Has your sister recovered from the mÃÃse bite?

While asbestos removal may not be hard, there's an awful lot of it on a large ship. And it's far from the only concern -- PCB's are also very common, and no doubt lead and mercury are also present. Large numbers of the world's ships are chopped up on a stretch of beaches in India and Bangladesh ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ) basically by near-slaves with hand torches. You can imagine how well that works out for the environment and the people; my understanding is that the steel often gets rolled into rebar. There are cleaner but smaller operations within the US; they are far more hassle and less lucrative. There's an informative show out there, maybe one of the Megafactories series, about this outfit: http://www.escomarine.us/ which I think very recently shut down.

Here they're often out in the rain as well. I was once told that it's most effective to support organizations that provide services, vs giving cash directly, so that's what I usually do, but there's one guy who sits with his dog in a parking lot island at a mall. I give him whatever change I have, figure it's for the dog. As for scamming, I dunno how prevalent that is. Many of the panhandlers I see here look to be a physical wreck and not living the good life. What *does* bug me though is when I see someone with a sign begging for food or work or shelter, yet they're smoking, which ain't cheap.

I mostly see them in front of grocery stores, and at the drive-through exit of at least one Charbux. I've never perceived one to be under any influence, or to be pushy or rude. I suspect the RC folks police them strictly.

Or here's an idea: pay your IT people a reasonable wage so you aren't stuck with the bottom of the barrel, so that they don't have to outsource anything more complex than wiping their butts.

Important context there, probably many of them were already making $70k or more. MSFT pays code monkeys right out of college $100k, which is one reason why housing around greater Seattle is so obscene.

Wow, where can you get childcare for only $1515/mo? I see more like $2000 usually.

Does that mean they don't recognize Wicca?

super-rich is very context-dependent. I hardly live an extravagant life, yet >$100k is breakeven at best, and I'm not even in Cali.

RTP seems to have succeeded, though, despite being tobacco and Jesse Helms. Getting people to move should be straightforward: play up the ability to live in something larger than a phone booth, and have a policy that one's salary at hire time is not set in stone forever. My sense of the silly valley is that one reason people jump around like popcorn is that companies don't give raises, ever, not even some crappy 2% CoLA type. Sure, there's talent in SV, but count on a significant fraction of it leaving within a couple of years.

There are 68000+ millionaires in King County, not including real estate. Guess where most of them came from? Microcultists can afford to pay their share.

Agreed. Corn to ethanol makes sense only as whiskey if at all. Anyone with an environmental clue knows that there is very little energy gain. Consider the water squandered on animal agriculture, including the huge fraction on grain production fed to livestock.

The cost of the chassis / drive bay is so often omitted from these discussions, which seem to be dominated by amateurs running a half dozen drives in a desk-side beige box tower. In commercial usage, the cost of a drive bay, including the chassis, power, cooling, and RU is easily more than the disk itself, and getting hands in to swap out failed units costs a couple hundred $. My storage clusters alone have 660+ spinners.

Another key is being 30, ideally 25. I've done phone interviews with them three times. The first two were with the same condescending twat who persistently harangued me about technical questions unrelated to the job. The third was with someone different, who couldn't speak English and was in an echoing room using a speakerphone. Before the third I was sent links to various online texts and videos about Google culture and how to succeed at interviews. The interviewer reacted negatively to me acting in accordance with their own advice. In the end I have to believe that many Google (and Amazon) interviews with Caucasian male citizens are dead before they start, setups so they can say "look we interviewed white male citizens and they were inadequate".

Alex P. Keaton?