Right, so block all pictures of women with uncovered faces because there is surely some Islamic majority country threatening over that? Block anyone advocating for immigrant rights in the US too, anyone who supports a trucker parking in downtown Ottawa, and anyone who says anything negative about Trump of course. You people that rationalize silencing and even criminalizing of opinions because you don’t agree with them make me sick.

Seething hatred of trump aside - at least in the US you have courts as a recourse.

Though IBM is shit and part of this will no doubt provoke the political rage arguments around WFH , I’ve worked worked in IT for decades across many technical and customer management roles and lemme tell you

Humans are humans. In terms of getting your contract re-signed, extended, or increased, literally everything else is a far, far, far second to going to meet with the contract signer face to face on a regular basis. Take them out for lunch. Ask about their kids and remember their hobbies. Teams or Zoom video calls don’t cut it - many of the IT nerds don’t really understand this. All of your technical masterpieces and failures matter so far less than the human relationship you either maintain or you don’t.

Disagree. Telomeres are programmed senescence.

I worked with a number of Indian outsourcers who I also agree are all terrible, and I did notice one thing relating to their education: they seem to be taught one single thing as it relates to "IT" and then are churned out as "ready to be employed by Infosys/Wipro/Accenture/TCS/etc...".

An example is I've seen those companies hired to maintain and support web apps a few times. There was always one guy who knew SQL (barely), almost as if he knew nothing about computers at all but the moment he could identify a table and write a simply SELECT statement, boom he was put into the hiring grinder as a "SQL expert". There would be another who seemed no know nothing except being able to start an IIS web service and perhaps assign a subdomain. Obviously, very few problems can be solved knowing only one of these domains, and it's the years-long North American education programs that do provide this cross-domain education.

Just another anecdotal story, but in my first year as a manager I was called in to review from C code from one of these newly offshored "C experts".. the problem was he didn't know how to instantiate an array with an unknown amount of elements (eg. putting empty brackets after the type). Was shocked and in many years haven't seen anything that shows more promise. Outsource to Indian at your own extreme risk and cost.

Just a factual response, but a poster below provided a link about an Ottawa library and the remove requests it received in the last year below: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...

Nearly all of them seem to come from left-wing sources. I doubt a right winger would have requested a children's book be removed because there was one illustration of a young girl in traditional native attire, which was deemed 'racist'.

You are both right.

I don't want to get involved in the politics here, but I have worked extensively with Deloitte and Accenture, and I can't help but add the same two cents many others have here: it is nearly guaranteed these were waste of money contracts. Accenture charges insane rates for their fog-a-mirror resources overseas and game their metrics to meet whatever service levels or milestones they're contracted for. Deloitte, I've never seen a company paid more just to create powerpoint decks which they surely have scripts by now just to replace the company names for the next sucker.

As a citizen of a country hit by these tariffs, and which depends a lot on exports there (thus I can't be said to be glad about them), I have to disagree with your assertion. Now, you may be right, so I suppose I'll state my opinion as being that I'm actually really worried that Trump is RIGHT about his strategy, even if he doesn't understand the mechanisms or even if his intent is as you state.

The US possesses the world's largest economy by quite a fair margin - access to sell goods there is what makes or breaks a lot of other country's economies. It is the gold standard of customers to have. Now, most countries put tariffs on trade in the reverse direction (imports from US) in order to protect their fledgling industries from the economic and financial machine that is the United States, not because they're looking to rip the US off.

That said, it is undeniable that since the 70s, nearly every major producer/manufacturer/business has taken big chunks of their business outside of US borders, and it also seems undeniable this was done for two main reasons: environmental law and minimum wage laws which came into effect in the US (and both laws I agree with). Can't have your clothing company paying children pennies per hour and dumping toxic sludge into a river in the US anymore and maintain those profit margins! Who can deny this has not been a MAJOR trend? The problem is that countries like Canada who simply find the optimal customer for their natural resources get screwed as well, but there are plenty of people who DESERVE to get screwed by these tariffs. Go ahead and tell me the real reason all the stuff Americans buy is from Vietnam or China is something other than these companies want to fuck the environment there and pay slave wages. I'll wait.

So what I'm worried about is that these hordes of companies are going to start shifting production back into the US, on whatever scale, and this is only going to widen the chasm between the US and everyone else economically. If the shift is large enough, then even with the price increases from costly local production, and even with automation, there will be enough more well-paying jobs in the US they will win (remember the Henry Ford story?). Trump could have done this for shitty reasons, but I still see if as over aggressively leveraging the US's already huge lead in the world economy,

Yeah, actuaries definitely have no incentive to increase profit via premiums by identifying extremely low or non-existent risks./s. Not saying that’s the complete case here, but seems like you’ve never dealt with an insurance company or know how an actuary operates. They base risk on a number of specific variables and a dataset absolutely massive, where the statistics won’t let them down. Forward looking estimates like this? Almost guaranteed to be profit driven by exacerbating the true risk.

If there's one firm takeaway from that movie as we enter the age of AI, never respond to a question from a computer with "I'm not sure".

It was quite heartening to see nearly all liberal westerners disassociate themselves from Palestine after the hostage release videos, and those like you feel the need to post anonymously. These people were kidnapped, abused, and clearly starved, and paraded around cheering crowds while being forced to do humiliating things. No decent or just society would ever do such a thing. Israel would never do such a thing.

It's kind of like the Moscow show trials - these are people so wrapped up in their own delusion they believed they were showing something to build support to the world. Now no one wants to be associated with them.

Used to love this RTS game. Started reading through the code and it's very well written at least to my preferences - easy to understand variable and function names and well written comments.

Umm, the letter states it's because the person was talking about the need to bring "actual weapons" to this fight. If that isn't a threat that should be at least followed up on, what is?