spying and loyalty

TRX
August 17, 2013
70:
@60:
petitioning for asylum. They must be chortling like drain pipes.
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Sure... unless someone there is worried that the NSA is running a Nosenko operation against them.

I still find it hard to believe that, with even the most basic security (and the NSA wrote the guidelines for Federal information security...) that Snowden could get access to so much of such varied information. After that, the layers of "hard to believe" just keep getting deeper and deeper.

TRX
August 18, 2013
115:
Going back to the corporate employee loyalty erosion thing, the IT industry might have been a contributing factor.

Geeking around with computers was FUN, and it didn't take long before corporate entities realized they could get enthusiastic labor at low prices... or just treat their workforce as temps.

The Voices finally dredged up a book I had read years ago - "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, about the engineering death march to complete the design of a new Data General minicomputer, circa 1980. 16x7 work weeks, people sleeping under their desks, eventual success... and then the tiger team shuffled over to the dungeon of tech support, or laid off.

Back then, it was a radical new thing... but I've been under that grindstone more than once, before I learned better, and nowadays it's the norm in the IT industry. Few employers want the overhead of a permanent skilled workforce, particularly in a field where the skill set ages so rapidly. There's no intent to develop "institutional knowledge" or maintain a working team; programmers and engineers are like toilet paper, to be used once and discarded.

Several of Greg Bear's dystopian novels have a common piece of background, where "employees" as we think of them are virtually unknown; almost all jobs go through temp agencies, and employees compete for those temp slots like Japanese teenagers swotting for their examination scores.

My wife works for a relatively famous multinational. She's been there for thirty years, about average for the permanent employees. But they haven't made any new hires for twenty years or so; half of the workforce are temps, some of whom have been there for years.

Maybe Bear was onto something...

TRX
August 18, 2013
116:
@114:
One could argue that the whole sweep of history in the Middle East during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and the War on Terror, were shaped by large energy corporations using western governmental military force (and local governments too) as proxies to protect their interests.
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Failure of the British government to protect various business interests in British America was the direct cause of the American Revolution.

Despite centuries of propaganda, the American Revolution was a revolution of the wealthy trading class, not a popular uprising. Enough businessmen got angry over their ships being sunk, the government basically told them to fribble off, there was a war on somewhere else, just deal with it. And so they did, though probably not in the way it was intended.

When you have corporate entities that have lobbyists and the funds to put their own people into the government, are large enough to sponsor legislation in their favor, sometimes have their own media networks, and some of them have annual budgets larger than the GNP of some entire nations, you have a bunch of 800-pound gorillas in the room that aren't safe to ignore, at least if you're a politician who hopes to keep his job.

Back in the '80s a common SF trope was "megacorps running the world." Intel and Microsoft still aren't issuing their own money and fielding private armies... but it's probably cheaper to outsource that sort of thing to national governments, which also lets someone else take the inevitable backlash. And like some kind of alien body snatchers, you have corporate entities like whatever Blackwater is called this week, which, as "private contractors" and mercenaries, have infiltrated until they're indistinguishable from government employees.

TRX
August 20, 2013
214:
@160:
And if the predictions on the Arctic sea for 2015 onward pan out then they'll have a brand new shortcut across the top instead.
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The Northeast Passage across the top of Russia has been in (at least occasional) use since the late 1500s. It was in use during WWII, and the Soviets have built a number of nuclear-powered icebreakers to keep the route open longer than midsummer.

Back in the early part of WWII a certain writer whose followers are prone to lawsuits claimed that he was captain of a ship patrolling the north Pacific between Alaska and Russia, playing cat-and-mouse with a German warship. Since the writer was a pathological liar his stories were generally discounted.

However, much later it became known that in the early part of the war, when the Reich and the USSR were still allies, the Soviets had escorted the German cruiser Komet through the Northeast Passage, where it loitered a while before proceeding south. Hmm...

TRX
August 20, 2013
215:
@193:
Mitch, how do you deal with friends who try to rope you into Amway or similar multi-level marketing scams?

Here's a hint: unless they're close friends or family, they usually become ex- friends, if you've got any sense.
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English is particularly poor in words describing the various levels of "friend", but when dealing with friends like that, I refuse to discuss the subject with them. It has worked with otherwise-normal friends who have decided the government is run by a secret Jewish underground, or they've personally been saved by Jesus, or suddenly developed leftist political leanings, etc.

Most people have at least one bizarre or unsupportable belief; if you cut off all such people, you're going to be in a very small group, mostly functioning as mirrors bolstering your own peculiar notions.