Unless you worked for Sun in 2010, I don't really care about your uninformed opinion. As for fucking your colleagues, give me a break; they'd kill their own mothers to get the knife to stab you in the back if it meant they get to keep their miserable jobs through the next redundancy. It's not unreasonable at all; it's the way things work. You can look out for number one or you can take it up the ass; I don't really give a damn either way but I do think these young kids should hear the advice once so they can regret not heeding it later.

Actually, I don't like this thinking. You're trying to say the right thing but can't bring yourself to do it. I'll help.

Do what you think is wrong.

There, I said it. Many of us were raised with a very outdated set of values. If, like me, you're one of them, you need to invert your moral compass when making decisions about relationships with people or corporate entities. What you think is wrong is most likely going to be best for you, and it's most likely what everyone expects you to do anyway. Think of it like driving a car: you want to do what everyone around you expects because that's how you avoid becoming a grease smear on the pavement. Throw in the fact that people who act in the ways we were taught are "wrong" are the people who get what they want. I'm sorry to say it, but you need to start doing all the wrong things if you want to get ahead.

Best advice I've ever read on Slashdot. Maybe that's not saying much, but I would give anything to have had this implanted in my brain 5 years ago.

I notice from the problem you pose that you haven't been fucked yet. That's ok; a lot of people manage to go through most of their careers without ever getting fucked; in our grandparents' era, a lot of people worked for only one or two companies, never got fucked at all, and retired without ever knowing what it's like. Today, though, it's very easy to find someone who will fuck you. In fact, it's all but impossible to avoid; sooner or later you're going to get fucked whether you want to or not. If it's not your own company's rapacious or incompetent management, your company will be bought out and you and your colleagues fucked repeatedly by the acquiring company.

In case I'm not being clear, my point is that no one gives a flying fuck about you. They don't care about your personal happiness, your career advancement, or whether your compensation is commensurate with your contribution. You may think that they're your friends; maybe they are, maybe not. Save it for the football game or the pub after work; while they're in the office they are in it for themselves, not you. At the office, they are the corporation, which is a pathological entity that rewards cruel and selfish behaviour and accumulates managers who behave that way regardless of whether the shareholders, directors, or senior managers themselves hold those values. They will gladly fuck you without a second thought if circumstances encourage doing so, and most of them would be stunned to learn that you took offense at your fucking; to them it's just part of running the business. Trust me: you're not even human to them when you're at the office; you're a cog in their machine.

Don't for one nanosecond consider being "loyal" to a corporation, nor to individuals within that corporation acting in its context. A lot of people here have advised you to "negotiate". Don't listen to them. If someone is offering you more money and an hour and a half of your life back every day, TAKE IT. If you attempt to negotiate, you may be given a counteroffer, but you will be let go as soon as they can find a cheaper alternative to paying you more money (not to mention that there is nothing they can do to eliminate your commute). When that happens, your other offer will be a distant memory and you will be stuck looking for whatever you can find.

You need to stop feeling anything for the people you work with. They see you as a cog, and you should see them the same way. It really helps to stop thinking of them as human at all. Oh, and welcome to the workforce, son! Savour the opportunity you have right now to be on the giving end; it won't always be that way.

It's one thing to prohibit activities that deny others the ability to enter a market, it's another thing entirely to tell one company that it can't buy another. They're very different. Simply "being big" does not by itself prevent someone else from starting their own company and competing with it (in some ways it makes it easier; what could be easier than offering better customer service, for example?). And this is not a question of natural monopolies; if there is value in competition and the opportunity to enter, there WILL be competition.

Me too. And after, crossing fingers, the deal goes through, I will be voting against all of its directors at the next shareholders' meeting. Why in God's name would anyone agree to pay $3 BILLION as a breakup fee even if the breakup occurs for reasons outside the buyer's control?! Everyone knows that US regulators have become completely arbitrary and capricious as the rule of law has disintegrated. To put $3 billion of your shareholders' money on the line betting that they would "allow" the deal (as if the government has any right to decide what I can buy!) is somewhere between insane and a gross breach of fiduciary responsibility. They belong in prison.

We don't have that season. Here in San Francisco, there are four seasons:

Rainy Season: Nov. 1 through Mar. 31
Season of False Hope: Apr. 1 through May 31
Foggy Season: June 1 through Aug. 31
Summer: Sept. 1 though Oct. 31

All dates approximate. Your seasons may vary.

Walking through unknown-to-cops Civil War era tunnels. Fit for purpose then, fit for purpose now.

Because you can bet your last buck that the TSA will be right there, ready to serve up an unconstitutional anal probe. I'll stick to travel modes in which my fourth amendment rights are respected.

Now, when those of us who feel that way are rounded up and given a mandatory 1-way trip on a colony ship, I'll go happily. For many reasons.

What you want is called The Economist.

Does this remind anyone of the South Seas tribes who, after WW2, made wooden radios and beacons in the expectation that they would cause aircraft bearing advanced goods to land?

The studies you cite were all conducted by the government or by people working under government contracts. Those are the same people who would benefit from selling the casks and waste management services to the government, so they all have an interest in making it look like Yucca Mountain is a safe and effective place to store high-level waste. Maybe it is, but they spent so much time and energy trying to convince us that their credibility is nil. After all, if they're so good at managing the transportation and storage of high-level waste, surely there's no reason they couldn't just fill a few empty warehouses in Detroit or Omaha or Baltimore with the casks, right? Because it's all so safe, right?

You even hint at another reason for skepticism. At best, Yucca Mountain might have a few hundred years of safe and effective storage before there's an accident in transport, a geological event, a leak, or some other event that we've all been told is simply impossible or has a 0.00001% chance of happening in 10,000 years. By that time, all the people responsible for designing and implementing the storage and transport system will be long gone. So there is zero accountability in the process: the people involved could know the waste will be in the groundwater in 100 years and no one responsible would live long enough to stand trial for it. Similarly, they could provide even wholly independent testing labs with cask "samples" that are engineered and manufactured to far higher standards than the production casks would be. By the time anyone discovers this, they're all dead and there are thousands of tonnes of extremely hazardous toxic waste in transport or underground with containment less than called for in the design. Of course, we're told that the government has ways of detecting and preventing these kinds of things from happening, which is why every few years you read about that same government giving its soldiers and sailors defective weapons and armour made by those same government contractors and tested using those same government protocols.

Maybe none of these things is true. Maybe Yucca Mountain really is a great choice, and maybe the casks really will last thousands of years and really can survive being smashed by a train or tossed off the Empire State Building by King Kong. It's a stretch, but it's not impossible. But I don't really believe the people who told us all that, I don't trust them, and no one else who would have had to bear the consequences of failure did, either. Hopefully somewhere there is a town full of people who, like you, have more trust in the government and their contractors and would welcome the opportunity to show the world how a skilled labour force can partner with the federal government and its major contracting corporations to deliver a safe and reliable system for transporting waste to their storage facility and keeping it there without leaks for at least 10,000 years (it really needs to be 100,000, but I'll give you credit for a length of time no greater than that of human history to this point). And after 10,000 years of that skilled labour force and those honest government employees -- I should say governmentS employees, since no government has ever lasted longer than a thousand years or so -- and contracting corporations providing a flawless safety record, your town's water supply, genetic health, and agricultural output will all be every bit as good as they are today. Then our descendents can all agree that the people of Nevada way back in the day sure were a bunch of Nervous Nellies who turned away a golden opportunity to employ a few people for no good reason (and that would really be the only benefit, since the state would get no tax revenue from the facility or its construction as it would all be on government land with government labour and contractors domiciled out of state). That's assuming that anyone 10,000 years from now even knows what Nevada or Yucca Mountain or the United States of America were, or for that matter that there's thousands of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste buried under your town. But hey, all of that might happen, and my long-since-decomposed bones sure will look silly then! THAT's a chance I'm very willing to take, and that was and presumably still is the prevailing attitude in Nevada. The potential cost of being too cautious is nil, especially since the state has no nuclear power facilities and would have gained almost no economic benefit from hosting the dump. What did they have to gain? The potential cost of being too trusting is thousands or even millions of people (your constituents, if you're Harry Reid) dying a horrible death and the long-term contamination of YET MORE of your state's territory. Does it make sense now?

Again, this is not about whether nuclear power is safe or necessary or a good idea. Nor is it even about whether the technically best solution to the problem of existing high-level waste is to bury it under Yucca Mountain as opposed to burying it somewhere else, reprocessing it in fast reactors, glassifying it, shooting it into space, or whatever. It's about whether the people of the State of Nevada acted reasonably and correctly in opposing that solution. I believe very strongly that they did. If you disagree, the government is now giving you an opportunity to put your life and those of your neighbours on the line to prove it. Good!

I guess my point was that there are particular reasons Nevada was and remains a highly inappropriate choice. NIMBY sounds a lot less compelling when you're living next to a reactor and running your gear on its juice.

I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years. There was absolutely no way we wanted that stuff stored at Yucca Mountain; it is a geologically active area and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city. All that would be mere hypocrisy if not for the fact that Nevada has no nuclear power plants and derives virtually none of its electricity from nuclear sources outside the state. This is completely orthogonal to whether nuclear power is a good idea, whether it can be made safe, whether fast reactors are better, whether waste should instead be reprocessed or turned into glass or shot into space, and just how bad coal or hydro or other sources are for us and the rest of earth's inhabitants. It's nothing more complicated than the fact that Yucca Mountain is at best a mediocre site, the local residents don't want it, and the waste is generated elsewhere for the primary benefit of people who do not live in Nevada. That should have been sufficient to make the feds look elsewhere 15 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't. That the state won the fight is cheering; that a fight was even necessary is an appalling violation of states' rights. Finding a geologically suitable site in a state with nuclear power plants and residents who trust the government to transport and store the waste safely in their vicinity is an excellent idea. If they'd done that in the first place, we'd all have billions of dollars back -- and we'd probably have a nuke dump, too. But it certainly wouldn't be at Yucca Mountain; the federal government has abused and betrayed Nevadans from the day the state was admitted to the union, and there is absolutely no way its residents will ever trust it with their lives and property. That they gain little or nothing from nuclear power serves only to reinforce their already compelling case. Let those who like the federal government and think it's full of good, kind, well-meaning and competent public servants take the waste from their own power plants instead. It's the right thing for everyone.

And where do YOU live, sir? In a state with nuclear power plants? Far away from Nevada? Right. It's just as meaningful for me to say that your basement is the best choice.