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Rain? Snow? Try $5.5b in debt [US POSTAL SERVICE]
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How are we defining healthy in this case? Has tech ever been a healthy industry?
Don't do either then? I mean, both are bad, yes, but this isn't an either or.
Getting rid of old workers is a huge waste of human capital and a strain on government support systems.
Plus, sometimes you end up needing those older guys when it turns out your new employees don't know how to use the systems from the early 80s still kicking around.
And since when was this a good thing?
How is it an either/or?
Where are you doing this and based on what?
The age bias seems to have crept in during the go-go late 80s and early 90s, when all the youth-led startups used their age as a marketing tool to distinguish themselves from older and stodgier companies like IBM. The constant overtime and crunch hours are definitely a legacy of that era.
Before that, there was certainly no connection between youth and ability to work in the industry. George Pake, as an example, was in his 50s and 60s when running Xerox PARC, and the majority of his staff were DARPA/Defense veterans in their 40s and 50s. The tech industry didn't become a bastion of 20 and 30 somethings until well into my lifetime.
When your product is basically commodified code solutions, the more cost effective solution results in either or.
Doing it based in Phillishere's statement about healthy industry.
There's a bit of revisionism going on here; IBM was an old and stodgy company in the 80s. They completely revamped their business to get out of hardware sales and into consulting and solution building.
And there was no connection before because the access that youth had to the tools of computing were very limited and very much hardware reliant. You're basically saying that a paradigm shift is all flim flam because the paradigm was different in the past.
Also you'll get no argument that management can be older and often is. But the Andy Groves of the world aren't being replaced by younger execs because they cost too much.
That's a meaningless garble of a sentence. It's an industry that uses educated professionals in a changing profession to produce a product. While this does mean it's cheaper to hire new people who you have to pay less and come pre-trained, that doesn't mean it's the only viable business model. Nor does it mean it's the one that's best for the industry.
No, he's saying that it was a paradigm shift. That the industry changed. But not based on necessity, but on availability.
Like the manufacturing sector, a cheaper labour pool emerged and the companies jumped all over it. And this was also helped along by an emerging culture within that profession that encourages this kind of behaviour. (see video game development for an even worse example)
Aren't you in the tech industry? Doesn't the fact that your industry has a bias against older workers worry you, as a human being subject to the aging process?
Such as?
I can't think of another industry that works the same hours as tech, except maybe law and finance. Even then, it evens out after the youngsters get older and either make partner/manager or go into private practice. Medicine is bad for interns, but even that ends after the initial hazing period.
The more I think about it, the combination of eternal crunch time and discarding of older employers seems unique to your sector.
Their hours and conditions are a lot better. It's one of the positive side benefits of having a workforce with a reputation for going on management killing mass shooting sprees.
I would prefer to have a premium for shipping to and from the Alaskan Hermit. There's no need to subsidize him.
And when the Alaskan Hermit president gets into office, he can punish you for not being Alaskan. Yay!
Part of the idea of national services is that they are equalized among the population. You subsidize a bit of the cost of mail to the hermit, and the hermit subsidizes that huge federal dam that generates power to your house. In the end, it evens out on a societal level even if not the individual level.
This is what the Republicans are proposing.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
There.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we got booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I don't think the health of the fund or the Post Office were top in the mind of the people who made this law.
But the whole thing is that it doesn't really even out between rural and urban. Everything that the governent does is more expensive for rural.
This evens out because a huge percentage of the children born in rural communities migrate to urban ones. Likewise, a large number of urbanites retire to rural communities. Neither of these type of communities are static.
By that logic, why don't we subsidize urban areas with the rural ones?
Because the money is in the urban areas.
People an resources flow from rural to urban, while money flows from urban to rural. And even with the money flowing out of urban cores, there is still (generally) enough to provide basic services.
Well, you could de-fund all initiatives to help rural areas, and then watch as only the people willing to work for slave wages are left.
The Hispanic shall inherit the earth, the rest will live on concrete.
If by mainly you mean completely, yes
As part of some outreach for the local Occupy movement myself and some others went to the local lettercarrier's union meeting a little while back. The attitudes there are all pretty much that dire doesn't even begin to describe their situation, and Saturday delivery was brought up. Apparently Amazon (the #1 user of the postal service, their biggest customer by far, they say) has made it clear that without Saturday delivery, they would take their business elsewhere. Netflix, another huge name for the USPS, would also possibly move away from them.
They had some job loss statistics that were projected as the result of dropping Saturday delivery, and they were pretty staggering. (I of course realize they would be the first group to overstate such figures, but let's not discredit everything with that notion.) Given that the USPS is also one of the larger employers of veterans in the country, maybe this information will give you folks some pause about taking it for granted that Saturday delivery is a thing that can easily be done away with.
I live in an apartment. My mailbox is tiny. If it gets full (which happens easily) or if I get a box larger than a baseball, my mail gets held at a USPS branch. I also commute nearly 50 miles to work, so picking up my mail at my local branch is literally impossible for me during the work week.
I try to get everything shipped to work, but when I can't, USPS Saturday pickup is the next best thing. The absolute worst is UPS - not only do they fail to deliver shit because I'm not home, their stupid little sticky notes don't stick to my door. Sometimes I'll find one on the ground outside, sometimes I'll have no idea they even came by until I get an email from the sender that delivery failed.
Further push people towards streaming and away from DVD-by-mail.
Well the US will be pay-by-the-megabyte within a year or so in all likelihood, so that's a no go as well
How much you want to bet?