Not at all. As an engineer, you give me clear goals:

Meet these specific standards under these specific conditions.

I can do that. I will probably do that at the expense of performance under other conditions. That's engineering. that's not being a corporate apologist. Now VW took it over the line, by actively modifying the code to pass those tests, something that is forbidden, but without third-party review it's impossible to catch this sort of stuff.

What needs to be happening is that the software is audited by independent third parties, and there is random testing of actual road performance.

Don't forget agri-business use. It takes a lot of power to pump all that water. The City of Hermiston on the Columbia Gorge uses less power than the single mega-farm just upstream on the Columbia River.

How exactly do you spill propane on yourself?

As someone who works in the RV industry, you're right to some extent. But also, appliances in houses do not get shaken, bumped, subjected to temps from well below freezing to 120*F, so the testing and quality is far more stringent.

Lastly, we use a lot of appliances common to boats, and durability and repairability are also important. You can't go to Walmart when you're on a boat; you fix, patch, or do without.

Our customers who installed dorm fridges because RV fridges are too expensive have found that the dorm fridges don't last too long.

Did you ever try to get a license for a "performance" like this? I did, once, just to see how difficult it is.

Turns out that, at the time, neither BMI nor ASCAP had a way to legally play their music unless you were a professional DJ, were pressing at least 200 CDs, or were re-mixing their music.

After 6 weeks of phone calls and emails, and getting shuttled off to various other agencies, it turned out that they had no license that would allow an individual or a business to play songs from their catalog for a single event.

Of course that does not prevent them from suing for lack of the same.

Really? Seriously? That's just a dumbass comment.

FB is a tool. Like any other tool. We use it because it works and it's cheaper than rolling our own.

We use Wordpress too. And cloud email. And a whole bunch of other technologies.

And if any one of them goes out of business we will find something else.

We use Facebook at work. A lot. It's how reach thousands of customers.

Face to face does not work so well when your 40k customers are spread over all of north america.

Google "Piercing the corporate veil".

And yes, I've owned LLCs, S-corps, and others. Right now I work for two LLCs both of which I own, as well as a full time job for a company.

Incorporation provides no shield whatsoever, at least in the US. They can still sue you into bankruptcy.

What you want is to spell out in the contract that anything you provide is an "instrument of service" and that it cannot be distributed, modified, blah, blah, without your permission.

And yes, you need a contract for each and every single job you do, no matter how small. There's always the chance that you will have an insane client (like I did) who ran up nearly a million dollars in costs arguing with us, and then ended up paying a quarter of that, when we calculated the original remedy would cost $1,800. And yes, the client was insane, absolutely bonkers. And I had bought that job from another company that we purchased, and they did not have a strong enough contract, and the job was tiny, about $4,000.

Being incorporated does absolutely nothing for you to protect you from that.

Seriously? With a criminal record, he's unlikely to be able to get a full time, long-term job. So he will bounce from one short term job to the next, filling the gaps with unemployment.

Further, he's probably likely to commit more crimes, even if petty crimes like drug use, so he will cost you and me in police time, court time, jail time. And he's more likely to get busted for those petty crimes since he will be living in high-crime, high police areas; whereas a rich kid would not be busted for simple possession a poor kid with no job will be.

Then there's the predictable drain on social services, subsidized housing, and so on.

It is far, far cheaper to pay for this kid's college at an Ivy League school than it is to send him to jail.

That's the part that the "law and order" "lock 'em up and throw away the key" nutjobs fail to understand.

So presumably you're willing to pay the $400,000 or so it will cost to keep him in jail "for several years" plus the inevitable public aid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc for the rest of his life?

Or would you rather pay a few thousand for counseling and public service monitoring?

Fuck your "lock 'em up" mindset. We already incarcerate more people in this country than any other civilized nation, and it serves no purpose whatsoever other than to fuck up peoples' lives and costs us, the taxpayers, millions of dollars.

But that's what we get when we make the justice system a for-profit operation.

Do you know why it's extremely difficult to get students interested in STEM?

My daughter is in 12th grade honors biology. Instead of labs they have "class activities" where they read out loud the "lab report" that had been prepared for them, and then - get this - then they get to color in a drawing showing the "experiment".

Contrast that with my science education. We made contact explosives and spread them out in the hallways. We put bits of sodium metal into other lab groups' sinks and laughed at the fireball. We used bunsen burners and gloriously burned things and had to evacuate until the stink went away.

All of these things are now forbidden in the name of safety and security and budget cuts.

That's why you can't get anyone interested in science. Because we have cut funding to the point where science education barely exists, where we no longer do "science" in high school.

That's why kids aren't interested in science. It's BORING.

Actually I agree with you. The picture is irrelevant. I'm not fighting for it. My whole point is that if each and every one of us goes out of our way to be offended by something, then nothing will get done.

I remember one of my profs introduced a guest speaker as a long-time personal friend of his, spoke of her professional and academic credentials at length, and mentioned in passing that she was the mother of 3 children and a wonderful cook and he enjoyed going to her house and talking to her over dinner.

One of my female classmates got incredibly offended by this, to the point that she wanted to file a formal complaint of sexism against the prof, for mentioning that his long time friend knew how to cook. This was particularly absurd in that this was an urban studies class where we talked at length about the social implications of modern cities, and being able to go to a friend's house for dinner had been discussed in the class.

There are people who simply look to be offended by something.

The problem with that is *something* is *always* offensive to someone. No matter what.

If I pick a male face it's offensive because I underrepresent women. If I pick a black face it's offensive because I'm a racist. If I pick an Asian female I'm sexualizing. If I pick a cute animal I'm promoting abuse. And so on and so forth.

Whatever.

If we have to limit our actions to what doesn't offend anyone at any time for any reason under any conceivable circumstances we can't ever do anything.

I say this as someone with a daughter in STEM.

It's a portrait. A head shot. Not a Playboy pinup. Now if the centerfold was actually pinned up in the classroom I'd have some serious objections.

What would you rather use? The whole point was to use a human image instead of a test pattern.

If we've gotten to the point that refusing to use a face because the person is naked out of the shot we're so far down the rabbit hole it's ridiculous. With that theory, we can't ever use any picture of anyone in any circumstances because they're - GASP - naked under their clothes.

The only argument she has is that they were told to search for the image, which inevitably would result in them finding the naked image. The instructor should have given them that image along with a few others to use.

We're a sexual species. If we can't ever talk about sex while we preen ourselves to look good no wonder we're so screwed up.