Northscaler | Sr. DevOps Engineer | REMOTE (based in Austin, TX) | Contractor (potentially contact to hire) | https://www.northscaler.com/
-----
Northscaler´s world leading scale-up technology provides sustainable solutions for businesses to grow operations. We like to think of scaling technology as the invisible business enabler – working progressively and intuitively with your teams so that you can be unbounded in your achievements.
-----
Our client base is largely small companies looking to either improve or replatform existing deployments. Each of our clients has different requirements, but we specialize in helm charts on kubernetes, in either GKE, EKS or on prem. We have a staff of highly skilled software engineers, and are needing to expand our devops team.
-----
Technologies: NodeJS, Kafka, Kubernetes, Helm.
Contact david.jannotta at northscaler.com for more information
Some invest it themselves into real estate, both in their own country (like highest towers, most fancy hotel, palm tree shaped islands) and abroad (skyscrapers and office buildings in various financial structures).
They're really setting themselves up for them and their future generations to remain rich and comfortable for the forseeable future even when oil dries up or demand goes down.
If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
I wonder if the standard for excessive profits truly measures profit and not simply price increases and deceptive service charges.
If it is the later I can say I have definitely been harmed by cost cutting measures related to quality of service within telecom. Contractors who don't have enough training and are overworked have completely supplanted full time personnel who know their company's product and can provide competent support.
The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.
[Update]
That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] I can't comment on timelines, but we're aware that customers are interested in more features around maintenance window scheduling, deferral, and notification, as well as shorter downtime for updates and smarter scheduling within a group of replicas.
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Confirmed. We know it's a problem that we need to fix. HA reduces downtime in unexpected failure cases (live migration for your primary only helps in planned shutdown cases, not if the physical machine fails), but doesn't currently help with maintenance-related downtime.
I wouldn't say they're risking nothing. Sure, they're not shutting down existing offices and removing themselves from markets, but they probably walked away from money they wont get back. I'm sure there were legal fees, plus people they might have already begun to recruit. So yes, its not a large risk, but its not like it didn't come at a loss for them.
Local Charlotte paper kind of agrees, it would be interesting to see companies pull out of places like China and Saudi Arabia, given the investment that has been made already, and the loss of growth that would come from that.
Essentially, the company would have to put social issues as a priority over being competitive, because I can assure you that someone else with lower morals would take that business. Would be a very hard stance for companies to take with share holders.
I feel products like this - http://www.vtechphones.com/products/product_detail/1673 - (just an example) are a better solution to this problem. You dont need a land line subscription, just a cell phone with bluetooth.
When my parents get home, their cell phones pair to the home phone, so when they receive a call, the home phone rings. They don't have to carry around cell phones, and they can place calls through their cell phones using the handsets. Seems complicated at first, but saved headache and $$ in the end.
I think the major selling point is that you're not SOL if you need to be reached or call 911 while your cell is dead/left in the car/etc.
Not that it's an important enough point for me personally to have a land line, but I can understand why a lot of people would favor that. As a $10/month add-on for existing Fiber customers it's not a bad deal.
"Today, the average member of the union in Oakland makes $147,000 per year in wages, with benefits equal to another $82,000 per year."
--
That is a huge amount of money, especially considering that includes entry level positions. While I understand these machines are complicated, and don't blame them for wanting to keep their jobs, I didn't expect over 200k a year total to be the average.
I find it interesting (if a bit sad) that your reaction to that earnings disparity is, essentially, "Union workers make too much money" rather than "Everyone else makes too little." In the free market, it seems everyone is allowed to negotiate the price of their goods except the wage-workers.
Why does HN rally against the big companies that use regulatory capture to squeeze out more profits, but then gives unions a pass. They are doing the same thing: supporting legislation that allows them to squeeze out more profits (as wages).
A single employee doesn't have much leverage compared to a company. The only leverage a worker has is the "freedom" to quit. For most companies this is a minor annoyance, but nothing they really worry about.
Compare this to the leverage a company has. It controls wages, work hours, work conditions and can fire a worker. This can have devastating impacts on the life of a worker. Unions are the only realistic option for the average workers to have an impact. It levels the playing field.
Unions can certainly have too much power and make self destructive decisions, but you can say the same about many corporations. This is not a problem with unions or corporations, but with a power balance that is out of control.
The only option to a union is strict regulations from the goverment, but that has problems of its own. At least the union has a more direct interest and domain knowledge about their work place
Until recently I would have agreed with many of your points, but I recently read a post to the contrary.[1] Here is a short excerpt:
>Everyone talks as if bosses have the better end. But talk is very different from action. If everyone were trying to start their own businesses and hire workers, that would count as "acting as if bosses have the better end of the deal." Most workers, however, make no effort to become entrepreneurs. You could object that most workers don't have the money to open their own businesses, but most rich workers make no effort to become entrepreneurs either.
Unions are corrupt. Corporations are corrupt. In the absence of a magic wand to fix both, I side with the group whose interests are broader and more like mine.
I am not sure which side has interests 'more like yours' in cases like this one. On the one side, the union is trying to squeeze their employers for as much money as possible, which is a benefit for the members but raises the cost of consumer goods, and reduces the earning potential of everyone working at a (goods) exporter. On the other hand, each port is trying to gain an upper hand in capacity and cost against its competitors, by reducing salary (and other) costs, which will allow it to retain a greater portion of the earnings (if they succeed), but will benefit consumers of foreign made goods, and exporters (regardless of whether the port succeeds in capturing more profits).
The average citizen's interests seem to be much better aligned with those of the port, as the benefits of competition will serve to distribute cost reductions to all users of product which pass through the ports.
The problem is that in this case the union is the one standing in the way of other people making more money. Longshoremen's unions are notoriously corrupt and exclusive. I have no idea what the situation is today but traditionally it was nearly impossible to gain entry into a longshoremen's union unless your father was in one, or you had some similar connection.
This is only taking "registered union members" into consideration, and many of those working lots of overtime. A good portion of longshore work is done by "casuals" who are paid less and work less hours as they gain the work experience to get into the union. There are no "entry level" positions for union members, almost everyone starts out as a non-union casual making ~25/hour for unpredictable work.
I think when all is said and done, the average longshore worker's salary is actually around 70-80k, with the average age being 45-50, but it depends on the year, agreements, etc.
As for the extra "benefits", that's just health insurance + pension, which nobody else ever calculates into your salary for any other job.
The Oakland numbers you're giving are per capita, not per household. If you cut out households making nothing, 80k isn't particularly remarkable for an Oakland income.
-----
Northscaler´s world leading scale-up technology provides sustainable solutions for businesses to grow operations. We like to think of scaling technology as the invisible business enabler – working progressively and intuitively with your teams so that you can be unbounded in your achievements.
-----
Our client base is largely small companies looking to either improve or replatform existing deployments. Each of our clients has different requirements, but we specialize in helm charts on kubernetes, in either GKE, EKS or on prem. We have a staff of highly skilled software engineers, and are needing to expand our devops team.
-----
Technologies: NodeJS, Kafka, Kubernetes, Helm.
Contact david.jannotta at northscaler.com for more information