Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove 1899 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015
Victim blaming! Drink!
I expect they pay it for the same reason that people pay kidnappers, despite government orders to the contrary: they're not willing to lose what was taken. It's all well and good for people with no skin in the game to tut judgementally, but if it were your business or beloved person at risk, you might be talking out the other side of your mouth.
"In other words, when the C-level PHBs give directives to 'improve' productivity and the supervisors comply with C-level demands, then the C-level PHB have someone to blame and fire when the workers try and sue the company."
Certainly one possible outcome, unfortunately. On the flip side, it gives line managers a justification for pushing back on unreasonable management demands on behalf of their staff. It also theoretically enables whistleblowers.
Shitty management will always find ways to be shitty, but letting staff and line management know what their rights and options are can at least try to reduce the shittiness.
As a former manager myself, I think the value is twofold:
1. Training supervisory staff in workers' rights removes the fig leaf of ignorance. Without training, the line supervisors can just point at company policy and say they were following it. With training, including the understanding that workers' legal rights trump company policy, individual supervisors can be held accountable for actions which violate employee rights, which in turn creates an incentive to respect and protect those rights.
2. This kind of training can build a sense of empathy in the supervisory staff for their workers. In theory, it should help the supervisors and managers be more aware of the human needs of their staff and thus be less likely to treat them as disposable cogs. Of course, this outcome is precisely what senior management at Amazon probably wants to avoid because it can decrease short-term efficiency by enabling workers to do things like urinate or eat. The workers will be laughing out the other sides of their faces when they're replaced by robots, let me tell you!
In many cases, "taking care of" meant cutting back on staff or refusing to backfill empty positions while expecting ever greater productivity from the employees. For my part, I was certainly grateful to remain employed during the pandemic, but it's also worth noting that my employer continued to be highly profitable during that time, so the tightening of the screws in terms of staffing and other resource availability did not sit well with me. If management or the business owners took a loss to keep people employed, that's one thing; if not, then keeping employees around was just part of staying in business.
And don't even get me started about the poor health care workers.
I was recently walking down one of the streets in my neighborhood, and some cad had flung a bunch of 3.5" floppies (dozens of them, IIRC) all over the sidewalk. Had I realized what demand there was for them, I would have collected them!
Also, in before the first commentard who insists that he never uses anything as newfangled and unnecessarily complicated as a hard drive and still mourns the death of paper tape.
I would not have believed that you could get a Cisco device of that spec for $125. Hell, my Synology AP cost more than that a few years ago. On the flip side, I don't pay Synology a subscription, either, and I continue to get software/firmware updates; I wonder how long Cisco provides updates for the devices mentioned in the article.
I had not heard of Librewolf, so I will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation! That said, my experience with hipster niche browsers (e.g. Palemoon or Waterfox) is that they don't seem to offer that much of an improvement over stock Firefox, so why bother maintaining the additional browser on my PC? Looking at the Librewolf's list of enhancements, most of those are things I already do:
* Disable telemetry
* Use DDG
* uBlock Origin
* Block autoplay
Etc.
It seems like most of what they're doing is taking stock Firefox and cranking up the privacy and blocking settings, and there's nothing wrong with that. It seems like the developers could solve most of the problem by distributing a custom configuration file, though.
"Personally I tolerate apps and websites that have reasonable levels of advertising (like ElReg)"
Personally, I don't. I have a no-holds-barred approach to blocking advertising (Pi-Hole, Blokada, and uBlock Origin are my weapons of choice) because most ads these days are insanely intrusive (I find El Reg's liberal spraying of advertising on the side banners to be unbearable), and then there's are the tracking and malware issues brought up already by other posters. I think paywalls are a perfectly valid approach to preventing "freeloading" by ad blockers, and if a site wants to use ad-blocker blockers, that's also fine by me in terms of me going elsewhere. Advertising has become so prevalent, pervasive, and pernicious, however, that for the sake of my own sanity and for the well-being of my various computers, I do my best to avoid consuming it as much as possible.
And don't even get me started on auto-play video ads, especially on mobile.
"Well, apart from the fact that they hate each other of course."
[citation needed]
Evidence so far indicates that the Russians have been pouring money into far-right extremist groups in the West, which in the US amounts to supporting the Republican party. The Republicans, conversely, have a rich history of collaborating with hostile powers going back at least as far as Nixon, but most famously illustrated in the Iran-Contra affair. Include the fact that the Russians have a strong, manly leader who rides horses shirtless and isn't afraid to dispose of political rivals the old-fashioned way, and you absolutely have a recipe for foreign collusion.
Literally from this article (admittedly near the bottom, so perhaps your attention span was too short to catch it):
"The viability of underwater datacenters has already been demonstrated by Microsoft, which has deployed several over the past decade as part of its Project Natick experiment."
In regard to the question of how a diplomatic solution might have avoided the conflict, it's hard to answer that question because most of us here don't really know what Russia wanted from the invasion. If the desired outcome was unfettered access to Ukraine's resources without the bother of having to negotiate with the Ukrainian government, then it's hard to see a diplomatic outcome that would meet that requirement while maintaining Ukraine's sovereignty.
"NATO on their doorstep?"
NATO was already on their doorstep. I suggest you look at a map and consider the location of Estonia, for example. Now, thanks to Putin's strategic genius, Finland is likely to join NATO, adding one more "doorstep" nation to the alliance. Ukraine will also certainly join, once they've thrown out the invaders. In short, a diplomatic solution to Russia's concerns seems like it would have yielded better results. That's armchair quarterbacking, of course; who knows what would have happened if the invasion had not turned into the current clusterfuck?
In any case, Ukraine was not a member of NATO and seemed to be content to follow a policy of Finlandization, continuing to be a neutral buffer state between the EU/NATO and Russia, but that wasn't good enough for Russia, so they invaded a sovereign nation.
As to the purpose of the missile defenses, why would Russia care if Russia didn't have imperialist ambitions in its pocket?
"It is not a war which either Russia or Ukraine wants."
If Russia didn't want a war, all they had to do was not fucking invade Ukraine. If they want the war to end, all they have to do is leave. What this war demonstrates to a lot of people is that Europe and NATO were correct in wanting missile defenses on their eastern borders to blunt a possible Russian invasion. Europe by and large has been content to maintain rump military forces, and the invasion of Ukraine is forcing a reconsideration of that stance and encouraging a military buildup throughout Europe. So . . . great job, Putin.
Ironically, I got the notification that I needed to change my Plex password because of their leak. Even Plex required me to enter my 2FA code to change my password, however, so the notion that you would not need to enter a current 2FA code to change your authentication mode is mind-boggling.
"misogyny you're displaying there"
What the actual fuck are you on about? I defy you to point out any misogyny in my post.
In any case, I'm sorry that your female friends felt railroaded. Mine felt like they were being leaned on to not have abortions. I agree with you that "least worst != good," but that definition implies that abortion is inherently bad, and you haven't indicated what "bad" means in this case. Is it bad because it's unpleasant, bad because it's morally wrong, or something else? If you mean it's mildly unpleasant, then I suppose you're right, but you can say the same thing about lots of necessary or elective procedures. I haven't enjoyed my root canals, but they're significantly preferable to leaving tooth infections untreated, and the fact that they're unenjoyable is not the same thing as "bad" when the net outcome is good. If you mean abortion is morally bad, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
"The simple fact is that abortion is never a good thing."
The word "fact" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. There's a lot of social messaging to the effect that abortion is bad ("But you'll be murdering your BAYYYYBEEEE!"), but the reality is that it saves lives for some and improves quality of life for many others. Asserting that it's "never good" is a simplistic argument, and, messaging aside, every woman I know who has gotten an abortion is intensely grateful that she was able to do so, for whatever reason is relevant to her.
. . . the program that integrates a bunch of things such as tasks, calendar entries, etc. and does it well is Outlook. I know it's the program that people love to hate, but there's nothing else that offers such seamless integration of basic scheduling and communication functions. I know someone will pop in with, "What about Evolution?" And it's true, Evolution is a pretty decent Outlook copycat, which merely reinforces my point insofar as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Go on, downvote away!
And, for good or for ill, you have a single throat to choke when things go wrong: Microsoft. A lot of businesses don't plump for support contracts with Microsoft, but they're certainly available, and you can always open a time and materials ticket. In my experience, Microsoft Enterprise Support is top-notch: they're highly knowledgeable, and they will absolutely work a ticket until the customer is satisfied the problem is solved. With Linux, the experience can be more highly variable, since there are so many distros with different support organizations; even with Red Hat, who are essentially the gold standard for enterprise Linux support, the support agents are allergic to getting on the phone or doing any sort of interactive session to investigate an issue.
@Robert Grant: the point of diversity programs is usually to counter implicit bias, i.e. the problem of hiring exactly the same sort of person each time with the assumption that only, e.g. white males who came from a certain kind of engineering school are capable of doing the work in question. Diversity programs are ideally meant to open up the candidate pool to qualified candidates who wouldn't otherwise be hired because they don't tick the right boxes in regard to conforming with the hiring manager or interviewing staff.
As with all things, these programs can of course go awry, so I would not want to assert that they're perfect.
Conversely, there are plenty of other tech companies with robust diversity programs who are going gangbusters (Salesforce and Google leap immediately to mind). Maybe the cranky old white dudes should quit their bitching about having to work next to people not entirely like themselves and get back to work.
Or maybe something entirely else is at fault.
...cryptobros explaining how this is not ackshually a Ponzi scheme, and also how some new "innovation" in cryptocurrency will make it all better, and whatabout scams not involving crypto? What about those, huh? You don't sound so smart now, do you? I think you owe someone an apology!
BTW, wanna buy some apes?
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