People ignore so many policies because there are too many policies as it is. It's just like idea that we've all committed a half dozen felonies before lunch. The policies cover too much, there are too many of them, and too often they are justified with breathless language about security and/or safety.

And most of them aren't even remotely about their claim to be protecting security or safety, they're about creating and/or protecting power centers and fiefdoms and obtaining control over people.

At the end of the day, most people see through them and just ignore them because of their sheer numbers. They know the powers that be don't have the resources, political will or moral authority to enforce most of them up front and will generally just cherry pick them as needed to persecute someone who gets in their way.

The downside is that the legitimate policies or the ones that might actually be beneficial get ignored, too. It's sort of one of the side effects of drug laws -- everything is bad, and when people find out that well, pot isn't really that bad, they end up overdosing on molly or heroin because the people issuing the warnings weren't honest.

this?

I think the big problem with certification exams is that they're almost always a product of the vendor. Vendors tend to want to push features they think are distinctive and/or give them a market edge, so they load their exams with questions that force you to study niche features seldom used. And this is above and beyond the trivia they load into the tests.

For example, VMware has a bunch of ways to control resource utilization (resource pools, etc) yet I've seen it used only once at a client site, and only slightly. The reality seems to be that hardware is cheap and fast enough that the complexity and implementation of it isn't worth whatever benefit it might provide. It's cheaper and easier just to throw an extra node, RAM, etc. at the problem. Maybe it's useful at the very high end where using it vs. not using it means the difference between millions of dollars in hardware, hosting, licensing and infrastructure costs (eg, 500 nodes versus 750 or something) but now we're talking the difference between wiring a residence versus building a 1M sq. foot factory.

And the trivia factor has to be eliminated somehow. I took a VMware training class (right before the release of ESX 4) and when the topic of the advanced configuration variables came up the instructor (a VMware employee) gave a spiel on how these variables weren't just dumb values but were almost always fairly well engineered and that pain and suffering would result from tinkering with them without guidance from support. Yet on my exam, there was 5-6 questions on these variables, all fairly obscure (not expected stuff, like how do redirect logging on a diskless host).

There's good reasons for licensing, like the fact that people can get electrocuted or have their house burn down if wiring is done incorrectly, blow their house up in a natural gas explosion, etc.

The downside to licensing from an economic perspective is that often gets misused as means to create a cartel and restrict entry to the field. I think it's no coincidence that the licensed trades' unions are still pretty strong in an era of declining union power. I just heard a podcast where economists complained about the over-extension of licensing and certification, even citing NYC licensing fortune tellers (I think the follow-on joke is that if you can predict your license number, you don't have to take the certification exam).

If IT licensing had been a requirement starting in 1995, I seriously doubt we'd be enjoying nearly the level of overall economic benefits from the Internet that we do now because restrictions on who could do what work. I think you can make a reasonable argument that IT deployment overall benefitted from flexibility in who could do the work. Some firms got burned by incompetent technologists but mostly firms benefitted in terms of flexibility in who could do the work.

I think some people might argue that security has suffered due to underskilled IT workers, yet ironically, security is one area with a ton of serious certifications yet we still have security problems in organizations which presumably would have incentives to hire certified workers.

Maybe. Maybe not.

In my experience the tests "test" you on your knowledge of how the VENDOR would like you to "solve" a "problem".

I haven't seen any test were there is something objectively "wrong" about any of the questions or answers.

But I have seen a lot of questions and answers that are phrased somewhat inaccurately for someone with more experience than just the vendor's training materials.

So if you know the subject, a quick read of the vendor's materials should tell you where the "tricky" areas are. But if you want to skip that step, you should be able to pass most certifications without a problem.

I think it's all about barriers to entry (no pun intended).

Ie, some woman you think is attractive enough to warrant sexual interest, has an interest in you for same, doesn't care you're married, you're able to engage in this without your wife or anyone else who might bust you suspecting anything.

I think if the barrier to entry was low, a lot more men would be tempted. But what's probably holding them back isn't so much their morals, but their own unwillingness to have sex with a less attractive woman or take many risks.

All the married men I know seem to be happily married and we've ALL had what-if conversations about affairs. Usually it seems to boil down to which set of totally unrealistic circumstances might arise and at which point the regret of not doing it is greater than doing it.

Like, I'm trapped in a hotel during a blizzard and by sheer chance so are two super hot movie stars and after killing time drinking they both decide they want me.

Short of that, other opportunities just seem unlikely or destined for serious nightmares.

It reminds me of something I read about when MBAs buy apartment buildings. They said if your building has a full roster of tenants, you're not charging enough in rent. You should be raising rents frequently enough that you always have 1-2 empty places that result from people who can't afford the rent increase.

It sure seems like it's a not entirely nuanced attempt to claim that Silicon Valley is struggling to suppress its desire to be willfully racist, conspiring with venture capitalists to ensure that black entrepeneurs are deliberately kept ot of Silicon Vallley and relying on discriminatory, elite colleges to make sure their "pipelines" are kept full of priviledged white people. Really?

I also can't help but ponder the contradiction in the institutional bias narratives. On one hand, institutional bias has kept the vast majority of blacks segregated, in desperate poverty, grossly uneducated and running through a revolving door of police harassment, arrest, and prison.

Yet in spite of this narrative (which I think is probably more true than false), the black community is still creating legions of talented professionals and entrepeneurs, so many that only discrimination can account for their inability to be represented proportional to their overall population among the ranks of Silicon Valley or corporate America as a whole.

Which is it? Either the black community is so healthy and well served that it's capable of producing all these entrepeneurs, IT experts, and other sundry well-educated professionals for corporate America to discriminate against. Or, the black community is shattered and oppressed by a system that can't give them a secondary school education and wants to keep them imprisoned. It can't be both.

I kind of want to agree with you that stopping it would be difficult due to market forces, but then why hasn't Eastern Europe become the new home of Google, Microsoft, et al?

They have a large and pretty well established educational system with lots of trained people from high quality educational systems that are not terribly unlike the US and have overall technical accomplishments similar to the US in terms of general engineering and science. They're physically close to Western Europe where so many of these companies already have significant business presences. The physical infrastructure is on par with the US (roads, electricity, housing, etc).

You might even argue that culturally they're more compatible, or at least less different, which could make for better social and organizational interfaces with US organizations.

The blog post was pretty content free about what exactly went wrong.

I would have guessed they would have the functional ability to either restore a storage snapshot to get back an entire LUN or a VM from a VM-based backup, and maybe they did.

I think the weight thing might be a wash. There's a metric ton of stern drives out there with one and, over about 30', two V8 engines, often big blocks. With large fuel tanks, 100 gallons and sometimes more isn't uncommon. I think if you swapped a couple of Tesla power trains for a pair of 496 cu in gas engines and their gas tanks you might even be lighter than you started.

For the use case of a lot of freshwater recreational boating, 30 miles range might be perfect. A lot of people don't go very far or run their engines for long -- they run to a cove to anchor for the day, then back to a slip where there is often a 30A outlet. If all they need is 10-15 miles per day and 15 knots will do, I could see this working.

Even if you made it Chevy Volt style with a small generator capable of providing a partial recovery charge, it'd still be less gas intensive than a pair of big block V8s.

Electric motors would also make for some interesting propulsion options, like pod drives with the motor in the pod (basically scaling down what a lot of big diesel-electric ships use now) and without a lot of the mechanical linkage losses of a mechanical pod drive.

Marinas with covered slips could cover the slips with solar panels and make the electric generation a lot greener. 75 300 sq ft slips in a marina should be capable of a couple hundred killawatts of power.

You'd have to accept the more limited cruising ranges and speeds, but honestly I don't see a ton of Sea Ray express cruisers on inland lakes going wide open. I see most of them doing 10-15 knots for a couple of hours -- there simply isn't that far to go period due to the size of the body of water and a lot of boaters just go anchor anyway.

I was thinking about that the other day.

It'd be interesting to see a Tesla powertrain used to replace the engine on a stern drive. If you were willing to accept some limitations in top speed and cruising range, it might be viable. A lot of inland lakes boats don't actually go very far and return to a slip with power connections.

I think it would be a weight savings which might be used to add battery capacity. Boats often have big-block engines and large gas tanks -- 120 gallons of fuel is half a Tesla battery pack and the electric motors are likely lighter than the ancient GM blocks Mercury uses.

The only thing that would have to be kind of thoughtfully designed would be protection from water. An engine compartment flooded with water is a headache, but not always a disaster. An electric system like that would be a problem.

If your attorney is advising you to go find another job and more or less ignore this, he is not the right person to be representing you. You are aware of the extent of the issue and the potential ramifications. Find a firm that also understands that and you all can make significant amounts of money.

It's actually not bad advice, IMHO. I think a lot of good legal advice is to avoid legal conflicts if you can do it without meaningful damages. In this case, the guy could just find another client and move on.

Sure, he could sue "and make significant amounts of money". But is that significant amount of money really recouping real damages on his part or just a chance to cash in? Plus it also seems that when lawyers take cases on contingency fees or in class actions, nobody really makes money but the lawyers.

With any government entity, you're facing an opposition with basically unlimited resources to defend itself. There's also the chance that someone high up the food chain and influential was the source of this policy. Those people can be dangerous -- what if this guy finds himself under investigation for some past project? Sure, it'd be bogus, but now you're defending yourself, too. And then there's the risk of getting blackballed from more work in that sector.

Back in the early 1960s, psychiatrist guided trips with LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin were kind of a thing. I have an ancient copy of "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience" and a common theme for many of the people who took LSD in controlled settings was a sense that it was a transformative experience.

Of course, that's probably what right wing nutjobs fear and why it got made illegal. Can't have the masses realize that religion, the rat race and the whole media-inspired hokum is bullshit.