Re: Scottish Titles
England almost immediately regretted getting a Stuart on the throne, and it took nearly half a century to get shot of the stupid bastards.
1575 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009
It seems to me that America was super keen on free trade until it didn't suit them suddenly, when China did that thing that Marx warned everyone about, and started to use capitalism against itself.
China priced some of these elements at a low enough price that the competition closed down which is capitalism 101. If America wants to compete I suppose they'll have to match the subsidies China has.
Oracle did that to the vast corporate octopus I work for a couple of years ago, gambling that it would be too hard and expensive for us to ditch them, but we're in the process of doing exactly that.
The rumour was that we spent about $US25 million per year with Oracle for the Asia Pacific region which has now been entirely moved to SAP (which is a whole other story).
I want to know about "manufacturers that learned a hard lesson in risk management when they put all their eggs in the China basket" and what those lessons were because from what I can see they're still all in on China and are making just as much money as they ever did. <br>
Why has China suddenly become the bad guys? I mean, they've always been bad guys but we didn't used to care as long as the money continued to flow.
We got the same pep talk from our new CEO, although I understand the GM of the branch I work at pushed back with a list of ancient equipment that needed replacing 10 years ago and is currently preventing us us from "being the best we can be".
I think he asked for $10 million and he won't be getting any of it.
I'm old and can remember when China decided to open itself to the West and courted foreign capital.
Many of us objected, saying that we shouldn't prop up an authoritarian regime, but we were told that trade was the way to liberalisation because as people get richer they want political freedoms also, so we could help the Chinese become a democracy.
This was a lie.
China has used the greed of capitalism against itself and stories like this illustrate that quite well.
I have stopped caring, because it makes no difference to me which awful greedy capitalist owns everything.
We have been lazy in the west about this stuff, relying on a single company instead of creating a robust ecosystem.
The West decided to do unregulated capitalism, so industries have become consolidated and competition is nominal in many of them.
I for one find it very strange how free and open markets are suddenly not the best course of action. Maybe we've been lied to.
Many other nations have barred it from selling its comms wares within their borders.
I live in a 5-Eyes nation and two of our major mobile networks use Huawei kit almost exclusively.
In fact, if I sign up for a new internet connection any one of the ISP's I deal with will send me a Huawei router.
Our "flexible" working arrangements means you can apply to your manager for 1 day per week work from home and if you want more than that the next manager up has to approve it.
Any more than 2 days is not considered.
When one of the team I work in quit a few months ago he cited the "flexible working" as one of the reasons he was leaving.
No, nothing is going to change.
We threw out Oracle and replaced it with S4/Hana.
Oracle worked, but was old and clunky and not easy to use. I'm pretty sure they threw some sort of license audit at us too.
I suspect S4/Hana is pretty good, but the contractors who are doing the work for us are terrible which makes SAP look bad. The problem is that we are a massive American corporation and the drive is to send every process possible to countries with the cheapest labour, so we've got what we paid for.
I am quite happily using Win 11 here on my work laptop, and it's fine.
It not better than Win10, but not really worse either in my view.
Microsoft's problem is that they have decided that users are not allowed to upgrade on perfectly good devices due to some completely arbitrary reason.
Why can't I run Win 11 on a 6 year old Dell Latitude 7470 I have in my possession? It has 16 GB of RAM and a 4-core processor, but is not good enough apparently.
Hi Battsmn, do you work at the same company as me?
Every system we have works exactly as you've described, to the point that when a manager employs a new staff member (which for most of them is maybe once a year or so) a colleague and I who have nothing whatsoever to do with HR are now the go-to people to get all the paperwork in order because we've managed to figure it all out for ourselves.
It doesn't help that our local HR manager is completely disengaged from her job and doesn't understand how any of it works herself, but every procedure not directly related to manufacturing or selling the product we supply has been outsourced to low-cost parts of the world, and we are now getting what we paid for.
Yes, I am looking for a new job actually.
I had a whole series of friend requests on Facebook, at one point, from attractive young ladies who seem to have forgotten to put a blouse on this morning.
Fortunately, even when I was young and smooth, attractive young ladies of that sort never showed any interest in me so I'm under no illusions now.
This is also almost identical to the ongoing incident at a large corporation I happen to work for, but in this case we turned off a working (sort of) Oracle system and turned on a shiny new SAP system.
I have just finished talking to an outside contractor who provides a very important service for us, and while he was apologetic he won't be working for us anymore because he no longer believes our finance people's assurances that he will be paid on time.
Fortunately for me, I can make this someone else's problem. I also have a job interview next week.
The point the GAO is trying to make is a little bit lost in the details, but it amounts to the fact that the oil and gas industry is important to America, but is not very profitable to the companies that run it, so what they need is an injection of taxpayers money to help them solve their security problems.