Certain cynics will speculate that they got their positions through "nationalized nepotism": instead of their uncle Frank or cousin Chris getting those unqualified sailors put into those jobs, it was their Uncle Sam. Politics.
Or maybe the Navy just can't seem to hire and retain enough competent sailors for the number of ships it has.
Cynics might also suggest that if money needs to be spent on payroll and other benefits to get good recruits and money needs to be spent on ships that are built in Congressional districts, the funding might be skewed towards the ships -- leaving the Navy with ships without enough competent sailors.
Recent (and currently on-going) civil unrest over the legal system's failure to punish a cop for treating his badge like a hunting license may cost the St. Louis metro area the Amazon "second headquarters.
Good.
Times two.
When governments tax existing small and medium-sized businesses more to grant tax breaks to big firms to locate in (or not move out of) a state or city, it's not good for the local economy. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the.s... The jobs "created" or "saved" are conspicuous. The jobs at smaller employers that are lost or never created in the first place are not.
That's one. And the second reason?
If those who are upset about how people react to cops misbehaving as usual get upset enough, maybe they'll do something constructive about it -- like having someone other than cops and prosecutors investigate and prosecute incidents where cops kill people.
"We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong." is a bad idea even when it turns out to be true. It diminishes the credibility of the decision even when it's correct.
Because serious security problems for the business often don't show up immediately.
If users have too little access to data or functionality, they will notice and complain, and pretty quickly. If they are paying customers or internal users who have any clout at all, the problem will get resolved by granting them more access.
If in the course of getting them they access they need (or think they need), they end up getting more access, that's not a problem worth complaining about, they figure -- if they notice it at all. If other users also get access, access that they should not have, that's not a problem worth complaining about, either. Assuming anyone even notices. (Usually. Some rare birds are like me: if they discover they can see or change data they shouldn't be able to, or have access to functionality they should not have, they report it, and try to get it taken away.)
Another (probably more likely) scenario: there was little or no attempt to restrict access in the first place. Nobody complained, because it was released with security problems from the start. "Time to market" and "Time to market with no important security problems" look exactly the same to the people who run the Sales and Marketing departments. (But "time to market with no important security problems" takes longer, and that they can and do notice.)
That excessive access may not ever get used in a way that hurts the business.
Or it might blow up pretty badly, right away or years and years later.
Now, about those state databases containing information about everyone's prescription drugs -- will they have the same level of security that Equifax had?
So, if I'm reading this right, ISPs like Comcast are so bad at providing Internet service in some places that backwater local governments and plucky rag-tag bands of amateurs are able to do what those ISPs don't, can't, or won't
Have they considered hiring out their hard-won expertise?
Probably not. For one thing, they'd probably need all sorts of licenses and permits and registrations and certifications to protect, uh, the public. That's it. To protect the public.
Shouldn't there be some punctuation around the name of the magazine, so it doesn't look like some oracle or god named "Science" is providing that information, rather than a prominent publication?
Could have been worse, I suppose. "In accordance with the prophecy", for instance.
Of all the taxes, only the income tax has the feared audit. Occasionally a store gets busted for not collecting sales tax or collecting it but not paying it to the state or county or city or federal government, but that's not a fear that hangs over people's heads. Nobody talk about "weaponizing" the federal excise tax on tires to hurt political opponents. Why the fear?
Three reasons: complexity, amount, powers.
The federal income tax laws are complicated.
In fact, they are too complicated to be legislated laws. The Congress enacts laws which exempt some income from taxation under some circumstances, and provides credits under some circumstances, and requires some things be reported under some circumstances, but doesn't provide all the details. There's just too much. So the law (legislation) doesn't provide all the specifics, and the IRS fills in the details. It writes them into the regulations (regulatory law). Even then, they aren't always entirely clear and just (by the loose standards of the federal government). Cases may then go to court, and a ruling may come out overturning some part of legislation or regulation, or modifying it (case law).
So, all three branches of government are involved in creating the law (legislation, regulations, case law) which people have to obey. There's a lot of law to obey. Even IRS employees can't always give the same answer to the taxpayer's questions about what is required and what is not.
It's not just complex, it's also expensive.
If the most a person might pay was 3% of their income, an audit wouldn't be catastrophic. There's a rumor -- which I have so far have not been able to confirm or disprove -- that when the income tax was proposed a century ago, some wanted an upper limit of perhaps 10% on it. But that was argued down, because it was feared that if a limit was included, the tax might someday go up to that. Now there is no limit, not even 100%, other than the wisdom, restraint, and integrity of the federal legislators, bureaucrats, and courts. (Insert own joke here.)
It's not just complex and expensive, it's also rather arbitrary.
The IRS has a lot of relatively unchecked power. The IRS can freeze bank accounts, demand documents, impose or waive hefty fines and interest -- much or all of it without the involvement of the courts. And the burden of proof then falls on you. You can take them to court (judicial court) if you think you've been wronged, if you can afford it, and maybe you can win. And if you win, will the IRS employees who wronged you be punished?
Being upset about the IRS using social media to find targets for its audits is considering a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's like raging against how slave catchers use specific vague provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, rather than objecting to slavery itself.
The constitutional amendment that authorized alcohol prohibition was (mostly) repealed. It's time to do the same for the amendment that authorized the income tax.
"Shortage" means either the people griping don't want to pay what the sellers are asking (whether it be software developers or fidget spinner makers), or the sellers have for some reason not chosen to charge all the market will bear (because they don't want to seem like dicks, they goofed on pricing or quantity, or there's a law against it).
Pony up the money and buy that Tickle Me Elmo on the, ahem, "secondary market", or pay people what it'll take to get them to work for you, or whatever, or quit yer griping.
Frankly, I'd prefer they create a database of crimes by cops.
Or rather -- since cops rarely get prosecuted, much less convicted, for actions that would be considered crimes if committed by non-"heroes" -- a database of, um, dubious actions by cops. Killing pet dogs for no apparently reason. Forcibly exploring bodily orifices under questionable circumstances. Busting into homes without warrants -- for that address. That sort of thing.
Uh, oh. That has on occasion worked out rather badly. (Took my anti-hyperbole pill this morning. The label warns of a possible side-effect: understatement.)
Actually, we did see it, some years back, in California. Though some California-esque FUBARness, the state government couldn't pay its bills right away, so it issued some sort of chit or voucher or scrip (I forget the details).
It wasn't money, of course, because, well, it just wasn't, OK? Get off my back!
So the state was buying office supplies and electricity and whatnot with these post-dated-checks-that-were-not-really-checks-and-were-not-even-post-dated slips of paper.
Kind of a bummer if you ran a business and wanted to pay your employees, and all you has was chit. I think eventually banks starting lending money, using this chit as collateral. It'd be good as money, once the state government pulled its collective head out of its collective ass and started honoring that chit.
What does that mean, exactly? That phrase has baffled me for years.
If that backing were reduced to, say, 50% of "the full faith and credit of the US Government", what would be different? What about a less drastic cut to say, 90% of "the full faith and credit of the US Government"?
Or were you being sarcastic, and I missed the joke?
Two decades from now, the company will threaten to move the facility out of state unless tax breaks continue. Even without ordinary corruption (bribes, etc), this sort of thing is awful. Businesses too small or too hard to move end up getting stuck with taxes, instead.
But it does illustrate that tax rates matter, which some dolts have a hard time understanding.
We are soon to move from the building where I started working for the company (shortly after it was acquired, a few years before the acquirer got acquired) to another building. The new building will have the standard workplace layout of the latter acquirer: open plan. Word is, the new location was obtained and furnished by corporate, with little or no local advice or control.
It will be interesting to see if new employee interviews result in anyone actually accepting jobs there. And what the corporate response will be if there is an ever-increasing number of open reqs.
I'm not sure if this is just ordinary bureaucratic cluelessness on the part of the home office, or part of a deliberate strategy of replacing the current workforce with less expensive staffers from the company's overseas offices.
While I can't dismiss the deliberate strategy explanation, bureaucratic cluelessness is a real possibility. Data point: The corporate HR people kept sending upper management-level resumes when we needed to fill a data-entry position with a temp.
Slashdot Mirror
Help! My browser keeps correcting "public-private partnership" into "excellent graft opportunity".
That's not right.
Certain cynics will speculate that they got their positions through "nationalized nepotism": instead of their uncle Frank or cousin Chris getting those unqualified sailors put into those jobs, it was their Uncle Sam. Politics.
Or maybe the Navy just can't seem to hire and retain enough competent sailors for the number of ships it has.
Cynics might also suggest that if money needs to be spent on payroll and other benefits to get good recruits and money needs to be spent on ships that are built in Congressional districts, the funding might be skewed towards the ships -- leaving the Navy with ships without enough competent sailors.
Recent (and currently on-going) civil unrest over the legal system's failure to punish a cop for treating his badge like a hunting license may cost the St. Louis metro area the Amazon "second headquarters.
Good.
Times two.
When governments tax existing small and medium-sized businesses more to grant tax breaks to big firms to locate in (or not move out of) a state or city, it's not good for the local economy. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the.s... The jobs "created" or "saved" are conspicuous. The jobs at smaller employers that are lost or never created in the first place are not.
That's one. And the second reason?
If those who are upset about how people react to cops misbehaving as usual get upset enough, maybe they'll do something constructive about it -- like having someone other than cops and prosecutors investigate and prosecute incidents where cops kill people.
"We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong." is a bad idea even when it turns out to be true. It diminishes the credibility of the decision even when it's correct.
Why would some one do this?
Because serious security problems for the business often don't show up immediately.
If users have too little access to data or functionality, they will notice and complain, and pretty quickly. If they are paying customers or internal users who have any clout at all, the problem will get resolved by granting them more access.
If in the course of getting them they access they need (or think they need), they end up getting more access, that's not a problem worth complaining about, they figure -- if they notice it at all. If other users also get access, access that they should not have, that's not a problem worth complaining about, either. Assuming anyone even notices. (Usually. Some rare birds are like me: if they discover they can see or change data they shouldn't be able to, or have access to functionality they should not have, they report it, and try to get it taken away.)
Another (probably more likely) scenario: there was little or no attempt to restrict access in the first place. Nobody complained, because it was released with security problems from the start. "Time to market" and "Time to market with no important security problems" look exactly the same to the people who run the Sales and Marketing departments. (But "time to market with no important security problems" takes longer, and that they can and do notice.)
That excessive access may not ever get used in a way that hurts the business.
Or it might blow up pretty badly, right away or years and years later.
It's been said -- 90% seriously -- that AI is computers doing things that require human intelligence, that computers can't do yet.
Once computers can do it, it's "pattern recognition" or "heuristic blah-blah-blah" or whatever.
The recently developed specific ability or method has a name, so it's no longer considered to be "artificial intelligence" when a computer does it.
Golly!
News to me. I never go there. Really!
Now, about those state databases containing information about everyone's prescription drugs -- will they have the same level of security that Equifax had?
My guess: no.
Didn't _Popular Science_ publishing something about this a few decades ago? Perhaps around the time they were hyping the Rolamite and ROVAC?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=popular.science+rolamite
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=popular.science+rovac
So, if I'm reading this right, ISPs like Comcast are so bad at providing Internet service in some places that backwater local governments and plucky rag-tag bands of amateurs are able to do what those ISPs don't, can't, or won't
Have they considered hiring out their hard-won expertise?
Probably not. For one thing, they'd probably need all sorts of licenses and permits and registrations and certifications to protect, uh, the public. That's it. To protect the public.
It was pretty much a given that we'd get one. We haven't elected someone other than The Lesser of Two Evils in over a century, with no end in sight.
Well, not "we". Those other voters. I haven't voted for a TLotE candidate in decades.
Shouldn't there be some punctuation around the name of the magazine, so it doesn't look like some oracle or god named "Science" is providing that information, rather than a prominent publication?
Could have been worse, I suppose. "In accordance with the prophecy", for instance.
Andrew Smith is Scottish?
What a shock!
Of all the taxes, only the income tax has the feared audit. Occasionally a store gets busted for not collecting sales tax or collecting it but not paying it to the state or county or city or federal government, but that's not a fear that hangs over people's heads. Nobody talk about "weaponizing" the federal excise tax on tires to hurt political opponents. Why the fear?
Three reasons: complexity, amount, powers.
The federal income tax laws are complicated.
In fact, they are too complicated to be legislated laws. The Congress enacts laws which exempt some income from taxation under some circumstances, and provides credits under some circumstances, and requires some things be reported under some circumstances, but doesn't provide all the details. There's just too much. So the law (legislation) doesn't provide all the specifics, and the IRS fills in the details. It writes them into the regulations (regulatory law). Even then, they aren't always entirely clear and just (by the loose standards of the federal government). Cases may then go to court, and a ruling may come out overturning some part of legislation or regulation, or modifying it (case law).
So, all three branches of government are involved in creating the law (legislation, regulations, case law) which people have to obey. There's a lot of law to obey. Even IRS employees can't always give the same answer to the taxpayer's questions about what is required and what is not.
It's not just complex, it's also expensive.
If the most a person might pay was 3% of their income, an audit wouldn't be catastrophic. There's a rumor -- which I have so far have not been able to confirm or disprove -- that when the income tax was proposed a century ago, some wanted an upper limit of perhaps 10% on it. But that was argued down, because it was feared that if a limit was included, the tax might someday go up to that. Now there is no limit, not even 100%, other than the wisdom, restraint, and integrity of the federal legislators, bureaucrats, and courts. (Insert own joke here.)
It's not just complex and expensive, it's also rather arbitrary.
The IRS has a lot of relatively unchecked power. The IRS can freeze bank accounts, demand documents, impose or waive hefty fines and interest -- much or all of it without the involvement of the courts. And the burden of proof then falls on you. You can take them to court (judicial court) if you think you've been wronged, if you can afford it, and maybe you can win. And if you win, will the IRS employees who wronged you be punished?
Being upset about the IRS using social media to find targets for its audits is considering a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's like raging against how slave catchers use specific vague provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, rather than objecting to slavery itself.
The constitutional amendment that authorized alcohol prohibition was (mostly) repealed. It's time to do the same for the amendment that authorized the income tax.
Do you wear a mask when you bust heads and vandalize property, too, Anonymous Coward?
You know, like a Klansman?
"Shortage" means either the people griping don't want to pay what the sellers are asking (whether it be software developers or fidget spinner makers), or the sellers have for some reason not chosen to charge all the market will bear (because they don't want to seem like dicks, they goofed on pricing or quantity, or there's a law against it).
Pony up the money and buy that Tickle Me Elmo on the, ahem, "secondary market", or pay people what it'll take to get them to work for you, or whatever, or quit yer griping.
Every one of those Confederacy memorial statues I've seen in the news has not been shiny, so I don't get the remark.
Or did I misunderstand again?
"Winter is coming."
A GoT viewer might be able to tell me if this is funny. All I know about GoT I learned from memes.
Frankly, I'd prefer they create a database of crimes by cops.
Or rather -- since cops rarely get prosecuted, much less convicted, for actions that would be considered crimes if committed by non-"heroes" -- a database of, um, dubious actions by cops. Killing pet dogs for no apparently reason. Forcibly exploring bodily orifices under questionable circumstances. Busting into homes without warrants -- for that address. That sort of thing.
Not going to hold my breath, waiting on that one.
twitter is now officially "too big to fail".
Uh, oh. That has on occasion worked out rather badly. (Took my anti-hyperbole pill this morning. The label warns of a possible side-effect: understatement.)
You've got to be forking kidding me!
Actually, we did see it, some years back, in California. Though some California-esque FUBARness, the state government couldn't pay its bills right away, so it issued some sort of chit or voucher or scrip (I forget the details).
It wasn't money, of course, because, well, it just wasn't, OK? Get off my back!
So the state was buying office supplies and electricity and whatnot with these post-dated-checks-that-were-not-really-checks-and-were-not-even-post-dated slips of paper.
Kind of a bummer if you ran a business and wanted to pay your employees, and all you has was chit. I think eventually banks starting lending money, using this chit as collateral. It'd be good as money, once the state government pulled its collective head out of its collective ass and started honoring that chit.
the full faith and credit of the US Government
What does that mean, exactly? That phrase has baffled me for years.
If that backing were reduced to, say, 50% of "the full faith and credit of the US Government", what would be different? What about a less drastic cut to say, 90% of "the full faith and credit of the US Government"?
Or were you being sarcastic, and I missed the joke?
Two decades from now, the company will threaten to move the facility out of state unless tax breaks continue. Even without ordinary corruption (bribes, etc), this sort of thing is awful. Businesses too small or too hard to move end up getting stuck with taxes, instead.
But it does illustrate that tax rates matter, which some dolts have a hard time understanding.
Apparently they didn't learn from previous experiences with communist countries. SovUnion comes to mind.
We are soon to move from the building where I started working for the company (shortly after it was acquired, a few years before the acquirer got acquired) to another building. The new building will have the standard workplace layout of the latter acquirer: open plan. Word is, the new location was obtained and furnished by corporate, with little or no local advice or control.
It will be interesting to see if new employee interviews result in anyone actually accepting jobs there. And what the corporate response will be if there is an ever-increasing number of open reqs.
I'm not sure if this is just ordinary bureaucratic cluelessness on the part of the home office, or part of a deliberate strategy of replacing the current workforce with less expensive staffers from the company's overseas offices.
While I can't dismiss the deliberate strategy explanation, bureaucratic cluelessness is a real possibility. Data point: The corporate HR people kept sending upper management-level resumes when we needed to fill a data-entry position with a temp.