On tv shows like The Voice or American Idol there's endless waves of singers with terrific vocal ranges, yet they never make it in the music industry. It is also not uncommon to have backing vocalists that have more vocal range than the front liner, or to have cover bands with better skills than the original band.

Good music is not perfect pitch or crazy skills. It's a mix of various qualities that is very difficult to pinpoint and analyze. That's why labels that put together bands matching the flavor of the week rarely succeed. And that's why computers don't create good music (by themselves).

She is a pop-country singer that comes up on a regular basis with catchy tunes with clean lyrics, and she did not build a career on dressing like a prostitute or releasing sex tapes. Already that makes her quite unique in that industry.

Not everyone likes pop music of course, but in that genre she is definitely top shelf, and her fight against bad music streaming deals is in line with pretty much everything she does. This is not U2 phony or Metallica greedy, this is someone using leveraging her position to help fellow musicians.

Detroit is interesting because unions played a major part in destroying its car industry. At a time where US car companies badly needed to adapt to the new Asian competition, most of their money was spent paying for pension and benefits of people who had left the workforce years or even decades earlier. So they entered the death spiral of downsizing, outsourcing and such.

Same thing happens with civil servants and public workers in many cities in North America. Not only are the services severely downsized (such as in Chicago where they had to reduce the school calendar to be able to afford the gold-plated teachers conditions), but in many cases the cities have to spend tax money on pension and healthcare of retired employees who did not work harder than current ones, but simply happened to be in the workforce when the economy was booming and the unions had the cities by the balls. The result is that people who can't themselves afford a pension plan or decent healthcare and who will live in poverty when they retire have to pay for those lottery winners.

Another issue with unions is the lack of flexibility. They hold onto job descriptions to a point where it becomes totally absurd. Such as in the case of those people working in one of Warren Buffet's newspapers (I think the one in Buffalo); when the newspaper brought in a new machine to fold papers, they couldn't change the job of those poor union workers who used to fold newspapers manually. So until they retire, those people stand in line besides the conveyor belt where the newspapers exit the folding machine and in the air they make a move with their hand that is similar to what they used to do to fold the newspapers manually. They are known as "the blessers", and they are the perfect example of a situation where employees become wards of the company, not part of a team that is there to help the business.

The Mandriva Syndrome

It also happens to have some of the most powerful unions and pro-worker laws in the country. Chicago is basically the US equivalent of Greece.

No. What prevents women from applying to the tech jobs is the amount of self-directed continuous learning that is required to succeed in this field. If that continuous education could be crammed in a one-night-per-week community college program that women can bitch/brag about on Facebook or Twitter and that would result in a formal document to add to their record, they'd flock to IT.

Also they just don't like computers, because computers are too straightforward and don't react to emotional blackmail.

Last time Al Qaeda disrupted the American economy, there was a big intelligence and military response. So what Snowden achieved is impressive; he basically destroyed IBM's business abroad (and many others) without a single soldier being deployed as a result. They could learn from him.

Here's the outcome of Mr Snowden's "whistleblowing":

- American IT companies are losing billions because foreign customers are scared
- Intelligence networks are fucked
- Nothing whatsoever has changed in the way government agencies spy on US citizens

  The guy should send his resume to Al Qaeda.

Greenpeace should get involved!

What if recent SSL exploits were just a smokescreen to allow the NSA to inject some kind of snooping backdoor in that thing. Now they require SSL everywhere to create a false sense of privacy. CONSPIRACY!

Let's boycott SSL!

Says the guy who managed to use "stupid" 3 times in his post plus threw in a "smartass" for good measure.

Something similar happened to me recently when I found the entire Airwolf series in my video collection...

Our tax dollars at work!

it's funny to see that end of the spectrum, while at the other end there's people getting fired of their low-paying job if they fail to maintain their quota of putting together 15 widgets per minute on the production line of some factory.

In the context of a discussion about changing the whole car door when a component fails you can't infer what an "electric window" is? And yet you call people stupid.

You must be a fascinating coworker.

I'm not going to track down parts, that's the dealership's problem. If they decide that it's more cost-effective to replace the door than to spend tons of man-hour fixing the failed component, it's up to them, I`m not the one paying either way.

The guy who did the job told me that more and more they do this kind of thing, replacing entire sections instead of fixing small parts because the electronics are too sensitive or something like that. I asked if the door was refurbished, he said no, they don`t send the old one back, they throw it in a container and when it`s full some local junker comes to get it.