I just don't understand. Here is my background.

Mom was a schizophrenic, my dad an alcoholic. We moved every year or so till I was 13. At that point we were stuck in a crummy motel in central California. This is in the early 80s. So when I was 16 I would walk into K-Mart and local appliance stores, and play around on the Commodore VIC 20's and later Commodore 64s. The local community college had a Commodore PET computer.

I had no money, no one to show me the ropes, not the best nor most stable education, parents that could not take care of themselves, so I had to watch over them and my 3 younger siblings. I taught myself Commodore Basic, then how to program in assembly. This consisted of writing a program on paper, looking up the opcodes, converting them from hex to decimal and then writing a loader that would POKE those values into memory and then do a SYS call to run the machine language program. From there I moved on to learn FORTH.

I will admit I am a male. But I had SO many disadvantages and yet I had a desire to learn how to program. Lets not forget wanting to learn how to do this classified me as a geek and meant I had to deal with lots of kids and peer pressure telling me there was something wrong with me on a fundamental level for engaging in such activities.

Exactly what is holding back any boy or girl in any halfway modern country from learning to program? "Boo Hoo, I would have to buck social norms to learn to program." Well it is not much of a dream or desire if that would stop you. "Boo Hoo, no one will teach me." There are thousands of hours of video on youtube, You can google out books on any programming language you want. If you don't like the teaching style of some video or book, try a different one.

The world in inherently "I don't give a damn". If you are a former heroin addict and you want to work in pharmacology, well you are going to have some hurdles to overcome. I can't tell you why any particular girl in junior high would decide they don't even want to know about computers. I can't tell you why a girl would decide against a career in programming. What I can tell you from pulling myself up in a world filled with welfare recipients who are just wanting a check is this. If you have to coddle and beg to get people into a program, and work hard at removing every barrier to their success, it hurts the drive and motivation for most people. Without it having some personal cost it has little value to them. Why work hard? If they don't do well, someone will step in and help them. If other things seem more important at the moment, walk away, the program will always welcome them back later with open arms.

TL;DR - If you are not willing to fight to become something because you want it, what outside program is really going to make a difference.

I 100% agree with you.

I worked for a company that was purchased by a larger company that did not want a competent Dilbert as an employee. A smart person who understood what they were doing, why they were doing it and why it was important. They wanted a minimum wage Wally. Someone who clocked in at 8:00 and out at 5:00, and did the bare minimum. They knew what to do to do the task at hand but did not ask questions. If they were told wrong, they would spend all day building parts that would not work, because they did not know how to tell if a part would work or not. All they knew for minimum wage is how to build the part like they were told to build it.

After that job, I swore I would never work for another company like that. I watch for it when interviewing for a job with a company, I will leave during the interview if I think they will be an employer who will pay bottom dollar for the minimum skilled employee to work for them. Every job I have ever had I have received promotions and raises because I was able to understand why things were going on and was able to make improvements that added enough value the employer recognized I was a good employee and paid me more.

I want to work for a company that will let me help them do better. That will treat me good and I will do good work for them. Not a company who wants to pay as little as possible and thinks, "who cares if they quit, we can find someone else who will do the lob for less".

Corporations are beholden to their shareholders. When asked if I could do A for the company and it will likely be the dominate player in the market in 20 years or do B right now and pay the shareholders a 10% increase in what they were getting and it does not appear to put the company out of business in the next 5 years. The CEO running the company is pretty much required to take option B. He is working for maximum shareholder value in the near to mid term.

If my goal was to build a company from 1 person to 10 and then to hire managers to do the work and grow the company to 100 people then to 500 and to offer an IPO. then yes, I am short sited in not loving employees.

But if I like what I do and can make a bit more money by having a few employees and know I am helping some folks out by giving them a job then why not? I only have to do it if I want to. But if government regulation is to much, or dealing with employee problems is to much or if I can't turn a profit at it, why not go back to doing it by myself?

To be successful, not every business must go from starting in a garage to being Apple or HP.

For those that like it small, a minimum wage increase like this may very well mean firing everyone and going back to being your only employee.

Back in 1992 I worked for a lawyer who had about $15,000 a month in expenses but had about $95,000 a month in receivables from passive income streams. That is right he was pocketing $80,000 a month even if he did not lift a finger, or never won a case. That includes employing 5 people full time. The state was looking at instituting mandatory employer paid insurance. He could afford to pay us all 3 times minimum wage and pick up the health care costs. In reality he would have fired all 5 of us and stopped practicing law or move to another state.

If every business that employed only 5 people shut down in LA, it would put a lot of people out of work. And every business big or small will be looking for a way to dodge this. It would be much cheaper to bake bread in Bakersfield and drive it over the grapevine. Hell, you don't even have to pay the driver LA wages.

At this point LA by 2020 and Seattle by 2022. Oregon is looking at doing this state wide by 2018. It is an interesting roll of the dice.

Either this is great news for everyone, other communities on the West coast will join in and it will be a workers paradise.

OR

It will be a bad thing on very large geographical area.

It is a big experiment and all indicators are this will hurt more people than it helps in the long run.

This is slashdot, home of that kind of behavior.

If you are interested in what nutritional ketosis is and want a quick way to do it right without buying $100 in books this is an excellent place to start.

If you see article X and then ask in the group about it, they will point you to article Y or citation Z. As always common sense is left up to the reader. Read both X and Y and make a decision for yourself.

I can tell you if I eat the typical "heart healthy" diet with plenty of grains, fruits and vegetables and avoid sweets...I am still pre-diabetic.

However if I eat a diet very low in carbohydrates, my blood sugar is fine. So I have 4 options

1. Eat all the processed foods and sugar and want and end up diabetic.
2. Eat what is considered a low fat, low cholesterol, heart healthy diet and end up diabetic.
3. Eat a low carbohydrate diet of under 50grams of carbs a day to remain healthy and non-diabetic.
4. Eat a very low carbohydrate diet under 25grams of carbs a day to remain healthy, non-diabetic and reap the benefits of nutritional ketosis

It really is not a religious issue. For me and my body, the only question I have to ask, "is it worth the extra effort to stay below 25grams of carbs a day to reap whatever benefits nutritional ketosis will give me or is standard low carb going to work better for me?"

For anyone interested, get a blood glucose meter and some testing strips and test your blood sugar levels, if you ever get above 120, the odds are a low carb diet will reap you some major health benefits. Also the words "keto" and "low carb" when used on pinterest will yield a butt load of delicious recipes that are low carb.

Dr Atkins died because he slipped on an icy sidewalk outside of his New York City office. He later died while in a coma. While in the coma he suffered from swelling. His autopsy shows he had heart damage. This is the headline most people have heard. The full story is that he had heart damage as a young man and the corner did note there was heart damage, but did not attribute it to his diet.

First of all a nutritional ketogenic diet is high in fat, moderate in protein and low in carbohydrates. If you eat to little protein you start breaking down muscle. If you eat way to much protein then excess protein is converted to sugar. As a generic range, lets say 75% fat, 20% protein and 5% carbohydrates (primarily from vegetables)

It has been shown that people who already have kidney damage can do more harm on a high protein diet. However this is not the case for people with healthy kidneys. Which is all still academic, sine a well formulated nutritional ketosis style diet is moderate in protein, not high in protein.

I also would not blame carbohydrates for all evils in the world. However, the combination of your genetics, diet and exercise can lead you to a place where your body does not do well with a carbohydrate rich diet. I am talking about people who are diabetic or pre-diabetic. A very low carb diet for them can be incredibly beneficial.

A good source for information about a ketogenic/very low carb diet, both how to do it and debunking common myths would be http://reddit.com/r/keto

The chances are very good that the last piece of bread, pastry, gravy or soup thickened with flour you have had, would have roundup on it. Thanks to the crops being treated right before harvest.

Many farmers will use roundup a few days before harvest because it dries the wheat out. http://www.washingtonsblog.com...

These folks are pikers.

Back in 1971 when I was 5 my parents dropped me and my 3 year old brother off at the theater to go watch Dumbo.

6 months later I went to go visit my grandmother. They loaded me up on the greyhound bus for the 12 hours drive and asked the driver to make sure I did not get off the bus till it got to the Los Angeles station.

I look back and think WTF? What was WRONG with my parents?

Or like me, have my fileserver a Linux system with the SMB shares on ZFS and have scripted hourly backups. Took me all of 20 minutes to recover. 16 minutes to figure out how far back to roll each share, 1 minute to look up the ZFS rollback command and 4 more minutes to commit all the rollback on all the affected shares.

Watch out, Balmer will want to squirt back at you with his shit brown Zune.

The Balmer peek

To get all the features of data integrity and error correction you need to avoid hardware raid with ZFS.

If ZFS controls the drives and you have striping or mirroring and one of the drives has corrupt data, ZFS can log an error and fix the data corruption. If hardware RAID controls the drive, it may realize a copy of the data is bad, and pass back the good copy, but RAID won't log an error nor fix the bad block. ZFS won't fix it either because it won't know since RAID handled returning the correct data to ZFS.

ZFS is self healing if it is NOT on top of hardware RAID. To reap all of the benefits of ZFS you need lots of RAM, that RAM should be ECC and two or more disks without hardware RAID.

As a child my dad taught me what to know about unions. He was a union stone mason in his youth.

Unions do not foster excellence. If you excel, you make everyone else look bad. My dad was a hard worker. He would get up at 4:00am and be laying brick by 5:00am, and some night had his truck lights on working till 8:00 or 9:00pm.

He said with the union job, you spent 4 hours working and 4 hours doing other things, like dropping your trowel off the top of the building. Then you had to wait for a supervisor to show up, explain you dropped your trowel. The supervisor then had to go down in the elevator, walk by the trowel, find a journeyman hod-carrier tell him to get the trowel and bring it up to you. 30 to 60 minutes wasted doing nothing, And by the time the trowel got back to you, you could stop to go to the bathroom.

I like doing good work. I don't want a union that protects me from my boss abusing me like it is 1910 again, but makes me a slave to mediocrity and not standing out from the crowd because it makes them look bad.

Damn straight!!! They are in my house.