Both of these are due to Agricultural Lobbying done on behalf of the mega-corp agribusiness

Fixed that for you. Hope it helps.

Secure!

That was due to an over-reaction by edgy poorly trained troops. As opposed to on a command from the central leadership.

"Laptops stay a few generations behind desktops, in terms of memory and bus speeds, memory and cache sizes, CPU speeds, etc."
  You still don't get it. My question is do you need the fastest "state of the art" hardware. If the answer is no, go with the lower end gear. WHo cares how fast a bus is if it is as fast as it MUST be.

How did this manager get to this 50% number? Was there a thorough end-to-end review with feedback and analysis from all stake holders? Or is this some half baked idea from reading vendors' web sites and intended to boost the new director's resume? You did not mention anything about a review so I suspect the latter.

You will never win this battle. I have never seen anyone win a battle like this. Bail out now and preserve your reputation. But before you go share your concerns with as many high level managers as you can.

I've pointed this out a number of times. But people do not seem to "get it". If you can reduce your power consumption then there is less waste heat and then less cooling cost. Note too that if your applications use lots of disk reads/writes and network IO with the cpu in a waiting state then you can save power by using a lower end gear. E.g. laptop chips and slower memory vs full blown "Enterprise" hardware.

At least the US hasn't run over any peacefully demonstrating citizens with tanks.

As long as you don't mind living in an oppressive Communist nation.

As long as you don't mind getting lung cancer, lead poising, or oppressed by a brutal Communist regime; China is a GREAT place.

Austin is a part of CA. As is Santa Fe, Boulder, Jackson, Laramie, Aspen, Bozeman, Sun Valley, and Steamboat. All Californicated or soon to be.

You're right, the wannbees will kill it. And the management leechs that live off of them.

Try, "can afford to live in silly valley". Six figures is minimum wage there. I interviewed for a job in Pittsburgh. The more I looked at it the more I liked it. I would've made more money and paid about $100k less for a good house in a decent neighborhood. In a city home to CMU, University of Pittsburgh, Biotech companies, and regional energy companies. And brew pubs.

If you want a good standard of living, go east.

More data does not mean better. They may be the wrong type of data or the signal may be lost in the noise. Less data focused on the right things could be the best approach. There must be a fundamental understanding of what should be measured first.

EE degree and trained as a pilot. Obviously trainable, check.
Able to work as part of a team, check.
Able to work under pressure, check.
Communications skills, roger that.
Able to supervise and mentor others, check.
Can be trusted to properly operate expensive hardware and software, check.
Shows initiative while following direction and procedures, check.
Attention to detail, check. Pilots who are not die.

When can you start?

It was censored