I can only guess you're either missing the point, or just talking shit for the sake of it.
I have absolutely seen it happen - jobs set up for certain people, but what I've never seen is externally advertised jobs set up for certain people. Every time I've seen such setups in private and public sector they've just made it internal only, because it's far easier to only have to make excuses for a handful of failed internal candidates than run the risk of facing a tribunal with external candidates who think the process was unfair. There's literally no benefit to HR advertising a stitch up job externally as it's simply more risk, more work, and more cost without providing any actual benefit and with no legal obligation.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I'm saying for external jobs I've never seen any evidence of it, nor is there any logical reason why it would be the case, it's a theory that doesn't even make sense.
I have however seen plenty of people who have claimed that's what happened, when in reality the real problem was them - they just weren't a suitable candidate, but refused to accept it.
Right, int he soviet-afghan war, when they were at the height of military expenditure.
Fast forward to 2008, when they invaded Georgia, a massively inferior opponent given the size and equipment of their forces and they lost 70 soldiers lives, 40 armoured vehicles and a couple of tanks and planes in just 9 day.
Or in other words, the modern Russian army is a joke, it's 3rd rate at best having struggled so badly against Georgia's 3rd rate military.
Christ, you only have to look at the pictures of them in the news, half of them look like they've spent every year since Afghanistan in the 80s doing nothing but eating all the pies.
Yes they are, and they voted to oust Yanukovych and to step down and allow the interim government to take their place.
Oh, what, I'm sorry, does that ruin your coup narrative? Sucks to be you. Sorry, but there was no coup, the elected government voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych, and to allow the interim government to take over.
The whole process was democracy in action, as much as that upsets the pro-Russian narrative.
It's really not that simple, he was only elected after a decade of Russia rigging votes, and attempting to assassinate the opposition. Russia rigged the vote for Yanukovych in 2004 but it was overturned by the courts and a re-run was forced, when that re-run occured Yanukovych's competitor was poisoned by the Russians but by some miracle managed to survive and still won the election over Yanukovych despite being extremely ill as a result of that poisoning.
The fact is that the Ukrainians as a majority have never wanted Yanukovych, but Russia has been trying to force him on them for years, and it's not surprising that when they finally do his tenure resulted in forced ejection (by a majority of 73% in the democratically elected parliament for what it's worth).
Yes the Ukraine is divided, but in February polls showed no single part of the Ukraine supported by a majority joining Russia - even Crimea only came out at 41% in support of joining Russia.
Russia has been meddling in Ukraine to try and keep it in the Russian sphere of influence and Russian leaning because it's scared shitless (rightly or wrongly) of having the European Union only a 2 hour drive from Moscow so it wants it as a pro-Russian buffer. The people of the Ukraine mostly do not want that though, they want to be like other ex-soviet states like Poland, the Czech republic and so forth which are now becoming very modern successful westernised nations.
So it's a battle between Russia doing everything it can to maintain a buffer, and the people wanting to enjoy the benefits of the West. The West can live without Ukraine, but Russia feels it can't live without the Ukraine as a buffer between it and the EU - the West supports the Ukrainian leadership because it respects what the people want, Russia is against the Ukrainian leadership because they don't want to be a pro-Russian buffer zone, they want to be like their EU neighbours - a modern, succesful, progressive nation. Who wouldn't? Even a lot of Russians are sick of living in Putin's Russia and want what we in the West have if you haven't forgotten the riots after Putin's last faux election that kept him in power so why so surprised that non-Russian citizens like those in Ukraine also want fuck all to do with him?
"The last elected Ukranian president was a Russian loyalist."
Who got into power after having lost the previous presidential election despite his Russian friends having tried to assassinate his competitor through poisoning. The election in which his competitor was poisoned which was in itself a re-run because the prior one was deemed by the courts to be necessary because the original election was utterly full of electoral fraud in favour of Yanukovych:
"He was a deposed by a moltov-throwing mob with west-leaning sympathies, so we support them."
No, he was deposed by people who were sick of a decade of Russian interference of their elections involving vote rigging and assassination attempts designed to get him in in the first place. The Ukrainian people have been sending a message for over a decade that they didn't want Yanukovych despite Russian attempts to defy that, and when they were finally worn down and accepted him and he proved that he was indeed the man they didn't want they reverted back to the stance that they'd had for that decade which was that they did not want a Russian puppet leader.
"But that doesn't change the feelings of the majority there."
Apparently it does, because the majority wanted to remain part of the Ukraine but with full autonomy, yet somehow they've now ended up completely Russian, at least in Russia's eyes.
Perhaps if Russia hadn't been fucking with Ukraine trying to get Yanukovych in charge of them since 2004 they'd have a better relationship between the Ukrainian people and Russia, but when you try and kill the president the people wanted, when you try and rig their votes, when you have Russian death squads in your country murdering your protest leaders it's not terribly surprising that the Ukrainian citizens including ethnic Russians in Crimea didn't all want to be part of Russia.
You can be a dick all you want to the guy you responded to, but it doesn't change the fact your argument is shit because there was still no "Retain the status quo" option.
This is the same as the UK's far right Tories proposed referendum on Europe, the far right Tories cry "democracy, people should have a say on Europe!" but then say the referendum will be a choice between leaving the EU, or staying in only if the EU accept some unacceptable changes. Where the fuck is my preferred option of "Stay in and change nothing about our relationship"?
It's not democracy if both options amount to the same thing no matter how much idiots like the Tory far right like to claim it is or fools like you like to believe it is.
"The BNP (Britain) and FN (France) are an expression of this in politics, and the FN has just given France another wake-up call in last weekend's municipal elections."
I used to think this was our problem too but in reality there are nations that never really had empires that still suffer from sizeable far right elements.
The actual problem is simply just that a certain portion of the human population are far-right wankers, and an additional portion can be swayed into becoming far-right wankers depending on how factors such as the economy are personally affecting them at any given point in time.
The only connection between the two is that imperial romanticism is a useful tool for the populism the far right thrives on, but even in it's absence they find something else just as adequate for the job of converting societies least educated so although it's used it's definitely not necessary.
They should've really given him a kick in the teeth by letting Brazil and China join to make it the G9.
It would make more sense too, because relative to China and Brazil, Russia is pretty much a has-been. Brazil and China have larger economies and more global clout - China is the most major voice in Asia and Brazil is the most major voice in South America. Russia in contrast is a barely top 10 economy, whose only voice it represents is it's own, no one else really gives a fuck what Russia thinks (okay, well, maybe Assad is an exception).
But I guess that's why it's lashing out, it must be awkward going from one of the two most important super powers in the world to being a global non-factor for anything other than a massive legacy arsenal of nukes.
The only reason Russia was in the G8 anyway was to try and make Putin feel better about his nation's otherwise slide into irrelevance but if he's going to have an outbreak of little big man syndrome anyway then why even extend him that courtesy? Might as well get the people that actually matter in instead like the Brazilians and China.
No, not on the border. In the election halls, running the elections.
Oh and in the TV stations running the TV, in the radio stations running the radio, in the Ukrainian bases to stop the Ukrainian troops getting information to the people, on the border stopping international observers verifying the legitimacy of the election.
If it was just on the border I doubt most people would give a shit, it would make it a free, fair, and legitimate election, but that's not the case.
I don't think the loss of life is really necessary, it just requires the West to be willing to play a game of brinksmanship - Russia's deployment on Eastern Ukraine's border needs to be matched by Western deployment on Western Russia's border.
Russia knows it couldn't win the war, it knows it wouldn't even be worth starting the war, so it's then entirely down to who blinks first, and just as the USSR ran out of money first last time, it would do so again this time.
You don't need to start a war, you just need to match his deployments to create a stalemate, then it's not as though he can roll further into Europe because there'll be a big Western military barricade in the way. From here you can negotiate a phased stand down by both sides, and that forces Putin to either go bankrupt in a stand off, or pull back his troops from the border and remove the threat of a Ukraine invasion.
If the Ukrainian people want us on their borders as a deterrent to war we should accept - it's not as though we don't already do this in places like Korea and Japan without any wars starting. Some may argue it's not our problem, and that's the same shit we heard with World War II - it's not our problem, until it is. Putin's advance needs to be checked now, before it reaches a point where it is our problem - once the bullets start flying in Ukraine THAT'S when it becomes impossible to stop, so it's far better to stop it now before the bullets have started flying.
The problem right now is we're leaving Ukraine in the shit, we're saying to Russia don't invade, but we're telling the severely militarily weaker Ukraine well there's not much we're willing to do if they do, so tough shit. If Russia does invade then it wont take much to spiral out of control and start effecting neighbouring nations and then it most definitely is our problem, we can't avoid it at that point because we have people and interests in those countries.
The West is paralysed by the fact Europe is not yet ready to have their energy supplies cut off, the US wants them to do more but isn't willing to sell shale gas to them to remove their dependence from Russia to let them do more and so nothing's happening whilst Russia does what it wants. Find an alternative to Russian gas for Europe and they can act more economically but I think this'll just make Putin more resolute to use military force without there also being a firm barrier of iron and steel on it's border to block that move on the chess board.
"Why does everyone ignore the fact that the population there WANT to join Russia?"
Because they almost certainly don't? Objective polling before the election put only 41% of Crimeans in favour of becoming part of Russia. Russia invaded, installed a puppet Crimean government (kicking the democratically elected one out) took over the airwaves, spread propaganda everywhere, refused to allow impartial international observers in and then called an election which they "won" with 97% support - the jump from 41% to 97% isn't within any sane margin of error.
The real question is if a majority of Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia then why did Russia have to go to such lengths? If the Crimean people supported joining Russian then their democratically elected government could've called a referendum, international observers could've been allowed in to verify it's validity and so on and so forth. The fact none of that happened is evidence enough that the Russians had zero confidence that the people there wanted to join them fair and square. If that was the case then hell I'd even support what happened, as it wasn't I can do nothing other than refer to it as an illegal annexation against the verifiable will of the populace.
Unless you're trying to claim Britain would've won the war without the harriers, then I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Apart from being partly wrong (the RAF harriers weren't there from day 1, they arrived later, the the Argentinian skyhawks had sidewinders just as the Harriers did so were no less well equipped) the point is that the Harrier performed incredibly well, which is in part why it's still used to this day.
It's one of those few aircraft in the world that has silly amounts of combat action behind it from the Falklands, through to the Gulf War, through to Afghanistan. It's one of the most well proven jets around and my point is simply that it too had similar masses of criticisms against it that the F-35 has, yet still turned out to be incredibly effective and successful.
I wasn't claiming it was a magical machine that prevented all losses to British forces so I don't know what the relevance of your point about casualties was? - no shit it's a war, thousands of miles from home, greatly outnumbered. Of course there were fucking casualties.
At the end of the day only 6 harriers (not 10) were lost and none in air to air combat. A 20 - 0 tally air to air in a short engagement (and countless air to ground kills to boot) is kind of a good score for a jet that was apparently a complete waste of time and money, outnumbered, operating in entirely untested conditions, against opponents that were often in pretty much equally modern aircraft with equally modern missiles.
There's no reason the F-35 for all it's criticisms couldn't prove itself in a similar manner - maybe it wont, I'm not calling it either way, but it seems silly to discount that possibility given that people making such criticisms have been wrong time and time again and aircraft really only tend to get their real actual deserved reputation in hindsight. Any criticism of effectiveness before they see action is just headline grabbing speculation for the most part - and that was my point with the harrier and the same is true of a number of other aircraft through history.
I've never seen it from the inside and I've worked in big businesses, even public sector where this sort of nonsense is far more likely to happen but doesn't because even when they with all their policies want to take the piss they just make it internal only.
There's literally no reason for companies to create an external job posting if they're planning to fill it internally unless they have a genuine belief that maybe, just maybe someone stellar will come from outside - just because you're not that stellar person doesn't make it unfair though.
It doesn't matter how long or disjointed the list of skills is, as I say, no one actually expects to get a candidate with absolutely everything on their wish list. I've applied for and gotten jobs where I had only about half of their list because I could either pick up the rest or because they could use someone else to fill those gaps and use me to fill the gaps I could fill, doesn't mean they wouldn't have loved someone with my skills and all those I didn't have but they knew they were clutching at straws.
Except I've never actually seen this theory played out in practice. If companies have someone internal in mind they have every freedom to make it an internal only job posting which is how I've seen it play out when that's what's happening.
Every time I have seen such adverts I've applied anyway gotten interviews, and sometimes the job. The reason for such lists is not the conspiracy theory you cite, but because it's just a wishlist - it's what they'd love, but it doesn't mean they realistically think they'll ever get it.
I don't understand why people are so quick to assume it's a conspiracy theory like this rather than the more realistic probability that you didn't get the interview because they just didn't like your CV. If this happened to me a lot I'd be looking at my CV, the fact it doesn't happen is probably because when I have failed to get responses I did look at my CV and improved it to avoid it happening again.
If you go round blaming everyone else rather than looking to see if you can improve your CV or covering letter or whatever it's only going to keep happening but I'm sure you'll keep telling yourself it's the market, it's immigrants, it's HR or whatever. It's not, it's you.
I'm not even sure that getting bored is a problem. I got bored in a job and left after 15 months but it was absolutely no barrier to to getting another job because I was blunt about the fact I was bored at the previous job and that that was a key factor in wanting to move but to be fair I also have longer stints of 3 years and 2 years behind me too (and one 6 year one when I worked in support).
I'd rather hire someone who admits they get bored easily and is willing to move on when they do than most people who wont admit it but just started to really drag their heals when they do get bored because they're doing no one any favours - I end up with a crappy member of staff with low morale, and they hate their job. I do what I can of course to try and keep them busy but sometimes there's only so much you can offer them.
I honestly don't have a problem with people who do short stints of a year or so, they're no different to contractors in this respect and frankly are some of the best staff I've had because of their breadth of experience at solving different problems in different ways at different places. Like you say, senior devs should be upto speed in a week or so so I don't view that as a problem. I'm happier having someone who does a stellar job because they're into it for a year and then get bored and fuck off than someone who hangs around uselessly after a year and wont fuck off because no one else will take them. I've still got a year of awesome developer out of the person that left and am free to hire the next one to replace them, that's good enough for me.
Of course, awesome developers that stay engaged indefinitely are indeed the best but I find them to be incredibly rare. I find those who get bored quickly are those who have a constant nagging to be constantly learning and they only get bored because you can't provide anything new, and that's why I tend to believe they correlate strongly with also being the best developers - because they're learning all the time, and just never stop - they get an itch if they stop and that's why they move jobs.
I do agree with you though for the most part, 3 years seems about typical. I find 2 - 3 years is reasonably about the time most companies can sustain someone's passion to keep learning before they run out of something to teach them. The only time it changes is if it's a firm with very varied clients with very varied offerings to provide them, or if it's a big enough company that they can move around to departments doing distinctly different things (i.e. places like Microsoft where if you get bored of Windows after 3 years, you could go do 3 years on Office, then 3 years on Xbox or whatever).
To be honest pretty much all of your criticisms about the F-35 were made about the Harrier too, but the Falklands made it clear that it did actually perform in the end given that 12 of them held their own against the entire Argentinian airforce at first which comprised of things like French built Mirage IIIs and Super Etendards, American built A4 Skyhawks, and Israeli built Daggers, all still pretty impressive jets for the early 80s.
I think it's impossible to gauge how a jet performs in practice until it actually has to, and even then it's probably more about how good your pilots are at adapting to it's weaknesses and taking advantage of it's strengths - a key part of the success of the Harriers in the Falklands. It seems pointless to write it off if it's never been tested when people did exactly that with the Harrier only to end up being proven so terribly wrong that their credibility on such matters was shot to hell.
I mean, as an ex-Marine you're no doubt well aware that even your guys subsequently bought them having seen how well they did for us in that war and they're still going strong for you to this day in places like Afghanistan.
"Not everyone can be trained for the same things. Some people should be trained into a different position, rather than trying to make them more at their current position when it's never going to happen. But their knowledge of the business is still useful, and if it was worth hiring them, then it's worth keeping them. Keep in mind, however, that the former is not a foregone conclusion."
I agree, I do find if you can move people into different positions it's sometimes exactly what they need, though it is still sometimes the case that some staff just can't be helped no matter what, and that sometimes there just isn't a suitable position to move people to - if they want to move into sales but sales are already overstaffed what options are there if they're being awkward refusing to wait?
"And equally, I've seen companies spend thousands training people (sometimes me) and then refuse to even let them use their new skills, going in some inexplicable other direction which smacks of kickbacks or blowjobs. Sadly, usually kickbacks."
I've seen this too but I can't say I've ever put it down to kickbacks or bribes or any such thing. Mostly it's just plain old managerial incompetence.
Um, okay, care to elaborate why? I Googled them and I'm not entirely sure still what the relevance of them is? that they trained at something and became good at it or what?
I don't think training is the panacea you're implying. The problem is that there are people who are just untrainable, I really don't know if this is because some people are genetically dumb, whether it's a social thing whereby they're brought up with an unchangeable attitude against taking anything in, or whether it's simply because they don't have a genuine interest in the topic and so can't actually bring themselves to learn anything about it even when the opportunity is thrown at them.
Given this, I can see why companies wont blow money trying to train people - it's too much of a risk, I've seen companies blow 10s of thousands of pounds trying to train the untrainable with no actual benefit to show for it at the end of it.
You're right that companies need a mix of all levels of talent but the problem is that you can't make any use of the lower levels of talent without the high levels, right now the talent is weighted too much towards the bottom, so whilst yes there's no shortage of those folks who are "trained" in STEM topics, there just aren't enough at the top of the pile to guide them. If you need 1 good dev for every 5 bad ones to push a project forward the issue is that we have only 1 good dev for every 10 bad ones - that means only one project gets started, 1 good dev and 5 bad ones get employed, and the other 5 remain unemployable because there's not enough good devs to guide them.
"As a Java EE developer I'd advocate the benefits of proper application servers/infrastructure but ASP/Java are slow to release languages"
I don't know if much of that is true anymore, there are plenty of cheap and easy web hosts for deploying ASP.NET applications nowadays. Not sure if the same is true for Java, I've not looked in a while, last time I needed an off-site Java host I just set up my application servers myself.
"You need infrastructure and planning while PHP is a great language for systems that don't have huge reliance requirements and need the project done yesterday."
Right, but there's a cost to that which too many people ignore - your application is inherently more bug prone, inherently less performant, and almost certainly less secure. Sometimes things just shouldn't be done yesterday, the reason they are is the reason we have so much insecure software on the web, so many personal details floating where they shouldn't and so much identity fraud as a result.
"(and even then obviously Facebook has managed to make it very reliable)"
I'm not convinced by this argument - it strikes me as popular myth as relatively Facebook just isn't that stable. Facebook's method of making Facebook work seems to be creating an insane amount of redundant servers so that if one falls over there's something else to take it's place. Despite this I've had a number of occasions where bits of Facebook have just stopped working, or some general downtime. It's still not overly common, but it is overly common compared to sites like Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, or Google who use technologies like Java and C++. So it's not that Facebook have made PHP reliable - they're just blowing an awful lot of money inefficiently to give an appearance of reliability whilst still having more glitches and downtime than others. Last time Facebook did an article on their server farm and their users I calculated based on their very own numbers that they had 8gb of RAM for every single user - is that not rather fucking insane? The cost of inefficiency to them must be massive, and they can afford it of course, but really, they're throwing so much profit away by sticking with it and fighting it into working most the time.
"Additionally ASP.NET (with C# as you didn't specify) is statically typed. Even the "var" type is resolved at compile time to the base class of whatever it's first instantiation returns."
This isn't entirely true, when.NET 4 was released in about 2010 Microsoft introduced the DLR which allows sections of code to be dynamically typed amongst other things. It's used quite heavily in for example ASP.NET MVC where your backend code is normally all statically typed because you want your data models et. al. to be solid, easier and quicker to debug and test, but your front end pages are dynamically typed because front end stuff tends to require quicker iterations. It gives you all the advantages of rapid page development dynamic languages allow, with none of the disadvantages of having an inherently more bug prone, lesser performant and inherently more time consuming to debug back end.
"Surely you do not advocate overturning election results just because you do not like the outcome? If you do, pot meet kettle."
I do if they're not verifiable because international observers have been kicked out and the vote has been held at gunpoint. That type of election result is no more legitimate than simple declaration by dictator.
Democracy isn't just about holding or pretending to hold a poll. It's about holding a verifiable poll, this wasn't that.
I didn't like the election of Yanukovych a few years back, but at least his election was determined to be free and fair so there's little that can be said against his initial election. This however is a farce, it was set up purposely to be unverifiable, it was set up to be legitimate from the outset. If Putin could've won the poll legitimately why take over all the broadcasters in the area, occupy the place with tens of thousands of soldiers, and refuse to let anyone in to verify the election was legitimate? In that case yes I absolutely support ignoring it - they can always hold it again in a legitimate and verifiable fashion if they're confident of their ability to win legitimately right?
Is it still plausible when you consider that they're claiming there was 82% turnout? That 25% of non-ethnic Russians turned up and nearly all voted to join Russia?
Seems more likely if the poll was legit they'd have voted for independence given that that's always been the most popular polled preference in Crimea.
China doesn't give a shit about US exports, it gives a shit about having a major world economy to sell stuff to. If it no longer has the US to sell stuff to then it no longer has reason to manufacture, no longer has jobs, and will suffer rebellion due to deteriorating living standards and lack of employment.
It's what the US imports from China that matters, and that's just about everything nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only guess you're either missing the point, or just talking shit for the sake of it.
I have absolutely seen it happen - jobs set up for certain people, but what I've never seen is externally advertised jobs set up for certain people. Every time I've seen such setups in private and public sector they've just made it internal only, because it's far easier to only have to make excuses for a handful of failed internal candidates than run the risk of facing a tribunal with external candidates who think the process was unfair. There's literally no benefit to HR advertising a stitch up job externally as it's simply more risk, more work, and more cost without providing any actual benefit and with no legal obligation.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I'm saying for external jobs I've never seen any evidence of it, nor is there any logical reason why it would be the case, it's a theory that doesn't even make sense.
I have however seen plenty of people who have claimed that's what happened, when in reality the real problem was them - they just weren't a suitable candidate, but refused to accept it.
Right, int he soviet-afghan war, when they were at the height of military expenditure.
Fast forward to 2008, when they invaded Georgia, a massively inferior opponent given the size and equipment of their forces and they lost 70 soldiers lives, 40 armoured vehicles and a couple of tanks and planes in just 9 day.
Or in other words, the modern Russian army is a joke, it's 3rd rate at best having struggled so badly against Georgia's 3rd rate military.
Christ, you only have to look at the pictures of them in the news, half of them look like they've spent every year since Afghanistan in the 80s doing nothing but eating all the pies.
Yes they are, and they voted to oust Yanukovych and to step down and allow the interim government to take their place.
Oh, what, I'm sorry, does that ruin your coup narrative? Sucks to be you. Sorry, but there was no coup, the elected government voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych, and to allow the interim government to take over.
The whole process was democracy in action, as much as that upsets the pro-Russian narrative.
It's really not that simple, he was only elected after a decade of Russia rigging votes, and attempting to assassinate the opposition. Russia rigged the vote for Yanukovych in 2004 but it was overturned by the courts and a re-run was forced, when that re-run occured Yanukovych's competitor was poisoned by the Russians but by some miracle managed to survive and still won the election over Yanukovych despite being extremely ill as a result of that poisoning.
The fact is that the Ukrainians as a majority have never wanted Yanukovych, but Russia has been trying to force him on them for years, and it's not surprising that when they finally do his tenure resulted in forced ejection (by a majority of 73% in the democratically elected parliament for what it's worth).
Yes the Ukraine is divided, but in February polls showed no single part of the Ukraine supported by a majority joining Russia - even Crimea only came out at 41% in support of joining Russia.
Russia has been meddling in Ukraine to try and keep it in the Russian sphere of influence and Russian leaning because it's scared shitless (rightly or wrongly) of having the European Union only a 2 hour drive from Moscow so it wants it as a pro-Russian buffer. The people of the Ukraine mostly do not want that though, they want to be like other ex-soviet states like Poland, the Czech republic and so forth which are now becoming very modern successful westernised nations.
So it's a battle between Russia doing everything it can to maintain a buffer, and the people wanting to enjoy the benefits of the West. The West can live without Ukraine, but Russia feels it can't live without the Ukraine as a buffer between it and the EU - the West supports the Ukrainian leadership because it respects what the people want, Russia is against the Ukrainian leadership because they don't want to be a pro-Russian buffer zone, they want to be like their EU neighbours - a modern, succesful, progressive nation. Who wouldn't? Even a lot of Russians are sick of living in Putin's Russia and want what we in the West have if you haven't forgotten the riots after Putin's last faux election that kept him in power so why so surprised that non-Russian citizens like those in Ukraine also want fuck all to do with him?
"The majority of people in Crimea were loyal to Russia before any of this unrest began a few months ago."
Liar. Only 41% were:
http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...
"The last elected Ukranian president was a Russian loyalist."
Who got into power after having lost the previous presidential election despite his Russian friends having tried to assassinate his competitor through poisoning. The election in which his competitor was poisoned which was in itself a re-run because the prior one was deemed by the courts to be necessary because the original election was utterly full of electoral fraud in favour of Yanukovych:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
"He was a deposed by a moltov-throwing mob with west-leaning sympathies, so we support them."
No, he was deposed by people who were sick of a decade of Russian interference of their elections involving vote rigging and assassination attempts designed to get him in in the first place. The Ukrainian people have been sending a message for over a decade that they didn't want Yanukovych despite Russian attempts to defy that, and when they were finally worn down and accepted him and he proved that he was indeed the man they didn't want they reverted back to the stance that they'd had for that decade which was that they did not want a Russian puppet leader.
"But that doesn't change the feelings of the majority there."
Apparently it does, because the majority wanted to remain part of the Ukraine but with full autonomy, yet somehow they've now ended up completely Russian, at least in Russia's eyes.
Perhaps if Russia hadn't been fucking with Ukraine trying to get Yanukovych in charge of them since 2004 they'd have a better relationship between the Ukrainian people and Russia, but when you try and kill the president the people wanted, when you try and rig their votes, when you have Russian death squads in your country murdering your protest leaders it's not terribly surprising that the Ukrainian citizens including ethnic Russians in Crimea didn't all want to be part of Russia.
You can be a dick all you want to the guy you responded to, but it doesn't change the fact your argument is shit because there was still no "Retain the status quo" option.
This is the same as the UK's far right Tories proposed referendum on Europe, the far right Tories cry "democracy, people should have a say on Europe!" but then say the referendum will be a choice between leaving the EU, or staying in only if the EU accept some unacceptable changes. Where the fuck is my preferred option of "Stay in and change nothing about our relationship"?
It's not democracy if both options amount to the same thing no matter how much idiots like the Tory far right like to claim it is or fools like you like to believe it is.
"The BNP (Britain) and FN (France) are an expression of this in politics, and the FN has just given France another wake-up call in last weekend's municipal elections."
I used to think this was our problem too but in reality there are nations that never really had empires that still suffer from sizeable far right elements.
The actual problem is simply just that a certain portion of the human population are far-right wankers, and an additional portion can be swayed into becoming far-right wankers depending on how factors such as the economy are personally affecting them at any given point in time.
The only connection between the two is that imperial romanticism is a useful tool for the populism the far right thrives on, but even in it's absence they find something else just as adequate for the job of converting societies least educated so although it's used it's definitely not necessary.
It's just confirmation that Scoble is still an irrelevant douche.
Slashdot needs this kind of reconfirmation every once in a while.
They should've really given him a kick in the teeth by letting Brazil and China join to make it the G9.
It would make more sense too, because relative to China and Brazil, Russia is pretty much a has-been. Brazil and China have larger economies and more global clout - China is the most major voice in Asia and Brazil is the most major voice in South America. Russia in contrast is a barely top 10 economy, whose only voice it represents is it's own, no one else really gives a fuck what Russia thinks (okay, well, maybe Assad is an exception).
But I guess that's why it's lashing out, it must be awkward going from one of the two most important super powers in the world to being a global non-factor for anything other than a massive legacy arsenal of nukes.
The only reason Russia was in the G8 anyway was to try and make Putin feel better about his nation's otherwise slide into irrelevance but if he's going to have an outbreak of little big man syndrome anyway then why even extend him that courtesy? Might as well get the people that actually matter in instead like the Brazilians and China.
"( Russian troops on the border )"
No, not on the border. In the election halls, running the elections.
Oh and in the TV stations running the TV, in the radio stations running the radio, in the Ukrainian bases to stop the Ukrainian troops getting information to the people, on the border stopping international observers verifying the legitimacy of the election.
If it was just on the border I doubt most people would give a shit, it would make it a free, fair, and legitimate election, but that's not the case.
I don't think the loss of life is really necessary, it just requires the West to be willing to play a game of brinksmanship - Russia's deployment on Eastern Ukraine's border needs to be matched by Western deployment on Western Russia's border.
Russia knows it couldn't win the war, it knows it wouldn't even be worth starting the war, so it's then entirely down to who blinks first, and just as the USSR ran out of money first last time, it would do so again this time.
You don't need to start a war, you just need to match his deployments to create a stalemate, then it's not as though he can roll further into Europe because there'll be a big Western military barricade in the way. From here you can negotiate a phased stand down by both sides, and that forces Putin to either go bankrupt in a stand off, or pull back his troops from the border and remove the threat of a Ukraine invasion.
If the Ukrainian people want us on their borders as a deterrent to war we should accept - it's not as though we don't already do this in places like Korea and Japan without any wars starting. Some may argue it's not our problem, and that's the same shit we heard with World War II - it's not our problem, until it is. Putin's advance needs to be checked now, before it reaches a point where it is our problem - once the bullets start flying in Ukraine THAT'S when it becomes impossible to stop, so it's far better to stop it now before the bullets have started flying.
The problem right now is we're leaving Ukraine in the shit, we're saying to Russia don't invade, but we're telling the severely militarily weaker Ukraine well there's not much we're willing to do if they do, so tough shit. If Russia does invade then it wont take much to spiral out of control and start effecting neighbouring nations and then it most definitely is our problem, we can't avoid it at that point because we have people and interests in those countries.
The West is paralysed by the fact Europe is not yet ready to have their energy supplies cut off, the US wants them to do more but isn't willing to sell shale gas to them to remove their dependence from Russia to let them do more and so nothing's happening whilst Russia does what it wants. Find an alternative to Russian gas for Europe and they can act more economically but I think this'll just make Putin more resolute to use military force without there also being a firm barrier of iron and steel on it's border to block that move on the chess board.
"Why does everyone ignore the fact that the population there WANT to join Russia?"
Because they almost certainly don't? Objective polling before the election put only 41% of Crimeans in favour of becoming part of Russia. Russia invaded, installed a puppet Crimean government (kicking the democratically elected one out) took over the airwaves, spread propaganda everywhere, refused to allow impartial international observers in and then called an election which they "won" with 97% support - the jump from 41% to 97% isn't within any sane margin of error.
The real question is if a majority of Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia then why did Russia have to go to such lengths? If the Crimean people supported joining Russian then their democratically elected government could've called a referendum, international observers could've been allowed in to verify it's validity and so on and so forth. The fact none of that happened is evidence enough that the Russians had zero confidence that the people there wanted to join them fair and square. If that was the case then hell I'd even support what happened, as it wasn't I can do nothing other than refer to it as an illegal annexation against the verifiable will of the populace.
Unless you're trying to claim Britain would've won the war without the harriers, then I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Apart from being partly wrong (the RAF harriers weren't there from day 1, they arrived later, the the Argentinian skyhawks had sidewinders just as the Harriers did so were no less well equipped) the point is that the Harrier performed incredibly well, which is in part why it's still used to this day.
It's one of those few aircraft in the world that has silly amounts of combat action behind it from the Falklands, through to the Gulf War, through to Afghanistan. It's one of the most well proven jets around and my point is simply that it too had similar masses of criticisms against it that the F-35 has, yet still turned out to be incredibly effective and successful.
I wasn't claiming it was a magical machine that prevented all losses to British forces so I don't know what the relevance of your point about casualties was? - no shit it's a war, thousands of miles from home, greatly outnumbered. Of course there were fucking casualties.
At the end of the day only 6 harriers (not 10) were lost and none in air to air combat. A 20 - 0 tally air to air in a short engagement (and countless air to ground kills to boot) is kind of a good score for a jet that was apparently a complete waste of time and money, outnumbered, operating in entirely untested conditions, against opponents that were often in pretty much equally modern aircraft with equally modern missiles.
There's no reason the F-35 for all it's criticisms couldn't prove itself in a similar manner - maybe it wont, I'm not calling it either way, but it seems silly to discount that possibility given that people making such criticisms have been wrong time and time again and aircraft really only tend to get their real actual deserved reputation in hindsight. Any criticism of effectiveness before they see action is just headline grabbing speculation for the most part - and that was my point with the harrier and the same is true of a number of other aircraft through history.
I've never seen it from the inside and I've worked in big businesses, even public sector where this sort of nonsense is far more likely to happen but doesn't because even when they with all their policies want to take the piss they just make it internal only.
There's literally no reason for companies to create an external job posting if they're planning to fill it internally unless they have a genuine belief that maybe, just maybe someone stellar will come from outside - just because you're not that stellar person doesn't make it unfair though.
It doesn't matter how long or disjointed the list of skills is, as I say, no one actually expects to get a candidate with absolutely everything on their wish list. I've applied for and gotten jobs where I had only about half of their list because I could either pick up the rest or because they could use someone else to fill those gaps and use me to fill the gaps I could fill, doesn't mean they wouldn't have loved someone with my skills and all those I didn't have but they knew they were clutching at straws.
Except I've never actually seen this theory played out in practice. If companies have someone internal in mind they have every freedom to make it an internal only job posting which is how I've seen it play out when that's what's happening.
Every time I have seen such adverts I've applied anyway gotten interviews, and sometimes the job. The reason for such lists is not the conspiracy theory you cite, but because it's just a wishlist - it's what they'd love, but it doesn't mean they realistically think they'll ever get it.
I don't understand why people are so quick to assume it's a conspiracy theory like this rather than the more realistic probability that you didn't get the interview because they just didn't like your CV. If this happened to me a lot I'd be looking at my CV, the fact it doesn't happen is probably because when I have failed to get responses I did look at my CV and improved it to avoid it happening again.
If you go round blaming everyone else rather than looking to see if you can improve your CV or covering letter or whatever it's only going to keep happening but I'm sure you'll keep telling yourself it's the market, it's immigrants, it's HR or whatever. It's not, it's you.
I'm not even sure that getting bored is a problem. I got bored in a job and left after 15 months but it was absolutely no barrier to to getting another job because I was blunt about the fact I was bored at the previous job and that that was a key factor in wanting to move but to be fair I also have longer stints of 3 years and 2 years behind me too (and one 6 year one when I worked in support).
I'd rather hire someone who admits they get bored easily and is willing to move on when they do than most people who wont admit it but just started to really drag their heals when they do get bored because they're doing no one any favours - I end up with a crappy member of staff with low morale, and they hate their job. I do what I can of course to try and keep them busy but sometimes there's only so much you can offer them.
I honestly don't have a problem with people who do short stints of a year or so, they're no different to contractors in this respect and frankly are some of the best staff I've had because of their breadth of experience at solving different problems in different ways at different places. Like you say, senior devs should be upto speed in a week or so so I don't view that as a problem. I'm happier having someone who does a stellar job because they're into it for a year and then get bored and fuck off than someone who hangs around uselessly after a year and wont fuck off because no one else will take them. I've still got a year of awesome developer out of the person that left and am free to hire the next one to replace them, that's good enough for me.
Of course, awesome developers that stay engaged indefinitely are indeed the best but I find them to be incredibly rare. I find those who get bored quickly are those who have a constant nagging to be constantly learning and they only get bored because you can't provide anything new, and that's why I tend to believe they correlate strongly with also being the best developers - because they're learning all the time, and just never stop - they get an itch if they stop and that's why they move jobs.
I do agree with you though for the most part, 3 years seems about typical. I find 2 - 3 years is reasonably about the time most companies can sustain someone's passion to keep learning before they run out of something to teach them. The only time it changes is if it's a firm with very varied clients with very varied offerings to provide them, or if it's a big enough company that they can move around to departments doing distinctly different things (i.e. places like Microsoft where if you get bored of Windows after 3 years, you could go do 3 years on Office, then 3 years on Xbox or whatever).
To be honest pretty much all of your criticisms about the F-35 were made about the Harrier too, but the Falklands made it clear that it did actually perform in the end given that 12 of them held their own against the entire Argentinian airforce at first which comprised of things like French built Mirage IIIs and Super Etendards, American built A4 Skyhawks, and Israeli built Daggers, all still pretty impressive jets for the early 80s.
I think it's impossible to gauge how a jet performs in practice until it actually has to, and even then it's probably more about how good your pilots are at adapting to it's weaknesses and taking advantage of it's strengths - a key part of the success of the Harriers in the Falklands. It seems pointless to write it off if it's never been tested when people did exactly that with the Harrier only to end up being proven so terribly wrong that their credibility on such matters was shot to hell.
I mean, as an ex-Marine you're no doubt well aware that even your guys subsequently bought them having seen how well they did for us in that war and they're still going strong for you to this day in places like Afghanistan.
Incorrect, D-, please try harder.
"Not everyone can be trained for the same things. Some people should be trained into a different position, rather than trying to make them more at their current position when it's never going to happen. But their knowledge of the business is still useful, and if it was worth hiring them, then it's worth keeping them. Keep in mind, however, that the former is not a foregone conclusion."
I agree, I do find if you can move people into different positions it's sometimes exactly what they need, though it is still sometimes the case that some staff just can't be helped no matter what, and that sometimes there just isn't a suitable position to move people to - if they want to move into sales but sales are already overstaffed what options are there if they're being awkward refusing to wait?
"And equally, I've seen companies spend thousands training people (sometimes me) and then refuse to even let them use their new skills, going in some inexplicable other direction which smacks of kickbacks or blowjobs. Sadly, usually kickbacks."
I've seen this too but I can't say I've ever put it down to kickbacks or bribes or any such thing. Mostly it's just plain old managerial incompetence.
Um, okay, care to elaborate why? I Googled them and I'm not entirely sure still what the relevance of them is? that they trained at something and became good at it or what?
I don't think training is the panacea you're implying. The problem is that there are people who are just untrainable, I really don't know if this is because some people are genetically dumb, whether it's a social thing whereby they're brought up with an unchangeable attitude against taking anything in, or whether it's simply because they don't have a genuine interest in the topic and so can't actually bring themselves to learn anything about it even when the opportunity is thrown at them.
Given this, I can see why companies wont blow money trying to train people - it's too much of a risk, I've seen companies blow 10s of thousands of pounds trying to train the untrainable with no actual benefit to show for it at the end of it.
You're right that companies need a mix of all levels of talent but the problem is that you can't make any use of the lower levels of talent without the high levels, right now the talent is weighted too much towards the bottom, so whilst yes there's no shortage of those folks who are "trained" in STEM topics, there just aren't enough at the top of the pile to guide them. If you need 1 good dev for every 5 bad ones to push a project forward the issue is that we have only 1 good dev for every 10 bad ones - that means only one project gets started, 1 good dev and 5 bad ones get employed, and the other 5 remain unemployable because there's not enough good devs to guide them.
"As a Java EE developer I'd advocate the benefits of proper application servers/infrastructure but ASP/Java are slow to release languages"
I don't know if much of that is true anymore, there are plenty of cheap and easy web hosts for deploying ASP.NET applications nowadays. Not sure if the same is true for Java, I've not looked in a while, last time I needed an off-site Java host I just set up my application servers myself.
"You need infrastructure and planning while PHP is a great language for systems that don't have huge reliance requirements and need the project done yesterday."
Right, but there's a cost to that which too many people ignore - your application is inherently more bug prone, inherently less performant, and almost certainly less secure. Sometimes things just shouldn't be done yesterday, the reason they are is the reason we have so much insecure software on the web, so many personal details floating where they shouldn't and so much identity fraud as a result.
"(and even then obviously Facebook has managed to make it very reliable)"
I'm not convinced by this argument - it strikes me as popular myth as relatively Facebook just isn't that stable. Facebook's method of making Facebook work seems to be creating an insane amount of redundant servers so that if one falls over there's something else to take it's place. Despite this I've had a number of occasions where bits of Facebook have just stopped working, or some general downtime. It's still not overly common, but it is overly common compared to sites like Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, or Google who use technologies like Java and C++. So it's not that Facebook have made PHP reliable - they're just blowing an awful lot of money inefficiently to give an appearance of reliability whilst still having more glitches and downtime than others. Last time Facebook did an article on their server farm and their users I calculated based on their very own numbers that they had 8gb of RAM for every single user - is that not rather fucking insane? The cost of inefficiency to them must be massive, and they can afford it of course, but really, they're throwing so much profit away by sticking with it and fighting it into working most the time.
"Additionally ASP.NET (with C# as you didn't specify) is statically typed. Even the "var" type is resolved at compile time to the base class of whatever it's first instantiation returns."
This isn't entirely true, when .NET 4 was released in about 2010 Microsoft introduced the DLR which allows sections of code to be dynamically typed amongst other things. It's used quite heavily in for example ASP.NET MVC where your backend code is normally all statically typed because you want your data models et. al. to be solid, easier and quicker to debug and test, but your front end pages are dynamically typed because front end stuff tends to require quicker iterations. It gives you all the advantages of rapid page development dynamic languages allow, with none of the disadvantages of having an inherently more bug prone, lesser performant and inherently more time consuming to debug back end.
"Surely you do not advocate overturning election results just because you do not like the outcome? If you do, pot meet kettle."
I do if they're not verifiable because international observers have been kicked out and the vote has been held at gunpoint. That type of election result is no more legitimate than simple declaration by dictator.
Democracy isn't just about holding or pretending to hold a poll. It's about holding a verifiable poll, this wasn't that.
I didn't like the election of Yanukovych a few years back, but at least his election was determined to be free and fair so there's little that can be said against his initial election. This however is a farce, it was set up purposely to be unverifiable, it was set up to be legitimate from the outset. If Putin could've won the poll legitimately why take over all the broadcasters in the area, occupy the place with tens of thousands of soldiers, and refuse to let anyone in to verify the election was legitimate? In that case yes I absolutely support ignoring it - they can always hold it again in a legitimate and verifiable fashion if they're confident of their ability to win legitimately right?
Is it still plausible when you consider that they're claiming there was 82% turnout? That 25% of non-ethnic Russians turned up and nearly all voted to join Russia?
Seems more likely if the poll was legit they'd have voted for independence given that that's always been the most popular polled preference in Crimea.
China doesn't give a shit about US exports, it gives a shit about having a major world economy to sell stuff to. If it no longer has the US to sell stuff to then it no longer has reason to manufacture, no longer has jobs, and will suffer rebellion due to deteriorating living standards and lack of employment.
It's what the US imports from China that matters, and that's just about everything nowadays.