What sort of privilege does the fat neckbeard have who can't derive any value from it? More to the point, how does that actually affect anyone?
That's like telling a poor sharecropper in 1870 that since he just turned 35, he could now (technically) be elected President and so that's awesome for him, since a woman couldn't ever be President, 35 or not. I'm sure that improved his self esteem and reduced his worries about how he was going to feed his family through the bad harvest.
I want to be clear here. I know women take a lot more shit in the workplace than most nerds realize. And much of it is completely unacceptable. It actually sounds like the shit that gets made fun of in comedy. Cat calling, persistently asking women out on dates who have politely turned them down, assuming that the women are the ones who set up dinners and appointments even when their job has nothing to do with that. Many nerds don't actually do that sort of thing, but many do.
But in the end, you can't blindly throw a theoretical privilege at an individual and discount their conditions. There are foreign billionaires in the US who probably have more power over the US Government than I do, or even myself and ten thousand of my closest friends, yet I can vote and they can't. You need to take into account the realities of situations, and those who cast about the idea of privilege at people who derive no value from it is a mockery.
I think both sides need to do some introspection about how they actually act and what assumptions they make. And they need to talk to one another. Men need to talk to women about what actual things have happened to them which have made them angry, and women need to understand the whole picture of why they are having problems in certain fields, or if that even represents a problem to begin with.
And both sides need to understand that, male or female, there are just some people who are assholes and perhaps you shouldn't generalize to a whole sex.
Perhaps you are right, but perhaps you are misjudging what "merit" is actually being tested for with a company like MS.
Microsoft, despite those mediocre products, did something right... make money selling software. Is the job of a company like Microsoft to sell "good" software, or to sell a product, no matter what its value to specific application?
One might argue that they almost certainly worked on a meritocratic basis. They have excellent marketeers and strategists. Oh and some passable development teams too.
Some people will actually support one side socially, and vote for the other in the ballot box. The reason for doing that is your friends and popular culture might think you're a "socialist" or you're "intolerant" if you vote one way or another.
While it is better to be fully out there with your beliefs, its not always an option. What if you were a closeted gay individual in the Deep South who feared complete ostracism or even physical harm, but definitely wanted to vote for a candidate who would support gay rights? What if you were a member of an unpopular religion who tries to keep their beliefs private, but now has them on display for people who refuse to be tolerant.
You know as soon as it would become public record, that some asshole is going to put your vote and you on a map using Google Maps and spread it around. We've already seen that with gun license owners.
And what keeps the government from "hacking" the current voting process? They just use different means. And it would be caught out the same way as you would "hacking". That is to say, someone would come forward for either patriotic or self-serving reasons.
Sure, if there was online voting, the NSA itself, as opposed to the other agencies, would be more likely to have the resources to do it. However, why do you think that they won't get Snowdened, like they already have?
Snowden went public based on some shady dealings, but actually hacking and controlling the vote? I don't know who you think works at the NSA, but it is abundantly clear that it is not 100% staffed by people who would let that slide.
I don't mind seeing this here, although I was a little confused about why it is something that the editors thought that most of the audience was interested in on Slashdot.
I do realize that articles tend to run far afield on occasion, especially on politics, but there does seem to be a certain sort of article that tends to draw interest here, let alone two parter video article.
It is sort of like the History channel playing something that isn't Hitler or Aliens. Or Hitler being an alien. Or Nostradamus... predicting Hitler AND aliens.
AOL still reaches people who can't get broadband and need to use modems. Poor sods.
The thing is, unlike with broadband, where AOL was just some walled garden app and some content sites, with modems, they're actually a real ISP. And they're really the only national modem based ISP still in existence worth talking about.
You don't have to be a little old lady to be using AOL. You just have to live far enough off the broadband network to need to use modems still.
And as someone who worked at AOL itself not so long ago, no one was more shocked than I was when the execs announced that they'd come to the realization that while dialup was declining, it wasn't actually doing so in a precipitous fashion any more. When you take away the loss of all of the broadband adopters, AOL still had a substantial business in dialup, and their dialup infrastructure was paid off and/or low maintenance. AOL, due to its size, is the last man standing from the dialup age.
Dialup will eventually end, but it could take decades to finally drive a nail in that coffin.
I was surprised at the price tag, but not incredibly. They are pretty big players in online advertising, and they do have some content that people look at regularly.
They haven't been a hot company for almost 20 years now, but it is amazing the number of assets and random shit you can pick up quickly which then slowly unravels as you wind down.
Just think of the shit Google is going to have once they start working their way down to irrelevance. Well, assuming they can make a profit on anything but search, that is.
George Bush was elected by close to a majority of the people of the United States. The NSA exists due to law created by the elected legislative branch.
Or do you mean that the people have to have approved every decision for it to have public support?
There are a lot of people who support the *mission* of something like the NSA, while not enjoying some of the ways they go about fulfilling that mission. I suppose you could say that the warrantless wiretapping situations and dragnet on electronic communication does not have popular support, but would we directly support many of the things that we nevertheless know must exist by the nature of the mission of our intelligence agencies if we were directly asked?
Here's some other things our intelligence agencies do: breaking and entering, obtaining foreign agents via extortion, spying on our allies and their military capabilities. They also spy on the opposition political parties in foreign countries and suggest which we should support based on our interests. Of course, we also likely have the occasional shoot out with foreign police and counter-intelligence agencies. Shall I go on?
The fact that we do have civilian oversight and that our people do affect how we go about intelligence gathering is probably head and shoulders above the public support that you'd find in a lot of other countries.
The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" rule is merely a means to simplify thinking about problems. It isn't a physical law or a bound of reality. There is nothing preventing the existence of complexity.
It is also a subjective rule. You are defining what is "extraordinary" based on your own view of the issue, mostly because you believe that "no deity" is less extraordinary than "one or more deities". Historically, however, that actually puts you firmly in the minority.
There are other people who believe the idea that the universe came into being *without* a deity would be an extraordinary concept.
Which one of you are correct? I have no idea. You're both stipulating something based on your own tastes.
Neither of you can "prove" or "disprove" an entity that is a) defined as the arbiter of reality itself and; b) does not wish to be tested outside of direct revelation.
You can't falsify a hypothesis that you can't design an experiment to test. That does *not* mean that the hypothesis is incorrect (or correct), merely that you lack the capability to prove it.
In the end, science is a useful tool that should not be lightly challenged on ground where it can deal with experimental data.
However, discussions about deities is where science is not at all on firm ground. That's why I can listen to smart people like Dawkins and despite the fact that I know they are good scientists, I don't see them as any more qualified to discuss the existence of deities than anyone else. It is just to their taste to believe otherwise and they can make arguments all day, but they've got no more actual proof of their assertion than the Pope has of his.
Of course, that is because the labels crowd out any other competition. You want to get press? Well there's a bunch of labels out there eating up PR opportunities and shutting down other methods of distribution. You show up on free internet radio? Time to shut those down.
One of the huge benefits of why I went to internet radio/streaming was so that I could discover music that the radio was much less likely to play for me, and was increasingly NOT playing for me. I recall hearing a DJ announce they were playing some "new song", which had not only been out for weeks, but was authored by someone who had actually been dead for years. And then, that song is played once an hour.
Not to mention on my road trips, I used to flip stations, only for the same song to be played in something like a 10 second time delay from the supposedly competing station I had switched from.
That's because labels do their best to write rules that keep their current hot properties hot, and squeeze out competition. You want my new hot song? You need to make sure that you are playing it x times per hour, and you have to prop it up by only playing ten year old songs around it, so it sounds fresher than it actually is.
I don't want to deprive anyone of a living, but I'm tired of being told what is "hot" and knowing there are thousands of artists out there, but I'm getting spoon fed what a label wants me to see. That's why people only know of two labels, because newer methods of distribution and promotion are still being choked off my the current industry.
Artists do get regularly screwed by labels. That said, most of the hate is just due to the business practices of the publishers, the artist being screwed thing is just extra kindling.
Most people are annoyed about how the publishing business is working hard to undermine better ways of obtaining music because they want to set up their tollbooths to not just monetize, but to monetize in a manner that least upsets their current business model. That means they work to kill anything that they can't figure out how to make money off of.
I really don't begrudge them their middleman fees, but they've become obnoxious about it, and adding to that, they seem to be a glamorous business with rich and ostentatious artists and executives which sort of puts the lie to the fact that they are hurting. The only way they are actually hurting is that they still want to be selling people CDs for $20+ per disc with one song that people want to hear. They used to be leading the way to getting artists to their audience. Now, they just seem to want to charge for the privilege of letting us listen to the artists we want to hear.
Classifications assist people in understanding the dynamics that make things like the processes behind CEO pay understandable. It's easy to say that they're "greedy" or "corrupt" or some other useless moralizing explanation of what is going on, but it really doesn't explain it. Poor people can be greedy and corrupt too, and that doesn't make them squat.
It's easy to poke fun of buzzwords as well. The difference between the gibberish you wrote and the buzzwords that those people use is that their gibberish makes them shitloads of money.
I'm less concerned about getting angry about the situation and more concerned about understanding how you can have what appears to be non-performing executives make metric fucktons of money. The answer is very simply that they get their money the same way that a popular artist or a popular singer does it. That is to say, some degree of skill or talent, followed up constant, and merciless promotion of themselves and their story as a product. And, like rock stars or other people who sign their contracts before they have to produce anything new, CEOs don't get fired for shit work, they just don't get re-signed.
You're probably confusing my "rock star" comparison with me thinking CEOs or people like that are talented artists or something. While some certainly have real skills, I'm more concerned about the comparison of how they make deals for employment and obtain bulletproof compensation (ie. they sign actual contracts with provisions on a more equal footing to corporations than most individuals can).
Doesn't quite work that way. There is a division of labor out there which may or may not be fair, but here it is:
Unskilled Skilled Talent
Your burger flippers are unskilled. The problem with that is that anyone can be unskilled at something, so there's always a large pool of people to pick from. More people than any number of unskilled jobs available. If they want jobs, they have to compete somehow. If they have no skills, then price is all they can compete on. "Retraining" an unskilled worker is pointless because, while it is relatively easy to do, you're still doing unskilled labor.
Your skilled workers are not just plumbers and electricians, but also most IT workers too. They can get screwed, but can usually find a job if they are willing to relocate. However, there is a danger that your skill itself becomes useless, or that there is a local glut of people who do what you do. Skilled workers are the most likely to be able to play the market based on re-training and movement. However, they're not immune from layoffs. Re-training will help them, but only if the re-training is close enough to what they did before where they can apply experience to that new job. Otherwise, off to the unskilled pool with you.
Finally, talent. The reason you don't "offshore" CEOs is because CEOs and rock stars and distinguished scientists are themselves considered valuable as unique individuals. They don't just have a skill, they personally have resources which are believed to improve your company aside from what they know or how many hours they work.
To be honest, there are CEOs out there who look like idiots in their field, but invariably, they're hired because of something they bring to the table. They know people, they are superb marketers, they're incredibly brilliant (even if past their prime) scientists, or they just have a brand. It doesn't have to be a CEO, it can be an asshole superstar programmer with as much gift for self-promotion as for coding.
My latest example of this is a senior executive who was at one place I used to work. He introduced a lot of interesting concepts, but didn't really develop those into a stable product. When I came on, I determined that he didn't even calculate how much his latest database was going to cost us per user. In fact, he didn't even get a price quote. In short, he was a walking disaster. Except....
Except he was a brilliant sales engineer who could talk to executives and make them interested in our product just by looking at some slides. We landed a huge deal and now we have a pile of shit, but when we get that pile of shit fixed, we're in a great place. I may have torn my hair out at the poor decisions that were made, but at least I had something to fight for, whereas we could have had a tight, perfect app with zero customers.
Or perhaps we could have had a great app and still gotten the good deal. That's the downside of talent, you don't always know if the brand is more than the marketing, but when it works... it works.
Yesterday, I watched a video from 1997 where Gil Amelio from Apple was introducing what would eventually become MacOS X. That video also had one other feature. There where two words on a slide brought everyone to a standing ovation: Steve Jobs. The talent had arrived.
Don't get me wrong, being the "talent" doesn't make you smarter or better, necessarily. It does mean you have a brand, though. And it is impossible for us to have a realistic discussion of why CEO's make what they make without understanding that they aren't paid for how much they work, or for what they know. For whatever reason, they're paid because they are who they are, and who they are is perceived to be a force multiplier of some form.
Of course, CEO's are offshored all the time. But no one calls it that, because it is a completely different process. They're business rock stars, and a lot of the same crap that goes for that type of rock star goes for them too. Including the ridiculous pay, and often the bad behavior as well.
Having worked as a contractor, the health insurance benefits are a big deal, although I'd say that it is likely his LTE work is by choice at this point. You'd usually take the LTE work to have a soft landing while you work on a full-time job. In that sense, it was a good deal.
However, for some people, insurance is not really a huge concern. Perhaps single and/or young. They should be careful that they don't go too long that way, or they might find health issues creeping up on them.
If I were that person, I'd start setting a date where I was working to get on a better health care plan via employment or something, but it can be a rational choice for them at this point.
You'll usually know you're getting a promotion because management doesn't usually spring "SURPRISE YOU'RE A MANAGER NOW!" on people in the context of bringing in H1-Bs or offshoring. Nobody in their right mind promotes someone in that scenario without preparing them for their new responsibilities.
Certainly, if they are going to get a replacement for this person because of an impending promotion, you want to *tell them that* so that the promoted person doesn't hilariously think that they're actually getting replaced and jump ship.
Note, in many places, you may get a promotion, but you usually train your replacement in your role *after* you get the promotion. If I go from engineer to manager, people are still coming to me for what I did before until I hand it off. As manager, you now supervise people who do what you used to do, but ultimately, you're still actually responsible for those items now. If you don't have staff to do it, *you* are still responsible for getting it done somehow.
Oddly enough, I trained some people to do a portion of my job in India, and then I stayed at the company I was at until I felt the company was going into the shitter too much for me to stay.
That said, plenty of people lost their jobs at that company and I felt a little like I wouldn't get cut. I'd have to say that in retrospect, that was an unwise for me to think, but I got off lucky.
If you're training replacements in India, it doesn't matter if *your* job is the one that gets cut, really. It means that a) you work for a company that is economizing in a bad manner, and b) it means there is a significant probability that you are now available to be cut at any point in the future.
In that case, you should intersperse your training time with interviewing time. You aren't leaving because you're going to get fired, although that is definitely possible. You're leaving because while you may not get fired personally, you will almost certainly work in a less desirable workplace after *everyone else* is cut.
One cost of "surviving" layoffs is that the new replacements usually suck, especially if they are off-shore or H1-Bs. That means the competent people left over now have more work they have to do, no more pay, little prospect of any extra pay (economizing, remember?), and they need to go through people in another country, or people who are less trained and probably have poor English communication skills in order to get things done.
There are people who stay with a company like an Edison because they have always worked there, and they don't want to move. Perhaps Edison *used to* be a good place to work and they believe that the downturn is temporary. Those people are going to be either in an unemployment line, or they're going to be overworked after something like this.
That is not to say that off-shoring or H1-B is invariably bad. It *is* invariably bad, however, when you're training them as replacements.
Or Bill Gates' kid. Considering Gates and Allen used time on a PDP-10 at Harvard which was financed by DARPA to compile and work on their earliest stuff like MS BASIC.
A lot of success stories know how to use other people's resources to make it big. This person is just trying to figure out how to do the same thing.
I am not really concerned personally about him doing that. If his company lets him get away with it, that's up to them. I am not incredibly interested in pointing out that the company is technically paying for his time to produce products for them, so he shouldn't be using the time they paid for to write stuff for himself.
However, I do believe that if he a) does it on his own time and b) does it on his own resources, he should own what he writes. In a perfect world, he should try and have a contract, but I do agree with people that think this will be a tough road unless he's a special snowflake like a hired gun or a CTO where the company will consider such a deal as part of employment. Unless he is, he's probably best with making sure the work has none of the hallmarks of being done using company resources, and switching employers and waiting a reasonable period before he goes live with the software. Or alternately, keeping sales on the down low until he switches employers.
Short story: contract is best, but likely impossible. Keep it on your own resources and your own time, and if you sell while still employed there, obscure the fact you are doing that as much as possible. And whatever you do, do NOT sell to some customer of your current company who might then think to go back to your current employer to complain about the quality of your work.
I think some people are just confused by the whole idea of factories in the US. We keep being told that all of that "factory-stuff" happens in China now.
Well... *someday* that same line that takes you to Reston is also going all the way to Dulles. Granted, the emphasis is on "someday", but at least the Silver Line is a real thing that is actually being built. Just late and over budget. Like everything else.
Contrast with extending the Orange line to Centreville, which is not happening and probably never will this century. Oh they're eminent domain-ing the I-66 corridor so you can fit more cars on it and charge tolls, but it will still be not enough and you're just adding more noise and pollution. Bah.
There's just something wrong with that statement in regard to "increasing focus" and "decreasing distractions". I'm having trouble putting my finger on just what seems off to me...
Everyone seems to have a problem with suburban sprawl. Now the affluent are deciding to move back to the city center and we're complaining that there are too many of them and they want to rebuild and fix up the infrastructure?
Which is it?
Yeah, it drives up property value. Guess what, that's what naturally happens when you add services and make the place look better.
I'm all for maintaining historical housing, but how do you bring people into city centers and maintain the relatively low population density of historical buildings?
CO2 for us isn't a pollutant, we just can't breathe it. If you put too much of anything but oxygen in a room, we wouldn't be able to breathe that either. Nitrogen is something that no one considers a "pollutant", but we can't respire in a room with 100% nitrogen in it either, even though we do pretty well with 70 percent or more Nitrogen every day.
Pollutants disturb processes, CO2 is *part* of a very important process, it's just out of balance right now.
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of privilege does the fat neckbeard have who can't derive any value from it? More to the point, how does that actually affect anyone?
That's like telling a poor sharecropper in 1870 that since he just turned 35, he could now (technically) be elected President and so that's awesome for him, since a woman couldn't ever be President, 35 or not. I'm sure that improved his self esteem and reduced his worries about how he was going to feed his family through the bad harvest.
I want to be clear here. I know women take a lot more shit in the workplace than most nerds realize. And much of it is completely unacceptable. It actually sounds like the shit that gets made fun of in comedy. Cat calling, persistently asking women out on dates who have politely turned them down, assuming that the women are the ones who set up dinners and appointments even when their job has nothing to do with that. Many nerds don't actually do that sort of thing, but many do.
But in the end, you can't blindly throw a theoretical privilege at an individual and discount their conditions. There are foreign billionaires in the US who probably have more power over the US Government than I do, or even myself and ten thousand of my closest friends, yet I can vote and they can't. You need to take into account the realities of situations, and those who cast about the idea of privilege at people who derive no value from it is a mockery.
I think both sides need to do some introspection about how they actually act and what assumptions they make. And they need to talk to one another. Men need to talk to women about what actual things have happened to them which have made them angry, and women need to understand the whole picture of why they are having problems in certain fields, or if that even represents a problem to begin with.
And both sides need to understand that, male or female, there are just some people who are assholes and perhaps you shouldn't generalize to a whole sex.
Perhaps you are right, but perhaps you are misjudging what "merit" is actually being tested for with a company like MS.
Microsoft, despite those mediocre products, did something right... make money selling software. Is the job of a company like Microsoft to sell "good" software, or to sell a product, no matter what its value to specific application?
One might argue that they almost certainly worked on a meritocratic basis. They have excellent marketeers and strategists. Oh and some passable development teams too.
Some people will actually support one side socially, and vote for the other in the ballot box. The reason for doing that is your friends and popular culture might think you're a "socialist" or you're "intolerant" if you vote one way or another.
While it is better to be fully out there with your beliefs, its not always an option. What if you were a closeted gay individual in the Deep South who feared complete ostracism or even physical harm, but definitely wanted to vote for a candidate who would support gay rights? What if you were a member of an unpopular religion who tries to keep their beliefs private, but now has them on display for people who refuse to be tolerant.
You know as soon as it would become public record, that some asshole is going to put your vote and you on a map using Google Maps and spread it around. We've already seen that with gun license owners.
And what keeps the government from "hacking" the current voting process? They just use different means. And it would be caught out the same way as you would "hacking". That is to say, someone would come forward for either patriotic or self-serving reasons.
Sure, if there was online voting, the NSA itself, as opposed to the other agencies, would be more likely to have the resources to do it. However, why do you think that they won't get Snowdened, like they already have?
Snowden went public based on some shady dealings, but actually hacking and controlling the vote? I don't know who you think works at the NSA, but it is abundantly clear that it is not 100% staffed by people who would let that slide.
I don't mind seeing this here, although I was a little confused about why it is something that the editors thought that most of the audience was interested in on Slashdot.
I do realize that articles tend to run far afield on occasion, especially on politics, but there does seem to be a certain sort of article that tends to draw interest here, let alone two parter video article.
It is sort of like the History channel playing something that isn't Hitler or Aliens. Or Hitler being an alien. Or Nostradamus... predicting Hitler AND aliens.
AOL still reaches people who can't get broadband and need to use modems. Poor sods.
The thing is, unlike with broadband, where AOL was just some walled garden app and some content sites, with modems, they're actually a real ISP. And they're really the only national modem based ISP still in existence worth talking about.
You don't have to be a little old lady to be using AOL. You just have to live far enough off the broadband network to need to use modems still.
And as someone who worked at AOL itself not so long ago, no one was more shocked than I was when the execs announced that they'd come to the realization that while dialup was declining, it wasn't actually doing so in a precipitous fashion any more. When you take away the loss of all of the broadband adopters, AOL still had a substantial business in dialup, and their dialup infrastructure was paid off and/or low maintenance. AOL, due to its size, is the last man standing from the dialup age.
Dialup will eventually end, but it could take decades to finally drive a nail in that coffin.
I was surprised at the price tag, but not incredibly. They are pretty big players in online advertising, and they do have some content that people look at regularly.
They haven't been a hot company for almost 20 years now, but it is amazing the number of assets and random shit you can pick up quickly which then slowly unravels as you wind down.
Just think of the shit Google is going to have once they start working their way down to irrelevance. Well, assuming they can make a profit on anything but search, that is.
George Bush was elected by close to a majority of the people of the United States. The NSA exists due to law created by the elected legislative branch.
Or do you mean that the people have to have approved every decision for it to have public support?
There are a lot of people who support the *mission* of something like the NSA, while not enjoying some of the ways they go about fulfilling that mission. I suppose you could say that the warrantless wiretapping situations and dragnet on electronic communication does not have popular support, but would we directly support many of the things that we nevertheless know must exist by the nature of the mission of our intelligence agencies if we were directly asked?
Here's some other things our intelligence agencies do: breaking and entering, obtaining foreign agents via extortion, spying on our allies and their military capabilities. They also spy on the opposition political parties in foreign countries and suggest which we should support based on our interests. Of course, we also likely have the occasional shoot out with foreign police and counter-intelligence agencies. Shall I go on?
The fact that we do have civilian oversight and that our people do affect how we go about intelligence gathering is probably head and shoulders above the public support that you'd find in a lot of other countries.
The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" rule is merely a means to simplify thinking about problems. It isn't a physical law or a bound of reality. There is nothing preventing the existence of complexity.
It is also a subjective rule. You are defining what is "extraordinary" based on your own view of the issue, mostly because you believe that "no deity" is less extraordinary than "one or more deities". Historically, however, that actually puts you firmly in the minority.
There are other people who believe the idea that the universe came into being *without* a deity would be an extraordinary concept.
Which one of you are correct? I have no idea. You're both stipulating something based on your own tastes.
Neither of you can "prove" or "disprove" an entity that is
a) defined as the arbiter of reality itself and;
b) does not wish to be tested outside of direct revelation.
You can't falsify a hypothesis that you can't design an experiment to test. That does *not* mean that the hypothesis is incorrect (or correct), merely that you lack the capability to prove it.
In the end, science is a useful tool that should not be lightly challenged on ground where it can deal with experimental data.
However, discussions about deities is where science is not at all on firm ground. That's why I can listen to smart people like Dawkins and despite the fact that I know they are good scientists, I don't see them as any more qualified to discuss the existence of deities than anyone else. It is just to their taste to believe otherwise and they can make arguments all day, but they've got no more actual proof of their assertion than the Pope has of his.
Of course, that is because the labels crowd out any other competition. You want to get press? Well there's a bunch of labels out there eating up PR opportunities and shutting down other methods of distribution. You show up on free internet radio? Time to shut those down.
One of the huge benefits of why I went to internet radio/streaming was so that I could discover music that the radio was much less likely to play for me, and was increasingly NOT playing for me. I recall hearing a DJ announce they were playing some "new song", which had not only been out for weeks, but was authored by someone who had actually been dead for years. And then, that song is played once an hour.
Not to mention on my road trips, I used to flip stations, only for the same song to be played in something like a 10 second time delay from the supposedly competing station I had switched from.
That's because labels do their best to write rules that keep their current hot properties hot, and squeeze out competition. You want my new hot song? You need to make sure that you are playing it x times per hour, and you have to prop it up by only playing ten year old songs around it, so it sounds fresher than it actually is.
I don't want to deprive anyone of a living, but I'm tired of being told what is "hot" and knowing there are thousands of artists out there, but I'm getting spoon fed what a label wants me to see. That's why people only know of two labels, because newer methods of distribution and promotion are still being choked off my the current industry.
Artists do get regularly screwed by labels. That said, most of the hate is just due to the business practices of the publishers, the artist being screwed thing is just extra kindling.
Most people are annoyed about how the publishing business is working hard to undermine better ways of obtaining music because they want to set up their tollbooths to not just monetize, but to monetize in a manner that least upsets their current business model. That means they work to kill anything that they can't figure out how to make money off of.
I really don't begrudge them their middleman fees, but they've become obnoxious about it, and adding to that, they seem to be a glamorous business with rich and ostentatious artists and executives which sort of puts the lie to the fact that they are hurting. The only way they are actually hurting is that they still want to be selling people CDs for $20+ per disc with one song that people want to hear. They used to be leading the way to getting artists to their audience. Now, they just seem to want to charge for the privilege of letting us listen to the artists we want to hear.
I'm just waiting for the IDE for mule blowing. Is the debugger any good?
Yes, the "Free Barrier" is a very hard one to break, although it does happen on occasion.
Classifications assist people in understanding the dynamics that make things like the processes behind CEO pay understandable. It's easy to say that they're "greedy" or "corrupt" or some other useless moralizing explanation of what is going on, but it really doesn't explain it. Poor people can be greedy and corrupt too, and that doesn't make them squat.
It's easy to poke fun of buzzwords as well. The difference between the gibberish you wrote and the buzzwords that those people use is that their gibberish makes them shitloads of money.
I'm less concerned about getting angry about the situation and more concerned about understanding how you can have what appears to be non-performing executives make metric fucktons of money. The answer is very simply that they get their money the same way that a popular artist or a popular singer does it. That is to say, some degree of skill or talent, followed up constant, and merciless promotion of themselves and their story as a product. And, like rock stars or other people who sign their contracts before they have to produce anything new, CEOs don't get fired for shit work, they just don't get re-signed.
You're probably confusing my "rock star" comparison with me thinking CEOs or people like that are talented artists or something. While some certainly have real skills, I'm more concerned about the comparison of how they make deals for employment and obtain bulletproof compensation (ie. they sign actual contracts with provisions on a more equal footing to corporations than most individuals can).
I'm not entirely sure you actually read what I wrote.
Doesn't quite work that way. There is a division of labor out there which may or may not be fair, but here it is:
Unskilled
Skilled
Talent
Your burger flippers are unskilled. The problem with that is that anyone can be unskilled at something, so there's always a large pool of people to pick from. More people than any number of unskilled jobs available. If they want jobs, they have to compete somehow. If they have no skills, then price is all they can compete on. "Retraining" an unskilled worker is pointless because, while it is relatively easy to do, you're still doing unskilled labor.
Your skilled workers are not just plumbers and electricians, but also most IT workers too. They can get screwed, but can usually find a job if they are willing to relocate. However, there is a danger that your skill itself becomes useless, or that there is a local glut of people who do what you do. Skilled workers are the most likely to be able to play the market based on re-training and movement. However, they're not immune from layoffs. Re-training will help them, but only if the re-training is close enough to what they did before where they can apply experience to that new job. Otherwise, off to the unskilled pool with you.
Finally, talent. The reason you don't "offshore" CEOs is because CEOs and rock stars and distinguished scientists are themselves considered valuable as unique individuals. They don't just have a skill, they personally have resources which are believed to improve your company aside from what they know or how many hours they work.
To be honest, there are CEOs out there who look like idiots in their field, but invariably, they're hired because of something they bring to the table. They know people, they are superb marketers, they're incredibly brilliant (even if past their prime) scientists, or they just have a brand. It doesn't have to be a CEO, it can be an asshole superstar programmer with as much gift for self-promotion as for coding.
My latest example of this is a senior executive who was at one place I used to work. He introduced a lot of interesting concepts, but didn't really develop those into a stable product. When I came on, I determined that he didn't even calculate how much his latest database was going to cost us per user. In fact, he didn't even get a price quote. In short, he was a walking disaster. Except....
Except he was a brilliant sales engineer who could talk to executives and make them interested in our product just by looking at some slides. We landed a huge deal and now we have a pile of shit, but when we get that pile of shit fixed, we're in a great place. I may have torn my hair out at the poor decisions that were made, but at least I had something to fight for, whereas we could have had a tight, perfect app with zero customers.
Or perhaps we could have had a great app and still gotten the good deal. That's the downside of talent, you don't always know if the brand is more than the marketing, but when it works... it works.
Yesterday, I watched a video from 1997 where Gil Amelio from Apple was introducing what would eventually become MacOS X. That video also had one other feature. There where two words on a slide brought everyone to a standing ovation: Steve Jobs. The talent had arrived.
Don't get me wrong, being the "talent" doesn't make you smarter or better, necessarily. It does mean you have a brand, though. And it is impossible for us to have a realistic discussion of why CEO's make what they make without understanding that they aren't paid for how much they work, or for what they know. For whatever reason, they're paid because they are who they are, and who they are is perceived to be a force multiplier of some form.
Of course, CEO's are offshored all the time. But no one calls it that, because it is a completely different process. They're business rock stars, and a lot of the same crap that goes for that type of rock star goes for them too. Including the ridiculous pay, and often the bad behavior as well.
Having worked as a contractor, the health insurance benefits are a big deal, although I'd say that it is likely his LTE work is by choice at this point. You'd usually take the LTE work to have a soft landing while you work on a full-time job. In that sense, it was a good deal.
However, for some people, insurance is not really a huge concern. Perhaps single and/or young. They should be careful that they don't go too long that way, or they might find health issues creeping up on them.
If I were that person, I'd start setting a date where I was working to get on a better health care plan via employment or something, but it can be a rational choice for them at this point.
You'll usually know you're getting a promotion because management doesn't usually spring "SURPRISE YOU'RE A MANAGER NOW!" on people in the context of bringing in H1-Bs or offshoring. Nobody in their right mind promotes someone in that scenario without preparing them for their new responsibilities.
Certainly, if they are going to get a replacement for this person because of an impending promotion, you want to *tell them that* so that the promoted person doesn't hilariously think that they're actually getting replaced and jump ship.
Note, in many places, you may get a promotion, but you usually train your replacement in your role *after* you get the promotion. If I go from engineer to manager, people are still coming to me for what I did before until I hand it off. As manager, you now supervise people who do what you used to do, but ultimately, you're still actually responsible for those items now. If you don't have staff to do it, *you* are still responsible for getting it done somehow.
Oddly enough, I trained some people to do a portion of my job in India, and then I stayed at the company I was at until I felt the company was going into the shitter too much for me to stay.
That said, plenty of people lost their jobs at that company and I felt a little like I wouldn't get cut. I'd have to say that in retrospect, that was an unwise for me to think, but I got off lucky.
If you're training replacements in India, it doesn't matter if *your* job is the one that gets cut, really. It means that a) you work for a company that is economizing in a bad manner, and b) it means there is a significant probability that you are now available to be cut at any point in the future.
In that case, you should intersperse your training time with interviewing time. You aren't leaving because you're going to get fired, although that is definitely possible. You're leaving because while you may not get fired personally, you will almost certainly work in a less desirable workplace after *everyone else* is cut.
One cost of "surviving" layoffs is that the new replacements usually suck, especially if they are off-shore or H1-Bs. That means the competent people left over now have more work they have to do, no more pay, little prospect of any extra pay (economizing, remember?), and they need to go through people in another country, or people who are less trained and probably have poor English communication skills in order to get things done.
There are people who stay with a company like an Edison because they have always worked there, and they don't want to move. Perhaps Edison *used to* be a good place to work and they believe that the downturn is temporary. Those people are going to be either in an unemployment line, or they're going to be overworked after something like this.
That is not to say that off-shoring or H1-B is invariably bad. It *is* invariably bad, however, when you're training them as replacements.
Or Bill Gates' kid. Considering Gates and Allen used time on a PDP-10 at Harvard which was financed by DARPA to compile and work on their earliest stuff like MS BASIC.
A lot of success stories know how to use other people's resources to make it big. This person is just trying to figure out how to do the same thing.
I am not really concerned personally about him doing that. If his company lets him get away with it, that's up to them. I am not incredibly interested in pointing out that the company is technically paying for his time to produce products for them, so he shouldn't be using the time they paid for to write stuff for himself.
However, I do believe that if he a) does it on his own time and b) does it on his own resources, he should own what he writes. In a perfect world, he should try and have a contract, but I do agree with people that think this will be a tough road unless he's a special snowflake like a hired gun or a CTO where the company will consider such a deal as part of employment. Unless he is, he's probably best with making sure the work has none of the hallmarks of being done using company resources, and switching employers and waiting a reasonable period before he goes live with the software. Or alternately, keeping sales on the down low until he switches employers.
Short story: contract is best, but likely impossible. Keep it on your own resources and your own time, and if you sell while still employed there, obscure the fact you are doing that as much as possible. And whatever you do, do NOT sell to some customer of your current company who might then think to go back to your current employer to complain about the quality of your work.
I think some people are just confused by the whole idea of factories in the US. We keep being told that all of that "factory-stuff" happens in China now.
Well... *someday* that same line that takes you to Reston is also going all the way to Dulles. Granted, the emphasis is on "someday", but at least the Silver Line is a real thing that is actually being built. Just late and over budget. Like everything else.
Contrast with extending the Orange line to Centreville, which is not happening and probably never will this century. Oh they're eminent domain-ing the I-66 corridor so you can fit more cars on it and charge tolls, but it will still be not enough and you're just adding more noise and pollution. Bah.
And no, I'm not bitter about that.
An app ecosystem is popping up to support that
There's just something wrong with that statement in regard to "increasing focus" and "decreasing distractions". I'm having trouble putting my finger on just what seems off to me...
Everyone seems to have a problem with suburban sprawl. Now the affluent are deciding to move back to the city center and we're complaining that there are too many of them and they want to rebuild and fix up the infrastructure?
Which is it?
Yeah, it drives up property value. Guess what, that's what naturally happens when you add services and make the place look better.
I'm all for maintaining historical housing, but how do you bring people into city centers and maintain the relatively low population density of historical buildings?
CO2 for us isn't a pollutant, we just can't breathe it. If you put too much of anything but oxygen in a room, we wouldn't be able to breathe that either. Nitrogen is something that no one considers a "pollutant", but we can't respire in a room with 100% nitrogen in it either, even though we do pretty well with 70 percent or more Nitrogen every day.
Pollutants disturb processes, CO2 is *part* of a very important process, it's just out of balance right now.