But, in practice in recent years, it's become nothing more than a way for big corps to skirt the free labor market and artificially suppress wages for skilled labor. You advertise a job at a ridiculously low wage, or with ridiculous requirements, and when no American worker responds or qualifies (because American programmers and engineers won't work for $30,000 ...

This hasn't just been the case in recent years, it has been the way the H1-B scheme has worked from the beginning. The place where I was working started doing this no sooner than the ink was dry on the H1-B legislation, more than 20 years ago.

The robot is your designated driver.

  You're not a perp until you've done something, or at least set in motion clear actions towards doing something.

But he has done something. Communicating threats is a crime in most states.

... if dropped on your foot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet

Gotta have more of that caffiene
Sweet little nectar from the coffee bean

The US will experience a massive outage like this one. India is handling this a lot better than we will.

  "... the Romans reserved this very harsh technique for unusual events. They were not dumb enough to do this to every unit on a routine basis!"

Neutron Jack was right about companies accumulating dead wood. They can and do. Used on a one time basis to get shed of non-productive workers, Rank and Yank is highly effective. But then they keep doing it on a routine basis. On subsequent iterations, they get rid of good people. They become so fixated on this process, it becomes an end in and of itself. I wonder whether Welch knew what he had set loose upon the world.

This concept was foisted upon the world by former GE CEO Jack Welsh. It has ruined one company after another and is an example of the cure being worse than the disease. Watch out when your company hires in HR people from places like GE, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, AT&T, etc.. They will try to get a promotion by implementing a slightly different version of this which will have about the same results.

  Utilities don't have enough staff to handle severe-storm outages - the expense would send rates soaring - and so they rely on out-of-state utilities to send help ..."

So the CEO says it's a choice between soaring rates and prolonged outages. These outages cost something too. If your business depends on electrical power, you're shut down. We're liable to end up with backup generators everywhere.

They used to have adequate numbers of linemen. But ever since the waves of mergers and the CEOs began lining their pockets, they cut way back on the staff.

So now, widespread T storms knock out power for a week. I shudder to think of how long power would be out now after a cat 3 hurricane or a widespread ice storm. It could be weeks.

  Then they lost their way, management started all sorts of retarded internal competition games ...

Bad management is why most of the high paying jobs have disappeared over the last several decades, due either to incompetence, crookedness or a combination of the two. Nokia is just the latest in a long line of mismanaged companies going belly up.

Amen. It's either buy or do without.

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?
Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

He's just a sophisticated kleptomaniac.

There are probably a good number of plagiarized papers out there that have launched careers. No doubt some of their authors have a pucker factor worrying that somebody with too much time on their hands will examine their paper.

  I salute IBM in cutting jobs ...

I salute them too, but in a different way.

This is IBM's new business model. They make the books look good by laying people off. Go for it! At the rate IBM is shrinking, they'll be gone soon enough and the world will be shed of them.