Damn, sorry to hear that. I could go off on a frothing at the mouth rant at how bad it was, what we went through. To save money our original company, a nationwide US health insurance company, outsourced us right at merit raise time (nice touch, a-holes) to an off-shore company that would probably only ever meet expectations running an assembly line operation for building PCs.

They were out of their league taking over level 1 and 2 operations for a large company, which was already working through the pains of merging with other companies they had acquired. Instead of inspiring the legacy workers to stick around to make the transition work, their attitude was we were lucky the host company insisted we get first crack to reapply for "our" jobs. Like it was all one big assembly line and we could be easily replaced with someone with an A+ cert for $11\hr. The equivalent of pulling up to a storefront and having IT landscapers jump in the back of a pickup truck to work that day. Might work for an assembly line but not for a complex embedded IT infrastructure with 1001 local support quirks. They were completely clueless.

Add insult to injury, their internal processes were so bad, over the course of a year they asked us continually to remind them of the phone# of the iPhone they gave us and the serial# of the laptop they gave us. At least half a dozen times, it was fucking absurd. And when we were offered an incentive to help reduce the ticket log backup, they mailed unsigned money orders to fictional home addresses they had on record for us. With the stamp on the wrong part of the envelope for those lucky enough to receive their unsigned money orders. You had the option of mailing the money order back to get it signed (good luck getting it back) or committing a felony to get the money you legally earned, by not using the first option. Took me 7 months to finally get my money order, who knows where they originally mailed it. Their indifference during this whole mess was staggering, you had to badger management and HR like they were a deadbeat drunk brother-in-law who owes you money.

And they kept putting off the review\raise process until they finally offered us 50 cents an hour for the highest performers. I gave my notice the next day.

Sorry for the rant, it was such a colossal failure on all fronts, except no doubt for the amount the host company saved on IT during that time. But of course nobody is interested in capturing the countless hours of downtime and lost productivity introduced by these IT cost "savings". Last I heard they were putting the contract back out to bid before the scheduled end of the current contract, which doesn't surprise me. What a freaking waste.

I hope you find work soon, Ant.

Why? There's no reason to do something overly complex when something simple works. I think some people think that companies do random "evil" shit just for kicks. It is all about efficiency and money. Potatoes are cheap as hell, and processing them like this is really efficient. There would be no reason to go and do something overly complex and use other products. It is really easy to cut a potato in to fry shape.

If you want to see it happen, go to a In n' Out. There they take the potatoes and stick them in a little hand press device and when they push down, a pile of uncooked fries comes out the other end. Same concept as the water knife, just not a big assembly line process.

When you are talking cheap food preparation they keep it as simple as possible because the keeps it cheap. If anything is added, there's a reason like the Dextrose (which is just a sugar).

Huh, never thought of that. So true...and I will add to this. In the past jobs in service have been able to absorb people into it to take up the loss of jobs (Say in agriculture and such.) So when Henry Ford made his assembly line, jobs were created pretty much everywhere. Restaurants are but one great example of this.

But with the techno revolution, the service sector was already pretty full. Now it is saturated. If I see one more new gas station down here in Florida, or another restaurant open, it will be too soon. I remember TWO, TWO Starbucks in the same mall. Such a false economy...

Now add automation and boom...

I always had this opinion as I was going through the school system.
Hearing his rant, I realize that somewhere along the way, people realized the transient nature of human paradigms, like government and social structure, and decided to focus education on the constant factors of human existence: Math, Science, the world.
I can also justify education of history for allowing us to not repeat the mistakes the idiots before us made (though that's a hit or miss most of the time).
While I agree with his complaints, I'd rather not have an educational system that simply geared people for functioning in the current society. We're always fighting against the educational system from turning us into cogs in a machine as it is, but imagine if our schooling concerned itself primarily/solely with matters of state? We'd fully realize that nightmare of an assembly-line workforce.

A lot of times I watch these videos of people building handmade exotic cars, and it seems like a very pleasant job, but for some reason this just looks awful. Rather than one person, say, bolting the engine together piece by piece, this is just an assembly line with people doing the work instead of robots. Very little of what they show would even remotely qualify as skilled labor.

I agree. You can have your Burger King your way and if any man in God's Great 'Murica tries to tell you how to eat it then they can go straight to Commie/Socialist Europe, where there's no Constitution that guarantees Freedom!

On the other hand, some things I cook take multiple days to prepare. Sometimes I may not have slept more than a couple hours overnight, tending to the food I just served you. The rubs, marinades, bastes, brines and such may represent years of experimentation. It often requires multiple different cooking methods to prepare one single item.

When I share that food with you, you can smother it in ketchup and salt before you taste it...that's your right. You can also take that food and eat it in the fucking street. I will, in fact, help you to the street. No...really...I insist.

There's assembly line food and there's unique, carefully prepared, food that sometimes represents a lifetime of care and effort. You can show some appreciation for the work that went into the food you're eating or you can be a self centered dick. That's what Freedom is all about.

Not directed at you personally DannyM...just the concept in general.

And how is it, everyone can come up with a DeLorean for these sketches? Aren't these things rare and expensive?

"Only 6,000 cars came off the assembly line at the DeLorean Motor Company factory in 1981, nearly 2,000 each year in 1982 and 1983. Sales were strong for the 1981 models, but sales dwindled in early 1982 and cars were stockpiled until DeLorean Motor Company went out of business later that year."

Nah, the Doom 3 palette was pitch black interspersed with the glowing eyes of demons, whose closets you have just foolishly stumbled over.
That demo (if you could really call it that) was very purdy but several things occurred to me while I was watching it. When our futuristic ninja gets busted I couldn't help but think, "Yep, I hate it when that happens" there's always one nosy douchebag who has to ruin an otherwise perfectly good infiltration.
In the future, shutting down an assembly line won't just stop the line but also blow up at least half of it, if only Henry Ford had thought of this, who knows where we would be today.
As good as this looks by the time a significant portion of the population has the hardware necessary to run this in real time we will all have moved on to Unreal Engine version 6. So none of this is especially practical for gaming purposes, it makes me wonder if they aren't trying to market this to film makers as well.

we've got one of these out at the pork processing plant for lykes. Pigs are killed with this huge device that look like headphones but it's actually 2 metal probes that go on the head and zap it with tons of electricity that kill the animal fairly instantly. Then they are hung up and butchered in an almost assembly line fashion. Workers all stand in line getting their bits and pieces assigned to them.

but some pigs are discarded for not passing inspection, sick, or whatnot, their entire body goes into the shredder that looks just like this. it's a gruesome scene to watch. There are many many videos of such from horses to pigs going into this same exact brand shredder on liveleak, theync, or ogrishforum

thankfully I don't work there any longer, I still love pork though. But that shredder is insane.

Fear is fear, whether it's of Hell or of prison, it's still fear. You need to teach with positive reinforcement, empathy, to instill in the kids a proper sense or right and wrong. The Bible has some good lessons, the Golden Rule is one of the best, Do unto others as you would have done unto you. I think just that act of projecting yourself unto others can give you the perspective to not be a dick all the time. At no point does God need to be involved, just an understanding and appreciation of your fellow man. Good and responsible behavior doesn't start and stop with religion, and I can't stand it when religions try and claim a monopoly on morality, because it just isn't true.

>> ^shinyblurry:

You're not going to stop kids from sinning by yelling at them. It's not the fear of going to prison which is going to stop them from screwing up, it's the fear of the Lord. If you raise your kids correctly, to honor and reverence Almighty God, using corporal punishment when appropriate, you will end up with a child of honor, who will respect other people, and want to contribute something good to society. Of course this also requires ample doses of unconditional love, and sensitivity to the needs of your child. It requires a total commitment to preparing a child for life in this world and giving him all the tools he needs to succeed. Discipline is a necessary component of this, one that is often missing in many homes. The scripture says if you don't discipline your child you hate him. Godly discipline, to note, is not to tear a child down in anger, but build a child up with love, and teach him how to take responsibility for his actions and own his mistakes instead of passing blame on to others.
If a bad product is coming out of a factory, then you need to check the assembly line. It's bad parenting which is creating these children. Parents who constantly coddle their children, try to be their friends and buy them off instead of discipline them. Parents who raise them on television and r rated movies and violent video games and all of this raw sewage of a corrupt and depraved culture being pumped into their fragile young minds. Parenting, just like everything else in life, is a garbage in garbage out principle. I just read a story about 4 eight year old kids performing sex acts on one another because they had figured out how to access internet porn on their ipads. This wouldn't happen if their parents actually knew or cared what was going on in their kids lives.
There used to be a moral standard in this country founded on the bible, but America has rebelled against God and rejected His laws, and now we are reaping the harvest of our rebellion. Our children are growing up without a moral compass or godly role models and you even cannot begin to count this cost. The only way this situation will change is if we fall on our faces and repent of our wickedness:
2 Chronicles 7:14
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

You're not going to stop kids from sinning by yelling at them. It's not the fear of going to prison which is going to stop them from screwing up, it's the fear of the Lord. If you raise your kids correctly, to honor and reverence Almighty God, using corporal punishment when appropriate, you will end up with a child of honor, who will respect other people, and want to contribute something good to society. Of course this also requires ample doses of unconditional love, and sensitivity to the needs of your child. It requires a total commitment to preparing a child for life in this world and giving him all the tools he needs to succeed. Discipline is a necessary component of this, one that is often missing in many homes. The scripture says if you don't discipline your child you hate him. Godly discipline, to note, is not to tear a child down in anger, but build a child up with love, and teach him how to take responsibility for his actions and own his mistakes instead of passing blame on to others.

If a bad product is coming out of a factory, then you need to check the assembly line. It's bad parenting which is creating these children. Parents who constantly coddle their children, try to be their friends and buy them off instead of discipline them. Parents who raise them on television and r rated movies and violent video games and all of this raw sewage of a corrupt and depraved culture being pumped into their fragile young minds. Parenting, just like everything else in life, is a garbage in garbage out principle. I just read a story about 4 eight year old kids performing sex acts on one another because they had figured out how to access internet porn on their ipads. This wouldn't happen if their parents actually knew or cared what was going on in their kids lives.

There used to be a moral standard in this country founded on the bible, but America has rebelled against God and rejected His laws, and now we are reaping the harvest of our rebellion. Our children are growing up without a moral compass or godly role models and you even cannot begin to count this cost. The only way this situation will change is if we fall on our faces and repent of our wickedness:

2 Chronicles 7:14

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

1. completely, utterly vague. Chances are, Exxon will still receive their subsidy.

2. mostly unrealistic. america is #1 energy hog and neither technology advancements nor more drilling here will solve that or feed that gluttonous thirst. we are dependent on foreign energy, which is partly why we have 450 military bases around the world. We need to reduce need, and to do that, we need to re-examine our role in the world as pure consumers.

3. Vague. While education is of the highest necessity, throwing a job training program at it ain't gonna help. The system, which is based on the idea of an assembly line, needs to be revised, and teaching needs to be valued as a higher profession.

4. Pay a little more? The rich need to pay a whole fuckload more. A thriving economy is based on a fluid, interdependent economic web, not a trickle down hierarchy.

class size doesn't matter if you educate like an assembly line

if you want to educate for real, class size indeed does matter. Students need individual attention from teachers. they need to be both heard and spoken to.

Profit means you are utilizing resources effectively. The opposite is net destruction. If everyone consumed more than they produced, we would eventually have nothing. Henry Ford accumulated a lot of personal wealth for his innovations, but everyone he traded with got a car and his employees were better paid than unions. You can pay a guy with a bulldozer a lot more than a guy with a shovel and savings and investment is what makes that upgrade possible. No business can force you to trade your production for theirs, only the government with taxes can do that. If the government didn't have the power to dole out special favors to business, would business bother bribing them? Lobbying is the symptom, the problem is in excess government power.

The thing that socialists don't understand is that the wealth creation is what's important, not concentration. In capitalism, 1 guy could have 7 yachts and a moon base, but if the average person has two cars, two kids, a home, and countless amenities, who cares? Without the profit motive, who would go through the trouble of inventing and selling anything en masse if your greatest reward is no better than someone on the assembly line who took no risk? If everyone equally has very little as the soviets did, how is that better?

But you know, socialists act like all megarich people do is spend their money on frivolous things. In reality, they have too much to do that. It gets invested in upstart companies who need the capital to express their ideas and by the end, most is usually given to charity. In other words, it gets recycled back into wealth creation whereas the government would just waste it on bombs and embassies.

Oh, and to the guy who said the FDA is there to help you from business, look up stevia and aspartame. Your naive belief that giving others the power to choose for you is a complete backfire that accomplishes the opposite. The FDA is bribed shitless into using their "protective ban" powers to ban, harass, or steal from perfectly safe competitors on behalf of their corporate cronies. Also look up all the instances where a company was sued for supplying dangerous or defective products. That's not the FDA, that's libertarian-approved courts and recourse dissuading fraud and abuse in the marketplace. It's not more profitable to take shortcuts, it's less profitable because you'll be sued into oblivion. Do some businesses die because their owners are too stupid to see that? Yes. But business mortality is good, we don't want destructive businesses surviving like a horrid government program can.

>> ^chilaxe:

blankfist
It's brilliant.. what's the line from? (Other than your life, I mean.)


I heard it from an older guy I used to work with on an assembly line back in the day. He said it once, and I lost it for a good five minutes. I've been trying to work it into a screenplay ever since.