Fuck you.

Our biggest problem is willingness to relocate - candidates who are already on the West Coast are so hammered by recruiters that it's hard to find anyone actually looking, but there are plenty of qualified engineers elsewhere.

Then hire remote developers. You'll open up your talent pool from your immediate area to the entire world (or USA if that's your choice). If HR or Accounting balks, remind them that someone who would require $120k/year living and working in the Valley can live in similar style for $60k in some flyover state. Once they see the dollar signs, well, let's be fair, they don't understand or care about anything else with regards to the open position. If they can pay 50% less, then having the developer physically in an office becomes much less important.

Most of your resistance will probably come from middle managers who are convinced that unless they're helicopter managers then the workers won't get anything done. Micromanagement uber alles.

A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

1) A scientific mindset is not a set of beliefs. Scientists do not worship what they cannot understand; they only seek to understand it.
2) Scientists do not consider the cause or purpose of the universe, only its nature. Cause or purpose implies an intelligent creator. We do not have any objective evidence that one exists. The Bible is not objective evidence, only philosophy, narrative, and metaphor. Even if it were, the current versions of the work have been translated and interpreted so many times by so many people with so many different agendas to push that the original meaning has been lost for thousands of years.
3) There is no objective evidence that a superhuman agency or agencies created the universe. There is conjecture and hypothesis. The problem is that the zealots insist that you prove a negative when you express an opinion on the subject. As we all know, proving a negative is impossible. Thinking that something is possible doesn't mean you believe it to actually be the case. We do not know what was happening before the Big Bang happened, as current technology does not exist to look beyond the singularity. Nothing can be proven or disproven about the origin of the Big Bang at the moment, and that is not a concession of a weak argument; the three most important words in science are "I don't know".
4) Exactly what devotional and ritual observances do scientists engage in? The closest I can come up with is getting your morning coffee.
5) Scientifically based solutions and practices are not the same as a moral code. Morals are arbitrary rules of conduct that a particular slice of humanity has decided are worth upholding, and as such, cannot by definition be associated with science. Nothing in science says you can't have sex before marriage, for example, or stone the gays to death, or beat your wife, or kill your slaves..

I'm positive you don't know what you're talking about.

What the deniers dispute is humans having a majoritive effect on climate change. The science on that is not settled.

It's settled. Getting 97% of scientists to agree on something is virtually impossible if there is no objective evidence. CO2 in the atmosphere makes temperatures rise. We're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere by the billions of tons. Therefore, more heat from the sun is trapped in the atmosphere, making global temperature rise. Honestly, it's not a difficult concept, and if you need an example of a greenhouse effect gone mad, take a look at Venus. It's like 863 degrees F / 462 degrees C on the surface, in large part to the atmosphere being 96% CO2. The origins of the high levels of CO2 on Venus are different from those on Earth, but they share a similar problem in that there is insufficient biomass to recapture the carbon in the atmosphere.

especially when new papers are being published trying to explain a hiatus in the warming trend and the significance of the oceans in the atmospheric temperature.

Please link to some of those papers; if they're not in reputable peer-reviewed publications, though, don't bother.

If the science on that was settled there would be no use for continued research.

You are failing to grasp the nature of scientific endeavor. We will never know everything about a particular topic; there is always more knowledge to be obtained. If 97% (or even a significant majority) of the new research contradicts the human-caused theory of global warming, then a conclusion can be drawn.

But I'm wasting my breath. If human-caused climate change deniers are confronted with objective evidence that contradicts their hypotheses, they simply stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU". The evidence is overwhelming; the science is settled (in as much as anything in science can be settled; the strength of science is in its flexibility and the tacit admission that any theory can be rejected based on new evidence, if the evidence is compelling enough).

Nothing you say in this reply cannot be contradicted with objective facts.

That would be an improvement over the current one.

Worrisome? Stop with the fear talk...

If somebody of a different nationality can make is past the border of the White House security, he deserves a path to have a legal account there. He needs the opportunity to prove that he can become a productive member of the White House network.

"Religion". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Nye has no patience for people who deny climate change because they're flat-out, provably, scientifically-settled wrong. It's like someone being expected to have patience with someone insisting the sky is yellow with purple polka dots. (Although, you might have patience with them because they're clearly deranged mentally. Do your own comparison of the zealots and the mentally ill here.)

As do banks, just not the same protections. Your bank account is FDIC protected up to $250k. So, which has better protections, and why?

IMHO the most important protection to consumers who use these accounts is access to their money while fraud is investigated. It's waaaaay easier to get your credit card issuer to put a temporary refund on your account while the matter is investigated than it is to get the bank where you have your checking account to return your funds while the investigation goes on. Some states have the same maximum liability protection on debit cards as they have on credit cards, but not all.

Also, if your credit card is maxed out, it doesn't keep you from paying your bills some other way, providing you have income. But someone emptying your checking account makes it a lot harder to pay your bills.

That said, I do use my debit card all the time; it has the same protections as my credit card, both are processed through the Mastercard network. I always use my credit card online, however.

Another symptom is the extent to which people will come to work, do exactly what they've been asked to do, and nothing more.

Because that's what they're being paid to do, and nothing more. There is virtually no incentive to go outside what you've been assigned. You will not get paid any more for doing more work than you have already been assigned; all that will happen if you do that is that you will be assigned that extra work permanently in the future (with no commensurate raise in pay). Congratulations, you devalued your own labor, saving the system the trouble.

People will say that that's lazy, that you should take on more on your own initiative because that will benefit the employer, and, in theory, you.

Those people are wrong.

Let's say you've been assigned the task of assembling 450 widgets in a day. You have become more skilled at that task, so it only takes you 7 hours instead of 8. (Assuming, naively, that they let you stick to an 8 hour day.) So, on your own initiative, you take on more work and get to 500 widgets a day. Congratulations, your labor is now worth less, since they got more work out of you for the same pay. Leaving aside that you're a massive chump if you do that, your extra labor does not benefit you. The company can sell 50 more widgets than they would have previously, so obviously that extra profit goes into your paycheck. Oh, wait, it doesn't. No, that profit goes to the rich folks that own your company, while you eat a 2%-raise shit sandwich.

A big knock against the auto worker unions is that the amount of work a union member is assigned over the course of a work day is negotiated. If they have been assigned 450 widgets to assemble, they assemble those 450 widgets and go home. Usually early. Then they get called lazy for not doing more work than they have been assigned. What they've really done is work to the letter of the contract. They have done the work that they have been paid for doing. You don't go into a butcher shop, buy a steak, and say "Oh, also, I'd like those short ribs for free." You'll get laughed out of there.

Often, there's no curiosity about the role that they're playing within the company, about how their role could be expanded or refined, or somehow changed.

Because they're not being paid to do that, and they have no incentive to do so independently. Your role? Cog. Expanded role? Same pay, more responsibility. Changed? The only way it changes is if you quit or get fired.

Even the better employees are generally those who just follow instructions, and those people rarely seem to grasp why they were provided those specific instructions, let alone figure out a better set of instructions for themselves.

They follow the instructions because they will be fired if they don't. They follow those instructions because that is what they are paid to do. Usually they're being paid to do it, not figure out another way to do it, because while they're figuring that out, they're not doing the work they're getting paid to do.

And if they had come up with a better solution, they rarely suggest it to their boss.

Because 1) they have no incentive to do so other than to kiss up to the boss, and 2) their boss will usually steal the idea and take credit for it themselves.

The American groupthink of the worker class has been subtly engineered over the last fifty years or so to remove the idea that as your company is more successful, you will share in that success. It's considered un-American to think that the CEO shouldn't get paid more than 2000 times what the front-line workers make, because freedom, eagles, free market, etc. Don't question your betters, get back to work, citizen. Oh, and don't get any ideas, or we'll remove your ability to pay your rent and take your kid to the doctor when they're sick.

But school often doesn't prepare us for that. We're trained to sit down, shut up, do exactly what we're told and no more. Don't ask questions. Don't imagine that you might be able to come up with a better solution. Just do what you're told, and don't think too much about it.

Then I guess school really does do a good job of preparing students for the workplace.

We have this amazing human ability to think; why do so many people show up for work unable to do it?

Because (in the USA anyway), thinking is not valued. Entire political parties continue to exist by labeling anti-intellectualism as "loyalty" or "patriotism" or "MURICA". Consequently, at most workplaces (and some jobs more than others), the ability to think is not marketable. You rarely see "must be an independent thinker" or "must have the ability to speak truth to power" in a job description, because they don't want that. As someone said above, they want cogs. Cogs don't think, they file their TPS reports on time and with the new cover page. Upper management then takes the information that they've compiled and looks for new and interesting ways to fire people.

Why in the world would Tesla believe in "open and productive dialog" with morons that are bought-and-paid for politicians.

PR. If they go to the pols (in a public forum) and ask the uncomfortable questions (as in, who owns your vote today, Senator), and they get stonewalled, they look like the victims (which, in fairness, they are in this case). People already hate politicians so much that making them look like assholes is like shooting fish in a barrel.. with an RPG. Also, they'll probably get overpaid PR flacks from the legacy automotive industry to demonstrate how out of touch they are when it comes to just how much their customers hate dealing with dealerships; this is useful in swaying public opinion away from the bullshit "local business that supports little league teams" argument that dealers like to make.

So, between making the pols look like unreasonable assholes, and making the dealers look like lying bumblefucks (neither of which is difficult), they're well on their way to winning in the court of public opinion, and could potentially have referendums on a ballot that would override what the bought-and-paid-for pols want to do.

Of course the Republican Party was the one that opened pandora's box with the patriot act, and country wide domestic spying.

Stay on topic, please. There are plenty of places to talk about privacy politics elsewhere on the net.

That's great that it works for you, however there is no "all the gas I'd burn otherwise" for me, and for what I do there is certainly no economic incentive to buy a car that costs more than my VW and is less capable.

Then don't buy one. Why are you even here? The story was about government restricting a business model, not "OMG everyone should buy an electric car because you're a bad person if you don't". Clearly your use case isn't a good one for an electric car. Not everyone's is. Lots of people's are (including mine, if the Model 3 hits the market for under $30k, it's worth the extra $5-10K as opposed to the equivalent gas-powered car for me never having to set foot in a car dealership).

Then clearly the Smart isn't meeting your needs. That's fine. A Honda Fit can't do the same job as an Odyssey.

It really sounds like you might be better off renting for those big trips, if your insurance is relatively expensive. Or, flying, it's an 800 mile trip.

Well, since you asked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary, depending on the study's population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz show between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year.[1]:64â"65[2][3] Low end estimates cited by Hemenway show approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[4][5] Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States

I also love the "FOR THE CHILDREN" argument. To stop child porn, we need to outlaw all encryption. To protect our children from obesity, we have to outlaw fatty foods. Sheesh! Grow up!

Also, lots of children are killed by cars each year. Do you propose banning cars? How about a woman who scares off an intruder with her gun. Is her life and the lives of her children worthless? Put your agenda away and put on your thinking cap.