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Comment Re:Change management fail (Score 3, Insightful) 162

Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India

Not necessarily. I've seen this exact kind of madness happen just as easily with locals, here in France. Like that time the local, on-site support team from our vendor rebooted the production server instead of the test platform, because woops wrong terminal window in the foreground.

Or when they covertly rolled out a "shame-bug fix" remotely on the production platform during a week-end night, again instead of targetting the test platform, then noticed their mistake, and wiped-out months of production data by reverting to a long-expired backup.

Or when the local datacenter people managed to botch our fully-automatized install+deploy+configure solution by messing up on the one thing they had to do right - that is, upload it and launch it on the correct machine of the cluster.

Don't think hiring local people for more money protects you from such cringe-worthy nonsense. The moment you outsource anything, and I do mean *anything*, no matter how far and how expensive and what nationality: if you base your expectations on anything but an actual track-record of reliability and dependability, you're exposing yourself to long hours of hair-pulling and yelling into phones.

Comment Decentralizing FEMA one step at a time (Score 2) 55

This is awesome on many levels for anyone with a keen understanding of transaction costs, and the effect of the internet on these costs.

Will they partner with Uber and set up special-case emergency pickup and relocation of disaster victims too ? It would be amazing I could take a complementary insurance to cover for that.

Submission + - Privately-funded study to test coconut oil as treatment for Alzheimer's (ctvnews.ca)

Jesrad writes: Following the growing viral popularity of Dr Mary Newport's reported success in treating her Alzheimer's Disease-stricken husband with coconut oil, and some positive results of in-vitro tests, come news of a clinical trial of coconut oil as a potential treatment for halting and reversing symptoms of the neuron-destroying disease.

Comment Classic game theory ? (Score 1) 619

I don't think there is much to see here.

Soviet communism, and marxist communism in general, operate (wrongly) under assumptions of the economy being a zero-sum game, so it's not really a surprise it has an effect on the ethics of its 'players'. Quoting straight from the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism:

whatever the capitalists take from the workers in the form of open or concealed profits, the workers lose completely. And this is the very definition of a zero-sum situation.

In a zero-sum game people tend to resort to unethical strategies more often, as in the classic Prisoner's dilemma.

Comment Re:There's another treatment that stops most T2 (Score 4, Interesting) 253

Oh so wrong. Healthy food is also fabulously tasty. Too bad most people have no idea what food actually is healthy and which ain't so much.

Through my college years of pizza, pasta, candy, couscous, cereal muesli and homemade fruit juices I ended up obese and prediabetic in 2007. I lost the extra weight and reversed the diabetic symptoms (fasting glycemia and Hb1ac back to normal) on zero exercise and a diet of roasted fatty duck filets (with the skin braised crispy), salmon sashimi, lamb/veal casserole, chicken massala and lots of greens bathing in molten butter.

There is a big personal investment required though: you must learn to cook.

Comment Re:Too true... (Score 1) 424

They just wanted the name of the restaurant removed from the title because it was 2nd place on Google and was starting to be detrimental to their business.

And now the name of their restaurant is forever associated throughout the entire world with stories detailing their being outrageously litigious, arguably to the point of practicing overt censorship.

A winning move indeed. Well played, gentlemen.

Comment Re:And the stupidest thing about it? (Score 3, Interesting) 710

you literally can't get more than 40 hours of work out of people anyway.

Try 20.

For most of our existence as a species, 18-24 hours of work per week has been the world-wide average time spent satisfying our basic needs. All the rest was leisure, endeavours in curiosity and socializing. This observation still verifies with the few primitive tribes still around. It also verifies in our records of ancestral agricultural tribes. That's the intensity of work our bodies have attuned to over hundreds of thousands of years of recent evolution.

From my professional experience too it verifies, and I'm curious about what other people may want to report about that. People around me may log long or short hours over the days but once you substract the pauses, all the staring at the screen in a blank mind right after lunch or at the end of the work day, all the heated discussions about this hot topic or that, all the trying to figure out or motivate yourself about what you should be doing next, and concentrate on the actual, value-adding focus and thinking and doing, that's hardly more than 3 to 5 hours a week-day, typically 1-3 hours around 10 in the morning and 2-3 hours around 3 P.M. Even middle management types who try to commit, who show up first and leave last everyday, spend most of their time socializing rather than actually organising things up (basically they're downrate, modernized tribes' chiefs).

If you've got a flexible enough mind, it's a lot more efficient for you (and healthier and easier and saner and...) to wake up without an alarm clock, and not rush to the office, help yourself with organising your tasks with basic methodology, then get stuff done in those 4-5 hours. And outside of those hours relax, talk with your colleagues, allow yourself to enjoy your lunch, etc. There's litterally no point trying to force it beyond that.

Also, you'll benefit immensely from cutting the crap out of your life at home too. Stop inflicting incessant news updates, FB status updates, tweets and 24/7 information TV on yourself, your brain is NOT built for that kind of abuse. Stop thinking in terms of pain/gain balance: an hour of treadmilling is not compensating a handful of cupcakes, not in any way you can measure utility for yourself, ever ; and similarly inflicting huge stress and deadlines and job abuse on yourself so you can then indulge in a more wasteful home and car and lifestyle is NOT balanced either.

That one most precious but limited resource that you have in a basically fixed amount for life: your time... stop throwing it away so liberally. You just need to spend half as much as your income (give or take a quarter of your income, there's quite a margin) and then you can get retired in your 30s (or 40s if you're already late in the game), even on a $40-50 000/year job.

Comment Re:Socialism is not working (Score 2) 710

I'm a french citizen and I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this whole debate. I wish anyone genuinely curious about this topic could live my situation for a couple years, just as I have gone and lived in other countries to see and learn. There is no way to get a useful view on this from a single vantage point.

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