Many comments here assume that going to law school == becoming a lawyer. This is not always true. Many go to law school since it a degree that you can use in many other business fields even without practicing law.
This is very strange. In Israel all citizens are required to issue a tourist visa before traveling to the US. The process is super quick. The embassy have a website that updates you on each step in the process and from applying until you get the actual visa it can take only 3 weeks. The only busy times are usually in summer months where many tourists want to issue visas, so waiting for the in person interview can be up to a month. But again, from the interview to getting the actual the visa is a matter of days.
Note that their is a distinction. While arguably even the ESTA is too much paperwork compared to what US citizens going the other way under these visa-free agreements face, it's a short form you fill out online that gets automatically approved within 12 hours for 95% of cases. It's when you get denied for this system (and yes, this can be for arbitrary reasons which they won't disclose), that things go wrong. It would not surprise me if the logic went "owns domain haxx + curl is used in hacker tools (and many many more legitimate uses, but some agent doesn't care)", "possible hacker", "put on list that causes ESTA denials".
Is sorry for your story and hope you can get well soon.
In Israel we have a complete social coverage system and while not perfect at times, still provides much necessary help for those in need. Everytime I hear those stories about the US and medical system, I find it so hard to believe that a country with so much wealth and talent, still hadn't solved it.
In Israel you can get unlimited minutes + text + 30GB data for $10 a month. If you want to include around 200-300 minutes to call out of the country you can get to $13 dollar. The premium packages cost $30 and include calls + data when abroad. All that on an LTE network.
My roughly equivalent US plan on AT&T is ~10x that.
Don't get me started on the international. $60/GB for a pass or insanely $2,050/GB pay-per-use without a pass [1]. The rate is higher than that in some cases too [2]. It really should be illegal. Of course this is on top of the normal data plan charge.
They also have another day pass plan for $10/day that allows you to use your normal data plan internationally [3], however, only a subset of AT&T plans are eligible for it.
That's a fairly recent development, though; they recently broke up the cell phone cartels that were charging outrageous rates in exchange for very poor service.
This is something we desperately need to do here, but I don't much faith we'll do it anytime soon.
Bell got 50+ years to extract incredible amounts of cash from their customers (who had, quite literally, nowhere else to go). Then it was broken up and prices fell dramatically, which sounds close to what happened in Israel?
Unfortunately, we clearly didn't learn anything from this, and we let the small companies formed from the Bell breakup buy each other up -> consolidate the industry again -> eliminate most of their competition, and we wonder why we're getting screwed again.
Hire for attitude, Train for skills - If you've good dedicated people that you can trust, I'm sure they can be trained for other positions.
Good people are always hard to come by, and they will be even more loyal if they will see that the company doesn't ditch them.
The tax breaks are built in for the life of the wind farms, so they don't really expire until the farms are retired.
The culprit is not actually the PTC, it's the combination of the PTC and insufficient transmission capacity from the wind farms to the rest of the state. When additional transmission capacity is added the wind generation will be absorbed (and paid for) by a much larger region and the incentive to under-price will go away.
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.
However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks.
Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.
Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part?
I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?
Scrum isn't so bad for juniors, but when you get older and want to tackle more ambitious projects, you won't want to be justifying mere weeks or days (sometimes even hours) of your own working time.
These methods take management strategies typically reserved for juniors and the underperforming and try to apply them to everyone. It's awful.
However, "Agile" and "Scrum" seem to mean different things everywhere. Some companies say they "do Scrum" but just mean that they have a 15-minute status meeting (which isn't that big of a deal; it's a minor annoyance but it actually can defuse politics and suspicion). Others haul out the whole shebang, with nightmarish "ceremonies" that take hours and involve beasts like "product backlogs" and "business user stories" meant to spread disease.
By "Scrum compliant", I meant the sort of mediocre (or junior) engineer who will accept being managed down to the day.
That said, I don't think that Agile or Scrum is the right thing, even for juniors. Junior engineers should be getting daily feedback, but it should be in the form of genuine doing-the-right-thing mentoring, not continual progress tracking.
