I find this characterization offensive. Who is to judge if the defined benefit pension if a primary school teacher or fireman, for example, is bloated? It's part of the negotiated pay package, nothing more or less.
At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.
Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.
At least in my union defined benefit pension it specifically excludes overtime since that obviously is ripe for abuse. It's just your basic calculation: average of your best 5 years of salary at 2% per year of service.
Is that not the case for police unions in the states?
FTA: "Although paying for excess hours can cost less than hiring new cops, overtime contributes to future pension costs.
“If your last few years before you retire, you work 300, 400 hours of overtime and bump up your pay by $40,000, that all goes into the salary that your pension is based on,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at New York’s Citizens Budget Commission."
So yeah, it seems like a bad idea to be able to scam the pension system like that.
Why are we mad at someone who has worked their whole life and is getting a decent retirement, when the article is talking about PE management fees being extracted from essential services at enormous rates?
And yes, pensions are a major part of the PE funding, but not all of it. There are a bunch of incredibly rich people who are also profiting from all of this at exorbitant rates. Can we be mad at them instead?
All seem trivial compared to the money sucked up by billionaires, who seem to do little good for society. I'm not going to get angry at a police officer trying to maximize their retirement when we live in a society that celebrates people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Those billionaires are not hoarding cash like a dragon in a lair, their wealth is mostly in stock in productive (FB is debatable at this point) companies many people use.
Boomers (only people I know receiving pensions) use pensions to fund lavish lifestyles without having build major companies.
Yeah. How dare they… give you one-day delivery of anything you might want like magic for the first time in human history and help use fewer fossil fuels to prolong your planet’s life while also providing ubiquitous connectivity anywhere on the planet’s surface. The selfish scoundrels.
My mom's a teacher. She would get a pension if the state could actually fund its pension program, which it can't now, and certainly won't when she retires in a few years. The government ones tend to actually have, yknow, morals and stuff.
Nothing personal here. It's possible for some pensions to suck and not others. It's also possible for a pension to suck and its beneficiaries to not suck.
I think I may have heard of a similar problem in a different field, computational thermodynamics. Solutions to a set of equations may be real or complex. The nonlinear solvers worked with real numbers exclusively and from time to time would not converge to any solution. Apparently if one used a solver that worked with complex numbers, the solver would reach a solution in real space more often than exclusively real solvers. Of course solving was much more expensive. Your explanation seems to fit here too
Interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you have any papers or other publicly available works to share that discuss this? I'd be very interested in reading about it.
As someone who knows very little about security, this is really interesting, thanks! A question though: how would one know if there has been a breach? These examples look relatively easy to detect, but I guess there would be more complex cases?
I also know very little, but something that struck me upon reading your question: if a breach is successful, the logs can't be relied upon for detection/analysis if they're on the same server. It's important to ship them elsewhere.
This is why some people run a honeypot in their network... and even those won't necessarily catch everything if the honeypot only mimics services that the attacker isn't probing for. You can set up tripwires on access and egress of sensitive data but that's only part of the surface area (and if the system gets attacked those tripwires could be disabled, if the attacker either knows what to look for or has a plan for a side channel for exfiltrating data).
Really the only good answer is defense in depth and keep looking for any indicators of odd behavior, and wall out unrelated systems entirely from each other, keep the DMZ and public facing bits as simple as possible.
You can use honeypot that bait hackers . I am running a non-intrusive one where you put baits in your servers or laptop, when hackers see it, they'll try to use them.
IOC or indicators of compromise, but if you know little it is always advisable to hire someone to go through it on demand or periodically as there’s no one trick to rule them all.
I believe that in Canada, and certainly in Alberta, the titles are very much controlled. The regulatory group APEGA has a Professional Engineer designation for software engineers as well
Context matters. Even in Alberta, the term “software engineer” doesn’t mean anything. Last time I looked into this, Quebec was trying the hardest to control usage and they actually took Microsoft to court for their MCSE title.
Another example: the University of Alberta has a software engineering program.
Search on Canadian job sites and you will find hundreds of software engineering jobs across Canada (including Alberta).
Other examples of non-PE engineers include stationary engineer (people who operate boilers) and locomotive engineer (people who operate trains). They may have their own regulations, but it is entirely distinct from Professional Engineers.
I had a similar realization, but it’s not really about working hard vs. not working hard, it’s about knowing what’s important to your manager. Early in my career I would never say no to any task, and would give the time estimate I thought the manager wanted, and then work over time to get it done. Half the time the finished product had bugs, got delivered too late, or ended up not matching what the client wanted, so the “hard work” didn’t translate directly into success. Now I try to figure out what the client’s actual needs are and how to meet them as quickly and with as little work as possible, and when something is requiring overtime, I immediately stop working on it and communicate that it’s a bigger issue than expected, and either push the project, get additional engineers, or find a different way to solve the issue. I think programmers really enjoy solving problems and we never like to admit that something is more difficult than we expected because we feel like we failed, but actually that’s just an expected part of the job. Obviously this only works if you have a good manager who actually cares about results. Bad managers are easy to manipulate because you just optimize for whatever BS metric they’ve decided is important, but those jobs are soul crushing.
