More on being laid off. The company is supposedly high-tech.
Defibrillators. Yet their cost-reduction is laying off R & D staff. (Also closing
an expensive Irvine office near the airport, which the engineering
staff regarded as an extravagant waste of money.) Yet the
former CEO who makes in 3 months what an engineer makes
in a year is kept.
Our PhD scientist who wrote the family jewels, the code that determines
whether to shock or not (which can kill or save), resigned a few days
ago. Rumor was it was to save jobs. A really nice guy, native Chinese.
I'll miss the folks at work, excellent senses of humor and brilliant all
around. The fired lead engineer was a woman, FWIW. And "middle
aged". A rare and precious work environment. (Actually she probably
didn't think that much of me; I wasn't as experienced in embedded and
when under time-pressure didn't do that well.)
Speaking of time. I was testing the Gizmo's error handling, and two
errors before I was done testing it, I found that a trivial failure caused
the whole system to reset. Life-critical gizmos and corporate time-scales
really don't mix. Other neat things: without experienced consultants
the project wouldn't have gotten done. Then they left. Its as if
no one ever read The Mythical Man-Month.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201835959/102-7210681-8668908?v=glance
PS: Leeches and Maggots are now FDA-regulated devices.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/24/news/fortune500/maggots/?section=money_mostpopular
I don't know which is a grosser critter. But if I needed them, they
would be limb-savers.
Personally I don't think the FDA or DEA should regulate what you
can buy. The use of certain words should be regulated by the state,
and addictive/sleep-inducing/hallucinogenic/fever-reducing
things should be required to be labelled. But you should be able
to buy whatever you want. Asking the government to take care of
you is 1. asking Evolution to take you out 2. encouraging big brother.
Better to have independent organizations like Kosher or the UL labs
available to consumers, than to have the government tell you what you
can or can't have. Again, if you sell something objectively (as measured
through scientific methods) addictive, hypertensive, etc., you must
label it thusly, (otherwise its fraud, which the government can
rightly regulate, as its the role of the government to regulate fraud
and unconsensual violence) but it should be otherwise freely available, available
for recommendation or scorn of whatever organization(s) you subscribe
to. Yes, the masses are dumb, but that's why there are recommending
agencies like Kosher, Consumer Reports, the folks who grant the labels
Organic or Green or whatever. The worst is to have the violence of the
State (elected by the dumbs) control what you can consume.
Democracy is merely (readily sellable to the mob) mob rule. That's what the
Bill of Rights is about --limiting the mob. Unfortunately, the mob
can elect slime that doesn't enforce the BoR, so democracy is
no guarantee of Freedom. Sometimes benevolent dictatorship is
appealing, except that there's no guarantee that dictator N+1 is
reasonable. But then, no guarantee that the next cycle of elected
slime or appointed "officials" is reasonable either. What we need
is a BoR that is enforced, to keep the idiots at bay, despite their
majority.
