That was well written. Specifically where you say "if you're chemically untrained the WHOLE word is what you should be looking for" instead of the more common "if you are [random profession] untrained, you cannot possibly understand anything about the field, so don't try and take my word for it."
You say all this and you knew that criminal activity was happening, and what the results would be, yet you didn't quit your job and go work for a lender so you could turn them in. Blaming others because you chose not to do anything about it is "kind of moral logic that most people grow out of in their teens." As YOU say "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." And what did you do? Nothing. You may not have received your paycheck from the specific institutions that had fraud going on in them, but you did gain financially, as a large part of the economy that you happily suckled from was running off of this fraud. You knew it was happening, yet did nothing to stop it. Maybe someday you will accept your responsibility for destroying the US economy.
100% of the 911 scare was generated by the incumbent phone carriers. They have fought tooth and nail for the privilege of making 911 fail on VOIP phones. In some places they have won, and have been allowed to cripple 911. In other places they have lost, and they are not allowed to cripple 911. Besides, the whole 911 fear mongering is lame anyway. Most people spend HUGE amounts of time in places that have no better 911 capabilities than what are available in the places that the incumbent phone companies have been allowed to cripple 911. Driving to work for example.
I would guess that they would hold up pretty well. The only concern would be heat. UV and whatnot would not matter because it is IN the paint. Completely covered. Also, since there would be millions of them, it could easily be very robust when it comes to dealing with even very high failures. If a section of road lost enough of the tags to overcome the massive redundancy, repairing the system would only entail bringing out a lane striper to paint a new line. Also, proactivly testing the system would only require that driving the road in question. You could even probably automate the testing with cheap robotics, as making a line following R/C sized car is cheap and simple. It's the kind of thing you might see in a 6th grade science fair today.
Your example doesn't show that persistence get a fine through. It shows that someone in with authority to fine them had a personal grudge against the company you worked for. Given that your company was "fined repeatedly", and almost every other company out there were never fined, bias is the only believable answer. If it was just persistence, then you could be sure that once the first fine happened, that employee would be fired. So, your company would have had to have many employees that were entirely different than all of the employees in all of the other lending institutions.
Which seems more plausable:
1) Every one of the moral people who worked in funding just happened to get hired at your company; an immoral company. This, and none got hired at any other company in the country.
or
2) Someone at the regulatory agency didn't like someone in the upper management of the lending company. Whether that is because he got annoyed with him at convention, his sister got screwed on a loan, or whatever...
The first would be enough to start a religion over. The second would just be business as usual.
Lane departure is being done all wrong. We need to get the various road authorities to start mixing something like this into the paint that they paint the lines with. Then vehicles could use RFID readers to no only know when they are departing a lane, but they could use this instead of GPS to identify where they are.
"If someone in a company caught wind of a problem and told the DOC (Department of Corporations in California) or the DRE (Department of Real Estate in California) then the company would be fined"
Absolute BS. The DOC and DRE knew full well that these problems were happening in virtually EVERY lending office of any size. Have you ever tried to report something to the DRE? They don't want to talk to you and they don't care if fraud is happening. If they were at all interested in stopping the wide spread fraud that was happening, they could have walked into any lender and found it. Hell, the Home and Garden Channel had at least a couple of TV shows that ran regularly where they would show people who had bad loans. It was on nation TV almost daily.
So, are you going to take responsibility for turning a blind eye to these criminal enterprises, or are you going to claim that you were to stupid to understand the wide spread reports of bad loans, as well as the bragging of people who were openly and publicly announcing that they were getting bad loans?
You are truly stupid if you think that one or two funders complaining about a practice that was well known by the authorities, and common practice in the industry was going do anything other than get them fired. Everybody knew what was happening, including you. Nobody cared until it blew up. Then everybody did exactly like you are doing and started to look for scape goats. Really. You are going to blame the people that refused commit the crimes? I assume that you also blame poor folk who live in ghettos for the drug trade because they know it happens in their neighborhood, and they don't publicly announce to the police who has dope and illegal guns?
I guess you also report every jay walker, speeder, dog off the leash, and copied music CD you ever see right?
Yeah, maybe you and I can share a cell. After all, you are personally responsible for thousands of deaths a year. You see people breaking the law by speeding every day, and don't report them. I'm sure that you call the police every time you see someone with a copied CD also, right? Don't forget those jay walkers. You report them every time you see them don't you?
So, when you stop being a murderer, then you can start judging others.
That is the first good excuse I have heard for monitoring company email. Of course, if the company doesn't have a similar policy about use of company letterhead, then the reason doesn't fly. My problem with these things is that different rules are applied when its "on a computer".
The company can solve this problem by making sure that it doesn't block web mail sites. After all, the problem is the domain name right?
Set up a system on site for the consultant. Give them a VPN connection to that system so they can remote access it, and have the data loaded on site. The consultant doesn't have to make an unnecessary costly drive, and you don't have to let your data leave the premises.
The only thing that saved my wife was that she was incredibly productive. When she would run across something they wanted forged, she would send them an email to the effect of "I am unsure of the legality of doing this, so if you can just send me back an email letting me know it is legal, I will complete the task. Thanks." This would result in a request to have the documents delivered to the managers office, and that would be the last she heard of them. If she wasn't out producing most of the other funders 2 to 1, she would not have lasted a month. In the end though, she did get fired for it at the first job. The second job ended because of the crash. They actually seemed to be OK with her refusals. They just let her crank out her work, and handed anything shady to someone who might be slower, but could prove their worth by handling such "problems".
The best part is that when we counted up the costs of daycare, gas, clothes, taxes, etc..., we only lost $400 a month when she wasn't working. It never made sense for her to go back to work.
No, the buyers were evil too. It was common for the buys to be fully aware that incorrect information was going on their applications, and while I have no doubt a lie was told here and there to the buyers, I cannot count the number of people who were openly bragging that it didn't matter that they couldn't afford their loans because they wouldn't own their house long enough for the higher rate to kick in.
That being said, the lenders were definitely committing crimes. Both of the lenders my wife worked for before the crash were committing crimes on an hourly basis. The funders were expected to keep a stock of different pens at their desks to modify documents and signatures. It was common for my wife to come home worried that they were going to fire her because she wouldn't forge documents. "When the police come in to make arrests, the management is NOT going to protect you." and "It is more expensive to spend time in jail than it is to get fired." became mantras in our house.
This is a problem that we need some help on solving. I personally have been telling women to start commenting on how men who pee on the floor don't know how to use their penis. If women start eluding to the idea that men who pee on the floor must suck in bed, we would likely see a huge improvement in this area.
"Macintosh is starting to out-sell Wintell on high end desktops."
Macs are not starting to out-sell Windows. They are out selling Windows in the > $1000 market. That is like opening a hotdog stand that charges $75 for a hot dog, selling one, and then bragging about how you are the #1 seller of > $75 hot dogs in the world.
So, I started reading the Lockhart's Lament.... I haven't read the whole thing, as it is longer than I have time for at the moment. You can be sure that I will go back to read the rest. I have to say that the first few pager are some damn good writing. Thanks for the link.
Tell that to the doctors and health insurance companies. If, you read farther up the thread, you will see that I just wrote my comment poorly. My point was that the definition of "obese" that the government/medical industry and insurance companies use is stupid.
It gets worse. When I said that I was quoting others with the word obese, I meant it as in I was using a "term" that is often used by others. I did know the rules. The problem is that I did not implement what I knew when I failed to put "obese" inside quotes every time I used it, and thus created confusion.
In any case, get the heck off Slashdot and go running! I should be doing the same. It's 2am! That's often called "probable cause".
In any case, try to rage less, it's bad for your health.;)
After taking my own advice and re-reading my previous post, I have to say that it does sound like I am complaining about too much muscle. That was poor writing on my part. I also noticed that I did not put quotes around the word 'obese' when I typed 'MORE'. As I said, my point wasn't that having muscle is bad. It was that the word 'obese' has become meaningless when used by the health industry, as you can easily be fatter and less 'obese' at the same time. (I got the quotes around it this time)
I'd kill to have your "problem" Until you have to pay for private health insurance. I was going to call you on misquoting me with the "too much" muscle problem, but after re-reading my own post, I have to say that it does sound like I am complaining about too much muscle. That was not my intent. I was actually complaining that the accepted definition of "obese" is atrocious.
You miss understand my point. The word "obese" is in quotes because I am quoting others by using it. I would never suggest that having more muscle is bad. My point is that studies that use the term "obese" almost always use BMI, and it is a worthless measurement. If you reread my post understanding that my example is showing why the word "obese" is pointless in this context, you will probably find that you disagree less.
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That was well written. Specifically where you say "if you're chemically untrained the WHOLE word is what you should be looking for" instead of the more common "if you are [random profession] untrained, you cannot possibly understand anything about the field, so don't try and take my word for it."
You say all this and you knew that criminal activity was happening, and what the results would be, yet you didn't quit your job and go work for a lender so you could turn them in. Blaming others because you chose not to do anything about it is "kind of moral logic that most people grow out of in their teens." As YOU say "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." And what did you do? Nothing. You may not have received your paycheck from the specific institutions that had fraud going on in them, but you did gain financially, as a large part of the economy that you happily suckled from was running off of this fraud. You knew it was happening, yet did nothing to stop it. Maybe someday you will accept your responsibility for destroying the US economy.
100% of the 911 scare was generated by the incumbent phone carriers. They have fought tooth and nail for the privilege of making 911 fail on VOIP phones. In some places they have won, and have been allowed to cripple 911. In other places they have lost, and they are not allowed to cripple 911. Besides, the whole 911 fear mongering is lame anyway. Most people spend HUGE amounts of time in places that have no better 911 capabilities than what are available in the places that the incumbent phone companies have been allowed to cripple 911. Driving to work for example.
I would guess that they would hold up pretty well. The only concern would be heat. UV and whatnot would not matter because it is IN the paint. Completely covered. Also, since there would be millions of them, it could easily be very robust when it comes to dealing with even very high failures. If a section of road lost enough of the tags to overcome the massive redundancy, repairing the system would only entail bringing out a lane striper to paint a new line. Also, proactivly testing the system would only require that driving the road in question. You could even probably automate the testing with cheap robotics, as making a line following R/C sized car is cheap and simple. It's the kind of thing you might see in a 6th grade science fair today.
Your example doesn't show that persistence get a fine through. It shows that someone in with authority to fine them had a personal grudge against the company you worked for. Given that your company was "fined repeatedly", and almost every other company out there were never fined, bias is the only believable answer. If it was just persistence, then you could be sure that once the first fine happened, that employee would be fired. So, your company would have had to have many employees that were entirely different than all of the employees in all of the other lending institutions.
Which seems more plausable:
1) Every one of the moral people who worked in funding just happened to get hired at your company; an immoral company. This, and none got hired at any other company in the country.
or
2) Someone at the regulatory agency didn't like someone in the upper management of the lending company. Whether that is because he got annoyed with him at convention, his sister got screwed on a loan, or whatever...
The first would be enough to start a religion over. The second would just be business as usual.
What you are asking for is not going to happen in the next twenty years. Putting RFID into the paint could happen tomorrow.
Lane departure is being done all wrong. We need to get the various road authorities to start mixing something like this into the paint that they paint the lines with. Then vehicles could use RFID readers to no only know when they are departing a lane, but they could use this instead of GPS to identify where they are.
"If someone in a company caught wind of a problem and told the DOC (Department of Corporations in California) or the DRE (Department of Real Estate in California) then the company would be fined"
Absolute BS. The DOC and DRE knew full well that these problems were happening in virtually EVERY lending office of any size. Have you ever tried to report something to the DRE? They don't want to talk to you and they don't care if fraud is happening. If they were at all interested in stopping the wide spread fraud that was happening, they could have walked into any lender and found it. Hell, the Home and Garden Channel had at least a couple of TV shows that ran regularly where they would show people who had bad loans. It was on nation TV almost daily.
So, are you going to take responsibility for turning a blind eye to these criminal enterprises, or are you going to claim that you were to stupid to understand the wide spread reports of bad loans, as well as the bragging of people who were openly and publicly announcing that they were getting bad loans?
You are truly stupid if you think that one or two funders complaining about a practice that was well known by the authorities, and common practice in the industry was going do anything other than get them fired. Everybody knew what was happening, including you. Nobody cared until it blew up. Then everybody did exactly like you are doing and started to look for scape goats. Really. You are going to blame the people that refused commit the crimes? I assume that you also blame poor folk who live in ghettos for the drug trade because they know it happens in their neighborhood, and they don't publicly announce to the police who has dope and illegal guns?
I guess you also report every jay walker, speeder, dog off the leash, and copied music CD you ever see right?
Yeah, maybe you and I can share a cell. After all, you are personally responsible for thousands of deaths a year. You see people breaking the law by speeding every day, and don't report them. I'm sure that you call the police every time you see someone with a copied CD also, right? Don't forget those jay walkers. You report them every time you see them don't you?
So, when you stop being a murderer, then you can start judging others.
That is the first good excuse I have heard for monitoring company email. Of course, if the company doesn't have a similar policy about use of company letterhead, then the reason doesn't fly. My problem with these things is that different rules are applied when its "on a computer".
The company can solve this problem by making sure that it doesn't block web mail sites. After all, the problem is the domain name right?
Set up a system on site for the consultant. Give them a VPN connection to that system so they can remote access it, and have the data loaded on site. The consultant doesn't have to make an unnecessary costly drive, and you don't have to let your data leave the premises.
The only thing that saved my wife was that she was incredibly productive. When she would run across something they wanted forged, she would send them an email to the effect of "I am unsure of the legality of doing this, so if you can just send me back an email letting me know it is legal, I will complete the task. Thanks." This would result in a request to have the documents delivered to the managers office, and that would be the last she heard of them. If she wasn't out producing most of the other funders 2 to 1, she would not have lasted a month. In the end though, she did get fired for it at the first job. The second job ended because of the crash. They actually seemed to be OK with her refusals. They just let her crank out her work, and handed anything shady to someone who might be slower, but could prove their worth by handling such "problems".
The best part is that when we counted up the costs of daycare, gas, clothes, taxes, etc..., we only lost $400 a month when she wasn't working. It never made sense for her to go back to work.
No, the buyers were evil too. It was common for the buys to be fully aware that incorrect information was going on their applications, and while I have no doubt a lie was told here and there to the buyers, I cannot count the number of people who were openly bragging that it didn't matter that they couldn't afford their loans because they wouldn't own their house long enough for the higher rate to kick in.
That being said, the lenders were definitely committing crimes. Both of the lenders my wife worked for before the crash were committing crimes on an hourly basis. The funders were expected to keep a stock of different pens at their desks to modify documents and signatures. It was common for my wife to come home worried that they were going to fire her because she wouldn't forge documents. "When the police come in to make arrests, the management is NOT going to protect you." and "It is more expensive to spend time in jail than it is to get fired." became mantras in our house.
This is a problem that we need some help on solving. I personally have been telling women to start commenting on how men who pee on the floor don't know how to use their penis. If women start eluding to the idea that men who pee on the floor must suck in bed, we would likely see a huge improvement in this area.
"which will be more expensive for dubious additional security."
No kidding. Does IBM think it is significantly harder to cut off a persons hand than it is to takeoff their finger?
"Macintosh is starting to out-sell Wintell on high end desktops." Macs are not starting to out-sell Windows. They are out selling Windows in the > $1000 market. That is like opening a hotdog stand that charges $75 for a hot dog, selling one, and then bragging about how you are the #1 seller of > $75 hot dogs in the world.
So, I started reading the Lockhart's Lament.... I haven't read the whole thing, as it is longer than I have time for at the moment. You can be sure that I will go back to read the rest. I have to say that the first few pager are some damn good writing. Thanks for the link.
10.5 cents per KWH? Man, I wish I could get power that cheap. My last bill had me paying 23 cents KWH for a good portion of the bill.
Sounds just like computers. I need to get one of those one of these days. Just as soon as they stop getting smaller and cheaper.
Tell that to the doctors and health insurance companies. If, you read farther up the thread, you will see that I just wrote my comment poorly. My point was that the definition of "obese" that the government/medical industry and insurance companies use is stupid.
In any case, get the heck off Slashdot and go running! I should be doing the same. It's 2am! That's often called "probable cause".
In any case, try to rage less, it's bad for your health.
After taking my own advice and re-reading my previous post, I have to say that it does sound like I am complaining about too much muscle. That was poor writing on my part. I also noticed that I did not put quotes around the word 'obese' when I typed 'MORE'. As I said, my point wasn't that having muscle is bad. It was that the word 'obese' has become meaningless when used by the health industry, as you can easily be fatter and less 'obese' at the same time. (I got the quotes around it this time)
You miss understand my point. The word "obese" is in quotes because I am quoting others by using it. I would never suggest that having more muscle is bad. My point is that studies that use the term "obese" almost always use BMI, and it is a worthless measurement. If you reread my post understanding that my example is showing why the word "obese" is pointless in this context, you will probably find that you disagree less.