To quote you " Has it occurred to anyone that just maybe they invested in a plant that was about to close thus putting everyone out of a job?"
What local jobs are you referring to? I can guarantee you that none of the locals are working in a plant such as this. Even Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rarely hire locals for anything meaningful at their oil production facilities. Countries that have any type of oil processing commonly scour North America for power engineers, process engineers, maintenance engineers, facility managers and even the general labour pool. For these oil companies it's just too expensive, time consuming and risky to get the locals involved. You need people that understand how a cracker works, proper welding techniques for pipe lines, how to take a gas compressor out of service for maintenance without blowing the facility up, how to get a pump to run again if the variable frequency drive dies, etc, etc. Due to the staggering and unfortunate lack of education in most of these countries that type of knowledge isn't available locally nor is it something you can just bone up on over a two week on the job training course.
This again leads right back to why most of the oil and gas production facilities are so toxic to their surrounding environments, nobody that works there lives around there, so what do they care?
I agree with the jest of your statement, but I want to take it just a little further.
You state" Just a thought, but living in a world where we aren't brought up to constantly need mind numbing entertainment spewed at us any time we aren't working might not actually be a bad thing.". What if that's what is actually responsible for the decline of movie and music sales? My music collection consists mainly of music from the'70s and '80s. And only a few artists at that. What if North American society as a whole is becoming jaded with the entertainment options available. The RIAA and the MPAA both blame 'rampant and uncontrolled' downloading of copyrighted content as being the sole cause of the decline in sales. What if those 'declines' are due more to the fact that people are getting plain fed up with the crap that's being shovelled out of the studios? I used to be able to listen to commercial radio but the quality of the pap being played in heavy rotation means I haven't listened to commercial radio for quite some time now. I've got my portable media player and that's good enough for me.
Another aspect the RIAA especially fails to take into account time and time again is the fact that CD's generally last considerably longer than a 45's, 33's or even a cassettes did. No need to constantly replace your favourite albums also translates into fewer album sales. And I know there are quite a few people like myself who have their entire audio collection FLAC'd onto their computers in a media library accessible with a few keystrokes while the original CD's sit in their jewel cases on the shelf. And with the advent of the Internet, how many of us are bypassing the conventional 'Major Labels/Payola/Fixed Radio playlists' marketing sham by visiting the sites of odd bands from around the world and ordering CD's either directly from the site or through their chosen online distributor, often a costs more inline with what a CD should cost as opposed to what the major labels milk from an album.
Abolish Internet Explorer? They did that at work, they 'un-installed' Internet Explorer at all of the physical plant work stations. However, just bring up Windows Explorer and type a web address into the location bar and off you go.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote you " Has it occurred to anyone that just maybe they invested in a plant that was about to close thus putting everyone out of a job?"
What local jobs are you referring to? I can guarantee you that none of the locals are working in a plant such as this. Even Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rarely hire locals for anything meaningful at their oil production facilities. Countries that have any type of oil processing commonly scour North America for power engineers, process engineers, maintenance engineers, facility managers and even the general labour pool. For these oil companies it's just too expensive, time consuming and risky to get the locals involved. You need people that understand how a cracker works, proper welding techniques for pipe lines, how to take a gas compressor out of service for maintenance without blowing the facility up, how to get a pump to run again if the variable frequency drive dies, etc, etc. Due to the staggering and unfortunate lack of education in most of these countries that type of knowledge isn't available locally nor is it something you can just bone up on over a two week on the job training course.
This again leads right back to why most of the oil and gas production facilities are so toxic to their surrounding environments, nobody that works there lives around there, so what do they care?
I agree with the jest of your statement, but I want to take it just a little further.
You state" Just a thought, but living in a world where we aren't brought up to constantly need mind numbing entertainment spewed at us any time we aren't working might not actually be a bad thing.".
What if that's what is actually responsible for the decline of movie and music sales?
My music collection consists mainly of music from the'70s and '80s. And only a few artists at that.
What if North American society as a whole is becoming jaded with the entertainment options available.
The RIAA and the MPAA both blame 'rampant and uncontrolled' downloading of copyrighted content as being the sole cause of the decline in sales. What if those 'declines' are due more to the fact that people are getting plain fed up with the crap that's being shovelled out of the studios? I used to be able to listen to commercial radio but the quality of the pap being played in heavy rotation means I haven't listened to commercial radio for quite some time now. I've got my portable media player and that's good enough for me.
Another aspect the RIAA especially fails to take into account time and time again is the fact that CD's generally last considerably longer than a 45's, 33's or even a cassettes did. No need to constantly replace your favourite albums also translates into fewer album sales. And I know there are quite a few people like myself who have their entire audio collection FLAC'd onto their computers in a media library accessible with a few keystrokes while the original CD's sit in their jewel cases on the shelf.
And with the advent of the Internet, how many of us are bypassing the conventional 'Major Labels/Payola/Fixed Radio playlists' marketing sham by visiting the sites of odd bands from around the world and ordering CD's either directly from the site or through their chosen online distributor, often a costs more inline with what a CD should cost as opposed to what the major labels milk from an album.
Just a thought
Abolish Internet Explorer?
They did that at work, they 'un-installed' Internet Explorer at all of the physical plant work stations.
However, just bring up Windows Explorer and type a web address into the location bar and off you go.
Doh!
Why not ask Homer if we can borrow his talking Astrolabe?
Hey, I know what Ragnarok is!
It's Captain Steiner's sword from FFIX, right?
So Captain Steiner is responsible for pole reversal?