're not seeing it solely because you refuse to believe it.
We're not going to be living in space cities in the 21st Century. The primary dwelling for the 21st Century will be a tentament.
Many people are devolving already into pre-tentaments, called "apartments". Some condos in cities also fulfill this pre-tentament condition.
So as wages fall, and the price and cost of real housing rise, it ONLY STANDS TO REASON that the end product will bottom out at Roman-esque tentaments.
Many people in Europe live in tentament housing. Fortunately for the Europeans, they have socialized systems and overall a strong sense of culture and community, so their tentaments aren't bad at all. But America is being converted into a corporation-support system ONLY -- with little to no regard for INDIVIDUAL survival, prosperity and even rights -- and that means legions of desperate poor, hence particularly nasty tentament housing.
The news media of course completely spins this future by endless concentration upon the yuppie classes and all the obnoxiously expensive shit they buy on almost 100% credit. But having highly overextended yuppies in McMansions is a very unstable position (and limited besides), hence the future becomes clear after that point.
Once the housing bubble bursts in a big way (which may take up to 20 years), America will have vast policing powers to force people to not make use of (i.e. squat on) all the abandoned housing, hence forcing people into the harsh hands of a new class of slumlord -- a hyperslumlord. These hypers will have vast, condensed properties hollowed out and fitted for as high a density of living as possible, since their only concern will be to get as much of each person's income as possible. These will become the actual tentaments. Legions of prior middle class will arrive at them with destroyed credit, few employment prospects, and very little savings.
But other instances of tentaments will arise. Many McMansions will be refurb'd into duplexes. Cutting a "normal" 1920s-1930s house into apartments had long ago been done, but in all their generational avoidance of honesty, Americans never wanted to call that a "tentament" trend.
At any rate, I'm right, and I'm preparing for that future. America's glorious 21st Century is arriving and it is not just tarnished, but it is steadily corroding before our eyes. To even survive as the middle class, I have to save money NOW, while I'm surrounded by people who are living on 103% of their incomes. My accumulated wealth is just about the only chance I have to avoid being shoehorned (essentially by force, and I mostly mean ECONOMIC force) into a tentament by the time Social Security crashes in the 2020s, and by the time my very threatened retirement looms in 2036.
P.S. Your personal refusals and problems don't concern me. If you don't see the numbers I've seen, it only means that you're not as well read as I am. The more you refuse to investigate your society's future vectors, the more you'll be stung by them. {shrug}
I hear of coder wages being driven ALREADY to $15/hr ($30K). Hence, you're wrong.
Techie wages are being driven to $8/hr. Try AVOIDING living in a tentament on that, chum.
It's all about driving the middle class down into the working poor. If you don't see it around you, then you're just not looking. But here in the Midwest it is a tsunami of social change.
You may have caught the news about Delphi intending to cut its worker wages by about 60%. That's going to happen to about 400 employees in a nearby town. IT'S HAPPENING, CHUM.
So we're left with you lookin' all stupid an' shit, standing in a field with a "willful ignorance" sign hung on your back.
Solution: bid lower to compete with foreign labor.
That would mean much of the American population will move into tentaments for 21st Century living. Expenses can't continue to rise (or even plateau) when income takes THAT MUCH of a dive.
I don't know about you, but I'm not just going to sit back in my 1 rented room in a tentament filled with desperate poor, just so some millionaire can get 20% on his money each year. Converting America to a tent city is going to lead to civil war.
And you're supposed to avoid civil war, you little fuck. Deal with ethics much? Watched "Omega Man" a few too many times?
Globalization will eventually even out values of labor. I expect my wages to drop. But "eventually" isn't good enough for meeting current obligations. What's happening now is an orgy of expatriating the American commonwealth just to mint a few more millionaires. It doesn't serve the common good and is leading to marked instability in societies across the globe as well. War is a bad price to pay for riches.
Of course the employer given the opportunity of dumping the over taxed American will scream to his congress critter about how those lazy American kids just want too much money.
In other words, American corporations love the American consumer, but they hate the America worker. This trend can't last.
Having seen this coming since 2000, and thence having understood that I'm the losing side in a CLASS WAR, I decided to stop consuming as much as possible and to save my money for the (and obviously) inevitable long periods of under- and un-employment for the rest of my life. This means that I don't consume the products and services that I end up creating or supporting. Again, this trend can't last... if the franchise of my behavior expands, which it only can, considering the shrinking set of options for many of the workers around me.
So what would you suggest? The legislature vote me a raise?
No, but your government levels can well STOP the extensive lubrication of the gears of the offshoring, outsourcing and immigration engines. Your legislature makes the laws, allegedly from the desires of the people. Said legislature is also authorized to lay taxes. Hence, you have every right to lay a departure tax on each dollar of the commonwealth that tries to expatriate. Those tax proceeds can then be used to pay the increased levels of unemployment claims, and as well indulge in this "re-training" that the Republican types claim is the salvation of the American worker. (Note: I don't actually believe this claim. Any skill or profession that a factory or tech worker can re-train into, is still eminently offshorable or outsourceable, or can be done by a cheaper immigrant.)
The sad truth is that YOUR OWN government is almost 100% supportive of expatriation of YOUR commonwealth -- dollar by dollar, asset by asset, factory by factory, corporation by corporation. Once you control your own government by removing the elite who are the vassals of corporate wealth, then there will be no need to do something as absurd as "voting you a raise".
Just stop them from "voting to raise your fees" (since your tax money is being extensively used to loot America by the corporate and wealthy minority). That's all I'm effectively saying.
At the expense of burning all my karma and offending all the Polital Correctness whores, I'll say that would never want to work for a Chinese, Indian or Russian boss. They've been kicked around as graduate students or as H1B workers and then they feel like they need to pay back and want to fuck everyone around them who is not from thier own part of the world.
Yep, you got modded a Troll. So let's just repeat your "from the trenches" observation and opinion, and I'll toss my Karma into the bonfire with you.
I seldom see yuppies who want to hear about racial issues in the workplace... yet I plainly see such issues in too many instances (albeit infrequently). Racial cronyism is as reprehensible as any other form of cronyism. Furthermore, the more H1B and L1 workers that appear in America, the more we invite these islands of cronies to exist.
Also, there is a shortage of IT workers who know what they're doing.
Alas, there's a veritable abundance of managers who don't care about that, since they are so busy salivating over the IT worker surplus and all the margin that that will buy them. Price is trumping quality quite often. It's gotten so bad around here (Toledo OH) that routinely I'm seeing a complete collapse of due diligence in the planning and execution of IT work... just to make the sale and have warm bodies show up in the belief that a valid invoice can then be issued. Too often the invoice is made and paid. It boggles the mind, but that's what happens when corporations tell everyone to be a salesman. Executive-level suppliers and consumers are not in actual business anymore -- they are merely playing instead a "Game of Money", and there are no rules, hence cheating is commonplace.
"Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water."
The flow of heat and water in hurricanes is well enough understood. I'm sure electrical discharges play a part in most storm mechanics, but even if a hurricane had ZERO discharges, its massive "humidity engine" would still run.
I don't know where these guys come from, where they think that electromagnetics are the ultimate macro-scale drivers of weather events.
Defining IT "career paths" is rapidly becoming an excuse to superqualify employees.
Superqualification is where you take a current position (or create a new similar one) and load it up with added qualifications (the most obvious one being "a college degree").
Superqualification is being used to push down wages and establish an IT elite. The surviving elite end up working monstrous hours and (eventually) training their own overseas or H1B/L1 replacements.
There's nothing wrong with introducing a little formality into a "mass of skilled employees" as happens to every business as it grows in size. But I strongly doubt that THAT is what's uppermost in your CIO's mind. What's likely to be going through his mind is what he heard on the golf course, or read in "CIOs Are Gods" magazine, or that he's noticed IT workers are in a crunch and he's damned determined to push down the wages of his current workforce one way or another.
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I would venture that the global "budget" for terrorism is only in the low tens of millions of dollars [...]
... which is still 5000 times your estimate. You're WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY off.
Considering that the First World's militaries -- dominated by the US -- perform most of the terrorism of the world, and have done so for the last 50 years, I'd have to say your estimate is off by a factor of x10000 AT LEAST.
That's pretty damned inaccurate, Roscoe. You should at least know that $2 billion per month is being spent to terrorize Iraq. That alone is $50B/yr
[I]n Germany, the Driving School (Fahrschule?) is mandatory to get a license and IIRC, costs about $2000.
That's because Germany is CIVILIZED, and has an actual SOCIETY. America in contrast is a wilderness of civility and almost wholly devoid of a society, and people there are still generally encouraged by American culture to prey upon their fellow man in a huge range of ways. Hence, it is still largely the case that a person can survive the pissant tests of their DMV, climb into a 3000LB killing machine, and then hurtle down the road drunk as a skunk and yellin' "yaaaaaahooo!". CRUNCH!
Just try to advocate a mandate to have all drivers in your state undergo a mandatory training program. Go ahead! Just try it. Rush Limbaugh will soon be on the radio screaming "Liberals! Liberals! Liberals!" about your proposal, and will then go on about the "nanny state", excessive costs of government, etc. America loves individualism as a secondary religion, since it supports the primary religion of MAKING MONEY.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
That doesn't work for doctors and lawyers, why would it work for programmers?
Sure it works, for a highly-restricted definition of "works". Programmers will find themselves still making severe mistakes, getting sued, then submitting themselves to an onerous programming malpractice insurance system. Those damaged by bad programming will still be damaged, but some will (a la the "lottery model" as is used now in medical malpractice suits) be able to collect money, even large settlements.
The medical consumer is perfectly OK with this model. Why wouldn't it "work" with programmers?
Wake up, bitch. Governments "consider" prosecuting, whereas in the case of an individual it's a certainty. And the case you mentioned is civil. How much jail time for the responsible executives does THAT entail?
Corporate apologist shitbag. Go the fuck away with your debunked-in-2-seconds propaganda. It's clear corporations break the law with impunity for things the individual would be jailed (even killed) for. We need a Corporate Imprisonment Penalty and a Corporate Death Penalty. Until then, morons like you will keep spouting apologia while corporations run rampant over the populace and the law itself.
There's nothing really off about your response, but who said anything about Republicans? As for "Red States", note that I used the term "Rusty States", not as a political color, but as the indicator of post-industrial-ness with (special emphasis) NOTHING to replace their prosperity with.
... after watching the big-L Liberal elite try to outlaw freedom of speech and the keeping and bearing of arms, for starters.
... urban and rural, liberal and conservative, yuppie and redneck, technician and salesman, labor and management.
If you want to bring up the demon of partisanship, the Republican backers have been voting for the class of elites who have been closing down their factories for years. They have done this even when Democrats were in power (albeit abridged by 1994). But so have Democrat constituencies. Urban yuppies were voting for Clinton, Gore and Kerry in droves, while these assholes did their political work of extensively greasing the wheels of globalism -- which is just socialism for the wealthy, and the free market for the working class.
I well know that over a dozen states that in 2004 voted the heaviest for Bush were also the largest beneficiaries of Federal funds. Anyone can look up those stats, and not only did I also, but I ran the numbers for 2000 and 1996. There's a bunch of egg over the faces of the so-called Conservative voters in those states.
But none of this does away with the cultural swing towards yuppies in our society. The media loves them since the media now almost solely IS them, and media also follows corporate overlord-ery, which means money, which means that same class again: yuppies.
This is why we even HAVE a term like "the flyover". It's fueled by disdain for the rural folk and manual laborers. And THAT is a significant reason why Bush fielded so many votes in 2000 (despite being a demented asshole). The disenfranchised conservative folk in the flyover finally rallied behind an icon
We're all to blame. We all have to fix this. Disdain of any kind is not serving the solution. We can point fingers for a bit, but eventually we have to work together
Of course, first we must kill all the lawyers.
It is likely because we do not hear a lot of things happening [in flyover country], and things do happen on the coasts.
... after a generation of having woken up to new owners who were almost invariably from NY or LA.
This is because the coasts treat news of Midwest factory closings and the like as unimportant. The economy is crashing in the Rusty States, and the coasters not only couldn't care less, but probably find it encouraging, since such a thing only translates to short-term gains in their stock portfolios.
It's all about class war, Ace. The Midwesterners are merely on the losing side, and losers never get fair treatment from the media. Overwhelmingly, Midwesterners are now waking up to empty businesses and shuttered factories
Despite my contempt for attitudes like yours, it still isn't rational to sympathize with the Midwesterners who are turning into America's fastest growing wage-slave class. Millions of unionized workers in the Midwest could see throughout the 1990s that their gravy train was ending. Yet instead of preparing for a future of markedly lower wages, they went as a class on a gargantuan spending spree in some sort of demented race with the much-better-paid coasters. We can certainly blame the banks for urging on this orgy of spending and speculation, but ultimately (per the doctrine of personal responsibility) it falls upon each worker for shouldering luxuries while pretending they were necessities.
That's because municipality and even state cops like to detain or arrest people nationwide when they see people anywhere with holstered guns. This unconstitutional and violent behavior is what's "chilling" the right to keep and bear arms, as you've observed.
... Washington DC, Chicago and now San Franciso. Many smaller metro areas have invoked bans to some degree. In my city (Toledo OH) anyone who has a holstered weapon is arrested on sight by any law enforcement. Allegedly there's a municipal ban on carrying. All this is of course horseshit, but unless we actually shoot the cops and politicians who enact these gestapo tactics, nothing will really improve.
There are 3 major metro areas in the US now that have dared to (as said above) unconstitutionally ban guns altogether
Somebody has to make the point that "home rule" doesn't mean that the law of the land (i.e. the US Constitution) can be over-ruled. Too bad we have so many judges legislating from their benches. Perhaps we should shoot them first?
Correction: Executives are only good at destroying companies. Al Qaeda doesn't have any corporations that can be blown up.
... "wiping up" after a particuluarly prolonged crapper.
Regardless, attaching fins to these executives and then dropping them from 45K feet is still a good idea. Think of it as
It makes sense. The floor is at positive pressure, so cold air flows out of it through openings. Each opening under a cabinet tries to fill said cabinet to some level with cold air. Now, the hot components in the cabinet will make the air surrounding them hot, hence rising. The end production (assuming you aren't underpowered with airflow) is that cold air rises within the cabinets, heats up, carries away the heat from the components, and then flows out of the tops ... to eventually be collected and cooled from the AC units in the room (if not actually vented, perhaps in some room designs).
That would make maintenance fun: "Oh oh! Got a blade down! Get the scuba gear! YAAAAHOO!"
The OP was talking about AIR ... not the nasty filthgas churning vilely in your abdomen! You could eat holes in cinder blocks with that stuff!
Obviously you realize that as the equipment contents of datacenters change, it doesn't make sense to change the room sturcture all that much? Hence many older datacenters have retained their raised floors. Of course, their air conditioners were also designed for raised floors.
... hence, they still routed cables under the floor for them, by design.
I don't know where you've worked, but every datacenter I've seen has had a raised floor, and all of them still had at least one mainframe structure still in use
(Many miles of telephone and power line were torn down in Africa because the natives, who weren't using those services themselves, wanted the metal for other things...)
Well, let that be a lesson for all of us. An "infrastructure" devoted to the elite will simply be destroyed by the majority who are being starved by said elite.
They're not expenses. They're frivolous wastes of company wealth, and it is the demand of we stockholders that they be REPLACED with robots that never require such compensation!
In "my world"? WTF? If you OWN stock in the company, you OWN the company ITSELF. YOU are responsible for the things you OWN, and doubly so for things that ACT on your behalf. So it's not just in "my world", Bub.
You want to OWN profits? That's what stockholders have always wanted. Well, you also have to accept responsibility for LOSSES.
I've already explained that investors ARE investors since they want to grow their wealth. Since they MUST invest, they really have to accept the idea that they are responsible for their investments invoking debts and other liabilities in THEIR name. After all, all that "shareholder value" screeching is a double-edged sword for the reasons I've already explained perfectly well. You have to take responsibility for losses as well as profits. This is the joy and sorrow of the Ownership Society, Bub.
Again, if you disagree, then you're an elitist scumbag who doesn't believe that any rules whatsoever apply to you. People like you are shot and dumped into ditches eventually, so keep it up.
It's deuced odd, innit, that we do lots of things we're responsible for, even things we are responsible for through the actions of others ... and yet society MARCHES ONWARD.
Owners want to expand their wealth. They can ONLY do this by investing. Hence they MUST invest.
So it doesn't matter about sentiments like "ooooh, I don't like being held responsible!". (Of course, it DOES matter if you're an elite scumbag and think that laws and morality just don't fucking apply to you.)
Humans have invested since time immemorial. The "zero liability" retardation is a modern invention designed to create a new aristocracy inside Republics to assist transforming them into Empires. So pardon me if I just fail to sympathize.
You're not seeing it solely because you refuse to believe it.
We're not going to be living in space cities in the 21st Century. The primary dwelling for the 21st Century will be a tentament.
Many people are devolving already into pre-tentaments, called "apartments". Some condos in cities also fulfill this pre-tentament condition.
So as wages fall, and the price and cost of real housing rise, it ONLY STANDS TO REASON that the end product will bottom out at Roman-esque tentaments.
Many people in Europe live in tentament housing. Fortunately for the Europeans, they have socialized systems and overall a strong sense of culture and community, so their tentaments aren't bad at all. But America is being converted into a corporation-support system ONLY -- with little to no regard for INDIVIDUAL survival, prosperity and even rights -- and that means legions of desperate poor, hence particularly nasty tentament housing.
The news media of course completely spins this future by endless concentration upon the yuppie classes and all the obnoxiously expensive shit they buy on almost 100% credit. But having highly overextended yuppies in McMansions is a very unstable position (and limited besides), hence the future becomes clear after that point.
Once the housing bubble bursts in a big way (which may take up to 20 years), America will have vast policing powers to force people to not make use of (i.e. squat on) all the abandoned housing, hence forcing people into the harsh hands of a new class of slumlord -- a hyperslumlord. These hypers will have vast, condensed properties hollowed out and fitted for as high a density of living as possible, since their only concern will be to get as much of each person's income as possible. These will become the actual tentaments. Legions of prior middle class will arrive at them with destroyed credit, few employment prospects, and very little savings.
But other instances of tentaments will arise. Many McMansions will be refurb'd into duplexes. Cutting a "normal" 1920s-1930s house into apartments had long ago been done, but in all their generational avoidance of honesty, Americans never wanted to call that a "tentament" trend.
At any rate, I'm right, and I'm preparing for that future. America's glorious 21st Century is arriving and it is not just tarnished, but it is steadily corroding before our eyes. To even survive as the middle class, I have to save money NOW, while I'm surrounded by people who are living on 103% of their incomes. My accumulated wealth is just about the only chance I have to avoid being shoehorned (essentially by force, and I mostly mean ECONOMIC force) into a tentament by the time Social Security crashes in the 2020s, and by the time my very threatened retirement looms in 2036.
P.S. Your personal refusals and problems don't concern me. If you don't see the numbers I've seen, it only means that you're not as well read as I am. The more you refuse to investigate your society's future vectors, the more you'll be stung by them. {shrug}
I hear of coder wages being driven ALREADY to $15/hr ($30K). Hence, you're wrong.
Techie wages are being driven to $8/hr. Try AVOIDING living in a tentament on that, chum.
It's all about driving the middle class down into the working poor. If you don't see it around you, then you're just not looking. But here in the Midwest it is a tsunami of social change.
You may have caught the news about Delphi intending to cut its worker wages by about 60%. That's going to happen to about 400 employees in a nearby town. IT'S HAPPENING, CHUM.
So we're left with you lookin' all stupid an' shit, standing in a field with a "willful ignorance" sign hung on your back.
Solution: bid lower to compete with foreign labor.
That would mean much of the American population will move into tentaments for 21st Century living. Expenses can't continue to rise (or even plateau) when income takes THAT MUCH of a dive.
I don't know about you, but I'm not just going to sit back in my 1 rented room in a tentament filled with desperate poor, just so some millionaire can get 20% on his money each year. Converting America to a tent city is going to lead to civil war.
And you're supposed to avoid civil war, you little fuck. Deal with ethics much? Watched "Omega Man" a few too many times?
Globalization will eventually even out values of labor. I expect my wages to drop. But "eventually" isn't good enough for meeting current obligations. What's happening now is an orgy of expatriating the American commonwealth just to mint a few more millionaires. It doesn't serve the common good and is leading to marked instability in societies across the globe as well. War is a bad price to pay for riches.
Of course the employer given the opportunity of dumping the over taxed American will scream to his congress critter about how those lazy American kids just want too much money.
... if the franchise of my behavior expands, which it only can, considering the shrinking set of options for many of the workers around me.
In other words, American corporations love the American consumer, but they hate the America worker. This trend can't last.
Having seen this coming since 2000, and thence having understood that I'm the losing side in a CLASS WAR, I decided to stop consuming as much as possible and to save my money for the (and obviously) inevitable long periods of under- and un-employment for the rest of my life. This means that I don't consume the products and services that I end up creating or supporting. Again, this trend can't last
So what would you suggest? The legislature vote me a raise?
No, but your government levels can well STOP the extensive lubrication of the gears of the offshoring, outsourcing and immigration engines. Your legislature makes the laws, allegedly from the desires of the people. Said legislature is also authorized to lay taxes. Hence, you have every right to lay a departure tax on each dollar of the commonwealth that tries to expatriate. Those tax proceeds can then be used to pay the increased levels of unemployment claims, and as well indulge in this "re-training" that the Republican types claim is the salvation of the American worker. (Note: I don't actually believe this claim. Any skill or profession that a factory or tech worker can re-train into, is still eminently offshorable or outsourceable, or can be done by a cheaper immigrant.)
The sad truth is that YOUR OWN government is almost 100% supportive of expatriation of YOUR commonwealth -- dollar by dollar, asset by asset, factory by factory, corporation by corporation. Once you control your own government by removing the elite who are the vassals of corporate wealth, then there will be no need to do something as absurd as "voting you a raise".
Just stop them from "voting to raise your fees" (since your tax money is being extensively used to loot America by the corporate and wealthy minority). That's all I'm effectively saying.
At the expense of burning all my karma and offending all the Polital Correctness whores, I'll say that would never want to work for a Chinese, Indian or Russian boss. They've been kicked around as graduate students or as H1B workers and then they feel like they need to pay back and want to fuck everyone around them who is not from thier own part of the world.
... yet I plainly see such issues in too many instances (albeit infrequently). Racial cronyism is as reprehensible as any other form of cronyism. Furthermore, the more H1B and L1 workers that appear in America, the more we invite these islands of cronies to exist.
Yep, you got modded a Troll. So let's just repeat your "from the trenches" observation and opinion, and I'll toss my Karma into the bonfire with you.
I seldom see yuppies who want to hear about racial issues in the workplace
Also, there is a shortage of IT workers who know what they're doing.
... just to make the sale and have warm bodies show up in the belief that a valid invoice can then be issued. Too often the invoice is made and paid. It boggles the mind, but that's what happens when corporations tell everyone to be a salesman. Executive-level suppliers and consumers are not in actual business anymore -- they are merely playing instead a "Game of Money", and there are no rules, hence cheating is commonplace.
Alas, there's a veritable abundance of managers who don't care about that, since they are so busy salivating over the IT worker surplus and all the margin that that will buy them. Price is trumping quality quite often. It's gotten so bad around here (Toledo OH) that routinely I'm seeing a complete collapse of due diligence in the planning and execution of IT work
"Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water."
The flow of heat and water in hurricanes is well enough understood. I'm sure electrical discharges play a part in most storm mechanics, but even if a hurricane had ZERO discharges, its massive "humidity engine" would still run.
I don't know where these guys come from, where they think that electromagnetics are the ultimate macro-scale drivers of weather events.
You aren't fooling me with this BULLSHIT.
Defining IT "career paths" is rapidly becoming an excuse to superqualify employees.
Superqualification is where you take a current position (or create a new similar one) and load it up with added qualifications (the most obvious one being "a college degree").
Superqualification is being used to push down wages and establish an IT elite. The surviving elite end up working monstrous hours and (eventually) training their own overseas or H1B/L1 replacements.
There's nothing wrong with introducing a little formality into a "mass of skilled employees" as happens to every business as it grows in size. But I strongly doubt that THAT is what's uppermost in your CIO's mind. What's likely to be going through his mind is what he heard on the golf course, or read in "CIOs Are Gods" magazine, or that he's noticed IT workers are in a crunch and he's damned determined to push down the wages of his current workforce one way or another.