Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@qoto.org

@munificent

I switched from being a carpenter & builder to computer programming due to injuries preventing me from doing what is a pretty strenuous job.

Did I regret it - never! I thoroughly enjoyed programming and I was paid at least 3 times as much as I ever earned as a carpenter and often 4 or 5 times as much!

I'm now retired but I still love doing a bit of programming! I started off my programming career learning 'C' and it's still my favourite language. Since then I have also worked in Visual Basic, Java, SQL & PL/SQL and more recently C# - so full circle in some ways.

All my retirement projects are written in C# these days and although I'm not a great fan of OO languages, it works!

Add age about 38, I morphed my career from being a builder into being a software engineer.
For 16 or 17 years I was a full time IT contractor and therefore moved fairly regularly from company to company. From the client's point of view, taking on computer contractors is a phenomenally expensive exercise, and it is therefore only the largest and most well-heeled companies who can afford to do that!
In my time as a contractor, I worked for some of the biggest names in British, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgish industry and commerce. Based on that experience, I think I can safely say that most companies are pretty appallingly badly managed however some stand out as examples of just how excruciatingly poor management decisions can be.
I'm not going to mention any names except to say that the company I'm talking about are a household name in the United Kingdom. They employed a director responsible for IT who was an enormous enthusiast for Unix; preferring it to windows even as a desktop client. At the time the company in question was using a mainframe for data crunching operations and this IT director thought that an outmoded platform. He decided pretty much unilaterally the the way forward was to port all the code that currently ran on the mainframe to Unix server boxes and to replace all the PC's that currently sat on the hundreds of desks throughout the company's offices with some workstations running Unix.
At a cost of £ millions, he ordered the purchase of the necessary hardware and recruited a team of analysts and programmers to port the mainframe codebase to a programming language that would run on Unix servers. The job was estimated to take a couple of years after which the mainframe could be finally shut down. Three years later, the work was nowhere near finished and after five years serious questions were being asked! At around this time, The IT director responsible decided that it was time for a career move and left the company for a similar position in another company. This debacle had already cost the company £ millions and the board of directors together with the new IT director decided that it was a lost cause and cancelled the entire project. The Sun workstations that had been purchased to replace the windows PC's on every single desk in the company were sold off at a massive loss to the staff themselves.

@auschwitzmuseum

It leads to the exact same destination as the USA is on course to visit very soon and the destination that, horrifically, Israel has chosen for it's people too!

@HarriettMB

I have never understood what on earth Billy Piper saw in the fascist twat!

This is a marketplace for trump supporting arsehole businesses. Now you can easily establish what business never to buy anything from!

www.publicsquare.com

@HarriettMB

I don't see how he can be not guilty; if the authorities didn't have evidence that he did what it is alleged he did, they wouldn't have brought the prosecution. The only thing a not guilty plea is going to get him is a stiffer sentence.

@syntaxseed

Anyone who thinks that the USA is going to become "factory to the world" again is hallucinating!

That mantle has now passed to China, Vietnam, Thailand and other 'developing' countries.

What we are witnessing is the decline of a once great power; the USA is in terminal decline just like the decline of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, the British empire, just like the decline of other gigantic powers - the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Russian empire/soviet union, the Spanish empire, the French and so on

A point or two to ponder:

When vehicles tyres wear, they liberate large quantities of rubber dust and although these days only about 40% of the rubber content of a car tyre is natural latex, that is still a massive quantity of rubber dust which, for those people unfortunate enough to be allergic to Hevea latex, could be expected to bring on a life threatening allergic reaction, particularly in towns where traffic is dense and the continuous heavy traffic will stir up the rubber dust especially in prolonged dry spells.

When I was young and right up to the 1990s, vehicle brake pads and brake shoes contained large quantities of asbestos which produced a fine dust as the friction materials wore away. This dust was deposited on the roads particularly after disc brakes became common (the dust produced by drum brakes tends to stay in the drums).

My questions are therefore:
why are people allergic to natural latex not dying like flies in the street from exposure to rubber dust from vehicle tyres and why were the majority of people who lived in towns prior to the 1990s not affected by asbestosis and mesothelioma from exposure to vehicle brake dust?