Absolutely. Bringing in foreign workers distorts a labor market, very much in business's favor. One of the big defenses of using the TFW program to bring in Asian workers to hand out coffee and burgers was "We can't get anybody to work up here in Frozen Butthole, Alberta", to which my response was "Well, no, you can't get anyone to work in Butthole, Alberta serving coffee for $15, when it costs over $1,000 month for the privilege of sleeping in a closet. If you pay $40 an hour, which is what serving coffee in the frozen tundra is really worth, then you'd be surprised."
One of the biggest scams going was a guy in Northern British Columbia whose company was bringing in Chinese foreign workers, and he'd made himself a litle sideline with a big tenement to house them, and then he'd charge them rent! And the real evil was that because these are sponsored workers, if they bitched, he fired them and they got sent back to the country they came from. The TFW program had quite literally turned some foreign workers into little better than indentured slaves. It was a sort of quasi-legal human trafficking operation, with the Government of Canada and the Provincial governments looking the other way, because, you know "BUSINESS!"
Unless he can start winning some states again, I don't see how he can hope to stop Trump. Before last night, maybe a slim chance, now, forget it. Trump has got the nod, which means Hillary Clinton is the next POTUS.
At least McAfee would be worth a few jokes. Fiorina is only deserving of unmitigated contempt. One of the worst CEOs in recent history, which is astounding, consider the amount of competition for worthless brain dead senior management there is these days.
She was an utter moron, the very picture of the idiot CEO who has no fucking idea what the business they've been put in charge of does, and just starts running amok through various business units, building debt with shit purchases, and then firing the R&D people because they can't get the two or three quarter turnarounds the fucking retards put on the Board by the institutional investors (read: corporate rapists) think is needed.
The problem here appears to be fraud. In Canada, we had similar abuses going on with the Temporary Foreign Worker program (the equivalent of an H1B). In general, companies were using a number of different tricks, from putting out job listings with very difficult to fulfill requirements, or in some cases putting out job listings but then rejecting any Canadian applying for the job regardless of qualification. The TFW program was so poorly managed, and the Provinces so unwilling to enforce labor codes, that unskilled workers from the Philippines were being brought in to staff fast food restaurants, but the real crime was large companies, like the Royal Bank of Canada attempting to layoff their IT staff to hire people from India. It was all technically against the rules, but as there was virtually no oversight at all, companies were literally committing visa fraud, all facilitated by major international recruitment companies like Actyl.
The low skilled jobs were grating in their own way because what they were doing was allowing fast food joints, particularly in the communities servicing the oil sector in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan to put cheap labor in place, in some cases, once their rents and fees were deducted, these TFWs were making far less than the provincially-mandated minimum wage, and often housed in pretty astonishingly shitty conditions to boot. In the end, the former Conservative government was forced to largely shut down the TFW program to save itself from embarrassment.
The whole time, of course, if applications weren't being rubber stamped and if the provinces had been enforcing labor standards laws for the foreign workers, this would never happened. Of course, the politicians and the bureaucrats put on a good show of being ever so shocked by the abuses, when one has to infer from the number of abuses and the length of time that it had all gone on, that the whole thing had been a wink-and-nod affair for a long time before the whole thing finally leaked to the press. Naturally a few McDonalds outlets were targeted for fines, but the big companies apologized and were never fully investigated.
The solution I agreed with in the end wasn't to kill the TFW program, because there are sectors in which local labor markets can't fill the need, but rather to make it the first step to immigrating and ultimately becoming a citizen. Barring that, at least enforcing existing laws and regulations would have been a start.
I use mine as a router when I'm out of town. Generally the quality of hotel WiFi is so terrible that I end up tethering. I have an SSH and RDP client on my phone, not pleasant to use, but in an emergency when I have to talk to the office servers, it will do. It's a damned handy device.
My Nexus 5, now over two years old, works fine, and still works with the latest version of Android. It did have an issue with reporting the SIM card missing, but it turned out all I needed to do was take the case off and just re-insert the SIM card, so to my great relief I didn't have to buy a new phone.
My daughter needs a new phone, so I'll probably end up getting a new one for Christmas this year, and gift mine to her. I did that with my iPhone 4, and it is just now that the phone is starting to have some hardware issues.
And yet you do post on the Internet, which means at the very least the last mile is via a right-of-way granted to your cableco or telco.
But, of course, you're talking utter bullshit. Unless you are literally a shut in, then yes, you're usually publicly-funded infrastructure all the time, and if you are a shut in, then whoever is helping you is using that infrastructure.
Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.
Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.
There is debate as to whether Starship Troopers was actual a defense of fascism, or an attempt at satire. I tend to lean towards it being a pro-fascist piece, because it doesn't seem to be very tongue in cheek at all.
There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. The likes of Larry Niven and Heinlein were transformed into pretty reactionary types as they aged. Some, like Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card have always been that way, but most certainly the tension between the more liberal elements in SF and the more conservative elements has been their for decades.
That's not counting the SF writers who just get plain fucking weird. Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Heinlein both wrote some pretty disturbing eroticism in later life.
For quite a while the public ballots worked, but where a group decides to undermine the process by intentionally stacking the vote, well yes, it gets undermined. All these right wing goons are doing is destroying the Hugos.
Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit. As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.
Anything beyond the centrist moderate wing of the Republican party is a pack of frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries that hate just about everything about the modern world.
In the end the studios and advertisers are going to walk. They already are in some cases. Newspapers are the canary in the coalmine. Mainstream advertisers are abandoning them to such an extent that the daily rag in many even medium sized towns is gone, and even the semi-weeklies are in serious trouble. Major newspapers are also suffering major revenue crunches, often with mountains of debt they have to service.
With the TV industry, sooner or later cord cutting and viewing alternatives (legal and illegal) are going to do the same thing to the broadcasters; their product will degrade to the point where advertisers just walk away.
Look at what one would consider the high point of traditional television; the MASH finale. Over 121 million people tuned in on February 28, 1983 to watch the show. For the traditional model it didn't get any better than that. By 1998, with so many more cable options, the Seinfeld finale mustered 76 million viewers. By 2004, a major network show like Friends could only muster 52.5 million, half of the Roots miniseries was able to get in front of a TV in 1977. In reality, the Internet is only finishing what the five hundred channel universe began two decades ago. How can the traditional networks survive with the steady erosion, and how long will the advertisers and the studios stick around to find out?
Slashdot Mirror
No, he's a con artist that uses a cloak of "Evangelism" to maintain the support of his constituency.
Absolutely. Bringing in foreign workers distorts a labor market, very much in business's favor. One of the big defenses of using the TFW program to bring in Asian workers to hand out coffee and burgers was "We can't get anybody to work up here in Frozen Butthole, Alberta", to which my response was "Well, no, you can't get anyone to work in Butthole, Alberta serving coffee for $15, when it costs over $1,000 month for the privilege of sleeping in a closet. If you pay $40 an hour, which is what serving coffee in the frozen tundra is really worth, then you'd be surprised."
One of the biggest scams going was a guy in Northern British Columbia whose company was bringing in Chinese foreign workers, and he'd made himself a litle sideline with a big tenement to house them, and then he'd charge them rent! And the real evil was that because these are sponsored workers, if they bitched, he fired them and they got sent back to the country they came from. The TFW program had quite literally turned some foreign workers into little better than indentured slaves. It was a sort of quasi-legal human trafficking operation, with the Government of Canada and the Provincial governments looking the other way, because, you know "BUSINESS!"
Unless he can start winning some states again, I don't see how he can hope to stop Trump. Before last night, maybe a slim chance, now, forget it. Trump has got the nod, which means Hillary Clinton is the next POTUS.
At least McAfee would be worth a few jokes. Fiorina is only deserving of unmitigated contempt. One of the worst CEOs in recent history, which is astounding, consider the amount of competition for worthless brain dead senior management there is these days.
The guy is a sociopath. He has no sincerely held views, no real beliefs, he's just a pure political animal, a Frank Underwood with eyeliner.
At this point, it just looks like desperation. It's hard to see how anyone is going to stop Trump.
She was an utter moron, the very picture of the idiot CEO who has no fucking idea what the business they've been put in charge of does, and just starts running amok through various business units, building debt with shit purchases, and then firing the R&D people because they can't get the two or three quarter turnarounds the fucking retards put on the Board by the institutional investors (read: corporate rapists) think is needed.
The problem here appears to be fraud. In Canada, we had similar abuses going on with the Temporary Foreign Worker program (the equivalent of an H1B). In general, companies were using a number of different tricks, from putting out job listings with very difficult to fulfill requirements, or in some cases putting out job listings but then rejecting any Canadian applying for the job regardless of qualification. The TFW program was so poorly managed, and the Provinces so unwilling to enforce labor codes, that unskilled workers from the Philippines were being brought in to staff fast food restaurants, but the real crime was large companies, like the Royal Bank of Canada attempting to layoff their IT staff to hire people from India. It was all technically against the rules, but as there was virtually no oversight at all, companies were literally committing visa fraud, all facilitated by major international recruitment companies like Actyl.
The low skilled jobs were grating in their own way because what they were doing was allowing fast food joints, particularly in the communities servicing the oil sector in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan to put cheap labor in place, in some cases, once their rents and fees were deducted, these TFWs were making far less than the provincially-mandated minimum wage, and often housed in pretty astonishingly shitty conditions to boot. In the end, the former Conservative government was forced to largely shut down the TFW program to save itself from embarrassment.
The whole time, of course, if applications weren't being rubber stamped and if the provinces had been enforcing labor standards laws for the foreign workers, this would never happened. Of course, the politicians and the bureaucrats put on a good show of being ever so shocked by the abuses, when one has to infer from the number of abuses and the length of time that it had all gone on, that the whole thing had been a wink-and-nod affair for a long time before the whole thing finally leaked to the press. Naturally a few McDonalds outlets were targeted for fines, but the big companies apologized and were never fully investigated.
The solution I agreed with in the end wasn't to kill the TFW program, because there are sectors in which local labor markets can't fill the need, but rather to make it the first step to immigrating and ultimately becoming a citizen. Barring that, at least enforcing existing laws and regulations would have been a start.
I think most people who even read this particular thread know who the dick is.
As low a creature as I am, at least I'm not an AC
I use mine as a router when I'm out of town. Generally the quality of hotel WiFi is so terrible that I end up tethering. I have an SSH and RDP client on my phone, not pleasant to use, but in an emergency when I have to talk to the office servers, it will do. It's a damned handy device.
My Nexus 5, now over two years old, works fine, and still works with the latest version of Android. It did have an issue with reporting the SIM card missing, but it turned out all I needed to do was take the case off and just re-insert the SIM card, so to my great relief I didn't have to buy a new phone.
My daughter needs a new phone, so I'll probably end up getting a new one for Christmas this year, and gift mine to her. I did that with my iPhone 4, and it is just now that the phone is starting to have some hardware issues.
And yet you do post on the Internet, which means at the very least the last mile is via a right-of-way granted to your cableco or telco.
But, of course, you're talking utter bullshit. Unless you are literally a shut in, then yes, you're usually publicly-funded infrastructure all the time, and if you are a shut in, then whoever is helping you is using that infrastructure.
Can I volunteer you as the first one for the death camps?
As opposed to the regressive right, right?
Can you define Socialism? Because all industrialized economies have since degree of Socialism.
Translation; I'm going to force you to have an unwanted baby, but I bear no responsibility for the end result of the force.
Good old reactionary conservatives. Quick to tell people waht to do, but greedy sociopaths in every other way.
It's fun watching pro-lifers turn into raving morons.
Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.
Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.
There is debate as to whether Starship Troopers was actual a defense of fascism, or an attempt at satire. I tend to lean towards it being a pro-fascist piece, because it doesn't seem to be very tongue in cheek at all.
There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. The likes of Larry Niven and Heinlein were transformed into pretty reactionary types as they aged. Some, like Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card have always been that way, but most certainly the tension between the more liberal elements in SF and the more conservative elements has been their for decades.
That's not counting the SF writers who just get plain fucking weird. Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Heinlein both wrote some pretty disturbing eroticism in later life.
For quite a while the public ballots worked, but where a group decides to undermine the process by intentionally stacking the vote, well yes, it gets undermined. All these right wing goons are doing is destroying the Hugos.
Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit. As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.
Anything beyond the centrist moderate wing of the Republican party is a pack of frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries that hate just about everything about the modern world.
As do several organized crime outfits in Eastern Europe.
In the end the studios and advertisers are going to walk. They already are in some cases. Newspapers are the canary in the coalmine. Mainstream advertisers are abandoning them to such an extent that the daily rag in many even medium sized towns is gone, and even the semi-weeklies are in serious trouble. Major newspapers are also suffering major revenue crunches, often with mountains of debt they have to service.
With the TV industry, sooner or later cord cutting and viewing alternatives (legal and illegal) are going to do the same thing to the broadcasters; their product will degrade to the point where advertisers just walk away.
Look at what one would consider the high point of traditional television; the MASH finale. Over 121 million people tuned in on February 28, 1983 to watch the show. For the traditional model it didn't get any better than that. By 1998, with so many more cable options, the Seinfeld finale mustered 76 million viewers. By 2004, a major network show like Friends could only muster 52.5 million, half of the Roots miniseries was able to get in front of a TV in 1977. In reality, the Internet is only finishing what the five hundred channel universe began two decades ago. How can the traditional networks survive with the steady erosion, and how long will the advertisers and the studios stick around to find out?