When you say H-1B salaries you mean the salaries that the person working gets paid with or the money Microsoft pays to some Indian intermediary company that actually pays the person doing the job much less?
Plus how much of the money Microsoft pays that Indian company gets back to the people at Microsoft doing the hiring as kickbacks?
Plus how much does Microsoft pay in an H-1B if they want to lay him off?
etc.
You can look up how much an H1b visa holder makes. The system isn't set up to look for a specific person, but with a small amount of intiution and some reasonable assumptions you can usually figure out which of your colleagues has which title in the system. If you find actual cases of fraud, report it. Let your H1B visa colleages know how much they should be making, and encourage them to demand that they be paid that wage. If companies actually had to pay those wages this whole business would stop pretty quick.
WWI was a mess because they wanted to use Napoleonic War era infantry tactics at a time where armies had machine guns.
All infantry soldiers back then were treated like disposable crap to feed the machine guns and artillery. It had nothing to do with where they came from.
You can put it more simply and say that defensive technology had outpaced offensive technology. Fixed fortifications had reached their peak and offensive weapons hadn't quite caught up yet. All the new offensive weapons seen for the first time during that war, such as the military aircraft, the invention of tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, etc were driven by this.
Globalization has built a middle class in China, India, Malaysia, Vietnam and bunch of other places I'm to lazy to think of or list.
These were dangerously ideological or at least polarized places 50 years ago. These days the only places you can find a real communist is N. Korea, a theme park in Poland and the humanities departments of western universities.
I've been to North Korea and it has communist practices which remain, but they have a lot of capitalism too. The elites sort of let the black market do its thing, because they needed the black market to get the cool toys and luxuries they wanted to have. The black market got stronger and stronger and now they are so organized that many of the black market sellers wear the same uniform. The government provides housing and a whole lot of other things, but they provide a salary too. They keep having to crack the door to capitalism more and more because the black market is becoming such a critical part of society there.
On a related note, a lot of the weird things North Korea says can be attributed to poor translation. There is an old joke of foreign languages in subtitles where a foreigner will ramble on and on and on, then the subtitles will pop up with a very simple idea. The Korean language is actually somewhat like that, using an unnecessary amount of words and leaving nothing as "subject to context" or "readily understood". Their spoken language says absolutely everything. A good translator will cut out all the cruft and get to the main point, but being so isolated from the rest of the world, maybe North Korean translators aren't as good as they ought to be.
Comcast etc sell their customers phone numbers to illicit third parties. I ended up having to throw together an Asterix system with a simple "no solicitations, press one to continue" message to filter out all the robo-calls I got when I was forced to switch services over to Comcast.
Why stick with Comcast then? Why continue to give them your business if they just stab you behind your back? Their VOIP offerings are hilariously overpriced. Get an OBIHai or Cisco SIP gateway, sign up for any of the dozens of SIP providers, and roll your own. My SIP provider even has voice menus you can set up on their system.
If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.
Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).
MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"
MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.
This sort of argument shows a lack of business common sense. People need operating systems to run on their computers. That operating system needs to be continuously updated with security fixes. It is also nice to get new features every now and then. What Microsoft really needs to do is drop the Major Revision concept and just sell "Windows" or "Office" as a service. The OS gets updated periodically and people pay periodically.
Microsoft has pushed this before and the backlash was/has been huge because they failed to show the advantages were greater than the disadvantages. They need to go to this model though because they seem unable to handle the task of creating a new Major Revision anymore.
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce.
I think you answered your own question in a sense. When your company was small, the culture was that every employee was very valuable and getting rid of someone just wasn't an option. People were accountable because they didn't want to let the team down. They could see how important they were. It was obvious every time a coworker took a week off for vacation.
When a company gets bigger, it has to shed the notion that every person is absolutely valuable and needed. Equally important is spending effort on making people feel important and cultivating a culture of "I don't want to let down my team". If you don't do something about it, that small-company culture will erode, and it seems like that is exactly what is happening.
No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.
Not entirely true. I think you are including childhood mortality. If you made it to age 20 (working age) in 1935, the year that the Social Security Act was enacted, you could expect to live to be about 66 years old if you were a man, or 68 if you were a woman. This isn't a "small portion of the population", it is, by definition of being the average life expectancy, at least half the population.
Life expectancy has gotten longer but it has been a very gradual process and the taxes have increased over the years. The reason that the program is in trouble is because the taxes have not quite kept up, and politicians have been playing financial games with the savings for decades.
Knives and other cutting implements can be abused by criminals, don't include them in my kitchen!
That example isn't even close to being equivalent. We're talking about the possibility that which someone can, with relative ease, wirelessly and anonymously deprive me of the use of my property without leaving much of a trace. You seem to be describing the crime of physical breaking and entering, which I would argue is none of those things.
They won't even need a button. I highly doubt an automated car will proceed to pilot itself on a high speed chase, or ignore red and blue lights.
Fbi should go back to consulting their Internet slang dictionary, rather than trying to think.
Don't put a kill switch in my car. Kill switches will be hacked and abused. Devices will be sold and marketed to kill a car, even if they are illegal. Just like the MIRT and all the related devices. Illegal as a $7 bill but assholes still buy them.
The Supreme Court ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, if such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required.
You can test people as long as it is "reasonably related" to the job and isn't done in a way that artificially discriminates against a protected class. Difficult, but not a ban.
so then it is indeed close to a ban.
No, it really isn't. I have been learning about this recently as part of MBA classes. All you have to do is look at your current workforce and find some common attributes among your top workers for job X. Maybe your top 5 sales guys all have above-average empathy (just one example, it could be anything). This is your basis for any legal defense later.
You then apply an aptitude test to your hiring process and reject anyone with inferior empathy. You don't need to even consider if this discriminates against a protected class. It is quite possible this DOES discriminate against men since women are usually known to be more empathetic. That doesn't matter though. All that matters is if you can demonstrate that empathy has something to do with a salesperson's success. Since you did your homework up front by looking at success and finding common attributes, anyone who challenges your process is going to lose. It is not close to a ban at all, just a legal provision that tells you what you were supposed to be doing anyway- find a good predictor of good job performance, then (and only then) find a test which tests that predictor.
Well we have known this for a long long time. Problem is how do we get the government to stop subsidizing fossil fuel?
I know environmentalists can sometimes see issues in only black and white, but a lot of the fossil fuel "subsidies" are programs to develop clean smockestack technology, carbon capture and storage, etc. Carbon capture and storage is, in my opinion as an industry insider, a larger technical challenge than the Manhattan project. Industry sure as heck isn't going to take on a massive engineering projects by itself. If these things were easy or cheap, they would have been done already. I want to leave a good planet to my kids too, but it can't happen overnight. Little steps. We'll get there.
Except everything we have now.
Still I guess there are brown people that need killing, so something had to give.
We have very cheap energy in the US right now. Investing in even cheaper energy is not worthwhile. Why should we pay? Let those countries who have high energy bills now, pay the bill now. Otherwise the US is just subsidizing other countries.
Their ideas are wrong, but they're hardly a threat. Most people don't take them seriously, and only 80-95% (depending on the disease) of a population needs to be immunized to achieve herd immunity.
I think you are grossly underestimating the ability of people to be complete morons. This link is a little dated, but in 1999, a poll showed that 18 percent of Americans think the Sun revolves around the Earth. In 2011, seven percent of people said they believe more than half of the federal government's budget goes to public broadcasting. Another four percent thought it was 31 to 50 percent of the budget. Is is easy to get 10-15% of the population to believe in absolute rubbish despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The MMR vaccine has an effectiveness of only around 95%- meaning 5% of people do the right thing, get vaccinated, but could still get the disease. MMR is given at 12-15 months of age, so roughly 1.5% of the population who will get the vaccine hasn't gotten it yet. Some people (no idea what %) are very poor and never go to doctors, even if the vaccine is free. That 5-20% "margin" of herd immunity starts to look awfully shaky if you consider all the people who already can't or don't get a vaccine.
Finally, the anti-vaxxers tend to live in pockets of people who believe as they do. This means the disease can get a foothold in those neighborhoods, and survive. There is a very real risk that some diseases could thrive long enough to mutate enough so that the vaccine doesn't work anymore.
Even if this doesn't become a "big" problem, the consequences can be very damaging on an individual basis. My daughter is only 6 months old. She hasn't gotten many vaccinations yet because she is just too young. If some clown passes on the measles to her, her death is a very real possibility. Can you justify a death like that as not being "a serious threat"? The stakes too high to ignore these idiots.
The original study linking vaccination to autism was from the UK. The press has really overstated the anti-vaxer thing in the US. I don't remember the exact statistic, but close to 99% of American children are vaccinated (at least partially). Most of the ones who aren't are clustered in immigrant communities, that's why we see the outbreaks. It poses no threat to the general population.
It poses a threat because these terrible ideas of the anti-vaxers get picked up by legitimate sources sometimes. And there are people who can't tell the difference between legitimate science and junk science. Ideas can spread more virulently and rapidly than real diseases. The antivax ideasare a threat, even if the effects of their actions aren't causing significant problems at this moment.
It seems unwise to claim to the winner. A lot of people who lost money when those bitcoins were seized will be quite upset with this guy. Considering many of the dealt in drugs, weapons and other illegal material I wouldn't like to speculate what they might do to him.
On the other hand, it seems wise to make a statement. Everybody can track those bitcoins anyway. One of the concerns I might have as a buyer of them would be that no exchange would deal with me and I couldn't cash them out. By making a statement which shows he is a "good guy" he might be able to escape the communities anger about the situation and deflect it back on the person who lost them and the government who took them, which is where the blame rightly belongs anyhow.
If it wasn't, that mutation would have been selected out of existence a long time ago.
OK, smartass, what is the evolutionary advantage for stupidity?
Because you'd think we'd have selected that away a long time ago as well.
Hell, we have an appendix. Why do we have an appendix? Why hasn't evolution made that go away?
Evolution is awesome, but it can do some silly things that stick around.
Most people think of evolution as "survival of the fittest", but this is a gross simplification. In a population bottleneck, genetic diversity can shrink rapidly if a large portion of the population dies out. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world died except a small and distinct group- lets say the Vietnamese people just for example. If the population recovered and repopulated the world, humans would have lost a tremendous amount of genetic diversity which may or may not be beneficial to survival.
Evolution in the traditional sense also only affects characteristics which affect the ability to reproduce. For example, it is impossible for humans to evolve the problem of cataracts or alzheimer's out of our genetic code. By the time these problems show up, the children of those affected have already become self-sufficient. Evolution is about "reproduction of the fittest" not the more general "survival of the fittest".
No it isn't. Although some medals are hard to earn, others are handed out like halloween candy. The National Defense Service Medal is automatically handed out to everyone that enlists. I got a Sea Service Ribbon just for SHOWING UP when my unit deployed (the alternative was to go to the brig). Achievement Medals are routinely awarded to people that go a little beyond the ordinary in solving problems or innovating. I was awarded two Navy Achievement Medals during my six years of service in the Marines. What is described in TFA is routine. It happens all the time.
You seem to deride the practice, but handing out halloween candy has a purpose- its a gift to make people want to keep doing what they just did (ie. show up). Small incentives and gifts can be very valuable tools for building relationships. I used to be a field engineer working at power stations. The big thing there was stickers. Millwrights and pipefitters have a tradition (going back probably until the invention of stickers) of collecting stickers and placing them on their hard hats. Stickers are "earned" by attending mandatory safety presentations ("Power Plant XYZ Safety Training 2014"), by belonging to various industry clubs, or just handed out by people (engineers/sales reps) looking to get a favor in the future. A hard hat full of stickers shows that you're an experienced guy who has been around a while. It is a mark of respect and experience. If you work in those professions and don't have a hard hat full of stickers, you're a greenhorn or otherwise somebody who doesn't know what they're doing.
I've shown up to a power station many times with a roll of stickers, and these guys instantly became my best friend and helped me out greatly in achieving the thing I was there to do. Don't underestimate the value of token gifts.
Bloomberg is a billionaire. I don't believe for a second he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart. If the guy really gave a flying fark about the poor there's a thousand and one things he could be doing. Maybe this is punishment to the local soda manufacturers? It's just too silly a thing to push when it means going up against companies like Coke & Pepsi, who aren't exactly well known for taking things lying down.
They would make just as much money, if not more, by selling smaller volumes at a not-quite proportionally smaller cost.
The many other countries in the west with proper healthcare have managed to limit their meddling to a few PSAs urging healthy eating and such.
When is the last time you saw the health police whipping overweight joggers through the streets of London?
If the US taxed corn syrup, instead of subsidizing it, that would be a start. Soft drnks are very modestly sized in every foreign country I have been in. Coincidentally, all those foreign countries use real sugar instead of corn syrup in their fizzy drinks.
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The ammonia in your cleaning bottle is hydrous ammonia, which is a fancy way of saying it is mostly water. Hydrous ammonia is pretty tame stuff. Anhydrous (no water) ammonia, like the kind required for chemical reactions, is nasty nasty stuff. If you breathe the vapors it can cause permanent damage to your lungs. If you get it on your skin, you can easilly get a nasty chemical burn. The vapor is flamable and forms explosive mixtures with air. It reacts violently with a variety of compounds.
Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.
To see how workaholism saps productivity and rarely leads to better results, look at Japan. Overtime is sacrosanct in Japan, at the company I worked at previously it was a badge of honor that the average amount of overtime was 60 hours a month. Japan has the lowest per-hour output in the G7, and it's a small wonder why. Managers will often times not buy hardware that can increase productivity because hey, you can simply make the workers work longer hours for free, whereas hardware costs money. The result is a populace that is unhappy, unhealthy, and well dying. The low birth rate is well known, what is less well known is that the Japanese have the least amount of sex in the developed world. The technology industry that everyone once thought would rule the world has come to be dominated by the west because managers have very little incentive to innovate, to increase productivity. And as the cherry on the shit sundae, the low productivity means that wages in Japan are lower, i.e. longer hours for less money. Trust me, you don't want to go down this route.
You've got the overall picture, but this isn't pushed down by the companies. It's the unions. There are numerous unions, including for things which are not unionized in other countries, like Engineers. Everybody could work 8 hours a day if they wanted, but there is pressure to stretch out the work. If you aren't booking a similar level of overtime as the other workers, you might get a visit from the union guy. Companies are hesitant to increase wages to eliminate the need for overtime, because there is no guarantee that employees wouldn't just soak up as much overtime as before.
One other odd thing about Japan is that in many professions, the salary curve is an upside down "U" shape. Straight out of college they pay low salaries, mid-career the employee has received salary increases and promotions and so are making a lot more. But as the employees career peaks, so too does their salary. The salary eventually decreases every year until the employee retires. Some companies even have a special "Retiree Consulting Company" where employees work when they reach a certain age (55, 60, etc). The employee takes a big pay cut, is taken off the company payroll, and is then a contractor/consultant, but doing the same job. Usually their hours are ramped down to 3 days/week, 2 days/week, 1 day/week etc until they actually retire from working.
It has benefits in that a person retiring has had a LONG time to prepare, pass on their knowledge, and train the next worker. But it definitely adds perverse incentives to milking the salary when you can because after a certain point, the employee is just making less and less every year.
pisses me off when they do that. It's why I don't buy games-on-disc anymore, you don't get what you already paid for. If it's not a standalone like KSP or a free persistent MMO like Battlestar Galactica, fucking keep it.
Well, then you don't know the gaming industry. Basically people work on a game and then get laid off.
This was fine back in the days where once you release, you can't patch (which was really helped because consoles of yore were a lot simpler to test for - nowadays you have to check out your 3D models and for glitching that could let players walk through walls because a/b/c/d/e was just right). Then there's the gameplay breaking bugs where if you save at the wrong moment, you can't restore.
Problem is, you can't patch the game if the developers aren't there anymore, and there's about a 2 month leadtime between submission of a game and when it appears on the shelf - pressing discs can easily be a month (your disc is just another one in the big press queue), and distribution another month (from disc factory to factory to distributiors and then to retail warehouses, etc).
So you have a team of devs sitting idle for two months. Well, you could put them on fixing some of the more egregious bugs found (leading to day 1 patches) because they have an extra 2 months to fix it, and the other devs (and artists, etc) can work on making extras (day 1 DLC). Because the moment the game is released, gamers might find a bug and you need to get people fixing it.
Developers can't sit around idle, and if a game's done, either you reallocate them to a new project, or lay them off. Either option doesn't work if you need to fix bugs. That's why you have day 1 patches (extra 2 months to fix bugs), day 1 DLC (2 months to generate content), and day 1 gamebreaking bugs.
And once someone is reassigned to another project, it's damn near impossible to get them to go back and fix issues with the existing code (just getting them back up to speed and building the code can be challenge all in itself).
Very few games get patched after the first month as that gets treated as the official close of the project. Unless there's a business case to keep DLC going in which case you'll have a small team for that. But that's it, and most games on the shelves are dead after the first month.
Day 1 DLC is still idiotic. It raises the cost of entry for the gamer and doesn't do anything to foster goodwill. Have the devs make DLC during the lull time if you must, but delay that DLC until 3-5 months after release.
"Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction."
lie, lie, lie. this is referring to the so-called open-office scheme, where they remove your privacy and sound barriers, sometimes even remove your personal desk and you are now 'fully interchangable cogs' to the company.
this has been proven to be wrong, but it keeps getting trotted out, as if repeating it over and over again will make us believe it.
CEO and bean-counter bullshit. see it for what it is.
Its not a lie, just a bad manager. The problem for management is that what works awesome at some companies fail completely at others. Company/Department A may be doing great with an open-office scheme, all the employees are happy and productivity goes up 50%. The problem is that a a manager at Company/Department B will try it out without considering in what, if any, ways which A is different from B. if B is the same as A in all the ways which matter, then the manager is a hero. But if B is different than A in some small way, then the manager has committed a big mistake. Sometimes the difference is foreseeable (bad manager) and sometimes it isn't.
This is exactly the same sort of rubbish that we heard when the first Japanese cars started arriving.
Different cultures. Don't assume that just because they are neighbors, Japanese products and Chinese products have the same potential. Japan has a long history and culture of quality and craftsmanship, and these are values which show in their products and services. In Japan people do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. I'm not as familiar with China but when I traveled there, I constantly felt hustled and that people were trying to take advantage of me. Their culture will gladly screw you over to make a dollar.
All of which you can do with FedEx, UPS, or the USPS's express flat service. It costs more, but how many times a year do you use that service?
Other than for bills, first class mail is dead. For bills, it's dying.
It is very valuable to grab someone's attention. Stuck in phone support hell? Company not treating you right? 49 cents and you get a piece of paper that someone, almost certainly outside of the small group of people who is treating you badly, will read. If you complain about something specific and actionable, it will be escalated and probably taken care of. 1 letter to CIGNA HQ and I got them to actually do something on my behalf. It took less time to write and drop in our office mail than a phone call to CIGNA usually takes. AND I didn't have to deal with their dreadful phone menu system.
Don't discount 1st class mail just because you aren't using it to your advantage.
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When you say H-1B salaries you mean the salaries that the person working gets paid with or the money Microsoft pays to some Indian intermediary company that actually pays the person doing the job much less?
Plus how much of the money Microsoft pays that Indian company gets back to the people at Microsoft doing the hiring as kickbacks?
Plus how much does Microsoft pay in an H-1B if they want to lay him off?
etc.
You can look up how much an H1b visa holder makes. The system isn't set up to look for a specific person, but with a small amount of intiution and some reasonable assumptions you can usually figure out which of your colleagues has which title in the system. If you find actual cases of fraud, report it. Let your H1B visa colleages know how much they should be making, and encourage them to demand that they be paid that wage. If companies actually had to pay those wages this whole business would stop pretty quick.
WWI was a mess because they wanted to use Napoleonic War era infantry tactics at a time where armies had machine guns.
All infantry soldiers back then were treated like disposable crap to feed the machine guns and artillery. It had nothing to do with where they came from.
You can put it more simply and say that defensive technology had outpaced offensive technology. Fixed fortifications had reached their peak and offensive weapons hadn't quite caught up yet. All the new offensive weapons seen for the first time during that war, such as the military aircraft, the invention of tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, etc were driven by this.
Globalization has built a middle class in China, India, Malaysia, Vietnam and bunch of other places I'm to lazy to think of or list.
These were dangerously ideological or at least polarized places 50 years ago. These days the only places you can find a real communist is N. Korea, a theme park in Poland and the humanities departments of western universities.
I've been to North Korea and it has communist practices which remain, but they have a lot of capitalism too. The elites sort of let the black market do its thing, because they needed the black market to get the cool toys and luxuries they wanted to have. The black market got stronger and stronger and now they are so organized that many of the black market sellers wear the same uniform. The government provides housing and a whole lot of other things, but they provide a salary too. They keep having to crack the door to capitalism more and more because the black market is becoming such a critical part of society there.
On a related note, a lot of the weird things North Korea says can be attributed to poor translation. There is an old joke of foreign languages in subtitles where a foreigner will ramble on and on and on, then the subtitles will pop up with a very simple idea. The Korean language is actually somewhat like that, using an unnecessary amount of words and leaving nothing as "subject to context" or "readily understood". Their spoken language says absolutely everything. A good translator will cut out all the cruft and get to the main point, but being so isolated from the rest of the world, maybe North Korean translators aren't as good as they ought to be.
Comcast etc sell their customers phone numbers to illicit third parties. I ended up having to throw together an Asterix system with a simple "no solicitations, press one to continue" message to filter out all the robo-calls I got when I was forced to switch services over to Comcast.
Why stick with Comcast then? Why continue to give them your business if they just stab you behind your back? Their VOIP offerings are hilariously overpriced. Get an OBIHai or Cisco SIP gateway, sign up for any of the dozens of SIP providers, and roll your own. My SIP provider even has voice menus you can set up on their system.
If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.
Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).
MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"
MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.
This sort of argument shows a lack of business common sense. People need operating systems to run on their computers. That operating system needs to be continuously updated with security fixes. It is also nice to get new features every now and then. What Microsoft really needs to do is drop the Major Revision concept and just sell "Windows" or "Office" as a service. The OS gets updated periodically and people pay periodically.
Microsoft has pushed this before and the backlash was/has been huge because they failed to show the advantages were greater than the disadvantages. They need to go to this model though because they seem unable to handle the task of creating a new Major Revision anymore.
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce.
I think you answered your own question in a sense. When your company was small, the culture was that every employee was very valuable and getting rid of someone just wasn't an option. People were accountable because they didn't want to let the team down. They could see how important they were. It was obvious every time a coworker took a week off for vacation.
When a company gets bigger, it has to shed the notion that every person is absolutely valuable and needed. Equally important is spending effort on making people feel important and cultivating a culture of "I don't want to let down my team". If you don't do something about it, that small-company culture will erode, and it seems like that is exactly what is happening.
No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.
Not entirely true. I think you are including childhood mortality. If you made it to age 20 (working age) in 1935, the year that the Social Security Act was enacted, you could expect to live to be about 66 years old if you were a man, or 68 if you were a woman. This isn't a "small portion of the population", it is, by definition of being the average life expectancy, at least half the population.
Life expectancy has gotten longer but it has been a very gradual process and the taxes have increased over the years. The reason that the program is in trouble is because the taxes have not quite kept up, and politicians have been playing financial games with the savings for decades.
Knives and other cutting implements can be abused by criminals, don't include them in my kitchen!
That example isn't even close to being equivalent. We're talking about the possibility that which someone can, with relative ease, wirelessly and anonymously deprive me of the use of my property without leaving much of a trace. You seem to be describing the crime of physical breaking and entering, which I would argue is none of those things.
They won't even need a button. I highly doubt an automated car will proceed to pilot itself on a high speed chase, or ignore red and blue lights.
Fbi should go back to consulting their Internet slang dictionary, rather than trying to think.
Don't put a kill switch in my car. Kill switches will be hacked and abused. Devices will be sold and marketed to kill a car, even if they are illegal. Just like the MIRT and all the related devices. Illegal as a $7 bill but assholes still buy them.
but there's nothing even close to a ban
The Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with you.
No it doesn't:
The Supreme Court ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, if such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required.
You can test people as long as it is "reasonably related" to the job and isn't done in a way that artificially discriminates against a protected class. Difficult, but not a ban.
so then it is indeed close to a ban.
No, it really isn't. I have been learning about this recently as part of MBA classes. All you have to do is look at your current workforce and find some common attributes among your top workers for job X. Maybe your top 5 sales guys all have above-average empathy (just one example, it could be anything). This is your basis for any legal defense later.
You then apply an aptitude test to your hiring process and reject anyone with inferior empathy. You don't need to even consider if this discriminates against a protected class. It is quite possible this DOES discriminate against men since women are usually known to be more empathetic. That doesn't matter though. All that matters is if you can demonstrate that empathy has something to do with a salesperson's success. Since you did your homework up front by looking at success and finding common attributes, anyone who challenges your process is going to lose. It is not close to a ban at all, just a legal provision that tells you what you were supposed to be doing anyway- find a good predictor of good job performance, then (and only then) find a test which tests that predictor.
Well we have known this for a long long time. Problem is how do we get the government to stop subsidizing fossil fuel?
I know environmentalists can sometimes see issues in only black and white, but a lot of the fossil fuel "subsidies" are programs to develop clean smockestack technology, carbon capture and storage, etc. Carbon capture and storage is, in my opinion as an industry insider, a larger technical challenge than the Manhattan project. Industry sure as heck isn't going to take on a massive engineering projects by itself. If these things were easy or cheap, they would have been done already. I want to leave a good planet to my kids too, but it can't happen overnight. Little steps. We'll get there.
Except everything we have now. Still I guess there are brown people that need killing, so something had to give.
We have very cheap energy in the US right now. Investing in even cheaper energy is not worthwhile. Why should we pay? Let those countries who have high energy bills now, pay the bill now. Otherwise the US is just subsidizing other countries.
Their ideas are wrong, but they're hardly a threat. Most people don't take them seriously, and only 80-95% (depending on the disease) of a population needs to be immunized to achieve herd immunity.
I think you are grossly underestimating the ability of people to be complete morons. This link is a little dated, but in 1999, a poll showed that 18 percent of Americans think the Sun revolves around the Earth. In 2011, seven percent of people said they believe more than half of the federal government's budget goes to public broadcasting. Another four percent thought it was 31 to 50 percent of the budget. Is is easy to get 10-15% of the population to believe in absolute rubbish despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The MMR vaccine has an effectiveness of only around 95%- meaning 5% of people do the right thing, get vaccinated, but could still get the disease. MMR is given at 12-15 months of age, so roughly 1.5% of the population who will get the vaccine hasn't gotten it yet. Some people (no idea what %) are very poor and never go to doctors, even if the vaccine is free. That 5-20% "margin" of herd immunity starts to look awfully shaky if you consider all the people who already can't or don't get a vaccine.
Finally, the anti-vaxxers tend to live in pockets of people who believe as they do. This means the disease can get a foothold in those neighborhoods, and survive. There is a very real risk that some diseases could thrive long enough to mutate enough so that the vaccine doesn't work anymore.
Even if this doesn't become a "big" problem, the consequences can be very damaging on an individual basis. My daughter is only 6 months old. She hasn't gotten many vaccinations yet because she is just too young. If some clown passes on the measles to her, her death is a very real possibility. Can you justify a death like that as not being "a serious threat"? The stakes too high to ignore these idiots.
The original study linking vaccination to autism was from the UK. The press has really overstated the anti-vaxer thing in the US. I don't remember the exact statistic, but close to 99% of American children are vaccinated (at least partially). Most of the ones who aren't are clustered in immigrant communities, that's why we see the outbreaks. It poses no threat to the general population.
It poses a threat because these terrible ideas of the anti-vaxers get picked up by legitimate sources sometimes. And there are people who can't tell the difference between legitimate science and junk science. Ideas can spread more virulently and rapidly than real diseases. The antivax ideas are a threat, even if the effects of their actions aren't causing significant problems at this moment.
It seems unwise to claim to the winner. A lot of people who lost money when those bitcoins were seized will be quite upset with this guy. Considering many of the dealt in drugs, weapons and other illegal material I wouldn't like to speculate what they might do to him.
On the other hand, it seems wise to make a statement. Everybody can track those bitcoins anyway. One of the concerns I might have as a buyer of them would be that no exchange would deal with me and I couldn't cash them out. By making a statement which shows he is a "good guy" he might be able to escape the communities anger about the situation and deflect it back on the person who lost them and the government who took them, which is where the blame rightly belongs anyhow.
OK, smartass, what is the evolutionary advantage for stupidity?
Because you'd think we'd have selected that away a long time ago as well.
Hell, we have an appendix. Why do we have an appendix? Why hasn't evolution made that go away?
Evolution is awesome, but it can do some silly things that stick around.
Most people think of evolution as "survival of the fittest", but this is a gross simplification. In a population bottleneck, genetic diversity can shrink rapidly if a large portion of the population dies out. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world died except a small and distinct group- lets say the Vietnamese people just for example. If the population recovered and repopulated the world, humans would have lost a tremendous amount of genetic diversity which may or may not be beneficial to survival.
Evolution in the traditional sense also only affects characteristics which affect the ability to reproduce. For example, it is impossible for humans to evolve the problem of cataracts or alzheimer's out of our genetic code. By the time these problems show up, the children of those affected have already become self-sufficient. Evolution is about "reproduction of the fittest" not the more general "survival of the fittest".
Getting a medal for it? That's new.
No it isn't. Although some medals are hard to earn, others are handed out like halloween candy. The National Defense Service Medal is automatically handed out to everyone that enlists. I got a Sea Service Ribbon just for SHOWING UP when my unit deployed (the alternative was to go to the brig). Achievement Medals are routinely awarded to people that go a little beyond the ordinary in solving problems or innovating. I was awarded two Navy Achievement Medals during my six years of service in the Marines. What is described in TFA is routine. It happens all the time.
You seem to deride the practice, but handing out halloween candy has a purpose- its a gift to make people want to keep doing what they just did (ie. show up). Small incentives and gifts can be very valuable tools for building relationships. I used to be a field engineer working at power stations. The big thing there was stickers. Millwrights and pipefitters have a tradition (going back probably until the invention of stickers) of collecting stickers and placing them on their hard hats. Stickers are "earned" by attending mandatory safety presentations ("Power Plant XYZ Safety Training 2014"), by belonging to various industry clubs, or just handed out by people (engineers/sales reps) looking to get a favor in the future. A hard hat full of stickers shows that you're an experienced guy who has been around a while. It is a mark of respect and experience. If you work in those professions and don't have a hard hat full of stickers, you're a greenhorn or otherwise somebody who doesn't know what they're doing.
I've shown up to a power station many times with a roll of stickers, and these guys instantly became my best friend and helped me out greatly in achieving the thing I was there to do. Don't underestimate the value of token gifts.
Bloomberg is a billionaire. I don't believe for a second he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart. If the guy really gave a flying fark about the poor there's a thousand and one things he could be doing. Maybe this is punishment to the local soda manufacturers? It's just too silly a thing to push when it means going up against companies like Coke & Pepsi, who aren't exactly well known for taking things lying down.
They would make just as much money, if not more, by selling smaller volumes at a not-quite proportionally smaller cost.
The many other countries in the west with proper healthcare have managed to limit their meddling to a few PSAs urging healthy eating and such.
When is the last time you saw the health police whipping overweight joggers through the streets of London?
If the US taxed corn syrup, instead of subsidizing it, that would be a start. Soft drnks are very modestly sized in every foreign country I have been in. Coincidentally, all those foreign countries use real sugar instead of corn syrup in their fizzy drinks.
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The ammonia in your cleaning bottle is hydrous ammonia, which is a fancy way of saying it is mostly water. Hydrous ammonia is pretty tame stuff. Anhydrous (no water) ammonia, like the kind required for chemical reactions, is nasty nasty stuff. If you breathe the vapors it can cause permanent damage to your lungs. If you get it on your skin, you can easilly get a nasty chemical burn. The vapor is flamable and forms explosive mixtures with air. It reacts violently with a variety of compounds.
Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.
To see how workaholism saps productivity and rarely leads to better results, look at Japan. Overtime is sacrosanct in Japan, at the company I worked at previously it was a badge of honor that the average amount of overtime was 60 hours a month. Japan has the lowest per-hour output in the G7, and it's a small wonder why. Managers will often times not buy hardware that can increase productivity because hey, you can simply make the workers work longer hours for free, whereas hardware costs money. The result is a populace that is unhappy, unhealthy, and well dying. The low birth rate is well known, what is less well known is that the Japanese have the least amount of sex in the developed world. The technology industry that everyone once thought would rule the world has come to be dominated by the west because managers have very little incentive to innovate, to increase productivity. And as the cherry on the shit sundae, the low productivity means that wages in Japan are lower, i.e. longer hours for less money. Trust me, you don't want to go down this route.
You've got the overall picture, but this isn't pushed down by the companies. It's the unions. There are numerous unions, including for things which are not unionized in other countries, like Engineers. Everybody could work 8 hours a day if they wanted, but there is pressure to stretch out the work. If you aren't booking a similar level of overtime as the other workers, you might get a visit from the union guy. Companies are hesitant to increase wages to eliminate the need for overtime, because there is no guarantee that employees wouldn't just soak up as much overtime as before.
One other odd thing about Japan is that in many professions, the salary curve is an upside down "U" shape. Straight out of college they pay low salaries, mid-career the employee has received salary increases and promotions and so are making a lot more. But as the employees career peaks, so too does their salary. The salary eventually decreases every year until the employee retires. Some companies even have a special "Retiree Consulting Company" where employees work when they reach a certain age (55, 60, etc). The employee takes a big pay cut, is taken off the company payroll, and is then a contractor/consultant, but doing the same job. Usually their hours are ramped down to 3 days/week, 2 days/week, 1 day/week etc until they actually retire from working.
It has benefits in that a person retiring has had a LONG time to prepare, pass on their knowledge, and train the next worker. But it definitely adds perverse incentives to milking the salary when you can because after a certain point, the employee is just making less and less every year.
Well, then you don't know the gaming industry. Basically people work on a game and then get laid off.
This was fine back in the days where once you release, you can't patch (which was really helped because consoles of yore were a lot simpler to test for - nowadays you have to check out your 3D models and for glitching that could let players walk through walls because a/b/c/d/e was just right). Then there's the gameplay breaking bugs where if you save at the wrong moment, you can't restore.
Problem is, you can't patch the game if the developers aren't there anymore, and there's about a 2 month leadtime between submission of a game and when it appears on the shelf - pressing discs can easily be a month (your disc is just another one in the big press queue), and distribution another month (from disc factory to factory to distributiors and then to retail warehouses, etc).
So you have a team of devs sitting idle for two months. Well, you could put them on fixing some of the more egregious bugs found (leading to day 1 patches) because they have an extra 2 months to fix it, and the other devs (and artists, etc) can work on making extras (day 1 DLC). Because the moment the game is released, gamers might find a bug and you need to get people fixing it.
Developers can't sit around idle, and if a game's done, either you reallocate them to a new project, or lay them off. Either option doesn't work if you need to fix bugs. That's why you have day 1 patches (extra 2 months to fix bugs), day 1 DLC (2 months to generate content), and day 1 gamebreaking bugs.
And once someone is reassigned to another project, it's damn near impossible to get them to go back and fix issues with the existing code (just getting them back up to speed and building the code can be challenge all in itself).
Very few games get patched after the first month as that gets treated as the official close of the project. Unless there's a business case to keep DLC going in which case you'll have a small team for that. But that's it, and most games on the shelves are dead after the first month.
Day 1 DLC is still idiotic. It raises the cost of entry for the gamer and doesn't do anything to foster goodwill. Have the devs make DLC during the lull time if you must, but delay that DLC until 3-5 months after release.
"Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction."
lie, lie, lie. this is referring to the so-called open-office scheme, where they remove your privacy and sound barriers, sometimes even remove your personal desk and you are now 'fully interchangable cogs' to the company.
this has been proven to be wrong, but it keeps getting trotted out, as if repeating it over and over again will make us believe it.
CEO and bean-counter bullshit. see it for what it is.
Its not a lie, just a bad manager. The problem for management is that what works awesome at some companies fail completely at others. Company/Department A may be doing great with an open-office scheme, all the employees are happy and productivity goes up 50%. The problem is that a a manager at Company/Department B will try it out without considering in what, if any, ways which A is different from B. if B is the same as A in all the ways which matter, then the manager is a hero. But if B is different than A in some small way, then the manager has committed a big mistake. Sometimes the difference is foreseeable (bad manager) and sometimes it isn't.
This is exactly the same sort of rubbish that we heard when the first Japanese cars started arriving.
Different cultures. Don't assume that just because they are neighbors, Japanese products and Chinese products have the same potential. Japan has a long history and culture of quality and craftsmanship, and these are values which show in their products and services. In Japan people do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. I'm not as familiar with China but when I traveled there, I constantly felt hustled and that people were trying to take advantage of me. Their culture will gladly screw you over to make a dollar.
All of which you can do with FedEx, UPS, or the USPS's express flat service. It costs more, but how many times a year do you use that service?
Other than for bills, first class mail is dead. For bills, it's dying.
It is very valuable to grab someone's attention. Stuck in phone support hell? Company not treating you right? 49 cents and you get a piece of paper that someone, almost certainly outside of the small group of people who is treating you badly, will read. If you complain about something specific and actionable, it will be escalated and probably taken care of. 1 letter to CIGNA HQ and I got them to actually do something on my behalf. It took less time to write and drop in our office mail than a phone call to CIGNA usually takes. AND I didn't have to deal with their dreadful phone menu system.
Don't discount 1st class mail just because you aren't using it to your advantage.