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Some more insider speculation, this time from our very own Freeper-on-the-scene.

Course I don’t know if I’d have put myself in the situation this guy did.

Some purportedly insider-based information paints a very plausible layout of how this might have happened. Best practice is even the security officer does not possess unaudited access to passwords; i.e., first of all, the passwords are somehow protected, and if the officer demands the password to use it, it leaves a visible trail, whether it is a log entry by a human guard, a broken envelope, or anything deemed sufficient to indicate the password has been used.

If Childs perceived the security officer was politically-appointed and not appointed by merit, and was not aware of this basic best practice, then it was entirely reasonable to challenge the demand for possessing the password. His mistake was not escalating to management immediately with a clear paper trail, so he can wash his hands of liability. He could have implemented automated version control snapshots of the IOS config dumps for example, and busted anyone on unauthorized changes after washing his hands of liability.

I predict Newsom will not spend any political capital to get Childs' case dismissed, and leave Childs out to hang. If so, I'm hiring him on contract when he is able to get out of jail; I need a network engineer with those kind of chops who can tell me straight up what is going on.

Immigration bureaucrats actively deny local efforts to enforce flagrant illegal immigration, but go after decorated, vetted paras. Whoever in immigration who backed pursuing this case needs to not only lose their cushy Federal government job for such stupidity, but lose their pension and be permamently barred from government jobs too, unless I'm missing some critical detail here.

sperm donors who have advanced education, such as a PhD or law degree.

Oh, great. So many members of Congress and state legislatures who started out their careers as attorneys are eligible.

...a case study in several political areas that promise to figure larger, not smaller, in our immediate future.

You are one of the first people I've seen that has made these observations. I'm way past the "hey lookit, aw gee, those Zimbabweans have it so tough" stage of observations as long as two years ago. When I read about places like North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and an innumerable other Turd World nations, I no longer wonder about what it's like over there, how they got into the mess, etc. Instead, I wonder how I'm going to hold together my family when the same trends grip America. Good to know others are thinking along the same lines. Glad I'm not alone in thinking the time to reverse course is nigh upon us if not past us already.

When the Chinese really get into wine, demand for our product is going to explode to the point where if we cut back today, we might not be able to fill it

They better not hold their breath. Their Beaujolais Nouveau marketing splash in Japan this year was a complete flop from what I could gather speaking with Japanese friends while I was in Japan. The marketing push was non-existent in China, even in the four-star hotels and five-star restaurants I went to in cosmopolitan Shanghai.

When the most Westernized portions of Japan and China turn up their noses at Beaujolais Nouveau, it is pure delusion to think these markets will save the French wine producers in general, and Beaujolais Nouveau in particular (the one cited in the article). In China and Japan, beer is what the vast majority of restaurant goers drink, with various domestically-produced cheap wines (think stuff like rice and plum wines selling for $8 USD per 750 ml) coming in second place, and anything over $10 USD per 750 ml simply reserved for special occassions.

I think wouldntbprudent's observation was very perceptive; French producers didn't perform their market research diligently enough. It is true that there are people who can distinguish a qualitative difference between wines produced in France and other nations. Furthermore, it is true that there are such people who prefer French wine at almost any premium markup. Those people are not who pay for the majority of the French wine industry's output. Those people might be influencers, but the crucial marketing insight the industry missed is that those influencers by and large are listened to after a decision is made to drink French wine, not before a decision is made to drink wine at all. Yet it is these same influencers who the industry spends an inordinate amount of energy and resources courting.

My guess is the French wine industry can rebound if they replace the mystique that only French wine is worth the experience of wine with another mystique that recognizes the vast majority of their output is bought by people who want to have a good time, but not necessarily a good time that revolves solely around the wine.

Large overseas retailers such as Tesco and Wal-Mart are currently barred at the retail level in India, but not in the wholesale market.

So globalization, offshoring and outsourcing is the wave of the future and we have to just suck it up and adapt in the U.S. when it comes to our IT industry, but all of a sudden the rules change when it is the retailing industry? If the fans of Lou Dobbs were clever, they would start pushing hard for India to open its retail channels to foreign ownership.

I'm in the IT industry but offshoring and outsourcing has benefitted my niche by a small amount. I'd estimate 10% of my business comes as a direct result of my clients' penchant to outsource instead of building skills in-house. That is measured by observing how many clients admit they have attempted the project in-house before calling in my company. As my business continues to grow and I expand it into other related niches, any dependency of my business model on outsourcing will trend down. So I don't really have a dog in the hunt either way. Outsourcing can be all the rage or suffocating under a protectionist trade regime, it won't affect my business that much in either scenario.

So my interest is holding each side in the debate accountable to their rhetoric. The free traders blithely ignore the gigantic exceptions like in this case. Protectionists cherry pick the industries they want noticed, as well. The protectionists also generally don't help their own cause by ignoring the very same exceptions and using that as the foundation of their attacks on free trade.

Philosophically, I'm pro-free trade, as long as it really is completely open trade. Meaning it is so open that multi-hundred page "agreements" are unnecessary. Citizen and non-citizen alike are treated exactly the same under business law, same goes for resident and non-resident. The so-called free trade proponents should simply admit that what we have now is "managed trade". As in government-managed, along with all its attendent inefficiencies and corruption.

The resounding silence of the media on a proportional prisoner exchange that previously thundered incessantly for "proportional response" in the interdiction of missile-wielding Hezbollah convinces me, once and for all, that the mainstream media is indeed profoundly anti-Semitic.

They should round them all up and check to see if they are illegal aliens.

There is big, big problem with this. Just how do you identify someone as a U.S. citizen?

Ethnic looks are not sufficient. There are plenty of very European-looking Mexicans.

Documentation is not sufficient. Easy to forge drivers licenses, and many states indeed have no controls over handing out licenses to only citizens so there are plenty of illegals who have perfectly valid driver licenses. There are illegals who have been here for decades, and can show as many utility bills as any resident citizen.

Birth certificates are easily forged. Identity in general is easily forged, and only very time consuming investigative work can reveal frauds.

The simple fact of the matter is that any calls to "round them all up" will only catch the stupid and defiant ones. I would be satisfied with that outcome, but some people might not.

When drawing a dividing line between citizens and non-citizens, better be sure you make it clear how that line is drawn, and be able to accept and defend the fuzziness of that line. Bush's plan is unfortunately a nod of the head to what is practical to implement. Absolutist positions that insist upon deporting everyone who is in the country illegally feel good, but are impractical. An Israeli-style concrete fence is a start.

ditto retorted

Yes, I can spoil myself now if I choose to and screw you if you don't like it, but every dollar I have, I earned. But that is only after busting my ass since I was a kid.

You do deserve everything you have earned. As a strong property-rights advocate, I wouldn't want to see it any other way.

I'm still a 7 years from SS eligibility but my SS statement shows I have been paying into the system for 43 consecutive years. Do the numbers and tell me how damn "spoiled" I was.

I don't blame you for wanting everything you paid into the system, paid back in your retirement. Does this mean you believe the system is self-sustaining, contrary to the Regents' own pronouncements? If you assert beyond all rational analysis that you deserve everything you paid into the system because the system has the funds when it technically does not, then end of story, we have nothing further to discuss.

On the other hand, if you have worked the numbers and seen that the system cannot continue, then let's talk a deal. Every person in Gen X onwards I have spoken to about this has agreed that if it would outright abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they would in a heartbeat sign an agreement saying everything they have put into the system to date is forfeit, and they cannot make a claim against those systems. That's a remarkable sacrifice for generations who are now edging into their 40's. Acknowledging that you have put in a lot, I wouldn't expect an equal percentage sacrifice, but would you be open to talking about some level of sacrifice to help kill this monkey on our nation's back? Perhaps something like giving up 30% of claimed benefits to help the system wind down while not leaving out those already in it or those just about (10-20 years or less) to enter it.

As the national debate currently stands, and where voters have voted, the outcome is crystallizing around the following picture. The Greatest Generation and the Boomer generation are going to claim full benefits against the systems. All generations afterwards are left to figure out how to either continue the systems and wreak the economy, continue the systems in a much diminished capacity (perhaps only in token form only, thereby benefitting only the bureaucracy that adminsters the systems), or kill the systems in an abrupt and very traumatic transition.

The Greatest Generation already lost their chance to correct some of their grievous mistakes. The solution will either be thrust upon a future generation when the problems have been exacerbated, or it will take a concerted effort by multiple generations today to humanely shut down these systems before they harm our nation even further.

But if your state is like mine, your state constitution says that the state will establish and maintain primary and secondary schools.

It sounds as if you are in Kansas. If so, you are correct that Article 6 of the Kansas state constitution and Article 7 of the Texas state constitution charge the state with making provisions for a public school system. However, as far as I can tell, they don't say vouchers are prohibited.

What exactly about a voucher turns the transaction into a subsidy? For that matter, what exactly is a public school? Is it the building, or the process? In other words, I have yet to see serious discussion in the body politic that questions the form that a public school takes to the detriment of substance. I contend that it is only an accident of history that the public school system as constituted is what we recognize as something that fulfills the mandates set forth in the constitution. If one can obtain the same result (or better) by different systems of funding, physical plant, and processes, I see no reason why the state constitutions would compel us to stay with the current set of buildings and bureaucracy.

doorgunner69 said sarcastically:

And Gen-X/Y/Z slackers are just the ones, right?

I think these generational bash-fests are pointless because they distract us from the real battles of dismantling the tremendous harm that anti-individual liberty agendas have wreaked upon this nation and continue to harm us to this day. That said, I do want to address your sarcasm.

Maybe it is just the circle of people I run around in. I meet a lot of people in my consulting business, so I have seen a pretty large cross-section of my industry (software). I would have to say Gen X/Y/Z are no more or less slackers than Boomers. Indeed, of the millionaires and multi-millionaires who are my friends, practically all are in these slacker generations, and all got to where they were by busting their humps in their own businesses so I'm certainly not inclined to caricature these generations as slackers.

My Boomer parents and friends have done very well, make no mistake; some are extremely content and successful by any measure. But the reality is when it comes right down to it, it will take a concerted effort by all generations to fix the mess left behind by decades of beliefs that forced individual liberties and self-responsibility to take a back seat to false beliefs in collectivism.

Most disputes can be handled out of court if the parties are honest and fair with one another. Aye, there's the rub!

What irritates a lot of people about disputes that bring in attornies though is that even if you have nailed someone, you still don't get any justice if going to court nets you no practical benefit. The last time I had to use an attorney, it was because a landlord was trying to stiff me out of the security deposit.

The only reason we sought counsel was not because we spent over $200 on Merry Maids and a handyman to clean up the duplex both inside and out (after we went through and cleaned it up ourselves). No, it was because the landlord left a voicemail stating his name, that he was in the duplex, it looked great, nothing out of order, and we would get our security deposit back the following fortnight. Then nothing until we called him two months later, when he changes his story, and says the place was an absolute shambles, urine stains all over, and he had to hire special carpet cleaners to eradicate the strong urine smell. Fortunately, it was a digital voicemail system, it saves the caller ID information, and we're in the habit of not deleting messages, so we have him directly contradicting himself.

Long story short, after meeting with the landlord's attorney and playing the recording, our real estate attorney said we had him dead to rights, and would prevail in court, but it would take time, and in the meantime we would have to keep him on retainer. I travel out of town on business, so going to court over such a small amount was a non-starter, especially since there was no possibility of punitive damages for taking it to court when it was such a cut and dried situation. We settled out of court, the landlord paid our attorney fees and 80% of the security deposit; we were certain that last 20% was just out of spite to tweak our noses, even though he was still out thousands and we technically prevailed.

What irked me was that the landlord blatantly tried to game the system, and he still got away with a largely symbolic gesture even when the attornies on both sides said the landlord would lose if it went to trial. That was what convinced me that justice is largely for sale in this country, and very little is left of rule of law. This is also what really drove home the point to me that even if I prevailed, only the attornies ever really win when going to court; nothing would ever compensate me for the time spent hassling with the case, since my attorney said we couldn't claim for lost time spent in court.

Judging by his car's stickers, the landlord was, naturally some might say, a Democrat. Heh.

Action not informed by the well thought ideas is not very efficient and often is destructive.

Agreed.

Where would be the Western civilization without thinking and debates?

And you should debate the general issues here or anywhere else for that matter. I'm not advocating any different for anyone else. For my personal, individual circumstances, with my limited time I prefer to work on a one-on-one basis, informed by the thinking and debates I've already had with my friends. This is simply how I choose to spend my time, and choose my battles against leftist ideology. You want to debate the general issues instead, and I respect that and encourage the open discussion. I believe there is ample room and need for both actions amongst conservatives. Conservatives are still vastly outnumbered in the world, there's plenty of work left to accomplish.

But do you comprehend the possibility that some care not only about their own individual interest?

Certainly do. I'm not in any position to affect the levers of power, however. So the best I can offer is to work with one man, a neighbor so to speak, to explore his options of what may best put food on the table for his family next week, next year, and five years from now.

This is the secret of the freetraders - for them their country can go to hell so long as they make a few dollars in profit.

I enjoy chewing the fat with my friends about the state of the world, lamenting the deplorable conditions of America, and hurling invective at those who bring down the nation. At the end of the day however, action is all that leaves tracks in history. As someone with limited time, and even less access to political power, the action I can meaningfully offer is simply leading by example, and offering to share what I know with others in the hope that it might help them avoid the same learning curve I went through. I have neither the expertise nor experience to know what would really work in the halls of power, so I can't really offer anything realistic in terms of discussing general policies that might help solve the offshoring issue, and leave that instead to others on this thread who follow the issue far more closely than I do.

But, if you want to carry this on, I would prefer it be done in private.

If you will permit it, I believe demonstrating in the open by individual example is the most powerful persuasion that exists. I believe there are a lot of others posting to and lurking in this thread who could benefit from a discussion of a concrete situation, because it personalizes the issues and becomes real to them.

This is not about me. I'm here because I believe what happened to me is wrong. I believed it was wrong before it happened to me. And I believe it should never happen to another American. I'm here to put an end to the betrayal of America by whatever means I can with my limited resources. If that means debate upto and including running for office, so be it. If that means other plausible means, so be it. I don't know all the options; but, this was bigger than me when it got to me and will remain so. I am not the focus nor do I want to be. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is.. which is more than I can say for the treason lobby.

These are all laudable sentiments. The personal testimonial however, is truly putting your money where your mouth is. I want to discuss this in the open because for my own selfish reasons I want to put my own beliefs to the test. I have no idea where an open discussion will lead to. We might, for example, conclude that you have done everything you possibly can, and there truly is no way out; and if it comes to that I will gladly concede you are correct about various aspects of the offshoring issue. However, I am inclined to believe that together we can come up with at least several viable strategies that can give you hope, and by extension, anyone else in a predicament similar to yours the same hope.

Just so you won't feel you are standing on the stage by yourself, I'll share my own personal testimonial out in the open, but with no expectation nor obligation on your part to do the same. I just want you to know that I wouldn't ask you to do anything I won't do myself. Think of it as a confidence building measure.

Back in 1997, I joined up with an IT consulting company, about 300 consultants in the firm. I was leaving another consulting company where I had naively run afoul of departmental politics so corporate life already held little appeal to me. I knew it was politics that was responsible for my poor annual review and not my actual performance because my old company's CEO and the client manager I was with at the time made personal appeals to me to stay, and the COO, for whom the annual review process was his personal pet project, said he made a mistake in my case in his own personal appeal. I left amicably, since it was water under the bridge and the best that everyone could do after all that happened was to learn and move on.

The new company seemed different however, so I gave corporate life another shot. I was the top performing consultant in my division; in the depths of the dot com bomb, I was one out of five consultants in the entire company who received any annual bonus at all, and out of the five, I got the highest bonus. Traveling 50 out of 52 weeks to billable projects and helping the sales and marketing teams with whatever they needed (RFPs, brochures, sales pitches, etc.) helped accomoplish this. My compensation was a healthy six figures, and I flew to so many projects I got lifetime platinum status with American Airlines.

There were warning signs despite all the good news, however.

I expressed my concerns two years before I felt they would come home to roost in the division. I was made technical lead of the division, but only about the time I predicted trouble would really hit the division. I was right. We were losing profitability steadily, and within two months after I was tapped as technical lead we would start bleeding red ink at our current burn rate. I quickly figured out that the previous business managers of the division had simply rode a fortuitous series of contracts and didn't really develop the business side. I got word through back channels that the former business people got my company blackballed by our primary vendor whose products we sell, because of their incredibly poor sales abilities (bugging the vendor for leads until the vendor gave up on us). By this point, the CEO was taking personal charge of the division, we were down to just one salesman, he was tapped as the de facto operations manager for the division, and I had learned enough about sales to know that our salesman only knew how to work inside sales and couldn't create his own leads.

Despite all this bad news, I took a chunk of my savings and invested in myself. At this point I knew bits and pieces of sales and marketing, but needed to put it together into a coherent system. So I signed up for a three-day seminar on marketing, on my own post-tax dime. It was very expensive (think used car expensive), but it delivered the goods. The entire division was shut down only four weeks after I was made technical lead, two weeks after I got back from the seminar, and it was mostly due to very poor management. The company did the business equivalent of strip mining, instead of farming and husbanding the market.

The dot bomb's effects were really getting under way at the time. Despite that, I could have gotten another consulting position because by that time I had started to build a name for myself, having spoken at one of the industry's annual conferences and helped the vendor's engineers on numerous occasions. I've been steadily working towards educating myself on the non-technical aspects of my industry, and since working for someone else seemed about as unstable as starting my own business, I opted to strike out on my own.

I'm not going to paint you a rosy picture. It was scary as hell sometimes. I came close to running out of cash twice in the first year, even though I had set aside a year's worth of living expenses. Got stiffed out of fees by an Indian body shop in our second year. But ever since we've slowly built momentum (cash reserves), and are into our fourth year of operation (five years is usually the startup mortality line, about 90% fail within that period). I've regained my former compensation level and rebuilt my personal cash reserves. And I'll never go back to working W-2 again even if it means more compensation (because I know that without full control, that compensation is only temporary).

The key to the successful transition was to learn how to conduct all aspects of my industry's business, and not just the technical side. But I didn't start this only when I started to see trouble brewing. I started learning what I could about the business aspects over ten years ago. I am hardly a smooth sales or marketing type of personality; but I made a conscious effort to study what it takes to be successful performing those roles. I'm still a wallflower at parties these days, though only private parties; at industry functions I work the room, which for me was incredibly uncomfortable to learn.

What I see in similar between us is that we are technically competent in our areas, but our personal fortunes were at the capricious whim of company management. I outlined with my personal testimonial only one way to counter this situation. Now, I happen to strongly advocate starting your own business as the superior answer to economic instability, but I acknowledge there are other equally remunerative approaches if pure compensation is what motivates you. You already have an advantage in my eyes because you have had some experience in sales. I hope to have a productive discussion with you about your personal situation, and hopefully with some positive feedback from others on this thread we can all find some path out of your current position that you agree can propel you towards the success you seek. And hopefully that will inspire others that have chimed in with stories similar to yours to seek their own paths out of their offshored conditions.

You see how smug you are? You actually believe anything that happens to you is happening for the FIRST time ever in this country.

I tried to indicate these are oversimplified generalizations. I'm sorry if I couldn't make it any more clear to you. Just to show that there are no hard feelings, and that I'm an equal opportunity generation basher, here's my generalization of generation "X". They're a bunch of slackers. Heck, they are the epitome of the word, there was an epynonymous movie made about them. They are so non-conformist there is a conforming dress code: sloppy, tattooed, and pierced. They're horrible employees, more adept at serving up video game high scores than serving customers. If you do hire them, they whine, whinge, and haven't known a day's hard work in their lives.

Naturally, this hardly describes my closest friends from college who are all generation "X". Out of ten, three are multi-millionaire business owners, four others run their own businesses that put them into the top 3% of the nation's income earners, the rest are top employees in their companies, all are conservatives, and none of us harbor a shred of hostility towards our elders as a group. We simply treat people by their actions as an individual; business has has hammered it into us that is the best way, if our parents didn't get that drummed into us first. The nation is screwed up with too much leftist "do-goodism"; the kind of blind hostility we see in this thread just distracts us from the real task of rooting out the leftist rot by the roots.

There are plenty of opportunities for cooperation between generations. For example, we can come together to support abolishing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and return to purely private donations and charity. To fund it, generation "X" and later will renounce any and all claims upon the program, giving up everything we've put into them to date. In return, the Boomer generation and older promise to make do with whatever is left in the programs.

Curious then that you chose to reply to the boomer response to the Xer's nonsense but not to the initial post by the Xer....why?

Luck of the draw, nothing to infer from who I chose to reply to in the thread stream, other than that was about where the thread was when I clicked on the post reply link.

I was speaking in general terms.

Okay, fair enough. I'm interested in your specific situation and instead of talking generalities like we have in this thread, I want to see what can be done about your individual circumstances, because I fall in the camp of people who believe that there are still enormous opportunities in this country.

For the record, I have worked on software systems where if X was not done by Y time, Z million dollars would be lost. Where Y time is six hours from the word "go", on a configuration I've never seen before in my life, and with a group of people I've never worked with before and now have to work with in perfect synchrony through only a phone and instant messaging connection. When you have that level of expertise, charging $50/hour and up is not a problem (actually, I charge 400% of that and my engagement calendar is still booked as much as I like, but you can reasonably expect $50-80/hour of W-2 employment at that level of expertise if you work for someone else), and you've indicated that you would consider that more than acceptable compared to your current situation.

Now, if it is true that you work in Windows support as freedumb2003 thinks, then yes, you have many long nights of studying ahead of you. However, I'm going to go with what little you have shared so far in this thread, instead of conjectures. You have indicated that you cannot move away from where you live (Indiana), and it has been a little over a year since your position was offshored. You claim you currently make $7 per hour. You say you have already looked at the construction market. Judging by your posts, I know that you can string together coherent sentences, though I can't tell one way or the other if you can put together reports for management consumption (I suspect you would be able to, or at least taught the skill in a year otherwise). Your offshored position was at EDS. You have some level of programming skills in C, C++, Pascal, and x86 assembler. You have about 10 years of PC sales experience.

You definitely don't have money to throw at your predicament, and possibly not very much time (say, 10-20 hours per week). You apparently do have enough time and/or money to get onto the Internet, at dialup speeds at least; otherwise we wouldn't be here on FreeRepublic. Whether you have to get onto the Net through the public library or through your own connection, the salient fact is you are finding the time to get on the Net.

Does this accurately describe your situation?

I don't remember us Boomers wishing that the generations before us would die, do you?

I wouldn't be so hasty throwing around characterizations (though I think that is counter-productive, see below). Look at it from the point of view of the generations coming after the "Greatest" and "Boomer" cohorts. Most of them hear a never-ending litany of the virtues of these earlier generations. Yet, before most reach the age of majority, the nation is technically bankrupt, it is arithmetically impossible to ever reconcile lavish financial commitments made by these generations to current tax burdens, and government grows ever larger and more intrusive under the guidance of these earlier generations.

So generation "X" onwards is left with the impression that the earlier two generations sold them into indentured servitude basically before they were born, then put in place the means to forcibly enforce the terms of the indenture for the few decades that the older and newer generations will overlap in their grasp for the levers of power. To top it all off, mainstream criticism of these earlier generations is considered improper. I dunno, but this all sounds pretty anti-liberty if you ask me. Of course, like all generalizations, it only contains a very small kernel of truth, and the remainder is wild extrapolation.

Pretty telling about THIS generation, IMO.

No, it is just oversimplification of an underlying phenomenon. Characterization by generation in either direction simply masks the real issue: the highly corrosive effects of leftist thoughts and actions. And speaking as a Gen X'er, I want conservatives of all generations along my side while we struggle to expel leftists' anti-liberty tendencies from this nation's body politic. To look askance at potential allies simply because of their age is to play right into the divisive hands of the leftits.