Yep. I never claimed to be proud, but our entire factory was about to be closed and outsourced to Taiwan because they were cheaper. The changes my team and I implemented got rid of 1/3 of our people and brought our costs down well below what the factory in Taiwan could offer. Now we actually do some outsourced work for overseas companies, which has led to increased employment in other areas of the company.

It was a choice of eliminating 1/3 of the jobs, or have all the jobs eliminated due to outsourcing. That's pretty easy choice.

It's not just computer power, it's programmer time.

I could eliminate about half the jobs at my company (I've already eliminated about 1/3) with automation, but I don't have the time, and we only have a few decent programmers. I spend most of my time fixing problems caused by the lack of automation, aka general human error.

Will my job get automated? Not for a while. I'll be retired in a few years anyway..

Yeah. What goombah99 said.

3) They often show you ads for things you've just bought. If I get a new laptop why do I want to see more laptop ads?

I wonder about this all the time. I still get ads for something I looked up once and then bought YEARS ago. And it's a pretty niche product, not something that is advertised to everyone.

If ads get too annoying I just start clicking on them. Then they have to pay. Sometimes I click a lot.

Exactly. My company, based in the US, had [contractor name redacted] take over our IT. [contractor name redacted] is based in India. They slowly got rid of all the American IT employees over about 2 years and replaced them with Indian nationals. They would rotate them in an out based on whatever kind work visa they had. None of them ever really learned our system and eventually they had to hire back some of the Americans they got rid of.

Fortunately management has started to wake up and we're ditching [contractor name redacted] at the end of their contract.

So you're saying that there's a dancing gene?

Back in my day we calculated war efforts in megapanzers.

Whatever the cost, it just got over a billion people excited about space again.

Wow, this old idiocy? Even during the first moon landing when I was only 5 I heard Walter Cronkite explain about the stiff wires holding the flag out.

Dude, you are dumber than a 5 year old.

My Nexus 5 doesn't have to be recharged every 12 hours as I've heard these "smart" watches do, so +1 for the Nexus 5.

Yep, I try to do a few basic programs in nearly every language I hear about, just to see what works well in which situation.

Exactly.

I started writing a replacement for our company's 20+ year-old file-based data system 7 years ago. I didn't tell anyone about it until a few years later when I had a prototype ready and started producing better and faster reports for management than the old system. But they still wouldn't okay me to go ahead and start designing a full replacement for our old system. Then the old system coughed up some blood for a couple weeks and nearly caused us a to lose a couple million in sales.

After everyone stopped running aroud with their hair on fire they asked me what it would take to get my new system up and running as a replacement. I did it and now I am the one who controls all company data. At least a half-dozen people now work supporting the system and writing new code for it, but no one else has 7 years experience thinking about and designing this system, so a lot of the details escape them. HA! Try to get rid of me now.

Proactive programming will get you far.

Let me know your results for toll road cameras. For...uh...science, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not a big believer in dowsing, but...I have seen it in action. In fact, back in 1993 I was shown how to do it by an old guy who was a friend of my grandfathers. And I did it. Of course, all I was able to do was find water pipes under people's yards, I don't know if it works any deeper. But dang I can find water pipes like a motherfucker now.

Ah, knowledge can only be passed to YOUR children. The hell with other people's children, right?