That is a good question. When I was in high school, we had a pretty solid tech wing: drafting/CAD, woods, metals, autos, electronics, graphic design was down that hall but I wouldn't necessarily lump that in with the rest. As for me, I took a semester of drafting and dropped it when I realized I was no damn good at drawing "stop brackets" and would be better off fucking around in the music department.

Coming into my freshman year, there was a really strong effort to push kind of a school-within-a-school for kids who weren't total fuckups who couldn't be trusted with heavy machinery (we sure had those) but also were never gonna sniff the honors/AP academic track. This would have integrated math, science, and English into technical education and helped kids get something substantial out of high school rather than passing without distinction through perfunctory courses in U.S. history and geometry. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of this because organizing this kind of integrated curriculum required ingenuity and perseverance that our administration wasn't really capable of, and I don't think the kids who took it really dug it (and in some cases were untrustworthy fuckups after all), so the whole thing had petered out before our class even graduated. The only remnant I can find of the ill-fated Career Campus is this terrible punk song a band from GC wrote. I'd probably know the names of the kids if I looked it up:

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What power does Scorehead have? He works for someone else if I remember correctly?

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I've long said Google's a paper tiger. They fail (google x) and fail (google wave) and fail (google live) and fail (google glass)...the only successes they've had that they didn't buy: gmail, banner ads related to search and android. their few other successes: youtube and maps, they bought. Google sucks so much dick they bought Dodgeball (a mobile social-networking app/site thing) and then had the guy they bought it from go and start Foursquare and drive Dodgeball into the crowded google graveyard.

banner ad revenue is taking a hit as advertising moves to mobile (tho google's still the main player there, just not as much revenue) and as desktop browsers use various adblock plugins (ghoster, uBlock Origin, etc) to kill ads altogether.

Once hardware makers figuring out they can spin up their own *nix kernels to be android compatible, google will lose out there.

youtube is a gold-mine of content and google's making ad-revenue. i just wonder how long the content owners will be content letting google take a huge slice of revenue from their works.

Google's long history of failure probably played a part in the recent reorg at google into Google Alphabet.

Google's most promising product:

INGRESS. which is a rip off of the iPhone's old Shadow Cities game. People love this fucking Ingress game. Google currently has ad support from Jamba Juice for it; but you can easily see google monetizing the hell out of Ingress and its successor, End Game.

Or else they are using Ingress to condition people to take orders from their cell phones as the thin end of the wedge to get us to order up UBERs to drive us to the FEMA camps.

i'm starting to think Hussra IS Jeff Bezos

...and Apple's only success since the 90s has been the ipod and derivatives and some success in laptops on the momentum caused primarily by the ipod/iphone/ipad.

That is what these companies do now. They create one magic product that makes them Scrooge McDuck level money, and then they waste a bunch of it hoping 1 out of 20 ideas buy them a second vault of gold.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah but you'd think Wall Street would stay away not gamble on the one in twenty with them. Sure gamble but the crazy stock prices don't line up with reality in my opinion.

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Elections have consequences.

They have absolutely dominated two industries so far(search and phone). They are a good bet to find a third one to dominate.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Apple has the advantage over google of having a strong brand with an insanely loyal customer base. Apple could pull a Cards Against Humanity and market shit under iTurd and their fanbois and girls would queue up to overpay for it.

working at amazon would probably be hell. working for any company that is largely successful because of low prices is surely going to find some way to pay you less than other places might.

hell i would rather work at walmart because at amazon its not only the cheapest way to do things, they also want the fastest/most productive. working at walmart is just kinda being there for the most part

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

The guy who is getting treated. In my experience every asshole considers himself a "great boss".

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

And every shitty employee considers themselves indispensable to the team.

You are going to need to put a little more thought into this. Especially after what happened in the 20th century.

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I'd say the shitty employee could care less about the team. Just keep the checks coming.

No, you need to put more thought into it. You don't get to declare yourself a good husband. Only your wife has that right. It's the same with employer/employee. If the employee is horseshit, the employer just dumps him. He has all the power.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Fucking right on...

And why wouldn't the employer do that? In your beloved unionization the employer would have to spend a year and mega bucks to get rid of a shitty employee.

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Elections have consequences.

how would you get specifics about pay, hours and conditions without testimonials? yes, the warehouse employees are treated poorly, in that it's not justified how they're treated. when there were floods and we were in a state of emergency, we were written up for leaving. didn't matter where you were or how far you lived, you had to make it to work or you could lose your job. one person i know lost their job while they were getting cancer treatments because they were deemed "too sick to work" and another because he couldn't trudge 100 miles in a snowstorm to get to work.

one thing that everyone should realize, though, is that the warehouse employee at amazon.com isn't just a regular warehouse employee. we were owners of the company. we were given stock options. we were involved in business projects that included the office people. i was part of "away teams" that helped set up other facilities. but we were never compensated for the work we did.

the seattle people always pat themselves on the back, but seriously, fuck them. if it wasn't for PHL1, amazon would have died when the internet bubble burst. when bezos had to shut down plants in other areas, we were the backbone of the company. not seattle.

I didn't say they were not mistreated. I said I want to look at numbers if I can find them and decide myself. Reading 10 pissed off former employees on Gawker is less to me than stats on 20,000 employees. Just me though. In the end I give a shit if you say Amazon sucks I do not really give a flying fuck.

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Elections have consequences.

Not true. I work in the industrial automaton and manufacturing sector and while a lot of high volume manufacturing has been moved offshore, there remains a lot of manufacturing in the US. My business is 99% dependant on US manufacuring and my business grows double digits every year. I remember the days before NAFTA, globalism & the internet and it was glorious. Every business was vertically integrated and things were built where they were designed. Sure things have changed but US manufacturing is very much alive and well for some of us.

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CSFMB 2014 Nascar Pick 'em Champion

We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. — Ronald Reagan

The point is, he can.

Why do you identify with the billionaire rather than the worker?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

The owner doesn't really "own" the laborer, he owns the labor. If an employee is uncomfortable with their work environment, then he or she is allowed to leave at some point. If circumstances dictate that the employee is not in a position to leave, then that is on the employee.

It doesn't mean that the employer has the right to act like an asshole, but each employee has to make their own determination as to what is tolerable and what's not. For some people money is a helluva incentive and for others not so much. My dad once told me, when I was confronted with something like this that at the end of the day you have to be able to live with yourself. Each individual will have to determine their own threshold of tolerance, it's not for anyone else to decide it for them

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i don't give a shit about gawker either, i'm telling you what *all of us* experienced, not what i experienced. i experienced some of that shit but everyone was pretty much treated like expendable tupperware.

can you find numbers on other companies' disgruntled employees lists?

I am just going to guess that it is moved out of major democratic/unionized/northern cities.

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Elections have consequences.

Why do you assume I do? Some people here argue in such absolutes.

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Elections have consequences.

Um, I identify with myself--ie., a consumer who buys a fuckton of shit on amazon.com and doesn't wanna see more money taken away from me and given to that billionaire to placate SJW's on reddit based on some shite tawking about their former employer by some whiny EX-employees of amazon.com.

You sound like you do. I'm not arguing with you. I'm asking you a question.

I think Americans have been trained and indoctrinated by the rich guy to identify with the rich guy. The paradigm of the owner holding all the power isn't set in stone. It only exists in so much as the worker allows it. Read some of the statements by Amazon employees who are "happy". They sound like members of a cult who need to be de-programmed.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

That isn't a bad way to put it. Same as why do I shop at Walmart rather than singularly protest. Because it saves me money.

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Elections have consequences.

If the employee doesn't like the job, they often leave. That is the ultimate power. And there are a precious few companies now days that are without shitty employees.

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Well, in that case, why don't we all just slug it out for the earth's resources and may the best man win.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Nope. I have and have had a diverse set of family members ranging from minimum wage grocery employee to union members of all types to top 1%ers. Despite what some here believe I am all over the place and decide what I think about stuff on a daily basis. Do I lean one way sure but I assure you I am less concrete footed than some around here.

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Elections have consequences.