Right, keep parroting the myth. I haven't worked with Fortune 500 heads because I'm not American but I have worked with FTSE 100 bosses.
Ironically your comments about Gates and Zuckerberg disprove your whole point - the fact is these folks did go from zero experience of those companies to successfully running them, more successfully than most of the long term candidates for those roles.
You're batshit crazy if you think Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg had some magic large business running skill. On the contrary, they had zero business running skills. They learnt them as they went and did a fantastic job for the simple reason it's not that hard. It's not some magical trait people are born with, it's learnt and it's not hard to learn nor a long learning process. I don't pretend then be 100% effective from day 1 but within 6 months you wouldn't notice the slightest bit of difference - the learning time is mostly just about memorisation of facts rather than requirement for an actual skill.
The fact is the higher you get the easier it gets. A large bulk of the skillset requirement for CEOs of the largest companies is in the ability to network and that's simply not a rare skill - much of it comes with the territory in terms of who you know, not what you know, but drop someone in a Fortune 500 CEO position and much of the people they need to network will come to them - it's a chicken and egg scenario in some ways that existing CEOs mostly just get lucky with in terms of meeting the right people. You need to understand fundamentals of business including financials like the components of your EBITDA and the impacts each of those has on your company's financial position but none of it's rocket science, it's all trivial to learn. The final thing you need is to understand your markets. Ironically this is where many CEOs are actually worse than many other people who could easily replace them.
I don't pretend anyone could do it still, but the point is simply that there's absolutely no shortage of the people who could do the job and most definitely no shortage of people who could often do the job better - you really think the likes of Blackberry and Nokia (pre-Elop, post-Elop was intentional) failed because the CEOs had bad luck or whatever? Utter nonsense, you had a bunch of guys who simply had no understanding of the industry they were in. I'm sure they could network, I'm sure they understood the financials but they didn't understand their market well enough which made them less fit for the role than many experienced people within there companies, below even director level who could trivially have replaced them.
I suspect if you believe these people are magical, born with some inherent trait few other people have, then you're more reflecting on your own inability to ever do the job rather than making a reasoned point about the general difficulty of filling this sort of role.
If you genuinely believe what you're saying you need to explain what it is about this people that others don't have - it needs to be something objective rather than a suggestion of magical inherent traits these folk are born with. Break it down into what those traits actually are and you'll rapidly find they're both learned and not uncommon.
The demand for cars didn't dry up, it slowed down, and that's a profound difference.
If a company can't cope with a slow down and risks bringing down a major portion of the economy with it as the result of a slow down then there's a fundamental structural issue there that needs to be dealt with one way or the other regardless else it's just delaying the inevitable until next time. Giving it state subsidy so it can continue to exist despite not being fit to survive only exacerbates the problem.
I think comparisons to the 1930s are largely meaningless, it was a different time, with a different society, and different issues. There just aren't the required parallels to assume what happened then can act as a perfect guideline to what would happen now.
Self-training doesn't preclude you from getting qualifications, it just means you're not dependent on the company for them.
I did my degree alongside working full time and paid for it whilst I was working out of my earnings. I've also done other qualifications off my own back, a lot of them are certainly affordable and I wasn't exactly earning highly at the time.
But regardless I'm convinced the HR departments don't recognise self-learning and so forth is just a myth. Even if it's true of some companies it's far from universal and all you need are the companies for where it's not true. I say this because I didn't exactly get stellar GCSEs, and I dropped out of my A-Levels and still got an IT support job followed by a development job before I even had my degree and although it wasn't highly paid it was still comfortably above the national average wage. Maybe I didn't get some interviews because of the lack of degree, A-Levels and so forth or maybe it was something else, but either way it certainly shouldn't be a hindrance if you know the topic in question. I find getting jobs easy, it takes a few weeks at most if I want something new, and I can command the wage I honestly feel I'm worth rather than the wage someone else thinks I'm worth.
I'm pretty certain that "oh HR filtered me because of my qualifications" is simply an excuse for "My CV is shit and I'm too close minded to accept that's why". Who even deals with HR anyway nowadays? I normally deal with recruitment agents who deal directly with the hiring IT/development managers at which point it's just about how good you are at talking to recruiters and expressing your abilities and skills.
It's always within the realm of possibility that I've always been insanely lucky, but I can only go off my own experience - I've self-learned, and I've always got jobs based on what I can do rather than what my qualifications are or aren't. I'm not some runaway millionaire but I live comfortably and am far above the majority of the population in terms of perks, benefits, and salary I receive so I'm happy with that.
I just don't have a lot of sympathy for those who sit and blame everything else because often they're in a lot better position to get jobs than I was but still can't - that implies the problem is wholly them because I've done exactly what they claim is not possible or is too difficult multiple times.
But all that assumes that for some unexplained reason the demand for cars would just dry up.
There seems no reason to think that if GM disappeared that demand for cars would also vanish too. More realistically the slack would just be picked up by the other auto manufacturers who'd see a drastic increase in demand as they filled the void.
There may be a temporary supply shortage as they struggled to meet demand, but this would likely be met quite quickly by established firms simply buying up GM's old plants. It may even be the case that they'd buy up the entire end-to-end IP and production chain for some of GM's offerings. This is after all what GM itself did with companies like Vauxhall.
It sounds like the argument against decreasing executive wages - that we have to pay that much to get top talent, it's similarly false because it's based on the false premise that such top talent is rare. It's not. You could sack the entire top tier of every Fortune 500 company tomorrow and there'd be plenty enough equally or even more competent people lining up to replace them for only a fraction of their salaries.
I'm not saying it'd be smooth running, there would be a fairly noticeable impact of GM's demise without a doubt, but it wouldn't be an end of world scenario, and frankly the forced re-organisation of the industry away from such a monolithic dinosaur being at the core of it would almost certainly be more healthy for the industry long term.
Not just US ally, Canada is one of the five-eyes group of nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It's pretty well established that these nations security services all work together in unison on just about everything now.
I'd wager given the status of five-eyes that New Zealand similarly uses it's benign image to spy where the US/UK can't get away with it on their behalf.
"Hell, I may even buy one of my favorite games (Killer Instinct), as long as I'm not subjected to MS monitoring and policing my swearing at friends during our own tournament."
This is a myth. Microsoft do not monitor private chat on Skype or in Parties (well, unless you're a target of an NSA tap or whatever).
The person that got banned for profanity was banned from using upload studio to upload videos. The XBox One has a facility to record game footage and upload it to be shared. It records without voice chat, only game sound, but you can add commentary afterwards. The person in question therefore took a video of his gameplay, added a load of swearing to it, shared it, then got banned from sharing further videos because of the excessive profanity. It's not that you're not even allowed to add profanity in your commentary, Microsoft have said you can, it's just that this guy's use of it was excessive. I'm not even sure his ban from Upload Studio would be permanent, if it's anything like past enforcement on XBox Live they usually just give you a couple of days the first time, then a week or month the second time, then permanent again after that - and I'm talking about when you use outright racist language on public chat here and such, not just because you trash talked and said "I hope your mum dies in a fire" or whatever.
I still don't agree with it, it's the internet, if you don't like swearing, fuck off, don't try and police it, but it's a far cry from the "Banned from his whole XBox for swearing in a private chat!" which is the lie that it got turned into by the press, Sony fanboys and Microsoft haters alike.
If Microsoft listened to private chats I'd have been banned a thousand times over by now for some of the bad taste jokes I've made with friends on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Skype. Similarly I've never been banned from the Playstation Network either FWIW.
One of my friends has this habit of "friending" any random person he plays with. So we were playing Battlefield 3 on the XBox 360 one day for a few hours and one of his friends came online who he promptly invited to our chat party and joined our game.
The guy's gamertag (nickname) was that of an infamous Islamic preacher, and I thought it was just typical gamer type name-trolling at first but after a few hours of this guy refusing to ever play the US and always joining the Russians - quitting and rejoining the game if need be to swap sides when the swap side timer hit him and ranting every 5 minutes between saying "yeah, die American pig" I began to realise for the first time that there are in fact people who are literally batshit extremists on there - for the first time ever I'd actually found one. For a while I assumed he was just joking but it only took a few jokes on my behalf and the complete lack of response from the guy to realise this guy was stone cold serious in his hatred for the US.
Does this mean I think they need to monitor games? Not really, chances are it was just some kid who needs to grow up and will never cause any harm, and given that this is the first extremist nutjob I've ever encountered online after nearly two decades of it it seems like an extremely inefficient way of finding them even if they were to be a threat, but what if he did find someone else like him on there? what if they need egg each other on and move on to a real atrocity? It's not outside the realm of possibility that two of them couldn't end up the next Boston bombers.
It's easy to say terrorists would never be that stupid, but the fact is most terrorists actually are. The leaders get it but they're not the ones putting themselves in the way of danger, these bottom of the rung dumb fucks are precisely the sort of people they want to go and get themselves killed for their cause and many have got themselves caught long before causing any problems precisely because of this level of stupidity. Even many hackers who tend to be far more intelligent than your average extremist have been caught precisely because they failed to consistently use secure communication.
They're not looking for the leaders on MMOs, those that are smart enough to avoid it, but they are looking for kids who don't know any better about ranting on logged chats assuming no one will ever get round to reading it - kids that could either become informants, or threats if their hatred is left to fester or circumstances open up the realm of possibility of action. The targets are definitely there, inside these games, but whether joining the games themselves is the sensible way to find them or determine how genuinely useful/problematic targets could be I'm really not convinced in the slightest.
But perhaps they expect that these people are more likely to be the lone wolf types, the sorts of guys who'd snap one day and go and shoot up a mall all by themselves or whatever, those they can't trace by simply following the known terror networks because although they sympathise with them they were never actually part of them - there was no link to follow. Perhaps in their desperation to deal with the lone wolf problem they can't see any other option than trying to pursue them in the places where many disaffected minds hang out?
UO wasn't even owned by EA when I played and it had no system of relating two players together like friends lists or any such thing so I don't see how it could be them. They simply had no real technical facility to associate us both, not to mention I use different e-mails for my accounts. To scan our in game chats and dig out our MSN accounts way back in the 90s seems particularly unlikely.
I agree but that's exactly what the GPs implication was - that Americans aren't getting these jobs that are going to H1-Bs because American companies aren't training people.
My point is that that's simply nonsense, there's another path to obtaining those acquired skills - self-learning. If the companies aren't training that doesn't prevent you obtaining the required skills.
Sure it's nice if you can have both, but given the US has an advantageous education system compared to many H1-B countries of origin it seems understandable that companies should ask why they'd waste money hiring someone and training them when they wont learn off their own back when they could just hire someone from somewhere else that has learnt off their own back in a less advantageous economy for learning. If an American wont spend $40, maybe a hundredth of a percentage of his income on a book and read it but someone from say, India will spend 1% of his income - 100x more based on wealth then why would you want to waste money on the American layabout? The Indian is clearly a far superior employee due to a far superior passion for the profession.
Expecting others to train you if you wont learn yourself is stupid, if you are willing to learn yourself then it's more worth a company sending you on training courses as well - because they know the money will be well spent in that you'll take a lot away from the course because you have a clear passion for it evidenced by your self-learning.
Which given that there's no known or provable physical phenomenon by which some god could exist or speak to you is the rational assumption to make.
To start entertaining the irrational in discussion makes all discussion meaningless as you can argue against anything and can never reach a logical conclusion about anything at that point.
"At least what companies DO is transparent. Anyone can see what the websites are sending/receiving, and you know when you are visiting or making use of them."
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but this is only partially true. I had LinkedIn start recommending people to me whom it could only have linked me to via my MSN messenger contact list.
I say this with certainty because I had a couple of contacts recommended on both Facebook and LinkedIn with whom my only association was via MSN messenger (or from Ultima Online years previous). Neither of us had ever used tools to share contact lists nor had phones at the time with apps that could read contact lists or any such thing.
So they're not entirely transparent, Microsoft at least seemed to be selling personal information to third parties without consent which would be an illegal breach of the UK's data protecton act.
You can see what's going to and from them, but you've no idea what they're doing with it, or who they're passing it on to after it's reached them.
He's not making fun of him for having religious beliefs, he's making fun of him for being completely oblivious to the fact that maybe he's unemployable because he's suffering delusions.
It's one thing to believe in some god, I think most people have no problem with that. It's not my cup of tea, but each to there own. However, it's a whole other thing to believe he speaks to you. That requires you to hear voices in your head. That requires you to be actually clinically insane.
People who are clinically insane tend not to be the best workers.
You'd have had a point if you'd instead talked about the fact we shouldn't joke about people who have mental health issues, then you'd be right.
I'll make an argument, software development is a profession with logic at it's core. It's inherent in just about everything you do as a developer.
You hence need to be capable of logical thinking that is to be able to make logical deductions.
When you get a job as a developer you'll hence most likely be working with very logical people, people who can deduce when your arguments and ideas don't make sense, and will expect you to back down if you can't logically defend your claim.
GoodNewsJim.com is probably one of the most batshit crazy pits of insanity and illogic I have seen in a long time, hence, it's not surprising that for 10 years he has been unable to fit into a role that requires him to show at least some degree of logical reasoning.
But for what it's worth, his post was full of assertions with no actual argument, he told us he's competent, he told us he had a degree from Carnegie Mellon. He asserts his competence, he asserts his talent, but he provides no actual evidence of any of that. What has he worked on? what has he done? How does he know he is talented? The employers he dealt with obviously did not think so.
I got a job as a software developer before I even had any kind of degree. I can go out and find new development jobs within a couple of months if I wish to change jobs and I see very good payrises every time - even my first development job without a degree was paying well above the national average. I therefore have a hard time having any sympathy for people who claim they're awesome then whinge that they can't get a job given that I've always found it trivial even when I had less qualifications than guys like this, and despite living in a region that isn't exactly stand out for number of development jobs. People like him had every advantage over people like me, yet still couldn't find employment whilst I could. It's for this reason that I'm certain that they are the problem, not the industry. The wealth of listed jobs coupled with the incredibly low levels of unemployment in the industry back this up. If you can't get a software development job in a reasonable amount of time, then you are most definitely the problem. You're the 1 in 50 (the unemployed 2% in the industry) that are just unemployable.
Seriously, if you only average 1 interview a year in this industry there's something very fucking wrong with you - that implies they were rejecting him before he even met them. That takes quite some doing and a pretty crappy CV. Perhaps he plastered his CV with comments about how god spoke to him too?
Why is it the job of corporations to train people?
I've always been willing to forge my own path to learning, I learn what I want to learn and I'm willing to dedicate my time and money to doing so.
All the greatest developers I've known are those who have a passion for learning, and they keep doing so, they never stop. If someone has this entitlement attitude where industry owns them training then they don't have that trait, sure you could send them on a training course for this, that, and the other, but if they have to insist on being sent on those courses then they don't have that required trait of ongoing development.
So if you think you're owed training by corporations, and that it's up to them to train you, rather than you to train yourself to be useful, then you don't have the inherent traits required to be truly great anyway.
If you can't self-learn, or organise self-learning, then no amount of training will make you the sort of person high tech companies need because learning and research go hand in hand and they want people who can do both to take their technologies forward. It's the necessity of cutting edge - it's not like bricklaying or whatever where you can be taught it in an apprenticeship and then get a job doing it over and over for life. The world of software especially at companies like these is ever changing and you have to be capable of ensuring your skills are ever changing and evolving to be fit for the field.
I'm with you on tax avoidance etc., but I think if you think others need to train you then you simply don't have what it takes to work at the forefront of this sort of field anyway and those that do will have trained themselves, and enjoyed doing so.
Given that there are plenty of people who have lost weight going from being obese to a healthy weight without a reduction in metabolism I think that's a given.
GP is right, you're extrapolating. You're taking one experiment in a specific set of circumstances and trying to extrapolate it to all cases.
The clue is in the experiment name itself - "starvation", obese people losing weight isn't starvation, giving them a balanced diet albeit with less calories is a completely different set of circumstances to starving people with a lack of balance in their diet including necessary vitamins.
B-complex vitamins help your metabolism when it comes to breaking down carbohydrates and so forth. The study you cited effectively found that vitamin-B deprivation can result in reduced metabolism - no shit, but as the GP said, what the fuck has this got to do with reducing the calorific intake of obese people given that we can maintain their vitamin B levels whilst doing so?
Reducing calorie intake isn't necessarily the same as causing vitamin imbalance, no one has suggested the latter, but your study did the latter as well as the former.
Yes, like it or not they're successful as fixing economies.
Labour made us bankrupt once before and nearly made us bankrupt again. Currently under largely Tory economic leadership we're the fastest growing developed nation in the world right now, we avoided triple dip recession and the double dip was even revised away. We've also had some of the cheapest borrowing rates for any nation saving a fortune.
They've also invested heavily in diversification, by working hard to promote the tech and scientific sectors and to improve trade with nations like China. In contrast Labour in the boom years was focussing heavily on banking and making cuts to science - yes, even in the boom years. Despite Labour's claim to be for the working class as well, Gordon Brown, again, in the boom years, removed the 10p tax rate - he increased tax on the lowest earners in society, whilst the coaliton (admittedly large because of the lib dems) have increased the tax free allowance beyond that which Brown stripped the 10p tax rate from.
Despite their austerity drives objective impartial surveys have shown that people haven't noticed a decrease in quality of local government services. Crime has continued to decrease despite cuts.
As I say, I don't like the Tories in general, I think they're prudish, I think they've got a hopeless record on the environment, I think they've got an awful workers rights record, I think they have a hopeless record with Europe and I think half their party are a bunch of bigotted arseholes who need to be shot. For these reasons I'd never vote for them, but I'd also never vote for Labour if our economy needs some TLC or for more than a term or two because time and time again they make a complete fuckup of it and borrow more than we can afford to pay back whilst still somehow managing to end up making the least wealthy pay more tax.
You've got to be a special kind of zealot to pretend that they don't at least have economic competence and credibility.
"Both the UK and the US were left worse off by the influence of Thatcher and Reagan, (may they burn in Hell)."
For Thatcher to have left the UK worse off that implies there would've been a better option.
For all her faults, the problem is that the alternative was still worse. That's why the Tories won 4 elections in a row, including 3 under Thatcher.
I don't particularly like the Tories. I think they're greedy and selfish, but one thing they have is economic competence and credibility. Given that Labour had bankrupted the UK it's not surprising therefore that people voted for Thatcher three times running. That's the same reason the Tories are back in power now.
We have a problem in the UK and that's that on one had we have a party that is economically competent but ideologically against the things that make our country great (like the NHS, our strong human rights laws and so forth) and on the other we have a party that's great at running things like the NHS but economically incompetent. It seems our only option is to elect the Tories when Labour has fucked up the economy and elect Labour when the Tories have fucked up the likes of the NHS, the human rights act, and our relationship with Europe.
Thatcher got in because most people didn't want to live in a perpetually bankrupt country, which was the alternative.
So like it or not, fault her all you want, she didn't leave our country worse off for the simple fact that it would have been even worse again without her. Effectively there was a choice between awful, and really fucking awful, so the people chose awful, but that's still a better choice than really fucking awful.
Say in this case they're succesful, say they manage to destroy Google with their patents, Google files for bankruptcy and is stripped down and sold off.
What do you think is going to happen to Google's patents? All it will take is a patent troll that has implemented no software itself to hit companies like Microsoft with them and Microsoft defensive patents will be 100% useless because the patent troll produces nothing useful to sue over.
Maybe Microsoft themselves will buy up the patents but that's going to get them into a massive bidding war and it's going to cost them hard and for what? Microsoft would have a choice - blow money on patents with no one to use them against meaning you're effectively spending money on patents you'll never be able to make any money back off of, or let them go to someone who can make money off of Microsoft by using them against them.
Then when that happens you'll see a whole industry arise, an industry in creating more patents for the single purpose of selling them for a fortune to Microsoft, or selling them to patent trolls.
It's not going to end well. Microsoft's defensive patent suits could only ever get it so far, then after that patents are going to be a massive net cost to them with nothing whatsoever to show for that cost.
"130 Desktops and max of 28 logical servers and you need 3 windows systems administrators!?"
Got to agree, I'm not even sure the guy is necessarily understaffed. When I worked IT support we managed a 6000 computer network across many different sites with 30 staff. Most recent places I've worked as a developer we had 2 IT folk for about 200 staff, 1 IT guy for about 150 staff (and client support on top). He's probably borderline where he is such that if a few major incidents occurred at once he'd really struggle, but that's something management have to accept. Depending on how important their IT infrastructure is to them then a day or so of network downtime whilst he catches up may be a non-issue to them.
It doesn't sound like they're understaffed on the developer side either frankly. It depends how big their applications are of course but 4 developers to support a 150 person what sounds like a manufacturing company is very much on the high side for that sort of industry. Maybe their development needs are exceptional, maybe not, but either way unless the management team has bought into the idea that their development needs are exceptional then they're not going to greenlight growing development any further. So as you say the developers either need to create a business case and come up with an explanation as to why the firms development needs are exceptional and what the benefits are, or they need to accept that they don't actually need more staff.
But this case sounds almost identical to a previous workplace of mine (where I was a developer) and having come from a larger IT support background I had a better understanding of IT support than my manager who was the IT support guy. The solution is to establish SLAs, get the board to decide on what response times they want and set up helpdesk ticketing software with those SLAs. If you continuously hit them then you were wrong about there being a problem, if you don't then one of two things can happen:
1) You'll get in trouble for not hitting SLAs
2) They'll recognise you need more help
If it's 2) then great, all is good. If it's 1) then this is for one of two reasons - either you're a slacker, and your bosses know it, or your bosses aren't reasonable enough to justify working for them anyway. Either way, if it's 1) whether you're lazy or not the fact is your bosses don't respect you and you're in a dead end job however you cut it. For my former boss it was very much the case that he resisted this idea precisely because he knew he was a lazy waste of space and he was only asking for more staff simply because he wanted to spend less time working and more time dicking around on the internet and whatever else.
So having SLAs set and a method of measuring them can be your enemy or friend in that they'll either make your case or get you in trouble, but if nothing else they'll let you know where you stand and make the decision for you as to whether you want to continue to work there.
It's only an anecdote, but in my experience "we need more staff" falls into three categories
1) You don't, you're just asking for your life to be made needlessly easier at the company's expense because you're lazy.
2) You do, and the company wont authorise it because they've no idea how to grow their business - get out now, you have no prospects there.
3) You work for a competent company where people are responsible and if you genuinely need more staff you don't even need to ask - you'll get authorisation for them as soon as you genuinely need them.
Either way the goal is to be the sort of person that fits into and gets a job at company 3).
"I am saying that anything which reduces the perceived economic value to humans of a species increases the chances that said species will go extinct."
You're now using the term perceived. You weren't previously. That's all I was ever originally disputing - that there would only be a perception of lessened economic value, not an actual loss of economic value which is how your original post phrased it. I was simply making the point that pretty much all species have an inherent economic value of some kind it's just not always obvious, or that the detriment caused by loss of a species can take more than an individuals lifetime such that although the cost may be nothing to a living individual, it may be high to later generations.
Personally I think this case is largely meaningless - I don't have much of an opinion about it beyond that even if successful I don't think it'll change much, research will just go elsewhere so I don't see what it'll actually change or achieve.
I think real change will only ever be achieved through education, teaching people that species like the chimpanzee when seen eating fruit aren't taking our food, but are merely keeping themselves alive so that such ecosystems can continue to thrive and provide fruit for both of us.
It makes no odds at the end of the day, even if we wipe species out and destroy ecosystems life in general will go on and it'll only be us that suffers.
As an aside it's interesting that you keep referencing the Western Black Rhino - the whole reason it went extinct was because it had an artificially high real economic value associated with it because of nonsense about rhino horn medicines and so forth so in this respect a made up reason for it to have real actual economic value is precisely the reason it went extinct in the first place which highlights the other danger - any economic value attached to them, real or perceived, has to be associated with them being kept alive, else you're just inviting poachers to wipe them out before they move onto the next species destroying ecosystems in the process.
"Looking at the pictures of the scene its hard to imagine that they were driving anywhere close to the 45mph speed limit."
To be fair most the damage from the picture is simply the fire damage. The impact damage will be the dent in the car and it's surprising how little speed is required to make quite a hefty visible damage impact.
I had a crash at only 20mph once, I lost all braking ability on a downhill in icy conditions and couldn't stop for a junction and even with the car hitting me at only 20mph it bent the whole front end of the car such that it was am insurance write off. So at 40mph you're going to see some serious looking damage.
It often looks worse than it is though, despite the whole front end of my car being smashed and distorted in my crash the engine was still in position and functional and I was able to drive the thing home (albeit with a somewhat amusing trail of small random bits of plastic and such left in my wake) and I was uninjured.
The lesson I learnt is that cars look a hell of a lot worse than they are after collisions. Oh, that and if your boss insists you come in when the roads are genuinely unsafe to drive on then you should tell him to go fuck himself.
You still don't seem to get it. These species DO provide economic value. They provide fertilisation and protection for growth of fruit, which is a food source, which has economic value.
The issue isn't absence of economic value, the issue is lack of recognition, understanding, and education of the economic value. Just because the economic value isn't immediately obvious, does not mean it is not there. This is precisely why I said it's about perception of lack of economic value, rather than reality of lack of economic value that's the problem.
You seem to be mixing the two and this is what I take issue with - you seem to be implying that there is lack of economic value in the species which is false, but also stating we need to increase the obviousness of the economic value which is true, and conflicts with your suggestion that there is no, or not enough economic value.
It's a simple cost/benefit ratio - the fact is there is more to be gained by allowing the likes of chimps to continue providing us with a food source than there is to fight a species that is no longer kept in check by them and which reduces our access to fruits. None of that means people necessarily realise the subtle but important impact the chimps have on their ecosystem, but it doesn't help that people like you muddy the waters with falsehoods such as the suggestion they have no economic value because you seemingly don't understand that not too complex concept of ecosystems and the role biodiversity plays, and how that provides value to us as a species.
I was only referring to diseases like smallpox because you brought it up. You can't really complain if I address a point you make.
Regarding the benefits of biodiversity of mammals it of course depends on the animal. All animals serve a purpose in their respective ecosystems and loss of one species can have marked impacts elsewhere. I believe Chimpanzees act both to disperse and fertilise seeds through their faeces from fruits they have eaten and partially in a predatory function. Yes we could wipe them out, but then you'd probably have overpopulation of red colobus monkeys which eat flowers, which prevents those plants flowering. The combined result of lack of chimp dispersal and fertilisation of seed, coupled with growth in red colobus eating flowers preventing development of fruit would decrease the possibility of regeneration of plant life and may mean less fruit crop for humans also. Their loss would also lead to a decrease in food availability for leopards meaning leopards may also then infringe on human territory more frequently increasing the need for policing.
We see this in the UK, where we wiped out the likes of the Eagle Owl and Wolf which used to hunt foxes. The loss of those species meant that farmers therefore complain about resultant greater fox populations attacking livestock because the foxes no longer have any natural predators, and so hunt them themselves. Reduction of foxes results in greater rabbit populations, which then go on to decimate vegetable crops, and so time and money is spent hunting them. The amount of time and money spent trying to keep fox and rabbit populations in check has been far higher than it would've been to just not eradicate eagle owls and the like in the first place.
To cut a long story short, your claims show a complete lack of understanding of the importance of biodiversity, and the way the natural world works. Your original comment gave the perception that you seem to think humans and chimps exist in a bubble with no outside impact. This is false. The way such ecosystems work is well established, and you cannot remove a species without having a measurable impact on that ecosystem.
In removing chimps as a competitor for food against humans, you simply increase the burden on humanity to hunt red colobus instead, or suffer the even greater subsequent loss of crop. Chimp faeces and diet means improved plant growth, and improved protection of fruit.
But yours is precisely the sort of short term thinking I'm referring to - you look at the chimp eating the fruit and you assume he's competition and should be wiped out, in reality he's taking his share and ensuring more can grow so that there's plenty for both. Without him there'll be less for everyone as the colobus feast on the flowers pre-fruit formation.
I'm amazed so few people understand the importance of healthy ecosystems and biodiversity and how they in fact help us.
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Right, keep parroting the myth. I haven't worked with Fortune 500 heads because I'm not American but I have worked with FTSE 100 bosses.
Ironically your comments about Gates and Zuckerberg disprove your whole point - the fact is these folks did go from zero experience of those companies to successfully running them, more successfully than most of the long term candidates for those roles.
You're batshit crazy if you think Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg had some magic large business running skill. On the contrary, they had zero business running skills. They learnt them as they went and did a fantastic job for the simple reason it's not that hard. It's not some magical trait people are born with, it's learnt and it's not hard to learn nor a long learning process. I don't pretend then be 100% effective from day 1 but within 6 months you wouldn't notice the slightest bit of difference - the learning time is mostly just about memorisation of facts rather than requirement for an actual skill.
The fact is the higher you get the easier it gets. A large bulk of the skillset requirement for CEOs of the largest companies is in the ability to network and that's simply not a rare skill - much of it comes with the territory in terms of who you know, not what you know, but drop someone in a Fortune 500 CEO position and much of the people they need to network will come to them - it's a chicken and egg scenario in some ways that existing CEOs mostly just get lucky with in terms of meeting the right people. You need to understand fundamentals of business including financials like the components of your EBITDA and the impacts each of those has on your company's financial position but none of it's rocket science, it's all trivial to learn. The final thing you need is to understand your markets. Ironically this is where many CEOs are actually worse than many other people who could easily replace them.
I don't pretend anyone could do it still, but the point is simply that there's absolutely no shortage of the people who could do the job and most definitely no shortage of people who could often do the job better - you really think the likes of Blackberry and Nokia (pre-Elop, post-Elop was intentional) failed because the CEOs had bad luck or whatever? Utter nonsense, you had a bunch of guys who simply had no understanding of the industry they were in. I'm sure they could network, I'm sure they understood the financials but they didn't understand their market well enough which made them less fit for the role than many experienced people within there companies, below even director level who could trivially have replaced them.
I suspect if you believe these people are magical, born with some inherent trait few other people have, then you're more reflecting on your own inability to ever do the job rather than making a reasoned point about the general difficulty of filling this sort of role.
If you genuinely believe what you're saying you need to explain what it is about this people that others don't have - it needs to be something objective rather than a suggestion of magical inherent traits these folk are born with. Break it down into what those traits actually are and you'll rapidly find they're both learned and not uncommon.
The demand for cars didn't dry up, it slowed down, and that's a profound difference.
If a company can't cope with a slow down and risks bringing down a major portion of the economy with it as the result of a slow down then there's a fundamental structural issue there that needs to be dealt with one way or the other regardless else it's just delaying the inevitable until next time. Giving it state subsidy so it can continue to exist despite not being fit to survive only exacerbates the problem.
I think comparisons to the 1930s are largely meaningless, it was a different time, with a different society, and different issues. There just aren't the required parallels to assume what happened then can act as a perfect guideline to what would happen now.
Self-training doesn't preclude you from getting qualifications, it just means you're not dependent on the company for them.
I did my degree alongside working full time and paid for it whilst I was working out of my earnings. I've also done other qualifications off my own back, a lot of them are certainly affordable and I wasn't exactly earning highly at the time.
But regardless I'm convinced the HR departments don't recognise self-learning and so forth is just a myth. Even if it's true of some companies it's far from universal and all you need are the companies for where it's not true. I say this because I didn't exactly get stellar GCSEs, and I dropped out of my A-Levels and still got an IT support job followed by a development job before I even had my degree and although it wasn't highly paid it was still comfortably above the national average wage. Maybe I didn't get some interviews because of the lack of degree, A-Levels and so forth or maybe it was something else, but either way it certainly shouldn't be a hindrance if you know the topic in question. I find getting jobs easy, it takes a few weeks at most if I want something new, and I can command the wage I honestly feel I'm worth rather than the wage someone else thinks I'm worth.
I'm pretty certain that "oh HR filtered me because of my qualifications" is simply an excuse for "My CV is shit and I'm too close minded to accept that's why". Who even deals with HR anyway nowadays? I normally deal with recruitment agents who deal directly with the hiring IT/development managers at which point it's just about how good you are at talking to recruiters and expressing your abilities and skills.
It's always within the realm of possibility that I've always been insanely lucky, but I can only go off my own experience - I've self-learned, and I've always got jobs based on what I can do rather than what my qualifications are or aren't. I'm not some runaway millionaire but I live comfortably and am far above the majority of the population in terms of perks, benefits, and salary I receive so I'm happy with that.
I just don't have a lot of sympathy for those who sit and blame everything else because often they're in a lot better position to get jobs than I was but still can't - that implies the problem is wholly them because I've done exactly what they claim is not possible or is too difficult multiple times.
But all that assumes that for some unexplained reason the demand for cars would just dry up.
There seems no reason to think that if GM disappeared that demand for cars would also vanish too. More realistically the slack would just be picked up by the other auto manufacturers who'd see a drastic increase in demand as they filled the void.
There may be a temporary supply shortage as they struggled to meet demand, but this would likely be met quite quickly by established firms simply buying up GM's old plants. It may even be the case that they'd buy up the entire end-to-end IP and production chain for some of GM's offerings. This is after all what GM itself did with companies like Vauxhall.
It sounds like the argument against decreasing executive wages - that we have to pay that much to get top talent, it's similarly false because it's based on the false premise that such top talent is rare. It's not. You could sack the entire top tier of every Fortune 500 company tomorrow and there'd be plenty enough equally or even more competent people lining up to replace them for only a fraction of their salaries.
I'm not saying it'd be smooth running, there would be a fairly noticeable impact of GM's demise without a doubt, but it wouldn't be an end of world scenario, and frankly the forced re-organisation of the industry away from such a monolithic dinosaur being at the core of it would almost certainly be more healthy for the industry long term.
Not just US ally, Canada is one of the five-eyes group of nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It's pretty well established that these nations security services all work together in unison on just about everything now.
I'd wager given the status of five-eyes that New Zealand similarly uses it's benign image to spy where the US/UK can't get away with it on their behalf.
"Hell, I may even buy one of my favorite games (Killer Instinct), as long as I'm not subjected to MS monitoring and policing my swearing at friends during our own tournament."
This is a myth. Microsoft do not monitor private chat on Skype or in Parties (well, unless you're a target of an NSA tap or whatever).
The person that got banned for profanity was banned from using upload studio to upload videos. The XBox One has a facility to record game footage and upload it to be shared. It records without voice chat, only game sound, but you can add commentary afterwards. The person in question therefore took a video of his gameplay, added a load of swearing to it, shared it, then got banned from sharing further videos because of the excessive profanity. It's not that you're not even allowed to add profanity in your commentary, Microsoft have said you can, it's just that this guy's use of it was excessive. I'm not even sure his ban from Upload Studio would be permanent, if it's anything like past enforcement on XBox Live they usually just give you a couple of days the first time, then a week or month the second time, then permanent again after that - and I'm talking about when you use outright racist language on public chat here and such, not just because you trash talked and said "I hope your mum dies in a fire" or whatever.
I still don't agree with it, it's the internet, if you don't like swearing, fuck off, don't try and police it, but it's a far cry from the "Banned from his whole XBox for swearing in a private chat!" which is the lie that it got turned into by the press, Sony fanboys and Microsoft haters alike.
If Microsoft listened to private chats I'd have been banned a thousand times over by now for some of the bad taste jokes I've made with friends on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Skype. Similarly I've never been banned from the Playstation Network either FWIW.
Nonsense, there already are. Dead Rising 3 for example is really quite an excellent little masterpiece.
One of my friends has this habit of "friending" any random person he plays with. So we were playing Battlefield 3 on the XBox 360 one day for a few hours and one of his friends came online who he promptly invited to our chat party and joined our game.
The guy's gamertag (nickname) was that of an infamous Islamic preacher, and I thought it was just typical gamer type name-trolling at first but after a few hours of this guy refusing to ever play the US and always joining the Russians - quitting and rejoining the game if need be to swap sides when the swap side timer hit him and ranting every 5 minutes between saying "yeah, die American pig" I began to realise for the first time that there are in fact people who are literally batshit extremists on there - for the first time ever I'd actually found one. For a while I assumed he was just joking but it only took a few jokes on my behalf and the complete lack of response from the guy to realise this guy was stone cold serious in his hatred for the US.
Does this mean I think they need to monitor games? Not really, chances are it was just some kid who needs to grow up and will never cause any harm, and given that this is the first extremist nutjob I've ever encountered online after nearly two decades of it it seems like an extremely inefficient way of finding them even if they were to be a threat, but what if he did find someone else like him on there? what if they need egg each other on and move on to a real atrocity? It's not outside the realm of possibility that two of them couldn't end up the next Boston bombers.
It's easy to say terrorists would never be that stupid, but the fact is most terrorists actually are. The leaders get it but they're not the ones putting themselves in the way of danger, these bottom of the rung dumb fucks are precisely the sort of people they want to go and get themselves killed for their cause and many have got themselves caught long before causing any problems precisely because of this level of stupidity. Even many hackers who tend to be far more intelligent than your average extremist have been caught precisely because they failed to consistently use secure communication.
They're not looking for the leaders on MMOs, those that are smart enough to avoid it, but they are looking for kids who don't know any better about ranting on logged chats assuming no one will ever get round to reading it - kids that could either become informants, or threats if their hatred is left to fester or circumstances open up the realm of possibility of action. The targets are definitely there, inside these games, but whether joining the games themselves is the sensible way to find them or determine how genuinely useful/problematic targets could be I'm really not convinced in the slightest.
But perhaps they expect that these people are more likely to be the lone wolf types, the sorts of guys who'd snap one day and go and shoot up a mall all by themselves or whatever, those they can't trace by simply following the known terror networks because although they sympathise with them they were never actually part of them - there was no link to follow. Perhaps in their desperation to deal with the lone wolf problem they can't see any other option than trying to pursue them in the places where many disaffected minds hang out?
UO wasn't even owned by EA when I played and it had no system of relating two players together like friends lists or any such thing so I don't see how it could be them. They simply had no real technical facility to associate us both, not to mention I use different e-mails for my accounts. To scan our in game chats and dig out our MSN accounts way back in the 90s seems particularly unlikely.
I agree but that's exactly what the GPs implication was - that Americans aren't getting these jobs that are going to H1-Bs because American companies aren't training people.
My point is that that's simply nonsense, there's another path to obtaining those acquired skills - self-learning. If the companies aren't training that doesn't prevent you obtaining the required skills.
Sure it's nice if you can have both, but given the US has an advantageous education system compared to many H1-B countries of origin it seems understandable that companies should ask why they'd waste money hiring someone and training them when they wont learn off their own back when they could just hire someone from somewhere else that has learnt off their own back in a less advantageous economy for learning. If an American wont spend $40, maybe a hundredth of a percentage of his income on a book and read it but someone from say, India will spend 1% of his income - 100x more based on wealth then why would you want to waste money on the American layabout? The Indian is clearly a far superior employee due to a far superior passion for the profession.
Expecting others to train you if you wont learn yourself is stupid, if you are willing to learn yourself then it's more worth a company sending you on training courses as well - because they know the money will be well spent in that you'll take a lot away from the course because you have a clear passion for it evidenced by your self-learning.
Which given that there's no known or provable physical phenomenon by which some god could exist or speak to you is the rational assumption to make.
To start entertaining the irrational in discussion makes all discussion meaningless as you can argue against anything and can never reach a logical conclusion about anything at that point.
"At least what companies DO is transparent. Anyone can see what the websites are sending/receiving, and you know when you are visiting or making use of them."
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but this is only partially true. I had LinkedIn start recommending people to me whom it could only have linked me to via my MSN messenger contact list.
I say this with certainty because I had a couple of contacts recommended on both Facebook and LinkedIn with whom my only association was via MSN messenger (or from Ultima Online years previous). Neither of us had ever used tools to share contact lists nor had phones at the time with apps that could read contact lists or any such thing.
So they're not entirely transparent, Microsoft at least seemed to be selling personal information to third parties without consent which would be an illegal breach of the UK's data protecton act.
You can see what's going to and from them, but you've no idea what they're doing with it, or who they're passing it on to after it's reached them.
He's not making fun of him for having religious beliefs, he's making fun of him for being completely oblivious to the fact that maybe he's unemployable because he's suffering delusions.
It's one thing to believe in some god, I think most people have no problem with that. It's not my cup of tea, but each to there own. However, it's a whole other thing to believe he speaks to you. That requires you to hear voices in your head. That requires you to be actually clinically insane.
People who are clinically insane tend not to be the best workers.
You'd have had a point if you'd instead talked about the fact we shouldn't joke about people who have mental health issues, then you'd be right.
I'll make an argument, software development is a profession with logic at it's core. It's inherent in just about everything you do as a developer.
You hence need to be capable of logical thinking that is to be able to make logical deductions.
When you get a job as a developer you'll hence most likely be working with very logical people, people who can deduce when your arguments and ideas don't make sense, and will expect you to back down if you can't logically defend your claim.
GoodNewsJim.com is probably one of the most batshit crazy pits of insanity and illogic I have seen in a long time, hence, it's not surprising that for 10 years he has been unable to fit into a role that requires him to show at least some degree of logical reasoning.
But for what it's worth, his post was full of assertions with no actual argument, he told us he's competent, he told us he had a degree from Carnegie Mellon. He asserts his competence, he asserts his talent, but he provides no actual evidence of any of that. What has he worked on? what has he done? How does he know he is talented? The employers he dealt with obviously did not think so.
I got a job as a software developer before I even had any kind of degree. I can go out and find new development jobs within a couple of months if I wish to change jobs and I see very good payrises every time - even my first development job without a degree was paying well above the national average. I therefore have a hard time having any sympathy for people who claim they're awesome then whinge that they can't get a job given that I've always found it trivial even when I had less qualifications than guys like this, and despite living in a region that isn't exactly stand out for number of development jobs. People like him had every advantage over people like me, yet still couldn't find employment whilst I could. It's for this reason that I'm certain that they are the problem, not the industry. The wealth of listed jobs coupled with the incredibly low levels of unemployment in the industry back this up. If you can't get a software development job in a reasonable amount of time, then you are most definitely the problem. You're the 1 in 50 (the unemployed 2% in the industry) that are just unemployable.
Seriously, if you only average 1 interview a year in this industry there's something very fucking wrong with you - that implies they were rejecting him before he even met them. That takes quite some doing and a pretty crappy CV. Perhaps he plastered his CV with comments about how god spoke to him too?
Why is it the job of corporations to train people?
I've always been willing to forge my own path to learning, I learn what I want to learn and I'm willing to dedicate my time and money to doing so.
All the greatest developers I've known are those who have a passion for learning, and they keep doing so, they never stop. If someone has this entitlement attitude where industry owns them training then they don't have that trait, sure you could send them on a training course for this, that, and the other, but if they have to insist on being sent on those courses then they don't have that required trait of ongoing development.
So if you think you're owed training by corporations, and that it's up to them to train you, rather than you to train yourself to be useful, then you don't have the inherent traits required to be truly great anyway.
If you can't self-learn, or organise self-learning, then no amount of training will make you the sort of person high tech companies need because learning and research go hand in hand and they want people who can do both to take their technologies forward. It's the necessity of cutting edge - it's not like bricklaying or whatever where you can be taught it in an apprenticeship and then get a job doing it over and over for life. The world of software especially at companies like these is ever changing and you have to be capable of ensuring your skills are ever changing and evolving to be fit for the field.
I'm with you on tax avoidance etc., but I think if you think others need to train you then you simply don't have what it takes to work at the forefront of this sort of field anyway and those that do will have trained themselves, and enjoyed doing so.
Given that there are plenty of people who have lost weight going from being obese to a healthy weight without a reduction in metabolism I think that's a given.
GP is right, you're extrapolating. You're taking one experiment in a specific set of circumstances and trying to extrapolate it to all cases.
The clue is in the experiment name itself - "starvation", obese people losing weight isn't starvation, giving them a balanced diet albeit with less calories is a completely different set of circumstances to starving people with a lack of balance in their diet including necessary vitamins.
B-complex vitamins help your metabolism when it comes to breaking down carbohydrates and so forth. The study you cited effectively found that vitamin-B deprivation can result in reduced metabolism - no shit, but as the GP said, what the fuck has this got to do with reducing the calorific intake of obese people given that we can maintain their vitamin B levels whilst doing so?
Reducing calorie intake isn't necessarily the same as causing vitamin imbalance, no one has suggested the latter, but your study did the latter as well as the former.
I remember when I decided to try EA Sports Active once and after about 30minutes or whatever it told me I'd burnt maybe half a kit-kat in calories.
Didn't seem like an efficient use of time, much easier to just eat half a kit-kat less each day.
Yes, like it or not they're successful as fixing economies.
Labour made us bankrupt once before and nearly made us bankrupt again. Currently under largely Tory economic leadership we're the fastest growing developed nation in the world right now, we avoided triple dip recession and the double dip was even revised away. We've also had some of the cheapest borrowing rates for any nation saving a fortune.
They've also invested heavily in diversification, by working hard to promote the tech and scientific sectors and to improve trade with nations like China. In contrast Labour in the boom years was focussing heavily on banking and making cuts to science - yes, even in the boom years. Despite Labour's claim to be for the working class as well, Gordon Brown, again, in the boom years, removed the 10p tax rate - he increased tax on the lowest earners in society, whilst the coaliton (admittedly large because of the lib dems) have increased the tax free allowance beyond that which Brown stripped the 10p tax rate from.
Despite their austerity drives objective impartial surveys have shown that people haven't noticed a decrease in quality of local government services. Crime has continued to decrease despite cuts.
As I say, I don't like the Tories in general, I think they're prudish, I think they've got a hopeless record on the environment, I think they've got an awful workers rights record, I think they have a hopeless record with Europe and I think half their party are a bunch of bigotted arseholes who need to be shot. For these reasons I'd never vote for them, but I'd also never vote for Labour if our economy needs some TLC or for more than a term or two because time and time again they make a complete fuckup of it and borrow more than we can afford to pay back whilst still somehow managing to end up making the least wealthy pay more tax.
You've got to be a special kind of zealot to pretend that they don't at least have economic competence and credibility.
"Both the UK and the US were left worse off by the influence of Thatcher and Reagan, (may they burn in Hell)."
For Thatcher to have left the UK worse off that implies there would've been a better option.
For all her faults, the problem is that the alternative was still worse. That's why the Tories won 4 elections in a row, including 3 under Thatcher.
I don't particularly like the Tories. I think they're greedy and selfish, but one thing they have is economic competence and credibility. Given that Labour had bankrupted the UK it's not surprising therefore that people voted for Thatcher three times running. That's the same reason the Tories are back in power now.
We have a problem in the UK and that's that on one had we have a party that is economically competent but ideologically against the things that make our country great (like the NHS, our strong human rights laws and so forth) and on the other we have a party that's great at running things like the NHS but economically incompetent. It seems our only option is to elect the Tories when Labour has fucked up the economy and elect Labour when the Tories have fucked up the likes of the NHS, the human rights act, and our relationship with Europe.
Thatcher got in because most people didn't want to live in a perpetually bankrupt country, which was the alternative.
So like it or not, fault her all you want, she didn't leave our country worse off for the simple fact that it would have been even worse again without her. Effectively there was a choice between awful, and really fucking awful, so the people chose awful, but that's still a better choice than really fucking awful.
It still can't end well in the long run.
Say in this case they're succesful, say they manage to destroy Google with their patents, Google files for bankruptcy and is stripped down and sold off.
What do you think is going to happen to Google's patents? All it will take is a patent troll that has implemented no software itself to hit companies like Microsoft with them and Microsoft defensive patents will be 100% useless because the patent troll produces nothing useful to sue over.
Maybe Microsoft themselves will buy up the patents but that's going to get them into a massive bidding war and it's going to cost them hard and for what? Microsoft would have a choice - blow money on patents with no one to use them against meaning you're effectively spending money on patents you'll never be able to make any money back off of, or let them go to someone who can make money off of Microsoft by using them against them.
Then when that happens you'll see a whole industry arise, an industry in creating more patents for the single purpose of selling them for a fortune to Microsoft, or selling them to patent trolls.
It's not going to end well. Microsoft's defensive patent suits could only ever get it so far, then after that patents are going to be a massive net cost to them with nothing whatsoever to show for that cost.
"130 Desktops and max of 28 logical servers and you need 3 windows systems administrators!?"
Got to agree, I'm not even sure the guy is necessarily understaffed. When I worked IT support we managed a 6000 computer network across many different sites with 30 staff. Most recent places I've worked as a developer we had 2 IT folk for about 200 staff, 1 IT guy for about 150 staff (and client support on top). He's probably borderline where he is such that if a few major incidents occurred at once he'd really struggle, but that's something management have to accept. Depending on how important their IT infrastructure is to them then a day or so of network downtime whilst he catches up may be a non-issue to them.
It doesn't sound like they're understaffed on the developer side either frankly. It depends how big their applications are of course but 4 developers to support a 150 person what sounds like a manufacturing company is very much on the high side for that sort of industry. Maybe their development needs are exceptional, maybe not, but either way unless the management team has bought into the idea that their development needs are exceptional then they're not going to greenlight growing development any further. So as you say the developers either need to create a business case and come up with an explanation as to why the firms development needs are exceptional and what the benefits are, or they need to accept that they don't actually need more staff.
But this case sounds almost identical to a previous workplace of mine (where I was a developer) and having come from a larger IT support background I had a better understanding of IT support than my manager who was the IT support guy. The solution is to establish SLAs, get the board to decide on what response times they want and set up helpdesk ticketing software with those SLAs. If you continuously hit them then you were wrong about there being a problem, if you don't then one of two things can happen:
1) You'll get in trouble for not hitting SLAs
2) They'll recognise you need more help
If it's 2) then great, all is good. If it's 1) then this is for one of two reasons - either you're a slacker, and your bosses know it, or your bosses aren't reasonable enough to justify working for them anyway. Either way, if it's 1) whether you're lazy or not the fact is your bosses don't respect you and you're in a dead end job however you cut it. For my former boss it was very much the case that he resisted this idea precisely because he knew he was a lazy waste of space and he was only asking for more staff simply because he wanted to spend less time working and more time dicking around on the internet and whatever else.
So having SLAs set and a method of measuring them can be your enemy or friend in that they'll either make your case or get you in trouble, but if nothing else they'll let you know where you stand and make the decision for you as to whether you want to continue to work there.
It's only an anecdote, but in my experience "we need more staff" falls into three categories
1) You don't, you're just asking for your life to be made needlessly easier at the company's expense because you're lazy.
2) You do, and the company wont authorise it because they've no idea how to grow their business - get out now, you have no prospects there.
3) You work for a competent company where people are responsible and if you genuinely need more staff you don't even need to ask - you'll get authorisation for them as soon as you genuinely need them.
Either way the goal is to be the sort of person that fits into and gets a job at company 3).
"I am saying that anything which reduces the perceived economic value to humans of a species increases the chances that said species will go extinct."
You're now using the term perceived. You weren't previously. That's all I was ever originally disputing - that there would only be a perception of lessened economic value, not an actual loss of economic value which is how your original post phrased it. I was simply making the point that pretty much all species have an inherent economic value of some kind it's just not always obvious, or that the detriment caused by loss of a species can take more than an individuals lifetime such that although the cost may be nothing to a living individual, it may be high to later generations.
Personally I think this case is largely meaningless - I don't have much of an opinion about it beyond that even if successful I don't think it'll change much, research will just go elsewhere so I don't see what it'll actually change or achieve.
I think real change will only ever be achieved through education, teaching people that species like the chimpanzee when seen eating fruit aren't taking our food, but are merely keeping themselves alive so that such ecosystems can continue to thrive and provide fruit for both of us.
It makes no odds at the end of the day, even if we wipe species out and destroy ecosystems life in general will go on and it'll only be us that suffers.
As an aside it's interesting that you keep referencing the Western Black Rhino - the whole reason it went extinct was because it had an artificially high real economic value associated with it because of nonsense about rhino horn medicines and so forth so in this respect a made up reason for it to have real actual economic value is precisely the reason it went extinct in the first place which highlights the other danger - any economic value attached to them, real or perceived, has to be associated with them being kept alive, else you're just inviting poachers to wipe them out before they move onto the next species destroying ecosystems in the process.
"Looking at the pictures of the scene its hard to imagine that they were driving anywhere close to the 45mph speed limit."
To be fair most the damage from the picture is simply the fire damage. The impact damage will be the dent in the car and it's surprising how little speed is required to make quite a hefty visible damage impact.
I had a crash at only 20mph once, I lost all braking ability on a downhill in icy conditions and couldn't stop for a junction and even with the car hitting me at only 20mph it bent the whole front end of the car such that it was am insurance write off. So at 40mph you're going to see some serious looking damage.
It often looks worse than it is though, despite the whole front end of my car being smashed and distorted in my crash the engine was still in position and functional and I was able to drive the thing home (albeit with a somewhat amusing trail of small random bits of plastic and such left in my wake) and I was uninjured.
The lesson I learnt is that cars look a hell of a lot worse than they are after collisions. Oh, that and if your boss insists you come in when the roads are genuinely unsafe to drive on then you should tell him to go fuck himself.
You still don't seem to get it. These species DO provide economic value. They provide fertilisation and protection for growth of fruit, which is a food source, which has economic value.
The issue isn't absence of economic value, the issue is lack of recognition, understanding, and education of the economic value. Just because the economic value isn't immediately obvious, does not mean it is not there. This is precisely why I said it's about perception of lack of economic value, rather than reality of lack of economic value that's the problem.
You seem to be mixing the two and this is what I take issue with - you seem to be implying that there is lack of economic value in the species which is false, but also stating we need to increase the obviousness of the economic value which is true, and conflicts with your suggestion that there is no, or not enough economic value.
It's a simple cost/benefit ratio - the fact is there is more to be gained by allowing the likes of chimps to continue providing us with a food source than there is to fight a species that is no longer kept in check by them and which reduces our access to fruits. None of that means people necessarily realise the subtle but important impact the chimps have on their ecosystem, but it doesn't help that people like you muddy the waters with falsehoods such as the suggestion they have no economic value because you seemingly don't understand that not too complex concept of ecosystems and the role biodiversity plays, and how that provides value to us as a species.
I was only referring to diseases like smallpox because you brought it up. You can't really complain if I address a point you make.
Regarding the benefits of biodiversity of mammals it of course depends on the animal. All animals serve a purpose in their respective ecosystems and loss of one species can have marked impacts elsewhere. I believe Chimpanzees act both to disperse and fertilise seeds through their faeces from fruits they have eaten and partially in a predatory function. Yes we could wipe them out, but then you'd probably have overpopulation of red colobus monkeys which eat flowers, which prevents those plants flowering. The combined result of lack of chimp dispersal and fertilisation of seed, coupled with growth in red colobus eating flowers preventing development of fruit would decrease the possibility of regeneration of plant life and may mean less fruit crop for humans also. Their loss would also lead to a decrease in food availability for leopards meaning leopards may also then infringe on human territory more frequently increasing the need for policing.
We see this in the UK, where we wiped out the likes of the Eagle Owl and Wolf which used to hunt foxes. The loss of those species meant that farmers therefore complain about resultant greater fox populations attacking livestock because the foxes no longer have any natural predators, and so hunt them themselves. Reduction of foxes results in greater rabbit populations, which then go on to decimate vegetable crops, and so time and money is spent hunting them. The amount of time and money spent trying to keep fox and rabbit populations in check has been far higher than it would've been to just not eradicate eagle owls and the like in the first place.
To cut a long story short, your claims show a complete lack of understanding of the importance of biodiversity, and the way the natural world works. Your original comment gave the perception that you seem to think humans and chimps exist in a bubble with no outside impact. This is false. The way such ecosystems work is well established, and you cannot remove a species without having a measurable impact on that ecosystem.
In removing chimps as a competitor for food against humans, you simply increase the burden on humanity to hunt red colobus instead, or suffer the even greater subsequent loss of crop. Chimp faeces and diet means improved plant growth, and improved protection of fruit.
But yours is precisely the sort of short term thinking I'm referring to - you look at the chimp eating the fruit and you assume he's competition and should be wiped out, in reality he's taking his share and ensuring more can grow so that there's plenty for both. Without him there'll be less for everyone as the colobus feast on the flowers pre-fruit formation.
I'm amazed so few people understand the importance of healthy ecosystems and biodiversity and how they in fact help us.