The Apple Watch is only a "flop" in the sense that people don't need them the same way they need a smartphone.
The Apple watch is only a success when you ignore the fact the "smartwatch" market has been an utter failure. Being the best at a failed market does not make you a success.
I work with two miscreants that used Apple watches. Paid near enough to 300 quid for them and both stopped using them within a few months because they didn't do anything useful and were just another device they needed to keep charged (and both of them had trouble keeping their phones charged).
I have to admit a certain amount of ignorance here, but is it possible to get a Rolex for $400?
I suspect that's where your argument falls down; it's as ridiculous as comparing a Bic Cristal to a Pelikan Souveraen, or a Vietnamese Moped to a Maybach.
In other words, you're comparing a mass-market product with an heirloom product. They're not even close to equivalent.
This, I believe the cheapest Rolex on offer is around 1,500 GBP.
Comparing the Apple Watch to the Rolex is like comparing a Toyota Camry to a BWM 8 series. Technically they're both 4 door saloon cars, but apart from having 4 doors, they're nothing alike. Apple products are a lot like Toyota Camries, not interesting, not particularly good in any way but still amongst the highest selling cars. The odd thing, I find the biggest problem with a Toyota Camry isn't the car (I mean its reliable to a fault) but the kind of people who buy them. Camry buyers dont want to think, so they go to the car that requires them to put the least amount of thought into a purchase as possible, this also means they put equally as little thought into driving them (hence the reputation Camry drivers get as being slow and dangerous). I find a lot of similarities with Apple users in that regard.
The Apple Watch should really be compared to the equivalent Citizens, which at US$400, would be a cheap one, even in Citizens range... and given how it looks like a failure vs Rolex, I cant imagine how bad the sales numbers look like against a Citizen.
Hmmm, Windows is working fine on all of my devices. It also runs all of my games from the last 30 years.
Linux is a great server/workstation OS--but it's a pain on a consumer device. I'm long past the point in my life when I'm okay with recompiling a kernel to fix my sound.
I have no issues with Linux, either on the desktop or the server. I haven't had to recompile a driver in 10 odd years (seriously, it was when I got my first media centre PC in 2005, since then... nothing). I've run Ubuntu and then Linux Mint when Ubuntu Macified the UI without a single problem on any hardware I've put it on.
It sounds like you've never used these operating systems... Ever and are just living off old myths that haven't been true in over a decade.
My intra-family IT work has gone down by about 95% since I've moved family members over to Macs.
I had 1 family member who used a Mac... She's just bought a basic Asus laptop last year because it was less than half the price and did a lot more than her Mac ever did.
Like you, she used to spout myth and propaganda about Mac's being better. Then her husband bought a gaming PC and she hasn't gone back to the Mac since. In fact it was her husband who convinced her to get the laptop so he could get his gaming and photoshop rig back.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
The point isn't to win over Intel, the point is to gain more control over their users and suppliers.
Apple only went from PowerPC to Intel because IBM told them to naff off when they wanted more control. IBM didn't need tthem as they were producing chips for the Wii, Xbox and PS at the time. Apple was a tiny fish pretending it was a shark. No skin off IBM's nose.
Now Apple are moving hardware vendors again to gain more control, I suspect it was because Intel moves too fast for them to keep their lines up to date.
Now for the users, we've long since known that Apple wanted to kill their general purpose computers and force their users into the same controlled environment as phones and tablets. They haven't been trying to pretend it's a "post-PC" era for nothing you know. Right now, it's far too easy for a Mac users to switch to any other brand of PC, Mac's simply aren't restrictive enough, giving users access to their own data to manipulate as they see fit makes it impossible to make it painful for users to leave their ecosystem.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs,
Actually this is a move to eliminate OS X and Macs. They've been moving towards this for years.
Given that the overwhelming majority Mac users only use Mac's as web and email machines, ARM SoC's are powerful enough to handle it. Apple's problem is converting users to the same closed ecosystem and non-user managed systems. Granted, this is harder to do than develop a SoC (which is something they just outsourced to the likes of Qualcomm) but its not like Apple users have not accepted this kind of thing before.
To answer my own post, if you want to reduce the flow of cheap labour whilst reducing the flow of jobs overseas there is only one way to do it.
Legalise and regulate.
Put simply, you cant stop it so dont even try. Split the H1-B (or 457) class visa into two. Once class for actually skilled immigration, the other for temporary workers.
The first class for the highly skilled. I.E. if a lab wanted to bring in a German scientist, this class is for people who can stand on their own merits and can demonstrate a competency by demand. You can put in weighted metrics (I.E. a degree from somewhere like the UK more than one from Spain which is worth more than Indonesia or India, as would work experience). For this class there must be a demonstration of skills and should either come with or lead to permanent residency.
The second class, this is for the H1B abusers. Those who want to bring in cheap labour. Restrict the jobs they can apply for, set a hard cap on the number of visas (no advance applications and once they're gone, they're gone) and charge a $10,000 fee per application (that's application, not granted visa) to be paid by the hiring employer (not the recruiter) and limit of no more than 12 months, after which the worker needs to leave the country before applying for another visa even if it's a permanent residency.
Regulating it is the only effective way of curtailing it. However no-politician will ever go for it because you'd get the "they turk ur jerbs" crowd's knickers in a knot despite the fact you will get less H1B abuse... Not to mention that businesses that like cheap labour will oppose it tooth and nail.
Both Republicans and Democrats are split on this. The Dems have both their working class constituencies - the ones that haven't already defected like those in MI, PA and WI, as well as their minority constituency - Indians, who still vote more heavily Democrat than Republican
Republicans, OTOH, have the collision b/w their business interests, who want more visas, vs their own grassroots that would like to see even legal immigration curtailed until unemployment is drastically reduced
So in all likelihood, there will be bipartisan support for both sides
First off, H1-B's cant vote. So there goes that conspiracy theory.
Secondly, they aren't complaining about what Trump did... He left an obvious loophole open that H1-B employers are well versed in using from other countries. They're complaining about a bill put forward by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (a D strangely enough) to raise the minimum H1-B salary to US$130,000. At the moment, they can invent fees and charges to reclaim most of the current salary, but it's going to get a bit hard to hide when they're trying to take $100,000 from a $130,000 salary.
Now we know who's abusing the H1B visa program - the ones who complain the loudest.
We offshore our India team, so we won't be affected by the H1B changes. But the body shops here will be decimated, which is probably going to be a good thing.
This wont happen.
First off, they're not even complaining about Trumps exec order, they're complaining about a bill put forward by Californian Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (and I wonder who her party is) to raise H1B salaries to US$130,000.
Secondly body shops wont close under Trumps exec order because they only have to demonstrate they tried to hire an American. This is the situation in Australia, a company that wishes to hire Australia's equivalent of a H1-B (Visa subclass 457 or just 457 for short) has to demonstrate that there isn't a sufficiently skilled Australian for the job. They do this by creating a job description that no one in reality can meet (I.E. 10 years experience with Windows 2012 in a production environment), of course no Australian could meet this and that part of the bargain is fulfilled. So now they get their Indian on a 457 who just coincidentally works for far less than an Australian.
They're not complaining about Trump's plan because it was all for show. He left the same loophole wide open for them and companies like Tata and Infosys have a lot of experience at abusing it.
The best case scenario here is that the jobs for H1-B's in the future will just be shipped overseas, again in the best possible scenario to another developed nation where Indians can be imported. However the most likely scenario is for Americans to be shipped offshore to head up Indian teams.
2K Games Wins the Right To Store and Share The Biometric Facial Data That You Voluntarily Gave Them.
This isn't scanning people against their will. This is people who decided they wanted their devices to scan them, uploaded them to 2K Games, and then decided to be concerned about their privacy.
I'm not saying this isn't scummy on 2K's part or troubling. But the first step to not having companies build facial recognition of you is to not decide to scan your face and give it to them.
Sigh, you're either a very bad lawyer or someone who lives in an incredibly black and white world.
Given how 2K operates, it is entirely possible that the game refuses to unlock certain features (up to and including multi-player access) until you let it scan your face. This is still voluntary under the technical definition but we tend to call it by it's proper name.. coercion.
I am a father of 8, and I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that Hyland's teething tablets are effective, and I want to continue to use them for my baby....
Um, shouldn't your focus be on contraceptives?
He's a homeopathic father of 8, I'm sure his surviving child will turn out just fine.
Ok so i actually am a licensed electrician. And to tell you the truth when you do Owner-Builder it is 100% identical to if you were a contractor.
Procedural wise they might be the same... But I've seen so many nightmares caused by owner-builders or owner-renovators because they didn't know what they were doing. I was a general dogsbody (labourer) on building sites when I was young (good money for unskilled labour in Oz back in those days) and the sheer extent that some people screwed up, what would be a 1 or 2 day job turned into a week or more because you'd have to un-fuck what the owner had done, then do it properly. It took more time to get things back to square one than it did to do the job.. and you can bet the owner-destroyer would whinge constantly over both the time it took and the bill they got.
Assuming the house in the article is up to code (which I'll give the benefit of the doubt because as you've said, it would have been inspected) then it's a pretty amazing feat to be able to do so from a set of plans and video tutorials.
No, it's a headline that isn't meant for stupid people.
You see, language is contextual, you're expected to be smart enough to fill in the gaps by using the context of the sentence. Obviously by mentioning "YouTube Tutorials" we're talking about educational resources, not building material.
If language did rely on people understanding context it would take ages to explain a simple concept, headlines would look like legal briefs as every possible explanation is covered off to avoid any ambiguity. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live on planet of the lawyers.
It applies to most of Trump's 'core issues'. In and of themselves, they're not extreme issues.
Controlling the border
Keeping good jobs in America
These are not extreme issues in themselves.
However the facts that fly in the face of your assertions is the fact Trump made them into extreme issues. What makes Trump racist is that he will not apply his policies equally. He didn't ban all refugees, just the ones that believe in a different sky faerie (and since then, North America has had one act of terror and another suspected act of terror... well they would be if they weren't perpetrated by white people against Muslims). If you want to put all Muslims on a list... why not Catholics and Protestants? They've cause more terror in the western world than Muslims ever have. Of course it's not "Politically Correct" to call out obvious double standards.
You and your ilk must stop trying to poison the well by pretending people are labelling you. No-one here mentioned racism before you did, this sounds like you're trying to poison the well (I.E. saying "I'm not racist but" before saying something obviously racist). If you're worried about being called a racist or fascist... maybe you need to think before you speak.
Also, the problem you've got with tariffs is that they never worked. They didn't keep jobs and only made things more expensive for the people who wanted to buy things. Tariffs will only work to make the middle class poor... which is Trumps end game.
All you have to do is insist that any person hired on H1B receive a salary 25% higher than the highest paid equivalent level US person in the company. If they are willing to pay the premium then it's pretty clear it's not bullsh*t to say they are more qualified for the job. I've seen proposals to simply fix the salary at say $150K . but a fixed salary can't span the distance from academia to industry or across various types of work.
As someone who handles a lot of resumes I plainly see that many foreign applicants are infact more qualified in some cases. So I don't think they should end the H1B program. They just need to end the abuse of it.
Yes but that wont ever happen.
Look at the wording, they have to _TRY_ to hire an American. This creates a huge loophole. This is the situation in Australia. Officially you cant hire someone on a 457 visa unless you can reasonably demonstrate there isn't an Australian who can do the job. So what businesses do is create fake and unrealistic job requirements (I.E. 10 years experience with Windows 2012) then claim no Australian is capable of meeting them and that this chap Sanjay can, the only problem is Sanjay needs a 457 visa. It's just sheer coincidence that Sanjay will work for half of the pay of an Australian.
Given that like the current Australian Government, the Republicans serve big business, such visas will be rubber stamped to shaft the middle class. Another similarity is that they will distract the Middle class with outright fake fear mongering about immigrants and then trying to turn them against the lower classes to keep them from figuring out who is really screwing them from behind.
The only reason your family suffers is because they can't make it in a meritocracy.
If the United States was a meritocracy, George W. Bush would be lucky to be the assistant manager of a Burger King, and you'd find 50% of investment bankers and dot com millionaires coming from a background of destitution because they studied hard in school.
(even when the liberal stories are dubious or "fake news," like with the infamous golden showers
Dont cite what actually happened, that disrupts his world view that all news he doesn't agree with is lying to him.
Most (if not all of the real) news organizations did cite the fact that it was an unconfirmed report.
I just think people need to understand that they need to get their news from more than one source, with more than one viewpoint in those sources. Facebook should not be anyone's only method of getting news.
First off, I overwhelmingly agree. I don't trust anything unless I can verify it. I mean correctly verify it, not just a copy/paste job from various news agencies citing the same sources.
But here's the problem. Not only are people lazy, they also want to be comforted and have their biases confirmed. They dont want their views to be challenged.
This is how organisations like Brietbart and Fox News convince their readership that other agencies are fake news whilst pummelling them with actual fake news. People who get their information from these sources have lost the ability to tell the difference and absolutely no desire to challenge that.
As for Facebook, no-one should be getting their news from there as it's tailors its content without the users knowledge. But again, people are lazy.
Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Google Assistant. All of them. There have already been articles out that say usage is dropping after the "new" factor wears off.
They will go the way of 3D TV within five years.
For the most part, the people I know who bought them tend to use them solely as music players. In that function I can see them being around for a while.
The rest of the functions, they're extremely faddish. After the 2nd time of getting A korma instead of the vindaloo you asked for you're not going to use it to order food any more.
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks.
Apple stores exist for people who dont want to think about their purchases. They are for people who want to be shown what to buy. The first step for this is to limit what is available as not to confuse them.
Apple products have long since become the Toyota Camry of their respective markets. The Toyota Camry is pretty much the Dane Cook of cars. Sure there's nothing wrong with it, but there's also nothing right about it. A Camry is reliable, comfortable, reasonably efficient, well priced but it wont ever give you the fizz, it's not a performer, not a looker, it doesn't even have quirks. Its a bland car in every single way, it wont even break down to interrupt the monotony of owning one, which is why they appeal to people who dont want to have to think about the car they buy and own. You really dont have to have two brain cells to own a Toyota Camry, in fact, having them is a hindrance to Camry ownership.
The similarities between the Toyota Camry and Apple products are obvious and numerous. They're both white, both unremarkable against the competition and both owned by beige people who dont think about what they buy.
People who have Macs are going back to other computers because they've realised there's nothing special about a Mac and cant justify paying double for a computer. With belts tightening, why would you pay twice as much for a computer that does less?
Face it, Apple was a fad, peaked and is now falling back into obscurity.
If the demand is there then MS will build there. UK didn't simply close up shop just because they left the EU. Stupid reporting is stupid.
Erm, Microsoft as well as several other businesses set up shop in the UK because the demand from Europe is there, not demand from the UK.
They chose the UK because it has free access to Europe and lower taxes for a highly developed nation. Get rid of the access to Europe and there's no point in expanding, for many companies they will be contracting or shutting up shop completely because there are now barriers between them and 80% or more of their market.
The leave campaing was centred entirely around the issue of immigration. They wouldn't even talk about jobs because they knew that if they did they'd have to discuss the fact there would be fewer jobs in the UK post Brexit.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple Watch is only a "flop" in the sense that people don't need them the same way they need a smartphone.
The Apple watch is only a success when you ignore the fact the "smartwatch" market has been an utter failure. Being the best at a failed market does not make you a success.
I work with two miscreants that used Apple watches. Paid near enough to 300 quid for them and both stopped using them within a few months because they didn't do anything useful and were just another device they needed to keep charged (and both of them had trouble keeping their phones charged).
I have to admit a certain amount of ignorance here, but is it possible to get a Rolex for $400?
I suspect that's where your argument falls down; it's as ridiculous as comparing a Bic Cristal to a Pelikan Souveraen, or a Vietnamese Moped to a Maybach.
In other words, you're comparing a mass-market product with an heirloom product. They're not even close to equivalent.
This, I believe the cheapest Rolex on offer is around 1,500 GBP.
Comparing the Apple Watch to the Rolex is like comparing a Toyota Camry to a BWM 8 series. Technically they're both 4 door saloon cars, but apart from having 4 doors, they're nothing alike. Apple products are a lot like Toyota Camries, not interesting, not particularly good in any way but still amongst the highest selling cars. The odd thing, I find the biggest problem with a Toyota Camry isn't the car (I mean its reliable to a fault) but the kind of people who buy them. Camry buyers dont want to think, so they go to the car that requires them to put the least amount of thought into a purchase as possible, this also means they put equally as little thought into driving them (hence the reputation Camry drivers get as being slow and dangerous). I find a lot of similarities with Apple users in that regard.
The Apple Watch should really be compared to the equivalent Citizens, which at US$400, would be a cheap one, even in Citizens range... and given how it looks like a failure vs Rolex, I cant imagine how bad the sales numbers look like against a Citizen.
Apple is not a tech company?
Yes, Apple is a marketing company. Someone else makes everything Apple sells, Apple only produces the logo.
I will admit, they are so good at being a marketing company they have people like you utterly convinced they are something else.
Windows is terrible because it's Windows.
Hmmm, Windows is working fine on all of my devices. It also runs all of my games from the last 30 years.
Linux is a great server/workstation OS--but it's a pain on a consumer device. I'm long past the point in my life when I'm okay with recompiling a kernel to fix my sound.
I have no issues with Linux, either on the desktop or the server. I haven't had to recompile a driver in 10 odd years (seriously, it was when I got my first media centre PC in 2005, since then... nothing). I've run Ubuntu and then Linux Mint when Ubuntu Macified the UI without a single problem on any hardware I've put it on. It sounds like you've never used these operating systems... Ever and are just living off old myths that haven't been true in over a decade.
My intra-family IT work has gone down by about 95% since I've moved family members over to Macs.
I had 1 family member who used a Mac... She's just bought a basic Asus laptop last year because it was less than half the price and did a lot more than her Mac ever did.
Like you, she used to spout myth and propaganda about Mac's being better. Then her husband bought a gaming PC and she hasn't gone back to the Mac since. In fact it was her husband who convinced her to get the laptop so he could get his gaming and photoshop rig back.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
The point isn't to win over Intel, the point is to gain more control over their users and suppliers.
Apple only went from PowerPC to Intel because IBM told them to naff off when they wanted more control. IBM didn't need tthem as they were producing chips for the Wii, Xbox and PS at the time. Apple was a tiny fish pretending it was a shark. No skin off IBM's nose.
Now Apple are moving hardware vendors again to gain more control, I suspect it was because Intel moves too fast for them to keep their lines up to date.
Now for the users, we've long since known that Apple wanted to kill their general purpose computers and force their users into the same controlled environment as phones and tablets. They haven't been trying to pretend it's a "post-PC" era for nothing you know. Right now, it's far too easy for a Mac users to switch to any other brand of PC, Mac's simply aren't restrictive enough, giving users access to their own data to manipulate as they see fit makes it impossible to make it painful for users to leave their ecosystem.
OS X is effectively dying.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs,
Actually this is a move to eliminate OS X and Macs. They've been moving towards this for years.
Given that the overwhelming majority Mac users only use Mac's as web and email machines, ARM SoC's are powerful enough to handle it. Apple's problem is converting users to the same closed ecosystem and non-user managed systems. Granted, this is harder to do than develop a SoC (which is something they just outsourced to the likes of Qualcomm) but its not like Apple users have not accepted this kind of thing before.
m.2 pci-e storage? and not that apple only stuff?
You seem to misunderstand the direction Apple is going in.
They want to give you less options, not more of them. Because thinking is hard. Solder all the things to the mainboard.
To answer my own post, if you want to reduce the flow of cheap labour whilst reducing the flow of jobs overseas there is only one way to do it.
Legalise and regulate.
Put simply, you cant stop it so dont even try. Split the H1-B (or 457) class visa into two. Once class for actually skilled immigration, the other for temporary workers.
The first class for the highly skilled. I.E. if a lab wanted to bring in a German scientist, this class is for people who can stand on their own merits and can demonstrate a competency by demand. You can put in weighted metrics (I.E. a degree from somewhere like the UK more than one from Spain which is worth more than Indonesia or India, as would work experience). For this class there must be a demonstration of skills and should either come with or lead to permanent residency.
The second class, this is for the H1B abusers. Those who want to bring in cheap labour. Restrict the jobs they can apply for, set a hard cap on the number of visas (no advance applications and once they're gone, they're gone) and charge a $10,000 fee per application (that's application, not granted visa) to be paid by the hiring employer (not the recruiter) and limit of no more than 12 months, after which the worker needs to leave the country before applying for another visa even if it's a permanent residency.
Regulating it is the only effective way of curtailing it. However no-politician will ever go for it because you'd get the "they turk ur jerbs" crowd's knickers in a knot despite the fact you will get less H1B abuse... Not to mention that businesses that like cheap labour will oppose it tooth and nail.
Both Republicans and Democrats are split on this. The Dems have both their working class constituencies - the ones that haven't already defected like those in MI, PA and WI, as well as their minority constituency - Indians, who still vote more heavily Democrat than Republican
Republicans, OTOH, have the collision b/w their business interests, who want more visas, vs their own grassroots that would like to see even legal immigration curtailed until unemployment is drastically reduced
So in all likelihood, there will be bipartisan support for both sides
First off, H1-B's cant vote. So there goes that conspiracy theory.
Secondly, they aren't complaining about what Trump did... He left an obvious loophole open that H1-B employers are well versed in using from other countries. They're complaining about a bill put forward by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (a D strangely enough) to raise the minimum H1-B salary to US$130,000. At the moment, they can invent fees and charges to reclaim most of the current salary, but it's going to get a bit hard to hide when they're trying to take $100,000 from a $130,000 salary.
Now we know who's abusing the H1B visa program - the ones who complain the loudest.
We offshore our India team, so we won't be affected by the H1B changes. But the body shops here will be decimated, which is probably going to be a good thing.
This wont happen.
First off, they're not even complaining about Trumps exec order, they're complaining about a bill put forward by Californian Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (and I wonder who her party is) to raise H1B salaries to US$130,000.
Secondly body shops wont close under Trumps exec order because they only have to demonstrate they tried to hire an American. This is the situation in Australia, a company that wishes to hire Australia's equivalent of a H1-B (Visa subclass 457 or just 457 for short) has to demonstrate that there isn't a sufficiently skilled Australian for the job. They do this by creating a job description that no one in reality can meet (I.E. 10 years experience with Windows 2012 in a production environment), of course no Australian could meet this and that part of the bargain is fulfilled. So now they get their Indian on a 457 who just coincidentally works for far less than an Australian.
They're not complaining about Trump's plan because it was all for show. He left the same loophole wide open for them and companies like Tata and Infosys have a lot of experience at abusing it.
The best case scenario here is that the jobs for H1-B's in the future will just be shipped overseas, again in the best possible scenario to another developed nation where Indians can be imported. However the most likely scenario is for Americans to be shipped offshore to head up Indian teams.
2K Games Wins the Right To Store and Share The Biometric Facial Data That You Voluntarily Gave Them.
This isn't scanning people against their will. This is people who decided they wanted their devices to scan them, uploaded them to 2K Games, and then decided to be concerned about their privacy.
I'm not saying this isn't scummy on 2K's part or troubling. But the first step to not having companies build facial recognition of you is to not decide to scan your face and give it to them.
Sigh, you're either a very bad lawyer or someone who lives in an incredibly black and white world.
Given how 2K operates, it is entirely possible that the game refuses to unlock certain features (up to and including multi-player access) until you let it scan your face. This is still voluntary under the technical definition but we tend to call it by it's proper name.. coercion.
The EU is going to raid an Irish citizen's home because they don't like the amount of tax he and the Irish government agreed he should pay?
Actually that would be Irish Tax and Customs that would do the raiding.
The EU collects from states, states collect from individuals and companies.
I am a father of 8, and I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that Hyland's teething tablets are effective, and I want to continue to use them for my baby. ...
Um, shouldn't your focus be on contraceptives?
He's a homeopathic father of 8, I'm sure his surviving child will turn out just fine.
Ok so i actually am a licensed electrician. And to tell you the truth when you do Owner-Builder it is 100% identical to if you were a contractor.
Procedural wise they might be the same... But I've seen so many nightmares caused by owner-builders or owner-renovators because they didn't know what they were doing. I was a general dogsbody (labourer) on building sites when I was young (good money for unskilled labour in Oz back in those days) and the sheer extent that some people screwed up, what would be a 1 or 2 day job turned into a week or more because you'd have to un-fuck what the owner had done, then do it properly. It took more time to get things back to square one than it did to do the job.. and you can bet the owner-destroyer would whinge constantly over both the time it took and the bill they got.
Assuming the house in the article is up to code (which I'll give the benefit of the doubt because as you've said, it would have been inspected) then it's a pretty amazing feat to be able to do so from a set of plans and video tutorials.
Stupid headline
No, it's a headline that isn't meant for stupid people.
You see, language is contextual, you're expected to be smart enough to fill in the gaps by using the context of the sentence. Obviously by mentioning "YouTube Tutorials" we're talking about educational resources, not building material.
If language did rely on people understanding context it would take ages to explain a simple concept, headlines would look like legal briefs as every possible explanation is covered off to avoid any ambiguity. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live on planet of the lawyers.
It applies to most of Trump's 'core issues'. In and of themselves, they're not extreme issues.
Controlling the border
Keeping good jobs in America
These are not extreme issues in themselves.
However the facts that fly in the face of your assertions is the fact Trump made them into extreme issues. What makes Trump racist is that he will not apply his policies equally. He didn't ban all refugees, just the ones that believe in a different sky faerie (and since then, North America has had one act of terror and another suspected act of terror... well they would be if they weren't perpetrated by white people against Muslims). If you want to put all Muslims on a list... why not Catholics and Protestants? They've cause more terror in the western world than Muslims ever have. Of course it's not "Politically Correct" to call out obvious double standards.
You and your ilk must stop trying to poison the well by pretending people are labelling you. No-one here mentioned racism before you did, this sounds like you're trying to poison the well (I.E. saying "I'm not racist but" before saying something obviously racist). If you're worried about being called a racist or fascist... maybe you need to think before you speak.
Also, the problem you've got with tariffs is that they never worked. They didn't keep jobs and only made things more expensive for the people who wanted to buy things. Tariffs will only work to make the middle class poor... which is Trumps end game.
All you have to do is insist that any person hired on H1B receive a salary 25% higher than the highest paid equivalent level US person in the company. If they are willing to pay the premium then it's pretty clear it's not bullsh*t to say they are more qualified for the job. I've seen proposals to simply fix the salary at say $150K . but a fixed salary can't span the distance from academia to industry or across various types of work.
As someone who handles a lot of resumes I plainly see that many foreign applicants are infact more qualified in some cases. So I don't think they should end the H1B program. They just need to end the abuse of it.
Yes but that wont ever happen.
Look at the wording, they have to _TRY_ to hire an American. This creates a huge loophole. This is the situation in Australia. Officially you cant hire someone on a 457 visa unless you can reasonably demonstrate there isn't an Australian who can do the job. So what businesses do is create fake and unrealistic job requirements (I.E. 10 years experience with Windows 2012) then claim no Australian is capable of meeting them and that this chap Sanjay can, the only problem is Sanjay needs a 457 visa. It's just sheer coincidence that Sanjay will work for half of the pay of an Australian.
Given that like the current Australian Government, the Republicans serve big business, such visas will be rubber stamped to shaft the middle class. Another similarity is that they will distract the Middle class with outright fake fear mongering about immigrants and then trying to turn them against the lower classes to keep them from figuring out who is really screwing them from behind.
If the United States was a meritocracy, George W. Bush would be lucky to be the assistant manager of a Burger King, and you'd find 50% of investment bankers and dot com millionaires coming from a background of destitution because they studied hard in school.
Basically it's despotism rather than meritocracy.
(even when the liberal stories are dubious or "fake news," like with the infamous golden showers
Dont cite what actually happened, that disrupts his world view that all news he doesn't agree with is lying to him.
Most (if not all of the real) news organizations did cite the fact that it was an unconfirmed report.
I just think people need to understand that they need to get their news from more than one source, with more than one viewpoint in those sources. Facebook should not be anyone's only method of getting news.
First off, I overwhelmingly agree. I don't trust anything unless I can verify it. I mean correctly verify it, not just a copy/paste job from various news agencies citing the same sources.
But here's the problem. Not only are people lazy, they also want to be comforted and have their biases confirmed. They dont want their views to be challenged.
This is how organisations like Brietbart and Fox News convince their readership that other agencies are fake news whilst pummelling them with actual fake news. People who get their information from these sources have lost the ability to tell the difference and absolutely no desire to challenge that.
As for Facebook, no-one should be getting their news from there as it's tailors its content without the users knowledge. But again, people are lazy.
Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Google Assistant. All of them. There have already been articles out that say usage is dropping after the "new" factor wears off.
They will go the way of 3D TV within five years.
For the most part, the people I know who bought them tend to use them solely as music players. In that function I can see them being around for a while.
The rest of the functions, they're extremely faddish. After the 2nd time of getting A korma instead of the vindaloo you asked for you're not going to use it to order food any more.
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks.
Apple stores exist for people who dont want to think about their purchases. They are for people who want to be shown what to buy. The first step for this is to limit what is available as not to confuse them.
Apple products have long since become the Toyota Camry of their respective markets. The Toyota Camry is pretty much the Dane Cook of cars. Sure there's nothing wrong with it, but there's also nothing right about it. A Camry is reliable, comfortable, reasonably efficient, well priced but it wont ever give you the fizz, it's not a performer, not a looker, it doesn't even have quirks. Its a bland car in every single way, it wont even break down to interrupt the monotony of owning one, which is why they appeal to people who dont want to have to think about the car they buy and own. You really dont have to have two brain cells to own a Toyota Camry, in fact, having them is a hindrance to Camry ownership.
The similarities between the Toyota Camry and Apple products are obvious and numerous. They're both white, both unremarkable against the competition and both owned by beige people who dont think about what they buy.
Most everybody that wants a Mac already has one.
It's worse than that.
People who have Macs are going back to other computers because they've realised there's nothing special about a Mac and cant justify paying double for a computer. With belts tightening, why would you pay twice as much for a computer that does less?
Face it, Apple was a fad, peaked and is now falling back into obscurity.
Extend the runway. gotta be cheaper than tunnels to LAX
You've never actually interacted with the government before, have you?
Its not just the government, but airlines too. They're not going to start scheduled services for a handful of passengers.
If the demand is there then MS will build there. UK didn't simply close up shop just because they left the EU. Stupid reporting is stupid.
Erm, Microsoft as well as several other businesses set up shop in the UK because the demand from Europe is there, not demand from the UK.
They chose the UK because it has free access to Europe and lower taxes for a highly developed nation. Get rid of the access to Europe and there's no point in expanding, for many companies they will be contracting or shutting up shop completely because there are now barriers between them and 80% or more of their market.
Reporting was fine, stupid comment was stupid.
That's not why I voted, you lying scum.
Yes it is you lying xenophobe.
The leave campaing was centred entirely around the issue of immigration. They wouldn't even talk about jobs because they knew that if they did they'd have to discuss the fact there would be fewer jobs in the UK post Brexit.