risotto_groupon

I often have a hard time networking because I was raised by two very serious people who took their jobs very seriously. I made the mistake of moving to Chicago where it seems like the accepted way to "make friends" at work is for everyone to pick someone to be "Dwight Shrute" and they bond by crapping all over them as much as they can.

I can't begin to tell you how utterly distasteful, unprofessional, and pretty shocking this I find this considering I work in a field full of nerds.

I have no qualms about leaving workplaces with toxic cultures like this (about 90% in Chicago). I have no desire to recommend or be recommended by people who's idea of bonding is forming a clique of bullies, find job security in doing as little training and professional development for new employees as they can get away with, and excuse their own poor performance by drinking until they can't remember their own name.

My work speaks for itself and has been enough to get me in the door wherever I want to go at the salaray I deserve.

eBay is just craigslist, but you have to hand over your money before you can tell whether they're a scammer.

Wait? What? You can't be serious? The market will sort "what is a worthwhile education"?

Why not let the market sort out legislation? Or court cases? Or child custody?

This is a pretty sad statement of your personal values if you're serious.

There are even imaginary zip codes... as in they are real zip codes but don't map to physical space.

Or do what I did and work for a company with Remote in its DNA and move somewhere so cheap you realize a 100% increase in salary from cost of living decrease.

How long are we going to accept, "Oops, the computer was racist!" as an excuse?

Its about as transparent as Roseanne on Ambien at this point.

If you're interested in this kind of thing I also recommend "Science, Strategy, and War" principally about John Boyd's EM theory of flight combat.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-Histor...

I hope its Greece so we can all be as transparent as possible about the real issue here...

(Democracy)

http://www.stasimuseum.de/en/enindex.htm

Just think of how amazing the museum will be for your great grandkids when we completely dismantle them when, inevitably, their stated mission goals supersede common sense and a responsible relationship to the American public.

If the glass is half full of citizen traffic and half full of non-citizen traffic and the NSA drinks ALL of it and I don't think they should be drinking ANY of it does that make me an optimist or a pessimist?

I suppose, if you want your puppet state to last as long as a movie release...

It hardly seems like the academic, probing, research oriented state sponsored kind though. It feels more like the half-baked but polished-seeming "Cloverfield 4" ad campaign kind.

I think they meant "apothecarily". As in, I play golf to self medicate.

Its all fun and games until someone dies in an elevator...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

The point of a payday loan is they DON'T report to credit bureaus... I'm sorry but this is complete malarky. Payday loans are terrible terrible financial instruments and should never be used as credit...

but I have used a payday loan in the past for an emergency when my wife needed to extend her job hunt by 3 weeks and we had credit that was about to go to collections and my guaranteed annual bonus was a month out.

There are some cases where a payday loan can be used effectively to PREVENT damage to your credit history.

Google, who owns Youtube, are distributors at best, and distributors who didn't come by their trade first hand.

They bought into it. They are pretenders who, for the first time in recorded history, are able to perform a massive product recall in the name of censorship without incurring backlash on a scale that would cause bankruptcy or riots.

To wish away all that context in the name of "digital" is a fool's errand.

the [28,000] disks had "labels nearly identical to the discs provided by Dell for its computers and had the Windows and Dell logos," the Times wrote. As a result, Lundgren pleaded guilty to two of 21 charges, conspiracy and copyright infringement. He told the paper, "If I had just written 'Eric's Restore Disc' on there, it would have been fine."

There's nothing funnier than watching a new manager who's good with clients try to onboard somebody.

I wish there were firmer guidelines and pay structure around the title, "practice lead", that it came with the same face time with the C-Suite, and non-billable hours to actually do the job of onboarding and workplace training as managers get.

At the same time, people in the armed forces are probably sick of hearing "GOOD JAB!" and getting slapped on the back while their countrymen do nothing to prevent the need for the means of war.

I did drugs on company time and that excuse didn't work.

The nazi hypothermia experiments using holocaust prisoners was simply measuring outcomes. It is the best measure of experimental outcomes we have using live test subjects...

But its highly questionable whether these results should be used, not only ethically, but because data gathered under such circumstances is less reliable... its more reliable than nothing... but should it be used? It exists and its mere existence will lead to policy and problems.

You should really listen to the podcast between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein that was just published on "The Bell Curve" and the data we have on IQ in minority populations. It might change the way you think about the immutability and sacrosanct nature of measuring outcomes.

I'm gonna go with, yes? I'd rather be disappointed and frustrated than on the back of a milk carton.

Many people in the USA do speak up and urge the government to stop the aggression against North Korea. People who do so are respected in the US by their fellow citizens and their ability to speak up, organize, protest in a non-violent way is protected by law.

In practice the local police have really screwed up protecting people's rights in recent years but it doesn't change the fact that achieving big goals like changing US foreign policy is HARD.

The difference is in the US change like this is HARD. Not necessarily DANGEROUS. If you can achieve political action and change you are RESPECTED because it is HARD. You are not FEARED because you are DANGEROUS.

1) The test itself is randomly generated from a huge set of master questions many of which are actually IN the study materials. Everyone studies "from a copy of the test". Its like saying you cheated at a spelling bee because you memorized the dictionary.

2) There are several parts to the exam but none of them involve an evaluation of how you write code, its all multiple choice.

3) The cert itself and studying for it doesn't prepare you for actually building a Magento site in any way. The Magento certification program is really just a way for businesses to get access to "leads" and get free advertising from Magento. Having more certs just helps a company look good.

4) If your buddy is experiencing a lot turnover my experience of the eCommerce industry and Magento shops specifically is that they are more inclined to put a heavy emphasis on "culture fit" and be high stress environments. They say, "If you see assholes everywhere, maybe you should look in mirror..." but it might just be your friend is experiencing the reality that eCommerce development is NOT the same environment as the Wordpress chop shops he may have started in.

The Magento Certification tests are so divorced from the skills and reality of developing a Magento site and the study materials are so, so, so bad that most organizations just send a couple of canaries to take the cert expecting them to fail, then based on the questions they saw the org will put together their own memorization based study materials and train other devs using their own internal docs.

THIS IS INTENTIONAL on the part of Magento. They want a high fail rate. It ensures that only orgs with lots of money (who can afford a couple failures) will get a large number of certs and become official Magento partners, and since you pay for each test more failures means more money.

They have carefully structured the cert so that about 1/2 the questions are actual general skills and useful knowledge for working with the framework and about 1/2 are rote memorization such as, "What is the EXACT class name and Method Name that does X?" where options are

My_Basic_Class_Car::doThing() My_Basics_For_Class_Car::doThings() My_Class_For_Car::doThing() My_Class_for_Cars::doThings()

You need like 75% to pass... so if you're really lucky you can guess your way through the memorization portion but 90% won't pass on their first try.

If I were a hiring manager looking at a candidate with a Magento cert I could glean 1 of 2 things:

1) This person took the cert independently and cared enough to cheat or pay a lot of money to get it.

2) This person worked at an org with enough institutional knowledge of Magento and their payola process that they probably learned SOMETHING while they were there.