Suprising HRC hasn't caught on to it yet, with the amount of effort she put into shutting down the Vieques traning site there in Puerto Rico a few years ago...
...because every wire coming off of it is probably unshielded, and then there's the moving ground. All of those will act as antennas for the signal as well. The article mentioned "microwave" and "100 Hz" in the same breath. Pshaw.
Big drawback against getting a GM car is OnStar. All it takes is a pissed off spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend to call up, allege some heinous kid-harming crime, that you're fleeing across state lines with "the kids", and you get the electronic boot. In today's shoot-first maybe-ask-questions-later bunker mentality, it's not a good thing.
In the future, only criminals will have cars with magnetos and no OnStar.
Well, now someone needs to go after OS makers for "lying" because of all the wasted space depending on data block size. Sure, you can have a 1-byte file, but it'll use up 512 bytes or more space on the HD... So, which is it? Is it a 1-byte file, or really a 512-byte (or 1024 or 2048 or 4096 or...) file?
I have a 1TB HD, and, well, I want to be able to actually use every byte of it!!!
A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there, pretty soon we're going to be talking about some actual wasted disk space...
Recently, I had the pleasure to fly from the US (PDX) to Europe on Lufthansa. Except for being in the middle 4 seats on an A340, it was a great flight. The free Warsteiner beer was good enough, too.
Contrast to United flight back from Amsterdam to Chicago... Maybe it was the particular flight, but it kind of sucked. At least back in cattle class, the flight attendants were going through the motions. Either they hated each other, had been working for too long, or were all having PMS. Not like I fly much, but there was not a lot of warm and fuzzies being emitted from the attendants. Economy Plus though was worth it for me (5' 10"). Odd how a couple of more inches of leg room make an 8 hr flight slightly more bearable.
Too bad, really.
Oh, and I suppose I should mention there was no fucking way I was going to pay $5.00 for a cheap-ass domestic beer.
If United is supposed to be one of the flagship US international carriers, then the Star Alliance has joined with the wrong member.
And, well, I should add that on a $1000 round-trip ticket, no fucking way am I paying for a box lunch, either.
Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are great, but the nitrogen they do bind up isn't released back into the soil until the nodules are dead.
Non-inoculated clover, soybeans and other legumes grow just fine w/o the symbiotic bacteria, and will respond to nitrogen fertilizer just the same as any other plant, but at least for farmers, it sort of defeats the purpose (i.e., growing legumes to get at least some effect of the nodules binding to atmospheric nitrogen to water-soluble nitrogen compounds, so as to not have to use quite so much anhydrous ammonia or nitrate fertilizers next year for some other crop).
Even with such an efficient crop, hopefully it's not all bunk. If it's as pernicious as it seems, it just might need some of Monsanto's evil gene manipulations just to keep it from getting established in the wild in areas it isn't native to.
Plus, there are other questions... what soil temperatures does it like? does it grow well in acidic/alkaline soils? Does it survive long bouts of drought? Does it survive long, damp, cool winters (pacific NW, England, etc)? Does it stand bitter cold winders (upper midwest US, Russia, etc)?
Before anyone starts growing it commercially in the US, if it's Roundup-resistant, there will be lots of upset crop farmers who will not put up with it. Some of them were burned by the jerusalem artichoke craze. Some of them closer to the southern US states will remember similar things being said about Kudzu.
It's finally dawned on me. After recently watching "Monty Python's Life Of Brian", the democratic congressional leadership is like the People's Front of Judea (or is the the Judean People's Front? Fuck you!!!). And the American public right now is like the crowd following Brian as he runs from the Romans. His shoe has fallen off. "He has given us a sign! we should all take off our shoes!" "The gourd! Follow the Gourd!" (the shoe is going to be Guiliani, and the gourd is Romney).
The democratic leadership spends their time dickering about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, dancing around the fact that they don't like to make, as John McCain's book title says, The Hard Choices. It is made by a bunch of great compromisers, and not enough back-alley street fightin' assholes who won't take no for an answer.
Too bad. As glad as I was to see the results of the 2006 election cycle, I don't know if there is enough collective spine in them to actually DO anything of merit, except spin around, make lots of noise, and in the end just have the usual value-less statements in 2008 (for the House and Senate elections, not Prez), "we actually got a lot done". Just as empty and bogus as GWB's "political capital" soundbite, Karl Rove's cocky proclamations, etc.
As far as Democratic candidates go, there really are only two that seem to have some sort of spine: Barracks Obama and Mike Gravel. Edwards and Clinton are willing to say anything, more (clinton) or less (edwards) to get the nomination and election, because that is what they want. They want the position, they don't want to serve. Their goals are self-focused. Their ambition is transparant. Their hypocrisy is obvious to most outside them, but not to their supporters, and definitely NOT to themselves (Clinton forcing the Prez to shut down the Navy's training range in Puerto Rico, to satisfy a few PR voters in NYC, and then saying, "I support the troops!" just a short time later, as luck would have it).
They are just like some of the no-talent white trash who go on to "American Idol" auditions, happen to get taped getting ripped a new one by Simon Cowell, and are then pissed off as they leave. Except no one has yet to step up and actually BE simon cowell to them.
Can't recall the story, whether I read it or heard it, but more than a few hospitals and clinics are adding hand sanitizer stations *because* it is less harsh on hands, it's faster, which removes the PITA factor for many Drs and Nurses. They did this after doing some serious observational studies on RNs and MDs washing their hands throughout their shifts, being rather surprised at how lax people actually were at washing their hands the way they were supposed to, vs what they said they did.
When they talked with staff about it, one of the big things was harshness to hands and the time-suck. Hand sanitizer works as good or better, and only takes a few seconds, compared to the recommended minimum 1 minute of scrubbing that they're typically supposed to do when washing hands.
Workers are happier, and disease transmission risk reduced. Sure beats hiring a bunch of Nurse Cratchetts to simply browbeat everyone to wash their hands or risk getting fired.
Because washing with soap and water (with or without triclosan, etc) is harsh on your skin, it makes the users (i.e., doctors and nurses), resistant to doing it, which increases spread of bacteria because on a whole they're not washing their hands as often because of the PITA factor.
The detergent component is what trashes your skin, because it gets rid of the oils on the surface of your skin (which most of the bacteria live in...), which results in them drying out and all that stuff if you wash your hands too much. Triclosan does nothing to help your skin.
The triclosan enhances the inherent, but limited, antimicrobial action of the soap (due to the pH of the soap), and the mechanical action of scrubbing one's hands, binding the oil-soap-bacteria mix together, and rinsing it all off with water is what actually produces the desired end state.
Which is why clinics and hospitals are starting to use hand sanitizer instead. It is gentler on the skin, actually works better at killing bacteria. Because it's gentler, it is going to get used more frequently.
When my daughter was in the NICU for 10 days, scrubbing with the povidone-laced sponges and scrubbers, once or twice a day going to see her got harsh on the hands... can't imagine doing it multiple times a day, all the time, like a nurse or doctor does.
While I"m sure there are a good number of management and executive types who take these little aphorisms to heart, more than a few of them use them simply as window dressing to justify their own actions and benefits they will get from what they are advocating "for the good of the company". What if the purchasing managers are getting some nice perks from Vendor A compared to Vendor B? What if Director Bob has a good friend or relative who is a board member at Company B, which stands to make a good sum?
Much like honest politicians who leave office only to show up a year or two later making bucketfulls of money because they have traded access to their socio-political network for lobbyist $$$ (many times seemingly lobbying for a cause or special interest that they were diametrically opposed to while in office) is so above-board and ethically clean as well...
Or your ex-spouse (who happens to have majority custody of your children) doing all sorts of things "in the best interests of the children".
What most of the companies I've worked at do is break down their business into "profit centers" and everything else. Profit centers are either growing in income, or are pretty well established. Everything else includes all of the back-end services needed to keep the company going, including IT.
In the first case, the unit that is seeing increased growth, costs aren't too much of a big deal, because the income being brought in is more than enough to supplant the costs of increasing headcount, etc., to keep the revenue growth going. As long as the revenue is increasing at a higher rate than expenses, then all is good, including the periodic fetes, management bonus sharing, etc. The good things tend to flow most of the time even down to the lower echelons of employees in various ways.
In the second case, the well-established unit that is still highly profitable, the goal is to keep profits at least static. If their income is not growing substantially, and they can't increase prices at much more than inflation, then the primary way to do this is to keep costs in control. One of the key ways in most places to do this is to minimize headcounts - hire good, multifunctional people that can do two or three or more different things. Keep manager count low as well. Shareholders tend to like this because they can count on the cash flow (read: dividends or other profit-sharing methods), but they also know that these people are needed to keep the money flowing into the company to fund all the other crap.
If you're in a non-revenue-generating group, life can suck pretty bad, especially if you are far from the blackhole that is upper management. The executive group is more than happy to siphon the profits off all the profit-generating groups - mahogony offices, Aeron chairs, multiple 30" LCD monitors for their 8-way desktop servers to run those cool powerpoint presentations, excel spreadsheets and hyperion "scorecard" apps (even though their executive secretaries read and print out their e-mail for them. They gotta keep up appearances and all that).
IT, Finance and accounting, and all that are in a constant fight just to keep their groups funded at the same level they were at last budget cycle. The only non-revenue-generating group that does well is probably the legal department. Thus the increased move in some companies to outsource some of these functions. The financial goal is to "control costs", and one key way to doing that through outsourcing is that those costs suddenly become fixed and predictable, and there is "someone else to blame" if things don't go well, including cancelling existing contract (again, paying a fixed breakup fee) to get another lowball bid from someone else, etc.
But there is nothing new or revolutionary here, so flame away, all those more "in the know".
Anyone remember the late 80's game, Empire? If you were a computer geek and in (student or employee) college at the time, it was quite possible to seriously mess with your circadian rhythms. The key to Empire was that movement phases were generally set at only a few per day, like 3-4. And attacks only happened during movement phases. So the key to seriously unleashing some whoopass was to set your attacks in motion in a late evening phase, so that you could see the results after the 3am update, unleash your next series of moves (because you know your opponent probably hasn't been logging in at 3am to take care of his forces...), and know that by 6am, you have totally eclipsed your opponent, if not conquered them fully.
Way back when (late 80's/early 90's), either KISW or KXRX had a great prank story one year: Queen Anne Hill was erupting like Mt. St. Helens. It sure seemed like they got some legitimately gullible people calling into the station, and the morning DJs (I think it was Crow & West) got seriously reprimanded from management... I think this led to most of the radio talent fleeing KISW at the time to KXRX (which, sadly, 3 or four years after that converted to a "new country" station).
Every few years someone in Seattle radio or TV does a story about the top of the Space Needle actually being a UFO and lifting off from the rest of the tower.
Yes. Having lived in states where you pay BOTH sales and income tax (for me, that's IL and CA), nothing sucks more (especially in a state like IL that had pretty high property taxes, toll roads, etc).
But there is a reason why I chose OR over WA... I'll take state income tax over sales tax.
Are you so sure about that? Blaming the spotted owl is easy. Most of the big logs get exported, raw. They were getting exported in the 80's (as well as running out), much like they are today. Y'all should be blaming the logging companies (the very ones shutting down your mills who export lots of raw logs, not dimensional lumber while importing as much softwood lumber products from British Columbia as they can), feller-buncher and other highly automated lumber mill manufacturers instead.
At best the big-log sawmills might have lasted 5 or 10 more years longer than they eventually did.
Me, personally, I have no problem with Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, etc trying to take over the pulp wood market. All those quick-growing pine trees hide the states, which is a good thing in general. I'm not too concerned with my toilet paper being locally manufactured or not.
I have lived more or less in the Pac NW since 1980... as a kid I was amazed seeing logging trucks with one- or two-log loads. That's how big old-growth douglas fir trees could be, but later on grew to understand the need to keep the rest of them around). Logging those things is a one-timer. No one is going to let a replanted stand of trees go another 1000 years to let the trees grow that big.
Really, the sad thing for me was the elimination of all the "tepee burners", especially in Puget Sound, burning up cedar sawdust... And now we have MDF instead.
Well, the state Legislature can't seem to raise most taxes (plenty of people are quick to add initiatives to roll back the taxes as soon as they spring up). Oddity a few years ago was Multnomah Co., which voted itself a special schools levy.
Now the big thing in Oregon is to sell roads to private companies. I'm one to argue that the money being spent on widening about 6 miles of I-205 maybe could have been spent instead on widening OR99 through Dundee (from SR18-99 junction to east side of Dundee), even taking out the federal monies. At the very least, it would get rid of that stupid gadfly's purple house that still has yet to be developed into his planned coffee stand, it could be done in about 7 months, and would settle the deal. Enough already. But there are too many people who stand to make some serious coin if they build the bypass...
Almost as wacky as the leaders of Washougal, WA, and their manifest lunacy trying to create this little sleepy redneck outback into a "destination" portal for the north shore of the Columbia River Gorge, and fighting the WADOT from making SR14 a 4-lane divided hwy through Washougal. Having driven through downtown Washougal, the delusions of grandeur are apparant (i.e., there is nothing in "downtown" Washougal).
People in Oregon don't know what taxes are, relatively speaking (yes, I'm an Oregon immigrant). They haven't lived in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan...
And all of the telco services that make up the Internet and most of its backbones are already taxed by a variety of local, county, state and federal methods, as are UPS, FedEx, DHL etc. on the delivery side, companies pay various business-related taxes, etc., and it is just as easy for companies to pass those costs on to customers ("Shipping & Handling Fees").
sounds like a simple local service for people to work on. There are companies that keep on top of this, and people/companies pay for the service. Why the BFD about it?
We bitch and moan about the income tax system, but it's a big enough field that there are plethora of individuals, Jackson-Hewitt, H&R Block, TurboTax, et al models for paying someone else to do federal and state income taxes.
Besides, the overhead for companies just gets passed on to the purchaser anyways. It wouldn't take too long for Quicken et al to come up with subscription-based models for keeping up-to-date with local sales tax laws. I would bet that they do this already...
We're also not talking about moving a company's books from simple one-country currency model to international model, where FOREX rates change daily...
Lake Co. illinois (circa 2000): sales tax varied between 7.8% and 8.2%, depending where you were. Cook County was about 10%, Chicago city limits was 12% (plus, special Chicago income tax on top of state income tax). But, hey, if your alderman kissed Bill Dailey's ass good enough, your streets got plowed in the winter. If he didn't, well... funny how the snow built up on your streets.
Upper midwestern states still rate high in overall tax burden on citizens (IL, WI, IN, OH, MI).
Several attempts have been made at this in the past. In many companies, there is one or two Excel uber-users (or even, gasp, actual developers), who are able to understand parts of the enterprise's accounting, ERP, CRM, etc. databases and make tools...er, workbooks, that facilitate some of the necessary analysis or other operational needs of the department they work in, even if it means "enter data from here in the app form X to this cell here", i.e., manual screen scraping.
The company I am contracting at is trying to do something like this with an enterprise rules engine by TIBCO. Others provide various kinds of APIs that hide the gory details of the database or application interface, whether it is SAS, SAP ABAPs, etc.
It might work in a general sense, but it will still involve developers at some point to bridge the gap between functional experts (i.e., accountants) and the application, in order to fit the application to the business, and not the other way around.
I got the same kind of grief from a Honda dealer when the tranny in our Odyssey started going out. The service writer alleged that Honda ATF fluid has magic stuff that aren't in typical AT fluid, strongly implying that we should have had our tranny flushed at the dealer, and that we would have to buy a new tranny (probably a rebuid, with insignificant warranty).
Another writer a few weeks later pulled in a couple of chips with Honda USA and got us a brand new tranny (we paid for labor). Apparantly the trannies in the 2nd gen Odysseys were having some longevity issues, and Honda quietly had extended the warranty to 100K miles. Our problem was that the torque converter lockup clutch was disintegrating.
Well, MS does give it all away, technically. There are several key DLLs that do not have typelibs or named hooks, and the functionality in them can only be accessed by using function IDs. Without the typelib, figuring out the parameters can be hard, (but some information can be inferred, say, if one parameter is obviously a pointer to a struct that is documented elsewhere).
Or, DLLs that don't have a "license" to be used in a given programming environment, or have magic values that actually turn them on, for lack of a better word, and those magic values aren't published publicly at all (except in the code that invokes the functionality).
Ideally, Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen's company) would buy MS-A, and whatever private equity group that BillG gathers owns MS-B. Both are taken private (bye-bye SEC, SarbOx). Secret deals ensue, and one or the other eventually is bought out, and the monopoly is restored.
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Suprising HRC hasn't caught on to it yet, with the amount of effort she put into shutting down the Vieques traning site there in Puerto Rico a few years ago...
...because every wire coming off of it is probably unshielded, and then there's the moving ground. All of those will act as antennas for the signal as well. The article mentioned "microwave" and "100 Hz" in the same breath. Pshaw.
Big drawback against getting a GM car is OnStar. All it takes is a pissed off spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend to call up, allege some heinous kid-harming crime, that you're fleeing across state lines with "the kids", and you get the electronic boot. In today's shoot-first maybe-ask-questions-later bunker mentality, it's not a good thing.
In the future, only criminals will have cars with magnetos and no OnStar.
Well, now someone needs to go after OS makers for "lying" because of all the wasted space depending on data block size. Sure, you can have a 1-byte file, but it'll use up 512 bytes or more space on the HD... So, which is it? Is it a 1-byte file, or really a 512-byte (or 1024 or 2048 or 4096 or...) file?
I have a 1TB HD, and, well, I want to be able to actually use every byte of it!!!
A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there, pretty soon we're going to be talking about some actual wasted disk space...
Anyone else besides me remember the Alaska Airlines commercial about "4 quarters for a dollar?"
Recently, I had the pleasure to fly from the US (PDX) to Europe on Lufthansa. Except for being in the middle 4 seats on an A340, it was a great flight. The free Warsteiner beer was good enough, too.
Contrast to United flight back from Amsterdam to Chicago... Maybe it was the particular flight, but it kind of sucked. At least back in cattle class, the flight attendants were going through the motions. Either they hated each other, had been working for too long, or were all having PMS. Not like I fly much, but there was not a lot of warm and fuzzies being emitted from the attendants. Economy Plus though was worth it for me (5' 10"). Odd how a couple of more inches of leg room make an 8 hr flight slightly more bearable.
Too bad, really.
Oh, and I suppose I should mention there was no fucking way I was going to pay $5.00 for a cheap-ass domestic beer.
If United is supposed to be one of the flagship US international carriers, then the Star Alliance has joined with the wrong member.
And, well, I should add that on a $1000 round-trip ticket, no fucking way am I paying for a box lunch, either.
United is heading in the wrong direction.
Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are great, but the nitrogen they do bind up isn't released back into the soil until the nodules are dead.
Non-inoculated clover, soybeans and other legumes grow just fine w/o the symbiotic bacteria, and will respond to nitrogen fertilizer just the same as any other plant, but at least for farmers, it sort of defeats the purpose (i.e., growing legumes to get at least some effect of the nodules binding to atmospheric nitrogen to water-soluble nitrogen compounds, so as to not have to use quite so much anhydrous ammonia or nitrate fertilizers next year for some other crop).
Even with such an efficient crop, hopefully it's not all bunk. If it's as pernicious as it seems, it just might need some of Monsanto's evil gene manipulations just to keep it from getting established in the wild in areas it isn't native to.
Plus, there are other questions... what soil temperatures does it like? does it grow well in acidic/alkaline soils? Does it survive long bouts of drought? Does it survive long, damp, cool winters (pacific NW, England, etc)? Does it stand bitter cold winders (upper midwest US, Russia, etc)?
Before anyone starts growing it commercially in the US, if it's Roundup-resistant, there will be lots of upset crop farmers who will not put up with it. Some of them were burned by the jerusalem artichoke craze. Some of them closer to the southern US states will remember similar things being said about Kudzu.
It's not the same plant as "meadowfoam", is it?
It's finally dawned on me. After recently watching "Monty Python's Life Of Brian", the democratic congressional leadership is like the People's Front of Judea (or is the the Judean People's Front? Fuck you!!!). And the American public right now is like the crowd following Brian as he runs from the Romans. His shoe has fallen off. "He has given us a sign! we should all take off our shoes!" "The gourd! Follow the Gourd!" (the shoe is going to be Guiliani, and the gourd is Romney).
The democratic leadership spends their time dickering about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, dancing around the fact that they don't like to make, as John McCain's book title says, The Hard Choices. It is made by a bunch of great compromisers, and not enough back-alley street fightin' assholes who won't take no for an answer.
Too bad. As glad as I was to see the results of the 2006 election cycle, I don't know if there is enough collective spine in them to actually DO anything of merit, except spin around, make lots of noise, and in the end just have the usual value-less statements in 2008 (for the House and Senate elections, not Prez), "we actually got a lot done". Just as empty and bogus as GWB's "political capital" soundbite, Karl Rove's cocky proclamations, etc.
As far as Democratic candidates go, there really are only two that seem to have some sort of spine: Barracks Obama and Mike Gravel. Edwards and Clinton are willing to say anything, more (clinton) or less (edwards) to get the nomination and election, because that is what they want. They want the position, they don't want to serve. Their goals are self-focused. Their ambition is transparant. Their hypocrisy is obvious to most outside them, but not to their supporters, and definitely NOT to themselves (Clinton forcing the Prez to shut down the Navy's training range in Puerto Rico, to satisfy a few PR voters in NYC, and then saying, "I support the troops!" just a short time later, as luck would have it).
They are just like some of the no-talent white trash who go on to "American Idol" auditions, happen to get taped getting ripped a new one by Simon Cowell, and are then pissed off as they leave. Except no one has yet to step up and actually BE simon cowell to them.
Can't recall the story, whether I read it or heard it, but more than a few hospitals and clinics are adding hand sanitizer stations *because* it is less harsh on hands, it's faster, which removes the PITA factor for many Drs and Nurses. They did this after doing some serious observational studies on RNs and MDs washing their hands throughout their shifts, being rather surprised at how lax people actually were at washing their hands the way they were supposed to, vs what they said they did.
When they talked with staff about it, one of the big things was harshness to hands and the time-suck. Hand sanitizer works as good or better, and only takes a few seconds, compared to the recommended minimum 1 minute of scrubbing that they're typically supposed to do when washing hands.
Workers are happier, and disease transmission risk reduced. Sure beats hiring a bunch of Nurse Cratchetts to simply browbeat everyone to wash their hands or risk getting fired.
But that's so wrong it's not even stupid.
Because washing with soap and water (with or without triclosan, etc) is harsh on your skin, it makes the users (i.e., doctors and nurses), resistant to doing it, which increases spread of bacteria because on a whole they're not washing their hands as often because of the PITA factor.
The detergent component is what trashes your skin, because it gets rid of the oils on the surface of your skin (which most of the bacteria live in...), which results in them drying out and all that stuff if you wash your hands too much. Triclosan does nothing to help your skin.
The triclosan enhances the inherent, but limited, antimicrobial action of the soap (due to the pH of the soap), and the mechanical action of scrubbing one's hands, binding the oil-soap-bacteria mix together, and rinsing it all off with water is what actually produces the desired end state.
Which is why clinics and hospitals are starting to use hand sanitizer instead. It is gentler on the skin, actually works better at killing bacteria. Because it's gentler, it is going to get used more frequently.
When my daughter was in the NICU for 10 days, scrubbing with the povidone-laced sponges and scrubbers, once or twice a day going to see her got harsh on the hands... can't imagine doing it multiple times a day, all the time, like a nurse or doctor does.
While I"m sure there are a good number of management and executive types who take these little aphorisms to heart, more than a few of them use them simply as window dressing to justify their own actions and benefits they will get from what they are advocating "for the good of the company". What if the purchasing managers are getting some nice perks from Vendor A compared to Vendor B? What if Director Bob has a good friend or relative who is a board member at Company B, which stands to make a good sum?
Much like honest politicians who leave office only to show up a year or two later making bucketfulls of money because they have traded access to their socio-political network for lobbyist $$$ (many times seemingly lobbying for a cause or special interest that they were diametrically opposed to while in office) is so above-board and ethically clean as well...
Or your ex-spouse (who happens to have majority custody of your children) doing all sorts of things "in the best interests of the children".
What most of the companies I've worked at do is break down their business into "profit centers" and everything else. Profit centers are either growing in income, or are pretty well established. Everything else includes all of the back-end services needed to keep the company going, including IT.
In the first case, the unit that is seeing increased growth, costs aren't too much of a big deal, because the income being brought in is more than enough to supplant the costs of increasing headcount, etc., to keep the revenue growth going. As long as the revenue is increasing at a higher rate than expenses, then all is good, including the periodic fetes, management bonus sharing, etc. The good things tend to flow most of the time even down to the lower echelons of employees in various ways.
In the second case, the well-established unit that is still highly profitable, the goal is to keep profits at least static. If their income is not growing substantially, and they can't increase prices at much more than inflation, then the primary way to do this is to keep costs in control. One of the key ways in most places to do this is to minimize headcounts - hire good, multifunctional people that can do two or three or more different things. Keep manager count low as well. Shareholders tend to like this because they can count on the cash flow (read: dividends or other profit-sharing methods), but they also know that these people are needed to keep the money flowing into the company to fund all the other crap.
If you're in a non-revenue-generating group, life can suck pretty bad, especially if you are far from the blackhole that is upper management. The executive group is more than happy to siphon the profits off all the profit-generating groups - mahogony offices, Aeron chairs, multiple 30" LCD monitors for their 8-way desktop servers to run those cool powerpoint presentations, excel spreadsheets and hyperion "scorecard" apps (even though their executive secretaries read and print out their e-mail for them. They gotta keep up appearances and all that).
IT, Finance and accounting, and all that are in a constant fight just to keep their groups funded at the same level they were at last budget cycle. The only non-revenue-generating group that does well is probably the legal department. Thus the increased move in some companies to outsource some of these functions. The financial goal is to "control costs", and one key way to doing that through outsourcing is that those costs suddenly become fixed and predictable, and there is "someone else to blame" if things don't go well, including cancelling existing contract (again, paying a fixed breakup fee) to get another lowball bid from someone else, etc.
But there is nothing new or revolutionary here, so flame away, all those more "in the know".
Anyone remember the late 80's game, Empire? If you were a computer geek and in (student or employee) college at the time, it was quite possible to seriously mess with your circadian rhythms. The key to Empire was that movement phases were generally set at only a few per day, like 3-4. And attacks only happened during movement phases. So the key to seriously unleashing some whoopass was to set your attacks in motion in a late evening phase, so that you could see the results after the 3am update, unleash your next series of moves (because you know your opponent probably hasn't been logging in at 3am to take care of his forces...), and know that by 6am, you have totally eclipsed your opponent, if not conquered them fully.
But then along came CivI/II...
at least, that's what Merrill Lynch uses.
Way back when (late 80's/early 90's), either KISW or KXRX had a great prank story one year: Queen Anne Hill was erupting like Mt. St. Helens. It sure seemed like they got some legitimately gullible people calling into the station, and the morning DJs (I think it was Crow & West) got seriously reprimanded from management... I think this led to most of the radio talent fleeing KISW at the time to KXRX (which, sadly, 3 or four years after that converted to a "new country" station).
Every few years someone in Seattle radio or TV does a story about the top of the Space Needle actually being a UFO and lifting off from the rest of the tower.
Yes. Having lived in states where you pay BOTH sales and income tax (for me, that's IL and CA), nothing sucks more (especially in a state like IL that had pretty high property taxes, toll roads, etc).
But there is a reason why I chose OR over WA... I'll take state income tax over sales tax.
Are you so sure about that? Blaming the spotted owl is easy. Most of the big logs get exported, raw. They were getting exported in the 80's (as well as running out), much like they are today. Y'all should be blaming the logging companies (the very ones shutting down your mills who export lots of raw logs, not dimensional lumber while importing as much softwood lumber products from British Columbia as they can), feller-buncher and other highly automated lumber mill manufacturers instead.
At best the big-log sawmills might have lasted 5 or 10 more years longer than they eventually did.
Me, personally, I have no problem with Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, etc trying to take over the pulp wood market. All those quick-growing pine trees hide the states, which is a good thing in general. I'm not too concerned with my toilet paper being locally manufactured or not.
I have lived more or less in the Pac NW since 1980... as a kid I was amazed seeing logging trucks with one- or two-log loads. That's how big old-growth douglas fir trees could be, but later on grew to understand the need to keep the rest of them around). Logging those things is a one-timer. No one is going to let a replanted stand of trees go another 1000 years to let the trees grow that big.
Really, the sad thing for me was the elimination of all the "tepee burners", especially in Puget Sound, burning up cedar sawdust... And now we have MDF instead.
Well, the state Legislature can't seem to raise most taxes (plenty of people are quick to add initiatives to roll back the taxes as soon as they spring up). Oddity a few years ago was Multnomah Co., which voted itself a special schools levy.
Now the big thing in Oregon is to sell roads to private companies. I'm one to argue that the money being spent on widening about 6 miles of I-205 maybe could have been spent instead on widening OR99 through Dundee (from SR18-99 junction to east side of Dundee), even taking out the federal monies. At the very least, it would get rid of that stupid gadfly's purple house that still has yet to be developed into his planned coffee stand, it could be done in about 7 months, and would settle the deal. Enough already. But there are too many people who stand to make some serious coin if they build the bypass...
Almost as wacky as the leaders of Washougal, WA, and their manifest lunacy trying to create this little sleepy redneck outback into a "destination" portal for the north shore of the Columbia River Gorge, and fighting the WADOT from making SR14 a 4-lane divided hwy through Washougal. Having driven through downtown Washougal, the delusions of grandeur are apparant (i.e., there is nothing in "downtown" Washougal).
Except for the "corporate kicker"...
People in Oregon don't know what taxes are, relatively speaking (yes, I'm an Oregon immigrant). They haven't lived in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan...
And all of the telco services that make up the Internet and most of its backbones are already taxed by a variety of local, county, state and federal methods, as are UPS, FedEx, DHL etc. on the delivery side, companies pay various business-related taxes, etc., and it is just as easy for companies to pass those costs on to customers ("Shipping & Handling Fees").
sounds like a simple local service for people to work on. There are companies that keep on top of this, and people/companies pay for the service. Why the BFD about it?
We bitch and moan about the income tax system, but it's a big enough field that there are plethora of individuals, Jackson-Hewitt, H&R Block, TurboTax, et al models for paying someone else to do federal and state income taxes.
Besides, the overhead for companies just gets passed on to the purchaser anyways. It wouldn't take too long for Quicken et al to come up with subscription-based models for keeping up-to-date with local sales tax laws. I would bet that they do this already...
We're also not talking about moving a company's books from simple one-country currency model to international model, where FOREX rates change daily...
It's called a "red herring".
Lake Co. illinois (circa 2000): sales tax varied between 7.8% and 8.2%, depending where you were. Cook County was about 10%, Chicago city limits was 12% (plus, special Chicago income tax on top of state income tax). But, hey, if your alderman kissed Bill Dailey's ass good enough, your streets got plowed in the winter. If he didn't, well... funny how the snow built up on your streets.
Upper midwestern states still rate high in overall tax burden on citizens (IL, WI, IN, OH, MI).
Several attempts have been made at this in the past. In many companies, there is one or two Excel uber-users (or even, gasp, actual developers), who are able to understand parts of the enterprise's accounting, ERP, CRM, etc. databases and make tools...er, workbooks, that facilitate some of the necessary analysis or other operational needs of the department they work in, even if it means "enter data from here in the app form X to this cell here", i.e., manual screen scraping.
The company I am contracting at is trying to do something like this with an enterprise rules engine by TIBCO. Others provide various kinds of APIs that hide the gory details of the database or application interface, whether it is SAS, SAP ABAPs, etc.
It might work in a general sense, but it will still involve developers at some point to bridge the gap between functional experts (i.e., accountants) and the application, in order to fit the application to the business, and not the other way around.
I got the same kind of grief from a Honda dealer when the tranny in our Odyssey started going out. The service writer alleged that Honda ATF fluid has magic stuff that aren't in typical AT fluid, strongly implying that we should have had our tranny flushed at the dealer, and that we would have to buy a new tranny (probably a rebuid, with insignificant warranty).
Another writer a few weeks later pulled in a couple of chips with Honda USA and got us a brand new tranny (we paid for labor). Apparantly the trannies in the 2nd gen Odysseys were having some longevity issues, and Honda quietly had extended the warranty to 100K miles. Our problem was that the torque converter lockup clutch was disintegrating.
Well, MS does give it all away, technically. There are several key DLLs that do not have typelibs or named hooks, and the functionality in them can only be accessed by using function IDs. Without the typelib, figuring out the parameters can be hard, (but some information can be inferred, say, if one parameter is obviously a pointer to a struct that is documented elsewhere).
Or, DLLs that don't have a "license" to be used in a given programming environment, or have magic values that actually turn them on, for lack of a better word, and those magic values aren't published publicly at all (except in the code that invokes the functionality).
Ideally, Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen's company) would buy MS-A, and whatever private equity group that BillG gathers owns MS-B. Both are taken private (bye-bye SEC, SarbOx). Secret deals ensue, and one or the other eventually is bought out, and the monopoly is restored.