West Virginia doesn't even have access to the ocean or even a very large river, much less a deep water port sufficient for a Naval base.

Well your complaints were all about the commercials, which I agree are annoying, and the same reason I cancelled my Hulu + subscription. I probably would pay more for it without the ads, though. I watch Netflix frequently, it has lots of good content, but the selling point for Hulu is you keep current with shows. It had enough current content it could have actually replaced 95% of my TV watching (only exception off the top of my head being the local morning news).

The ads on Hulu were actually MORE annoying than regular TV, since I could always fast-forward through those (an option Hulu does not support).

Yea, I miss the good old days. MTV actually played music (and no advertising). USA actually had programming all night (and it was weird stuff). TBS had black-and-white movies.

Now, get off my lawn

Well my nipples, in fact, are sexual objects. My wife's were, too, until she had a kid. Then, not so much. Not at all, in fact.

Ant that is why they are using the phrase which are used for online financial transactions as a place to start, and put the system in place. Camel's nose in the tent, as it were. More people will be okay with it. Once the system is in place, it will expand to cover everyone (except, of course, governments, politicians, and large corporations).

Right now, I can pay my ISP an extra $10 - 20 to anonymize my information on Whois. I still have to provide it to my ISP - that has already been made a legal requirement. But with the crackpot stuff I sometimes tend to put on the Intarwebs, I don't want to become a victim of doxing or swatting by some butt-hurt "hactivist". So it's worth it. But when they expand this system, or decide that fee needs to be $1000 or more, well, it just won't be available to me any more.

So, in the long run, this is an effort to end anonymous speech, to scrub unpopular opinions from the Web, and coerce small players into leaving the website business or, worse, further centralizing distribution of content. There are currently only six media companies in the US that control 90% of all media. There are plenty of elitists that would love to see all of the content on the Internet controlled by those six companies. It would make it so much easier to drown out any dissenting voices, wouldn't it?

It's because consulting firms are unable to find high skilled computer experts in the US, so they must expand the H1-B program to bring in more foreigners to compensate for the lack of competent Americans!

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".

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Actually, Disney outsourced their IT operations to HCL America (the US division of the Indian-based HCL). HCL has a rather large contract with Disney.

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.

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

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.

"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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".