2016 US Presidential Race - Mod Warning in OP

Overheal

Amerika wrote: »

I consider most “Independents” as political wimps. They only claim to be so, so as not to be labeled part of the big two. They usually cannot participate in primaries, even though in the end they end up voting for one of the big two anyway. I know of at least 14 other parties that ran candidates for president back in 2012. You’d think that if someone who claimed to be Independent were truly independent, those 14 other parties would have gotten a much higher percentage of votes. Independents truly could be a force in America, but choose not to be, and seem content in their entire political atmosphere on simply bashing one or both parties.

Well again, thats a situation propagated by the corporate media, and by the RNC and DNC, that a third party vote is a discarded vote. If you're independent, voting for an independent, and speaking to a Democrat, you're giving your vote to the Republicans. If you're an Independent, speaking to a Republican about voting Independent, you're giving your vote away to the Democrats. You in fact get socially pressured to vote for one of the 2 parties. But since you asked, despite an animated borderline violent rant from a relative Tea Partier about voting for a 3rd party, I still chose to vote for Ron.

BuilderPlumber

KingBrian2 wrote: »

Did anyone not bother to look into that incident and make sure it did not happen again. The Cold War escalated in the 80's and plenty of civilian targets were hit. Many passenger aircrafts were destroyed by the superpowers. South Koreans & Cubans were made the victims. Numerous hijackings took place in France and Italy by terror organisations.

Indeed, most of today's problems have their roots in the cold war era. The superpowers fought proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and all over Africa for instance. Other wars like the Iran-Iraq war were encouraged and lead to these countries being impoverished and often lead by extreme elements that would not have gotten to power otherwise. Saddam would not have invaded Kuwait for example only for he was totally broke by 1990 and wanted to save his skin.

ISIS, al Qaeda and others like this have their roots in the American and Saudi supported Mojahedin of Afghanistan and militant Islam is something that grew out of control in the cold war era. Warped killers were trained and armed to create havoc in many of these Islamic countries that bordered the then USSR. The ancestors of the Taliban might be at one point chanting Death to America but receiving arms and guns from America to fight against the USSR who they hated as much. Their hatred of America was put to one side for a time ... until the USSR was out of Afghanistan and the Americans cut off the funding! 9/11 and such events were inevitable and events like Lockerbie showed what lay ahead. But yet organisations like al Qaeda were still considered to be in some way useful and were tolerated.

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

With regard to manufacturing, location and transportation are key factors. It doesn't make sense to have a manufacturing operation on an island, which is farthest most from the EU. I've dealt with a lot of Europeans, and very many of them do have a working understanding of English, even though it's not their native language. And not every position in every companies would need to understand English. Heck, there are a lot of people here in the US workforce that speak Spanish only.

Do you actually believe this nonsense? The manufacturing located by US multinationals in Ireland is high tech manufacturing, not heavy manufacturing.

I work in semiconductor manufacturing. The reason we have had 5 billion dollars invested in our site in the last 3 years is that we do the job better and cheaper than our sister factories in the US. The reasons for this are multi faceted and extremely complex, the corporate tax fits in there somewhere but in a minor way. Both in the US and Ireland we struggle to hire people with the right skills, and having worked on both side our people are generally better educated due to the low coat of college.

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

With regards to Intel, doesn't the US have a more than enough level of technically-educated English speaking workforce to supply their needs? And as you noted, location is not a major factor in shipping microprocessors. So it seems it simply does come to .

Actually no. The US doesn't have enough technical graduates to meet their needs.

If it did I wouldn't have spent 2012/13 in Arizona filling the need at huge expense to Intel. Me and 750 highly trained and educated workers from Ireland.

Every Intel site has at least 10% of it's work force as immigrants. Highly educated and skilled immigrants.

The US education system simply isn't meeting the needs of high tech companies.

Wompa1

Brian? wrote: »

Actually no. The US doesn't have enough technical graduates to meet their needs.

If it did I wouldn't have spent 2012/13 in Arizona filling the need at huge expense to Intel. Me and 750 highly trained and educated workers from Ireland.

Every Intel site has at least 10% of it's work force as immigrants. Highly educated and skilled immigrants.

The US education system simply isn't meeting the needs of high tech companies.

I worked in High Tech in Ireland for 5 years. So far I'm up to almost 4 years over here. We have a depth of talent to choose from here. Really sharp people. Not sure why you assume they are lesser. When I worked in Ireland it was for a multi-national my colleagues who had been there longest talked crap about the American counterparts, having lived and worked here for a while, I know they were just blowing smoke

Brian?

Wompa1 wrote: »

I worked in High Tech in Ireland for 5 years. So far I'm up to almost 4 years over here. We have a depth of talent to choose from here. Really sharp people. Not sure why you assume they are lesser. When I worked in Ireland it was for a multi-national my colleagues who had been there longest talked crap about the American counterparts, having lived and worked here for a while, I know they were just blowing smoke

I'm hardly "blowing smoke". In the USA most techs I met were either trade school educated or ex military. Great at following orders and phenomenal work ethic in general. In Ireland most techs are IT or University educated.

The big difference was we were much more likely to disagree with the status quo and seek improvement.

This can be seen in hard data. We're cheaper and more efficient. We have been for the last 20 years.

Wompa1

Brian? wrote: »

This can be seen in hard data. We're cheaper and more efficient. We have been for the last 20 years.

Link to the data? I never bought the charts showing the Irish are some of the hardest workers in the world. It doesn't make sense at all.

We've got the hardest working Academic in Europe too but when you look at the way Irish Academics time is tracked, you start to see the bigger picture.

I don't believe that Irish workers are more efficient. Definitely cheaper! But not more efficient. When working in my job over here, I've also worked with some offsite teams working in the west of Ireland. I've worked with customers in all different types of Industries around the world. Still to this day the most backwards environment\team I worked with was a certain three letter company in Dublin. An absolute shambles!

Over half of working Americans haven't taken a vacation in the last year. Productivity in the US has increased exponentially in the last 40 years.

I have worked with people who went to Ivy League schools. People who got their education benefits from the military and people that were self taught\went to a vendor course and then took some exams and worked their way up through odd jobs until they finally got up to a larger company.

The best people I have worked with in my career so far were the people that didn't go to college. I worked with a lot of people back in Ireland that didn't even know the basics...the command line intimidating them. Hell, a lot of time was spent putting an interface or automation in place so they didn't have to work with the command window...All college educated.

In my opinion, Irelands big failing in technology at least up until 3 years ago was the fact back during the original Tech boom people were being told to go into Tech..so they did it to get a job without having any real interest or passion. Our college courses are\were a joke. I had a group project in my final year with 3 others. Two of the ladies on the team said they didn't want to do any of the coding and instead did the Theory work...They got top marks...People like them are the reason why I worked with people who couldn't use the command line in a 'highly skilled' position.

In the US. A bad thing and kind of a good thing is the fact that if you're not performing or you're a spoofer. Bye Bye. There's some that can get by in Government jobs but in private Enterprise over here people get found out pretty quickly.

Amerika

Has claiming Ireland is not a tax shelter, and their IT workforce excellence is the real reason international companies come there, the new national pastime?

Well, Intel is in trouble, they plan on laying off 5% of their workforce, they're pushing for more H-1B visas to replace US jobs with cheap labor (not because of excellence), and they're looking at Bermuda because of its near 0% corporate tax.

Countries like Ireland better hope Trump gets nowhere near the White House.

Wompa1

Amerika wrote: »

Has claiming Ireland is not a tax shelter, and their IT workforce excellence is the real reason international companies come there, the new national pastime?

Well, Intel is in trouble, they plan on laying off 5% of their workforce, they're pushing for more H-1B visas to replace US jobs with cheap labor (not because of excellence), and they're looking at Bermuda because of its near 0% corporate tax.

In a previous job (in Ireland), we were incentivized to automate a lot of the work that our off-shore colleagues did. At the time it was suggested that it would be a win because OffShore, while still a lot cheaper ended up costing more than expected on paper due to communication and cultural issues popping up.

What happened when we had a well oiled automated tool in place?

The tool was provided to the lads over in India and a bunch of people in our office were put out of work.

Bank of Ireland moved a bunch of their IT work offshore right after getting bailed out.

It has nothing to do with the quality of the work. The reason companies come to Ireland is the tax incentive. I'm working for a startup right now. Our CEO is looking at London and Amsterdam for a European HQ. I was trying to convince him to try Ireland. He's hesitant. He says it would be a good way to get a tax break but the trade off would be poor quality work! I'm telling him to come over with me next year to scout it out for himself.

He believes we have poor quality education and that the quality of work is overshadowed by the fact it's cheaper to operate from there. We'll see. Maybe he'll get a good feeling for the place.

Amerika

Wompa1 wrote: »

In a previous job (in Ireland), we were incentivized to automate a lot of the work that our off-shore colleagues did. At the time it was suggested that it would be a win because OffShore, while still a lot cheaper ended up costing more than expected on paper due to communication and cultural issues popping up.

What happened when we had a well oiled automated tool in place?

The tool was provided to the lads over in India and a bunch of people in our office were put out of work.

Bank of Ireland moved a bunch of their IT work offshore right after getting bailed out.

It has nothing to do with the quality of the work. The reason companies come to Ireland is the tax incentive. I'm working for a startup right now. Our CEO is looking at London and Amsterdam for a European HQ. I was trying to convince him to try Ireland. He's hesitant. He says it would be a good way to get a tax break but the trade off would be poor quality work! I'm telling him to come over with me next year to scout it out for himself.

He believes we have poor quality education and that the quality of work is overshadowed by the fact it's cheaper to operate from there. We'll see. Maybe he'll get a good feeling for the place.

Can you see Bermuda becoming a Caribbean Silicon Valley in the near future? I'm sure plenty of Tech types would love to relocate to fun in the sun.

Amerika

With the rising big GOP three being non-political and non-establishment Republican types (Trump, Carson, Fiorina), and with the likes of Jeb Bush fading in the wind, I’m starting to hear grumblings that big donors are now reaching out to Mitt Romney to jump in and save the day. Could the third time be the charm?

Wompa1

Amerika wrote: »

Can you see Bermuda becoming a Caribbean Silicon Valley in the near future? I'm sure plenty of Tech types would love to relocate to fun in the sun.

I think the cost of living there is quite high. Also, it's a British territory so it might not be the best place to do business. I believe they have a lot of holidays and stuff but they don't have a minimum wage. I don't know a whole lot about it but from what little I do. Prices are driven up by wealthy big wigs relocating there...so it's more of a rich mans paradise than a working class place.

Amerika

Wompa1 wrote: »

I think the cost of living there is quite high. Also, it's a British territory so it might not be the best place to do business. I believe they have a lot of holidays and stuff but they don't have a minimum wage. I don't know a whole lot about it but from what little I do. Prices are driven up by wealthy big wigs relocating there...so it's more of a rich mans paradise than a working class place.

Thanks, I heard Google has been in talks with the Bermuda Business Development Agency over setting up a physical presence on the Island.

eire4

Overheal wrote: »

Well again, thats a situation propagated by the corporate media, and by the RNC and DNC, that a third party vote is a discarded vote. If you're independent, voting for an independent, and speaking to a Democrat, you're giving your vote to the Republicans. If you're an Independent, speaking to a Republican about voting Independent, you're giving your vote away to the Democrats. You in fact get socially pressured to vote for one of the 2 parties. But since you asked, despite an animated borderline violent rant from a relative Tea Partier about voting for a 3rd party, I still chose to vote for Ron.

I would also add that both of the 2 parties that make up the cartel on power in Washington have made sure throughout most of the US that laws are in place that make it very difficult for third parties to compete in any meaningful way. Sure there are other parties in the US but quite clearly the Washington 2 party monopoly have strangled the opposition and of course the Citizens United decision has only made that situation worse in terms of there not being a level playing field.
It is very ironic in a country that goes on about freedom of choice that their politics is in fact basically a 2 party monoply which actively works to make sure no meaningful other voices can be heard or emerge to challenge them.

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

Has claiming Ireland is not a tax shelter, and their IT workforce excellence is the real reason international companies come there, the new national pastime?

No. It's been the case for many years.

Well, Intel is in trouble, they plan on laying off 5% of their workforce, they're pushing for more H-1B visas to replace US jobs with cheap labor (not because of excellence), and they're looking at Bermuda because of its near 0% corporate tax.

Countries like Ireland better hope Trump gets nowhere near the White House.

Intel is not in trouble. You have zero insight into what's going on inside the company. Intel Ireland is In a massive hiring phase. Intel Oregon is always hiring. Arizona and New Mexico are laying of.

H1-B visas are for highly skilled labour.

Brian?

Wompa1 wrote: »

Link to the data? I never bought the charts showing the Irish are some of the hardest workers in the world. It doesn't make sense at all.

I can't link any data, I'd be sacked if I reproduced any of it here!

We've got the hardest working Academic in Europe too but when you look at the way Irish Academics time is tracked, you start to see the bigger picture.

I don't believe that Irish workers are more efficient. Definitely cheaper! But not more efficient. When working in my job over here, I've also worked with some offsite teams working in the west of Ireland. I've worked with customers in all different types of Industries around the world. Still to this day the most backwards environment\team I worked with was a certain three letter company in Dublin. An absolute shambles!

Over half of working Americans haven't taken a vacation in the last year. Productivity in the US has increased exponentially in the last 40 years.

I have worked with people who went to Ivy League schools. People who got their education benefits from the military and people that were self taught\went to a vendor course and then took some exams and worked their way up through odd jobs until they finally got up to a larger company.

The best people I have worked with in my career so far were the people that didn't go to college. I worked with a lot of people back in Ireland that didn't even know the basics...the command line intimidating them. Hell, a lot of time was spent putting an interface or automation in place so they didn't have to work with the command window...All college educated.

In my opinion, Irelands big failing in technology at least up until 3 years ago was the fact back during the original Tech boom people were being told to go into Tech..so they did it to get a job without having any real interest or passion. Our college courses are\were a joke. I had a group project in my final year with 3 others. Two of the ladies on the team said they didn't want to do any of the coding and instead did the Theory work...They got top marks...People like them are the reason why I worked with people who couldn't use the command line in a 'highly skilled' position.

In the US. A bad thing and kind of a good thing is the fact that if you're not performing or you're a spoofer. Bye Bye. There's some that can get by in Government jobs but in private Enterprise over here people get found out pretty quickly.

I disagree with most of what you say here. My experience has largely been the opposite, maybe because I work in manufacturing and it's much easier to quantify performance. Anyway the debate seems pointless if I can only produce anecdotal evidence to counter conjecture.

Amerika

Brian? wrote: »

No. It's been the case for many years.



Intel is not in trouble. You have zero insight into what's going on inside the company. Intel Ireland is In a massive hiring phase. Intel Oregon is always hiring. Arizona and New Mexico are laying of.

H1-B visas are for highly skilled labour.

Seems all may not be smelling like roses there. Didn’t they just lay off 165 from Santa Clara and 152 from Folsom?

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/07/intel-advocates-h1b-visa-lays-off/

Overheal

Amerika wrote: »

Seems all may not be smelling like roses there. Didn’t they just lay off 165 from Santa Clara and 152 from Folsom?



http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/07/intel-advocates-h1b-visa-lays-off/

Did you even read the link? It wasn't a layoff it was a turnover of American staff for foreign hires. What more indication would you need that, at least in the case of Intel, the higher skilled workers are not Americans?

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

Seems all may not be smelling like roses there. Didn’t they just lay off 165 from Santa Clara and 152 from Folsom?

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/07/intel-advocates-h1b-visa-lays-off/

I was only talking about manufacturing sites. As this was the ongoing debate. Folsom and Santa Clara are not manufacturing sites.

They could very easily be laying off workers from one, non manufacturing , site and hiring at another site which is a manufacturing site. It's highly unlikely the skills are transferable from site a to b. Hence the need for H1 visas.

Amerika

Brian? wrote: »

I was only talking about manufacturing sites. As this was the ongoing debate. Folsom and Santa Clara are not manufacturing sites.

They could very easily be laying off workers from one, non manufacturing , site and hiring at another site which is a manufacturing site. It's highly unlikely the skills are transferable from site a to b. Hence the need for H1 visas.

Well, something tells me with their stock being down over 22% year-to-date, stockholders will be demanding immediate changes be implemented to stem the bleeding.

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

Well, something tells me with their stock being down over 22% year-to-date, stockholders will be demanding immediate changes be implemented to stem the bleeding.

You're right, but it has nothing to do with the debate at hand. Intel Ireland is not a tax haven, it's an extremely efficient and important business unit.

Overheal

Amerika wrote: »

Well, something tells me with their stock being down over 22% year-to-date, stockholders will be demanding immediate changes be implemented to stem the bleeding.

Really? This is how far off topic we're going? Do you have any idea how many factors affect stock price? Rhetorical question, don't want an answer.

Amerika

Overheal wrote: »

Really? This is how far off topic we're going?

It's really not far off topic as Donald Trump has been hitting for ways to combat companies who move operations to tax haven countries in order to avoid paying US taxes (including dropping the tax rate here in the US and other things), and hitting companies who are costing US jobs in the process by creating manufacturing businesses in other countries with possible tariffs.

http://ourfuture.org/20150818/trump-argues-for-huge-corporate-tax-giveaway-low-minimum-wage

Brian?

Amerika wrote: »

It's really not far off topic as Donald Trump has been hitting for ways to combat companies who move operations to tax haven countries in order to avoid paying US taxes (including dropping the tax rate here in the US and other things), and hitting companies who are costing US jobs in the process by creating manufacturing businesses in other countries with possible tariffs.

http://ourfuture.org/20150818/trump-argues-for-huge-corporate-tax-giveaway-low-minimum-wage

Tariffs you say? Wouldn't matter a damn in this case. The chips made in Ireland are sold in the EU, those made in the US are sold in the US.

Wompa1

Brian? wrote: »

I disagree with most of what you say here. My experience has largely been the opposite, maybe because I work in manufacturing and it's much easier to quantify performance. Anyway the debate seems pointless if I can only produce anecdotal evidence to counter conjecture.

It's very easy for me to quantify success too. There's thousands of different data points being collected with Operation Management tools in our environment. Also, without that there's metrics like support tickets being created due to a break caused by us.

What I will say is in Ireland we had enough people to do the work. Or at least that's how I felt. Over here, we have a lot of work and not a lot of people. We get the work done and succeed but it's to our own downfall. As long as we're producing results we won't get any more resources.

If you're in manufacturing, is that Unionized? A lot of manufacturing is. I have yet to work in any organization over here that's unionized. I have yet to work directly for a Government agency too. I've heard they are a bit feckless and from working with them indirectly, it seem to ring true. I've heard working in Academia is also a little like Government work here too..

not that that's a bad thing. Sounds like a nice change of pace to me!

Amerika

Brian? wrote: »

Tariffs you say? Wouldn't matter a damn in this case. The chips made in Ireland are sold in the EU, those made in the US are sold in the US.

Maybe not in Intel's case but it will matter in other manufacturing endeavors.

And an interesting aside note. One of my daughters is taking a computer class in college. The majority of students in the class are foreign. Must say something for the computer environment education system in the US.

Wompa1

Amerika wrote: »

Maybe not in Intel's case but it will matter in other manufacturing endeavors.

And an interesting aside note. One of my daughters is taking a computer class in college. The majority of students in the class are foreign. Must say something for the computer environment education system in the US.

Many students that come to the states are foreign but it might say something more about how the average American citizen is treated...The US does have SOME very good third level institutes but also a lot of lousy ones. Not everybody here has the opportunity to go to college, though...which is a problem.

As for the idea that maybe that the Irish plants may only distribute to Europe, that's not true in all cases. Multiple times now I've gone to collect a prescription and saw Made in Ireland...Not sure about Intel, but wouldn't be surprised if they also ship over here. Many of the workers in Chandler, Arizona are actually originally from the Intel plant in Ireland.

Wompa1

Back on point. Did you see that Trump announced today that he will rename the Denali mountain in Alaska back to McKinley...

Amerika

Wompa1 wrote: »

Back on point. Did you see that Trump announced today that he will rename the Denali mountain in Alaska back to McKinley...

LOL. I notice Obama hasn’t decided to change the name of Mount Democrat (a high mountain summit in the Mosquito Range of the Rocky Mountains of CO) back to Mount Buckskin. :pac:

Overheal

:rolleyes:

Nobody bothers to read the issues do they. Mt. McKinley in Denali, Alaska, was named after an Ohioan president that spent 6 months in office before being assassinated. The mountain was so named by the gentleman that named it only because he had just heard the news about McKinley's nomination for president, pre-assassination, and thought the name sounded cool. The Ohio state govt cried about the Denali change saying among other things it honored McKinley's "Countless Years" to this country. Uhm.

Denali is actually the name preferred by the Alaskan State Government as far as I am aware. But an act of congress named the mountain and so an act of congress would normally have to name the mountain again - the Ohio representatives have continued to block the motion to name the mountain back since it was first raised back in the 70s/80s.

Therefore, Obama is stepping in to rename an Alaskan thing what the Alaskan's want, despite the desires of Ohioans that live almost 4,000 miles away.

But the Mt. Democrat jabs. That's more of what we need. Useless gobshyte soundbytes that do nothing to further political discourse.

Can't get mad about Trump's remarks though, he's just a troll for show.