That unemployment pay is more attractive than working says a lot about prevailing wages. If unemployment covers rent and working does not, why in the hell would any rational person want to work? And why should employers think they shouldn't have to compete with that?
Part of the problem is that the high unemployment premiums are coming from via the stimulus packages which will probably end at some point. In the meantime more businesses will go bankrupt or close doors.
So yeah, it's rational for the employee to sit things out, but the market is distorted
Remember, as Thomas Sowell has correctly pointed out, the true minimum wage is always ZERO. I'm advising a smallish manufacturer now whose goal (as a response to minimum wage and other govt regulation) is to eliminate ALL of their employees, through both automation and outsourcing. I've seen the numbers, and this takes them from barely profitable in a good economy to marginally profitable even in a fairly down economy. They will not survive another downturn if they don't do this, so all the jobs will be gone soon, anyway.
This isn't what they want to do, but what they must do, especially with no barrier to Chinese cheating in the market.
Policy has consequences, and right now, most of our government policies are actually arguing against creating (or even maintaining) jobs.
Has Thomas Sowell talked to any panhandlers lately? I'd say the floor on minimum wage is at least $3/Hr if one can sit on a curb with cardboard and earn that much.
Extrapolate out of how often I see folks giving money out on my way home at the same intersection (around 1/4) times for a 2 minute wait. With what looks to be more than a dollar worth of sponsorship for the panhandlers habit
In the U.S., a very short step since the courts have already held that e-mail service providers' copies of messages don't get the same protection as personal copies. I don't see how Alexa or any of the other "Hey, Spy" devices' third-party handling of speech for translation/interpretation would be considered differently. Especially given the ignored/clicked-through ToS that say "we're sending this home, is that OK?".
>> And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing
There's still COBOL code out there running core business systems that's older than I am, and I'm closer to 60 than I am to 50.
When 5MB disk storage system is the size of a small car and costs $50k, you fight for bytes. Or if your data is stored on magnetic tapes and reading in a dataset can be costed by the kilobyte, takes minutes per megabyte, and requires a million dollar's worth of equipment and dedicated staff, you fight for every byte.
The phone I carry today is hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the $5,000,000 mainframe I was working around Y2K and the apps on it - most delivered freely - make it far more capable than the raw processing power difference would indicate.
If you are fighting for bytes then storing dates as "DD-MM-YY" strings is very inefficient, as you are wasting a factor 4X on storage compared to just storing the days since 1900 as a 2-byte integer. I understand that storage used to be expensive, but I don't understand where the two-digit year comes into play as I can't envision an efficient storage mechanism that is limited to exactly the years 1900-1999.
You need also to have the code to do the conversion. If you store, in a byte, the years since 1900 (or 1970) then every time you load and/or process a date to be displayed you need to add 1900 (or 1970) and then convert from int to str which takes time (machines were slow) and code.
And the code takes space.
You may think the space is trivial, but I remember working for nearly two weeks on a commercial system to save around 15 bytes on a system, and it was worth it.
Then the culture was embedded ... you worked to save bytes, and didn't do things that would cost more bytes. And the systems worked, and didn't need updated, so they persisted.
One of my tasks for Y2K prep was to modify an in-house-developed record-based "database" to accommodate a the century change. Originally developed in the '60s the year had originally been a single digit because everyone thought commercial DBMS' would be viable in few years so there would be a replacement before the decade rolled over. :-| They'd grafted decade handling into the thing before I got there so it could survive the '70s because they had a lot of expensive data in various file sets that contained the data. Converting to a commercial database was expensive and represented a huge business risk, so...
If you have eight bit bytes, you would of course store these as three two digit BCD numbers requiring one byte each, and need no conversion logic. (The code for printing BCD numbers is already there, because you need it to print
amounts of money anyway).
We've been forced to deal with the TLS issue by our software product's customers. Some of our technically-minded folks have been raising the issue for a while but new features are sexy and sell, and fixing not-yet-broken code doesn't. Amazing/discouraging that only the threat of immediate loss of six figures of income gets any attention.
I've seen these precluding secondary employment with competitive entities, but it seems there'd be little competition between Fred's and Alice's businesses (based on name alone).
The details will always have to be looked at by the inheritors - it's more important to not say something wrong or contradictory IMO. When I've had to do something like this in the past I circle through it, documenting the high-level ops before details anywhere. Tricky or especially complicated details next, then the operational details for as much as I've time for.
I'm doing this now for a couple of things I've inherited because my predecessors either never documented it or it's been lost to time. High-level flow, tricky and/or problematic bits with operational & recovery info, then the mundane as I have time. That means the mundane or some of the less-tricky tricky bits will be "vague" for a while.
Because sometimes he "wrong" action is the right thing to do. No automated system can anticipate everything. Think the NASCAR "drive at the wreck in front of you" - by the time you get there it will have moved.
Especially on a ship that might have to spring from "situation normal" to active combat (maneuver/attack/defend all at once) without a pre-knowable trigger condition.
