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Contusion3532

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My brother and I came up with an interview process for help desk positions many years ago. It was sort of an open-book exam. He set up a computer and a network printer. I believe he purposely misconfigured something with the networking of the network printer, possibly one other issue too.

They had 1 hour, utilizing any resource on the internet they wanted, to correctly configure the network printer. If they completed it, great, if not, he'd go through and see what their troubleshooting process was, what they researched, etc.

This type of interview worked really well for hiring help desk staff, but obviously hiring a software engineer and evaluating them is much more difficult.

I think so. It's my belief that they often times leadership sees software engineers as cogs that can easily be replaced by another. They don't appreciate the years of institutional knowledge that experienced engineers have, vast productivity differences between workers, etc.

"In the Wall Street Journal story in May, the Petersons said they bought the home in 2007 for $16.65 million, invested $10 million in renovations and decided to sell it because their teenage children are in boarding school and they have another property in the city, as well as homes in Aspen, Colo., and Indiana."

I imagine their "financial situation" has left them completely out of touch with the common person.

There is no shortage of people or children on the planet. Having children -- if you live a western lifestyle -- is the most destructive thing a person can do, in regard to carbon emissions and damage to the earth. What about your duty to protect the Earth, that God gave you? Why not adopt? There is a shortage of children that need parents. Wouldn't God prefer that you do that?

There is no solution. The industrialized nations used the externality of carbon emissions to build their current status. These nations are unwilling to subsidize and compensate developing nations so that they can develop while using clean energy.

Politicians can't tell their constituents the truth -- that their lifestyles are destroying the planet and are unsustainable. They'll be replaced be politicians that tell voters what they want to hear or scapegoat others.

Exactly. The cumulative emissions of the United States dwarf the rest of the countries in the world[1].

The powerhouse that is the United States was built on the externality of carbon emissions. Now that the West has built their economies of this externality, they're trying to prevent developing nations from catching up by utilizing the same externality.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/The-2...

For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.

That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.

It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.

Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments.

It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.

Slavery abolition is a progressive position, and in the Civil War era the Republican party was the more progressive party. In the 20th century there was an ideological shift in the Democratic and Republican parties.

It's pretty clear that the modern Democratic party was the one pushing for civil rights.

"The transition into today's Democratic Party was cemented in 1948, when Harry Truman introduced a pro-civil rights platform and, in response, many Democrats walked out and formed the Dixiecrats. Most rejoined the Democrats over the next decade, but in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement had also deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, and Republican politicians developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. These approaches are known as the Southern strategy. Anti-civil rights members left the Democratic Party in droves, and Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats' presidential candidate from 1948, joined the Republican Party." [1]

Also, look at a map of the Confederate states. Look at a map today. Why are they mostly red states today? The people/families that lived there then mostly stayed, except for the millions of African Americans that migrated to the north.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_switching_in_the_United_...