Maybe they didn't know the candidate was lousy when they hired them. They hired someone that seemed okay, they turned out to be lousy, and now they can't get rid of them. In my school district, there is no shortage of candidates for teaching jobs. If it was possible to ease out bad teachers one way or another, there would be more opportunities to find potentially good ones.
The bigger danger is there is some major event like a plague and not enough people are left to maintain a technical society. Who would know how to make a microprocessor, or even refine gasoline? Tan leather? Grow crops? We could be back to the stone age in a single generation.
Way to take one case, and generalize it to justify a vastly oversimplified view of how the system works. These guys got screwed, but some early employees of Microsoft, Apple, Google etc ended up as millionaires. That is the startup gamble.
Mike Turner's actions will be judged through the legal system, that is also part of the system, it's like a checks and balances thing.
You can bitch about the "free market" -- again that is just one component of something a lot more complicated. But that is the dynamic bit that produces companies like MSFT, AAPL and GOOG. If you don't like that, there is a huge government sector just waiting for you.
I can't believe comments that have so little intellectual depth get modded +5 insightful.
Oh come on, farm corporations? It was welfare for farmers, but democrats are equally enthusiastic as republicans, and farmers are individuals and families. You can't frickin blame everything on corporations, what's next, the young are being exploited by corporations of the elderly and the schools suck because of evil educational corporations?
They have found the formula for eternal totalitarian control, 1984 style:
1. Create an external threat (Great Satan)
2. Control and censor the media
3. Allow Internet for recreation, use it to spy on dissenters
4. Train a militia to be willing to shoot to kill demonstrators as traitors and spies
5. Hold sham elections to give a veneer of legitimacy
Seems like a hard system to crack. Has been working for North Korea, Burma and others.
Second on the intrusiveness of pat downs. Most of the people posting must not fly often and have never been through a pat down, I've been patted down multiple times and I find it highly offensive. The idea that it would include the crotch area boggles the mind. I'd rather go through 20 full body scanners.
That being said, as someone who flies a lot I'm in favor of keeping people with bombs off planes. It's like a public health problem, if there were certain people with a rare disease that made them explode on airplanes, I'd favor screening.
People seem to think good organizations come from Hollywood central casting. The president says 'make it so' and in the next scene you have an office full of analysts looking at big screens and people walking around with clipboards.
You can't have any kind of good organization without good managers, and government bureaucracies are so suffocating any talented manager will get out as quickly as possible. Contracting out is a way of trying to apply the flexibility of private organizations to public purposes. These may suck but in my experience they suck less than having government employees do the same work.
People have elaborate fantasies about governments taking on complex jobs, I think it is based on what they see in movies. Real life government organizations, in my experience, are at a primitive stage of evolution, more like "segmented worm" than "primate".
This is a test of your biases. How would you feel if the Democratic Party was trying to create a support organization of volunteering IT professionals? The Republican party? moveon.org?
If you think the US does not need some organization that does the job of DHS, then you are an idiot. If you accept that the job needs to be done, then you also have to accept the people that you've got, you can't just fire them all and build a new DHS by hiring, say, fine arts majors. At that point you can have a discussion of how to organize and what limits to impose.
That said, seems to me like InfraGard opens up the process a bit. Instead of only DHS employees and a tightly knit web of contractors and suppliers knowing what is coming up, smaller companies and individuals with a clearance, or who can get one, could potentially get more access to some of this information, and provide feedback. That concept sounds okay to me, if it works.
Too many responses oversimplify. The system is incredibly complex and interconnected. Some intellectual humility is called for, what exactly would you propose, do you understand why the idea of throwing out all creeps from positions of power is not a workable plan?
Further, for all the suckiness of the American system, and however you rate GW Bush on the scale of jackasses, a good case could be made that the American system is the best in the world, when you factor everything in. Yeah, I like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, too, but the case can be made.
If you want to boggle at how bad things can get, contemplate Zimbabwe or North Korea for a while.
Human history _is_ the endless war scenario. It's the universal peace scenario that is yet to be demonstrated. By this logic, if you are enjoying peace locally, it is because the fighting is going on somewhere else.
And yet this organization structure outperforms others, like family-dominated and bureaucratic. Small supportive consensus based organizations may be 'better' in some philosophical sense, but if they are outcompeted by the 'pathological' organization they are not going to make it.
So you can regret that (metaphorically, I am still talking about organizations), the bluebird and the butterfly become extinct while the starling, rat and cockroach thrive. But you are going up against a natural law here. Saying "somebody should do something about it" doesn't get you anywhere.
Actually sounds like a business travel profile. American Express has all my frequent flyer numbers as well as all the other information needed to book travel. If DHS was getting that, they would have everything mentioned. I travel every week so it would be extremely inconvenient if Amex did not have that stored. But DHS would need a warrant for that, I hope!
Yes, seems like the autocrats have found the winning recipe.
1. Shut down internet and mobile phones
2. Use thugs to kill demonstrators
3. Imprison freely
4. Suppress independent journalism, use state-controlled media to promulgate the party line
5. Blame foreigners
Result: 1000 years of tyranny??? Has been working in Burma and N Korea. Looks like it will work in Iran too.
Teachers, or at least their unions, have to take some of the blame for forcing the single-provider model of education.
If there was a choice of schools, religious parents could send their children to religious schools where the curriculum could be as irrational as they pleased.
And, yes, a lot of parents would choose that, and their children would be educated in the equivalent of madrassas.
But if you believe that people should be free to make their own decisions, even bad ones, that extends to parents being able to decide how their childredn should be educated.
I would agree but without being so judgmental. In my experience people who are drawn to religion have more intense feelings, more internal conflicts, more problems.
The non-religious are calmer.
But I wouldn't say it is better to be the one way than the other, unless you want want to live in a world where everyone is the same.
When I was younger I used drugs, was totally pro-legalization, gave money to NORML etc.
Now I'm not so sure, the "war on drugs" generates a weird tension in American society which is incredibly creative, from William Burroughs and Jimi Hendrix/Grateful Dead to rap and trance.
I love the Dutch and all, and I'm deeply sympathetic to the poor bastards whose lives have been f*d by farcical drug sentences. But I'm awed by the power unleashed by this dark side/light side battle.
I don't see that anyone has mentioned autonomous or self-driving vehicles. Seems obvious that as those get better and senior's skills degrade, we're all safer if said seniors don't try to drive themselves anymore. Same could be said of teens.
Seriously, the justification for a free market is that it is more efficient. I don't know whether the $15k was too little, or too much. Neither do you. Neither does the 'Programmers Guild', whoever they are.
The ones who know best are the employer who offered the $15k and the employee who took the offer for whatever reasons.
Basic fact is that when people work as a team they can do more.
True leftists distrust teams, over time fragment, turn authoritarian. Or go live in a 10x12 cabin in Montana.
I don't know what Powell went through before the UN appearance. But once he had made that decision he had to put on his game face, and be as convincing as possible. That isn't being a 'yes man', that's taking one for the team.
If you are a pacifist and believe we should disband all armies and live peacefully together, good luck with that.
If you accept the need for a military, you can't staff it with a bunch of hypothetical avatars, you need real people that are interested in doing the job. They may be "morons" or "assholes" but if you and your friends didn't apply we pretty much have to work with what we've got.
French term liberal is pretty much opposite of the US. Sarko is a 'liberal' in French terms, meaning economically, he supports open markets, free enterprise (more or less). Sego is more 'anti-liberal', though nowhere near so much as the hard left -- supporting protectionism, extensive regulation, government management of the economy and public ownership of businesses (utilities, railroads and so on).
What people get paid has to accord with the value they produce, you can't just pull a salary out of the air. Programming jobs already pay pretty well, even for $200K I can't believe there are many physicians who have any programming skills who would leave the practice of medicine for that.
The other cost/benefit is for the purchaser of IT. If I have an IT project that'll save me $1 million and it costs $500K, I'll do it, but if it costs $2 million obviously I won't. You can't just arbitrarily raise IT prices, if laptops were $10,000 how many do you think would sell?
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it's plain to me that the USA benefits from every skilled immigrant who comes here. I can't believe some of these posters are in the IT workforce at all, where the hell are they working where they aren't dealing every day with Indians and Chinese and Russians and other immigrants? We wouldn't have an IT industry at all without them.
Hmm, whenever there is one of these globalization discussions on Slashdot it always seems like the antis are more angry & hostile, more victimized and inclined to blame others for their problems, and less sophisticated in their use of language and logic.
I wonder if there is some correlation between that, and their employers' apparent enthusiasm for laying them off?
I got dodder in my garden from a basil plant I bought at a local nursery. That is one vicious weed. It's a parasitic rootless vine, hard to imagine if you've never seen it.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations can spread money around and be persuasive, but at the end of the day the real power is with the guys with the guns.
When Chavez wanted Exxon's oil wells he just took them.
Whatever you believe about corporations, comparing them to dictatorships in their capacity to do evil is vastly disproportionate.
Maybe they didn't know the candidate was lousy when they hired them. They hired someone that seemed okay, they turned out to be lousy, and now they can't get rid of them. In my school district, there is no shortage of candidates for teaching jobs. If it was possible to ease out bad teachers one way or another, there would be more opportunities to find potentially good ones.
The bigger danger is there is some major event like a plague and not enough people are left to maintain a technical society. Who would know how to make a microprocessor, or even refine gasoline? Tan leather? Grow crops? We could be back to the stone age in a single generation.
Mike Turner's actions will be judged through the legal system, that is also part of the system, it's like a checks and balances thing.
You can bitch about the "free market" -- again that is just one component of something a lot more complicated. But that is the dynamic bit that produces companies like MSFT, AAPL and GOOG. If you don't like that, there is a huge government sector just waiting for you.
I can't believe comments that have so little intellectual depth get modded +5 insightful.
Oh come on, farm corporations? It was welfare for farmers, but democrats are equally enthusiastic as republicans, and farmers are individuals and families. You can't frickin blame everything on corporations, what's next, the young are being exploited by corporations of the elderly and the schools suck because of evil educational corporations?
1. Create an external threat (Great Satan)
2. Control and censor the media
3. Allow Internet for recreation, use it to spy on dissenters
4. Train a militia to be willing to shoot to kill demonstrators as traitors and spies
5. Hold sham elections to give a veneer of legitimacy
Seems like a hard system to crack. Has been working for North Korea, Burma and others.
That being said, as someone who flies a lot I'm in favor of keeping people with bombs off planes. It's like a public health problem, if there were certain people with a rare disease that made them explode on airplanes, I'd favor screening.
You can't have any kind of good organization without good managers, and government bureaucracies are so suffocating any talented manager will get out as quickly as possible. Contracting out is a way of trying to apply the flexibility of private organizations to public purposes. These may suck but in my experience they suck less than having government employees do the same work.
People have elaborate fantasies about governments taking on complex jobs, I think it is based on what they see in movies. Real life government organizations, in my experience, are at a primitive stage of evolution, more like "segmented worm" than "primate".
If you think the US does not need some organization that does the job of DHS, then you are an idiot. If you accept that the job needs to be done, then you also have to accept the people that you've got, you can't just fire them all and build a new DHS by hiring, say, fine arts majors. At that point you can have a discussion of how to organize and what limits to impose.
That said, seems to me like InfraGard opens up the process a bit. Instead of only DHS employees and a tightly knit web of contractors and suppliers knowing what is coming up, smaller companies and individuals with a clearance, or who can get one, could potentially get more access to some of this information, and provide feedback. That concept sounds okay to me, if it works.
Further, for all the suckiness of the American system, and however you rate GW Bush on the scale of jackasses, a good case could be made that the American system is the best in the world, when you factor everything in. Yeah, I like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, too, but the case can be made.
If you want to boggle at how bad things can get, contemplate Zimbabwe or North Korea for a while.
Human history _is_ the endless war scenario. It's the universal peace scenario that is yet to be demonstrated. By this logic, if you are enjoying peace locally, it is because the fighting is going on somewhere else.
So you can regret that (metaphorically, I am still talking about organizations), the bluebird and the butterfly become extinct while the starling, rat and cockroach thrive. But you are going up against a natural law here. Saying "somebody should do something about it" doesn't get you anywhere.
Actually sounds like a business travel profile. American Express has all my frequent flyer numbers as well as all the other information needed to book travel. If DHS was getting that, they would have everything mentioned. I travel every week so it would be extremely inconvenient if Amex did not have that stored. But DHS would need a warrant for that, I hope!
Yes, seems like the autocrats have found the winning recipe.
1. Shut down internet and mobile phones
2. Use thugs to kill demonstrators
3. Imprison freely
4. Suppress independent journalism, use state-controlled media to promulgate the party line
5. Blame foreigners
Result: 1000 years of tyranny??? Has been working in Burma and N Korea. Looks like it will work in Iran too.
If there was a choice of schools, religious parents could send their children to religious schools where the curriculum could be as irrational as they pleased.
And, yes, a lot of parents would choose that, and their children would be educated in the equivalent of madrassas.
But if you believe that people should be free to make their own decisions, even bad ones, that extends to parents being able to decide how their childredn should be educated.
The non-religious are calmer.
But I wouldn't say it is better to be the one way than the other, unless you want want to live in a world where everyone is the same.
Now I'm not so sure, the "war on drugs" generates a weird tension in American society which is incredibly creative, from William Burroughs and Jimi Hendrix/Grateful Dead to rap and trance.
I love the Dutch and all, and I'm deeply sympathetic to the poor bastards whose lives have been f*d by farcical drug sentences. But I'm awed by the power unleashed by this dark side/light side battle.
I don't see that anyone has mentioned autonomous or self-driving vehicles. Seems obvious that as those get better and senior's skills degrade, we're all safer if said seniors don't try to drive themselves anymore. Same could be said of teens.
Seriously, the justification for a free market is that it is more efficient. I don't know whether the $15k was too little, or too much. Neither do you. Neither does the 'Programmers Guild', whoever they are.
The ones who know best are the employer who offered the $15k and the employee who took the offer for whatever reasons.
Basic fact is that when people work as a team they can do more.
True leftists distrust teams, over time fragment, turn authoritarian. Or go live in a 10x12 cabin in Montana.
I don't know what Powell went through before the UN appearance. But once he had made that decision he had to put on his game face, and be as convincing as possible. That isn't being a 'yes man', that's taking one for the team.
If you are a pacifist and believe we should disband all armies and live peacefully together, good luck with that.
If you accept the need for a military, you can't staff it with a bunch of hypothetical avatars, you need real people that are interested in doing the job. They may be "morons" or "assholes" but if you and your friends didn't apply we pretty much have to work with what we've got.
French term liberal is pretty much opposite of the US. Sarko is a 'liberal' in French terms, meaning economically, he supports open markets, free enterprise (more or less). Sego is more 'anti-liberal', though nowhere near so much as the hard left -- supporting protectionism, extensive regulation, government management of the economy and public ownership of businesses (utilities, railroads and so on).
What people get paid has to accord with the value they produce, you can't just pull a salary out of the air. Programming jobs already pay pretty well, even for $200K I can't believe there are many physicians who have any programming skills who would leave the practice of medicine for that.
The other cost/benefit is for the purchaser of IT. If I have an IT project that'll save me $1 million and it costs $500K, I'll do it, but if it costs $2 million obviously I won't. You can't just arbitrarily raise IT prices, if laptops were $10,000 how many do you think would sell?
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it's plain to me that the USA benefits from every skilled immigrant who comes here. I can't believe some of these posters are in the IT workforce at all, where the hell are they working where they aren't dealing every day with Indians and Chinese and Russians and other immigrants? We wouldn't have an IT industry at all without them.
I wonder if there is some correlation between that, and their employers' apparent enthusiasm for laying them off?
I got dodder in my garden from a basil plant I bought at a local nursery. That is one vicious weed. It's a parasitic rootless vine, hard to imagine if you've never seen it.