In the Presidential debate between Greater Evil and Lesser Evil, Lesser Evil won. That means that the third debate will be judged to be a tie, since that’s necessary in order to preserve the symmetry of the kabuki presentation.
Gads I am tired of this Presidential race. November can’t come fast enough for me.
In other news, posting has been somewhat light because I’m on the stress diet again. You remember that two years ago, I was looking for a house, and suddenly my employer went under and I ended up losing twenty pounds. Well. I started looking for a house again (remember my offhand note about possibly buying a cabin in Boulder Creek?), and you know what that means. Three times I’ve looked for a house, three times my employer’s gone under either right after I pulled the trigger, or right before. I promise my next employer that I won’t look for a house until after I retire 
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- Badtux the WTF Penguin
Could you find a gig at a really big co.?
Well, we’ll see. With my luck if I went to work for nVidia or VMware, they’d go bankrupt within two years after I started looking for a house to buy
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Use your power for good – get a job with a company you don’t want around anymore, and start house hunting the minute you’re hired.
The goatshit race is never over, not while there is corporate money to be made by the meeja and the need to distract the sheople from that slaughterhouse ramp up ahead with bright whiny objects. The only reason the corpomedia haven’t been filled with speculation about the 2016 Preznitial goatrace is because Hopey’s dopey performance in Denver gave them legitimate grounds to pretend that 2012 is a horse race again. Fakecoverage of the 2016 election will begin on the night of Nov. 6, unless the results have been cheated so close that a 2000-style “take it to the courts” brouhaha can be ginned up.
If you hate the presidential race from your gloriously solid blue, try being in the living political commercial hell I’m in right now. There is no relief. Ever!! Sometimes contradicting ads run one after another, then they repeat. I can’t wait for the time when I can see nothing but ads for cars, beer, and more cars.
This time has improved my reading skills, but I can’t even watch a MLB playoff game or an NFL blowout without the incessant blaring of negative political bloviating. Damn you, turdblossom (and your little dog).
BTW, I feel for your situation. There’s nothing worse than not being able to control basic housing needs. Don’t give up. It will probably get better in the next forty or so years. It almost always does.
Go to your employer’s greatest rival, point out your unmatched powers of evil, and ask them to pay your mortgage if you go house-hunting…
Damn, sorry to hear about the job situation. I did that for awhile — hiring me was the Kiss of Death for various companies. Your luck will turn.
Thanks all. The kiss of death situation is actually more a case of me preferring small companies and small companies by their fundamental nature being unable to survive events outside of their control or that are under their control but they simply misfire on. The game is rigged against the little guy, period. But I can’t see working in Dilbert-land, I’d be bored to death.
- Badtux the Small-fry Penguin
This is sort of what is going in private industry in terms of the biosciences…you see…most research companies hate doing research, ironically enough. So you see a cycle of an R&D company getting large enough where it can afford to subcontract out most of its R&D to other companies instead of the expense of doing its own R&D in-house. Of course a company loses a lot of control over its research when it does that, but since it looks good to upper management in terms of cutting costs this fact is glossed over. As a case in point, Medtronic used to be a premier research company in the US until it decided that it no longer wanted to do its own research and had a whole slew of layoffs in 2007. Now the point can be raised that a lot of R&D in the biosciences is now done by smaller companies which allows for a greater degree of work opportunities for people looking for work. Unfortunately, many of these smaller companies are located in China and India where you can find no shortage of laboratory technicians and you do not have to worry about minimum wage requirements or pesky employee benefits. Even the large R&D companies that still do their own research are largely sending it out to laboratories that they own offshore.
The only reason why you see any degree of biomedical research remaining in the US is that the FDA does not yet recognize Chinese or Indian testing standards, but it is only a matter of time before they bow under pressure from corporate-backed politicians to do so.
Well, that wasn’t the problem here, we actually insourced from India (i.e., originally had an India R&D office, but shut it down and brought the best people over here). It’s just a case where a small company simply can’t make mistakes, because margins are so thin that it doesn’t take many mistakes to sink the company. There were three different mistakes made in the past 18 months and that’s all it takes to do in a small company, there just isn’t the buffer to absorb those kinds of things like there is in a big company where they just axe a product group when a product doesn’t sell for whatever reason rather than the whole company going under.