True... a few years ago this factor got Scott Adams accused of being a (possibly unwitting) tool of "The Man". The guy's point was that, since Dilbert hit the scene, a lot of energy that disgruntled workers might have spent organizing, fighting for change, or storming the executive offices with torches and pitchforks got redirected into simply making fun of the evil practices, and sighing "it's like this everywhere; what can you do?"
The ideal (from these requirements) e-voting system would be:
A shiny, new touch-screen (or whatever technology) machine is used by the voter to pick candidates.
This machine does NOT count the votes. It prints out a human-readable, machine-scannable ballot.
The voter looks over this ballot, then runs it through a scanner into a ballot box.
The scanner counts the votes and reports instant election-night results.
This way, we have the ease of use of touch-screen machines, the audit trail of paper ballots, and insurance that the paper ballot matches voter intent. For extra paranoia, have the touch-screen frontend also count votes, ensure that the optical scanner and the frontend are made by different companies using no common software, and investigate any statistically significant differences in count between the two.
To save money on new scanner development, we could even use existing scanners like the ones my
county uses.
Of course, this means that the touch-screen frontend only serves as a disabled-assistive and an ease-of-use device. Perhaps the money would be better spent on education to teach voters to fill in the scannable ballots directly. People with disabilities can use the age-old methods of bringing a trusted assistant along, or of requesting assistance from friendly and helpful precinct officials.
Morally wrong doesn't matter to corporations. They simply incant their mantra: they must do whatever's legal to increase shareholder profits. Turnover, bad quality, or any other long-term consequence doesn't matter to them either, with current executive compensation structures. (This is also a consequence of executives being disposable employees like you & me; in the Olden Days, execs expected to retire from their company & get a pension, so they wanted the company to be stable in the long term. Nowadays, they know they'll be somewhere else in 5 years anyway, so why not pump & dump?)
Getting another job won't help you; practices that are evil/profitable enough simply become industry standard. (The same is true in consumer products; anyone wishing to refute this, point me to somewhere I can get a cellphone or credit card without a long list of consumer-unfriendly terms & conditions).
Clueful management won't help you; market pressures force software companies to death-march everything (customers will just buy from the competitor that promises it unrealistically soon & cheap). This may mean that Doing Software Right is simply economically infeasible; nobody is willing to pay enough or wait long enough. This is why programmers tend to be more aware of the "race-to-the-bottom" nature of capitalism than others; it's blindingly obvious in our field.
Also, the race to the bottom is killing the U.S. software industry, it's only a matter of time. (Even if U.S. companies didn't offshore a single software project, eventually low-wage countries would develop their own software companies and kill the U.S. ones on price). Death-marches may simply be a consequence of trying to hold onto jobs in a dying industry.
Actually, with open source products you have more people to blame.
With a commercial product, you must buy support from the vendor. It's the only choice. If your bug is not considered important enough by the vendor's management, tough shit, no fix for you.
With an open source product, you can buy support from any number of people (including in-house programmers). They may not have the same level of product-specific expertise as the original developers, but it's possible for them to fix/change the product and/or figure out your problems.
Training someone is never in any company's short-term best interest, so it doesn't happen. Instead, simply hire someone that other company already trained.
I've noticed this for a long time in the want ads (even before the crash): specifications that essentially require that you've done the exact same job before.
Assuming this trend continues (assuming we have a capitalist society, it probably must), hope you like the first job you got out of school, because you'll never be able to get one that's substantially different. Also, this will make jobs we think of as "ordinary" (programming, sysadminning, auto mechanicry,...) into fields that you have to "break into" like acting (wait tables for years while handing out samples of your work & sleeping with producers...)
My T'ai Chi teacher says that positive thinking takes discipline and effort; that, left to itself, one's mind will start down a spiral of negative thinking. I am inclined to agree, having lived that depressive spiral many, many times (aack! Capitalist dystopia just around the corner! Better start learning how to scrounge food out of dumpsters!)
I've heard the theory that this was a survival advantage in caveman days, and now hangs around as evolutionary baggage (just like greed and us-vs.-them - survival advantage for cavemen, bad for industrialized society). (Did that rock just move? I bet it's something that'll eat me. Better round up the guys and go kill it.)
OTOH, we all know paranoia has its usefulnesses, even today, especially in programming. (Trust that buffer to be non-NULL? Never!)
That's been the bright side I've been able to see about the Republican victories (President & Congress) in the election... the US is probably going to collapse into a Third World nation anyway, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats control it, but at least this way I can blame it on the Republicans.
For example, at my company, in a couple of years, when I'm fully vested, I'll be able to buy about $2000 worth of stock. (It's something like 40K shares at $0.05, I forget the exact numbers).
This means that, if the company increases in value 10-fold (and ever goes public to begin with), my potential gain is $18000 minus taxes.
That's nice, but hardly a reason to work nights, weekends and holidays for no extra cash.
Even management's most optimistic projections would put my upside potential at $50K or so minus taxes. This means that stock options have no motivational value to me whatsoever.
I can see the potential trouble bad credit can give you for a security clearance (as others have mentioned, it could indicate a weakness to bribery).
However, one thing that really bothers me is the use of credit score by employers in non-security-sensitive, non-money-handling jobs.
Once everyone starts doing this, I can easily see a death-spiral scenario where you fall on hard times, credit is ruined, can't get a job because of bad credit, and then have no way to dig yourself out!
Whether Bush or Kerry should / should not have won is irrelevant to the topic under discussion.
What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.
With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.
Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.
Because the "jobs" rationalization is just a smokescreen. When he says something is bad for "jobs" he really means it's bad for corporate profits. There are many who appear to believe that the two are equivalent (more profits = more jobs), others who use that meme to justify more profits at any expense.
So:
Environmental (or any other) regulations = bad for profits = "bad for jobs" = politicians are against it
Offshoring = good for profits (but bad for jobs/society*, so jobs are not mentioned, other rationalizations are used) = politicians are for it
(*) Yes, I know that economics is not a zero-sum game; neither is it an infinite-sum game, and just because it's not zero-sum does not mean the sum must go up.
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True... a few years ago this factor got Scott Adams accused of being a (possibly unwitting) tool of "The Man". The guy's point was that, since Dilbert hit the scene, a lot of energy that disgruntled workers might have spent organizing, fighting for change, or storming the executive offices with torches and pitchforks got redirected into simply making fun of the evil practices, and sighing "it's like this everywhere; what can you do?"
This way, we have the ease of use of touch-screen machines, the audit trail of paper ballots, and insurance that the paper ballot matches voter intent. For extra paranoia, have the touch-screen frontend also count votes, ensure that the optical scanner and the frontend are made by different companies using no common software, and investigate any statistically significant differences in count between the two.
To save money on new scanner development, we could even use existing scanners like the ones my county uses.
Of course, this means that the touch-screen frontend only serves as a disabled-assistive and an ease-of-use device. Perhaps the money would be better spent on education to teach voters to fill in the scannable ballots directly. People with disabilities can use the age-old methods of bringing a trusted assistant along, or of requesting assistance from friendly and helpful precinct officials.
Getting another job won't help you; practices that are evil/profitable enough simply become industry standard. (The same is true in consumer products; anyone wishing to refute this, point me to somewhere I can get a cellphone or credit card without a long list of consumer-unfriendly terms & conditions).
Clueful management won't help you; market pressures force software companies to death-march everything (customers will just buy from the competitor that promises it unrealistically soon & cheap). This may mean that Doing Software Right is simply economically infeasible; nobody is willing to pay enough or wait long enough. This is why programmers tend to be more aware of the "race-to-the-bottom" nature of capitalism than others; it's blindingly obvious in our field.
Also, the race to the bottom is killing the U.S. software industry, it's only a matter of time. (Even if U.S. companies didn't offshore a single software project, eventually low-wage countries would develop their own software companies and kill the U.S. ones on price). Death-marches may simply be a consequence of trying to hold onto jobs in a dying industry.
With a commercial product, you must buy support from the vendor. It's the only choice. If your bug is not considered important enough by the vendor's management, tough shit, no fix for you.
With an open source product, you can buy support from any number of people (including in-house programmers). They may not have the same level of product-specific expertise as the original developers, but it's possible for them to fix/change the product and/or figure out your problems.
I've noticed this for a long time in the want ads (even before the crash): specifications that essentially require that you've done the exact same job before.
Assuming this trend continues (assuming we have a capitalist society, it probably must), hope you like the first job you got out of school, because you'll never be able to get one that's substantially different. Also, this will make jobs we think of as "ordinary" (programming, sysadminning, auto mechanicry, ...) into fields that you have to "break into" like acting (wait tables for years while handing out samples of your work & sleeping with producers...)
I've heard the theory that this was a survival advantage in caveman days, and now hangs around as evolutionary baggage (just like greed and us-vs.-them - survival advantage for cavemen, bad for industrialized society). (Did that rock just move? I bet it's something that'll eat me. Better round up the guys and go kill it.)
OTOH, we all know paranoia has its usefulnesses, even today, especially in programming. (Trust that buffer to be non-NULL? Never!)
That's been the bright side I've been able to see about the Republican victories (President & Congress) in the election... the US is probably going to collapse into a Third World nation anyway, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats control it, but at least this way I can blame it on the Republicans.
This means that, if the company increases in value 10-fold (and ever goes public to begin with), my potential gain is $18000 minus taxes.
That's nice, but hardly a reason to work nights, weekends and holidays for no extra cash.
Even management's most optimistic projections would put my upside potential at $50K or so minus taxes. This means that stock options have no motivational value to me whatsoever.
However, one thing that really bothers me is the use of credit score by employers in non-security-sensitive, non-money-handling jobs.
Once everyone starts doing this, I can easily see a death-spiral scenario where you fall on hard times, credit is ruined, can't get a job because of bad credit, and then have no way to dig yourself out!
What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.
With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.
Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.
So: Environmental (or any other) regulations = bad for profits = "bad for jobs" = politicians are against it
Offshoring = good for profits (but bad for jobs/society*, so jobs are not mentioned, other rationalizations are used) = politicians are for it
(*) Yes, I know that economics is not a zero-sum game; neither is it an infinite-sum game, and just because it's not zero-sum does not mean the sum must go up.