We can easily get in a chicken and egg argument but in my opinion this trend toward lack of loyalty was begun by employers, not their employees.
It wasn't the employees who first went around pronouncing that the age of lifetime employment was over and people had better get used to have 2 or 3 different careers in a lifetime. It wasn't employees who decided to ship their own jobs overseas to save some money. It isn't the average worker who is pushing the trend toward hiring people with the precise skill set needed at the moment and then throwing them overboard the second they aren't needed. And god forbid a company should spend money on retraining these days.
These guys may have been a little sleazy in how they went about things but the fact that anyone should be surprised by their behavior is astonishing - and not a little too self-righteous for my taste.
You want traditional family values to make a comeback? How about starting with a move toward a society where the family wage earners can have some measure of stability and faith in their employer.
Wow, some of you really need to get some blood pressure medicine.
Just for the record, I wasn't thinking of 2000 or 2004, though in fairness that was from clear. The Rorschach Effect is pretty amusing though.
Look, the meat of the comment isn't about elections or the Ukraine, it is about the American public's near complete apathy and willingness to be led by the nose on almost any topic so long as their stomachs are full and their TIVOs keep recording the schlock fed to them by the multinationals. Just reading Slashdot you can see the erosion daily, from broadcast flags and outrageous patents to increasingly intrusive uses of technology and all of it goes essentially unopposed. The corporations frame the issues for the public, the media pronounces the message, the politicians get their payola and we all slide further into the abyss.
Perhaps you think the public could summon enough interest to fight a stolen election. I have my doubts insofar as I haven't seen them do anything in the last 25 years other than bend further over and sing their current employer's jingle.
Goverments have been overthrown for less than this.
Only in countries where the populace still has some balls. The Ukraine is a current example.
These days the US is all about bread and circuses. Canceling the Sunday football schedule is more likely to overthrow a government than stealing an election.
I want to see the average 15 year old talking to the average 850 year old. That would be approximately like like a teeenager today asking someone "What was life like before the Magna Carta?"
But if you are going to pick on someone you don't like for political reasons... GROW UP and do it in a more mature way (like with real, relevant facts)
And speaking of glass houses...
It's not like he was an incumbent that was so bad he lost to a dead guy (which would be one thing). He was the challenger
Actually Ashcroft was the incumbent. Mel Carnahan, the former governor, was the challenger.
Don't take my word for it: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1 1/07/senate.missouri/
Sadly it is not just limited to the legal process. Money talks in America, period.
And it will stay that way so long as we remain a culture that values a person with a lot of green paper in his pocket over a person who has accumulated knowledge or integrity or has spent their lives helping others.
Why do we have shows like "The Apprentice" when you could have essentially the same show with people striving for a PhD, or to complete a project like designing a new chip or a dozen similar quests? So what if there is no million dollar job or payoff at the end? Does that make it any less interesting or worth watching the human pathos involved?
Somehow I don't think we will ever be the country we really want to be until it is normal for the average Joe to walk up to The Donald and say "I don't care how much money you have, you look like an alien freak with that haircut."
I'm not sure we so much disagree as are speaking about slightly different issues.
I completely agree about innovation but manufacturing jobs are not being shipped to China because of any lack of innovation or laziness on the part of the American workforce. They are being shipped because the labor is cheaper, tax and tariff matters are skewed, and American corps want to get into that consumer market any way that they can, namely by selling out their American workforce.
I feel similarly about the software industry in India. Not to start a flame but I don't see any great innovation going on there. I know the Indian execs at some of the outsourcing firms flap their gums a lot but the reality is that most American companies are still at the stage where they are outsourcing their non-critical maintenance work.
That may change in the future or it may not. Frankly I suspect the Indian outsourcing firms' fanaticism about "process" threatens any hope that innovation can take root. It is almost a miniature version of Indian governmental bureaucracy, albeit without the corruption.
Getting back to your point about American needing to innovate however, the outsourcing trend has hurt the US terribly there as well. Talk to any tech company that has tried to get venture capital over the last four years and you will hear story after story about how they were told that they needed to include offshoring plans in their "story" before any VC firms would talk to them, no less commit money. Some VC guy got caught in a moment of public honesty not long ago and came out and said the truth: they look at the US as the place where version 1.0 will be produced and then the work will go overseas after that. Regardless of how innovative we are that may or may not translate into intermediate or long term employment.
>> Has it occurred to you that we're losing our edge, not because outsourcing, but because we haven't been working very hard to keep it?
No, it hasn't occurred to me because it is absurd.
On just about any measure you can think of Americans are on the top. Look at the productivity figures over the last ten years. They are phenomenal. Also by any human measure - hours worked, vacation not taken, sick days not taken, time and money spent keeping current in their profession, etc. - Americans are at the top of the heap.
This does not for a second mean that there aren't serious cultural problems such as education that need to be addressed. But, flat out, as a culture Americans work their asses off. Outsourcing is about one thing and one thing only: cheap labor. Every other justification is just someone blowing smoke up your ass.
Thankfully this very personal information will be floating about in a very secure wireless environment where there will be no technically proficient people hanging around for hours with nothing to do with their laptops...
I have thought of things along this line too. Talk about the ultimate Open Source Project - hey kids, let's reinvent the internet but eliminate the mistakes!
A primary design requirement of the current internet was that it should survive a nuclear attack, presumably from another country. The new internet should be designed with the (additional) requirement that it survive financial and civil liberty attacks from our own governments.
People forget (or are too young to remember) that we got by on primative BBS systems for quite awhile and people were reasonably content. A home brew internet is potentially far more interesting and useful than the bulletin boards ever were.
I can imagine a bifurcated world where we have the (commercial) internet as we know it today and an alternative internet akin to what it was before the 1990s corporate takeover. Only the latter will be build with privacy and anonymity features built right into the system not as a bump on the ass afterthought.
Hey, there are open sourced operating systems. Is a network really that much of stretch?
--> So.. can I spoof my IP address and get my calls billed to my neighbor??
The goverment is not going to go down this road (of taxing all VoIP traffic) but if they did then, hypothetically, you could cause havoc - which is one more reason they won't go this route.
I am guessing that the easiest scheme to bill VoIP traffic is to just use the information in the signalling portion of the "call". Almost all VoIP systems use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which, given a financial incentive, should be ridiculously vulnerable to exploitation. It is just a simple text-based protocol which specifies the RTP stream(s) that comprised the call, what kinds of media are involved in the call, etc. Nothing exploitable in there, is there?
I think this was meant to be UNE-P - Unbundled Network Element Platform, basically where CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) must be able to rent equipment from ILECS.
-->PSC: ??
Public Service Commission
-->PSD: ??
Prevention of Significant Deterioration? I think this might be an EPA/state environmental entity?
-->How exactly do they intend to regulate the unregulatable?
They don't. Even the pols aren't that stupid. What they will end up doing is taxing any applications that interface and crossover to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The last time I looked Skype did not do this (and now probably won't ever do so).
[smile] My apologies. For a brief moment I thought you knew something about economics or how the money markets work. If you did you would realize how thoughoughly meaningless the above statement is.
-->Your wonderful country is ][ this close to bankcrupcy, my friend
One senses an almost gleeful tone in your message. If you think for a moment beyond your reflexive anti-Americanism you would realize how utterly misplaced that glee is.
The failing of relatively small economies can cause major dislocations - think Thailand in the late '90s and the subsequent "Asian contagion". If Thailand, whose GNP is no larger than a rounding error for the US GNP, can cause such problems you don't even want to imagine what a US bankruptcy would do to the world. Let's just simplify it and say that no one will be left standing and world-wide human suffering would be incalculable.
-->Conversion masters degrees for know-nothings switching from other careers...
Nothing like some gratuitous emotional violence on Easter morning.
I guess my mind reading capabilities are clouded this morning because based on what he wrote I can't tell whether the poster has a Masters in CS or not. What I can surmise however, is that you are a mean spirited little prick who doesn't know a great deal about he computing industry.
The first thing anyone realizes is how utterly vast the range of areas and skill sets are in the field. It is entirely possible that someone working in telecom, for instance, wouldn't have a detailed idea of how to manage content on a web site yet they could be excellent computer scientists. Just because someone isn't intimately familiar with your dipshit little specialty does not make them any less competent or valuable.
With that in mind go back and read nhavar's post from the point of view of someone who isn't already familiar with the problem space. What they see are a bunch of acronyms and hints at solutions for things they couldn't even know were problems. Which is precisely what AxelBoldt's post was alluding to.
Now go back and wash your mouth out with soap. Or perhaps all you know is SOAP.
-->and if his fingerprints have changed since his last entry
More likely the thinking is that they are going to stop anyone whose prints have ever been found in certain caves in Afganistan, Pakistan, or on any document or residence having anything remotely to do with Al Qaeda.
-->Hopefully that'll suck up a few minutes of time of some campaign worker
It will suck up the.003 seconds of computer time that it takes to strip your info off the email header, send out a form letter, and put you in a database so you can be harassed
by American politicians until the end of time.
86 percent of the customers...are choosing to take advantage of the faster processing time...the ability to close their home equity loan in ten days versus twelve days.
Why is overseas processing two days faster? Does e-Loan not have sufficient staff in the US? Are the computers faster in India? Is the company unwilling to pay for a 2nd and 3rd shift to facilitate domestic production around the clock?
If they want to make this comparison then job exporters need present the real choice faced by consumers in most offshoring situations: are you willing to ship your private documents overseas if it is no faster than domestic processing and e-Loan will keep all of the labor savings for their executives' year end bonuses and stock option plans?"
-->A more correct argument would be something similar to 'I think gambling is immoral and do not think it should be endorsed or even tolerated by the state...'
A tough stand for a country where something like 40 out of the 50 states run a lottery.
Slashdot Mirror
Loyalty used to mean something in this country.
Where have you been for the last twenty years?
We can easily get in a chicken and egg argument but in my opinion this trend toward lack of loyalty was begun by employers, not their employees.
It wasn't the employees who first went around pronouncing that the age of lifetime employment was over and people had better get used to have 2 or 3 different careers in a lifetime. It wasn't employees who decided to ship their own jobs overseas to save some money. It isn't the average worker who is pushing the trend toward hiring people with the precise skill set needed at the moment and then throwing them overboard the second they aren't needed. And god forbid a company should spend money on retraining these days.
These guys may have been a little sleazy in how they went about things but the fact that anyone should be surprised by their behavior is astonishing - and not a little too self-righteous for my taste.
You want traditional family values to make a comeback? How about starting with a move toward a society where the family wage earners can have some measure of stability and faith in their employer.
Sorry, not convincing.
Read the thread again and work through it. You'll get it in your own time.
Which "abyss"? Myself, and everybody I know are better off than 5 years ago. Quite a bit so, in fact. Thank you very much.
You just made my point.
Not that I want to find out.
We can agree on that.
Wow, some of you really need to get some blood pressure medicine.
Just for the record, I wasn't thinking of 2000 or 2004, though in fairness that was from clear. The Rorschach Effect is pretty amusing though.
Look, the meat of the comment isn't about elections or the Ukraine, it is about the American public's near complete apathy and willingness to be led by the nose on almost any topic so long as their stomachs are full and their TIVOs keep recording the schlock fed to them by the multinationals. Just reading Slashdot you can see the erosion daily, from broadcast flags and outrageous patents to increasingly intrusive uses of technology and all of it goes essentially unopposed. The corporations frame the issues for the public, the media pronounces the message, the politicians get their payola and we all slide further into the abyss.
Perhaps you think the public could summon enough interest to fight a stolen election. I have my doubts insofar as I haven't seen them do anything in the last 25 years other than bend further over and sing their current employer's jingle.
Goverments have been overthrown for less than this.
Only in countries where the populace still has some balls. The Ukraine is a current example.
These days the US is all about bread and circuses. Canceling the Sunday football schedule is more likely to overthrow a government than stealing an election.
I want to see the average 15 year old talking to the average 850 year old. That would be approximately like like a teeenager today asking someone "What was life like before the Magna Carta?"
It is now ok to use taxpayer dollars to get the current politicians reelected.
Isn't that pretty much the working definition of "annual budget"?
But if you are going to pick on someone you don't like for political reasons... GROW UP and do it in a more mature way (like with real, relevant facts)
And speaking of glass houses...
It's not like he was an incumbent that was so bad he lost to a dead guy (which would be one thing). He was the challenger
Actually Ashcroft was the incumbent. Mel Carnahan, the former governor, was the challenger.
Don't take my word for it: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1 1/07/senate.missouri/
Sadly it is not just limited to the legal process. Money talks in America, period.
And it will stay that way so long as we remain a culture that values a person with a lot of green paper in his pocket over a person who has accumulated knowledge or integrity or has spent their lives helping others.
Why do we have shows like "The Apprentice" when you could have essentially the same show with people striving for a PhD, or to complete a project like designing a new chip or a dozen similar quests? So what if there is no million dollar job or payoff at the end? Does that make it any less interesting or worth watching the human pathos involved?
Somehow I don't think we will ever be the country we really want to be until it is normal for the average Joe to walk up to The Donald and say "I don't care how much money you have, you look like an alien freak with that haircut."
This just sucks energy and resources from the One True Way: Teleportation!
You go BBN. You survived that monstrosity.
I'm not sure we so much disagree as are speaking about slightly different issues.
I completely agree about innovation but manufacturing jobs are not being shipped to China because of any lack of innovation or laziness on the part of the American workforce. They are being shipped because the labor is cheaper, tax and tariff matters are skewed, and American corps want to get into that consumer market any way that they can, namely by selling out their American workforce.
I feel similarly about the software industry in India. Not to start a flame but I don't see any great innovation going on there. I know the Indian execs at some of the outsourcing firms flap their gums a lot but the reality is that most American companies are still at the stage where they are outsourcing their non-critical maintenance work.
That may change in the future or it may not. Frankly I suspect the Indian outsourcing firms' fanaticism about "process" threatens any hope that innovation can take root. It is almost a miniature version of Indian governmental bureaucracy, albeit without the corruption.
Getting back to your point about American needing to innovate however, the outsourcing trend has hurt the US terribly there as well. Talk to any tech company that has tried to get venture capital over the last four years and you will hear story after story about how they were told that they needed to include offshoring plans in their "story" before any VC firms would talk to them, no less commit money. Some VC guy got caught in a moment of public honesty not long ago and came out and said the truth: they look at the US as the place where version 1.0 will be produced and then the work will go overseas after that. Regardless of how innovative we are that may or may not translate into intermediate or long term employment.
>> Has it occurred to you that we're losing our edge, not because outsourcing, but because we haven't been working very hard to keep it?
No, it hasn't occurred to me because it is absurd.
On just about any measure you can think of Americans are on the top. Look at the productivity figures over the last ten years. They are phenomenal. Also by any human measure - hours worked, vacation not taken, sick days not taken, time and money spent keeping current in their profession, etc. - Americans are at the top of the heap.
This does not for a second mean that there aren't serious cultural problems such as education that need to be addressed. But, flat out, as a culture Americans work their asses off. Outsourcing is about one thing and one thing only: cheap labor. Every other justification is just someone blowing smoke up your ass.
Thankfully this very personal information will be floating about in a very secure wireless environment where there will be no technically proficient people hanging around for hours with nothing to do with their laptops...
--> Technically you can start your own internet.
I have thought of things along this line too. Talk about the ultimate Open Source Project - hey kids, let's reinvent the internet but eliminate the mistakes!
A primary design requirement of the current internet was that it should survive a nuclear attack, presumably from another country. The new internet should be designed with the (additional) requirement that it survive financial and civil liberty attacks from our own governments.
People forget (or are too young to remember) that we got by on primative BBS systems for quite awhile and people were reasonably content. A home brew internet is potentially far more interesting and useful than the bulletin boards ever were.
I can imagine a bifurcated world where we have the (commercial) internet as we know it today and an alternative internet akin to what it was before the 1990s corporate takeover. Only the latter will be build with privacy and anonymity features built right into the system not as a bump on the ass afterthought.
Hey, there are open sourced operating systems. Is a network really that much of stretch?
--> So.. can I spoof my IP address and get my calls billed to my neighbor??
The goverment is not going to go down this road (of taxing all VoIP traffic) but if they did then, hypothetically, you could cause havoc - which is one more reason they won't go this route.
I am guessing that the easiest scheme to bill VoIP traffic is to just use the information in the signalling portion of the "call". Almost all VoIP systems use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which, given a financial incentive, should be ridiculously vulnerable to exploitation. It is just a simple text-based protocol which specifies the RTP stream(s) that comprised the call, what kinds of media are involved in the call, etc. Nothing exploitable in there, is there?
-->UNEP: United Nations Environment Programme??
I think this was meant to be UNE-P - Unbundled Network Element Platform, basically where CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) must be able to rent equipment from ILECS.
-->PSC: ??
Public Service Commission
-->PSD: ??
Prevention of Significant Deterioration? I think this might be an EPA/state environmental entity?
-->How exactly do they intend to regulate the unregulatable?
They don't. Even the pols aren't that stupid. What they will end up doing is taxing any applications that interface and crossover to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The last time I looked Skype did not do this (and now probably won't ever do so).-->the world is switching to Euro's.
[smile] My apologies. For a brief moment I thought you knew something about economics or how the money markets work. If you did you would realize how thoughoughly meaningless the above statement is.
-->Your wonderful country is ][ this close to bankcrupcy, my friend
One senses an almost gleeful tone in your message. If you think for a moment beyond your reflexive anti-Americanism you would realize how utterly misplaced that glee is.
The failing of relatively small economies can cause major dislocations - think Thailand in the late '90s and the subsequent "Asian contagion". If Thailand, whose GNP is no larger than a rounding error for the US GNP, can cause such problems you don't even want to imagine what a US bankruptcy would do to the world. Let's just simplify it and say that no one will be left standing and world-wide human suffering would be incalculable.
-->Conversion masters degrees for know-nothings switching from other careers...
Nothing like some gratuitous emotional violence on Easter morning.
I guess my mind reading capabilities are clouded this morning because based on what he wrote I can't tell whether the poster has a Masters in CS or not. What I can surmise however, is that you are a mean spirited little prick who doesn't know a great deal about he computing industry.
The first thing anyone realizes is how utterly vast the range of areas and skill sets are in the field. It is entirely possible that someone working in telecom, for instance, wouldn't have a detailed idea of how to manage content on a web site yet they could be excellent computer scientists. Just because someone isn't intimately familiar with your dipshit little specialty does not make them any less competent or valuable.
With that in mind go back and read nhavar's post from the point of view of someone who isn't already familiar with the problem space. What they see are a bunch of acronyms and hints at solutions for things they couldn't even know were problems. Which is precisely what AxelBoldt's post was alluding to.
Now go back and wash your mouth out with soap. Or perhaps all you know is SOAP.
-->and if his fingerprints have changed since his last entry
More likely the thinking is that they are going to stop anyone whose prints have ever been found in certain caves in Afganistan, Pakistan, or on any document or residence having anything remotely to do with Al Qaeda.
-->Hopefully that'll suck up a few minutes of time of some campaign worker
It will suck up the .003 seconds of computer time that it takes to strip your info off the email header, send out a form letter, and put you in a database so you can be harassed
by American politicians until the end of time.
86 percent of the customers...are choosing to take advantage of the faster processing time...the ability to close their home equity loan in ten days versus twelve days.
Why is overseas processing two days faster? Does e-Loan not have sufficient staff in the US? Are the computers faster in India? Is the company unwilling to pay for a 2nd and 3rd shift to facilitate domestic production around the clock?
If they want to make this comparison then job exporters need present the real choice faced by consumers in most offshoring situations: are you willing to ship your private documents overseas if it is no faster than domestic processing and e-Loan will keep all of the labor savings for their executives' year end bonuses and stock option plans?"
-->A more correct argument would be something similar to 'I think gambling is immoral and do not think it should be endorsed or even tolerated by the state...'
A tough stand for a country where something like 40 out of the 50 states run a lottery.