It doesn't sound like he's done the obvious thing here. Ask for slightly different work.
Get all his regular work done quickly (say in 80% of his work time), then go to that Boss he say's is so great and ask for something more interesting to do to fill that other 20%. Say he wants to learn something new, work on something new, so that he can stay interested in his work and progress technically.
If he really does work for a great company with a good boss, then that'd be a no brainer. If he is actually only smart enough to write vb macros, then he'll find that out pretty quickly also.
When someone tells you that your definitions are wrong, you should at least take 30 seconds to do a web search and check your sources before arguing about it.
The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).
They also use the same dollar figure for all the different geographic parts of the country, which is ludicriously inacurate as the actual cost of living in different parts of the country (especially the "poorer" parts) varies dramatically.
According to their official dollar numbers, my family (with four kids) is one of your 12% under the poverty line. Of course, we live in a quarter of a million dollar house (which again, due to geographic cost of living differences doesn't tell you it's one of the nicest in town where we live, but would be a tiny townhouse where we lived a couple of years ago in DC) and don't lack for anything, including a 100" HD theater next to my home office.
Being a college student, depending on your job/non-job situation, you may also be part of that same 12%.
So if one of the Google founders takes his $1 salary and just sells a billion dollars in stock at the end of the year(capital gains) and somehow manages to otherwise keep his bank account interest income under the poverty line, he also would qualify for being "under the poverty line" that year.
But those are the kinds of anomolies you get when your census definitions are designed to try to make things look worse than they are. Annual income doesn't equal wealth level or living standards. At best it's a very poor correlation in the US, with students and especially the retired being probably the most glaringly obvious exceptions.
People who are in the business of promoting envy -- and that includes not only politicians and activists, but also much of the intelligentsia -- are increasingly forced to resort to statistics because serious differences between flesh-and-blood Americans are fewer than ever.
In other times and places, the difference between being in the top economic strata and the bottom strata was the difference between feast and famine. Being poor meant sometimes not having enough to eat or not being able to keep your home warm in the winter or not having adequate clothing to protect you against the elements when you went outside. It meant dressing your children in ragged or patched-up clothes.
In some countries it still means things like that. Someone in his native India told best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza that he wanted to see America because he wanted to see a country where poor people are fat. He was right. Americans in the lower income brackets are obese more often than those in the upper brackets.
Most Americans living below the official poverty line have air conditioning, microwaves and VCRs. About half have a car or truck. Moreover, most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in 1975 have also been in the top 20 percent at some point since then.
People who are genuinely poor all their lives still exist, but only about 3 percent of the American population remains in the bottom 20 percent for as long as a decade.
This is fine as far as most of us are concerned. But it is tough if you are in the envy or "social justice" business. It means you have to work harder to stir up indignation, votes and government programs to deal with "inequities" between the "haves" and the "have nots."
What you fail to account for in your ignorance is that "12%" statistic doesn't include welfare payments, food stamps, subsidized housing, free health care and other assistance for the people you are talking about. Once you count what they actually receive and own in terms of income and assets, they're a lot richer than the vast majority of people in many other countries or time periods.
Oh, and I've read over 40,000 books in my life, with at least a few hundred of them being on economics. Perhaps you should attempt to get an education instead of a piece of paper, moron?
In the US economy, most of the poorest 20% defined by income eventually become "rich" and most of the richest 20% used to be "poor", and then become "poor" again. It's a misleading statistic, because the "poor" are usually young and uneducated, then they get older, work for a while, get paid better based on their experience and gained wisdom, thus leaving that bottom 20% income bracket. Eventually, they retire and become "poor" again because of their lack of income.
Measured in terms of wealth, in the US the vast majority of the bottom 20% are no longer in that bottom 20% in terms of wealth as little as 10-20 years later.
As for your myth about "This is hardly enough for a subsistence diet and housing.", most people in the US who are under the poverty line are much wealthier than the vast majority of people just 50 or 100 years ago. Most of the "poor" in the US have color TVs, air-conditioning and are fighting obesity in much more spacious living conditions than the majority of US citizens USED to have in this country.
In fact, the vast majority of "under the poverty line" US citizens, if transplanted with their life-style into most other countries in the world even today would be considered "rich" there.
Where do you get your distorted view of economic reality in the US?
The funny part is that it let's you do it already. Those "customizable buttons"? You can make them do pretty much whatever you want, URL-wise, including take the text from the search box and insert it into multiple URLs to grab as keywords for searching them.
Sadly, I don't recall all the recent Google vs. U.S. request for statistics stories making that distinction, even in the parts of the comments that I happened to read, although it was Child Porn the law was against, not Porn in general.
Of course, you need Dishnetwork and a new MPEG4 receiver (VIP622 is nice) to get the Voom channels right now, but over time that barrier to entry will ease.
From someone who was around during the Reagan years, just wanted to point out that under Reagan's tax cuts, government revenue did increase significantly. So you can't blame deficits on tax cuts that had the effect of increasing revenues.
The problem was that government spending under a Democrat controlled congress and your mentioned military initiatives managed to increase faster most years.
Yeah, they make a big point about wanting it to be cool enough to eliminate HTPC fan noise, then choose the latest Intel dual core CPU. Perhaps that part needs a little rethink?
See search engine watch for extensive details, but the upshot is that the administration only asked search engines for a week's worth of search terms data and the request didn't include asking for anyone's personal data, just a list of terms and related search frequency statistics. Almost all the other major search engines have released the requested data and publicly stated that the data didn't include anything personal or threatening to individual privacy. Google's refusal probably has more to do with competitive reasons more than any privacy issues.
Don't believe all the hype you might read in the Mercury News.
See this comment for a more detailed explanation of the actual changes and you'll see that your example concept has no relation to what is actually going on.
Under the "changes", it is estimated that more loans in larger dollar amounts will be given out (since they raised the loan caps) than before the changes. The estimated savings come from increased repayment down the road, not reduced loans being made.
Now try and apply that to the reality of the changes in the student loan program and you'll see that your example has absolutely no relation to reality.
The per student amount of loans available was raised considerably. The artifically low interest rates subsidized by the government were allowed to rise a couple percent, but with the benefit of becoming fixed instead of variable. Interest rates in the US have been rising recently, you might also note.
Any student who is currently eligible for a student loan would still be eligible after the changes and could actually get a bigger loan to deal with inflation. What's going on is that down the road when they go to pay it off, they'll have to pay more for the loans they took out, thus saving the taxpayers some money over the next 5 years.
So how does that scenario reduce the availability of student loans for students again? Answer, it doesn't, it just affects the eventual payback by the now working professional.
Google sets much higher restrictions on who they allow to become a premium publisher, such as a bare minimum of 10 million page views/month.
Google also gives many more options to their premium publishers, so most "regular" Adsense publishers would love to become one.
Thus, there is no incentive for Google to create a Trojan Horse because they want "more premium subscribers".
But the Adsense code is highly restricted for regular publishers, meaning you aren't allowed to change it from Google's provided format. Premium publishers have additional variable options and changes to the code that regular publishers don't.
Hence why the Trojan would be able to easily find regular Adsense code in a page, but may not identify a premium publisher's Adsense code as easily in order to replace it with a same-sized ad, for example.
Apparently I'm starting to get too old for the/. crowd.
I made it through the entire page of comments (ok, only 2+, didn't read the others) and not a single person mentioned where this has all been done before in the MU* (MUSH/MUX/MUD/etc..) realm. You know, hundreds of players at a time in a multi-user game. Game services that did nothing but rent game accounts for you to build and run your own. All of the software highly customizable, with the better ones (Like PennMush, TinyMU*, etc..) having an in-game programming language that still has list and string functions easier to use than most high-level languages today have.
You know, the things that today's MMOG are built on top of? Heck, if you looked at Everquest, you could tell it was just a MUD with a GUI thrown on top.
This "Multiverse" is simply bringing the current crop of graphical MUDs back to the previous realm of how things were before some big budget guys starting spending the cash necessary to stick a GUI on top of some MUD software.
The only connection to Google in this vulnerability is that the exploit allows access to local files that a web site isn't supposed to have access to and Google stores local files on the user's computer that can then be accessed.
The google thing was a proof of concept (with a pretty page for showing it to people who use Google Desktop), not any particular relationship to the vulnerability.
But I guess if you mention Google, it gets more attention? The summary could have just as easily said "vulnerability allows access to user's Hotmail email!!!!!!!!", which would be just as true, assuming the user is storing a cookie for easier access to hotmail.com.
I included the couple of hundred thousand they listed for Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute in my "political" contributions total.
The article pointed out 2-3 million in political contributions and a bunch of charitable stuff. That's all a biased article can come up with, which is a far cry from your supposed 100 times Soros' 27 million plus.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't sound like he's done the obvious thing here. Ask for slightly different work.
Get all his regular work done quickly (say in 80% of his work time), then go to that Boss he say's is so great and ask for something more interesting to do to fill that other 20%. Say he wants to learn something new, work on something new, so that he can stay interested in his work and progress technically.
If he really does work for a great company with a good boss, then that'd be a no brainer. If he is actually only smart enough to write vb macros, then he'll find that out pretty quickly also.
Then go back and look at JFK's platform and campaign promises. They're mostly more "right" than Bush's actions. Lower taxes, smaller budget, etc...
So how come the current left demonizes Nixon and worships Kennedy? Wouldn't you think it'd be the other way around?
Of course, one got impeached and the other one assasinated, so maybe that emotional response overrides any policy response.
From the census bureau definition page:
They also use the same dollar figure for all the different geographic parts of the country, which is ludicriously inacurate as the actual cost of living in different parts of the country (especially the "poorer" parts) varies dramatically.
According to their official dollar numbers, my family (with four kids) is one of your 12% under the poverty line. Of course, we live in a quarter of a million dollar house (which again, due to geographic cost of living differences doesn't tell you it's one of the nicest in town where we live, but would be a tiny townhouse where we lived a couple of years ago in DC) and don't lack for anything, including a 100" HD theater next to my home office.
Being a college student, depending on your job/non-job situation, you may also be part of that same 12%.
So if one of the Google founders takes his $1 salary and just sells a billion dollars in stock at the end of the year(capital gains) and somehow manages to otherwise keep his bank account interest income under the poverty line, he also would qualify for being "under the poverty line" that year.
But those are the kinds of anomolies you get when your census definitions are designed to try to make things look worse than they are. Annual income doesn't equal wealth level or living standards. At best it's a very poor correlation in the US, with students and especially the retired being probably the most glaringly obvious exceptions.
Garbage in, garbage out.
What you fail to account for in your ignorance is that "12%" statistic doesn't include welfare payments, food stamps, subsidized housing, free health care and other assistance for the people you are talking about. Once you count what they actually receive and own in terms of income and assets, they're a lot richer than the vast majority of people in many other countries or time periods.
Oh, and I've read over 40,000 books in my life, with at least a few hundred of them being on economics. Perhaps you should attempt to get an education instead of a piece of paper, moron?
In the US economy, most of the poorest 20% defined by income eventually become "rich" and most of the richest 20% used to be "poor", and then become "poor" again. It's a misleading statistic, because the "poor" are usually young and uneducated, then they get older, work for a while, get paid better based on their experience and gained wisdom, thus leaving that bottom 20% income bracket. Eventually, they retire and become "poor" again because of their lack of income.
Measured in terms of wealth, in the US the vast majority of the bottom 20% are no longer in that bottom 20% in terms of wealth as little as 10-20 years later.
As for your myth about "This is hardly enough for a subsistence diet and housing.", most people in the US who are under the poverty line are much wealthier than the vast majority of people just 50 or 100 years ago. Most of the "poor" in the US have color TVs, air-conditioning and are fighting obesity in much more spacious living conditions than the majority of US citizens USED to have in this country.
In fact, the vast majority of "under the poverty line" US citizens, if transplanted with their life-style into most other countries in the world even today would be considered "rich" there.
Where do you get your distorted view of economic reality in the US?
The funny part is that it let's you do it already. Those "customizable buttons"? You can make them do pretty much whatever you want, URL-wise, including take the text from the search box and insert it into multiple URLs to grab as keywords for searching them.
All it takes is a tiny bit of XML.
text of the bill.
It has over 40 co-sponsors (From Allen to Obama) and doesn't look like it's going to become a partisan battle, so maybe it'll actually pass.
Sadly, I don't recall all the recent Google vs. U.S. request for statistics stories making that distinction, even in the parts of the comments that I happened to read, although it was Child Porn the law was against, not Porn in general.
HijackThis
Vundo removal tool
Some Free removal tools and the Bitdefender Live CD
So, for example, if they had a new HD channel entirely devoted to gaming with tournament coverage, strategy from game designers, etc... coming out Feb. 1st?
Of course, you need Dishnetwork and a new MPEG4 receiver (VIP622 is nice) to get the Voom channels right now, but over time that barrier to entry will ease.
From someone who was around during the Reagan years, just wanted to point out that under Reagan's tax cuts, government revenue did increase significantly. So you can't blame deficits on tax cuts that had the effect of increasing revenues.
The problem was that government spending under a Democrat controlled congress and your mentioned military initiatives managed to increase faster most years.
They can watch it, until it gets slashdotted.
2 0.wmv
/. effect takes over. :)
Mark Sanford (running for Gov.) got permission to put the show on his site at mms://sql2.slicker.com:1890/sanfordforgovernor/20
Good luck watching it until the
How about something from AMD that is comparable in terms of prcessing power, while while generating far less heat?
Yeah, they make a big point about wanting it to be cool enough to eliminate HTPC fan noise, then choose the latest Intel dual core CPU. Perhaps that part needs a little rethink?
See search engine watch for extensive
details, but the upshot is that the administration only asked search engines
for a week's worth of search terms data and the request didn't include
asking for anyone's personal data, just a list of terms and related search
frequency statistics. Almost all the other major search engines have
released the requested data and publicly stated that the data didn't include
anything personal or threatening to individual privacy. Google's refusal
probably has more to do with competitive reasons more than any privacy
issues.
Don't believe all the hype you might read in the Mercury News.
Yeah, the massive copper shortage will occur just before we hit "peak oil" and all the real economists roll over in their graves.
In short, the story is BS.
Ah, but finally a legit use for that 1000 Watt power supply, as long as you include the multi-cpu and raid setup, of course. :)
See this comment for a more detailed explanation of the actual changes and you'll see that your example concept has no relation to what is actually going on.
Under the "changes", it is estimated that more loans in larger dollar amounts will be given out (since they raised the loan caps) than before the changes. The estimated savings come from increased repayment down the road, not reduced loans being made.
Now try and apply that to the reality of the changes in the student loan program and you'll see that your example has absolutely no relation to reality.
The per student amount of loans available was raised considerably. The artifically low interest rates subsidized by the government were allowed to rise a couple percent, but with the benefit of becoming fixed instead of variable. Interest rates in the US have been rising recently, you might also note.
Any student who is currently eligible for a student loan would still be eligible after the changes and could actually get a bigger loan to deal with inflation. What's going on is that down the road when they go to pay it off, they'll have to pay more for the loans they took out, thus saving the taxpayers some money over the next 5 years.
So how does that scenario reduce the availability of student loans for students again? Answer, it doesn't, it just affects the eventual payback by the now working professional.
!"increasing as much as planned" != "cutting back"
Of course, it is a
Google sets much higher restrictions on who they allow to become a premium publisher, such as a bare minimum of 10 million page views/month.
Google also gives many more options to their premium publishers, so most "regular" Adsense publishers would love to become one.
Thus, there is no incentive for Google to create a Trojan Horse because they want "more premium subscribers".
But the Adsense code is highly restricted for regular publishers, meaning you aren't allowed to change it from Google's provided format. Premium publishers have additional variable options and changes to the code that regular publishers don't.
Hence why the Trojan would be able to easily find regular Adsense code in a page, but may not identify a premium publisher's Adsense code as easily in order to replace it with a same-sized ad, for example.
There are some inconsistencies about the events of his alleged "beating".
Apparently I'm starting to get too old for the /. crowd.
I made it through the entire page of comments (ok, only 2+, didn't read the others) and not a single person mentioned where this has all been done before in the MU* (MUSH/MUX/MUD/etc..) realm. You know, hundreds of players at a time in a multi-user game. Game services that did nothing but rent game accounts for you to build and run your own. All of the software highly customizable, with the better ones (Like PennMush, TinyMU*, etc..) having an in-game programming language that still has list and string functions easier to use than most high-level languages today have.
You know, the things that today's MMOG are built on top of? Heck, if you looked at Everquest, you could tell it was just a MUD with a GUI thrown on top.
This "Multiverse" is simply bringing the current crop of graphical MUDs back to the previous realm of how things were before some big budget guys starting spending the cash necessary to stick a GUI on top of some MUD software.
The only connection to Google in this vulnerability is that the exploit allows access to local files that a web site isn't supposed to have access to and Google stores local files on the user's computer that can then be accessed.
The google thing was a proof of concept (with a pretty page for showing it to people who use Google Desktop), not any particular relationship to the vulnerability.
But I guess if you mention Google, it gets more attention? The summary could have just as easily said "vulnerability allows access to user's Hotmail email!!!!!!!!", which would be just as true, assuming the user is storing a cookie for easier access to hotmail.com.
I included the couple of hundred thousand they listed for Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute in my "political" contributions total.
The article pointed out 2-3 million in political contributions and a bunch of charitable stuff. That's all a biased article can come up with, which is a far cry from your supposed 100 times Soros' 27 million plus.