mauricemir

One of my Grandfathers had to evacuate his whole school from Birmingham - his house also got bombed (lucky without my father in it )

Yep more distracting that having executive jet engines being tested out side your office (I used to work on campus at cranfield)

Though being able to go and watch the spitfire they rebuilt being demoed was really cool.

When i worked for Reed Elsevier in london I used to boot my laptop and go across the road to get breakfast in the 10-15 mins that took the laptop would have booted :-)

Even more ironic is that these 2/3rd gen Brits are not to keen on the newer Eastern European immigrants.

I remember being a bit shocked by one of my school mates (on of the Ugandan Asians expelled by Amin) saying that he could understand voting for the BNP.

yes but Java is such a swine to get to grips with for things like hadoop.

Back when I did MR I found Pl/1G much easier to get to grips with then having to spend 90% of your development time trying to work out the Godammed class-path and getting eclipse to work.

MM might depend on the law in your country for BT in the UK it was xx hours per week on average.

Employers can "demand" a lot whether its justicable is another matter.

And a manager requiring attendance at say a 9 o'clock meeting is not the same as require you to be in the office 9-5 5 days a week

Well not sure that self employed lawyers are germane to the discussion.

There is also a LOT of sharp practice in legal billing

Would not FORTRAN make more sense than C if a real compiled language is required for performance.

Especially as 99.99% of HPC clusters are running Linux or some unix variant.

So this dual Xenon 72 Core system is slow - Subs are so cute just like 6 year olds pretending to be like mommy and daddy

So? Tech occupations are almost all 100% salaried for Managerial and professional Grades.

It depends I know people would would be highly insulted if you called them hourly paid.

Having "no fixed hours of work" is a social class signifier in many cultures.

But you are right some one getting paid 250k is still a worker and does have "labor" issues just as some one on 25k does.

Obviously issues may present in different ways for high and low paid workers

He can demand all he likes - the point is with salaried employees is its "no fixed hours of work " and its up to you to decide how to compete your assigned tasks.

I recall one of my coworkers at BT commenting well that he was taking Friday off to play Golf as he was using up his TOIL.

If they are treating you as hourly paid you should be getting OT.

Ah SAP one of those products that promises the moon on a stick and requires expensive SAP consultants to configure - worse than Oracle from what I am told

I Used Audi as they where reported as the most desired employer for engineers in Germany.

Probably explains why Germany is such a powerhouse in software development NOT.

I do wonder about the effect of all the bright kids who would do CS/Computing in the USA/Uk instead want to work for Audi.

Rigid hierarchies do have down sides until recently get put on the vocational track in the German school system that was it you where on it for life and it was almost impossible to go from Aprentice-> Technician to Engineer.

But in the UK renting is far more expensive and in general the USA's housing is far cheaper for similar area's

The problem is that a Fetishistic obsession with 100% cash savings instead of actually investing in something is not a good thing for the economy.

It also leads to bizarre outcomes where foolish pensioners invest in exotic and risky cash like instrument's like PIBS instead of 100+ year old investment trusts.

Transport costs for commuters is the other big one

Think about it for a while:

So you deliberately add to the basket of goods a device (that you know will deflate) at say £200 10 years later its now £25.

Makes inflation seem less than it really is.

Its more a problem in country's with week banking systems where the population do not trust the banks - look at the outflows of cash from Greece.

Because common sense its better to investing in something than pay the same or higher to rent it.

Renting would have to be a LOT! cheaper than owner occupiers to make renting a rational decision.

Payday loans in the UK have been around for a long time and well before that you have Pawnbrokers

Crashed very very badly - they had 100+ year mortgages that where handed down from generation to generation.

You can imagine the will reading "I leave my Rolex and and the remaing 40 years of my mortgage to my son/daughter"

These days a dvd player and a computer are not luxury items (in the UK)

But when they where added to the index they where a lot more expensive than now - which is one sneaky way you can fiddle the inflation figure.

It can be look at how property prices in Japan crashed negative equity is never a good thing

That is the problem, the ONS office for national statistics was tasked to come up with a new inflation index that did have some element of housing costs CPIH.

Unfortunately the last government didn't like the results and the ONS was to to go away and try again.

Another problem if the basket of goods used has formerly expensive items like DVD players and Computers that over time experience massive price deflation - it skews the figures

Broadsheets ie proper news papers do tend to use slightly more adult language when compared to tabloids.

And the NYT is a very old fashioned newspaper.

In the Indian subcontinent having what is called a "reliving letter" from your previous employers is very important.

Have a look at the workplace stack overflow to see the sort of problems Asian developers face "horrific" is how it was describe to me.

you know with the way cars are built these days even a slow speed shunt can cause a write off and whiplash neck injuries are not fun

I can see Russian style dash cams being popular fro driver less cars to stop the obvious possibilities for insurance fraud.

I could see some Fixie riders deliberately trying to cause cars to trigger this.