That guy probably needs to move to a different city. That's the only way to break that cycle.

But yes, this is a good illustration about why you should always avoid changing your mind after formally accepting an offer.

If you don't more or less have the employer by the short and curlies they wouldn't have counter offered.

If you're a skilled employees, chances are you do have the employer "by the short and curlies", in a way: they have a schedule they're working towards, and if one employee up and leaves, that's going to screw up their schedule, and make the boss look bad. They don't have extra employees sitting around ready to take your place at a moment's notice (and most likely they're chronically "understaffed" anyway), and there's little chance they're going to find someone qualified within 2 weeks (assuming you give them that much time, rather than just walking out; they might also have a dumb policy of kicking you out as soon as you resign).

So, it's entirely to their advantage to go ahead and give you a raise to keep you around for a little while longer, until they can find your replacement. Then they'll get rid of you, when it's convenient for them.

This is why you should never accept a counteroffer. If it were a good company, they would have given you a raise already. The sad truth is, you can't stay at any company too long, because (with rare exceptions) they'll always keep your salary at whatever it was when you first joined, plus perhaps some very meager inflationary raises. Within a few years, you'll always find that you can make more money by jumping over to a different company and doing the same job.

My list, if I still lived in Arizona, would include all my neighbors who have dogs and let them bark for hours on end every day. And all my neighbors who have pit bulls that "get loose" every few days and attack people.

Luckily, I moved out of Arizona to the northeast, and no one here seems to have out-of-control barking dogs or pit bulls. In fact, for the first time in about 2 decades, I actually like all my neighbors. It's sorta like Mayberry up here, completely unlike the total ghetto that was Arizona.

If Florida is anything like Arizona, no.

Holy shit, that's hilarious. In addition, this is the first really good use for Twitter I have ever seen in my life.

I'm not disagreeing, as it sounds like you're referring to an actual incident where kettling was tried and failed, but given a sufficient number of police to contain the rioters, and given the police have sufficient gear (riot shields, pepper spray, batons, etc.), I don't understand quite why kettling wouldn't work. Any violent protesters who try to leave the kettle-zone will just get sprayed or beaten down, right?

Don't forget House of Sand and Fog. What a horrible movie. The acting was good by everyone involved, but what a horrible, pointless plot. I'd rather watch Species any day; at least Species has a super-hot chick and some good alien scenes in it.

The problem I see with paintballs is that I don't believe that kind of paint is permanent (or else it wouldn't wash out of paintball players' clothes). So all the authorities have to do is spray off the camera housing with a hose. It'd be an irritant to them, for sure, but using real spray paint would require a lot more work on their part to get the camera operational again.

Is there any way to get paintballs filled with regular oil-based permanent paint (like typical Krylon spray-can paint)?

Oh sorry, I misread his post. In that case, no problem. Swing away.

If the tools you have get the job done well enough for you, there is no reason to change.

However, it can be beneficial, if you have a little spare time, to occasionally check out what's new to see if it's better than what you're using now. This doesn't mean you need to adopt it, but if you don't look at new stuff now and then, how will you know if there's something better around or not?

1. Because it is a race to the bottom: if you're getting companies in there because of your 'near zero' corporate tax, don't be surprised if they move to another country with 'nearer zero' corporate tax, and lower payroll tax as well, and maybe poorer working conditions.

They're going to go where the talent is. If you're trying to set up a software shop, you're not going to have much success finding skilled employees in Zimbabwe or Kazakhstan; but there's tons of skilled employees in the US. Skilled employees rarely leave their country for crappier countries just for work, unless they're being offered a huge salary (like with the Americans who go to work in Dubai or Saudi Arabia). Having a lower corporate tax is good when you're (you=national government) trying to compete against other countries with similar standards and costs of living.

2. Because if a company isn't paying corporate tax, then it is much harder for it to be worth having them in the country (the cost of servicing their existence may exceed their return to society/government)

Did you forget that the company is hiring employees, who all pay income and other taxes themselves? The more high-paying jobs you can attract to your country, the more your workers (and imported workers) will pay in taxes. It doesn't cost anything to "service the existence" of a company, unless that company is creating a lot of pollution or causing some other negative side-effect. But in that case, you can deal with that problem specifically, such as by taxing pollution or pollution-generating industries. Software companies don't produce any significant pollution, and what they do, such as electricity consumption, can be dealt with with taxes on electricity generation (with different taxes for different types of generation: wind,solar = low tax, coal = high tax, etc.) to make electric power cost reflect its true cost to society.

In simple terms, when you tax something, it means you really want less of it. For most things, when you add a tax, you create a dis-incentive for people to consume that thing. Sales taxes discourage sales and commerce and consumption; property taxes discourage the purchase of property, even income taxes reduce the incentive to make more money unless you can do so with no more work. So if you tax companies, you're reducing the incentive to have and operate a business. Since economies depend on businesses operating and generating profit and employing workers, why on earth would you want to discourage people from doing that, by having taxes on it? There really shouldn't be any taxes on business, logically; instead, you should just tax income (since not many people want to make less money). All that profit that business makes eventually becomes someone's income, so there's no reason to tax it as a profit; that amounts to double-taxation. Of course, you do need to have some protections to make sure people don't just move the money offshore somewhere to avoid paying their income tax on iot, and it would help a lot if capital gains were taxed at the same rate (or maybe higher) than wage income.

Those cameras are pretty rugged, with metal cases, and are mounted high up on steel poles. Your bat isn't going to do anything to the steel poles, and you'll probably need a ladder to get access to the camera housing (and then, swinging a bat while standing on a ladder isn't a good idea).

There's two things that are effective against these cameras: rifle rounds, and gas-powered portable cutoff saws. Of course, using either of these in an urban area is likely to attract police attention, and leave witnesses.

If you just want to disable them, a can of spray paint is probably your best bet. But you'll still need a ladder and some time. Maybe if you had some way of mounting a spray can on the end of a 3-foot pole; then you could quickly walk by and cover the lens with paint.

Sorry, but that idea would only keep politics restricted to rich, well-connected people, no different than it is now. Otherwise, how are you going to determine which candidates qualify for being part of this pool? What's to keep 100 million regular Joes and Janes from deciding they want to run for President, and thus should be entitled to a share of this campaign money pool? Are we going to have a government agency which approves political candidates? That's not very democratic, in fact it sounds a whole lot like China's system.

Besides, don't most of the "exotic" small-hand-build car lines sell directly?

I'm pretty sure they do. You can't go to some local dealership and buy a Panoz.

Especially seeing as Tesla has to send out technicians to do any repairs, or have the vehicle shipped back to the factory for repairs.

Yes, but when does that ever happen? These are electric cars; there's not much to fail in them, unlike cars with incredibly complex gasoline engines. Go to a Tesla showroom sometime; many of them have the stripped-down chassis so you can see everything inside: the suspension, motors, steering, etc. Most of the parts are pretty standard: R&P steering rack (with electric assist), ABS modulator, etc. The only things that are going to go wrong on these cars are the typical things that fail after 100,000 or more miles: brake master cylinders, wheel bearings, etc. Those things can be fixed by any regular mechanic. The only thing the regular mechanic can't handle (yet) is the battery and electric motor part, and that's probably the most reliable part of the whole car. The only other thing likely to fail early is parts of the interior (i.e., rattles and squeaks).

I wonder whether Tesla negotiates on a per-unit basis like a local dealer does, or whether they follow the old Saturn model of one price for everybody. If the latter, what does the middle man really add to the bargain?

I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure after what Tesla representatives have said to me at the mall showrooms is their pricing is standard (the "old" Saturn model, strange how you call a single price for a product, rather than requiring everyone to haggle, "old"). Nothing about Tesla, from a business perspective, resembles the traditional ("old") way of selling cars, I'm sure their pricing isn't either. As for middle men, they don't add squat to the bargain. They just add more cost, so some slimy dirtbag salesman can get a giant unearned commission for doing no work at all, and instead telling you lies about the product he's selling (such as that the car's air conditioning uses "compressed CO2"--a salesman really told me that once).

There is also a notion of relative cost. The machine for turning bauxite into aluminium probably cost millions of dollars and years to develop, which is an investment that needs to be protected. Software costs are often no more than tens of thousands of dollars and took months to develop, possibly even weeks. The relevance of the first investment is probably more than ten years, while the the relevance of the software investment is probably in the order of 2-5 years.

Also, in the first case there is no incentive to replace the technology quickly whereas there is incentive for software - software gets replaced either because the is a commercial incentive or a bunch of geeks just had an urge to prove something could be done.

When we do comparisons of investment, development periods and how long something is useful we can can see that we can't apply the same rule book and carrot in both cases.

As stated, copyright provides sufficient protection in the world of software.