Cutting employees doesn't always mean a company is in trouble.
Of course it does. It means either you made terrible hiring choices for a long time in the past, and nobody noticed and stopped it, or your business went down and now you don't have work for people that you had work for before.
Either one means trouble.
Suppose they improved their production process so they are able to be 30% more efficient. Increases in efficiency often mean that fewer people are needed in the process.
You are right, I add a third one: You ran your company inefficiently for a very long time and nobody noticed.
Efficiency improvements in the order of 30% don't appear overnight. They happen slowly and over a long enough time that your workforce can be adapted.
If you give this a moment's thought, you'll understand why it's a bad idea. Everyone needing their own $50,000 vehicle is the opposite of public transportation.
You heard the opposite of what I said. I am talking about self-driving cars as public transport. So instead of 100 busses, you would have 1000 self-driving cars.
So your idea of a driverless car going from "door to door" is a fantasy.
If you think of self-driving cars as a replacement for public transport instead of a replacement for your personal car, initial limitations are absolutely fine. People are used to busses going fixed route, automated taxis driving only a subset of the streets in the city would still be an improvement. The challenge with the Google approach is that it needs to work under ALL circumstances. By reducing "all" to "a defined subset", you make the challenge one or two orders of magnitude easier.
I don't want to see one dollar in public funds spent to develop this technology or to create infrastructure for a self-driving fleet until we've made actual public transportation affordable and viable,
Maybe you got that backwards? Maybe self-driving cars are what will make public transport affordable and viable? The two main criticisms of it are that it doesn't go door-to-door and that you have to share it with other people, not all of whom you want to share it with.
Cutting employees is a sure sign of a company in trouble, so why does the stock go up? Even with the fixation on quarterly results it doesn't make much sense to me. Are these all investors hoping that they will find another idiot to offload the stock to before it crashes?
Exactly. The difference between CEO and minister is that the CEO serves the board of directors, but a minister serves the country. With "the country" being an abstract entity, there is no personal supervision, which is why the rules are more important. You can't call up the souvereign (i.e. the people) and ask for permission.
The point is that all executives bend the rules, and the IT staff allow them to because they like being paid.
That's not the reason.
The reason is that top-level management already does carry the risk for things going sideways. It's the difference between being a passenger and being the driver - yes, different rules apply because one is in charge of the machine.
The point that needs change is not that executives have special rules, but that in reality they are often not held responsible when basically their entire job is being responsible.
Would you tell your CEO that he wasn't able to access his email from some unsecure consumer laptop on his private jet?
No, I would tell him to please sign this paper that says he was made fully aware of the risks and is accepting them. My job is to be his advisor, not his nanny.
They are exploiting a design flaw in the Bitcoin network. One that was known pretty much from the start. One that was obvious as being a breaking point. As soon as Bitcoin becomes important enough for national governments to worry, you really thought this wouldn't happen? If the USA wants to destroy Bitcoin, they wouldn't turn on the NSA supercomputers as miners for a few days and be done with it? Please.
"investigation launched" by moron elements of government
Disagree. The NHTS investigation is the right thing to do. They need to do an independent check into the facts and see if there's anything to be learnt here. Now I don't know how good and neutral they are, but if everything is done right, the result could just as well be "well, he was being an idiot and we found no fault with the autopilot system".
Does cyber security get worse because people will be paid with Pounds instead of Euros?
You were always paid in Pounds in the UK, because the UK was even before the Brexit vote basically half a member in the EU. No Euro, no Schengen zone and a lot of other special rules.
There is, however, a kind of "potion of level-up". It's called taking security seriously and changing it from an afterthought to a nonfunctional requirement, in the language of enterprise architects.
Right on everything, except the globalisation attack.
The problem isn't globalisation. It would've been entirely possible for the entire population to profit from globalisation. If the 1% hadn't decided that they'd rather have all that nice money to themselves.
Nonsense. Information Security (as it was called before "cyber" became the new black) is plagued by much more basic problems. For example that half of the companies in any given country basically don't have any. Or that we've still not solved basic problems like account enumeration or brute-force attacks (which, you wouldn't believe, way too many applications still allow).
There are essentially two games. The one is where baseline security is attacked, hackers looking for the weakest link, for targets of opportunity, and if you have adequate security, you're good. It's a case of not having to outrun the bear.
And then there are the target attacks on high-priority targets. Done by top-notch professional attackers, often backed by organised crime and/or nation states. Unless you have equally top-notch security, you're toast.
In both cases, Brexit or not makes little difference. In the first case, everything you need to know is in basically any "IS for dummies" guide. In the later case, the required information isn't shared by bureaucrats in Brussels, but by tech experts in conferences and informal meetings. Since the UK isn't part of the Schengen zone anyways, no difference in travel arrangements, Brexit or not.
Frankly speaking, cooking and cleaning isn't a big deal. I've lived on my own for long enough to understand that a) it's not the most fun thing in the world and b) complaining about it takes more time and nerves then just doing it.
If I could get the same income sitting at home with the condition that I clean and cook, I'd jump at the chance immediately, because I would have hours upon hours more in my life for things I enjoy.
At some point, some enlightened civilization of the future will have a culture that accepts that men and women are different, and that's perfectly okay and not due to any sort of nefarious mythical patriarchy.
This.
I know so many strong and successful women, that I've probably lost touch with reality. Or maybe I'm the one in touch with reality and feminists are pushing an agenda? Nah, can't be, nobody ever in the history of the world pushed an agenda that benefitted themselves, completely unheard of.
Women can and are crazy successful in the real world. What you will notice about them is that they don't deny that they are women and they don't cry about being disadvantaged. They understand that their success is built on being the best woman for the job, not the best man for the job. There are gender differences, beyond the obvious biology, from muscle structure to brain structure and yes, some social conditioning as well. Whether you are man or woman, if you use these differences to your advantage, you will go far. If you whine about them all day, you won't.
Having a female perspective, presence, and balance is actually worth the hit on pure skill.
Yes, if the existing team is largely men.
If the existing team is largely women, the opposite is true. Because, surprise, surprise, this is actually about balance and variety and not about which gender is somehow "better" then the other. Anyone who ever worked in a women-dominated team will tell you war stories about how bitchy women can be when they have the floor to themselves.
You are right that zero women is bad. The same is true for zero men.
In the dating world, men are the ones approaching and women are the ones rejecting. By the time you go for a job, a typical man has suffered a lot of these rejections, while a typical woman has given them, not suffered from them.
The confidence that men build is a necessity. As a man, if you don't bounce back from a rejection and try again, you'll die a virgin. As a woman, all you have to do is stand in a bar and reject the creeps until a cute guy hits on you. Women rarely approach men in dating, and get even more rarely rejected.
But what they did here should be considered as another data point in the overall picture. I've seen similar effects in applications, which in parts of Europe are becoming more and more anonymous, some companies will remove picture, name and other gender-identifications before passing the application to the department that are hiring, all in the name of eliminating a gender gap - but the gap remains. There must be at least one reason beyond the perceived gender.
All of your theories evaporate when you read that once they removed the effect they detected from the study, any statistically significant gender difference disappeared.
Yeah the "most vulnerable people" part is bullshit.
But, traffic violation tickets are a scam. Over here, it usually takes weeks, sometimes a month or two, until you get the letter. Where it basically gives you the opportunity to pay or write back with a statement. That delay is either gross incompetence or intentional, because yeah, sure I know exactly what I was doing when I was driving some road I already forgot six weeks ago. I can definitely swear under oath that I was not doing over the speed limit. I definitely remember all the parking signs that were nearby and can tell you absolutely surely where exactly I was parking.
Of course I can't. So every sane person avoids the risk, pays the small fine and gets on with their lives. But you know what? Every single time where I actually could remember the details or had by pure chance taken a picture that I could use, every single time that I fought the ticket, I won. Of course sometimes I park illegally, I live in the center of a city, when I want to park in front of my house to carry up or down something heavy, I pretty much don't have a choice. But there are some tickets where I'm not sure, because I don't have OCD and I don't take a picture of my car every time I'm parked somewhere.
Cops should have to provide photographic evidence the same way they do for speeding tickets. It's not difficult these days to give them a small camera. In fact, for many other reasons cops should anyway have a camera on them. They should prove what they claim I did. The whole "cop saw you and he counts as a witness" is a setup if due to these artificial delays and life being life you have almost no chance to counter their claims.
The whole "pay this small fine and we'll forget about it" is a protection money racket. Give proper fines without all this trickery and deceit. Why is my "we'll forget about it" money ten bucks, but if I dare to go to court you will raise the ticket price? No? Court costs, sure, that is my risk. But suddenly the parking ticket becomes more expensive because I decide to fight it? That's extortion, plain and simple.
So, end of rant - you can see why a lot of people feel that parking tickets are unfair. Not by their nature, but by the way they are handled. And that's why people love something that gives them a chance to fight the perceived injustice.
What is this Pinterest for anyway? The only place where I ever see it showing up is when I'm searching for something by image search and the results are spammed with Pinterest links which are all dead to me because you can't get to the original source from there.
I've made it a habit to exclude the domain from image searches, and that's all it means to me. Anyone found an actual productive use for it?
Nobody said Russia is innocence in white. People with brains are just tired of this cold war USA = good, Russia = evil propaganda.
But you admitted that the west has broken its promises, which was all that was claimed in this thread, so case closed. If you want to compare dicks, sorry, violations, that's three threads over to the left.
The thing is controversial, but your choice of words makes it clear you have no interest in facts and nuanced views, you're a stupid git who shouts at everyone who dares to not share your dimwitted opinion.
You are trying to equate unequatable.
You are dodging the question and your counterpoint has nothing to do with the argument. It was a simple question: Do you believe the USA would stand by and watch if the Warsaw Pact were resurrected and Canada and Mexiko joined? Yes or no? It's a simple question.
If you switch on your brain you will see that the difference between Russia and the USSR is not the core of the argument I'm making.
The USA is, as we are writing this, moving armed forces into countries bordering Russia. I ask you again: What would happen if Russia did the same? You think US media and politics would shrug and say "well, Canada and Mexiko are souvereign nations, if they think this is in their best interest, we're ok with that?"
Of course not. There would be a media blitz and a new "red army on our front door" propaganda.
against a well known and historically documented aggressor.
List of countries that the USSR/Russia has attacked since the end of WW2:
Slashdot Mirror
Cutting employees doesn't always mean a company is in trouble.
Of course it does. It means either you made terrible hiring choices for a long time in the past, and nobody noticed and stopped it, or your business went down and now you don't have work for people that you had work for before.
Either one means trouble.
Suppose they improved their production process so they are able to be 30% more efficient. Increases in efficiency often mean that fewer people are needed in the process.
You are right, I add a third one: You ran your company inefficiently for a very long time and nobody noticed.
Efficiency improvements in the order of 30% don't appear overnight. They happen slowly and over a long enough time that your workforce can be adapted.
If you give this a moment's thought, you'll understand why it's a bad idea. Everyone needing their own $50,000 vehicle is the opposite of public transportation.
You heard the opposite of what I said. I am talking about self-driving cars as public transport. So instead of 100 busses, you would have 1000 self-driving cars.
So your idea of a driverless car going from "door to door" is a fantasy.
If you think of self-driving cars as a replacement for public transport instead of a replacement for your personal car, initial limitations are absolutely fine. People are used to busses going fixed route, automated taxis driving only a subset of the streets in the city would still be an improvement. The challenge with the Google approach is that it needs to work under ALL circumstances. By reducing "all" to "a defined subset", you make the challenge one or two orders of magnitude easier.
I don't want to see one dollar in public funds spent to develop this technology or to create infrastructure for a self-driving fleet until we've made actual public transportation affordable and viable,
Maybe you got that backwards? Maybe self-driving cars are what will make public transport affordable and viable? The two main criticisms of it are that it doesn't go door-to-door and that you have to share it with other people, not all of whom you want to share it with.
Cutting employees is a sure sign of a company in trouble, so why does the stock go up? Even with the fixation on quarterly results it doesn't make much sense to me. Are these all investors hoping that they will find another idiot to offload the stock to before it crashes?
Exactly. The difference between CEO and minister is that the CEO serves the board of directors, but a minister serves the country. With "the country" being an abstract entity, there is no personal supervision, which is why the rules are more important. You can't call up the souvereign (i.e. the people) and ask for permission.
The point is that all executives bend the rules, and the IT staff allow them to because they like being paid.
That's not the reason.
The reason is that top-level management already does carry the risk for things going sideways. It's the difference between being a passenger and being the driver - yes, different rules apply because one is in charge of the machine.
The point that needs change is not that executives have special rules, but that in reality they are often not held responsible when basically their entire job is being responsible.
Would you tell your CEO that he wasn't able to access his email from some unsecure consumer laptop on his private jet?
No, I would tell him to please sign this paper that says he was made fully aware of the risks and is accepting them. My job is to be his advisor, not his nanny.
Disclaimer: That actually is my job.
They are exploiting a design flaw in the Bitcoin network. One that was known pretty much from the start. One that was obvious as being a breaking point. As soon as Bitcoin becomes important enough for national governments to worry, you really thought this wouldn't happen? If the USA wants to destroy Bitcoin, they wouldn't turn on the NSA supercomputers as miners for a few days and be done with it? Please.
"investigation launched" by moron elements of government
Disagree. The NHTS investigation is the right thing to do. They need to do an independent check into the facts and see if there's anything to be learnt here. Now I don't know how good and neutral they are, but if everything is done right, the result could just as well be "well, he was being an idiot and we found no fault with the autopilot system".
Does cyber security get worse because people will be paid with Pounds instead of Euros?
You were always paid in Pounds in the UK, because the UK was even before the Brexit vote basically half a member in the EU. No Euro, no Schengen zone and a lot of other special rules.
The difference really isn't all that big.
There is no magic or silver bullet in security,
There is, however, a kind of "potion of level-up". It's called taking security seriously and changing it from an afterthought to a nonfunctional requirement, in the language of enterprise architects.
Right on everything, except the globalisation attack.
The problem isn't globalisation. It would've been entirely possible for the entire population to profit from globalisation. If the 1% hadn't decided that they'd rather have all that nice money to themselves.
Here is a pretty good writeup with some graphs:
https://medium.com/@jamesallwo...
Nonsense. Information Security (as it was called before "cyber" became the new black) is plagued by much more basic problems. For example that half of the companies in any given country basically don't have any. Or that we've still not solved basic problems like account enumeration or brute-force attacks (which, you wouldn't believe, way too many applications still allow).
There are essentially two games. The one is where baseline security is attacked, hackers looking for the weakest link, for targets of opportunity, and if you have adequate security, you're good. It's a case of not having to outrun the bear.
And then there are the target attacks on high-priority targets. Done by top-notch professional attackers, often backed by organised crime and/or nation states. Unless you have equally top-notch security, you're toast.
In both cases, Brexit or not makes little difference. In the first case, everything you need to know is in basically any "IS for dummies" guide. In the later case, the required information isn't shared by bureaucrats in Brussels, but by tech experts in conferences and informal meetings. Since the UK isn't part of the Schengen zone anyways, no difference in travel arrangements, Brexit or not.
Frankly speaking, cooking and cleaning isn't a big deal. I've lived on my own for long enough to understand that a) it's not the most fun thing in the world and b) complaining about it takes more time and nerves then just doing it.
If I could get the same income sitting at home with the condition that I clean and cook, I'd jump at the chance immediately, because I would have hours upon hours more in my life for things I enjoy.
At some point, some enlightened civilization of the future will have a culture that accepts that men and women are different, and that's perfectly okay and not due to any sort of nefarious mythical patriarchy.
This.
I know so many strong and successful women, that I've probably lost touch with reality. Or maybe I'm the one in touch with reality and feminists are pushing an agenda? Nah, can't be, nobody ever in the history of the world pushed an agenda that benefitted themselves, completely unheard of.
Women can and are crazy successful in the real world. What you will notice about them is that they don't deny that they are women and they don't cry about being disadvantaged. They understand that their success is built on being the best woman for the job, not the best man for the job. There are gender differences, beyond the obvious biology, from muscle structure to brain structure and yes, some social conditioning as well. Whether you are man or woman, if you use these differences to your advantage, you will go far. If you whine about them all day, you won't.
Having a female perspective, presence, and balance is actually worth the hit on pure skill.
Yes, if the existing team is largely men.
If the existing team is largely women, the opposite is true. Because, surprise, surprise, this is actually about balance and variety and not about which gender is somehow "better" then the other. Anyone who ever worked in a women-dominated team will tell you war stories about how bitchy women can be when they have the floor to themselves.
You are right that zero women is bad. The same is true for zero men.
Here's an interesting thought:
In the dating world, men are the ones approaching and women are the ones rejecting. By the time you go for a job, a typical man has suffered a lot of these rejections, while a typical woman has given them, not suffered from them.
The confidence that men build is a necessity. As a man, if you don't bounce back from a rejection and try again, you'll die a virgin. As a woman, all you have to do is stand in a bar and reject the creeps until a cute guy hits on you. Women rarely approach men in dating, and get even more rarely rejected.
Could it be that there is a connection?
That is a very interesting additional point.
But what they did here should be considered as another data point in the overall picture. I've seen similar effects in applications, which in parts of Europe are becoming more and more anonymous, some companies will remove picture, name and other gender-identifications before passing the application to the department that are hiring, all in the name of eliminating a gender gap - but the gap remains. There must be at least one reason beyond the perceived gender.
All of your theories evaporate when you read that once they removed the effect they detected from the study, any statistically significant gender difference disappeared.
Want to bet this will not make it into the larger discussion? Truth that doesn't fit the narrative is usually shouted down or ignored.
Because all the value is in having the idea and making a few sketches, yes?
Whatever came of the requirement to submit a working prototype to get a patent? That would fix half of the patent systems problems.
Yeah the "most vulnerable people" part is bullshit.
But, traffic violation tickets are a scam. Over here, it usually takes weeks, sometimes a month or two, until you get the letter. Where it basically gives you the opportunity to pay or write back with a statement. That delay is either gross incompetence or intentional, because yeah, sure I know exactly what I was doing when I was driving some road I already forgot six weeks ago. I can definitely swear under oath that I was not doing over the speed limit. I definitely remember all the parking signs that were nearby and can tell you absolutely surely where exactly I was parking.
Of course I can't. So every sane person avoids the risk, pays the small fine and gets on with their lives. But you know what? Every single time where I actually could remember the details or had by pure chance taken a picture that I could use, every single time that I fought the ticket, I won.
Of course sometimes I park illegally, I live in the center of a city, when I want to park in front of my house to carry up or down something heavy, I pretty much don't have a choice. But there are some tickets where I'm not sure, because I don't have OCD and I don't take a picture of my car every time I'm parked somewhere.
Cops should have to provide photographic evidence the same way they do for speeding tickets. It's not difficult these days to give them a small camera. In fact, for many other reasons cops should anyway have a camera on them. They should prove what they claim I did. The whole "cop saw you and he counts as a witness" is a setup if due to these artificial delays and life being life you have almost no chance to counter their claims.
The whole "pay this small fine and we'll forget about it" is a protection money racket. Give proper fines without all this trickery and deceit. Why is my "we'll forget about it" money ten bucks, but if I dare to go to court you will raise the ticket price? No? Court costs, sure, that is my risk. But suddenly the parking ticket becomes more expensive because I decide to fight it? That's extortion, plain and simple.
So, end of rant - you can see why a lot of people feel that parking tickets are unfair. Not by their nature, but by the way they are handled. And that's why people love something that gives them a chance to fight the perceived injustice.
What is this Pinterest for anyway? The only place where I ever see it showing up is when I'm searching for something by image search and the results are spammed with Pinterest links which are all dead to me because you can't get to the original source from there.
I've made it a habit to exclude the domain from image searches, and that's all it means to me. Anyone found an actual productive use for it?
Are you completely mental or a paid shill?
Nobody said Russia is innocence in white. People with brains are just tired of this cold war USA = good, Russia = evil propaganda.
But you admitted that the west has broken its promises, which was all that was claimed in this thread, so case closed. If you want to compare dicks, sorry, violations, that's three threads over to the left.
Yes, yes â" a tale oft-repeated by Russian scum. Please, cite the treaty, where that promise was made. Oops...
No such treaty was signed, but documents support the claim. Here is a reputable source for you:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Quote Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, has said in the past that Moscow was given a "clear commitment."
NATO itself officially rejects this claim: http://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/...
The thing is controversial, but your choice of words makes it clear you have no interest in facts and nuanced views, you're a stupid git who shouts at everyone who dares to not share your dimwitted opinion.
You are trying to equate unequatable.
You are dodging the question and your counterpoint has nothing to do with the argument. It was a simple question: Do you believe the USA would stand by and watch if the Warsaw Pact were resurrected and Canada and Mexiko joined? Yes or no? It's a simple question.
It never was Russian.
Way to go off on a tangent.
If you switch on your brain you will see that the difference between Russia and the USSR is not the core of the argument I'm making.
The USA is, as we are writing this, moving armed forces into countries bordering Russia. I ask you again: What would happen if Russia did the same? You think US media and politics would shrug and say "well, Canada and Mexiko are souvereign nations, if they think this is in their best interest, we're ok with that?"
Of course not. There would be a media blitz and a new "red army on our front door" propaganda.
against a well known and historically documented aggressor.
List of countries that the USSR/Russia has attacked since the end of WW2:
Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968â"1991, Afghanistan 1979â"1989, Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014
List of countries that the USA has attacked since the end of WW2:
China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Belgian Congo 1964, Guatemala 1964, Dominican Republic 1965-66, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Lebanon 1982-84, Grenada 1983-84, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1981-92, Nicaragua 1981-90, Iran 1987-88, Libya 1989, Panama 1989-90, Iraq 1991, Kuwait 1991, Somalia 1992-94, Bosnia 1995, Iran 1998, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, Yugoslavia â" Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Libya 2011
I rest my case.