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Comment Re:"Paleolithic diets" now vs then (Score 1) 281

The latest research points to primarily sugar being the main problem in our diets. Excessive carbs in general seem to be likely driving a fair amount of weight and health problems and my very rudimentary understanding of the paleo approach addresses this and it's why many people on it find success -- if you're eating paleo, you aren't eating much bread, sugar, etc.

It seems to me that this transition to carb heavy diets that satiate hunger probably helped accelerate civilization -- it helped to satisfy hunger more easily and freed people to pursue activities that didn't involve hunting for food from dusk till dawn. But this came at a price -- negative health effects.

Maybe I just don't understand what paleo is all about, but trying to achieve a balance of macronutrients closer to those original diets seems like the point (or it should IMO) and not actually trying to eat foods that are 100% like what our ancestors ate.

Comment Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score 1) 441

It's a very typical practice to have insane requirements that just aren't practical for jobs you have no intention of locally sourcing. Spend 10 minutes on a major job board and you'll find them. It will be like 6+ years experience in a product that's only been out for 6 or 7 years. They'll want someone that's an expert on three or four unrelated things that it's just not likely someone WILL be an expert on all of them -- expert in Java, SAN and Networking with 8+ years project management experience. They will post someone with CCIE level experience and be asking for someone at a CCNA level salary.

I've noticed you'll find this behavior often in older public companies that have exhausted their market growth through saturation and have made every reasonable efficiency improvement they can make without hitting salaries and cutting workforce. This is the last step of the constant drive for greater profits to appease shareholders.

Being in one of these companies at this transition period is not particularly pleasant and there's a better than good chance you'll get axed either on the front-end as they find a way to outsource your job or on the back-end as they prep the company to look more attractive to a potential buyer or after an acquisition and your job is marked as duplicate because someone from the other company is working for less and will get saddled with your work load.

Comment Re:Pete and Repeat (Score 1) 278

Most employers only care what you've done in the last 7 years. Outside of that window, it's generally assumed that either A. The skills/tech are no longer relevant or B. If you haven't used it in the last 7 years, you probably don't remember it well enough to be relevant anyway.

Tweak your resume to highlight your skills and experience that are relevant to the job posting. Don't include anything that isn't directly related or completely awesome. I mean REALLY awesome. Like you won a prestigious award kind of awesome.

Most resumes I've seen that are excessively long would be less than 2 pages following this design regardless of the formatting unless you used gigantic fonts.

Comment Re:Athletes? (Score 1) 146

Pretty much all of the games require at least two of the following:

1. The kind of hand to eye coordination you'd need for ping pong
2. The mental concentration golfers must exert for virtually every shot (often for the entire length of a game)
3. The muscle memory necessary of any sport

That the players don't generally utilize their cardiovascular system doesn't mean it's less of a sport. I mean after all -- you don't exert much cardiovascular wise in golf or bowling.

Comment Re:keep calm everyone.... (Score 1) 183

Funny enough I think "panic" is _exactly_ what frightens the crap out of governments of heavily populated and prosperous countries. Citizens acting irrationally and taking evasive actions that craters economies -- that's the stuff apocalyptic books are made of. The entire world could change in a matter of months if this hit a few major cities in America, Europe, Russia and other major nations.

People don't panic _as much_ about flu pandemics because of lower death rates and healthy folks typically only having a few days of not so great experiences but otherwise being OK. But a 50%+ death rate? That's the kind of thing that makes lots of people do very dumb things.

Comment Keep ERP system customization to a minimum (Score 3, Insightful) 209

I've seen companies spend ludicrous sums on TYRING to fit square ERP pegs into their odd ball shaped hole of business processes. Keep customization to a minimum. If you can't find an ERP system out of the box to do what you need it to almost completely, then building external apps to do what you want is not a bad way to go provided you have in-house talent to manage it.

Also make sure the vendor approves of what you're doing in those external apps. You might find them blaming you for system problems and not provide support when you need it most. You can bet the odds of this go up if you outsource the dev work. It's nothing for them to blame a third party they don't have a business relationship with.

Just remember -- external tools are basically external modules that are only dependent on the underlying data. As long as the database schema doesn't change, system upgrades shouldn't have any impact on your external tools.

Comment Re:I'm confused (Score 1) 200

Chattanooga is a city that has quite a few very wealthy interests that wanted to better their community because they would benefit too. The people that you might normally think of as being against such a venture were not. The broadband is just one piece of the puzzle of investments that have been made with open arms of power brokers.

If you were to have visited it 10 or 15 years ago and then came back today, you'd swear that you were in a different city. The transformation has been nothing short of amazing. And that's why the city is full of tourists most of the year.

Comment Convenience in place of Caution (Score 1) 265

You're trading caution for convenience.

I have automated some things such as patch installation overnight only to wake up to a broken server despite the patches being heavily tested and known to work in 100% of the cases before only to not have them work when nobody was watching.

I urge you to only consider unattended automation overnight when it's for a system that can reasonably incur unexpected downtime without jeopardizing your job and/or the organization. If it's critical -- DO NOT AUTOMATE.

You've been warned.

Comment Re:Cheaper beer (Score 1) 264

Whoops it cut out part of my statement because it thought I was trying to insert HTML code. That should read:

If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own (insert specific niche agricultural product here) efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.

Comment Re:Cheaper beer (Score 3, Informative) 264

It's the intention and effect that outsourcing to other countries usually has. Namely:

Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes
Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises

If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.

Oh and for extra bonus craptasticness -- it's unsustainable in the long run.

Comment Re:Pffft (Score 2) 723

That's not quite right. Fully 8 hours in advance of the storm hitting (i.e. before everyone started their morning commute), a very direct and confident warning went out that Atlanta was going to get hit. Al Roker did a timeline of the warnings and there's just no way you can watch that and not conclude that the authorities were asleep at the wheel.

Comment Re:Fail by all posters so far on the issue (Score 4, Insightful) 692

At the risk of drifting to one side or the other -- I think you're oversimplifying. While gentrification is not a new phenomenon, this is one of the first times I've ever heard of people reacting so viscerally to it. I think the reason this stings so badly for existing non-Google employee residents is because it's not happening due to a new employer opening their doors nearby. If that were the case, existing residents could potentially get jobs there and afford the new normal.

In this particular instance, you have an employer that is NOT nearby making the fact that this location is not nearby a non-issue for its employees and causing gentrification in a way that mostly leaves current residents out of the loop since it's not likely the average resident could get a job at Google. The results can be devastating situation depending. Some residents might only be getting by or barely getting ahead. Having to relocate could completely upset their financial balance in a way that they can't rectify.

At a minimum, people's lives are being upended due to no fault of their own and it's quite clear where they should direct their energy.

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