I work as a sysadmin for one of the leading computer services companies in the US. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to work from home and scheduling flexibility. And I don't mind working a reasonable number of hours beyond the base eighty hours per pay period. The problem is with defining "reasonable".
Most experienced managers are willing to play ball and give you something in exchange for the extra work you do. If I need tomorrow off, I just send my boss an email. Nobody knows or cares when or if I come to work - as long I am doing my job. Most of the time this works out well.
On the other hand, there are managers who take the extra effort and extra hours for granted. They expect people to be available to work nights, weekends, and holidays; to put in days of overtime without being paid for it; and then they have the nerve to tell you that you were late to work or that you did answer your phone at 2am on Saturday morning. I had a boss like that. I complained - he got canned. I guess I got lucky.
Both B-1 and Tu-160 were designed primarily to use stand-off weapons. That is neither aircraft would normally be expected to enter the effective effective of enemy air defenses - either SAMs or fighter CAPs. When launching long-range cruise missiles isn't enough, however, both B-1 and Tu-160 were also given high-speed low-level air defense penetration capability. In either scenario Tu-160's much higher speed and range are a greater asset than B-1's extra 3km of maximum altitude.
Tu-160 has nothing in common with B-1A. To an amateur they may look similar. Tu-160 is considerably larger than B-1A, twice as fast, carries more payload, and has far better range.
I think this type of classification would be pointless. Even if the computer could somehow differentiate between photos of boats and photos of men in suites floating face down in the bay, this would not help with seamlessly patching holes in images. But the truth is, while software can recognize particular elements of a photo, there is no understanding of of the subject or its context. Thus a missing mountain range in the background can be replaced by an ocean or a parking lot. Whatever categories this method uses, these are not categories humans use. It is based on mathematical analysis of the image data. "Semantic" is just a word developers like to use, just "AI", or "knowledge-based computing".
In other news: Texaco announced its decision to sue the Russian Air Force for using a red star on its aircraft. A pair of Tu-95s were seen circling over Texaco's headquarters in White Plains, N.Y. earlier today. Russian Defense Ministry officials declined to comment.
Let's see, rubber bullets have been know to kill or leave serious internal injuries that can permanently affect your quality of life. People have been beaten to death with batons and some have died from tear gas. Bright lights can permanently damage your eyes and even leave you blind. I will go with a water cannon. Besides, seeing a homeland security agent armed with a supersoaker in itself will be worth the cost of the airline ticket.
In other news: according to the recent opinion poll published by the American Society of Macaroni Lovers, forks are to replace spoons in the next seven years.
And where would you put your 2000 hard drives? Your VCR? What if - however surprising this may seem to you - one of your 2000 hard drives fails? Would you tell the customer that you just lost 500Gb-worth of photos and three years of their research data? What if you lose two hard drives? We all store a great deal of porn on our PCs, but this is not the same.
Photographic copies have a few advantages over digital data storage media. Photographic plates, properly stored, will reliably last 20-30 years, at least. Tapes and hard drives will not. Digital data will need to be maintained. Storing such a large amount of digital data will be a continuous process of reading and writing; replacing disks, drives or tapes; upgrading software, hardware and networking. This is not the kind of a backup that you will be able to put away for 20 years and then go back and "refresh" it. Also, storing backups on photo plates in microfiche format will not require another 165 tons of glass plates - microfiche, remember?
If your glass plate with microfiche reliably lasts for 20 years, this will be about 10 years more than I would give any hard drive or tape. It amazes me how willing people are to believe in the longevity of digital data. This supposed longevity is largely an urban myth. Banks, universities, insurance companies keep lots of data in digital format for extended periods of time. But it costs them a pretty penny and almost invariably they still maintain paper archives.
I think this digital optimism stems from the fact that very few people tried to access any large body of 50-year-old digital data. I know that in the aerospace industry in the US average retention of backups rarely exceeds five years. This is because reliably storing data for longer periods of time causes the costs of backup environment to skyrocket. Sometimes I had to deal with recovering data from 10-15 years ago with mixed success. I remember one instance when data could be recovered from tapes but luckily paper copies were found in the engineering library archive. So how often did you have to recover digital data a decade or two old?
The final price depends entirely on what equipment and methods you chose, and, therefor, what level of reliability you can expect. Don't look at the price of just the hard drives: you still need something to put them into. Look at the prices of high-end disk arrays capable of storing and managing 1Pb of data with adequate redundancy, expansion capability, and enough space left over to refresh data every so often.
Add the cost of a workgroup- or enterprise-level Unix server to handle data integrity maintenance and a backup system for this server. Consider the cost of at least two operators or sysadmins with sufficient skills to manage this high-end equipment. Also consider the cost of datacenter space, electricity, and vendor support plans. Don't forget that someone will need to actually access this data, so you need to consider network costs and an appropriate server to facilitate user access to this 1Pb of data. Also user management, access management, NFS, Samba, FTP, Web server and all that jazz.
This is all from my actual real-world experience of managing a large enterprise data backup system. It gets very expensive if you want availability and reliability. All of a sudden you will get a couple more zeros at the end of your estimate. In fact, I think you will quickly realize that the cost of hard drives may not even be the primary ticket item.
Ever tried to maintain archival backups for a petabyte-worth of data? You would need a team of operators, millions of dollars worth of storage hardware, expensive climate-controlled facilities. This will not be a one-time expense either. The best way to back up 165 tons of photographic plates is to use more photographic plates to hold microfiche sets. Not exactly cutting-edge technology, but it will outlast any tape archive or storage array. And it will be cheaper.
At a music store I can listen to any track on an album and I rarely like more than one. So why should I buy a whole bag of assorted jelly beans if I already tried them all and only like the red ones? Recording labels put artists under a great deal of pressure to produce albums. The result is a couple of good tracks and a dozen space fillers.
I want the opportunity to buy what I want and not to buy what I don't want. I don't think I am being unreasonable.
If an album has 20 tracks and costs $20, I want to be able to buy one track for $1. And it has to be the same quality as on CD - lossless format and DRM-free. Until the music industry shows such flexibility, labels will continue losing sales, music piracy will thrive, and musicians will remain under pressure to produce mediocre art.
Recently I was looking for some new patio furniture. I went to all the usual places - Kmart, Sears, Walmart, etc. - but couldn't find anything to buy. In one store I liked the chairs, but not the table; in another store I liked the table but the chairs lacked the necessary butt support; Walmart had the chairs and the table that I liked, but they came with an umbrella the size of a traveling circus. The problem was - everything was sold in sets. If you like the umbrella - you have to buy the table and the six hideous chairs that come with it.
It was like shopping for music: you find a track you like and have to buy the whole album. If I had an option of buying - legally - any track that I want in lossless format, DRM-free, I would probably be spending around $100 every month on music. Why not - I have the money, I like music, I have the time to listen to it. But the way things are, I hardly buy any music anymore. Sony and the rest of the RIAA herd think they are protecting their bottom line. I think in reality their obstruction of online music business is exactly the reason behind their sales decline.
Here are some of the recent impressions from someone who just had to deploy a 120-node SLES 9 cluster, shortly followed by an 80-node RHEL 4 cluster. This is not scientific research, so here is my unscientific professional opinion: both RHEL and Suse are a royal pain the ass to install, configure and maintain.
I have over a decade of Unix sysadmin experience (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX) and about five years Linux experience (Red Hat and SuSE primarily). To give you an idea of my personal preferences and my unbiased nature: my personal laptop runs Solaris 10; my work laptop runs Suse 10; my home PC is a Windows XP Pro; my work desktop #1 is RHEL 4 WS; desktop #2 is Suse 9.1; and desktop #3 is a Sun Blade running Solaris 10.
So what is my problem with Linux? I like Suse as a desktop system. It's easier to configure and re-configure then Red Hat, mostly thanks to Yast and some logical organization of things. I am not a GUI sysadmin: I live inside Korn shell. Still, having a well-organized GUI is useful because you just can't remember everything.
All the little annoying things, which I can deal with on my laptop or desktop, are multiplied to obscene proportions in a large cluster. Scali and Yast apparently don't like each other; there are strange transient NFS problems having something to do with large file support; patching is more complicated then it has to be with RHEL and absolutely infuriating with SLES.
I don't want to go into all the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the two leading enterprise linuxes, the bottom line is: you want reliability and performance - stick with the big 'nixes and leave Linux to ripen a bit more. You want a desktop, then go with Linux, if Windows is not your cup of tea. But be prepared to catch heavy flak from your former Windows users.
There is no such thing as a "typical user". Rather there are typical tasks. Web browsing, emailing, text messaging are all trivial things you can do with most modern operating systems. Or can you? How many of your users ran into problems with video and sound using a Linux desktop? Why don't Java applets in Web pages never seem to work right under Solaris? Why does a thousand other things go wrong?
Is Linux more buggy than Windows? I don't think so, but many of my users do. They are switching from Windows to Linux - not their choice to begin with - and, being already used to all the Windows problems, they find Linux bugs to be new and worth complaining about. A lot. I have Suse 10 running on my laptop PERFECTLY. Everything works right: video, sound, wireless, card reader, volume buttons and all the other little things that usually annoy Linux users. But it wasn't easy getting there and it has to be if Linux is ever going to squeeze Windows market share. Not every PC user is a Unix sysadmin and they don't have to be.
This is just the kind of ridiculous reasoning bad managers use to screw hard-working employees on bonuses and raises. If you are rewarding a team member for a job well done, the rest of the team should feel inspired. They will see that their excellent job is noticed and rewarded, and the next time around it may be them who gets the extra bonus.
If the team's response to someone being rewarded more than others is anything but positive, then there really is no team but a bunch of a-holes; and so, as a manager, you shouldn't worry about bringing their morale down: most a-holes are pessimists by nature anyway.
However, many managers prefer giving out $50 "recognition awards" to the entire team (80% of which are mostly space fillers - people spending countless hours attending useless telecons and sending torrents of emails) thus destroying any desire in their more competent employees to perform beyond expectations. People with talent end up performing like the rest of them, on ocassion working just hard enough to skip over the next round of layoffs.
Someone should tell Ms. Poppendieck that they already tried Communism and so far it didn't work out.
OK, let's be reasonable here. Just because I value money over working conditions doesn't mean I will sacrifice my health for a marginal increase in pay. I already work with loud annoying jerks, so I will take that 10%, thank you very much. I don't think that a systems analyst will be remembered for all of history regardless of which team he is a part of. There is no glory for us humble IT servants. No glory other than money.
Naturally, I consider long-term advantages as well. There was a recent statistical study by SSA, I think, showing a nice graph of retirement age vs. average life expectancy. Did you know that, if you retire at the age of 65, your life expectancy will be 67? How's that for long-term planning? To be honest, this is not something I am looking forward to.
Well, to each his own. I think sometimes people lose perspective and forget why they are working. Unless you are rolling in cash, you are working for the money. The goal is to make as much as possible as quickly as possible. It's not about enjoyable atmosphere, plush office, pleasant people, or the gourmet coffee. It's about money - you make enough of it and hopefully you retire while you still can enjoy it. Call me shallow, but isn't this the point of having a job in the first place?
Don't get me wrong: if I had a choice of jobs that paid the same but one offered better working conditions, obviously I'd go for the same pay and better working conditions. And, naturally, I would not take a systems analyst job in Iraq just because it pays better - I may be greedy but I still think that my life, health, and my family are more important. However, one should not lose sight of the big picture. And, as far as I can see, things like working atmosphere (unless it involves RPGs and AK-47s), diversity, employee appreciation, free coffee and donuts, or the view from your office window are not a big part of that big picture.
Agree. Money is why I have a job. Don't give me a "Thank you" card or the "Employee of the month" coffee mug. I appreciate the extra attention, but let the dollars do the talking. I don't care who I work with - whites, blacks, males, females, transvestites, or hermaphrodites. If they know their stuff and do what they've been hired to do, we'll get along just fine. They can be loud, rude, ugly, and smelly. If I don't have to do their jobs for them - I will love them with all my heart.
As to the questioners on which this and similar ratings are based - what a bunch of hogwash. I know people who spent their best years in a dead-end IT job. They desperately grab on to anything positive about their situation - like a new water filter in the lunch room coffee maker. Isn't it wonderful to work for a company that replaces water filters at least once a year? I am sure it creates a real family atmosphere.
Well, if you watch Moore's movies and see an image of a fascist state, then maybe you are right. This, of course, would be your interpretation of the facts and the storyline. I don't necessarily see the same thing, although I would have to agree that we are getting there. There is no denying the half-a-trillion-dollar defense budget and the fact that nearly a quarter of US armed forces are deployed in foreign countries. Some may look at these facts and see an aggressive imperialist international stance.
As to the average Joe, it would be naive to think that many of us have the time or the education to understand the intricate workings of the US military-industrial complex or it's health care system, for that matter. I'd be happy with people understanding that on occasion - perhaps more often than not - the government we elect does not act in our best interests.
Some people understand this just from their daily experiences. Others require a documentary.
MM makes movies for Americans, not for Europeans. So it's understandable that you may misinterpret his message. He is not trying to push the fascist state image or to spin a conspiracy theory. The primary goal of all of Moore's documentaries is to expose the cozy relationship between the corporate America and the government.
Moore's goal is to make one realize that the reality behind "liberty and justice for all" is a bit more complicated. The bottom line: Moore's movies make the average Joe feel even more average - small, insignificant and, eventually, seriously pissed off.
Some direct their anger at Moore himself and accuse him of peddling conspiracy theories. However, there is nothing in his documentaries that is not already public knowledge. He just takes the widely available facts - mostly things you can find in any library - and pounds them into your stupid brain using whatever literary and cinematographic tools and tricks he feels will drive the point home.
The goal is to make one aware of the facts and to make one think. What you think, of course, is entirely up to you. And this is what a documentary is for.
Slashdot Mirror
What is happening in Myanmar? What is Myanmar?
I work as a sysadmin for one of the leading computer services companies in the US. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to work from home and scheduling flexibility. And I don't mind working a reasonable number of hours beyond the base eighty hours per pay period. The problem is with defining "reasonable". Most experienced managers are willing to play ball and give you something in exchange for the extra work you do. If I need tomorrow off, I just send my boss an email. Nobody knows or cares when or if I come to work - as long I am doing my job. Most of the time this works out well. On the other hand, there are managers who take the extra effort and extra hours for granted. They expect people to be available to work nights, weekends, and holidays; to put in days of overtime without being paid for it; and then they have the nerve to tell you that you were late to work or that you did answer your phone at 2am on Saturday morning. I had a boss like that. I complained - he got canned. I guess I got lucky.
Both B-1 and Tu-160 were designed primarily to use stand-off weapons. That is neither aircraft would normally be expected to enter the effective effective of enemy air defenses - either SAMs or fighter CAPs. When launching long-range cruise missiles isn't enough, however, both B-1 and Tu-160 were also given high-speed low-level air defense penetration capability. In either scenario Tu-160's much higher speed and range are a greater asset than B-1's extra 3km of maximum altitude.
Ah, another Wikipedia expert. Pathertic.
Tu-160 has nothing in common with B-1A. To an amateur they may look similar. Tu-160 is considerably larger than B-1A, twice as fast, carries more payload, and has far better range.
I think this type of classification would be pointless. Even if the computer could somehow differentiate between photos of boats and photos of men in suites floating face down in the bay, this would not help with seamlessly patching holes in images. But the truth is, while software can recognize particular elements of a photo, there is no understanding of of the subject or its context. Thus a missing mountain range in the background can be replaced by an ocean or a parking lot. Whatever categories this method uses, these are not categories humans use. It is based on mathematical analysis of the image data. "Semantic" is just a word developers like to use, just "AI", or "knowledge-based computing".
In other news: Texaco announced its decision to sue the Russian Air Force for using a red star on its aircraft. A pair of Tu-95s were seen circling over Texaco's headquarters in White Plains, N.Y. earlier today. Russian Defense Ministry officials declined to comment.
Let's see, rubber bullets have been know to kill or leave serious internal injuries that can permanently affect your quality of life. People have been beaten to death with batons and some have died from tear gas. Bright lights can permanently damage your eyes and even leave you blind. I will go with a water cannon. Besides, seeing a homeland security agent armed with a supersoaker in itself will be worth the cost of the airline ticket.
In other news: according to the recent opinion poll published by the American Society of Macaroni Lovers, forks are to replace spoons in the next seven years.
This is exactly my point. I think you meant to reply to someone else's posting.
And where would you put your 2000 hard drives? Your VCR? What if - however surprising this may seem to you - one of your 2000 hard drives fails? Would you tell the customer that you just lost 500Gb-worth of photos and three years of their research data? What if you lose two hard drives? We all store a great deal of porn on our PCs, but this is not the same.
Photographic copies have a few advantages over digital data storage media. Photographic plates, properly stored, will reliably last 20-30 years, at least. Tapes and hard drives will not. Digital data will need to be maintained. Storing such a large amount of digital data will be a continuous process of reading and writing; replacing disks, drives or tapes; upgrading software, hardware and networking. This is not the kind of a backup that you will be able to put away for 20 years and then go back and "refresh" it. Also, storing backups on photo plates in microfiche format will not require another 165 tons of glass plates - microfiche, remember?
If your glass plate with microfiche reliably lasts for 20 years, this will be about 10 years more than I would give any hard drive or tape. It amazes me how willing people are to believe in the longevity of digital data. This supposed longevity is largely an urban myth. Banks, universities, insurance companies keep lots of data in digital format for extended periods of time. But it costs them a pretty penny and almost invariably they still maintain paper archives.
I think this digital optimism stems from the fact that very few people tried to access any large body of 50-year-old digital data. I know that in the aerospace industry in the US average retention of backups rarely exceeds five years. This is because reliably storing data for longer periods of time causes the costs of backup environment to skyrocket. Sometimes I had to deal with recovering data from 10-15 years ago with mixed success. I remember one instance when data could be recovered from tapes but luckily paper copies were found in the engineering library archive. So how often did you have to recover digital data a decade or two old?
The final price depends entirely on what equipment and methods you chose, and, therefor, what level of reliability you can expect. Don't look at the price of just the hard drives: you still need something to put them into. Look at the prices of high-end disk arrays capable of storing and managing 1Pb of data with adequate redundancy, expansion capability, and enough space left over to refresh data every so often.
Add the cost of a workgroup- or enterprise-level Unix server to handle data integrity maintenance and a backup system for this server. Consider the cost of at least two operators or sysadmins with sufficient skills to manage this high-end equipment. Also consider the cost of datacenter space, electricity, and vendor support plans. Don't forget that someone will need to actually access this data, so you need to consider network costs and an appropriate server to facilitate user access to this 1Pb of data. Also user management, access management, NFS, Samba, FTP, Web server and all that jazz.
This is all from my actual real-world experience of managing a large enterprise data backup system. It gets very expensive if you want availability and reliability. All of a sudden you will get a couple more zeros at the end of your estimate. In fact, I think you will quickly realize that the cost of hard drives may not even be the primary ticket item.
Ever tried to maintain archival backups for a petabyte-worth of data? You would need a team of operators, millions of dollars worth of storage hardware, expensive climate-controlled facilities. This will not be a one-time expense either. The best way to back up 165 tons of photographic plates is to use more photographic plates to hold microfiche sets. Not exactly cutting-edge technology, but it will outlast any tape archive or storage array. And it will be cheaper.
At a music store I can listen to any track on an album and I rarely like more than one. So why should I buy a whole bag of assorted jelly beans if I already tried them all and only like the red ones? Recording labels put artists under a great deal of pressure to produce albums. The result is a couple of good tracks and a dozen space fillers.
I want the opportunity to buy what I want and not to buy what I don't want. I don't think I am being unreasonable.
If an album has 20 tracks and costs $20, I want to be able to buy one track for $1. And it has to be the same quality as on CD - lossless format and DRM-free. Until the music industry shows such flexibility, labels will continue losing sales, music piracy will thrive, and musicians will remain under pressure to produce mediocre art.
Recently I was looking for some new patio furniture. I went to all the usual places - Kmart, Sears, Walmart, etc. - but couldn't find anything to buy. In one store I liked the chairs, but not the table; in another store I liked the table but the chairs lacked the necessary butt support; Walmart had the chairs and the table that I liked, but they came with an umbrella the size of a traveling circus. The problem was - everything was sold in sets. If you like the umbrella - you have to buy the table and the six hideous chairs that come with it.
It was like shopping for music: you find a track you like and have to buy the whole album. If I had an option of buying - legally - any track that I want in lossless format, DRM-free, I would probably be spending around $100 every month on music. Why not - I have the money, I like music, I have the time to listen to it. But the way things are, I hardly buy any music anymore. Sony and the rest of the RIAA herd think they are protecting their bottom line. I think in reality their obstruction of online music business is exactly the reason behind their sales decline.
Here are some of the recent impressions from someone who just had to deploy a 120-node SLES 9 cluster, shortly followed by an 80-node RHEL 4 cluster. This is not scientific research, so here is my unscientific professional opinion: both RHEL and Suse are a royal pain the ass to install, configure and maintain.
I have over a decade of Unix sysadmin experience (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX) and about five years Linux experience (Red Hat and SuSE primarily). To give you an idea of my personal preferences and my unbiased nature: my personal laptop runs Solaris 10; my work laptop runs Suse 10; my home PC is a Windows XP Pro; my work desktop #1 is RHEL 4 WS; desktop #2 is Suse 9.1; and desktop #3 is a Sun Blade running Solaris 10.
So what is my problem with Linux? I like Suse as a desktop system. It's easier to configure and re-configure then Red Hat, mostly thanks to Yast and some logical organization of things. I am not a GUI sysadmin: I live inside Korn shell. Still, having a well-organized GUI is useful because you just can't remember everything.
All the little annoying things, which I can deal with on my laptop or desktop, are multiplied to obscene proportions in a large cluster. Scali and Yast apparently don't like each other; there are strange transient NFS problems having something to do with large file support; patching is more complicated then it has to be with RHEL and absolutely infuriating with SLES.
I don't want to go into all the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the two leading enterprise linuxes, the bottom line is: you want reliability and performance - stick with the big 'nixes and leave Linux to ripen a bit more. You want a desktop, then go with Linux, if Windows is not your cup of tea. But be prepared to catch heavy flak from your former Windows users.
There is no such thing as a "typical user". Rather there are typical tasks. Web browsing, emailing, text messaging are all trivial things you can do with most modern operating systems. Or can you? How many of your users ran into problems with video and sound using a Linux desktop? Why don't Java applets in Web pages never seem to work right under Solaris? Why does a thousand other things go wrong?
Is Linux more buggy than Windows? I don't think so, but many of my users do. They are switching from Windows to Linux - not their choice to begin with - and, being already used to all the Windows problems, they find Linux bugs to be new and worth complaining about. A lot. I have Suse 10 running on my laptop PERFECTLY. Everything works right: video, sound, wireless, card reader, volume buttons and all the other little things that usually annoy Linux users. But it wasn't easy getting there and it has to be if Linux is ever going to squeeze Windows market share. Not every PC user is a Unix sysadmin and they don't have to be.
This is just the kind of ridiculous reasoning bad managers use to screw hard-working employees on bonuses and raises. If you are rewarding a team member for a job well done, the rest of the team should feel inspired. They will see that their excellent job is noticed and rewarded, and the next time around it may be them who gets the extra bonus.
If the team's response to someone being rewarded more than others is anything but positive, then there really is no team but a bunch of a-holes; and so, as a manager, you shouldn't worry about bringing their morale down: most a-holes are pessimists by nature anyway.
However, many managers prefer giving out $50 "recognition awards" to the entire team (80% of which are mostly space fillers - people spending countless hours attending useless telecons and sending torrents of emails) thus destroying any desire in their more competent employees to perform beyond expectations. People with talent end up performing like the rest of them, on ocassion working just hard enough to skip over the next round of layoffs.
Someone should tell Ms. Poppendieck that they already tried Communism and so far it didn't work out.
OK, let's be reasonable here. Just because I value money over working conditions doesn't mean I will sacrifice my health for a marginal increase in pay. I already work with loud annoying jerks, so I will take that 10%, thank you very much. I don't think that a systems analyst will be remembered for all of history regardless of which team he is a part of. There is no glory for us humble IT servants. No glory other than money.
Naturally, I consider long-term advantages as well. There was a recent statistical study by SSA, I think, showing a nice graph of retirement age vs. average life expectancy. Did you know that, if you retire at the age of 65, your life expectancy will be 67? How's that for long-term planning? To be honest, this is not something I am looking forward to.
Well, to each his own. I think sometimes people lose perspective and forget why they are working. Unless you are rolling in cash, you are working for the money. The goal is to make as much as possible as quickly as possible. It's not about enjoyable atmosphere, plush office, pleasant people, or the gourmet coffee. It's about money - you make enough of it and hopefully you retire while you still can enjoy it. Call me shallow, but isn't this the point of having a job in the first place?
Don't get me wrong: if I had a choice of jobs that paid the same but one offered better working conditions, obviously I'd go for the same pay and better working conditions. And, naturally, I would not take a systems analyst job in Iraq just because it pays better - I may be greedy but I still think that my life, health, and my family are more important. However, one should not lose sight of the big picture. And, as far as I can see, things like working atmosphere (unless it involves RPGs and AK-47s), diversity, employee appreciation, free coffee and donuts, or the view from your office window are not a big part of that big picture.
Agree. Money is why I have a job. Don't give me a "Thank you" card or the "Employee of the month" coffee mug. I appreciate the extra attention, but let the dollars do the talking. I don't care who I work with - whites, blacks, males, females, transvestites, or hermaphrodites. If they know their stuff and do what they've been hired to do, we'll get along just fine. They can be loud, rude, ugly, and smelly. If I don't have to do their jobs for them - I will love them with all my heart.
As to the questioners on which this and similar ratings are based - what a bunch of hogwash. I know people who spent their best years in a dead-end IT job. They desperately grab on to anything positive about their situation - like a new water filter in the lunch room coffee maker. Isn't it wonderful to work for a company that replaces water filters at least once a year? I am sure it creates a real family atmosphere.
Well, if you watch Moore's movies and see an image of a fascist state, then maybe you are right. This, of course, would be your interpretation of the facts and the storyline. I don't necessarily see the same thing, although I would have to agree that we are getting there. There is no denying the half-a-trillion-dollar defense budget and the fact that nearly a quarter of US armed forces are deployed in foreign countries. Some may look at these facts and see an aggressive imperialist international stance.
As to the average Joe, it would be naive to think that many of us have the time or the education to understand the intricate workings of the US military-industrial complex or it's health care system, for that matter. I'd be happy with people understanding that on occasion - perhaps more often than not - the government we elect does not act in our best interests.
Some people understand this just from their daily experiences. Others require a documentary.
MM makes movies for Americans, not for Europeans. So it's understandable that you may misinterpret his message. He is not trying to push the fascist state image or to spin a conspiracy theory. The primary goal of all of Moore's documentaries is to expose the cozy relationship between the corporate America and the government.
Moore's goal is to make one realize that the reality behind "liberty and justice for all" is a bit more complicated. The bottom line: Moore's movies make the average Joe feel even more average - small, insignificant and, eventually, seriously pissed off.
Some direct their anger at Moore himself and accuse him of peddling conspiracy theories. However, there is nothing in his documentaries that is not already public knowledge. He just takes the widely available facts - mostly things you can find in any library - and pounds them into your stupid brain using whatever literary and cinematographic tools and tricks he feels will drive the point home.
The goal is to make one aware of the facts and to make one think. What you think, of course, is entirely up to you. And this is what a documentary is for.