yup. that works much better.
We prefer to use open-source with the government because it is takes too long to order and pay for the restaurant food.:-)
This metaphor also allows for all of the variations of using "pre-made" commercial libraries (like using Hamburger Helper) and hiring a chef to cater your party (hiring an open-source consultant to tailor the installation for you).
Very nice.
Hmm... here goes:
1. There is no cost-effective competing product to Microsoft Project with the same functionality. And yes, I have tried competing products.
2. The only people telling other businesses that Open Source is cheaper are geeks - not fellow businessmen that have been proven in the field. (Consider Microsoft versus Novell - who makes more money? who has better market share? and therefore, who will have more street credibility?)
3. Open Source products (such as CVS, which is really, really good and better than the competition) change UI, workflow and features all of the time - which causes retraining amongst non-techies. Retraining diverts resources from what they were really supposed to do - make money. If you want to beat Microsoft, show how little retraining will be needed, and how large the available pool of non-technical people who use Linux is (like Secretaries, Accountants, Marketing, etc...) Remember, in most companies we are just infrastructure, the same as the accountants. We don't make money for the company, and we don't contribute directly to the making of money. Nothing will get done just because it makes our life better - it will only get done if it makes their life better. Especially if the IT budget is seperate from their department's budget.
If you want to win this game, win the home market. If you can get enough secretaries, accountants, managers, etc... to use Linux at home AND like it (not just like it better than Microsoft) then you will see them put it on their resume, and they will use it in their start-up businesses, which will eventually cause it to be accepted as those businesses are absorbed by the larger one.
Creating a monopoly on potential workers is called unionizing. In a free market everything would be open to capitalistic forces - including labor.
Government regulations on working conditions or environmental issues don't work because companies are allowed to relocate to regions without those regulations - first within the US, from the north to the south, and then outside of the US.
Where I grew up the black radio stations promoted "economic determinism". That means that you use the money you spend to assure that companies whose policies benefit you are more successful. (This does work, as long as you have good enough information to be able to scale higher "benefit".) This plays out in two ways:
1. If EA is truly abusing its workers, and there is such a large pool of potential workers, band together and make a co-operative company that competes with them. If these are truly abuses, removing the middle-men who siphon of profits should allow for better conditions with profitability.
2. Convince consumers not to buy EA games - this may be harder though, since EA employees are still better off than the average worker, who doesn't even get good health care, let alone stable working hours.
You can go without orgasm for quite some time after marriage - the chemicals produced by the feeling of "love" are even more addictive - which ruins many relationships, when one partner searches for more intense "love" with other sources. Remember that the brain chemicals for "love" are the same as produced by chocolate - and that is intensely addictive, with true withdrawal.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't look at pictures of naked women - I just don't find a need to orgasm when doing so.
Here are the things I have looked at in job interviews:
1. If I ask you something you don't know, do you admit it or try to bullshit me? (I need to know that you will come to me for help before a deadline passes)
2. If I ask you something you don't know, and offer to help you understand it, will you ask me questions so that you can figure it out? (I need to know that you are willing to be trained)
3. If I ask you to justify your methodology of coming up with that answer, can you do it civilly and logically, or do you start to insult me? (I need to know that you will be able to survive in front of the customer when the questions start)
I have done this using deliberate vocal calming techniques, and with a friendly demeanor, and still have had most people fail at least one of the above items. To give ratios, 12 people have passed that out of approximately 250 people I have interviewed in the past 10 years.
You may have to stretch things in putting down the keywords on your resume for HR to circle to get you in the door, but if you fail the above few good companies will hire and keep you (companies I work for have hired people who failed the above - and promptly fired them in a few months)
The company that I work for is small, and has to provide the image of "quality" workers. We also have to mentor the people on the customer site (who are beginners). Quite frankly, the two people at the customer site are better than many people with five to ten years of experience - and we have already come across a situation where the client, with two years experience, is more experienced than a ten-year veteran, and they have a problem with this.
Other small companies will be in the same situation - contracting to a bigger firm to provide experience and mentoring, in which case they can't hire a beginner.
No my friend, government derives power by inventing problems. For an example:
1. Scientist invents robot to kill roaches.
2. Robot is successful, people forget how bad roaches were, and government declares some roaches "endangered".
3. Government sets up regulations governing the killing of roaches. Oddly enough, these regulations are only enforced when the values of homes are at stake.
4. Government sells licenses for "roach hunts" when the population of roaches recover, since they now have no natural predators.
5. Political parties campaign for and against "roach hugging liberals" in elections.
6. Roaches are found to produce large quantities of methane gas due to distribution of feces in area without proper ventilation, and are blamed for global warming.
Did I miss anything?
Actually, its mostly in the commercial sector... I work for a military contract, close to the customer, and I have reasonable hours... the customer even cares about my health. Work far away from the military's sight, and it's a different story...
Now, when I worked for a commercial company that will not be named, employees only got pregnant when the went back to India, because that is the only time they got to sleep with their spouses... (as for us Americans, well...)
There are two sides to unions in the US. Taking as an example the Teamsters (which is one of the most powerful unions)
Good Side:
1. When my aunt's husband died in the performance of his duty, without life insurance, they paid her monthly compensation (and still do).
2. His salary was decent, and there were good health benefits (hard to get in the US in blue collar jobs)
Bad Side:
1. Wages tend to be the same across the industry, since they are negotiated across companies.
2. If one company will not bargain, all companies in that type of business have strike action done against them (this is what makes the Teamsters so powerful).
Unions in the US were made to counterbalance the associations the owners made to collectively force costs lower by fixing the wages and benefits (and deciding collectively, illicitly and illegally to not hire workers whom they did not like).
While there are still small businesses in this industry, unionization will not be worth it - because the small businesses can be shut down on illegal behavior, and they would be destroyed by industry-wide bargaining. If we ever get to the point where there are no small businesses, then unionization will be needed - because large businesses will never be able to be totally shut down. It's too easy for the owners to open up again as a different business.
As for benefits... many programmers left in the US getting good wages have jobs that are related to government functioning or vital services. Strikes will be crushed by the government in both of those cases - and you can be jailed for striking and denying governmental or vital services.
Actually, I think that wireless should be implemented using the software radio protocols and smart antenna. This would allow dynamic reassignment of gain and modification of algorithms, so that the network could adapt to the needs of its users.
Most of the transmission means to increasing encryption and bandwidth use spatial methods - adjust the gain on a set of antennas, and differentiate between the signals from two different transmitters - the equivalent of connecting two modems to your computer and using two different lines. Smart antenna ( http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/smart_ant/ ) allows modification of gain to form a radio "bubble" around the receiver - increasing the power requirements of a jammer, and allowing it to be found easier. Note that this processing doesn't slow down the connection.
And yes, I am an expert in this technology.
Actually, you are missing out on an important factor here - taxation. Road maintenence in the US is paid for through taxation on fuel, property taxes on cars (for those states that have that tax) and toll fees. Of all of these, only taxation on fuel is the least regressive (i.e. more the most even in terms of percentage of income that the tax consumes). Hydrogen would be dispensed in stations where taxation could be easily performed and collected - electricity (unless you are talking about unusual feed necessities, like greater than 50 Amp service) is not seperably taxable, so a tax-burden-to-consumption model is not possible.
As for switching to a toll-based system, that would be the most regressive - since the poor often have to drive long distances from where they can afford housing to where there is enough money to pay them enough to afford healthcare.
Yeah - one of my friends and I are considering becoming lawyers - same problems, but you get to really, really take it out on the opposition...:-)
BTW - I'm not joking.
All of the code I write for companies is considered proprietary - I can't show you 1000 lines of code, since it would be a violation of my contract.
I suspect that many of the other "good" programmers out there are in a similar situation.
Actually, that isn't always true, even if it is a ridiculously small amount. TrueGreen of Sterling VA tried to tell me that I had a "in perpetuum" contract with them. They sent to collections for $30.00 . I never had a contract with them, and regularly tell the debt collectors that I will pay upon receipt of a copy of my contract. Then it is dropped for two years, and resubmitted to a debt collection service.
Now, this doesn't seem like a lot of money, but if I were to ever pay it to get them off of my back, there would be an implied contract - and TrueGreen would bill me for $30.00 a month for my entire life.
Hmm... I'd say that was right, except that the way that patent an copyrights are being used in America makes every product a virtual monopoly. This creates a barrier to lowering of prices, since you can't just get a competing product - you have to leave the entire paradigm, since the way of doing things has been patented, not an instance of the thing (as was the case with, say, a particular house plan - I can still reproduce the house, just not buy the plans. In software, the way copyrights are going, I would not be allowed to have a dining room next to the kitchen).
And as for bashing economists, their problem is that they are as naive as most other people - unless you can show me an economist that would have factored Senator Byrd into West Virginia's economy to make a more accurate model. The only bow to politics I have seen in Economics is the effect of the Fed on rates.
This isn't something that software engineering understands either - I would be really surprised if Yourdon's "Death March" was in the curriculum of many colleges.
...and there is the real problem. High-priced CEO's pay less taxes (ultimately) and spread around the wealth less geographically. If one CEO makes the same as ten workers (or fifty, etc...) that CEO is not likely to live in ten or fifty different municipalities. And that CEO is most likely to live in a "rich" neighborhood.
Net effect? Less education and infrastructure money to the poor or middle-class neighborhoods. The less education you have, the less likely you will be to qualify for the jobs in the forefront of the new technologies - i.e. those jobs that rely on skills not available cheaper in other countries yet.
Look to the example of Louis Comfort Tiffany for an example of both working at the same time - he had artisans produce "custom" stained glass pieces at high prices, and he had artisans perform increasingly minor changes to stained glass pieces until you had the cheapest, mass-produced pieces. The quality of the custom pieces got his company a reputation. The margin on the mass-produced pieces got him the profit.
With this model, both things work... or, to try it another way, a company that produces open-source software to get it's name in the door, and then charges more for custom solutions based on them, since it now has the reputation and exposure to be able to offset its higher cost (and profit) with its reputation... like, say, IBM Global Services?
Simple - social security doesn't pay enough to get all the shiny new toys that we want, so we would continue working if we could be as healthy as we were at twenty. Then the government can drop social security payments for all but the uncurable (while continuing charging the taxes), mandate the technology as "necessary", and eliminate all retirement. Remember that most NATO nations face dwindling, not increasing, populations. And if we can modify the "fertile time" of women until 60 or 80, we can stop them from having kids until they can afford it, by force if necessary.
Why does everyone here think "1984" when the world is really turning out more like "Brave New World"?
Try this scenario on for size - license plate records tied to establishments visited. Then a cash-poor municipality sells the information to a large corporation or two, which uses the information to target better service at people who spend more money.
Remember - a government isn't allowed to prosecute you for actions that happened before they passed a law, and that law enforcement is regulated by the courts. A company can prosecute you for actions taken before a policy is stated, and not allow you to take that policy into court.
If you want to see how that applies, imagine if that city had instead created Home Owner Associations, and those associations had put up cameras - HOA's around here in Virginia are allowed to rule that you can not park a car over a five years old in the community - it would have been just as easy to enforce that only cars over $50,000 in price can be parked there without written approval of the association, and have private police "escort" people with cheaper cars off of the property unless they had written approval. No gates, no state ruling on gates, no publicity, and the same outcome. All you have to do is add criminal checks to the approval process...
The reason that construction doesn't change is two-fold: 1. The cost of failure is high - as an example, check the cost to communities of using grey PBC pipe that leaks in the presence of chlorine for water lines. 2. The construction workers in most areas are incompetent or undertrained - as an example, one in three houses built in the area I live have switched hot and cold water pipes - so you stand a chance of getting severe burns when using the toilet. Oh, and I live in the anti-union state of Virginia.
As for tax breaks, no, that isn't the reason that energy efficiency is not supported. It is because of taxes that it isn't supported - a look at the taxes in the DC area reveals three seperate taxes on electricity, on gas and on telephone. Methods such as Internet must be centralized (and made inefficient) to support the raising of local revenue by taxes. Remember that these are the only ways that some areas can get much revenue - outsourcing removes the wage taxes that could be retrieved (and that is far more aggregate than capital gains for corporations, which tops out at 20% - I pay more for my salary to the government than a corporation pays for it's profit on outsourcing my job).
There is another thing to remember in all of this - the manager might not be the one "in charge" - he or she might only be the figurehead - try to find the real person in charge and deal with them - otherwise you might find yourself pleasing the boss, and still getting bad grades because someone else doesn't like your work.
I had problems with this once because an engineer was angry because my roommate didn't want to do her work for her, and another time because the vice-president didn't like the fact that I hung out with the people of Southern Indian origin instead of just the Northern Indians. If I had paid more attention, I could have defused those situations.
You can do it - the same way that I did: simply act the part, and you will become it. It isn't just extroverts that get ahead in the job - they get ahead in dating too, because two introverts never ask each other out. (I got married soon after becoming an extrovert).
Here is a non-threatening exercise - go to a party, and seek out the people who are introverted and shy, and spend the party trying to make them feel good - do that enough and you will have enough practice to do this at work - simply treat your boss like the introverts at the party.
Remember, according to US law, a corporation is a legal entity (i.e. it is a person, for most intents and purposes). So as long as the corporation exists, this is valid. And this means that this is an asset transferable with ownership of the corporation (unlike yearly registration, which would have less value). If I evaluate assets by replacement value, and the cost of domain registration goes up, this asset even appreciates in value.
If they go out of business, I take the percentage left of my lease and multiply it by the present replacement value and declare a one-time loss of that amount - which makes a nice tax break.
I can think of many scenarios where this could generate interesting tax breaks that are salable...
By the way, they are also doing security for US military websites - so they aren't going out of business anytime soon.
Hmm... if famine was truly caused by there being too many of us, then there is no reason for dieting, and no one would complain about Genetically Engineered crops, or organically grown crops. Everyone would be equally hungry. Oh, and there would be no subsidies for farmers not to grow crops.
One day, famine may be due to overpopulation. Right now, it is due to politics or isolation of a population. Or both. Honestly, human life isn't that important to us. Neither is animal life.
Put it all into perspective - let's say that we learn to dampen our effect on this planet - will this stop the next ice age? Will this stop the ice caps from significantly melting? Will this stop the next asteroid or comet from causing a massive extinction event? And if any of those things happen, won't we still have massive extinctions?
What we can do is buy time for ourselves, like I am by putting myself on a low-saturated fat diet. This won't stop me from dying - it'll just decrease the odds of me dying now. I can still get hit by a car, suffer an anurism or die of asthma, or some expression of my bodies inherent desire to reject its parts.
The only way for me to get out of this situation would be to find a way to house my personality elsewhere. The way out for humanity is to find housing elsewhere, in a place with less chance of becoming inhospitable to us. That needs technology.
Forgetting all of that, a friend recently paid $100 dollars for someone to tune his piano... (that was for one hour of work)
There are three things to consider in price:
1. How much "yuckiness" is in the job? i.e. you will gladly pay a plumber to crawl under your house with the spiders and and mud to fix a pipe that you could have fixed yourself. Many people don't want to hunt through the whole hard drive to remove that virus
2. The amount and severity of errors people have had in that area doing things themselves - like when you have replaced a sink and the adapter to the water pipe wasn't tight enough so it failed as the pressure in the pipes increased and you had to replace seven pieces of drywall in your basement and the computer the water leaked into -- the equivalent is installing a new browser and loosing your income tax information.
3. How scary it is to deal with the professional - and this is where we lose. The stereotyped (and sometimes real) response that a person is a looser for not knowing how to do computer maintenence, or run a program, etc... No one is going to pay for computer help if they are afraid that the person coming to their house will say that they are stupid idiots. When the plumber came to my house after I forgot to raise the flange when replacing the toilet after installing wood flooring he didn't say "you idiot - always raise the flange!". He just said "remember - always raise the flange if the flooring type is changed". And if you don't know what a flange is - then you have a small clue what the average person out there thinks when you say "have you applied the latest Microsoft security vulnerability patches for the.NET security hole"?
Slashdot Mirror
yup. that works much better. :-)
We prefer to use open-source with the government because it is takes too long to order and pay for the restaurant food.
This metaphor also allows for all of the variations of using "pre-made" commercial libraries (like using Hamburger Helper) and hiring a chef to cater your party (hiring an open-source consultant to tailor the installation for you).
Very nice.
Hmm... here goes:
1. There is no cost-effective competing product to Microsoft Project with the same functionality. And yes, I have tried competing products.
2. The only people telling other businesses that Open Source is cheaper are geeks - not fellow businessmen that have been proven in the field. (Consider Microsoft versus Novell - who makes more money? who has better market share? and therefore, who will have more street credibility?)
3. Open Source products (such as CVS, which is really, really good and better than the competition) change UI, workflow and features all of the time - which causes retraining amongst non-techies. Retraining diverts resources from what they were really supposed to do - make money. If you want to beat Microsoft, show how little retraining will be needed, and how large the available pool of non-technical people who use Linux is (like Secretaries, Accountants, Marketing, etc...) Remember, in most companies we are just infrastructure, the same as the accountants. We don't make money for the company, and we don't contribute directly to the making of money. Nothing will get done just because it makes our life better - it will only get done if it makes their life better. Especially if the IT budget is seperate from their department's budget.
If you want to win this game, win the home market. If you can get enough secretaries, accountants, managers, etc... to use Linux at home AND like it (not just like it better than Microsoft) then you will see them put it on their resume, and they will use it in their start-up businesses, which will eventually cause it to be accepted as those businesses are absorbed by the larger one.
Creating a monopoly on potential workers is called unionizing. In a free market everything would be open to capitalistic forces - including labor.
Government regulations on working conditions or environmental issues don't work because companies are allowed to relocate to regions without those regulations - first within the US, from the north to the south, and then outside of the US.
Where I grew up the black radio stations promoted "economic determinism". That means that you use the money you spend to assure that companies whose policies benefit you are more successful. (This does work, as long as you have good enough information to be able to scale higher "benefit".) This plays out in two ways:
1. If EA is truly abusing its workers, and there is such a large pool of potential workers, band together and make a co-operative company that competes with them. If these are truly abuses, removing the middle-men who siphon of profits should allow for better conditions with profitability.
2. Convince consumers not to buy EA games - this may be harder though, since EA employees are still better off than the average worker, who doesn't even get good health care, let alone stable working hours.
You can go without orgasm for quite some time after marriage - the chemicals produced by the feeling of "love" are even more addictive - which ruins many relationships, when one partner searches for more intense "love" with other sources. Remember that the brain chemicals for "love" are the same as produced by chocolate - and that is intensely addictive, with true withdrawal.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't look at pictures of naked women - I just don't find a need to orgasm when doing so.
Here are the things I have looked at in job interviews:
1. If I ask you something you don't know, do you admit it or try to bullshit me? (I need to know that you will come to me for help before a deadline passes)
2. If I ask you something you don't know, and offer to help you understand it, will you ask me questions so that you can figure it out? (I need to know that you are willing to be trained)
3. If I ask you to justify your methodology of coming up with that answer, can you do it civilly and logically, or do you start to insult me? (I need to know that you will be able to survive in front of the customer when the questions start)
I have done this using deliberate vocal calming techniques, and with a friendly demeanor, and still have had most people fail at least one of the above items. To give ratios, 12 people have passed that out of approximately 250 people I have interviewed in the past 10 years.
You may have to stretch things in putting down the keywords on your resume for HR to circle to get you in the door, but if you fail the above few good companies will hire and keep you (companies I work for have hired people who failed the above - and promptly fired them in a few months)
The company that I work for is small, and has to provide the image of "quality" workers. We also have to mentor the people on the customer site (who are beginners). Quite frankly, the two people at the customer site are better than many people with five to ten years of experience - and we have already come across a situation where the client, with two years experience, is more experienced than a ten-year veteran, and they have a problem with this.
Other small companies will be in the same situation - contracting to a bigger firm to provide experience and mentoring, in which case they can't hire a beginner.
No my friend, government derives power by inventing problems. For an example:
1. Scientist invents robot to kill roaches.
2. Robot is successful, people forget how bad roaches were, and government declares some roaches "endangered".
3. Government sets up regulations governing the killing of roaches. Oddly enough, these regulations are only enforced when the values of homes are at stake.
4. Government sells licenses for "roach hunts" when the population of roaches recover, since they now have no natural predators.
5. Political parties campaign for and against "roach hugging liberals" in elections.
6. Roaches are found to produce large quantities of methane gas due to distribution of feces in area without proper ventilation, and are blamed for global warming.
Did I miss anything?
Actually, its mostly in the commercial sector... I work for a military contract, close to the customer, and I have reasonable hours... the customer even cares about my health. Work far away from the military's sight, and it's a different story...
Now, when I worked for a commercial company that will not be named, employees only got pregnant when the went back to India, because that is the only time they got to sleep with their spouses... (as for us Americans, well...)
There are two sides to unions in the US. Taking as an example the Teamsters (which is one of the most powerful unions)
Good Side:
1. When my aunt's husband died in the performance of his duty, without life insurance, they paid her monthly compensation (and still do).
2. His salary was decent, and there were good health benefits (hard to get in the US in blue collar jobs)
Bad Side:
1. Wages tend to be the same across the industry, since they are negotiated across companies.
2. If one company will not bargain, all companies in that type of business have strike action done against them (this is what makes the Teamsters so powerful).
Unions in the US were made to counterbalance the associations the owners made to collectively force costs lower by fixing the wages and benefits (and deciding collectively, illicitly and illegally to not hire workers whom they did not like).
While there are still small businesses in this industry, unionization will not be worth it - because the small businesses can be shut down on illegal behavior, and they would be destroyed by industry-wide bargaining. If we ever get to the point where there are no small businesses, then unionization will be needed - because large businesses will never be able to be totally shut down. It's too easy for the owners to open up again as a different business.
As for benefits... many programmers left in the US getting good wages have jobs that are related to government functioning or vital services. Strikes will be crushed by the government in both of those cases - and you can be jailed for striking and denying governmental or vital services.
Actually, I think that wireless should be implemented using the software radio protocols and smart antenna. This would allow dynamic reassignment of gain and modification of algorithms, so that the network could adapt to the needs of its users.
Most of the transmission means to increasing encryption and bandwidth use spatial methods - adjust the gain on a set of antennas, and differentiate between the signals from two different transmitters - the equivalent of connecting two modems to your computer and using two different lines. Smart antenna ( http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/smart_ant/ ) allows modification of gain to form a radio "bubble" around the receiver - increasing the power requirements of a jammer, and allowing it to be found easier. Note that this processing doesn't slow down the connection.
And yes, I am an expert in this technology.
Actually, you are missing out on an important factor here - taxation. Road maintenence in the US is paid for through taxation on fuel, property taxes on cars (for those states that have that tax) and toll fees. Of all of these, only taxation on fuel is the least regressive (i.e. more the most even in terms of percentage of income that the tax consumes). Hydrogen would be dispensed in stations where taxation could be easily performed and collected - electricity (unless you are talking about unusual feed necessities, like greater than 50 Amp service) is not seperably taxable, so a tax-burden-to-consumption model is not possible.
As for switching to a toll-based system, that would be the most regressive - since the poor often have to drive long distances from where they can afford housing to where there is enough money to pay them enough to afford healthcare.
Yeah - one of my friends and I are considering becoming lawyers - same problems, but you get to really, really take it out on the opposition... :-)
BTW - I'm not joking.
All of the code I write for companies is considered proprietary - I can't show you 1000 lines of code, since it would be a violation of my contract.
I suspect that many of the other "good" programmers out there are in a similar situation.
Actually, that isn't always true, even if it is a ridiculously small amount. TrueGreen of Sterling VA tried to tell me that I had a "in perpetuum" contract with them. They sent to collections for $30.00 . I never had a contract with them, and regularly tell the debt collectors that I will pay upon receipt of a copy of my contract. Then it is dropped for two years, and resubmitted to a debt collection service.
Now, this doesn't seem like a lot of money, but if I were to ever pay it to get them off of my back, there would be an implied contract - and TrueGreen would bill me for $30.00 a month for my entire life.
Hmm... I'd say that was right, except that the way that patent an copyrights are being used in America makes every product a virtual monopoly. This creates a barrier to lowering of prices, since you can't just get a competing product - you have to leave the entire paradigm, since the way of doing things has been patented, not an instance of the thing (as was the case with, say, a particular house plan - I can still reproduce the house, just not buy the plans. In software, the way copyrights are going, I would not be allowed to have a dining room next to the kitchen).
And as for bashing economists, their problem is that they are as naive as most other people - unless you can show me an economist that would have factored Senator Byrd into West Virginia's economy to make a more accurate model. The only bow to politics I have seen in Economics is the effect of the Fed on rates.
This isn't something that software engineering understands either - I would be really surprised if Yourdon's "Death March" was in the curriculum of many colleges.
...and there is the real problem. High-priced CEO's pay less taxes (ultimately) and spread around the wealth less geographically. If one CEO makes the same as ten workers (or fifty, etc...) that CEO is not likely to live in ten or fifty different municipalities. And that CEO is most likely to live in a "rich" neighborhood.
Net effect? Less education and infrastructure money to the poor or middle-class neighborhoods. The less education you have, the less likely you will be to qualify for the jobs in the forefront of the new technologies - i.e. those jobs that rely on skills not available cheaper in other countries yet.
Look to the example of Louis Comfort Tiffany for an example of both working at the same time - he had artisans produce "custom" stained glass pieces at high prices, and he had artisans perform increasingly minor changes to stained glass pieces until you had the cheapest, mass-produced pieces. The quality of the custom pieces got his company a reputation. The margin on the mass-produced pieces got him the profit.
With this model, both things work... or, to try it another way, a company that produces open-source software to get it's name in the door, and then charges more for custom solutions based on them, since it now has the reputation and exposure to be able to offset its higher cost (and profit) with its reputation... like, say, IBM Global Services?
Simple - social security doesn't pay enough to get all the shiny new toys that we want, so we would continue working if we could be as healthy as we were at twenty. Then the government can drop social security payments for all but the uncurable (while continuing charging the taxes), mandate the technology as "necessary", and eliminate all retirement. Remember that most NATO nations face dwindling, not increasing, populations. And if we can modify the "fertile time" of women until 60 or 80, we can stop them from having kids until they can afford it, by force if necessary.
Why does everyone here think "1984" when the world is really turning out more like "Brave New World"?
Try this scenario on for size - license plate records tied to establishments visited. Then a cash-poor municipality sells the information to a large corporation or two, which uses the information to target better service at people who spend more money.
Remember - a government isn't allowed to prosecute you for actions that happened before they passed a law, and that law enforcement is regulated by the courts. A company can prosecute you for actions taken before a policy is stated, and not allow you to take that policy into court.
If you want to see how that applies, imagine if that city had instead created Home Owner Associations, and those associations had put up cameras - HOA's around here in Virginia are allowed to rule that you can not park a car over a five years old in the community - it would have been just as easy to enforce that only cars over $50,000 in price can be parked there without written approval of the association, and have private police "escort" people with cheaper cars off of the property unless they had written approval. No gates, no state ruling on gates, no publicity, and the same outcome. All you have to do is add criminal checks to the approval process...
The reason that construction doesn't change is two-fold: 1. The cost of failure is high - as an example, check the cost to communities of using grey PBC pipe that leaks in the presence of chlorine for water lines. 2. The construction workers in most areas are incompetent or undertrained - as an example, one in three houses built in the area I live have switched hot and cold water pipes - so you stand a chance of getting severe burns when using the toilet. Oh, and I live in the anti-union state of Virginia.
As for tax breaks, no, that isn't the reason that energy efficiency is not supported. It is because of taxes that it isn't supported - a look at the taxes in the DC area reveals three seperate taxes on electricity, on gas and on telephone. Methods such as Internet must be centralized (and made inefficient) to support the raising of local revenue by taxes. Remember that these are the only ways that some areas can get much revenue - outsourcing removes the wage taxes that could be retrieved (and that is far more aggregate than capital gains for corporations, which tops out at 20% - I pay more for my salary to the government than a corporation pays for it's profit on outsourcing my job).
There is another thing to remember in all of this - the manager might not be the one "in charge" - he or she might only be the figurehead - try to find the real person in charge and deal with them - otherwise you might find yourself pleasing the boss, and still getting bad grades because someone else doesn't like your work.
I had problems with this once because an engineer was angry because my roommate didn't want to do her work for her, and another time because the vice-president didn't like the fact that I hung out with the people of Southern Indian origin instead of just the Northern Indians. If I had paid more attention, I could have defused those situations.
You can do it - the same way that I did: simply act the part, and you will become it. It isn't just extroverts that get ahead in the job - they get ahead in dating too, because two introverts never ask each other out. (I got married soon after becoming an extrovert).
Here is a non-threatening exercise - go to a party, and seek out the people who are introverted and shy, and spend the party trying to make them feel good - do that enough and you will have enough practice to do this at work - simply treat your boss like the introverts at the party.
Remember, according to US law, a corporation is a legal entity (i.e. it is a person, for most intents and purposes). So as long as the corporation exists, this is valid. And this means that this is an asset transferable with ownership of the corporation (unlike yearly registration, which would have less value). If I evaluate assets by replacement value, and the cost of domain registration goes up, this asset even appreciates in value.
If they go out of business, I take the percentage left of my lease and multiply it by the present replacement value and declare a one-time loss of that amount - which makes a nice tax break.
I can think of many scenarios where this could generate interesting tax breaks that are salable...
By the way, they are also doing security for US military websites - so they aren't going out of business anytime soon.
Hmm... if famine was truly caused by there being too many of us, then there is no reason for dieting, and no one would complain about Genetically Engineered crops, or organically grown crops. Everyone would be equally hungry. Oh, and there would be no subsidies for farmers not to grow crops.
One day, famine may be due to overpopulation. Right now, it is due to politics or isolation of a population. Or both. Honestly, human life isn't that important to us. Neither is animal life.
Put it all into perspective - let's say that we learn to dampen our effect on this planet - will this stop the next ice age? Will this stop the ice caps from significantly melting? Will this stop the next asteroid or comet from causing a massive extinction event? And if any of those things happen, won't we still have massive extinctions?
What we can do is buy time for ourselves, like I am by putting myself on a low-saturated fat diet. This won't stop me from dying - it'll just decrease the odds of me dying now. I can still get hit by a car, suffer an anurism or die of asthma, or some expression of my bodies inherent desire to reject its parts.
The only way for me to get out of this situation would be to find a way to house my personality elsewhere. The way out for humanity is to find housing elsewhere, in a place with less chance of becoming inhospitable to us. That needs technology.
Forgetting all of that, a friend recently paid $100 dollars for someone to tune his piano... (that was for one hour of work) .NET security hole"?
There are three things to consider in price:
1. How much "yuckiness" is in the job? i.e. you will gladly pay a plumber to crawl under your house with the spiders and and mud to fix a pipe that you could have fixed yourself. Many people don't want to hunt through the whole hard drive to remove that virus
2. The amount and severity of errors people have had in that area doing things themselves - like when you have replaced a sink and the adapter to the water pipe wasn't tight enough so it failed as the pressure in the pipes increased and you had to replace seven pieces of drywall in your basement and the computer the water leaked into -- the equivalent is installing a new browser and loosing your income tax information.
3. How scary it is to deal with the professional - and this is where we lose. The stereotyped (and sometimes real) response that a person is a looser for not knowing how to do computer maintenence, or run a program, etc... No one is going to pay for computer help if they are afraid that the person coming to their house will say that they are stupid idiots. When the plumber came to my house after I forgot to raise the flange when replacing the toilet after installing wood flooring he didn't say "you idiot - always raise the flange!". He just said "remember - always raise the flange if the flooring type is changed". And if you don't know what a flange is - then you have a small clue what the average person out there thinks when you say "have you applied the latest Microsoft security vulnerability patches for the