Pretty much. It's ineffective.

McDonalds can order the picketers off the premises, and they have to wait outside and let customers pass. The act of sending an HTTP request is, on the other hand, actually blocking others from sending requests.

Because a picket line is a visible display. You motherfuckers move out of the way, you're blocking the customers; annoying them is fine. If picketers physically barre customers from entry to a place of business, they get pepper spray and handcuffs.

It looks like Paypal is saying, "This won't decrease our business risk, it won't impact the actual source of the problem, and these people aren't responsible for or capable of the damage they did. On their own, they would annoy the network security guys; most of the network guys wouldn't notice them. This isn't relevant to us; except that if these kids get fucking crushed for this people we can't fight will be pissed at us and kick us more! We need to stop this to reduce our risk of suffering mob justice!"

Somewhere around there, some folks felt the system was unfair and brought up an argument. It turned into a business argument. That's basically how it works.

Oatmeal was the quaker guy. You know. The fag with the perm.

My opinion on Africa is that the currently-modern countries are fine; the starvation-level countries need feudalism in the short term; and the type of technology to deploy in many of these places will be different than what we use here. That is to say: more sustainable, self-sufficient technology that needs less infrastructure will suit underdeveloped countries in that region better, but porting that same tech here would just get lots of greenie-weenie gum-flapping and high implementation fees to little benefit. Major infrastructure in the poorer regions of Africa of course would just devastate their economy; while actually providing sanitization and food distribution and education at an acceptably high level without requiring a multi-mega-bajilliotrillion-gold-pieces bootstrap they can't afford to maintain, much less implement in the first place, would give them a vehicle for economic prosperity.

A Project Management Office includes a Manager of Projects who staffs a Project Portfolio Manager who examines the needs of all projects in the business and asks questions like: "Why are they building out this over here, and this other thing over there, which are substantially similar and could be built as one system instead of two and take half of the effort?"

A Chief Operations Officer is an executive whose job is to get middle and lower management to provide brief explanations of their operations, how they meet the needs of the business, and what their resource requirements are. This executive then asks questions like, "Why does Finance need 250 clerks when there are systems out there to automate most of these processes we're doing manually?" He then brings this up to the CIO, CEO, board of directors, and so on, causing the business to place resources into evaluating and potentially implementing new processes to cut down on that work load so they can repurpose and/or lay off most of those clerks (it's not a charity).

And so it goes.

So, you're saying we shouldn't give people 20 years for murder but 40-60 years for sex with a minor?

Most departments want to hire more people to show on the DH CV that they head a department of 250 people executing multi-million-dollar initiatives. They conveniently leave off that the business need can be addressed with 8 clerks and a $90,000/year outsourced payroll solution instead of a $2 million/year in-house Oracle installation and 5 DBAs and whatnot supporting 200 clerks using a poorly-written in-house HR and purchasing system integrated with an off-the-shelf payroll system.

Closest response I've actually seen.

There's a lot of "managers don't want to think", "Break stuff and blame staffing", and "use Logic(TM)" responses here from clueless tech idiots who think they're management or diplomats or something. These are the same people that can't understand what executives (CEO CSO CISO etc.) actually do and why they're needed.

I've been studying project management because of this same shit. On one hand this place is understaffed; on the other, the stuff we're staffing up for would be easy to do on half the staff we have already... if managed properly. With a breakdown of the work, project experience and documentation that allows for fairly accurate estimating, and various risk management documents, you can show that A) you're in desperate need of more staffing if you want to actually complete any work this year; and/or B) current staffing prohibits implementation of risk controls, and the company's position is very precarious and based on the idea that one or two minor things can go wrong and the major things won't happen.

Negotiation requires good communication, but also good facts to communicate. You need to show management that their goals are best served by following your suggestions. This produces a situation where both sides feel they've gotten something out of the negotiation, and both sides understand what they're doing and why.

As a final thought, refer to chapter 4 of the PMBOK5e, particularly the section on meetings: Meetings are for A) communicating information; B) generating alternatives (brainstorming, etc., coming up with possible actions; or C) decision making. Exactly one per meeting. Have a meeting, communicate the situation: work to be done, human time available, human time consumed, problems, risks, and so on. Have another meeting a few days later, discuss how to address the problem: change timelines, drop projects, alter (reduce) project scopes, emphasize addressing risks, emphasize projects to improve efficiency so the same staff can complete their work in less time and with less effort, hire additional staff, etc. Have another meeting a week or so later, make a decision: make any procedural changes and create any additional positions as is fit. Never, ever do a bunch of different shit in one meeting; that's how you get vacant management-driven from-the-hip decisions that tend to be the worst possible solutions to any problem.

Hey now, I'm a neo-separatist. I want to dissolve the North American Empire of Crassus.

It's disturbing, but it looks relatively painless compared to beheading (NOT as painless as you'd think--there's a lot of debate about how long a disembodied head may remain conscious, ranging from instant black-out to 13-ish seconds to a matter of constitution and aiming of the hatchet), electrocution (also standard), etc. The only painless method is nitrogenation, and that's only "humane" because animals are stupid; lethal injection always seemed like a terrible fate for a human, who has to watch himself die slowly, feel the doctors strap him down, prep him, see the needle being brought over, feel it puncture the skin, feel the slow onset of drug-induced lethargy... versus a bullet to the head, where you stay at the "well this is it, I'm going to die" state and transition to dead without watching it actually happen (the bullet moves fast). Painless suffocation would be faster--nitrogen will drop you quick--but you still know the air is going to kill you, and there's a lead-up with psychological horror of invisible death.

It's still wasteful. Genetic tampering would produce a less-expensive crop and a simplified process.

Google tells me they don't use a meat grinder; they use a "macerator", essentially the same thing but operating with a feed profile that effectively acts within the same time frame as breaking the animal's neck. So potentially more humane than snapping their necks, depending on if the animal survives a brief moment to experience a broken neck or not.

It looks like the auger is large enough to pass a chick without harm, shuttling it ... to its doom. So the process is as stressful as the standard factory shuffle of grabbing and shifting and moving the animal around while it's greatly confused about what's happening. And then: Crunch.

I wouldn't call it cruel. Disturbing, but not cruel. The cycle of life and death is acceptable; this is ... a lot of incidental death. I believe it would be quite profitable if we could find a way to force development of female chicks; likewise, we could limit the overproduction and routine destruction of these animals. Of course, then the GMO crowd would freak out--and the most likely way to pull this off is by hormonal injections into a laying hen, so of course some others would start talking about these "estrogenized hens" or something that will shrink your testicles or give you breasts or whatnot (i.e. the ridiculous notion that an injection into a parent causing a hormone imbalance in produced eggs which forces development of a female despite genetic male chromosomes would result in a chick that carries an estrogenic load and lays eggs carrying an estrogenic load that differs from any other hen and poses a health threat by overloading the human system with estrogen when eaten).

Dropping a chicken live into a meat grinder would be costly and expensive. The meat grinder would be useless until disassembled and cleaned; the output would contain bone, brain, beak, and feathers, with obvious texture imperfections.

This is what I was thinking: people are panicking over nasty-shit-at-sea. How is disposal actually handled, what are the actual environmental impacts, etc? Imagine dumping barrels of Vitamin A into the ocean: people wouldn't bat an eye; but that shit is toxic as living hell and would cause a localized ecological disaster, possibly mass extinction. Nuclear reactor water? A thousand gallons isn't going to hurt anything; but people are panicking about how if Fukushima leaks a few liters into the ocean it will destroy all life on the planet.