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Comment Re:why is Eric snowden an expert on security (Score 4, Informative) 196

A source "with detailed knowledge on the matter" told Reuters that hiring screeners for Booz Allen had found some details of Snowden's education that "did not check out precisely," but decided to hire him anyway

Resume falsified, yup sounds like a typical "expert" to me.

You have bought into the administration smear campaign and government propaganda. Booz Allen isn't necessarily lying, here, but this statement, along with the ridiculously picayune reasons for rejecting candidates based on some detail not being perfect, it's likely something as innocuous as listing the wrong day of the month for a graduation, or misspelling of an instructor's name.

You might educate yourself by checking out the form Snowden was required to complete. I challenge anyone to be able to fill it out completely and include nothing that does not "check out precisely".

Comment Re:REVENGE! (Score 1) 229

I would actually pay MORE to cut my channels to just the local broadcast stations. What a scam.

Try an antenna to get your broadcast stations. If you're in a region with decent signal strength, you will be happily surprised at what your TV can bring in... for FREE!

You can even re-provision the coax cable you use now for the cable service to hook up the antenna!

Not really worth the hassle, considering I'd be paying almost the same thing to Verizon anyway. And I tried the antenna before, many years ago. It works for a few of the local channels, but some either won't tune or are so full of pauses and artifacts they aren't watchable. Easier just to keep the bundle. Plus, I'd end up spending the ~ $10 I would save anyway so the wife can watch her HGTV shows on Hulu Plus...

Comment Re:REVENGE! (Score 1) 229

suck it cable companies, we dont need you anymore, we just need internet access and-DAMMIT. well played cable companies, well played.

I decided I didn't need the TV service from Verizon any more, so I called about cancelling that and just keeping Internet. It turns out, that's only a $10 a month savings ("Well you don't get the bundle discounts."). I do watch the local broadcast stations, but that package is $12.99, so I would actually pay MORE to cut my channels to just the local broadcast stations. What a scam.

Comment Re: Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score 1) 614

I'm now going to make an educated guess and say that you've never sat in on executive-level financial reviews of an entire business because if you had, we wouldn't be having this particular debate.

Only for non-profits, and while they were even more focused on limiting expenses (I would think), no one ever suggested getting rid of skilled veterans and replacing them with code monkeys. In fact the one outsourcing attempt (to a foreign company) was such a failure it had to be reversed.

And you're always, always right, no matter what. I have never once seen you admit that you are wrong, Curunir_Wolf, and your posts are brazen and detailed enough that any admission would be startling.

I have been wrong (really, really wrong) more than once, and while I have admitted so in some cases, I've found it's best to shut up and let the correction (often, multiple corrections from many folks) stand on their own.

I should also note that I don't have the experience with html tags that you do either

Then you should change your posting settings to "plain text", so that at least you can put in line breaks. The first post was wall-of-words enough but this one is really painful to pick through.

Wages have not technically been flat.

This is what I had to respond to. I thought it was well known and well-established. 1-3% raises, to only a few, is part of what is keeping wages flat. And while some like to point out that "well inflation is very low", they use only the latest modified CPI, which ignores things like food, energy, and housing costs which have all risen even faster than CPI. And even CPI shows price increases between 2 and 4% for the last 20 years. That means a 1-3% raise is actually falling income.

You can Google the results of wages over time on your own to educate yourself, but for your edification, I will also provide some references. The first is from Pew Research, which studied wages from 1964. It clearly demonstrates the issue of stagnant wages throughout that period. The most marked trend, though, has been the stagnation of wages since about 2000. An interesting report on the trend comes from the Economic Policy Institute. Of particular note in that study are several very troubling trends:

  • Productivity has actually increased significantly during the period. That is, workers are performing more work, while compensation remains flat.
  • During the Great Recession, productivity continued to increase (7.7 percent), while wages were flat (0.0 percent) as measured by the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC).
  • Compensation for the top 5% of earners actually has seen growth. The most growth.

The last point is interesting. What is basically means is that as productivity grows, the company executives compensate themselves, while replacing their workers with cheaper foreign labor. The company declines, goes into bankruptcy, the executives bail out with their golden parachutes, and everything from a small block to an entire town ends up in dire financial straights.

I don't know what the answer is for resolving this spiral into a country in decline, but I do know what happened to the leaders of France when it happened there...

Comment Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score 1) 614

Except that you missed a few huge points dipshit. The government requires that anyone filing self employment taxes will have to have Form 1080s from at least two different companies.

This is false. You seem to have just pulled a bunch of bullshit out of your ass, because nothing you said is correct. Just to start, there is no IRS for 1080. And, no, you don't need to report earnings from more than one company, there is no such requirement. I won't bother pointing out all the rest of the errors in your post, just a link to the IRS instructions for self-employed individuals and small businesses.

Comment Re:Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score 2) 614

Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year.

That's funny, because wages have been pretty stagnant for more than 20 years.

At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs.

How does the labor cost compare to revenue? You can't just look at it in isolation like that. Also, if you have high turnover in entry-level jobs, you're doing something wrong. What does the retention policy look like. High turnover is very expensive for most companies. You should be looking at that, now how to get more out of low-level labor for the same pay.

The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.

"Arguably" being the key term. If you're not getting a return on the investment for those bonuses and raises, why are you handing them out? If you are getting good ROI, then what's the issue?

They also tend to manage to negotiate to be at the top of the pay scale for their profession/age/region. All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.

Why? As mentioned, retention is cheaper than turnover. There is no reason to continue to keep your employees "at the top" if they are not providing good value for the company. If they are at the top working for you, they will probably have a hard time getting more at other companies coming in off the street, so you can limit those raises, or at least make sure the increase are justified by increase value / revenue.

increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for,

Why are you increasing headcount? Is it because the company is growing? Then why do you complain about sharing increased profits with the workers that are generating it for you?

often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company.

What a short-sighted bunch of bullshit. You're an executive? Well you suck at your job, and doing this is going to hurt your company, whether you are too ignorant to realize it or not.

You, me, everyone who has a 401K or stock options or owns stock, we demand growth at all costs.

So now you have growth, but it's better to cut your employees (who are doing the work) not only out of the growth, but out of any compensation at all for helping you get there. Then you hire these young, inarticulate buffoons to run the front lines and, guess what? Now you're bleeding customers.

The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. This change is coming, it cannot be stopped, and it doesn'lt matter that many of the big employers lied to get this. This would have come regardless. Change IS happening, but it's not necessarily the fault of big bad CEOs and faceless Mr. Smiths--it is the turbulence of the world at play.

Actually, from your description of your management style, it is absolutely your fault, because you can't see how harmful these practices are to your company's long-term survival. Today you're replacing US working with cheap foreign labor. Tomorrow your (now shitty) company is replaced by cheap foreign goods and services.

Comment Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score 1) 614

The whole point of H1-B/outsourcing hires is to depress wages and benefits, not actually because they can't find qualified people (outside of extremely rare cases).

Exactly. And it's not the only wage suppression going on in the US right now - it's a highly orchestrated long-term plan, and it's working flawlessly. Expenses have been going up and wages stagnant for many years. Decent paying wage jobs are simply not available anymore as anything but a short-term step to starting your own business, which is the only way to improve your income over the long term these days. The big problem is that small businesses are being squeezed so hard by taxation, rent-seekers, and protectionist regulations it's very difficult to start one.

Comment Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score 2) 614

This act is antithetical to the whole act. I really do not understand how this is still legal based on the above.

Easy. Disney is NOT replacing their employees - they are re-organizing a division by contracting for SERVICES. The actual "employer" is Tata or InfoSys or HCL. They hire H1-B workers based on some criteria that may be much different. Then they provide the bodies to do the work that replaces the Disney employees. It's basically a bait-and-switch, where Disney absolves itself of any responsibility for hiring. They lay off workers because they are not just paying someone else to provide "services".

Comment Re:Them damn commies? Really? (Score 0) 254

MotherJones used to have journalists, but they are now nothing but a pro-progressive propaganda rag, fond of running hit pieces on anyone to the right of Mao Zedong.

You do realize you just replied with a "god damn commies" ad hominem to an article citing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, on the topic of... well... diseases and vaccination?

I said nothing about Commies - and it wasn't a link to CDC, it was a link to Mother Jones. They site all kinds of stuff, then provide their own interpretation.

Here is your clues that, while the article uses facts, it's points are all opinion:

  • "major spike" - linked to another Mother Jones article spouting a lot of hyperbole and cherry-picked statistics
  • "2015 might be even worse"
  • A tiny, modified, and out of context quote from an authority [appeal to authority]. Actual quote: "It's only January and we have already had a very large number of measles cases. As many cases as we typically have all year in typical years. This worries me and I want to do everything possible to prevent measles from getting a foothold in the United States and becoming endemic again." Note "could get" is not something Schuchat actually said.
  • Scary graphics, which apparently had issues so glaring one of them had to be revised

For Mother Jones, this article is really not bad, I don't have any real issues with it. But Mother Jones is not a trustworthy publication. Just saying.

Comment Re:Parents should be liable (Score 0) 254

Diphtheria has a very serious "side effect", and I suspect the percentage of patients who develop it is larger than the percentage that react to the vaccine.

So as long as most people are okay, just accept whatever collateral damage is caused. Sure, okay. I'm glad this "Well I'm okay so screw the rest of you" attitude isn't applied to most other government programs.

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