I worked for Accenture in one of the "delivery centres" in the Eastern Europe and it was total crap. They hired 1st and 2nd year students for peanuts, and sold them as professionals to rich foreign companies. The turnover of staff was about a third - after one learned something, it was best to get out of there as soon as possible. From the posts on the glassdoor i can infer that this is the strategy accenture employs worldwide.

I've heard the same story from friends who worked for Accenture in São Paulo, Brazil (Accenture's largest office in South America). My former bosses also worked for Accenture soon after graduating with engineering degrees.

Accenture's usual technique is to hire students or recent graduates from technical fields, who are reasonably capable in programming and computer science but know absolutely nothing about the consulting problems at hand or the software platforms which they use. Accenture gives them a weekend's notice before allocating them in real world projects they were not trained to do. These employees are overworked, underpaid, deliver substandard services and most end up quitting after one or two years. The few who don't quit and aren't complete morons get promoted.

Obama is a lawyer and a politician.

If the internet nerds are so needy and desperate for a role model in politics, they should try to elect a scientist or engineer. Even an MD would be a better nerd than a lawyer.

Quote from one of the biggest Communists: Thomas Jefferson

That statement made me cringe, because it contradicts the whole body of knowledge that exists about Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson's quote merely shows that he was opposed to an inventor or discoverer gaining a monopoly over an idea. This is consistent with his defense of liberty, minimal government and free market capitalism.

s/glib/glibc/

Gnome's glib is actually very clean and readable.

>> He's not fit to write C.
> Which is probably why glibc source code looks like preprocessor soup.

Glib looks like preprocessor soup because it has to be portable and fast. The only sane way to avoid using the preprocessor is to move the logic into the C code. This usually results in better readability, but destroys performance. The insane way would be to duplicate code, which has a disastrous impact on maintainability.

The actual `use value' of gold (as decoration, malleable flexible material, conductor) is about US$80 an ounce. The other $900 is fluff value we've assigned to it because a few currencies were based on it for a while.

How did you get this $80 figure?

I don't understand how one could separate use value and market value, since if you're using something, then you obviously believe it's worth at least what you'd get by selling it at the market price.

but it cuts the Vatican's power bill to zero, and the spare power can be sold to Italy at the market rate, resulting in a significant financial win for the Vatican.

This would only be a "significant financial win" if the money gained by selling electricity in a reasonable time frame (say, 15 years) not only covered the cost of the panels and their maintenance, but paid more than a safe investment.

If this were the case, there would be capitalists all over the world assembling massive solar arrays for electricity production.

biggoted Southern States who were violating the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

It's pretty ridiculous to suggest that the Union was interested in defending the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, because one of Lincoln's greatest acts of tyranny was the unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus.

In fact, the civil war can be considered a power grab by the federal government, in direct opposition to the Constitution.

Yeah, because buying the slaves and land would've fixed the problem. I'm sure that the Southern States, having received said lump sum payment, would've abolished slavery after this. This reminds me of arguments that I have with left wing nuts who claim if we were nice to the terrorists that they'd leave us alone. There is no guarantee that either the states would've sold the north the slaves or that they would've refrained from getting more slaves afterwards.

Go read my comment again. I never suggested that the North should've bought the slaves. In fact, buying the slaves would raise their market price and encourage the South to get more of them. My point was that the war was so absurdly expensive that it could've paid for the slaves and land for their families.

Do you think that if the slaves were purchased that way, it would've ended slavery? Wouldn't the South have just brought more slaves in to replace the old?

Of course the South would've brought more slaves.

My point is that the war was so expensive that even buying the slaves and land for their families would've been cheaper. I never claimed this was a practical solution. If I had to propose a solution, it would involve not provoking the South with tariffs which essentially amounted to commercial blockades, and avoiding a war altogether.

Americans are taught that the US civil war was about freeing the slaves, when in fact the slaves were only an aspect of a larger economic dispute.

Exactly.

The United States holds the distinction of being the only country where a civil war was tied to the issue of slavery. To put matters in perspective, it would've been cheaper to buy all the slaves and a fair amount of land for them than to pay for the civil war.

The twisted notion that Lincoln's civil war was an act of brilliance stinks of indoctrination.

After watching PETA's ad it's no surprise that it didn't air. I doubt they even have the budget to air commercials during the Superbowl.

PETA probably commissioned a sexy ad knowing fully well it wouldn't be approved by NBC. The fact that it's "banned" gives PETA the Superbowl publicity it can't afford. (And as others have said, Superbowl watchers aren't exactly PETA's target audience.)

(...) or the ability of the government to stimulate by borrowing dollars from domestic and foreign holders of dollars and spending it in particular, focussed areas (since such policy does not rely on manipulate M1.)

The Fed's balance sheet was spent on the first bailouts, and the US is now printing money to cover the current bailouts. The government is manipulating M1.

The author of that piece attempts to confuse the issue by posting a different graph that shows a falling trend in how effective stimulative government deficit spending has been on average recently, and attempting to suggest, without any real reason, that the two graphs are directly related

You're confusing the issue by implying that they are not directly related. Manipulation of M1 leads to an even worse trend on the second graph.

The second graph does show a long-term problem, and particularly does show why, once this recession ends, the US government must, in the subsequent expansion, begin to pay down the debt or at least stop expanding the debt faster than the GDP during expansions

I love how people like yourself, Bernanke and Paulson concede under pressure that deficit spending is disturbing, but at the same time hold a Keynesian attitude of printing money to "stimulate" the economy.

There's only one correct attitude during a recession: liquidate bad debt and expose fraud. Deficit spending during a recession only drains money from healthy sectors of the economy.

If I borrow $100 now and put it to work now, that $100 will have a net effect of the $100 spent x the current multiplier

Right. And the multiplier has fallen below 1.0. The United States cannot print or borrow out of this mess, which is the point that the grandparent post was making.

It's not like the United States has a safe with trillions of dollars that can be distributed or invested in some central planning scheme. The trillions of dollars which are being offered represent money that the US government doesn't have.

From your response I can tell you are a Southern Baptist who has been exposed to "The Mormon Question" or know someone who has. It saddens me to see you so naively misled.

You're very off base. I'm not Southern Baptist. I'm not even American.

Here's the deal: Muslims claim Jesus was just a man. Christians claim that Jesus is God. Therefore, the God of Islam cannot be the God of Christians (because a regular man obviously cannot be the one and only God). QED. No need to invoke the Trinity.

Any religion which rejects Jesus as God is automatically incompatible with Christianity. Reducing the role of Jesus to that of a prophet contradicts the New Testament and the Christian concept of salvation through grace.