You didn't start your question with the sentence:
"I am the CIO for one of the largest HVAC manufacturers in the world."

So the answer is: I hope you either have a family tie to the company, or some other mechanism of having your voice heard.
Since you already have shown that the path is chosen and the consultants are already on the ground running with the conversion, then it's already too late.

See, really your problem is that you hired in people that don't know how to do the job, and that's the problem with the majority of consultants these days. If you have good people (consultants or internal) then good things are possible no matter what choice is made. If you have bad people, it doesn't matter either.. the outcome was based purely on whether you have the knowledgeable people in a decision making role and in positions to actually do the work.

It's pretty much hit or miss on successful or failure ERP implementations, the common thread is the people and management. Unless that's fixed, get ready for a rough ride.

There's one thing that I try to keep in mind, though, when traveling down the rough road:
Change the things that you're able to change and position yourself for the change that you can't. So that way, even though things don't go your way, hopefully you have a backup plan that is still possible in the event of failure.

The problem with this battle is that you're a contract worker. So if reasoning/persuasion doesn't work, then you're only options are to end the contract, or fulfill your obligation.
Keep documentation that shows that you brought up the problem, and were rejected. Bake in language on subsequent contracts that give you an out under these types of scenarios, and move on.
If someone is unwilling to listen to reason, is in a position of power, and there's no laws that they are breaking, then that pretty much gives you all of the information you need to know about your options! Just learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Ok, so let's have them fail this bill. Would that make it better?

2 is all you get.
Same as why U.S. citizens aren't asking other countries to stop spying on them. It's up to their government to prevent it. You know, sanctions and whatnot.

Spying is fun, tons of people are doing it. You ever open up outlook and view someone else's calendar? ohhh yeah, spying! It's all in the game.

So what does that come out to?
They sell something like 800 million books a year:
http://www.digitalbookworld.co...

Multiple that by 9,000 per infringement:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/...

A conservative estimate would have them owing:
7,200,000,000,000

Or if you don't want to count the 0's: 7.2 trillion dollars.

I think they should fork over the 7.2 trillion; that'll teach them a lesson.

Touché

Food - we have machinery making it easier. So we don't need 100 people tending to a crop anymore... But! the replacement of labor with machinery is slowing down.
Each of those areas are impacted by technology the same way, but ultimately I see it just like I see a black hole.

You have some people think that a black hole is a single dimension point in space in which all matter has collapsed. That would be the equivalent of the types of futures in which all labor is replaced by robots/automation.

I look at a black hole is a 3 dimensional object still, which still experiences time. Matter is just collapsed really efficiently, but has volume in which the force necessary to compress it further is not achievable by gravitational force being exerted. I don't have any maths to support this thought, and there's probably some out there that disprove it, but I see it based on our current understanding which may not have accounted for variables that arise in those types of environments. So my gut tells me it still has volume.

So just like food production, I think there will always be a minimal non-zero set of people required to run things. Anything less and you go out of business just due to no one being able to purchase your goods, but everyone trying to steal them instead :)

Computer Science != programming

Here's an ascii Venn diagram for you:

(Computer Science ...(programming)... ... ... ... ... ..(damn filters preventing junk characters). ... ... ...snipped for brevity... ... ... ... ... ...)

Uhhh... Windows Vista? Windows 8? Need I go on? - Those were all based on logic and produced complete bullshit :)

You're really not getting money back from credit cards. The vendors mark up their prices to account for the fees they have to pay to the credit card companies for those transactions.

Really what you're doing is getting a portion of the markup back from the credit card company. You get 1%, the object you purchased was 3% marked up, 2% goes to the credit card company. (Over simplified, but that's the idea).

A more correct way of looking at it is you're not paying full markup for an item that people who pay in cash do.
In relativistic terms, you still have a financial advantage over those individuals - if that's what's important to you :)

Join em.

...with the Finkler part at the end. I've gotten to the same point where I'm coming across "frameworks" that are supposed to be the be all end all of everything you could possible want to develop on to make your enterprise applications. They are designed so generically, and configurably, that they become useless and waste much more time trying to find the right combination of configuration to make things actually work, since they had to duct tape 30 different other kinds of frameworks together into their framework. Not to mention, the documentation falls apart in the end, and the amount of untested combinations leads you to just working your own hacks in.

I walk into a store to buy a hammer and I can find a sub-selection of the ones listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
There's a reason why there's variations, because each one makes a particular job easier. Is this really a bad thing to have so many variations? I don't think there's anything wrong with it, and I certainly don't want to try to make a 1 hammer fits all when it results in a Swiss army knife in which people only use 2 or 3 parts of it.

So yeah, I really like the idea of stability, clarity, and I'd add purpose. Make the frameworks do 1 thing right 99.999% of the time and shoot for 100% before tacking on 29 other things to the side of it to make your Swiss army knife.

Another way to counteract it is to indicate you signed under duress. If you are trying to get a job to put food on the table and you really don't have another option, when when someone tells you sign this or we won't hire you, you're "forced" to sign it even if you didn't want to. Any signature acquired under duress is invalid and doesn't form a binding agreement.
I think it just matters if these agreements are signed after the individual arrives on their first day of work, or before they accept the position and inform their previous business. My assumption is that these agreements are put in front of the person on their first working day... you really have no choice but to sign anything they put in front of you then...

http://www.lawguru.com/article...

The best thing is you won't feel a thing or even see it coming!
Spaghettification, fire, drowning, blunt force trauma, radiation poisoning... all rather painful even if only for a split second. This, it even prevents the electrons from being picked up and interpreted as pain!

Are you implying that there may be 50% less "organic" additives to my burger after the robot revolution? Or am I going to have to worry about having oil spit into my burger? I'm not sure which is more disgusting...
By then, it may be completely unburger anyways.