Debatable. Personally, I go with "extend Medicare to cover pre-existing conditions AND routine care, and make Health Insurance work like Auto (and all other) Insurance (only cover calamities - think how expensive auto insurance would be if it covered routine maintenance) works...
That's essentially what they did, but they did it by having the government provide a pool of money to the insurance companies, and they grossly underestimated how big the pool needed to be.
Lies. Not everyone who doesn't agree with your viewpoint is corrupt.
Regardless of whether you think net neutrality is good or bad, there is absolutely no legitimate justification for creating a completely toothless net neutrality law. Either you're for net neutrality and you want real regulation or you're against it and you don't want regulation. In the first case, you should vote for the bill as originally written. In the second case, you should have the guts and integrity to vote against it.
And there's even a third possibility, in this case, It would be perfectly reasonable for a legislator to argue that the proposed solution is a bad solution, and that a better solution would be requiring that fiber providers lease access to their competitors for a reasonable fee to cover the costs of line maintenance.
However, the only plausible reason for making a bill toothless is so that you can lie to the public and claim to be for net neutrality while in actuality deliberately undermining it. And that, right there, is absolutely the very definition of political corruption. Even if he hadn't taken telecom money, and if the only thing he did was blindly do whatever lobbyists told him to do, that's still corruption. So when people are calling this legislator corrupt, it is incredibly hard to argue to the contrary.
Insulting these people by calling them corrupt means you'll never convince them understand your viewpoint. Instead you become a lying enemy who must be destroyed. Some people certainly are corrupt, but not everyone. You should try to enlightening them instead of attacking them.
You cannot enlighten those who talk out of both sides of their mouths. They'll just lie to you and tell you what you want to hear, then vote the other way.
Even then, the best-case scenario is that you now have two companies with infrastructure that won't (or will barely) pay for itself before it has to be replaced.
A few years back, some of us did the math and concluded that most areas won't see a payoff from fiber deployment for at least 10 years. Fiber only lasts for about 15–25 years, so the absolute maximum sustainable number of fiber providers is approximately two, no matter how well-funded any of the companies is, unless you have someone who is prepared to lose money indefinitely, purely on principle, solely because they want to "stick it to" the incumbent carrier.
The cost to entry for the wires, even if everything is on poles or in conduit, even if there is no artificial monopoly granted by the local government, still makes it absolutely impossible to break even, because there will always be an entrenched provider that isn't still paying off its infrastructure, who can afford to lower prices until it drives any new competitor out of business, then buy that competitor's wires for a low-cost infrastructure upgrade, and raise prices to make up for their losses. I've seen this happen time and time again, even when you're talking about a moderately well established company trying to join an existing market.
There is literally no way for a new ISP to enter most markets unless it can rent existing fiber from an existing wire provider, and there are no laws requiring fiber providers to lease access to their lines. So really, we have only three viable options for preventing abuse: Mandate government-owned fiber, mandate fiber leasing to competitors, or treat ISPs as a regulated monopoly. (Well, I suppose there's a fourth option: we could do more than one of those things.)
This person wasn't fired by a machine. His manager was let go and during the transition period failed to renew the contractor - irrespective of the reason, not renewing a contractor is functionally equivalent to terminating the contract. The contracting company failed to notice this. They subsequently failed to inform the contractor.
The word "renew" was a misnomer here. The contract was not up for renewal. What happened is that it was not properly transferred from one employee/contractor database to another. Basically, he got paid (possibly late) for doing nothing because the company didn't have its act together.
California law allows the Labor Commissioner to file claims for lost wages for someone unreasonably fired for doing legal things outside of work. However, there is an exception for situations where those actions would potentially harm the business, and in particular, it is generally believed that the exception does not prevent anti-fraternization rules involving dating subordinates. As a rule, it is acceptable to have those rules, and typically, people transfer to other positions to avoid those sorts of conflicts of interest.
What makes this problematic in this particular case is that there are no employees who aren't the CEO's subordinates. This potentially leads to questions about whether such a rule is reasonable under the circumstances, but that would likely involve a long, drawn-out court case. This is probably why he was allowed to resign, rather than being fired, which makes it much harder for him to sue.
On the flip side, every other manager at Intel has the option of moving someone out of his/her direct management chain, making a violation of the policy avoidable while still having the relationship. The CEO doesn't really have that option. Arguably, the nature of that position necessitates a different policy.
The employee obviously was complaining. Do the math here.
No, not obviously. If one of that employee's coworkers didn't get a promotion, that person might assume that Intel's stack ranking, combined with favoritism for the employee in question, were the problem, and might have complained to HR.
he is using the "no true Scotsman" fallacy but is not entirely wrong either. The only thing he is wrong about is the idea of "true neutrality". He is right they were never for it, but actual neutrality by definition means NO rules in reality or it would not be neutral, it would instead by pro or anti something.
That's a silly argument. Net neutrality means treating all traffic neutrally. You can't realistically have that without rules, because otherwise the temptation for businesses to prioritize their own traffic over that of their competitors is too great to resist.
Net Neutral had Zero-Rating in it and was a huge loophole that would allow content owning ISP's to favor their content services over others effectively making NN a weak to pointless affair on that front.
While I agree that zero-rating is an abomination, and that having it be explicitly forbidden by communications law is a virtue, there is some truth to the point that such actions by an ISP would be anticompetitive and opens them up to prosecution under title 15. The reason we need it explicit in FCC code or similar is that despite such abuse on an ongoing basis, no title 15 action has ever happened, in large part because the FTC doesn't understand communications enough to understand what's happening.
The moment they required insurers to insure people with preexisting conditions, that eliminated any possibility of your health insurance not skyrocketing. It was still the right thing to do.
Prior to ACA, preexisting conditions had to be covered by employer-sponsored plans (apart from an exclusion period at the start of employment), which is why they were more expensive than individual plans prior to ACA. And for individual plans, the costs of those folks were an externality; the hospitals often ate the cost of care as patients filed for bankruptcy, and those costs were distributed evenly over all of the insured, including employer-sponsored plans, so individual healthcare plans only paid a fraction of their fair share.
After ACA, people stopped losing their homes, they stopped having to file for bankruptcy, and the costs from preexisting conditions among the individually insured were borne by the individually insured, so the costs jumped to where you would expect them to be — somewhat higher than the lower-risk employer-sponsored plans.
Yes, making it possible for people with serious, long-term health issues to get insurance is expensive, but that's part of living in a civilized society.
I've seen those behind the scenes shows that show what the main actors have to do everyday to produce a typical sci-fi adventure show. They'll work 10, 12, or even 16 hours on set for 4, 5, or 6 days a week for 12 to 20 weeks a year. These actors that are often between 20 and 50 years old find this difficult. When an actor gets to be in their 60s and 70s then they tend to take on roles with limited screen time. They'll be an admiral, school principal, precinct captain, or whatever in an office that shows up on screen for maybe 10 minutes total in a 45 minute episode. They'll stride into a conference room or something, hear what the main characters have to say, make a decision, and then disappear until the end of the episode where they congratulate the main characters for a job well done.
That's the nice thing about an ensemble cast. You can have a number of characters who are still fairly major characters, without them all having to have them on screen for the entire episode. For example, he could be one of three or four teachers, and in a majority of scenes, there would be at least one of the teachers present, but rarely all four.
That said, from what I've read about him, if he asked for a less major role, I'd expect the reason to be so he could spend more time doing higher-calibre acting in the theater, rather than because he didn't want to act as much.:-) Just saying.
I wish you were kidding. I haven't actually seen any sewage yet here in San Francisco, but I've been up here all week this week, and the smell reminds me of the few times I went to Ciudad Juarez as a kid (across the border from El Paso), where you'd see cracks in the sidewalk with sewage bubbling up through them. Every time I come up here from the South Bay, I'm reminded of why I try to avoid coming up here.
Hey, it worked for circuses for years. Why not car production?
I don't know about circuses, but the whole thing sounds like a comedy routine. I figure this is how it went down:
Minion: We're at maximum capacity. Musk: Well, we have to double our production in the next three months. Minion: Are you nuts? Ramping up that fast would be intense. Musk: Sounds good. Start building them. Minion: Building what? Musk: Tents. Minion: Brilliant!
Tent indicates its a temporary shelter, using one permanently is very problematic as canvas or synthetics will give way to the elements (wind, rain, sun) long before metal, wood or concrete. So you either need to be replacing them on a regular basis or using them on a temporary basis.
Lots of food courts in shopping malls are under translucent tents. And Google's Charleston East campus is going to be a giant tent. Do you suppose all those folks might know something that you don't? Like the fact that the cost of a few thousand bucks in canvas every ten years is a lot less than the cost of, for example, glass?:-)
I saw an interview he had where he'd talk about sitting in a hotel room, watching a Star Trek episode he had been in and not remembering that episode being taped.
Meh. I'm O(half his age), and half the time, I couldn't tell you what I did at work last week.:-) Besides, I'm pretty sure he's not actually losing his marbles. Minor memory problems like those (including doing things while distracted and forgetting you did them) are actually reasonably normal at that age, and are not inherently a sign of anything serious.
Given his relatively good health (from all outward indications), I'm fully expecting him to out-age Betty White.
Considering that the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 56.7 degrees, you're sitting somewhere else. If that's the alleged final destination of trolls who make completely out-of-topic posts, that place has not frozen yet. This is plausible considering that Elon Musk still has weird ideas, politicians still lie, everything seems to be going as usual.
Whoa, there. If Earth were really only 56.7 degrees, it would be a frozen hell already. I think you mean that the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 331.15.
They did that as a side story in one of the movies twenty years ago. It works fine as a ten second "oh, that's so sad that the cadet died" story, but as a core plot line, it doesn't sound like it would appeal to young people much at all. If anything, you'd get a bunch of Wesley Crusher stories that will be hated equally by everyone, regardless of age.
The systems will also be wired into the entertainment system so they cannot be turned off. I don't know why you would want to turn them off anyway, unless you have something to hide.
That's okay. The first thing I do in every Marriott hotel these days is unplug the entertainment system from the TV entirely so that the TV's video input button works and I can watch Netflix on a laptop plugged into the set. Unplugging it further to disable the Alexa functionality is no big deal.
A teen-oriented series set at Starfleet Academy from Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, the duo behind the recent Dynasty reboot and Marvel's Runaways adaptation.
Now, do you really think that's such a great idea? Most of you hated Wesley Crusher on ST:TNG and wished his character would get killed. How can you get behind this bullshit? Garbage.
I could actually see this concept working, if it is done well.
Wesley was, indeed, annoying — to the point that IIRC there was a whole newsgroup dedicated to coming up with ways for his character to die — but it wasn't because the concept of kids in space was so horrible. No, Wesley was annoying because the writers didn't know what to do with him. As a result, nearly every Wesley episode could be summed up as "Wesley broke something. The ship is about to blow up. Wesley somehow figures out a way to fix what he broke. Everyone lives to see him break things another day."
I seem to vaguely remember the episode where Captain Picard got stuck in an elevator with a bunch of kids as an episode that worked reasonably well. In fact, I'm really hoping that the show involving Patrick Steward is the "teen-oriented" show. He could play an academy teacher or headmaster or similar, after having retired from active duty. I think the interaction between him and young people would play very well on TV when it isn't being forced by a character who doesn't really fit the context (Wesley).
I'm assuming such a show would be about Starfleet Academy, though it could also work approximately as well if it involved slightly younger people who were still in school and were studying in hopes of joining Starfleet Academy. Either way, the premise is easy, and reasonably well grounded in the Star Trek universe. The open question, of course, is whether they can come up with writers who are capable of coming up with plots that are both plausible sci-fi (in the context of the Trek universe) and involve young people, without getting so mired in angsty teen drama that nobody wants to watch it, and without the plots quickly devolving into "Saved By the Bell In Space" levels of superficiality under the mistaken belief that young people are incapable of conscious levels of thought.
And right there you have ANOTHER mission for the new "Space Force". I had previously suggested that the "Space Force" should be structured like the Coast Guard; in that role, preventing or removing "hazards to navigation" would be right in their wheelhouse. SAR. Maintenance of navigational beacons. Removing - harvesting, more likely - junk or derelict satellites.
Even better. If you time the deorbit correctly, you can take out an unfriendly government in what could only be a freak accident.
The majority of break-ins today are not random. This is because most household items are now commodity.
A decent number of thefts are, in fact, essentially random, committed by drug addicts trying to get precisely those sorts of commodity items that won't look suspicious when they take them into a pawn shop to trade for cash to buy drugs.
Everyone else however refers to android as the ad infected cheap mobile OS because many people have experienced getting malware infections from apps in the play store...
Of course, it is worth noting at this point that this isn't a valid justification for not allowing third-party stores or sideloading, because the Play Store is neither.
The company has plausible deniability in the first case, but not the second.
Why do you say that? In either case, the company would have to lie and say that they hired the person to come work for them, but didn't ask them to do something bad to the person's previous employer. I'm really not seeing the difference from the company's perspective. Either a company is willing to grossly violate the law or it isn't.
If it's sabotage, it's much more likely to be an employee who spent their life savings shorting TSLA at 10x leverage.
Most companies have strict rules against buying or selling puts and calls while an employee, and IIRC, the SEC's insider trading division frowns upon it, too. I would say that's the least likely explanation. The most likely explanation is almost always an employee who knows he/she is about to get fired, who decides to scorch the earth on the way out, and thus creates new credentials to allow him or her access after leaving the company to afford himself or herself at least some plausible deniability. In other words, the most likely truth is almost precisely what they believe actually happened.
Slashdot Mirror
That's essentially what they did, but they did it by having the government provide a pool of money to the insurance companies, and they grossly underestimated how big the pool needed to be.
Regardless of whether you think net neutrality is good or bad, there is absolutely no legitimate justification for creating a completely toothless net neutrality law. Either you're for net neutrality and you want real regulation or you're against it and you don't want regulation. In the first case, you should vote for the bill as originally written. In the second case, you should have the guts and integrity to vote against it.
And there's even a third possibility, in this case, It would be perfectly reasonable for a legislator to argue that the proposed solution is a bad solution, and that a better solution would be requiring that fiber providers lease access to their competitors for a reasonable fee to cover the costs of line maintenance.
However, the only plausible reason for making a bill toothless is so that you can lie to the public and claim to be for net neutrality while in actuality deliberately undermining it. And that, right there, is absolutely the very definition of political corruption. Even if he hadn't taken telecom money, and if the only thing he did was blindly do whatever lobbyists told him to do, that's still corruption. So when people are calling this legislator corrupt, it is incredibly hard to argue to the contrary.
You cannot enlighten those who talk out of both sides of their mouths. They'll just lie to you and tell you what you want to hear, then vote the other way.
Even then, the best-case scenario is that you now have two companies with infrastructure that won't (or will barely) pay for itself before it has to be replaced.
A few years back, some of us did the math and concluded that most areas won't see a payoff from fiber deployment for at least 10 years. Fiber only lasts for about 15–25 years, so the absolute maximum sustainable number of fiber providers is approximately two, no matter how well-funded any of the companies is, unless you have someone who is prepared to lose money indefinitely, purely on principle, solely because they want to "stick it to" the incumbent carrier.
The cost to entry for the wires, even if everything is on poles or in conduit, even if there is no artificial monopoly granted by the local government, still makes it absolutely impossible to break even, because there will always be an entrenched provider that isn't still paying off its infrastructure, who can afford to lower prices until it drives any new competitor out of business, then buy that competitor's wires for a low-cost infrastructure upgrade, and raise prices to make up for their losses. I've seen this happen time and time again, even when you're talking about a moderately well established company trying to join an existing market.
There is literally no way for a new ISP to enter most markets unless it can rent existing fiber from an existing wire provider, and there are no laws requiring fiber providers to lease access to their lines. So really, we have only three viable options for preventing abuse: Mandate government-owned fiber, mandate fiber leasing to competitors, or treat ISPs as a regulated monopoly. (Well, I suppose there's a fourth option: we could do more than one of those things.)
The word "renew" was a misnomer here. The contract was not up for renewal. What happened is that it was not properly transferred from one employee/contractor database to another. Basically, he got paid (possibly late) for doing nothing because the company didn't have its act together.
California law allows the Labor Commissioner to file claims for lost wages for someone unreasonably fired for doing legal things outside of work. However, there is an exception for situations where those actions would potentially harm the business, and in particular, it is generally believed that the exception does not prevent anti-fraternization rules involving dating subordinates. As a rule, it is acceptable to have those rules, and typically, people transfer to other positions to avoid those sorts of conflicts of interest.
What makes this problematic in this particular case is that there are no employees who aren't the CEO's subordinates. This potentially leads to questions about whether such a rule is reasonable under the circumstances, but that would likely involve a long, drawn-out court case. This is probably why he was allowed to resign, rather than being fired, which makes it much harder for him to sue.
On the flip side, every other manager at Intel has the option of moving someone out of his/her direct management chain, making a violation of the policy avoidable while still having the relationship. The CEO doesn't really have that option. Arguably, the nature of that position necessitates a different policy.
No, not obviously. If one of that employee's coworkers didn't get a promotion, that person might assume that Intel's stack ranking, combined with favoritism for the employee in question, were the problem, and might have complained to HR.
That's a silly argument. Net neutrality means treating all traffic neutrally. You can't realistically have that without rules, because otherwise the temptation for businesses to prioritize their own traffic over that of their competitors is too great to resist.
While I agree that zero-rating is an abomination, and that having it be explicitly forbidden by communications law is a virtue, there is some truth to the point that such actions by an ISP would be anticompetitive and opens them up to prosecution under title 15. The reason we need it explicit in FCC code or similar is that despite such abuse on an ongoing basis, no title 15 action has ever happened, in large part because the FTC doesn't understand communications enough to understand what's happening.
The moment they required insurers to insure people with preexisting conditions, that eliminated any possibility of your health insurance not skyrocketing. It was still the right thing to do.
Prior to ACA, preexisting conditions had to be covered by employer-sponsored plans (apart from an exclusion period at the start of employment), which is why they were more expensive than individual plans prior to ACA. And for individual plans, the costs of those folks were an externality; the hospitals often ate the cost of care as patients filed for bankruptcy, and those costs were distributed evenly over all of the insured, including employer-sponsored plans, so individual healthcare plans only paid a fraction of their fair share.
After ACA, people stopped losing their homes, they stopped having to file for bankruptcy, and the costs from preexisting conditions among the individually insured were borne by the individually insured, so the costs jumped to where you would expect them to be — somewhat higher than the lower-risk employer-sponsored plans.
Yes, making it possible for people with serious, long-term health issues to get insurance is expensive, but that's part of living in a civilized society.
That's the nice thing about an ensemble cast. You can have a number of characters who are still fairly major characters, without them all having to have them on screen for the entire episode. For example, he could be one of three or four teachers, and in a majority of scenes, there would be at least one of the teachers present, but rarely all four.
That said, from what I've read about him, if he asked for a less major role, I'd expect the reason to be so he could spend more time doing higher-calibre acting in the theater, rather than because he didn't want to act as much. :-) Just saying.
I wish you were kidding. I haven't actually seen any sewage yet here in San Francisco, but I've been up here all week this week, and the smell reminds me of the few times I went to Ciudad Juarez as a kid (across the border from El Paso), where you'd see cracks in the sidewalk with sewage bubbling up through them. Every time I come up here from the South Bay, I'm reminded of why I try to avoid coming up here.
Yeah. San Francisco is amazingly rural. You'll often find entire stretches of sidewalk miles long with only one or two people living on them....
I don't know about circuses, but the whole thing sounds like a comedy routine. I figure this is how it went down:
Minion: We're at maximum capacity.
Musk: Well, we have to double our production in the next three months.
Minion: Are you nuts? Ramping up that fast would be intense.
Musk: Sounds good. Start building them.
Minion: Building what?
Musk: Tents.
Minion: Brilliant!
Lots of food courts in shopping malls are under translucent tents. And Google's Charleston East campus is going to be a giant tent. Do you suppose all those folks might know something that you don't? Like the fact that the cost of a few thousand bucks in canvas every ten years is a lot less than the cost of, for example, glass? :-)
Meh. I'm O(half his age), and half the time, I couldn't tell you what I did at work last week. :-) Besides, I'm pretty sure he's not actually losing his marbles. Minor memory problems like those (including doing things while distracted and forgetting you did them) are actually reasonably normal at that age, and are not inherently a sign of anything serious.
Given his relatively good health (from all outward indications), I'm fully expecting him to out-age Betty White.
Whoa, there. If Earth were really only 56.7 degrees, it would be a frozen hell already. I think you mean that the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 331.15.
They did that as a side story in one of the movies twenty years ago. It works fine as a ten second "oh, that's so sad that the cadet died" story, but as a core plot line, it doesn't sound like it would appeal to young people much at all. If anything, you'd get a bunch of Wesley Crusher stories that will be hated equally by everyone, regardless of age.
The systems will also be wired into the entertainment system so they cannot be turned off. I don't know why you would want to turn them off anyway, unless you have something to hide.
That's okay. The first thing I do in every Marriott hotel these days is unplug the entertainment system from the TV entirely so that the TV's video input button works and I can watch Netflix on a laptop plugged into the set. Unplugging it further to disable the Alexa functionality is no big deal.
A teen-oriented series set at Starfleet Academy from Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, the duo behind the recent Dynasty reboot and Marvel's Runaways adaptation.
Now, do you really think that's such a great idea? Most of you hated Wesley Crusher on ST:TNG and wished his character would get killed. How can you get behind this bullshit? Garbage.
I could actually see this concept working, if it is done well.
Wesley was, indeed, annoying — to the point that IIRC there was a whole newsgroup dedicated to coming up with ways for his character to die — but it wasn't because the concept of kids in space was so horrible. No, Wesley was annoying because the writers didn't know what to do with him. As a result, nearly every Wesley episode could be summed up as "Wesley broke something. The ship is about to blow up. Wesley somehow figures out a way to fix what he broke. Everyone lives to see him break things another day."
I seem to vaguely remember the episode where Captain Picard got stuck in an elevator with a bunch of kids as an episode that worked reasonably well. In fact, I'm really hoping that the show involving Patrick Steward is the "teen-oriented" show. He could play an academy teacher or headmaster or similar, after having retired from active duty. I think the interaction between him and young people would play very well on TV when it isn't being forced by a character who doesn't really fit the context (Wesley).
I'm assuming such a show would be about Starfleet Academy, though it could also work approximately as well if it involved slightly younger people who were still in school and were studying in hopes of joining Starfleet Academy. Either way, the premise is easy, and reasonably well grounded in the Star Trek universe. The open question, of course, is whether they can come up with writers who are capable of coming up with plots that are both plausible sci-fi (in the context of the Trek universe) and involve young people, without getting so mired in angsty teen drama that nobody wants to watch it, and without the plots quickly devolving into "Saved By the Bell In Space" levels of superficiality under the mistaken belief that young people are incapable of conscious levels of thought.
Even better. If you time the deorbit correctly, you can take out an unfriendly government in what could only be a freak accident.
A decent number of thefts are, in fact, essentially random, committed by drug addicts trying to get precisely those sorts of commodity items that won't look suspicious when they take them into a pawn shop to trade for cash to buy drugs.
Never knew about war's locks, but I once let slip its dogs.
Of course, it is worth noting at this point that this isn't a valid justification for not allowing third-party stores or sideloading, because the Play Store is neither.
Why do you say that? In either case, the company would have to lie and say that they hired the person to come work for them, but didn't ask them to do something bad to the person's previous employer. I'm really not seeing the difference from the company's perspective. Either a company is willing to grossly violate the law or it isn't.
Most companies have strict rules against buying or selling puts and calls while an employee, and IIRC, the SEC's insider trading division frowns upon it, too. I would say that's the least likely explanation. The most likely explanation is almost always an employee who knows he/she is about to get fired, who decides to scorch the earth on the way out, and thus creates new credentials to allow him or her access after leaving the company to afford himself or herself at least some plausible deniability. In other words, the most likely truth is almost precisely what they believe actually happened.