On the "cash is good side": Anonymity, ease of use, and it's cheaper (at least in theory: no transaction fee). It's also a more robust payment system, because it works even if there's a power outage, or your Internet is down, or whatever.
On the other side, cash may not actually be cheaper, because someone has to count it, deposit it at the bank, run to get more change, etc.. There is also the risk of theft, depending on where you are located.
For the, the winning argument is anonymity. A way to purchase items that doesn't add yet more personal data to the cloud. OTOH, it is possible that the GDPR will solve this problem. Your average shop does not ask you for permission to collect and share your purchase data - eventually, some privacy organization will notice this and file suit, and the penalties are stiff enough to get even the biggest company's attention.
Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".
Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."
For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers, if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:
When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.
Privatized medicine can work. There are clinics in the US that offer a menu of fixed-price services, and take direct payment (no insurance). No bureaucracy leads to reasonable prices - everybody wins.
The problem comes when the government intervenes too much. In the health insurance market, insisting that everyone must be covered, regardless of health problems or pre-existing conditions - that's no longer insurance, and has led to the problems the US is facing. Let the private insurance market work - it worked just fine for most people, most of the time, over many decades.
For people who cannot qualify for private insurance, the government can become the health care provider of last resort. That's basically where Medicare/Medicaid would come into play. Essential services only, no cosmetic or optional treatments. This is also where people would land, who get ill or injured, but couldn't be bothered to pay for insurance.
The situation in countries like the UK is actually not too dissimilar. The NHS provides health care for everyone, as long as you don't mind waiting months or years for anything that's not immediately life threatening. Meanwhile, there is a perfectly functional private insurance market for people who don't want to wait - the prices are reasonable, and coverage is good. As far as I can tell, the government basically ignores the private market - which is probably why it works.
- We have the 1% - the wealthy and powerful, who only send other people into danger, and then only if it enhances their own wealth and power. You sure won't see them doing any sort of real military service, for example. And they surely won't risk themselves or their money on "adventures".
- We have the middle class. In today's world, they enjoy a living standard that can only be compared to royalty of earlier times. Huges houses, plenty of food, cheap entertainment, right down to the supercomputer in your pocket. Very, very few of these people (and I include myself here) have the balls to do anything more dangerous than a bungee jump - and most not even that.
- We have the lower class. Largely uneducated and unskilled, they live off of bread and circuses provided (unwillingly, through taxation) by the middle class. Some might have the intestinal fortitude for an adventure, if there were opportunity at the end of it, but they haven't got the necessary education or skills.
A Mars mission takes money that only the first group has, education and skills found in the second group, and the motivation that might be found in the third group. Unfortunately, none of these are found together, in the same people. Granted, there are exceptions (Elon Musk and SpaceX come to mind), but they are notable mainly for their rarity.
We all know about the town of Scunthorpe. I suppose that talking about Dickeybirds is right out? Be sure you don't mishit any balls. And British bird watchers are eagerly awaiting the day that the Great Tit becomes extinct, so they don't have to talk about it any longer.
More seriously, if Debian is removing Weboob, then they also need to remove all of the following packages: Liboobs, Titanion and TitanTools. If they do not, inquiring minds want to know why...
Sometimes one really doesn't understand. People talk about reducing plastic usage, but then they do just the opposite. Recent example: There's a particular brand of cat litter that I usually buy. Cat litter is basically fancy dirt, nothing special, and this brand packed it in a paper bag, which was fine. I went to buy another bag last week, and: they've changed to a heavy-duty plastic bag. WTF?
Russia tried to influence a US election. So what? This is standard stuff. Every country tries to protect its interests, and part of this is trying to influence other countries and their governments. News at 11:00.
If people want to get upset about something, how about prosecuting Bush and Obama for attacking sovereign countries without a declaration of war? While Trump hasn't ended any wars, at least he hasn't added any new entries to the list...
This. This technology is more than 30 years old. It is air-gapped, meaning that the primary security barrier is physical - it is invulnerable to any sort of ordinary hacking. Anti-virus makes zero sense. "Removable media" may well refer to floppy disks.
The IG report does identify a number of problems, but mitigating these problems on ancient technology is non-trivial, and may not even be possible. For example, the processors involved may not even be capable of encrypting data to modern standards, in any sort of reasonable time.
The fundamental problem is the mentality that "the customer is always right". That wasn't even what was originally said, all those years ago in Macy's. It was more along the lines of, don't argue with the customer in public.
If something is broken, or wrong, or whatever - of course, you should be able to send it back. However, when it comes to abuse, the retail world needs to grow a spine. Just as an example: There is an online clothing retailer where I live. They have trendy stuff, and quickly became very popular with young women. The last I heard, a year or so ago, fully half of the clothes were returned. Some anonymous interviews with their customers revealed the reason: Lots of them would order 3 or 4 outfits, wear them out, or to parties, or whatever - show off something new - and then return the outfits, only to order more.
The same thing happens in other branches, although non-clothing is a bit less personal. Who hasn't received a piece of electronics, or a toy, or whatever where the packaging has clearly been opened? If shop like the clothing retailer I mentioned stay in business, the only way they can do it is by sending out those very same articles again to the next customer. Sold as if they were new, not due to some shady middleman, but directly by the stores themselves.
So we all pay the price for this crap. Getting (hopefully lightly) used stuff sold to us as new. And generally paying higher prices, because the associated costs have to be covered somehow. If you aren't familiar with the site NotAlwaysRight, you should have a look. It's where people in retail get to tell the stories of some of the customers they have to deal with. It's funny, sure, but it's also freaking sad...
If you look at their data (download the PDF - it has the overview graphs), it's what you expect: CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the West are declining. China, following massive rises, has plateaued at a high level - on a per capita basis, the same as the EU (shocking, given the number of Chinese living essentially pre-industrial lives).
On a per capita basis, the US is still far higher than anyone else. However, this has been declining at an impressive pace, and there is no obvious basis for the claim that US consumption will increase in 2018. In fact, that would be a huge trend reversal, and (imho) is likely a politically motivated claim.
Meanwhile, emissions from India and other Asian countries are increasing rapidly. In fact, they are driving *all* of the global increase, plus compensating for declining emissions everywhere else.
First, the screen is a separate, sealed unit. There should be (and AFAIK is) no open connection between the air ducts and the screen.
Second, WTF do you want a filter? The air ducts suck in air, blow it over a heat exchanger and back out again. Who cares if there's dust in the air? It will generally just blow right back out.
A filter is just going to clog up and cause the machine to overheat. And joe-average user will never clean the damned thing.
This is clearly impractical. If you're driving for a ride-sharing company, how many rides are you taking? Where are you working? Do you drive efficiently or inefficiently? How can this map to any particular wage?
Some drivers work for both Uber and Lyft. How do you prove they are refusing rides for one service, because they are currently transporting someone for the other service? Or do they get double the minimum wage?
This looks like an attempt to force ride-sharing services into the taxi service model, where people are hired as employees, and have their work directed centrally: You must go here and pick up this passenger. At which point they become taxis, and need medallions. Which is probably the real goal behind this: corporate cronyism, to protect the existing NY taxi businesses.
I've been in Africa, I've been involved in a couple of projects there. There are some really great people, but also a pile of problems. Yet, anytime someone tries to discuss those problems, people like you shut down the discussion with cries of "racism".
Fine, but first: can you please explain how the US military went from being reviled in the 70's to the hero worship of today? I really do not understand this, given that the wars of the past couple of decades have been even less honorable and less justified than Vietnam.
Dunno what you can do about "low information voters". Allow me to digress...
Just recently I somehow came across an article from the US, where a biologist had discovered retroviruses in vaccines, and these viruses were responsible for everything from autism to dementia. Having angered the powerful pharma cartels, the researcher was in jail, and all of her data had been confiscated.
Curious, I did a bit of research. As always, there was a kernel of truth. The researcher had, indeed written a paper about retroviruses. She had been fired from her job, and had taken company data (apparently paper files) with her. The company charged her with theft. She handed the data back, and the charges were dropped.
So you get conspiracy theorists who read more into this, in support of their pet paranoia - in this case, clearly anti-vaxxers. They make use of technology - like WhatsApp - to spread their nonsense. In the US, this isn't a huge problem, because enough of the population has enough of an education, and the "low information voters" ultimately don't dominate the voting population.
So...Nigeria... A country where most of the population has little education, and hence few critical thinking skills. The West has given them high technology, but they lack the general level of education to go with it. So the fruits and nuts can spread their nonsense far and wide - and it has a massive influence.
Democratic institutions can only work, when the population has a minimal level of education. The purists pushing democracy as some sort of panacaea? They are indirectly responsible for a lot of death and misery. It's not PC to notice, but the continuous warfare in much of Africa has not been an improvement over colonialism.
The freshwater problems of these islands is not due to climate. It is almost always a case of local overuse. When the islanders pump to much fresh water out of the island, salt water impinges. Overuse of freshwater can also cause land subsidence.
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
If it's actually true that Russia jammed GPS, one should thank them profusely. Any military planner who expects GPS to last past the first minutes of a serious military confrontation, is living in fantasy land. It is easily jammed, and numerous countries undoubtedly have anti-satellite capability. Hence, practicing maneuvers without GPS had better be standard practice.
Of course, it's also possible that one NATO unit was tasked with the jamming, without informing the other units. And this was later blamed on Russia, because right now every damned thing is blamed on Russia.
Wrong. My phone lives in my pocket and sees heavy use. It has been repaired once, and has a couple of chips in the bezel, where it was dropped (good reason to avoid phones with no bezel).
If you take decent care of your stuff, and don't have to have the new shiny, three years is no problem.
Three years? Even as a gamer, I am using a 5 year old gaming PC with no problems. My Nexus 5X works fine, and I have no plans to replace it - why should I? Computing devices live a lot longer than three years. While new features can be reserved for new phones, security updates should be provided essentially forever.
Heck, I still have my original Nexus S, from 2010, and it works fine. The Google packages have bloated so much that they no longer fit. However, with root I could uninstall the Google bloat, and it is a fine backup phone.
Before you proceed, first ask yourself if the class fulfills its purpose. You have 15 years in the field - but most students have zero. Is the course out of date, or is it just covering the basics?
If it really is 10 years out of date, then you have two avenues to try. First, if you have an otherwise ok impression of the instructor, that's the place to start. Let him/her know of your experience, and offer to write down a list of topics and material that you see as relevant.
But honestly: I don't see this first alternative helping. I teach fundamental courses, and I still update them every single year. I expect you have an instructor who's burned out, or close to retirement, or suffering some other personal problem.
In which case, your second alternative is to go to the head of the program. Do this *after* you've finished the course, because you *will* piss off the instructor. Again, lay out your experience, and compare the current material with what is being taught in the course.
If the head of the program doesn't care, then you're in the wrong program. Finish your degree, get the piece of paper, and go on with life...
In recent years, I'm more familiar with the UK labor (um...labour) market than the US, and there the situation has really developed into a class-based society. You have the "nobility", who have jobs with benefits. And you have the "serfs" who are technically "temps" - short-term contract positions with no benefits. I know of cases where only upper management are actually employees - everyone else, from middle management on down, is a temp.
The advantages of this are obvious, at least to pointy-haired types: reduced costs and flexible labor - you can hire-and-fire on a whim.
The disadvantages are numerous. For the temps, life is insecure: jobs are short, typically somewhere around a year. They have no benefits, and if they don't manage to hang jobs seamlessly together (and how are you supposed to do that?), they wind up spending their savings surviving the frequent times of unemployment. Or else, this racket get subsidized by the taxpayer, when they wind up on benefits.
There are also downsides for the businesses that the spreadsheet-driven managers don't seem to understand. If you have any business with face-to-face customer service, customer loyalty is seriously impacted, because there's always someone new - you never see the same person for an extended period of time. There is also a lack of loyalty within the business - if you're just temporary, why should you actually give a sh*t? Difficult issue? Just shove it aside - by the time it become critical, you'll be gone anyway.
Lastly, consider training, and errors. The UK is a seriously chaotic place to do business. At least part of this is due to the fact that everyone is always new, always just learning the job. By the time they know what they are doing, they're gone, and next temp is hired.
Manufacturing is certainly a huge part of the equation, and this definitely must be considered.
What I find more amusing is a look at the fuel efficiency. In many, many places electricity comes from power plants burning fossil fuels. A good internal combustion engine will top 30%. How does it look for an electric vehicle?
The generation efficiency of a methane or coal plant is likely around 40%. Transmission efficiency from the power plant to your home, about 90% efficiency. Battery charging efficiency is between 80% and 90%, and you get another 80%-90% efficiency when discharging the battery. Multiple that all together, and you wind up...right around the efficiency of internal combustion.
tl;dr: Electric vehicles that get their electricity indirectly from fossil fuels have about the same overall efficiency as internal combustion vehicles. All they are doing is outsourcing the CO2 generation.
...gene-editing technology will be used to correct genes leading to diseases like cystic fibrosis, but people won't resist using the technology to make them stronger or smarter. "Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, "
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
Meanwhile, imagine the potential* benefits to society, if we could increase average health, and raise the average intelligence by a standard deviation or two.
*Potential. It is also entirely believable that the people who take most advantage of this will - intentionally or otherwise - select for sociopathy or other deleterious traits.
Slashdot Mirror
On the "cash is good side": Anonymity, ease of use, and it's cheaper (at least in theory: no transaction fee). It's also a more robust payment system, because it works even if there's a power outage, or your Internet is down, or whatever.
On the other side, cash may not actually be cheaper, because someone has to count it, deposit it at the bank, run to get more change, etc.. There is also the risk of theft, depending on where you are located.
For the, the winning argument is anonymity. A way to purchase items that doesn't add yet more personal data to the cloud. OTOH, it is possible that the GDPR will solve this problem. Your average shop does not ask you for permission to collect and share your purchase data - eventually, some privacy organization will notice this and file suit, and the penalties are stiff enough to get even the biggest company's attention.
Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".
Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."
For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers, if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:
When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.
Privatized medicine can work. There are clinics in the US that offer a menu of fixed-price services, and take direct payment (no insurance). No bureaucracy leads to reasonable prices - everybody wins.
The problem comes when the government intervenes too much. In the health insurance market, insisting that everyone must be covered, regardless of health problems or pre-existing conditions - that's no longer insurance, and has led to the problems the US is facing. Let the private insurance market work - it worked just fine for most people, most of the time, over many decades.
For people who cannot qualify for private insurance, the government can become the health care provider of last resort. That's basically where Medicare/Medicaid would come into play. Essential services only, no cosmetic or optional treatments. This is also where people would land, who get ill or injured, but couldn't be bothered to pay for insurance.
The situation in countries like the UK is actually not too dissimilar. The NHS provides health care for everyone, as long as you don't mind waiting months or years for anything that's not immediately life threatening. Meanwhile, there is a perfectly functional private insurance market for people who don't want to wait - the prices are reasonable, and coverage is good. As far as I can tell, the government basically ignores the private market - which is probably why it works.
We are too comfortable...
- We have the 1% - the wealthy and powerful, who only send other people into danger, and then only if it enhances their own wealth and power. You sure won't see them doing any sort of real military service, for example. And they surely won't risk themselves or their money on "adventures".
- We have the middle class. In today's world, they enjoy a living standard that can only be compared to royalty of earlier times. Huges houses, plenty of food, cheap entertainment, right down to the supercomputer in your pocket. Very, very few of these people (and I include myself here) have the balls to do anything more dangerous than a bungee jump - and most not even that.
- We have the lower class. Largely uneducated and unskilled, they live off of bread and circuses provided (unwillingly, through taxation) by the middle class. Some might have the intestinal fortitude for an adventure, if there were opportunity at the end of it, but they haven't got the necessary education or skills.
A Mars mission takes money that only the first group has, education and skills found in the second group, and the motivation that might be found in the third group. Unfortunately, none of these are found together, in the same people. Granted, there are exceptions (Elon Musk and SpaceX come to mind), but they are notable mainly for their rarity.
We all know about the town of Scunthorpe. I suppose that talking about Dickeybirds is right out? Be sure you don't mishit any balls. And British bird watchers are eagerly awaiting the day that the Great Tit becomes extinct, so they don't have to talk about it any longer.
More seriously, if Debian is removing Weboob, then they also need to remove all of the following packages: Liboobs, Titanion and TitanTools. If they do not, inquiring minds want to know why...
Sometimes one really doesn't understand. People talk about reducing plastic usage, but then they do just the opposite. Recent example: There's a particular brand of cat litter that I usually buy. Cat litter is basically fancy dirt, nothing special, and this brand packed it in a paper bag, which was fine. I went to buy another bag last week, and: they've changed to a heavy-duty plastic bag. WTF?
I now buy a different brand of fancy dirt...
Russia tried to influence a US election. So what? This is standard stuff. Every country tries to protect its interests, and part of this is trying to influence other countries and their governments. News at 11:00.
The US not only meddles in elections; they go farther: the US goes in and overthrows governments they don't like (that's a list of 57 publicly known incidents).
If people want to get upset about something, how about prosecuting Bush and Obama for attacking sovereign countries without a declaration of war? While Trump hasn't ended any wars, at least he hasn't added any new entries to the list...
This. This technology is more than 30 years old. It is air-gapped, meaning that the primary security barrier is physical - it is invulnerable to any sort of ordinary hacking. Anti-virus makes zero sense. "Removable media" may well refer to floppy disks.
The IG report does identify a number of problems, but mitigating these problems on ancient technology is non-trivial, and may not even be possible. For example, the processors involved may not even be capable of encrypting data to modern standards, in any sort of reasonable time.
The fundamental problem is the mentality that "the customer is always right". That wasn't even what was originally said, all those years ago in Macy's. It was more along the lines of, don't argue with the customer in public.
If something is broken, or wrong, or whatever - of course, you should be able to send it back. However, when it comes to abuse, the retail world needs to grow a spine. Just as an example: There is an online clothing retailer where I live. They have trendy stuff, and quickly became very popular with young women. The last I heard, a year or so ago, fully half of the clothes were returned. Some anonymous interviews with their customers revealed the reason: Lots of them would order 3 or 4 outfits, wear them out, or to parties, or whatever - show off something new - and then return the outfits, only to order more.
The same thing happens in other branches, although non-clothing is a bit less personal. Who hasn't received a piece of electronics, or a toy, or whatever where the packaging has clearly been opened? If shop like the clothing retailer I mentioned stay in business, the only way they can do it is by sending out those very same articles again to the next customer. Sold as if they were new, not due to some shady middleman, but directly by the stores themselves.
So we all pay the price for this crap. Getting (hopefully lightly) used stuff sold to us as new. And generally paying higher prices, because the associated costs have to be covered somehow. If you aren't familiar with the site NotAlwaysRight, you should have a look. It's where people in retail get to tell the stories of some of the customers they have to deal with. It's funny, sure, but it's also freaking sad...
If you look at their data (download the PDF - it has the overview graphs), it's what you expect: CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the West are declining. China, following massive rises, has plateaued at a high level - on a per capita basis, the same as the EU (shocking, given the number of Chinese living essentially pre-industrial lives).
On a per capita basis, the US is still far higher than anyone else. However, this has been declining at an impressive pace, and there is no obvious basis for the claim that US consumption will increase in 2018. In fact, that would be a huge trend reversal, and (imho) is likely a politically motivated claim.
Meanwhile, emissions from India and other Asian countries are increasing rapidly. In fact, they are driving *all* of the global increase, plus compensating for declining emissions everywhere else.
First, the screen is a separate, sealed unit. There should be (and AFAIK is) no open connection between the air ducts and the screen.
Second, WTF do you want a filter? The air ducts suck in air, blow it over a heat exchanger and back out again. Who cares if there's dust in the air? It will generally just blow right back out.
A filter is just going to clog up and cause the machine to overheat. And joe-average user will never clean the damned thing.
This is clearly impractical. If you're driving for a ride-sharing company, how many rides are you taking? Where are you working? Do you drive efficiently or inefficiently? How can this map to any particular wage?
Some drivers work for both Uber and Lyft. How do you prove they are refusing rides for one service, because they are currently transporting someone for the other service? Or do they get double the minimum wage?
This looks like an attempt to force ride-sharing services into the taxi service model, where people are hired as employees, and have their work directed centrally: You must go here and pick up this passenger. At which point they become taxis, and need medallions. Which is probably the real goal behind this: corporate cronyism, to protect the existing NY taxi businesses.
I was talking about the poorly educated population in Nigeria. You're the one who brought race into it.
I've been in Africa, I've been involved in a couple of projects there. There are some really great people, but also a pile of problems. Yet, anytime someone tries to discuss those problems, people like you shut down the discussion with cries of "racism".
Who is the real racist, here?
Fine, but first: can you please explain how the US military went from being reviled in the 70's to the hero worship of today? I really do not understand this, given that the wars of the past couple of decades have been even less honorable and less justified than Vietnam.
Dunno what you can do about "low information voters". Allow me to digress...
Just recently I somehow came across an article from the US, where a biologist had discovered retroviruses in vaccines, and these viruses were responsible for everything from autism to dementia. Having angered the powerful pharma cartels, the researcher was in jail, and all of her data had been confiscated.
Curious, I did a bit of research. As always, there was a kernel of truth. The researcher had, indeed written a paper about retroviruses. She had been fired from her job, and had taken company data (apparently paper files) with her. The company charged her with theft. She handed the data back, and the charges were dropped.
So you get conspiracy theorists who read more into this, in support of their pet paranoia - in this case, clearly anti-vaxxers. They make use of technology - like WhatsApp - to spread their nonsense. In the US, this isn't a huge problem, because enough of the population has enough of an education, and the "low information voters" ultimately don't dominate the voting population.
So...Nigeria... A country where most of the population has little education, and hence few critical thinking skills. The West has given them high technology, but they lack the general level of education to go with it. So the fruits and nuts can spread their nonsense far and wide - and it has a massive influence.
Democratic institutions can only work, when the population has a minimal level of education. The purists pushing democracy as some sort of panacaea? They are indirectly responsible for a lot of death and misery. It's not PC to notice, but the continuous warfare in much of Africa has not been an improvement over colonialism.
The freshwater problems of these islands is not due to climate. It is almost always a case of local overuse. When the islanders pump to much fresh water out of the island, salt water impinges. Overuse of freshwater can also cause land subsidence.
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
If it's actually true that Russia jammed GPS, one should thank them profusely. Any military planner who expects GPS to last past the first minutes of a serious military confrontation, is living in fantasy land. It is easily jammed, and numerous countries undoubtedly have anti-satellite capability. Hence, practicing maneuvers without GPS had better be standard practice.
Of course, it's also possible that one NATO unit was tasked with the jamming, without informing the other units. And this was later blamed on Russia, because right now every damned thing is blamed on Russia.
Wrong. My phone lives in my pocket and sees heavy use. It has been repaired once, and has a couple of chips in the bezel, where it was dropped (good reason to avoid phones with no bezel).
If you take decent care of your stuff, and don't have to have the new shiny, three years is no problem.
Three years? Even as a gamer, I am using a 5 year old gaming PC with no problems. My Nexus 5X works fine, and I have no plans to replace it - why should I? Computing devices live a lot longer than three years. While new features can be reserved for new phones, security updates should be provided essentially forever.
Heck, I still have my original Nexus S, from 2010, and it works fine. The Google packages have bloated so much that they no longer fit. However, with root I could uninstall the Google bloat, and it is a fine backup phone.
Before you proceed, first ask yourself if the class fulfills its purpose. You have 15 years in the field - but most students have zero. Is the course out of date, or is it just covering the basics?
If it really is 10 years out of date, then you have two avenues to try. First, if you have an otherwise ok impression of the instructor, that's the place to start. Let him/her know of your experience, and offer to write down a list of topics and material that you see as relevant.
But honestly: I don't see this first alternative helping. I teach fundamental courses, and I still update them every single year. I expect you have an instructor who's burned out, or close to retirement, or suffering some other personal problem.
In which case, your second alternative is to go to the head of the program. Do this *after* you've finished the course, because you *will* piss off the instructor. Again, lay out your experience, and compare the current material with what is being taught in the course.
If the head of the program doesn't care, then you're in the wrong program. Finish your degree, get the piece of paper, and go on with life...
"We all know that we need universal health care and UBI."
Um...no. You need to get out of your echo chamber more often.
In recent years, I'm more familiar with the UK labor (um...labour) market than the US, and there the situation has really developed into a class-based society. You have the "nobility", who have jobs with benefits. And you have the "serfs" who are technically "temps" - short-term contract positions with no benefits. I know of cases where only upper management are actually employees - everyone else, from middle management on down, is a temp.
The advantages of this are obvious, at least to pointy-haired types: reduced costs and flexible labor - you can hire-and-fire on a whim.
The disadvantages are numerous. For the temps, life is insecure: jobs are short, typically somewhere around a year. They have no benefits, and if they don't manage to hang jobs seamlessly together (and how are you supposed to do that?), they wind up spending their savings surviving the frequent times of unemployment. Or else, this racket get subsidized by the taxpayer, when they wind up on benefits.
There are also downsides for the businesses that the spreadsheet-driven managers don't seem to understand. If you have any business with face-to-face customer service, customer loyalty is seriously impacted, because there's always someone new - you never see the same person for an extended period of time. There is also a lack of loyalty within the business - if you're just temporary, why should you actually give a sh*t? Difficult issue? Just shove it aside - by the time it become critical, you'll be gone anyway.
Lastly, consider training, and errors. The UK is a seriously chaotic place to do business. At least part of this is due to the fact that everyone is always new, always just learning the job. By the time they know what they are doing, they're gone, and next temp is hired.
Sad to hear that the US is going the same way.
Manufacturing is certainly a huge part of the equation, and this definitely must be considered.
What I find more amusing is a look at the fuel efficiency. In many, many places electricity comes from power plants burning fossil fuels. A good internal combustion engine will top 30%. How does it look for an electric vehicle?
The generation efficiency of a methane or coal plant is likely around 40%. Transmission efficiency from the power plant to your home, about 90% efficiency. Battery charging efficiency is between 80% and 90%, and you get another 80%-90% efficiency when discharging the battery. Multiple that all together, and you wind up...right around the efficiency of internal combustion.
tl;dr: Electric vehicles that get their electricity indirectly from fossil fuels have about the same overall efficiency as internal combustion vehicles. All they are doing is outsourcing the CO2 generation.
...gene-editing technology will be used to correct genes leading to diseases like cystic fibrosis, but people won't resist using the technology to make them stronger or smarter. "Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, "
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
We already have the societal problems. As the saying goes: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." Even if we raise the averages, the problems remain essentially the same. What do we do now, with the ineducable and unskilled? We don't currently have any good solution...
Meanwhile, imagine the potential* benefits to society, if we could increase average health, and raise the average intelligence by a standard deviation or two.
*Potential. It is also entirely believable that the people who take most advantage of this will - intentionally or otherwise - select for sociopathy or other deleterious traits.