alexmarcy

In most cases because it is impossible to find out who is doing the calling because the numbers are spoofed.

For example, when my phone receives a call from my own phone number am I going to sue myself? There is no way to track down the actual caller in most cases.

This is going to have zero impact on the 900 spam calls I get every single day from towns in my home state with less than 50 residents.

Corso Systems | Remote with On-site work as needed at customer facilities | Full time | https://corsosystems.com/careers

Looking for systems engineers across all skill levels. You will get to work with innovative manufacturing companies and technology, build process automation systems, business information and analytics systems, as well as IIoT projects, products, and SaaS implementations.

More details on the link above.

Their stuff is a nightmare to use, and is insanely expensive.

Always nice when we get to just swap it out for something like Canary or even Ignition although folks are always trying to trash the Ignition Historian when it works well for most use cases people need to solve.

Corso Systems | Control Systems Engineer | Remote | Full-time | corsosystems.com

Corso Systems is a systems integration firm focused on manufacturing execution and optimization. We work with all manufacturing industries to improve their processes through supply chain integrations, process automation, and procedural improvements.

We are looking for folks on the technical side to help with our ever increasing portfolio of new and interest problems to solve.

http://corsosystems.com/were-hiring-2018-corso-is-looking-fo...

So the basic gist is Consumer Reports is trying to find a younger audience by building a new website to compete with The Wirecutter for attention?

This was a very long and convoluted article to get to that conclusion.

Corso Systems | Chicago | Control Systems Engineer, Marketing/Sales | REMOTE | corsosystems.com

We're seeking a control systems engineer, entry level is ok. Typical tasks include developing GUIs and process control logic for manufacturing systems, database administration, web services development, and system commissioning. There is a lot of overlap with more "general" programming disciplines, CS, etc., and while a technical background is great, a technical degree is not a requirement.

Remote work is fine, along with travel to customer facilities when necessary for commissioning.

We're also looking for a sales/marketing person to help develop our marketing processes and content to drive new business. This includes written content for our site and industry publications, working with our customers to develop case studies, and developing video content for our projects, side projects, and general shenanigans.

We are a small company helping large manufacturers optimize their processes, reduce costs, and do what they do better through the use of automation, data analysis, and workforce utilization.

Check out our site and let us know directly if you are interested or have any questions.

info@corsosystems.com

How does buying pizza with a corporate credit card result in a felony conviction?

Mindy Kaling's character on The Office was ahead of her time. WUPHF!

I don't think it would be better off without the gigafactory, I think it would be better off without such a steep investment in one company.

Sure, there will be tax and other money spent where the people live and work, but I'm not seeing how that will be enough of a boost to the economy to justify $1.3B in incentives given to Tesla, especially when their ask was for less than half of that amount.

I'm not against long-shots that take time to mature, as long as those are part of a diversified investment portfolio.

The legislators gave up or severely decreased tax incentives to other industries to make up the gap. Could Tesla be worth all of that in the long run? Possibly, still, I think it would be wise to continue to invest some of the money in other ventures rather than putting it all in on Tesla.

I agree, I'm just not sure that having to give up existing tax incentives to other industries to fund a $1.3B subsidy to one company is the way to go about generating new industry in the area.

There is a small group of start-ups in the area that seem to be doing well for themselves and every so often there is talk of Reno becoming the next Silicon Valley, so I think the SAAS sector is covered.

Reno also has Sierra Nevada Corp, which was in competition with SpaceX and Boeing on some space related ventures for whatever that is worth.

The problem I have with Musk's use of government money is that his companies most reliant on the money are still reporting net losses after being in business for a decade. Maybe in the "start-up" world of hoping to make a big exit he is successful, still, I don't know how anyone can call this Musk being successful. Maybe he will be down the road, but I don't see it that way.

I'm originally from Reno NV, which will be directly impacted by the gigafactory. I think NV took a huge gamble on the tax incentives there, including cutting huge amounts of funding for other, much more diverse industries. As NV has seen, focusing on one or two extremely unstable industries (gambling and mining) can quickly put you in a bind when things go south, the economy, price of rare metals, etc. They are simply banking on Tesla as a third pillar of industry, one without a track record of returning on its investment in the form of profits. If things continue on the same track they have been with Tesla, I don't see NV getting a very good return on investment in the long run.

Also, no one is taking into account the skilled manufacturing workforce (or lack thereof) in Reno, the existing manufacturing going on there, and the fact that either people will need to either come from out of state, or be poached from just about every manufacturing company in the area to supply Tesla's workforce requirements. If manufacturing in Reno is brought to its knees to support Tesla how is that any better than not having Tesla there in the first place?

Finally, the location of the gigafactory is going to lead people to live in Reno, but the factory is in a different county. Therefore the burden of all of the extra children, traffic, government services, etc., will be focused in an area not receiving any money from the overall package for those services.

While I hope someone besides Musk and his shareholders can take part in the upside of all of this investment, I personally don't see it coming to fruition anytime soon.

I got it too.

Lessons learned seem solid, would love to see an example of turning the pictures into a finished asset.

The general consensus having lived in Reno and seen all of the pushes over the last 30 years for it to become the next hub of various industries is it is close to everywhere else. The other main draw is the lack of taxes.

The potential for the new Tesla battery facility being located here is a good marketing bullet point. If it materializes it will change the local economy at least in the short term during construction and possibly beyond. If it doesn't happen here it will be another failed attempt to lure huge business to the area. Other notable pushes have been for shipping/industrial manufacturing which resulted in a new Wal-Mart mega-warehouse and some upgrades to other facilities and another push for pharmaceutical companies such as Genentech to open facilities in the area that fizzled out.

There have been a lot of marketing pushes over the last couple of years trying to make Reno seem like the great new destination city. I think this article is in that same vein.

There is a decent push locally with events like One Million Cups* going on to promote local companies. Included in that group are things like the Reno Collective and GirlMade among a myriad of other businesses ranging from art retreats to internet of things hardware. Also in that group is Abbi Agency which is the firm behind a lot of the marketing pushes about the area in general.

Personally I see the push for Reno to become the next Silicon Valley, Boulder CO, etc. as a good idea in theory, just one that is not using a clear message. I don't see the messaging as delivering a clear idea about "Why Reno?", instead it is more of a "Reno can be like..." message.

I would say the area has potential as far as people capable of both making and pushing really hard for something to happen to make Reno great, I'm just not sure if the culture is ready for that to come to fruition. Reno is overall a very conservative, old-boy type of place and hasn't been the most accepting of change, at least in my opinion.

*Full disclosure, my industrial automation company, Precise Integration, has been involved in the One Million Cups group locally in Reno.

I wasn't aware this was even something people worried about until I saw someone else doing a low-tech version of it a while back... http://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2014/02/19/-reno-inv...

You can also ask around at credit unions to find one that reports to credit bureaus and take out a small loan and pay it back on time. It will cost you a bit in interest but is another avenue to building credit.

Given Nathan's business model I don't see how this is a risky move for him to make. He sells products and will likely continue to earn money on those even without investing additional hours of work during the year.

It would really only be a big risk if he was to stop putting in hours AND take his products off the market for the rest of the year.

I agree this would be a very scary proposition as a freelancer with a direct correlation between hours worked and revenue.

To squash the backlash against Abrash leaving Valve, they should time the announcement of the next iteration of Half Life.

Engineering programs are designed to weed people out and give the ones who stay the ability to teach themselves new things. Debugging is an example of one of those new things. If you go to school and have your hand held through the entire process you won't be very well equipped to function in the real world where it truly can be sink or swim.

My Chemical Engineering program was designed around the approach of "give the students homework with no instruction and review the problem sets after they are due". This was tough to handle and weeded a lot of people out every semester yet was a great introduction to working in the real world where a lot of times you have to figure out complex situations with little to no help from anyone else.

The worst one I ever heard about was while I was at a potato processing plant in Idaho where they make McDonald's hashbrowns.

After the potatoes are peeled and washed they are run through a pipe with blades to slice the potatoes into french fries. These blades are sharpened with lasers and are insanely sharp because they need to cut a lot of potatoes before being changed.

One day they were shutdown and it was time to change the blades. The lady doing the change placed the new blades on the table and bumped the table when she turned to grab a wrench from her toolbox. The new blades started to fall and she instinctively reached out to grab them to prevent them from falling to the floor.

She ended up not grabbing anything because the blades sliced her fingers clean off. They took her to the hospital and due to the blades extreme sharpness, the cut was so clean reattachment was a pretty easy procedure. I don't know if she had any long-term negative effects from the incident.

Safety is important, be aware of your surroundings and don't instinctively grab things you shouldn't be touching in the first place.

My worst would have been catastrophic if I had waited one minute to make my mistake.

I was commissioning a new control system at a power plant's water treatment facility. I was fairly new to the industry and had mostly looked over the guy who did the bulk of the work's shoulder as on the job training.

This particular day the guy was out sick and we had to finalize a couple of things before we ran through the final tests.

There was an instruction to open a valve to fill a tank and it had the wrong variable linked to it. The problem was to maintain the naming standards I had to do a download to the processor to make the change. When I had been doing work in the office this was not a big deal, download the program to the processor, it stops running for a moment while it loads the new logic into memory and starts back up.

Not thinking through the implications of the processor shutting down while the process was up and running I made the code changes, hit download and about 30 seconds later an operator came running over looking like he had seen a ghost and he was pissed.

While I was making my code changes the operator was hooking up a hose to drain a rail car of some chemicals. The way the valves were configured before I made my changes was correct and would have had no consequence it I didn't touch anything. The way the valves were configured when the processor restarted would have routed the rail car's contents to the wrong tank resulting in a reaction which would have created a huge plume of highly toxic gas. The way the wind was blowing this plume would have blown directly to the largest town in the area and could have killed a ton of people.

The operator heard the valves in question changing position before he opened the valve on his hose to empty the rail car and figured something was up. When he saw the whole process had shut down he got really angry because I had ignored the protocol in place to avoid such a disaster.

I got chewed out and kicked off the site. My boss attributed my mistake to inexperience and I had to give a safety presentation on what I did wrong.

Lessons learned: Be sure you are aware of any implications your actions have. If you are unsure or guessing about something stop what you are doing and go ask someone first.

Don't give people mission critical work on their first project and have them work unsupervised. Training is important.

Always be aware of safety requirements, especially when you are working with machinery, automated processes, chemicals or anything else that can hurt, maim or kill you.

This seems like a cool technological problem to solve that is completely unnecessary. Is waiting a 1-2 days to receive something in the mail that big of a deal?

I think their take is that the valuation is a BS metric. Sure it is a calculation based on the cash paid for the equity but that doesn't mean that someone is going to go in and pay the $X valuated for the 100% equity.

I imagine that 37 Signals is doing just fine with their revenues and all told will probably be laughing their way to the bank with their total lifetime value when all is said and done.

To me the SAAS space is no different than starting a band, being an actor, etc. It is easy to get into at some basic level but almost impossibly hard to become the next Rolling Stones, Tom Hanks or some other crazy successful example of the field.

That is by no means a reason not to do it, just that expectations need to be set about what reality actually looks like.

Would be nice to be able to be able to find out info on the two other contacts in my city that show up during the sign up process, I'd reach out to them but there isn't an easy way to find out who they are.

SEEKING WORK - remote/contractual

Proficient in Rails, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, C#, SQL

I primarily work in industrial automation doing control system design/programming and developing data management/visualization sites to monitor data coming from the plant floor and integrated into ERP systems.

Based in Las Vegas.

alexm [at] preciseintegration.com

I have built similar tools for a couple clients in the past and received interest in making it into a product based on a demo on our site. I invested some time in making that happen and am looking for people to beta test so I can add additional database connectivity and work out any bugs.

Any thoughts on the landing page or how to drive traffic would be greatly appreciated.

I was wondering last night why there isn't video of airplane landings being taken as a routine course of action? If nothing eventful happens they can delete the footage but in an instance like this they would have video of exactly what happened.