The problem is that bees are dying off now and this is an emergency; while a 2-3 moratorium on chemical manufacture would devastate the industry manufacturing that chemical, making it economically infeasible to go back to it within probably a decade or more, even if the replacements were worse/more expensive/whatnot. The cost of re-starting and recovering the business--repeat start-up costs--would push the price up beyond economic feasibility.
Think about what would happen if Best Buy was told to shutter all of its doors for 3 months. In 5 weeks it would be a dead company, no recovery. The same happens with the supply chain, except supply chains can stockpile and so may have the ability to cope with 6-8 month business freeze. But 2-3 years is a lot of time for a supply company to sit and wait, trying to keep up with liabilities, without re-tooling their equipment for something that they can actually make money from and abandoning ever returning to their old product because it would cost too much and incur too much risk to go back.
Proper problem solving strategy starts by defining the problem--what is affected, what is not affected, where are they, how are they different, when did the effect occur, what changed around that time, what is the pattern, etc. Based on that definition, you can then rate the likelihood of various causes. In this case: are only one type of bee dying? If we have Honey Bees versus Bumblebees, both susceptible to a toxin, both in experiments reacting the same way to exposure, yet both in the same treated area and only the Honey Bees are affected and in an untreated area the Honey Bees are still affected despite lack of exposure, it's unlikely that the toxin is the problem. On the other hand, if the Bumblebees are more resistant and there is pattern behavior based on exposure, you're highly likely to have found it--you can't be sure, and hell it's still questionable at best (are the toxin levels JUST RIGHT where Bumblebees don't give a shit but Honey Bees are devastated? Seriously? That's ridiculous), but this is absolutely actionable.
Because cab drivers are people and thus draw a salary, and need to be driving around looking for people to pick up. Calling a cab service means you need to find an unoccupied cab nearby.
The salary for a cab driver would be gone, so the cost of a cab would go down. Cabs could be linked to a system which analyzes and predicts cab demand and deploys cabs to nearby garages or other staging areas, keeping a cab minutes away. The cab would show up at your house. The cab would not get bored or draw a salary, so there could be more cabs for a faster response time and higher capacity without added overhead. Cabs could cycle out automatically, sending charged or refueled cabs out to replace depleted cabs and bringing depleted cabs back to central garages where garage workers would plug them back in or refuel them (a wireless charger for electric cabs is doable, but there's loss; a human may be cheaper).
With the convenience of a cab minutes away with a lower price than traditional cabs and unlimited range, consumers would be able to ditch the cost of insurance and licensing while still being able to take a cross-country road trip. If the cab company has a nation-wide network, it can drive from coast to coast. The ride could be non-stop or it could stop at hotels along the way so you don't have to sleep in the back seat. Cabs could swap off with refueled ones along the way, take you to a refueling station to be refueled, or instruct you to provide fuel via a controlled credit card that only accepts fuel purchases and only remains active for the duration of your ride.
The current demand for cabs is low because cabs are expensive compared to driving. Compare that to Zip-Car at $6.25 per hour, and imagine the half-hour drive to and from work costing you $12.50 per day. $250/mo, compared to my drive costing me $80/mo in gas and $120/mo in insurance plus wear-and-tear on the car to the tune of an extra $2500/year in maintenance, bringing me to $450/mo. Then the car fails, and you need to buy a new one with a $250/mo car payment--$700/mo. Most taxicabs charge 25 cents per mile in Florida and $2 per mile in New York; my 15 mile commute costs me the above, but it would be $3.75 each way ($6.50/day) by Orlando taxi.
Factor the total cost of maintenance, insurance, and fuel in. Most people will immediately see fuel and miss the rest; you can advertise insurance easily--most can factor that in. People who are looking to buy a car will see a $250/mo payment versus the cost of riding public personal transit, which is a make-or-break deal really. Then there's "no surprise expenses when your car breaks down--it's our car, it's our problem!" angle.
GM doesn't have to worry about everyone who has a car; they have to worry about everyone who is going to get a car. It's the same issue that broadcast television has: people aren't just cutting the cable; rather, college students aren't even signing up for cable. 2 million new subscribers this year! 2.5 million new subscribers this year! 2.3 million new subscribers this year! 1 million... what? 700,000 new... is this right? 200,000 new subscribers this year... uh...
What happens when GM goes from selling 1 car to every person every 3-5 years to selling 1 car to every person every 10 years? What happens when a flood of 20-somethings decide to get rid of the old beater mommy and daddy gave them when they turned 16 (and mommy got a new station wagon!), but buys... NOTHING! Half of a demographic disappears overnight. What then?
Remember that people who already bought your shit aren't assets. People who are going to buy your shit are where you're getting your next meal. Hundreds of millions of college graduates, but suddenly the next generation only 10% as many go to college? That's 10% as many loans, 10% as much interest revenue, 10% as much tuition. There's still hundreds of millions of people who went to your college in the past 4 decades, but that's not going to fund your institution, or the bank giving the loans out. Hundreds of millions of televisions in every household will pay your next meal, but what about the old and dying? Where are your new subscribers to replace them?
Hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road. But who is buying new ones?
I used to fancy a girl who worked as a data recovery engineer. You wouldn't believe how many people hear the RAID controller alarming and get up to close the case instead of hot swapping a spare drive.. then a week later the second drive goes. She had a fanciful story about how spinning disks used to occasionally fail in such a way that a random sector would go bad, report incorrect data, and a RAID-1 mirror would "fix" it by destroying data on the other drive. She also used to tell me software RAID options had a tendency to actually beat hardware RAID options for data integrity outside of other inline failures--that is, when the system is operating under optimal circumstances, most hardware RAID systems more often self-corrupt than software RAID systems. Just an odd statistic, and I never got overall risk performance stats out of her.
Outsourced information services in general have known security concerns. That they come under a new buzzword doesn't make them less secure. Even contractors who come in and touch your systems can walk out with massive amounts of private data.
"We're experiencing data going bad and not being restorable from back-ups because it just CORRUPTS itself for no visible reason" "That's a myth and doesn't actually happen."
HIV was created by racist bigots to slander blacks and homosexuals.
Fact: Google has a self-driving car. They're not the only one.
Fact: ZipCar is a business. They turn a profit.
Fact: This is ZipCar with cars that don't need to be at a garage or a curb-side parking spot within walking distance; it's essentially cabs without cab drivers.
Fact: The taxicab business is a thriving industry. This is in no part due to the wondrous experience of interacting with a cabbie, and almost wholly in part due to the convenience of a service by which you can have a car come and get you instead of navigating public transportation routes.
Argument given: it sounds fancy, must be a fantasy that can't happen in real life.
This is why somebody will be rich and it won't be you.
God, yes. So many small-minded MBAs have this completely unrealistic bullshit going through their heads, and they actually think it'll work. Like there was this college grad once that wrote up this ridiculous business plan about how he was going to bring packages from all over the country back to a single distribution center, and then ship them back out on planes and have them delivered the day after they were sent. Ludicrous. And now we have shit like Amazon talking about same-day delivery, laughable, never happen.
I've been listening to excuses like this for years. "No, it can't be done..." "No, corporate is too tight with money..." "No, the government doesn't care about us..."
You can shut it. 12 years of the whole neighborhood calling city services to complain about a burned down house and they staunchly refused; in two weeks I had placed phone calls to 5 city offices, my councilwoman, and the mayor, and the house is now scheduled for demolition. People claim security just "makes things too hard" and I build systems that integrate security such that workflows are only affected by minor adjustment and some security administrator gets the job of managing all the big stuff in the background. I've been told time and again that certain tools can't be used because "nobody will buy into that, it's too expensive" or whatever and I've done the analysis and gotten buy-in from parties who stood in staunch opposition just days before.
Stop telling me what can't be done. Go jump off a bridge, we don't need you.
"On Monday evening, only days before an area man masturbated yet again to 3D images of Bigfoot getting a blowjob, the Senate extended the Undetectable Firearms Act."
McDonalds can order the picketers off the premises, and they have to wait outside and let customers pass. The act of sending an HTTP request is, on the other hand, actually blocking others from sending requests.
Because a picket line is a visible display. You motherfuckers move out of the way, you're blocking the customers; annoying them is fine. If picketers physically barre customers from entry to a place of business, they get pepper spray and handcuffs.
It looks like Paypal is saying, "This won't decrease our business risk, it won't impact the actual source of the problem, and these people aren't responsible for or capable of the damage they did. On their own, they would annoy the network security guys; most of the network guys wouldn't notice them. This isn't relevant to us; except that if these kids get fucking crushed for this people we can't fight will be pissed at us and kick us more! We need to stop this to reduce our risk of suffering mob justice!"
Somewhere around there, some folks felt the system was unfair and brought up an argument. It turned into a business argument. That's basically how it works.
My opinion on Africa is that the currently-modern countries are fine; the starvation-level countries need feudalism in the short term; and the type of technology to deploy in many of these places will be different than what we use here. That is to say: more sustainable, self-sufficient technology that needs less infrastructure will suit underdeveloped countries in that region better, but porting that same tech here would just get lots of greenie-weenie gum-flapping and high implementation fees to little benefit. Major infrastructure in the poorer regions of Africa of course would just devastate their economy; while actually providing sanitization and food distribution and education at an acceptably high level without requiring a multi-mega-bajilliotrillion-gold-pieces bootstrap they can't afford to maintain, much less implement in the first place, would give them a vehicle for economic prosperity.
A Project Management Office includes a Manager of Projects who staffs a Project Portfolio Manager who examines the needs of all projects in the business and asks questions like: "Why are they building out this over here, and this other thing over there, which are substantially similar and could be built as one system instead of two and take half of the effort?"
A Chief Operations Officer is an executive whose job is to get middle and lower management to provide brief explanations of their operations, how they meet the needs of the business, and what their resource requirements are. This executive then asks questions like, "Why does Finance need 250 clerks when there are systems out there to automate most of these processes we're doing manually?" He then brings this up to the CIO, CEO, board of directors, and so on, causing the business to place resources into evaluating and potentially implementing new processes to cut down on that work load so they can repurpose and/or lay off most of those clerks (it's not a charity).
Most departments want to hire more people to show on the DH CV that they head a department of 250 people executing multi-million-dollar initiatives. They conveniently leave off that the business need can be addressed with 8 clerks and a $90,000/year outsourced payroll solution instead of a $2 million/year in-house Oracle installation and 5 DBAs and whatnot supporting 200 clerks using a poorly-written in-house HR and purchasing system integrated with an off-the-shelf payroll system.
There's a lot of "managers don't want to think", "Break stuff and blame staffing", and "use Logic(TM)" responses here from clueless tech idiots who think they're management or diplomats or something. These are the same people that can't understand what executives (CEO CSO CISO etc.) actually do and why they're needed.
I've been studying project management because of this same shit. On one hand this place is understaffed; on the other, the stuff we're staffing up for would be easy to do on half the staff we have already... if managed properly. With a breakdown of the work, project experience and documentation that allows for fairly accurate estimating, and various risk management documents, you can show that A) you're in desperate need of more staffing if you want to actually complete any work this year; and/or B) current staffing prohibits implementation of risk controls, and the company's position is very precarious and based on the idea that one or two minor things can go wrong and the major things won't happen.
Negotiation requires good communication, but also good facts to communicate. You need to show management that their goals are best served by following your suggestions. This produces a situation where both sides feel they've gotten something out of the negotiation, and both sides understand what they're doing and why.
As a final thought, refer to chapter 4 of the PMBOK5e, particularly the section on meetings: Meetings are for A) communicating information; B) generating alternatives (brainstorming, etc., coming up with possible actions; or C) decision making. Exactly one per meeting. Have a meeting, communicate the situation: work to be done, human time available, human time consumed, problems, risks, and so on. Have another meeting a few days later, discuss how to address the problem: change timelines, drop projects, alter (reduce) project scopes, emphasize addressing risks, emphasize projects to improve efficiency so the same staff can complete their work in less time and with less effort, hire additional staff, etc. Have another meeting a week or so later, make a decision: make any procedural changes and create any additional positions as is fit. Never, ever do a bunch of different shit in one meeting; that's how you get vacant management-driven from-the-hip decisions that tend to be the worst possible solutions to any problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that bees are dying off now and this is an emergency; while a 2-3 moratorium on chemical manufacture would devastate the industry manufacturing that chemical, making it economically infeasible to go back to it within probably a decade or more, even if the replacements were worse/more expensive/whatnot. The cost of re-starting and recovering the business--repeat start-up costs--would push the price up beyond economic feasibility.
Think about what would happen if Best Buy was told to shutter all of its doors for 3 months. In 5 weeks it would be a dead company, no recovery. The same happens with the supply chain, except supply chains can stockpile and so may have the ability to cope with 6-8 month business freeze. But 2-3 years is a lot of time for a supply company to sit and wait, trying to keep up with liabilities, without re-tooling their equipment for something that they can actually make money from and abandoning ever returning to their old product because it would cost too much and incur too much risk to go back.
Proper problem solving strategy starts by defining the problem--what is affected, what is not affected, where are they, how are they different, when did the effect occur, what changed around that time, what is the pattern, etc. Based on that definition, you can then rate the likelihood of various causes. In this case: are only one type of bee dying? If we have Honey Bees versus Bumblebees, both susceptible to a toxin, both in experiments reacting the same way to exposure, yet both in the same treated area and only the Honey Bees are affected and in an untreated area the Honey Bees are still affected despite lack of exposure, it's unlikely that the toxin is the problem. On the other hand, if the Bumblebees are more resistant and there is pattern behavior based on exposure, you're highly likely to have found it--you can't be sure, and hell it's still questionable at best (are the toxin levels JUST RIGHT where Bumblebees don't give a shit but Honey Bees are devastated? Seriously? That's ridiculous), but this is absolutely actionable.
Because cab drivers are people and thus draw a salary, and need to be driving around looking for people to pick up. Calling a cab service means you need to find an unoccupied cab nearby.
The salary for a cab driver would be gone, so the cost of a cab would go down. Cabs could be linked to a system which analyzes and predicts cab demand and deploys cabs to nearby garages or other staging areas, keeping a cab minutes away. The cab would show up at your house. The cab would not get bored or draw a salary, so there could be more cabs for a faster response time and higher capacity without added overhead. Cabs could cycle out automatically, sending charged or refueled cabs out to replace depleted cabs and bringing depleted cabs back to central garages where garage workers would plug them back in or refuel them (a wireless charger for electric cabs is doable, but there's loss; a human may be cheaper).
With the convenience of a cab minutes away with a lower price than traditional cabs and unlimited range, consumers would be able to ditch the cost of insurance and licensing while still being able to take a cross-country road trip. If the cab company has a nation-wide network, it can drive from coast to coast. The ride could be non-stop or it could stop at hotels along the way so you don't have to sleep in the back seat. Cabs could swap off with refueled ones along the way, take you to a refueling station to be refueled, or instruct you to provide fuel via a controlled credit card that only accepts fuel purchases and only remains active for the duration of your ride.
The current demand for cabs is low because cabs are expensive compared to driving. Compare that to Zip-Car at $6.25 per hour, and imagine the half-hour drive to and from work costing you $12.50 per day. $250/mo, compared to my drive costing me $80/mo in gas and $120/mo in insurance plus wear-and-tear on the car to the tune of an extra $2500/year in maintenance, bringing me to $450/mo. Then the car fails, and you need to buy a new one with a $250/mo car payment--$700/mo. Most taxicabs charge 25 cents per mile in Florida and $2 per mile in New York; my 15 mile commute costs me the above, but it would be $3.75 each way ($6.50/day) by Orlando taxi.
Factor the total cost of maintenance, insurance, and fuel in. Most people will immediately see fuel and miss the rest; you can advertise insurance easily--most can factor that in. People who are looking to buy a car will see a $250/mo payment versus the cost of riding public personal transit, which is a make-or-break deal really. Then there's "no surprise expenses when your car breaks down--it's our car, it's our problem!" angle.
Oh my god she said that FIVE TIMES EVERY DAY!
GM doesn't have to worry about everyone who has a car; they have to worry about everyone who is going to get a car. It's the same issue that broadcast television has: people aren't just cutting the cable; rather, college students aren't even signing up for cable. 2 million new subscribers this year! 2.5 million new subscribers this year! 2.3 million new subscribers this year! 1 million... what? 700,000 new... is this right? 200,000 new subscribers this year... uh...
What happens when GM goes from selling 1 car to every person every 3-5 years to selling 1 car to every person every 10 years? What happens when a flood of 20-somethings decide to get rid of the old beater mommy and daddy gave them when they turned 16 (and mommy got a new station wagon!), but buys ... NOTHING! Half of a demographic disappears overnight. What then?
Remember that people who already bought your shit aren't assets. People who are going to buy your shit are where you're getting your next meal. Hundreds of millions of college graduates, but suddenly the next generation only 10% as many go to college? That's 10% as many loans, 10% as much interest revenue, 10% as much tuition. There's still hundreds of millions of people who went to your college in the past 4 decades, but that's not going to fund your institution, or the bank giving the loans out. Hundreds of millions of televisions in every household will pay your next meal, but what about the old and dying? Where are your new subscribers to replace them?
Hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road. But who is buying new ones?
I just sent the commission a number of other ways to suicide, some involving the golden gate bridge with the anti-suicide system in place.
I used to fancy a girl who worked as a data recovery engineer. You wouldn't believe how many people hear the RAID controller alarming and get up to close the case instead of hot swapping a spare drive.. then a week later the second drive goes. She had a fanciful story about how spinning disks used to occasionally fail in such a way that a random sector would go bad, report incorrect data, and a RAID-1 mirror would "fix" it by destroying data on the other drive. She also used to tell me software RAID options had a tendency to actually beat hardware RAID options for data integrity outside of other inline failures--that is, when the system is operating under optimal circumstances, most hardware RAID systems more often self-corrupt than software RAID systems. Just an odd statistic, and I never got overall risk performance stats out of her.
Outsourced information services in general have known security concerns. That they come under a new buzzword doesn't make them less secure. Even contractors who come in and touch your systems can walk out with massive amounts of private data.
"We're experiencing data going bad and not being restorable from back-ups because it just CORRUPTS itself for no visible reason" "That's a myth and doesn't actually happen."
HIV was created by racist bigots to slander blacks and homosexuals.
Fact: Google has a self-driving car. They're not the only one.
Fact: ZipCar is a business. They turn a profit.
Fact: This is ZipCar with cars that don't need to be at a garage or a curb-side parking spot within walking distance; it's essentially cabs without cab drivers.
Fact: The taxicab business is a thriving industry. This is in no part due to the wondrous experience of interacting with a cabbie, and almost wholly in part due to the convenience of a service by which you can have a car come and get you instead of navigating public transportation routes.
Argument given: it sounds fancy, must be a fantasy that can't happen in real life.
This is why somebody will be rich and it won't be you.
God, yes. So many small-minded MBAs have this completely unrealistic bullshit going through their heads, and they actually think it'll work. Like there was this college grad once that wrote up this ridiculous business plan about how he was going to bring packages from all over the country back to a single distribution center, and then ship them back out on planes and have them delivered the day after they were sent. Ludicrous. And now we have shit like Amazon talking about same-day delivery, laughable, never happen.
Converse: GM failing because nobody is buying their cars seems to indicate that the demand for cars HAS DRIED UP.
I've been listening to excuses like this for years. "No, it can't be done..." "No, corporate is too tight with money..." "No, the government doesn't care about us..."
You can shut it. 12 years of the whole neighborhood calling city services to complain about a burned down house and they staunchly refused; in two weeks I had placed phone calls to 5 city offices, my councilwoman, and the mayor, and the house is now scheduled for demolition. People claim security just "makes things too hard" and I build systems that integrate security such that workflows are only affected by minor adjustment and some security administrator gets the job of managing all the big stuff in the background. I've been told time and again that certain tools can't be used because "nobody will buy into that, it's too expensive" or whatever and I've done the analysis and gotten buy-in from parties who stood in staunch opposition just days before.
Stop telling me what can't be done. Go jump off a bridge, we don't need you.
This is a lot of decision-by-negativity. I see opportunities.
Yep. Just like how GM has used its patents to stop Tesla, instead of the dealerships using backdoor legislative bribery.
"On Monday evening, only days before an area man masturbated yet again to 3D images of Bigfoot getting a blowjob, the Senate extended the Undetectable Firearms Act."
Irrelevant bullshit is irrelevant.
Pretty much. It's ineffective.
McDonalds can order the picketers off the premises, and they have to wait outside and let customers pass. The act of sending an HTTP request is, on the other hand, actually blocking others from sending requests.
Because a picket line is a visible display. You motherfuckers move out of the way, you're blocking the customers; annoying them is fine. If picketers physically barre customers from entry to a place of business, they get pepper spray and handcuffs.
It looks like Paypal is saying, "This won't decrease our business risk, it won't impact the actual source of the problem, and these people aren't responsible for or capable of the damage they did. On their own, they would annoy the network security guys; most of the network guys wouldn't notice them. This isn't relevant to us; except that if these kids get fucking crushed for this people we can't fight will be pissed at us and kick us more! We need to stop this to reduce our risk of suffering mob justice!"
Somewhere around there, some folks felt the system was unfair and brought up an argument. It turned into a business argument. That's basically how it works.
Oatmeal was the quaker guy. You know. The fag with the perm.
My opinion on Africa is that the currently-modern countries are fine; the starvation-level countries need feudalism in the short term; and the type of technology to deploy in many of these places will be different than what we use here. That is to say: more sustainable, self-sufficient technology that needs less infrastructure will suit underdeveloped countries in that region better, but porting that same tech here would just get lots of greenie-weenie gum-flapping and high implementation fees to little benefit. Major infrastructure in the poorer regions of Africa of course would just devastate their economy; while actually providing sanitization and food distribution and education at an acceptably high level without requiring a multi-mega-bajilliotrillion-gold-pieces bootstrap they can't afford to maintain, much less implement in the first place, would give them a vehicle for economic prosperity.
A Project Management Office includes a Manager of Projects who staffs a Project Portfolio Manager who examines the needs of all projects in the business and asks questions like: "Why are they building out this over here, and this other thing over there, which are substantially similar and could be built as one system instead of two and take half of the effort?"
A Chief Operations Officer is an executive whose job is to get middle and lower management to provide brief explanations of their operations, how they meet the needs of the business, and what their resource requirements are. This executive then asks questions like, "Why does Finance need 250 clerks when there are systems out there to automate most of these processes we're doing manually?" He then brings this up to the CIO, CEO, board of directors, and so on, causing the business to place resources into evaluating and potentially implementing new processes to cut down on that work load so they can repurpose and/or lay off most of those clerks (it's not a charity).
And so it goes.
So, you're saying we shouldn't give people 20 years for murder but 40-60 years for sex with a minor?
Most departments want to hire more people to show on the DH CV that they head a department of 250 people executing multi-million-dollar initiatives. They conveniently leave off that the business need can be addressed with 8 clerks and a $90,000/year outsourced payroll solution instead of a $2 million/year in-house Oracle installation and 5 DBAs and whatnot supporting 200 clerks using a poorly-written in-house HR and purchasing system integrated with an off-the-shelf payroll system.
Closest response I've actually seen.
There's a lot of "managers don't want to think", "Break stuff and blame staffing", and "use Logic(TM)" responses here from clueless tech idiots who think they're management or diplomats or something. These are the same people that can't understand what executives (CEO CSO CISO etc.) actually do and why they're needed.
I've been studying project management because of this same shit. On one hand this place is understaffed; on the other, the stuff we're staffing up for would be easy to do on half the staff we have already... if managed properly. With a breakdown of the work, project experience and documentation that allows for fairly accurate estimating, and various risk management documents, you can show that A) you're in desperate need of more staffing if you want to actually complete any work this year; and/or B) current staffing prohibits implementation of risk controls, and the company's position is very precarious and based on the idea that one or two minor things can go wrong and the major things won't happen.
Negotiation requires good communication, but also good facts to communicate. You need to show management that their goals are best served by following your suggestions. This produces a situation where both sides feel they've gotten something out of the negotiation, and both sides understand what they're doing and why.
As a final thought, refer to chapter 4 of the PMBOK5e, particularly the section on meetings: Meetings are for A) communicating information; B) generating alternatives (brainstorming, etc., coming up with possible actions; or C) decision making. Exactly one per meeting. Have a meeting, communicate the situation: work to be done, human time available, human time consumed, problems, risks, and so on. Have another meeting a few days later, discuss how to address the problem: change timelines, drop projects, alter (reduce) project scopes, emphasize addressing risks, emphasize projects to improve efficiency so the same staff can complete their work in less time and with less effort, hire additional staff, etc. Have another meeting a week or so later, make a decision: make any procedural changes and create any additional positions as is fit. Never, ever do a bunch of different shit in one meeting; that's how you get vacant management-driven from-the-hip decisions that tend to be the worst possible solutions to any problem.