We used to let them stay because we didn't promise them that we'd give them benefits and they could have the opportunity to sink or swim. As someone else said, in the Wild West, you made your money or you died in grinding poverty or on church charity. The other method was banding together as a community to help each other out.
Now, everyone gets more and more entitlement benefits, so having someone come into the country actually costs everyone an increasing amount of money and there is no incentive to work the problems out for themselves. So, now we send them home because we can't afford our own population, let alone more people who may or may not be able to support themselves.
IT isn't a monolithic field. There are certain skillsets that you really need to look for in some cases and you can't find them. In others, you have a lot of people to choose from, or you are big enough that you can expend the time to have new hires learn on the job.
In a smaller company, you need experience because every head count is precious. I can't hire someone out of college or who has a completely different skillset because I'm not some line manager who gets 6 head count and 5 contractor count on my team, I'm the trainer, the architect, and the executive sponsor.
In a bigger company, you can hire a lot of people and you have a training budget that you can make good use of because you don't need every worker on your project every single day they are here. Consequently, we can't hire someone who needs to come up to speed, but we do make up for that by paying well and offering the chance to make a difference to the business, as opposed to being a code monkey.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were paid shills here, but I would be surprised if they contributed even to even 2% of the conversations that someone has suggested that there is a shill involved in. Mostly, you are dealing with legitimate users who have different experiences than you do.
In any case, for the most part, accusations of paid comments are pointless. If the shill has an argument, attack the argument. Being a paid commenter doesn't make your arguments any more or less valid. If they are wrong, their money can't force them to be right. And if they are right, then being paid doesn't invalidate their argument.
Relative sizing aside, the 401k may not be the largest asset, but it IS the asset that they can use for liquidity when they get old. They can't just sell their house, nor is a new or second mortgage a good idea.
It is entirely legitimate to not want to wipe out the savings of the middle class just so you can get at the rich people. The rich people may lose a bigger absolute number, but the middle class will lose out proportionately.
Yes, but this isn't in public. The fact that they had easily learned the password and were regularly using it isn't the same as it being "in public".
I don't think this should be a felony, but just because I leave my front door unlocked and slightly ajar doesn't give you permission to enter it.
On the other hand, I don't know why schools are so quick to call the cops for something like this. Kids must do something at this level of annoying multiple times a day, every day. If they called the cops for every one of those, we'd have to move the classes to prison.
Here's the thing. There shouldn't be squabbling over the backbone. You pay for the bits that you consume or create that traverse the backbone. It doesn't matter what those bits are. ISPs should charge a price per bit.
What should not be happening is the bits being read and handled differently based on the content. The only conceivable reason to do so would be QoS for certain protocols and if you want those bits treated differently, by protocol, then you pay for those type of bits to get priority on a protocol basis. However, that doesn't mean they need to care if I am looking at YouTube or reading a Slashdot summary or taking a Skype call. They should base their price per bit on what it takes to upgrade their backbone to support all those bits and make their profit. Their peering arrangements should count bits passed and charge, get credit or limit access based on an agreement of how many bits are passed. That's it.
If the ISPs want to use their existing backbones to jump start other services, like Pay per View, then fine, but charge for that service separately. If you want to encourage use of your service, then build in an honest fee for data that has to traverse peering points, again, on a per bit rate. That makes it so that the customer has an incentive to use your local service, while allowing them to select others without having to inspect content.
I am not in favor of the death penalty, but I don't care if he feels happy when he gets executed. At that point he'll briefly be happy-ish, and then he'll be rotting meat that we at least don't need to pay for anymore.
As for the afterlife, we all know he's not going to get any virgins when he dies. The best he can hope for is that he doesn't end up in eternal torment. Allah or not, what he did doesn't fit the idea of the Holy Warrior as even mainstream Islam would define it. He's an extremist who is using his purported faith as an excuse for whatever feelings of alienation he has. Those feelings were preyed upon by the terrorist groups, but ultimately, he's responsible for himself.
It's like Christians who went on Crusades who believed that a God who let himself be hung on a cross would actually want them to go slaughter people over some kingdom. It's just bad behavior draped in a convenient excuse.
The only reason to keep him alive is that he is able to perhaps redeem himself in some small way so he does have the chance to look at what he did and reject it. While unlikely, *that* sort of turnaround might actually have a chance to help someone else by showing that he got over his delusions and he no longer believes he was righteous.
More importantly, it is so we know that we aren't the sort of people who think that killing people more actually makes anything better.
Then someone failed to properly screen the candidate for the job to begin with. You need to figure that sort of thing out before the offer, not during.
As I told someone who I was negotiating with on a salary once:
"When I walk in that door, I work for you and this company, but right now, I am here on my own behalf and I need to look out for myself and my family."
Just because you negotiate doesn't mean you're a team-killing egomaniac. You're looking out for yourself and yours, which no one is going to do for you but yourself. When you do join the team, then you also look out for the company and the team. I don't think that's an unfair position to take. If you're going to be the best team player, you don't want to walk in that door every day feeling like you got a raw deal or it will affect you and your work.
Maybe, but Reddit doesn't strike me as the sort of place with pay bands in that sense. I suppose they could fabricate a new title, and suggest it makes more money, but you can only go so far with that.
Of course, I can see managers trying that, but I presume that her directive would mean that any alteration of the offer, other than the equity alterations suggested, would be rejected at HR. As a manager, you have to have your opening approved, including title, before you can even interview people. HR also drafts the offer letter and approves the terms. Negotiations can cause the title or the pay to change, but I'm guessing that unless she's not sincere about this, she's not permitting title changes with different compensation after the offer.
Here's the thing. I probably make more than some people due to negotiations, but I probably make less than others based on the same. Honestly, unless I am truly getting screwed, as long as my needs are met, I don't care if someone makes more than I do. There are also some people out there who have families or child support payments or a sick mother or something who would benefit from the extra money and lobbied to get it.
A woman needs to do only do one thing. After researching the salary she feels is fair for the position, she decides if she is comfortable with it or not. If she is, then stick to that number come hell or high water. She's not in a competition to figure out who makes more than her, she should be just trying to live her life successfully. If she wants a Mercedes to drive around in and she needs X amount to get it, then she needs to ask for X.
While I understand that it seems unfair that women may make less because they don't negotiate, negotiation is nothing more than knowing your real number and being willing to walk away if they can't give it to you. You can point blank tell someone your actual number and tell them that if they can make it, you will start. If they can't, then this is her first, best, and final offer. If an adult woman can't figure that number out for herself and stick to it, then no "no negotiation" policy is ever going to help her.
Brainwashed follower was about the only defense he had after his actions.
I'm not entirely sure that he has any good choices now. Being executed might be just as good as the million years he's going to be in prison. I suppose I wouldn't pick execution, but holy shit, what a shitty life he has in front of him now, either way.
Good. He earned his shitty future. I'm just sorry that incarcerating him will have almost no effect on the people who will be doing the same sort of thing in the future. People as stupid as he is don't let "consequences" get in their way when they really want to fuck other people over.
Honestly, the guillotine did fuckall for France and continued to produce fools who thought that Red Revolution is how things got done all the way up to the Communists. The development of a middle class in the Third Estate was the most valuable thing for France in general. You could have maintained a peaceful transition over a longer period of time and dispensed with the rivers of blood.
For every radical action, you got an equal and opposite reactionary action in response. The history of the French Revolution represents a story of a bunch of people killing each other to get to a place that you could have reached without any of that crap if the hyperbole had been toned down.
France was always going to end up either a republic or a constitutional monarchy because the value of a absolutist monarchy was at an end. Equal blame goes to both the King and the revolutionaries for the way that it actually went down.
English is not an easy language to learn and has a lot of irregular uses, but it is much easier for adult second language learners to learn than say, Chinese.
It would be difficult to say English is "superior", but it is better than some for certain specific requirements.
English is also backed up by Latin, which still survives in certain applications and is a complete language with some more regularity.
Well, I mean it's only the Marlboro Man and some ads for liquor. There's nothing all that strange about those. Kids were seeing those all the time in the glory days of the 1950s.
Yeah, I've actually read books based on what I have found out about them. Later, as a point of interest, I sometimes try and figure out if they won an award. Sometimes, they do. Other times, they don't.
It's like the Oscars. There are fabulous movies that have rightfully won them. And great movies that haven't. And then there are the movies that sort of suck, but you realize that they won because they were "okay" but hit some sort of theme the Academy liked.
At that point, you remember that it is a bunch of movie insiders patting themselves on the back. Sometimes that pat on the back is for true success, and sometimes that pat is for making something that movie people want to make, but the interest is confined to that group.
So, the Hugo Award winners have won the hearts of the Hugo Award voters. And if you think highly of those voters, that may sway you. Mostly, though, there is no actual expectation that the Hugo or Nebula selection people automatically meet my requirements for SF.
Personally, I think they can give a Hugo to anyone they want. I'll just stop thinking Hugo winners are special.
Actually, the point the parent makes kind of makes sense. Business leaders may or may not be nice people, but they usually err on the side of making more money for less investment.
If you truly could pay a woman 25% less to do the exact same job at the same level of quality, then men would be much less attractive overall. You might suggest the "Boys' Club" mentality, and there is no doubt that this can come into play, but all it takes is one executive or CEO in a competitive business who starts the "race to the bottom" and suddenly your office and that of all of your competitors is filled with cheap female labor who are now causing you to make more profit for the exact amount of work you were getting before with premium priced men.
Think about it this way. There is no doubt that in the past, many Americans, including business leaders, thought of brown people as inferior for many reasons. They could get them cheaply, even then, but they didn't think they could do the job of the white male working-man and it wasn't as easy to leverage them as labor. As soon as someone figured out how to outsource easily, and move factories elsewhere, we saw where that ideology went. Straight to Mexico, and Taiwan, and China. Do business leaders still think that the "brown people" are inferior. I bet many do. Is that stopping them from making money hand-over-fist from using them? Nope.
So, the understanding is that the rubber meets the road somewhere. Business leaders might stand on their prejudices stubbornly, but when you are talking about a 25% labor discount, do you really believe that they'd ignore the benefit? All it takes is one money-grubbing business leader who couldn't give a fig for medieval notions of gender roles and you have a situation where everyone else in that market has to adapt or die.
None of this is to say that I've logically proven that they get 25% less pay for equal work. The aforementioned prejudice factor, as well as other societal mores can affect females in the workplace. However, there is still something to be said for looking at the factors which might affect how females work in the marketplace differently than men. Those might be differences that make sense. While women make less money, they also live longer than men on average. Would the average woman live a shorter life, but make more money if she operated in the workplace in the same mode as the average man?
However, sometimes qualifications need to be gained by access to opportunities for learning. If a person is capable of learning, but is monetarily or background disadvantaged, they will not be able to compete.
I think it is best for everyone if there is a certain level playing field. We want everyone who can complete to be part of the pool. That improves the competitiveness of the whole pool.
Where I think AA fails is that we add people who are not performing to a certain level to a pool of people who do perform at that level. That may or may not be the fault of the people who take advantage of the program, but it is a problem.
In my opinion, we need to spend more on tutoring and other help that improves the home life of the student from when they are younger, and then draw a line after which you no longer differentiate by disadvantaged state, but use a stringently objective process for admission to programs which works hard to avoid any bias towards (or against) cultural, as opposed to purely academic credentials.
In this process, when studies are done of various group admissions, if there are determined to still be bias against disadvantaged groups, we need to get to the root cause and attack it there, instead of any sort of quota system. Quotas devalue the group that gets that advantage. It helps no one if you can perform less, and still obtain advanced placement, and from there, advanced opportunity, but at the same time, you are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as lesser performing.
I'm honestly not sure how it would help. If you have a bunch of people who have no interest in voting and force them to vote, you're not guaranteeing a good result, you're guaranteeing that people show up. Them being a "crowd" does not magically make them able to make good decisions or even to care. More to the point, it doesn't make them educated enough to make a good decision.
In the end, lowest common denominator will become even more important, because you'll want to cater to people who don't care and want to be told what to do so they can go back to work. You may need to change to commercials somewhat, it may even get more moderate.
However, moderate isn't a synonym for "correct". There are scenarios where one distinct choice or another is correct. Compromise in that case means you're actually making the problem worse, just not as bad as it could be.
There are a lot of countries with high voter turnout that have horrible governments. Mandatory voting can be turned against a disinterested population just as much as optional voting.
Be decisive. Don't micromanage, but there are some times where you have to make a decision. That's now your job. If you ever want to get things done, you need to decide things after an appropriate amount of time and then see it through.
You're not always going to be right, but you can't let that paralyze you. Better to be wrong and learn from it, than to do nothing when something needs to be done. Which is not to say that you don't think about it first.
Get goals from your boss. You don't have to make all the decisions. That's what your boss gets paid to do too.
Think about the business. If you're a middle IT manager, you're probably still at least a little technical. That's fine. What you aren't is a pure technician/admin/dev anymore. You need to start thinking about what makes sense for your team and your place in the company as a whole. Hint: retaining your staff is as important from a business angle as cutting costs, but you should think about both.
You're probably a supervisor now. That means you should take evaluating your team seriously. Reviews aren't there so you can give them all 3s (or 5s), they are there so your team knows how they are doing. That's *important*. Most people want to know how to make you happy so they can get raises. The others... need to know when they are screwing up. If you aren't spending real time and thought on giving good feedback, you're a shitty manager and you should resign immediately.
Be willing to do anything that you expect your team to do, including stay late or up early. However, again, you're not there to do the same things as the people on your team. Stay late and coordinate if that is needed. If not, go home and get some sleep so you aren't crabby the next day. Or so you can cover for the guy who was up all night.
Your team should be able to do their job without your assistance unless they are in a really bad spot. You are important because you will be the contact between your boss and your team. You will get the team the resources they need to get their job done. If they need Dev support, you contact the Dev manager to make sure they know about the need. If they need more network cables, you get the network cables.
Overcommunicate. You make sure that your boss and higher ups are not harassing your team for statuses. You provide the statuses. You manage up, as well as down.
If you are hiding in your cube coding or something all day, you're not doing your job. Walk around a bit and see what is going on and if anyone needs something.
You may not be their buddy, but you don't have to be aloof. Find out about the people on your team and what's generally going on with their lives.
When people leave your team... thank them for their work and congratulate them on their new opportunity. Even if they were an asshole.
As explained in the article, the staff of the NSA does not have carte blanche to just spy on people. They operate based on requirements. Now, those requirements might cause information to be collected in a way that is unconstitutional, let's face it, they're doing a job. The feeling that they are doing something earth shatteringly wrong is not one that you get in a bureaucracy like the NSA because they're generally only privy to a compartmentalized section of it. Similar sorts of things happen all the time with regimes where large bureaucracies support activities such as intelligence gathering, or "special activities".
That means that any particular person working there believes that their little bit of the work is helping their country. Without a full insight into the project, they will not feel that the criticisms leveled at the Agency are leveled at them personally. Instead, they believe that Snowden is making their job more difficult, which honestly, he is. It's a matter of perspective. Easy for those of us with no involvement or investment in the NSA to take a strong view against their employer, but for those who earnestly work to do their job there to aid their country, they're going to feel like they're being betrayed. Some of them might, like Snowden, have a larger view and rebel against it, but do would not have his access.
I usually don't get on people about common typos like their and they're, but this is something an editor should catch. A counsel and a council are two completely different things.
Except the real hope was that at some point, the people in Iran would actually consider overthrowing the government, or moderate it in some manner. Much like the end of apartheid spelled the end of the South African nuclear program, the end of the extremist theocracy, or even a significant dialing back of it, would most likely remove Iran's need or desire for these sorts of weapons.
Realistically, the only thing that will stop Iran's theocracy from pursuing those weapons is for that theocracy to fundamentally change. Iran is an expansionist regional power using asynchronous means (adeptly, I might add) to improve their standing and reach in the region. They are a revolutionary government, trying to foster revolution outside their borders. While they have a government with those goals, they will always want to pursue nuclear weapons, because at some point, they're going to want insurance that covers them when they make a move that is just a little too audacious for them to avoid military conflict.
Their only real Achilles' Heel is a) the possibility of an invasion, but much more likely, b) the fact that there is an ultra-conservative government in charge of what used to be one of the most cosmopolitan populations in the Middle East. The young people there as not on the same page as the mullahs. Much of the urban population isn't either.
Removing the sanctions reduces the pressure on the mullahs to reform themselves, possibly enough that the dissonance between them and the more moderate population does not turn into real reform. If the theocracy comes through economically, then it buys the theocracy credit in the eyes of the population segments that we were hoping would drive change internally.
Look at Russia. The Russians had some good years there for awhile after they got over the initial turmoil of the USSR falling apart. Now their population is firmly behind Putin, faked votes notwithstanding. They think he gets shit done. Now, we are allowing the mullahs to look like they are getting shit done and can bring the US to the table. It doesn't matter that it was Obama's idea to try negotiations, the Iranian government certainly isn't going to spin it that way.
I'm not against negotiating with Iran generally, and I certainly don't want an invasion, but I wonder if this is the right time and the right understanding of the situation. It feels like Obama just wants to justify his preemptive Nobel Prize and have a Camp David moment, but Camp David happened after Egypt had taken some beatings first and were ready to come to the table. I think we're missing our only real chance, short of invasion, to actually influence that country towards a more peaceful future.
I remember seeing it. Not in the theater, but maybe on TV or someone rented it or something. It was not too bad for the time, although actually a little more odd and scary than the other Disney fare you'd have gotten back in the day.
And yes, don't bother seeing it if you know anything about how real black holes work. This is very much something you only really enjoy if you are a kid, or your understanding of black holes is almost completely uninformed.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to let them stay because we didn't promise them that we'd give them benefits and they could have the opportunity to sink or swim. As someone else said, in the Wild West, you made your money or you died in grinding poverty or on church charity. The other method was banding together as a community to help each other out.
Now, everyone gets more and more entitlement benefits, so having someone come into the country actually costs everyone an increasing amount of money and there is no incentive to work the problems out for themselves. So, now we send them home because we can't afford our own population, let alone more people who may or may not be able to support themselves.
I don't think he's lying. Don't assume that.
IT isn't a monolithic field. There are certain skillsets that you really need to look for in some cases and you can't find them. In others, you have a lot of people to choose from, or you are big enough that you can expend the time to have new hires learn on the job.
In a smaller company, you need experience because every head count is precious. I can't hire someone out of college or who has a completely different skillset because I'm not some line manager who gets 6 head count and 5 contractor count on my team, I'm the trainer, the architect, and the executive sponsor.
In a bigger company, you can hire a lot of people and you have a training budget that you can make good use of because you don't need every worker on your project every single day they are here. Consequently, we can't hire someone who needs to come up to speed, but we do make up for that by paying well and offering the chance to make a difference to the business, as opposed to being a code monkey.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were paid shills here, but I would be surprised if they contributed even to even 2% of the conversations that someone has suggested that there is a shill involved in. Mostly, you are dealing with legitimate users who have different experiences than you do.
In any case, for the most part, accusations of paid comments are pointless. If the shill has an argument, attack the argument. Being a paid commenter doesn't make your arguments any more or less valid. If they are wrong, their money can't force them to be right. And if they are right, then being paid doesn't invalidate their argument.
Relative sizing aside, the 401k may not be the largest asset, but it IS the asset that they can use for liquidity when they get old. They can't just sell their house, nor is a new or second mortgage a good idea.
It is entirely legitimate to not want to wipe out the savings of the middle class just so you can get at the rich people. The rich people may lose a bigger absolute number, but the middle class will lose out proportionately.
Yes, but this isn't in public. The fact that they had easily learned the password and were regularly using it isn't the same as it being "in public".
I don't think this should be a felony, but just because I leave my front door unlocked and slightly ajar doesn't give you permission to enter it.
On the other hand, I don't know why schools are so quick to call the cops for something like this. Kids must do something at this level of annoying multiple times a day, every day. If they called the cops for every one of those, we'd have to move the classes to prison.
Here's the thing. There shouldn't be squabbling over the backbone. You pay for the bits that you consume or create that traverse the backbone. It doesn't matter what those bits are. ISPs should charge a price per bit.
What should not be happening is the bits being read and handled differently based on the content. The only conceivable reason to do so would be QoS for certain protocols and if you want those bits treated differently, by protocol, then you pay for those type of bits to get priority on a protocol basis. However, that doesn't mean they need to care if I am looking at YouTube or reading a Slashdot summary or taking a Skype call. They should base their price per bit on what it takes to upgrade their backbone to support all those bits and make their profit. Their peering arrangements should count bits passed and charge, get credit or limit access based on an agreement of how many bits are passed. That's it.
If the ISPs want to use their existing backbones to jump start other services, like Pay per View, then fine, but charge for that service separately. If you want to encourage use of your service, then build in an honest fee for data that has to traverse peering points, again, on a per bit rate. That makes it so that the customer has an incentive to use your local service, while allowing them to select others without having to inspect content.
Resolved for the full set of use cases:
s/the (corporations|lazy people) do/everyone does/gi;
I am not in favor of the death penalty, but I don't care if he feels happy when he gets executed. At that point he'll briefly be happy-ish, and then he'll be rotting meat that we at least don't need to pay for anymore.
As for the afterlife, we all know he's not going to get any virgins when he dies. The best he can hope for is that he doesn't end up in eternal torment. Allah or not, what he did doesn't fit the idea of the Holy Warrior as even mainstream Islam would define it. He's an extremist who is using his purported faith as an excuse for whatever feelings of alienation he has. Those feelings were preyed upon by the terrorist groups, but ultimately, he's responsible for himself.
It's like Christians who went on Crusades who believed that a God who let himself be hung on a cross would actually want them to go slaughter people over some kingdom. It's just bad behavior draped in a convenient excuse.
The only reason to keep him alive is that he is able to perhaps redeem himself in some small way so he does have the chance to look at what he did and reject it. While unlikely, *that* sort of turnaround might actually have a chance to help someone else by showing that he got over his delusions and he no longer believes he was righteous.
More importantly, it is so we know that we aren't the sort of people who think that killing people more actually makes anything better.
Then someone failed to properly screen the candidate for the job to begin with. You need to figure that sort of thing out before the offer, not during.
As I told someone who I was negotiating with on a salary once:
"When I walk in that door, I work for you and this company, but right now, I am here on my own behalf and I need to look out for myself and my family."
Just because you negotiate doesn't mean you're a team-killing egomaniac. You're looking out for yourself and yours, which no one is going to do for you but yourself. When you do join the team, then you also look out for the company and the team. I don't think that's an unfair position to take. If you're going to be the best team player, you don't want to walk in that door every day feeling like you got a raw deal or it will affect you and your work.
Maybe, but Reddit doesn't strike me as the sort of place with pay bands in that sense. I suppose they could fabricate a new title, and suggest it makes more money, but you can only go so far with that.
Of course, I can see managers trying that, but I presume that her directive would mean that any alteration of the offer, other than the equity alterations suggested, would be rejected at HR. As a manager, you have to have your opening approved, including title, before you can even interview people. HR also drafts the offer letter and approves the terms. Negotiations can cause the title or the pay to change, but I'm guessing that unless she's not sincere about this, she's not permitting title changes with different compensation after the offer.
Here's the thing. I probably make more than some people due to negotiations, but I probably make less than others based on the same. Honestly, unless I am truly getting screwed, as long as my needs are met, I don't care if someone makes more than I do. There are also some people out there who have families or child support payments or a sick mother or something who would benefit from the extra money and lobbied to get it.
A woman needs to do only do one thing. After researching the salary she feels is fair for the position, she decides if she is comfortable with it or not. If she is, then stick to that number come hell or high water. She's not in a competition to figure out who makes more than her, she should be just trying to live her life successfully. If she wants a Mercedes to drive around in and she needs X amount to get it, then she needs to ask for X.
While I understand that it seems unfair that women may make less because they don't negotiate, negotiation is nothing more than knowing your real number and being willing to walk away if they can't give it to you. You can point blank tell someone your actual number and tell them that if they can make it, you will start. If they can't, then this is her first, best, and final offer. If an adult woman can't figure that number out for herself and stick to it, then no "no negotiation" policy is ever going to help her.
Brainwashed follower was about the only defense he had after his actions.
I'm not entirely sure that he has any good choices now. Being executed might be just as good as the million years he's going to be in prison. I suppose I wouldn't pick execution, but holy shit, what a shitty life he has in front of him now, either way.
Good. He earned his shitty future. I'm just sorry that incarcerating him will have almost no effect on the people who will be doing the same sort of thing in the future. People as stupid as he is don't let "consequences" get in their way when they really want to fuck other people over.
Honestly, the guillotine did fuckall for France and continued to produce fools who thought that Red Revolution is how things got done all the way up to the Communists. The development of a middle class in the Third Estate was the most valuable thing for France in general. You could have maintained a peaceful transition over a longer period of time and dispensed with the rivers of blood.
For every radical action, you got an equal and opposite reactionary action in response. The history of the French Revolution represents a story of a bunch of people killing each other to get to a place that you could have reached without any of that crap if the hyperbole had been toned down.
France was always going to end up either a republic or a constitutional monarchy because the value of a absolutist monarchy was at an end. Equal blame goes to both the King and the revolutionaries for the way that it actually went down.
Well, yes and no.
English is not an easy language to learn and has a lot of irregular uses, but it is much easier for adult second language learners to learn than say, Chinese.
It would be difficult to say English is "superior", but it is better than some for certain specific requirements.
English is also backed up by Latin, which still survives in certain applications and is a complete language with some more regularity.
Theoretically, it can be small and unsophisticated.
Realistically, it will be triple redundant and expensive. Just like everything else on an airplane is, with good reason.
Well, I mean it's only the Marlboro Man and some ads for liquor. There's nothing all that strange about those. Kids were seeing those all the time in the glory days of the 1950s.
What's so great about an 8k? I had a Macintosh 128k in 1984.
Get off my lawn.
Yeah, I've actually read books based on what I have found out about them. Later, as a point of interest, I sometimes try and figure out if they won an award. Sometimes, they do. Other times, they don't.
It's like the Oscars. There are fabulous movies that have rightfully won them. And great movies that haven't. And then there are the movies that sort of suck, but you realize that they won because they were "okay" but hit some sort of theme the Academy liked.
At that point, you remember that it is a bunch of movie insiders patting themselves on the back. Sometimes that pat on the back is for true success, and sometimes that pat is for making something that movie people want to make, but the interest is confined to that group.
So, the Hugo Award winners have won the hearts of the Hugo Award voters. And if you think highly of those voters, that may sway you. Mostly, though, there is no actual expectation that the Hugo or Nebula selection people automatically meet my requirements for SF.
Personally, I think they can give a Hugo to anyone they want. I'll just stop thinking Hugo winners are special.
Well they could do something like a black hole.
With a 50's rocket ship entering it and...
I'll just stop there.
Actually, the point the parent makes kind of makes sense. Business leaders may or may not be nice people, but they usually err on the side of making more money for less investment.
If you truly could pay a woman 25% less to do the exact same job at the same level of quality, then men would be much less attractive overall. You might suggest the "Boys' Club" mentality, and there is no doubt that this can come into play, but all it takes is one executive or CEO in a competitive business who starts the "race to the bottom" and suddenly your office and that of all of your competitors is filled with cheap female labor who are now causing you to make more profit for the exact amount of work you were getting before with premium priced men.
Think about it this way. There is no doubt that in the past, many Americans, including business leaders, thought of brown people as inferior for many reasons. They could get them cheaply, even then, but they didn't think they could do the job of the white male working-man and it wasn't as easy to leverage them as labor. As soon as someone figured out how to outsource easily, and move factories elsewhere, we saw where that ideology went. Straight to Mexico, and Taiwan, and China. Do business leaders still think that the "brown people" are inferior. I bet many do. Is that stopping them from making money hand-over-fist from using them? Nope.
So, the understanding is that the rubber meets the road somewhere. Business leaders might stand on their prejudices stubbornly, but when you are talking about a 25% labor discount, do you really believe that they'd ignore the benefit? All it takes is one money-grubbing business leader who couldn't give a fig for medieval notions of gender roles and you have a situation where everyone else in that market has to adapt or die.
None of this is to say that I've logically proven that they get 25% less pay for equal work. The aforementioned prejudice factor, as well as other societal mores can affect females in the workplace. However, there is still something to be said for looking at the factors which might affect how females work in the marketplace differently than men. Those might be differences that make sense. While women make less money, they also live longer than men on average. Would the average woman live a shorter life, but make more money if she operated in the workplace in the same mode as the average man?
I am not big on Affirmative Action either.
However, sometimes qualifications need to be gained by access to opportunities for learning. If a person is capable of learning, but is monetarily or background disadvantaged, they will not be able to compete.
I think it is best for everyone if there is a certain level playing field. We want everyone who can complete to be part of the pool. That improves the competitiveness of the whole pool.
Where I think AA fails is that we add people who are not performing to a certain level to a pool of people who do perform at that level. That may or may not be the fault of the people who take advantage of the program, but it is a problem.
In my opinion, we need to spend more on tutoring and other help that improves the home life of the student from when they are younger, and then draw a line after which you no longer differentiate by disadvantaged state, but use a stringently objective process for admission to programs which works hard to avoid any bias towards (or against) cultural, as opposed to purely academic credentials.
In this process, when studies are done of various group admissions, if there are determined to still be bias against disadvantaged groups, we need to get to the root cause and attack it there, instead of any sort of quota system. Quotas devalue the group that gets that advantage. It helps no one if you can perform less, and still obtain advanced placement, and from there, advanced opportunity, but at the same time, you are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as lesser performing.
I'm honestly not sure how it would help. If you have a bunch of people who have no interest in voting and force them to vote, you're not guaranteeing a good result, you're guaranteeing that people show up. Them being a "crowd" does not magically make them able to make good decisions or even to care. More to the point, it doesn't make them educated enough to make a good decision.
In the end, lowest common denominator will become even more important, because you'll want to cater to people who don't care and want to be told what to do so they can go back to work. You may need to change to commercials somewhat, it may even get more moderate.
However, moderate isn't a synonym for "correct". There are scenarios where one distinct choice or another is correct. Compromise in that case means you're actually making the problem worse, just not as bad as it could be.
There are a lot of countries with high voter turnout that have horrible governments. Mandatory voting can be turned against a disinterested population just as much as optional voting.
Try to listen more than you talk.
Be decisive. Don't micromanage, but there are some times where you have to make a decision. That's now your job. If you ever want to get things done, you need to decide things after an appropriate amount of time and then see it through.
You're not always going to be right, but you can't let that paralyze you. Better to be wrong and learn from it, than to do nothing when something needs to be done. Which is not to say that you don't think about it first.
Get goals from your boss. You don't have to make all the decisions. That's what your boss gets paid to do too.
Think about the business. If you're a middle IT manager, you're probably still at least a little technical. That's fine. What you aren't is a pure technician/admin/dev anymore. You need to start thinking about what makes sense for your team and your place in the company as a whole. Hint: retaining your staff is as important from a business angle as cutting costs, but you should think about both.
You're probably a supervisor now. That means you should take evaluating your team seriously. Reviews aren't there so you can give them all 3s (or 5s), they are there so your team knows how they are doing. That's *important*. Most people want to know how to make you happy so they can get raises. The others... need to know when they are screwing up. If you aren't spending real time and thought on giving good feedback, you're a shitty manager and you should resign immediately.
Be willing to do anything that you expect your team to do, including stay late or up early. However, again, you're not there to do the same things as the people on your team. Stay late and coordinate if that is needed. If not, go home and get some sleep so you aren't crabby the next day. Or so you can cover for the guy who was up all night.
Your team should be able to do their job without your assistance unless they are in a really bad spot. You are important because you will be the contact between your boss and your team. You will get the team the resources they need to get their job done. If they need Dev support, you contact the Dev manager to make sure they know about the need. If they need more network cables, you get the network cables.
Overcommunicate. You make sure that your boss and higher ups are not harassing your team for statuses. You provide the statuses. You manage up, as well as down.
If you are hiding in your cube coding or something all day, you're not doing your job. Walk around a bit and see what is going on and if anyone needs something.
You may not be their buddy, but you don't have to be aloof. Find out about the people on your team and what's generally going on with their lives.
When people leave your team... thank them for their work and congratulate them on their new opportunity. Even if they were an asshole.
As explained in the article, the staff of the NSA does not have carte blanche to just spy on people. They operate based on requirements. Now, those requirements might cause information to be collected in a way that is unconstitutional, let's face it, they're doing a job. The feeling that they are doing something earth shatteringly wrong is not one that you get in a bureaucracy like the NSA because they're generally only privy to a compartmentalized section of it. Similar sorts of things happen all the time with regimes where large bureaucracies support activities such as intelligence gathering, or "special activities".
That means that any particular person working there believes that their little bit of the work is helping their country. Without a full insight into the project, they will not feel that the criticisms leveled at the Agency are leveled at them personally. Instead, they believe that Snowden is making their job more difficult, which honestly, he is. It's a matter of perspective. Easy for those of us with no involvement or investment in the NSA to take a strong view against their employer, but for those who earnestly work to do their job there to aid their country, they're going to feel like they're being betrayed. Some of them might, like Snowden, have a larger view and rebel against it, but do would not have his access.
This.
I usually don't get on people about common typos like their and they're, but this is something an editor should catch. A counsel and a council are two completely different things.
Except the real hope was that at some point, the people in Iran would actually consider overthrowing the government, or moderate it in some manner. Much like the end of apartheid spelled the end of the South African nuclear program, the end of the extremist theocracy, or even a significant dialing back of it, would most likely remove Iran's need or desire for these sorts of weapons.
Realistically, the only thing that will stop Iran's theocracy from pursuing those weapons is for that theocracy to fundamentally change. Iran is an expansionist regional power using asynchronous means (adeptly, I might add) to improve their standing and reach in the region. They are a revolutionary government, trying to foster revolution outside their borders. While they have a government with those goals, they will always want to pursue nuclear weapons, because at some point, they're going to want insurance that covers them when they make a move that is just a little too audacious for them to avoid military conflict.
Their only real Achilles' Heel is a) the possibility of an invasion, but much more likely, b) the fact that there is an ultra-conservative government in charge of what used to be one of the most cosmopolitan populations in the Middle East. The young people there as not on the same page as the mullahs. Much of the urban population isn't either.
Removing the sanctions reduces the pressure on the mullahs to reform themselves, possibly enough that the dissonance between them and the more moderate population does not turn into real reform. If the theocracy comes through economically, then it buys the theocracy credit in the eyes of the population segments that we were hoping would drive change internally.
Look at Russia. The Russians had some good years there for awhile after they got over the initial turmoil of the USSR falling apart. Now their population is firmly behind Putin, faked votes notwithstanding. They think he gets shit done. Now, we are allowing the mullahs to look like they are getting shit done and can bring the US to the table. It doesn't matter that it was Obama's idea to try negotiations, the Iranian government certainly isn't going to spin it that way.
I'm not against negotiating with Iran generally, and I certainly don't want an invasion, but I wonder if this is the right time and the right understanding of the situation. It feels like Obama just wants to justify his preemptive Nobel Prize and have a Camp David moment, but Camp David happened after Egypt had taken some beatings first and were ready to come to the table. I think we're missing our only real chance, short of invasion, to actually influence that country towards a more peaceful future.
I remember seeing it. Not in the theater, but maybe on TV or someone rented it or something. It was not too bad for the time, although actually a little more odd and scary than the other Disney fare you'd have gotten back in the day.
And yes, don't bother seeing it if you know anything about how real black holes work. This is very much something you only really enjoy if you are a kid, or your understanding of black holes is almost completely uninformed.