But taking that suggestion seriously, the problem is that by the time most people blow their horns, 10+ seconds have elapsed, and the damage is basically done.
No, not every tiny fiber. People who work with asbestos on a regular basis have a significantly inflated risk. Most of the time, what you breathe in comes back out. The odds of getting cancer from one-time exposure to asbestos are, AFAIK, very, very small.
Like the traffic isn't already loud? Besides, they could be a little smarter about it and use RADAR to determine if traffic is moving, and honk the horn if nobody moves after two seconds. That would make it less frequent, but still nearly as effective. And drivers would quickly learn to pay attention to avoid the honk, so this would also have the effect of making itself moot.
It would be nice to have a traffic light alarm feature, but that only helps if all the cell phone users buy new cars. That feature would have to have been made broadly available in new cars at least 15 years ago to be broadly effective today. By contrast, an air horn on particularly problematic traffic lights can be deployed today and is immediately effective at solving the problem.
Better than ruining the lives of anyone living within earshot of an intersection (except, perhaps, the deaf) how about an ignition interlock system? If your car detects the driver using their phone in conjunction with unsafe driving practices...
Remaining stopped at a traffic light, assuming other drivers are not driving dangerously, is not unsafe. Therefore your proposal wouldn't help at all unless those drivers are also using their phones while driving badly.
Besides, it doesn't take an insanely loud air horn to get people's attention. It just has to be loud enough to be heard inside a car with the radio playing—no louder than a car horn. And if you embed it in the pavement underneath the car and use constructive interference correctly, you should be able to create a directed burst of sound that would be loud to the person in the driver's seat of the frontmost car, but quiet everywhere else. After all, the vehicle that fails to move is almost invariably the frontmost vehicle. The drivers of other vehicles typically notice motion in their peripheral vision even if they are looking down at their phones.
Cars still don't drive themselves, and very few cars percentage-wise even have collision avoidance, which is the only sort of safety feature that can possibly significantly reduce the rate of collisions among people who truly aren't paying attention to the road in a dangerous way.
The reason cell phone use doesn't cause the huge number of crashes that were predicted is much more obvious: 99% of the time, a driver doesn't actually need to do anything, even without self-driving cars, because most of the time, the road is straight, and there isn't something in front of you. And unlike drunk driving, people don't typically use a phone continuously, so the probability of overlap is small. That makes the risk of cell phone use inherently very low even if it is technically a risky behavior. And if we assume that most people choose when to use the cell phone based on the conditions around them—at traffic lights, on long straight stretches with no visible cars at upcoming intersections, etc.—then the risk logically should drop to remarkably close to zero among otherwise good drivers. Any statistics that appear to show otherwise are highly suspect.
Studies aren't needed to see if something happens. Studies are needed to gauge and create a baseline reference for a problem for which future studies will be repeated over and over again to see if any of the measures various governments are taking work in reducing the behaviour.
And once they have that, they'll come to the inevitable conclusion that cell phone bans aren't useful—not because they're ineffectual, but rather because the lack of a thousand-fold increase in accidents over the past ten years means that cell phone distraction isn't really that much worse than any other distraction. After all, if 90% of drivers use their cell phones while driving, then you'd expect a fairly high percentage of crashes to involve a cell phone, so when the statistics match that expectation, rather than wildly exceeding it, it means the phones aren't really causing crashes.
Of course, this problem is easily solved using commonly available technology. Just put an electronic air horn on every traffic light and honk it when the light turns green in any direction. This would be useful regardless of the reason for distraction, whether it's a cell phone, a radio, or the kids bouncing off the ceiling in the back seat.
1. Drawing money for a month before the experiment start as most banks use internet technology to contact their branches. (Yes might be secured but still TCP/IP)
All Tcp/IP is NOT Internet (lease lines).
Realistically, most point-to-point connections are virtual these days, encapsulated over the public Internet via a VPN tunnel. Yes, you can get physical leased lines, but why would you bother?
2. You cannot buy from certain stores because they use internet
technology to update store details and order new stock.
Sure, stores that are not ACTUAL stores are not accessible is i problem to no one.
Your local grocery store uses the Internet to coordinate how much of each kind of produce it receives. To truly avoid the Internet, you would literally have to be a farmer and grow all your own food.
3. You cannot even send a letter or receive a letter because I can promise you the systems that sort your mail are connected to the internet in some way. (Uses network technology)
All letters are physical. I believe you refer to email.
Nope. The systems that sort your mail also upload metadata about every letter to centralized systems for logistics purposes so that they know how many long-haul trucks need to roll from point A to point B (and for law enforcement reasons).
4. In some buildings you will not be able to use elevators so walk up the stairs as they monitor the lifts via internet connections.
Actual 100% bullshit.
Actual 100% reality. At a bare minimum, those security cameras in the elevator are likely to be Internet-connected (or at least Intranet with some sort of gateway to the Internet). And in some cases, so are the monitoring systems that watch for malfunctions, plus the HVAC systems that provide heat and cooling in modern buildings, etc. We truly live in a connected world.
6. You cannot use a phone because even landline phones these day at some stage pass through internet connected devices.
Once again, leased lines != Internet.
I think the original poster was talking about the very real risk of receiving a phone call from a VoIP user. (And worse, most of them are fraudulent scammers faking local phone numbers. But I digress.)
If you want to keep unprincipled actors in the datamining sphere from getting (too much) information about you, you *can* avoid patronizing internet services that are run by them. That means you don't get to enjoy 95% of the internet, because every-fucking-thing is run/owned/exploited/controlled by Google, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudflare...
Actually, you can't, because almost invariably your immediate ISP will be run by an unprincipled actor in the data-mining sphere, and any VPN provider you choose to hide your traffic will also likely be surreptitiously run by an unprincipled actor in the data-mining sphere (not to mention that others will wonder why you feel the need to hide your traffic from your ISP, and will then suspect you of wrongdoing).
The real problem here is that the people making the decisions at this point (including this Congressperson) lack sufficient understanding of the difference between an ISP—a company providing the Internet service for your home or business—and an Internet content provider, e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. The law that they blocked applied only to the former, not to the latter, precisely because you do have a lot of choices in the content providers, but rarely have more than one viable ISP option, and essentially never more than two.
If you read his statement as "If we treated Internet content providers as regulated utilities...", the statement makes perfect sense and is perfectly correct. What it fails to recognize is that most Americans get their actual home broadband service from a regulated monopoly. Internet service providers have always been regulated utilities, from the very beginning, albeit a less regulated arm of a regulated industry, whether that industry is the telephone provider or the cable company.
The only real competition, meager as it might be, is among cellular providers. Unfortunately, because of the high cost of cellular broadband, it is generally practical only for people who can't get wired service. If you look at areas that have access to traditional wired Internet service, I doubt even 1% of those folks get their home Internet service from someone other than the cable company, the phone company, or a CLEC leasing the lines from the phone company. The supposed "competition" is so rare that it is essentially lost in the noise.
The bottom line is this: As long as regulatory decisions are made by people who double-click Internet Explorer and think that it is "the Internet", we're going to continue to have brain damaged regulatory policies that screw consumers. No 73-year-old is qualified to do that job, period. Frankly, I have my doubts about anyone old enough to realistically get elected to Congress being qualified. Even folks in their early forties only grew up with the Internet if their parents worked at a university, so maybe single-digit percentages of them are qualified. You have to get down to folks in their early thirties and younger to have a non-negligible probability of competence, and folks that young generally haven't bubbled up to the federal level yet.
Call it age discrimination if you want, but putting a 73-year-old in charge of regulating the Internet is like putting a strictly adherent Old Order Mennonite (of the horse-and-buggy-only variety) in charge of the DOT. You can't usefully understand how to govern something that you don't understand, and you can't understand something without being immersed in it.
I own something called a CircuitWriter pen (though it has probably dried out by now after a decade and a half). The resistance was too high, and I had trouble making traces narrow enough to be workable, so it couldn't do what I needed, but there's certainly nothing new about the concept.
"Pretty safe", yes, but you've never been completely safe. That said, the FAA has some well-defined requirements about how they have to treat people who've been involuntarily bumped, which includes a hefty cash payment (equal, I believe, to the full round-trip fare) plus a seat on the next available flight (on any airline, in any class at or above the class you paid for).
How the heck is it even possible to get involuntarily bumped? Either you have a boarding pass with a seat assignment or you don't. Once you do, you have a seat. So this means they had to have taken someone who didn't have a seat and given that person a seat while forcing somebody else who already had a seat to give up that seat. That's completely idiotic. Just reassign the person who didn't have a seat before. They didn't check in early enough to get a seat, which was their decision. Why should people who spent the extra effort to check in and get their seat assignment have to suffer so that people who couldn't be bothered can take their seats?
The only even semi-plausible situation that could explain this would be if the equipment changed to a smaller plane, but even then, they should have known about the reduction in seats prior to boarding.
With cash back I get a very concrete view of what I'm getting back with real dollars and there is no blackout period or any of that BS. I only take the plane when I really need to though, with the trip back to europe every other year to visit family, and do road trips for most vacations.
That's really the only smart choice. Those airline cards were barely worth it when they were free. Once the airlines realized that there were enough suckers who would pay an annual fee for them, they became worthless junk.
With airline mileage cards, you get the equivalent of 1–1.5 cents per dollar spent. There are plenty of cash-back cards that pay that (and some that pay even more on various categories), and as you said, no blackout periods when paying with real dollars, so unless your travel plans are flexible, you'll probably find that you keep building up miles and aren't ever able to spend them. The only real benefit is that you get back 2% on airline travel. For that extra.5%, you pay $100 in annual fees. So for the airline mile cards to actually be worth more than you're spending in fees, you would have to spend a whopping $20,000 on airline travel every year. And if you make the kind of money where you can afford to spend that much money on airline flights, you don't care about getting cash back anyway.
Given how bad a deal the airline cards are, it is no real surprise, then, that the airlines are complaining about not enough people getting their cards. If they were free, they would be worth it for the extra half percent on airline ticket purchases. With a fee, they're a complete joke. (The high-end airline cards at least give you access to the airlines' special first-class lounge, which might be a benefit for some people if they would otherwise have done that, but the $99 cards are basically worthless.)
Right now, IMO, the best deal is Amazon's card. It pays 3% back on Amazon purchases (5% if you're a Prime member, which means your Prime membership becomes free at $5,000 in annual Amazon purchases), 2% on gas stations and supermarkets, and 1% everywhere else. For most people, this averages out to significantly more money than the airline cards, and there's no annual fee, so there's no downside if you find a better deal in a given month (e.g. when Citi or Chase gives 5% on one of those categories for a quarter).
It isn't quite that grim, but hyperbole aside, 80% of startups fail within the first year, and 95% within the first five years.
The first thing you have to do is disabuse yourself of the notion that starting your own company means you're going to get rich or that you'll pay other people so you can have less work. Expect to have to do far more work than you ever imagined, and expect the business to fail. Make sure you have enough money set aside that when it fails, you'll have time to find another job before you go broke.
And always keep in the back of your mind that every single one of your employees should be making those same calculations, but may not be. The once who don't depend on you to keep them out of the homeless shelters. Be honest with yourself about how the company is doing financially. Don't fun your business into the ground chasing after the next big thing. Come up with a solid plan to deliver a product that's realistically achievable, and then deliver it. Then come up with a solid plan to deliver something else. Try to reach profitability early, and if you conclude that your plan to do so isn't going to work, fail early and move on to something else that's achievable before you run out of funding.
Try to hire people straight out of college who don't have a lot of outside financial obligations, so that if the company goes belly-up, nobody loses their house. That or hire people who are older and wealthy enough that they choose to work for you because they can afford to take the risk. Try to avoid people in between—not through discriminatory hiring practices, but through open, honest communication. Tell them up front exactly what they're getting into, and let them decide if it is right for them. Most of the time, the people who really can't afford to take the risk won't, assuming you warn them ahead of time. But know that at least a few of your employees will ignore the warning. Manage your finances with them in mind.
You shouldn't assume that Google's demographic breakdown for H1-Bs is the same as the industry as a whole (where Indians are overrepresented). Giant insourcing companies (e.g. Infosys) tend to pick up their H1-Bs predominantly from India, which skews the mean higher. Thus, the percentage of Indians at other major tech companies pretty much has to be much lower than the mean for the numbers to balance out.
Some men do, but what you're seeing is the difference between anecdotes and statistics. Statistically, men are less likely to do those things than women. When looked at in the aggregate, this creates a bigger wage gap than would otherwise exist.
And the difference doesn't end there. You also have to factor in people choosing whether to ask for a promotion or not. Most people (men and women alike) assume that higher pay means greater demands on their time, and choose not to ask rather than take on the extra responsibility. Women are more likely to not ask, at least in aggregate, because they are statistically more likely to have greater outside responsibilities beyond work.
Which again, you cannot specifically cite. Again, if it is so clear, you'd think you could cite it as I have.
Actually, I did, several posts back. You just ignored the citation because it doesn't match with your political view. Article VI, clause 3 says, "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution".
Again, pure speculation, as again, neither you nor any advocate of #DoYourJob could cite a specific constitutional or legal requirement for them to do anything with any nomination.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it define what "support this Constitution" means. One could argue, then, that it is sufficient to physically place a physical piece of paper on top of the head of every Congressperson, thus ensuring that they literally support it (hold it up). One could further argue that it is perfectly acceptable for Congress to deliberately pass laws that violate both the letter and the spirit of that document so long as their Constitutional hats remain firmly on their heads while they do so. No sane person would argue that such an interpretation is plausible, of course, but there's nothing explicitly stated in the Constitution that says that it would be a violation of one's oath to interpret it that way. Yet most people would agree that it would be. The question becomes one of determining where you draw the line of reasonableness, and apparently you draw the line a long way from where I do.
What concerns me more, though, is that you're asking for concreteness in constitutional law where none exists, deliberately, so that the courts have leeway in determining what is and is not acceptable behavior by the government. For example, nowhere in the Constitution was it written that blacks have the right to attend the same schools as whites, yet the courts upheld that non-enumerated right. One could also rationally argue that the people have a right to a properly functioning Supreme Court with nine members or argue that the President has a right to a response, rather than a lack of response, when submitting a nominee for consideration. This is not at all a stretch. In fact, the need for the courts to be able to recognize non-enumerated rights is precisely why we have the entire ninth amendment.
A) Cite WHY they did so, and
Okay, here's your citation. Historically, every time that the court has lacked a clear majority in one direction or the other, and particularly when there have been eight members, the courts have taken fewer cases.
B) Cite HOW this prevented them from acting as an 'proper check and balance'... which again ignores all of the inferior courts, and
The inferior courts are often called that for a reason. When circuit courts come up with wildly different opinions, there must be a single arbiter. For every case not granted certiorari that would have been granted certiorari under a full bench, the court's voice is muffled. A weakened SCOTUS doesn't completely prevent the courts from acting as a proper check and balance, but it does significantly diminish their ability to do so.
The simple fact is (and will continue to be) that the Senate acted fully within their authority, like it or not.
Ending your post with Q.E.D. doesn't make it so. The thing about constitutional law is that issues are seldom (if ever) clear-cut. There is absolutely no Q.E.D. in matters of constitutional law until settled by the Supreme Court, and arguably even then (see also Brown vs. the Board of Education of Top
Half true... they made rather clear, through their inaction that they did not consent to that nominee at the time... having previously advised the President not to nominate and waste anyone time.
Half true. Had it gone to a vote, the previous candidate would likely have gotten enough votes for confirmation, hence the reason the leadership was not about to let it go to a vote, nor even go up for debate. The Constitution says the consent of the Senate, not the consent of the Senate Majority Leader.
No? It's as if... the Senate has rather wide latitude... almost as if it's written into the Constitution itself (see Article I, Section 5, Clause 2)!
Within reason, certainly. Nothing in that clause permits the Senate to be derelict in its duty to uphold the Constitution, however. In fact, it says the exact opposite. But keep believing your partisan spin. If Democrats had pulled what the Republicans did, the Republicans would have come completely unhinged, and would have called for prosecution of the leadership.
Except it didn't... we have existing mechanisms & traditions for handling ties... which not only can happen due to a lengthy vacancy, but something as simple as a recusal.
Except it did. The Supreme Court of the U.S. dramatically reduced the number of cases it heard—from an average of about 75 cases in previous years (and 80 in 2015) to only 25 in 2016. If you're seriously arguing that a factor of three reduction in court throughput isn't a severe breakage, you're kidding yourself.
Except they are not constitutionally required to hold a vote, or a hearing, or even a meeting with a nominee. Their 'consent' is required... and they simply withheld it.
They did not withhold consent. They withheld the opportunity to even talk about consent. That's critically different from a constitutional perspective.
As for whether they are constitutionally required or not, I would argue that their one job is to vote on issues, and that refusing to discharge their duties for an entire year—particularly in a way that breaks the ability of the highest court in our land to serve as a proper check and balance—constitutes a direct violation of their oath of office (Article VI, clause 3). So yes, they are constitutionally required to either provide or decline consent.
Even those in the House of Representatives, which plays no part in the confirmation of a SCOTUS justice?
Yes. Those who do not speak up when they see their immediate colleagues doing something heinous are just as guilty as those colleagues.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, you're saying that backers' money went up in smoke?
Rust is also a common problem with traditional cable-based parking brakes. Get a little water in the cable, and over time, it rusts and freezes up.
Ah. Yes, I missed the joke entirely.
But taking that suggestion seriously, the problem is that by the time most people blow their horns, 10+ seconds have elapsed, and the damage is basically done.
I'm suddenly reminded of a character on Arrested Development.
No, not every tiny fiber. People who work with asbestos on a regular basis have a significantly inflated risk. Most of the time, what you breathe in comes back out. The odds of getting cancer from one-time exposure to asbestos are, AFAIK, very, very small.
Like the traffic isn't already loud? Besides, they could be a little smarter about it and use RADAR to determine if traffic is moving, and honk the horn if nobody moves after two seconds. That would make it less frequent, but still nearly as effective. And drivers would quickly learn to pay attention to avoid the honk, so this would also have the effect of making itself moot.
It would be nice to have a traffic light alarm feature, but that only helps if all the cell phone users buy new cars. That feature would have to have been made broadly available in new cars at least 15 years ago to be broadly effective today. By contrast, an air horn on particularly problematic traffic lights can be deployed today and is immediately effective at solving the problem.
Remaining stopped at a traffic light, assuming other drivers are not driving dangerously, is not unsafe. Therefore your proposal wouldn't help at all unless those drivers are also using their phones while driving badly.
Besides, it doesn't take an insanely loud air horn to get people's attention. It just has to be loud enough to be heard inside a car with the radio playing—no louder than a car horn. And if you embed it in the pavement underneath the car and use constructive interference correctly, you should be able to create a directed burst of sound that would be loud to the person in the driver's seat of the frontmost car, but quiet everywhere else. After all, the vehicle that fails to move is almost invariably the frontmost vehicle. The drivers of other vehicles typically notice motion in their peripheral vision even if they are looking down at their phones.
Cars still don't drive themselves, and very few cars percentage-wise even have collision avoidance, which is the only sort of safety feature that can possibly significantly reduce the rate of collisions among people who truly aren't paying attention to the road in a dangerous way.
The reason cell phone use doesn't cause the huge number of crashes that were predicted is much more obvious: 99% of the time, a driver doesn't actually need to do anything, even without self-driving cars, because most of the time, the road is straight, and there isn't something in front of you. And unlike drunk driving, people don't typically use a phone continuously, so the probability of overlap is small. That makes the risk of cell phone use inherently very low even if it is technically a risky behavior. And if we assume that most people choose when to use the cell phone based on the conditions around them—at traffic lights, on long straight stretches with no visible cars at upcoming intersections, etc.—then the risk logically should drop to remarkably close to zero among otherwise good drivers. Any statistics that appear to show otherwise are highly suspect.
And once they have that, they'll come to the inevitable conclusion that cell phone bans aren't useful—not because they're ineffectual, but rather because the lack of a thousand-fold increase in accidents over the past ten years means that cell phone distraction isn't really that much worse than any other distraction. After all, if 90% of drivers use their cell phones while driving, then you'd expect a fairly high percentage of crashes to involve a cell phone, so when the statistics match that expectation, rather than wildly exceeding it, it means the phones aren't really causing crashes.
Of course, this problem is easily solved using commonly available technology. Just put an electronic air horn on every traffic light and honk it when the light turns green in any direction. This would be useful regardless of the reason for distraction, whether it's a cell phone, a radio, or the kids bouncing off the ceiling in the back seat.
1. Drawing money for a month before the experiment start as most banks use internet technology to contact their branches. (Yes might be secured but still TCP/IP)
All Tcp/IP is NOT Internet (lease lines).
Realistically, most point-to-point connections are virtual these days, encapsulated over the public Internet via a VPN tunnel. Yes, you can get physical leased lines, but why would you bother?
2. You cannot buy from certain stores because they use internet technology to update store details and order new stock.
Sure, stores that are not ACTUAL stores are not accessible is i problem to no one.
Your local grocery store uses the Internet to coordinate how much of each kind of produce it receives. To truly avoid the Internet, you would literally have to be a farmer and grow all your own food.
3. You cannot even send a letter or receive a letter because I can promise you the systems that sort your mail are connected to the internet in some way. (Uses network technology)
All letters are physical. I believe you refer to email.
Nope. The systems that sort your mail also upload metadata about every letter to centralized systems for logistics purposes so that they know how many long-haul trucks need to roll from point A to point B (and for law enforcement reasons).
4. In some buildings you will not be able to use elevators so walk up the stairs as they monitor the lifts via internet connections.
Actual 100% bullshit.
Actual 100% reality. At a bare minimum, those security cameras in the elevator are likely to be Internet-connected (or at least Intranet with some sort of gateway to the Internet). And in some cases, so are the monitoring systems that watch for malfunctions, plus the HVAC systems that provide heat and cooling in modern buildings, etc. We truly live in a connected world.
6. You cannot use a phone because even landline phones these day at some stage pass through internet connected devices.
Once again, leased lines != Internet.
I think the original poster was talking about the very real risk of receiving a phone call from a VoIP user. (And worse, most of them are fraudulent scammers faking local phone numbers. But I digress.)
Actually, you can't, because almost invariably your immediate ISP will be run by an unprincipled actor in the data-mining sphere, and any VPN provider you choose to hide your traffic will also likely be surreptitiously run by an unprincipled actor in the data-mining sphere (not to mention that others will wonder why you feel the need to hide your traffic from your ISP, and will then suspect you of wrongdoing).
The real problem here is that the people making the decisions at this point (including this Congressperson) lack sufficient understanding of the difference between an ISP—a company providing the Internet service for your home or business—and an Internet content provider, e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. The law that they blocked applied only to the former, not to the latter, precisely because you do have a lot of choices in the content providers, but rarely have more than one viable ISP option, and essentially never more than two.
If you read his statement as "If we treated Internet content providers as regulated utilities...", the statement makes perfect sense and is perfectly correct. What it fails to recognize is that most Americans get their actual home broadband service from a regulated monopoly. Internet service providers have always been regulated utilities, from the very beginning, albeit a less regulated arm of a regulated industry, whether that industry is the telephone provider or the cable company.
The only real competition, meager as it might be, is among cellular providers. Unfortunately, because of the high cost of cellular broadband, it is generally practical only for people who can't get wired service. If you look at areas that have access to traditional wired Internet service, I doubt even 1% of those folks get their home Internet service from someone other than the cable company, the phone company, or a CLEC leasing the lines from the phone company. The supposed "competition" is so rare that it is essentially lost in the noise.
The bottom line is this: As long as regulatory decisions are made by people who double-click Internet Explorer and think that it is "the Internet", we're going to continue to have brain damaged regulatory policies that screw consumers. No 73-year-old is qualified to do that job, period. Frankly, I have my doubts about anyone old enough to realistically get elected to Congress being qualified. Even folks in their early forties only grew up with the Internet if their parents worked at a university, so maybe single-digit percentages of them are qualified. You have to get down to folks in their early thirties and younger to have a non-negligible probability of competence, and folks that young generally haven't bubbled up to the federal level yet.
Call it age discrimination if you want, but putting a 73-year-old in charge of regulating the Internet is like putting a strictly adherent Old Order Mennonite (of the horse-and-buggy-only variety) in charge of the DOT. You can't usefully understand how to govern something that you don't understand, and you can't understand something without being immersed in it.
The good news is that they'll be electric.
The bad news is that you'll have to charge them with a Lightning cable.
Ah, but is it watching TV that rots the brain or rotten brains that cause the TV watching?
I own something called a CircuitWriter pen (though it has probably dried out by now after a decade and a half). The resistance was too high, and I had trouble making traces narrow enough to be workable, so it couldn't do what I needed, but there's certainly nothing new about the concept.
You are multiplying numbers that are not supposed to be multiplied. After five years, there are 5 left out of the original 100.
How the heck is it even possible to get involuntarily bumped? Either you have a boarding pass with a seat assignment or you don't. Once you do, you have a seat. So this means they had to have taken someone who didn't have a seat and given that person a seat while forcing somebody else who already had a seat to give up that seat. That's completely idiotic. Just reassign the person who didn't have a seat before. They didn't check in early enough to get a seat, which was their decision. Why should people who spent the extra effort to check in and get their seat assignment have to suffer so that people who couldn't be bothered can take their seats?
The only even semi-plausible situation that could explain this would be if the equipment changed to a smaller plane, but even then, they should have known about the reduction in seats prior to boarding.
That's really the only smart choice. Those airline cards were barely worth it when they were free. Once the airlines realized that there were enough suckers who would pay an annual fee for them, they became worthless junk.
With airline mileage cards, you get the equivalent of 1–1.5 cents per dollar spent. There are plenty of cash-back cards that pay that (and some that pay even more on various categories), and as you said, no blackout periods when paying with real dollars, so unless your travel plans are flexible, you'll probably find that you keep building up miles and aren't ever able to spend them. The only real benefit is that you get back 2% on airline travel. For that extra .5%, you pay $100 in annual fees. So for the airline mile cards to actually be worth more than you're spending in fees, you would have to spend a whopping $20,000 on airline travel every year. And if you make the kind of money where you can afford to spend that much money on airline flights, you don't care about getting cash back anyway.
Given how bad a deal the airline cards are, it is no real surprise, then, that the airlines are complaining about not enough people getting their cards. If they were free, they would be worth it for the extra half percent on airline ticket purchases. With a fee, they're a complete joke. (The high-end airline cards at least give you access to the airlines' special first-class lounge, which might be a benefit for some people if they would otherwise have done that, but the $99 cards are basically worthless.)
Right now, IMO, the best deal is Amazon's card. It pays 3% back on Amazon purchases (5% if you're a Prime member, which means your Prime membership becomes free at $5,000 in annual Amazon purchases), 2% on gas stations and supermarkets, and 1% everywhere else. For most people, this averages out to significantly more money than the airline cards, and there's no annual fee, so there's no downside if you find a better deal in a given month (e.g. when Citi or Chase gives 5% on one of those categories for a quarter).
It isn't quite that grim, but hyperbole aside, 80% of startups fail within the first year, and 95% within the first five years.
The first thing you have to do is disabuse yourself of the notion that starting your own company means you're going to get rich or that you'll pay other people so you can have less work. Expect to have to do far more work than you ever imagined, and expect the business to fail. Make sure you have enough money set aside that when it fails, you'll have time to find another job before you go broke.
And always keep in the back of your mind that every single one of your employees should be making those same calculations, but may not be. The once who don't depend on you to keep them out of the homeless shelters. Be honest with yourself about how the company is doing financially. Don't fun your business into the ground chasing after the next big thing. Come up with a solid plan to deliver a product that's realistically achievable, and then deliver it. Then come up with a solid plan to deliver something else. Try to reach profitability early, and if you conclude that your plan to do so isn't going to work, fail early and move on to something else that's achievable before you run out of funding.
Try to hire people straight out of college who don't have a lot of outside financial obligations, so that if the company goes belly-up, nobody loses their house. That or hire people who are older and wealthy enough that they choose to work for you because they can afford to take the risk. Try to avoid people in between—not through discriminatory hiring practices, but through open, honest communication. Tell them up front exactly what they're getting into, and let them decide if it is right for them. Most of the time, the people who really can't afford to take the risk won't, assuming you warn them ahead of time. But know that at least a few of your employees will ignore the warning. Manage your finances with them in mind.
You shouldn't assume that Google's demographic breakdown for H1-Bs is the same as the industry as a whole (where Indians are overrepresented). Giant insourcing companies (e.g. Infosys) tend to pick up their H1-Bs predominantly from India, which skews the mean higher. Thus, the percentage of Indians at other major tech companies pretty much has to be much lower than the mean for the numbers to balance out.
Some men do, but what you're seeing is the difference between anecdotes and statistics. Statistically, men are less likely to do those things than women. When looked at in the aggregate, this creates a bigger wage gap than would otherwise exist.
And the difference doesn't end there. You also have to factor in people choosing whether to ask for a promotion or not. Most people (men and women alike) assume that higher pay means greater demands on their time, and choose not to ask rather than take on the extra responsibility. Women are more likely to not ask, at least in aggregate, because they are statistically more likely to have greater outside responsibilities beyond work.
Actually, I did, several posts back. You just ignored the citation because it doesn't match with your political view. Article VI, clause 3 says, "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution".
Nowhere in the Constitution does it define what "support this Constitution" means. One could argue, then, that it is sufficient to physically place a physical piece of paper on top of the head of every Congressperson, thus ensuring that they literally support it (hold it up). One could further argue that it is perfectly acceptable for Congress to deliberately pass laws that violate both the letter and the spirit of that document so long as their Constitutional hats remain firmly on their heads while they do so. No sane person would argue that such an interpretation is plausible, of course, but there's nothing explicitly stated in the Constitution that says that it would be a violation of one's oath to interpret it that way. Yet most people would agree that it would be. The question becomes one of determining where you draw the line of reasonableness, and apparently you draw the line a long way from where I do.
What concerns me more, though, is that you're asking for concreteness in constitutional law where none exists, deliberately, so that the courts have leeway in determining what is and is not acceptable behavior by the government. For example, nowhere in the Constitution was it written that blacks have the right to attend the same schools as whites, yet the courts upheld that non-enumerated right. One could also rationally argue that the people have a right to a properly functioning Supreme Court with nine members or argue that the President has a right to a response, rather than a lack of response, when submitting a nominee for consideration. This is not at all a stretch. In fact, the need for the courts to be able to recognize non-enumerated rights is precisely why we have the entire ninth amendment.
Okay, here's your citation. Historically, every time that the court has lacked a clear majority in one direction or the other, and particularly when there have been eight members, the courts have taken fewer cases.
The inferior courts are often called that for a reason. When circuit courts come up with wildly different opinions, there must be a single arbiter. For every case not granted certiorari that would have been granted certiorari under a full bench, the court's voice is muffled. A weakened SCOTUS doesn't completely prevent the courts from acting as a proper check and balance, but it does significantly diminish their ability to do so.
Ending your post with Q.E.D. doesn't make it so. The thing about constitutional law is that issues are seldom (if ever) clear-cut. There is absolutely no Q.E.D. in matters of constitutional law until settled by the Supreme Court, and arguably even then (see also Brown vs. the Board of Education of Top
Half true. Had it gone to a vote, the previous candidate would likely have gotten enough votes for confirmation, hence the reason the leadership was not about to let it go to a vote, nor even go up for debate. The Constitution says the consent of the Senate, not the consent of the Senate Majority Leader.
Within reason, certainly. Nothing in that clause permits the Senate to be derelict in its duty to uphold the Constitution, however. In fact, it says the exact opposite. But keep believing your partisan spin. If Democrats had pulled what the Republicans did, the Republicans would have come completely unhinged, and would have called for prosecution of the leadership.
Except it did. The Supreme Court of the U.S. dramatically reduced the number of cases it heard—from an average of about 75 cases in previous years (and 80 in 2015) to only 25 in 2016. If you're seriously arguing that a factor of three reduction in court throughput isn't a severe breakage, you're kidding yourself.
They did not withhold consent. They withheld the opportunity to even talk about consent. That's critically different from a constitutional perspective.
As for whether they are constitutionally required or not, I would argue that their one job is to vote on issues, and that refusing to discharge their duties for an entire year—particularly in a way that breaks the ability of the highest court in our land to serve as a proper check and balance—constitutes a direct violation of their oath of office (Article VI, clause 3). So yes, they are constitutionally required to either provide or decline consent.
Yes. Those who do not speak up when they see their immediate colleagues doing something heinous are just as guilty as those colleagues.