You know, the football team at UW Madison might compete with the NFL for ratings.
Also the basketball team may compete with the NBA for ratings.
Obviously there is MUCH more to privatize.

(Or maybe there is a role for publicly owned things?)

It gets even more crazy. On the UW, Madison campus the UW hospital is a public authority (basically a separate entity from the UW) Can the university provide LAN access to that building? Not the way things are written now.

Craziness.

>The trick therefor for companies is to both have good account management AND hire professionals who care about not becoming a criminal.

I found myself on the receiving end of the recession a year ago, having to suddenly tune my interviewing skills again. I still think one of my best selling points was being able to answer the "Why should we hire you?" question with this:

"My position was eliminated and I was given a 90 day notice by my previous employer. At which point I was allowed to work through the full contract and not immediately escorted out. As an IT professional working under IT Managers who understood the security risk I posed, this was not an oversight, but the result of 8 years of working for this employer with integrity."

I think if I had been removed from the premises, as policy normally dictates, I wouldn't have even brought it up. But since it played out this way, it gave me an angle to show loyalty and some dignity. And yes, my accounts were set to expire at 5pm the day I left.

Actually there are generally not many low-skilled jobs out there.. they slowly dissappear.
There was a research project in the 90's called "The midwest Job Gap". It's basic conclusion was there were 2-4 low-skill workers (for various reasons, these people aren't going to learn their way up to high skill jobs) for every 1 low skill job.

Here's an old reference to it: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4404804.html

The premise that there is enough work to go around for low skill workers is generally false.

"...they memorize a series of buttons to press to get whatever result they want and if anything unexpected happens, they're completely lost."

Going along with this comments's logic and the quote from the original post, I've found that users can be trained to hit the print screen button when they get a message they don't care about. We've got Printscreen 2000 installed all over the place, which makes it much closer to a one-click solution than the Windows default. They get a screenshot and keep doing what they're doing. I get the error message.

Have a look here:
http://www.menwithouthats.com/micro.html

Men Without Hats knew this was coming.

Pop goes the world!

Crud now that "the Other guy" won, that means Fallout 3 can't happen.
Darn *throws Vault tickets away*