It's a case of wanting your cake and eating it, too.
See, if there is a great demand for a thing, it tends to cost more. This should go for labor, too. But what they want is to short-circuit the whole process by getting it cheaper than the market would demand. American employees can't compete with most overseas employees, simply based on essential living expenses alone. Case closed. American employees lose, American employers win.
You might think that's perfectly fair and the way the market should be - but I ask you, when was the last time you paid anything but American prices based on American supply and demand for groceries in an American city? It doesn't matter if fruit is plentiful and cheap in somepart of the world - you aren't getting it for those prices. You're getting it at local cost. Labor, on the other hand, is a vast pool that can be exploited at global levels to avoid regional supply and demand constraints.
Trust me, if the field paid enough, people would be there to fill the jobs.
I've found that it's almost impossible to even find out what salary a company is offering in the first place. Last time around, I spent months (easily half a year) involved inmultipleinterviews with a half dozen companies. NONE of them would reveal the intended salary range. For all I knew, they could be talking $20k or $200k. And by the time you'd find out (the offer letter, of course), you've already invested an unbelievable number of hours on each of them.
I do like what someone mentioned above, though. The stupid remark about people who don't want their companies and government to send work outside of the country to spite their own labor force (and citizens) as being "xenophobic".
I live in America and pay my taxes here. I didn't know I was fucking responsible for employing the rest of the fucking universe.
Yeah, well, most of us don't have the chance to compete. We live in whatever country we live in and are subject to the living expenses of said country. I can't live on a $5,000 chinese salary, because I might have to pay my $1,200/mo fucking shitty studio apartment rent (which is expensive, because it's in a tech heavy city where there are actually jobs to be had).
When I can buy a house for $50k and a gallon of milk for a nickel, we'll fucking talk competition. At the moment, it's just a bullshit excuse to blame the "victims" by saying "you're not as cheap as some slave labor in china, so go fuck yourself".
Did I miss something or aren't you the same person who says on your site that you're unemployed, don't have a car and live at home with your mom?
Why don't you go find one of those hot opportunities you're so sure are out there. I'd give you a few pointers, but most of the companies I'd offer are in hiring freezes at the moment (and have been for years in some cases).
Since when has the star wars saga come to an end? He's working on two new series for television, based on Star Wars. The third film isn't even out yet - and there's still the possibility of episodes seven, eigh and nine. Not to mention the various release versions that will come out over the next decade to make money off of the morons who buy everything with the words "star wars" on them.
If Lucas is stuck in a rut, it's his own doing. He's put out so much crap based on his original three pieces of crap almost three decades ago and he wonders why he's pigeon-holed and might have a hard time moving into something else? Well, fucking duh.
I couldn't really care less. I can't remember the last thing Lucas made that I enjoyed. The original Star Wars was okay - I can take it or leave it. The First of the new ones sucked (and I haven't seen any since) and I can't think of anything besides THX1138 that I've liked.
Hopefully he'll just vanish and make room for some new talent.
I have no sympathy for AOL. They constantly mark valid email from my site as "spam" and dump it into a user's junk folder. Then I get hundreds of people complaining about how I never sent them their password or their auction notifications or replied to their questions. And of course, I can't reply to them to tell them "yes I did" because the same thing preventing them from getting my messages in the first place prevents this as well.
AOL is just suffering the fate of what they already do to tens of thousands of legitimate sources of email. The big difference being that actual spam actually comes from actual AOL sources, whereas not one single spam has ever originated from or been relayed through my server in six years.
Tough titties. AOL can go pound sand for all I care.
I had my site blacklisted for weeks - very detrimental to an auction site that needs to send out thousands of notifications per day - because one person on my network (upstream) that had absolutely no relation to me other than paying for a service in the same building that my server is housed. It was painful and there was nothing I could do about it and the listing service was SLOOOOOW to respond.
I don't like how these "services" cause such massive collateral damage. Sure, they spout the ideal that "if all the affected innocents complain, the upstream provider will have to deal with the offender"... But as an innocent, I can't tolerate being subjected to this ever - let alone every time. And there are few if any places that truly can not ever be compromised by a fake account, fake credit card or other bad-guy. It makes my service (which is free and funded out of my own pocket with my own time by the way) look horrible, to have massive email problems for so long.
Of course, if it happens to AOL - it's the end of the world. But if it happens to some small fry (who has NO control over who else uses the network that he has an IP address on), then it's just "tough shit".
I always thought the etch-a-sketch pre-dated both concepts. It doesn't use a mouse, but it does use rotating knobs to control the graphical display with a "cursor".
"No, Steve, I think it's more like you want everyone to drink the kool-aid, but you found out I'd already pissed in everyone's drinks and they're dumb enough to like it."
By that logic, the more users there are of a product, the better designed and more reliable it should be, due to the greater meantime between releases. I guess that makes a lot of sense, what with how much more reliable Windows is than OSX and how much better polished and usable it is. *cough*
How can people suggest that Firefly is even remotely on the same level of shows like Farscape and Lexx? Or even First Wave? Firefly wasn't the worst show around, but it was nothing spectacular. As someone already said, it was like "a western in space". What was Star Trek? Roddenberry's attempt at "wagontrain, in space".
Further, if it was that great of a series, it would have been kept around. FOX doesn't axe shows with great ratings unless they can't afford to produce them (see Sci-Fi with Farscape). And at least Farscape made it four years.
Firefly seemed like a decent show. But not a great sci-fi show. In fact, other than transporting around in a small spaceship, I don't remember much science-fiction to it at all. The only thing I even remember from it is this scene where they were stuck on a train as prisoners or something. Gee, how original.
And I find it very amusing that you call "Firefly" a series for "adults" when it was created by the same git who brought us Buffy and Angel.
I only watched a couple episodes, but was not terribly impressed. It's sort of like Brisco County Junior, in space and without Bruce Campbell. Or with any original plots.
I haven't watched TV for a couple years now, but I caught a few shows on G4 this week. It's okay, but it's entirely game oriented and few of the people are likeable. They all seem like wannabe actresses and actors just taking whatever job they can get. With only a few exceptions, they seem like people who probably walk off the set when filming is done and sneer at the retarded dorks they have to cater to. Especially that block-necked guy who hosts that show where teams compete in videogames on the air.
As far as hot chicks - there's only really Morgan Webb (which, really, should be more than enough for anybody) and the blonde punkish chick from that show with the douchebag guy and some other chick. Whatever happened to Jessika from TechTV? Hot little red head. Yum.
I really think that the best venue for the quality guys from TechTV (this includes Kevin Rose, Yoshi, Leo, Patrick and a few others) is online. Ditch the network and produce your own material. Distribute it via BitTorrent in xvid format. Kind of following up on Kevin Rose's website.
I'm not much for television and even less for TechTV/G4. As it is, I will probably switch to G4 when I'm really bored and need some background noise.
Universal Enlightenment... So like... if you sit and ponder fairies and fluffy bunnies long enough, the world just works itself out?
"Universal Enlightenment" sounds like a lot of BS to me. How is it different than "finding jesus" or anything else? Everyone's idea of enlightenment as well as how they attain it and recognize it is completely different and leads you back to the problem the world already has.
Rather than trying to acquire some sort of external source, how about just "being" and "doing". I can sit and meditate all I want, but it doesn't put money in the bank, get me a promotion, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless or cure cancer now, does it? It just makes you*feel* better about yourself, regardless of the current world state of affairs. Which, if you ask me, is a bit like self-imposed prozac. Or passive enslavement. Because, instead of initiating and acting on change for the better, you're just... pondering.
Sort of like philosophy. Maybe fun to talk about, but entirely useless in the real world. Nobody ever philosophized themselves a mortgage check.
People - the reason American workers can't compete with outsourced Chinese labor is not because American's are lazy or live expensive lives. It's because China has the world's largest pool of slave labor.
So for everyone who likes to ramble on about how American's aren't hard working enough, expect too much money and are spoiled - exactly how would you have us compete with slave labor? Short of becoming slave labor ourselves? Of course, we're essentially doing that already with corporations farming work out to prisoners in some jurisdictions in this country.
Look, if you can't compete with third-world technical labor, that's YOUR problem. Nobody owes you a thing in this country. No company should be held accountable to such selfish entitlements as a living or even competative wage, health insurance, vacation and sick time, lunch breaks, safety regulations and so on.
Really, if someone is willing to do the job for a quarter of the price and doesn't care if they live twelve deep in a studio apartment, work in a tech farm with the fire doors chained shut all day and without any regard to societies business regulations (contributing to social security, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medicair, an IRA or a 401K then you have a personal problem.
Get off your high horse and stop expecting handouts, you lazy, selfish, entitlement whore! Take your $5.15 and like it! Or go back and get a new education in something else! Yes, I know you just graduated awhile ago and are still in serious debt and had hoped to settle down with your girl and start a family, but go back to school and... oh wait, that's right... almost everythign can be farmed out now... Okay - well - forget school. Go watch a Wal-Mart checker or a cashier at McDonald's and learn how to operate the registers and headsets! -- Oh, wait... that's right... drive-through ordering is outsourced now, too... Um... Well, go find some soda cans to redeem for deposit!
Personally, I have a hard time taking the name "Ubuntu" seriously. Yes, I know it stands for something important or meaningful in some South African language or whatever. But it just sounds kind of silly.
And yes, I realize I'm saying this as a person who prefers a distro that names its releases after Toy Story characters...
Huh. That's interesting. I had Debian downloaded, and installed on a dual AMD rackmount server in an evening. This included compiling in SMP support and i2so hardware RAID support for my 3Ware card.
That server has been in operation under a heavy load for almost four straight years now and it's running the latest version of all important servers, except it's still 4x PHP and hasn't quite gone to 8x Postgresql. But I wouldn't want that anyway, since they've yet to be tested and proven in the Debian world (and if I really wanted to deal with them, I'd just suck them down from unstable or compile them myself).
I liked the look of Mandrake, but couldn't get it to utilize my 23" Cinedisplay. It insisted at displaying it at a stupidly low resolution, no matter how I munged the ModeLine. I finally gave up after a week of tooling with it.
Really, I wouldn't use anything except Debian as a linux server. Rock solid. I don't need bleeding edge. I need tried and true and tested. And for the rare bit of bleeding edge, I apt-get src and deal with it on my own. For desktop - well, I'd gladly play with any of the other contenders. And regularly do. I just wouldn't entrust them to my servers.
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It's a case of wanting your cake and eating it, too.
See, if there is a great demand for a thing, it tends to cost more. This should go for labor, too. But what they want is to short-circuit the whole process by getting it cheaper than the market would demand. American employees can't compete with most overseas employees, simply based on essential living expenses alone. Case closed. American employees lose, American employers win.
You might think that's perfectly fair and the way the market should be - but I ask you, when was the last time you paid anything but American prices based on American supply and demand for groceries in an American city? It doesn't matter if fruit is plentiful and cheap in somepart of the world - you aren't getting it for those prices. You're getting it at local cost. Labor, on the other hand, is a vast pool that can be exploited at global levels to avoid regional supply and demand constraints.
Trust me, if the field paid enough, people would be there to fill the jobs.
I've found that it's almost impossible to even find out what salary a company is offering in the first place. Last time around, I spent months (easily half a year) involved inmultipleinterviews with a half dozen companies. NONE of them would reveal the intended salary range. For all I knew, they could be talking $20k or $200k. And by the time you'd find out (the offer letter, of course), you've already invested an unbelievable number of hours on each of them.
I do like what someone mentioned above, though. The stupid remark about people who don't want their companies and government to send work outside of the country to spite their own labor force (and citizens) as being "xenophobic".
I live in America and pay my taxes here. I didn't know I was fucking responsible for employing the rest of the fucking universe.
Yeah, well, most of us don't have the chance to compete. We live in whatever country we live in and are subject to the living expenses of said country. I can't live on a $5,000 chinese salary, because I might have to pay my $1,200/mo fucking shitty studio apartment rent (which is expensive, because it's in a tech heavy city where there are actually jobs to be had).
When I can buy a house for $50k and a gallon of milk for a nickel, we'll fucking talk competition. At the moment, it's just a bullshit excuse to blame the "victims" by saying "you're not as cheap as some slave labor in china, so go fuck yourself".
Did I miss something or aren't you the same person who says on your site that you're unemployed, don't have a car and live at home with your mom?
Why don't you go find one of those hot opportunities you're so sure are out there. I'd give you a few pointers, but most of the companies I'd offer are in hiring freezes at the moment (and have been for years in some cases).
I will not dismiss an "Ask Google" remark that doesn't give keywords to a question without giving keywords myself.
Since when has the star wars saga come to an end? He's working on two new series for television, based on Star Wars. The third film isn't even out yet - and there's still the possibility of episodes seven, eigh and nine. Not to mention the various release versions that will come out over the next decade to make money off of the morons who buy everything with the words "star wars" on them.
If Lucas is stuck in a rut, it's his own doing. He's put out so much crap based on his original three pieces of crap almost three decades ago and he wonders why he's pigeon-holed and might have a hard time moving into something else? Well, fucking duh.
I couldn't really care less. I can't remember the last thing Lucas made that I enjoyed. The original Star Wars was okay - I can take it or leave it. The First of the new ones sucked (and I haven't seen any since) and I can't think of anything besides THX1138 that I've liked.
Hopefully he'll just vanish and make room for some new talent.
I have no sympathy for AOL. They constantly mark valid email from my site as "spam" and dump it into a user's junk folder. Then I get hundreds of people complaining about how I never sent them their password or their auction notifications or replied to their questions. And of course, I can't reply to them to tell them "yes I did" because the same thing preventing them from getting my messages in the first place prevents this as well.
AOL is just suffering the fate of what they already do to tens of thousands of legitimate sources of email. The big difference being that actual spam actually comes from actual AOL sources, whereas not one single spam has ever originated from or been relayed through my server in six years.
Tough titties. AOL can go pound sand for all I care.
I'm certainly not a big fan.
I had my site blacklisted for weeks - very detrimental to an auction site that needs to send out thousands of notifications per day - because one person on my network (upstream) that had absolutely no relation to me other than paying for a service in the same building that my server is housed. It was painful and there was nothing I could do about it and the listing service was SLOOOOOW to respond.
I don't like how these "services" cause such massive collateral damage. Sure, they spout the ideal that "if all the affected innocents complain, the upstream provider will have to deal with the offender"... But as an innocent, I can't tolerate being subjected to this ever - let alone every time. And there are few if any places that truly can not ever be compromised by a fake account, fake credit card or other bad-guy. It makes my service (which is free and funded out of my own pocket with my own time by the way) look horrible, to have massive email problems for so long.
Of course, if it happens to AOL - it's the end of the world. But if it happens to some small fry (who has NO control over who else uses the network that he has an IP address on), then it's just "tough shit".
I always thought the etch-a-sketch pre-dated both concepts. It doesn't use a mouse, but it does use rotating knobs to control the graphical display with a "cursor".
I think it's more like:
"No, Steve, I think it's more like you want everyone to drink the kool-aid, but you found out I'd already pissed in everyone's drinks and they're dumb enough to like it."
By that logic, the more users there are of a product, the better designed and more reliable it should be, due to the greater meantime between releases. I guess that makes a lot of sense, what with how much more reliable Windows is than OSX and how much better polished and usable it is. *cough*
Welcome to 1982-1984.
Firefly is for adults? Are you insane?
How can people suggest that Firefly is even remotely on the same level of shows like Farscape and Lexx? Or even First Wave? Firefly wasn't the worst show around, but it was nothing spectacular. As someone already said, it was like "a western in space". What was Star Trek? Roddenberry's attempt at "wagontrain, in space".
Further, if it was that great of a series, it would have been kept around. FOX doesn't axe shows with great ratings unless they can't afford to produce them (see Sci-Fi with Farscape). And at least Farscape made it four years.
Firefly seemed like a decent show. But not a great sci-fi show. In fact, other than transporting around in a small spaceship, I don't remember much science-fiction to it at all. The only thing I even remember from it is this scene where they were stuck on a train as prisoners or something. Gee, how original.
And I find it very amusing that you call "Firefly" a series for "adults" when it was created by the same git who brought us Buffy and Angel.
I only watched a couple episodes, but was not terribly impressed. It's sort of like Brisco County Junior, in space and without Bruce Campbell. Or with any original plots.
I haven't watched TV for a couple years now, but I caught a few shows on G4 this week. It's okay, but it's entirely game oriented and few of the people are likeable. They all seem like wannabe actresses and actors just taking whatever job they can get. With only a few exceptions, they seem like people who probably walk off the set when filming is done and sneer at the retarded dorks they have to cater to. Especially that block-necked guy who hosts that show where teams compete in videogames on the air.
As far as hot chicks - there's only really Morgan Webb (which, really, should be more than enough for anybody) and the blonde punkish chick from that show with the douchebag guy and some other chick. Whatever happened to Jessika from TechTV? Hot little red head. Yum.
I really think that the best venue for the quality guys from TechTV (this includes Kevin Rose, Yoshi, Leo, Patrick and a few others) is online. Ditch the network and produce your own material. Distribute it via BitTorrent in xvid format. Kind of following up on Kevin Rose's website.
I'm not much for television and even less for TechTV/G4. As it is, I will probably switch to G4 when I'm really bored and need some background noise.
That's nothing. Slashdot reduces your IQ by 40.
This isn't a big deal. Everyone knows gay people use Macs.
(Yes, this was sarcasm.)
Universal Enlightenment... So like... if you sit and ponder fairies and fluffy bunnies long enough, the world just works itself out?
"Universal Enlightenment" sounds like a lot of BS to me. How is it different than "finding jesus" or anything else? Everyone's idea of enlightenment as well as how they attain it and recognize it is completely different and leads you back to the problem the world already has.
Rather than trying to acquire some sort of external source, how about just "being" and "doing". I can sit and meditate all I want, but it doesn't put money in the bank, get me a promotion, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless or cure cancer now, does it? It just makes you *feel* better about yourself, regardless of the current world state of affairs. Which, if you ask me, is a bit like self-imposed prozac. Or passive enslavement. Because, instead of initiating and acting on change for the better, you're just... pondering.
Sort of like philosophy. Maybe fun to talk about, but entirely useless in the real world. Nobody ever philosophized themselves a mortgage check.
You make an excellent point.
People - the reason American workers can't compete with outsourced Chinese labor is not because American's are lazy or live expensive lives. It's because China has the world's largest pool of slave labor.
So for everyone who likes to ramble on about how American's aren't hard working enough, expect too much money and are spoiled - exactly how would you have us compete with slave labor? Short of becoming slave labor ourselves? Of course, we're essentially doing that already with corporations farming work out to prisoners in some jurisdictions in this country.
It doesn't matter. Hiro and the giant nuke-toting Aleutian will infiltrate and destroy the crazy water-city soon enough!
What is your problem?!
Look, if you can't compete with third-world technical labor, that's YOUR problem. Nobody owes you a thing in this country. No company should be held accountable to such selfish entitlements as a living or even competative wage, health insurance, vacation and sick time, lunch breaks, safety regulations and so on.
Really, if someone is willing to do the job for a quarter of the price and doesn't care if they live twelve deep in a studio apartment, work in a tech farm with the fire doors chained shut all day and without any regard to societies business regulations (contributing to social security, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medicair, an IRA or a 401K then you have a personal problem.
Get off your high horse and stop expecting handouts, you lazy, selfish, entitlement whore! Take your $5.15 and like it! Or go back and get a new education in something else! Yes, I know you just graduated awhile ago and are still in serious debt and had hoped to settle down with your girl and start a family, but go back to school and... oh wait, that's right... almost everythign can be farmed out now... Okay - well - forget school. Go watch a Wal-Mart checker or a cashier at McDonald's and learn how to operate the registers and headsets! -- Oh, wait... that's right... drive-through ordering is outsourced now, too... Um... Well, go find some soda cans to redeem for deposit!
They ARE tracking everyone. Duh. Haven't you been implanted with your RFID yet?
It's just like when you kill the head vampire.
Personally, I have a hard time taking the name "Ubuntu" seriously. Yes, I know it stands for something important or meaningful in some South African language or whatever. But it just sounds kind of silly.
And yes, I realize I'm saying this as a person who prefers a distro that names its releases after Toy Story characters...
Huh. That's interesting. I had Debian downloaded, and installed on a dual AMD rackmount server in an evening. This included compiling in SMP support and i2so hardware RAID support for my 3Ware card.
That server has been in operation under a heavy load for almost four straight years now and it's running the latest version of all important servers, except it's still 4x PHP and hasn't quite gone to 8x Postgresql. But I wouldn't want that anyway, since they've yet to be tested and proven in the Debian world (and if I really wanted to deal with them, I'd just suck them down from unstable or compile them myself).
I liked the look of Mandrake, but couldn't get it to utilize my 23" Cinedisplay. It insisted at displaying it at a stupidly low resolution, no matter how I munged the ModeLine. I finally gave up after a week of tooling with it.
Really, I wouldn't use anything except Debian as a linux server. Rock solid. I don't need bleeding edge. I need tried and true and tested. And for the rare bit of bleeding edge, I apt-get src and deal with it on my own. For desktop - well, I'd gladly play with any of the other contenders. And regularly do. I just wouldn't entrust them to my servers.