But Gimp, Darkroom and Rawtherapee are not up to the task. Windows/Mac offerings are great for my workflow. -Posted from my Windows 11 laptop used for editing photos.

Oh tailgating is rampant. Confirmed for myself and watching video.

Years ago I tested the badge swipe data for my enterprise to see if it was good enough to automate attendance, it was not. They had me look at other methods, IP addressing, application usage, and web usage. All had their pitfalls that would hurt employees. I talked them out of it.

I could not talk them out of tracking attendance. They landed on having my team build an attendance tracking application where managers reported their team's attendance. Even this is fraught with human error.

The concept of managing to deadlines, deliverables and KPIs fell on def ears. Butts in seats is the metric they wanted.

It's executive and senior managers covering up their inability to deliver based on actual deliverables.

Is Swan Lake on every channel?

I grew up in a house hold of poets. We sit around the fire and entertain each other with stories.

My intellectual superiority must be validated. /s

No one wants to go to the theater anymore and I don't understand why!

Turn off the Fox News and Sinclair owned media sources.

Yodlee is like mint.com, people sign up for the service. What makes Yodlee worse is they run the backend for many bank's personal financial management (PFM) systems, aka account aggregation. For most, they do not know they are signing up for Yodlee to collect their data.

At least with Mint.com you know exactly what's going on.

I imagine most who sign up for their banks PFM service do not realize it's run by Yodlee. Customers are trusting the bank is doing the right thing. In a way, Yodlee is trading on the assumed fiduciary responsibility of banks.

Only in recent years have banks begun to scrutinize their business partner/vendor relationships. Particularly what is done with customer data by the vendor.

The tax was poorly written. It was a tax on gross receipts over 21 million. This hit low margin businesses hard. Yeah sure, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Getty and the rest could have paid it. We have many regional businesses that would be hit very hard, likely leaving the city. We need to revisit it.

I'm in a similar situation as you, OP.

Managing distractions is the key thing I am working on.

I manage a team consisting of a systems engineer, one help desk person and a bank operations clerk that depends heavily on the technology group.

We are unfortunately not back office, we are very accessible to the general bank staff. This has its blessings but far more detractors in my opinion. There's an expectation by the rest of the bank staff that my people are accessible at any time for walk up questions. This is far from the case, we all have our projects and work queues.

So what I have been doing to deflecting these walk ups and ad-hoc requests as much as possible. I find these distractions to be the biggest hindrance to productivity and employee happiness for my group. My people just want to keep things running and solve business problems. They do not want to help people download photos of Mr. Sniffles to their "hard drive".

Long story short, consider the distractions whether it be operational, logistical or even political. If you can insulate and protect your people from the minutia that is the modern workplace, I think you will find them productive and happy. Your people should feel like they completed something each day they leave. Also leave at good hours and be able to leave the office behind on the weekends.

Actually, something else is causing the seals to fail on the bearings and master bearing. The sampling pipe was the original theory but it could not account for the damage being done.

FTFA “Contractors are not entirely sure what’s happening to the seals. They’re letting sand in, which is not good,” said Matt Preedy, deputy Highway 99 administrator for the state Department of Transportation (DOT). “Either you’ve got gaps somewhere, or you’ve got cracks in the seals.”

http://seattletimes.com/html/l...

Basically, our water front soil make up is not ideal. Much of the Seattle water front is fill dirt from various late 19th century and early 20th century projects around Seattle. Much of the path Bertha is taking underground is lined with caissons to keep the liquid dirt at bay.

It's a cycle. Overpopulation requires more arable land for agriculture. When there isn't any, it's created, such as the San Joaquin Valley. This valley was basically desert. This was done by damming a few rivers and irrigating the land. That being said you can only convert so many deserts for agriculture, you start to run out of water, even if you still receive your normal annual rain fall. That would be a drought caused by over population. Same thing is is happening in Phoenix. The water table continues to drop and the aquifers are becoming harder and harder to reach. Not due to climate change but by more people.

So dealing with overpopulation needs to go hand in hand with changing how we generate and use energy.

There's a movement in the industrialized world. Fewer young people are choosing to have children period. I'm not sure if this trend would ever offset those who choose to have 5, 10 or even 12 offspring in their life.

A Vietnamese friend once explained that in Vietnam, people have large families as infant mortality was quite high; to the point that children would be referred to by their birth order for several years until it was certain they would survive. So the oldest would be "First One" then so on and so forth. With modern medicine, infant mortality has plummeted but cultures still believe they need large families.

I agree, family planning is one tool to mitigate our future issues.

You beat me to it.

For more information: Maginot Line

In the US, Direct Deposit rules vary by state. There are states that allow employers to offer only one method of compensation, meaning direct deposit.

On another note, there are a number of reasons why we still use checks in the US. The main reason is playing with float. Companies will squeeze every cent out of their money by hanging on to it for as long as possible. The banks do it too. Also, the banks have been putting "band-aids" on the check problem. Notably, Check21 or digital check clearing.

The Fed (our reserve bank) has made a successful push to digitize all paper item clearing. Checks rarely make it past the branch or payee. This is thanks to branch capture and remote check deposit products.

Checks are still the cheapest and easiest way for individuals to make payment. With the advent of digital item clearing, it's not going away. Until micro-payments become cheaper, we'll continue to use checks.