My samsung epic 2 gps antennae is much weaker than it used to be.

I suspect the other hardware is also designed to be "good enough to last a few years but not a decade" to save a few pennies.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

That translated into martial arts is roughly the equivalent of a 4th DAN, but for that you need longer due to 'regulations regarding examinations', waiting periods between 2 examinations.

Depends on the martial art. The most modern practice recognizes natural talent while incorporating considerable traditional technique; I assure you, everyone does not walk into their first day of training on an equal basis -- I've been teaching for decades and I think I've seen about every level of beginner skill there is. Some people are simply gifted. Certainly from there on in we see the difference between the shows-up-once-a-week and the person who seems to be there every hour they can possibly manage.

Also, more on topic, I can definitely assure anyone who is curious that you're not doing high level thinking when executing advanced martial arts techniques.

All you really need to do to understand this is think about bike riding. When you learn, you learn, you think like crazy. Which does you very little good. But eventually, you internalize the process (that's what I call it, anyway) and you can do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else, paying almost no attention at all to the activity of riding the bike. Those near-instant balance corrections, the precise amount of handlebar control and lean for cornering, all of that comes from "underneath." Same thing for advanced MA.

That whole business about finding your calm center and holding it -- that's a real thing. If you start thinking under threat or pressure, your performance will drop like a stone. The best technique comes from a relaxed, centered condition, accepting of whatever comes.

Well, we can say that we should not tolerate it and then make legal changes to prevent it.

For example, we could fix the abuse of exempt status and require pay for hours over 50 per week for people who are not actively managing at least a few other people or who are owners of more than 10% of the business or whose income is at least triple the average income (currently about $150,000).

The united states is somewhat unique among the top 25 countries with high hours, low protections, low services but yet only 14th in per capita income. And that per capita income is skewed because our gini index is so far out of whack compared to other non-3rd world countries.

The average wasn't 80 hours a week (that's goldmen sachs.. who recently officially cut back from 110 hours a week to 90 hours a week). The average was 72 hours a week for about 6 months (including a 27 and a 28 day "week" where we worked sundays and saturdays. It was about 68 hours for the rest of the 18 months. The insane hours were for releases where we were both on call overnight and had to work the next day (I slept in the car in the office parking lot- showered in the gym and went back to work after 4 hours sleep).

We can fight these trends by sharing the information that if you have indian contracting company workers, and you are changing your software in a huge project- the repeated occurrence is to lay off 90-95% of the american staff when the project is done. So LOOK FOR A JOB as soon as those conditions start.
Be aware that if the company suddenly starts working you 60-80 hours a week- they have no respect for you and you have no security. So don't wait til they dump several hundred of you on the market at the same time.

It's getting increasingly fucked up for healthy people in the bottom 80% as well.

Essentially the top 20% has taken almost every bit of wealth and income produced by increased productivity since 1980. And a lot of that is focused in the top 1.67%.

Woo hoo! Mr. Libertarian! You are so right.

Folks had a "choice" of quitting into the highest unemployment in a decade, losing their houses, forcing their kids out of college, and giving up any shot at retirement.

Free choice! America! Fuck yea!

Unlike so many other countries in the world, many of which have higher living standards and higher per capita income than the united states and where labor laws protect the ordinary citizens from such abuse.

In my case, I did exercise my "choice" as soon as I made my "number" and retired at 51.

CIA world factbook:

  Exports:

$113.6 billion (2013 est.)
country comparison to the world: 35
$119.3 billion (2012 est.)
Exports - commodities:

machinery and equipment, computers, chemicals, medical devices, pharmaceuticals; food products, animal products

It's 25th in the world for per capita income.
The united states is 14th.

Don't get me wrong- I've been primarily on Libreoffice and then Openoffice for several years now.

But I see no reason that you couldn't have automated the data transfer in the microsoft environment too. I've written programs both in VBA and in Openoffice Basic which implement that kind of functionality.

The significant challenge to the openoffice side is better integration with email an the calendar. It provides microsoft with a lot of lockin.

Don't be ridiculous. The dinosaurs lived long before the GNU utils were written. They would have been compressed.

In many cases... yes. The most expensive phones have an up-front cost in addition to the two-year commitment, but if you get the most expensive phone you can without an up-front fee, then there is no price difference between that one and the cheapest phone.

Yes, this is ridiculous.

In ireland, you get 20 days vacation and 9 paid holidays a year.

The average Irish working week is 39 hours and the legal maximum 48.

I was forced to work 83 hours at my last employers. On salary.

Then a year later, they laid all of us off and replaced us with indians.

Then we found out through leaks they had been PLANNING to lay us off when they ordered us to work those hours.

People had heart attacks, divorces.

It's evil and society shouldn't tolerate it.

1 Luxembourg $4,089
2 Norway $3,678
3 Austria $3,437
4 United States $3,263
5 United Kingdom $3,065
6 Belgium $3,035
7 Sweden $3,023
8 Ireland $2,997
9 Finland $2,925
10 South Korea $2,903
11 France $2,886

So basically, you get better, less expensive, more effective* mostly free national health care, better social security, better standards of living, shorter working days (8-4/9-5 vs 8-5/9-6), and 6 weeks vacation.

For that you surrender $387 a month. In france.

It costs you less in Sweden, Belgium, and UK. I think working conditions in Ireland are currently worse than in the U.S.

It costs you nothing in Luxembourg (atypical), Norway, and Austria.

*While exceptions exist in the U.S., they are usually for very expensive treatments. In general, the mortality rate, child and infant mortality rate, and lifespan are better in the listed countries. U.S. health care outcomes for the bottom 80% are worse than 28 or 29 other 1st world countries.

---

More generally (not in response to your post), you can't negotiate vacation in the U.S. It's a benefit- it's hard coded in the software. I did it once- getting a week without pay- after five years my new manager just arbitrarily cancelled it when I got my paid 3rd week. There was no one to appeal to if I wanted to remain employed.

You are really quite mistaken. The attitude you are displaying is actually quite recent- it developed after 1980. "Business" is purely a social construct. If you look into the history of corporations, the legal constructs were explicitly created for the benefit of society in general in mind.

If all businesses had no employees- then no one could buy any products.

Money is just how we agree to swap things around in society to prevent violence.

Whenever things get too unbalanced, the violence is waiting around just under the surface. It's happened over and over throughout history. Even the wealthy are starting to be openly concerned about the imbalance of the distribution of income and wealth in society.

If we reach a point where business practices benefit well under 50% of the population, I assure you that things will change.

And yet we always here how it's women's genitalia that has the power.

I think men's power were in their arms, backs, and their greater aggression.

Dicks really had little to do with it.

Cultures which didn't procreate quickly got wiped out for most of history. If you had 3 baby boys and they had 1 baby boy, then in 20 years, your culture took over (either peacefully or violently).

Any kind of culture that supported a low birth rate wasn't really practical until the invention of guns and machines.