Author: Synetech

There Is No Such Thing As “Over-Qualified”

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I was in the bathroom yesterday and as usual I got some of my best thinking done—there isn’t a whole lot more you can do in there. For many years I have been disgusted by the propensity of employers to reject better than average people because they are “over-qualified”. I have known from the moment I heard the term that it was a complete load but not until yesterday was I able to put into words that others can understand why it is a load.

First of all lets examine what it is. When an employer says that someone is over-qualified it means that the applicant has more skills/abilities/education/etc. than the job requires that is, the job is basically beneath them. But, why would an employer turn away someone who is obviously able to do the job very well? The short answer is that they are afraid that the applicant would leave—sticking them with the duty and expense of finding yet another person for the position—due to boredom, a better job, or some other reason that they would not have to worry about with a lesser applicant.

So far it makes sense so let’s get to the point. It is nevertheless a load because if that person were inundated with job offers from better places then surely they would not be here applying for a job beneath them. If that person were so easily bored with this job then surely there are other menial jobs that are less boring. Basically my point is that there are two main reasons that someone would apply for a job that they are over-qualified for.

First is that they are having trouble finding a more appropriate job. Perhaps there are none in that town or perhaps the few that there are, are already filled. In any case, if they are unable to find a better job than this, then they are not likely to find one in the near future and the cost-benefit ratio is in the employers favor to hire them because even if they do leave in a year or two, the performance and other advantages they would bring far outweigh having to hire someone else later.

Second, the applicant may be applying to a job that others perceive as beneath them because they themselves do not believe it is. They may be applying because they enjoy that work. For example, a person with a medical license might apply for a job as a line cook because they love cooking and they do not have much experience in that. Others would see it as menial but the doctor sees it as fun. Again, in this case there is ample reason to hire them.

In summary there is no such thing as “over-qualified” it is always in the best interests of the employer to hire the best possible person for the task. I hope you keep that in mind the next time someone smarter than you applies for a job.

From Pitbulls To Jews; Prejudice and Abuse of Power is Alive and Well in 2005

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In Canada right now there is a bill to ban pitbulls in Ontario. If the bill passes, anyone who owns a pitbulls will be forced to have it neutered, many existing pitbulls will be destroyed (read: murdered), and no pitbulls will be allowed into the province ever again. And of course the term “pitbull” refers to several breeds of dog.

Why are they doing this? Because there have been a few cases where someone was injured by one. You may ask if they are so violent then why is this a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because the dogs are not by themselves a problem but rather a man-made problem.

Pitbulls are naturally no more dangerous than say, a lion and certainly no more dangerous than a shark or grizzly bear. People however breed the dogs to be vicious, they train them to be as aggressive as possible. They do this for a few reasons; one is security—you know—those “beware of dog” signs, if the dog is bred to be vicious then it is good for protection. Well, maybe not protection/defense but rather offense. Another reason people breed them to be violent is for dog fighting; they pit two dogs against each other in a fight to the death and bet on who will survive. This is obviously a sick andespicablele action that should itself be banned and the offenders “destroyed”.

Okay, this issue ifairlyly straight forward. But where do the Jews come in? Instead of focusing on the neutering or the destroying, lets look at the other effect that the law would have. It would prohibit any new pitbulls from ever being brought into the province because they are objectionable to some people. This is rather insane.

First of all, pitbulls are animals, natural, living things, beings who are no less entitled to living anywhere that are capable than any human. Just because some people don’t like them doesn’t mean they should be banned from entry. If they do so, then it would set precedentnt that could snowball. What’s next? Banning mosquitoes? How abouprairieie dogs? any animals that smell? what about people that smell bad? stupid people? people who sing badly? blacks? Jews?

The pitbull law is tantamount to prejudice, pure and simple. They don’t like something so they ban it. That’s fine if the something is a number, color, word, etc. but when it is another creature—no matter how “insignificant”/”inferior”/etc., then they better have a damn good reason to ban it.

A Story About Me And I

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Why do our English teachers insist we say “Bobby and I” instead of “me and Bobby”? Is it because the former does not roll off the tongue as nicely as the latter? Is it because the second one is grammatically correct? Is it because one makes you rich and famous while the other makes you sick and smelly? No.

There are two reasons we are told to use “X and I” instead of “me and X” and neither have to do with linguistics. First, they tell us to say it like that because they themselves were told to say it like that and they never bothered to ask why. This goes back all the way to the people who originated the phrases and is also a disturbing and dangerous trend that is very common; people are worse than sheep, they accept what they are told and pass it on whether it is right or not.

The other reason is in fact a result of the same problem as the first reason. It is because we are told not to be pompous. We are told to be modest and humble and to put others first. This is just a linguistic extension to the self-sacrifice complex that people are so obsessed with. The people who come up with these rules that subtly promote putting others before oneself do so because they expect that it will eventually pay off for them when dealing with others who end up following these rules.

The real question is do they use these rules religiously themselves.

*UPDATE*
Mmmm crow…

Fox Better Than NBC At Philanthropy, Both Bad At Broadcasting

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In the wake of the tsunami that devastated south-east Asia at the end of 2004, many philanthropic initiatives have been started to help.

Recently Rupert Murdoch, the head of Fox Corporation donated $1,000,000 dollars to the efforts for that area and it’s people. Not to be left out, NBC has also taken a step to help, except that NBC’s help is much more indirect and comes at much less expense to themselves. NBC has decided to air a telethon during primetime.

Why is Fox better than NBC? Because Fox donated cold hard cash—and quite a bit of it too—which is tangible and has a direct impact. NBC on the other hand has not donated cash—or anything else for that matter—that can be immediately used. Instead, they have donated airtime; airtime that was previously dedicated to an episode of LAX, a show that NBC had already cancelled.

So, what do we have in the end? On the one hand we have Fox who has alreedy donated a whole bunch of cash that can immediately be used. On the other hand we have NBC who is going to donate some airtime that had already been deemed worthless—since the show that was scheduled had such poor ratings that it was cancelled—to run a telethon in hopes of getting other people to donate money. Clearly Fox is better here in it’s philanthropic abilities than NBC.

Of course regardless of any charitable actions, both Fox and NBC are terrible—and crappy, horrible, worthless, !#$%^&*—at broadcasting.

GTA2 “Free”, DooM Not Free => Rockstar Games:3 2.5, id software:0

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Last week Rockstar Games, in an attempt to boost PR and put a little Christmas joy in peoples hearts decided to release their not-so-old (1999) game Grand Theft Auto 2 for free. They have already released GTA1 last year and I hope they will do so for GTA3 and so on in the future. What happens is that instead of having to purchase this old game for about $10 from some bargain bin in some drug store, you can just download the full version game from their website. Moreover, the release is compatable with current hardware so it can run on newer machines whereas the original versions might not.

This is fantastic. I have lauded R* in several places—and personally—for this great move. It is great for PR and a wonderful good-faith gesture to their fans. Instead of clinging desperately to their IP for a few extra measly bucks, they release old stuff for free to garner future support and customers. They are not the only ones who have done this but are probably the best known since what they are releasing (GTA, GTA2) are such big successes compared to other now-free games.

In contrast id software is the antithesis of R*. id is like the aforementioned, uh, aforeimplied? miser. They have clung greedily to their old ancient games—which no longer work on modern computers—instead of releasing them to the public, even without bother to update them to work on todays systems. I’m sure many people would love to get a free copy of the full version of Wolf3D, SOD, DooM, DooM II, Heretic, Hexen, Quake 1, even Quake 2.

Of course id has no intention of releasing their games, in fact a quick check of their “id store” reveals another bizarre idiocy which relates to their classics. They have their very first FPS game Wolfenstein3D which is available only as a download—not delivered to your door on CD—priced the same as some of their newest games on CD. Another example is Quake I by download is more expensive than Quake I on CD. Maybe it’s just me but isn’t a download cheaper than a CD? I’m certain that the person in charge of the id store/pricing either has no idea about any of the games, or just doesn’t care at all.

Cheers to R* and jeers to id.

*UPDATE*
Ever since the news broke people all over the world have been scrambling to get it. Some how—I can’t seem to remember nor figure out, although it would be almost trivial to track my steps if I really wanted to—I managed to learn of this news only a couple of hours after it became known. As a result I was one of the first few people to attempt to download it. It did not work, their servers were bogged down, crashed, abducted by aliens, who knows. Needless to say I, and millions of people around the world were frustrated to no end since then hoping to get a hold of this great classic with no luck. Finally today by a sudden stroke of luck I managed to get their site to initiate the file transfer. It didn’t work. I only got a tiny bit of it before it messed up. I tried it again with the same results. I tried it a third time carefully and it began the transfer. Not only that but I was downloading it at a very fast speed. A few minutes later I had it, installed it, and even played it for a few seconds to make sure it was really real—playing it is more fun than a pinch. I figure they had sorted things out and it was now working. Not so. In fact I tried again and it did not work. I checked the several dozen places I had been watching to keep an eye on the situation—and people’s reactions—and realized that I may be the ONLY PERSON ON EARTH who managed to get it. A while later I decided to try to get their release of GTA1. I got it after a few attempts and still nobody else seemed to be able to get anything. I was really starting to wonder now.

Here’s the problem with this “freebie”. Instead of releasing the game on the BitTorrent network—like many others have done for example id with their Wolfenstein Enemy Territory—which allows them to diseminate it quickly and efficiently without using too much of their own bandwidth but rather other downloader’s bandwidith, they kept it as an HTTP transfer which puts the entire onus on their own servers. Then there’s the fact that they seem to have dedicated only ONE server for this knowing full well that it would cause a hurricane of traffic. Plus there’s an ominus message that your information that you enter in the form will be collected even if you are not eligable to download. All this adds up to the suspicion that R* is using this as a way of making a bunch more money from their old game. How? By getting gulible people to enter their email addresses in the form, give them something that’s not worth any money anymore and send them merrily on their way. Once they’ve got your email address however, they turn around and sell it to spammers who then send you 1,000,000,000,000,000 junk emails per day. This email harvesting puts a real damper on their goodwill actions. Of course this is all unconfirmed, although highly likely speculation.

I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and felt bad for everyone, including R*. Here they are trying to do something nice for people and it’s blowing up in their face. If you look at the posts people have made you’ll see a steady progression of happiness and thankfulness to anger and cursing. I decided I would help some people out. There was one obstacle though. On their download page R* has inserted a little blurb—among a whole bunch of other text—stating that even though this is now a free game, they are not permitting people to mirror it (make 3rd party copies available) without their express permission. Well, I was a little worried about that but then I saw that they had changed the download page. Now when you enter your information instead of attempting to present you with the EULA and try to begin the transfer, it just gives you an explanatory apology message, tells you to try again later, and mentions that your information was not collected. It sounds a little too suspicious for my tastes.

*UPDATE 2*
I don’t know if R* harvested email addresses or not, although I did recently see a sudden, massive jump in spam. I do know however that you do not actually need to enter any information to download—if you know how to get the direct URL.

*UPDATE – Mar.24.05*
I was at Futureshop today for a job interview and I saw a box of DooM. It had DooM, DooM II, and Final DooM in it. What really caught my eye was the $25 price tag. The worst part is that if someone is naïve enough to pay that kind of money for these ancient—yet still good—games, then they will be sorely dissappointed when they come to realize that the games do not run on their newer computers. The will have paid $25 for absolutely nothing. R* on the other hand not only released their old games for free but UPDATED them to work on current machines.

Cheers to R* and Jeers to id indeed.

Make A Living At McDonald’s?

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I just saw the stupidest commercial in a long time. It was a McDonald’s commercial where some guy—I mean some idiot—is talking about how he has since childhood dreamed of being a sandwich-board guy for McDonald’s. As if that is not bad enough, he has placed a sandwich-board on his infant in the crib saying that he intends the same path for his child.

?!?!

Isn’t it bad enough that this guy aspires to being some dolt who stands around in the street wearing a couple of pieces of sheet wood advertising for McDonald’s? Did they really need to make the commercial so that he dooms his child to the same fate? I mean come on! What kind of person would want that for their child. Normal people dream of their child being a doctor, astronaut, president, this guy wants his kid to be an ad-monkey.

This isn’t the first stupid McDonald’s commercial, besides the lame R&B; campaign that McDonald’s has been running for the past year in an attempt to get at the “ghetto” market—you know the ones, where people are rapping and stuff with that annoying “I’m Loving It” jingle—they have done similar stupid ads. There was one where they were showing a bunch of employees talking about how happy they are working at McDonald’s. One woman says that she has been working at McDonald’s for over 30 years. Thirty years!

What kind of moron thinks up these ads? Nobody wants to think that they may have to end up working at McDonald’s flipping burgers, getting burned by oil, earning minimum wage, and hating their lives for 30 years. Jobs at McDonald’s are transitory, they are supposed to be temporary; if you stay at McDonald’s for an extended period then there is something wrong and you should take stock of your life and try to figure out what went wrong.

Remakes Of Sequles To Remakes Of Sequles

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Every now and then Hollywood catches a theme and it seems that all the movies churned out follow that theme. For example when Twister came out, there were lots of tornado and weather related movies, Jurassic Park spawned dozens of dinosaur movies while Independance Day caused alien movies and similar events with volcanos (Volcano), viruses (Outbreak), and so on.

Unfortunately the theme for these past few years has not been a traditional theme as much as a template. These past few years many—I don’t want to use actual numbers but what the heck, let’s say 90%+—of the movies made have been remakes of old films, and in some cases, of not so old films. There is little more dissappointing than to watch a movie that you think is good only to learn that it is just a ripoff/knock off of another movie that was good way back when.

If a movie made in the past few years isn’t a remake then it’s a sequle, maybe a sequle of a remake (ala Meet the Fockers).

Things are really getting out of hand now, it seems that Hollywood has pretty much completely run out of ideas and is resorting to using existing ones to make movies now. It’s not really worth watching movies anymore.

Cycling Through The Same Christmas Episodes Over And Over Again

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I’m currently nearing the end of a many month long endeavour to catch up on a couple of shows that I had not watched during their first run but am now watching in syndication where they are airing one or more episodes per day. Checking the current episode against the episode listings and even taking into account special days like Christmas where they may not air an episode, I calculated the exact date when I will finally be done. Unfortunately the networks have done something I did not anticipate. For the past week—the week leading up to Christmas—instead of airing the episodes properly like they should be, they are exclusively airing Christmas—and winter—episodes from those shows. What this means is that my whole schedule is thrown off track because instead of seeing the 10+ episodes that I should be seeing this week past week, I’m seeing episodes that I’ve already seen over and over, and over and over and over again. One show only lasted five season—a lot by today’s standards—so they had AT MOST that many Christmas episodes while the other had nine. As you can imagine they run out of these Christmas episodes quickly so they just cycle through them again and again until Christmas comes and goes; and they call it “A Special Christmas Episode”. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Always A Human Example In Science Fiction

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I’m watching a sci-fi show right now and once again got hit with an annoying little consistency that seems to be prevelant in sci-fi shows that have aliens and alien cultures in it everywhere. What happens is that someone in the show will mention something and give a few examples—usually historic ones—which will pretty much always include at least one human reference and at least one alien reference. For example lets say a character is talking to another character about art and wants to give a few master artists as examples, then they’ll say something like “…great art from people like Michaelangelo, Greetblaczag, or Blorgjlob.” or “…like Zeepledorb, Marktong, or Cézanne.” They’ll always give a few alien examples to indicate that this is a sci-fi show with aliens, but always include a human example. I suppose it could be because it’s a human show, or maybe because humans think they’re so great. Maybe it’s because the writers think that viewers would feel alienated if they didn’t included at least one human reference each time. *Pardon the pun.*

Nov.16.04 – 1:28am *UPDATE*

It’s worse than I thought. I was watching an episode of Star Trek: Voyager the other day and noticed the above statement taken to the extreme. Instead of just listing a couple of alien examples and a human example, they were talking about human matters (Starfleet captains) and two unknown captains were listed as well as one well known one. I found this fitting but shocking because this is not a lone incident, in all situation where a science fiction show self-references in a list, they will list a few names you have never heard of, but will always throw in a name from a previous episode, previous series, or film, or something that you DO know.

Just once I would like to hear someone list a few things that are completely unknown and leave it at that.

Why The Push To Vote?

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This past year has seen a lot of pressure to vote. Politicians, musicians, actors, athletes, and pretty much anyone who has any celebrity has been pushing voting like a back alley drug dealer pushing crack. Why? Well, if you do vote and the winner makes your life miserable, they can just say “Hey, you voted for me!” The blame then falls on yourself instead of them. Of course if you don’t vote and they do a terrible job then they’ll say “You should have voted for the other guy!” but this latter argument is weaker so they go with the former.

It’s quite clever really, they avoid blame no matter what you do. Maybe it’s just me but isn’t the government supposed to exist for the purpose of making the lives of it’s citizens better? Should not they they be doing the work rather than putting the onus on the people? If the current regime is not working shouldn’t it be their responsibility to fix it rather than expect the people to completely replace it? Of course I don’t propose an entirely self-sufficient government where the people have no input or power, I just think the government should not be trying to scapegoat on it’s citizens.